The Lowdown on the Riffraff

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Up, depart from my people, you and the Israelites with you!” (Exodus 12:31). With these words of release from Pharaoh, the Exodus from Egypt begins. In the cloak of night, Moses and Aaron lead the Israelites out of Pharaoh’s capital city. “The Israelites journeyed from Raamses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, aside from children,” the Book of Exodus recounts (Exodus 12:37). But the Israelites were not Moses’ sole followers: “Moreover, a mixed multitude went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds” (Exodus 12:38).

In the wilderness, too, the Israelites are not alone. Once again we find reference to strangers traveling with them. At Taberah, the Book of Numbers recounts, “the people took to complaining bitterly about the Lord” (Numbers 11:1). But it is not just the Israelites who moan of their hunger: “The riffraff who lived amidst them felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat!’” (Numbers 11:4).

We may never know who these “riffraff” and “mixed multitude” were. The Bible provides no social or ethnic identification for them. They are mentioned only in these two passages.¹ Nor does the text tell us how they came to be in Egypt and why they left. We only know that they were not Israelites.

The obscurity of the “riffraff” and the “mixed multitude,” however, belies their importance to the biblical account. The presence of an unnamed people living among the Israelites at this defining moment in their history, sharing their food—and their hunger—is 032not insignificant. Perhaps that is why they are mentioned twice, in two different books of the Bible, and each time with a word that is unique in the Hebrew Bible.^a Indeed, the notion of a mixed multitude traveling with the Israelites not only influenced later biblical laws regarding the stranger (Hebrew, geµr) but also may provide us with a glimpse of a true historical memory embedded in the Exodus account.

The first legislative reference to the geµr living among the Hebrews appears in the Passover laws (Exodus 12:43–49),² proclaimed in Egypt before the laws of Sinai. On the day that the Israelites leave Egypt, the Lord informs Moses and Aaron: “This is the law of the passover offering: No foreigner (Hebrew, ben nechar) shall eat of it. If a stranger (geµr) who dwells with you would offer the passover to the Lord, all his males must be circumcised that he shall be admitted to offer it; he shall then be as a citizen of the country. But no uncircumcised person may eat of it. There shall be one 033law for the citizen and for the stranger (geµr) who dwells among you.” Note that foreigners in general are distinguished from the geµr, the stranger who dwells among the Israelites. The geµr must comply with at least some Hebrew laws; and a geµr may become like a citizen.

Later law codes add a peculiar precept to the laws relating to the geµr, stubbornly reminding the Hebrews that they must not oppress the stranger but love him because the Hebrews were once strangers in Egypt. Most laws in the Bible are not explained; they are simply revealed. But here the sojourn in Egypt is offered as justification for the laws relating to the geµr.³ In Exodus, for example, God tells the Israelites not to “oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). In the Book of Leviticus, the Lord tells Moses: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34).^b And in Deuteronomy, the Israelites are commanded to “befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19).

The sojourn in Egypt is also offered as justification for the very first law, the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt the house of bondage: You shall have no gods beside me” (Exodus 20:2–3; Deuteronomy 5:6–7). Further, the Hebrews are commanded to avoid various customs and rituals because they were practiced in Egypt and Canaan (Leviticus 8:3).

In all these laws, the Hebrews preserve a tradition of being strangers in Egypt.⁴ They also retain a memory of non-Israelites who lived amidst them. The Israelites were required by law not to abuse these strangers because they had experienced both good and evil at the hands of the Egyptians—from the days when Joseph and his descendants were privileged sojourners in Egypt until the king of Egypt “who knew not Joseph” began to mistreat the Hebrews (Exodus 1:8–11).⁵

