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Israel, and the Bible
After a period of 100 thousand years of steady cooling down, the temperature of earth begins to rise.
There is a theory called the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which contends that an extraterrestrial object exploded over North America around 11 thousand years ago, initiating the Younger Dryas cold event, the extinction of many North American mega-fauna, and the demise of the Clovis archaeological culture.
The warmer and wetter climate in the Southern Hemisphere helped human migration into South America. At the same time the populations of the European Northern Hemisphere were forced into southern migrations.
Around the same time, about 10 thousand years ago, there was also rapid warming, populations increased, and a property of evolution we call civilization emerged. Around 6000 to 5000 BC, the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations began to develop.
Migration and trade between northern European tribes along eastern trade routes will stimulate interactions with the settled populations of Mesopotamia. As trade increases, northern traders will begin to threaten the wealthy established southern civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Carthage. About 2500 years ago, barbarians from the north began to conquer and absorb these civilizations.
Perhaps these migrations came with different mindsets. Living in a harsh northern climate, with a different diet, may have made these people tougher and more serious adversaries. Cold weather does have a culling effect on the weak. In addition, unlike the cake eaters of the south, the northern Europeans would have had a diet consisting of more meat. Not only would the additional protein make for larger people, but it also helps in brain development.
In my lifetime archaeologists uncovered Göbekli Tepe. This is a Neolithic site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, which existed between 9500 and 8000 BCE. This predates most Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization and indicates to me that these northern hunter gatherers were not as barbarian as we may think.
I consider Macedonia, Assyria, and Greece as cultures that are strongly influenced by northern tribes. From about 2500 BC till the final conquest of the southern civilizations by Alexander the Great in 320 B.C., we see a steady attack on southern civilizations by northern Europeans.
These northern tribes would confederate and influence Mediterranean civilizations. Possibly as soldiers with the sea peoples which plunder Egypt, as well as the Greek/Macedonians that will ultimately conquer Babylon and Egypt.
Adam and Eve
Before the wars of northern aggression began, the civilizations of Babylon and Egypt had become the great civilizations we know today. Between Babylon and Egypt we see the struggle of Cain and Abel, an ongoing account of one killing the other, with Israel in the middle. In fact, all history has been made of one civilization trying to kill the other.
The influence Egyptians had on the Israelites, must have been significant. With the exception of Moses’ account of an Exodus, the Merneptah Stele, as well as the Bible tell us that these two people lived in relative peace for thousands of years. With no mountains to separate them, no walls, we see no fortifications built between these two peoples.
If you look at this in terms of human dynamics, you will see the resources of the Nile River and its civilization as a prize to be taken. Any band of tough guys would have seen the advantage of taking from Egypt all they could. We also know that the Egyptians were powerful and clever, they were more than capable of conceiving ways to protect themselves.
The story of Adam and Eve, and the history of Abraham is told by Moses to the Israelites. In this historical account of the Jews, we come to a time when the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Moses is planning to have them escape from the richest land in the world, to be relocated to exactly where all enemies of Egypt will need to come through to take the Nile River valley and its resources. But, before this can happen, a back story is given called Genesis.
The creation story of the Israelites is very similar to the Egyptian creation story. In the Egyptian story, God comes from chaos and creates the earth, the sky, the night and the animals. The Egyptian story has Osiris and Isis instead of Adam and Eve… Osiris is killed by his brother Set. Whereas the biblical creation account has Cain killing his brother Abel. In addition, Cain the bad son heads to the East.
This would work nicely if you wanted to have these people distrust anyone coming from the east, for they are the sons of Cain. Especially effective if all your enemies are from the east, like the Babylonians and Assyrians.
The Egyptian belief is that the first population of earth are Gods, but in Genesis they are humans. In the Egyptian story God created the heavens and the earth, but heaven and earth are understood as Gods. In one Egyptian myth, humans are believed to have been created by the gods to serve them and to maintain order (maat) in the world. Humans were seen as a crucial part of the divine plan and were expected to fulfill their roles by living virtuous lives and upholding maat.
In the biblical account, God created the heavens, the earth, and man and woman in his image. Then on the seventh day it is done. But wait, he actually is not done, he has forgotten something, as an afterthought a working class is created for, he forgot there was no one to do the work.
