by
Damien F.
Mackey
American blues
singer B.B. King had reckoned that, “If it wasn't for bad luck … I wouldn't have no
luck at all!”
And it might be similarly said that, if it
wasn’t for Hebrew wisdom (chokmah), we
may not have had many of the cultural features of Egypt and Mesopotamia. For,
whilst invariably the conventional historians regard Israel as having been the
recipient, rather than the instigator, the revised chronology tells quite
another story. And it supports the statement of Jesus Christ that “Salvation
[which is wholly civilising] is from the Jews”.
[John 4:22]
No. 1 below will
consider how deeply ancient Israel affected some of the most stunning cultural
features of high Egyptian civilisation (especially the glorious 18th
dynasty), hence my placement above of chokmah
(חָכְמָה) before the ankh
(
).
No. 2 below will
consider Israel’s influence upon aspects of the Mesopotamian civilisation.
Israel
Overflows Into Egypt
Thanks to Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s revision of
18th dynasty Egyptian history (in his series, Ages in Chaos) - what I would consider undoubtedly to be his major
contribution - we were given, for the first time, a proper perspective upon
this particular period of ancient history. With the crippling Sothic theory (and
the ‘Dark Ages’ to which it gave rise) now swept aside - see e.g. my simplified
explanation of this:
The Fall of
the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited
Velikovsky was able to re-align an era of
Egyptian history conventionally (Sothically) dated from c. 1550-1300 BC, with
the United Monarchy of Israel (kings Saul, David and Solomon), c. 1050-930 BC,
and on to the early Divided Monarchy era (Ahab, Jehoshaphat, and so on). In
other words, an artificially (Sothic) conceived chronology of Egypt was found
to be about 500 years out of alignment with biblical history.
Velikovsky’s most convincing identification of two
kings of Amurru who feature in the
El-Amarna [EA] correspondence at the time of pharaohs Amenhotep III and IV (=
Akhnaton), namely, kings Abdi-ashirta
and Aziru, with the biblical Syrian
succession of, respectively, Ben-hadad I and Hazael, I took as a solid
foundation stone for my postgraduate thesis:
A Revised History of
the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and Its Background
Amenhotep III and Akhnaton (c. mid-C14th BC) are
conventionally dated, though, some 500 years before Ben-hadad I and Hazael (c.
mid-C9th BC).
New
Kingdom Egypt
Pharaoh Akhnaton
Now, it has often been pointed out that pharaoh
Akhnaton’s “Sun Hymn” closely resembles, in part, King David’s Psalm 104. And
with good reason.
At site http://www.seanet.com/~realistic/psalm104.html,
for instance, we are provided with “The
eight points of comparison: Psalm 104 and the Hymn to Aten”. Here, and mostly
elsewhere, the conclusion is - and understandably from a conventional point of
view - that the Bible is in debt to the pagan religion, or literature.
Thus: “… as short as sixty years ago, there is little doubt that the
archaeologists who discovered the similarities in ancient texts were astounded
since they had been raised to believe in the Bible as the “only word of God”.”
The reality, however, is that in the case of
Akhnaton versus David, it is the latter who was the source of inspiration.
Hebrew chokmah before the Egyptian ankh.
For, well before Akhnaton had written thus of the chicken
and the egg:
When the
chick in the egg speaks in the shell, You give him breath within to sustain
him; When you have made him complete, To break out from the egg, He comes out
from the egg, To announce his completion, Walking on his legs he comes from it.
How many
are your deeds, Though hidden from sight, O Sole God beside whom there is none!
You made the earth as you wished, you alone, All peoples, herds, and flocks;
All upon earth that walk on legs, All on high that fly on wings, The lands of
Khor and Kush, The land of Egypt. You set every man in his place, You supply
their needs; Everyone has his food, His lifetime is counted. Their tongues
differ in speech, Their characters likewise Their skins are distinct, For you
distinguished the peoples. ….
King David had written of the good providence of
Yahweh (Psalm 104:10-15):
He makes springs
pour water into the ravines;
it flows between the
mountains.
They give water to
all the beasts of the field;
the wild donkeys
quench their thirst.
The birds of the sky
nest by the waters;
they sing among the
branches.
He waters the
mountains from his upper chambers;
the land is
satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow
for the cattle,
and plants for
people to cultivate—
bringing forth food
from the earth:
wine that gladdens
human hearts,
oil to make their
faces shine,
and bread that
sustains their hearts.
