How Josephus Stacked Egypt's Anti-Jewish Lies Until They Collapsed

Most readers know Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian writing in Rome, as the man who chronicled the destruction of the Second Temple. Against Apion, his late and combative little book, is something else.

It is the earliest surviving Jewish reply to the anti-Jewish history of Egypt. Josephus reaches back into the writings of an Egyptian priest, a court intellectual, and a Greek scholar of Alexandria, lines up their stories of the Exodus side by side, and shows that they slander the Jewish people while contradicting each other on every meaningful detail. The contradictions, in his hands, become the argument.

Four passages from Against Apion trace the demolition.

The Egyptian Priest Who Started the Lie

The first witness Josephus calls is Manetho, the Egyptian priest who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek in the third century BCE. Against Apion 28 takes Manetho's version of the Exodus and starts pulling at its threads.

Manetho's tale opens with a king named Amenophis who, the historian claims, desired to see the gods. Josephus stops the story almost as soon as it starts. Which gods, exactly? The ox, the goat, the crocodile, and the baboon? The Egyptians worship those already. The king has seen them every day. The heavenly gods? Then what specifically made Amenophis assume he could see them, when the priests had never given him a method?

Then comes the prophet. The man is described as wise, and yet he advises the king that the gods refuse to appear because Egypt is full of lepers. Josephus presses again. Since when do gods care about skin? Are they not more offended by wickedness? And how do you gather eighty thousand lepers in one day from a country whose royal household had not noticed they existed?

The chapter ends without a refutation in the usual sense. Josephus has only asked questions. Manetho already looks ridiculous.

The Story That Could Not Decide Whose Dream It Was

Then Josephus calls his second witness. Against Apion 33 turns to Chaeremon, a Stoic philosopher and Egyptian priest who tutored the young Nero. Chaeremon also tells a version of the Exodus, and Josephus reads it next to Manetho's with a kind of patient cruelty.

Manetho says the king wanted to see the gods. Chaeremon says the king had a dream sent by Isis. Manetho says the prophet's name was Amenophis. Chaeremon says it was Phritiphantes. Manetho counts eighty thousand expelled people. Chaeremon counts two hundred fifty thousand. They agree exceedingly well, Josephus writes, and the sarcasm is so sharp it survives two thousand years of translation.

The technique is simple. Josephus does not yet argue from Scripture. He argues from the slanderers themselves. If the lies could not even keep their numbers straight, the lies were not memory. They were invention.

The Most Hateful Version, and Why It Mattered

The third witness is the worst. Against Apion 34 introduces Lysimachus, an Alexandrian author whose version of the Exodus is so cruel that Josephus admits it betrays itself.

In Lysimachus's telling, the Jews of Egypt are not just lepers. They are leprous, scabby, plague-bringing parasites who beg for food at temples until they cause a famine. King Bocchoris consults an oracle. The oracle commands that the diseased be drowned in lead-lined boxes in the sea and the rest abandoned in the desert. Then, in the wilderness, Moses appears and gathers the survivors and gives them their laws.

Josephus does not even pretend to debate the medical claims. He notes the structural giveaway. Lysimachus has had to invent a new Egyptian king that Manetho and Chaeremon never mentioned, a new oracle no source corroborates, and a method of execution drowning in lead-lined boxes that no other ancient writer describes. The version, Josephus says, is invented out of virulent hatred of our nation. Hatred this fluent does not need facts to operate.

The point Josephus is quietly making is that anti-Jewish slander does not begin in his century. It began as soon as the Jewish people became visible, and it has always proceeded the same way. Stack three versions and the slanderers cannot keep their own story straight.

The Moses the Slanderers Could Not See

Having taken apart the lies, Josephus turns toward what he believes the Egyptian historians missed. Against Apion 16 reframes Moses against the great lawgivers of the Greek world.

Most lawgivers, Josephus argues, claimed antiquity for their codes so that no one would suspect them of copying earlier traditions. Minos of Crete did. Lycurgus of Sparta did. The greatness of a lawgiver, he writes, lies in convincing the people that the laws are old, divine, and worth living by. By that standard, Moses is the greatest of them.

The Torah Moses delivered is not a legal code dressed up in piety, in Josephus's reading. It is a legal code built on piety, a constitution whose first premise is that God is watching. People who believe themselves seen by heaven, Josephus argues, sin less. Moses understood this and made it the foundation. He was not, Josephus insists, an impostor the way Lysimachus claimed. He was the only legislator in the ancient world whose people kept his laws after his death.

Why the Contradictions Were the Argument

Stack the four passages together and the structure of Against Apion comes into focus. The case in Josephus's hands, gathered in the Josephus collection, does not need to prove itself against the slanders. It only needs the slanders quoted in the right order.

Manetho saw a king who wanted to see the gods. Chaeremon saw a king with a dream from Isis. Lysimachus saw a king consulting Zeus-Ammon about a famine. Each version is told as if it were the truth. Each is incompatible with the next. And the figure of Joseph, who is supposed to be the reason any Israelites were in Egypt in the first place, is missing from all three.

Josephus does not have to remind his reader that the Torah's account names Joseph by chapter, names Pharaoh by office, names every dream that did the work. The Torah is not in court here. The slanderers are. And when the slanderers cannot keep their own lies aligned, the case against the Jewish people falls apart under its own weight.