Page "Osarseph" Paragraph 4

The second, set some two hundred years later, tells the story of Osarseph.

According to Josephus, Manetho described Osarseph as a tyrannical high priest of Osiris at Heliopolis.

Pharaoh Amenophis had a desire to see the gods, but in order to do so he first had to cleanse Egypt of lepers and other polluted people, setting 80, 000 of them to work in the stone quarries, and then confining them to Avaris, the former Hyksos capital in the Eastern Delta.

There Osarseph became their leader and ordered them to give up the worship of the gods and eat the meat of the holy animals.

The Osarsephites then invited the Hyksos back into Egypt, and together with their new allies drove Amenophis and his son Ramses into exile in Nubia and instituted a 13-year reign of religious oppression: towns and temples were devastated, the images of the gods destroyed, the sanctuaries turned into kitchens and the sacred animals roasted over fires, until eventually Amenophis and Rameses returned to expel the lepers and the Hyksos and restore the old Egyptian religion.

Towards the end of the story Manetho reports that Osarseph took the name " Moses ".