FOR MY MOTHER
Who Believes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Walter Mattfield of BIBLE ORIGENS
for his invaluable assistance. His many years of research,
and more importantly his willingness to share the fruits of
his labor with me, drastically reduced the amount of time I would
otherwise have had to commit to this project. On many occasions
Walter supplied me with information, pointed me in the right direction
for additional resources or saved me from stumbling along unprofitable paths.
Many other scholars, amateur and professional alike, have contributed to the creation of this book. Whenever appropriate, I credit them in the notes. Of course, as the author I am solely responsible for the book’s contents and no views expressed herein were espoused by the scholars who so generously devoted their wealth of knowledge to its completion.
PREFACE
People have long speculated on the date of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, the nature of the Burning Bush of Moses, the mysterious god Yahweh and his angel, and on the founding of the first tent shrine at Mount Sinai. Perhaps even more effort has gone into attempts to identify Moses with attested personages of the time. And this is to be expected, given the fact that these events form the foundation of a religion held dear by much of the world. But to date, all that surrounds Moses and his experiences and actions is still a mystery – and some would doubtless prefer that it remain such.
As an inheritor of the Judaic-Christian traditions of the West, I’d long harbored a “closet” interest things Biblical. In childhood, I was impressed with the miraculous qualities of the Old Testament stories. While I was inculcated in my society’s belief to some extent, I was also permitted total freedom of thought and, once I had achieved a sufficient level of maturity, was allowed to form my own opinions of religious beliefs. It is true that many emphasize how vital it is to question one’s faith, yet I have never personally encountered those who practice what they preach in this regard. I have found that universally any genuine manifestation of doubt, or any focused, objective scrutiny of belief systems, are either directly or indirectly discouraged. If discouragement is not a sufficient deterrent, sanction or exclusion usually has the desired effect. The only truth a certain religion binds itself to is that which serves to perpetuate itself. Other truths, unless they can be made to eventually lead the wayward back to the flock, are not entertained in any substantive way.
After many years of pondering these matters, and often coming to grips with their ramifications, I decided it was time to apply myself to a speculative analysis of some of the central episodes of the Book of Exodus. I realized, after thoroughly reacquainting myself with the material, doing an enormous amount of research on secondary sources and contemporary texts deemed respectable by the academic community and, after much thought, having come up with a revolutionary theory, that I might have something important and exciting to say on the subject. Although this theory ran counter to everything that had gone before, it has been arrived at, ironically, by respecting the Biblical account. I had not found it necessary to rely on late, corrupt, confused, suspect retellings by “authorities” such as those by Manetho. Nor have I had to resort to “revised” chronologies, some of which temporally displace the Exodus by hundreds of years in order to make it coincide with the much earlier expulsion of the Hyksos or Foreign Kings from Egypt.
At the same time, I appreciate more than others have the profound impact Egyptian society and, more particularly, Egyptian religion, must have had on the Hebrews during centuries of residence in the land of Pharaoh. I find it a ridiculous notion that after such a long period of time assimilating to Egyptian ways, to being in a very real sense “Egyptianized”, that the Hebrews did not engage in a fair degree of religious syncretization. Standard practice for the Egyptians was to identify various gods and goddesses with each other, or even aspects of gods and goddesses with each other, and to embrace the worship of foreign deities in a similar process. Any investigation of the religion that Moses founded must acknowledge the obvious: his people had long been subjected to the seductive power of Egyptian beliefs and rituals, and even in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula the Egyptian gods and goddesses held sway.
As for my method of argument in the following pages, language and archaeology will be my twin guides. A unique comparative approach to will seek to reveal conclusive relationships between Hebrew and Egyptian words. The findings suggested by these relationships will then be considered in the context of the only two sites in the Sinai which could possibly have been Mount Horeb/Sinai. This blending of tongues and exploration of ancient ruins will help us find a verifiable candidate for Moses himself.
My apology is offered in advance to individuals who are offended by the ideas contained in this little book, as well as to institutions that ordinarily interpret as objectionable any intellectual treatment of the supposed Word of God. I am also well aware that even skeptics of Biblical veracity may resent what I have set out to do, either because they disagree on my “angle of attack” or because they already have developed or adopted their own pet theories which run counter to my own.
Many will doubtless question my motives for committing the worse possible act of hubris: daring to peer under the veil of the holiest of mysteries, to see if I can glean but a fraction of a glance at what is either the ultimate reality or what is ultimately real. To this charge I can only respond with full honesty and, I hope, a measure of modesty: I do not believe it is the purpose of our life to believe. I believe it is the purpose of our life to find out what it is we should not believe. Only by doing that, through an endless process of eliminating ignorance and the false beliefs ignorance engenders – a process which might loosely and somewhat philosophically be defined as “scientific” - can we ever discover real and abiding truths.
Daniel Harnam
September 2007
THE DATE OF THE EXODUS
Exodus 12:40-41 tells us the prior to the Hebrew departure from Egypt under Moses, they had been in the land for 430 years. 1 Kings 6:1 claims the right number is 480 years, while the Septuagint says 440. In Exodus 1:11, we learn that the Hebrews had been set to work building Pi-Ramesses (modern Qantir) and Pithom (Tell er-Retabeh or Tell el-Maskhutah). Finally, when the Exodus actually occurs, the Hebrews cannot take the Egyptian Way of Horus along the coast to Canaan because of the presence there of the Philistines (13:17).
These fairly precise dating markers allow us to pinpoint the events of the Exodus account. It is well known, firstly, that the builders of Pi-Ramesses and Pithom were Seti I and Ramesses II the Great. Thus the pharaoh who is reigning at the time of Mose’s birth could be none other than the 19th Dynasty’s Ramesses II (1304-1237 B.C.; Donald Redford), for whom Pi-Ramesses was named.
However, given that the Hebrews cannot go along the coast when they leave Egypt because of the presence of the Philistines there, we know that this could not have happened any earlier than the reign of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty. This is because the Philistines had not settled in Canaan until the reign of Ramesses III. This pharaoh was also long-lived – in fact, by far the longest lived ruler of Egypt since the days of Ramesses II: 32 years. Six pharaohs intervened between the reigns of Ramesses II and Ramesses III, their combined reigns totaling approximately 37 years.
When Moses is a young man, he murders an Egyptian overseer (2:12) and has to flee to Midian. His sojourn in Midian, during which he marries a Midianite woman and has children, lasts for “a long time” (2:23), after which the pharaoh dies. This extra-long reign strongly suggests Ramesses II again, as he was on the throne for 67 years. However, as we have seen above, Ramesses III also had a very long reign, and it was in his reign that the Philistines settled in Canaan. Ramesses III not only used Pi-Ramesses as a royal residence, but is thought to have built a larger stables for the city atop those belonging to Ramesses II. If this is true, then Ramesses III could have been confused with the original builder of Pi-Ramesses.
I have culled the following from Ian Shaw’s account of the reign of Ramesses III in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt:
1) The Sea Peoples first tried to enter Egypt in the days of Merneptah (the successor of Ramesses II; they did it again in the reign of Ramesses III
2) Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu was closely modeled on the Ramesseum of Ramesses II
3) Ramesses III tried to emulate Ramesses II in many other ways; his own royal names were all but identical to those of Ramesses II and he even named his sons after the lattrer’s numerous offspring
4) Ramesses III expanded Piramesses; the Harem Conspiracy, the goal of which was to assassinate Ramesses III, was apparently hatched at Piramesses
It is fairly obvious based upon the above that Biblical commentators who opt for Ramesses II as the pharaoh of Moses’ birth and early years are simply wrong.
Indeed, if we calculate 430 years from Jacob’s arrival in Egypt (= the Hyksos king Jakobher, whom Redford puts at 1662-1653), we find ourselves at 1223, during the reign of Ramesses II. If we opt for the 480 year span, we arrive at 1173, which falls in the reign of Ramesses III.
Of course, if Moses’s life spanned the period from Ramesses II to that of Ramesses III, we would have another reason for a possible confusion of these two pharaohs. In Part Three of this book, we will see that our historical candidate for Moses lived from the reign of one of these kings to the reign of the other.
As it happens, Ramesses IV had a very short reign of only 6 years. His son, Ramesses V, was on the throne for only 4 years before he perished in a smallpox epidemic. Ramesses VI (156-1149 B.C.) is the pharaoh under whom the Egyptian presence in Sinai was withdrawn. Putting this all together, if we allow for Ramesses III being the pharaoh Moses originally flees from for killing the Egyptian overseer, and make his successor Ramesses the IV the pharaoh of the Exodus, with his son Ramesses V being the firstborn of pharaoh whom Yahweh slew in the plague (29:1), we have a startlingly coherent and accurate chronology for the Exodus. Granted, in reality Ramesses V actually ruled for a few years after his father; he did not pre-decease Ramesses IV. But such a telescoping of events is not unusual in traditional history and I think that in this context the slight discrepancy must be allowed.
I would add that if we use the 480 year calculation and apply the start date of this period not to Jakobher/Jacob, but to his son, Joseph, of the next generation of Hebrews in Egypt, the tally might well come out matching exactly the reign of either Ramesses IV or V.
The proponents of a revised chronology which runs counter to the Exodus marker dates and supports the notion of the Exodus being a Hebrew version of the Hyksos expulsion several centuries prior to the time of Ramesses III does not take into account the fact that we are specifically told by trustworthy Egyptian accounts that the Hyksos did not drop down into the Sinai. Instead, once they were expelled from Avaris (Tell ed-Dab’a) in the Delta, they were defeated again at the Sinai border fortress of Tjaru (Tell Heboua, the “Northeastern Gate” of Egypt; Mohammed Abd El-Maksoud, Director of the Eastern Delta and Sinai, Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt), and then were driven north after a successful three-year siege at Sharuhen (possibly Tell Haroer in the Negev, rather than Tell el-Ajjul on the coast; Donald Redford). Such a scenario cannot be reconciled with Moses leading the Hebrews into the southern Sinai.
It is true that the 18th Dynasty founder Ahmose I, the Egyptian pharaoh responsible for driving out the Hyksos, re-opened the Sinai to Egyptian control. Ahmose re-established the mines and Hathor-Sopdu temples at Serabit el-Khadim, while the Timna mines and Hathor temple did not become established until the time of Ramesses II (or perhaps the co-regency of Ramesses II and his father, Seti I). Serabit el-Khadim remained in operation until Ramesses VI’s withdrawal from the Sinai. We have evidence of his presence there. Timna does not show evidence for Ramesses VI; the record there stops with Ramesses V.
We will have reason to return to a more detailed discussion of both Serabit el-Khadim and Timna when we search for Mount Sinai/Horeb in Part Two.
YAHWEH AND HIS ANGEL
Now that we have established to what period in Egyptian history Moses belongs, and have come up with an approximate date for the Exodus, i.e. sometime during the reigns of Ramesses IV or V, we can begin to examine the Hebrew god Yahweh in the context of Egyptian religion.
Our first step in performing this task is to briefly go over the meaning of Yahweh’s name, as this is currently accepted by most modern scholars. The best explanation of the name Yahweh is still held to be that propounded by Professor Frank M. Cross in his book _Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic_: YHWH is a shortening of the phrase ‘il zu Yahweh s.aba’t or “El/God who creates the hosts (of heaven)”. Here Yahweh is a causative of the verb h-w-y, “to be” (Professor John Huehnergard, Harvard University).
I concur with this theory. Yahweh is most certainly to be derived from the Hebrew verb hayah or hawah, “to be or become”. The ancient Hebrew god is, therefore, the “He Who Comes Into Being” or, simply, “He Who Becomes”/”The Becoming One”. Indeed, it has been expressed that the idea is not that of being or of existing, but of coming to pass.
