Part
One:
The
Chosen People
A Review of Ahmed Osman’s
Out of Egypt. The Roots of
Christianity Revealed
(Century, 1998)
by
Dr. Norman Simms of the
University of Waikato sent me a copy of this book, asking me to write a review
of it. This, my review, was originally published in his publication, The Glozel
Newsletter, No. 5:1 (ns), 1999, pp. 1-17. The following is a modified version of
this.
Part I: The Chosen People
Introduction
Another crucial peg in Velikovsky’s reconstruction was his identification of the biblical “Queen of Sheba” as Queen Hatshepsut, co-ruler with Thutmose III. Osman passes over this fabulous queen in a couple of pages (pp. 20-21), having far more to say about the influential Queen Tiye – whom Velikovsky argued to have been the prototype of the tragic Queen Jocasta of the Greeks (in Oedipus and Akhnaton). Osman identified Tiye all at once as – if I am still following him – Joseph’s daughter, Solomon’s “Great Royal Wife”, and Moses’ mother.
Controversial Bethesda pool discovered exactly
where John said it was
Ancient
History, Archaeology and the Birth of Jesus Christ
Part I: The Chosen People
Introduction
It is heartening to find scholars more and more
appreciating the importance of the east – Egypt being especially relevant here
– in influencing ancient and modern civilisations. M. Bernal (The Black Athena, 1987) took a big step
in this direction. Before him, Professor A. Yahuda (The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian, 1933),
perhaps setting the ball rolling, had shown in minute detail – against ‘pan
Babylonianism’ – that the entire Pentateuch (first 5 books of the Bible) is
saturated with Egyptian influence: e.g. the distinct parallel between Egyptian
mythology and the patriarchal narratives of the Bible. Along these lines,
Bernal has referred to M. Astour’s view that the Greek story of Io-Zeus-Hera
closely resembles the Semitic one of Hagar-Abraham-Sarah (op. cit., p. 91).
Now Ahmed Osman, an Islamic author from Cairo,
has brought a twist to this recognition of the east by proposing some
astounding identifications in his book, Out
of Egypt (a reference to Matthew 2:15), in his attempt to show that the
roots of Christianity are to be found, not in Israel, but in Egypt. Osman
states the aim of his book when making reference to the destruction of the
great library of Alexandria by Christians in AD 391 (p. xii):
“As a result of this barbaric
killing of Alexandrian scholars and destruction of its library, which contained
texts in Greek of all aspects of ancient wisdom and knowledge, the true
Egyptian roots of Christianity and of Western civilization have been obscured
for nearly 16 centuries. The aim of this book is to rediscover these roots,
with the help of new historical and archaeological evidence”.
He goes on to write (next page): “The time has
come for Egypt’s voice to be heard again”. And he believes that he is the man
for the job: “Because of my Islamic background, I feel confident that I am
qualified to offer a balanced picture, which does not exclude any source from
examination”. Osman’s main sources are the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran (Dead
Sea) and the Gnostic literature of Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt).
Perusing Osman’s book as a revisionist historian,
I find it fascinating that he has located David and Solomon precisely where
Immanuel Velikovsky did, to the early 18th dynasty of Egypt. No doubt
Velikovsky’s 18th dynasty revision (Ages
in Chaos, I and II) was his main achievement, that will stand in
pyramid-like strength after much else of his historical revision has collapsed
under the weight of scientific criticism.
The 18th dynasty is also Osman’s entire showcase,
encompassing all of his major characters. However, nowhere in his book do I
find reference to Velikovsky or to any other of the well-known revisionist
historians. Osman either has not been influenced by Velikovsky at all, or
perhaps does not bother to mention him because Osman retains the conventional
dating of the early-mid 18th dynasty, instead of lowering it by the 500-600
years that Velikovsky had maintained was necessary.
More radical still – and even the most intrepid
revisionists would baulk at this one – is Osman’s lumping together of Abraham,
Joseph and Moses, into the same 18th dynasty scenario, with, not only David and
Solomon (his Part I: “The Chosen People”), but even with Jesus (his Part II: “Christ
the King”); thereby totally ignoring customary chronological spacings.
According to Osman, the 18th dynasty characters: Thutmose III, Amenhotep III,
Yuya, Akhnaton and Tutankhamun, are to be identified as, respectively: David,
Solomon, Joseph, Moses and Jesus Christ. Thus, once traditional heroes of
Israel – even a great father-figure like King David – are now transmogrified
into Egyptian (or, in Yuya’s case, a Syrian). Osman’s excuse for so radical a bouleversement seems to be that he is
the one best suited to rediscover “the true Egyptian roots of Christianity and
of Western civilization”.
Well, I believe that he has gone about it all in
a most biased fashion. I cannot see how Osman – himself a follower of both
Sothic dating and Higher Critical view – can possibly escape the label of
anti-semitism (here meaning anti-Israel) as described in my earlier TGN article (“Velikovsky and Academic
Anti-Semitism”). Osman is guilty of historical piracy, ‘hijacking’ famous
Israelites into an Egyptian environment and ‘forcing’ Egyptianhood upon them.
But that is an old trick – the Greeks had done it (in favour of Greece) long
before him. Whilst admittedly the revision that has grown out of Velikovsky’s
efforts can be at times radical, its protagonists are generally careful not to
up-end established sequences. Much of the revision revolves around the more
plausibly allowable, like deleting ‘Dark Ages’, or shortening artificially
over-stretched eras (such as Egypt’s “Third Intermediate Period”). Velikovsky
in fact lost many supporters when he, flying in the face of hard archaeological
evidence, had indulged in such a radical up-ending by separating the 18th from
the 19th dynasty (sequentially) and inserting in between foreign dynasties of
150 years duration (his Ramses II and His
Time, and Peoples of the Sea).
Though Osman certainly becomes most interesting
when he departs from the conventional norm, this is only the case when he does
so with some sort of coherence. He correctly maintains that his country, Egypt,
exerted an influence upon biblical and Christian thinking. However, as I intend
to show, he does not appear to have properly understood what he has rightly
sensed. He tries to force his examples - thereby missing Egyptian influences
that really are there, whilst creating ones that are not.
The Sothic chronology lets him down badly,
exacerbating his mishmash.
Osman proposes David as an Egyptian pharaoh of
the C15th BC, who impregnates Sarai. And, taking his cue from the Babylonian
Talmud (Osman, p. 12), he recklessly makes David the father of Isaac. Despite
his avowed aims, Osman lets himself down by his failure to appreciate the
relevance of Egypt’s Old Kingdom; his lack of perspective regarding the 18th
dynasty; but, most of all, by his anti-Israel bias. He locates the era of the
Exodus to the 19th dynasty (New Kingdom), Late Bronze Age.
Professor Emmanuel Anati, a genuine
archaeologist, has argued authoritatively (in The Mountain of God, p. 287) that the entire socio-political
setting of the Moses story and Joshua’s Conquest pertains to the Old
Kingdom/Early Bronze Age.
That is centuries earlier than even the 18th
dynasty.
Osman adopts the view that the books of Genesis
and Exodus were very late compilations (cf. pp. 1, 12 and 66), having been long
handed down by oral tradition before being committed to writing during the
Babylonian Exile (C6th BC).
Here I should like to suggest, following P.J.
Wiseman (Ancient Records and the
Structure of Genesis), that the eleven toledôt
divisions throughout Genesis: “These are the generations of …” - as well as the
regular occurrence of catch-lines - attest Genesis as being a compilation of
family histories written on series of tablets, each history signed off by its
owner, or writer. The toledôt is the
classic colophon of ancient Near Eastern writings, but unfortunately read by
most as a heading instead of an ending. The Book of Genesis claims to be a
combination of histories for the great patriarchs, from Adam to Joseph. Moses
is traditionally its compiler or editor, hence the Egyptian flavour of the
entire book.
Osman does not give to the biblical date the same
credence as he applies to his other sources: Qumran and Nag Hammadi.
Osman, in fact, really butchers the biblical
chronology, showing scant respect for genealogical data and ensuing time spans.
He makes AD 391 a crucial, cutting-off point, his
point de depart.
He completely ignores what could be a vital fact,
that the library of Alexandria may have been totally destroyed by the Romans at
the time of Cleopatra, centuries before AD 391. Julius Cæsar is supposed to
have started that fire, to cripple the royal fleet (Dio Cassius 42. 38. 2).
Osman writes that the storehouse of old wisdom in
Alexandria’s Serapeum (p. xiii):
“…proved irresistible for
Diodorus Siculus … when he set out in the time of Julius Cæsar, to research his
ambitious Bibliotheca Historica - the ‘bookshelf of history’. Diodorus,
who was an enthusiast of the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (which have
survived until today in the teachings of Islamic Sufis, Jewish Qabbalah,
Rosicrucians and Freemasons), became convinced of Egypt’s importance as a
source of knowledge”.
The Serapeum, Osman writes on the next page,
“later became also a center for Gnostic communities, both Hermetic … and
Christian”.
As I argued in a previous TGN (“Rediscovering
the Egyptianised Moses”, No. 4:6, 1998), Hermes was the Greek version of the
Egyptianised Moses. Also, Freemasonry is, like ancient Baalism, a syncretism of
Yahweh and Baal.
In Pt. II of this article, “Christ the King”, I
shall comment further on Hermeticism and Gnosticism.
No doubt revisionists reading Out of Egypt would
be thinking that they could propose identifications far more appropriate for
the biblical characters with whom Osman deals, especially Joseph (see #4
below); identifications, too, that leave intact detailed genealogies.
1. David = Thutmose III
Osman ‘becomes a revisionist’ when proposing that
pharaoh Thutmose III’s march via the narrow “Aruna” road was actually an
assault upon Jerusalem itself. This is an instance (about the only one) of
where he really grabbed my attention; not only because he, too, has suspected
that the Davidic era was synchronous with the early 18th dynasty,
but because his interpretation of Aruna had already been proposed and
strongly defended by Velikovskian modifier, Dr. Eva Danelius (“Did Thutmose III
Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?”, SIS, Vol. II, 1978, pp. 64-79), after Velikovsky had laid the
groundwork by identifying Thutmose III as the biblical pharaoh “Shishak”
who sacked the Jerusalem Temple in the 5th year of king Rehoboam of
Jerusalem (I Kings 14:25) (Ages in Chaos, I, ch. iv).
No need here for Israelites to be turned into Egyptians.
Whilst Velikovsky’s “Shishak” argument was
ingenious, in part, he rather spoiled his own argument, I think, by holding to
the conventional view that the My-k-ty of the Egyptian Annals was
Megiddo in northern Israel. Dr. Danelius really saved this whole package by
identifying My-k-ty as pertaining to Jerusalem itself. She plausibly
identified all three roads debated as to their appropriateness by Thutmose’s
staff as roads in southern Palestine. The Aruna road that
Thutmose eventually elected to take – the road most dreaded by his officers –
was in fact the narrow and precipitous camel-road from Jaffa up the Beth-horon
ascent approaching Jerusalem from the north.
Osman has come to the same conclusion, that Aruna
refers to the Beth-horon pass. But, with his unfortunate identification of
Thutmose III with David, instead of the far more plausible “Shishak”, he
has introduced an unwieldy ‘baggage-train’ onto that narrow route.
2. Solomon = Amenhotep III
Another crucial peg in Velikovsky’s reconstruction was his identification of the biblical “Queen of Sheba” as Queen Hatshepsut, co-ruler with Thutmose III. Osman passes over this fabulous queen in a couple of pages (pp. 20-21), having far more to say about the influential Queen Tiye – whom Velikovsky argued to have been the prototype of the tragic Queen Jocasta of the Greeks (in Oedipus and Akhnaton). Osman identified Tiye all at once as – if I am still following him – Joseph’s daughter, Solomon’s “Great Royal Wife”, and Moses’ mother.
According
to standard biblical chronology, Queen Tiye would have to have lived in excess
of 800 years to have met all of these criteria.
Meanwhile
Velikovsky’s reconstruction of the Solomonic age had its own hiccups. He had
ventured to identify Hatshepsut’s 9th year expedition to Punt with the visit to
Jerusalem by Queen Sheba, but revisionist Dr. J. Bimson (in “Hatshepsut and the
Queen of Sheba”, SIS, Vol. VIII,
12-26) eventually destroyed this argument; so effectively in fact that many
‘Velikovskians’ who had already been badly shaken by Velikovsky’s proposed
separation of the 19th from the 18th dynasty, now even abandoned Velikovsky’s
18th dynasty matrix and began to explore new chronologies.
I
re-addressed the whole issue for C and CH
Review (“Solomon and Sheba”, 1997:1) and may have salvaged Velikovsky here
due to the fortuitous discovery (as I see it) of King Solomon himself in the
Egyptian records, in the person of the mighty and seemingly royal Senenmut; a
dominant figure during the co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Senenmut had
recorded of himself (P. Dorman, The
Monuments of Senenmut, 1988, p. 175): “I was in this land under
[Hatshepsut’s] command since the death of [her] predecessor …”. That, combined
with Senenmut’s information that his name “is not to be found amongst the
annals of the ancestors” (J. Baikie, A
History of Egypt, Vol. II, p. 80), suggested that he was originally not from
Egypt. A further possible hint that Senenmut was non-Egyptian were his
“idiosyncracies in regard to the Egyptian language: the uncommon substitution
of certain hieroglyphs” and his penchant for creating cryptograms, e.g., in
relation to Hatshepsut’s throne name, Makera (Dorman, pp. 138, 165).
Velikovsky
did not miss the point that the Queen of Sheba was known as Makeda in Ethiopian legend; a name
almost identical to Hatshepsut’s throne name, Makera (Maat-ka-re).
The visit
of Sheba/Hatshepsut to Solomon was essentially connected, I think, with her
marriage to king Solomon, occurring while Hatshepsut was yet queen. She would
soon become Pharaoh. Senenmut, who had unique prerogatives and who was favoured
with many titles, came to dominate Egypt at this time, despite the presence
there of formidable personalities like Hatshepsut and Thutmose. Most historians
would agree with Baikie’s view (op. cit.,
p. 81) that Senenmut “was by far the most powerful and important figure of
[Hatshepsut’s] reign”, and R. Hari’s, that few non-royal [sic] personages in
pharaonic Egypt “have caused as much ink to flow as has Senenmut” (“La
vingt-cinquième statue de Senmout” JEA 70,
p. 141). The fact that his statues and inscriptions are still so abundant in
Egypt is all the more remarkable considering the campaign of destruction that
was waged against his monuments after his death.
But historians
are not able to outdo the self-praise in which Senenmut himself (or his scribe)
indulges in his statues. “I was the greatest of the great in the land …”, he
announces on one (Baikie, op. cit., pp.
80-81). Due to Solomon’s profound influence on Sheba/Hatshepsut, the harsh
administration of Israel (cf. 1 Kings 5:13f.) spilled over into Egypt. Her
country, we are told, “was made to labour with bowed head for her …” (Breasted,
A History of Egypt, p. 271). And, not
surprisingly, Senenmut was the one whom she appointed in charge, “I was a
foreman of foremen”, he tells us, “… overseer of all the works of the house of
silver [treasury?] …. I was one to whom the affairs of [Egypt] were reported;
that which South and North contributed was on my seal, the [forced] labour of
all countries was under my charge”. As Solomon, Senenmut’s labour gangs spread
into Egypt and other countries. Given Senenmut’s tutelage over the young
Thutmose, I am not surprised – but rather grateful – to read where Osman has
picked up marked similarities between Solomon’s taxation system and that of
Thutmose III (op. cit., pp. 57-58).
Israel’s wisdom literature – much of which is
attributed to David and Solomon – began to be reflected in Hatshepsut’s Egypt.
I compared some of Hatshepsut’s inscriptions with Psalms, Song of Songs, and
other Scriptures; and I followed Baikie (op.
cit., p. 89) in noting that Hatshepsut had reproduced one of David’s Psalms
(131 Vulgate; 132 Jerusalem Bible) almost word for word in places, though
substituting “Karnak” for “Jerusalem”. Stratigraphically, the prosperous and
internationalized Late Bronze I-II seems to reflect the opulence of this time.
Thus there is no problem whatever with Osman’s correct assertion, in favour of
his own reconstruction (op. cit., p. 18):
“Indeed, no such empire [as David’s] can be said to have been created between
the reign of Tuthmosis [Thutmose] III in the 15th century BC [sic] and the
second half of the 6th century BC, when Cyrus of Persia conquered both
Mesopotamia and Egypt”.
The unexpected discovery of Solomon in the
Egyptian records seems to have further cemented Velikovsky’s 18th dynasty
scenario. The revision is now able to cope with the formidable trio of
Hatshepsut, Thutmose III and Senenmut, all in a biblical context.
Solon
A spin-off from this identification is that the
exceedingly wise Solon of Greek folklore who went travelling by ship for a
decade, notably to Egypt, for mercantile purposes, is most likely a Greek
appropriation of the wise Solomon in the latter part of his reign, when he
involved himself in foreign affairs and his fleet. There are strange anomalies
with Solon as a C6th BC Athenian. Archaeology does not seem to favour so
advanced a civilisation that early at Athens (see e.g. P. James, Centuries of Darkness, pp. 96-98). E.
Yamauchi (“Two Reformers Compared: Solon of Athens and Nehemiah of Jerusalem”, The Bible World, pp. 262-292) found it
doubtful if money was yet coined there, as Solon is supposed to have done; and
he also, following Cyrus Gordon (another great pioneer defender of the east),
has identified Solon’s reforms as Jewish, paralleling Nehemiah’s.
