THE
REAL MOSES AND HIS GOD
BY
AUGUST HUNT
Copyright
© August Hunt 2014 All Rights Reserved
Cover
Photo Credit: Jan Pieter Van De Giessen of Aantekeningen Bij De Bijbel
World
Wide Web bijbelaantekeningen.nl/gallery3/tag/Timna
FOR
MY FATHER
WHO
WAS ALWAYS SEEKING THE TRUTH
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 8
Chapter
One: The Date of the Exodus 13
Chapter
Two: Yahweh and His Angel 23
Chapter
Three: The Burning Bush 41
Chapter
Four: Mount Horeb/Sinai 69
Chapter
Five: The Ark of the Covenant 77
Chapter
Six: Moses 87
Chapter
Seven: Sokar of Rosetau and
Baal of Peor: The Burial Place of
Moses 110
Chapter
Eight: How Ramessesemperre
Became Moses 112
Appendix One - The Goddess Eve and
Her Dirty Consort Adam: A Different
Take
on Creation and the Location of the
Garden East of Eden DIRTY
Appendix Two – The Real Mountain of
Noah and His Ark
THE
REAL MOSES AND HIS GOD
or
HE WHO IS COMING INTO BEING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
wish to thank Walter Mattfield of BIBLE ORIGENS for his invaluable
assistance. His many years of research,
and more importantly his willingness to share the fruits of his labor with me,
drastically reduced the amount of time I would otherwise have had to commit to
this project. On many occasions Walter
supplied me with information, pointed me in the right direction for additional
resources or saved me from stumbling along unprofitable paths.
Many
other scholars, amateur and professional alike, have contributed to the
creation of this book. Whenever
appropriate, I credit them in the body of the text. Of course, as the author I
am solely responsible for the book’s contents and no views expressed herein
were espoused by the scholars who so generously devoted their wealth of
knowledge to its completion.
INTRODUCTION
People
have long speculated on the date of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, the
nature of the Burning Bush of Moses, the mysterious god Yahweh and his angel,
and on the founding of the first tent shrine at Mount Sinai. Perhaps even more effort has gone into
attempts to identify Moses with attested personages of the time. And this is to be expected, given the fact
that these events form the foundation of a religion held dear by much of the
world. But to date, all that surrounds
Moses and his experiences and actions is still a mystery – and some would
doubtless prefer that it remain such.
As
an inheritor of the Judaic-Christian traditions of the West, I have long
harbored a “closet” interest in Biblical literature. In childhood, I was impressed with the
miraculous qualities of the Old Testament stories. While I was inculcated in my society’s
beliefs to some extent, I was also permitted total freedom of thought and, once
I had achieved a sufficient level of maturity, was allowed to form my own
opinions on things religious. It is true
that many emphasize how vital it is to question one’s faith, yet I have never
personally encountered those who practice what they preach in this regard. I have found that universally any genuine
manifestation of doubt, or any focused, objective scrutiny of belief systems,
are either directly or indirectly discouraged.
If discouragement is not a sufficient deterrent, sanction or exclusion
usually has the desired effect. The only
truth a certain religion binds itself to is whatever serves to perpetuate
itself. Other truths, unless they can be
made to eventually lead the wayward back to the flock, are not entertained in
any substantive way.
After
many years of pondering these matters, and often coming to grips with their
ramifications, I decided it was time to apply myself to a speculative analysis
of some of the central episodes of the Book of Exodus. I realized, after thoroughly reacquainting
myself with the material, doing an enormous amount of research on secondary
sources and contemporary texts deemed respectable by the academic community
and, after much thought, having come up with a revolutionary theory, that I
might have something important and exciting to say on the subject. Although this theory runs counter to
everything that had gone before, it has been arrived at, ironically, by
respecting the Biblical account. I had
not found it necessary to rely on late, corrupt, confused, suspect retellings
by “authorities” such as those by Manetho.
Nor have I had to resort to “revised” chronologies, some of which
temporally displace the Exodus by hundreds of years in order to make it
coincide with the much earlier expulsion of the Hyksos or Foreign Kings from
Egypt.
At
the same time, I appreciate more than others have the profound impact Egyptian
society and, more particularly, Egyptian religion, must have had on the Hebrews
during centuries of residence in the land of Pharaoh. I find it a ridiculous notion that after such
a long period of time assimilating to Egyptian ways, to being in a very real
sense “Egyptianized”, that the Hebrews did not engage in a fair degree of
religious syncretization. Standard
practice for the Egyptians was to identify various gods and goddesses with each
other, or even aspects of gods and goddesses with each other, and to embrace
the worship of foreign deities in a similar process. Any investigation of the religion that Moses
founded must acknowledge the obvious: his people had long been subjected to the
seductive power of Egyptian beliefs and rituals, and even in the desert of the
Sinai Peninsula the Egyptian gods and goddesses held sway.
As
for my method of argument in the following pages, language and archaeology will
be my twin guides. A unique comparative
approach will seek to reveal conclusive relationships between Hebrew and
Egyptian words. The findings suggested
by these relationships will then be considered in the context of the only two
sites in the Sinai which could possibly have been Mount Horeb/Sinai. This blending of tongues and exploration of
ancient ruins will help us find a verifiable candidate for Moses himself.
My
apology is offered in advance to individuals who are offended by the ideas
contained in this little book, as well as to institutions that ordinarily
interpret as objectionable any intellectual treatment of the supposed Word of
God. I am also well aware that even
skeptics of Biblical veracity may resent what I have set out to do, either
because they disagree on my “angle of attack” or because they already have
developed or adopted their own pet theories which run counter to my own.
Many
will doubtless question my motives for committing the worse possible act of
hubris: daring to peer under the veil of the holiest of mysteries, to see if I
can glean but a fraction of a glance at what is either the ultimate reality or
what is ultimately real. To this charge
I can only respond with full honesty and, I hope, a measure of modesty: I do
not believe it is the purpose of our life to believe. I feel it is the purpose of our life to find
out what it is we should not believe.
Only by doing that, through an endless process of eliminating ignorance
and the false beliefs ignorance engenders – a process which might loosely and
somewhat philosophically be defined as “scientific” - can we ever discover real
and abiding truths.
August Hunt
January 1, 2014
CHAPTER
ONE:
THE
DATE OF THE EXODUS
Exodus
12:40-41 tells us that prior to the Hebrew departure from Egypt under Moses,
the Israelites had been in the land for 430 years. 1 Kings 6:1 claims the right number is 480
years, while the Septuagint says 440. In
Exodus 1:11, we learn that the Hebrews had been set to work building
Pi-Ramesses (modern Qantir) and Pithom (Tell er-Retabeh or Tell
el-Maskhutah). Finally, when the Exodus
actually occurs, the Hebrews cannot take the Egyptian Way of Horus along the
coast to Canaan because of the presence there of the Philistines (13:17).
These
fairly precise dating markers allow us to pinpoint the events of the Exodus
account. It is well known, firstly, that
the builders of Pi-Ramesses and Pithom were Seti I and Ramesses II the Great. Thus the pharaoh who is reigning at the time
of Mose’s birth could be none other than the 19th Dynasty’s Ramesses II
(1304-1237 B.C.; dates courtesy Donald Redford), for whom Pi-Ramesses was
named.
However,
given that the Hebrews cannot go along the coast when they leave Egypt because
of the presence of the Philistines there, we know that this could not have
happened any earlier than the reign of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty. This is because the Philistines had not
settled in Canaan until the reign of Ramesses III. This pharaoh was also long-lived – in fact,
by far the longest lived ruler of Egypt since the days of Ramesses II: 32
years. Six pharaohs intervened between
the reigns of Ramesses II and Ramesses III, their combined reigns totaling
approximately 37 years.
When
Moses is a young man, he murders an Egyptian overseer (2:12) and has to flee to
Midian. His sojourn in Midian, during
which he marries a Midianite woman and has children, lasts for “a long time”
(2:23), after which the pharaoh dies.
This extra-long reign strongly suggests Ramesses II again, as he was on
the throne for 67 years. However, as we
have seen above, Ramesses III also had a very long reign, and it was in his
reign that the Philistines settled in Canaan.
Ramesses III not only used Pi-Ramesses as a royal residence, but is
thought to have built a larger stables for the city atop those belonging to
Ramesses II. If this is true, then Ramesses III could have been confused with
the original builder of Pi-Ramesses.
I
have culled the following from Ian Shaw’s account of the reign of Ramesses III
in “The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt”:
1)
The Sea Peoples first tried to enter Egypt in the days of Merneptah (the
successor of Ramesses II); they did it again in the reign of Ramesses III
2)
Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu was closely modeled on the
Ramesseum of Ramesses II
3)
Ramesses III tried to emulate Ramesses II in many other ways; his own royal
names were all but identical to those of Ramesses II and he even named his sons
after the latter’s numerous offspring
4)
Ramesses III expanded Piramesses; the Harem Conspiracy, the goal of which was
to assassinate Ramesses III, was apparently hatched at Piramesses
It
is fairly obvious based upon the above that Biblical commentators who opt for
Ramesses II as the pharaoh of Moses’ birth and early years are simply wrong.
Indeed,
if we calculate 430 years from Jacob’s arrival in Egypt (Jabob may be the
Hyksos king Jakobher, whom Redford puts at 1662-1653), we find ourselves at
1223, during the reign of Ramesses II.
If we opt for the 480 year span, we arrive at 1173, which falls in the
reign of Ramesses III.
Of
course, if Moses’s life spanned the period from Ramesses II to that of Ramesses
III, we would have another reason for a possible confusion of these two
pharaohs. Later in this book, we will
see that our historical candidate – or candidates
- for Moses lived from the reign of one of these kings to the reign of the
other.
As
it happens, Ramesses IV had a very short reign of only 6 years. His son, Ramesses V, was on the throne for only
4 years before he perished in a smallpox epidemic. Ramesses VI (156-1149 B.C.) is the pharaoh
under whom the Egyptian presence in Sinai was withdrawn. Putting this all together, if we allow for
Ramesses III being the pharaoh Moses originally flees from for killing the
Egyptian overseer, and make his successor Ramesses the IV the pharaoh of the
Exodus, with his son Ramesses V being the firstborn of pharaoh whom Yahweh slew
in the plague (29:1), we have a startlingly coherent and accurate chronology for
the Exodus. Granted, in reality Ramesses
V actually ruled for a few years after his father; he did not pre-decease
Ramesses IV. But such a telescoping of
events is not unusual in traditional history and I think that in this context
the slight discrepancy must be allowed.
I
would add that if we use the 480 year calculation and apply the start date of
this period not to Jakobher/Jacob, but to his son, Joseph, of the next
generation of Hebrews in Egypt, the tally might well come out matching exactly
the reign of either Ramesses IV or V.
The
proponents of a revised chronology which runs counter to the Exodus marker
dates and supports the notion of the Exodus being a Hebrew version of the
Hyksos expulsion several centuries prior to the time of Ramesses III does not
take into account the fact that we are specifically told by trustworthy
Egyptian accounts that the Hyksos did not drop down into the Sinai. Instead, once they were expelled from Avaris
(Tell ed-Dab’a) in the Delta, they were defeated again at the Sinai border
fortress of Tjaru (Tell Heboua, the “Northeastern Gate” of Egypt; information courtesy Mohammed Abd El-Maksoud,
Director of the Eastern Delta and Sinai, Supreme Council of Antiquities,
Egypt), and then were driven north after a successful three-year siege at
Sharuhen (possibly Tell Haroer in the Negev, rather than Tell el-Ajjul on the
coast, according to Donald Redford).
Such a scenario cannot be reconciled with Moses leading the Hebrews into
the southern Sinai.
It
is true that the 18th Dynasty founder Ahmose I, the Egyptian pharaoh
responsible for driving out the Hyksos, re-opened the Sinai to Egyptian
control. Ahmose re-established the mines
and Hathor-Sopdu temples at Serabit el-Khadim, while the Timna mines and Hathor
temple did not become established until the time of Ramesses II (or perhaps the
co-regency of Ramesses II and his father, Seti I). Serabit el-Khadim remained in operation until
Ramesses VI’s withdrawal from the Sinai.
We have evidence of his presence there.
Timna does not show evidence for Ramesses VI; the record there stops
with Ramesses V.
We
will have reason to return to a more detailed discussion of both Serabit
el-Khadim and Timna when we search for Mount Sinai/Horeb in a subsequent
chapter.
In
THE BIBLE UNEARTHED; ARCHAEOLOGY’S NEW VISION OF ANCIENT ISRAEL AND THE ORIGIN
OF ITS SACRED TEXTS (The Free Press, 2001), Chapter 2, “Did the Exodus
Happen?”, authors Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman claim that no
evidence exists for supporting the notion that the Exodus actually took
place. They point to a paucity of
archaeological remains in the Sinai and conclude that there is no trace of even
a greatly reduced number of Hebrews living in the region at the supposed time
of Exodus. This reasoning is faulty, of
course, and goes to the heart of the kinds of mistakes in judgment that can
take place when looking for proof of a traditional account without allowing for
a variant interpretation of that account.
One cannot remain a steadfast literalist when treating of Biblical
narratives. Finkelstein’s approach to
Biblical Studies has come under severe fire, most recently in Robert Draper’s
“Kings of Controversy: Was the Kingdom of David and Solomon a Glorious Kingdom
or Just a Little Cow Town?” (December 2010 National Geographic Magazine).
While
William G. Dever (in Chapter 2, “The Exodus – History of Myth?”, WHO WERE THE
EARLY ISRAELITES AND WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2006) takes a less brutal view of the Exodus narrative than Finkelstein
and Silberman, he does outline five problems that seem to make the story
suspect:
1)
Too much detail for an orally handed-down account; for such an account to be
accurate, it would have to be much vaguer
2)
Some information is “clearly fanciful” and “contradictory”; anachronisms abound
3)
The priestly material is too complicated and thus plainly represents later
traditional material
4)
Problems with the itinerary or “stages” of the Sinai wanderings exist. Many places are lost or cannot otherwise be
identified; some are known to have been Egyptian at the time of the Exodus
5)
The “recurrent problem of miracles”; despite attempts to explain these miracles
as natural phenomena, the heavy reliance on “mighty acts of God” cast doubt on
the whole narrative
Once
again, none of these points force us to abandon the possibility or even the
probability that the Exodus was a real, historical event or conflation of
historical events. Any traditional
narrative is prone to being embellished as centuries elapse. It does not mean that just because such
embellishments are present we must dispense with the underlying traditional
account. Instead, we must more carefully
examine the account itself to see if there is any way its basic story can be
shown to be true. We do this by
stripping it of its embellishments and looking for any event or events in the
records of other ancient Near Eastern peoples that may account for the
formation of such a tradition. First and
foremost among these people, of course, must be the Egyptians.
CHAPTER
TWO:
YAHWEH
AND HIS ANGEL
Now
that we have established to what period in Egyptian history Moses belongs, and
have come up with an approximate date for the Exodus, i.e. sometime during the
reigns of Ramesses IV or V, we can begin to examine the Hebrew god Yahweh
within the context of Egyptian religion.
Our
first step in performing this task is to briefly go over the meaning of
Yahweh’s name, as this is currently accepted by most modern scholars. The best explanation of the name Yahweh is
still held to be that propounded by Professor Frank M. Cross in his book
_Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic_: YHWH is a shortening of the phrase ‘il zu
Yahweh s.aba’t or “El/God who creates the hosts (of heaven)”. Here Yahweh is a causative of the verb h-w-y,
“to be” (further information courtesy Professor John Huehnergard, Harvard
University). I concur with this theory,
despite a recent attempt by Adam Strich (“The Root *HWY and the Name YHWH”,
Harvard University, 2008) to demonstrate that the ‘to be’ definition is
secondary to the original meaning of the root, which was ‘to fall’.
Yahweh
is most certainly to be derived from the Hebrew verb hayah or hawah, “to be or
become”. The ancient Hebrew god is,
therefore, “He Who Comes Into Being” or, simply, “He Who Becomes”/”The Becoming
One”. Indeed, it has been expressed that
the idea is not that of being or of existing, but of coming to pass.
It
is not at all certain, however, that it really is Yahweh in the Burning
Bush. To quote the relevant passage from
Exodus 3:2 and 3:4:
“There
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush… When
the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the
bush…”
Now,
theologians have attempted to account for the ‘angel’ by assuming this was
merely the physical manifestation of God. In other words, when God chose to
reveal himself to men, he took on the appearance of the ‘angel’.
This
is correct only to a point. The Hebrew
word used in this context for ‘angel’ is mal’ak. It derives from an unused root meaning “to
dispatch as a deputy”. The meaning is
actually “messenger”. Now, in Egyptian
religion the moon god Thoth (DHw.t.y, probably pronounced something like
‘Djehuti’) had the common epithet of isti ra, “the deputy/substitute/representative
of [the sun god] Re”. According to
Boylan’s “Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt”, this epithet refers to the idea that the
moon takes the place of the sun at night, but its light is merely a reflection
of that of the sun. A late epithet of
Thoth is wpwty, “messenger”, a designation which may have come about because of
Thoth’s identification with Hermes. From
very early on, Thoth was a kind of agent of Re, being the latter’s chief
scribe/minister (information courtesy Aayko K. Eymo).
The
etymology of the name Thoth is unknown.
Current opinion holds to the notion that DHw.t.y may stand for “He of
DHw.t”. The problem with this theory is
that no such place as DHw.t is recorded in the Egyptian sources.
In
an effort to come up with a better derivation for Thoth’s name, my attention
was recently drawn to an Egyptian baboon deity named DjehDjeh (DHDH). The
repetition that is obvious in Djeh-Djeh caused me to consider the possibility
that the name could be imitative in origin. So I wrote to two world experts on
baboons and asked whether there is a vocalization among the Hamadrayas baboons
that could have been represented or "mimicked" by 'Djeh! - Djeh!'. In
response, Dr. Dorothy Cheney pointed me to her web site page with baboon
vocalizations:
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~seyfarth/Baboon%20research/vocalizations.htm
After
paying very close attention to various kinds of barks, I concluded that the
two-phase calls of baboons could easily have been rendered by ‘Djeh-Djeh’.
Sergei
Anatolyevich Starostin claimed that DH-DH tied in with Cushitic gwa-gwa /
gaw-gaw, "(large) monkey", but he admits that the data are too scarce
and unreliable to really postulate an Afroasiatic word. It seems clear to me
that the Cushitic word
is
likewise a sound mimicking word, and that to apply Afroasiatic sound shifts to
it would be very dubious.
To
go a step further, I wonder whether it is possible that the above mentioned
baboon call, of purely imitative origin, could have yielded a hypothetical
word/name for the sacred baboon, *DH(w). This occured to me as Hopfner proposed a hypothetical word *DH(w ) for
'ibis', to explain the problematic name of the god Thoth (DHw.t.y), but to my
knowledge his hypothetical word for ibis cannot be backed up with ancient
Egyptian or Afroasiatic examples.
According
to Thomas Kelly (via the AEgyptian-L mailing list):
“An
imitative origin for Djeh-Djeh has merit. Jaromir Malek states, on page 25, in
“The Cat in Ancient Egypt”: “There was only one word for cat in pharaonic Egypt
which we can find in the hieroglyphic writing.
It was the onomatopoeic miu or mii (feminine miit), imi (feminine imiit
or miat) in demotic, the penultimate stage of the Egyptian language, and emu or
amu in Coptic, written from c. the third century AD. The cat was simply '(s) he
who mews,' and as we shall see, this was how the Egyptians themselves
understood it. If the "miu"
from a cat became the word for cat then it is possible that the bark from a
baboon could become the word for baboon.”
Thoth,
according to Gardiner, Peet and Cerny (_The Inscriptions of Sinai, Part II),
was the nomen loci or patron deity of Maghara near Serabit el-Khadim in the
Sinai. Both these places were mined by
the Egyptians (see below). Thoth is also
present in several inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim.
But
if the angel of the Lord is the moon god Thoth, how can Yahweh be the sun god
Ra?
The
Egyptians had a marvelous capacity for religious syncretization. One god could be identified with another, and
often gods who served very specific functions became mere aspects of a greater
god. The syncretized deity we are most
interested in when it comes to Yahweh as a possible aspect of Re is Re-Khepri.
Khepri
was the god of the rising sun in Egyptian religion, and as such also the god of
the resurrected sun who had survived the night in the underworld to be reborn
in the morning. Symbolized by a scarab
beetle, the name of this god derives from the verb xpr, “come into being”. A related word is xprw, “form,
manifestation”, literally ‘that which has come into being’.
Scarab
( = Khepri) amulets were found at Timna and Serabit el-Khadim, as were sphinxes
(= Horemakhet-Khepri and, of course, the pharaoh as the human incarnation of
that syncretized deity). Serabit
el-Khadim has two sphinxes representing Thutmose III flanking and adoring
Hathor in the form of a sistrum.
One
of the sphinxes at Timna bears the upper portion of a cartouche containing the
prenomen ‘User-ma’at-re’ for Ramesses II, III or V. Petrie describes statues of sphinxes flanking
the temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim; these were representative of
Thutmose III. The god Khepri is
mentioned in only one dedication in the Sinai.
This occurs at Serabit el-Khadim, where Thutmose III is called the
“precious egg of Khepri”.
So
if Yahweh is merely a Semitic rendering of the Egyptian divine name Khepri, and
the angel of Yahweh is the Egyptian god Thoth, Yahweh himself may not actually
be present in the Burning Bush. Thoth
may be there alone, speaking not only for Yahweh-Khepri, but as Yahweh-Khepri.
Margaret
Barker, in her recent book THE GREAT ANGEL: A STUDY OF ISRAEL’S SECOND GOD
(Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), has proposed that the apparent confusion
between Yahweh and his angel/messenger is due to the fact that originally
Elohim (the plural of majesty and excellence used for a single divine being,
not a plural in number, as for “gods”) was the chief creator deity of Israel,
and Yahweh his son. According to this
theory, then, Yahweh was the messenger of Elohim. The problem with Barker’s argument is that it
fails to take into account the significance of Yahweh to a thoroughly
Egyptianized Asiatic (see below for Moses’ ancestry). Moses identified his own Egyptian deity with
a Midianite god. But it would appear the
‘messenger’ that spoke to Moses from the Burning Bush was not Yahweh/Khepri
himself, but an entity the Egyptians would have been very familiar with – Thoth
the deputy of the sun god.
Does
this explanation adequately explain the mystery of the deity (or deities) of
the Burning Bush? Well, it may do so if
we view the phenomenon solely from the Egyptian perspective. Unfortunately, this nice, neat picture I’ve
just painted does not take into account some important factors on the Midianite
side of things. Nor does it take into consideration the identity of Abraham’s
god prior to the Hebrew’s long stay in Egypt.
Any
investigation of Abraham or Abram must begin with an analysis of his name as
well as those of his immediate family.
From
“Abraham: What cultural, textual, and archaeological sources can tell us about
this patriarch”, by P. Kyle McCarter, in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the
Roman Destruction of the Temple, edited by Hershel Shanks, Biblical Archaeology
Society:
“…the
connections between the family of Abraham and the city of Haran in northern
Mesopotamia (Eski Harran or "Old Haran" in modern Turkey) are very
precise in our earliest narrative source (J. or the Yahwist). Terah, Nahor and
Serug--Abraham's father, grandfather and great grandfather (Genesis
11:22-26)--seem to be the eponymous ancestors of towns in the basin of the
Balikh River, near Haran.
All
three names appear in Assyrian texts from the first half of the first
millennium B.C.E. as the name of towns or ruined towns in the regions of Haran,
namely Til-(sha)-Turakhi (the ruin of Turakh), Ti-Nakhiri (the ruin of Nakhir)
and Sarugi. Earlier, in the second millennium B.C.E., il-Nakhiri had been an
important administrative center, called Nakhuru. The patriarchal connection
with this region may be rooted in historical memories of Amorite culture of the
second millennium B.C.E.”
The
reference to the Amorites (literally ‘Westerners’) here leads us to brief
discussion of Abram’s ‘Ur of the Chaldees’.
While various places have been selected for this site, the best is still
Ur in southern Mesopotamia. This became
part of the Amorite kingdom, as described succinctly in this account from
http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsMiddEast/MesopotamiaAmorites.htm:
“The
Amorites began to arrive in the territory to the west of the Euphrates, modern
Syria, from around 2500 BC. The Akkadians called them Amurru, and they probably
originated from Arabia (a less popular theory places them in India). Although
there was no actual invasion, for a period of five hundred years they drifted
down into southern Mesopotamia, integrating into Sumerian civilisation where
they lived in enclaves. They served in the armies of Third Dynasty Ur, and
provided general labour for both Ur and Akkad before that. As Ur declined, and
with it Sumerian civilisation, many Amorites rose to positions of power. When
the final end of Ur came at the hands of the Elamites, the Amorites, virtually
Sumerians themselves by now, were in a strong position to pick up the pieces.
Rather
than maintain the Sumerian system of city states, where farms, cattle and
people belonged to the gods or the temples (ie. the king), the Amorites founded
kingdoms which had their capitals at many of the old cities, even if some of
these new kingdoms were virtually the equivalent of a city state in their size
and power. As well as inheriting the surviving Sumerian cities, the Amorites
also built a number of large and powerful cities of their own, from Syria down
to southern Mesopotamia…
They
founded or expanded cities and created kingdoms of their own, such as Amrit,
Amurru, Andarig, Arvad, Dilbat, Ekallatum, Eshnunna, Hamath, Isin, Karana,
Qattara, Razama, Terqa, and Tuttul (and probably Der as well, although records
here are sketchy). They also assumed control of older city states throughout
Mesopotamia, Syria, and Canaan, such as Alalakh, Alep (Aleppo), Borsippa,
Carchemish, Ebla, Gebal, Kazallu, Kish, Lagash, Larsa, Mari, Nippur, Qatna,
Sippar, Tuba, Ur and Uruk.”
But
can we prove Abram was an Amorite? Well,
the Encyclopedia Judaica (2007) says of the name Abram:
“ABRAHAM
(originally Abram ; Heb. אַבְרָהָם, אַבְרָם),
first patriarch of the people of Israel. The form "Abram" occurs in
the Bible only in Genesis 11:26–17:5, Nehemiah 9:7, and i Chronicles 1:26.
Otherwise, "Abraham" appears invariably, and the name is borne by no
one else. No certain extra-biblical parallel exists. A-ba-am-ra-ma, A-ba-ra-ma,
A-ba-am-ra-am occur in 19th-century b.c.e. Akkadian cuneiform texts. Abrm
appears in Ugaritic (Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (1965), pp. 286, 348, text 2095,
line 4), but is most likely to be read A-bi-ra-mì (Palais Royal d' Ugarit, 3
(1955), p.20, text 15.63, line 1). There is no evidence that Abram is a
shortened form of Abiram. As to the meaning of Abram, the first element is
undoubtedly the common Semitic for "father"; the second could be
derived from Akkadian ra'âmu ("to love") or from West-Semitic rwm
("to be high"). "He loved the father" or "father
loves" is a far less likely meaning than "he is exalted with respect
to father" i.e., he is of distinguished lineage. The meaning "exalted
father" or "father is exalted," while less satisfactory, cannot
be ruled out. No Hebrew derivation for Abraham exists. In Genesis 17:5
"the father of a multitude [of nations]" is a popular etymology,
although it might possibly conceal an obsolete Hebrew cognate of Arabic ruhâm,
"numerous." More likely, Abraham is a mere dialectic variant of
Abram, representing the insertion of h in weak verbal stems, a phenomenon known
from Aramaic and elsewhere.”
It
should be pointed out that the cuneiform text forms of the name alluded to
above come from the city of Dilbat, which was of Amorite foundation.
But
the best evidence we have that Abraham was an Amorite comes from the name of
his father. Terah can indeed be linked
to the Amorite city name Til-sha-Turakh.
But this is only part of the story.
The name Terah itself (once wrongly linked with a moon god because of
the Ur-Haran connection; see the entry for Terah in Dictionary of Deities and
Demons in the Bible) has been properly derived from Akkadian turahu (remember
the –h in both words is pronounced liked a k), ‘mountain goat, ibex’. And this etymology tells us exactly who Terah
is: he is Amurru/Martu, the god of the Amorites.
Amurru/Martu,
whose city was the unlocated Ninab, had as his sacred animal a ‘caprid’, i.e. a
horned, goat-like animal. According to
Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East, he is variously
depicted stepping on a caprid, holding a caprid in his arms, or the caprid may
appear alone, symbolizing the god, or may appear with only the god’s shepherd’s
crook.
Thus
Abram is ‘son of Amurru/Martu’, i.e. he is an Amorite.
The
god of Abraham was originally Amurru/Martu.
The adoption of the Canaanite El – the equivalent god in that pantheon –
was a logical and perhaps inevitable development once the Hebrews found
themselves in Canaan. By consulting such
excellent sources as the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, we
quickly learn of the many identical traits shared by Amurru and El:
“[Amurru]
is best characterized as a storm god… A number of scholars believe the name
Shadday, usually found as El-Shadday, reflects the epithet bel sade, ‘Lord of
he Mountain’, currently carried by Amurru… Martu has many traits of a West
Semitic storm god… According to a Sumerian hymn, Amurru is a warrior god,
strong as a lion, equipped with bows and arrows, and using storm and thunder as
his weapons…His behavior typically reflects the characteristics of Amorite
nomads as perceived by civilized Mesopotamians… Cross explains the combination
El-Shadday by assuming Amurru is the Amorite name (or form) of El. He argues that El as the divine warrior of
important western tribes or leagues was reintroduced into Mesopotamia under the
name Amurru… The cuneiform orthography An-an-mart-tu could be read as
El-Amurrum, ‘the Amorite El’… The pairing of Amurru with Ashratu, morever, also
suggests an underlying identification with El…”
Amurru's
affinity with the storm god Adad is evinced by his being referred to as 'Adad
of the Deluge'. The Iconography of
Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East discusses this aspect of his
character:
"Amurru
is repeatedly represented together with the symbol of the storm god Adad, the
lightning bolt. The divine figures seem
to have shared special bonds in written sources. Additionally, they seem to have borrowed
iconographic attributes from each other from time to time. When bearing in mind that Amurru as a god of
the steppe might have developed some features of a storm god, his association
with Adad is not surprising."
We
will see in the next chapter just how Amurru plays into the Moses story. For now, it is important only to point out
that the ibex of Amurru shows up with the name of Yahweh associated with it –
and both are brought into the iconographic context of the tree or pole of
Yahweh’s consort Asherah.
CHAPTER
THREE:
THE
BURNING BUSH
All
of which leads us back to a careful consideration of the Burning Bush. In Egyptian religion, gods and goddesses are
frequently associated with sacred trees and often this association is intended
to convey the fact that the trees in question are actual symbols for the
divinities, i.e. the god or goddess is the tree. For Khepri, however, I was only able to find
two instances in which the god is definitively linked to trees.
In
the first, Khepri as scarab beetle is found atop the head of Iusaas, goddess of
the sacred acacia located just north of Heliopolis, in the temples of Hibis,
Edfu and Dendera (Elisabeth O’Connell, Assistant Keeper, Department of Ancient
Egypt and Sudan, The British Msueum).
This goddess, also apparently referred to as Nebet-Hetepet, “Lady of
Offerings”, was in the Ptolemaic period assimilated to Hathor, who then took on
the title of “Lady of the Acacia”. In
the Late Period, a text relates how Seth approached the “wonderful hall of
Iusaas with the acacia tree in which life and death are contained (Katherine
Griffis-Greenberg, Doctoral Program, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford).” Originally Hathor’s tree was the sycamore,
and the sun was said to rise between two sycamore trees in the east every
morning. In one of the Pyramid texts,
the god Horus is said to emerge from an acacia tree (Khepri was identified with
Horus as Horemakhet, Horus in the Horizon, the name given to the Great Sphinx
at Giza by Thutmose IV), and the god Osiris (Khepri can be depicted wearing the
crown of Osiris) in Late Period monuments and documents is called ‘Unique [or
alone] in the acacia tree’. Yet another
Pyramid Text gives the Pharaoh Pepi as “the son of Khepri, born from Hetepet,
under the tresses of [the goddess] of the town of Iusaas, north of On
[Heliopolis]…” Finally, the Coffin Texts
speak twice of “the acacia of Iusaas-town north of” Heliopolis (Dr. Martina
Ullman). The Book of the Dead says of
Osiris that “I betook myself to the Acacia Tree of the [divine] Children”.
There
is no doubt, then, that Khepri is brought into intimate connection with the
acacia tree. Unfortunately, his
appearing atop the head of the goddess Iusaas as an iconographical motif is
found only in the Late or Ptolemaic periods (Dr. Martina Ullmann). In addition, the acacia is called shittim in
the Bible, as was the wood used to build Yahweh’s ark (more on which I will have
below). It would appear, then, that the
seneh or “thorn bush” that is the Burning Bush cannot have been an acacia
(although see below).
The
second tree from Egyptian religion which can be shown to have a connection with
Khepri also has an affiliation with Thoth, the angel of Yahweh-Khepri. This is the so-called Desert Date, Balanites
aegyptica, known to the ancient Egyptians as the ished tree.
On
the southern wall of the tomb of the Ramesses II period official Amenmose (TT
373) is a representation of the Egyptian ished tree, which is said to be the
tree of the eastern horizon from which the sun rises (Pierre Koemoth and Sydney
H. Aufrere). In front of the ished tree
is the god Osiris in his capacity of wp iSd, “opener of the ished tree”. Osiris had to open the ished so that the sun
could escape from the underworld – in its guise as Khepri – and ascend into the
morning sky. We can plainly perceive
Khepri as a winged scarab beetle flying towards/into the ished, which Osiris is
“opening” for him.
A
more startling example of Khepri with the ished is shown on a wall relief at
the Temple of Hibis. Here we can see
Khepri crowning the ished tree, while Thoth, the “Angel of Yahweh/Khepri”, is
writing on the leaves of the tree.
Thoth
is known to have written the name of Ramesses II on the leaves of the ished
tree at Heliopolis. The moon god
performs the same function on ished tree scenes involving Seti I and Ramesses
II at Karnak. According to Donald
Redford, the ished tree motif first appears during the 12th Dynasty. So we can make the irrefutable claim that
both Khepri and Thoth were placed in close connection with Balanites aegyptica
by the ancient Egyptians.
Having
thus determined that there is justification for linking both Khepri (= Yahweh?)
and Thoth (= the angel of Khepri-Re?) with the Desert Date or Balanite Tree, we
need to take a closer look at the Biblical Burning Bush.
The
Hebrew word used to name the Burning Bush is cenah, pronounced seneh. This is from an unused root meaning “to
prick”. As such, it is usually described
as a “thorn bush”. The Balanite or ished
tree of Thoth and Khepri has thorns.
While
there is no indication the ished tree was conceived of by the ancient Egyptians
as a symbol for a goddess, we must remember that Hathor, the chief deity of
both the Serabit el-Khadim and Timna temples in the Sinai Peninsula, was called
“Lady of the Sycamore”. In Egyptian
belief, the sun rose between two “Sycamores of Turquoise”. Another epithet of Hathor was “Lady of the
Turquoise”. Isis and the sky goddess Nut
could also appear as sycamore trees.
Walter
Mattfield, basing his conclusions on the findings of several respectable
Egyptologists, has convincingly argued for the Golden Calf of the Moses story
being the Egyptian sun-calf who is depicted rising between Hathor’s sycamore
trees. The sun-calf was also said to be born each morning from Nut the
“Heavenly Cow”. So Moses’ injunction
against worshipping the Golden Calf was directed at the god Ihy, son of Hathor,
who could take the form of a calf. For
the Egyptians, even the pharaoh, as the human incarnation of the sun god, could
take the form of a golden calf. The
Hebrews who were worshipping the Golden Calf as the rising sun were merely
worshipping Khepri under another guise.
It
would not be unreasonable, therefore, to see in the ished tree of the eastern
horizon yet another representation of the sky goddess. Khepri (Yahweh?) and the Thoth (Angel of
Yahweh?) could be viewed as occupying the Burning Bush precisely because they
are in the sky. The various rock
carvings in the Sinai of the seven-branched menorah are themselves, of course,
images of the sky-tree, in whose branches burn the flames of the seven planets.
While
the balanite would seem to be the Burning Bush, we are once again (as I hinted
at in the last chapter) focusing solely on the Egyptian material. We are not taking into account the god of
Abraham, i.e. Amurru of the Amorites.
Nor are we bearing in mind something even more important.
We
have found ‘Yahweh’ names in the 2nd millennium B.C. cuneiform
archives of Mari in NW Mesopotamia.
These names take the form Yahwi-ilum, Yahwi-Adad, Yahwi-Dagan and the
like. Yahwi- in these theonyms is
usually taken to mean ‘to manifest
[oneself]’ or similar and the word is, indeed, derived from the same word
meaning ‘to be’. Thus the Shasu group
called YHW’ in the Egyptian records (see the next chapter) is not the only
occurrence of the Yahweh word or name found outside the Bible.
For
the Hebrews, the sacred tree or pole was the Asherah, named for the goddess of
this name. She was the consort of El,
but also of Amurru, the god of Abraham.
Learning more about Asherah and discovering the identity of her tree are
critical for our understanding of what happened at the Burning Bush.
As
Professor Nicolas Wyatt’s entry on Asherah in the Dictionary of Deities and
Demons in the Bible makes clear, “the etymological possibilities [for Asherah]
are considerable.” No consensus has yet
been reached on the name, but in my opinion only one makes sense given the
Biblical context. I refer the reader to
the dictionary entry for a discussion of all the current proposed etymologies.
The
most common misunderstanding when it comes to the word asherah in the Bible is
that a pole (or poles) is mentioned. It
is not – ever. The idea of a pole comes
from what appears to be implied by the text.
For instance, we know the asherah (or plural asherim) were made of
wood. Also, a tree that was planted in a
sacred precinct could be termed an asherah. The most important verse for our
purposes is Deuteronomy 16:21, here from the New Revised Standard Version:
“You
shall not plant any tree as a SACRED POLE [the highlighted words are here
substituted as an inferior translation for the word asherah] beside the altar
that you make for the Lord your God; nor shall you set up a STONE PILLAR
[matstsebah] – things that the Lord your God hates.”
Now
the real question is this: was 1) the use of the goddess’s name as a common
noun denoting a pole or tree due to the fact that as she was symbolized by a
tree, the tree itself coming to be called after her or 2) did her name itself
originally mean tree or pole or, finally, 3) are we totally wrong about the
asherah being a tree or pole and, if so, what was it/she?
To
help us determine which of these three possibilities best explains the name
Asherah, I will list first the remaining Bible verses (from the NRSV) that
contain her name, leaving her name intact rather than translating it with an
unwarranted phrase:
Judges
6:25 NRS
That
night the Lord said to him, "Take your father's bull, the second bull
seven years old, and pull down the altar [mizbeach] of Baal that belongs to
your father, and cut down the ASHERAH that is beside it;
Judges
6:26 NRS
and
build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, in
proper order; then take the second bull, and offer it as a burnt offering with
the wood of the ASHERAH that you shall cut down."
Judges
6:28 NRS
When
the townspeople rose early in the morning, the altar of Baal was broken down,
and the ASHERAH beside it was cut down, and the second bull was offered on the
altar that had been built.
Judges
6:30 NRS
Then
the townspeople said to Joash, "Bring out your son, so that he may die,
for he has pulled down the altar of Baal and cut down the ASHERAH beside
it."
1
Kings 16:33 NRS
Ahab
also made an ASHERAH. Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God
of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him.
2
Kings 13:6 NRS
Nevertheless
they did not depart from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he caused
Israel to sin, but walked in them; the ASHERAH also remained in Samaria.
2
Kings 17:16 NRS
They
rejected all the commandments of the Lord their God and made for themselves
cast images of two calves; they made an ASHERAH, worshiped all the host of
heaven, and served Baal.
2
Kings 18:4 NRS
He
removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the ASHERAH. He
broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days
the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.
2
Kings 21:3 NRS
For
he rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he erected
altars for Baal, made an ASHERAH, as King Ahab of Israel had done, worshiped
all the host of heaven, and served them.
2
Kings 23:15 NRS
Moreover,
the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who
caused Israel to sin—he pulled down that altar along with the high place. He
burned the high place, crushing it to dust; he also burned the ASHERAH.
The
ONLY proposed etymology for the goddess name that fits what is going on in the
above-quoted verses is Akkadian asirtum (esertu/isirtu/isertu), discussed by
Tilde Binger in Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament
(Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 232, 1997):
“Asirtum
[etc.] –
Sanctuary,
chapel, temple (place of congregation); the goddess of the temple; a separate
room in private houses for cultic purposes; a temple-shaped base, used for
placing pictures and symbols (sacred); a ‘place of grace’; a sacrifice or gift
for the gods; care; charity; guidance; an overseer; a female organizer or
supervisor of sacrifices
…Mesopotamian
asirtum is almost exclusively used of sacred places.”*
The
Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, under its entry for the word igigu, mentions a god
found in a list named I-sir-tum, from isirtu, ‘sanctuary’.
Now,
in light of this etymology, we can see Asherah in a two-fold way: she is, on the one hand, the sanctuary
itself, delimited by a sacred tree, and the goddess named for the
sanctuary. Thus you can GO TO THE
ASHERAH to worship ASHERAH.
*The
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible article adds “the common noun atr
(‘asr), meaning ‘sacred place’ is most widely attested in the Semitic languages
(Albright, AJSL 41 1925; Day 1986).
In
the Canaanite myth “The Gracious Gods”, El tells Asherah and her doublet Rahmay
and their two sons, the Morning and Evening Star, to
“…raise
up a sanctuary (or dais? better throne) in the midst of the holy desert:
“…there
you will make your dwelling among the stones and trees.”
If
we notice in the Bible verses cited, the asherah tree or pole is almost always
paired with either a stone pillar or an altar (itself often made of unhewn
stone). This is startlingly similar to
Athirat’s sanctuary (or throne) and dwelling ‘among the stones and trees’.
I
would make one comment on Tilde Binger’s discussion of the word asirtum. The same noun is found in Old Babylonian as
ašte2; (ĝeš) aš-te; (ĝeš) iš-de3, "chair, throne; seat, dwelling; shrine,
chapel”. This immediately reminds one of
the throne of Athirat, as well as the chair the goddess Inanna (Ishtar, the
Canaanite Astarte) wants Gilgamesh to make for her from the wood of the huluppu
tree she planted in her garden in Uruk.
She also wants a bed made and both may be considered emblems of Venus as
queen and goddess of love/sex (or the marriage bed?). If the throne of the goddess were manifest in
the tree, then the Asherah as sacred space would specifically be her place of
enthronement. She could be, by
extension, the Throne-goddess as well as the Sanctuary-goddess.
The
same huluppu tree is home to the Anzu-bird (thundercloud in its crown), Lilitu
(wind demoness in its trunk) and the snake that knows no charm (Euphrates River
at its roots). Thus we are talking about
a fairly typical world tree, whose top was positioned at the North Pole, the
point upon which the sky turned. The
most familiar example of such a tree would be the tree of the golden sun apples
belonging to the Hesperides of Greek myth.
This tree’s fruit is known to be solar in nature, as it was the sun that
made the western sky glow golden when it set.
As is the case with the huluppu tree, the tree of the Hesperides was
guarded by a serpent, Ladon of a Hundred Heads.
As
to whom Athirat/Asherah really is, Professor Nicolas Wyatt has made his case
for seeing her and her sister Raymay as hypostases for the sun goddess
Shapsu. For those interested in reading
his argument, please see “The Gracious Gods: A Sacred Marriage Liturgy”, found
in Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2002.
Other top scholars do not agree with Wyatt’s argument. However, it is clear that she and her sister
give birth, respectively, to the Morning and Evening Star. In the Mesopotamian system, Ishtar/Inanna,
i.e. Venus, has as her mother either Ninlil consort of Enlil the father of the
gods, or Ningal the consort of Nanna the moon god. Athirat/Asherah, as consort of El the father
god would then be the Canaanite equivalent of Ninlil, “Lady Wind”.
Professor
John Day of Oxford passed along the following information regarding Asherah the
goddess and Asherah the cult object:
“The
most likely view is that Ugaritic Athirat/Hebrew Asherah/Akkadian Ashratum
means "sanctuary, holy place". This fits the fact that the name
sometimes appears parallel in Ugaritic with the name Qudshu, which has this
same meaning. Asherah is not a sun goddess. She appears as the mother of the
gods, "creatress of creatures", and would appear to have been a kind
of fertility goddess of some kind, as indicated by certain depictions showing
her with emphasized breasts. The symbolism of her by a stylized tree (rather
than a mere pole) also coheres with this.
If
you read my book on Yahweh & the gods and goddesses of Canaan, or my
articles on Asherah in Journal of Biblical Literature 1986 or in Anchor Bible
Dictionary vol. 1, you will know that I see "Asherah" in the Old
Testament as denoting sometimes the goddess and more often the wooden symbol of
her. This wooden symbol is expressly stated to have been manmade in the OT, so
not a living tree as the rabbis later imagined. I have also argued that the
symbol had the form of a stylized tree, as depicted on one of the "Yahweh
and his Asherah" pithoi from Kuntillet Ajrud. (The Hebrews may have forgotten the original
etymological meaning 'sanctuary'.) "Asherah" and "the
asherah" are mentioned in similar contexts, so there is no doubt that the
latter was named after the former.”
The
particular stylized tree that he mentions is flanked by two ibexes who are
feeding on its leaves. This helps us
identify just exactly what tree belonged to the goddess. I’ve consulted several modern scientific
studies on the diets of ibexes (e.g. Hakham and Ritte 1993 on these animals in
the Dead Sea region), and somewhere around 70% of their diet is composed of
ACACIA LEAVES. [Of course, the ibex also consume the Desert Date or Ished
Tree.]
There
is, in fact, an important symbiotic relationship that exists between ibex and
acacia. To quote from Elanor M. Bell’s
Life at Extremes: Environments, Organisms and Strategies for Survival (2010):
“[Dorcas
gazelles and ibex] are both predators and dispersers of Acacia seeds: while
some seeds are destroyed, others are defecated unharmed. Ingestion by large herbivores facilitates
germination by scarification of the seedcoat.
While infestation by bruchid beetles reduces Acacia germination,
herbivores may reduce brucchid infestation: (i) due to their stomach acids;
(ii) crushing by the herbivore’s teeth; or (iii) by removing seeds prior to
(re-) infestation.”
Why
is this significant? Because of the
extraordinary holy nature of the wood of the acacia. From
biblestudytools.com/encyclopedias/isbe/acacia.html:
“ACACIA
a-ka'-sha
(shiTTah, the shittah tree of the King James Version, Isaiah 41:19, and
`atse-shiTTah, acacia wood; shittah wood the King James Version, Exodus
25:5,10,13; 26:15,26; 27:1,6; Deuteronomy 10:3.):
ShiTTah
(= shinTah) is equivalent to the Arabic sant which is now the name of the
Acacia Nilotica (NOT Leguminosae), but no doubt the name once included other
species of desert acacias. If one particular species is indicated in the Old
Testament it is probably the Acacia Seyal--the Arabic Seyyal--which yields the
well-known gum Arabic. This tree, which has finely leaved ular flowers, grows
to a height of twenty feet or more, and its stem may sometimes reach two feet
in thickness. The tree often assumes a characteristic umbrella-like form. The
wood is close-grained and is not readily attacked by insects. It would be well
suited for such purposes as described, the construction of the ark of the
covenant, the altar and boarding of the tabernacle. Even today these trees
survive in considerable numbers around `Ain Jidy and in the valleys to the
south.”
I
would add that a very common site at Timna (see Chapter 4 below) is ibex
feeding on acacia trees.
So,
what we have for the Egyptian and Hebrew trees and their associated deities are
these:
1)
Ished tree with Khepri and Thoth
2)
Acacia tree with Yahweh and Angel/Messenger of the Yahweh
The
problem is that the Angel of Yahweh is the actual fire in the bush. This does not fit Thoth at all. Furthermore, a little further in the Moses
story (Exodus 13:21-22, we are told that Yahweh went before the Hebrews in the
form of a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. As the pillar of fire is almost certainly the
same cloud filled with heavenly fire, i.e. lightning, most especially sheet
lightning, and as the cloud that descends upon Mt. Sinai during the Theophany
is the same lightning-filled cloud as well as the cloud otherwise associated
with the Tabernacle and described as Yahweh’s tent (Psalm 18:10-11), we must
assume the old storm god Amurru of the ibex is still present. We will see in the next chapter that the same
cloud was generated with incense and appeared over the ‘mercy seat’ of the ark
of the covenant.
So
what to make of the Burning Bush episode?
Well, as it turns out, we must introduce another god known to be
associated with the Egyptian ished tree into the equation. This is the Father god – and ram god – Amun, the head of the Egyptian pantheon. Amun not only was conflated with Khepri, but
is often described in terms very similar to Khepri himself (see David Klotz’s
Adoration of the Ram: Five Hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple, Yale
Egyptological Studies 6, 2006). Amun’s name means ‘The Hidden One”, and other
gods – like the sun god Re – were considered to be his physical manifestation. So in his capacity as Amun-Re he was both
visible and invisible.
Amun
was a very complicated deity, who eventually subsumed pretty much every other
god in the pantheon. Often these gods
were referred to as his bas, ba being a word that not only indicates a sort
of soul, but a sort of separate physical
mode of existence for its owner. Ba can also mean ‘ram’, and ‘to be manifest,
present’.
What
follows is a hymn from Hibis to Amun as the Ba of Shu, the air/wind god:
THIRD
BA
[Yo]u
are Amun,
you
are Shu,
you
are the highest of gods,
you
are “Sacred of Manifestations” [dsr-hpr.w; title for Ba of Shu] as the four
winds of heaven,
so
(you) are called, when they come forth from the mouth of his majesty.
The
Ba of Shu, who bends the winds, who traverses heaven daily,
Who
lives as the Supports of Shu, unto the limit of the heavenly circuit.
He
enters into every tree,
with
the result that the branches come alive:
His
power is more cutting than any powerful lion.
He
makes the sky rage,
and
he stirs up the sea :
It
is (only) through his calming that they settle down.
The
one who is most manifest (ba) of manifestations (ba.w).
He
makes Hapi flood according to his will,
and
he makes flourish (?) the fields according to his desire:
nobody
else being as p[owerful] besides him.
His
voice is heard, but he is not seen,
while
letting every throat breathe.
The
one who reassures the pregnant concerning her children,
so
the newborn which comes from her lives.
He
who goes around the mysterious-regions for [W]eary-of-Heart,
existing
as the sweet, northern wind.
It
was to let him have use of his body
that
he filled his nose by means of all of his scents, at all times, every day,
while
arriving at his time, without cease in his action,
In
his name of Horus Valiant of Arm,
who
protects Shentayt,
so
that her son might endure upon the throne of his father,
may
he live eternally.
Amun,
the Ba of Shu,
Who
travels inside a cloud,
while
separating earth from heaven,
as
he endures in all things.
The
Life-force from whom one lives, eternally.
Now,
we may immediately recognize here the ram-god Amun, existing inside a cloud,
invisible as the wind. In a Ptolemaic
hymn to Amun, we are told:
“Loud
of voice without being seen:
It
was within his cloud that he shouted on earth.”
The
“shouting” is, of course, thunder, taken as the voice of the god.
I
would see Yahweh and his ‘angel’ the same way.
I’ve already alluded to the Amorite theonyms found at Mari – Yahwi-ilum,
Yahwi-Adad, Yahwi-Dagan. If we then
allow for such names to be read as ‘Manifest is El/Adad/Dagan’ or, perhaps
better, ‘Manifestation of El/Adad/Dagan’, then Yahweh IS Amun, while the Angel
of Yahweh is Amun’s storm-cloud manifestation, which we can equate with the
earlier Amurru/El. In other words,
Yahweh/Amun “resides” within the storm-cloud (Amurru/El), but is himself
invisible. If we accept this, then
Yahweh and the cloud-angel are one and the same entity and yet separate
entities. The old Amurru/El as Angel is merely the visible aspect of the
unnamed, hidden god Amun.
SUMMARY
OF ARGUMENT:
The
name YHWH has exactly the same meaning as that of the Egyptian Khepri. While I do not see evidence in YHWH's cult of
Khepri, the word xpr, 'to be, to become, to manifest', as well as bA, ' to be
manifest', 'to be present', are used for Amun, the chief god of the Egyptian
pantheon, in several contexts. All other
gods came to be viewed as manifestations of Amun.
In
the Amorite personal names I alluded to, the Yahwi- component is not a divine
name. It is paired with a divine name
and means something like 'god X is manifest'.
The YHW’ Shasu group may have been called such because they worshipped a
god called 'the Manifest One’ or ‘the One who Manifests Himself’.
Syncretism
being what it is, deities with similar characteristics were often identified
with each other. There is a lot of
evidence for an Amorite connection for Abraham, and if his father Terah the
ibex/wild mountain goat is a reference to the caprid of Amurru/Martu, then we
can at least say that before the Hebrews stayed in Egypt they were Amorites who
worshiped the storm god Amurru. The
latter has been related to the Canaanite El by several scholars, and not only
because of their shared consort, Athirat/Ashratu (the Asherah of Yahweh).
If
Amurru worshipers were in Egypt long enough, they may have conflated their
ibex-god with the ram-god Amun, El's counterpart. And Amun, in turn, whose visible
manifestation was the storm cloud (as demonstrated in Egyptian hymns to the
god), was identified by the Midianites with their own god Yahweh, the
Manifested One.
Having
established that Moses’ ished/balanite tree was syncretized with the Midianite
acacia, and that Amun of the ished was similarly syncretized with Yahweh of the
Asherah, and that Yahweh’s angel is merely a designation for the storm-cloud
form of Amun/Yahweh, where was the sacred mountain of the god and tree?
CHAPTER
FOUR:
MOUNT
HOREB/SINAI
Often
one will find the name Sinai derived falsely from the name of the Babylonian
moon god, Sin or Suen. This has been
shown by numerous authorities to be indefensible both philologically and
phonologically. However, the Hebrew
definition for Sinai (Ciynay) is “thorny”, from a Proto-Semitic *sinn. There is
a Western Chadic word c*in-, meaning ‘sharp point, tooth, sharp, sharp object’,
an Akkadian sinnu, “tooth”, Arabic sinn, “point”, Syriac sinna, Ugaritic sn,
Ge’ez senn.
This
etymology for Sinai supplies us with the clue we need for getting a
geographical fix on the mountain of Moses.
The Egyptian god of Sinai was Sopdu, whose name is derived from spd,
“sharp”. The hieroglyph used to spell
the first part of Sopdu’s name stands for “sharp” and is a simple pointed
triangle. It has been surmised that this
pointed triangle was in reality a plant thorn, and by extension a tooth.
Indeed, in the Pyramid texts the word spd is applied to the teeth of the
god. Sopdu is found at Maghara in the
Sinai as “Lord of the Eastern (Desert).”
At nearby Serabit el-Khadim, where he was worshipped with Hathor, “Lady
of the Turquoise”, he is called “Lord of the East”, “of the Foreign Lands” and
“Lord of the Foreign Lands”.
What
I find hard to believe is that no one has seen fit to propose the
following: that Sinai is the Semitic
rendering of ‘land of Sopdu’, and that the Mountain of Sinai must, therefore,
be a mountain of the god Sopdu.
One
such mountain was, obviously, that of Serabit el-Khadim with its Sopdu
shrine. But is this mountain the same as
Mount Horeb, the name Exodus gives for the location of the Burning Bush?
Horeb
or Choreb (pronounced kho-rab) means “desert”, and is from the root charab, “to
be dry, be dried up”. There is no
mountain of this name in the Sinai, and some have thought it merely a
descriptive phrase rather than a true name, i.e. Mount Sinai was a “desert
mountain” or a “mountain in the desert”.
But archaeology has opened up another possibility.
When
Moses first went to live in Midian, which at that time was across the Gulf of
Aqaba from Sinai, its northwestern-most part being roughly coterminous with the
extreme southern end of the Arabah, “he led his flock beyond the wilderness,
and came to Horeb, the mountain of God (Exodus 3:1).” Now, in this context, it makes no sense at
all for Moses’s mountain to be Serabit el-Khadim in the southeastern Sinai
Peninsula. There is, in fact, only one
place he could have reached from Midian as a shepherd that would fulfill the
requirements of a Mount Horeb.
A Midianite presence has been demonstrated at
the Egyptian mining complex at Har Timna or Mount Timna at the southwestern end
of the Arabah. The Egyptians called
Timna or, rather, the Arabah (see Beno Rothenberg) Atika, a word perhaps to be
related to Akkadian etequ, Proto-Semitic ‘ataq, Ugaritic ‘tq, “to pass, go along,
go past; to go through, cross over”.
Juan Manuel Tebes also believes Atika is the Arabah and would further
connect the name with the Biblical Atak (“Egypt in the East: The Egyptian
Presence in the Negev and the Local Society During the Early Iron Age”, in
Cahiers Caribeens d’Egyptologie 9, February/March 2006). Midianite miners were also present at Riqeita
near Gebel Musa and, of course, at Serabit el-Khadim, but both of these places
are too distant from Midian to be Horeb.
Timna
is also the only other place in the region which bears evidence of Hathor
worship in the Egyptian period. The
Hathor shrine at Timna was re-established during the reign of Ramesses III and
a Midianite tent shrine which would appear to be the model for the Biblical
Tabernacle replaced it shortly after the demise of Ramesses V (Beno
Rothenberg). We have seen above that the
Exodus took place around this time.
We
also know (see Donald Redford’s section on the Shasu or Asiatic nomads in his
_Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times_) that Egyptian records from Soleb
and Amarah of the fifteenth century B.C. mention YHW’ within the geographical
context of Seir/Edom, i.e. the Arabah of Timna.
Thus the god Yahweh with whom Moses identified his own Egyptian Amun was
already in existence centuries before Moses’ time, and Yahweh belonged at Mount
Horeb. Indeed, Biblical tradition claims
that Yahweh came forth from Seir and originated in Edom.
Unfortunately,
we cannot say that Sopdu was at Timna.
His worship is not attested there – only Hathor’s.
The
name Horeb, ‘Desert’, may correspond to that of Arabah. The latter means “desert plain, steppe,
desert, wilderness”. While the Akkadian
harbu cited above appears to be a cognate of Hebrew Horeb, there was also a
Sumerian eria meaning “wasteland”. It is
my guess that Arabah came from a root more similar to eria than to harbu. In any case, the “wilderness” Moses takes his
flock across to reach Mount Horeb is, almost certainly, the Arabah itself, and
Horeb is just another way of saying “Mount Arabah”.
The
Balanite or ished tree is found in the Arabah, as is the acacia, so the
presence of the Burning Bush at Mount Timna/Horeb is to be expected.
If
what I have outlined above is correct, we would seem to have two holy mountains
of God, not one: Mount Sinai/Sopdu and Mount Horeb. How do we account for this within the
confines of the Biblical story?
Well,
as hinted at above, the tent shrine Moses is said to have set up at Mount
Sinai/Sopdu or Serabit el-Khadim was actually erected at Mount
Horeb/Timna. There is no Midianite-style
tent shrine at Serabit el-Khadim. It
does not necessarily follow, however, that the tradition placing Moses and the
Hebrews at Mount Sinai is a spurious one.
We
could account for the inclusion of two holy mountains of God in the Moses story
by positing that Timna and Serabit el-Khadim, due to the presence at both
places of Hathor shrines, had merely been confused with each other and thus
conflated. The Midianites themselves
were miners at both Serabit el-Khadim and Timna. As a good example of how the mountain of God
could be relocalized, we need only look at Jebel Musa, the “Mountain of Moses”,
near another Midianite mining center (Riqeita).
Several other mountains in the Sinai have been proposed as Moses’s Mount
Horeb, but none of them possess the four critical, prerequisite features that
are found only at Timna: 1) proximity to Midian 2) the presence of Midianites
3) a significant Egyptian attestation (which translates into the presence of
Egyptian gods and Egyptian religious motifs, such as that of the ished tree)
and 4) a tent shrine. Nor do any of
these other candidates for Moses’ Mount Sinai show signs of the worship of
Sopdu, something unique to Serabit el-Khadim.
Once
again, if we trust the Biblical narrative, we can allow for Moses’ actual
journey to Serabit el-Khadim-Mount Sinai/Sopdu and still be able to explain why
the Midianite tent shrine of Timna was wrongly transferred to the former
location. We have seen how Moses’ first
sojourn in Midian corresponds to the reign of Ramesses III, who re-established
the mines and Hathor Temple at Timna. We
also know that Moses took the Hebrews out of Egypt after the deaths of Ramesses
IV and V, in other words, in the reign of Ramesses VI. Not only was the last expedition to Serabit
el-Khadim launched by Ramesses VI, but during the same pharaoh’s reign the
Midianites destroyed the Hathor temple at Timna and erected their own tent
shrine. So it is distinctly possible
that the trek of Moses and his people to Serabit el-Khadim happened at the same
time the tent shrine was erected at Timna.
When
we search for a historical Moses below, we will take a close look at a man (or
men) who could well have been at both Timna during its re-establishment by
Ramesses III and at Serabit el-Khadim during the expedition by Ramesses VI.
In closing, I would remind my readers that the name Amun (= the Midianite Yahweh) is actually found in the inscription at Timna as part of the name of Ramesses III:
"Between the king and the goddess, and facing to the right, are a pair of vertical cartouches, the first in the field between their heads, the second in the field between their legs. These contain respectively the prenomen and nomen of Ramesses III "Wosimare'-mi'amun Ramesses-hikaon". Although the cartouche containing the nomen is preceded by the title rib hc-w "Lord of Diadems", there is no visible trace of a corresponding title before the prenomen. It should be noted, however, that the surface of the cliff is damaged and weathered here, and that there is room beneath the border line of the stela and the first cartouche to restore rib U-wy "Lord of the Two Lands"."
[From 'The Royal Butler Ramessesemperrēʿ' by Alan R. Schulman, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 13 (1976), pp. 117-130, American Research Center in Egypt; http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001124]
CHAPTER
FIVE:
THE
ARK OF THE COVENANT
Much
has been written in the past on the Ark of the Covenant as essentially a
typical Egyptian portable shrine. Many such shrines are mentioned or depicted
in the Egyptian records. It is not my
purpose in this chapter to cover this ground again. Rather, I will restrict my treatment of the
ark to just two features: the guardian cherubim mounted on each end of the
‘mercy seat’ and the tablets of the Law said to be contained within the sacred
chest.
Walter
Mattfeld has assembled a wealth of material on what may be the ancient Near
Eastern parallels to the Biblical cherubim of the ark. He has proposed that the cherubim (from
Akkadian harabu, “to bless, to praise, to dedicate an offering”; cf. Ugaritic
krb) appear as winged or unwinged lions or sphinxes flanking the thrones of
Canaanite, Phoenician and Egyptian monarchs.
The Ark of the Covenant is sometimes thought to be Yahweh’s throne
(although see below).
In
the case of the Egyptian guardian sphinxes, they are always shown with their
wings folded down over their backs.
There is one Egyptian throne, that of the New Kingdom Queen Mutnodjme,
wife of Pharaoh Horemheb, which has a female sphinx with wings extended. Other Egyptian scenes show portable thrones
also protected by flanking lions or sphinxes.
The
best example of a sphinx with wings extended acting the role of a throne
guardian is that found on an ivory at Megiddo, dating to ca. 1200 B.C. We also have a splendid depiction on a stone
sarcophagus of King Hiram of Byblos seated on a similar throne, flanked by a
sphinx with wings extended, dated a c. 1300-1200 B.C.
Perhaps
the most interesting portrayal of an Egyptian winged sphinx is found on a
chariot panel of pharaoh Thutmose IV (1419-1410 B.C.). Here the sphinx is trampling Asiatic
enemies.
But
there are four major problems with viewing the cherubim as throne
sphinxes. First, the idea that the ark
was Yahweh’s throne is due to a misinterpretation of the Hebrew word kapporeth,
which has been translated “mercy seat” in the past. Kapporeth is actually to be related to
Akkadian kaparu and like so much else in the Old Testament demonstrates
borrowing of Mesopotamian words and concepts by the Jews during the Babylonian
Captivity.
According
to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, kaparu means ‘to wipe off, to smear on (a
paint or liquid)’; kupurru is ‘to wipe off, to clean objects, to rub, to purify
magically’, so ‘to be rubbed, to be smeared’.
Kupiratu is ‘wipings’, kupurtu is ‘ointment’. The idea is that the lid or cover of the ark,
with its attached cherubim, was periodically either ritually cleaned, i.e.
purified, and/or was anointed with oil, purified with incense or had
sacrificial blood smeared upon it. So
the kapporeth was ‘that which was cleaned or smeared or otherwise covered with
a purifying substance’. The idea that
the kapporeth is an object of atonement comes from the recorded practice of its
being exposed to incense and sprinkled with blood on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus
16:11-15). The incense created smoke
that hovered over the kapporeth, symbolizing the angel/cloud manifestation of
Yahweh/Amun.
Second,
the guardian sphinxes are used only for the thrones of human monarchs, not for
gods proper. Third, the throne guardians
face forward, looking in the same direction as the seated monarch or, in the
case of portable thrones, in the direction the said thrones are being
carried. And fourth, the sphinxes
guarding these thrones do not assume an adoring/praying/ blessing posture,
something which is inherent to the cherubim, whose very name demand such a
function.
Thus
the cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant cannot have been sphinxes. Sphinxes work no better in defining the form
and function of the cherubim than the Egyptian Aker, the double-headed lion
earth god who symbolized the horizon.
Aker’s heads faced outward.
Is
there any way we can determine the identities of the winged cherubim that
flanked the kapporeth on the Ark of the Covenant?
Well,
according to Canticles iii, sparks that issued from between the two cherubim
killed serpents and scorpions. The
Egyptian scorpion goddess was called Serket.
While apparently subsumed by Isis in the late period, Serket appears
with the goddess Neith during the New Kingdom in Luxor Temple and in
Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple (Wilkinson).
The scorpion goddess is also paired with Nephthys, sister of Isis, in
the mythological story if the birth of Horus.
In this last, Nephthys and Serket assist Isis in guarding the infant god
after he is stung or bitten. In the same
myth, Isis is accompanied by seven scorpions which are the emanations of
Serket. These scorpions protect her and
her unborn child.
Nephthys
was not evoked for protection against snakebite. So if Serket or Isis were one of the
cherubim, Nephthys is very unlikely to have been the other. We need a goddess who served an apotropaic
function specifically geared towards snakes and who is known to have been
associated with either Isis or Serket.
Several
Egyptian goddesses could take serpent form.
Wadjet was the primary cobra goddess of Egypt. She is linked with Nekhbet, not with Isis or
Serket. Isis herself, of course, was
famous for having cured the sun god Re of snakebite – a snakebite she herself
caused to be inflicted upon the god. So
it is certainly possible that the two cherubim are Isis and Serket. However, we have seen that Serket is paired
with Neith and the latter goddess had strong serpent affinities. Not only did she create the underworld
serpent Apophis, but she could appear in serpentine form as protectress of the
pharaoh and of Re (see Richard Wilkinson’s “The Complete Gods and Goddesses of
Ancient Egypt”). She appears as a
serpent in the Book of the Dead (185) and as a gilded wooden cobra found in Tutankhamun’s
tomb.
Pyramid
text 1375 has a pharaoh proclaim: “… Neith is behind me [in a protective sense]
and Serket is before me.” Also in the
Pyramid Texts, Neith watches over the deceased Osiris with Isis, Nephthys and
Serket. These four goddesses were
assigned to the four sides of the coffin and were charged with watching over
the sons of Horus, themselves guardians of the canopic jars.
Most
important for our understanding of the ark of the covenant is the depiction on
a rock carving at Abu Simbel of Ramesses II's army at the Battle of
Kadesh. For at the center of his army is a portable shrine, complete with
an adored deity flanked by two winged goddesses, facing the deity, their arms
outspread. This is proof that such portable shrines were carried by the
Egyptians in battle, much as is claimed to be the case in the Old Testament in
regards to the Ark of the Covenant. While we cannot know which deity is
portrayed in this particular carving, it is almost certainly Amun-Re (=
Yahweh), the chief Egyptian god of the time.
Similar
images are found elsewhere in Egyptian iconography, either with portable
shrines in isolation or with such shrines placed atop boats. Both types might be carried by bearers
resting long poles on their shoulders.
The only major difference from scene to scene is what deity’s cult
statue is situated between the flanking winged figures. Quite accidentally, I
recently came across a faience model tambourine in the Metropolitcan Museum of
Art which shows Bastet in just such a shrine/boat, flanked by the two winged
adorers/protectors. A rare surviving
wooden portable shrine from the Ptolemaic period in the Smithsonian Institute’s
collection has three panels depicting winged deities flanking gods. Adolf Erman’s drawing of Amun-Ra’s portable
bark-shrine at Karnak, which is being carried by priests, (“Life of Ancient
Egypt”, p. 275) shows once again the same winged goddesses flanking the cult
statue. Karnak has reliefs of other
divine barks as well, with the stylized adoring/protecting winged deities
flanking the deities in their shrines.
Having
postulated that the two cherubim of the ark were, in all likelihood two
Egyptian goddesses, and Yahweh was the Midianite version of Amun, we may next
consider the two tablets of the Law. As
described in the Biblical account, the tablets were made of stone at the
mountain of God. Such an action, viewed
within an Egyptian context, clearly suggests the carving of dedicatory stelae. Stelae of this kind were made and set up at
holy sites, including Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. Typically, they were raised in the name of a
pharaoh as a recording of something done for the residing deity of the holy
site in question. Such stela were often
large and very heavy. They were intended
as stationary, permanent monuments.
While
it is certainly possible that the Hebrews under Moses instituted a new role for
rock-hewn stelae, i.e. the recording of commandments uttered by Yahweh, from a
mere practical standpoint it can be said unreservedly that no one would want to
carry such objects around in a portable shrine.
If this is the case, just what lies behind the story of the recording of
the Ten Commandents on stone tablets?
The
explanation is deceptively simple. A
common word for a stela in the Egyptian language was ‘wD’. This word derives from the verb ‘wD’, meaning
“command”. In other words, a stela was a “commandment”, in the sense, according
to the Egyptologists, that it was commanded or commissioned to be set up by a
royal person.
Thus
when we are told in the Moses story that the commandments were written on stone
tablets, what is actually happening is that “commandments”, i.e. stelae, are
being cut out of stone, carved with dedicatory inscriptions and set up at the
Hathor temple on Serabit el-Khadim. To
this day many such stelae can be seen at this place. There are even broken stelae strewn about
which may well have provided the creative impetus for the episode of Moses’
breaking of the first tablets of the Law when he discovered the Hebrews
worshipping the solar Golden Calf.
Similar stelae were set up at the Timna Hathor temple, although these
were destroyed or defaced when the Midianites erected their tent shrine
there. Only one Timna stela has remained
intact and we will discuss this object’s significance in the next chapter.
CHAPTER
SIX:
MOSES
In
looking for a historical candidate for Moses, we need to fulfill several
conditions, all based on the criteria we have established in previous parts of
the book. First, he must be Asiatic,
i.e. not a native Egyptian. Two, he
needs to have been present at Timna during the re-establishment there of the
mines and Hathor temple in the reign of Ramesses III. Three, he needs to have been present at
Serabit el-Khadim during Egypt’s last expedition to that site under the
direction of Ramesses VI – or there must be a reasonable level of probability
that he or a namesake was there as this time.
Four, he must be someone sufficiently educated in regards to the Egyptian
religious system to have identified the Shasu group YHW’ in Edom/Seir with his
own god Amun and to have associated the ished/balanite tree with the local
acacia. Five, he would need to be of a
fairly significant social status within the Egyptian highly-stratified,
hierarchical system, for the Bible tells us he was the adopted son of
Pharaoh. And six, his ancestry must be
consistent in a fundamental way with the genealogy supplied for him in the
Bible.
To
begin trying to satisfy these various points, it is important to reiterate what
has often been remarked regarding Moses’ line of descent from Jacob via
Levi. And that is, simply put, this: an
ancestral trace that runs Jacob (probably the Hyksos
Jakobher)-Levi-Kohath-Amram-Moses is insufficient to cover the over four centuries that spanned the period from
the entry into Egypt of the Hebrews and the Exodus, which we have surmised
happened immediately after the death of Ramesses V. Moses’ genealogy is, in large part, a
fabrication, with the life spans of the people involved being greatly exaggerated
in order to make sense of the Biblical narrative.
Exodus
tells us that Levi was born to Jacob in Aram, known later as Assyria. This may
well be essentially correct, as Ramesses III recorded a certain Levi-El in a
list of places mentioned in his description of a Syrian campaign. Kohath, son of Levi, was born in Canaan. In Genesis 46:8-11, we learn that Kohath went
with his father and Jacob to Egypt. We
are not introduced to Amram, son of Kohath, until Exodus 6:18. There is it implied that Amram was born to
Kohath in Egypt. However, one of Amram’s
brothers was named Hebron, and this last is a mere eponym for Hebron in Canaan.
If
the reader will indulge the author, we should briefly investigate these names
from an etymological perspective. The accepted
Semitic meaning of Levi is ‘He who joins or unites”, from a primitive root
lavah (lwh). This has been interpreted
as referring to the bond that existed between this priestly clan and their god,
Yahweh. Given the toponym Levi-El or
“[those who or that which is] joined to/united with El [‘God’]”, this
definition if almost certain. The
corresponding Egyptian word was xnm, “join, unite with”. Xnm is the root that lies behind the name of
the important Egyptian god Khnum, ‘He who unites or joins’. In a verbal sense xnm had the sense of “to
join or unite with a god or the dead” (see David Shennum’s English-Egyptian
Index).
On
the other hand, it is also possible that the Levites, with their patriarch
Levi, were originally simply the inhabitants of the L
evi-el
town mentioned above. Many proper names
which first appear in the genealogies of the Book of Genesis reveal themselves
to be merely eponyms. The Levites may be
no different; Levi would be the eponym for Levi-el. As the inhabitants of this place were by
virtue of their town-name “attached to God”, such a distinction may well have
caused them to be viewed as deserving of a special priestly function.
A
second definition for lwh is 'to borrow, to lend', and it has been theorized
that a Levite, therefore, was 'one pledged for a debt or vow' to Yahweh or to
his sanctuary (see The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies by John William
Rogerson and Judith Lieu, 2006).
"Levite"
has also been connected with an Assyro-Babylonian word li'u or le'uu,
"wise, prudent" (Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria,
Ann Jeffers, 1996).
The
fourth possible etymology for lwh is perhaps more illuminating: 'to turn,
twist'. Such a derivation could imply
that the Levites "turned and twisted" in ritual dances. The Egyptians had a word rwi, which we know
became lo in Coptic. This Egyptian verb
would have been something like *laway.
Its primary meaning was 'leave, depart, go away', but it also described
a type of ritual dance.
But
Meek pointed out that several personal names in the tribe of Levi were to be
derived from words for 'snake': Nahshon, Nahash, Shuppim. He also emphasized the creation of the bronze
serpent Nehushtan by Moses of the tribe of Levi – perhaps to be related to the
cult artifact excavated from Timna.
Frequently discussed in this connection is Leviathan (livyathan, the
"twisting serpent"), who was envisioned as the primeval sea
encircling the earth. This image of a twisting or encircling serpent brings to
mind Egyptian mhn, 'coil', and Mehen, 'the coiled one', the great serpent who
protected the sun god Re on his nightly journey through the underworld. In the Underworld Books, Mehen is depicted
coiled around or above the shrine-like cabin of the boat of Re. A feminine form of Mehen, Mehenet, is the
name given to the uraeus serpent placed on the head of Re. As the Levites were in charge of Yahweh's
ark, might they not have been a priestly clan originally named for Mehen or
Mehenet? Hebrew livyah was a wreath-like
ornament. It is thus possible the Levites wore wreaths fashioned to resemble
the coiled serpent protector of Re.
Aaron’s
name would appear to designate a certain priestly function. Professor John Huehnergard of Harvard
University informed me that it had been suggested that Aaron’s name may be
derived from “an otherwise lost or rare Semitic root '-h-r; there is a rare
Arabic word 'ahar- cited in a few dictionaries.” According to Professor Wolfhart Heinrichs of
Harvard University,
‘Ibn
Manz.ûr (13th cent.) in his large dictionary "Lisân al-ŒArab” says:
al-aharah
is the "equipment of a house." [Then he quotes] al-Layth [redactor of
the earliest Arabic dictionary]: the aharah of a house is the clothes, the
carpets & cushions, and the furniture therein. ThaŒlab [grammarian, d. 904]
said: [The phrase] baytun h.asanu 'l-z.aharati wa-'l-aharati wa-'l-Œaqâr means
the "equipment," the z.aharah being what is outside and the aharah
being what is inside [plus the lot, on which the house is built]. The plural is
ahar [which is actually a generic noun, while aharah is the unit noun] and
aharât [which is the plural of the unit noun, thus denoting several units].
[This followed by four lines in the rajaz meter that contain the word ahar,
which are then explained.]
I
can't say that ahar(ah) is a ghost word. It is certainly rare, I have never
seen it in a text. Rajaz poetry is
notorious for its strange vocabulary, which could mean that it is easy to hide
a ghost word in a line of rajaz. On the other hand, the lexicographers mostly
insisted on good transmission of words. Some ghost words did creep in, due to
lapsus calami and other distortions. But the word ahar does not easily lend
itself to such misspellings.’
I
then proposed that the name Aaron does derive from a lost Hebrew word cognate
with Arabic aharah (or with the root of aharah), and asked if this could be a
reflection of his priestly function inside the Tabernacle. Or, more precisely, he was the priest in
charge of the equipment of the Tabernacle.
This would mean that 'Aaron' was not originally a proper name, but a
title or descriptive of a priestly role/function. Professor Heinrich responded:
“This explanation looks plausible to me.”
As
for Kohath, the son of Levi, Professor Anson F. Rainey of Tel Aviv University
says:
“The
name of a hero, hunter, in Ugaritic literature is Aqhat. It is the same word as
Kehat plus prosthetic aleph. The attested biblical forms cannot possibly be
participles, either active or passive. There are no long vowels anywhere. The
very short "o" vowel is deceptive, don't fall for it.”
I
will return to this name for a more detailed examination below.
Amram,
son of Kohath, is a manufactured name.
It means “Exalted People/Nation”, and may be compared to Abram, “Exalted
Father”, the original name of Abraham (“Father of Multitudes” via folk
etymology). The Exalted People is a
designation for the Hebrews. It is most
decidedly not the name of Moses’ father.
Instead, it is intended to show either his descent through the Hebrews,
God’s Chosen People, or through the Levitical branch of the Kohathites.
Miriam,
the name of Moses’s sister and hence daughter of Amram, derives from the same
verbal root RWM, meaning “to be high above; to be exalted; to rise up”. As a personal name it means “[the] exalted
one” and may be compared with the Ugaritic MRYM, Punic MRM. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, we find it used
in the context MRYM SPN, “heights of Saphan”, the Saphan in question being the
mountain of the god Baal.
The
various Ramah or Ramoth place-names in Canaan were also derived from this same
Semitic root and thus designated high places, while Ammon or the “[Land] of the
People/Nation” preserves a form stemming from the Am- of Amram (although this
region is given an eponymous founder Ben-ammi, “Son of the People”).
Kohath
is the most important of the names claimed as ancestors of Moses. There is good reason for not only associating
this name with that of the Ugaritic Aqhat, but for identifying the two
‘hunters’ as the same legendary, heroic personage.
The
Ugaritic hero Aqhat is the son of Danil (a name later found in Hebrew as
Daniel). Recent scholarship has reached
a concensus on an epithet assigned to Danil, ’MT. RPI’. Wilfred G. E. Watson of the University of
Newcastle on Tyne and Nicholas Wyatt of the University of Edinburgh in their
“Handbook of Ugaritic Studies”, perhaps put it best:
“In
my translation [of the Aqhat Epic] (1998c, 250 n. 5), I have taken it [the
epithet MT. RPI] in the sense of ‘man (i.e. ruler) of Rapha’.
Rapha
or Raphon was named for the god Rapiu and can be identified with the modern
Er-Rafeh close to the Biblical sites of Ashtoreth-Karnaim and Edrei in that
part of Bashan known as Hauran. An
Ugaritic text (see KTU 1.108) states that the god Rapiu is enthroned at and
rules from Ashtoreth-Karnaim and Edrei.
Originally,
Danil was associated with Hermel just south of Kadesh and Shabtuna in Syria
because of his second epithet, ‘Mt. Hrnmy’.
The identification of HRNMY with Hermel was first proposed by W.F.
Albright in his “The Traditional Home of the Syrian Daniel”, Bulletin of the
American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 130, pp. 26-27. Albright has arrived at this conclusion by
assuming that the ‘RNM/HRNM found in Egyptian records was HRNM(Y). To make his argument for Hermel work,
Albright resorted to letter substitutions, letter transpositions and disposed
of the Arabic meaning of this place-name by declaring it a folk etymology. Hermel was judged to be HRNM because the
former seemed to be in the same general area as several other place-names mentioned
in the same Egyptian records.
Albright
has no idea what the original meaning of HRNM might have been. Nor did he account for the fact that there
are actually two Hermels (one in Hamah, the other in Tartus), which would have
forced him to explain how both of these town names were identical corruptions
of HRNM. The terminal –Y of HRNMY is
thought to be an ethnicon (Professor Anson Rainey, private communication) or,
to put it in the words of Professor Huehnergard of Harvard (private
communication), “Ug. Hrnmy is merely the gentilic adjective of the place name
hrnm, pronounced harnamu.”.
I
would propose a new identification for the site of HRNM, namely the ancient
Naveh, or Nawa, very close to Ashtoreth, Edrei and Raphon. The HR- can easily be accounted for
thusly: according to Professor Wilfred
G.E. Watson at The University of Newcastle on Tyne, “The Ug. word hr occurs in
KTU 1.107:44 and 1.4 ii 36 and perhaps in 7.53:3; it means ‘mountain’.” Hebrew naveh is from navah, and is cognate
with Akkadian namu, “living in the steppe, steppe-dweller”. The word is found in the Mari texts with the
meaning “movable encampment of people and herds”. Anson Rainey (in his “The
Military Personnel of Ugarit”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1
/ 2, January, 1965) says that ‘Wiseman has observed that namu is the Middle
Babylonian reflex of nawu(m) from the Mari texts which meant “encampment”,
“pasturage” or “steppe”. James M. Scott
(in “A New Approach to Habakkuk II 4-5A”, Vetus Testamentum XXXVm 3, 1985)
states that
‘…
the Hebrew verb nawa may have an almost exact cognate correspondent in the
well-attested Old and Standard Babylonian verb namu, meaning “to be abandoned,
to lie in ruins, to lay waste, to turn to ruins; to become waste, ruined”…
Several lines of evidence support the correspondence of nawa to namu, both in
form and meaning. First, namu
corresponds to nawa phonologically: even through the Akkadian m would be the
normal correspondent rather than the less common w, both namu and nawu are attested
forms… Second, the substantive derivative of namu (i.e. namu “pasture land”)
corresponds in usage to the derivatives of nawa (i.e. naweh “abode of shepherds
or flocks” and nawa “pasture, meadow”)… Third, if the Ugaritic verb nawa “to be
desolated” belongs to the same root as nawa and namu, then nawa belongs to a
common lexical stock denoting destruction.”
Namu
occurs in Ugaritic text RS 8.208 as applied to a man named Buriyanu, where the
word is translated by J. J. Finhelstein as “man of the steppe”.
Geographers,
historians and archaeologists have defined Nawa as the city of Ayub, i.e. the
Biblical Job. The town is also said to
include the tomb of Shem, Noah's son. The palaces and dwellings of Nawa
demonstrate its historical importance and there are many ancient hills and
ruins around, including Al Jubia and Tell Umm Horan.
HRNMY,
then, could mean that Dan’il is a man of Naveh, as well as a man of Raphon,
both sites being in the Hauran of Bashan.
An alternative to this interpretation will be briefly discussed below.
Bashan,
in Hebrew bsn, is cognate with Ugaritic bthn, Akkadian basmu, Aramaic ptn and
Arabic bathan: all nouns (see James H. Charlesworth’s “Revealing the Genius of
Biblical Authors: Symbology, Archaeology, and Theology”, COMMUNIO: A THEOLOGICAL
JOURNAL, XLVI, 2004, Nr.2, and F. Charles Fensham’s “Ps. 68:23 In the Light of
the Recently Discovered Ugaritic Tablets”, JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES,
Vol. 19, No. 4, October 1960) denoting some kind of dragon or snake. It is possible the reference is to a
cosmological serpent much like the Tiamat of the Babylonian creation epic ENUMA
ELISH, who when slain has a mountain heaped over her head and other mountains
heaped over her udder. Bashan is
dominated by “Mount Bashan”, now Jebel el-Druze, a cluster of over a hundred
basaltic volcanoes, and the associated volcanic field. Jebel el-Druze is the northern part of the
great Harrat (Arabic for “lava flow”) Ash Shamah, which extends from southern
Syria, across Jordan and into northwestern Saudi Arabia. It is conceivable that the lava field itself
was thought to be what remained of the cosmological serpent. The alternate
etymology is Hebrew bsn, 'fertile, stoneless piece of ground' (Dictionary of
Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd Revised Edition). But I have to go with the geography, and that
favors the 'serpent' interpretation.
I
have above proposed that Harnamu is for “Mountain of the Steppe”, a reference
to a hill at Nawa. But it is just as
possible that Harnamu is a reference to Mount Bashan itself, literally a sacred
mountain at the heart of Dan’il’s kingdom.
The
region of Bashan stretched from the border of Gilead in the south to the slopes
of Mount Hermon in the north (W. Ewing in _The International Standard Bible
Encyclopedia_). As such, it was the most
northerly part of Palestine east of the Jordan River. Hauran is an extraordinarily rich plain,
running between Jebel ed-Druze or Mount Bashan on the east, and Jedua and
Jaulan (modern Golan) in the west. This
plain reaches Jebel el ‘Aswad in the north and the Yarmuk River in the
southwest, and finally open desert in the southeast. It is from 1,500 to 2,000
ft. above sea-level, and almost 50 miles in length, by 45 in breadth. The district of the Hauran known as En-Nuqrah
has fertile soil composed of volcanic detritus where wheat is cultivated.
The
name Hauran may mean either “Hollow [land]” or the land of the Canaanite god
Hauron, an underworld deity not unlike Rapiu.
It may not be a coincidence that the Kohathites, after the conquest of
Palestine by the Hebrews, were given the twin cities of Beth-Horon in
Ephraim. Horon (cognate with Hauran) has
as its root Hebrew hor (chowr, “hole, cave”), and is in all likelihood not
“House of the Hollow”, but “House of [the god] Hauron”. Also interesting is the presence of Hauran in
Bashan, “the Serpent/Dragon” (see above); the god Hauron is evoked in two
Ugaritic charms for healing snake-bite.
So
now that we have established with some degree of certainty that Danil and his
son Aqht belonged to Bashan, and to the plain of Hauran in Bashan in
particular, we can return to our consideration of the Kohath grandfather of
Moses, who bears a name identical with that of Aqht.
At
Timna, which we have identified with Moses’ Mount Horeb, a rock-face carving
was found above the Midianite tent-shrine.
It will be recalled that this Midianite tent-shrine has been erected on
the site of the earlier Egyptian shrine to Hathor.
The
carving in question is a dedication of Ramesses III to Hathor, presented by one
Ramessesemperre, “Re has given birth to him in the house of Re”, a royal
butler.
What
scant information we have on this man (kindly provided to me by Dr. Maarten J.
Raven, Curator, Egyptian Department, National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden,
Netherlands; see the article “The Royal Butler of Ramessesemperre by Alan R.
Schulman , JARCE XIII, 1976, and “Le Dinnitaire Ramesside Ramses-em-per-re,
Jocelyne Berlandini-Grenier, BIFAO 74, 1974) strongly suggests that he was
either the son or grandson of another Ramessesemperre who held high offices
under the pharaohs Ramesses II and Merneptah.
The first Ramessesemperre was Syro-Palestinian, having the original,
non-Egyptian name Benitjen or “Ben-azen”, with a father Yupa’o or Yupaao
(another foreign name; according to Michael Coogan this last could be from the
Semitic root yp’, “to shine”). The first
Ramessesemperre had yet another Egyptian name, Meriunu. But what is startling about this man is that
he was from Ziri-bashana.
Olivier
Lauffenburger informs me that Ziri-bashana occurs in the Amarna letter EA201 (a
letter from Artamanya of Ziri-bashana to the Egyptian king). Ziri is, in fact, to be read seri (with an
emphatic s), which means in Akkadian “plain, steppe, open country”. Thus Ziri-bashana or Ziri-Bashan is the Plain
of Bashan, i.e. the Hauran of the legendary Canaanite hero Aqht.
It
would not be unreasonable for a man of Hauran in Bashan to count among his
distant ancestors a great Bashan hero such as Aqht. Aqht’s descendents, in turn, were an “Exalted
People”, i.e. Amram, among whom was Ramessesemperre or “Moses”. Note that is has long been recognized that
Moses is a truncated form of just such a theophoric name as Ra-messes.
Now,
this latter Ramessesemperre, the son or grandson of his earlier name-sake, is
thought by Rothenburg, the excavator of Timna, to be the man in charge of the
expedition to Timna to re-establish the mining operations there and re-dedicate
the Hathor shrine. To support this
notion, which by and large is accepted by the Egyptological community, he cites
the following from the “Papyrus Harris” (408-409, James Henry Breasted’s
_Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume 4, The Twentieth Through the Twenty-Sixth
Dynasties_). In this papyrus, Ramesses
III boasts that
“I
sent forth my messengers to the country of the Atika [= Timna/Mount Horeb], to
the great copper mines which are in this place.
Their galleys carried them; others on the land-journey were upon their
asses. It has not been heard before,
since kings reign. Their mines were
found abounding in copper; it was loaded by ten-thousands into their
galleys. They were sent forward to
Egypt, and arrived safely. It was
carried and made into a heap under the balcony, in many bars of copper, like
hundred-thousands, being of the color of gold of three times. I allowed all the people to see them, like
wonders.”
“I
sent forth butlers and officials to the malachite-country [= Serabit
el-Khadim], to my mother, Hathor, mistress of the malachite. There were brought for her silver, gold,
royal linen, mek-linen, and many things into her presence, like the sand. There were brought for me wonders of real
malachite in numerous sacks, brought forward into my presence. They had not been seen before, since kings
reign.”
The
royal butler who led the expedition to Timna under Ramesses III later held the
rank of “Commander of Foreign Warriors”.
This is attested in Year 4 of the reign of Ramesses V, the pharaoh who
perished of smallpox, the plague of the Exodus story that took all the Egyptian
first-born sons. The Foreign Warriors
are thought to have been mercenary Sherden, a Sea People most likely from
Sardis and not, as previously believed, Sardinia. We have seen above how Ramesses V is the last
pharaoh attested at Timna, and that Ramesses VI was the last Egyptian king to
send an expedition to Serabit el-Khadim.
The Midianite tent-shrine at Timna formed the basis for the Biblical
traditions concerning the Tabernacle at the Mountain of God.
I
would propose that this Ramessesemperre who was in charge of the expedition to
Timna under Ramesses III was sent on a similar expedition to Serabit el-Khadim
under Ramesses VI. At the time of this
latter expedition to what was Mount Sinai/Sopdu, the Midianites established their
tent-shrine at Mount Horeb/Timna. The
Ramesses VI expedition to Mount Sinai was thus conflated in popular tradition
with the simultaneous establishment of the tent-shrine at Mount Horeb.
There
is little difficulty in accepting that Ramessesemperre/Moses, when at Timna,
took a wife from among the Midianites who either worked at the copper mines or
who shared some kind of control of those mines with the Egyptians. We already know that a people called YHW’
lived in precisely this region and Ramessesemperre/Moses would quite naturally
have identified his own ram-god Amun with a similar local deity.
Ramessesemperre
at Mount Sinai/Serabit el-Khadim would, of course, be accompanied by his god,
Amun. Any rededication of the Serabit
el-Khadim Hathor temple during the reign of Ramesses VI, which coincided with
the building of the Midianite tent-shrine at Timna over the ruins of the Hathor
shrine Ramessesemperre had rededicated there in the reign of Ramesses III,
would in the conflated Biblical account be rendered as the Theophany of Sinai.
In
passing, given Moses relationship with the Burning Bush, it may be significant
that Ramessesemperre the elder is shown adoring Hathor, Lady of the Sycamore,
on lintel (?) Brooklyn 35.1315, and receiving a libation from the goddess Nut
in tree form on the second register of stela British Museum 79.
CHAPTER
SEVEN:
SOKAR
OF ROSETAU AND BAAL OF PEOR: THE BURIAL PLACE OF MOSES
Ramessesemperre
was, to the best of our knowledge, buried at Saqqara in Egypt. His tomb is listed among missing tombs in
this area by G. T. Martin in “Hidden Tombs of Memphis”. Dr. Maarten J. Raven, Curator of the Egyptian
Department for the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden in the Netherlands,
who has worked extensively at Saqqara, informs me that “Indeed we have found a
single relief block, perhaps belonging to the tomb of Rameseesemperre.”
Deuteronomy
34:6 tells us that Moses was buried “in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite
Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.”
Now,
Saqqara gets its name from that of the ancient Egyptian god Sokar, who was lord
of Rosetau (R’-sTA.w). This Rosetau
means, literally, “Mouth [of the] passage/cavern/ramp” that led into the
Underworld. Beth-peor was named for its
Mount Peor, peor meaning ‘cleft’ or ‘gap’, from pa’ar, ‘to open wide [the
mouth], to gape’. This mountain was home
to a Moabite god called, aptly, Baal-Peor, i.e. ‘Lord of the [mouth-like]
Gap’. The Gap in question was doubtless
an entrance into the Underworld. According to “The Dictionary of Deities and
Demons of the Bible”, the name Peor “is related to Heb P’R, ‘open wide’, which
in Isa 5:4 is said of the ‘mouth’ of the netherworld.” The same source defines Baal-Peor as probably
“the chthonic aspect of the Canaanite god of fertility, Baal.”
What
has obviously happened here is that there was some memory of Moses’ burial at
Saqqara, but the burial place was moved to Beth-peor to serve the needs of the
Biblical narrative. Baal-peor must have
been seen as the Moabite equivalent of Sokar of Rosetau. The reason Moses’ tomb at Beth-peor could not
be found is because it was never there to begin with. It was at Saqqara.
CHAPTER
EIGHT:
HOW
RAMESSESEMPERRE BECAME MOSES
It
is reasonable to ask how the Egyptian official Ramessesemperre (or a conflation
of the first and second personages of this name?) could possibly have become
the Moses of the Bible. While it is
beyond the scope of this work to attempt a detailed analysis of such topics as
the evolution of folkloristic motifs during the course of centuries of orally
transmitted tradition, etc., there are a few general comments that can be made
which might go far towards answering this question.
1)
Ramessesemperre was an Asiatic, whose father had come from Bashan bordering on
what would become Israel.
2)
As the leader of an expedition to Timna (Horeb) and, probably, Serabit
el-Khadim (Sinai), he would have had under his leadership other Asiatics, among
whom undoubtedly would have been Hebrews.
3)
While at Timna, Ramessesemperre could well have been given a daughter of a
local Midianite priest, a worshipper of Yahweh.
That Ramessesemperre, who was thoroughly Egyptianized, would have
identified the Midianite Yahweh with his own Amun is only natural: the
Egyptians engaged in this kind of syncretization of deities on a regular basis.
4)
Some of the Hebrew slaves (or laborers?) at Pi-Ramesses and Pithom might well
have been conscripted to accompany Ramessesemperre on his mining
expeditions. These slaves would have
been set to work in the mines at these sites, or have been involved in the
smelting process and the transportation of copper and malachite.
5)
The last mining expedition to Serabit el-Khadim, Moses’ Sinai, took place
during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses VI.
After this, the Egyptians withdrew permanently from the Sinai
Peninsula. If, as I have proposed,
Ramessesemperre led this last expedition, one which was concurrent with the
Midianite founding of their tent sanctuary to Yahweh at Timna, which had not
been visited by the Egyptians since the reign of Ramesses V, and if we further postulate that
slaves of this last expedition to Serabit el-Khadim either escaped from the
Egyptian overseers or were released on the orders of Ramessesemperre (who,
knowing in advance there would be no more expeditions, had no further need of
the Hebrews), then we can create the following narrative outline of the
development of the Moses story: An
expedition to Timna is sent out during the reign of Ramesses III, under the
leadership of Ramessesemperre. The
Hathor shrine at Timna, along with the mines there, are re-established. Ramessesemperre remains at Timna for the
duration of the mining operations, taking as a wife (or concubine?) the
daughter of a Midian priest. His close
family connection with the Midianites, who may also have worked the mines,
caused him to recognize his own god Amun as the Egyptian counterpart of his
father-in-law’s god Yahweh. The story of
the Exodus from Egypt after the death of Ramesses V is a reflection of the expedition
launched by Ramesses VI to Serabit el-Khadim.
This would prove to be the last mining expedition in the Sinai
undertaken by the Egyptians. If
Ramessemperre were present as leader of the expedition, then this would match
the story of Moses’ journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai. At this same time, the Midianites destroyed
the Hathor shrine at Timna and replaced it with their own tent sanctuary to
Yahweh. If this event were roughly
contemporaneous with a group of Hebrew slaves escaping from their Egyptian
overseers at Serabit el-Khadim or being released from their servitude by none
other than Ramessesemperre, then their eventual presence at the tent sanctuary
at Horeb – which in the Biblical narrative is mistakenly placed at Serabit
el-Khadim – would make the Moses story complete. We need only allow for the usual legendary
accretions to the tale, and the relocation of Moses’ final resting place from
Saqqara in Egypt to Mount Peor on the border of the Promised Land.
It
seems clear that the life and career of the Egyptian official Ramessesemperre
was the model for that of the Biblical Moses, and that the historical Moses
was, therefore, Ramessessemperre.
A NOTE ON THE MERNEPTAH STELA,
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE MOSES CHRONOLOGY
Professor
James K. Hoffmeier has pointed out a possible chronological problem with my
Moses candidate. As he outlines this
problem (see in more detail his paper “What is the Biblical Date of the
Exodus?”, in JETS, 50/2, June 2007, pp. 225-47),
1.
Why is Israel mentioned in the Merneptah Stela as present in Canaan in 1208
B.C. if the Exodus and Moses are date to 75 years later on your scheme?
2.
There is evidence at the very end of the LBA and Iron I (13th cent.) for new
villages, types of houses, etc, and some destructions (like Hazor) at this
period, but not a century later when your Israelites should appear in the land!
These points, while significant, presuppose
that only one group came into Israel at one time. While it is certainly
true that the Merneptah Stela and even some archaeological evidence show that
an entity by the name of Israel existed somewhat before the time of
Ramessesemperre, this does not negate the possibility that the latter figure
was commemorated in the way I have outlined above by a group arriving slightly
later in Canaan. If the traditions of this later group had eventually
come to predominate, then the entire Exodus story would naturally have been
written in such a way as to best accommodate the legendary feats of Moses.
Plus, I’ve already mentioned that
the later Ramessesemperre may well have been a son or grandson of the one who
served at the time of Pharaoh Merneptah.
The two figures could easily have been confused and/or conflated in
legend, the earlier one living at the time the Merneptah Stela was erected.
More
recently, the date of Ahmose I has been questioned due to a new interpretation
of the so-called Tempest Stela (see “Tempest
Stela of Ahmose: World’s Oldest Weather Report”, Apr 3, 2014 in
Sci-News.com). Thus some of these
important early dates connected with Egyptian royal chronologies continue to be
revised.
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