"HOLY MOSES" -- WHAT A STORY

This blog entry is the first in a series of entries showing the fictional and mythological origins of common Bible stories and beliefs.

Part 1

Everybody in the Western world, and much of the rest of humanity, is familiar with the story of Moses in the bull rushes. It's a Sunday School favorite. Several other “Bible stories” are also sentimental favorites. They are so ubiquitous that hardly anyone questions their historical authenticity.

The mental picture in people's minds is of a robed Moses sitting in a tent in the middle of the Sinai desert, writing his heart out under some sort of godly inspiration. They have similar pictures of other supposed Bible writers and are absolutely convinced that it all was directly from the mouth of their God.

Surprise!

There has been abundant evidence available for decades that those inspirational little stories and accounts were made up fictions crafted centuries, even millenniums, after the supposed occurrences by imaginative select, edit, rearrange and paste scribes with an agenda. That agenda being the goal of those religious leaders (read: priests) to build a secure place for themselves that would be financed and maintained by the masses they had so carefully tutored and groomed.

They had just returned from several generations of Babylonian captivity (around 600 B.C.) during which they had been exposed to the highly advanced civilization of Babylon, its literature and highly developed religious hierarchies. The Jewish priestly class could now write and publish, possibly for the first time in Israelite history. They were finally equipped to craft a self-serving theocracy and determinedly set about doing so.

The Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, is really a religious novel based on legends and myths, plus an occasional carefully edited and enhanced historical occurrence, that were adopted by the Israelite priesthood and re-crafted to support the doctrine and perspective they wanted people to accept. Included in that approach were the chauvinistic Israelite aspirations that would appeal to the population (the “chosen” people, etc.).

Go to this video presentation for an illuminating rundown and overview that goes hand in hand with my recent post about the “Famn Damily” concerning what actually happened to produce what we call “The Bible”: http://www.anatheist.net/2011/01/a-history-of-god/.

Let's start with that picture of Moses floating in the Nile.

Laurence Gardner reveals some interesting historical facts in his book, The Origin of God.

About 400 years had transpired since the family entourage had gone to Egypt in the days of the drought and famine. This is a period of time about the same as that which separates me from my earliest colonial ancestor in the Lynn, Massachusetts settlement of 1630.

Gardner points out that the Moses story was adapted from a Mesopotamian original, the Legend of Sharru-kin and pertains to Sargon the Great. king of Akkad. The translated account reads: “My changeling mother conceived me; in secret she bare me. She set me in a basket of rushes, and with pitch 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, the drawer of the water.”

During the intervening three hundred plus years, the Israelites had become very much a part of the Egypt of their time. Some of them had become part of the ruling elite – the pharoanic dynasties. Their religious inclinations and beliefs had also achieved some prominence and led to philosophical conflict, probably with ethnic overtones.

I will quote from Gardner: “...the new pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, could not accept the Egyptian deities and their myriad idols....Yaouai, had been acknowledged and promoted as the Aten by his own father, Amenhotep III....(he) progressed and developed the Yaouai concept, even changing his own name from Amenhotep (Amen is pleased) to Akhenaten (Glorious spirit of the Aten)....he closed all the temples of the Egyptian gods and became very unpopular, particularly with the priests of Ra and those of the traditional national deity, Amen.”

There were numerous plots against Akhenaten's life. He was eventually forced to abdicate and his son, Tutankhaten, assumed the throne, soon after changing his name to Tutankhamun to show his allegiance to Amun, rather than to Aten. Akhenaten was banished from Egypt but was still regarded by his supporters as the royal Mose or Moses (“Mose, Mosis or Moses...was a distinctive appellation of an Egyptian royal heir.” – Gardner).

The word, “Moses,” became confused between its Egyptian meaning and the Hebrew word “mosche” which means “the drawer out,” taken from “m-sh-a,” to draw. From this confusion, a lot of spurious mythology has arisen.

A great deal more was going on in ancient Egypt than we are led to believe. The levitical priests and scribes may not have known about it all almost a millennium later when they set to work crafting what has come down to us. Their main concern was the creation of a story line that suited their purposes. To this end, they scoured the mythologies and histories of the nations around them and adapted, rewrote and fictionalized at will to come up with what millions now accept as divinely inspired history.

As I have witnessed politics and religion in action, I long ago decided that the first imperative in arriving at a semblance of truth on any political or religious subject was to determine what the “hidden agenda” might be. Rarely are those agendas featured on the six-o-clock news. Most people never suspect such agendas exist, but they certainly do. They also existed in 600 B.C. and in all the centuries since.

