The Shepherd Kings Who Took Egypt Without a Battle

Click for full size

Men of Obscure Race Came Out of the East

Egypt had a king named Timaus, and in his reign the eastern roads filled with men no Egyptian scribe could name. No heralds rode ahead of them. No war had been declared. The frontier posts saw dust before they saw riders, and by the time the report reached the palace there was no frontier left to report on.

They took the country without a battle. That was the detail the Egyptian priest who wrote it all down, a man named Manetho, could never make honorable, and he did not try. Men of obscure race, he called them. They burned the cities, pulled down the temples of the gods, killed some men and dragged the wives and children of others off into slavery. Then they set one of their own on a throne at Memphis and called him Salatis, and Egypt began paying tribute out of the granaries that had fed her own priests.

The Fortress at Avaris and the Name Egypt Gave Them

Salatis did not trust the east that had carried him in. He found a city called Avaris, raised its walls, and packed it with armed men so nothing could come down that road behind him. From inside those walls his line held Egypt for five hundred and eleven years by Manetho's own count, longer than any nation cares to remember being ruled.

Egypt gave the newcomers a name. In the sacred dialect hyc meant king, and in ordinary speech sos meant shepherd, so the scribes wrote Hyksos, shepherd kings. Manetho offered a second reading and said he preferred it. Aspirate the first syllable and hyc stops meaning king and starts meaning captive. Captive shepherds. Their own sacred books, he said, called them captives too.

Two Hundred Forty Thousand Walked Toward Syria

The kings of Thebes rose against them and would not stop rising. They drove the shepherd kings back across the country taken so easily, penned them behind the Avaris walls, and sat down to a siege.

What came out of that gate was two hundred and forty thousand people with their households, and they went into the wilderness rather than take the terms. They feared Assyria, so they did not turn north. They crossed into Syria, and in the country later called Judea they built a city, walled it, and named it Jerusalem. Manetho even dated the founding. Thirty-seven years, he reckoned, before Abraham ever left Haran.

The Second Scroll Called Them Diseased

Nearly four hundred years after Manetho put down his pen, a Jewish historian in Rome unrolled the same books and found a second Egypt hiding inside them. Josephus read the passage twice.

In this account the founders of Jerusalem were not conquerors at all. They were sick. Manetho described a crowd of diseased and defiled people driven out of Egypt for what was on their skin, gathered under a renegade priest, walking to Judea to build the same city. And he wrote the ending like a dispatch from a winning general. Amenophis came back from Ethiopia with a great army, his son came with another, and both joined battle with the shepherds and the polluted people, beat them, killed many, and pursued the rest to the bounds of Syria.

Josephus had a phrase for the whole performance. He called it "arrant lies."

Josephus Puts a Dead Priest on the Stand

The trap was Manetho's own arithmetic, and Josephus closed it without hurrying. If these people were Egyptians thrown out for their sores, then they were Egyptians. The older scroll said the opposite. Strangers of obscure birth came from elsewhere, seized Egypt at spear-point, and left it again generations later. A people cannot be native lepers and foreign kings in the same land. Manetho had written both, about the same men.

Josephus pressed harder. He would prove out of Manetho's own pages that Moses had lived and led long before this expulsion of the sick was ever supposed to have happened. The lawgiver walked in no column of outcasts. The Egyptian had welded two unrelated memories into one insult.

One more thing caught his eye. Manetho had leaned his whole case on the word captive and claimed the Hebrews' own books used it of themselves. Josephus went back to Genesis and found the scene the Egyptian meant. Joseph's brothers stood in front of Pharaoh and said, "Thy servants are shepherds" (Genesis 47:3). Shepherds, yes. Nobody in that room said captive. Manetho had put the word into a Hebrew mouth and then submitted it as evidence.

The Charge That Moses Taught Israel to Hate Strangers

The libraries held uglier things than Manetho. Lysimachus had written his own expulsion. Apollonius Molo went after the lawgiver himself, calling Moses a charlatan and his laws a training in wickedness, and the accusation that traveled furthest was that those laws had been designed to make a man hate anyone born outside them.

Apollonius could not hold his charges in one shape. On one page the Jews were atheists and haters of the human race. On another they were cowards. A few lines later they were reckless and mad. Then they were the feeblest of all barbarians, the one nation that had given the world nothing worth keeping.

So Josephus stopped defending and started reading the law out loud. Where Apollonius had found atheism he set down piety. Where the man had found hatred of strangers he set down love and shared life. Then he put a wager in front of anyone still writing against him. Bring your own nation's laws, lay them beside these, and read both to the end. He claimed more than that the Jews possessed such laws. He claimed they kept them better than anyone kept their own.

On the table the older scroll lay open at the line about Avaris, where two hundred and forty thousand people walked out of a besieged fortress with their households and turned toward Judea. Josephus left that sentence exactly as the Egyptian had written it. He had gone looking for a witness who could not be accused of loving the Jews, and the witness had put them in Egypt, in their hundreds of thousands, and marched them out.