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Apion Invented an Oath No Jew Had Ever Sworn

In Alexandria they repeated a short proof. If God loved the Jews, they would not keep losing. A forger added an oath no one had ever heard.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. An Oath Nobody Heard
  2. Dead in the Mines
  3. Gods Who Weep and Take Wages
  4. Moses at the Stranger's Door

Apion stood in a Greek hall and made Jewish pain into a proof. If the Jews were loved, he said, they would not keep losing. Their laws were not just. Their worship was wrong. Alexandria sat fat as an imperial city. Defeat, in his mouth, became theology.

Apion Invented an Oath No Jew Had Ever Sworn Click for full size

The short charge traveled faster than any archive. A dinner guest could repeat it between cups. Josephus sat down with a stylus and refused the scale.

An Oath Nobody Heard

Apion had a story ready. The Jews, he said, swear by God, Maker of heaven and earth and sea, to bear no goodwill to any foreigner, and least of all to Greeks. The oath made a people look like a locked door with a curse on the latch.

Josephus turned the lie in his hands until the join showed. If Apion wanted the tale to match his other forgeries, he should have said Egyptians, not Greeks. The old slander claimed Israel had been driven out by Egyptian kinsmen. Greeks sat far off. Jews had no quarrel with them, and no jealousy of their laws. Some Greeks had even come over to Jewish statutes and stayed. Some had not had the courage and had left again.

No one had ever heard this oath sworn. Apion, Josephus wrote, was the only person who had heard it, because he was the first to compose it. A forger needs a witness. He appointed himself.

Dead in the Mines

Older Egyptian poison said the Jews sprang from lepers and the diseased, coughed out of the Nile and driven into the desert. Josephus answered with Manetho himself, a hostile priest turned against the tale. Manetho admitted the Jewish nation was not derived from Egypt, and that Egyptians were not mixed into it. Distinction, even from an enemy pen, is still distinction.

Then Josephus pressed the count. People forced into mines die. They had been there a long time, in a bad condition. Battles after an expulsion kill more. Flight kills still more. A broken remnant cannot become a thriving nation on schedule. The origin story fails as arithmetic before it fails as honor.

He was defending blood and name against a myth built to make Israel look like waste. A man in a mine does not found a people. A last battle and a last flight do not seed a law.

Gods Who Weep and Take Wages

He widened the case to how nations picture God. Painters and sculptors shaped deities from clay, ivory, and gold. Some gods were beardless and young. Some wore beards and old age. One was a smith. One goddess was a weaver. One fought men as a warrior. Some played the harp. Some loved the bow. They quarreled about mortals until they wounded one another and then lamented their own hurts.

The chief of them, Josephus wrote, could not save his own offspring, and could not bear their deaths without tears. Fate bound him. Adulteries sat in heaven as if they were sport. The eldest, who was also their king, could not even wait to reach a bedchamber. Some gods served men as builders for a wage. Some kept sheep. Some sat in a prison of brass like malefactors.

Cities then offered gifts to the better sort of these figures, and called others averters of evil, as if the divine could be hired and paid off. Josephus asked what sober person would not rebuke the forgers of such stories. Opinion about God, he insisted, should not change with fashion. Jewish law fixes the object of worship so that a sculptor's newest statue cannot remake Heaven every season.

Moses at the Stranger's Door

Against that workshop he set Moses. The legislator made room for anyone who wished to observe the laws, and he did it in a friendly manner. True union, Josephus wrote, extends not only to our own stock, but to those who would live the same way. Those who come by accident only, with no mind to keep the statutes, are not admitted into that communion. The door opens. It does not swing for a tourist.

Apion wanted Jewish pain to mean Jewish trash. Josephus answered with an oath nobody heard, with mines that would have eaten a leper-nation, with gods who weep and take wages, and with a law that trains a people to receive the stranger who means to stay. Suffering remains. The lie that suffering equals divine rejection does not.

He wrote knowing Greek rooms love a clean insult. A short charge about calamity can outrun a long archive. So he lengthened the archive on purpose. Each detail was a weight on Apion's scale until the scale tipped. The stylus kept moving after the dinner hall had gone home.

JosephusApionEgyptJosephMosesLaw
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From the tradition

Sources

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The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Against Apion 30:1Against Apion

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Against Apion, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Sometimes, digging into the past brings up unexpected things... and uncomfortable questions.

Against Apion isn't exactly light bedtime reading. It's a polemic, a fiery defense of Judaism against the slanderous accusations of a man named Apion, an Egyptian grammarian who clearly wasn't a fan. Josephus, a staunch defender of his people, wrote this to set the record straight.. or, at least, his version of it.

