Moses and Akhenaten (5 page)

Produced prophets among you,

Made you kings, and gave

You what he had not given

To any other among the peoples …' (Sura V, 20)

The reference here is not to two kings, but more than two, for Arabic has different plural forms for dual and multiple, and it is difficult to see in the light of later evidence how this can be anything other than a reference to the four Amarna kings.

The Koran also provides a different picture of Moses' departure from the Ethiopian capital. Where the Talmud indicates that it was a friendly farewell, the Koran suggests that it was an escape from a threat to his life:

And there came a man,

Running, from the furthest end

Of the city. He said:

‘O Moses! the Chiefs

Are taking counsel together

About thee to slay thee:

So get thee away, for I

Do give thee sincere advice.' (Sura XXVIII, 20)

The Talmud also provides a different reason for the attempt to kill Moses at birth. It was Moses specifically who was to be murdered because he posed a threat to the throne of Egypt. Pharaoh, according to the Talmud, had a dream in which he was sitting on the throne when he saw an old man holding a large pair of scales. The old man placed the elders and princes of Egypt on one side of the scales and a lamb on the other. The lamb proved to be heavier. The king asked his adviser Bi'lam the significance of this strange dream. Bi'lam explained that a great evil would befall the country: ‘A son will be born in Israel who will destroy Egypt.'

Reu'el the Midianite, who is described in the Old Testament as the father-in-law of Moses, enters the scene here as another of the king's counsellors, who advised him that he should not oppress the Israelites, but allow them to leave for Canaan. This advice did not find favour with the king, who responded by banishing Reu'el to his own country and accepting an alternative course of action recommended by Bi'lam – that as a precautionary measure all boys born to the Hebrews should be cast into the river.

Prior to this, coinciding with the accounts in the Bible, we are told that Amram had married Jochebed, who bore him a daughter, Miriam, described in the Old Testament as ‘a prophetess', followed by a son, Aaron. Now we learn of a prophesy by Miriam that a second son would be born to her parents and this son would ultimately deliver the Israelites from their Egyptian oppressors. When the baby appeared as predicted, Jochebed hid the new-born infant in her home for three months, but a strict search of the Israelites' homes was carried out regularly and various ruses were employed to discover any male children who had been concealed. One was for Egyptian women to bring their own babies into houses in Goshen and make them cry, whereupon any Hebrew babies hidden on the premises would start to cry as well and betray their place of concealment.

The birth of a male child to Jochebed came to light in this way, but she hid the baby in the reeds of the Nile before Pharaoh's officers arrived to take him away. There, as in the Old Testament, he was rescued by a daughter of the king, Bathia – identified in a subsequent passage as the first-born of her mother – who gave him the name of Moses, saying: ‘I have drawn him from the water.' Moses ‘became even as a son to Bathia … as a child belonging rightly to the palace of the king'.
²

When Moses was about three years of age, the story goes on, in the course of a banquet at which his family and princes of the realm were present, Pharaoh took Moses on his lap, whereupon the child stretched out his hand, removed Pharaoh's crown from his head and placed it on his own. The king felt this action had some possibly sinister significance. ‘How shall this Hebrew boy be punished?' he asked.

Bi'lam confirmed the king's suspicions. ‘Think not, because the child is young, that he did this thing thoughtlessly,' he said. ‘Remember, o king, the dream this servant read for thee, the dream of the balances. The spirit of understanding is already implanted in this child, and to himself he takes thy kingdom.'

The judges and wise men, including Jithro (Reu'el), the priest of Midian, assembled and Pharaoh related what had happened and the interpretation Bi'lam had placed upon Moses' action. Jithro, who was anxious to save the child's life, suggested: ‘If it be pleasing to the king, let two plates be placed before the child, one containing fire, the other gold. If the child stretches forth his hand to grasp the gold, we shall know him to be an understanding being, and consider that he acted towards thee knowingly, deserving death. But if he grasps the fire, then let his life be spared.' Two bowls were brought, one containing gold, the other fire, and placed before the child, who put out his hand and grasped the fire, which he put into his mouth, burning his tongue and becoming thereafter, as the Bible says, ‘heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue'. However, his life was saved.