So many other ‘firsts’, too, are attributed to this
most unusual of pharaohs, Akhnaton, some of them being quite ridiculous: e.g.
he was supposedly the world’s ‘first monotheist’. A lot of this hoopla about Akhnaton stems from Sigmund
Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939),
according to which Moses was not a Hebrew at all, but was actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower
of the presumably monotheistic Akhnaton.
Ahmed Osman takes this even further in what
must be one of the silliest books ever written, Out of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed (Century, 1998), wherein the author actually identifies Moses as Akhnaton
(and Jesus Christ as Tutankhamun, no less).
I wrote a review of this absurdity:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses
But
notice what is happening here in both cases (Freud and Osman). The Hebrew
aspect of things is typically diminished. The traditionally Hebrew Moses now
becomes an ethnic Egyptian. And so does Jesus Christ.
The
revision of history I have found to be satisfyingly fruitful, whereas the conventional
system cannot possibly be so if it really is so far out of gear with reality.
The EA era, when properly aligned with biblical history, comes alive in a most
amazing and unexpected fashion. It becomes possible now to get a totally
different perspective on pharaoh Akhnaton and his famous wife, Queen Nefertiti.
She, no longer to be regarded as a C14th BC character, but set in the C9th BC,
becomes a perfect alter ego of the
biblical queen, Jezebel.
Two
bad girls merged into one.
At
least that is what I argued in my university thesis, and have since up-dated this
in follow-up articles, such as:
The Shattering
Fall of Queen Nefertiti
and
Queen
Nefertiti Sealed as Jezebel
These
post-thesis articles on the subject correct the former clumsy to-ing and
fro-ing of Nefertiti/Jezebel, from Ahab (now to Amenhotep III), now to
Akhnaton, by now regarding Akhnaton as king Ahab himself. Hence Akhnaton, far
from being a pure monotheistic worshipper of Yahweh, can be reconsidered as having
been a worshipper of Baal, urged on by his cruel wife Nefertiti - just as king Ahab
was urged on by Jezebel (I Kings 21:25): “There was never
anyone like Ahab, who sold
himself to do evil in the eyes of the
LORD, urged on
by Jezebel his wife”.
Moreover, the enigmatic Atonism can now be identified as
the Baalism of the Scriptures; a syncretic Baalism, though, of the
Syro-Mitannians (hence Atonism’s Indic elements).
Similarly
as with EA, the conventional chronology plays havoc with the interpretation of
the abundant documentation from ancient Ugarit (Ras Shamra). Typically, the pagan mythology to be found in the
Ugaritic texts is considered to have influenced the patriarchal tales in the
Old Testament (http://www.homsonline.com/EN/Citeis/Ugarit.htm):
Many texts discovered at
Ugarit, including the "Legend of Keret," the "Aghat Epic"
(or "Legend of Danel"), the "Myth of Baal-Aliyan," and the
"Death of Baal," reveal an Old Canaanite mythology. A tablet names
the Ugaritic pantheon with Babylonian equivalents; El, Asherah of the Sea, and
Baal were the main deities. These texts not only constitute a literature of
high standing and great originality but also have an important bearing on Old
Testament studies. It is now evident that the patriarchal stories in the Old
Testament were not merely transmitted orally but were based on written
documents of Canaanite origin, the discovery of which at Ugarit has led to a
new appraisal of the Old Testament.
[End of quote]
The revision tells a different story, but one
that convention could not possibly accommodate.
Though professor Albright had shown some amazing insight - some of the
language being used at this time exhibits ‘pure Hebrew idiom’. Mut-Baal, the
son of EA’s Lab’ayu, displays in one of his letters (EA 256) some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed
origin words. But Albright noted of line 13: “As already recognized by the
interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew”. Albright, as pointed out by D. Rohl (A Test of Time:
The Bible from Myth to History, p. 245) even went very close to admitting of the
local speech that it was Hebrew, “... phonetically, morphologically, and
syntactically the people then living in the district ... spoke a dialect of
Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very closely akin to that of Ugarit. The
differences which some scholars have listed between Biblical Hebrew and
Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological distinctions”.
But
even these “chronological distinctions” cease to be a real issue in the
Velikovskian context, according to which both the EA letters and the Ugaritic tablets
are to be re-located to the time of the Divided Monarchy of the two tribes of
Judah and the ten tribes of Israel.
For my revised perspective on Lab’ayu and his two sons, see:
Is El Amarna’s Lab’ayu Biblically Identifiable?
and:
Identifying Pharaoh Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun
Instead of commentators being able to perceive the
pagan myths as, what they generally are, second-hand (third-hand, etc.)
misappropriations of the original Hebrew scriptures, they conclude that - as
above - the “origin” was with the pagan story.
