One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  NOTE TO P. 82. {footnote 219 ]

  The Músà (Moses) of the Moslems is borrowed from Jewish sources, the Pentateuch and especially the Talmud, with a trifle of Gnosticism which, hinted at in the Koran (chapt. xviii.), is developed by later writers, making him the “external” man, while Khizr, the Green prophet, is the internal. But they utterly ignore Manetho whose account of the Jewish legislator (Josephus against Apion, i. cc. 26, 27) shows the other or Egyptian part. Moses, by name Osarsiph=Osiris-Sapi, Osiris of the underworld, which some translate rich (Osii) in food (Siph, Seph, or Zef) was nicknamed Mosheh from the Heb. Mashah=to draw out, because drawn from the water230 (or rather from the Koptic Mo=water ushe=saved). He became a priest an An or On (Heliopolis), after studying the learning of the Egyptians. Presently he was chosen chief by the “lepers and other unclean persons” who had been permitted by King Amenophis to occupy the city Avaris lately left desolate by the “Shepherd Kings.” Osarsiph ordained the polity and laws of his followers, forbidding them to worship the Egyptian gods and enjoining them to slay and sacrifice the sacred animals. They were joined by the “unclean of the Egyptians” and by their kinsmen of the Shepherds, and treated the inhabitants with a barbarity more execrable than that of the latter, setting fire to cities and villages, casting the Egyptian priests and prophets out of their country, and compelling Amenophis to fall back upon Ethiopia. After some years of disorder Sethos (also called Ramesses from his father Rampses) son of Amenophis came down with the King from Ethiopia leading great united forces, and, “encountering the Shepherds and the unclean people, they defeated them and slew multitudes of them, and pursued the remainder to the borders of Syria.” Josephus relates this account of Manetho, which is apparently truthful, with great indignation. For the prevalence of leprosy we have the authority of the Hebrews themselves, and Pliny (xxvi. 2), speaking of Rubor Ægyptus, evidently white leprosy ending in the black, assures us that it was “natural to the Ægyptians,” adding a very improbable detail, namely that the kings cured it by balneæ (baths) of human blood.231

  Schiller (in “Die Sendung Moses”) argues that the mission of the Jewish lawgiver, as adopted son (the real son?) of Pharoah’s daughter, became “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” by receiving the priestly education of the royal princes, and that he had advanced from grade to grade in the religious mysteries, even to the highest, in which the great truth of the One Supreme, the omniscient, omnipotent God was imparted, as the sublime acme of all human knowledge, thus attributing to Moses before his flight into Midian, an almost modern conception of an essentially anthropomorphous Deity.

  Further, that his conscious mission when he returned to Egypt was not merely the deliverance of his people from the Egyptian yoke, but the revelation to them of this great conception, and so the elevation of that host of slaves to the position of a nation, to whose every member the highest mystery of religion should be known and whose institutions should be based upon it. It is remarkable that Schiller should have accepted the fables of Manetho as history, that he should not have suspected the fact that the Egyptian priest wrote from motives of personal spite and jealousy, and with the object of poisoning the mind of Ptolemy against the learned Jews with whom he stood on terms of personal friendship. Thus he not only accepts the story that the Hebrews were expelled from Egypt because of the almost universal spread of leprosy among them, but explains at length why that loathsome and horrible disease should have so prevailed. Still Schiller’s essay, written with his own charming eloquence, is a magnificent eulogy of the founder of the Hebrew nation.

  Goethe (“Israel in der Wüste”), on the other hand, with curious ingenuity, turns every thing to the prejudice of the “headstrong man” Moses, save that he does grant him a vivid sentiment of justice. He makes him both by nature and education a grand, strong man, but brutal (roh) withal. His killing the Egyptian is a secret murder; “his dauntless fist gains him the favour of a Midianitish priest-prince . . . . under the pretence of a general festival, gold and silver dishes are swindled (by the Jews under Moses’s instigation) from their neighbours, and at the moment when the Egyptians believe the Israelites to be occupied in harmless feastings, a reversed Sicilian vesper is executed; the stranger murders the native, the guest the host; and, with a horrible cunning, only the first-born are destroyed to the end that, in a land where the first-born enjoyed such superior rights, the selfishness of the younger sons might come into play, and instant punishment be avoided by hasty flight. The artifice succeeds, the assassins are thrust out instead of being chastised.” (Quoted from p-100 “The Hebrews and the Red Sea,” by Alexander W. Thayer; Andover, Warren F. Draper, 1883.) With respect to the census of the Exodus, my friend Mr. Thayer, who has long and conscientiously studied the subject, kindly supplied me with the following notes and permitted their publication.

  Richard Francis Burton’s translation: detailed table of contents

  Trieste, October 11, 1887.

  My Dear Sir Richard,

  The points in the views presented by me in our conversation upon the Hebrews and their Exodus, of which you requested a written exposition, are, condensed, these:

  Assuming that the Hebrew records, as we have them, are in the main true, i.e. historic, a careful search must reveal some one topic concerning which all the passages relating to it agree at least substantially. Such a topic is the genealogies, precisely that which Philippsohn the great Jewish Rabbi, Dr. Robinson, of the Palestine researches, and all the Jewish and Christian commentators — I know no exception — with one accord, reject! Look at these two columns, A. being the passages containing the genealogies, B. the passages on which the rejection of them is based:

  A. 1. Genesis xxiv. 32 to xxv. 25 (Births of Jacob’s sons). 2. xxxv. 23-26 (Recapitulation of the above). 3. xlvi. 8-27 (List of Jacob and his sons, when they came into Egypt). 4. Ex. vi. 14-27 (Lineage of Aaron and Moses). 5. Numb. xxxvi. 1-2 (Lineage of Zelophehad). 6. Josh. vii. 17-18 (Lineage of Achan). 7. Ruth iv. 18-22 (ditto of David). 8. 1 Chron. ii. 9-15 (ditto). 9. Mat. i. 2-6 (ditto). 10. Luke iii. 32-37 (ditto). 11. Ezra vii. 1-5 (ditto of Ezra).

  The lists of Princes, heads of tribes, the spies, the commission to divide conquered Palestine, contain names that can be traced back, and all coincide with the above.

  B. 1. Gen. xv. 13. 2. Ex. xii. 40, 41. 3. Acts vii. 6.

  These three give the 400 and the 430 years of the supposed bondage of the Bene

  Jacob, but are offset by Gen. xv. 16 (four generations) and Gal. iii. 17

  (Paul’s understanding of the 430 years).

  4. The story of Joseph, beginning Gen. xxxvii. 2, gives us the dates in his life; viz., 17 when sold, 30 when he becomes Prime Minister, 40 when his father joins him.

  5. 1 Chron. vi. 1-15 (Lineage of Ezra’s brother Jehozadak, abounding in repetitions and worthless).

  1. As between the two, the column A. is in my opinion more trustworthy than B.

  2. By all the genealogies of the Davidian line we have Judah No. 1, Solomon No. 12. By Ezra’s genealogy of his own family we have Levi No. 1, and Azariah (Solomon’s High Priest) No. 12. They agree perfectly.

  3. If there were 400 years of Hebrew (Bene Jacob) slavery between the death of Joseph and the Exodus, there were 400 - 80 = 320, between Joseph’s death and the birth of Moses. If this was so there is no truth in the accounts of Moses and Aaron being the great-grandchildren of Levi (Levi, Kohath, Amram, Aaron and Moses). In fact, if Dr. Robinson be correct in saying that at least six generations are wanting in the genealogies of David (to fill the 400 years) the same must be lacking in all the early genealogies. Reductio ad absurdum!