Manetho, a native Egyptian, was a contemporary of the first two Ptolemies, rulers at the start of the Thirty-second and last Egyptian Dynasty early in the third century
BC,
and is said to have described himself in a letter to Ptolemy II as ‘High Priest and scribe of the sacred shrines of Egypt, born at Sebennytus and dwelling at Heliopolis'.
³
He is one of the early Egyptians who wrote about his country in Greek, assembling tales that he had found in the temple library, made up in part of ancient stories that had initially been transmitted orally before being set down in writing.

Scholars disagree about how many books can actually be attributed to Manetho, but it is accepted that he was the author of
The History of Egypt
(or
Aegyptiaca
) in three volumes. The main difficulty we face in trying to establish the contents of Manetho's original work, however, is the fact that we do not have direct access to it: the fragments available have all come to us via other authors. Quotations from his work have been preserved mainly by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (
AD
70); the Christian chronographers Sextus Julius Africanus (3rd century
AD
) and Eusebius (4th century
AD);
in isolated passages in Plutarch and other Greek and Latin authors, and a later compiler called George the Monk – an ‘attendant', also known as Syncellus (
AD
800), of Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople – who contributed greatly to the transmission.

According to Josephus in his book
Contra Apionem,
Alexandria had become a main centre for the Jews during the time of the Ptolemies. They enjoyed both Alexandrian citizenship and the city's ‘finest residential quarter' by the sea. The Alexandrian Jews were naturally interested in Manetho's account of their historic links with Egypt, although they found some aspects of it objectionable. His original work therefore did not survive for long before being tampered with. The efforts of Jewish apologists account for much of the subsequent corruption of Manetho's text and the creation of what is known as ‘Pseudo-Manethonian' literature.

Although, as we shall see, Egypt tried to wipe out all trace of the four Amarna kings – Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye – by excising their names from king lists and monuments after the fall of the Amarna regime, they are correctly named by Manetho as having ruled between the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, and Horemheb, who is to be identified as the Pharaoh of the Oppression. In addition, an epitome of Manetho's history had already been made as early as Ptolemaic times in the form of lists of dynasties accompanied by short notes on outstanding kings and important events, including the defeat of the Hyksos invaders, followed by the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the Exodus. These versions of the epitome differ from one another, indicating that some distortion has occurred in the process of transmitting and editing Manetho's
Aegyptiaca
itself. However, a number of points are worth making:

•  The list of Syncellus (according to Africanus) places the Exodus, when ‘Moses went forth from Egypt', in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who drove out the Hyksos shepherds: this is an error arising from wrongly identifying, as Josephus did, the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and the subsequent expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmosis as the Exodus;

•  The lists of Syncellus (according to Eusebius) and the version of Eusebius which was found translated into Armenian place the Exodus of the Jews, with Moses at their head, more than two centuries later in the reign of the king who succeeded Orus (Amenhotep III,
c.
1405–1367) – his son and coregent Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten);

•  Syncellus (according to Africanus) also states that it was in the reign of Amos (Ahmosis), the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, that Moses led the Exodus;

•  Syncellus (according to Eusebius) claims that it was ‘about' the reign of a Pharaoh named Achencherres (Amenhotep IV, who later became Akhenaten) – that ‘Moses led the Jews in their march out of Egypt';

•  The Armenian version of Eusebius similarly lists the reign of Achencheres (Akhenaten) as the time ‘when Moses became the leader of the Jews in their Exodus'.

