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Settling Moses' debt
August 27, 2003
An Egyptian law professor, Nabil Hilmi, announced last week that he and some expatriate friends are cobbling together a lawsuit against "all of the Jews in the world."
The charge: When Moses led the enslaved Jews out of Egypt, they stole gold, silver, clothing and cooking utensils in "the greatest collective fraud history has ever known." Hilmi wants the gold back, plus interest for the last 3,300 years of their freedom, give or take a few centuries.
Although Hilmi acknowledges those items are now priceless, he only hopes to collect trillions of dollars. Never mind small obstacles such as statutes of limitation, jurisdiction and the absence of any reputable historical record. By Hilmi's estimate, each man, woman and child carried 4.5 lbs. of pure gold--along with the rest of their belongings--from "the host country," as he euphemistically calls Pharoanic Egypt.
Hilmi is not coming completely out of left field. In Exodus, the Lord instructs Moses to beseech his people: "ask every man of his neighbor and every woman of her neighbor, jewelry of silver and gold." In a Hebrew book edited around 100 C.E., a Jewish sage named Gebiha grapples with the issue of theft.
But Gebiha absolves the Jews of their debt until Egypt compensates them for their captivity. (Notably, he doesn't ask for punitive damages.) He has a figure at the ready: 200 zuz, an ancient currency, per person per year. Multiplied by 600,000 slaves (a conservative estimate), and 430 years of slavery, he totals approximately 8.6 million mina, a larger silver denomination.
That would be $650 million in modern Egyptian debt, based on Tuesday's silver price.
However, Hilmi demands interest on the gold he says Jews took, and what's fair is fair. Compounding interest on Egypt's debt over the last 3,300 years, Egypt would owe the Jews about $1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is a cosmic sum billions of times Egypt's GNP over its entire history. As for the trillions Hilmi wants--that's a pittance.
Jews aren't calling for reparations. They were happy to settle for matzoh and freedom. But if Hilmi wants to play ***-for-tat, Israel might wind up with a controlling share in the Pyramids.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
I just about fell out of my chair reading this in my morning paper. What do you guys think?
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