History of the Jews (5 page)

That West Semites came into Egypt in large numbers is certain. They began to penetrate the Nile Delta as early as the end of the third millennium
BC
. These immigrants usually came peacefully; sometimes willingly in search of commerce and work; sometimes driven by hunger—for the Nile was much the most regular provider of grain
surpluses—and sometimes as slaves. There is a famous passage in an Egyptian papyrus, Anastasi
VI
, in which Egyptian frontier guards notify the palace of a tribe passing through in search of pasture and water. Papyrus No. 1116a in Leningrad shows a gracious pharaoh donating rations of wheat and beer to headmen identified as coming from Ashkelon, Hazor and Megiddo. For a time, indeed, from the eighteenth to the sixteenth centuries
BC
, Egypt had a dynasty of foreign rulers called the Hyksos. Some of their names seem Semitic—Khyan, Yakubher, for example. In the first century
AD
the Jewish historian Josephus, trying to buttress the Exodus story, quoted Manetho to link it with the eventual expulsion of the Hyksos in the mid-sixteenth century. But the Egyptian detail in the Bible would fit more neatly with a later period.

Indeed there is pretty convincing evidence that the period of Egyptian oppression, which finally drove the Israelites to revolt and escape, occurred towards the last quarter of the second millennium
BC
, and almost certainly in the reign of the famous Rameses
II
(1304-1237
BC
). At the opening of the Book of Exodus, it said of the Egyptians: ‘Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Rameses.’
⁶⁶
Rameses
II
, the greatest builder of the nineteenth-dynasty New Kingdom rulers—indeed the most prolific builder since the pyramid-creators of the Old Kingdom—engaged in tremendous building-works at Pithom, the modern Tell er-Rataba in the Wadi Tummilat, and in the place he called after himself, Rameses or Pi Ramesu, the modern San el-Hagar on the Tanatic arm of the Nile.
⁶⁷
These nineteenth-dynasty pharaohs came from this part of the Delta, to which they transferred the central government, near the Biblical land of Goshen. Vast numbers of forced or slave labourers were employed. A papyrus from Rameses
II
’s reign, Leiden 348, states: ‘Distribute grain rations to the soldiers and to the Habiru who transport stones to the great pylon of Rameses.’
⁶⁸
But it is not probable that the exodus itself took place in Rameses’ reign. It seems more likely that the Israelites broke out under his successor, Merneptah. A victory stele of this pharaoh has survived and been dated 1220
BC
. It relates that he won a battle beyond Sinai, in Canaan, and refers to the defeated as ‘Israel’. He may not have won, as pharaohs often presented their defeats or stalemates as triumphs, but it is clear that he fought some kind of engagement with the Israelites outside his territory, so they had already left. This is the first non-Biblical reference to Israel. Taken in conjunction with other evidence, such as calculations based on
I
Kings 6:1 and Judges 11:26,
⁶⁹
we can
be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century
BC
and had been completed by about 1225
BC
.

The stories of the plagues of Egypt, and the other wonders and miracles which preceded the Israelite break-out, have so dominated our reading of Exodus that we sometimes lose sight of the sheer physical fact of the successful revolt and escape of a slave-people, the only one recorded in antiquity. It became an overwhelming memory for the Israelites who participated in it. For those who heard, and later read, about it, the Exodus gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history. Something happened, at the frontiers of Egypt, that persuaded the eye-witnesses that God had intervened directly and decisively in their fate. The way it was related and set down convinced subsequent generations that this unique demonstration of God’s mightiness on their behalf was the most remarkable event in the whole history of nations.

Despite intensive investigations over many years, we really have no idea where the hand of the Lord saved Israel from pharaoh’s army.
⁷⁰
The critical phrase is ‘at the sea of reeds’ or ‘at the sea’. This could mean one of the salt lakes, or the northern end of the Suez Gulf, or even the top of the Gulf of Aqaba; another alternative is the Serbonian Sea (Lake Sirbonis) in northern Sinai, which in effect is a lagoon of the Mediterranean.
⁷¹
What we do know is that the frontier was heavily defended in places and policed throughout. The episode which saved the Israelites from pharaoh’s fury, and which they saw as divine redemption, was so stupendous as to become for them and their progeny the dynamic of their whole spiritual existence. Ask yourselves, Moses said to them, since the day God created man, ‘whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing, or hath been heard like it?’ Has God ever before ‘assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?’ In Exodus, Moses has God himself point to the stupendous wonder of his acts, and show how they relate to his plans for them as a people: ‘Ye have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice in deed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.’
⁷²

This overwhelming event was matched by the extraordinary man who made himself the leader of the Israelite revolt. Moses is the
fulcrum-figure in Jewish history, the hinge around which it all turns. If Abraham was the ancestor of the race, Moses was the essentially creative force, the moulder of the people; under him and through him, they became a distinctive people, with a future as a nation. He was a Jewish archetype, like Joseph, but quite different and far more formidable. He was a prophet and a leader; a man of decisive actions and electric presence, capable of huge wrath and ruthless resolve; but also a man of intense spirituality, loving solitary communion with himself and God in the remote countryside, seeing visions and epiphanies and apocalypses; and yet not a hermit or anchorite but an active spiritual force in the world, hating injustice, fervently seeking to create a Utopia, a man who not only acted as intermediary between God and man but sought to translate the most intense idealism into practical statesmanship, and noble concepts into details of everyday life. Above all, he was a lawmaker and judge, the engineer of a mighty framework to enclose in a structure of rectitude every aspect of public and private conduct—a totalitarian of the spirit.

