MAPEO DE ACTORES QUE INFLUYEN EN LA PARROQUIA RICAURTE

In his treatise on Isis and Osiris Plutarch mentions that Seth-Typhon, the murderer of Osiris, was driven out of Egypt and spent a week jour-neying to Palestine, where he became the ancestor of the Jews by father-ing two sons, Hierosolyma and Juda.¹⁷He instituted the Sabbath in com-memoration of his weeklong flight and erected a statue of his sacred animal, the ass, in the temple at Jerusalem.¹⁸Seth is usually associated with the donkey in Egyptian mythology. In Greco-Egyptian texts, the God Iao—the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton¹⁹—is equated with Seth and the ass because the name sounded like the—

obviously onomatopoetic—Egyptian word for “ass.”

Within these traditions, the xenophobic climate surrounding Seth, the Asiatic foe, assumes an unmistakably anti-Semitic ring. True, the Egyptian attitude toward Jews was no less hostile in the Greco-Roman era than was their attitude toward Greeks. In the case of the Greeks, this hostility can be explained by their occupation, domination, and colonial exploitation. The Jewish case is less easily explained. One cannot ex-clude the possibility that there was more to Egyptian anti-Judaism than just their notorious xenophobia.

In this respect, the story that Manetho tells about Moses seems of prime importance. We owe the preservation of this fragment from Manetho’s otherwise lost work on Egyptian history to Flavius Josephus, who quotes it in his pamphlet Contra Apionem as a particularly flagrant case of injustice against the Jewish nation. Contra Apionem is a collection of, and response to, renderings of Jewish history—especially the Exodus from Egypt—by mostly Egyptian Hellenistic historians. The work is both an apologia of Jewish history, culture, and religion and an anthol-ogy of ancient “anti-Semitic” writing. It is important to realize this con-text before studying the Manetho fragment itself, which is quoted by Josephus for a reason. His polemical and apologetic perspective has led to an interesting case of misreading.

Manetho was an Egyptian priest who wrote his History of Egypt under Ptolemy II in the first half of the third century BCE.²⁰ King Amenophis, he tells us, wanted to see the gods. The sage Amenophis Paapis—a well-known historical personage whose presence dates the events under Amenophis III to the first half of the fourteenth century BCE—tells Amenophis that he may see the gods if he cleanses the land of lepers. This hint as to the date of the events was lost on Josephus, who was ignorant of Amenophis Paapis. He therefore took this story to be a variant of the account that Manetho gives of the expulsion of the Hyksos in another section of his work, which is also quoted by Josephus.

As a Jewish historian eager to reject any manifestations of anti-Judaism in Hellenistic historiographical literature wherever he could find it, Josephus read Jewish themes into texts that dealt with something else entirely. In the case of Manetho, he read the theme of exodus into both the account of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the story about King Amenophis and his counselor, which actually refer to events separated by almost two hundred years. Josephus could not have known this be-cause he was unable to identify Amenophis Paapis.

The king sent all lepers into the eastern desert, put them into forced labor camps, and had them work in the quarries. Amenophis, the seer, predicted divine punishment because there were priests among the

prisoners. He said that they would receive help from outside, conquer Egypt, and reign there for thirteen years. Fearing to tell the king this in person, he wrote everything down and committed suicide. The lepers chose Osarsiph, a Heliopolitan priest, as their leader to enter into nego-tiations with the intimidated king. He received permission to settle in Avaris, the ancient capital of the Hyksos, where he organized the lepers by giving them laws prescribing all that is forbidden in Egypt and ruling out all that Egypt prescribes. The first and foremost commandment is not to worship the gods; the second, not to spare any of their sacred an-imals, nor to abstain from other forbidden food; and the third, not to have intercourse with outsiders.

Osarsiph’s actions illustrate the principle of normative inversion, which consists of inverting the norms of the other culture. This seems to me the most forceful way of constructing extrasystemic, “untranslat-able” otherness and of marking the difference. This principle recurs repeatedly where the relationship between Jews and gentiles is being discussed, not only in “pagan” and anti-Jewish argumentation but also within a Jewish context. This is especially true of Maimonides and his Guide for the Perplexed, where the normative inversion of the customs of the Sabians serves as a historical explanation for most of the ritual laws.²¹After establishing his anti-Egyptian and counterreligious institu-tions, Osarsiph fortified the city and sent an invitation to the Hyksos in Jerusalem, who had been driven out of Egypt some two or three hun-dred years earlier, to join the lepers in their revolt. The Hyksos returned.

