Hebrews envious of Moses may have turned him in to Pharaoh

by Damien F. Mackey “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not” (Acts 7:25). Moses, like the patriarch Joseph, was a man of destiny. He had been specially selected by the Lord to lead his people, the Hebrews, out of the “iron furnace” that was Egypt, away from a cruel slavery enforced by hard-hearted Pharaohs, into the Promised Land of freedom and abundance. In this Moses resembles Jesus Christ, who was sent by Almighty God, his Father, to save souls from the fiery iron furnace of Hell, from a cruel slavery driven by demons, to open the gates of Heaven for perfect, everlasting freedom. Like with Egypt, ‘Heaven had been shut, with no one to open it, Hell had been opened, with no one to close it’. Moses would be the agent for freedom from slavery in Egypt. Jesus Christ would be the Key to unlocking the Gates of Heaven. But, just as Jesus ‘came to his own people and his people received him not’ (John 1:11), so would Moses immediately encounter obstacles from his fellow Hebrews. And this would persist for the remainder of his life, for, as Moses would harshly learn, ‘it may be possible to take the Israelites out of the heart of Egypt, but it was well-nigh impossible to take Egypt out of the hearts of the Israelites’. Moses, who edited (not wrote) the Book of Genesis, must have realised that the time told to Abram (Abraham) about the length of sojourn in Egypt was coming to an end (Genesis 15:13): “And [God] said unto Abram, ‘Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years’.” While some take this as meaning a 400-year servitude in Egypt, the most astute (my estimation) biblical chronologists would split this figure between (the Patriarchs in) Canaan and only 215 years in Egypt. And Moses must have realised, too, that he was the one best fitted to deliver this - himself a Hebrew, of the priestly Israelite family of Levi, who had even served for a time as pharaoh (as Djedefre-hor-ptah/Userkare) before abdicating in disgust of the royal crown (cf. Esther 4:17), had successfully led Egypt’s armies, and was proficient in all Egyptian learning and protocol. Moses knew how to converse with Pharaohs. Moses must have thought that the time had now come when he had courageously intervened to protect a fellow-Hebrew who was being beaten by an Egyptian overseer, and he killed the Egyptian (Exodus 2:11-12). The trouble was, the Hebrews were at war amongst themselves (v. 13): “The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, ‘Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?’” “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not” (Acts 7:25). The fact was that the 40-year old Moses himself was not yet ready for this onerous task. He would need yet another 40 years for a spiritual detoxification, to become de-Egyptianised. Jannes and Mambres/ Dathan and Abiram Some Jewish legends can be mighty helpful, such as the one providing the information that the two squabbling Hebrews, un-named in Exodus 2:13, were the contentious Reubenite brothers, Dathan and Abiram. Their ancestor Reuben, the oldest of Jacob’s many sons, had been the only one who had not wished for Joseph to be killed (Genesis 37:21-22, 29-30). His descendants, Dathan and Abiram, though, were, like certain others, extremely envious of Moses. Instead of showing any sort of gratitude to this “… very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3), the Reubenite pair steadfastly resisted Moses. Even after the Exodus. Perhaps they, too, like Moses, had been officials of some repute in Egypt. Dathan and Abiram, as Reubenites, offspring of Jacob’s oldest son, may perhaps have aspired to leadership - according to what I read recently - rather than this Levite priest, Moses. Whatever the cause of their underlying resentment, one of them barked back at Moses (Exodus 2:14): “‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Then Moses was afraid and thought, ‘What I did must have become known’.” Exodus 2:15: “When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well”. We are going to read that Dathan and Abiram themselves had notified Pharaoh. Surely, the troublesome pair, Dathan and Abiram, must be the two to whom Saint Paul will refer, poorly transliterated, as “Jannes and Jambres [Mambres]” (2 Timothy 3:8): “Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith”. They will become a complete thorn in Moses’s side right until their terrible demise. While these two pairs of names, Dathan-Abiram/Jannes Jambres, do not square up very well, some names in the Bible can be slaughtered when transliterated. To give another instance, the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, was slain by