All of this strongly suggests that Solon was not
Greek at all.
The phenomenon that was Senenmut is perhaps
explained only by the revision. Akhnaton likewise is a phenomenon, and Osman
goes to great lengths to explain him.
3. Moses =
Akhnaton
Akhnaton stands out as a singular individual
throughout the history of Egypt, and it is not surprising therefore that
scholars are intrigued by him. Osman is no different, he being prepared to turn
chronology upside down to equate Akhnaton with Moses. Osman is not the first to
have noted a likeness between Akhnaton’s Hymn and Psalm 104, indicating a close
contemporaneity between Akhnaton and David – but this can better be met by
Velikovsky’s scheme according to which el-Amarna (Akhnaton’s era) is to be
re-located to the C9th BC.
And I think that Velikovsky’s equation of
Akhnaton with the legendary Oedipus, if correct, more than adequately accounts
for the Pharaoh’s personal idiosyncracies.
As for Moses, there is no need to repeat here all
that I wrote about him recently in my:
Moses - May be Staring Revisionists Right in the Face
identifying him as, among others, Sinuhe of the so-called Middle Kingdom
of Egypt. What I could mention here, perhaps, is Sir Flinders Petrie’s comment
about Sinuhe (Egyptian Tales, p. 129):
“The titles given to [Sinuhe] … are of a very high rank, and imply that he was
the son either of the king or of a great noble. And his position in the queen’s
household shows him to have been of importance … quite familiar [with the royal
family]”.
The Talmud, Osman says, holds that Moses was a
king (op. cit., p. 68). But a high
official of pharaohs would be more accurate.
El-Amarna [EA]
Perhaps Velikovsky’s finest reconstruction was
his detailed comparison between the EA letters of Amenhotep III and Akhnaton
and the mid-C9th BC. Describing himself as if a Time Lord, with “the searching
rod … of time measurement” in his hand, Velikovsky declared (Ages in Chaos, I, p. 224): “I reduce by
six centuries the age of Thebes and el-Amarna, and I find King Jehoshaphat in
Jerusalem, Ahab in Samaria, Ben-Hadad in Damascus. If my rod of time
measurement does not mislead me, they are the kings who reigned in Jerusalem,
Samaria and Damascus in the el-Amarna period”.
Chronologically, Velikovsky was not far off the
mark here. The ruler of Jerusalem (Urusalim)
during the el-Amarna period, Abdi-hiba,
identifies far better as Jehoram, rather than his father, Jehoshaphat,
according to revisionist, Peter James. I summarised this view in:
King Abdi-Hiba of Jerusalem Locked in as a ‘Pillar’ of Revised History
I have also accepted the conclusion of
Velikovskian modifiers, notably in this case M. Sieff, that el-Amarna’s
prolific correspondent, Rib-Addi,
could not have been king Ahab of Israel as Velikovsky had thought. On this, see
my:
Is El Amarna’s Rib-Addi Biblically Identifiable?
Peter James and his colleagues were far more able
to accept Velikovsky’s identifications of el-Amarna’s successive kings of
Amurru, Abdi-Ashirta and Aziru, with the biblical succession of
Ben-Hadad I and Hazael of Syria (“The Dating of the El-Amarna Letters”, SIS, Vol. 2:3, 1977/78, p. 80):
“With [these] two
identifications [Velikovsky] seems to be on the firmest ground, in that we have
a succession of two rulers, both of who are characterised in the letters and
the Scriptures as powerful rulers who made frequent armed excursions - and
conquests - in the territories to the south of their own kingdom …”.
And Dr. John Bimson clinched this by adding a
third Syrian king, Ben-Hadad II, the Du-Teššub of the Hittite records. (“Dating
the Wars of Seti I”, SIS, Vol. 5:1,
1980/81, pp. 21-22).
I think that we may be able to salvage Velikovsky
even further by finding his cherished Ahab, not in his choice of Rib-Addi (clearly a Phoenician king),
but in EA’s Lab’ayu. On this
tentative theory, see my:
“In most scholarly works Labayu is referred to as
the king or ruler of Shechem”, wrote D. Rohl and B. Newgrosh, adding “and this,
we feel, has been misleading” (“The El-Amarna Letters and the New Chronology”, C and C Review, p. 18, 1988, pp. 23-42).
Since Shechem is only a few miles from Samaria, I
suggest that Lab’ayu ruled from
there.
Was Lab’ayu
a Hebrew speaker? El-Amarna Letter 252, written by him, has been described by
W. Albright as “no less than 40% pure Canaanite” (“An Archaic Hebrew Proverb in
an Amarna Letter from Central Palestine”, JNES,
89, 1943, pp. 29-32); a comment that has evoked this response from Rohl and
Newgrosh: “It is a pity that Albright was unable to take his reasoning process
just one step further because, in almost every instance where he detected the
use of what he called ‘Canaanite’ one could legitimately substitute the term
‘Hebrew’.”
Albright indentified the word nam-lu in line 16 as the Hebrew word for
‘ant’ (nemalah). Lab’ayu wrote: “If ants are smitten, the do not accept (the
smiting) quietly, but they bite the hand of the man who smites them”. Albright
recognised here a parallel with the two biblical proverbs (6:6 and 30:25). King
Ahab likewise was inclined to use a proverbial saying as an aggressive
counterpoint to a potentate (cf. 1 Kings 20:10, 11).
Lab’ayu’s
son, too, Mut-Baal, also displayed in
one of his letters (# 256) some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed origin words.
Albright noted of line 13: “As already recognized by the interpreters, this
idiom is pure Hebrew”.
“Son of Zuchru”
Velikovsky also identified king Jehoshaphat’s
captain, “son of Zichri”, with el-Amarna’s “son of Zuchru” (Ages in Chaos, I, pp. 228-230). Who
could argue with that!