John R. Salverda has turned this upside down,
thanks to his marvellous ability to discern, in the pagan mythologies,
especially the Greek, the pure biblical original. To give just one example (but
one would do well to Google him), see Salverda’s account of how the Greeks
derived their “Pelops” from biblical king Ahab:
Pelops, Ahab and the Achaeans
Semitic writing has even been discerned in the
pyramid texts of pharaoh Unas of Egypt’s (Old Kingdom) 5th dynasty.
Semitic
passages in Egyptian texts that were discovered more than a century ago,
inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in
Egypt. The pyramid dates from the 24th century B.C.E., but Egyptologists agree
that the texts are older. The dates proposed for them range from the 25th to
the 30th centuries B.C.E.
….
Although
written in Egyptian characters, the texts turned out to be composed in the
Semitic language spoken by the Canaanites in the third millennium B.C.E., a very
archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew. The
Canaanite priests of the ancient city of Byblos, in present-day Lebanon,
provided these texts to the kings of Egypt.
[End of quote]
Evidence such as the above seems to show the Greeks
to be very culturally young indeed.
And later in this 1. we are going to consider the phenomenon of the Greeks being credited
with the invention of architectural features that did not arise with them, with
mathematics, and, even very significantly, with philosophy itself.
Origins of the 18th Dynasty
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Ed (Ewald) Metzler ... next turned
on its ear ... the conventional tendency to consider Israel as always the
recipient of the generous cultural bounty of the great pagan nations. Taking a
huge step beyond Velikovsky ... Dr. Metzler identified
this 18th dynasty as the Israelite monarchy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Velikovsky had, as said above, re-aligned
this, one of Egypt’s most spectacular and well-known dynasties, with (at its
beginning) the United Monarchy of Israel under kings Saul, David and Solomon.
A lowering of Egyptian dynastic history by 500
years!
That
was an excellent start, enabling for a proper alignment of secular and biblical
history.
Its
fruitfulness is becoming ever more apparent.
Dr.
Ed (Ewald) Metzler, himself a Velikovskian, next turned on its ear, upside down
and inside out, the conventional tendency to consider Israel as always the
recipient of the generous cultural bounty of the great pagan nations. Taking a
huge step beyond Velikovsky, but building on Velikovsky’s new alignment of the
18th dynasty with Israel’s United Monarchy, Dr. Metzler identified this 18th dynasty as
the Israelite monarchy. One can read all about this in his chapter,
“Conflict of Laws in the Israelite Dynasty of Egypt” (http://moziani.tripod.com/dynasty/ammm_2_1.htm).
According
to Metzler’s re-worked 18th dynasty schema (I have substantially accepted
this):
Ahmose = Ahimaaz
Amenhotep I = Saul (wife Ahinoam = Ahhotep)
Thutmose I = David
Thutmose II = Solomon,
and as according to Velikovsky
Hatshepsut = the biblical Queen
of Sheba
Thutmose III = the biblical King
Shishak of Egypt
A
key connection made by Metzler was the sacking of the city of Gezer, biblically
attributed both to “pharaoh” and to “David”. Previously I had commented on this
as follows:
Who was the ‘pharaoh’ of I Kings 9:16 who had sacked
Gezer as a dowry for his daughter to marry Solomon? Velikovsky had opted for
Thutmose I, without his having attempted to make any link between this pharaoh
and king David. Metzler likewise has identified this biblical “pharaoh” with
Thutmose I, but with the far more interesting aspect to it that Thutmose I was
David.
….
[Metzler] “Since King David-Thutmosis I was also the
father of Queen Hatshepsut-Sheba, King Solomon refers to her in his Song of
Songs (4:10 et passim) as Achoti Kallah ‘my sister, my spouse!’. This explains,
too, how it was possible that the city of Gezer, which King David had
conquered, was given to King Solomon as dowry of ‘Pharaoh's daughter’. When the
city of Gezer was destroyed by David Achinoam was already his wife, but he was
not yet King of Judah and Israel, because King Saul was still alive … (1 Samuel
27, 3-11). Hence it is technically correct that the city was conquered by the
pharaoh (1 Kings 9, 16), as she is the pharaoh’s daughter who made him pharaoh
by marriage.”
“When David defeated Gezer, he killed all its inhabitants leaving ‘neither man
nor woman alive’ (1 Samuel 27, 8 and 9). Likewise, the pharaoh, whose daughter
King Solomon married, is reported to have ‘gone up, and taken Gezer, and burnt
it with fire, and slain the Canaanites that dwelt in the city’ (1.Kings 9, 16).