It is not at all certain, however, that it really is Yahweh in the Burning Bush. To quote the relevant passage from Exodus 3:2 and 3:4:
“There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush… When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush…”
Now, theologians have attempted to account for the ‘angel’ by assuming this was merely the physical manifestation of God. In other words, when God chose to reveal himself to men, he took on the appearance of the ‘angel’.
I think this is wrong. The Hebrew word used in this context for ‘angel’ is mal’ak. It derives from an unused root meaning “to dispatch as a deputy”. The meaning is actually “messenger”. Now, in Egyptian religion, the moon god Thoth (DHw.t.y, probably pronounced something like ‘Djehuti’) had the common epithet of isti ra, “the deputy/substitute/representative of [the sun god] Re”. According to Boylan’s _Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt_, this epithet refers to the idea that the moon takes the place of the sun at night, but its light is merely a reflection of that of the sun. A late epithet of Thoth is wpwty, “messenger”, a designation which may have come about because of Thoth’s identification with Hermes. From very early on, Thoth was a kind of agent of Re, being the latter’s chief scribe/minister (Aayko K. Eymo).
The etymology of the name Thoth is unknown. Current opinion holds to the notion that DHw.t.y may stand for “He of DHw.t”. The problem with this theory is that no such place as DHw.t is recorded in the Egyptian sources.
In an effort to come up with a better derivation for Thoth’s name, attention was recently drawn to an Egyptian baboon deity named DjehDjeh (DHDH). The repetition that is obvious in Djeh-Djeh caused me to consider the possibility that the name could be imitative in origin. So I wrote to two world experts on baboon and asked whether there's a vocalization among the Hamadrayas baboons which could have been represented or "mimicked" by 'Djeh! - Djeh!'. In response, Dr. Dorothy Cheney pointed me at her web site page with baboon vocalizations:
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~seyfarth/Baboon%20research/vocalizations.htm<about:blank
After paying very close attention to various kinds of barks, I concluded that the two-phase calls of baboons could easily have been rendered by 'Djeh-Djeh'.
Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin claimed that DH-DH tied in with Cushitic gwa-gwa / gaw-gaw, "(large) monkey", but he admits that the data are too scarce and unreliable to really postulate an Afroasiatic word. It seems clear to me that the Cushitic word
is likewise a sound mimicking word, and then to go apply Afroasiatic sound shifts to it would be very dubious.
To go a step further, I wonder whether it is possible that the above mentioned baboon call, of purely imitative origin, could have yielded a hypothetical word/name for the sacred baboon, *DH(w). This occured to me as Hopfner's proposed a hypothetical word *DH(w ) for 'ibis', to explain the problematic name of the god Thoth (DHw.t.y), but to my knowledge his hypothetical word for ibis cannot be backed up with ancient Egyptian or Afroasiatic examples?
According to Thomas Kelly (via the AEgyptian-L mailing list):
“An imitative origin for Djeh-Djeh has merit. Jaromir Malek states, on page 25, in The Cat in Ancient Egypt: ‘There was only one word for cat in pharaonic Egypt which we can find in the hieroglyphic writing. It was the
onomatopoeic miu or mii (feminine miit), imi (feminine imiit or miat) in demotic, the penultimate stage of the Egyptian language, and emu or amu in Coptic, written from c. the third century AD. The cat was simply '(s) he who
mews,' and as we shall see, this was how the Egyptians themselves understood it.’ If the "miu" from a cat became the word for cat then it is possible that the bark from a baboon could become the word for baboon.”
Thoth, according to Gardiner, Peet and Cerny (_The Inscriptions of Sinai, Part II), was the nomen loci or patron deity of Maghara near Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. Both these places were mined by the Egyptians (see below). Thoth is also present in several inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim.
Thoth Baboon at Serabit el-Khadim
Yet if, as I think is likely, the angel of the Lord is the moon god Thoth, how can Yahweh be the sun god Re?
The Egyptians had a marvelous capacity for religious syncretization. One god could be identified with another, and often gods who served very specific functions became mere aspects of a greater god. The syncretized deity we are most interested in when it comes to Yahweh as a possible aspect of Re is Re-Khepri.
Khepri was the god of the rising sun in Egyptian religion, and as such also the god of the resurrected sun who had survived the night in the underworld to be reborn in the morning. Symbolized by a scarab beetle, the name of this god derives from the verb xpr, “come into being”. A related word is xprw, “form, manifestation”, literally ‘that which has come into being’.
Scarab (=Khepri) amulets were found at Timna and Serabit el-Khadim, as were sphinxes (= Horemakhet-Khepri and, of course, the pharaoh as the human incarnation of that syncretized deity). Serabit el-Khadim has two sphinxes representing Thutmose III flanking and adoring Hathor in the form of a sistrum.
Sphinxes Flanking the Goddess Hathor
(Courtesy Walter Mattfield)
Serabit el-Khadim Sphinx
One of the sphinxes at Timna bears the upper portion of a cartouche containing the prenomen ‘User-ma’at-re’ for Ramesses II, III or V. Petrie describes statues of sphinxes flanking the temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim; these were representative of Thutmose III. The god Khepri is mentioned in only one dedication in the Sinai. This occurs at Serabit el-Khadim, where Thutmose III is called the “precious egg of Khepri”.
So if Yahweh is merely a Semitic rendering of the Egyptian divine name Khepri, and the angel of Yahweh is the Egyptian god Thoth, Yahweh himself may not actually be present in the Burning Bush. Thoth may be there alone, speaking not only for Yahweh-Khepri, but as Yahweh-Khepri.
THE BURNING BUSH
All of which leads us back to a careful consideration of the Burning Bush. In Egyptian religion, gods and goddesses are frequently associated with sacred trees and often this association is intended to convey the fact that the trees in question are actual symbols for the divinities, i.e. the god or goddess is the tree. For Khepri, however, I was only able to find two instances in which the god is definitively linked to trees.
In the first, Khepri as scarab beetle is found atop the head of Iusaas, goddess of the sacred acacia located just north of Heliopolis, in the temples of Hibis, Edfu and Dendera (Elisabeth O’Connell, Assistant Keeper, Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, The British Msueum). This goddess, also apparently referred to as Nebet-Hetepet, “Lady of Offerings”, was in the Ptolemaic period assimilated to Hathor, who then took on the title of “Lady of the Acacia”. In the Late Period, a text relates how Seth approached the “wonderful hall of Iusaas with the acacia tree in which life and death are contained (Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, Doctoral Program, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford).” Originally Hathor’s tree was the sycamore, and the sun was said to rise between two sycamore trees in the east every morning. In one of the Pyramid texts, the god Horus is said to emerge from an acacia tree (Khepri was identified with Horus as Horemakhet, Horus in the Horizon, the name given to the Great Sphinx at Giza by Thutmose IV), and the god Osiris (Khepri can be depicted wearing the crown of Osiris) in Late Period monuments and documents is called ‘Unique [or alone] in the acacia tree’. Yet another Pyramid Text gives the Pharaoh Pepi as “the son of Khepri, born from Hetepet, under the tresses of [the goddess] of the town of Iusaas, north of On [Heliopolis]…” Finally, the Coffin Texts speak twice of “the acacia of Iusaas-town north of” Heliopolis (Dr. Martina Ullman). The Book of the Dead says of Osiris that “I betook myself to the Acacia Tree of the [divine] Children”.
There is no doubt, then, that Khepri is brought into intimate connection with the acacia tree. Unfortunately, his appearing atop the head of the goddess Iusaas as a iconographical motif is found only in the Late or Ptolemaic periods (Dr. Martina Ullmann). In addition, the acacia is called shittim in the Bible, as was the wood used to build Yahweh’s ark (more on which I will have in Part 4 below). Thus the seneh or “thorn bush” that is the Burning Bush cannot have been an acacia.
The second tree from Egyptian religion which can be shown to have a connection with Khepri also has an affiliation with Thoth, the angel of Yahweh-Khepri. This is the so-called Desert Date, Balanites aegyptica, known to the ancient Egyptians as the ished tree.
On the southern wall of the tomb of the Ramesses II period official Amenmose (TT 373) is a representation of the Egyptian ished tree, which is said to be the tree of the eastern horizon from which the sun rises (Pierre Koemoth and Sydney H. Aufrere). In front of the ished tree is the god Osiris in his capacity of wp iSd, “opener of the ished tree”. Osiris had to open the ished so that the sun could escape from the underworld – in its guise as Khepri – and ascend into the morning sky. We can plainly perceive Khepri as a winged scarab beetle flying towards/into the ished, which Osiris is “opening” for him.
A more startling example of Khepri with the ished is shown on a wall relief at the Temple of Hibis. Here we can see Khepri crowning the ished tree, while Thoth, the “Angel of Yahweh/Khepri”, is writing on the leaves of the tree.
Thoth is known to have written the name of Ramesses II on the leaves of the ished tree at Heliopolis. The moon god performs the same function on ished tree scenes involving Seti I and Ramesses II at Karnak. According to Donald Redford, the ished tree motif first appears in during the 12th Dynasty. So we can make the irrefutable claim that both Khepri and Thoth were placed in close connection with Balanites aegyptica by the ancient Egyptians.
Having thus determined that there is justification for linking both Khepri (= Yahweh) and Thoth (= the angel of Khepri-Re) with the Desert Date or Balanite Tree, we need to take a closer look at the Biblical Burning Bush.
The Hebrew word used to name the Burning Bush is cenah, pronounced seneh. This is from an unused root meaning “to prick”. As such, it is usually described as a “thorn bush”. The Balanite or ished tree of Thoth and Khepri has thorns.
While there is no indication the ished tree was conceived of by the ancient Egyptians as a symbol for a goddess, we must remember that Hathor, the chief deity of both the Serabit el-Khadim and Timna temples in the Sinai Peninsula, was called “Lady of the Sycamore (Fig)”. In Egyptian belief, the sun rose between two “Sycamores of Turquoise”. Another epithet of Hathor was “Lady of the Turquoise”. Isis and the sky goddess Nut could also appear as sycamore trees.
Walter Mattfield, basing his conclusions on the findings of several respectable Egyptologists, has convincingly argued for the Golden Calf of the Moses story being the Egyptian sun-calf who is depicted rising between Hathor’s sycamore trees. The sun-calf was also said to be born each morning from Nut the “Heavenly Cow”. So Moses’ injunction against worshipping the Golden Calf was directed at the god Ihy, son of Hathor, who could take the form of a calf. For the Egyptians, even the pharaoh, as the human incarnation of the sun god, could take the form of a golden calf. The Hebrews who were worshipping the Golden Calf as the rising sun were merely worshipping Khepri under another guise.
It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to see in the ished tree of the eastern horizon yet another representation of the sky goddess. Yahweh/Khepri and the Angel of Yahweh/Thoth are “in” the Burning Bush precisely because they are in the sky. The various rock carvings in the Sinai of the seven-branched menorah are themselves, of course, images of the sky-tree, in whose branches burn the flames of the seven planets.
Having established, then, that the “Burning Bush” was in all likelihood the Egyptian ished or Balanite Tree, where is the Biblical Mountain of God cited as the location of the Burning Bush? It is to this question that we next turn our attention.
MOUNT HOREB/SINAI
Often one will find the name Sinai derived falsely from the name of the Babylonian moon god, Sin or Suen. This has been shown by numerous authorities to be indefensible both philologically and phonologically. However, the Hebrew definition for Sinai (Ciynay) is “thorny”, from a Proto-Semitic *sinn. There is a Western Chadic word c*in-, meaning ‘sharp point, tooth, sharp, sharp object’, an Akkadian sinnu, “tooth”, Arabic sinn, “point”. Syriac sinna, Ugaritic sn, Ge’ez senn.
This etymology for Sinai supplies us with the clue we need for getting a geographical fix on the mountain of Moses. The Egyptian god of Sinai was Sopdu, whose name is derived from spd, “sharp”. The hieroglyph used to spell the first part of Sopdu’s name stands for “sharp” and is a simple pointed triangle. It has been surmised that this pointed triangle was in reality a plant thorn, and by extension a tooth. Indeed, in the Pyramid texts the word spd is applied to the teeth of the god. Sopdu is found at Maghara in the Sinai as “Lord of the Eastern (Desert).” At nearby Serabit el-Khadim, where he was worshipped with Hathor, “Lady of the Turquoise”, he is called “Lord of the East”, “of the Foreign Lands” and “Lord of the Foreign Lands”.
What I find hard to believe is that no one has seen fit to propose the following: that Sinai is the Semitic rendering of ‘land of Sopdu’, and that the Mountain of Sinai must, therefore, be a mountain of the god Sopdu.
One such mountain was, obviously, that of Serabit el-Khadim with its Sopdu shrine. But is this mountain the same as Mount Horeb, the second name Exodus gives for the location of the Burning Bush?
Horeb or Choreb (pronounced kho-rab) means “desert”, and is from the root charab, “to be dry, be dried up”. There is no mountain of this name in the Sinai, and some have thought it merely a descriptive phrase rather than a true name, i.e. Mount Sinai was a “desert mountain” or a “mountain in the desert”. But archaeology has opened up another possibility.
When Moses first went to live in Midian, which at that time was across the Gulf of Aqaba from Sinai, its northwestern-most part being roughly coterminous with the extreme southern end of the Arabah, “he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God (Exodus 3:1).” Now, in this context, it makes no sense at all for Moses’s mountain to be Serabit el-Khadim in the southeastern Sinai Peninsula. There is, in fact, only one place he could have reached from Midian as a shepherd would fulfill the requirements of a Mount Horeb.
A Midianite presence has been demonstrated at the Egyptian mining complex at Har Timna or Mount Timna at the southwestern end of the Arabah. The Egyptians called Timna or, rather, the Arabah (see Beno Rothenberg) Atika, a word perhaps to be related to Akkadian etequ, Proto-Semitic ‘ataq, Ugaritic ‘tq, “to pass, go along, go past; to go through, cross over”. Juan Manuel Tebes also believes Atika is the Arabah and would further connect the name with the Biblical Atak (“Egypt in the East: The Egyptian Presence in the Negev and the Local Soceity During the Early Iron Age”, in Cahiers Caribeens d’Egyptologie 9, February/March 2006). Midianite miners were also present at Riqeita near Gebel Musa and, of course, at Serabit el-Khadim, but both of these places are too distant from Midian to be Horeb.
Timna is also the only other place in the region which bears evidence of Hathor worship in the Egyptian period. The Hathor shrine at Timna was re-established during the reign of Ramesses III and a Midianite tent shrine which would appear to be the model for the Biblical Tabernacle replaced it shortly after the demise of Ramesses V (Beno Rothenberg). We have seen above that the Exodus took place around this time.
We also know (see Donald Redford’s section on the Shasu or Asiatic nomads in his _Egypt, Canaan and Israle in Ancient Times_) that Egyptian records from Soleb and Amarah of the fifteenth century B.C. mention “Yhw” within the geographical context of Seir/Edom, i.e. the Arabah of Timna. Thus the god Yahweh with whom Moses identified his own Egyptian Khepri was already in existence centuries before Moses’ time, and Yahweh belonged at Mount Horeb. Indeed, Biblical tradition claims that Yahweh came forth from Seir and originated in Edom. It may or may not be a coincidence that Thutmose IV, who is known to have given special precedence to Khepri, was of the fifteenth century B.C.
Unfortunately, we cannot say that Sopdu was at Timna. His worship is not attested there – only Hathor’s.
The name Horeb, ‘Desert’, may correspond to that of Arabah. The latter means “desert plain, steppe, desert, wilderness”. While the Akkadian harbu cited above appears to be a cognate of Hebrew Horeb, there was also a Sumerian eria meaning “wasteland”. It is my guess that Arabah came from a root more similar to eria than to harbu. In any case, the “wilderness” Moses takes his flock across to reach Mount Horeb is, almost certainly, the Arabah itself, and Horeb is just another way of saying “Mount Arabah”.
The Balanite or ished tree is found in the Arabah, so the presence of the Burning Bush at Mount Timna/Horeb is to be expected.
If what I have outlined above is correct, we would seem to have two holy mountains of God, not one. How do we account for this within the confines of the Biblical story?
Well, as hinted at above, the tent shrine Moses is said to have set up at Mount Sinai/Sopdu or Serabit el-Khadim, was actually erected at Mount Horeb/Timna. There is no Midianite-style tent shrine at Serabit el-Khadim. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the tradition placing Moses and the Hebrews at Mount Sinai is a spurious one.
Yes, we could account for the inclusion of two holy mountains of God in the Moses story by positing that Timna and Serabit el-Khadim, due to the presence at both places of Hathor shrines, had merely been confused with each other and thus conflated. The Midianites themselves were miners at both Serabit el-Khadim and Timna. As a good example of how the mountain of God could be relocalized, we need only look at Jebel Musa, the “Mountain of Moses”, near another Midianite mining center (Riqeita). Several other mountains in the Sinai have been proposed as Moses’s mountain, but none of them possess the four critical, prerequisite features that are found only at Timna: 1) proximity to Midian 2) the presence of Midianites 3) a significant Egyptian attestation (which translates into the presence of Egyptian gods and Egyptian religious motifs, such as that of the ished tree) and 3) a tent shrine. Nor do any of these other candidates for Moses’ mountain show signs of the worship of Sopdu, something unique to Serabit el-Khadim.
Once again, if we trust the Biblical narrative, we can allow for Moses’ actual journey to Serabit el-Khadim/Mount Sinai-Sopdu and still be able to explain why the Midianite tent shrine of Timna was wrongly transferred to the former location. We have seen how Moses’ first sojourn in Midian corresponds to the reign of Ramesses III, who re-established the mines and Hathor Temple at Timna. We also know that Moses took the Hebrews out of Egypt after the deaths of Ramesses IV and V, in other words, in the reign of Ramesses VI. Not only was the last expedition to Serabit el-Khadim launched by Ramesses VI, but during the same pharaoh’s reign the Midianites destroyed the Hathor temple at Timna and erected their own tent shrine. So it is distinctly possible that the trek of Moses and his people to Serabit el-Khadim happened at the same time the tent shrine was erected at Timna.
When we search for a historical Moses in Part Six below, we will take a close look at a man who could well have been at both Timna during its re-establishment by Ramesses III and Serabit el-Khadim during the expedition by Ramesses VI.
THE ARK OF THE COVENANT
Much has been written in the past on the Ark of the Covenant as essentially a typical Egyptian portable shrine. Many of the latter are mentioned or depicted in the Egyptian records. It is not my purpose in this chapter to cover this ground again. Rather, I will restrict my treatment of the ark to just two features: the guardian cherubim mounted on each end of the ‘mercy seat’ and the tablets of the Law said to be contained within the sacred chest.
Walter Mattfeld has assembled a wealth of material on what may be the ancient Near Eastern parallels to the Biblical cherubim of the ark. He has proposed that the cherubim (from Akkadian harabu, “to bless, to praise, to dedicate an offering”; cf. Ugaritic krb) appear as winged or unwinged lions or sphinxes flanking the thrones of Canaanite, Phoenician and Egyptian monarchs. The Ark of the Covenant is sometimes thought to be Yahweh’s throne (although see below).
In the case of the Egyptian guardian sphinxes, they are always shown with their wings folded down over their backs. There is one Egyptian throne, that of the New Kingdom Queen Mutnodjme, wife of Pharaoh Horemheb, which has a female sphinx with wings extended. Other Egyptian scenes show portable thrones also protected by flanking lions or sphinxes.
The best example of a sphinx with wings extended acting the role of a throne guardian is that found on an ivory at Megiddo, dating to ca. 1200 B.C. We also have a splendid depiction on a stone sarcophagus of King Hiram of Byblos seated on a similar throne, flanked by a sphinx with wings extended, dated a c. 1300-1200 B.C.
Perhaps the most interesting portrayal of an Egyptian winged sphinx is found on a chariot panel of pharaoh Thutmose IV (1419-1410 B.C.). Here the sphinx is trampling Asiatic enemies. Above the sphinx’s back is a sun shade, and above the sun shade a beautiful winged scarab with sun and shen ring (this last representing eternity). To the best of my knowledge, this is the only representation of Khepri the scarab god hovering over the back of a winged sphinx. Thutmose IV is the pharaoh who in the famous ‘Dream Stela’ identifies the Great Sphinx at Giza with Khepri.
All of which brings me to the most important point concerning the cherubim of the ark, providing these were indeed sphinxes: while graven images, i.e. idols or statues of the god, were supposedly prohibited, and we could imagine the Hebrew priests so placing the portable shrine so that the morning sun rose up behind it to appear above the ‘mercy seat’ and between the two cherubim with their sheltering wings, it is vital to keep in mind that the cherubim or sphinxes were Yahweh/Khepri.
This being so, it would not necessary to carry around a supplementary statue of Khepri, whether in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form, as he was already present atop the ark as winged sphinxes.
But there are four major problems with viewing the cherubim as throne sphinxes. First, the idea that the ark was Yahweh’s throne is due to a misinterpretation of the Hebrew word kapporeth or “cover”, the lid of the sacred chest, which has been translated “mercy seat” in the past. Second, the guardian sphinxes are used only for the thrones of human monarchs, not for gods proper. And third, the throne guardians face forward, looking in the same direction as the seated monarch or, in the case of portable thrones, in the direction the said thrones are being carried. And fourth, the sphinxes guarding these thrones do not assume an adoring/praying/ blessing posture, something which is inherent to the cherubim, whose very name demand such a function.
Thus the cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant cannot have been sphinxes. Sphinxes work no better in defining the form and function of the cherubim than the Egyptian aker, the double-headed lion earth god who symbolized the horizon. Khepri could be shown between the two heads of this god, himself sometimes envisioned as a conjoined sphinx. But the faces of aker are facing outwards away from Khepri and Aker is wingless.
There are, however, many images of Khepri in which the god is flanked by adoring deities who face him. While there are different deities who perform this worshipful gesture for Khepri, the ones who are winged are almost invariably female. We have some beautiful representations of goddesses standing to either side of Khepri with wings extended above and below the scarab beetle. These goddesses can stand in the bow and stern of Khepri’s solar boat. My favorite example is perhaps that found in the tomb of Petosiris, in which the god is flanked by a winged Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, and a winged Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt. Wadjet and Nekhbet as Nephthys and Isis guard Osiris with their wings on one of the Tutankhamun pectorals.
Is there any way we can determine the identities of the winged cherubim that flanked Yahweh/Khepri on the Ark of the Covenant?