Queen Jezebel
Velikovsky had ingeniously identified the only
female in the el-Amarna correspondence, Baalat-neše,
with the biblical “great woman of Shunem”, whose son Elisha restored to life (2
Kings 4:8-37) (ibid., p. 220). But I
think that, given Baalet-neše’s
undoubted rank, a likelier candidate for her would be Ahab’s wife, Jezebel
(i.e. Neše-bel-[at]?). On this, see my:
Is El Amarna’s “Baalat Neše” Biblically Identifiable?
Kingdom of Mitanni
Many historians – though not Osman, who passes it
over in one page (p. 56) – have puzzled long and hard over the so-called
‘Kingdom of Mitanni’ that figures in the el-Amarna correspondence.
What were its origins? Where was it located?
Its language – as with the name of its best-known
king, Tushratta or Dushratta, who wrote to the el-Amarna pharaohs
– is thought to be Indo-Iranian. But once again the revision may provide the
key to unlock the enigma. DUSHRATTA would simply be a variant of the name,
Abdi-Ashirta (i.e. AbDU-aSHRATTA). He is Ben-Hadad, Ahab’s contemporary. See
my:
Ben-Hadad I as El Amarna’s Abdi-ashirta = Tushratta
The name therefore is probably not Indo-Iranian
at all, but West Semitic; the last element being the name of the Canaanite
goddess Ashtarte. The name DU-TEŠŠUB is a similar construction, substituting
for Ashtarte the storm-god Teshub. The mysterious ‘Kingdom of Mitanni’ turns
out to be simply the extensive Syrian kingdom of Ben-Hadad I and Hazael, a
buffer state between Assyria and the Hittites.
4. Joseph = Yuya
Osman maintains that Joseph was the highly
credentialled Yuya, Syrian relative
of Akhnaton. Yuya, like Joseph, he
states, was the only official in Egypt ever to be called “Father of Pharaoh”.
And he optimistically claims that the details of Joseph’s life after his
interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams “are matched by only one person in Egyptian
history - Yuya, the minister of
Amenhotep III (p. 39). But again Osman’s apparent ignorance of pre-18th
dynasty Egyptian history lets him down. Professor A. Yahuda (op. cit., pp. 23-24) had already found the
equivalent title, “Father of Pharaoh” in Old Kingdom Egypt; the Genesis
expression, ab, ‘father’, a title borne (centuries before Yuya) by the Vizier, Ptah-hotep, who was
itf ntr mryy-ntr, ‘father of god, the beloved of god’; god
here indicating Pharaoh.
Now, since Ptah-hotep was also a wise sage, whose
writings resemble the Hebrew Proverbs, and since he – like Joseph – lived for
110 years, then it is worthwhile considering - as some scholars already have - that
Ptah-hotep was Joseph in his guise as scribe and sage.
Osman’s identification of Joseph is a classic
example, I think, of where revisionists would think that they could easily
trump him. T. Chetwynd, for instance (in “A Seven Year Famine in the Reign of
King Djoser with Other Parallels between Imhotep and Joseph”…” C and AH, 1987,
pp. 49-56), has found numerous parallels between Joseph and the celebrated
Vizier, Imhotep, of the 3rd dynasty (Old Kingdom), who supposedly
saved Egypt from a 7-year Famine.
Imhotep, who according to J. Hurry (Imhotep, p. 90) was “one of the few men of
genius in the history of ancient Egypt … one of the fixed stars of the Egyptian
firmament”, is portrayed as a kind of ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ of Egypt:
mathematician, scientist, engineer, architect. He was more besides. Carved on
the base of a statue of Zoser in the Cairo Museum is a short inscription
describing Imhotep as: “The seal-bearer of the King of Lower Egypt … the high
priest of Heliopolis ... the chief of the sculptors, of the masons …”. Imhotep
has also come down through history as a thaumaturgist, healer and Egyptian
patron saint of medicine.
Joseph also, according to Yahuda (op. cit., p. 24), would have been “of the high
priestly caste” of Heliopolis – like Imhotep. Chronologically, 3rd
dynasty Imhotep is perfectly situated in relationship to my 4th
dynasty Moses connection. (Refer back to my Moses article).
Concluding
Remark
Really, the presence of Israelites in positions
of great power even in Old Kingdom Egypt is my answer to Osman’s belief in the
Egyptian roots of the Chosen People. It was in fact a Hebrew influence that
permeated Egypt and then came back to Israel. Would not Jacob have carried all
of the treasured toledôt scriptures of his forefathers into Egypt, where
they would have been handed on to the influential Joseph? He, as priest of
Heliopolis and Vizier of Egypt, would have preached them to the Egyptian
people. The theology of Heliopolis became pre-eminent in the land.
Imhotep-Joseph was one of the real geniuses of Egyptian history.
Now we are beginning to understand why the early
Old Testament reflects such an Egyptian influence. Some of its writers, Joseph,
Moses and Solomon, were also key figures in Egypt’s destiny. Strictly speaking,
the influence was from the side of Israel. Thus, Osman might have found rather
more fertile subject matter had he chosen to write about Israel’s influence,
rather than Egypt’s, upon ancient to modern culture. But his prejudices
weighing against that may be too strong.
Part Two:
Christ The King
Part II: Christ
the King
Predictably, now, Osman tries to ‘pour’ the Holy
Family also into an 18th dynasty matrix; with Jesus as Tutankhamun;
Mary as Nefertiti; and Joseph as the Vizier, Aye. Here again
one encounters the emergence of various questionable patterns of argument that
clearly and strikingly parallel those in Part I. Osman again:
- places a blind trust in the conventional chronology and archaeology.
Whilst the historical era of the four Gospels,
once revised, might – and only might – turn out to be relatively more clear cut
by comparison with events in early Egyptian dynastic history, one should
nevertheless expect the chronological earthquake caused by Velikovsky to be
still transmitting aftershocks right down the line, so as to plunge late BC
events into an AD time frame. Moreover if Solon really is Solomon, as I
maintain, and the ‘Ionian’ philosophers actually have their origin with Old
Testament Joseph, and Athenian archaeology is not properly established before
the late C5th BC, then Classical history – Greek, and Roman, too –
must stand in need of a significant revision.
Of course I would not expect Osman to be able to
produce a new model just like that. My problem with him is that he so
uncritically embraces conventional late BC dates (e.g. for Herod and Pilate) as
“the established historical facts” (Out of Egypt, p. 110). Chronologically, Osman seems
to work hand in glove with Hershel Shanks, editor of the influential
Washington-based magazines Biblical Archaeological Review and Bible
Review, of whose conclusions I was so critical in The Glozel Newsletter (No
4:2, 1998).
- he treats with contempt the four Gospels.
Osman’s refusal to consider the Gospels as being
significant eyewitness records is to my mind another classic example of what I
noted in Pt. I, that not a shred of
credibility ought to be conceded to the writings of Israel. He seems unaware of
the papyrus discoveries from Egypt and Qumran that, according to German
papyrologist, C. Thiede (Eyewitness to Jesus, Doubleday), call for an
earlier dating of all four Gospels. {According to the article “Thiede’s Witness”,
in The Wanderer (June 12, 1997), this book is now very hard to find.
Is there being applied by the academic world a “Conspiracy of Silence” -
to use the title of Osman’s ch. 17 - in the case of Thiede? And of Carmignac?
(see below)}.
Shanks’ reaction to the new scholarship is the
typically off-handed sort to which entrenched academics must resort whenever
they cannot cope with the facts (Wanderer, ibid.): “Highly regarded
scholars are often reluctant to spend the time it takes to debunk these far-out
claims”. Well, it is not “the time” that they lack, but the answers.
An ironical note: I doubt if the
Egyptian-oriented Osman would be over-impressed by the fact that: “… Hershel
Shanks puts Thiede in the same category as those cranks who claim that Jesus
was not Jewish but Egyptian”.
Thiede’s conclusions may not be mainstream, but
they accord nicely with those of expert linguist, J. Carmignac (The Birth of
the Synpotic Gospels, Franciscan Herald Press, 1984), who discovered many
links with the New Testament whilst translating the Qumran texts. Carmignac was
in fact “absolutely dumbfounded to discover [how] extremely easy” it was
for him to translate back into Qumranic Hebrew the Greek texts of Matthew and
Mark (ibid., p. 1). This
led him to the inescapable conclusion that Matthew and Mark were originally
written in Hebrew (or possibly its sister-language, Aramaïc), thus according
with “numerous Fathers of the Church” that there was “a Hebrew Matthew”.
Carmignac felt compelled thus to revise the dating for the synoptic Gospels (ibid.,
pp. 6, 60):
.… The latest dates that can be admitted for Mark (and the Collection
of Discourses) is 50, and around 55 for the Completed Mark; around 55-60 for
Matthew; between 58 and 60 for Luke. But the earliest dates are clearly more
probable: Mark around 42; Completed Mark around 45; (Hebrew) Matthew around 50;
(Greek) Luke a little after 50.
In support of this revision, Carmignac provided a
most striking example from Luke 1:68-79 of the Evangelist’s dependence upon
what he entitled Semitisms of Composition (pp. 27-29): “Is it by
chance”, he asked, “that the second strophe of this poem begins by a triple
allusion to the names of the three protagonists: John [the Baptist], Zachary,
Elizabeth? But this allusion only exists in Hebrew; the Greek or English
translation does not preserve it”.
Dr. Eva Danelius, whom we met in Pt. I in
“Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?”, SIS, Vol. II
(1978), claimed for instance that the Book of Revelation (conventionally dated
to c. 95 AD) ought really to be viewed from a pre-70 AD standpoint:
For the attentive reader it is
obvious that a part of John’s visions – the 24 elders, the importance of clean
white garments, the punishment of those who neglect their duty as watchmen –
reflect details of the duties of priests and Levites in the Beth Moked, the
northenmost building of the Temple compound, where the keys to the Temple mound
were guarded under measures of the strictest security (p. 70, with reference to
the Babylonian Talmud, Ch. 1. Midoth).
- he is quite biased in his methodology.
Osman employs a convenient modus operandi throughout especially the
latter part of his book, sweeping aside as “fiction”, or “forgeries”,
whatever documents oppose his viewpoint. Thus the entire Book of Joshua
becomes “a work of fiction” (p. 168) because – according to Osman’s
extraordinary thesis – Joshua should no longer by then have been alive. And whatever
early AD documents do refer to the physical Jesus – contrary to Osman’s
argument that there was no physical Jesus that late – must be dismissed out of
hand by him as “forgeries”, without any backing up of his claims with
solid evidence or footnotes.
Just as the mainstream archaeologists, basing
themselves upon a faulty chronology, end up finding no Old Testament biblical traces
(e.g. of the Exodus; the Conquest; David/Solomon), and need to dig deeper, so often,
too, with the New Testament, which critics accuse of being ‘un-historical’,
with ‘later additions’. Until one digs deeper. Here is a classic case in point (https://opentheword.org/2014/09/02/controversial-bethesda-pool-discovered-exactly-where-john-said-it-was/):
Controversial Bethesda pool discovered exactly
where John said it was
written by Dean
Smith
….
The remains of the Bethesda Pool found exactly
where the Apostle John said it was located.
There is a story in the Gospel of John that proved
problematic for liberals who don’t believe the Bible.
I am talking about Jesus healing of the lame man
at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-15). In the account, Jesus came across a lame man
lying by the pool. According to tradition, when an angel stirred the waters,
the first sick person to enter the pool was healed.
When Jesus asked the man, who had been lame for 38
years, how he was doing, the man said because he did not have anyone to help
him, when the waters stirred someone always stepped in before him. Jesus said
to him, “Get up, pick up your pallet and walk” (v 8) and the man was instantly
healed.
In the account, the apostle John provides some
detail about the pool. First he said it was near the “sheep’s gate” and
secondly it had “five porticoes” (verse 2). A portico, similar to a porch, is a
covered entrance way. It was a five-sided pool.
However, because the healing by this pool is only
mentioned in John’s Gospel, the liberals quickly concluded it was a later
addition by someone not familiar with Jerusalem. That theory prevailed until
the late 19th century when archaeologists discovered the pool exactly where
John said it was — by the Sheep’s gate now located in the Muslim-controlled
sector of Jerusalem.
Not only that, the pool had five porticoes, just
as John said it did. It was five sided because the rectangular pool had two
large basins that were separated by a wall/portico. This made five in total for
the pool. The northern pool collected water which replenished the southern
side.
Because of the broad steps located beneath a
portico leading down to the southern basin, it is believed this pool is also
served as a mikveh or ritual bath for the Jews.
In addition, they even found evidence of the
healing tradition associated with the pool as they discovered shrines dedicated
to a Greek god of healing — Asclepius (a god of medicine/healing). It was part
of a Roman medicinal bath built on the site between 200AD and 400AD.
Obviously, pagans recognized the healing
attributes of the pool and transferred them to their pagan gods. A similar
thing happened in Acts 14:9-18 when villagers in town of Lystra mistakenly
believed Zeus
and Hermes had performed a miraculous healing after Paul and Barnabas
healed a lame man from the city.
So John was right.
Osman’s ‘Jesus’
(i) As Tutankhamun
Osman has to make much of Tutankhamun, whose tomb
inscriptions rather than the four Gospels, he seems to think, hold the true
account of Jesus’ fate. He calls the young Pharaoh “the charismatic
Tutankhamun”, adding (p. 135): “It is, I believe an unconscious recognition
of the truth about his identity that impels millions to visit his tomb … each
year in what might be described as a form of pilgrimage, and more millions to
queue for hours to view … the treasures recovered from the tomb by Howard
Carter …”.
Or, one might wonder, may not such fascination be
due to the fact that people just love to view magnificent treasures of gold and
lapis lazuli?
The truth is, as P. Fox wrote: “… curiously
enough, for all the splendour of his burial, Tutankhamun was a ruler of little
importance” (Tutankhamun’s Treasure, OUP, 1951, p. 20). And H. Carter,
the discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb, wrote similarly (The Tomb of
Tut-ankh-Amen, I, 45):
In the present state of our
knowledge we might say with truth that the one outstanding feature of
[Tutankhamun’s] life was the fact that he died and was buried. Of the man
himself – if indeed he ever arrived at the dignity of manhood – and of his
personal character we know nothing.
Dr. Velikovsky had used the supplementary (as he
saw it) information of the Oedipus drama to help him account for
anomalies of this period, such as why so insignificant a king as Tut
(Velikovsky’s Eteocles) was glorified with so magnificent a tomb by Aye
(his Creon) (Oedipus and Akhnaton, Abacus, 1969, Ch. “Crowned
with Every Rite”, pp. 131-141).
Not at all convincing either is Osman’s forcing
of Egyptian texts and the Bible to support his theory that ‘Jesus’/Tutankhamun
was killed by an 18th dynasty priest, Panehesy, so as to tie in with
his interpretation of the Talmud, according to which a priest, “Pinhas
… killed [Jesus]” (b. Sanh, 106b, as cited by Osman, p. 132). Osman reaches the new
conclusion – without offering any primary evidence in support – that
Tutankhamun was killed by Panehesy; who, as Akhnaton’s “chancellor and Chief
Servitor of the Aten”, may indeed have been a priest. He then really
complicates matters by identifying Panehesy, firstly with the Israelite priest
Phinehas (Numbers 25:6-15), before going on to equate both priests with the
Talmudic Pinhas. But nowhere does he bother to show where the Talmud
identifies this Pinhas as a priest.
The names Panehesy and Phinehas are indeed
strikingly similar [the name Phinehas is clearly of Egyptian origin],
but their circumstances are not. The zealous Phinehas had intervened when an
Israelite had, in flagrant breach of the Law, brought a Moabite woman into his
family “under the very eyes of Moses and the whole community of the sons of
Israel as they wept at the door of the Tent of Meeting”. Phinehas arose,
“seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them
both through, the Israelite and the woman, right through the groin” (vv. 6-8).
This incident is said to have occurred in Transjordania, not “at the foot of
Mount Sinai” where Osman would have ‘Jesus’/Tutankhamun meet his violent death.
To get around this inconvenient snag, Osman – taking his cue from documentary
theorist, E. Sellin (Osman, p. 144) – argues that the biblical account of
Phinehas has been “subjected to some priestly sleight-of-hand in the editing in
order to cover up what actually happened”.
This neat piece of subterfuge sets Osman free
then to pursue his own far-fetched Whodunnit.
(ii) As
Joshua
Osman also equates Jesus (Hebrew Ye-shua) with Old Testament Joshua (Ye-ho-shua), enabling him to synthesise
the episodes of Moses and Joshua on Mount Sinai (Old Testament) with the
Transfiguration (New Testament), with Moses and Jesus together on the same
mountain (for him also Mount Sinai). But here Osman quite undoes himself:
- firstly, by adhering to the traditional view that Mount Sinai was
Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula (he calls it Gebel Musa, p. 101). [Egyptians
may understandably be reluctant to let go of the centuries long tradition of
having a ‘Mount Sinai’ in their own (or neighbouring) territory]. Professor
Emmanuel Anati (The Mountain of God: Har
Karkom, Rizzoli, 1986) had proved Jebel Musa to be quite lacking in Late
Bronze Age archaeology (relevant to the 18th dynasty). Osman will later have
St. Paul trekking off to Jebel Musa, thus enabling him to develop further his
pro-Egyptian thesis, with the Apostle supposedly being influenced by
Alexandrian Hermetic and Gnostic thinking. But his case for Paul’s dependence
upon Alexandrian lore cannot be sustained given that Mount Sinai could not have
been anywhere near Egypt. St. Paul says that Mount Sinai was “in Arabia”
(Galatians 4:25).
- secondly, as if that weren’t bad enough, his reconstruction leads
him into the absurd situation whereby his ‘Jesus’/Joshua, who had already been
slain, later resurfaces in the Book of Deuteronomy; not to mention – after that
– in what Osman calls “an entire book devoted to his exploits” (Book of Joshua)
(p. 168).
Joshua/Jericho
Archaeology’s original impulse was to recognize
the Early Bronze Age walls at Jericho as the famous fallen walls of the Book of
Joshua. But that notion was abandoned once the Sothic scheme of chronology was
applied to the site, re-dating those particular walls to about half a
millennium earlier than Joshua. Osman naturally swallows this line of
reasoning, calling the entire Book of Joshua “a work of fiction” (p. 169). The
fact is that the book has in support of its narrative a complete stratigraphy.
Jesus
Osman claims that the physical Jesus is not
referred to in contemporary records, either Roman or Jewish. I say physical
Jesus because a key distinction in Osman’s thesis is that Jesus had both (a) a
physical persona, as Joshua/Tutankhamun; and (b) a spiritual persona, as known
by the Apostles (p. 109). Osman is even bold enough to claim that, in this very
convenient (for him) split theory – which has something of a Docetist ring
about it [the Docetists denied that Christ ever had a real body or a narrowly
‘historical’ existence] – he is supported by the Church Fathers. But from my
reading of the Fathers, I think that Osman has badly misunderstood their use of
allegory, according to which all the holy men of the Old Testament were to be
regarded as forerunners – in one way or another – of Christ; but not as the
actual Christ; just as they regarded the holy women (e.g. Sarah, Ruth, Judith
and Esther) as types of Mary.
In the minds of the Church Fathers (e.g. Sts.
Irenaeus, Adv. haer., III, 22, 4;
Epiphanius, Haer., 78, 18; Jerome, Epist., 22, 21), Jesus Christ and Mary
were the ‘New Adam’ and the ‘New Eve’, and they believed the Old Testament to
be replete with symbolical prefigurations of the two. Osman, referring to the
physical Jesus, writes (p. 109):
Two thousand years ago, at the
time Jesus is said to have lived, Palestine was part of the Roman Empire. Yet
no contemporary Roman record exists that can bear witness … to the physical
appearance of Jesus. Even more surprising is the absence of any reference to
Jesus in the writings of Jewish authors living at that time in Jerusalem or
Alexandria ….
I think that there is a bit of legerdemain involved here as well. It is
all too easy for Osman to say “no contemporary … record exists”, when he is
going to, one by one, dismiss as “forgeries” any contenders, and brush aside
the Gospels as contradicting each other (p. 110). Contemporary Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus wrote, not only about the Essenes - and about Pontius Pilate,
John the Baptist, and James - but he also wrote directly about Jesus Christ (Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. 18, ch.
iv):
Now, there was about this time
Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of
wonderful works – a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He
drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was (the)
Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had
condemned him to the Cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake
him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets
had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him ….
Osman claims that this passage, “greatly valued
during the Middle Ages as the only external testimony from the C1st AD pointing
to Jesus having lived at that time” has since “become an embarrassment, having
been exposed in the 16th century as a forgery” (op. cit., ibid.). He offers not a single name or footnote to verify
this, only an argumentum ab silentio,
that the prolific Origen never referred to this passage.
Re the supposed contradictions amongst the four
Gospels, Osman [who believes that the earliest versions were written only
“several decades after the events they describe”] writes (pp. 109-110):
… when we attempt to match the
four gospels … against the facts of history we cannot escape the implication
that with the gospels themselves we are dealing with a false dawn. We find no
agreement about when Jesus was born or when he was put to death.
… Only two of the four gospel
authors, Matthew and Luke, refer to the birth of Jesus, but their accounts do
not agree. … Matthew places his birth firmly in the time of Herod … Luke …
relates the birth of Jesus to that of John the Baptist, who was also born ‘in
the days of Herod, the king of Judaea’ (Luke 1:5).
…. Luke goes on to tell the
familiar story of the birth of Jesus in a Bethlehem stable … and contradicts
both Matthew and his own earlier account by placing these events a decade after
the death of Herod the Great: ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there
went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of
Syria). … We know from Roman sources that this event could not have taken pace
before AD 6, the year in which Quirinius was appointed governor of Syria and
Judaea became a Roman province.
Of course the Roman people themselves did not
date in terms of BC or AD.
Scholars and historians would be reluctant today to
assert that the date for Jesus’ birth has been fixed with chronological
precision. John Paul II, for instance, writing his first encyclical “Redemptor
Hominis” (1978), referred to the date of the Jubilee Year 2000 “without
prejudice to all the corrections imposed by chronological exactitude …” (#1). I
am very much impressed with the work of Daryn Graham on this controversial subject
area. See e.g. his:
Osman, after conveniently sweeping aside all
opposing data, will direct our attention towards what he calls “the established
historical facts”. But while such an authoritative sounding phrase might be
enough to coerce many into an immediate passive conformity, it probably does
not have that sort of hypnotic effect upon hardened revisionists, who might
straightaway ask: “What “facts”? How “established”?
As with the Old Testament, so with the New, it is
easy to point out anomalies with the conventional history; but then to go on
and say that the writings of Israel contradict real history, or one another,
because they do not fit the Procrustean bed of textbook chronology, is to say
too much – until that bed has been properly made and set on solid foundations.
There is enough evidence in the case of Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), for example,
to indicate that establishment figures such as Hershel Shanks are not reliable
guides as to archaeological interpretation.
And certainly Ahmed Osman does not inspire much
confidence in this regard.
