Moses the Law-giver
An individual by the name of Moses did exist, and was connected with some type of exodus of enslaved Asiatics from Egypt. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, Semites of all kinds, including the Habiru, must have been more than a little unpopular and it would explain why the otherwise friendly Egyptians suddenly enslaved many or even all of those who remained in the country during the decade 1560 to 1550 BC. (1) Large numbers of these people were forced to work in turquoise mines. These mines were just a short distance from the mountain of Yahweh, Mount Sinai in the southern mountains of the Sinai Peninsula.
These proto-Jews spoke in Canaanite, worshipped Egyptian deities and set up monuments to the gods Osiris, Ptah and Hathor, which does not tie in with the popular image of the noble, enslaved followers of Yahweh yearning to be led to Jerusalem by ‘the god of their fathers’. (2)
Moses led ‘his people’ out of Egypt very close to the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos.
Moses means simply ‘born of’. The name normally required another name fixed to it, such as Thothmoses (born of Thoth). Either Moses himself or some later scribe dropped the name of an Egyptian god in form of his name.
According to the Book of Exodus, the Pharaoh instructed that all Israelite male children were to be thrown into the Nile. This is impossible. Such a barbaric decree would have been totally at odds with the concept of Ma’at held so dear by the Egyptians. Any pharaoh giving this command would be giving up his right to an afterlife when his heart was weighed. It would have been very unpleasant and unhealthy to have thousands of rotting corpses floating about in the population’s only source of water.
According to the Old Testament, Moses’s mother was determined not to let her infant son die, so she placed him in the bulrushes at the edge of the Nile in a basket daubed with pitch where he was found by the pharaoh’s daughter. This birth episode is identical to that of Sargon I, the king who reigned over Babylon and Sumer many hundreds of years before Moses.
The birth story is fiction created in the sixth century BC for the birth of the Jewish nation, the ancient theme of creation emerging from the waters. It was also an excellent way of rationalizing how a general in the Egyptian army and member of the Egyptian royal family came to be the founding father of the Jewish people.
The description of Moses’s mother as a Levite woman was an attempt to put history in an order that suited the story’s later authors. The Book of Exodus has confusion as to whether Moses or Aaron was the main player.
Different authors filled in the gaps.
These authors describe camels as beats of burden and the use of coins at the time of Isaac and Joseph, when in fact neither occurred until much later. Another significant mistake is the description of Abraham avoiding southern Israel as the land of the Philistines, when we now know that they did not arrive until well after the Israelites had come out of Egypt.
Moses was a young Semite general in the army of the last Hyksos king and was driven out of Egypt into the wilderness with the rest of the Asiatic hordes when the Theban monarchy regained control.
To learn the secrets of the Egyptians, Moses must have been involved with a true pharaoh, not a Hyksos impostor.
Acts 7:22
’Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’
As a senior member of the pharaoh’s court, Moses was instructed in the principles of resurrection. For the young Moses this ritual was to acquaint him with the secrets of king-making, the highest expression of power, the mere possession of which was a mark of royalty.
The biblical story of the Exodus clearly demonstrates that the group led by Moses was highly Egyptianised and the worship of Egyptian deities was normal practice. Moses receiving the ten commandments on tablets of stone was absolutely necessary to mark the establishment of a new state. Every king had to be given his ‘royal charter’ from the gods as proof.
These tablets could only have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics as Moses would not have understood any other script. The idea of messages materializing out of marks on stone amazed ordinary people and the scribes who could make ‘stone talk’ were considered to be holders of great magic. The Egyptians called hieroglyphics ‘the Words of the God’, a term that would often be repeated throughout the Bible.
The War God of the Mountains of Sinai
Instead of a noble and great people winning their freedom and finding their ‘promised land’, we read a disturbing catalogue of primitive demonology, betrayal, mass murder, rape, vandalism and grand theft. It was the most disgraceful statement of origin for a new nation imaginable.
The story of Moses starts with a murder. He sees an Egyptian hitting a Habiru and, after looking around to be sure no one was looking, he kills the Egyptian. The crime was witnessed by another Habiru who reported the incident to the Egyptians, so Moses became a wanted man. He went on the run, heading east into the Sinai where he was taken in by the Midianites (also called Kenites) and where he married the king’s daughter, Zipporah.
