Chaeremon and Lysimachus Answered

That is Chaeremon’s account. I think the falsehood of both accounts is plain at once from what has been said. If there were any truth underneath them, they could not disagree so much; but those who make up lies do not write in agreement with others, they invent whatever they please. Manetho says the beginning of the expulsion of the polluted was the king’s desire to see the gods; Chaeremon has made up a dream of his own, from Isis. Manetho says the one who foretold the purification to the king was Amenophis; this man says Phritibautes. And on the size of the multitude they agree beautifully: Manetho says eighty thousand, Chaeremon two hundred and fifty thousand! [a]

Again, Manetho first sends the polluted into the quarries, then gives them Avaris to live in, stirs them to war against the other Egyptians, and only then says they called in help from the people of Jerusalem. Chaeremon says that as they were leaving Egypt they found near Pelusium three hundred and eighty thousand people left behind by Amenophis, invaded Egypt again with them, and Amenophis fled to Ethiopia. But the finest touch of all is that he does not say who these many tens of thousands of soldiers were or where they came from, whether they were Egyptian by race or had come from abroad. Nor has he explained why the king would not bring them into Egypt — he who made up the dream of Isis about the lepers.

Chaeremon also puts Joseph beside Moses, as though he were driven out at the same time, though Joseph died four generations before Moses, which is nearly a hundred and seventy years. Moreover, Ramesses the son of Amenophis, according to Manetho, fought beside his father as a young man and was driven out with him in his flight to Ethiopia; but this writer has him born in a cave after his father’s death, and later winning a battle and driving the Jews, about two hundred thousand of them, into Syria. What carelessness! He never said who the three hundred and eighty thousand were, nor how the two hundred and thirty thousand perished, whether they fell in battle or went over to Ramesses. And most remarkable of all, it is impossible to learn from him whom he calls Jews, or to which of the two groups he gives this name — the two hundred and fifty thousand lepers, or the three hundred and eighty thousand around Pelusium. But perhaps it would be foolish to refute at greater length writers who refute themselves; to be refuted by others would have been less disgraceful.

To these I will add Lysimachus. He takes up the same subject for his lie as those already mentioned, the lepers and the maimed, but he has outdone their implausibility with his inventions; plainly he composed them out of great hatred. He says that in the reign of Bocchoris, king of Egypt, the people of the Jews, who were lepers and had the scab and certain other diseases, fled to the temples and begged for food there. Because so very many people had fallen sick, the crops failed in Egypt. Bocchoris, king of the Egyptians, sent men to the shrine of Ammon to consult the oracle about the crop failure. The god told him to purge the temples of impure and impious men by casting them out of the temples into desert places, and to drown those with the scab and the lepers, since the sun was angry that they were alive; then he should purify the temples, and so the land would bear fruit. [c]

When Bocchoris received these oracles, he called the priests and the attendants of the altars and ordered them to pick out the unclean and hand them over to the soldiers to lead away into the desert, and to wrap the lepers in sheets of lead and let them down into the sea. When the lepers and those with the scab had been drowned, the rest were gathered together and left out in desert places to die. There they met and took counsel about themselves. When night came on, they lit fires and lamps and kept watch over themselves, and the next night they fasted and prayed the gods to be gracious and save them.

On the following day a certain Moses advised them to take their chances and cut a single road until they reached inhabited places. He urged them to show goodwill to no human being, to give no one the best advice but always the worst, and to overturn any temples and altars of the gods they came upon. The rest agreed, and doing what they had decided, they traveled through the desert. After great hardships they reached inhabited country, where they abused the people and plundered and burned the temples, until they came to the land now called Judea, where they founded a city and settled. This town was named Hierosyla, from their temple-robbing disposition. Later, when they had grown strong, they changed the name in time so as not to be reproached with it, and called the city Hierosolyma and themselves Hierosolymites.

This writer could not even manage to name the same king as the others, but made up a newer name. Passing over the dream and the Egyptian prophet, he goes off to Ammon to fetch an oracle about those with the scab and the lepers. He says a multitude of Jews gathered at the temples. Did he give this name to the lepers, or only to those among the Jews who fell sick? For he says “the people of the Jews.” What people? Newcomers, or native to the country? Why then do you call them Jews, if they are Egyptians? And if they are foreigners, why do you not say where they came from? How could so great a multitude remain, after the king had drowned many of them in the sea and thrown the rest out into desert places? Or how did they cross the desert, conquer the country we now live in, found a city, and build a temple famous among all people? [e]

He ought also to have said more about the lawgiver than just his name: what race he was of and who his parents were, and why he would have undertaken to give them such laws about the gods and about wronging people on the journey. If they were Egyptians by race, they would not have changed their ancestral customs so easily; and if they came from somewhere else, they surely had laws kept by long habit. If they had sworn never to bear goodwill toward those who drove them out, that would have been a reasonable story. But that they should take up an undeclared war against all mankind, if they were in such a bad state as he says and needed help from everyone — that shows great folly, not in them, but in the liar.

He even dared to say that they named the city after temple-robbing, and then changed the name later. Plainly the name brought shame and hatred to later generations, while the founders themselves thought they were doing themselves honor by giving the city that name! In his great lack of restraint in abuse, this fine fellow did not understand that we Jews do not use the same word as the Greeks for temple-robbing. What more need one say to a man who lies so shamelessly? But since this book has now reached a fitting length, I will make a new beginning and try to supply what remains of my subject in the next.