Manetho and Josephus Flavius

By vocation Manetho was an Egyptian priest associated with the cult of Serapis. He was not only well versed in the high Greek culture of his day, but he was also thoroughly familiar with Egyptian lore and could read hieroglyphics. He was the first Egyptian to write a history of his country in Greek.

The two kings in Manetho’s list that scholars have not been able to corroborate from names on monuments or other objects are the first two, Salitis and Bnon. Some scholars have suggested that Manetho’s Bnon may be a ruler of the contemporaneous XVIth Dynasty whom Manetho incorrectly placed in the XVth Dynasty.

The origin of the term “Hyksos” derives from the Egyptian expression heka khasewet (”rulers of foreign lands”), used in Egyptian texts such as the Turin King List to describe the rulers of neighbouring lands. This expression begins to appear as early as the late Old Kingdom in Egypt, referring to various Nubian chieftains, and as early as the Middle Kingdom, referring to the Semitic chieftains of Syria and Canaan.

Manetho, a priest who wrote a history of Egypt in the third century BCE, placed Joseph’s entry into Egypt and his rise in the early part of the reign of the Hyksos king, Apophis. The Hyksos were expelled, and then Moses called them back to help the later Israelites escape from Egypt (see the Hyksos articles).

The oldest Israelite literature about the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, describes Israel’s entry into Canaan in the following terms:

“The peoples heard, they trembled:
Writhing seized the inhabitants of Philistia;
Then, the chieftains of Edom were discomfited;
The chiefs of Moab—terror seized them.
All the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.” Exodus 15:14–15 [1]

Some of the Semitic migrants found their way not just into southern Syria and Transjordan, [1]  but into the central hills of Cisjordan. Merneptah mentions this group in the celebrated Israel Stele. Some of the evidence from the material culture suggests that the early Israelites enjoyed some familiarity with Canaanite culture. Still, most of the evidence linking the collared-rim jar, for example, to Canaanite towns, is susceptible to explanation on the basis of trade.