Moses and Akhenaten (6 page)

‘Meanwhile, the Solymites [who originated in Jerusalem] came down with the polluted Egyptians and treated the inhabitants in so sacrilegious a manner that the regime of the shepherds seemed like a golden age to those who now beheld the impieties of their present enemies. Not only did they set cities and villages on fire, not only did they pillage the temples and mutilate the images of the gods, but, not content with that, they habitually used the very sanctuaries as kitchens for roasting the venerated sacred animals, forced the priests and prophets to slaughter them and cut their throats, and then turned them out naked …' Manetho adds that Amenophis subsequently advanced from Ethiopia with a large army and his son, Rampses, at the head of another, and that the two attacked and defeated the shepherds and their polluted allies, killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria.

Modern scholars have tended to accept the view that Manetho did not rely in his account of the Israelites' sojourn in Egypt entirely on Ancient Egyptian historical sources. Gardiner, for instance, says in his book
Egypt of the Pharaohs:
‘… the story of Amenhophis (Amenhotep III) and the lepers quoted from him by Josephus … show that he made use not only of authentic records, but also of popular romances devoid of historical value.' He also makes the point a page earlier: ‘… Josephus' excerpts from Manetho were introduced to support the latter's belief that the biblical account of the Exodus and the expulsion of the Hyksos under Tethmosis refer to one and the same historical event … Admittedly the lengthy excerpts in question embody also several popular stories of the most fantastic description, explicitly recognized as such by the Jewish historian.'

This view has been challenged recently, however, by Redford in
Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals and Day Books.
After giving an account of the surviving library of the temple of Sobek in Fayum, which dates from the first century
BC
to the fourth
AD,
has been brought to light over the last hundred years and is currently in process of publication, he comments, in discussing some aspects of Manetho's work that is conventionally dismissed as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian': ‘There is absolutely no justification in … construing them as interpolations. Nor is it correct to imagine Manetho garnering oral traditions and committing them to writing. He would have had no use for, and probably would have despised, material circulating orally and not found formally represented by the temple scroll. What he found in the temple library in the form of a duly authorized text he incorporated in his history; and, conversely, we may with confidence postulate for the material in his history a written source found in the temple library, and nothing more.' Redford identified the source of Manetho's Osarseph story as the events of the Amarna religious revolution, first remembered orally and later set down in writing.

Although the leader of the contaminated people was given as Osarseph by Manethos, other writers have favoured the name of Moses. In his
History of Egypt
in five books, Apion himself – who lived in the first half of the first century
AD,
was born in Upper Egypt, studied in Alexandria and taught rhetoric in Rome under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius – wrote in his third book, as quoted by Josephus: ‘Moses, as I have heard from old people [the elders] in Egypt, was a native of Heliopolis who, being pledged to the customs of his country, erected prayer-houses open to the air in various precincts of the city, all facing eastwards, such being the orientation also of Heliopolis. In place of obelisks he set up pillars, topped by human figures, beneath which was a model of a boat; and the shadow cast on this basin by the boat described a circle corresponding to the course of the sun in the heavens.'
⁵

Another Alexandrian author named Chaereman (1st century
AD
philosopher and librarian of Alexandria, who afterwards became the tutor of Nero), also favoured Moses: ‘Moses and another sacred scribe Joseph',
⁶
as did Lysimachus (Alexandrian writer of uncertain date, but later than the 2nd century
BC),
also quoted by Josephus.
⁷

There are a number of conflicts between these various accounts of the life of Moses, which one would expect with stories passed on by word of mouth for centuries before they were finally written down. We are, for instance, given two dates, more than two centuries apart, for the Exodus. Furthermore, while the Talmud tells us that it was Moses who fled to Ethiopia, Manetho claims that it was Amenhotep III, whom I look upon as having been Moses' father. For the moment, however, several points in these two opening chapters are worth emphasizing.

Both at the time of the birth of Moses and when he was seeking permission for the Israelites to leave Egypt, the indications are that the ruling Pharaoh was in residence in the vicinity of Goshen, where the Israelites had been allowed to settle … Moses, who is described as a native of Heliopolis, where Akhenaten is thought to have spent much of his childhood, protested to the Lord that he would have difficulty in communicating with the Israelites … the Exodus is linked in three cases with the reign of Akhenaten … the name of the Egyptian queen who became the wife of Moses is given as Adonith (Aten-it) and is clearly derived from the Aten, the one God whom Akhenaten attempted to force upon the Egyptian people … Moses remained in Egyptian memory also by the name of Osarseph, a priest of Heliopolis, which links him with vizier Joseph, the Patriarch who brought the tribe of Israel down to Egypt, whom I have identified as Yuya, Akhenaten's maternal grandfather
⁸
… Manetho's identification of the reign of Amenhotep III – while the son of Habu was still alive, some time before the king's Year 34 – as the right time for the start of religious rebellion and the Jewish Oppression is not built simply on popular tales of his time, but on old traditions, already set down in writing, that he found in his temple library … it is clear from the biblical narrations that the Oppression of the Israelites took two separate forms – the threat to the lives of Hebrew male children and the use of the Israelites' forced labour to build the cities of Pithom and Raamses, which, as we shall see, followed a period of religious upheaval … Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land for the alleged offence of striking a rock with his rod to obtain water for his followers.

