Some thoughts on greco-roman versions of the Exodus story

Abstract

As one who has not revisited the authors discussed by Erich Gruen in his paper, "The Use and Abuse of the Exodus Story," since my own dissertation, I relish the opportunity reflect on these issues after thirty years of concentrating on other matters. The center of Gruen's piece, as I read it, is the problematic figure of Josephus and his Against Apion, the basic source for our knowledge of anti-Jewish Exodus narratives in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. As Gruen puts his basic thesis, "The distorting lens of Josephus has slanted our vision for too long." To be sure, we have Exodus accounts independent of Josephus (Hecataeus of Abdera, Strabo, Pompeius Trogus, Diodorus Siculus and Tacitus) and Gruen rightly insists that in assessing them we need to rid ourselves of the framework, originated by Josephus, according to which they fall into one of two categories pro-Jewish or anti-Jewish. The picture derived from the non-Josephan versions is more complicated, and more interesting, than that. And from our inability to reconcile these accounts with Josephus' dichotomous framework, Gruen raises a fundamental question. Given the obvious conclusion that "the Exodus narrative became transformed and manipulated" in non-Jewish accounts, who were the manipulators and what were their motives? The reigning consensus, from Josephus to the present, has been that the manipulators were non-Jewish authors and, in the case of the "anti-Jewish" versions, that their motives were anti-Jewish sentiments. In other words, these "anti-Jewish" versions of the Exodus originated in circles of antisemitic, non-Jewish Greek, Egyptian and Roman authors.