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)( TI T E have no food to eat and my fields yield
yy no harvest, because I cannot sow corn.
* All my villages are in the hands of the
Khabiru. I am shut up like a bird in a cage, and
there is none to deliver me. I have written to
the king, but no one heeds. Why wilt thou not
attend to the affairs of thy country? That dog,
Abd-Ashratum, and the Khabiri have taken Shi-
gata and Ambi and Simyra. Send soldiers and an
able officer. I beseech the king not to neglect this
matter. Why is there no answer to my letters?
Send chariots and I will try to hold out, else in
two months’ time Abd-Ashratum will be master
cf the whole country. Gebal will fall, and all
the country as far as Egypt will be in the hands
of the Khabiri. We have no grain; send grain.
I have sent my possessions to l yre, and also my
sister’s daughters for safety. I have sent my own
son to thee, hearken to him. Do as thou wilt
with me, but do not forsake thy city Gebal. In
former times when Egypt neglected our city we
paid no tribute; do not thou neglect it. 1 have
sold my sons and daughters for food and have
nothing left. Thou sayest: ‘Defend thyself,’ but
how can I do it? When I sent my son to thee
he was kept three months waiting for an audience.
Though my kinsmen urge me to join the rebels
I will not do it.”
This pathetic plea was inscribed by Rib-Adda
of Gebal to Pharaoh Amenhetep IV over thirty-
three hundred years ago. And our interest in
Rib-Adda’s plight derives from the fact that many
scholars now tend to identify the formidable
Khabiri with the Hebrews, and their invasion of
Palestine and Syria with the Hebrew conquest of
Canaan under Joshua. Gebal, as you will re
member if you know your Bible, was a city noted
for its shipbuilders. Today it is only a village
somewhere in Syria; but thirty-three centuries ago
it was one of the strongholds on which rested the
Egyptian suzerainty over Palestine and points
north.
Now Amenhetep IV, father-in-law of Tutank
hamen, was an idealist, a pacifist and a religious
reformer. He inclined to a relative monotheism—
that is, he wished the great god Aten, lord of
Heaven, to become the national god of Egypt—
and accordingly had his hands full with quarrels
with the adherents of other cults. Naturally he
couldn’t be bothered with the difficulties of his
governors in distant Palestine and Syria. They
wrote to the king—their letters have come down
to us—but no one heeded. For a time Egyptian
rule in the Syrian provinces collapsed.
This particular Pharaoh reigned about a hun
dred years before Rameses 11, who often is re
garded as the Pharaoh of the oppression—because
it was Rameses who built Pithom, one of the store-
cities which, according to Exodus, the Egyptian
taskmasters forced the Israelites to build. In other
words, here we have the Israelitish conquest of
Canaan taking place a century before the op
pression and a century and a half before the
exodus from Egypt, according to the Biblical ac
count. A slight discrepancy which some Egyptol
ogists resolve by surmising that there was more
than one exodus and which others nullify by
denying that the Khabiri were Hebrews, while
we ordinary mortals can only wish helplessly that
barbarians had never burned libraries or otherwise
destroyed historical records.
While we’re on the lookout for discrepancies we
may consider this one also: Granting that Rameses
II was the Pharaoh of the oppression, we must
consider his son, Mineptah, to be the Pharaoh of
the exodus. For a time this was thought to be
the case—until someone discovered an incon
venient inscription dating from the rule of Minep
tah. “Israel is desolated, his seed is not,” says the
Pharaoh’s record of a great victory, “Palestine
has become a widow at the mercy of Egypt.”
Which is all very well, except that it is difficult
to understand how Israel can be vanquished in
Palestine before the Israelites have conquered
Canaan. But even this is not beyond our scholars’
powers of explanation; this time they tell us that
. 16]
Conquerors or Captives?
Historical Speculations on the Hebrews in
r
L-sypt
By FLORENCE ROTHSCHILD
A fresh and most original article which discusses the possibility that the children of Israel
conquered the Egyptians before they became captives in the land of Mizraim.
The Exodus
it was another Israel which was conquered in
Palestine while the Hebrews we know were leav
ing Egypt.
Please don’t think that this is an attempt to
impugn the veracity of the Biblical account of
the exodus which we are celebrating these days.
We are simply trying to show how difficult it is
to correlate the facts of the exodus with historical
knowledge gained from non-Biblical sources. None
of the Egyptian records tell us of any events relat
ing unmistakably to Joseph and his people. Sep
arate incidents are mentioned: The bringing in
of slaves as Joseph was brought,
the rise of foreigners to high
office under the Pharaohs, even
seven-year famines such as that
against which Joseph provided;
further, we know of a district
on the northeastern frontier
of Egypt where, as in the Bibli
cal land of Goshen, nomadic
Semitic tribes sometimes settled.
But we have no records of a dis
tinctly Hebrew settlement in
Egypt or of an actual exodus of
Israelites — unless we accept
Josephus’ identification of the
Israelites with the Hyksos.
I he Hyksos—the name means
“Shepherd^ Kings”—were a
band of Semitic nomads who
conquered Egypt nearly four
thousand years ago. It is their
distinction that they are the
first invaders of Egypt of whom Passover Seder by
we know. But this is about all
we do know about them: That, coming from the
east, they made themselves the masters of Egypt
ruling the land of Mizraim for about four hun
dred years, constituting what are known as the
sixteenth and seventeenth Egyptian dynasties; that
they made efforts to oust the numerous Egyptian
deities and introduce the worship of their own
Semitic god; that finally the Egyptians rebelled,
drove out the Hyksos-their chief stronghold was
j'farts, which lay to the northeast of the Nile
delta—and later attacked them in southeast Pales
tine Archaeologists have found a contemporary
record of the capture of Avaris by Ashmes, founder
of the eighteenth dynasty. If Josephus is right,
therefore, Aahmes, whose reign opened in 1580
B.C.E., was the Pharaoh of the exodus.
Our knowledge of the Hyksos themselves comes
largely from Manetho, an Egyptian historian ot
the third century before the present era, whose
own works have been lost but are known to u>
through quotations in the writings of Josephus
and others. Manetho naturally did not like the
Semitic conquerors of Egypt. As quoted b\ Jo
sephus—the Jewish historian who in the first cen
tury of the current era wrote of the antiquities
of his people — Manetho de
scribed the Hyksos invasion as
follows: “A people of inglorious
origin from the regions of the
east suddenly attacked the land,
of which they took possession
easily, without a struggle. 1 he\
overthrew those who ruled in it.
burnt down the cities and laid
waste the sanctuaries of the
gods. They ill-treated all the
inhabitants, for they put some
to the sword, and carried other>
into captivity with their "M"
and children. Then they made
one of themselves king. Mam
tho went on to relate how t u
Hyksos, after establishing them
selves as the rulers ot
brought on a rebellion b\ at
tempting to force the natl ' e
court at Thebes to give up
own cult in favor ot the benu 1( -
religion of the Shepheu in -
Then an Egyptian prince managed to Ct,n
Hyksos in Avaris, and his son, Thothnio. 1 ^
it impossible to capture their city, a <mtl ^ hum
to leave Egypt; whereupon the Hyk>o>. j,
dred and forty thousand strong, retreatu t ^
the desert in the general direction of H r ^ a j ein>
establishing themselves in Judea, built . <■ -
Such is Manetho’s record. And though
modern scholars disagree with Joseph u> 11 j s
tion of the Hyksos with the Hebrew ^ t ^ at
enough resemblance between this storv ^
related in exodus to justify our remen.mr>n
Shepherd Kings at the (Please turn
Moritz Oppcnheim
* THE SOUTHERN ! RAELltl