Manetho

Hyksos ~ Shepard Kings... the Israelites of Goshen

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• published: 05 Sep 2014
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In his Against Apion, the 1st-century AD historian Josephus Flavius debates the synchronism between the Biblical account of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and two Exodus-like events that the Egyptian historian Manetho apparently mentions. It is difficult to distinguish between what Manetho himself recounted, and how Josephus or Apion interpret him. Josephus identifies the Israelite Exodus with the first exodus mentioned by Manetho, when some 480,000 Hyksos, wrongly interpreted as "shepherd kings" by Josephus (also referred to as just as shepherds, as kings and as captive shepherds in his discussion of Manetho), left Egypt for Jerusalem.[8] The mention of Hyksos identifies this first exodus with the Hyksos period (16th century BC). Apion identifies a second exodus mentioned by Manetho when a renegade Egyptian priest called Osarseph led 80,000 "lepers" to rebel against Egypt. Apparently Manetho conflates events of the Amarna period (in the 14th century) and the events at the end of the 19th Dynasty (12th century).[citation needed] Then Apion additionally conflates these with the Biblical Exodus, and contrary to Manetho, even alleges that this heretic priest changed his name to Moses.[9] Many scholars[10][11] do not interpret lepers and leprous priests as literally referring to a disease, but rather to a strange and unwelcome new belief system. Josephus records the earliest account of the false but understandable etymology that the Greek phrase Hyksos stood for the Egyptian phrase Hekw Shasu meaning the Bedouin-like "Shepherd Kings", which scholars have only recently shown means "rulers of foreign lands".[12]