Different Jewish
traditions of the exodus from Egypt
Returning to the issue of tradition, I find it
valuable to note that concerning the events upon which the main core of Judaism
is based, several significantly different traditions existed as late as about
the beginning of the Common Era, and different Jewish circles and thinkers
accepted whichever tradition better fit their spiritual or other needs. The
different traditions popular among the Jews at that time cannot all be true,
and we have no means of reasonably judging which of those traditions (if any)
describes the events as they happened.
There were mutually contradictory traditions
popular among the Jews around the beginning of the Common Era about the Exodus
from Egypt -- one of the foundations of our faith. We have three detailed
accounts of the plagues of Egypt written between the 1st century BCE and the
1st century CE by authors who considered themselves, and were considered by the
Jewish community, faithful Jews and apologists for the Judaic tradition. The
most prominent is Artapanus, an Egyptian Jewish writer who authored the
book On the Jews about 100 BCE (fragments of the book came down to us
in the writings of the 4th century CE Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea,
who brings it in his Praeparatio Evangelica, book IX, chapter 27, sections
28-33). Artapanus stated that the forefathers of Israel laid the foundations of
all human culture: Abraham taught the ancient Egyptians astrology, Joseph
introduced agricultural reforms designed to protect poor and weak peasants from
the aggressiveness of rich farmers -- but his favorite person was Moses.
According to On the Jews Moses invented civil engineering and
shipbuilding, armed the Egyptians and led them to war against Ethiopia, introduced
hieroglyphic writing, the Egyptian religion, and their philosophy. In
short, On the Jews is clearly an apology for the Judaic tradition and
its heroes, so its author would have had no reason to distort this tradition,
at least when distortion would bring him no polemic gain. And yet Artapanus's
account of the plagues greatly differs from that of the Torah.
The first plague, according to Artapanus,
begins with Moses striking the Nile's waters with his rod. The waters overflow,
flood all the land of Egypt, stand, stink, and cause death for fish and thirst
for men. Yet in his description the waters of the Nile do not become
blood. In the course of the second plague Moses strikes the ground with
his rod and the ground produces "a flying creature" -- an account
paralleling the Torah's story of Aaron striking the ground to initiate the
plague of lice. In this account Artapanus must be describing the plague of wild
beasts (arov), for the plague of lice is explicitly mentioned among the later
plagues; we have an exchange of traditions about lice and wild beasts.
"The flying creature," according to Artapanus, affects
"everybody...by pestilence" -- a parallel to the plague of boils.
After the boils, Moses simultaneously brings the frogs, the locust,
and the lice. In the Torah account, of course, these are completely discrete
plagues -- the second, the third, and the eighth, and the plagues of frogs and
lice were brought by Aaron, not Moses (in the first plague, too, the Torah
speaks of Aaron, not Moses, striking the Nile). But most astonishing is that
Artapanus does not mention anything like the plague of murrain, the plague of
darkness, and the plague of the firstborns.
Another account of the plagues is brought in
Philo's Vita Mosis ("The Life of Moses"), written in the
first half of the 1st century CE. Philo of Alexandria, also known by his Jewish
name, Yedidiah, is perhaps the most famous of pre-Mishnaic Jewish authors. He,
too, was a faithful Jew, considered the People of Israel the chosen nation,
"priests and prophets for all humanity," stated that one should not
neglect the observance of any of the Jewish commandments and customs which have
been divinely ordained, and fiercely rejected intermarriage. In his writings
Philo praised the spiritual greatness of the personalities of the Scripture,
attributed high moral reasons to the Torah commandments, and spoke with great
enthusiasm of Moses and his laws. In short, he, too, was clearly an apologist
for Judaic tradition, and is the last who should be accused of intentional
distortion.
Yet Philo's account of the plagues is also
significantly different from that of the Torah. Philo does speak of ten plagues
(and not seven, like Artapanus), but his order of the plagues is different: 1)
blood 2) frogs 3) lice 4) hail 5) locust 6) darkness 7) boils 8) wild beasts 9)
murrain of cattle 10) plague of the firstborn. Philo also gives homiletic
interpretations to the chronological proximity of certain plagues in his
account, so he considered his order of the plagues real and accurate. This order,
of course, is different from the Torah's. Another detail in Philo's account is
that the plague of the firstborns does not hit the cattle, while the Torah says
explicitly: "And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt will die... and
all the firstborn of animals." (In later tradition many homilies were said
on this verse; see Rashi's commentary).