One of the most persistent accusations against the Jews was that they were somehow "tainted" or "impure," that their origins were less than noble. Apion, echoing earlier Egyptian writers like Manetho, claimed that the Jews were descended from lepers and other diseased people who were expelled from Egypt. Ouch.

Josephus, understandably, took serious issue with this. And in Against Apion, he presents a counter-narrative. He quotes Manetho himself, attempting to turn the Egyptian historian's words against him. Here's the gist: According to Manetho, the Jewish nation "was not derived from Egypt, nor were any of the Egyptians mingled with us."

Think about the weight of that statement. Josephus is arguing that even according to a hostile source, the Jews were a distinct people, separate from the Egyptians. He then goes on to suggest a grim reason why the alleged "leprous and distempered people" couldn't have formed the basis of the Jewish nation.

He points out the harsh realities of life for these individuals: many would have died in the mines where they were forced to work, others in the battles that supposedly followed their expulsion, and still more during the final, desperate flight. In other words, Josephus is arguing that sheer attrition would have decimated their numbers, making it impossible for them to become a thriving nation.

Is this a convincing argument? Well, that's where things get tricky. History is rarely black and white, and ancient sources are often colored by bias and political agendas. Josephus was writing to defend his people, and he was clearly selective in his use of sources. But that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong.

What is important to remember is that these ancient accusations, these whispers of impurity and tainted origins, have had a long and painful history. They've been used to justify discrimination, persecution, and even violence against the Jewish people for centuries.

So, when we read these old texts, we need to read them critically, with an awareness of the context in which they were written and the potential harm they can inflict. We need to ask ourselves: Whose voice is being amplified? Whose voice is being silenced? And what are the consequences of accepting a particular narrative as truth?

It's a heavy task, but it's a necessary one. Because the stories we tell about the past shape the world we live in today. And we have a responsibility to make sure those stories are as accurate, as fair, and as compassionate as possible.

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Against Apion 11:1Against Apion

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Against Apion, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

The writer Josephus, in his work Against Apion, deals with just such an argument. He's responding to the claims of a fellow named Apion, who’s taking potshots at the Jewish people. Apion, according to Josephus, says, "Look, you Jews are clearly not favored by the divine. You don't have just laws, and you don't worship God correctly. How else do you explain the fact that you're often under the rule of others? Your city has suffered calamities, unlike Alexandria which has always been an imperial city."

Ouch.

Josephus isn't having it. He cleverly turns Apion's argument right back on him. "Hold on a minute," he says, in effect. "Are you seriously suggesting that only nations who’ve never been conquered are righteous or have just laws? If that’s your standard, pretty much everyone fails! Very few nations have been consistently in power without facing subjugation at some point. History is full of empires rising and falling."

Then, Josephus really gets going. He zeroes in on Apion's own people, the Egyptians. And this is where it gets interesting. Josephus points out a rather uncomfortable truth: The Egyptians, despite Apion's boasting, have a pretty consistent track record of being… well, ruled by others. He says they “appear to have never, in all the past ages, had one day of freedom, no, not so much as from their own lords.”

He even references the Persians, who, as Josephus reminds us, repeatedly laid waste to Egyptian cities, demolished their temples, and even killed the animals they considered gods. Awkward!

Josephus isn't trying to revel in anyone's misfortune. His point is much bigger than that. He's saying, "Bad things happen. Calamities strike. It's part of the human experience. To single out one group and say their suffering is proof of some inherent flaw is not only unfair, it's ridiculous." He mentions the Athenians and Lacedaemonians (Spartans), respected for their courage and piety, yet they too faced misfortunes. What about King Croesus, known for his piety, who also suffered greatly? Were they all somehow deserving of their fates?

He then calls out Apion for conveniently forgetting the long history of Egyptian subjugation. Josephus emphasizes that the Egyptians were servants to the Persians and later to the Macedonians. Meanwhile, the Jewish people, he reminds us, "enjoyed liberty formerly; nay, more than that, have had the dominion of the cities that lie round about us, and this nearly for a hundred and twenty years together." He even mentions that when all the other kings were conquered by the Romans, the Jewish people were considered their confederates and friends because of their fidelity.

Josephus isn't just engaging in historical point-scoring. He’s challenging a dangerous line of thinking. The idea that suffering equals guilt. The notion that power equals righteousness. He's reminding us that history is complex, that fortunes rise and fall, and that judging an entire people based on their current circumstances is not only inaccurate but deeply unjust.

It is worth noting the historical commentary on this section of Josephus's work. As one note observes, the Egyptians "had never, in all the past ages since Sesostris, had one day of liberty, no, not so much as to have been free from despotic power under any of the monarchies to that day." And, the commentary continues, this remained "equally true in the latter ages, under the Romans, Saracens, Mamelukes, and Turks, from the days of Josephus till the present ago also." (Against Apion, 11, note 16). As Ezekiel prophesied, Egypt was destined to be a "base kingdom" (Ezekiel 29:14, 15).