Remembering the prediction, King Amenophis shrank from fighting the rebels, hid the divine images, and fled with the sacred animals to Ethi-opia. The lepers and the Hyksos ruled Egypt for thirteen years in a way that, in the collective memory of the Egyptians, made the former Hyksos rule appear like a golden age. Not only were the towns and temples laid waste and the holy images destroyed during this period, but the sanctu-aries were turned into kitchens and the sacred animals grilled on fires. At this stage of his narrative Manetho makes the highly significant remark that Osarsiph took the name “Moses.” Although this might be a later gloss, whoever wrote this sentence made it clear that in that author’s view the religion of Moses was tantamount to the persecution of the gods, the destruction of their images, and the slaughter of their sacred animals.

Finally, Manetho continues, Amenophis and his grandson, Ramses, re-turned from Nubia and drove out the lepers and their allies.

Josephus read this story as an account of the Hebrew Exodus, this despite the fact that Manetho explicitly states that the Hyksos (the

Hebrews, in Josephus’s understanding of Egyptian history) had already been settled in Jerusalem for two hundred years or more. Josephus mis-takenly thinks that Manetho presented two versions of the event, one taken from the “sacred scriptures” and the other from oral tradition (mytheuomena kai legomena). However, to what else could Manetho have been referring in his story of the lepers if not to the Exodus of the Jews?

In my book Moses the Egyptian I subscribed to the by now prevalent interpretation, dating back to the days of Eduard Meyer, who as early as 1904 proposed to see in this story a reflection of the Amarna experi-ence. During the Amarna period Akhenaten (the son of Manetho’s King Amenophis) shut the temples, halted the rituals and feasts, and installed a strict and exclusive monotheism for about fifteen or seven-teen years (thirseven-teen is also a possibility).²²This experience must have had an equally traumatizing effect on the Egyptian psyche as the As-syrian conquests of Egypt six hundred years later. For the first time in recorded history someone stood up to reject and abolish a whole reli-gious tradition in the name of truth. This experience might have given the Asiatic foe its distinctively religious or antireligious traits and en-riched the nature of evil by adding the concept of iconoclasm or, rather, “theoclasm.”

Theoclasm is represented in Manetho’s narrative and in many simi-lar stories as the most extreme form of impurity, namely, leprosy, in much the same way as idolatry is represented in the biblical texts as madness. On the basis of the monotheistic distinction between truth and error, idolatry appears as the worst kind of error, whereas on the basis of the traditional distinction between purity and impurity, icono-clasm appears in the shape of leprosy. However, there is an association of leprosy and idolatry in the Bible as well. In her fascinating analysis of Numbers, Mary Douglas discovered a cyclical structure that connects the laws concerning the expulsion of the lepers (Num. 5:1–4) with the laws concerning the expulsion of the idolaters (Num. 33:50–56). Lep-rosy and idolatry are the worst forms of pollution because they prevent God from “dwelling in the midst of his people.”²³

In the eyes of the Egyptians monotheism, or, rather, “monolatry” is evil, sinful, and criminal because the world is full of gods, and the gods must be worshiped. The gods are social beings, living and acting in

“constellations”; a lonely god would be devoid of any power or person-ality and would have no impact on the great project of maintaining the world. However, this precisely describes Seth, who is asocial, an outcast, and condemned to solitude. He is one, who

rejoices in separation, who hates fraternity, who relies only on his own heart among the gods.²⁴

In a Ramesside tale we read that Apophis, the Hyksos king, wor-shiped Seth in a monolatric way:

King Apophis chose for his lord the god Seth.

He did not worship any other deity in the whole land except Seth.²⁵ There is thus an obvious connection in Egyptian eyes between the asocial nature of Seth and the monolatrous exclusivity of his worship.

Both are abhorred as manifestations of extrasystemic otherness and of deadly sin and evil.