Since it was rebuilt and resettled only by King Solomon (1 Kings 9, 15), King
David-Thutmosis I must be the pharaoh, who ceded it to him as a wedding
present. There is no room for a foreign invasion towards the end of King
David's reign, because ‘the Lord had given him rest round about from all his
enemies’ (2 Samuel 7, 1). Moreover, it does not make sense to conquer a city
just to give it away, as pointed out by Abraham Malamat”.
[End of quote]
I became aware of this, Dr. Metzler’s enormous
contribution to revisionism (whether or not he be correct in all of his
details), only after I had written an article in defence of Velikovsky’s Queen
Hatshepsut as the biblical Queen of Sheba. Whilst in the process of writing
this article I became aware of the presence of a very powerful, quasi-royal
personage - a supposed commoner - operating in the wings behind Hatshepsut. But
one about whom historians say he was ‘the real power behind the throne’. This
was the mighty Senenmut (Senmut), whom I came to recognise as King Solomon
himself.
See my:
Solomon and Sheba
More
recently, this article has been complemented with,
Does the Name ‘Senenmut’ Reflect the Hebrew
'Solomon'?
The Divine plan was for Israel to become, through
the agency of King David and his descendants, “this torah for humanity” (2 Samuel 7:19), according to American author
and biblical scholar, Dr. Scott Hahn (Kinship
by Covenant …, p. 15 https://books.google.com.a): “The
Davidic covenant”, Hahn writes, “had implications primarily for Israel but
secondarily “for the nations” as well, whose kings were to be vassals of the
Davidic king (Pss 2, 72, 89)…”.
But that was not all. The name of King David was
to be universally famous (I Chronicles 17:8): “I
have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have destroyed all your
enemies. Now I will make your name famous throughout the earth!”
Conventional history
and archaeology, however, being totally misplaced:
Textbook History Out of Kilter With Era of King Solomon
By 500 Years
are not able to substantiate
the reality of that biblical testimony with regard to the Davidic monarchy.
David, we are told, was merely an insignificant petty king - if indeed he had existed
at all - and his supposedly glorious son, Solomon, may never have existed.
In the face of such
biblical minimalising, I felt compelled to write:
Rescuing King Solomon from the Archaeologists
and:
Israel Finkelstein has not archaeologically “destroyed
Solomon”, as he thinks. He has completely missed Solomon
If David were indeed Thutmose I, then his
influence over Egypt could have been only fairly minimal given the short reign
of that particular pharaoh (roughly a decade, but disputed). Israel’s real
cultural inundation of the Land of the Nile (Egypt) would have occurred during
the golden era of Solomon and Sheba. And the Torah, for one, did indeed begin to flow into ancient Egypt at the
time of the wonderful Hatshepsut, the biblical Queen of Sheba. I have argued
her case in:
Why Hatshepsut can be the 'Queen of Sheba'
Supplemented by:
The Queen of (Beer) Sheba
Not only the Torah,
though, but so much else as well: Davidic Psalms, Solomonic wisdom,
literature, love poetry, and Proverbs. This I have shown abundantly in “Solomon
and Sheba”.
And so far we are talking about only the
religious and literary side of things.
There was much more. For we read about King
Solomon’s southern visitor (I Kings 10:4-5): “When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom
of Solomon and the palace he had built, the food on his
table, the seating of his officials, the attending servants in their
robes, his cupbearers, and the burnt offerings he made at the Temple of the Lord, she was overwhelmed”.
She must have the same for Karnak, which was to
be her ‘Jerusalem’. And have it all she did.
Hence I wrote previously:
…. An Image
from the Psalms
When Hatshepsut's
commemorative obelisks were completed, she had the usual formal words inscribed on them. However, [J.]
Baikie states that [A History of Egypt, A and C. Black Ltd., London, 1929, Vol. 11, p. 89]:
The base inscriptions ...
are of more importance, chiefly because they again strike that personal note which is
so seldom heard from these ancient records, and give us
an actual glimpse into the mind and the heart of a great woman. I do not think
that it is fanciful to see in these utterances the expression of something very
like a genuine piety struggling to find expression underneath all the customary
verbiage of the Egyptian monumental formulae.
In language that “might
have come straight out of the Book Psalms”, the queen continues,
I did it under [Amon-Ra's]
command; it was he who led me. I conceived no works without his doing .... I
slept not because of his temple; I erred not from that which he commanded. ...
I entered into the affairs of his heart. I turned not my back on the City
of the All-Lord; but turned to it the face. I know that Karnak is God's
dwelling upon earth; ...the Place of his Heart; Which wears his beauty ....