Josephus made an error by identifying the arrival of the conquering Hyksos as the Descent into Egypt of the Israelites and their subsequent expulsion by Ahmosis as the Exodus. What helped him to make the mistake was his desire to show that the Israelites had left Egypt long before Amenhotep III and the religious revolution that began in his reign. Josephus begins by saying that the Jews' ancestors, whom he regarded as the Hyksos, ‘entered Egypt in their myriads and subdued the inhabitants'.
⁴
Later they were driven out of the country, occupied Judaea and founded Jerusalem. At this point he complains that Manetho ‘took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us [the Israelites] as mixed up with a crowd of Egyptian lepers and others who for various maladies were condemned … to banishment from the country.' (We should not take the descriptions of the rebels as being literally lepers or suffering from other maladies, the sense here being that they were impure because of their denial of Egyptian gods.) This sequence of events, says Josephus, is linked with a king named Amenophis (Amenhotep III), whom Josephus – believing that the Jews (Hyksos) had left Egypt centuries earlier – describes as ‘an imaginary person'. Josephus' account then goes on: ‘This king, he [Manetho] states, wishing to be granted … a vision of the gods, communicated his desire to his namesake, Amenophis, son of Paapis [son of Habu], whose wisdom and knowledge of the future were regarded as marks of divinity. This namesake replied that he would be able to see the gods if he purged the entire country of lepers and other polluted persons, and sent them to work on the stone quarries to the east of the Nile, segregated from the rest of the Egyptians. They included, he adds, some of the learned priests, who were afflicted with leprosy. Then this wise seer Amenophis was seized with a fear that he would draw down the wrath of the gods on himself and the king if the violence done to these men were detected; and he added a prediction that the polluted people would find certain allies who would become masters of Egypt for thirteen years …'

The adviser known as son of Habu started his career under Amenhotep III as an Inferior Royal Scribe, was promoted to be a Superior Royal Scribe and finally reached the position of Minister of all Public Works. He was also appointed as Steward of Sitamun, the sister Amenhotep III had married in order to inherit the throne but failed to make his Great Royal Wife (queen). Son of Habu lived to be at least eighty and the last date we have for him is the thirty-fourth year of Amenhotep III. Later he became for the Egyptians a kind of saint whose cult was reported as late as Roman times.

Eventually, after the men in the stone quarries had spent many miserable years, the king heard their pleas for less harsh treatment and gave them the abandoned city of the Hyksos, Avaris. There, having at last a base of their own, they appointed as their leader one of the priests of Heliopolis (On), called Osarseph, and undertook to obey all his orders. By his first law, Osarseph ordained that his followers should not worship the gods of Egypt, nor abstain from the flesh of any of the animals held in special reverence in the country. He also commanded that they should form an exclusive society, mixing only with their own kind. Manetho's account, as interpreted by Josephus, then goes on:

After laying down these and a multitude of other laws, absolutely opposed to Egyptian custom, he [Osarseph] ordered all hands to repair the city walls and make ready for war with King Amenophis [Amenhotep III]. Then, in concert with other priests and polluted persons like himself, he sent an emissary to the shepherds who had been expelled by Tethmosis [the Asiatic Hyksos, who were expelled by Ahmosis] in the city of Jerusalem, setting out the position of himself and his outraged companions and inviting them to join in a united expedition against Egypt. He undertook to escort them first to their ancestral home at Auaris [Avaris], to provide abundant supplies for their multitudes, to fight for them when the moment came and, without difficulty, to reduce the country to submission. The shepherds, delighted with the idea, all eagerly set off in a body numbering two hundred thousand men …

In the face of this threatened invasion, Amenophis (Amenhotep III) ‘sent for the sacred animals which are held in most reverence in the temples and instructed the priests in each district to conceal the images of the gods as securely as possible.' However, he did not do battle with the invaders, but retreated to Ethiopia (Kush), ‘whose king was under obligation to him and at his service'. This king made Amenophis welcome and provided accommodation and food for him and his followers for the thirteen years of banishment that the son of Habu had predicted. Manetho's account, according to Josephus, then continues: