The mere celebration of Passover was apt to make permanent a certain hostility between the two nations. When we compare Deut. xxiii. 7, “Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian,” with Ezra ix. 1, where the customs of the Egyptians are classed as abominations, and where Egyptian, Moabite, and Edomite are added to the list of peoples (Deut. vii. 1) to be shunned and avoided, it is plain that the attitude toward Egyptians had undergone considerable change in the intervening centuries. It requires a long period of antagonism to explain the later Alexandrian anti-Semitism.
At the same time the papyri show other phases of life as well. They offer instances of amicable relations, even of intermarriage, as well as instances of hostility, such as that which resulted in the destruction of the shrine of Yahu at Elephantine. The latter incident is too obscure to permit us to draw inferences from it. But it is clear that it can no more be considered typical than the other examples, which show perfectly free and friendly intercourse.
The story as it appears in Hecataeus, however, does not imply, even in its unflattering aspects, hostility on the part of the Egyptians. It may be remembered that the founders of several Greek nations as well as the Jews were expelled from Egypt on the occasion mentioned. It is easy to see how Egyptians, learning of Greek and Jewish legends that ascribed the origin of those nations to themselves, would accept the ascription, and make it a part of their own stories in a way to flatter the national vanity.
While therefore the supposition that Egyptians based their version on the Jewish story of the Exodus as it became known to them is much the more probable view, the possibility of an independent Egyptian tradition on the subject is not to be dismissed cavalierly.
The Egyptian records that have come down to us do not often mention Jews. Careful study has made it plain that the Pharaoh of the oppression or the Exodus cannot be identified so readily as was formerly done, but they have shown that the popular traditions about the Hyksos had at least so much foundation in fact, that about 1580 B.C.E. Ahmose I did actually drive out the Semitic or half-Semitic conquerors of the country, and these conquerors are quite plausibly identified with the Hyksos. Now during the Hyksos period we hear of a ruler named Jacob-Her, or Jacob-El, and a few centuries after the inscriptions of Mer-ne-ptah show Israel already established in Palestine. If, in the casual selection of inscriptions that has been made by the lapse of thirty-five centuries, these facts appear, it is surely not impossible that in 300 B.C.E. a great many more facts were known. It is not likely that every Egyptian priest could read the hieroglyphics, but some could, and the knowledge of a few could easily become common possession.
When Greeks came to Egypt in the train of Alexander and Ptolemy, they not only brought Jews there, but they found them, as well as the story just discussed, whether two hundred or twelve hundred years old.
When we meet the Egyptian version again, it is in a form unmistakably malevolent. A very few years after Hecataeus, an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote the history of his people in Greek. His sources were popular traditions much more than the monuments, but they were at least partly documentary. Manetho’s book has been lost, and its “fragments,” as usual, appear in the form of quotations in much later books, where we must estimate the probabilities of wilful and careless error.
The fragments of especial interest to us are contained in Josephus’ apologetic work known as Contra Apionem (§1, 26-27), where unfortunately one cannot always distinguish between the statements of Josephus and those of Manetho.
The essential part of Manetho’s story, as far as we can piece it together, is that the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing more nor less than the defeat and expulsion of certain rebellious Egyptians. These latter had been isolated from their fellow-men as lepers and criminals, and had treasonably summoned to their aid the Bedouin Hyksos from Jerusalem. The Egyptian outcasts were led by a Heliopolitan priest named Osarsiph, who afterwards changed his name to Moses. After a short domination over Egypt, they were defeated and expelled, and pursued to the frontiers of Syria.
If the very indefinite words of Josephus are to be trusted (Contra Apionem, i. 26), Manetho expressly asserts that this account is based upon what is popularly told of the Jews (τὰ μυθευόμενα καὶ λεγόμενα περὶ τῶν Ἰουδαίων). Whether Manetho really said so or not, it is extremely unlikely that it was the case. The account seems too finished and detailed to have such an origin. It is much more likely that it is a deliberate invention of Manetho himself, following the Jewish story with a certain amount of care. As has been suggested, the name Osarsiph is simply an Egyptian version of Joseph, the name of Osiris (which often appears as Osar- or Osor- in names)[[97]] being substituted for the assumed theophoric element Jo-, a syllable that would be familiar to all Egyptians in such very common Jewish names as Johanan and Jonathan.