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A Summing Up

The presence of so imposing an array of Egyptian elements in the Genesis stories and Patriarchal narratives (and we have only scraped the tip of the iceberg here), completely overshadowing the reminiscences of unmistakably Babylonian origin, can only be ex-plained as the result of a deliberate transformation and re-modelling of the written histories from the Patriarchal times, under the influence of an Egyptian milieu. This predominance of Egyptian influence can even be considered as a determining factor for dating the compostion of the Genesis stories and Patriarchal narratives. For it is clear that such a far-reaching Egyptian saturation can have taken place only in an environment in which the Hebrews lived in close contact with the Egyptians, and it is likewise clear that the only period in which so close a contact can have occurred was the Egyptian-Hebrew epoch.

Hence, there is compelling evidence in support of the traditional view that Moses was the compiler, or editor, of the Book of Genesis. But he was not its author, as we discovered in "The Toledoths of Genesis". This latter conclusion is further borne out by the fact that nowhere in Scripture is there a statement that Moses actually wrote the narratives and genealogies of Genesis. In Genesis we have no statements referring to Moses in the same way as, or similar to, those so often repeated in the remainder of the Pentateuch, "The Lord said unto Moses ..." P. J. Wiseman had in fact claimed that the non-occurrence in the Book of Genesis of this phrase, "The Lord said unto Moses ..." is surely a clear indication that when it is used in the remaining Books of Moses, it is likely to have been used authentically and accurately, the text having been preserved in a pure state.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The New Testament method of referring to the books of Moses is also worthy of note. According to Wiseman, it "is a significant example of the accuracy with which references to authorship are made in the Bible" (47). Although Christ and the Apostles repeatedly quoted from Genesis, "they never actually say that Moses wrote or spoke the statement quoted". But when we read references or quotations taken from the beginning of Exodus and onwards to Deuteronomy, "it is then we begin to read in the New Testament, 'Moses said ...'"

Conclusion

Having discussed, in fair detail, the Egyptian influence upon the language of the Book of Genesis - and, before that, Wiseman's thesis on the structure of the book, I may now summarise the following synthesis in favour of Mosaic compilation of the Book of Genesis:

- Moses wrote the Book of Genesis in a fully matured Hebrew language that was at that time intensely under the influence of the Egyptian language - the Hebrew language having been brought to its pitch of literary perfection by Egyptian. The entire Book of Genesis was composed from an Egyptian perspective as regards its language and many of its conventions. The distinctly Egyptian tone in language, concept and custom pervades the entire book.

- Moses was in possession of the ancient records of his forefathers, passed down from great antiquity via Noah and his sons in the Ark, to the family of Abraham, firstly in Mesopotamia, then in Canaan, and finally via Jacob to Joseph in the governorship of Egypt. Over the centuries these ancient records would doubtlessly have undergone translations, transliterations and editing. Moses, having access to the Egyptian archives, was thoroughly conversant with the histories of his forefathers even whilst still a prince in Egypt. These sacred texts would have served as his only 'Bible.'

- Moses retained the basic structure and literary form of these ancient source-records from which he compiled the book we call "Genesis." But he added various footnotes and directional guides for the sake of his contemporaries, since many of the ancient place-names (e.g. in the history of Abraham) were no longer in use in Moses' day.

- Moses' forty years of exile in Midian had afforded him the excellent opportunity to have become familiar with the lands and languages of the tribes living to the east of Egypt; lands that would so affect the Israelites and their history after the Exodus.

- Furthermore, it seems that Moses greatly edited the texts of his ancestors. Doubtless, the original series of Isaac, for instance, or Esau, would have been much longer than has come down to us in Genesis. Moses retained only what he considered to be fitting and beneficial to his people. This does not mean that the histories that he had before him were necessarily fragmentary, but rather that Moses found little in some of them that he considered to be relevant to the book that he was compiling; the book that we now call "GENESIS."

