After the
Assyrian conquest of Egypt during the 7th century BCE, Seth was considered an evil deity by the Egyptians and not commonly worshipped, in large part due to his role as the god of foreigners. From at least 200 BCE onward, a tradition developed in the Graeco-Egyptian
Ptolemaic Kingdom which identified
Yahweh, the God of the Jews, with the
Egyptian god Seth. Diverging from previous
zoologically multiplicitous depictions, Seth's appearance during the Hellenistic period onwards was depicted as resembling a man with a donkey's head. The Greek practice of
interpretatio graeca, ascribing the gods of another people's pantheon to corresponding ones in one's own, had been adopted by the Egyptians after their
Hellenisation; during the process of which they had identified Seth with
Typhon, a snake-monster, which roars like a lion. The story of
the Exodus, featured in the
Hebrew Bible, speaks of the Jews as a nation betrayed and subjugated by the
Pharaoh, for whom Yahweh subjects Egyptians to
ten plagues — destroying their country, defiling the
Nile, and killing all their first-born sons. Jewish migration within the Hellenised Ptolemaic Kingdom to Greek-speaking Egyptian cities such as
Alexandria led to the creation of the
Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into
Koine Greek. Furthermore, the story of the Exodus was
adapted by
Ezekiel the Tragedian into the , a Greek play performed in Alexandria and seen by Egyptians and Jews. Egyptian receptions of the Exodus story were widely negative, because it insulted their gods and praised their suffering. Thus it inspired Egyptian works retelling the story, but changing its details to mock the Jews and exalt Egypt and its gods. In this context some Egyptians discerned similarities between Yahweh's in-narrative actions and attributes and those of Seth (such as being associated with foreigners, deserts, and storms), in addition to a phonetic resemblance between , Yahweh's name as used by
hellenised Jews, and , then considered as the animal of Seth. From this arose a popular response to the Jewish accusation that Egyptians were merely worshipping beasts, namely that, in truth, the Jews themselves worshipped a beast, a donkey or a donkey-headed man, ie Seth. Accusations of
onolatry against the Jews spread from the Egyptian milieu, with its understanding of the donkey's Seth-related importance, to the rest of the
Graeco-Roman world, which was largely ignorant of this context. In the most famous variations of narratives alleging Jewish onolatry
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a
Seleucid king famous for raiding the
Jerusalem Temple, supposedly discovered that its
Holiest of Holies was not empty, but instead contained a donkey idol, and Tacitus (early second century CE) claimed that the Jews dedicated in their holiest shrine a statue of a wild ass. After the emergence of
Christianity the same charge was also repeated against its devotees. Most famously so in the earliest known depiction of the
crucifixion of Jesus, the
Alexamenos graffito, where a Christian by the name of Alexamenos is shown worshipping a donkey-headed crucified god. According to Litwa, this tradition forms the basis for the development of
Gnostic beliefs about Yaldabaoth. == Role in Gnosticism ==