Manetho Answered, Chaeremon’s Tale

Manetho first sets up a laughable cause for his invention. King Amenophis, he says, desired to see the gods. Which gods? If he meant the ones their laws appoint — the ox, the goat, the crocodiles and the baboons — he was seeing them already. As for the heavenly gods, how could he see them? And why did he have this desire? Why, of course: because another king before him had seen them! Then he had learned from that king what they were like and in what way he had seen them, so that he needed no new technique. [a]

But, we are told, the seer through whom the king expected to accomplish this was a wise man. Then how did he not foresee that the king’s desire was impossible? For it did not come to pass. And what reason was there for the gods to stay out of sight because of people who were maimed or leprous? The gods are angry at impious deeds, not at the defects of bodies. How could eighty thousand lepers and sick people be gathered in practically one day? And how did the king come to disobey the seer? The seer told him to banish the maimed from Egypt, but he threw them into the quarries, as though he needed workers rather than meaning to purify the country.

Manetho says that the seer killed himself, foreseeing the anger of the gods and what would happen to Egypt, and left his prediction in writing for the king. Then how did the seer not know about his own death from the beginning? Why did he not at once oppose the king when he wanted to see the gods? How was it reasonable to fear evils that were not going to happen in his own time? Or what worse thing would he have had to suffer, that he hurried so to kill himself?

Now let us look at the silliest thing of all. The king heard all this and was afraid of what was to come, yet even then he did not drive out of the country those maimed people of whom he had been told to clear Egypt. Instead, at their request, he gave them a city, Manetho says — the one the shepherds once lived in, called Avaris. When they had gathered there, he says, they chose as their leader a man who had once been one of the priests of Heliopolis. This man taught them not to worship the gods, nor to abstain from the animals revered in Egypt, but to sacrifice and eat them all, and to associate with no one except those who had sworn the conspiracy with them. He bound the multitude with oaths to stand by these laws, built a wall around Avaris, and made war on the king.

Manetho adds that he sent to Jerusalem, inviting those people to fight alongside them and promising to give them Avaris, since it was the ancestral home of those who would come from Jerusalem, and from there as a base they would take all Egypt. Then he says that they came with an army of two hundred thousand, and that Amenophis, king of Egypt, thinking he must not fight against the gods, at once ran away to Ethiopia, after entrusting Apis and some of the other sacred animals to the priests with orders to keep them safe. Then the people of Jerusalem came on, overturned the cities, burned the temples, slaughtered the horsemen, and in a word held back from no lawlessness or cruelty. The priest who laid down their constitution and their laws, he says, was by birth from Heliopolis, named Osarsiph after Osiris, the god of Heliopolis; but he changed his name and called himself Moses. In the thirteenth year, he says — that being the length of exile fated for him — Amenophis came out of Ethiopia with a great army, joined battle with the shepherds and the polluted, defeated them, killed many of them, and pursued them as far as the borders of Syria.

Here again he does not notice how implausible his lie is. The lepers and the multitude with them, even if they had been angry before with the king and with those who had treated them so in keeping with the seer’s prediction, would surely have grown gentler toward him once they had come out of the quarries and received a city and land from him. And if they still hated him, they would have plotted against him privately; they would not have made war on everyone, since a crowd so large plainly had a great many relatives. And even if they had decided to make war on the men, they would not have dared to make war on their own gods, nor laid down laws utterly opposed to those of their fathers, in which they had been brought up. [b]

We must be grateful to Manetho, though, for saying that the leaders in this lawlessness were not those who came from Jerusalem, but the people themselves, who were Egyptians, and above all their priests, who devised these things and bound the multitude by oaths. But surely this is absurd: that none of their own relatives and friends joined their revolt or shared the danger of the war, while the polluted sent to Jerusalem and brought in allies from there! What friendship or kinship had there been between them before? On the contrary, they were enemies, and differed from them very greatly in their customs. Yet he says they obeyed at once when promised that they would take Egypt — as though they did not know very well the country from which they had been driven out by force.