One more account of the ten plagues may be
found in The Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus Flavius, written in
93 CE. Josephus is known, mostly due to his book Against Apion, as
defending Judaism and its traditions against anti-Semitic attacks; this can
also be seen in The Antiquities of the Jews. Here again it is hard to
speak of intentional distortion of the tradition. In The Antiquities of the
Jews (book II, chapters 12-14), Josephus brings a detailed account of the
plagues -- and in this report there is not a single plague which hits
cattle. According to Josephus the Egyptian cattle were not hit by murrain, nor
by boils, hail, or the plague of the firstborn -- in contrast to what we are
told by the Torah. The most interesting in this context is the plague of
murrain, for according to the Torah, this plague hit cattle only (see Exodus
9:3-7). Instead of this story, Josephus brings a short, blurred, and almost incomprehensible
account of people's illness, forming a single narrative with the story of the
plague of wild beasts.
It seems that Josephus systematically rejected
the tradition of the loss of the Egyptian cattle when speaking of the plagues
themselves -- and yet this tradition leaves its tracks in his story of Moses
negotiating with Pharaoh: Josephus tells that after the plague of locust,
Pharaoh permitted the Hebrews to leave with their wives and children, but
demanded they leave their cattle in Egypt, for the Egyptian cattle had been
lost (The Antiquities of the Jews, book 2, chapter 14, section 5). In
light of Josephus's narrative Pharaoh's demand is unreasonable and
incomprehensible, but it is easily understood in light of the story of murrain of
cattle which Josephus rejected. This contradiction in Josephus's account is,
therefore, a typical result of two different traditions coexisting in the mind
of a single author. These, and many other facts about the various Jewish
traditions of the Exodus and their interrelationship, may be found in The
Evolution of the Exodus Tradition by Samuel E. Loewenstamm (Magnes Press,
1992).
What was the relationship of these other
traditions to Scripture? How could they be propagated against Torah tradition?
Clearly there was considerable diversity in the ancient Jewish world on these
matters.
As you have
noted, these early chroniclers were apologists, who evidently felt a keen need
to reconcile the traditions they received from Jewish sources, with the
histories composed by the various historians of surrounding nations. I agree
with your contention that they should not be accused of intentional distortion;
at the same time, I do suspect them of unintentional distortion, as that will
almost certainly occur from the attempts to reconcile an accurate tradition,
with an inaccurate one.
To give an example: Josephus, in his
work Against Apion, which you mention above, details at length that the
sojourning of the Jewish people in Egypt occurred during the reign of the
Hyksos, a line of foreign rulers that took power in Egypt, between 1650 BCE and
1550 BCE according to conventional history. Josephus also makes the case that
the first Hyksos king was the Biblical Joseph, as, according to Josephus, the
word ‘hycsos’ means ‘shepherd kings’ or ‘captive shepherds’, which he
understood to be a reference to Joseph.
He writes: “Now Manetho, in another book of his,
says, ‘That this nation, thus called Shepherds, were also called Captives, in
their sacred books.’ And this account of his is the truth; for feeding of sheep
was the employment of our forefathers in the most ancient ages and as they
led such a wandering life in feeding sheep, they were called Shepherds. Nor was
it without reason that they were called Captives by the Egyptians, since one of
our ancestors, Joseph, told the king of Egypt that he was a captive, and
afterward sent for his brethren into Egypt by the king's permission.” (Against
Apion 1:92)
(According to my approach of reconciling
Egyptian dates with the Torah that I detailed previously, the Hyksos would have
ruled over Egypt during the times of the Judges, and were probably not of
Jewish origin).
Almost everyone disagrees with Josephus’
account, especially as ‘hyksos’ actually means ‘foreign rulers’. But it is
clearly evident that the reason why Josephus went to the lengths that he did in
his full supposition as elaborated on over there, is to reconcile our
tradition, with the histories compiled by Egyptian historians.
Now, I suspect that it was Manetho
himself, or his instructors, who were at the root of this misunderstanding; and
that originally there were two separate traditions of foreign populaces living
in Egypt – the sojourning of the Israelites and the rulership of the Hyksos –
and at some point in time, those two traditions were meshed together, which
created the false impression that Moses lived at the time of the Hyksos.