The account of the riffraff living “amidst” the Hebrews in Egypt has a strange echo in a well-known Egyptian text dealing with the expulsion of foreigners from Egypt. Called the Speos Artemidos inscription after the site in Middle Egypt where it was found, the text was carved into the facade of a rock-cut chapel built by Queen Maakare Hatshepsut (c. 1489–1469 B.C.E.), one of Egypt’s few female pharaohs, who ruled over Egypt with her young stepson Thutmose III (1490–1436 B.C.E.). In the inscription (see the sidebar to this article), Hatshepsut alludes to two separate groups of non-Egyptians who had been expelled from Lower Egypt. She first mentions a group of “Asiatics” (Egyptian, c³mw) and “the foreigners amidst them” in the town of Avaris and the surrounding Delta.⁶ These “Asiatics” were no doubt the Hyksos, strangers from Canaan who ruled Lower Egypt from their capital, Avaris, from about 1675 B.C.E. until they were expelled by Pharaoh Nebpehtire Ahmose (c. 1570–1545), several decades before Hatshepsut rose to power.^c In describing “the foreigners who lived amidst them,” the inscription uses almost the exact phrase found in Numbers 11:4: “the riffraff who lived amidst them” (Egyptian m-q3b = Hebrew b-qrb_).

Hatshepsut then declares that she herself ousted a second group of foreigners from Egypt: “I have banished the abomination of the gods, and the earth has removed their foot(prints).” This allusion to the eviction of a despised group—detested even by the gods—might be the long-sought Egyptian reference to the Hebrew expulsion from Egypt. The only problem is the date: This expulsion under Hatshepsut evidently took place in about 1475 B.C.E., in the middle of her reign; the Hebrew Exodus under Moses, however, is conventionally dated to the 13th century B.C.E.⁷

But perhaps Hatshepsut is referring to a pre-Mosaic expulsion of Hebrew “foreigners.” After all, Israelite tradition knows of two separate evictions of Hebrews from Egypt. According to Genesis 12, long before the days of Joseph or Moses, a severe famine in Canaan drove Abram (later called Abraham) and Lot into Egypt. Fearing that the Egyptians would slay him in order to have access to his beautiful wife, Abram asks Sarai (later called Sarah) to pretend to be his sister. Major complications ensue: Pharaoh, unaware that Sarai is already married, takes her into his household. When God sends “mighty plagues” (Genesis 12:17) on the Egyptian palace, Pharaoh (if historical, Thutmose III) sends for Abram and asks, “What is this you have done to me! Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife?” The episode ends with Pharaoh expelling the patriarch and his clan: “Now, here is your wife; take her and begone!” (Genesis 12:18–19). The similarity to the Mosaic expulsion scenario—in which the later pharaoh commands Moses, “Up, depart from among my people, you and the Israelites with you!” (Exodus 12:31)—is unmistakable.

It is tempting to try to relate Hatshepsut’s eviction of the “abomination of the gods” to this first biblical expulsion from Egypt, the expulsion of Abraham, Sarah and Lot, and to understand both the Egyptian and Israelite traditions as preserving the same historical event. But without further evidence, this theory must remain a theory. At the very least, however, the Egyptian 054records indicate that there were deeply rooted Egyptian memories of various strangers being evicted from Egypt.

Today, Hatshepsut’s Speos Artemidos inscription and other Egyptian texts mentioning the eviction of foreigners are accepted as historical documents. Scholars have not always been so kind to the Exodus account, which is often dismissed as a complete fiction, composed by later writers to promote a particular religious or political agenda.⁸ But might not the biblical account, as well as the Egyptian texts, preserve the memory of a historical expulsion from Egypt—an expulsion of the Israelites and the foreigners living amidst them?

Indeed, the Bible’s use of an Egyptian sojourn as a justification for later laws protecting the stranger suggests that the sojourn was a historical reality. Indeed, why would anyone make it up? And why invent the “riffraff” who emerge from Egypt with the newborn nation of Israel? Why concoct Egyptian hospitality as well as bondage simply to rationalize laws not to abuse strangers? Why command the Hebrews: “You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land” (Deuteronomy 23:8)? It is much simpler to interpret these legal justifications as having a basis in ancient historical Hebrew tradition—in strong memories of an extended, meaningful stay in Egypt that ended with the Exodus of the Israelites and the “mixed multitude.”