Manetho’s Revisionist Exodus

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The hatred of Jews, like the great foundational story of the liberation of the Jews, begins in Egypt.

The book of Exodus, which dates from around 1300 to 1450 BCE, contains the central story of Judaism, the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It is recalled every year at Passover and constituting a promise for Jews who have been enslaved and oppressed throughout history that God would someday once again liberate them from their enemies. According to Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian in the first century CE, it also became the occasion for one of the first anti-Jewish polemics in history, that of the Egyptian historian Manetho. Manetho flourished in the third century BCE; most of Manetho’s writings have been lost, but some fragments survive, and Josephus summarizes more.

Josephus profoundly disapproves of Manetho and accuses him of numerous inaccuracies. Working from Manetho’s writings, Josephus states that Amenophis, the king of Egypt, “conceived a desire to behold the gods,” and that a prophet told him that he could do so “if he cleansed the whole land of lepers and other polluted persons.”

The king accordingly sent eighty thousand “into the stone-quarries to the east of the Nile, there to work segregated from the rest of the Egyptians,” but then was overcome with remorse at how he had mistreated these people. Josephus continues with what he says is a direct quote from Manetho: “When the men in the stone-quarries had suffered hardships for a considerable time, they begged the king to assign to them as a dwelling-place and a refuge the deserted city of the Shepherds, Auaris, and he consented.”

Once there, according to Manetho, the lepers began a revolt and “appointed as their leader one of the priests of Heliopolis called Osarseph, and took an oath of obedience to him in everything.” Osarseph “made it a law that they should neither worship the gods nor refrain from any of the animals prescribed as especially sacred in Egypt, but should sacrifice and consume all alike, and that they should have intercourse with none save those of their own confederacy.”

Osarseph was not just a lawgiver. Manetho continues: “After framing a great number of laws like these, completely opposed to Egyptian custom, he ordered them with their multitude of hands, to repair the walls of the city and make ready for war against King Amenophis.” He sent emissaries to a group of shepherds in Jerusalem, asking them to join him and his fellow lepers in attacking Egypt.

The shepherds agreed. Faced with a significant force arrayed against him, Amenophis fled to Ethiopia, whereupon the shepherds and the lepers attacked the people of Egypt and treated them “impiously and savagely.” They “set towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating images of the gods without restraint.” They even “made a practice of using the sanctuaries as kitchens to roast the sacred animals which the people worshipped: and they would compel the priests and prophets to sacrifice and butcher the beasts, afterwards casting the men forth naked.”

After telling this story, Manetho makes his big revelation: “It is said that the priest who framed their constitution and their laws was a native of Heliopolis, named Osarseph after the god Osiris, worshipped at Heliopolis; but when he joined this people, he changed his name and was called Moses.” Josephus concludes by noting that Manetho records the return of Amenophis from Ethiopia “with a large army.” This time, he took up the fight against the shepherds from Jerusalem and the Egyptian lepers led by Moses “and defeated them, killing many and pursuing the others to the frontiers of Syria.”

Josephus then states that he believes Manetho’s account to be “manifest lies and nonsense,” and it very well may be. There is even some question as to whether it originally referred to Moses and the Exodus at all. Some historians have concluded that the identification of Osarseph with Moses was not made by Manetho, but was a later interpolation, and that Manetho isn’t talking about the Exodus, but the expulsion of the Hyksos, foreign rulers who were expelled from Egypt in the seventeenth century BCE, two centuries before the Exodus.

This was a common confusion. The expulsion of the Hyksos and the Exodus were conflated together even in some official Egyptian records. Whatever Manetho originally wrote, negative stereotypes of the Jews took hold and began to spread. In Josephus’s version of Manetho’s account, Moses is not a prophet or a hero, but a leper and an enemy of the gods. The ruler of Egypt is not a cruel oppressor, but someone who showed kindness to the lepers (who are the Israelites in his telling), only to be repaid with their rebellion. The Israelites are not miraculously rescued from Egypt, but are driven out by a king who had had his fill of their misdeeds.

Manetho himself, if Josephus’s version of his writings is accurate, may have been motivated by a desire to present a more positive view of the Egyptians than appears in the Exodus account. Whatever his motivations may have been, however, his upside-down version of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt was extremely influential, to the extent that Josephus thought it necessary to rebut it four hundred years after Manetho lived.