Thursday, October 24, 2019

Location and Language of Babel



              

by


Damien F. Mackey

  


Now, turning to geographical considerations, “eastward” and “plain of Shinar”, there may be

a pressing need to shift the conventional goal posts. And that is exactly what Anne Habermehl has done in her ground-breaking article, “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?”


 

Language of Babel

 

This heading is not so much concerned about the language, or languages, spoken at ancient Babel, as about a re-consideration of the meaning of the words/phrases particularly of verse 1: “whole world”; “eastward”; “plain of Shinar”.   

Here, as in the Pentecost event of Acts 2, translations might superficially convey the impression of a global event, “whole world” (Genesis 11:1), to be compared with Acts 2:5’s “every nation under heaven”. A pairing of Babel with Pentecost is relevant insofar as the disastrous confusion of languages in the case of the former, owing to the sin of pride (Genesis 11:4, 7-9), is Divinely undone by the miraculous phenomenon of “tongues” at Pentecost (Acts 7:11): “… we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”    

 

 

With the benefit of such a comparison it may be suggested that the confusion of languages was, just as was the Flood, only “local in geographic extent” (for full quote, read on further).

 

The different and contemporaneous Sumerian and Akkadian languages may have been a result.

 

Matt Lynch, however, has a somewhat different take on Babel and Pentecost (2016):

http://theologicalmisc.net/2016/05/pentecost-reversal-babel/

 

Pentecost — A Reversal of Babel?



Once, when I was teaching a church class, two people started speaking to each other in German. It made things easier for them because it was their native language. But it didn’t make things easier for Margaret (name changed). With deep frustration she exclaimed, ‘Can we just speak English here!’

 

The experience of linguistic diversity leads many to wish for unity—or rather, homogeneity. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone just spoke normal (i.e., English)?  That desire for intelligibility is understandable, but the desire for that language to be English can also betray ethnocentrism. Especially from where I come in the U.S., which has no national language, the fight to retain English can easily slide into a fear-driven attempt to keep ‘our’ culture and ‘our’ language dominant.

 

Confusion over Babel

 

Yesterday the church celebrated its founding linguistic event—Pentecost—an event that many hail as the definitive reversal of Babel. Whereas at Babel, God confused languages, at Pentecost, God brought people of all languages together and united them. At Babel tongues were confused. At Pentecost, tongues were understood. You get the idea.

However, Pentecost may not be anti-Babel in the way some suppose. For starters, the reversal idea assumes that a unified language was a good idea gone wrong, and that eschatological unity would somehow involve a return to one language—a Spirit language.

 

But Genesis never states that the confusion of languages was a bad thing. The only downside was for the Babelites, who couldn’t finish their Manhattan project. On the positive side, language diversification enabled humanity to get on with the task of ‘filling the earth,’ something they were meant to do but didn’t because of their big hero project. Notice the language in Gen 11:4:

 

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

 

God had wanted humans to ‘fill the earth’ (Gen 1). Babel was in direct contravention of God’s intended vision of teeming diversity.

At Pentecost, God embraces language diversity. He doesn’t destroy it. So yes, the Spirit reverses the imperial unification of Babylon, but not the multiplication of languages.

 

Empires and Language

 

To see why the preservation of multiplication is important, it’s important to grasp the imperial function of language unification. Joel Green helps us here:

The wickedness of this idolatrous plan [to build Babel] is betrayed in the opening of the Babel story, with its reference to ‘one language’—a metaphor in the ancient Near East for the subjugation and assimilation of conquered peoples by a dominant nation. Linguistic domination is a potent weapon in the imperial arsenal, as people of Luke’s world themselves would have known, living as they did in the wake of the conquest of ‘the world’ by Alexander the Great and the subsequent creation of a single, Greek-speaking linguistic community.[1]

 

By confusing languages God was merciful, not punitive. He already recognized that ‘this is only the beginning of what they will do’ (11:6). Who knows what WMDs the Babelites would’ve created? Middleton writes, ‘Babel thus represents a regressive human attempt to guarantee security by settling in one place and constructing a monolithic empire, with a single language, thus resisting God’s original intent for humanity.’[2]

 

So God gave humanity a push toward its original purpose, to fill the world, cultivate it, build cultures, and grow. Linguistic diversity is a natural outgrowth of this process, and one which the Spirit rubber stamps at Pentecost.

 

Israel& the Nations

 

But before we land on Pentecost, it’s important to look at a few snapshots of Israel’s ‘universal’ vision in Isaiah:

 

In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. … For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isa 2:2-3)

I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory… And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites, says the LORD. … From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the LORD. (Isa 66:18, 21, 23)

 

In the first vision, the nations come to receive instruction from Israel. In the second, they come to worship, and some even becomes priests. They come as nations, with all their diversity of languages (‘nations and tongues’). And, they retain their identity as nations. They neither dissolve into one gigantic Israelite world empire nor isolate themselves completely.

 

Israel’s worship system includes foreigners and receives the nations’ offerings, while the nations receive teaching from Israel.

 

Pentecost—Preservation and Unification

 

When we turn to Pentecost, we see that the Spirit is similarly uninterested in unifying language: ‘Jews … from every nation under heaven … each one heard them speaking in the native language of each’ (Acts 2:5-6).

