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 note
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 note
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 people, or to the three hundred and eighty thousand
that were about Pelusium. But perhaps it will be looked upon as a silly
thing in me to make any larger confutation of such writers as sufficiently
confute themselves; for had they been only confuted by other men, it had
been more tolerable.
I shall now add to these accounts about Manetho and Cheremon somewhat
about Lysimachus, who hath taken the same topic of falsehood with those
forementioned, but hath gone far beyond them in the incredible nature of
his forgeries; which plainly demonstrates that he contrived them out of
his virulent hatred of our nation. His words are these: "The people
of the Jews being leprous and scabby, and subject to certain other kinds
of distempers, in the days of Bocchoris, king of Egypt, they fled to the
temples, and got their food there by begging: and as the numbers were very
great that were fallen under these diseases, there arose a scarcity in
Egypt. Hereupon Bocehoris, the king of Egypt, sent some to consult the
oracle of [Jupiter] Hammon about his scarcity. The god's answer was this,
that he must purge his temples of impure and impious men, by expelling
them out of those temples into desert places; but as to the scabby and
leprous people, he must drown them, and purge his temples, the sun having
an indignation at these men being suffered to live; and by this means the
land will bring forth its fruits. Upon Bocchoris's having received these
oracles, he called for their priests, and the attendants upon their altars,
and ordered them to make a collection of the impure people, and to deliver
them to the soldiers, to carry them away into the desert; but to take the
leprous people, and wrap them in sheets of lead, and let them down into
the sea. Hereupon the scabby and leprous people were drowned, and the rest
were gotten together, and sent into desert places, in order to be exposed
to destruction. In this case they assembled themselves together, and took
counsel what they should do, and determined that, as the night was coming
on, they should kindle fires and lamps, and keep watch; that they also
should fast the next night, and propitiate the gods, in order to obtain
deliverance from them. That on the next day there was one Moses, who advised
them that they should venture upon a journey, and go along one road till
they should come to places fit for habitation: that he charged them to
have no kind regards for any man, nor give good counsel to any, but always
to advise them for the worst; and to overturn all those temples and altars
of the gods they should meet with: that the rest commended what he had
said with one consent, and did what they had resolved on, and so traveled
over the desert. But that the difficulties of the journey being over, they
came to a country inhabited, and that there they abused the men, and plundered
and burnt their temples; and then came into that land which is called Judea,
and there they built a city, and dwelt therein, and that their city was
named Hierosyla, from this their robbing of the temples; but that
still, upon the success they had afterwards, they in time changed its denomination,
that it might not be a reproach to them, and called the city Hierosolyma,
and themselves Hierosolymites."
