PART TWO: THE LANGUAGE OF GENESIS

The key to the structure of the Book of Genesis, as we learned in "The Toledoths of Genesis", following the most illuminating research of P. J. Wiseman, is to be found in the repetitious phrase, "These are the generations ['Toledoth'] of..." This valuable discovery left us with no doubt that the Book of Genesis was compiled from a series of ancient docu-ments (histories) - recorded on writing tablets - each one signed by one or other well-known biblical character from the Patriarchal era (e.g. Noah, Shem, Terah, Isaac, etc.), who must have owned and/or written his own set of histories.

 

The main point that was to be concluded from all of this was that the Book of Genesis is a most ancient document, the bulk of its material having been written before the time of Moses.

It was also noted in the Introduction to this present article that Moses is traditionally regarded as being the editor or compiler of the Book of Genesis. I am going to produce some compelling evidence to show that this tradition is a reliable one. To this end, I expect to gain assistance from linguistics; specifically from the ancient Egyptian language. For, as I pointed out on page 1, Professor Yahuda had made the enormously important discovery that Egyptian exerted a profound influence upon the language of Genesis.⁽¹⁾

Here I shall be pre-supposing the following data pertaining to the historical Moses:

- That Moses lived in Egypt during the Old/Middle Kingdom; the time of those Asiatics of Stratum G/1 at Tell el-Daba (ancient Avaris), whom we have identified in PART ONE as the Israelites;

- That Moses was, culturally speaking, 'Egyptianized'. For, since the aforementioned Asiatics, who were slaves, show every indication of having been 'Egyptianized', how much more should we expect 'Egyptianization' in the case of Moses, whom, we are told, had been brought up since childhood in the household of pharaoh (cf. Exodus 2:8, 10)! In fact, when Moses fled Egypt and arrived in Midian, he was straightaway identified there as being "an Egyptian" (Exodus 2:19).

- Moses had been highly educated in all the culture of Egypt (Acts 7:22). Thus we would expect that he, in his speech and writing - even after the Exodus - would continue to reflect that sophisticated Egyptian influence in regard to idiom, polished phraseology, metaphors, etc.

Now, what we are going to discover in this article is that there does in fact exist a profound Egyptian influence of this latter kind throughout the language of Genesis.

Effects of the "Documentary Hypothesis"

As was explained in "The Toledoths of Genesis," the Graf-Wellhausen system has dominated the field of Biblical research for more than a century. Consequently, the entire Pentateuch is considered by scholars to be a late product - even those parts that deal with the Egyptian Epoch of Israelite history (i.e., from Joseph to the Exodus, c.1700-1500 BC).

Scholars in the study of antiquity have tackled the many challenging aspects of Genesis with greater or lesser success. "The Assyro-Babylonian school" for instance, according to Yahuda, "has undoubtedly been very successful in shedding new light on many parts of the Bible and also on some chapters of Genesis. But far from solving the problems of composition and antiquity of the Pentateuch, it rather complicated them."⁽²⁾

Similarly Yahuda found that Egyptology, despite its useful contributions, has been too hamstrung by the "Documentary Hypothesis" to have been able to shed sufficient light:

"Egyptology, too, failed, to furnish a solution only because after the rise of the Graf-Wellhausen School some of the leading Egyptologists accepted its theories without having sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and the Bible to enable them to take any initiative in these questions. As they could not find more than any occasional connexions between Hebrew and Egyptian, they simply took it for granted that Egyptology had very little to yield for the study of the Bible, and as to the Bible itself, Professor Adolf Erman went so far as to affirm that all 'that the Old Testament had to say about Egypt could not be regarded with enough suspicion.'"⁽³⁾

Not surprisingly this sort of attitude posed an obstacle for enterprising students:

"Such a statement and others of like purport, coming as they did from Egyptologists of established authority, brought it about that students who might have perhaps undertaken to penetrate more deeply into a study of Hebrew-Egyptian relationships, were intimidated and deterred from approaching the matter; and on the other hand, Biblical critics could always refer to such statements as highly authoritative in support of their views on the late origin of the Pentateuch and the unreliable character of those parts which deal with Egypt."⁽³⁾

As for the small number of scholars who were courageous enough to challenge the entrenched system, these were severely penalised for so doing:

"The endeavours of those few scholars who dared to go beyond the limits prescribed by the 'official' view of representative Egyptologists were either ignored altogether or only condescendingly considered, the results of their research being contemptuously rejected as unscientific and even fantastic."⁽³⁾

Yahuda wrote, in his own field of expertise, with the conviction and determination of one of those who had in fact been daring enough to swim against the tide of academic opinion; or (to change the metaphor) of one who has 'seen the light' according to Plato's Cave analogy⁽⁴⁾ and has generously sought to share his discoveries with others, in order to help them. Consequently he writes without bitterness.

Other able researchers have not been so fortunate. Did I not dwell at some length, in "The Pharaoh Who Looted Solomon's Temple,"⁽⁵⁾ upon the sad fate of Harold H. Nelson, Professor Breasted's talented pupil, who was "intimidated" (according to the context of the previous quote) into persevering with a doctoral thesis whose predetermined conclusions the young researcher had come to realise could not be squared with the facts? Nelson, unfortunately, was "deterred from" (see same quote) attempting a fresh approach to the subject, since his Rockefeller-funded master, Professor Breasted, was expecting his student to prove the latter's own conclusions in relation to the first military campaign of pharaoh Thutmose III.

The consequences for anyone who, in Nelson's situation, might have been daring enough to have practised scrupulous academic honesty, according to the evidence at hand, would almost certainly have been to have had one's doctoral thesis "contemptuously rejected as unscientific and even fantastic" (see same quote).

Had Nelson been allowed free intellectual rein to pursue the path along which the archaeological and geographical facts, pertaining to the first campaign of Thutmose III, were inevitably leading him - or had he had the courage to break free from the bonds of conventional academic expectation, and start afresh - then it may have fallen to him to have advanced the preparation of the ground for the brilliant conclusions in regard to Thutmose III (e.g. his biblical identity) that the revisionist scholars have since been able to reach.⁽⁶⁾

But for Nelson such a happy fate was not to be. The outcome for him, as no doubt it has been for many another enterprising student, was an utter dissatisfaction with the final product. Sure, the young researcher went on to complete his doctoral thesis according to Breasted's rulings, and was awarded the inevitable pass; but Nelson later completely dis-sociated himself from its conclusions.

It is appropriate here to repeat that for a long time now the conventional study of antiquities, including early biblical history, has been held captive bound by a tyrannical scheme that is quite artificial; a scheme that shows every indication of the mischievous genius of Procrustes at work.⁽⁷⁾

For, just as the legendary Procrustes used to stretch out upon his rack, or chop and cut down to size, any traveller who had the misfortune to stray into his inn, so as to make him fit his bed, so have the "Sothic" chronologists of the Berlin School of Egyptology radically over-stretched secular history, and so have the Graf-Wellhausen inclined documentists hacked and fragmented the Scriptures, in order to make these conform to their pre-conceived notions of how things ought to be.

The reader of my computer Bible series would by now have a fair idea of what I am driving at here.

Underlying this oppressive system, from whose stranglehold it is now extremely difficult to break away (as witness the tragic case of Harold H. Nelson) there must be a definite philosophy. If I were asked to identify that philosophy, or better still, that epistemology, I would unhesitatingly point to that idiosyncratic system developed by Immanuel Kant (d.1804), because of its similar Procrustean tendency to apriorise. Kant, whilst not actually denying the existence of extra-mental reality (as some have done), did in fact distrust the human mind's ability to make contact with such reality per se; believing rather that the mind im-poses its own unique constructs upon the real world out there.⁽⁸⁾ Is not this the ancient Procrustes in action in our very own times?

The legacy of so artificial an approach to reality - an approach that seems to be rather widely practised in the academic world today - is that our universities and colleges now present schemes of biblical criticism and ancient history that, whilst being in themselves ingenious inventions, have not a great deal of bearing upon concrete fact.

In this computer series we have already seen the frustrated Procrustes in action, straining to make biblical history conform to the over-stretched bed of the "Sothic" chronology (e.g. in the first article, "The Sothic Star Theory of the Egyptian Calendar"). We have again seen him at work when striving, in butcher-like fashion, to hack and chop the Genesis texts into neat, marketable slices, to fit the idiosyncratic demands of the "Documentary Hypothesis" (e.g. in "The Toledoths of Genesis"). Now we are going to glimpse the menacing figure of Procrustes lurking behind the study of Biblical language.

My consistent purpose in writing this series has been to get back to historical and scientific reality. That was still my purpose in PART ONE of this present article. And so it will be now with PART TWO, as I analyse the language of Genesis according to what it really is, not according to what Procrustean 'experts' might say it ought to be.

Though factually-minded scholars, of whatever discipline, who have the courage to challenge the many artificialities to be found in entrenched academia might be made to suffer for this initially, the cumulative force of their evidence, building and maturing over a period of time, will eventually reach such a crescendo, like a tidal wave, that the old dyke walls of academia will no longer be able to hold fast, but will be swept away. This is already what has slowly but surely begun to happen with the revised chronology of ancient Near Eastern history (a study that has so much bearing upon biblical history), with experts like Professor Emmanuel Anati and Dr. Rudolf Cohen now weighing in with their own important contributions on behalf of the revision.

Development of the Hebrew Language

We find that modern Biblical scholars unconditionally link together the Hebrew and Canaanite languages (Canaan being the land of the sojournings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) as if these were 'sister' languages of the Western Semitic group; though they are unsure as to how they conceive the mode of development of Hebrew and the conditions under which it completed its growth into the literary language that we find in Genesis.