Things were getting out of hand, so Peter stood up to interpret the event. He did so by drawing on Joel 2, which anticipated a work of the Spirit that obliterated a different sort of division. Here’s Peter quoting from Joel 2:28-29:

 

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and womenI will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

 

The point couldn’t be clearer—the Spirit gave without regard for status, sex, or nationality. In giving, the Spirit unified the people of God (‘tearing down the dividing wall of hostility’ Eph 2:14), but in a way that preserved their cultural diversity. One Spirit, many gifts. One Spirit, many languages. The Spirit doesn’t negate difference, but cultivates and leverages that difference in service of God’s mission toward all nations.

So yes, Pentecost reverses the homogeneity of Babel. And yes, Pentecost reverses any hostility that may have arisen in the wake of linguistic confusion. Yet, the Spirit puts the diversity of cultures (preserved in their languages) on display and empowers each for the proclamation of a de-centered Good News. This was a profoundly anti-imperial move.  The point isn’t that the Spirit speaks one language. Instead, the Spirit speaks your language—no matter who you are. ....

 

Returning now to the subject of geographical extent, for the Flood, for Babel, Rich Deem has written of “The Genesis Flood Why the Bible Says It Must be Local”:

 

“Psalm 104 directly eliminates any possibility of the flood being global (see Psalm 104-9 - Does it refer to the Original Creation or the Flood?). In order to accept a global flood, you must reject Psalm 104 and the inerrancy of the Bible. If you like to solve mysteries on your own, you might want to read the flood account first and find the biblical basis for a local flood.

 

The Bible's other creation passages eliminate the possibility of a global flood

 

The concept of a global Genesis flood can be easily eliminated from a plain reading of Psalm 104,1 which is known as the "creation psalm." …. The verse that eliminates a global flood follows: "You set a boundary they [the waters] cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." (Psalm 104:9)1 Obviously, if the waters never again covered the earth, then the flood must have been local. Psalm 104 is just one of several creation passages that indicate that God prevented the seas from covering the entire earth.2 An integration of all flood and creation passages clearly indicates that the Genesis flood was local in geographic extent”.

 

Now, turning to geographico-linguistic considerations re Babel, “eastward” and “plain of Shinar”, there may be a pressing need to shift the conventional goal posts. And that is exactly what Anne Habermehl has done in her ground-breaking article, “Where in the World Is the Tower of Babel?” (https://answersingenesis.org/tower-of-babel/where-in-the-world-is-the-tower-of-babel/), there shifting the geographical focus for the Tower of Babel incident away from southern Iraq (ancient “Sumer”), the customary “Cradle of Civilisation”, to the Khabur region of NE Syria. According to this new view, the biblical “land of Shinar” to whose “plain” men migrated after the Flood (Genesis 11:2), and thought to indicate “Sumer”, is roughly to be identified, instead, as the region of Sinjar (the scene of much fighting in our era).

This is how Anne Habermehl has introduced (summarised) her article:

 

Abstract

 

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is believed by many to be the record of a real historical event that took place after the worldwide Flood, at a time when the earth’s population still lived together in one place. The enduring archaeological question, therefore, is where the Tower of Babel was built. It is widely considered that Shinar, where the Bible says the Babel event took place, was a territory in south Mesopotamia; and that Babel was located at Babylon. However, an analysis of history, geography, and geology, shows that Shinar cannot have been in the south, but rather was a territory in what is northeastern Syria today; and that the remnants of the Tower must be located in the Upper Khabur River triangle, not far from Tell Brak, which is the missing city of Akkad.

 

An immediate point in Habermehl’s favour is that she has been able to, in her scholarly and well-researched article, provide a fairly compelling identification (namely, Tell Brak) for the lost city of Akkad (Accad), Nimrod’s city (Genesis 10:10), so famous in ancient times, but not identified even to this day.

 

Akkad is generally estimated to have been situated in the environs of modern Baghdad.

 

As to the word, “eastward”, one may have to ask, “eastward” from where?

Various translations of the word, the Hebrew miqqedem (מִקֶּדֶם), are “from the east”, “in the east”. The Ark survivors were last heard of “on the mountains of Ararat [Urartu]”, which is already close to the eastern extremities of the ancient world. It is unlikely that preserved humanity travelled even further “eastwards” (or its variants) than this in search of fertile habitable land.

Hebrew miqqedem also has the meaning “of old [long ago”], which makes more sense to me.

Further, regarding the location of the Tower of Babel, the Septuagint (LXX) Isaiah provides a geographical clue which, whilst conforming with Habermehl’s location of biblical “Shinar”, would not, however, support a conventional location of the land as Sumer, nor anywhere further “eastward”. In Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers we read this intriguing information, regarding Isaiah 10:9: “Is not Calno [Calneh] as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as Damascus?” (“... instead of naming Carchemish, gives “Calanè, where the tower [ὁ πύργος] was built ...”):
 
“…. Is not Calno as Carchemish?—The six names obviously pointed to more recent conquests in which Sargon and his predecessors had exulted. One after another they had fallen. Could Judah hope to escape? (1) Calno, the Calneh of Genesis 10:10, Amos 6:2. That prophet had held up its fate in vain as a warning to Samaria. …. The LXX. version, which instead of naming Carchemish, gives “Calanè, where the tower [ὁ πύργος] was built,” seems to imply a tradition identifying that city with the Tower of Babel of Genesis 11:4. (2) Carchemish. Few cities of the ancient world occupied a more prominent position than this. Its name has been explained as meaning the Tower of Chemosh, and so bears witness to the widespread cultus of the deity whom we meet with in Biblical history as the “abomination of the Moabites” (1 Kings 11:7)”.
 