Well, according to Canticles iii, sparks that issued from between the two cherubim killed serpents and scorpions. The Egyptian scorpion goddess was called Serket. While apparently subsumed by Isis in the late period, Serket appears with the goddess Neith during the New Kingdom in Luxor Temple and in Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple (Wilkinson). The scorpion goddess also is also paired Nephthys, sister of Isis, in the mythological story if the birth of Horus. In this last, Nephthys and Serket assist Isis in guarding the infant god after he is stung or bitten. In the same myth, Isis is accompanied by seven scorpions which are the emanations of Serket. These scorpions protect her and her unborn child.
Nephthys was not evoked for protection against snakebite. So if Serket or Isis were one of the cherubim, Nephthys is very unlikely to have been the other. We need a goddess who served an apotropaic function specifically geared towards snakes and who is known to have been associated with either Isis or Serket.
Several Egyptian goddesses could take serpent form. Wadjet was the primary cobra goddess of Egypt. She is linked with Nekhbet, not with Isis or Serket. Isis herself, of course, was famous for having cured the sun god Re of snakebite – a snakebite she herself caused to be inflicted upon the god. So it is certainly possible that the two cherubim are Isis and Serket. However, we have seen that Serket is paired with Neith and the latter goddess had strong serpent affinities. Not only did she create the underworld serpent Apophis, but she could appear in serpentine form as protectress of the pharaoh and of Re (Wilkinson). She appears as a serpent in the Book of the Dead (185) and as a gilded wooden cobra found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Pyramid text 1375 has a pharaoh proclaim: “… Neith is behind me [in a protective sense] and Serket is before me.” Also in the Pyramid Texts, Neith watches over the deceased Osiris with Isis, Nephthys and Serket. These four goddesses were assigned to the four sides of the coffin and were charged with watching over the sons of Horus, themselves guardians of the canopic jars.
The problem is that Serket does not appear in Egyptian religion flanking Khepri with another goddess. Neither, for that matter, does Neith. Isis is several times portrayed in this fashion, and her companion is always her sister Nephthys. We must assume, therefore, that the protection against scorpions and snakes afforded by the cherubim was due to one of them being Isis. Her companion atop the ark was Nephthys.
We know of plenty of examples of Isis and Nephthys flanking Khepri in ancient Egyptian art. The Louvre has a funeral pectoral which shows Khepri in his boat, flanked by Isis and Nephthys. The same two goddesses flank Khepri in a boat in the tomb of Siamun at Siwa. I have already mentioned the tomb of Petosiris at Tuna el-Gebel, where Wadjet and Nekhbet in winged forms flank Khepri. But in this same relief the goddesses Isis and Nephthys on found on either side of the cobra and vulture goddesses. In her book _Der Gott Khepri_, Martina Minas-Nerpal shows more instances of Khepri with Isis and Nephthys: 1) the triad on a coffin (CG 6190) and 2) in the Book of Gates. In the latter source, Isis and Nephthys in the form of uraei/cobras guard the Twelfth Gate through which the sun god will pass in order to rise up into the eastern horizon. They are also present in the final scene, where they embrace the scarab beetle which Nun, goddess of the primeval waters, is lifting up towards Nut the sky goddess. The two goddesses appear with a winged Khepri on a 21st Dynasty pectoral of Psusennes. They face each other with outstretched wings on a couple of the Tutankhamun shrines and are frequently portrayed on coffins with outstretched wings. We find them in anthropomorphic form, winged anthropomorphic form or as kites protecting Osiris and the Djed Pillar. On the lintel of the tomb of Ramesses VII (KV1), a sun disc containing a scarab is flanked by Isis and Nephthys below the king’s names. We even have them flanking the winged scarab on one of Tutankhamun’s pectorals.
There are other examples of Khepri being adored/protected/supported by the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, but the above should adequately demonstrate that this was a common motif in Egyptian religious iconography. Indeed, of all the various deities, male and female, who are depicted flanking Khepri, those most frequently utilized – by far - are Isis and her sister. While it is true that in most scenes involving Khepri and the two goddesses the latter do not possess wings, they are found in this form on anthropoid coffins (Kei Yamamoto, University of Toronto).
The images supplied below all show Khepri being adored/protected by flanking deities. These are only a few examples of many such in Egyptian iconography:
Having postulated that the two cherubim of the ark were, in all likelihood, Isis and Nephthys, we may next consider the two tablets of the Law. As described in the Biblical account, the tablets were made of stone at the mountain of God. Such an action, viewed within an Egyptian context, clearly suggests the carving of dedicatory stelae. Stelae of this kind were made and set up at holy sites, including Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. Typically, they were raised in the name of a pharaoh as a recording of something done for the residing deity of the holy site in question. Such stela were often large and very heavy. They were intended as stationary, permanent reminders of feats performed for or offerings made to the god or goddess.
While it is certainly possible that the Hebrews under Moses instituted a new role for rock-hewn stelae, i.e. the recording of commandments uttered by Yahweh, from a mere practical standpoint it can be said unreservedly that no one would want to carry such objects around in a portable shrine. If this is the case, just what lies behind the story of the recording of the Ten Commandents on stone tablets?
The explanation may be deceptively simple. A common word for a stela in the Egyptian language was ‘wD’. This word derives from the verb ‘wD’, meaning “command”. In other words, a stela was a “commandment”, in the sense, according to the Egyptologists, that it was commanded or commissioned to be set up by a royal person.
Thus when we are told in the Moses’ story that the commandments were written on stone tablets, what is actually happening is that “commandments”, i.e. stelae, are being cut out of stone, carved with dedicatory inscriptions and set up at the Hathor temple on Serabit el-Khadim. To this day many such stelae can be seen at this place. There are even broken stelae strewn about which may well have provided the creative impetus for the episode of Moses’ breaking of the first tablets of the Law when he discovered the Hebrews worshipping the Golden Calf. Similar stelae were set up at the Timna Hathor temple, although these were destroyed or defaced when the Midianites erected their tent shrine there. Only one Timna stela has remained intact and we will discuss this object’s significance in Part Six below.
MOSES
In looking for a historical candidate for Moses, we need to fulfill several conditions, all based on the criteria we have established in previous parts of the book. First, he must be Asiatic, i.e. not a native Egyptian. Two, he needs to have been present at Timna during the re-establishment there of the mines and Hathor temple in the reign of Ramesses III. Three, he needs to have been present at Serabit el-Khadim during Egypt’s last expedition to that site under the direction of Ramesses VI – or there must be a reasonable level of probability that he was there as this time. Four, he must be someone sufficiently educated in regards to the Egyptian religious system to have identified the Yahweh of the Shasu group in Edom/Seir with his own god Khepri and to have conceptualized the ished tree along along with its associated deities, Khepri and the sun god’s deputy, Thoth. Five, he would need to be of a fairly significant social status within the Egyptian highly-stratified, hierarchical system, for the Bible tells us he was the adopted son of Pharaoh. And six, his ancestry must be consistent in a fundamental way with the genealogy supplied for him in the Bible.
To begin trying to satisfy these various points, it is important to reiterate what has often been remarked regarding Moses’ line of descent from Jacob via Levi. And that is, simply put, this: an ancestral trace that runs Jacob (probably the Hyksos Jakobher)-Levi-Kohath-Amram-Moses is insufficient to cover the over four centuries that spanned the period from the entry into Egypt of the Hebrews and the Exodus, which we have surmised happened immediately after the death of Ramesses V. Moses’ genealogy is, in large part, a fabrication, with the life spans of the people involved being greatly exaggerated in order to make sense of the Biblical narrative.
Exodus tells us that Levi was born to Jacob in Aram, known later as Assyria. This may well be correct, as Ramesses III recorded a certain Levi-El in a list of places mentioned in his description of a Syrian campaign. Kohath, son of Levi, was born in Canaan. In Genesis 46:8-11, we learn that Kohath went with his father and Jacob to Egypt. We are not introduced to Amram, son of Kohath, until Exodus 6:18. There is it implied that Amram was born to Kohath in Egypt. However, one of Amram’s brothers was named Hebron, and this last is a mere eponym for Hebron in Canaan.
If the reader will indulge the author, we should briefly investigate these names from an etymological perspective. The accepted Semitic meaning of Levi is ‘He who joins or unites”, from a primitive root lavah (lwh). This has been interpreted as referring to the bond that existed between this priestly clan and their god, Yahweh. Given the toponym Levi-El or “[those who or that which is] joined to/united with El [‘God’]”, this definition if almost certain. The corresponding Egyptian word was xnm, “join, unite with”. Xnm is the root that lies behind the name of the important Egyptian god Khnum, ‘He who unites or joins’. In a verbal sense xnm had the sense of “to join or unite with a god or the dead” (see David Shennum’s English-Egyptian Index).
On the other hand, it is also possible that the Levites, with their patriarch Levi, were originally simply the inhabitants of the Levi-el town mentioned above. Many proper names which first appear in the genealogies of the Book of Genesis reveal themselves to be merely eponyms. The Levites may be no different; Levi would be the eponym for Levi-el. As the inhabitants of this place were by virtue of their town-name “attached to God”, such a distinction may well have caused them to be viewed as deserving of a special priestly function.
A second definition for lwh is 'to borrow, to lend', and it has been theorized that a Levite, therefore, was 'one pledged for a debt or vow' to Yahweh or to his sanctuary (see The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies by John William Rogerson and Judith Lieu, 2006).
"Levite" has also been connected with an Assyro-Babylonian word li'u or le'uu, "wise, prudent" (Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria, Ann Jeffers, 1996).
The fourth possible etymology for lwh is perhaps more illuminating - that it means 'to turn, twist'. Such a derivation could imply that the Levites "turned and twisted" in ritual dances. The Egyptians had a word rwi, which we know became lo in Coptic. This Egyptian verb would have been something like *laway. Its primary meaning was 'leave, depart, go away', but it also described a type of ritual dance.
But Meek pointed out that several personal names in the tribe of Levi were to be derived from words for 'snake': Nahshon, Nahash, Shuppim. He also emphasized the creation of the bronze serpent Nehushtan by Moses of the tribe of Levi. Frequently discussed in this connection is Leviathan (livyathan, the "twisting serpent"), who was envisioned as the primeval sea encircling the earth. This image of a twisting or encircling serpent brings to mind Egyptian mhn, 'coil', and Mehen, 'the coiled one', the great serpent who protected the sun god Re on his nightly journey through the underworld. In the Underworld Books, Mehen is depicted coiled around or above the shrine-like cabin of the boat of Re. A feminine form of Mehen, Mehenet, is the name given to the uraeus serpent placed on the head of Re. As the Levites were in charge of Yahweh's ark, might they not have been a priestly clan originally named for Mehen or Mehenet? Hebrew livyah was a wreath-like ornament. We might suppose that the Levites wore wreaths fashioned to resemble the coiled serpent protector of Re.
Aaron’s name would appear to designate a certain priestly function. Professor John Huehnergard of Harvard University informed me that it had been suggested that Aaron’s name may be derived from “an otherwise lost or rare Semitic root '-h-r; there is a rare Arabic word 'ahar- cited in a few dictionarie.” According to Professor Wolfhart Heinrichs of Harvard Univesity,
‘Ibn Manz.ûr (13th cent.) in his large dictionary "Lisân al-ŒArab" says:
al-aharah is the "equipment of a house." [Then he quotes] al-Layth [redactor of the earliest Arabic dictionary]: the aharah of a house is the clothes, the carpets & cushions, and the furniture therein. ThaŒlab [grammarian, d. 904] said: [The phrase] baytun h.asanu 'l-z.aharati wa-'l-aharati wa-'l-Œaqâr means the "equipment," the z.aharah being what is outside and the aharah being what is inside [plus the lot, on which the house is built]. The plural is ahar [which is actually a generic noun, while aharah is the unit noun] and aharât [which is the plural of the unit noun, thus denoting several units]. [This followed by four lines in the rajaz meter that contain the word ahar, which are then explained.]
