33. This is the account Cheremon gives us. Now I take it for granted
that what I have said already hath plainly proved the falsity of both
these narrations; for had there been any real truth at the bottom, it
was impossible they should so greatly disagree about the particulars.
But for those that invent lies, what they write will easily give us very
different accounts, while they forge what they please out of their own
heads. Now Manetho says that the king's desire of seeing the gods was
the origin of the ejection of the polluted people; but Cheremon feigns
that it was a dream of his own, sent upon him by Isis, that was the
occasion of it. Manetho says that the person who foreshowed this
purgation of Egypt to the king was Amenophis; but this man says it was
Phritiphantes. As to the numbers of the multitude that were expelled,
they agree exceedingly well [24] the former reckoning them eighty
thousand, and the latter about two hundred and fifty thousand! Now, for
Manetho, he describes those polluted persons as sent first to work in
the quarries, and says that the city Avaris was given them for their
habitation. As also he relates that it was not till after they had made
war with the rest of the Egyptians, that they invited the people of
Jerusalem to come to their assistance; while Cheremon says only that
they were gone out of Egypt, and lighted upon three hundred and eighty
thousand men about Pelusium, who had been left there by Amenophis, and
so they invaded Egypt with them again; that thereupon Amenophis fled
into Ethiopia. But then this Cheremon commits a most ridiculous blunder
in not informing us who this army of so many ten thousands were, or
whence they came; whether they were native Egyptians, or whether they
came from a foreign country. Nor indeed has this man, who forged a dream
from Isis about the leprous people, assigned the reason why the king
would not bring them into Egypt. Moreover, Cheremon sets down Joseph as
driven away at the same time with Moses, who yet died four generations
[25] before Moses, which four generations make almost one hundred and
seventy years. Besides all this, Ramesses, the son of Amenophis, by
Manetho's account, was a young man, and assisted his father in his war,
and left the country at the same time with him, and fled into Ethiopia.
But Cheremon makes him to have been born in a certain cave, after his
father was dead, and that he then overcame the Jews in battle, and
drove them into Syria, being in number about two hundred thousand. O the
levity of the man! for he had neither told us who these three hundred
and eighty thousand were, nor how the four hundred and thirty thousand
perished; whether they fell in war, or went over to Ramesses. And, what
is the strangest of all, it is not possible to learn out of him who they
were whom he calls Jews, or to which of these two parties he applies
that denomination, whether to the two hundred and fifty thousand leprous
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