Some have even associated the god Chemosh with Ham himself, the son of Noah.

 

This switches the land of the Tower of Babel away from Sumer to the vicinity of Carchemish.

The name, Carchemish, including apparently the meaning of “Tower”, may indicate that this is where the attempted building of the Tower of Babel had been undertaken.

It could not have been in the well-known Babylon of Sumer, which city was begun much later.

Any map of Mesopotamia will show that - whether one believes Noah’s Ark to have landed on Mt. Çudi (Judi) in Kurdistan, or Mt. Ararat in Turkey - ancient Babylon is hundreds of kilometers directly south of both of these places. Various authors have pointed this out. “This somewhat inconvenient geographical fact (for those who believe that the people migrated eastward or westward) is downplayed by those who believe that the Tower was built at the city of Babylon, and requires inventing scenarios that move the people far enough south while still satisfying their perception of this Scripture”. (Anne Habermehl’s article)

 

Sadly, the location of other cities connected with Nimrod in this same Genesis verse (10:10): “The beginning of [Nimrod’s] kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar”, is also a matter of dispute. Some translations even get rid of “Calneh” altogether, by substituting “all of these [i.e., Babel, Erech and Accad] in the land of Shinar”.

Another point in Habermehl’s favour, I think, is that her choice of Sinjar (Shinjar) for “Shinar” is far more linguistically plausible than is “Sumer”.

 

Scholars and historians have been totally confounded by the abrupt rise of the Sumerian culture nearly 6,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This “sudden civilisation” seemed to appear out of thin air and refused to conform to the popular historical theory of linear development in cultural evolution.

Historian Professor Charles Hapgood squarely faces the issue when he writes that “today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modern society on all continents… We shall now assume that 20,000 years ago while paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on earth.”

 

Likewise the rise of Sumeria has been a major puzzle.

 

Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God writes, “With stunning abruptness… there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden… the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all high civilisations of the world.”

William Irwin Thompson puts it even more succinctly. “Sumer is a poor stoneless place for a neolithic culture to evolve from a peasant community into a full-blown civilisation,” he writes, “but it is a very good place to turn the plains and marshes into irrigated farmlands … In short, Sumer is an ideal place to locate a culture already having the technology necessary for urban life and irrigation agriculture.”

This would indicate that human settlement of Sumer, and the cities and culture that developed from this, had occurred somewhat later than was formerly believed.

 

There is to be considered the possibility that pre-Flood Cain-ites had settled there and that, after the Flood, when Sumer was re-settled, Cain-ite names were re-applied to the cities that now sprang up there. My earlier view had been, in line with others, that cities named after the Cain-ites (Enoch, Irad, Tubal-cain) were identifiable in the names of southern Mesopotamia cities. According to: http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/the-babylonian-connection-

 

David Rohl has proposed that both Uruk and Ur were named after Enoch, because their actual Sumerian names were Unuk and Unuki, respectively. Rohl goes on to see a connection between Bad-tibira and Tubal-Cain, because Bad-tibira means “City of the Metal Worker.” Finally, Eridu, which archaeologists and Sumerian historians believe is the oldest city of all, could have been named after Irad (according to Rohl) or Jared (according to Zecharia Sitchin).

 

Cain himself, though, as traditions seem to indicate, settled on the edge of “Seth’s land”. According to what we learned earlier, Cain had not moved far from the vicinity of the Garden of Eden.

 

As already touched upon, NE Syria is also more geographically proximate (than is Sumer) for the descendants of Noah from my point of view (Habermehl is obviously a global Floodist), according to which Noah’s Ark landed upon the mountains of modern Kurdistan (ancient Urartu). It might be expected, then, that humankind would soon find its way into the fertile Khabur region. That this region qualifies as a “plain” is apparent from Habermehl’s description of it (she includes a photograph):

 

“It is difficult to tell from what we know of history exactly where the boundaries of the entire land of Shinar were; indeed, those boundaries may not even have remained precisely the same at different times. However, we will generally describe Shinar as a land including the territory that is located immediately south of the Turkish mountains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This area is almost perfectly flat as far as the eye can see (fig. 2). It surely qualifies as “a plain in the land of Shinar,” as Genesis calls it”.

 

There is yet another most useful upside to Habermehl’s reconstruction; one that she herself has pointed out, and it is not favourable to the documentary theory: “One result of “moving” Babel from south Mesopotamia to the north of Syria is that secular historians will no longer be able to claim that the building of the Tower was merely a story inspired by the ziggurat at Babylon (for example, Parrot 1955, p. 17)”.

 

In fact, with the early Genesis scene shifted right away from Babylonia, then those old arguments according to which the Book of Genesis (e.g., the Flood) had borrowed from Mesopotamian lore will no longer carry any force.

It is well known where the ancient city of Babylon stood. But - and as Habermehl strongly - argues, Babylon and the “Babel” of Genesis 10:10 are not necessarily synonymous.

Habermehl herself does not actually identify the location of Babel. She presumes that it must lie at the approximate centre of the triangle of cities that she has associated with Genesis 10:10.

But might not the LXX be telling us, by substituting the name “Babylon” for “Carchemish”, that the impressive site of Carchemish (modern Jerablus) was itself a Babylon, a Babel? – perhaps in close association with Calneh – in the very region “where the Tower was built”?

 

One unusual French scholar, Fernand Crombette, whose unique and complicated method of translating ancient texts with the aid of Coptic has bemused many, had claimed that Carchemish was where Noah and his sons lived after the Flood, and that its modern name, Jerablus, actually translates as The Naked Man (L‘homme nu), referring to the incident of the drunken Noah (Genesis 9:20-25). Given that the region of Carchemish may have been the suitable place for grape vines: “In Mesopotamia, grapevines could be nurtured only in the north, notably in the region of Carchemish” (P. King, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 98), then Crombette may have got this right. Northern Syria might have been, for this very reason, the first place of choice for migrations after the Flood waters had begun to subside. 

 

That does not necessitate, however, that all human groups, post-Flood, had converged upon the fertile “plain in the land of Shinar”.

 

Carchemish, once excavated by the famed adventurer, T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), but now currently situated on the boundaries of a war zone, awaits a fuller archaeological effort. “Nicolò Marchetti of Bologna University, who leads the renewed investigations with a joint Italian-Turkish team beginning in 2011, says that, despite the city's historical significance, only 5 percent of the site has been excavated”.

 

I personally should be most interested to find whether further excavational work at the site of Jerablus (Carchemish), or its environs, might yield any evidence of the famous Tower of Babel. 

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Moses distorted by Greeks in Dionysus




Image result for murdock moses dionysus
 
 
by
 
Damien F. Mackey
 
 
 
So many mythological characters, deities, so-called founders of religion and philosophies, were based upon the immensely important Hebrew prophet and Lawgiver, Moses.
Even certain real historical kings were greatly influenced by Moses, and some had Moses-like legends building up around them in later centuries.
 
 
That is by no means the perspective on Moses, though, as adopted by independent scholar of comparative religion and mythology, Acharya S, aka D.M. Murdock, according to one of whose books on Moses he is based on the Greek god, Dionysus/Bacchus.
 
The Moses-Dionysus connection is a 15-page ebook/PDF highlighting the commonalities between the Hebrew lawgiver and the Greek god, also known as Bacchus. This ebook represents an adaptation of the forthcoming book Did Moses Exist? The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver.
 
Why have scholars since the early 17th century - many of them Christian theologians - composed studies of correspondences between Moses and Dionysus/Bacchus?
What are these parallels, and where do they come from? What are some of the primary sources?
Discover who was really drawn from the Nile and and tamed the Red Sea!
 



 
"The existence of Moses as well as the veracity of the Exodus story is disputed amongst archaeologists and Egyptologists, with experts in the field of biblical criticism citing logical inconsistencies, new archaeological evidence, historical evidence, and related origin myths in Canaanite culture."
"Moses," Wikipedia.org
 
"We cannot be sure that Moses ever lived because there are no traces of his earthly existence outside of tradition."
Dr. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (2)
 
"On Moses as the putative 'founder of the Israelite religion,' …Susan Niditch, [in] Ancient Israelite Religion…, barely mentions the possibility of a historical Moses..."
Dr. William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Known & When Did They Know It? (99)
 
The Moses-Dionysus Connection includes commentary spanning the centuries from some of the best minds of Europe and America, such as Vossius, Bochart, Patrick, Huet, Voltaire, Edwards, Dupuis, Hort, Le Brun, Clarke, Higgins and Taylor.
Famed French philosopher Voltaire made the following astounding remarks way back in the 18th century - and he wasn't the first! Why don't we know these facts? Said Voltaire:
 
The ancient poets have placed the birth of Bacchus in Egypt; he is exposed on the Nile and it is from that event that he is named Mises by the first Orpheus, which, in Egyptian, signifies "saved from the waters"…
 
He is brought up near a mountain of Arabia called Nisa [Nysa], which is believed to be Mount Sinai. It is pretended that a goddess ordered him to go and destroy a barbarous nation and that he passed through the Red Sea on foot, with a multitude of men, women, and children. Another time the river Orontes suspended its waters right and left to let him pass, and the Hydaspes did the same. He commanded the sun to stand still; two luminous rays proceeded from his head.
He made a fountain of wine spout up by striking the ground with his thyrsus, and engraved his laws on two tables of marble. He wanted only to have afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, to be the perfect copy of Moses.
 
Find out more about this centuries-long scholarship that has been buried and hidden.
 
[End of quotes]
 
For my own Egyptian identifications of Moses as a legal official in Egypt, see e.g. my article:
 
Moses a Judge in Egypt
 
 
 
For Moses the Lawgiver appropriated by the Greeks (Spartans), see my article:
 
Moses and Lycurgus
 
 
 
Acharya S, aka D.M. Murdock has adopted the typical view according to which the Hebrews were inevitably the beneficiaries of the wisdom, literature, law, myth and folklore of the pagans – even if this means subordinating renowned Hebrew personages to fanciful gods and goddesses.
 
Thus I would have to share Hans-Georg Lundahl’s lack of enthusiasm for Murdock’s wild thesis: http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2012/11/so-dionysus-was-copy-of-moses-may-one.html
 
So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume?

Acharya S (a k a D. M. Murdock) does it again. And so presumable she will be doing for some time, I do not want her to stand uncontradicted though.

Here she quotes Voltaire, so the following is my quote of Voltaire via Acharya:*
 
The ancient poets have placed the birth of Bacchus in Egypt; he is exposed on the Nile and it is from that event that he is named Mises by the first Orpheus, which, in Egyptian, signifies "saved from the waters"… He is brought up near a mountain of Arabia called Nisa [Nysa], which is believed to be Mount Sinai. It is pretended that a goddess ordered him to go and destroy a barbarous nation and that he passed through the Red Sea on foot, with a multitude of men, women, and children. Another time the river Orontes suspended its waters right and left to let him pass, and the Hydaspes did the same. He commanded the sun to stand still; two luminous rays proceeded from his head. He made a fountain of wine spout up by striking the ground with his thyrsus, and engraved his laws on two tables of marble. He wanted only to have afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, to be the perfect copy of Moses.


OK. Possible. Let us take chronology. Dionysus is a Greek divinity so recent that Homer (c. 800 BC he wrote Iliad and Odyssey) does not know him. That is well after Moses. Time enough for the old Hebrews to remember him correctly and for Pagans to remember him wrong.

I have previously reasoned or guessed that Deukalion and Pyrrha (the Flood surviving childless old couple in Greek Mythology) are based on:

1) Noah and Family (Flood survivors)
2) Abraham and Sarah (a so far childless old couple when visited by three angels who announced also the coming destruction of Sodom)
3) Lot and two daughters (hospitable survivors of a disaster similar to the Flood, though geographically limited, and faced after being saved with some conundrum about how to repeople the world (in Genesis it is only an imagined conundrum, imagined by the two daughters who thought the world had been destroyed but for them: when they soaked their father drunk he made them pregnant with Moab and Ammon).

If Orpheus (supposing Orpheus the husband of Eurydice to be the one to whom Voltaire referred as to "the first Orpheus") said such things about Dionysus, he might have similarily been getting the story of Moses in a distorted fashion.

I think Pagans had a reason to distort the stories. Step one, they leave out things they do not want to believe. Step two, they put in things, preferrably from stories already known and which may well be true ones too, to fill the gaps in the story.

What is left out in the Deukalion and Pyrrha story? The Miracle of Sarah's pregnancy and the fact that Sodomy was the third and final of the Sins leading God to decide the destruction.

The first of these woud to a Pagan, used to judging hopes and fears after how things usually go, as a foolhardy miracle to hope for and a stupidity to believe in.

As to the second, since the time of Hercules (reputed a lover of Iolaus), Greeks had more and more been lenient on sodomy, if not in legislation at least in talking about peopple outside their own jurisdiction.

Now, Voltaire analysed himself that the one thing left out from the story of Dionysus, if a copy from that of Moses, are the ten plagues. Not quite left out though. Pentheus would in such a case echo the Pharao. But in the main yes.

Reason? Well, Moses had argued that the Pharao insulted the law of the one God whose chosen people the Israelites were (as the Catholics are today, by the way, though with other duties to those outside, since that is indeed for all nations).

Would that not have struck a false note with people who believed in many gods and in equal or nicely graduated degrees of favour by the gods?

And furthermore, the Israelites were described as being held as slaves: those being the chosen people might very well have struck a Pagan who believed slaves were such by nature or divine decision as very awkward to believe or accept.
 

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Some Moses-like myths



1. Did God really write the Ten Commandments Himself?
 

 







by
 
Damien F. Mackey
 
 
 
 
Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares
"some cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend.
 
 
 
 
Law and Government
 
The great Lawgiver in the Bible, and hence in Hebrew history, was Moses, substantially the author of the Torah (Law). But the history books tell us that the Torah was probably dependent upon the ‘law code’ issued by the Babylonian king, Hammurabi (dated to the first half of the C18th BC).
I shall discuss this historical anomaly a little further on.
 
For Egyptian identifications of Moses as a legal official in Egypt, see e.g. my article:
 
Moses a Judge in Egypt
 
 
 
For Moses the Lawgiver appropriated by the Greeks (Spartans), see my article:
 
Moses and Lycurgus
 
 
 
The Egyptians may have corrupted the legend of the baby Moses in the bulrushes so that now it became the goddess Isis who drew the baby Horus from the Nile and had him suckled by Hathor (the goddess in the form of a cow - the Egyptian personification of wisdom). In the original story, of course, baby Moses was drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess, not a goddess, and was weaned by Moses' own mother (Exodus 2:5-9).
Anyway, Moses became for the Egyptians Hor-mes, meaning 'son of Hathor', which legendary person the Greeks eventually absorbed into their own pantheon as Hermes, the winged messenger god. [The Roman version of Hermes is Mercury]
 
Could both the account of the rescue of the baby Moses in the Book of Exodus, and the Egyptian version of it, be actually based upon a Mesopotamian original, as the textbooks say; based upon the story of King Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia? Sargon tells, "in terms reminiscent of Moses, Krishna and other great men", that [as quoted by G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 152]:
 
.… My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me ….
 
Given that Sargon is conventionally dated to the C24th BC, and Moses about a millennium later, it would seem inevitable that the Hebrew version, and the Egyptian one, must be imitations of the Mesopotamian one. Such is what the ‘history’ books say, at least, despite the fact that the extant Sargon legend is very late (C7th BC); thought, though, to have been based upon an earlier Mesopotamian original. See my article:
 
Did Sargon of Akkad influence the Exodus account of the baby Moses?
 
 
For Sargon of Akkad as a possible biblical character, see e.g. my article:
 
Nimrod a "mighty man"
 
 
 
 
What is more certain and accurate, I think, is Dean Hickman re-dating of King Hammurabi of Babylon to the time of Solomon (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying Hammurabi's older contemporary, Shamsi-Adad I, as king David's Syrian foe, Hadadazer (2 Samuel 10:16).
I have been able to take this further since in articles such as:
 
Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
 
 
According to this new scenario, Hammurabi well post-dated Moses and could not possibly have influenced the Torah (Law).
 
(a) Greek and Phoenician 'Moses-like Myths'
 
M. Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares "some cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend. He gives his parallels as follows [Hellenosemitica, p. 99]:
 
Moses grows up at the court of the Egyptian king as a member of the royal family, and subsequently flees from Egypt after having slain an Egyptian - as Danaos, a member of the Egyptian ruling house, flees from the same country after the slaying of the Aigyptiads which he had arranged. The same number of generations separates Moses from Leah the "wild cow" and Danaos from the cow Io.
 
My comment: The above parallel might even account for how the Greeks managed to confuse the land of Ionia (Io) with the land of Israel in the case of the earliest philosophers:
 
Joseph as Thales: Not an "Hellenic Gotterdamerung" but Israelite Wisdom
 
 
Astour continues (op. cit., pp. 99-100):
 
Still more characteristic is that both Moses and Danaos find and create springs in a waterless region; the story of how Poseidon, on the request of the Danaide Amymona, struck out with his trident springs from the Lerna rock, particularly resembles Moses producing a spring from the rock by the stroke of his staff.
 
A ‘cow’ features also in the legend of Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Tyre upon the disappearance of his sister Europa, who was sent by his father together with his brothers Cilix and Phoenix to seek her with instructions not to return without her. Seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Cadmus was told to settle at the point where a cow, which he would meet leaving the temple, would lie down. The cow led him to the site of Thebes (Greek and Egyptian cities by that name).
There he built the citadel of Cadmeia.
 
Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite and, according to the legend, was the founder of the House of Oedipus]
Astour believes that "even more similar features" may be discovered if one links these accounts to the Ugaritic (Phoenicio-Canaanite) poem of Dan’el, which he had previously identified as "the prototype of the Danaos myth" (p. 100):
 
The name of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather of Moses. The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed, figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t, the daughter of Danel and the devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story as Pû'ã, a midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses. The very name of Moses, in the feminine form Mšt, is, in the Ugaritic poem, the first half of Danel's wife's name, while the second half of her name, Dnty, corresponds to the name of Levi's sister Dinah.
 
Astour had already explained how the biblical story of the Rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) was "analogous to the myth of the bloody wedding of her namesakes, the Danaides".
He continues on here with his fascinating Greco-Israelite parallels:
 
Dân, the root of the names Dnel, Dnty (and also Dinah and Danaos), was the name of a tribe whose priests claimed to descend directly from Moses (Jud. 18:30); and compare the serpent emblem of the tribe of Dan with the serpent staff of Moses and the bronze serpent he erected. …Under the same name - Danaë - another Argive heroine of the Danaid stock is thrown into the sea in a chest with her new-born son - as Moses in his ark (tébã) - and lands on the serpent-island of Seriphos (Heb. šãrâph, applied i.a. to the bronze serpent made by Moses). Moses, like Danel, is a healer, a prophet, a miracle-worker - cf. Danel's staff (mt) which he extends while pronouncing curses against towns and localities, quite like Moses in Egypt; and especially, like Danel, he is a judge….
 
(b) Roman 'Moses-like Myth'
 
The Romans further corrupted the story of the infant Moses, following on probably from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians and Greeks. I refer to the account of Romulus (originally Rhomus) and Remus, thought to have founded the city of Rome in 753 BC. Both the founders and the date are quite mythical. The Romans may have taken an approximate form of the Egyptian name for Moses, (Sinuhe, or Sa-nu(mu) Musare), and turned it into Rhomus and Remus (MUSA-RE = RE-MUS), with the formerly one child (Moses) now being doubled into two babies (twins). According to this legend, the twins were put into a basket by some kind servants and floated in the Tiber River, from which they were eventually rescued by a she-wolf. Thus the Romans more pragmatically opted for a she-wolf as the suckler instead of a cow goddess, or a lion goddess, Sekhmet (the fierce alter ego of Hathor).
The Romans took yet another slice from the Pentateuch when they had the founder of the city of Rome, Romulus, involved in a fratricide (killing Remus); just as Cain, the founder of the world's first city, had killed his own brother, Abel (cf. Genesis 4:8 and 4:17).
 
 
 
(c) Mohammed: Arabian ‘Moses-like Myths'
 
An Islamic lecturer, Ahmed Deedat ["What the Bible Says About Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) the Prophet of Islam" (www.islamworld.net/Muhammad.in.Bible.html)], told of an interview he once had with a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Transvaal, van Heerden, on the question: "What does the Bible say about Muhummed?" Deedat had in mind the Holy Qur'an verse 46:10, according to which "a witness among the children of Israel bore witness of one like him…". This was in turn a reference to Deuteronomy 18:18's "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and I will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."
The Moslems of course interpret the "one like him [i.e. Moses]" as being Mohammed himself.
Faced with the dominee's emphatic response that the Bible has "nothing" to say about Mohammed - and that the Deuteronomic prophecy ultimately pertained to Jesus Christ, as did "thousands" of other prophecies - Deedat set out to prove him wrong.
For the gross historical anachronisms associated with ‘Mohammed’, see articles such as my:
 
Further argument for Prophet Mohammed's likely non-existence
 
 
In such articles the prophet Mohammed is shown to have been (at least in part) a composite biblical character and a non-historical entity.  
 
Some Conclusions regarding Mohammed (c. 570-632 AD, conventional dating)
 
It is not surprising that the biography of ‘Mohammed’, much of whose foundations were actually Israelite (biblical), as I have argued, borrowed in part from the Moses story, as is even more the case with the so-called ‘Buddha’. On the latter see e.g. my series:
 
Buddha just a re-working of Moses. Part One: The singular greatness of Moses
 
beginning with:
 
 
Mohammed especially resembles Moses in:
 
(i) the latter's visit to Mount Horeb (modern Har Karkom) with its cave atop, its Burning Bush, and angel (Exodus 3:1-2), possibly equating to Mohammed's "Mountain of Light" (Jabal-an-Nur), and 'cave of research' (‘Ghar-i-Hira'), and angel Gabriel;
(ii) at the very same age of forty (Acts 7:23-29), and
(iii) there receiving a divine revelation, leading to his
(iv) becoming a prophet of God and a Lawgiver.
 
 
Mohammed as a Lawgiver is a direct pinch, I believe, from the Hebrew Pentateuch – but also from the era of the prophet Jeremiah whom Mohammed also much resembles.
Consider the following [O'Hair, M., "Mohammed", A text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 65, first broadcast on August 25, 1969. (www.atheists.org/Islam.Mohammed.html)]:
"Now the Kaaba or Holy Stone at Mecca was the scene of an annual pilgrimage, and during this pilgrimage in 621 Mohammed was able to get six persons from Medina to bind themselves to him. They did so by taking the following oath.
 
Not consider anyone equal to Allah;
Not to steal;
Not to be unchaste;
Not to kill their children;
Not willfully to calumniate".
 
This is simply the Mosaïc Decalogue, with the following Islamic addition [ibid.]:
"To obey the prophet's orders in equitable matters.
In return Mohammed assured these six novitiates of paradise. The place where these first vows were taken is now called the first Akaba".
 
"The mission of Mohammed", perfectly reminiscent of that of Moses (and of Jeremiah), was "to restore the worship of the One True God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, as taught by Prophet Ibrahim [Abraham] and all Prophets of God, and complete the laws of moral, ethical, legal, and social conduct and all other matters of significance for the humanity at large."
 
The above-mentioned Burning Bush incident occurred whilst Moses
 
(a)    was living in exile (Exodus 2:15)
(b)   amongst the Midianite tribe of Jethro, in the Paran desert.
(c)    Moses had married Jethro's daughter, Zipporah (v. 21).
 
Likewise Mohammed (also partly applicable to Jeremiah)
 
(a)    experienced exile;
(b)   to Medina, a name which may easily have become confused with the similar sounding, Midian, and
(c)    he had only the one wife at the time, Khadija. Also
(d)   Moses, like Mohammed, was terrified by what God had commanded of him, protesting that he was "slow of speech and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10). To which God replied: "Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be your mouth and teach you what you are to speak' (vv. 11-12).
 
Now this episode, seemingly coupled with Moses’s (with Jeremiah’s) call, has come distorted into the Koran as Mohammed's being terrified by what God was asking of him, protesting that he was not learned.
To which God supposedly replied that he had 'created man from a clot of congealed blood, and had taught man the use of the pen, and that which he knew not, and that man does not speak ought of his own desire but by inspiration sent down to him'.
Ironically, whilst Moses the writer complained about his lack of verbal eloquence, Mohammed, 'unlettered and unlearned', who therefore could not write, is supposed to have been told that God taught man to use the pen (?). But Mohammed apparently never learned to write, because he is supposed only to have spoken God's utterances. Though his words, like those of Moses (who however did write, e.g. Exodus 34:27), were written down in various formats by his secretary, Zaid (roughly equating to the biblical Joshua, a writer, Joshua 8:32, or to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch).
 
This is generally how the Koran is said to have arisen.
 
But Mohammed also resembles Moses in his childhood in the fact that, after his infancy, he was raised by a foster-parent (Exodus 2:10).
And there is the inevitable weaning legend [Zahoor, A. and Haq, Z., "Biography of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)", (http://cyberistan.org/islamic/muhammad.html), 1998.]: "All biographers state that the infant prophet sucked only one breast of his foster-mother, leaving the other for the sustenance of his foster-brother".
 
There is even a kind of Islamic version of the Exodus. Compare the following account of the Qoreish persecution and subsequent pursuit of the fleeing Moslems with the persecution and later pursuit of the fleeing Israelites by Pharaoh (Exodus 1 and 4:5-7) [O’Hair, op. cit., ibid.]:
 
When the persecution became unbearable for most Muslims, the Prophet advised them in the fifth year of his mission (615 CE) to emigrate to Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) where Ashabah (Negus, a Christian) was the ruler. Eighty people, not counting the small children, emigrated in small groups to avoid detection. No sooner had they left the Arabian coastline [substitute Egyptian borders], the leaders of Quraish discovered their flight. They decided to not leave these Muslims in peace, and immediately sent two of their envoys to Negus to bring all of them back.
 
The Koran of Islam is, to a great extent, an Arabic version of the Hebrew Bible with all its same famous patriarchs and leading characters.
That is apparent from what the Moslems themselves admit. For example [ibid.]:
 
The Qur'an also mentions four previously revealed Scriptures: Suhoof (Pages) of Ibrahim (Abraham), Taurat ('Torah') as revealed to Prophet Moses, Zuboor ('Psalms') as revealed to Prophet David, and Injeel ('Evangel') as revealed to Prophet Jesus (pbuh). Islam requires belief in all prophets and revealed scriptures (original, non-corrupted) as part of the Articles of Faith.
 
The reputation of Ibn Ishaq (ca 704-767), a main authority on the life and times of the Prophet varied considerably among the early Moslem critics: some found him very sound, while others regarded him as a liar in relation to Hadith (Mohammed's sayings and deeds). His Sira is not extant in its original form, but is present in two recensions done in 833 and 814-15, and these texts vary from one another. Fourteen others have recorded his lectures, but their versions differ [ibid.]:
 
It was the storytellers who created the tradition: the sound historical traditions to which they are supposed to have added their fables simply did not exist. . . . Nobody remembered anything to the contrary either. . . .
There was no continuous transmission. Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and others were cut off from the past: like the modern scholar, they could not get behind their sources.... Finally, it has to be realized that the tradition as a whole, not just parts of it as some have thought, is tendentious, and that that tendentiousness arises from allegiance to Islam itself. The complete unreliability of the Muslim tradition as far as dates are concerned has been demonstrated by Lawrence Conrad. After close examination of the sources in an effort to find the most likely birth date for Muhammad--traditionally `Am al-fil, the Year of the Elephant, 570 C.E.--Conrad remarks that ["What Historians have Deduced about the Historical Mohammed.

(d) Modern Myths about Moses
 
From the above it can now be seen that it was not only the Greeks and Romans who have been guilty of appropriation into their own folklore of famous figures of Israel. Even the Moslems have done it and are still doing it. A modern-day Islamic author from Cairo, Ahmed Osman, has - in line with psychiatrist Sigmund Freud's view that Moses was actually an Egyptian, whose Yahwism was derived from pharaoh Akhnaton's supposed monotheism [Out of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed (Century, 1998)] - identified all the major biblical Israelites, from the patriarch Joseph to the Holy Family of Nazareth, as 18th dynasty Egyptian characters. Thus Joseph = Yuya; Moses = Akhnaton; David = Thutmose III; Solomon = Amenhotep III; Jesus = Tutankhamun; St. Joseph = Ay; Mary = Nefertiti.
 
This is mass appropriation! Not to mention chronological madness!
 
I was asked by Dr. Norman Simms of the University of Waikato (N.Z.) to write a critique of Osman's book, a copy of which he had posted to me. This was a rather easy task as the book leaves itself wide open to criticism. Anyway, the result of Dr. Simms' request was my "Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses" article [The Glozel Newsletter, 5:1 (ns) 1999 (Hamilton, N.Z), pp. 1-17], in which I argued that, because Osman is using the faulty textbook history of Egypt, he is always obliged to give the chronological precedence to Egypt, when the influence has actually come from Israel over to Egypt.
A revised version of this article can now be read as:
 
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part One: The Chosen People
 
 
The way that the conventional Egyptian chronology is artificially structured at present, is thanks largely to Eduard Meyer's now approximately one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie, Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen der Königlich preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin (Akad. der Wiss., 1904).
 
For a refutation of this hopeless system, see e.g. my article:
 
The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited
 
 
Meyer’s erroneous thesis could easily give rise to Osman's precedence in favour of Egypt view (though this is no excuse for Osman's own chronological mish-mash). One finds, for example, in Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to king David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the woman-ruler - dated to the C15th BC, 500 years earlier than David - must have influenced the great king of Israel. Or that pharaoh Akhnaton's Hymn to the Sun, so like David's Psalm 104, had inspired David many centuries later.
Only a proper revision of Egyptian history brings forth the right perspective, and shows that the Israelites actually had the chronological precedence in these as in many other cases.
 
It gets worse from a conventional point of view.
 
The 'doyen of Israeli archaeologists', Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, frequently interviewed by Beirut hostage victim John McCarthy on the provocative TV program "It Ain't Necessarily So", is, together with his colleagues, virtually writing ancient Israel right off the historical map, along with all of its major biblical characters.
This horrible mess is an inevitable consequence of the faulty Sothic chronology with which these archaeologists seem to be mesmerized. With friends like Finkelstein and co., why would Israel need any enemies!

The Lawgiver Solon
 
Whilst the great Lawgiver for the Hebrews was Moses, and for the Babylonians, Hammurabi, and for the Spartans, Lycurgus, and for the Moslems, supposedly, Mohammed, the Lawgiver in Athenian Greek folklore was Solon of Athens, the wisest of the wise, greatest of the Seven Sages.
Though Solon is estimated to have lived in the C6th BC, his name and many of his activities are so close to king Solomon's (supposedly 4 centuries earlier) that we need once again to question whether the Greeks may have been involved in appropriation. And, if so, how did this come about? It may in some cases simply be a memory thing, just as according to Plato's Timaeus one of the very aged Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon [Plato's Timaeus, trans. B. Jowett (The Liberal Arts Press, NY, 1949), 6 (22) and /or Desmond Lee's translation, Penguin Classics, p. 34]:
 
\’O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes [Greeks] are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. …’.
 
Perhaps what the author of the Timaeus really needed to have put into the mouth of the aged Egyptian priest was that the Greeks had largely forgotten who Solomon was, and had created their own fictional character, "Solon", from their vague recall of the great king Solomon who "excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" (1 Kings 10:23).