Pharaoh’s Sorcerers Revisited. A Sahidic Exodus Apocryphon (P.Lips. Inv. 2299) and the Legend of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians between Judaism, Christianity, and Native Egyptian Tradition (original) (raw)
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Review of Pnina Galpaz-Feller, The Exodus from Egypt: Reality or Imagination? (Hebrew)
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The Arab-Muslim historical tradition contains interesting data on history and culture of the subdued countries, including Egypt and Judea. Both countries went through the Assirian, Babilonian and Persian invasions, plunder and devastation of their territories. However, the folklore and semi-folklore novels, collected by Ibn Abd al-Hakam, al-Masudi and at-Tabari, show a specific picture of resistance to the invasions in which it is sometimes depicted as successful, contrary to the historical truth. This resistance is never carried out by military but always by fantastic, supernatural means. The choice of particular ways of resistance is culturally-based: For Egypt, the plots are usually connected with magical opposition to an invader (a magician summons ghosts and daemons for help, creates supernatural helpers or destroys the figurines representing enemies), while for the Judeans the plots connected with the direct divine intervention, usually upon a prophet's request, are typical. Thus, these examples reveal the mechanism of replacement in folklore of the facts of real defeats by the stories of inhuman protectors' help to the humans. If the resistance was depicted as successful, the story was to serve as a warning for potential enemies, and as a symbol of the irrevocable end of the epoch, if not.
The Pharaoh of the Exodus Fairy tale or real history? Outcome of the investigation
For Egyptologists as well as archaeologists, and even now Bible scholars, the answer to the question: Who to believe: Moses or Egyptologists? is obvious (Dever: 2003, 233): Rather than attempt to defend the factual historicity of the Exodus traditions, I suggest that we must understand the Exodus story precisely as a myth, specifically as a “metaphor for liberation” (...) There is ample evidence that the Exodus story was read metaphorically already in ancient times, certainly so by the early rabbis and by later rabbinical commentaries. Several scholars (Finkelstein, Dever and others) posit that the Exodus narrative may have developed from collective memories of the Hyksos expulsions of Semitic Canaanites from Egypt, possibly elaborated on to encourage resistance to the 7th century domination of Judah by Egypt. For these scholars the liberation from Egypt after the “10 plagues”, as it is written in the Book of Exodus, is quite different from the historical “war of liberation against the Hyksos”. For them, “it seems” that several campaigns against the stronghold at Avaris were needed, during at least one decade, before the Hyksos were finally dislodged and driven from Lower Egypt. Finally, Ahmose I, the first pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, won the war against the Hyksos. What are the Egyptian documents underlying this hypothesis: none, and what is the chronology of this mysterious war: nobody knows! Consequently, who to believe: Moses or Egyptologists? https://www.lulu.com/shop/gerard-gertoux/the-pharaoh-of-the-exodus-fairy-tale-or-real-history/paperback/product-1vjrmky7.html
Merenptah and Amenmesse -Egyptian Rumors Concerning the Exodus
“And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12): Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in Honor of Thomas E. Levy, 2023
The hypothesis at the core of this paper was published in a much larger work by the author in JEgH 12 2019. Due to its focus on Egyptological matters, that article reached a small circle of specialists, and its ramifications for the biblical scholarship have largely gone unnoticed. The present paper fills this gap-pointing as often as possible to the more extensive discussion of the previous paper's evidence. Recent archaeological evidence invalidates previous chronological solutions for the reign of Amenmesse: edging him between the reigns of Merenptah and Sethos II or allowing a partial overlap between Sethos II and Amenmesse's early reigns. His reign's time and geographical base must be rethought and identified within the regnal period of Merenptah. This reconstruction looks strikingly similar to the late narratives (Manetho, Apion, Potter's Oracle, The Lamb Oracle) concerning a revolt, Merenptah's flight to Ethiopia, his return to Egypt, and his defeat of the contender. The late narratives' association of Amenmesse's rule with the Israelites is understandable against the historical background of a stock of Israelite prisoners brought by Merenptah to Egypt from his previous campaigns. Due to this historical context, the literature of the time offers several hidden references to Israel. The Tale of Two Brothers, the political manifesto of the revolt, is an etiological story of the relations between Egypt and Israel using eponymic patterns as in the story of Danaos and Aigyptos. A Ramses V dated parodistic retelling of the tale, pChassinat III, introduces allusions later picked up by Manetho's characters of Moses and Joseph (Barbotin, Revue d’égyptologie 50:5–26, 1999; Bányai, J Egypt Hist 12:36–103, 2019, n. 153). A discussion of the literary material from this period demonstrates the necessity of a new approach to Early Israel and its possible relations to Retenu, a term designating an Asiatic neighbor of Egypt.
The new proposed historical contextualization of Artapanus has been presented as the new scholarly consensus by J. J. Collins, “Artapanus Revisited,” in P. Walters (ed.), Judaism to Christianity: Tradition and Transition : A Festschrift for Thomas H. Tobin, S.J., on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday (Leiden 2010), 59-68 and C.R. Holladay, “Acts and the Fragmentary Hellenistic Jewish Authors,” Novum Testamentum 53 (2011) 22-51.