MANDAEAN LITERATURE 529
Exodus. The Mandaeans identify with the Egyptians, however, instead of the
Israelites. Indeed, there is an annual ritual meal dedicated to the Egyptians
who perished in the Sea of Reeds while pursuing the Israelites. The Man-
daeans claim that Moses (whom they call Musa) quarreled with their ances-
tors in Egypt. Instead of serving the true god, Moses worshiped the evil deity
Adonai (that is, the biblical god, whom the Mandaeans also identify with
the sun).
Although these stories suggest a desire to differentiate the Mandaeans
from the biblical Israelites, they also reveal a kind of kinship, at least in terms
of historical consciousness. Equally provocative is a text that depicts Judaism
as a stage that must be "cast off" before becoming Mandaean. The same text,
known as the Scroll of Exalted Kingship, connects the Mandaic term for Jew-
ish people, or iahutaiia, with another word meaning "abortion" or "miscar-
riage," a midrashic type of pun that implies that Judaism is an incompletely
developed religion in comparison with Mandaeism.
The most explicitly historical account of the group's origins, a document
called the Haran gawaita, also suggests a link to Judaism. According to the
Haran gawaita, a community of Mandaeans once lived in Jerusalem, where
they were persecuted by the Jewish people. In response to this pressure, the
text claims, the Mandaeans emigrated to the east, eventually settling in pres-
ent day Iran and Iraq. Elements of the text, including a reference to a certain
king Ardban (perhaps the Parthian ruler Artaban III, IV, or V), indicate a
first or second century CE date for the events described. Finally, another
story that takes place in Jerusalem tells of a Jewish girl named Miriai, who
converted to Mandaeism after receiving a revelation from the savior figure
Anosh. Miriai became the ancestor of 365 disciples, whose death at the hands
of the Jewish people incited Anosh to destroy the city of Jerusalem and slay
the Jewish community.
These and other complex stories allude to an intimate if highly ambivalent
relationship between Mandaeism and Judaism. This relationship is also at-
tested to by a host of similar (and in some cases identical) beliefs in angels, a
number of striking and important parallels between Mandaeism and Jewish
mysticism, and a shared history in Babylonia, where the two communities
spoke similar dialects of Aramaic and had extensive contact over the centuries.
A different theory of origins was offered by the Portuguese Christians
who came into contact with the Mandaeans in the sixteenth century. Al-
though they were not the first European Christians to encounter the Man-
daeans (an Italian Dominican monk reported a meeting in 1290), the