Notes and References:

1. Yahuda, A.S., "The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian" (Oxford U.P., 1933).

2. Ibid., i.

3. Ibid. On p.ix, Professor Yahuda made the following statement however in favour of the contribution by the established Egyptologists: "I particularly desire to point out that I owe a great part of my knowledge of Egyptian matters to the works of those Egyptologists who have most persistently adopted a sceptical standpoint with regard to a Hebrew-Egyptian relationship. Whilst I unreservedly acknowledge my indebtedness to them, I cannot refrain from expressing some disappointment at the quite incongruous fact, that strong opposition was forthcoming precisely from these Egyptologists, as they ought to have been the first to hail the important results derived from their works. That such an attitude should have been taken up by these scholars, can, I regret to say, only be explained by the fact that the abundant evidence brought forward in my book thoroughly and definitely disproved views which they had maintained with an almost 'Pharaonic' stubborness during the past forty years, affirming again and again that there was very little to be obtained from Egypt and Egyptian for the elucidation of the Old Testament." Yahuda's quote from A. Erman was taken from the latter's "Aegypten und aegyptisches Leben im Altertum" (1885), 6. Erman reaffirmed this view in the revised edition, by H. Ranke (1923), 5. Similarly Dr. Alan H. Gardiner said about the Exodus that "all the story of the Exodus ought to be regarded as no less mythological than the details of creation as recorded in Genesis", and that "at all events our first task must be to attempt to interpret these details on the supposition that they are a legend." "Etudes Champollion" (1922), 205.

4. Plato, "The Republic", Bk. VII (Penguin, 1955). But, as I noted in Part One, Yahuda's work is vitiated to some extent by his adherence to the conventional chronology, which is however not to be regarded as his area of expertise.

5. Mackey, D., "The Pharaoh Who Looted Solomon's Temple," Computer Bible Series 3 (Part Two). Nelson had been struck by the fact that the geography and topography that the Egyptian Annalist was describing in Thutmose III's first campaign, in relation to a city that is conventionally identified with the biblical fortress of Megiddo, just did not reflect the true character of Megiddo's environs at all. See also footnote (6).

6. I. Velikovsky, in his "Ages in Chaos" I (Abacus, 1953), ch. IV, was the first to suggest that Thutmose III was a contemporary of King Solomon, and was to be identified with the biblical Pharaoh "Shishak". D. Courville followed this view in "The Exodus Problem and its Ramifications", Vol. I, Ch. XVI (CA, 1971), without making any significantly new contributions. Dr. E. Danelius, in "Did Thutmose III De-spoil the Temple in Jerusalem?," SIS Review, Vol. II, no.3 (1977/78), 64-79, greatly enhanced Velikovsky's thesis by her identifying the terrain described in the Egyptian Annals as that pertaining to the hilly and extremely narrow Beth-horon pass, leading towards Jerusalem. By actually pin-pointing in Thutmose's account three roads that lead towards Jerusalem, Danelius was able to consolidate Velikovsky's thesis, showing that Thutmose III actually led his army right up to the Temple of Jerusalem.

7. For a brilliant account of the modern-day activities of Procrustes, see G. Ardley's "Aquinas and Kant" (Longmans, Green & Co., 1950), p.21, also ch. X, etc.

8. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that: (1) the founders of the "Documentary Hypothesis," Graf-Wellhausen; (2) the inventor of the "Sothic" Chronology, Eduard Meyer; and, in this present paper, (3) Adolf Erman, were all Germans, and hence would likely have been exposed to the influence of Kant. And since the Germans have the reputation for doing things in a thorough way, 'gruendlich' (lit. "from the ground up"), non-German institutes of higher learning sometimes take over their ideas unquestioningly.