Baikie continues, unaware
that it really was the Psalms and the sapiential words of David and Solomon,
that had influenced Hatshepsut's prayer:
The sleepless eagerness of
the queen for the glory of the temple of her god, and her assurance of the
unspeakable sanctity of Karnak as the divine dwelling-place, find expression in
almost the very words which the Psalmist used to express his ... duty towards
the habitation of the God of Israel, and his certainty of Zion's sanctity as
the abiding-place of Jehovah.
“Surely I will not come
into the tabernacle of my house, nor go up into my bed; I will not give sleep
to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids. Until I find out a place for the
Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob. - For the Lord hath chosen
Zion; he hath desired it for his habitation. This is my rest for ever; here
will I dwell; for I have desired it”.
[End of quote]
Even the tri-partite coronation ceremony used by
pharaoh Thutmose I, when crowning his daughter, Hatshepsut, appears to have had
its origins in Hebrew ceremony, as I showed in my “Solomon and Sheba” article; the
former having its same pattern in King David’s tri-partite coronation rite of
his favoured son, Solomon.
What else had the biblical Queen seen in
Jerusalem and had probably desired to emulate?
(I Kings 10:4-5) “… the palace
[Solomon] had built, the food on his table, the seating
of his officials, the attending servants in their robes, his cupbearers, and
the burnt offerings he made at the Temple of the Lord”.
Hatshepsut erected her palace of Ma'at as part of a series of major
renovations to the Amun temple during her reign. The queen tore down a number
of structures of Amenhotep I on this location, moving his calcite bark shrine
as well. The queen may have dismantled a portico of Osiris statues from the
Middle Kingdom temple of Senusret I (possibly located just east of the palace
of Ma'at) to connect her new sanctuary to the ancient cult center.
At some point, Hatshepsut added a beautiful red quartzite bark shrine,
her "red chapel," to the center of the palace of Ma'at. The addition
of this large shrine necessitated the removal of a number of interior walls of
the palace.
The palace of Ma'at functioned for storage of cult equipment as well as
providing an offering place for the divine cult.
[End of quote]
Note in regard to this description that: “The
Egyptian concept of ma’at could be considered an embodiment of wisdom” (http://jreuter.hubpages.com/hub/Wisdom-Literature-in-the-Ancient-Near-East-and-Israel). And wisdom (chokmah) was what the Queen of Sheba
knew King Solomon to have been all about (I Kings 10:4). {Chokmah itself is probably akin to, not only the Egyptian ma’at, but also to the dharma of the Hindus and the Logos of the Greeks}.
Next Hatshepsut needed a magnificent Temple. And
did she not have for this the very assistance of Solomon himself, as Senenmut?
About this I wrote in “Solomon and Sheba”:
Chief Architect
Now that Hatshepsut was Pharaoh, nothing could stop her grandiose plans.
As queen, she had seen fantastic thing in Israel - the King enthroned in
splendour, the palace, the Temple with its magnificent liturgy and gardens, and
the Red Sea fleet, which may have arrived at Solomon's port while she was
visiting him (cf. 1 Kings 10:1 and 10:11). Solomon could provide the
same for her in Egypt. Significantly he, as Senenmut, was also Hatshepsut's
chief architect …. Egypt could be efficiently reorganised on the same stern
system that Solomon had imposed upon his own country. The work gangs would be
employed everywhere, with Senenmut both their “foreman [and] overseer”.
We recall how cruel were the Egyptian “foremen” in Moses' time, and that Moses had killed
one of them for beating an Israelite (Exodus l:11 and 2:11-12).Yahweh had
ultimately delivered his people from this “iron furnace”
of slavery in Egypt. How ironical, then, that a king of Israel, a believer in
Yahweh, would now force the Egyptian people into servitude - but now with the
Pharaoh's blessing! In return, Solomon could play the rôle of trading
middleman, e.g. between Egypt and Syria.