“And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground” Genesis 2:5
God now creates Adam and Eve to till the earth and work the garden. I would suppose Adam and Eve are made to serve the Man and Woman earlier created in God’s image during the first seven days of creation. Obviously if you are made in God’s image you don’t till the earth, that’s what slaves are for.
The parallels between the Egyptian religion and the Old Testament are quite numerous, to the extent of archaeologists finding Biblical verses in Egyptian literature such as the Instruction of Amenemope.
The principal takeaway from these stories, is that they are stories. In the Biblical Genesis we see not only a similarity with the Egyptian creation account, but the footings for a story that will establish a distinction between a slave class and free people. This story will also create and instruct a Jewish people to be warriors.
The Floods
The Ice Ages began 2.4 million years ago and lasted until 11,500 years ago. The world would warm up, and if our concept of God is the Alpha and Omega, then climate is an act of God and for this account, this is when God created man. Current evidence suggests that modern Homo sapiens appeared in Africa around 190,000 B.C.E., so we were around far before 11,000 years ago, but we began to act like the humans we know today around 11,000 years ago.
As ice began to melt, the seas and rivers would swell, and great floods would come. It would stand to reason that as most people lived along the rivers and seas, catastrophic floods would have been an increasing problem for them.
The peoples of the northern lands would have found their lands more plentiful. With shorter winters and longer growing seasons, populations would grow in these northern regions and they will do what all humans do, breed, overpopulate, and migrate.
As harsh conditions change into the relatively warm and calm forests we now know of Europe and Western Asia, populations develop into new civilizations, and begin to trade with the northern outskirts of the established Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations.
An emergent property of life is civilization, and this was starting to emerge 6000 years before Christ, and its character was shaped by floods and migrations. Current archaeological finds may indicate that religion, and civilization began not in Egypt, but in Macedonia and Turkey. Exactly in the region where the northern migrations and trade routes intersect with the southern middle eastern people.
Hunter gatherers move with herds of animals, and migration expands cultural experience. In a sense the sons of Cain who left Eden, in Africa, 100,000 years earlier, would travel the earth and eventually return.
A journey of thousands of years was now in this man’s collective memory. These people are coming out of the woods, their theology is evolving from animal Gods, to conceptual Gods of the human condition.
Some would come to believe that there was something internal that connected us to God, a living God that spoke to us. A single living God responsible for suffering, love, wisdom and all human aspects. One God separate from the Pleroma, not to be understood but to be obeyed, maybe this is the God that speaks to Abraham. It is remarkable that some people still have an issue with evolution, we evolve, even in how we understand our God.
As we evolved, some prophets will declare there is but one God. In Babylon, the Gods of Babylon are rejected by Abraham in favor of YHWH “ (translated as “I AM THAT I AM” in English). In Egypt Akhenaten declares the Sun God Aten to be above all else. This is also seen in the evolving concept behind the Persian/Assyrian Zoroastrians, and their God Ahura Mazda.
Mount Ararat is where Noah is said to have landed the Ark, and is located in Eastern Anatolia, a region of modern Turkey. The people that lived near Mount Ararat were the Assyrians and will later be called Persians. They will in time become believers of the one God Ahura Mazda (Ahura — lord, Mazda- wisdom), and their prophet is Zarathustra. The Assyrians are from the same region of the Hyksos, who will later become the Israelites.
Abraham comes from the city of Ur, in Babylon, and will become the patriarch of the Hebrew people. Abraham will travel from Ur, through the lands of the Assyrian people on his way to Egypt, and from Egypt his people will create the nation of Israel.
The Bible will tell us Abraham lived in the tenth generation after the flood. The family of Abraham go through a journey from Babylon through the lands of the Hurrians, Hyskos, and Mitanni and then south/west to Egypt where this story began. The Hurrians, from Mitanni are the sons of Noah, as Abraham who has a God known as YHWH. The lands of Mitanni from where the tribes of Abraham have come to Egypt from are Zoroastrians and have one God they name Ahura Mazda.
In Egypt the sons of Abraham will meet the illusionists and masters of the Kingdom of Egypt. The line of wise men known as the Pharaohs now come face to face with their past, those that had gone east of Eden have returned. The religion of Abraham, intersects with the religion of the Egyptians. The sons of Abraham who have a covenant with God, one God above all others, will come to eventually teach the great Egyptians.
The character of civilization is built on migrations, people exchange concepts and technologies, and this changes the nature of culture.