I assume that this is also the reason
why he records other things in his writings, in ways that do not agree with
Judaic tradition. For example, he writes in Antiquities of the Jews XX 10:1: “Now the number of years during the
rule of these thirteen [high priests], from the day when our fathers departed
out of Egypt, under Moses their leader, until the building of that temple which
King Solomon erected at Jerusalem, were six hundred and twelve” – clearly in
contradiction to the 480 years given in Kings I 6:1.
Another example can be brought from Against Apion 1:30-38,
where he writes: “For our forefathers did not only appoint the best of these
priests, and those that attended upon the Divine worship, for that design from
the beginning, but made provision that the stock of the priests should continue
unmixed and pure; for he who is partaker of the priesthood must propagate of a
wife of the same nation, without having any regard to money, or any other
dignities; but he is to make a scrutiny, and take his wife's genealogy from the
ancient tables, and procure many witnesses to it. And this is our practice
not only in Judea, but wheresoever any body of men of our nation do live; and
even there an exact catalogue of our priests' marriages is kept; I mean at
Egypt and at Babylon, or in any other place of the rest of the habitable earth,
whithersoever our priests are scattered; for they send to Jerusalem the ancient
names of their parents in writing, as well as those of their remoter ancestors,
and signify who are the witnesses also. But if any war falls out, such as have
fallen out a great many of them already, when Antiochus Epiphanes made an
invasion upon our country, as also when Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus
did so also, and principally in the wars that have happened in our own times,
those priests that survive them compose new tables of genealogy out of the old
records, and examine the circumstances of the women that remain; for still they
do not admit of those that have been captives, as suspecting that they had
conversation with some foreigners. But what is the strongest argument of our
exact management in this matter is what I am now going to say, that we have the
names of our high priests from father to son set down in our records for the
interval of two thousand years; and if any of these have been transgressors of
these rules, they are prohibited to present themselves at the altar, or to be
partakers of any other of our purifications; and this is justly, or rather
necessarily done, because every one is not permitted of his own accord to be a
writer, nor is there any disagreement in what is written; they being only
prophets that have written the original and earliest accounts of things as they
learned them of God himself by inspiration; and others have written what hath
happened in their own times, and that in a very distinct manner also.”
It is seemingly impossible to reconcile his statement of
having records “for the interval of 2000 years” with Judaic tradition, as we
believe that the Exodus occurred at 1312 BCE, and between then and 100 CE,
which is around the time when Josephus composed this work, is just over 1400
years. I suspect that the reason that Josephus gave the number of 2000 years,
is as a result of trying to mesh our tradition with the histories recorded by
the historians of other nations just before Josephus’ time; by adding to the
timeline around 130 years between the Exodus and the construction of the First
Temple, to reconcile with Manetho; by adding around 200 years to the length of
the Second Temple, to reconcile with Persian history; and adding around 50
years for the length of the First Temple, for reasons that I am not sure of
yet. It therefore comes out, according to him, that the Exodus occurred at
around 1700 BCE, which is 1800 years before 100 CE.
As such, it very possible that the
accounts of the Ten Plagues that we find in their writings, may have gone
through a similar process; they may very possibly not represent an authentic
Jewish tradition of them. Even further, it is possible that they felt that they
had some leeway in moving around the order of the plagues, as within Jewish
tradition itself, we have two different orders of them – the one in Exodus
(chapters 7-12), and the one in Psalms (chapters 78 and 105).
This is one of the reasons given for
Rabbi Judah Bar Ilui’s famous mnemonic, mentioned in the Passover Haggadah, of דצ"ך עד"ש באח"ב, where it is explained that one
of Rabbi Judah’s intentions was to teach that the true order of the plagues
followed the account given in Exodus. But Philo, Josephus and Artapanus all
lived before the times of Rabbi Judah, so it may be possible that during their lifetimes,
there wasn’t yet a clear teaching about the correct order of the plagues.
I will conclude by mentioning, that a
possible reason why in Josephus’ account, there is missing the plague of
murrain, may be due to a copyists’ omission, or perhaps, an inadvertent omission
by Josephus himself. It can be suggested from the fact that this plague is
included later on in his account, that it was originally there, or supposed to
be there, in the earlier section as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment