Chaeremon of Alexandria on the Jews
Chaeremon is - like his fellow Alexandrian intellectuals Lysimachus and Apion - the butt of a large portion of Josephus' famous anti-anti-Semitic text: 'Against Apion'. We are fortunate in that unlike Lysimachus and Apion we know quite a lot about Chaeremon in so far as a large number of fragments of his books were quoted in works that have come down to us and give us an idea as to who he was and what believed. (1)
Now Chaeremon was the head of a branch of the great library of Alexandria that was attached to the Temple of Serapis in that city. Now as such a ranking official at a very important temple: Chaeremon was also a high-ranking member of the priesthood. Thus, Chaeremon's days were spent in and around books as well as probably in some form of tutoring and participation in religious rituals. Not only do we know that Chaeremon was a member of the priesthood, but that he was also a noted Stoic philosopher, which we can gather from the numerous quotations and positive references to his thought that have come down to us.
Now in Chaeremon's history of Egypt - which also seems to have treated the religion of Egypt very thoroughly - we are told by Josephus that he has occasion to comment on the jews and their time in Egypt.
Josephus' comments are as follows:
'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."' (2)
Josephus then goes to write an acerbic commentary on Chaeremon's ideas where he asserts:
'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 foreshadowed 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 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 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.' (3)
Now before we begin to address Chaeremon's assertions and Josephus' arguments: we should note that Josephus' argument against Chaeremon is almost exactly the same as the one he uses to attack Chaeremon's fellow Alexandrian intellectual: Lysimachus. In this standardised argument Josephus is trying to use sceptical questions to attack Chaeremon and Lysimachus' arguments about the origins of the jews in addition to playing the different variations of the Egyptian origin theory against each other to clear the ground for implicit his claim that only the account of jewish origins made by the Torah is the true one.
This is, of course, a religious position for Josephus given that he was an ardent follower of Judaism (to the point of a leadership position in the first jewish revolt) and that this is expressed in his argument by his otherwise out of place vitriolic attack on the Egyptian goddess Isis (i.e., 'forged a dream' as Isis wasn't real to Josephus' mind).
This once again demonstrates the necessity of realising that Josephus is not - as he is frequently used by pro-jewish and Christian authors - a fairly objective author, but rather one who was highly partisan and was prepared to misrepresent facts and his opponents as and when it suited him to do so. (4) The 'confirmation' of the biblical story using Josephus - a not uncommon practice among Christians and jews both historically and currently - commits the fallacy of circular reasoning in so far as Josephus' position was that the Torah account was correct (as it was words of god) and the fact that Josephus' chronology - as a partisan jewish source - largely corresponds with modern Biblical accounts is down to the fact that they both stem from the same source. So, one cannot use one as confirmation of the historical validity of the other.
Having cleared up that issue: we can begin by noting that Chaeremon's text is a variation of an anti-jewish historical tradition that was particularly current in the early Graeco-Roman world and was repeated by numerous different anti-jewish authors. The reasons for attributing it to be a deliberate or benign misreading of the Exodus story of jewish tradition - as one modern authority describes them - (5) seem to me rather thin and based - as van der Horst all but admits - (6) purely on Josephus' original rebuttal of the charges.
This is made particularly odious when we recall that Josephus - as we have noted - is well-known to be highly partisan, but the use made of him is like that of an objective source: so rather than deal with the obvious problems of Josephus' testimony pro-jewish scholars have an unfortunate tendency to root their rejection of this opposing historical origin for the jews in Josephus' rejection of it rather than considering it as a viable hypothesis contrary to Josephus' claims.
In essence pro-jewish scholars like van der Horst - who incidentally seems to think that jewish ritual murder started off as a theory of jewish cannibalism in the ancient world with which I strongly disagree - (7) like to pretend to be basing their conclusion on a critical approach to the sources, but then use Josephus uncritically forgetting that - as Waddell noted as early as 1940 - Josephus mutilated and corrupted the texts that he was using to argue against his anti-jewish opponents. (8)
The problem with van der Horst's position is ably - if unintentionally - pointed out by Granger Cook who argued that the idea of 'inhuman jewish laws' would 'have been easy to refute' at the time that Chaeremon wrote because of the presence in Alexandria of a very large jewish community. (9) By extension then if what Chaeremon wrote as was much proverbial nonsense as van der Horst claims: then surely there would have been many more attacks on it written by jewish and non-jewish authors other than Josephus, which was not the case.
The point here is that if what so eminent and well-known an intellectual as Chaeremon (and by extension Lysimachus and Apion) wrote was as unrealistic and nonsensical as the pro-jewish side of the debate would like to claim: then why do we have very sparse records of jewish and non-jewish intellectuals opposing it? After all Alexandria was a hotbed of intellectual energy at this time and for many centuries thereafter: why is there a singular lack of critical attacks on this theory from the period? Why is it that the attacks on Chaeremon only come from those with a vested intellectual interest in the chronology of the jews outlined in the Torah being literally or figuratively absolute?
This is easily answered from an anti-jewish perspective by pointing out that the chronological tradition offered by Chaeremon and other authors was intellectually reasonable and viable within the context of the beliefs that jews themselves held at this time. Indeed we can note that Chaeremon's chronology of jewish expulsion from Egypt is actually quite plausible - if as I have previously argued - (10) we recognise that the 'affliction of leprosy' is actually a metaphor for mental sickness (i.e., a religious cult that was held to be subversive to the Egyptian state) and explains why in all texts which mention this story it is always the Egyptian priesthood (usually that of Amun but in this case Isis) who are those behind the expulsion. A singular convergence of the different accounts that van der Horst and others do not address or offer a reasonable explanation of.
That Chaeremon refers to the 'pollutions' that the cast-out people had suffered suggests something external and foreign to the Egyptians: alluding to the fact that it was not a literal disease but rather a pollution of foreign ideas (making sense of the struggle for the right to rule Egypt that Chaeremon describes going on as background to the ejection of the jews). Further Chaeremon's mention of the 'frightful appearance' refers not to leprosy itself (although one could take it as Chaeremon's overly literal understanding of the tradition he was writing about) but to the idea expressed by Lysimachus that the jews were wont to beg at the Egyptian temples and were the very wretched of the earth (i.e., foul and dirty to look upon [almost like actual lepers]) because they did no work and did not; by extension, have access to the normal hygienic routines of wider Egyptian and Greek society.
The use of Isis rather than Amun in Chaeremon's text can also be explained very simply by pointing out the centrality and diffusion of the cult of Isis among the Alexandrian Greeks (and later the Romans) at the time of Chaeremon's writing (11) and fits well with the suggestion of van der Horst's that the 'Isis' part of the story is an addition. (12) Although I am slightly changing van der Horst's model (i.e., that Isis was added to an alternative Greek chronology rather than anti-Semitic ideas were added to an Isis revenge story): I do not see doing so as being inconsistent or at general variance with his analysis.
Thus, once again we can see that the alternative Greek chronology of the jews in Egypt is actually far more intellectually solid than proponents of the more traditional jewish chronology would have us believe. In particular this chronology has the benefit of recasting the Exodus story into a more critical and plausible light with Moses being an Egyptian; making sense of his use of Egyptian military tactics (the famous 'pillars of smoke and fire' [i.e., Egyptian military signals to keep armies in their line of march]), and taking power over a cult whose leaders and key members had just been executed after failing to topple established Egyptian religion (and the rest of their membership being in disarray).
This means in effect that if we see Chaeremon as describing the jewish origin as being in a religious cult - who were deemed subversive - figuratively emasculated by the Egyptian authorities and then taken over by Moses, then we can solve Josephus' counter-arguments (as we can account for the discrepancies between the different chronologies offered by Egyptian and Greek authors) and also suggest that the alternative hypothesis of jewish origins should be taken more seriously than it has been: precisely because it potentially allows us to fill in the blanks to the Exodus story in a way that has the benefit of being both intellectually plausible as well as making the Exodus story more readable.
Therefore, we should look at Chaeremon's chronology of the jews in Egypt in a more positive manner than has historically been the case and also places the jews once again as a subversive group within the ancient world, which rather suits both the narrative of the Tanakh and also what we know of later jewish actions such as the revolts against Rome and the later battles with the Christians.
References
(1) These have been collected in Pieter Willem van der Horst, 1984, 'Chaeremon: Egyptian Priest and Stoic Philosopher', 1st Edition, E. J. Brill: Leiden
(2) Ibid., p. 9; Joseph. Cont. Ap. 1:32
(3) Ibid., 1:33
(4) As I have documented on several occasions, but most obviously in the case of Pythagoras of Samos: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/hermippus-of-symrna-pythagoras-of
(5) van der Horst, 'Chaeremon', Op. Cit., p. 50
(6) Ibid., p. 51
(7) See Pieter Willem van der Horst, 2008, 'The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism: A Chapter in the History of Antisemitism', Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 43-56
(8) William Waddell (Trans.), 1940, 'Manetho', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. xv
(9) John Granger Cook, 2004, 'The Interpretation of the Old Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism', 1st Edition, Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, pp. 29-30
(10) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/lysimachus-of-alexandria-on-the-jews
(11) Reginald Witt, 1997, 'Isis in the Ancient World', 2nd Edition, John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, pp. 234-235
(12) van der Horst, 'Chaeremon', Op. Cit., p. 50