9. For views about the location of Abraham's place of origin, "Ur of the Chaldees", by historians who do not identify it with the famous Ur of Babylonia, see e.g. C. Gordon's "Before the Bible", 287; by the same author, "Abraham and the Merchants of Ura," JNES, 27 (1958); also E. Green's "Abraham's Birthplace," C&AH, Vol. VIII, pt.1 (January, 1986), 79-80; and H. Storck's "Ur of the Chaldees - Once Again," C&AH, Vol. IX, pt.1 (January, 1987), 43-47.

10. Yahuda, op. cit., xxxii.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., xxxiii.

13. Ibid., 4.

14. Ibid., xxxiii.

15. Ibid., xxxv. But not only Egyptian elements; for here Yahuda has noted: "By a careful sifting and sorting of the linguistic peculiarities in many portions of Numbers, and especially of Deuteronomy - which according to indications there given were compiled during the wanderings in the Sinai Peninsula [sic], in the desert, and finally in the Araba, close to the Jordan - we meet with many words and expressions which must have been taken from the peoples and tribes with whom the Israelites came into contact in those areas".

16. More than half a millennium, in fact, by even the most conservative estimate.

17. Yahuda, op. cit., xxix.

18. Ibid., 107.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., xxix.

21. That is not to say that they would not have absorbed any HAM-itic influence at all, since Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had sojourned in the land of the Hamitic Canaanites even before Israel went into Egypt as a nation. But it would be virtually impossible at this stage of our knowledge to determine the extent of such influence.

22. The Egyptian language did not change all that radically, however, between the Old and New Kingdom eras.

23. Yahuda, op. cit., 123.

24. Ibid., 128.

25. Ibid., 192.

26. Ibid., 193.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 204.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 206.

32. Ibid., 20.

33. Ibid., 23.

34. Devaud, E. (ed.), "Les maximes de Ptahhotep d'apres le papyrus Prisse" (Fribourg, 1916), 17.

35. Yahuda, op. cit., 142.

36. Ibid., 7.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 13. Hence Velikovsky (op. cit., 73) was quite wrong in his claim that the "One" referred to in Pharaoh Ahmose's account of his assault on Avaris, the stronghold of the "Hyksos", was not the Pharaoh himself but was the Biblical king, Saul, acting as the Pharaoh's ally. "I followed the king on foot when he rode abroad in his chariot. One besieged the city of Avaris. I showed valor on foot before his majesty .... One fought on the water in the canal of Avaris ..." According to Velikovsky: "The indefinite pronoun would not have been used if the Egyptian king had been at the head of the besieging army". That, however, is a false opinion. The terms "king," "One" and "his majesty" in this inscription all refer to Pharaoh Ahmose. I nonetheless agree with Velikovsky in his view that the defeat of the "Hyksos' was due to operations against them by both the early Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaohs and the Israelites (under Saul & David), and that Egypt and Israel were allies at this time (i.e. the beginning of the New Kingdom of Egypt).

39. Ibid., 13-14.

40. In fact, because of this tendency by Biblical authors of early books, like Genesis and Exodus, not to name the various Pharaohs, some historians have concluded - quite unjustifiably as we now find - that these authors were quite ignorant of the facts pertaining to the histories about which they were writing.

41. Chabas (1865), as referred to by Yahuda, op. cit.,44.

42. Ibid. .

43. Maly, E, in JBC 47:9.

44. Yahuda, op. cit., 17.

45. Ibid., 17-18.

46. Wiseman, P. "Clues to Creation in Genesis" (Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1977), 66.

47. Ibid.

Damien F. Mackey (September, 1996)

Other articles in this series (see CompuServe's "Living History Forum", Ancient/Archaeology library; and also the Bible Study libraries of "Catholics On Line" and "Christian Fellowship"):

1. The Sothic Star Theory of the Egyptian Calendar.
2. Is the Bible Fact or Fiction. A Reply to TIME.
3. Pharaoh Who Looted Solomon's Temple.
4. Queen of Sheba: Hatshepsut.
5. The Toledoths of Genesis.
6. Moses as Compiler of Genesis nd that Egypt and Israel were allies at this time (i.e. the beginning of the New Kingdom of Egypt).

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