It was here that Moses was introduced to the god of the Midianite tribes, a god of storms and of war whose symbol was a crucifix-like motif worn on their forehead; it later became known as the ‘Yahweh Mark’.
The first recorded meeting with the God of the Jews and Chr5istians seems strangely cold and threatening. When Moses enquired about His credentials and asked for His name he was being very smart; but it did not work. Moses knew from his Egyptian upbringing that gods were not always superior to humans and if a man could extract the name of the god he would have power over him. If Moses had received the answer to his question regarding the God’s principal name, he would have effectively enslaved the god.
If we take what the Bible says at face value, then the creator figure, whom the Western world calls simply ‘God’, started out as a humble genie living on his wits in the mountains of north-east Africa and south-west Asia.
Fearful for his independence, the Midianite god refused Moses’s question as to his name and tried to establish his own importance by telling Moses to take off his shoes and keep back because he is on holy ground. The Book of Exodus tells us that God’s reply to the question of His name was:
’Ehyeh asher ehyeh.’
Translated as ‘I am who I am’, this carried a stronger import better rendered as ‘Mind your own damned business!’ The names Yahweh or Jehovah were not the god’s name.
According to the Bible story, Moses eventually returned to Egypt to release the bands of assorted Asiatics whom the Egyptians called Habiru from slavery, supposedly using the powers of his new storm jinn/genie/god to bring misery and death to the unfortunate Egyptians. We are told that 600,000 Israelites left for a forty-year journey through the desert. There is no trace of such an event in Egyptian history, and had it been an event on the scale claimed in the Bible there would have been. Had the group been this size they would have represented a quarter of the entire population of Egypt.
Moses then took his people into the Sinai back to the Midianite encampment and then went back up the sacred mountain for a meeting with the god who still lived there. The storm god who lived in a black cloud told Moses that if any of the Israelites or their animals set foot upon the mountain or even touched it, he would kill them by shooting them through or stoning them. The new god then informed his new followers that they were required to worship him or he would take vengeance not only on the individuals concerned but their children, grandchildren and beyond. He went on to demand that the Israelites give him gifts of gold, silver, brass, fine linen, badgers’ skins and shittim wood (acacia) and build an ark completely covered in gold for him to live in. This ark was of classical Egyptian design with two so-called ‘cherubim’ on top, which are a pair of winged sphinxes; that is, winged lions with human heads.
This new god cannot have made too much of an impression upon the majority of the Israelites as they made a golden calf as soon as Moses had climbed up his mountain to talk to Yahweh. This effigy was a representation of the Egyptian god Apis, which greatly upset the new god. He instructed Moses to command his priests to kill as many of these ‘sinners’ as possible and, we are told, three thousand Israelites were slain.
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
The Book of Deuteronomy (Douai version) explains events as God’s chosen people started to threaten the city state of Canaan in parts of chapters 2 and 3:
’And Sehon came out to meet us with all his people to fight at Jasa. And the Lord our God delivered him to us: and we slew him with his sons and all his people.
And we took all his cities at that time, killing the inhabitants of them, men women and children. We left nothing of them.
Except the cattle which came to the share of them that took them: and the spoils of the cities, which we took.
From Aroer, which is upon the bank of the torrent Arnon, a town that is situated in a valley, as far as Galaad. There was not a village or city that escaped our hands: the Lord our God delivered all unto us…
Then we turned and went by way of Basan: and Og the king of Basan came out to meet us with his people to fight in Edrai.
And the Lord said to me: Fear him not: because he is delivered into thy hand, with all his people and his land. And thou shalt do to him as thou hast done to Seehon king of the Amorrhites, that dwelt in Hesebon.
So the Lord our God delivered into our hand Ogalso the king of Basan, and all his people. And we utterly destroyed them:
Wasting all his cities at one time. There was not a town that escaped us: sixty cities, all the country of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Basan.
All the cities were fenced with very high walls, and with gates and bars: besides innumerable towns that had no walls.
And we utterly destroyed them, as we had done to Sehon the king of Hesebon: destroying every city, men and women and children. But the cattle and the spoils of the cities we took for our prey.’
Yahweh reminds his people that he is ever-powerful and ready to fiercely punish those that fail to worship him. Deuteronomy 8:19-20
’But if thou forget the Lord thy God, and follow strange gods, and serve and adore them: behold, now I foretell thee that thou shalt utterly perish.