On the subject of the Israelite occupation of the abandoned Hyksos city of Avaris, Redford has also commented: ‘The occupation of a deserted area, set apart (though in the modified form of the story replaced by Avaris) sounds like the hegira to Amarna' – Akhenaten's move from Thebes to his new capital in the face of opposition to his religious ideas by nobles and priests of the State god Amun – ‘and the thirteen years of woe wrought by lepers and shepherds can only be the term of Akhenaten's stay in his new city. The figure of Osarseph/Moses is clearly modelled on the historic memory of Akhenaten. He is credited with interdicting the worship of all the gods and, in Apion, of championing a form of worship which used open-air temples oriented east, exactly like the Aten temples of Amarna.'
⁹

What are the historical events that inspired these varied, and often contradictory, accounts – and at what precise point in history did they take place?

3

THE ISRAEL STELA

A
CHRONOLOGY
for the life of Moses clearly depends upon establishing in the first place when the Descent of the Israelites into Egypt took place and how long they remained there before the Exodus. It is generally accepted that they were in the country at the end of the Eighteenth and start of the Nineteenth Dynasties (
c
.1308
BC),
but when they arrived and departed have both been the subject of considerable disagreement. The Old Testament is not very helpful in this matter. It does not give any dates, or the names of any reigning monarch, referring to him only as ‘Pharaoh', ‘King' or ‘Pharaoh, King of Egypt'. Nor does it tell us where the capital city of the Pharaoh in question was situated. It also provides us with some conflicting statements about how long the Sojourn lasted:

And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. (Genesis, 15:13)

But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again … (Genesis, 15:16)

Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.

And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. (Exodus, 12:40–41)

In addition, the Old Testament always provides us with the names of heads of tribes and the names of their descendants who are important to the story that is being related. In the case of the Sojourn we are given the names of four generations – Jacob's (Israel's) third son, Levi, and Levi's son (Kohath), grandson (Amram) and great-grandson (Moses).

If we examine Egyptian sources we find nothing that matches precisely the broad outline of the biblical account of the Descent, Sojourn and Exodus. Yet this lack of precise evidence cannot be taken as a reason to dismiss the account as a complete fabrication or to suppose a mythological origin for these narrations. The Bible gives some inside details of life in Egypt during the Empire (the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties) that in many cases have to be seen as originating as a result of first-hand knowledge. These details cannot be regarded as a later colouring, as some scholars maintain, for how could a Jewish priest and scribe like Ezra, returning to Jerusalem from the Exile in Babylon in the fifth century
BC,
be expected to have inside details about life in Egypt during the Empire eight centuries earlier? The only logical explanation is that the biblical accounts of the Descent into Egypt and eventual Exodus have at their core real historical characters and events. It is therefore a matter of seeking clues within the Old Testament that may help us to determine to which period of Egyptian history these events belong.

The historical period we have to examine is a long one, ranging from the seventeenth century
BC
until the thirteenth. In the seventeenth century
BC
Lower and Middle Egypt came under the control of the invading Hyksos – Asiatic shepherd rulers, with some Semitic elements among their followers – who set up their capital at Avaris in the Eastern Delta, where they ruled for just over a hundred years. They were eventually defeated in battle and driven from the country by Ahmosis (
c
. 1575–1550), founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which would develop into a golden age in the history of Ancient Egypt and lasted until almost the end of the fourteenth century
BC.
During this period Thebes in Upper Egypt became the capital and chief religious centre of the country, while the king's main residence was at Memphis in Lower Egypt. With the arrival of Ramses I, the first Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, Thebes retained its importance, but the king's main residence moved to the old city of Avaris, now rebuilt by the Israelites as Pi-Ramses and named after the Ramses kings of the dynasty. It is also from this period that the whole of the Eastern Delta area named as Goshen in the Bible became known as the Land of Ramses.

The name Ramses (spelled Rameses) is also found in the Pentateuch, but not as the name of a ruling king. In Genesis, 47:11, it is given as the name of the land where the Israelites were allowed to settle on their arrival in Egypt. As the Goshen area did not become known as the Land of Ramses until the Nineteenth Dynasty, and nobody disputes that the Israelites arrived in Egypt at some time before this era, it seems that the name Ramses is simply being used here as an equivalent of Goshen as it became known as ‘the Land of Ramses' at the time of the Exodus. The name Rameses occurs again in Exodus, 12:37, where it is described as the starting point of the Exodus. Further pointers to a northern residence at the start of the Nineteenth Dynasty are provided by the accounts of the way Moses, having returned to the Eastern Delta to rescue his people, was urged by the Lord to confront Pharaoh in the morning when he went down to the banks of the Nile (Exodus, 7:15; 8:20).

It would seem that two reasonable deductions might be made from these brief summaries of the biblical account of the Sojourn and what we know of the seat of power in ancient Egypt: firstly, that as shepherds were looked upon already as ‘an abomination' when the Israelites arrived in Egypt, their appearance on the scene must have post-dated the Hyksos period, which was the root cause of the anti-shepherd hostility; and, secondly, the fact that they were settled in Goshen, remote from the seat of Pharaonic power, suggests that this seat must at the time have been at Thebes, some 400 miles away in Upper Egypt, rather than Avaris, the Hyksos capital and capital of the land of Goshen in the Eastern Delta.

However, with no archaeological evidence to help them, early Egyptologists were persuaded to believe – correctly, as it happens – that the Exodus could not be assigned to an earlier time than the Nineteenth Dynasty. It was when they attempted to decide in which reign of the Nineteenth Dynasty it took place that they went astray. Two points misled them: firstly, the figure of 430 years, given in the Old Testament as the duration of the Sojourn, which they appear to have accepted literally; and, secondly, the statement by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century
AD,
which they also seem not to have questioned, that the Israelite arrival took place during the period of Hyksos rule. This view appeared to be justified by some elaborate mathematical guesswork, for if we add up the figures in the Bible between the start of the Sojourn and the Exodus, and compare them with the then accepted Egyptian dates, we arrive at the following totals: