Competing Exoduses

Jan Assmann (The Mind of Egypt) summarizes the account of the exodus provided by late antique Egyptian writers – Manetho, Apion, and Pompeius Trogus, a first-century BC historian.

The last of these conflates the exodus with an old Egyptian story of the expulsion of the lepers: “Moses is the son of Joseph. The Egyptians, afflicted by leprosy and other ills, are warned by the oracle to drive them out of Egypt together with other lepers. In his flight, Moses abducts the sacred utensils of the Egyptians, who set off in pursuit but are forced to turn back by a storm. Moses arrives in Palestine after a seven-day journey on foot and decrees that the seventh day be a holy day. Mindful that they had been driven out of Egypt for fear of contagion, Moses forbids the Jews any contact with foreigners; this prohibition gradually develops into a religious taboo” (401).

Like other Egyptian versions of the exodus, this is “notable for [its] almost phobic concern with purity and their meticulous care for the cultic images and the sacred animals” (401). Assmann thinks that the story embodies Egyptian fears of “otherness” in a late antique subordination to Persians, Greeks, and Romans.

Egyptian versions of the exodus have a tragic afterlife in the middle ages. In 1321, all the lepers in France were “rounded up and killed,” accused of infecting fountains  and wells. It was said that Jews had conspired with them, and this charged returned a quarter century later during the black death in France. Jews were massacred, and “Carlo Ginsburg suggests that the medieval dissemination of Flavious Josephus’ tractate Contra Apionem brought the Egyptian myth to the western world and facilitated the association of Jews and lepers, together with such traditional anti-Semitic cliches as ritual murder and the cult of the donkey” (403).