As the nation, which the Lord destroyed at thy entrance, so shall you also perish, if you be disobedient to the voice of the Lord your God.’
Moses became a murderer in Egypt and spent the rest of his life killing huge numbers of people, both strangers and those who had placed their trust in him. Man continually re-crafts God in his image.
The Timing of the Exodus
Recent archaeological exploration has uncovered evidence of a large number of destroyed towns and cities indicating a late middle Bronze Age timing for the Exodus. Such a dating would put the Exodus somewhere in the hundred years between the Hyksos expulsion and the mid-fifteenth century BC.
It was the training he received in Egypt that gave him the insight and ability to create his own god and establish a new nation in the face of great difficulty. Moses clearly treated his people as simple-minded souls and indeed they must have been compared to their leader who was skilled in all the secrets of the Egyptians.
David and Solomon
The tribes of Israel existed independently for some hundreds of years in a period known as the period of the Judges. These Judges were not judicial or magisterial figures but localized heroes or ‘saviors’.
The idea that the twelve tribes of Israel were all involved in the Exodus is wrong. The tribes of Simeon and Levi had been virtually wiped out and the tribe of Judah was just becoming recognized as being Israelite at all.
The nomadic Habiru tribesmen became the Hebrew nation of Israelites.
The oldest book of the Old Testament is the Song of Deborah. Each judgeship had localized power over one or several tribes and provided little political or economic leadership, with allegiance being voluntary.
All judges were not equal. The warrior Jerubbaal later named Gideon (His original name honored the god Baal, which illustrates that at the time Yahweh was not as entrenched as the later authors of the Old Testament would like us to believe) was offered kingship as an heir to Moses.
Gideon refused the kingship. He founded a religious centre at Ophrah where he made a cult object known as an ‘ephod’ which was a type of ark, suggesting that he possessed another god. Gideon kept an extensive harem and reputedly had seventy sons. His son Abimelech transcended the status of a judge and became king. His temple devoted to Baal has been excavated and found to have been a ‘migdal’ or fortified temple with walls seventeen feet thick, and on each side of the doorway bases for sacred pillars have been found. (3)
This was a generation after the death of Moses and hundreds of years before Solomon’s Temple; yet we have two sacred pillars either side of the doorway in a temple belonging to the first king of the Jews. The meaning of the pillars could only have come from Moses via Gideon to Abimelech. They could have known of no king-making process other than that which Moses learned in Egypt.
The secrets of the royal house and of king-making were kept alive in the line of Gideon’s judges.
Excavations have shown that Shiloh was destroyed in around 1050 BC, witnessed by Samuel, who was an important judge, prophet, priest and king-maker.
The war between the Israelites and the Philistines is recorded in the biblical story of Samson, who was a Nazarite (a holy man). He destroyed three thousand Philistines by physically pulling down both the left- and right-hand pillars, which is a metaphor for undermining their national stability.
It was Samuel who made the Benjamite, Saul, king in a private anointing ceremony. There is, of course, no description of the ceremony. The relationship between Samuel and Saul was that of the twin powers of priest and king, the two pillars of a successful society uniting to produce stability. This relationship quickly came under stress when Saul made a sacrifice at Gilgal without the benefit of Samuel’s ministrations, and when he failed to follow Samuel’s instruction to destroy the harem of the defeated Amalekites, Samuel began to regret his choice.
A new candidate soon emerged, this time from the major tribe of Judah rather than from the smallest tribe of Benjamin. His name was David, and he came from a small town called Bethlehem.
David was a courtier, a soldier and a statesman. The story of the slaying of Goliath is true, but it was not David who killed the giant Gittite – that was done by another man from Bethlehem called Elhanan, (4) the son of Jaareoregim. (5)
The attributing of the event to David was a later attempt to portray David as a simple ;shepherd boy unused to war, but the fact was that he was a great soldier and politician throughout his life.
Saul saw the threat from David and tried to have him removed, but it was Saul who lost his life and Samuel created his second king. It is not widely appreciated that when David was on the run from Saul he served in the armies of the Philistines against the Israelites; a strange qualification for the founder of the greatest line in Israel’s history.
David became king of Israel around 1000 BC. He took Jerusalem and built himself a palace, and moved the tent housing the Ark of the Covenant and the altar to the site of a temple that he proposed to build for Yahweh.