So, the next time you hear someone trying to connect a group's struggles to some supposed inherent failing, remember Josephus. Remember Apion. And remember that history is rarely as simple as it seems. Perhaps, instead of judging, we should be asking ourselves, what can we learn from each other’s experiences?

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Against Apion 35:1Against Apion

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Against Apion, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Flavius Josephus, the first-century Romano-Jewish historian, grappled with this very question in his work, Against Apion. And his answer is surprisingly relevant, even today.

Josephus homes in on what he sees as a fundamental flaw in the pagan world's approach to the Divine. He argues that much of the confusion and, frankly, the scandals surrounding their deities stemmed from a basic lack of knowledge – and a lack of consistent teaching – about the true nature of God. The heathen legislators, as he calls them, didn’t fully grasp the essence of the Divine, and even what little they understood, they didn't share effectively with the people.

Can you imagine a society where even the leaders have only a hazy idea about God, and they don't prioritize sharing that understanding? Josephus points out that they didn't build their political systems around a central, consistent concept of the Divine. Instead, they treated religion almost as an afterthought. This opened the door for poets to invent gods with every human failing imaginable, and for orators to manipulate the masses into accepting foreign deities that suited their political agendas.

Then there were the artists. The painters and sculptors of Greece held immense power, each crafting their own version of the Divine. As Josephus notes, they could conjure up a god out of clay or create an image from a bare picture. The most celebrated artisans even had access to precious materials like ivory and gold for their creations.

But here's the kicker: as Josephus observes, this led to a kind of religious fickleness. Some temples flourished, adorned with elaborate rituals, while others were abandoned. The older gods, revered for generations, were overshadowed by newer, trendier deities. And these new gods? Some were quickly embraced, only to have their temples left desolate before long. It was a constant cycle of creation, worship, and abandonment, all driven by human whim.

The core of Josephus's argument is that opinions about God and the worship due to Him should be constant and unchanging. Imagine the contrast he's drawing with the Jewish tradition, where the concept of God, as revealed in the Torah, is meant to be a fixed point, a source of unwavering truth across generations. What happens when our understanding of the Divine becomes subject to the changing winds of popular opinion, artistic trends, and political maneuvering? Does it cheapen the sacred? Does it create confusion and ultimately, a spiritual void? Josephus certainly thought so, and his words offer a powerful critique of a world where the Divine is shaped more by human hands than by divine revelation.

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Against Apion 29:1Against Apion

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Against Apion, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

In his work, Against Apion, he outlines some of the core principles embedded in Jewish law. And they go way beyond the usual "be nice" platitudes.

He points out that our legislator – meaning Moses, the great lawgiver – laid down some fundamental obligations that extend to all of humanity. Things we must do. Simple acts of kindness that can have a huge impact. Offering fire, water, and food to those in need. Showing travelers the way. Ensuring that no one is left unburied. Basic human decency.

Then it gets interesting. It's not just about being kind to those who are down on their luck. What about those we consider our enemies? Josephus argues that our tradition calls for moderation even in dealing with them. We are not allowed to set their country ablaze, nor are we permitted to cut down fruit-bearing trees. Think about the implications of that! Restraint, even in the heat of conflict.

He goes on to say that we’re forbidden to despoil the dead in wartime. Provision must be made for captives, ensuring they are not harmed, and that women are especially protected from abuse. It's a powerful statement about human dignity in the darkest of times.

This idea of extending compassion even to those who might wish us harm.

But it doesn't stop there. Josephus emphasizes that this ethical framework even encompasses our treatment of animals. We are permitted only a regular use of them, not abuse. If an animal seeks shelter in our home, we are forbidden to slay it. We cannot kill a mother animal along with its young. And even in enemy territory, we are obligated to spare animals that labor for mankind.

Why is this so important? Josephus argues that these laws aren’t just about rules. They are about cultivating a particular kind of character. "Thus hath our lawgiver contrived to teach us an equitable conduct every way, by using us to such laws as instruct us therein." It’s about training ourselves to act ethically, consistently, in every situation. And there's a consequence for failing to do so. He adds, "while at the same time he hath ordained that such as break these laws should be punished, without the allowance of any excuse whatsoever."

So, what do we take away from this? It seems to me that Josephus is presenting a vision of ethical life that is both deeply rooted in tradition and startlingly relevant today. It's a vision that calls us to extend our circle of compassion, to act with restraint and humanity, and to recognize the inherent dignity of all living beings. It's a tall order, no doubt. But isn’t that what makes it so compelling? A constant striving toward a more just and compassionate world.

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