Hatshepsut's Temple
Hatshepsut naturally enlisted Senenmut to plan her temple, “The Most
Splendid of Splendours”, at Deir el-Bahri. He no doubt, in turn, as
Solomon, sought expert assistance from the Phoenicians, just as he had done
more than two decades earlier in the case of the Temple of Yahweh, in
Jerusalem. Accordingly, Velikovsky had referred to Mariette's view that
Hatshepsut's fine building betrayed “a foreign influence”, possibly from “the land of [Punt]” [As referred to in G. Maspero's The Struggle of the Nations, p. 241, n. 2]. If the Puntites
were the Phoenicians [as I believe] - and (according to the Bible) Phoenician craftsmen
had assisted Solomon in his building of Yahweh's Temple - then it is most interesting
that Mariette had observed that Hatshepsut's temple “probably represents ... a Phoenician
influence” [quoted in Naville’s The Temple of Deir el Bahari, Introductory Memoir, p. 1]. From
this, Velikovsky had concluded that the design of the latter was based on
the Jerusalem model. [Dr. J.] Bimson, however, would then reject this view,
saying that Hatshepsut’s temple was clearly based on the layout of smaller
11th Dynasty temple nearby. [“Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba”, C and C
Review, Vo1. VIII, 1986, pp. 12-26]. Baikie [op. cit., pp. 67-68],
for his part, admitted that the 11th Dynasty temple would have offered Senenmut
“the suggestion of how it would best to treat such a site ...”, but he was
adamant that Hatshepsut’s temple was no slavish imitation of the older
building. Senenmut, he said: ... appreciated a good suggestion when he saw it -
all the more credit to him for his commonsense; but to say that he must
therefore be denied any credit for originality is to set up a canon of
criticism which would deprive Shakespeare of the credit for the creation of
Hamlet, and Donatello of that for the creation of the Gattamelata statue. Having
got his suggestion, he proceeded to glorify it, until he had produced a
building which is infinitely superior ... to that of the earlier architect. Baikie
regarded the 11th Dynasty effort as “stumpy and sawn-off looking compared with
the grace of the successive terraces, the long ramps and the graceful
colonnades of the XVIIIth Dynasty artist”.
[End of quote]
“Much has been attributed to the Greeks that
did not belong to them”, I wrote in “Solomon and Sheba”, giving this testimony
from Sir H. Breasted in relation to Hatshepsut’s temple. “Breasted [A History of Egypt, p. 274] made the
point that Hatshepsut’s marvellous temple structure was a witness to the fact
that the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the later
Greeks would be credited as originators”.
And had not the Queen also seen King Solomon’s
brand new fleet?
So maybe Hatshepsut’s own magnificent fleet -
that went to the land of Punt unaccompanied by her (see my Hatshepsut
articles), to collect exotic myrrh for her temple - provides us with a
contemporary illustration of what King Solomon’s own fleet must have looked
like.
The Phoenician contribution to all of this
(palace and temple building, fleet and navigation) should not be
underestimated. And I shall later, in 2., identify the mighty Phoenician king, Hiram, of the
Bible, with Iarim Lim, the mighty contemporary
of Hammurabi of Babylon (both revised now to the time of Solomon).
Yet, according to my
“Solomon and Sheba” article, Solon is yet another Greek appropriation of a
Hebrew original, this time of the biblical King Solomon. And, according to E.
Yamauchi [“Two
Reformers Compared: Solon
of Athens and Nehemiah of Jerusalem”, The Bible World: Essays in Honor of Cyrus H.
Gordon, NY, KTAV, 1980], Solon’s laws and reforms were strikingly
Jewish, reminding Yamauchi of those of the biblical governor Nehemiah at
Jerusalem. And finally, according to P. James [Centuries of Darkness, Jonathan Cape, 1991, p. 97], archaeology shows no
sophisticated Athenian culture for the time of Solon (c. 600 BC). “The first
incontrovertible ‘fixed point’ in Greek [archaeological] chronology is the
Parthenon, begun in 447 [BC, conventional dating]”.
Old
Kingdom Egypt
Earlier (Pre-Monarchical)
History
Given my identification (not original) of the biblical Joseph of Egypt
with the genius vizier, Imhotep, of Egypt’s 3rd dynasty, builder of
the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara:
Joseph as Thales:
Not an "Hellenic Gotterdamerung" but Israelite
Wisdom
it may no longer be surprising to find that Semitic writing was found in
the pyramid texts of pharaoh Unas.
Not only were stone-built pyramids apparently a Hebrew contribution, but
so, too, was philosophy according to my:
Hebrew Foundations of Pythagoras
Nor was I by any means the first to have perceived this order of
contribution:
Church Fathers Were Right About Jewish Origins of Greek
Philosophy
But all of this
was later attributed to the pagan Greeks.
I have attempted to rectify this false (as I consider it) situation by
re-setting the point of reference for ancient philosophy:
Re-Orienting to Zion the History of Ancient Philosophy
Finally, there are those ancient traditions,
such as from Josephus (Antiquities, 1, 154–168), of the
patriarch Abraham as being famous amongst the Babylonians as a skilled astronomer and
mathematician, and as a teacher who exerted a formative influence on the
intellectual traditions of the Egyptians and the Greeks. According to
Josephus, Abraham analysed the “phenomena that were visible both at land and
sea, as well as those that happen to the sun and moon, and all the heavenly
bodies” as proof there is one Creator God (ibid.,
chap. vii, sec. 1). http://www.coghomeschool.org/site/cog_archives/booklets/Abraham%20a%20Scientist.txt
Conclusion to 1.