David established a well trained army, largely composed of foreign mercenaries, with which he defeated the Philistines. David then established a peace treated with Hiram, King of Tyre, but the unruly behavior of David and his family soon brought instability.
The event read like a Hollywood epic. David fell for Bathsheba and murdered her husband Uriah. David’s son, the crown prince Amnon, was killed by his brother Absalom after he had raped his own half-sister Tamar, and Absalom tried to take the kingdom from his father by force. After what amounted to civil war, David retained his kingdom and his son Absalom lost his life hanging from the branches of a tree.
All of these distractions prevented David from building the temple. The heir to the throne Adonijah, was crowned king. Before the coronation feast was over, another son by Bathsheba called Solomon was anointed king by Zadok. Solomon’s ceremony was held to be the true one and the new king did away with his brother and his supporters.
Solomon married the pharaoh’s daughter and was given the strategic city of Gezer where he constructed the house of Yahweh. It stood on a hilltop with its porchway facing east. The pillars of that porchway stood to represent the harmony and balance of the united kingdom.
Boaz, the left-hand pillar stood to the south representing the land of Judah and signifying ‘strength’; Jachin stood in the north representing the land of Israel signifying ‘establishment’ and when united by the lintel of Yahweh the two provided ‘stability. This concept was wholly borrowed from the Egyptians. The structure of the Israelite monarchy and theology still had not lost its ancient origins.
Hiram, king of Tyre provided the skilled workforce and most of the raw materials. This was a great expense and Solomon started to run out of money. The population had to endure forced labor, with gangs of ten thousand people being sent for monthly spells in the Lebanon to work for Hiram, king of Tyre. The kingdom was split into twelve regions, with each region responsible for providing taxes to the palace for one month of each year. Tax levels became increasingly high.
Interest in Yahweh was always pretty thin, and other gods were held in higher esteem. Yahweh was no more than the Israelite war god, useful in time of battle but a fairly lowly figure when viewed against the full pantheon of the gods.
So it was with Solomon. Towards the end of his reign Solomon gave himself over to the sole worship of other gods, which caused dissatisfaction with a number of groups, particularly the priests of the Temple at Jerusalem. It was later rationalized that this wickedness of Solomon’s was not punished by Yahweh out of respect for his father David. In short, form the time of Moses right through to Solomon, Yahweh does not seem to have impressed his ‘chosen people’ very much at all.
Solomon’s son Rehoboam continued to demand co-operation. The unity of the two lands fell apart and Israel had no more to do with Judah.
The secrets of the ceremony of initiation through resurrection, and or moral rectitude based on the principles of building a temple, were handed down amongst the royal group.
The two pillars and the associated resurrection ceremony of Seqenenre Tao had been taken to Israel by Moses and become the secret of the Royal House of Israel.
CONCLUSION
The story of the birth of Moses was based on a Sumerian legend and adopted as a way of rationalizing how a senior Egyptian general and member of the Egyptian royal family came to be the father of the Jewish nation. Moses had been privy to the substituted secrets of Seqenenre Tao and he was familiar with the story of the two pillars; he used these secrets to establish a new king-making ritual for his followers. This gave the stateless, cultureless Jews an identity and a secret ritual that was passed onto the line of David.
It was Moses who adopted the Kenite turbulent storm god Yahweh who was identified by the tau symbol, known originally as the ‘Yahweh Mark’. Once he had made contact with his new God, Moses went back to Egypt where he was wanted for murder to lead out a group of Habiru. The journey of the Jews into the land of Canaan is depicted in the Bible as one continuous process of slaughter of the indigenous population.
Once the religion of Yahweh was established, the people of Yahweh, the Israelites, were led by a series of judges, starting with Joshua, the leader famous for the battle of Jericho.
The Prophet Samuel anointed Saul the first king of the Jews but he was eventually succeeded by David in around 1000 BC. It was his son Solomon who built the first Temple in Jerusalem with the two pillars. A pillar in the North representing Judah and a pillar4 in the South representing Israel. The twin pillars stood showing the monarchy still had its Egyptian roots and rituals. Solomon died leaving his country bankrupt.
(1) Werner Keller: The Bible as History
(2) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(3) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(4) 2 Samuel 21:19
(5) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
