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.
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]
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.
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.
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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