Ancient literary text
Josephus, Against Apion 1.73–92
Flavius Josephus, quoting Manetho. English by H. St. J. Thackeray.
Josephus, first century. The passage is his quotation of Manetho on the earlier rulers of the Delta.
- Citation
- H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus, volume 1: The Life, Against Apion, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), Against Apion 1.73–92. In that printing the English is on pages 191–199. The copy checked says the 1926 English is out of copyright.
- Locator
- Against Apion 1.73–92
What the source says
Josephus says he cannot quote the Egyptian records themselves, and he quotes Manetho instead. In this stretch Manetho, in the second book of his Egyptian history, tells of an eastern people who took Egypt in the reign of Tutimaeus, made Salitis king, and fortified a city called Auaris, east of the Bubastis arm of the Nile, in the Sethroite nome. He gives their name as Hycsos, which he explains as king-shepherds, and lists six rulers. Josephus then says those kings and their descendants held Egypt for 511 years, that the kings of the Thebaid later shut them into Auaris, and that under a treaty with Thummosis, son of Misphragmouthis, 240,000 of them left Egypt for Syria and built a city in the country now called Judaea, which they named Jerusalem.
Why it is here
This is the passage the Hyksos essay starts from: Josephus quoting Manetho on the shepherd kings and Auaris.
Ralph’s interpretation
Josephus says the shepherds were the ancestors of the Jews. That sentence is taken as the identification of the biblical Exodus with this expulsion, and Auaris is read as Tell el-Dab‘a. The sixteenth-century date, and the link to Ahmose, are a reading of the Egyptian record. They are not a date printed in these sections.
Alternative readings
Thackeray’s note says Auaris is perhaps Pelusium, and that the Hycsos domination is put by him at about 1800 to 1580 BC, ended by Ahmose. He adds that the connexion with the Jews is disputed, and that some critics, naming H. R. Hall, think Josephus is right to treat the expulsion as the original of the Exodus story. That is the editor’s note, not a line of Josephus and not Ellis’ page.