Jots & Tittles

Moses & Co. on Trial

Moses and the enslaved Israelites should have thought twice before they absconded from Egypt with, as it says in Exodus 12:35, “articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing.” If an Egyptian jurist has his way, “the Jews” must now, after more than three millennia, repay their debt to Egypt—with interest.

According to a bulletin of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law school of Egypt’s Al-Zaqaziq University, announced in August that he and a group of fellow Egyptians are preparing a lawsuit against “all the Jews of the world” to win compensation for the treasure allegedly lost by his country during the biblical Exodus. “At that time,” Hilmi told an Egyptian interviewer, “[the Jews] stole from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing, and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless.”

How priceless? Hilmi says he calculated the size of the theft by description of the goods the Israelites used to furnish the tabernacle in Exodus 35:12–36. Estimating that the wealth amounted to 300 tons of gold, and accounting for inflation—which is considerable after 3,500 years (6,000 by Hilmi’s reckoning)—the debt is equivalent in today’s economy to “1,125 trillion tons of gold,” according to Hilmi.