Apion on Moses and the Sabbath

In the former book, my most honored Epaphroditus, I proved our antiquity, confirming the truth from the writings of the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans and the Egyptians and producing many Greek writers as witnesses. I also made my reply to Manetho, Chaeremon and certain others. I will now begin to refute the rest of those who have written anything against us. As for venturing a reply to Apion the grammarian, I have been in doubt whether it is worth the effort. Some of what he has written is like what others have said; some he has added in a very feeble way; and most of it is buffoonery and, to tell the truth, a great deal of ignorance, as you would expect from a man of bad character who spent his whole life playing to the crowd. [a]

But most people, through their own folly, are caught by talk like this rather than by what is written with some care; they enjoy abuse and are annoyed by praise. So I thought it necessary not to leave this man unexamined either, since he has written an accusation against us as openly as if in a court of law. For I also see that most people take great delight when someone who started by slandering another is himself exposed for the vices that belong to him.

It is not easy to go through his argument, or to know clearly what he means to say. But in the great confusion and jumble of his lies, some of it falls under the same heading as what we have already examined, our ancestors’ departure from Egypt; some is an accusation against the Jews who live in Alexandria; and third, mixed in with these, is an accusation about the holy rites of our temple and our other customs.

That our fathers were not Egyptians by race, and were not driven out of Egypt because of bodily disease or any other such misfortune, I think I have already proved not only adequately but beyond what was needed. But I will touch briefly on what Apion adds. In the third book of his History of Egypt he says this: [d]

“Moses, as I heard from the elders of the Egyptians, was from Heliopolis. Bound by the customs of his fathers, he offered prayers in the open air toward the precincts of the sun, but he turned them all toward the east, for that is how the City of the Sun lies. In place of obelisks he set up pillars, beneath which was carved a boat-shaped bowl, and the shadow of a man fell on it, so that it always goes around this course together with the sun in the sky.” Such is the grammarian’s marvelous account. The lie needs no words; it is evident from the facts. Moses himself, when he built the first tabernacle for God, put no such carving in it, nor commanded those after him to make one; and Solomon, who later built the temple in Jerusalem, kept clear of all such fussy contrivance as Apion has woven together.

He says he heard from the elders that Moses was from Heliopolis — plainly because, being younger himself, he trusted men who were old enough to have known Moses and kept company with him! He is a grammarian, yet he could not say with confidence which was the homeland of Homer the poet, nor even of Pythagoras, who lived only yesterday or the day before; but about Moses, who came before them by so many years, he pronounces so easily, trusting the hearsay of elders, that he is plainly lying.

As for the dates — the time when he says Moses led out the lepers, the blind and the lame — our precise grammarian agrees beautifully, I think, with those before him! Manetho says the Jews left Egypt in the reign of Tethmosis, three hundred and ninety-three years before Danaus fled to Argos; Lysimachus says under King Bocchoris, that is, seventeen hundred years ago; Molon and some others as they each saw fit. But Apion, the most trustworthy of them all, has fixed the departure exactly in the seventh Olympiad, and in its first year, the year in which, he says, the Phoenicians founded Carthage. He no doubt added Carthage because he thought it the plainest proof of his accuracy; but he did not see that he was drawing the refutation on himself. For if the Phoenician records are to be trusted on this point, King Hiram is recorded in them as more than a hundred and fifty years older than the founding of Carthage. I gave the evidence about him earlier from those Phoenician records: that Hiram was a friend of Solomon, who built the temple in Jerusalem, and contributed a great deal to its construction. And Solomon himself built the temple six hundred and twelve years after the Jews came out of Egypt.

He has improvised the same number of exiles as Lysimachus — he says there were a hundred and ten thousand of them — and he gives a marvelous and convincing reason for the name of the sabbath. “After traveling six days,” he says, “they got buboes in the groin, and for this reason they rested on the seventh day, having reached safety in the country now called Judea. They called the day sabbaton, keeping the Egyptian language; for the Egyptians call pain in the groin sabbatōsis.”

Would a man not laugh at such drivel — or rather hate the shamelessness of writing such things? Plainly all hundred and ten thousand people got buboes! If they were blind and lame and sick in every way, as Apion says they were, they could not have gone even a single day’s journey. And if they were all able to march through a great desert and, besides that, to fight and conquer those who opposed them, they would not all have got buboes together after the sixth day. Such a thing does not happen by nature, of necessity, to people who march; armies of many tens of thousands march a moderate distance day after day for many days. Nor is it likely to have happened so by chance; that would be the most absurd thing of all.

The marvelous Apion has said first that they reached Judea in six days; and then again he says that Moses went up the mountain called Sinai, between Egypt and Arabia, stayed hidden there forty days, and came down from there and gave the Jews their laws. Yet how could the same people stay forty days in a desert, waterless place, and also cross the whole country between in six days? And his grammarian’s change of the name sabbath shows either great shamelessness or dreadful ignorance; for sabbō and sabbaton are very different. In the language of the Jews sabbaton means rest from all work, but sabbō, as he says, means among the Egyptians pain in the groin.

Such is the novelty the Egyptian Apion has invented about Moses and the Jews’ departure from Egypt, beyond what the others said. And why should we wonder that he lies about our ancestors, saying they were Egyptians by race? About himself he lied the other way round. He was born at the Oasis in Egypt, an Egyptian of the Egyptians, as one might say; yet he forswore his true homeland and race, and by falsely claiming to be an Alexandrian he admits how base his race is. It is natural, then, that he calls those he hates and wants to abuse Egyptians; for if he had not thought the Egyptians the lowest of people, he would not have fled from the race himself. Those who are proud of their homelands take pride in being called after them, and expose those who lay false claim to them. [h]

Toward us the Egyptians feel one of two things: either they claim kinship with us to raise their own standing, or they drag us in to share their bad reputation. The noble Apion, it seems, wanted to give his slander against us to the Alexandrians as a kind of payment for the citizenship they had granted him. Knowing their hatred of the Jews who live alongside them in Alexandria, he has set out to abuse those Jews, and to take in all the rest along with them; and in both he lies shamelessly.