This was the story as the Israelites told it, but the Egyptians laughed at them:
"Nothing of the kind has happened: no king of Egypt ever perished in the sea, and the leader of the Jews whom they call in Egyptian Mosu—Child, Son—is not a 'Son of God' at all, as they imagine, but the son of a slave, a wicked sorcerer, murderer and thief, who ran away into the desert to the Midian nomads and then secretly returned to Egypt and became the leader of a robber band of Khabiri, the Plunderers, who are the same as the Jews. The Khabiri are continually rising in the border lands of Egypt. In the days of King Tutmose the Fourth there was such a rising; a band of Khabiri went to the desert of Sinai and perished there of hunger and thirst together with Mosu or Moses, their leader."
This was how the sons of Ham mocked the sons of Israel. And, indeed, not only the Egyptians but many of the Israelites themselves—for Moses led only a part of them out of Egypt—refused to believe the miracles of Exodus or to worship the new god, Jahve.
"What sort of god is it?" they asked. "We do not know him. Jahve in the Midian language means 'Destroyer.' He is the god of the nomads of Sinai and not of the Israelites, the demon of the desert, a consuming fire. His son, Moses, covered his face when he appeared before the people lest they should discover whom he was like. No, the gods of our fathers, the gentle Elohim, were different: Eliun, the Father, El-Shaddai the Son, and El Ruach, the Mother. This new god is anger, tempest, consuming fire and those three are mercy, loving kindness, dewy freshness."
And they also said:
"There has been no Exodus but there will be; there has been no Son yet but the Son is to come according to the words of our father Jacob: 'the sceptre shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until the Messiah come.'"
Hamuel, son of Avinoam of the house of Judah, a priest of El-Shaddai, worshipped the old gods, the Elohim, hated the new god Jahve and awaited the coming of the Messiah.
He was a wise man; he doctored the sick; told fortunes by throwing dice—teraphim—which revealed the divine preordination of human destinies; he received good pay for this and also made money by a traffic, of which the Customs officers knew nothing, in silphium, a medicinal herb from Lybia, and the balm of Gilead for anointing the dead. He lived in the town of Bubastis at the mouth of the Nile, protected by gods and respected by men.
He had two sons: the elder Eliav by Thamar, an Israelite, and the younger Issachar by Asta, an Egyptian.
It had happened that Hamuel went on business to the town of Mendes; there, in the temple of the god Goat, he saw a little girl priestess, Asta, and fell in love with her so much that he did not hesitate to give a hundred gold rings, utens, the price of thirty pairs of oxen, to pay for her flight from the temple: the priestesses betrothed to the god could not under the penalty of death marry anyone and especially not an 'unclean' Jew. Asta loved her mortal husband ardently, but could not forgive herself for being unfaithful to the immortal one and suffered such remorse that her mind became slightly deranged. When she gave birth to a son she imagined that she had conceived him by the god: the priestesses believed that the god Goat, the fiery-red Bindidi—Sun-Ra in the flesh and the source of virility in men and beasts—had carnal union with them. Asta whispered strange stories to the little Iserker, as she called Issachar in Egyptian, and sang strange songs to him about the golden-fleeced, golden-horned Goat that grazed in the azure meadows of the sky and came down sometimes to love the beautiful daughters of the earth.