two of his sons while he was worshiping the god Nisroch (2 Kings 19:37) (some hopefully think that this was a piece of Noah’s Ark). The actual god that Sennacherib was worshipping, the god of light and fire, was Nusku (Mercury as the evening star?), badly transliterated in 2 Kings as “Nisroch”. The tendency, a natural one, is to suspect that the two characters to whom St. Paul referred were Egyptians (e.g., magicians) who had ‘resisted Moses to his face’ when Moses was back in the land of Egypt. I, in the course of my attempts over the years to set Moses in an historical Egyptian dynastic setting, have generally tried to take into account “Jannes and Jambres” as Moses’s contemporaries. But to identify them had turned out to be far from an easy task. Were Jannes and Jambres, as according to long-standing tradition, Egyptian magicians, a pair of brothers? Or were they themselves actual rulers of Egypt? The latter was the conclusion to which I had initially come, that Jannes and Jambres must have been separate Egyptian kings, both of whom had been inimical to Moses. Jannes In my revised context, Unas (Manetho’s Onnus, Jaumos, Onos), who fitted into my scheme as an alter ego of Moses’ foster/father-in-law, Chenephres (= Chephren, Neferkare/Pepi, Sesostris), and who appropriately was a magician king: “It was Unas who created the practice of listing some magic spells on the walls of the tomb” (https://www.ask-aladdin.com/egypt-pharaohs/unas/), had a name that accorded very well linguistically with Jannes. This has often been pointed out. Jambres (Mambres) This name it seemed to me, as Mambres, had something more of an Egyptian ring to it, say e.g., Ma-ib-re. By now I was locked in to thinking that Mambres, too, must have been a ruler of Egypt, and the most likely candidate for him - a standout, I thought - was the “stiff-necked” king who had refused to let the people of Israel go away from Egypt. He “opposed” (Gk. antestēsan) Moses and Aaron even in the face of the Ten Plagues. That scenario meant that I now must identify an Egyptian ruler of the Plagues and Exodus who had one of his names resembling Mambres (or Jambres). That, I then thought, had to be Maibre Sheshi of the Fourteenth Dynasty. Jannes and Jambres identified This pair I now consider, however, to have been actual Israelite (Hebrew) personages, who had opposed Moses even in Egypt, and who would continue to oppose him most bitterly during the Exodus. “Then Moses summoned Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab. But they said, ‘We will not come! Isn’t it enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness? And now you also want to lord it over us! Moreover, you haven’t brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey or given us an inheritance of fields and vineyards. Do you want to treat these men like slaves No, we will not come!’” Numbers 16:12-14 Dathan and Abiram, two Reubenite brothers, were the pair, “Jannes and Jambres” of whom Paul wrote so disparagingly in 2 Timothy 3:8. Nahum Sarna well describes the troublesome pair in his article, “Dathan and Abiram”, for: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dathan-and-abiram DATHAN AND ABIRAM (Heb. דָּתָן, cf. Akk. datnu, "strong"; and Heb. אֲבִירָם, "my [or 'the'] father is exalted"), sons of Eliab of the tribe of Reuben, leaders of a revolt against the leadership of Moses (Num. 16; 26:9–11). According to these sources, they joined the rebellion of *Korah during the desert wanderings. Defying Moses' summons, they accused him of having brought the Israelites out of the fertile land of Egypt in order to let them die in the wilderness (16:12–14). Moses then went to the tents of Dathan and Abiram and persuaded the rest of the community to dissociate themselves from them. Thereafter, the earth opened and swallowed the rebels, their families, and property (16:25–33). Apparently Dathan and Abiram had ‘form’, going back to their days in Egypt, they being traditionally “… identified with the two quarreling Israelites (Ex. R. 1:30) …”: In the Aggadah Dathan and Abiram are regarded as the prototype of inveterate fomenters of trouble. Their names are interpreted allegorically, Dathan denoting his violation of God's law, and Abiram his refusal to repent (Sanh. 109b). They were wholly wicked "from beginning to end" (Meg. 11a). They are identified with the two quarreling Israelites (Ex. R. 1:30) and it was they who caused Moses' flight from Egypt by denouncing him to Pharaoh for killing the Egyptian taskmaster, and revealing that he was not the son of Pharaoh's daughter (Yal., Ex. 167). They incited the people to return to Egypt (Ex. R. 1:29) both at the Red Sea and when the spies returned from Canaan (Mid. Ps. 106:5). They transgressed the commandment concerning the manna by keeping it overnight (Ex. R. 1:30). Dathan and Abiram became ringleaders of the rebellion under the influence of Korah, as a result of the camp of their tribe being next to that of Korah, and on this the rabbis base the statement "Woe to the wicked, woe to his neighbor" (Num. R. 18:5). When Moses humbly went to them in person in order to dissuade them from their evil designs, they were impertinent and insulting to him (mk 16a). In their statement to Moses, "we will not come up," they unconsciously prophesied their end, as they did not go up, but down to hell (Num. R. 18:10). …. Clearly, Dathan and Abiram had an inflated sense of their own self-importance. But, can these names, Dathan and Abiram, be merged with Jannes and Jambres? I think that perhaps they can – though not without difficulty. We read above that, in the Aggadah, the names Dathan and Abiram are interpreted allegorically. The other pair of names, Jannes and Jambres, can be rendered as “John and Ambrose”, according to R. Gedaliah (Shalsheleth Hakabala, fol. 7. 1): https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/gills-exposition-of-the-bible/2-timothy-3-8.html “It is commonly said by the Jews … that these were the two sons of Balaam, and they are said to be the chief of the magicians of Egypt … the latter of these is called in the Vulgate Latin version Mambres; and in some Jewish writers his name is Mamre … by whom also the former is called Jochane or John; and indeed Joannes, Jannes, and John, are the same name; and R. Gedaliah … says, that their names in other languages are John and Ambrose, which is not unlikely”. In this case, Dathan would better be rendered as Jathan, a contraction of Jonathan, hence Ἰωάννης (Iōannēs) in Greek. We can easily see the connection here with Jannes (Iōannēs). Ambrose, obviously not a Hebrew name: “The later Jews distorted the names into John and Ambrose” (https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_timothy/3-8.htm), is a very good fit for Jambres. But less so a fit for Abiram. It first occurred to me on 18th December, 2019 that Jannes and Jambres may be identifiable with Dathan and Abiram. I had not, then, had time to read if, and where, others may have expressed this same idea. From the following, which rejects any such connection, it would appear that some have proposed that the two pairs might equate (“as some have thought”): https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_timothy/3-8.htm …. These were not Jews, who rose up and opposed Moses, as Dathan and Abiram did, as some have thought; but Egyptian magicians, the chief of those that Pharaoh sent for, when Moses and Aaron came before him, and wrought miracles; and who did in like manner by their enchantments, Exodus 7:11 upon which place the Targum of Jonathan has these words: "… and Pharaoh called the wise men and the magicians; and Janis and Jambres, the magicians of the Egyptians, did so by the enchantments of their divinations.'' Moses forced to flee from Pharaoh Owing to his action of killing the Egyptian, Moses had had to flee Egypt from Pharaoh. It would not be the last time that he would have to do so (in the Exodus). But different Pharaohs were involved in each case. The Story of Sinuhe, which shares “a common matrix” with the Exodus account (professor Emmanuel Anati), rightly tells that the ruler from whom the hero fled was Sesostris. This Sesostris I have identified with “Chenephres”, the traditional husband of Moses’s Egyptian foster-mother, “Merris” (Meresankh). The coronation name that Sesostris took was, according to Nicolas Grimal (A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 164) Neferkare (“Beautiful is the Soul of Re”), which can be inverted as Kanefer[r]e (of the same meaning). From Egyptian Kanefer[r]e is derived the Greek “Chenephres”. By now our “Chenephres” is a golden thread linking Egyptian dynasties and kingdoms. Thus we have for this second Oppressor Pharaoh, after the “new king” in Exodus 1:8: Old Kingdom Fourth Dynasty: Khafre (Kanefer[r]e), Greek “Chephren”; Fifth Dynasty: (Unas), Neferirkare (Neferikare)”; Sixth Dynasty: Pepi (Neferkare)”; ‘Middle’ Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty: Sesostris (Neferkare)”; Thirteenth Dynasty: Sobekhotep so-called IV (Khanefer[r]e)”; According to the textbooks, from Chephren (c. 2500 BC) to Sobekhotep IV (c. 1800 BC), constituted a massive 700 years of ancient Egyptian history. But the life of Moses, radically re-defining Egyptian dynasties and kingdoms, has Chephren (Khafre) “Chenephres” and Sobekhotep (Khanefer[r]e) “Chenephres” as being just the one, same Pharaoh, at just the one point in history.