  4. Jacob, a young man, we will say of 40, is sent to Laban for a wife. He remains in Padan Aram twenty years (Gen. xxxi. 38), where all his sons except Benjamin were born, that is, before he was 60. At 130 he joined Joseph in Egypt (Gen. xlvii. 9). Joseph, therefore, born in Padan Aram was now, instead of 40, over 70 years old! That this is so, is certain. In Judah’s exquisite pleadings (Gen
. xliv. 18-34) he speaks of Benjamin as “the child of Jacob’s old age,” “a little one,” and seven times he calls him “the lad.” Benjamin is some years younger than Joseph, but when the migration into Egypt takes place-a few weeks after Judah’s speech-Benjamin comes as father of ten sons (Gen. xlvi. 21), but here Bene Benjamin is used in its broad sense of “descendants,” for in 1 Chron. vii. 6-12 we find that the “Bene” were sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. To hold that Joseph at 40 had a younger brother who was a great-grandfather, is, of course, utterly absurd.

  5. According to Gen. xv. 18, the Exodus was to take place in the fourth generation born in Egypt, as I understand it.

  Born in Egypt: —

  Levi (father of) Kohath Judah (father of) Pharez

  Hezron

  1. Amram 1. Ram 2. Aaron 2. Amminadab 3. Eleazar 3. Nahshon 4. Phinees 4. Salma

  A conspicuous character in Numbers (xiii. 6, 30; xiv. 24, etc.) is Caleb. In the first chapter of Judges Caleb still appears, and Othniel, the son of his younger brother Kenaz, is the first of the so-called Judges (Jud. iii. 9). This also disposes of the 400 years and confirms the view that the Exodus took place in the fourth generation born in Egypt. Other similar proofs may be omitted — these are amply sufficient.

  6. What, then, was the origin of the notion of the 400 years of Hebrew slavery?

  If the Egyptian inscriptions and papyri prove anything, it is this: that from the subjugation of Palestine by one of the Thormes down to the great invasion of the hordes from Asia Minor in the reign of Ramses III., that country had never ceased to be a Pharaonic province; that during these four or five centuries every attempt to throw off the yoke had been crushed and its Semitic peoples deported to Egypt as slaves; that multitudes of them joined in the Exodus under Moses, and became incorporated with the Hebrews under the constitution and code adopted at Horeb (=Sinai? or Jebel Araif?). These people became “Seed of Abraham,” “Children of Israel,” by adoption, to which I have no doubt Paul refers in the “adoption” of Romans viii. 15-23; ix. 4; Gal. iv. 5; Eph. i. 5. In the lapse of ages this distinction between Bene Israel and Bene Jacob was forgotten, and therefore the very uncritical Masorites in their edition of the Old Testament “confounded the confusion” in this matter. With the disappearance of the 400 years and of the supposed two or three centuries covered by the book of Judges, the genealogies stand as facts. The mistake in the case of the Judges is in supposing them to have been consecutive, when, in fact, as the subjugations by neighbouring peoples were local and extended only over one or two tribes, half a dozen of them may have been contemporaneous.

  7. Aaron and Moses were by their father Amram, great-grandchildren of Levi- -by their mother his grandchildren (Ex. vi. 20). Joseph lived to see his own great-grandchildren. Moses must have been born before Joseph’s death.

  8. There is one point determined in which the Hebrew and the Egyptian chronologies coincide. It is the invasion of Judea by Shishak of Egypt in the fifth year of Rehoboam, son of Solomon (1 Kings xiv. 25). Supposing the Egyptian chronology from the time of Minephtah II. to be in the main correct, as given by Brugsch and others, the thirteen generations, Judah — Rehoboam, allowing three to a century, take us back to just that Minephtah. In his reign, according to Brugsch, Pharaoh sent breadstuffs to the Chittim in “the time of famine.” The Hebrew records and traditions connect Joseph’s prime ministry with a famine. By the genealogies it could have been only this in the time of Minephtah.