I can't say that ahar(ah) is a ghost word. It is certainly rare, I have never seen it in a text. Rajaz poetry is notorious for its strange vocabulary, which could mean that it is easy to hide a ghost word in a line of rajaz. On the other hand, the lexicographers mostly insisted on good transmission of words. Some ghost words did creep in, due to lapsus calami and other distortions. But the word ahar does not easily lend itself to such misspellings.’
I then proposed that the name Aaron does derive from a lost Hebrew word cognate with Arabic aharah (or with the root of aharah), and asked if this could be a reflection of his priestly function inside the Tabernacle. Or, more precisely, he was the priest in charge of the equipment of the Tabernacle. This would mean that 'Aaron' was not originally a proper name, but a title or descriptive of a priestly role/function.
Professor Heinrich responded: “It looks plausible to me.”
As for Kohath, the son of Levi, Professor Anson F. Rainey of Tel Aviv University says:
“The name of a hero, hunter, in Ugaritic literature is Aqhat. It is the same word as Kehat plus prosthetic aleph. The attested biblical forms cannot possibly be participles, either active or passive. There are no long vowels anywhere. The very short "o" vowel is deceptive, don't fall for it.”
I will return to this name for a more detailed examination below.
Amram, son of Kohath, is a manufactured name. It means “Exalted People/Nation”, and may be compared to Abram, “Exalted Father”, the original name of Abraham, “Father of Multitudes”. The Exalted People is a designation for the Hebrews. It is most decidedly not the name of Moses’ father. Instead, it is intended to show either his descent through the Hebrews, God’s Chosen People, or through the Levitical branch of the Kohathites.
Miriam, the name of Moses’s sister and hence daughter of Amram, derives from the same verbal root RWM, meaning “to be high above; to be exalted; to rise up”. As a personal name it means “[the] exalted one” and may be compared with the Ugaritic MRYM, Punic MRM. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, we find it used in the context MRYM SPN, “heights of Saphan”, the Saphan in question being the mountain of the god Baal.
The various Ramah or Ramoth place-names in Canaan were also derived from this same Semitic root and thus designated high places, while Ammon or the “[Land] of the People/Nation” preserves a form stemming from the Am- of Amram (although this region is given an eponymous founder Ben-ammi, “Son of the People”).
Kohath is the most important of the names claimed as ancestors of Moses. As we shall see, there is good reason for not only associating this name with that of the Ugaritic Aqhat, but for identifying the two ‘hunters’ as the same legendary, heroic personage.
The Ugaritic hero Aqhat is the son of Danil (a name later found in Hebrew as Daniel). Recent scholarship has reached a concensus on an epithet assigned to Danil,’MT. RPI’.
Wilfred G. E. Watson of the University of Newcastle on Tyne and Nicholas Wyatt of the University of Edinburgh in their _Handbook of Ugaritic Studies_, perhaps put it best:
“In my translation [of the Aqhat Epic] (1998c, 250 n. 5) I have taken it [the epithet MT. RPI] in the sense of ‘man (i.e. ruler) of Rapha’.
Rapha or Raphon was named for the god Rapiu and can be identified with the modern Er-Rafeh close to the Biblical sites of Ashtoreth-Karnaim and Edrei in that part of Bashan known as Hauran. An Ugaritic text (see KTU 1.108) states that the god Rapiu is enthroned at and rules from Ashtoreth-Karnaim and Edrei.
Originally, Danil was associated with Hermel just south of Kadesh and Shabtuna in Syria because of his second epithet, ‘Mt. Hrnmy’. The identification of HRNMY with Hermel was first proposed by W.F. Albright in his “The Traditional Home of the Syrian Daniel”, _Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research_, No. 130, pp. 26-27. Albright has arrived at this conclusion by assuming that the ‘RNM/HRNM found in Egyptian records was HRNM(Y). To make his argument for Hermel work, Albright resorted to letter substitutions, letter transpositions and disposed of the Arabic meaning of this place-name by declaring it a folk etymology. Hermel was judged to be HRNM because the former seemed to be in the same general area as several other place-names mentioned in the same Egyptian records. Albright also has no idea what the original meaning of HRNM might have been. Nor did he account for the fact that there are actually two Hermels (one in Hamah, the other in Tartus), which would have forced him to explain how both of these town names were identical corruptions of HRNM. The terminal –Y of HRNMY is thought to be an ethnicon (Professor Anson Rainey, private communication) or, to put it in the words of Professor Huehnergard of Harvard (private communication), “Ug. Hrnmy is merely the gentilic adjective of the place name hrnm, pronounced harnamu.”.
I would propose a new identification for the site of HRNM, namely the ancient Naveh, or Nawa, very close to Ashtoreth, Edrei and Raphon. The HR- can easily be accounted for thusly: according to Professor Wilfred G.E. Watson at The University of Newcastle on Tyne, “The Ug. word hr occurs in KTU 1.107:44 and 1.4 ii 36 and perhaps in 7.53:3; it means ‘mountain’.” Hebrew naveh is from navah, and is cognate with Akkadian namu, “living in the steppe, steppe-dweller”. The word is found in the Mari texts with the meaning “movable encampment of people and herds”. Anson Rainey (in his “The Military Personnel of Ugarit”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 / 2, January, 1965) says that ‘Wiseman has observed that namu is the Middle Babylonian reflex of nawu(m) from the Mari texts which meant “encampment”, “pasturage” or “steppe”. James M. Scott (in “A New Approach to Habakkuk II 4-5A”, Vetus Testamentum XXXVm 3, 1985) states that
‘… the Hebrew verb nawa may have an almost exact cognate correspondent in the well-attested Old and Standard Babylonian verb namu, meaning “to be abandoned, to lie in ruins, to lay waste, to turn to ruins; to become waste, ruined”… Several lines of evidence support the correspondence of nawa to namu, both in form and meaning. First, namu corresponds to nawa phonologically: even through the Akkadian m would be the normal correspondent rather than the less common w, both namu and nawu are attested forms… Second, the substantive derivative of namu (i.e. namu “pasture land”) corresponds in usage to the derivatives of nawa (i.e. naweh “abode of shepherds or flocks” and nawa “pasture, meadow”)… Third, if the Ugaritic verb nawa “to be desolated” belongs to the same root as nawa and namu, then nawa belongs to a common lexical stock denoting destruction.”
Namu occurs in Ugaritic text RS 8.208 as applied to a man named Buriyanu, where the word is translated by J. J. Finhelstein as “man of the steppe”.
Geographers, historians and archaeologists have defined Nawa as the city of Ayub, i.e. the Biblical Job. The town is also said to include the tomb of Shem, Noah's son. The palaces and dwellings of Nawa demonstrate its historical importance and there are many ancient hills and ruins around, including Al Jubia and Tell Umm Horan.
HRNMY, then, could mean that Dan’il is a man of Naveh, as well as a man of Raphon, both sites being in the Hauran of Bashan. An alternative to this interpretation will be briefly discussed below.
Bashan, in Hebrew bsn, is cognate with Ugaritic bthn, Akkadian basmu, Aramaic ptn and Arabic bathan: all nouns (see James H. Charlesworth’s “Revealing the Genius of Biblical Authors: Symbology, Archaeology, and Theology”, COMMUNIO: A THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL, XLVI, 2004, Nr.2, and F. Charles Fensham’s “Ps. 68:23 In the Light of the Recently Discovered Ugaritic Tablets”, JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 1960) denoting some kind of dragon or snake. It is possible the reference is to a cosmological serpent much like the Tiamat of the Babylonian creation epic ENUMA ELISH, who when slain has a mountain heaped over her head and other mountains heaped over her udder. Bashan is dominated by “Mount Bashan”, now Jebel el-Druze, a cluster of over a hundred basaltic volcanoes, and the associated volcanic field. Jebel el-Druze is the northern part of the great Harrat (Arabic for “lava flow”) Ash Shamah, which extends from southern Syria, across Jordan and into northwestern Saudi Arabia. It is conceivable that the lava field itself was thought to be what remained of the cosmological serpent.
I have above proposed that Harnamu is for “Mountain of the Steppe”, a reference to a hill at Nawa. But it is just as possible that Harnamu is a reference to Mount Bashan itself, literally a sacred mountain at the heart of Dan’il’s kingdom.
The region of Bashan stretched from the border of Gilead in the south to the slopes of Mount Hermon in the north (W. Ewing in _The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia_). As such, it was the most northerly part of Palestine east of the Jordan River. Hauran is an extraordinarily rich plain, running between Jebel ed-Druze or Mount Bashan on the east, and Jedua and Jaulan (modern Golan) in the west. This plain reaches Jebel el ‘Aswad in the north and the Yarmuk River in the southwest, and finally open desert in the southeast. It is from 1,500 to 2,000 ft. above sea-level, and almost 50 miles in length, by 45 in breadth. The district of the Hauran known as En-Nuqrah has fertile soil composed of volcanic detritus where wheat is cultivated.
The name Hauran may mean either “Hollow [land]” or the land of the Canaanite god Hauron, an underworld deity not unlike Rapiu. It may not be a coincidence that the Kohathites, after the conquest of Palestine by the Hebrews, were given the twin cities of Beth-Horon in Ephraim. Horon (cognate with Hauran) has as its root Hebrew hor (chowr, “hole, cave”), and is in all likelihood not “House of the Hollow”, but “House of [the god] Hauron”. Also interesting is the presence of Hauran in Bashan, “the Serpent/Dragon” (see above); the god Hauron is evoked in two Ugaritic charms for healing snake-bite.
So now that we have established with some degree of certainty that Danil and his son Aqht belonged to Bashan, and to the plain of Hauran in Bashan in particular, we can return to our consideration of the Kohath grandfather of Moses, who bears a name identical with that of Aqht.
At Timna, which we have identified with Moses’ Mount Horeb, an intact stela was found above the Midianite tent-shrine. It will be recalled that this Midianite tent-shrine has been erected on the site of the earlier Egyptian shrine to Hathor.
The stela in question, carved from the cliff-face itself, is a dedication of Ramesses III to Hathor presented by one Ramessesemperre, “Re has given birth to him in the house of Re”, a royal butler.
What scant information we have on this man (kindly provided to me by Dr. Maarten J. Raven, Curator, Egyptian Department, National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, Netherlands; see the article “The Royal Butler of Ramessesemperre by Alan R. Schulman , JARCE XIII, 1976, and “Le Dinnitaire Ramesside Ramses-em-per-re, Jocelyne Berlandini-Grenier, BIFAO 74, 1974) strongly suggests that he was either the son or grandson of another Ramessesemperre who held high offices under the pharaohs Ramesses II and Merneptah. The first Ramessesemperre was Syro-Palestinian, having the original, non-Egyptian name Benitjen or “Ben-azen”, with a father Yupa’o or Yupaao (another foreign name; according to Michael Coogan this last could be from the Semitic root yp’, “to shine”). The first Ramessesemperre had yet another Egyptian name, Meriunu. But what is startling about this man is that he was from Ziri-bashana.
Olivier Lauffenburger informs me that Ziri-bashana occurs in the Amarna letter EA201 (a letter from Artamanya of Ziri-bashana to the Egyptian king). Ziri is, in fact, to be read seri (with an emphatic s), which means in Akkadian “plain, steppe, open country”. Thus Ziri-bashana or Ziri-Bashan is the Plain of Bashan, i.e. the Hauran of the legendary Canaanite hero Aqht.
It would not be unreasonable for a man of Hauran in Bashan to count among his distant ancestors a great Bashan hero such as Aqht. Aqht’s descendents, in turn, where an “Exalted People”, i.e. Amram, among whom was Ramessesemperre or “Moses” (it has long been recognized that Moses is a truncated form of just such a theophoric name as Ra-messes).
Now, this latter Ramessesemperre, the son or grandson of his earlier name-sake, is thought by Rothenburg, the excavator of Timna, to be the man in charge of the expedition to Timna to re-establish the mining operations there and re-dedicate the Hathor shrine. To support this notion, which by and large is accepted by the Egyptological community, he cites the following from the “Papyrus Harris” (408-409, James Henry Breasted’s _Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume 4, The Twentieth Through the Twenty-Sixth Dynasties_). In this papyrus, Ramesses III boasts that
“I sent forth my messengers to the country of the Atika [= Timna/Mount Horeb], to the great copper mines which are in this place. Their galleys carried them; others on the land-journey were upon their asses. It has not been heard before, since kings reign. Their mines were found abounding in copper; it was loaded by ten-thousands into their galleys. They were sent forward to Egypt, and arrived safely. It was carried and made into a heap under the balcony, in many bars of copper, like hundred-thousands, being of the color of gold of three times. I allowed all the people to see them, like wonders.”
“I sent forth butlers and officials to the malachite-country [= Serabit el-Khadim], to my mother, Hathor, mistress of the malachite. There were brought for her silver, gold, royal linen, mek-linen, and many things into her presence, like the sand. There were brought for me wonders of real malachite in numerous sacks, brought forward into my presence. They had not been seen before, since kings reign.”
The royal butler who led the expedition to Timna under Ramesses III later held the rank of “Commander of Foreign Warriors”. This is attested in Year 4 of the reign of Ramesses V, the pharaoh who perished of smallpox, the plague of the Exodus story that took all the Egyptian first-born sons. The Foreign Warriors are thought to have been mercenary Sherden, a Sea People most likely from Sardis and not, as previously believed, Sardinia. We have seen above how Ramesses V is the last pharaoh attested at Timna, and that Ramesses VI was the last Egyptian king to send an expedition to Serabit el-Khadim. The Midianite tent-shrine at Timna formed the basis for the Biblical traditions concerning the Tabernacle at the Mountain of God.
Ramessesemperre Before the Goddess Hathor
I would propose that this Ramessesemperre who was in charge of the expedition to Timna under Ramesses III was sent on a similar expedition to Serabit el-Khadim under Ramesses VI. At the time of this latter expedition to what was Mount Sinai/Sopdu, the Midians established their tent-shrine at Timna. The Ramesses VI expedition to Mount Sinai was thus conflated in popular tradition with the simultaneous establishment of the tent-shrine at Mount Horeb.
There is little difficulty in accepting that Ramessesemperre/Moses, when at Timna, took a wife from among the Midians who either worked at the copper mines or who shared some kind of control of those mines with the Egyptians. We already know that a people who worshipped YHW lived in precisely this region and Ramessesemperre/Moses would quite naturally have identified his own Khepri with the local god YHW or Yahweh.
Ramessesemperre Before the Deified Thutmose III
The presence of Ramessesempere at Mount Sinai/Serabit el-Khadim would, of course, be attended by the presence of his god, Khepri/YHW. Any rededication of the Serabit el-Khadim Hathor temple during the reign of Ramesses VI, which coincided with the building of the Midianite tent-shrine at Timna over the ruins of the Hathor shrine Ramessesemperre had rededicated there in the reign of Ramesses III, would in the conflated Biblical account be rendered as the Theophany of Sinai.
I have already hinted at above that Hauran may present the Ugaritic god-name Hauron. This god was, in turn, identified with the Great Sphinx of Giza, who was otherwise known as Khepri. I also mentioned how the Kohathites, while not given any cities or territory in Bashan, were allotted Beth-Horon, the “House of [the god] Hauron”.
I also briefly discussed the only mention of the god Khepri extant at Serabit el-Khadim, which is found in an inscription of Thutmose III. Ramessesemperre the elder (father or grandfather of our Moses) pays homage to the deified Thutmose III on Stela Brussels E 5014.
In passing, given Moses relationship with the Burning Bush, it may be significant that Ramessesemperre the elder is shown adoring Hathor, Lady of the Sycamore, on lintel (?) Brooklyn 35.1315, and receiving a libation from the goddess Nut in tree form on the second register of stela British Museum 79.
SOKAR OF ROSETAU AND BAAL OF PEOR: THE REAL BURIAL PLACE OF MOSES
Ramessesemperre was, to the best of our knowledge, buried at Saqqara in Egypt. His tomb is listed among missing tombs in this area by G. T. Martin in “Hidden Tombs of Memphis”. Dr. Maarten J. Raven, Curator of the Egyptian Department for the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden in the Netherlands, who has worked extensively at Saqqara, informs me that “Indeed we have found a single relief block perhaps belonging to the tomb of Rameseesemperre.”
Deuteronomy 34:6 tells us that Moses was buried “in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.”
Now, Saqqara gets its name from that of the ancient Egyptian god Sokar, who was lord of Rosetau (R’-sTA.w). This Rosetau means, literally, “Mouth [of the] passage/cavern/ramp” that led into the Underworld. Beth-peor was named for its Mount Peor, peor meaning ‘cleft’ or ‘gap’, from pa’ar, ‘to open wide [the mouth], to gape’. This mountain was home to a Moabite god called, aptly, Baal-Peor, i.e. ‘Lord of the [mouth-like] Gap’. The Gap in question was doubtless an entrance into the Underworld.
What has obviously happened here is that there was some memory of Moses’ burial at Saqqara, but the burial place was moved to Beth-peor to serve the needs of the Biblical narrative. Baal-peor must have been seen as the Moabite equivalent of Sokar of Rosetau. The reason Moses’ tomb at Beth-peor could not be found is because it was never there to begin with. It was at Saqqara.
The Step Pyramid at Saqqara
HOW RAMESSESEMPERRE BECAME MOSES
It is reasonable to ask how the Egyptian official Ramessesemperre (or a conflation of the first and second personages of this name) could possibly have become the Moses of the Bible. While it is beyond the scope of this work to attempt a detailed analysis of such topics as the evolution of folkloristic motifs during the course of centuries of orally transmitted tradition, etc., there are a few general comments that can be made which might go far towards answering this question.
1) Ramessesemperre was an Asiatic, whose father had come from Bashan bordering on what would become Israel.
2) As the leader of an expedition to Timna (Horeb) and, probably, Serabit el-Khadim (Sinai), he would have had under his leadership other Asiatics, among whom undoubtedly would have been Hebrews
3) While at Timna, Ramessesemperre could well have been given a daughter of a local Midianite priest, a worshipper of Yahweh. That Ramessesemperre, who was thoroughly Egyptianized, would have identified the Midianite sun god Yahweh with his own Khepri is only natural: the Egyptians engaged in this kind of syncretization of deities on a regular basis.
4) Some of the Hebrew slaves (or laborers?) at Pi-Ramesses and Pithom might well have been conscripted to accompany Ramessesemperre on his mining expeditions to Timna. These slaves would have been set to work in the mines at these sites, or have been involved in the smelting process and the transportation of copper and malachite.
5) The last mining expedition to Serabit el-Khadim, Moses’ Sinai, took place during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses VI. After this, the Egyptians withdrew permanently from the
An expedition to Timna is sent out during the reign of Ramesses III, under the leadership of Ramessesemperre. The Hathor shrine at Timna, along with the mines there, are re-established. Ramessesemperre remains at Timna for the duration of the mining operations, taking as a wife (or concubine?) the daughter of a Midian priest. His close family connection with the Midians, who may also have worked the mines, caused him to recognize his own god Khepri as the Egyptian counterpart of his father-in-law’s god Yahweh.
The story of Moses’ flight from
At this same time, the Midianites destroyed the Hathor shrine at Timna and replaced it with their own tent sanctuary to Yahweh/Khepri. If this event were roughly contemporaneous with a group of Hebrew slaves escaping from their Egyptian overseers at Serabit el-Khadim or being released from their servitude by none other than Ramessesemperre, then their eventual presence at the tent sanctuary at Horeb – which in the Biblical narrative is mistakenly placed at Serabit el-Khadim – would make the Moses story complete. We need only allow for the usual legendary accretions to the tale, and the relocation of Moses’ final resting place from
It seems clear that the life and career of the Egyptian official Ramessesemperre was the model for that of the Biblical Moses, and that the historical Moses was, therefore, Ramessessemperre.
HEZEKIAH’S SEAL
Recent articles in Biblical Archaeology Review (see Robert Deutsch’s “Lasting Impressions: New Bullae reveal Egyptian-Style Emblems on Judah’s Royal Seals”, Volume 28, Number 4, July/August 2002, and “The Mystery of the Nechushtan”, Volume 33, Number 2, March/April 2007), King Hezekiah of Judah (c. 727-698 B.C.) abandoned the Egyptian cult images of the winged scarab, i.e. Khepri, the winged sun disk, i.e. Horus of Behdety, the winged solar Uraeus cobra and the bronze serpent or Nechushtan, itself a Hebrew form of the Uraeus .
Hezekiah, according to scholar Kristin Swanson (“A Reassessment of Hezekiah’s Reform in Light of Jar Handles and Iconographic Evidence”, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 64, 2002), began using Assyrian symbology instead. He did this because Judah had fallen under Assyrian domination. The old emblems of Judah, preserved since the time of Moses, and all borrowed directly from Egyptian models, were no longer deemed acceptable by Sennacherib, the Assyrian king.
The winged scarab is found on bullae belonging to Hezekiah. Bullae are impressed lumps of clay used to stamp seals, in this case on jar handles. I have attempted to show above that Yahweh is merely the Hebrew name for Khepri. Much has been made of the bronze votive serpent found at the Timna Midianite shrine. I would add that not only were scarabs found at Timna/Mt. Horeb and Serabit el-Khadim/Mt. Sinai, but at the latter there occur numerous instances of the winged sun disk on Egyptian stelae The uraeus is frequently depicted at the brow of the pharaoh. This cobra symbol can, in fact, be seen at the brow of Ramesses III on the Hathor stela dedicated by Ramessesemperre/Moses at Timna.
ADDENDUM:
"THEY WERE PUT TO DEATH IN THE FIRST DAYS OF HARVEST": AN OLD TESTAMENT PROTOTYPE FOR THE CRUCIFIXION OF CHRIST
By
Daniel Harnam
(Copyright 9 May 2008)
Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak. His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on... He [Joab] took three spears in his hand, and thrust them into the heart of Absalom, while he was still alive in the oak...They took Absalom, threw him into a great pit in the forest, and raised over him a very great heap of stones.
2 Samuel 18: 9-17
Today it is common to accept the historicity of the man Christ. But what to do about the god Christ is another matter. Clearly, primitive Christianity included within its development a heavy mythologizing of its central figure. Only in the last few years have astronomers confirmed the importance to the Christ story of astrological events.
For example, Dr. Ernest L. Martin has conclusively described the phenomenon which came to be known as the ‘Star’ of Bethlehem, which culminated in the birth of the Sun as well as the Son (http://www.askelm.com/star/index.asp), while Colin J. Humphreys and W. Graeme Waddington have managed to fix the date of the Crucifixion to a day on which occurred a lunar eclipse (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1985/JASA3-85Humphreys.html).
The other most important episodes in the life of Christ – the Baptism, Transfiguration and Ascension, also either relate directly to Jewish agricultural festivals and holy days or to yet more celestial events. Because the booths are mentioned in the context of the Transfiguration story, this episode can be placed during the festival of Succoth or tabernacles.
The Baptism, because the same language spoken by God about Christ is used during the Transfiguration, is likely to be associated with the Simhat Beit HaShoevah of Sukkoth, during which the ‘water of salvation’ was drawn from the Well of Siloam, conveyed to the Temple and poured over the altar.
Christ's face shining like the sun during the Transfiguration is symbolic of the light provided by large lamps in the temple courtyards during Sukkoth. The festival of Sukkoth marked the beginning of summer in the ancient Jewish agricultural calendar. For the reason, Christ is ‘transfigured’ because the sun has entered its most powerful season of the year.
The Ascension (one can run this on a good planetary program like SkyPro), which occurred some 40 days after the Resurrection, was marked by a conjunction of the New Moon and the sun as both bodies rose above the horizon in the morning of 17 May 33 AD.
A detailed study of the other major events of Christ’s life would probably reveal additional correspondences with festivals and astronomical events. Such an endeavor is beyond the scope of this current paper, however. Here I wish to restrict myself to what I believe to be an overlooked motif in the Old Testament which goes a long way towards accounting for the mythological significance of Christ’s Crucifixion.
While it became customary from a very early date suggest that events in Christ’s life were prefigured by Old Testament prophecies, to my knowledge no one has come forth with an examination of some key Old Testament passages dealing with executions by hanging which shed considerable light on the true nature of Christ’s Passover sacrifice.
The Crucifixion, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Louvre, Paris
In the first place, Joshua himself, the traditional leader during the conquest of
In Joshua 10:1-27, we are told of five kings who hide on Joshua in the
Now, we immediately recognize some of the parallels between this account of hanging by Joshua and the Crucifixion of Christ. There is the act of hanging itself, the deposition in a cave (or tomb), the sealing of a cave (or tomb), the guarding of the cave (or tomb). But despite these parallels, the Joshua hanging story does not help us understand the significance of Christ’s Crucifixion. We can only say that the standing still of the sun and moon on the same day just prior to the hiding of the five kings in the cave records a solstice and major or minor lunar standstill. What meaning lies behind the Crucifixion of Christ must be sought in 2 Samuel 21:1-9.
These Biblical passages tell the following story: in the days of King David, there was a three-year famine. God tells David the famine is a punishment for Saul’s putting the Gibeonites the death. Thus to put an end to the famine, David asks the Gibeonites what he can do to expiate Saul’s sin. The Gibeonites ask for – and are given! – seven sons of Saul. These seven sons of Saul are impaled on the
According to the New Testament accounts, Jesus is given up by the Jews to the Romans for execution. Varying explanations have been given for Christ’s crime, one which necessitated capital punishment. But there can be little doubt that it was his refusal to deny that he was the Messiah which led to his condemnation in front of Pilate’s court.
As mentioned previously, Messianic expectations were of a military nature. The pro-Roman government of
So how were the ruling elite of
They accomplished this in an ingenious way: by offering Christ up as an expiation sacrifice. Just as the sons of Saul had been given over to the Gibeonites to avoid more of the famine, itself a punishment for the transgressions Saul committed against the Gibeonites, so were the government and priesthood of
During the course of the evolution of primitive Christianity, two things were realized:
1) The promised military Messiah had not come during Christ’s lifetime. Hence it came to be believed that Christ would come again at some ill-defined time in the future, this time as a genuine militaristic Messiah. According to “The Revelation of St. John”, Christ’s return will happen during the reign of the Roman emperor who is the eighth and the same time one of the seven. Although the number of the Beast (666 or 616; the early MSS. have both readings) is usually taken to be derived from gematria and to represent Nero, Caligula or Domitian, the eighth Roman emperor was Vespasian. The 42 months of authority given to the Beast does not match the length of any of the early Roman emperors; instead, this time period stands for either the interval in which Vespasian was appointed military commander of Judaea in the Autumn of AD 66 to his confirmation as emperor by the Roman senate in the Autumn of 69 or, perhaps, his arrival in Antioch in the early Spring of 67 to the Fall of Jerusalem under his son Titus in September AD 70. Christ himself, in Matthew 24:34, says to his disciples of his near-future fulfillment of Messianic expectancies: "Truly I tell you, this generation [i.e. that of the disciples themselves] will not pass away until all these things have taken place." One of these "things", mentioned in Mt. 24:2, is the destruction of the Temple by the Romans under Vespasian. These passages have created tremendous discomfiture among believers, and the first has been distorted to mean today's current generation. The text simply does not bear out this interpretation. And, indeed, when Christ cries out in a loud voice (Mt. 27:46) "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?", he is plainly expressing his bitterness and despair at not being delivered by God as the chosen Messiah. There is no other way to explain this statement other than that Christ, right up to the moment of his death on the cross, was fully expecting to be saved by divine intervention so that he could play out his Messianic role.
2) The idea that Christ’s sacrifice had been for the benefit of the Romans and the Jewish God could not be condoned. Thus a shift was made in the value attached to the Crucifixion. Instead of Christ being offered up as an expiation for Jewish sins committed against Rome, his placement on the Cross was an expiation for sin in general and, even more broadly, for all mankind. In the “Golden Legend” of the Middle Ages, we learn that the wood that went into the making of Christ’s Cross had come from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden east of
This, as I see it, is essentially what we have now in today’s Christianity. The religion is built upon a series of falsehoods thrust upon the original story of Christ and steadfastly perpetuated now for centuries. These falsehoods were invented to prevent the ministry of Christ from being forgotten, and to supply his sacrificial death with a meaning deemed profound and vital for the salvation of the soul. To these falsehoods were bound yet more, all culled from the wealth of knowledge pertaining to important astrological, agricultural and traditional historical/religious events.
ADDENDUM II:
"THE FATHER AND I ARE ONE": CHRIST AND THE ZODIAC
By
Daniel Harnam
(Copyright 24 May 2008)
Christ Helios or Christ the "Sun" in his Chariot, Third Century Mosaic on the Ceiling of the Tomb of the Julii, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome
The zodiacal correspondences found in the ancient Israelite and primitive Christian religions have been remarked upon before by various authorities. Some of these correspondences are profound, however, and if thoroughly elucidated show beyond doubt that the basis of both religious systems was a highly developed worship of the sun. < xml="true" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" prefix="o" namespace="">
Theologians may deny this, claiming that solar symbolism only is implied. But that the cult of Yahweh/Khepri was indeed a solar one, and that the prophet Christ was converted into a solarized divinity is not difficult to demonstrate.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel came together into just such a confederation because the year was composed of twelve solar months, and was marked by twelve zodiacal signs. Such a grouping of tribes honored Yahweh/Khepri by acknowledging that the sacred astrological calendar which marked the passing of the sun through the year of twelve divisions was what dictated the agricultural rhythms that provided his worshippers with sustenance and thus life itself.
When Joshua and his people camped at Gilgal after crossing the Jordan, they set up twelve stones. As the place-name Gilgal means ‘Circle”, it is possible this story of the setting up of the stones is etiological. However, given the prominence of stone circles in so many places around the Mediterranean and in Europe, it would not be surprising for a circle of twelve stones, representing the twelve zodiac signs, to have been erected at Gilgal as a memorial of the Jordan crossing. It is even conceivable that astronomical sight-lines were built into the stone circle, enabling the monument’s builders to calculate dates and phenomena associated with the sacred solar calendar.
Joshua, as is well known, is the earlier Hebrew form of the Aramaic name which we render Jesus. Both mean ‘Yah[weh] saves’ or, perhaps, ‘Yah[weh] is salvation’, an appropriate designation for a solar figure who represents Khepri, the sun god of morning resurrection.
Other zodiacal “encoding” is present in the listings of the various twelve-stone groupings, which occur in both the Old and New Testaments. Of these the most significant are the twelve stones of the Yahweh priest’s breastplate and the twelve foundation stones of New Jerusalem. To accord with the twelve tribe division of
The twelve stones of the breastplate of the Yahweh priest are not the only cultic objects arranged in groups of twelve. In Ex. 24:4 Moses erects 12 pillars of stone with an altar under a hill. Lev. 24.5 mentions 12 cakes, Num. 7:3 12 oxen, Num. 7:84 12 charges of silver, 12 silver bowls and 12 golden spoons, Num. 7:87 12 bullocks, 12 rams, 12 lambs, 12 kid goats, Num. 17:6 12 rods, Num. 29:17 12 bullocks, etc. In all, the number 12 (or on occasion 12,000) is found 189 times in the Old Testament.
It is the stones of the breastplate, however, which have gotten the most attention – and much of the reason for this is because they seem to have their counterparts in the stones that serve as the foundation for New Jerusalem in Revelations. Although the actual arrangement of the stones on the breastplate has been much debated, as has their proper identification with modern stone names, the order in which they are listed in Ex. 28:17-21 is as follows:
Carnelium
Chrysolite
Emerald
Turquoise
Sapphire
Moonstone
Jacinth
Agate
Amethyst
Beryl
Onyx
Jasper
While Hebrew tradition assigns zodiacal values to the 12 tribes, each tribe’s proper association with one of the stones of the breastplate is disputed. In my opinion, there is no reason to contend over this, as we need only accept the order the tribes as listed in Numbers 2 as matching the list provided for the stones. In Num. 2, we are told that the 12 tribes had assigned directional camp sites arranged around the Tabernacle.
The description of the 12 tribal encampments around the Tabernacle continues with that of Issachar “next” to
Judah – Leo - carnelian
Issachar – Virgo - chrysolite
Zebulun – Libra - emerald
Reuben – Scorpio - turquoise
Simeon – Sagittarius - sapphire
Gad – Capricorn - moonstone
Ephraim – Aquarius - jacinth
Mannaseh – Pisces - agate
Benjamin – Aries - amethyst
Dan – Taurus - beryl
Asher – Gemini - onyx
Naphtali – Cancer – jasper
Christ Pantokrator with Zodiac, fresco, Monastery of Dekoulou, Itilo, Mani, Greece
The Sun in his Chariot, Surrounded by the Zodiac, Beit Alpha Synagogue 6th Century Mosaic
When we get to the New Testament, several lists of the 12 Apostles of Christ are provided. There is a certain uniformity to these lists, allowing for a few differences, i.e. order changes and name substitutions. Here they all are, placed side by side for comparison:
Matthew Mark Luke Acts (1:13)
Simon Peter Simon Peter Simon Peter Simon Peter
Andrew James Andrew John
James John James James
John Andrew John Andrew
Philip Philip Philip Philip
Bartholomew Bartholomew Bartholomew Thomas
Thomas Matthew Matthew Bartholomew
Matthew Thomas Thomas Matthew
James James James James
Thaddeus Thaddeus Simon Zealot Simon Zealot
Simon Cananaean Simon Cananaean Judas s. of James Judas s. of James
Judas Iscariot Judas Iscariot Judas Iscariot
As Andrew is the brother of Simon Peter, and James and John are brothers, we can assume that the two lists which pair these two sets of brothers - those of Matthew and Luke - are correct. Except for Acts, which inserts Thomas between Philip and Bartholomew, all the Gospels agree in following the two sets of brothers with Philip and Bartholomew.
We may fairly safely equate Simon Zealot of the lists of Luke and Acts with Simon Cananaean of those of Matthew and Mark.
Judas son of James in Luke and Acts is clearly a substitute or the Thaddeus of Matthew and Mark. And, of course, Judas Iscariot in Acts is conspicuously absent.
Thomas is Aramaic for ‘Twin’, in Greek Didymos. We can identify him with Gemini. To determine whether he should precede or follow Matthew, we need to remember that James and John the sons of Zebedee were nicknamed the ‘sons of thunder’. The rainy season in
I would then create a sort of ‘master list” according to the above-mentioned criteria:
Simon Peter – Sagittarius
Andrew – Capricorn
James – Aquarius
John – Pisces
Philip – Aries
Bartholomew – Taurus
Thomas – Gemini
Matthew – Cancer
James (son of Alphaeus) – Leo
Thaddeus/Judas son of James – Virgo
Simon the Cananaean/Zealot – Libra
Judas Iscariot – Scorpio
Simon Peter, the most important of the Apostles, falls in the sign of Sagittarius, which at the time of Christ was the house of the sun from roughly 22 November to 25 December. His name, Simon, is a later form of the Hebrew Simeon, who is the tribe of Sagittarius and the sapphire.
The sapphire is mentioned in Ex. 24:10:
…and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.
And in Ezek.
And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire…
Ezek. 10:1:
Then I looked, and above the dome that was over the heads of the cherubim there appeared above them something like a sapphire, in form resembling a throne.
Ezek. 28:13:
You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, carnelian, chrysolite, and moonstone, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald…
In Rev. 21:19-20:
The foundations of the wall of the city [of New Jerusalem] are adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agte, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst.
So according to Biblical tradition, the sapphire, whose color is blue like the sky, was not only what God stood upon, but was also the stone of God’s throne. It is this stone which gives Simon his epithet Peter. The
In concluding this brief examination of some of the zodiacal correspondences to be found in the Bible, and specifically how these relate to Christ and his 12 Apostles, we need to treat of Ezekiel 1:15-25 and various passages in Revelations.
Ezekiel contains the famous description of the four cherubim as composite solar year beasts, making for a four-year calendar cycle. These cherubim have four faces: that of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. These ‘faces’, of course, represent Aquarius, Leo, Taurus and Scorpio, respectively. The various Church Fathers arbitrarily equated the Four Evangelists with these animals, but the correct identifications can be determined by drawing from the Apostle list I outlined above:
James – Aquarius
Bartholomew – Taurus
James – Leo
Judas – Scorpio
The Four Evangelists in the Book of Kells
In the time of Ezekiel (c. 600 BC), the sun was in the center of Aquarius right around 20 January, in Taurus right around 28 April, in Leo right around 2 August and in Scorpio right around 8 November. We cannot identify these four zodiacal houses at this particular time as those which contained the equinoxes and solstices, the Hebrew tekufot or 'turning points' (sing. tekufah), as these solar events took place in different signs in 600 B.C.:
Spring Equinox (March 21*) Cusp of Pisces and Aries
Summer Solstice (June 21*) Gemini
Fall Equinox (September 21*) Virgo
Winter Solstice (December 21*) Cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn
* Approximate dates
If we are to remain faithful to the supposed date of the text, then the four faces of Ezekiel’s solar year beasts must represent the Four Jewish New Years, which divided the year into quarter seasons. These four New Years and the span of time in which they could fall in any given year are as follows:
September-October 1 Tishrei Rosh Hashanah (Head of the Year)
January-February 15 Shevat New Year for Trees
March-April 1 Nisan New Year of Redemption Season
August-September 1 Elul New Year for Cattle Tithing
I have already referred to the 12 zodiacal stones of the foundation of Revelations’ New Jerusalem. But there is one more direct reference to the zodiac in the last book of the Bible.
When we are told about the opening of the seven seals, we learn that the first seal is associated with an archer on a white horse. The third seal has a rider on a black horse carrying a set of scales. These are, respectively, Sagittarius and Libra, with the second seal’s sword-bearing rider intervening as Scorpio. The seven seals thus correspond to seven Zodiac signs, listed in reverse order:
First horseman Sagittarius
Second horseman Scorpio
Third horseman Libra
Fourth horseman Virgo
Souls of martyrs Leo
Day of the Lord Cancer
Silence of Yahweh Gemini
Although the author of Revelations has gone backwards on the Zodiac, he could have gone forward the same number of signs from Sagittarius and still arrived at Gemini. According to the editors of the Jerusalem Bible, the coming of Yahweh was preceded by an awed silence.
The seven trumpets and seven bowls appear to have been organized in a similar fashion. Because the second, third, sixth and seventh trumpet and bowl are the same, and the seventh trumpet and bowl represent the arrival of the kingdom of heaven and the end of the world, respectively, we may assume that these symbols also designate Zodiac signs.
Two important stars are mentioned as falling in the list of trumpets. These are Wormwood in the third trumpet and Abaddon/Apollyon “the Destroyer” in the fifth trumpet.
Abaddon/Apollyon (see Van der Toorn, Becking and Van der Horst’s _Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible_) was very early on associated with the Greek Apollo. The Greeks themselves made their own etymological connection, by deriving this god’s name from apollumi, “to destroy”. They thought Apollo in this guise to be the destroyer of the wicked. That this aspect of Apollo is meant by Abaddon (elsewhere merely the ‘place of destruction’, i.e. Sheol or the underworld, and not a personified figure) is made obvious by the monsters over which he is said to be king. These locusts with human faces, lions’ teeth and scorpions’ tails are a more horrific version of Ezekiel’s solar year beasts of the four Jewish New Years. Because the monsters of Abaddon are specifically told (Rv. 9:4) not to damage the grass or the green growth of trees, Abaddon of the fifth trumpet cannot belong to the dry season in Israel (May-October, with July-August being the hottest period), but must be place between October and the beginning of May, with the heaviest rains falling between December and February. Given that the trumpets start with Sagittarius, we are this time going forward, not backwards on the Zodiac, to Aries. In 90 AD, the approximate time of the writing of Revelations, the sun entered Aries around the 20th of April.
The Wormwood star, then, being in the third trumpet, would belong in the sign of Aquarius, the Water-bearer. This is why this particular star falls on a third of the rivers and the springs of water, turning the waters into wormwood. As for the nature of the star itself, I would associate it with the Eta Aquarids meteor shower, which is active between April 21 and May 12, from a radiant located in the north central portion of the Aquarius. Maximum activity occurs on May 5th, when the shower produces about 20 meteors per hour for observers in the northern hemisphere and 50 for observers in the southern hemisphere.
Incidentally, the sign of Aquarius may make an appearance in Mark14:13. There Jesus tells his disciples to go into Jerusalem to find a room for the Passover meal. They are to be met there by "a man carrying a jar of water... follow him, and whevever he enters, say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?'" As Passover in AD 33 occurs in the sign of Aries, two signs back on the Zodiac would bring us to Aquarius, which marked the rainy season that extended into Aries.
As is made clear by Ernest Martin in his work on the Star of Bethlehem, Revelations’ woman (= Mary) clothed with the sun (Christ), standing on the moon, and crowned with 12 stars representing the 12 zodiacal constellations, is the sign of Virgo. The seven-headed, ten-horned, seven-diademed dragon standing before the woman that later is driven to earth and vomits a river from its mouth is the constellation Hydra, which indeed lies right alongside Virgo. Of course, the dragon Satan is also merely a symbol for the Roman puppet Herod, who tried to have the Christ child slain. Satan has been misidentified with Lucifer or the Morning Star on a reading of Isaiah 14:12, which translates the Hebrew phrase helel ben-sahar, "Shining One, son of dawn", as "Bright Star or Day Star", etc. If the Ugaritic cognate hll is any indication, the word helel should be applied not to Venus, but to the moon. In any case, the Dragon Satan of Revelations is neither Venus nor the moon.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, Mary is obviously Venus, the Queen of Heaven in ancient Near Eastern religious tradition. We find her in this guise in John 19:25 as Mary, mother of Christ, Mary’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. The two symbols - Virgo the constellation and Venus the planet - are not mutually exclusive emblems for Mary, however. Ernest L. Martin, in his excellent treatment of the Star of Bethleham, has shown that this phenomenon involved Venus in the sign of Virgo. In other words, Mary is Venus as Virgin.
The name Clopas has been subject to various interpretations in several languages. It actually represents an original Greek Klopos, "Thief", a reference to the thieves crucified with Christ on 3 April 33 AD. On this day, the rise of the sun in Aries at 5:27 is preceded by the double rising in Pisces of Venus at 4:18 and Mercury at 4:33. The sun sets on this day at 17:57, with Venus setting at 16:28 and Mercury at 16:00. It will be remembered that Mercury is the Greek Hermes, who had the following epithets:
Pheletes - Thief, Robber
Arkhos Pheleteon - Leader of Robbers/Thieves
Klepsiphron - Deceiver, Dissembler (from the root klepto, 'to steal')
Thus we can say that the "thieves" crucified with Christ were Mercury, while the three Marys at the Cruxifixion were Venus.
Revelations’ ‘four living creatures’ with the four faces (man, lion, ox and eagle) we have met before in Ezekiel. They are solar year beasts, their four faces representing the four Jewish New Years as they once fell in the zodiac signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus and Scorpio. These solar year beasts are accompanied by the 24 elders, who quite obviously stand for the 24 hours of the sacred day.
Finally, we have the tree of life in New Jerusalem, with its twelve fruits.
In addition to this zodiacal symbolism, Revelations is replete with other astrological imagery. For example, the fourth of the seven churches of
ADDENDUM III:
THE TRUE LOCATION OF CHRIST’S TOMB
By
Daniel Harnam
(Copyright
Two traditional locations have been proposed as the location of Christ’s tomb: that of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Garden, both in
According to the testimony of the Gospel of John, “there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.” Christ’s deposition here is made to sound merely like convenience: “And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.” There is nothing here to suggest that the tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea.
Luke echoes John, except that there is no reference to the garden. Mark is even vaguer, in that it mentions only “a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock.” Matthew alone informs us that Joseph laid Christ’s body “in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock.”
Most scholars now agree that Arimathea should be identified with Rantis or Ranthis. This site was in Ephraim very near to Timnath-Serah. Timnath-Serah was the burial place of the Old Testament Joshua. Jesus, whose name was the Aramaic form of the Hebrew Joshua, was at first viewed as a second Joshua who would defeat the Romans and drive them from the Promised Land. As such, he was buried in the same place the first Joshua was buried.
Joshua’s tomb itself is placed in two different places. Modern Tibna may be Timnath, and is identified with the latter by Eusebius in his Onomasticon. Samaritan tradition insists the site is properly Kafr Haris. Scholars tend to side with Eusebius in favoring the former town.
From the Onomasticon of Eusebius:
Armthem Seipha (Sofim). City of
Gaas. Mountain (in the tribe of Ephaim) where Josue was buried north of it. His (the) monument (of Josue son of Nun) is now pointed out near the
Thamna. Where Juda sheared his sheep. A (very) large village remains (is shown) in the boundary of Diospolis midway to
Thamnathsara. City of
ARIMATHEA (RATHAMIN) AND TIMNATH (THAMNA)
Timnath-Serah is also found spelled Timnath-Heres. The change in spelling is deliberate, as Heres (pronounced cherec) is the word for sun, making the place-name mean “Portion of the Sun”. The fact that the town was sacred to the sun and that sun-worship undoubtedly took place there had to be eliminated from the record and so the name was changed.
It is my opinion that there is no reason for the inclusion of Joseph of Arimathea in the story of the entombment of Christ other than as a clue to the actual location of Christ’s tomb. Anyone could have laid Christ in a
Holy Sepulchre Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea
The Garden Tomb of Christ
Joshua's Tomb at Tibna