St. Paul’s “Jannes and Jambres” were a pair of Reubenite brothers
by
Damien F. Mackey
“Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth.
They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected”.
2 Timothy 3:8
Jannes and Jambres not Egyptians
The tendency, a natural one, is to suspect that the two characters to whom St. Paul refers in
2 Timothy 3:8, “Jannes and Mambres [Jambres]”, were Egyptians (e.g., magicians) who had ‘resisted Moses to his face’ when Moses was still back in the land of Egypt.
Here it will be suggested, instead, that the pair were Israelite troublemakers for Moses,
whose bitter opposition to the great man would lead to their terrible demise.
In the course of my attempts over the years to set Moses in an historical Egyptian setting I have generally tried also to take into account “Jannes and Mambres” as Moses’ contemporaries.
But this has hardly been an easy task – especially when one does not know who were this pair, Jannes and Mambres, or what was their nationality, or their status.
Were they, 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 come, that Jannes and Mambres 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 accords very well linguistically with Jannes.
This has often been pointed out.
Jannes, then, would be that king who was, according to Artapanus, highly jealous of Moses, a military genius, who kept upstaging the king in his exploits. “Jealousy of Moses' excellent qualities induced Chenephres to send him with unskilled troops on a military expedition to Ethiopia, where he won great victories”. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Moses
Theirs was very much a Saul-David kind of relationship (I Samuel 18:7): “Saul has his thousands, David his tens of thousand”, which, of course, enfuriated King Saul (vv. 8-9): “Saul was very angry; this refrain displeased him greatly. ‘They have credited David with tens of thousands’, he thought, ‘but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?’ And from that time on Saul kept a close eye on David”.
Thus it could be said, as of Jannes (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”, that Chenephres “opposed Moses”. After Moses had killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew (Exodus 2:11-12), we read that (v. 15): “When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian …”.
There was no love lost between these two men, and so I thought that the first of St. Paul’s pair, “Jannes”, could be this particular ruler of Egypt, with “Mambres” to be, as I expected, a late one.
Mambres
This name, it seemed to me, had something more of an Egyptian ring to it, say e.g., Ma-ib-re.
By now I was locked in to believing 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 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 thought, had to be Maibre Sheshi of the Fourteenth Dynasty.
Whether or not, the significant ruler Maibre Sheshi was the king ruling Egypt at the time of the Plagues and Exodus I would now regard as being quite irrelevant to Paul’s Jannes and Mambres.
These I now consider to be Israelite (Hebrew) personages, who had opposed Moses even in Egypt, and who would continue to oppose him most bitterly during the Exodus.
Jannes and Mambres identified
“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). Modern scholars generally regard this narrative as resulting from an editorial interweaving of originally distinct accounts of two separate rebellions against the authority of Moses. It is noted that verses 12–15 and 25ff. form a continuous, self-contained literary unit and that the former contains no mention of Korah, who is likewise omitted from the references in Deuteronomy 11:6 and Psalms 106:17. The event described served as a warning to Israel and as an example of divine justice (ibid.). Ben Sira (45:18), too, mentions it. However, no further details are given about the two rebels, and the narrative is clearly fragmentary. It is not unlikely that the rebellion was connected with the series of events that led to the tribe of Reuben's loss of its earlier position of preeminence. ….
Apparently Dathan and Abiram had ‘form’, going back to their days in Egypt, 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). ….
If they were, in fact, “the two quarreling Israelites” (Exodus 2:13-14): “The next day [Moses] went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, ‘Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?’ The man said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?’,” then the retort ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us?’ perfectly reflects what Dathan and Abarim would say to Moses later in the desert (Numbers 16:13) ‘And now you also want to lord it over us!’
Clearly, Dathan and Abiram had an inflated sense of their own self-importance.
Moses had officially been appointed, by the king of Egypt, as “ruler and judge over” these people.
For Moses was at the time, according to my revision, ‘Chief Judge’ and ‘Vizier’ of Egypt:
Historical Moses may be Weni and Mentuhotep
Can the names, Dathan and Abiram, be merged with Jannes and Jambres?
I believe that they basically can.
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):
“It is commonly said by the Jews F15, that these were the two sons of Balaam, and they are said to be the chief of the magicians of Egypt F16; the latter of these is called in the Vulgate Latin version Mambres; and in some Jewish writers his name is Mamre F17 by whom also the former is called Jochane or John; and indeed Joannes, Jannes, and John, are the same name; and R. Gedaliah F18 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.
Since it occurred to me only yesterday (18th December, 2019) that Jannes and Jambres may be identifiable with Dathan and Abiram, I have not yet 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”):
…. 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.''
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