The books of the Bible which recount his work, especially Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers, present Moses as a giant conduit through which the divine radiance and ideology poured into the hearts and minds of the people. But we must also see Moses as an intensely original person, becoming progressively, through experiences which were both horrific and ennobling, a fierce creative force, turning the world upside down, taking everyday concepts accepted unthinkingly by countless generations and transforming them into something totally new, so that the world becomes a quite different place in consequence, and there can be no turning back to the old ways of seeing things. He illustrates the fact, which great historians have always recognized, that mankind does not invariably progress by imperceptible steps but sometimes takes a giant leap, often under the dynamic propulsion of a solitary, outsize personality. That is why the contention of Wellhausen and his school that Moses was a later fiction and the Mosaic code a fabrication of the post-Exilic priests in the second half of the first millennium
BC
—a view still held by some historians today—is scepticism carried to the point of fanaticism, a vandalizing of the human record. Moses was beyond the power of the human mind to invent, and his power leaps out from the page of the Bible narrative, as it once imposed itself on a difficult and divided people, often little better than a frightened mob.

Yet it is important to note that Moses, though an outsize figure, was in no sense a superhuman one. Jewish writers and sages, fighting against the strong tendency in antiquity to deify founder-figures, often
went out of their way to stress the human weaknesses and failings of Moses. But there was no need; it is all in the record. Perhaps the most convincing aspect of the Biblical presentation is the way in which it shows Moses as hesitant and uncertain almost to the point of cowardice, mistaken, wrong-headed, foolish, irritable and, what is still more remarkable, bitterly conscious of his shortcomings. It is very rare indeed for a great man to confess: ‘I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.’
⁷³
Lack of articulation is about the last disqualification a lawgiver and statesman will admit. Still more striking are the images of Moses as an isolated, rather desperate and inefficient figure, struggling with the burdens of a huge role he has reluctantly accepted but grimly seeks to discharge. Exodus 18 shows him conscientiously sitting in judgment, from dawn till dusk, hearing cases brought to him by the people. His father-in-law Jethro, on a visit, asks indignantly: ‘Why sittest thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning until even?’ Moses replies wearily: ‘Because the people come unto me to inquire of God! When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws.’ To this Jethro replies: ‘The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou will surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee.’ So he proposes the creation of a regular, trained judiciary, and Moses, being in many ways a modest man, with the magnanimity to solicit and follow good advice, does as the old man proposes.
⁷⁴

Moses, as he comes to us from the Bible, is a deeply appealing mixture of the heroic and the human, who dealt in tremendous certitudes which concealed all kinds of doubts and sometimes sheer bewilderment. Because of his position, he had to keep up a brave front of omniscience; because he had to keep his fissiparous horde together, he was obliged to thunder confidently, even when unsure, and to display publicly a relentlessness he did not feel in his heart. So his image was stern, his watchword ‘Let the Law bend the mountain.’ There is no doubt truth in the early aggadic tradition that Aaron was more popular than his far greater brother: when Aaron died, everyone wept, but when Moses died only the menfolk mourned.
⁷⁵
With the Bible record, readers today have perhaps a clearer picture of Moses’ whole character than the men and women who actually followed him.

Moses was not only the most influential of all the Jews of antiquity before Christ; he was also the only one to make a considerable impact on the ancient world. The Greeks conflated him with their own gods and heroes, especially Hermes and Musaeos; he was credited with inventing Hebrew writing, seen as the prelude to Phoenician script and
so of Greek. Eupolemus said he was the first wise man in the history of mankind. Artapanos credited him with organizing the Egyptian system of government and inventing all kinds of warlike and industrial machinery. Aristobulus thought that both Homer and Hesiod drew inspiration from his works, and there was a general view among many ancient writers that mankind as a whole, and Greek civilization in particular, owed much to his ideas.
⁷⁶
Not surprisingly, Jewish writers of antiquity endorsed this tradition of Moses as a leading architect of ancient culture. Josephus says he invented the very word ‘law’, then unknown in Greek, and was the first legislator in world history.
⁷⁷
Philo accused both philosophers and lawgivers of plundering or copying his ideas, Heraclitus and Plato being the chief culprits.
⁷⁸
Still more striking is the assertion of the pagan writer Numenius of Apamea (second century
AD
) that Plato was just a Moses who spoke Greek.
⁷⁹
The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses’ existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history.

But there was also a tendency among pagan writers, from the second half of the first millennium
BC
, to see Moses as a baleful figure, the creator of a form of religion which was strange, narrow, exclusive and anti-social. Moses is strongly associated with the very earliest stirrings of systematic anti-Semitism. Hecataeus of Abdera (fourth century
BC
), who wrote a history of Egypt (now lost), accused him of secluding his followers from other men, and encouraging xenophobia. Manetho (
c
.250
BC
) first put about the extraordinarily persistent legend that Moses was not a Jew at all but an Egyptian, a renegade priest of Heliopolis, who commanded the Jews to kill all the Egyptian sacred animals and set up alien rule.
⁸⁰
The notion of the rebellious Egyptian priest, leading a revolt of outcasts including lepers and negroes, became the fundamental matrix of anti-Semitism, the Ur-libel, embroidered and repeated through the centuries with extraordinary persistence. It is reproduced, for instance, twice in anti-Semitic passages in Karl Marx’s letters to Engels.
⁸¹
It is curious, too, that Sigmund Freud, certainly no anti-Semite, based his last work,
Moses and Monotheism
, on Manetho’s story that Moses was an Egyptian and a priest, adding the common speculation that his religious ideas were derived from the monotheistic sun-cult of Akhenaten, and much pseudo-factual nonsense of his own.
⁸²