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Manetho: History of Egypt and Other Works (Loeb Classical Library No. 350)
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Manetho: History of Egypt and Other Works (Loeb Classical Library No. 350) Customer Reviews
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Who was Moses?
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Who was Moses?
Did the Exdous really occur?
These are among some of the questions addressed in this short work. It was written at the behest of Ptolemy II second in the Ptolemic and last of the Egyptian dynasties (of which Cleopatra would later so immortalize). At the time of its commission, Ptolemy II wanted a complete history of Egypt from its inception to the time of Alexander the Great.
Regrettably the work now exists only in fragments as they were preserved by later writers. Nonetheless what does exist provides interesting glimpses into the Egyptian view of the Exodus.
Instead of denying the Exodus, Manetho put an Egyptian spin on it, saying that Moses' true name was Osarseph and that he was essentially a renegade priest during the time of Akenaten. Far from casting the Israelites as couregous freedom fighters, Manetho paints them as forced expatriots, forceably kicked out of their country.
This Egyptian view of the matter later came to serve as a centerpiece to Gary Greenberg in his Moses Mystery wherein he speculated that the Exodus did indeed occur around the time of the reign of Akenaten and really did involve support from the then then disopossessed Egyptian priesthood. As is known generally to historians, Akenaten proclaimed the sole worship of the Aten or sun disk at the expense of all other then existent Egyptian religions.
While it is certainly logically plausible that the priests dispossed by Akenaten's reforms would have rebelled, the link between any antipathy they experienced and a genuine Israelite Exodus has now come to be disregarded on other grounds. For one thing, as shown in his book Who were the Israelites and Where did they come from? archeologist William Dever expressed the conventional viewpoint that their is no archeological evidence to support the existence of a historical Exodus of Israelites from Egypt. For another, while it is true that Manetho denies but puts a different spin the Israelite Exodus, it was not uncommon in history writing at the time for one countries writers to similarly downplay the histories of other peoples.
In other words, while the Manetho assertions certainly provide interesting fodder for academic speculation it's probably best to limit that speculation to merely what the second century BCE Egyptians were saying about the Israelite Exodus and not the fact whether such an Exodus actually occured. |
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