bacht

sorry my bad, I didn't make the connection with the Persian period.

So this would be an old expulsion of Hyksos into Canaan, remembered by the Egyptians, applied to a later expulsion of Jews into Canaan. The Jews then turned around and spun this as a glorious exodus, is that the idea? I can live with that, a lot simpler than the traditional story.

Moses then could've been a Jewish soldier or community leader who arrived in Judah sometime in the 5th C. Would this be connected with the failure to rebuild the Jewish temple at Elephantine? This was also supposedly the time when Samaritans and Judahites formally separated their worship.

bacht

That would imply post-Alexander. We know Jews were living in Egypt long before that (maybe as Assyrian mercenaries, 7th C?), so it's likely that they had their own legends and traditions before the Hellenistic period.

Maybe a lot of the written material came from Egypt originally?

Diogenes the Cynic

The Torah is written in Hebrew. the Hebrew language did not yet exist at the alleged time of Moses. The Torah also shows clear evidence of multiple, independent sources being syncretized into a single narrative. There are no serious scholars (excluding those who argue from a purely confessional position, not an empirical one) who give any credence at all to Mosaic authorship of the Torah (an attribution which is not even made by the Torah itself, by the way).

spin

No later expulsion necessary, just the ethnic slight of having already been ejected from Egypt, a bunch of lepers. They should leave as their presumed ancestors had.

Moses would have the same "good Jew in hostile country who made good" write up as would Daniel and Esther.

It's functional, economical and speculation!


spin

semiopen

The Elephantine_papyri

.

is from 407 BCE.

But the passover letter

http://www.kchanson.com/ANCDOCS/westsem/passover.html

Passover was one day and seven days of unleavened bread.

The concept sort of works but it doesn't have a lot of academic support I think.

spin

Ummm, passover is part of an agricultural calendar, ie it needed a sedentary agricultural society. When did it get attached to Moses and the exodus??


spin

seyorni

According to the Quran, Mary, mother of Jesus, was Moses' sister (Quran. 3:35ff). This is reiterated in Quran 66:12, where She's referred to as "Maryam, daughter of Imran" (Moses' father). In Quran 19:28 she's referred to as "sister of Aaron and a little further on, 19:53, Aaron is referred to as "brother of Moses." In Quran 23:45-50 the three siblings, Aaron, Mary and Moses are again mentioned together.

This makes the Exodus and the Nativity coeval, either 3500 or 2000 years ago (pick one).

Doug Shaver

So?

Some Jews in the 4th century BCE had some documents and believed those documents had been written several centuries earlier by a particular individual whose story comprises much of the narrative portion of those documents. And therefore . . . ?

DNAReplicator

I looked this reference up, and am more than a little intrigued. Like Dr Zoidberg, I used to think there must be a connection between Armarna and the exodus. However, having then studied Egyptology, and having a hard-nosed sceptic archaeologist brother, I had relegated such a suggestion to the province of wishful thinking. Having read through the passages in Josephus, I want to have another look at this.

Firstly, there is more detail in Josephus than you give – in fact he gives two, seemingly independent Egyptian versions of an Exodus like event, attributed to Manetho and Chaeremon. For the sake of discussion I have summarised the stories below;

A heretic priest called Osarseph took control of Egypt under a pharaoh called Amenophis (note Akhnaton was born and became regent under the name Amenophis), who ruled Egypt for 13 years. Amenophis wanted to see the Gods, and Osarseph told him he could if he expelled lepers and sick people, from Egypt. Amenophis rounded up 80,000 sick and lepers, but he did not expel them, instead setting them to work in stone quarries. After a while the slaves petitioned the king to move to Avaris (eastern Nile delta). Here they elected Osarseph their leader, and set up fortifications. Osarseph forged an alliance with the Hyskos who sent an army of 200,000.

Amenophis then raised an army of 300,000 to face Osarseph and the Hyskos, first taking the precaution of hiding his 5 year old son, “Sethos, also called Ramasses”. However, just as he was about to attack, Amenophis withdrew to Memphis, concerned that his actions would be seen by the gods as an attack on them. Amenophis then headed south to Ethopia where he lived as a guest of the King. After a reign of religious terror lasting 13 years, Amenophis and his son re-invaded from Ethopia, driving the Hyskos and Osarseph into Syria.

Manetho explicitly states that Osarseph is Moses, but otherwise shows no knowledge of the text of the Septuagint. The Chaeremon version of the tale goes something like

There are two rebel leaders – Peteseph, who is identified as Joseph and Tisathen, who is identified as Moses. Amenophis has a dream in which Isis criticizes him for destroying her temple. Amonophis seeks advice, and a sacred scribe advises him to throw “contaminated” people out of Egypt. Amenophis rounds up 250,000 and orders them out. When they get to the border, there is an exiled Egyptian army there of about 380,000 soldiers who join forces. The pharaoh then flees to Ethopia, but his pregnant wife stays in Egypt, and gives birth to his son, Ramasses. When Ramasses grows up, he defeats the ‘Jews’ and his farther returns from Ethopia.

While there are obvious differences between the Egyptian and the Hebrew accounts, there are also some similarities with each other and the biblical account. Similarities include the ejection of a people from Egypt seen as a threat, indecision on the part of the pharaoh about making them leave, enslavement (not practiced in Egypt until after the ejection of the Hyskos), journey of the enslaved peoples to a new location in Egypt, divine retribution for the enslavement, a slave revolt bringing destruction and chaos, indecision about military confrontation on the part of the Pharaoh, a cruel ruler of Egypt, the hiding of a child hero who is raised as the Pharaohs son, and his eventual growing up and triumph.

I am left with more questions than answers at this point. While some of the main characters of the new kingdom are loosely recognisable from these tales, they span a period from about 1500BC to 1200BC. At first glance, the tales do seem to loosely resemble Armarna-esqe events.

I will go elsewhere to get laughed at by Egyptologists for raising the issue, but have some questions at this point which may be best answered here.

The assumption that these stories are anti-Jewish polemic appears to be based on the fact that they are preserved in ‘Against Apion’ . While Apion obviously wrote anti-Jewish polemic, do we have any reason to think that Manetho and Chaeremon would also have been interested in doing so? What was the general attitude towards Jews in Egypt during the Ptolemaic era? Do we know, or is it likely that there would have been widespread knowledge of the LXX around this time in Egypt, or are the Egyptian Moses stories possibly an independent tradition?

My interest is piqued, so I’m also going to take another look at the supposed link between the Hymn to the Aten and psalm 104 (see http://kemet.250x.com/psalm104.html). It looks superficially reasonable – any thoughts?

DrZoidberg

But there's no reason to think that ideas from the Aten cult didn't work it's way into Coptic Christianity, or even later Judaism. I know of several researchers who've claimed that Alexandrian Jews had a big impact on what later became Christianity.

What I'm trying to say is that there's no reason to believe that the only influence Aten's cult could have on Judaism only could have taken place before the Exodus. There's historically been loads of traffic between Israel and Egypt. It'd be stupid to think that ideas didn't spread the same way.

The problems with any arguments like that is that they're impossible to track. I still think it is interesting.