If they had been in want or had been faring badly, perhaps they might have run the risk. But they lived in a prosperous city and enjoyed a large country better than Egypt. Why then would they have run into danger to help men who were their old enemies, maimed in body, whom not even their own relatives would put up with? For they surely did not foresee that the king would run away. On the contrary, Manetho himself has said that Amenophis’s son was coming to meet them at Pelusium with three hundred thousand men. Those who were coming certainly knew that; but how could they have guessed his change of mind and his flight?

Then he says that the invaders from Jerusalem, having mastered Egypt, did many terrible things, and he reproaches them for it — as though he had not brought them in as enemies, or as though the people called in from outside were the ones to blame, when the Egyptians by race had been doing these things before they arrived and had sworn to do them. But some time later, he says, Amenophis came on, won a battle, and drove the enemy as far as Syria, killing them as he went. So very easy, it seems, is Egypt to capture for invaders from anywhere at all! And those who had then conquered it in war, though they learned that Amenophis was alive, neither fortified the passes from Ethiopia, though they had ample means to do so, nor made ready the rest of their forces. And he followed them all the way to Syria, he says, killing them, across the waterless sand — which is plainly not easy for an army to cross even without a fight.

According to Manetho, then, our race did not come from Egypt, nor were any of the Egyptians mixed with us. For many of the lepers and the sick no doubt died in the quarries, having been there a long time and suffering badly; many in the battles that followed; and most of all in the last battle and the flight.

It remains for me to answer Manetho about Moses. The Egyptians regard this man as wonderful and divine, and they want to claim him as their own, with an incredible slander: they say he was from Heliopolis, one of the priests there, driven out with the rest because of leprosy. But the records show that he lived five hundred and eighteen years earlier, and led our fathers out of Egypt into the country we now inhabit. [c]

That he did not suffer any such affliction of the body is plain from what he himself says. He forbade lepers to stay in a city or live in a village; they were to go about alone, with their clothes torn, and he regards anyone who touches them or lives under the same roof with them as unclean. And if the disease is healed and the person recovers his natural condition, he prescribed certain rites of purification — washings in spring water and the shaving of all the hair — and orders him to offer many sacrifices of every kind, and only then to enter the holy city. Yet one would have expected the opposite: that a man who had himself suffered this affliction would show some forethought and kindness toward those who shared his misfortune. And it was not only about lepers that he made such laws. He did not allow even those who were maimed in the smallest part of the body to serve as priests; and if a priest suffered such a misfortune in the course of his service, he took the honor away from him. How likely is it, then, that he would foolishly make such laws, or that people gathered together out of such afflictions would accept laws drawn up against themselves, to their own disgrace and harm?

The name, too, he has changed very implausibly. He was called Osarsiph, he says. But that name does not fit the change at all, while his true name means “one saved out of the water,” for the Egyptians call water mōy. I think, then, it has been made plain enough that as long as Manetho followed the ancient records he did not stray far from the truth; but when he turned to stories with no author behind them, he either made them up himself without regard for likelihood, or trusted some who spoke out of hatred.

After Manetho I want to examine Chaeremon. He too claims to be writing a history of Egypt, and he gives the king the same name as Manetho does, Amenophis, and calls his son Ramesses. He says that Isis appeared to Amenophis in his sleep and blamed him because her temple had been torn down in the war. Phritibautes, a sacred scribe, told him that if he purged Egypt of the men who carried pollutions, he would be freed from his terror. So the king picked out two hundred and fifty thousand of the afflicted and drove them out. Their leaders were scribes, Moses and Joseph, Joseph being a sacred scribe; their Egyptian names were Tisithen for Moses and Peteseph for Joseph. These came to Pelusium and found there three hundred and eighty thousand people whom Amenophis had left behind, not wishing to bring them into Egypt. They made friends with these and marched against Egypt. Amenophis could not withstand their attack and fled to Ethiopia, leaving his wife behind pregnant. She hid in some caves and gave birth to a son named Ramesses, who, when he grew to manhood, drove the Jews, about two hundred thousand of them, into Syria, and brought his father Amenophis back from Ethiopia. [f]