When reading any history, it is advisable to combine one's reading with a sizable grain of the proverbial salt.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE FAMN DAMILY

Herbert Armstrong, as lousy a theologian as he was, got one thing about the scriptures partially right. He maintained that the Hebrew word “Elohim” was a “uni-plural” name for god that meant God was more than one, actually a family of beings.

From there, his understanding and subsequent teaching went way off into left field, and beyond, leading to the assertion that we, if saved and faithful to the end, would join that family – would actually be born as Gods, brothers of Jesus, at the resurrection.

I won't get into the varying teachings of multitudes of sects, philosophies, religious denominations, etc. that sometimes put us humans in the category of already being individuated parts of the universal god spirit. The Mormons expect to be glorified and become supreme gods over multitudes of worlds throughout the universe. I guess that pertains only to this planet as the originating center of everything because that's where they happen to be. I haven't delved into the specifics.

Ancient cultures of Southern Europe and the Middle East all worshiped anthropomorphized gods who were mirrors of human society on an exalted level. All the pantheons revolved around a supreme, randy, philandering divine patriarch with jealous wives, concubines, multitudes of quarreling children jockeying for position, etc.

In the Greek world, Zeus was at the top of the heap and father of the gods, with all the inevitable attendant problems. The Romans had their Jupiter.

The Canaanites and Mesopotamians had their own little god-family setup. Into this world was born a guy we know as Abraham.

In that world, there was a father of the local gods known as El Elyon, God Most High. One of his sons was Yahweh who became over time the specific god of the Israelites. Others of his sons and daughters became the exalted gods and goddesses of other tribes and localities. There was Ashtoreth, his wife, also called Asherah, Ishtar, Ninlil and Elath, Baal, his senior son, and Anath, his daughter.

They were known collectively as Elohim, the divine family of El or El Elyon.

The names given these gods varied throughout the Near East. El was Ilu Kergal to the sumerians. Baal was known as Hadad in Phoenicia and Nergal in Mesopotamia. Anath was Inana to the Sumerians and Astarte to the Phoenicians.

According to I Kings 11:5, Solomon worshiped Ashtoreth and that worship continued in Judea until the Babylonian captivity.

The Israelites did not consider Yahweh the only god any more than their neighbors did. That is why the commandment against worshiping other gods specifically stated that they should have no other gods “before” Yahweh because he was jealous of his position as their specific god. It took centuries of development before those other gods got shoved out of the way, sublimated and incorporated into just one deity that is worshiped to this very day as the one and only god. These gods were considered real and a competitive threat.

Scholars like Laurence Gardner, Chris Rolston, Mark Smith, Frank Cross and others tell us that the early picture given for Yahweh is that of a Near Eastern tribal deity. Those facts have been covered up and forgotten as that tribal deity evolved over time along with Israelite chauvinistic aspirations. Soon he became the only true god, the others being marginalized and finally, totally ignored by followers of Judaism and Christianity.

The Hebrew scriptures as we know them today weren't written by Moses or any of the other “heroes” they portray. They evolved slowly over centuries and began taking shape only after the Babylonian captivity during which the Jews became more highly educated and had access to the historical records and myths their “hosts” and scholarly neighbors had meticulously preserved. There was no organized Jewish book for centuries; just separate scrolls, revered in some places, questioned in others and constantly revised and edited to correspond to currently held opinions and doctrine, and, of course, the interests of the temple priesthood.

Laurence Gardner in The Origin of God makes this revealing statement about Genesis: “...there is little discrepancy between the manner of his biblical representation and those of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Canaanite tablets from which the Genesis portrayal derived....but there is much information in the source records which the Bible writers preferred to leave unstated....God's image becomes increasingly a matter of retrospective scribal interpretation.” In other words, there was “scribal spin.”

Gardner's book is currently available through bookstores and Amazon. It is thorough and scholarly but is easy to read and understand. Likewise, The Early History of God by Mark S. Smith.

These facts have been known to scholars for generations. Recent archaeological discoveries have added immense new knowledge which makes it plain that the common conceptions about the origin of the “god” people confidently worship are totally erroneous.

The Pentateuch, and much of the rest of the Old Testament, is basically a legendary fiction crafted in the centuries following the Babylonian captivity largely from sources the Israelites obtained from their more advanced captors and neighbors. It is based on fables and myths that circulated freely from nation to nation and tribe to tribe and were preserved in the libraries and archives of the more advanced peoples and the chauvinistic motives of the priests and scribes involved.

For quick and interesting info on the multiple gods theme, go to You Tube and look up videos by the backyard professor.  For another good rundown on how this evolution took place, here is another great You Tube video:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3