  9. The Bene Jacob were but temporary sojourners in Goshen and always intended to return to Canaan. They were independent and had the right to do so. See what Joseph says in Gen. i. 24-25. But before this design was executed came the great irruption of the depopulated all Palestine, in the time of Ramses III. Here was the opportunity for the Bene Jacob to enlarge their plans and to devise the conquest and possession of Palestine. According to Josephus, supported by Stephen (Acts vii. 22), Moses was a man “mighty in works”-a man of military fame. The only reasonable way of understanding the beginning of the Exodus story, is to suppose that, in the weakened condition of Ramses III., the Hebrew princes began to intrigue with the enslaved Semites-the Ruthenu of the Egyptian inscriptions — and this being discovered by the Pharaoh, Moses was compelled to fly. Meantime the intrigues were continued and when the time for action came, under one of Ramses’ weak successors, Moses was recalled and took command.

  10. This prepares us for the second query, which you proposed, that is as to the numbers who joined in the Exodus.

  The Masoretic text, from which the English version of the Hebrew records is made, gives the result of the census at Sinai (=Horeb) as being 603,550 men, “twenty years old and upwards, that were able to go forth to war in Israel”-the tribe of Levi not included. On this basis it has been generally stated, that the number of the Bene Israel at the Exodus was three millions. Of late I find that two millions is the accepted number. The absurdity of even this aggregate is manifest. How could such a vast multitude be subsisted? How kept in order? How compelled to observe sanitary regulations? Moreover, in the then enfeebled state of Egypt, why should 603,550 armed men not have marched out without ceremony? Why ask permission to go to celebrate a sacrifice to their God?

  But there is another series of objections to these two millions, which I have never seen stated or even hinted, to which I pray your attention.

  The area of Palestine differs little from that of the three American States,

  Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the most densely peopled of the

  Union, containing by the last census a population of somewhat less than two

  and a half millions.

  By the second Hebrew census (Numb. xxvi.) taken just before the death of Moses, the army was 601,730; from which the inference has always been drawn, that at least 2,000,000, in the aggregate, Levites 23,000 males still excepted, entered and possessed the conquered territories.

  Take now one of the late maps of Palestine and mark upon it the boundaries of the tribes as given in the book of Joshua. This second census gives the number of each tribal army to be inserted in each tribal territory. Reuben, 43,750; Judah, 76,500; Benjamin, 45,600, etc., etc. By Josh. xii. the land was then divided between some 40 petty kings and peoples, 31 of whom are named as having been subjected. If, now, Joshua’s army numbered over 600,000, why was not the conquest made complete? Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut are divided into 27 counties. Suppose, now, that these counties were each a separate and independent little kingdom dependent upon itself for defence, what resistance could be made to an army of 600,000 men, all of them grown up during forty years of life in a camp, and in the full vigour of manhood? And yet Joshua was unable to complete his conquest! Again, the first subjugation of a part of the newly-conquered territory as noted in the book of Judges, was Judah and Simeon by a king of Edom.232 If Judah could put an army into the field of 76,500, and Simeon 22,500, their subjugation by a king of Edom is incredible, and the story absurd. Next comes King Eglon of Moab and subjugates the tribes of Reuben and Gad, east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan. And yet Reuben has an army of over 43,000, and Gad 45,000. And so on.

  With an army of 60,000 only, and an aggregate of half a million of people led out of Egypt, all the history becomes instantly rational and trustworthy.

  Richard Francis Burton’s translation: detailed table of contents

  There remains one more bubble to be exploded.

  Look at these figures, in which a quadruple increase — at least 25 per centum too great — is granted.233

  1st Generation, the Patriarchs, in number. . . . . . . . . . . 12 2nd Generation, Kohath, Pharez, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . ..48 3rd Generation, Amram, Hezron, etc.. . . . . . . . . . . . .192 4th Generation, Aaron and Moses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .768 Aggregate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1,020 Minus 25 per cent. for deaths, children, etc.. . . . . . . . .255 Actual number of Bene Jacob. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .765