1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

MOSES AS COMPILER OF GENESIS

INTRODUCTION

In "The Toledoths of Genesis," the previous article in this computer Bible series, I introduced the reader to the excellent discoveries of P. J. Wiseman, who had been able to identify the nature of the sources that were used in the compilation of the Book of Genesis. Wiseman, drawing most effectively upon the information supplied by modern archaeology about ancient scribal methods, had had no difficulty proving that the original sources used in Genesis were most ancient, even pre-dating the time of Moses.

 

 

Moses, of course, has traditionally been identified as the compiler⁽¹⁾ of the Book of Genesis, and indeed as the author, substantially, of the remainder of the Pentateuch.

Now I had mentioned, in the course of my writing "The Toledoths of Genesis," that I would provide a follow-up article⁽²⁾ in which I would be producing evidence in support of this traditional view. That will indeed be the main purpose of this present article, "Moses as Compiler of Genesis."

Whereas in "The Toledoths of Genesis" the focus had been upon the structure of the Book of Genesis, in this new article it will be upon its language. Professor A. S. Yahuda (3) had already shown beyond a shadow of doubt that the language of Genesis is so saturated with Egyptianisms that the book could only have been written in its final form during an era of history when Israel was profoundly under the influence of Egypt.

Yahuda's discovery was a tremendous breakthrough in discussions about the Book of Genesis. Prior to it, the fact that Egyptian had exerted such a telling influence upon the language of Genesis had remained completely hidden from biblical scholars. Why was this? Seemingly because of the fact that so few of them were able to combine in one person both an expertise in Hebrew as well as a thorough knowledge of the Egyptian language.

For Yahuda, who was an expert in both Hebrew and Egyptian,⁽⁴⁾ the fact of the Egyptian influence upon the language of Genesis was inescapable. It "leaped to the eye," to use his own phrase.⁽⁵⁾ Yahuda's thesis turned out to be a most potent, scientific argument in support of the traditional view about the compilation of Genesis; for really the only time in its history when Israel was so significantly under the influence of Egypt was during its "Egyptian Epoch," that is the phase of its history from Joseph to Moses.

Yahuda's fine work does however suffer to some degree from a chronological defect; even though chronology was not his concern in writing his book. Because he had accepted the standard view of history (which is rejected here) that Moses had lived during the New Kingdom Era of Egyptian history, the Late Bronze Age (thus, in the C13th BC), Yahuda had tended to search almost exclusively for linguistic examples from that era, from which to draw his parallels with the Bible, and thus to verify his linguistic thesis.

But, as is becoming more and more obvious now to some of the most reputable archaeologists researching in the Sinai and the Negev deserts (e.g. Professor Emmanuel Anati and Dr. Rudolf Cohen, see PART ONE) - and as I have argued in a previous article in this series, "Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? A Reply to TIME" - the era of Moses and the Exodus definitely well pre-dated Egypt's New Kingdom.⁽⁶⁾ (Please refer to footnotes, which are very important in this article).

Fortunately, many of Yahuda's New Kingdom examples of the Egyptian language do still hold good for what I have shown to be the correct time of Moses, during the Old/ Middle Kingdoms (that is, Early Bronze/Middle Bronze).⁽⁷⁾ But since, naturally, the pre-New Kingdom examples from the Egyptian language will be the ones that are going to throw the clearest light on the time of Moses, it is on these that I shall be concentrating in the course of this article.

From what I have said so far, the reader will be able to appreciate that the historical aspect cannot be completely overlooked in this discussion about the compilation of the Book of Genesis and linguistics. I shall therefore devote PART ONE to history, to "The Era of Moses," and this will serve as a kind of introductory section to the main part of this article "The Language of Genesis", which will occupy PART TWO. PART ONE (the historical introduction) of this article properly follows on from my, "Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? A Reply to TIME", in which I presented a revised chronology for the Exodus and the Conquest of Palestine, and offered a far more satisfactory historical location for Moses than is conventionally provided. PART TWO (on the linguistics of Genesis) will be - as said above - the natural follow up to "The Toledoths of Genesis", and can be read independently from PART ONE if the reader so wishes.

The inclusion of a substantial historical introduction to this subject of the compilation of Genesis will now afford me the perfect opportunity to do two things:

FIRSTLY, to provide further examples (following on from "The Toledoths of Genesis") of why the conventionalist⁽⁸⁾ historians, using a faulty chronological scheme, must always end up by concluding that the biblical writers borrowed from pagan stories or myths.

SECONDLY, to introduce some compelling new evidence in favour of the revised⁽⁹⁾ chronology pertaining to the Mosaic era. I am referring here chiefly to the research of Pro-fessor Emmanuel Anati, a most experienced archaeologist of the Sinai and Negev deserts, who, in his recent books "The Mountain of God" (1986) ⁽¹⁰⁾ and "Har Karkom in the Light of New Discoveries" (1993), ⁽¹¹⁾ has shown from exhaustive archaeological data obtained from these regions that the conventional C13th BC (or Late Bronze Era) placement in history for Moses (including the Exodus and the Wanderings of the Hebrews in the desert) can no longer possibly be sustained.

Thus Anati has written:

"In the last 100 years, many efforts have been invested on finding some hints of the Israelites and their exodus in the Egyptian ancient literature. In the many Egyptian texts that date to the New Kingdom, and there are plenty, there is no mention of the flight from Egypt or the crossing of the "Red Sea." Not even the general historical and social background correspond. The biblical episodes in Egypt refer to the presence of significant groups of Asians in the area of the Delta. Political changes upset their social standing. If all of this tradition has a minimal basis in historical fact, then it cannot have been totally ignored by the Egyptians."(12)

Nor, according to Professor Anati, did the Egyptians totally ignore it:

"And in fact it was not ignored. The relevant texts do not date to the New Kingdom at all, but to the Old Kingdom. In other words, it is our humble opinion that the archaeological evidence of the above mentioned sites, the tribal social structures described in the Bible, the climatic changes and the ancient Egyptian literature all seem to indicate that the events and situations which may have inspired the biblical narrations of Exodus do not date to the thirteenth century BC but ... to the late third millennium BC."⁽¹³⁾

Anati, as I have already noted and explained in the important footnotes (6), (7) & (11) at the end of this section, still accepts the conventional dating of the Old and New Kingdoms, which is actually far too high. But this only means that his discoveries are all the more valuable, because he has admitted to having grown up with the conventional system, and because he did not actually set out to make any chronological statement.⁽¹⁴⁾

Professor Anati had simply been researching the archaeology on, and in the vicinity of, an intriguing mountain known by the beautiful and appropriate Israeli name, Har Karkom, "Saffron Mountain,"⁽¹⁵⁾ in the Negev desert, and had come to realise that this mountain - rather than the traditional one, Jebel Musa (the so-called "Mountain of Moses") in the Sinai Peninsula - had all the earmarks of being the real Mount Sinai.

The sheer weight of testimony of the archaeological data itself, with which Professor Anati had found himself confronted at this site, had forced him radically to reassess the estimate of the conventional historians in regard to the Exodus and Israel's Wanderings.

Anati's research impressed upon him that Har Karkom - far more than any other mountain in the Sinai and Negev regions, including Jebel Musa - had been regarded by the ancients as a "holy" (cultic and sacral) mountain, from Stone Age times⁽¹⁶⁾ down to (and most especially during) what he terms the "BAC complex" (that is, Early Bronze to Middle Bronze I). (By contrast, Jebel Musa, showed little occupation until the Byzantine Christian era). Most significantly, Anati found no traces whatsoever of Late Bronze Age archaeology (the conventional time for Moses) on, or around, Har Karkom.

PART ONE: THE ERA OF MOSES

Here I intend to supplement, with valuable supporting data - especially from the recent discoveries of Professor Anati in the Negev desert regions - what I have already written about the era of Moses in "Is the Bible fact or Fiction?"

The Starting Point

The Bible reveals that Egypt, for at least the four centuries (approximately) from the time that Abraham came to Palestine, until the Exodus (that is, from c.1900-1500 BC),⁽¹⁷⁾ was a power to be reckoned with.

Then there occurred the Exodus, the basic details about which most of us are familiar. During this catastrophic time, the pride of Egypt was humbled to the dust, and it remained thus humbled throughout the entire era of the Judges in Palestine (c.1450-1000 BC). Hence it took the land of the Nile some 450 years to recover, and to become again a world power, after the affects of the Ten Plagues; of having been pillaged by some two million foreigners who then quit the country; and finally of having suffered the loss of its pharaoh, his army and chariotry, as the Sea closed over them.

Such, according to the Bible, is the pattern of events in relation to Egypt. The version that greets us in the standard history texts, however, tells us of quite a different scenario. According to this version, Egypt continued to maintain a fair degree of its power and prestige, even after a so-called 'Exodus.' Hence, we are told, the Biblical account of the event must be a gross exaggeration of what really happened - the 'Exodus' actually having been a modest affair; perhaps involving only a few families.

But we now know that this conventional system, based upon an artificial use of the Sothic cycle, has completely missed the mark in its estimation of this extraordinary era. That the very foundations of the Sothic system of chronology (used for dating the successive dynasties of Egypt) are unstable, having been raised upon artificial and unrealistic premises, has recently been shown from high-level research.⁽¹⁸⁾ Now, since so artificial a scheme cannot, and does not provide any satisfactory synchronisms between the early history of Egypt and that of Mesopotamia/Palestine, the system ought to be discarded and replaced by something far more workable.

In regard to this more workable alternative, I should like here briefly to outline the newly emerging, revisionist system for the Exodus and Conquest, some of whose most recent additions are based upon the authoritative findings of Professor Anati and Dr. Cohen.⁽¹⁹⁾

A. The Israelites

I submit that, as a starting point for a revised chronology, it must be recognised that:

The nomadic Middle Bronze I people, who came from the direction of Egypt, during a period of history when Egypt was in absolute chaos; who dwelt in the Sinai and Negev (especially at Kadesh-Barnea); who eventually entered Palestine from Transjordan, by crossing the Jordan River; and who then proceeded to dispossess the local inhabitants of their cities (most notably at Jericho, where the walls fell flat and the city was burned to the ground), were the Israelites.

In regard to the Exodus and Conquest, the Bible has recorded for us two of the most unique incidents in the history of humankind. Hence, the appropriate archaeological data at these points in time ought to be absolutely unequivocal as to their interpretation. I suggest that they truly are.

Our starting point, that the Middle Bronze I people are to be identified with the Israelites of the Exodus, has already been worked out by the best revisionist historians. This view has recently been verified by Dr. Cohen, the conventionally trained authority of the Sinai and Negev. And it is now being greatly bolstered by the findings of Professor Anati.

Commencing, then, with this most unique situation in the history of the world, one can work both backwards and forwards on the time scale, to fill out the historical picture for the era of Moses. Let us then, point by point, correlate with the Egyptian data some of the major incidents from the Book of Exodus:

B. The Israelites in Bondage

This situation fits nicely during the extensive building activity in brick in the Nile Delta region, during the mid/late Twelfth Dynasty period. I have already proposed in "Is the Bible Fact or Fiction?" that this period was concurrent with the latter part of the Sixth Dynasty. I showed in that article that there were many Asiatics living in Egypt at this time, even as slaves, and that the contemporary pharaohs (20) had used slave labour to build pyramids of brick mixed with straw, just as recorded in Exodus about the Israelites (5:16). I was not alone in noting the grim visages of the mid-Twelfth Dynasty kings.⁽²¹⁾

Now whilst some have interpreted this grim-ness as being a kind of studied thoughtfulness - occasioned, as they imagine, by the economic hardship (due to erratic Nile levels) that Egypt was then supposedly experiencing - I prefer to regard these faces as belonging to the grim task-masters whom the chief Pharaoh of Memphis (probably the long-reigning Pepi II) had placed over the Israelites (Exodus 1:11).

C. The Baby Moses Exposed on the River Nile

I have already drawn attention to the Egyptian myth about the god Horus, and his mother, Isis, that reflects the account of Moses' exposure in a basket on the Nile.⁽²²⁾ Only since I pointed this out have I become aware of the fact that Professor Yahuda had provided an extensive list of striking parallels between the Egyptian mythology and incidents that had occurred during the Patriarchal to Judges history of the Israelites.⁽²³⁾ The burning question to be answered is: Who borrowed from whom?

The conventional and documentary historians, enmeshed as they are in their faulty chronology and/or their belief that the Scriptures were written very late (after centuries of oral tradition), invariably conclude that the scriptural writers were the ones who had bor-rowed from the pagans. A classic example of this occurs in the case of a legend about one of the most famous of the Mesopotamian kings, Sargon of Akkad, who is conventionally dated to the 23rd century BC,⁽²⁴⁾ well before the time of Moses.

After reading the legend of Sargon, one can only conclude that it must - to use a phrase of Anati's that we are going to meet again further on - "have a common matrix"⁽²⁵⁾ with the story of Moses, placed in a basket and subsequently saved from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter (Exodus 2:3-6). Thus we read about Sargon:

"My mother, the high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not (over) me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki (who took me) as his son (and) reared me ..."

What we need to understand about the "Legend of Sargon", however, is that the accounts of it that we now have were written many centuries after (by any estimation) the time of either Sargon or Moses. The extant accounts of this legend belong to the neo-Assyrian period, later than 1000 BC. Sargon almost certainly pre-dates Moses. Even so, Mesopotamian history has still to undergo a great deal of revision. Once a true model has been achieved, once Mesopotamian history has undergone a shortening similar to what the revisionist historians have shown to have been necessary for Egyptian history (because of the fact that Egyptian chronology had been artificially over-stretched by many centuries), then we might learn some surprising things about great monarchs like Sargon of Akkad.⁽²⁶⁾

D. Slaughter of Male Hebrew Children

In "Is the Bible Fact or Fiction?" I already referred to evidence, from the Twelfth Dynasty site of Illahun, of the mass burials of babies, "buried two to three to a box" underneath the floors of many houses there, and I had noted that: "Internment of bodies at domestic sites was not an Egyptian custom."

Now, David Rohl, in his new book, "A Test of Time,"⁽²⁷⁾ has further suggested that multiple graves in the region of the Delta, at Tell el-Daba (ancient Avaris) during the same approximate period, had an excessively large proportion of babies:

"... it was discovered that there was a higher percentage of infant burials at Tell ed-Daba [sic?] than is normally found at archaeological sites of the ancient world. Sixty-five per cent of all the burials were those of children under the age of eighteen months. Based on modern statistical evidence obtained from pre-modern societies we would expect the infant mortality rate to be around twenty to thirty per cent. Could this be explained by the slaughter of the Israelite infant males by the Egyptians?"

Moreover, the Brooklyn Papyrus reveals that Egyptian households at this time were filled with Asiatic slaves, some of whom bore biblical names. In fact the name "Shiphrah", mentioned in this papyrus, is identical to that borne by one of the Hebrew midwives whom Pharaoh had commanded (unsuccessfully) to kill the male babies (Exodus 1:15).