However, according to the testimony of the Book of Genesis, written - as we now know (see "The Toledoths of Genesis") - by people who were eyewitnesses and/or con-temporaries of the events that they describe, the Canaanites were not a SEM-itic people at all. They were of HAM-itic stock (cf. Genesis 10:6, 15-19). Israel, on the other hand, was a Semite, "a wandering Aramaean" (cf. Genesis 10:22; 11:12-27; Deuteronomy 26:5).⁽⁹⁾

Moreover, the less apparent fact that the language of Genesis had been vastly influenced by Egyptian, having even been brought to its pitch of literary perfection by the latter - as Yahuda had so painstakingly demonstrated - has completely escaped virtually all scholars of biblical language.

Of course the very thought that anything like a literary language and literary activity even existed before the complete conquest of Canaan by Joshua and his forces (after the death of Moses) is scoffed at by modern Biblical critics. They cannot accept any viewpoint that does not accord with their notions about the religious evolution in Israel. The system that these critics have inherited seems invariably to lead them to conclusions diametrically opposed to every Biblical statement about the composition of the Pentateuch, and to rank it on linguistic and literary-historical grounds as being quite a late product.

To critics of this sort, Professor Yahuda threw down the gauntlet. If by comparison with the Egyptian, he said, it could be proved that the Egyptian influence upon Hebrew was so extensive that the literary perfection of this language can only be accounted for and explained by that influence, would it not then be quite clear that it can have happened only in "a common Hebrew-Egyptian environment"?⁽¹⁰⁾

Now from a BIBLICAL point of view, as we have suggested, the Egyptian Epoch of Israelite history that culminated in the Exodus (c.1500 BC) was the only period when there existed the sort of close intimacy with Egypt necessary for "so extensive" an influence of Egyptian upon the Hebrew language.

From an ARCHAEOLOGICAL point of view, of course, we have been able confidently to identify that culminating moment of the Egyptian Epoch as the time of the collapse of the Old Kingdom, when Egypt was reduced to a state of chaos of long duration.

Yahuda believed that it was during this Egyptian Epoch that Hebrew would have fully matured as a literary language, thereby reaching "the perfection which we encounter in the Pentateuch."⁽¹¹⁾

Let us then turn our thoughts towards Egypt.

As we are told in the Joseph narrative (Genesis) and Exodus stories, the Israelites spent a long time in Egypt (Exodus 12:40) - in excess of 200 years by any view - as a tribe apart (Exodus 1:8); with their own manners and specific customs (Genesis 43:32); with their own worship (Exodus 5:17); living in a separate area assigned to them in the Delta near the Asiatic border (Genesis 47:6); with their own organisation (Exodus 4:29); as a self-contained entity in the midst of an Egyptian environment. During this substantial period of time the Israelites, as Yahuda has rightly noted, "cannot possibly have escaped the influence of Egyptian culture and Egyptian life."⁽¹²⁾ On the contrary, in spite of their segregation, they would have adapted themselves from the start to Egyptian conditions, conceptions and customs.

Now regarding the nature of the all-important evidence for the Egyptian influence upon the Hebrew language, Professor Yahuda wanted early to emphasise the fact that the comparisons to be drawn between these two languages are not simply superficial ones. They are not just to be confined, for instance, to the level of mere phonetic similarity (al-though that, too, often applies). They go in fact much deeper, right through to the psycho-logical core of the contributing language. Thus Yahuda explained:

"In order fully to appreciate the inner relationship between the linguistic usages of Hebrew and Egyptian, it is not sufficient to make a mere com-parison of words or to prove the common origin of certain words in both languages. We have to penetrate very deeply into the psychology of the Egyptian language, and into the very fibres of its structure, if we wish to discern the true degree to which Hebrew was influenced."⁽¹³⁾

Not only, he added, must this influence be extensive and distinctly traceable in all matters dealt with in Genesis, so that there can be no question of mere accident or of a faint influence reminiscent of a dim past, but in a more special sense the dependence of one language upon another would be revealed chiefly in the following phenomena⁽¹⁴⁾:

(1) In the adoption of loan-words.

(2) In the coinage of new words and expressions, technical terms, turns of speech, metaphors, and phrases quite in the spirit of, and even in literal accordance with, the other language, "in which case the characteristic of such new formations is that they are alien to the spirit of the adopting language and to the conceptions and institutions of the people speaking it - but reflecting throughout the spirit of the other language and the conditions of the alien environment".

(3) In the adoption of grammatical elements and adaption to some syntactical rules of the alien language, so that even in structure and style there is a close assimilation in many respects.

I shall not necessarily be adhering to the order (1-3) cited above whilst providing linguistic examples throughout the following pages. However, all three sections will be represented amongst the examples selected. In an article of greater scope it would be possible to demonstrate a relationship between Hebrew and Egyptian in the widest measure, but here the reader will need to be content with a relatively brief demonstration of it.

It should be kept in mind, too, that we are presently dealing only with the Book of Genesis and not with the entire Pentateuch. Nevertheless, the Egyptian elements listed above are traceable to the same extent and with the same frequency throughout the entire Pentateuch as they are in Genesis (15).

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