Exodus
Archaeologists tell us that around 3500 years ago (circa 1650–1550 BCE) Semitic people from the lands east of Egypt settled in the lands of the Nile Delta. These people are generally believed to be called the Hyksos, a people which may have originated from a variety of regions, including the Near East, Canaan, and Mitanni. The Mitanni kingdom, was located in northern Mesopotamia what is now Syria, it was a powerful state during the second millennium BCE and had close ties with Egypt through trade and diplomacy. I would suggest since Mitanni had close relations with Egypt at this time in history, the tribe of Abraham, a confederation of mercenaries, would be the ideal source for these people, The Old Testament does tell us that Abraham and his men traveled from Ur in Babylon, then through Mitanni and Canaan prior to entering Egypt.
Ancient Egyptian texts, such as the Execration Texts and the Amarna Letters, mention the presence of foreign populations in the Nile Delta region. The Egyptians call these people the Hyksos, or “the foreign rulers,” and were defeated and expelled from Egypt in the 18th Dynasty by the Pharaoh Ahmose. The “Storm or Tempest Stela,” is a monument erected by Ahmose at the Temple of Karnak, it describes a great storm that destroyed the Hyksos army as they attempted to flee Egypt, which Ahmose interpreted as a sign of divine favor. The Egyptian historian Manetho, who wrote in the 3rd century BCE. tells us that the Hyksos or Shepherd kings invaded Egypt from the east, overrunning the land, burning the cities and destroying their temples, and recounts how the Hyksos were eventually expelled from Egypt by the pharaohs of the New Kingdom.
Then there is the account of the Jewish first century historian Josephus, of which the Jewish Virtual Library says:
Josephus identified the Hyksos as the patriarchal Jews, equating their appearance in Egypt with the Joseph story in Genesis and their subsequent expulsion with the biblical tale of Exodus.
I think we can safely say the Egyptians did remove these people from Egypt, but history cannot clearly say where they went.
The Hyksos had infected the land of the Pharaohs with foreign beliefs, such that one of its Pharaohs, Amenhotep IV (1351–1334 BC), tries to convert the Egyptian religion and all its Priests to the belief in one God, Amun — Aten — Ra , the solar deity.
There are no other archaeological or historical events that parallel the biblical events of the people of Abraham and the Exodus like this one. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell both believed that the reign of Amenhotep IV, was the most likely time for the Exodus story.
Remember these Egyptian Pharaohs are the greatest of all masters, they have for thousands of years perfected the control of how reality is perceived by their slaves. As today, in the world of ancient Egypt, reality, religion, and history is invented for the working slave class through propaganda, for the benefit of the Priests and Pharaohs.
Keep in mind that in these times, the ruling class believed they were Gods, only a select few could read, and most all people were slaves.
Is the following story a possibility?
The Pharaoh hires a fella called “Moses” to remove the Hyksos from his land and most cleverly places them back to where they came from, next to Egypt and in Canaan. To do this he will give them a new and extraordinary reality. These people, these mercenaries who believe in one God, the sons of Abraham, they that have infected the land of the Pharaohs, will be given a makeover of biblical proportions.
Thousands are sent into the desert, led by Moses and his priests. For 40 years they are forced to wander in this desert. They walk in circles and starve. A most remarkable form of brainwashing and mind control will occur, mass Stockholm syndrome for a new nation. A generation passes, and a new history complete with laws and commandments is given to them to be believed. They are then resettled at the very border of Egypt, to be governed by Kings they believe to be their own and told that they have been given this land by God. They will protect this land unlike any slave, for they believe they are free, and have been divinely given this land. The truth will be kept from them, and they will fight all invaders that come for the rich lands of the Nile, of Egypt.
A short side note: Why didn’t anyone ask… “why did the Pharaoh not go get his slaves back?” They could have said at some point in the hundreds of years, “We can’t let Moses get away with that! Let’s go get the slaves we lost so many years ago!”
There should be some sort of sentiment there, a few wars at least, but nothing, no problems. Plus, there is no sea between Egypt and Israel. You can walk there, in fact it is a walk on the beach, you can go barefoot if you like.
None the less the Israelites do a lot of fighting, just not against the Egyptians. The Old Testament is a war history of these people.
The biggest question I had was: Why have the children and people of our Western Civilization been told this story as fact ever since a Roman Emperor and Caesar decided to do so in 325 BC?