these laws, but also for such as should be maimed in the smallest part
of their body, who yet are not permitted by him to officiate as priests;
nay, although any priest, already initiated, should have such a calamity
fall upon him afterward, he ordered him to be deprived of his honor of
officiating. How can it then be supposed that Moses should ordain such
laws against himself, to his own reproach and damage who so ordained
them? Nor indeed is that other notion of Manetho at all probable,
wherein he relates the change of his name, and says that "he was
formerly called Osarsiph;" and this a name no way agreeable to the
other, while his true name was Mosses, and signifies a person who is
preserved out of the water, for the Egyptians call water Moil. I think,
therefore, I have made it sufficiently evident that Manetho, while he
followed his ancient records, did not much mistake the truth of the
history; but that when he had recourse to fabulous stories, without any
certain author, he either forged them himself, without any probability,
or else gave credit to some men who spake so out of their ill-will to
us.
32. And now I have done with Manetho, I will inquire into what Cheremon
says. For he also, when he pretended to write the Egyptian history, sets
down the same name for this king that Manetho did, Amenophis, as also of
his son Ramesses, and then goes on thus: "The goddess Isis appeared
to Amenophis in his sleep, and blamed him that her temple had been
demolished in the war. But that Phritiphantes, the sacred scribe, said
to him, that in case he would purge Egypt of the men that had pollutions
upon them, he should be no longer troubled with such frightful
apparitions. That Amenophis accordingly chose out two hundred and fifty
thousand of those that were thus diseased, and cast them out of the
country: that Moses and Joseph were scribes, and Joseph was a sacred
scribe; that their names were Egyptian originally; that of Moses had
been Tisithen, and that of Joseph, Peteseph: that these two came to
Pelusium, and lighted upon three hundred and eighty thousand that had
been left there by Amenophis, he not being willing to carry them into
Egypt; that these scribes made a league of friendship with them, and
made with them an expedition against Egypt: that Amenophis could not
sustain their attacks, but fled into Ethiopia, and left his wife with
child behind him, who lay concealed in certain caverns, and there
brought forth a son, whose name was Messene, and who, when he was grown
up to man's estate, pursued the Jews into Syria, being about two hundred
thousand, and then received his father Amenophis out of Ethiopia."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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