Hebrew wisdom and culture are found to have been
often at the historical forefront of humankind’s greatest achievements. From
the astronomical, mathematical and architectural knowledge of the ancient
patriarchs, to stone-built pyramid construction; palace and temple building and
sacred liturgy; court etiquette and coronation rites; fleets and navigation; knowledge of the alphabet; all manner of literature and poetry; art; and
philosophy.
Not to mention the fact that - as according to
this article - the Hebrews have left us a detailed historical record which
enables for the establishment, today, of a satisfactory alignment of chronology
with stratigraphy (archaeology).
2. Israel Influences Mesopotamia
Account of
Creation
The artificial and pre-archaeological JEDP theory
of biblical structure and authorship - with major parts of the Book of Genesis said
to have been written in Babylonia (known as Pan
Babylonianism: “… the idea that the content of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is
basically plagiarized from Babylonian (more widely, Sumero-Mesopotamian) material”),
during the Captivity era - has wrought a havoc for biblical studies similar to
that of the Sothic theory as discussed in 1.
For a thorough critique of the JEDP theory, its
errors, but also its occasional insights, see my series (hopefully to be
continued):
Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis
Tracing the Hand of Moses in Genesis. Part Two.
FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS
Really, the whole documentary
approach to Biblical interpretation is due to mythologizing tendencies that -
employing all possible and impossible kinds of combinations - seek to work into
the Genesis stories - and even into the narratives of the Patriarchs - features
and elements drawn from the Babylonian or Egyptian myths that are absolutely
remote from, and completely alien to, the Hebrew spirit.
One has only to compare the
Genesis account of Creation with the Babylonian one, for instance, to realize
how intrinsically different they are. The two accounts are as follows:
|
Bible
|
Babylonian Creation Tablets
| |
|
1. Light
|
1. Birth of the gods, their rebellion and threatened destruction.
| |
|
2. Atmosphere, water
|
2. Tiamat prepares for battle.
| |
|
3. Land,
vegetation
|
3. The gods are summoned and wail
bitterly at their threatened destruction.
| |
|
4. Sun and Moon
(regulating the lights)
|
4. Marduk promoted to rank of 'god': he receives his weapons for
fight. These are described at length; he defeats Tiamat, splits her in half
like a fish and thus makes heaven and earth.
| |
|
5. Fish and birds
|
5. Astronomical poem.
| |
|
6. Land animals
|
6. Kingu who made Tiamat to rebel is bound and, as a punishment, his
arteries are severed and man created from his blood. The 600 gods are
grouped; Marduk builds Babylon where all the gods assemble.
|
|
|
A comparison of the
two accounts makes it immediately apparent that the Bible owes nothing
whatever to the Babylonian tablets, despite the efforts of commentators to
try to convince us that whoever wrote this portion of Genesis had actually
borrowed his concepts from these corrupted Mesopotamian myths. If we rely
solely on the text of Genesis, without being biased by the Babylonian
mythology, we find no trace of any contest with a living monster in the sense
of the Babylonian myth of the fight of the gods.
[End of
quote]
|
Authorship
of Genesis
Still following Wiseman, I argued for - once
again against the naïve conclusions of the JEDP - the great antiquity of the
Book of Genesis as a document comprising pre-Mosaïc patriarchal histories,
which Moses himself later edited.
See my:
The "Toledoths" [Toledôt] of Genesis
My combined use here of Wiseman and Professor A.
S. Yahuda, who insisted that Genesis is actually replete with Egyptian language
and idiom, even for those episodes (e.g. Babel) that are thought to have taken
place in Mesopotamia, strikes a blow against standard theory:
... the linguistic
contribution of Professor A. Yahuda [The Language of the Pentateuch in its
Relation to Egyptian, Oxford U.P. 1933] comes in to deal a shock blow to
both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism. Yahuda,
unlike Wiseman, was an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian
and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage
over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern
any appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch. Yahuda however realized
that the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian - not only for the
periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including
Israel's sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods associated with Babylonia
(presumably the Flood account that we have already discussed, and certainly the
Babel incident). For instance, instead of the Akkadian word for 'Ark' used in
the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the Canaanite ones current elsewhere
in the Bible …, the Noachic account Yahuda noted …uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, `box, coffer, chest') ….
Most important was the
linguistic observation by Yahuda [ibid.,
p. xxix]:
Whereas those books of Sacred
Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile
reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that
these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first
part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the Babylonian influence in the language is
so minute as to be almost non-existent.
[Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr.
Jean Carmignac, had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise -
in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and
show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his
argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books].
While Yahuda's argument is
totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to
consider the likelihood of 'cultural traffic' from Palestine to Egypt,
especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might
expect that the toledôt documents borne by Israel into Egypt would have become
of great interest to the Egyptians under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph
(historically Imhotep of Egypt's 3rd dynasty), who had after all saved the
nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine, thereby influencing Egyptian thought and
concepts.
The combination of Wiseman and
Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of
ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any
artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis. Whilst Kikawada and Quinn
have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have also suggested
how its analytical tools may be useful at least when applied to the apparent
multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau and Jacob
narrative), the system appears as inherently artificial in the light of
archaeological discoveries. Cassuto may not have been diplomatic, but
nevertheless he was basically correct in his estimation of documentism:
"This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it
and is founded on air".
It is no coincidence that
documentary theory was developed during the era of the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who proposed an a priori
approach to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach
of the Aristotelian philosophy of being [Those interested should read Gavin
Ardley's masterful Aquinas and Kant, 1950]. The philosophy of science is
saturated with this new approach. Kantianism I think is well and truly evident
too in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen
… attitude to the biblical texts. And Eduard Meyer carried this over into his
study of Egyptian chronology, by devising in his mind a quantifying a priori theory - an entirely artificial
one that had no substantial bearing on reality - that he imposed upon his
subject with disastrous results. Again an "imposing and beautiful edifice
… founded on air".
[End of quote]
Very much along Yahudan lines I recently queried:
If Genesis Borrowed from Babylonian Epic,
why an Egyptian ‘loan word’ for Noah’s Ark?
Moses the
Lawgiver
Moses and the Law of Hammurabi
Far from Moses having received the Law (Torah) from Yahweh upon Sinai, the
Hebrews - we are told - had derived their laws and statutes from, once again, a
pagan-inspired Law Code, that of King Hammurabi of Babylon, conventionally dated
centuries before Moses. The famous Hammurabi has been slid up and down the time
scale by chronologists. He is thought by some to equate with the biblical
Amraphel. I cannot agree with this:
“Amraphel King of Shinar” Was Not King Hammurabi
But it is generally considered now by
conventionalists that Hammurabi reigned during the C18th BC. Revisionists, of
course, disagree with this, some having tried a c. C15th BC dating for him, whilst
others have dragged Hammurabi all the way down to the time of Solomon. Now, if
Hammurabi were a contemporary of Solomon, then there could be no question of
his Law Code having any influencing power over the Law of Moses at Sinai. (For
my suggested location of the Holy Mountain (following Professor Immanuel
Anati), see:
True Mount Sinai in the Paran Desert
Now,
I fully accept the chronological model according to which King Hammurabi
belonged to the era of Solomon - who was, of course, a follower of Moses.
Moreover, I have suggested further that Solomon’s ally, Hiram, was the powerful
Amorite king, Iarim Lim, and that Zimri-Lim was Solomon’s foe, Rezon
(Rezin):
Hammurabi the Great King of Babylon was King Solomon
Zimri Lim to be Re-Located to Era of King Solomon
The
Law Code of Hammurabi would now be regarded as being inspired by Hebrew Law,
the Torah flowing through the Davidic
dynasty into the ancient “nations” (as discussed in 1.).
Moses and Sargon of Akkad
The Exodus story of the baby Moses placed in the
reed basket by his mother and consigned to the river, is inevitably compared
with a very similar account about baby Sargon. Sargon conventionally, like
Hammurabi, is dated to well before Moses. So, inevitably again, the non-Hebrew
tale is said to have influenced the Hebrew one.
In the case of Sargon of Akkad (unlike that of
Hammurabi, Hatshepsut, or Akhnaton), I have come to accept that he did actually
pre-date the biblical person who is said to have borrowed from him – namely,
Moses (Exodus story).
For Sargon biblically identified (well pre-dating
Moses), see:
Sargon of Akkad (Nimrod) as ‘Divine’ Shulgi of Ur III
But some new perspectives may now be needed.
Firstly, the Sargonic legends are probably late
Assyro-Babylonian, and so composed much later than the era of Moses.
And, secondly, a ground-breaking article (2011)
by Anne Habermehl:
Where in the World Is the Tower of
Babel?
sees
the re-location of the biblical ‘land of Shinar’ to NE Syria (the Sinjar
region), with the possibility that the hitherto unidentified city of Akkad is
to be found at the modern site of Tell Brak. This could spell a further blow to
the supposed Babylonian influences in the Bible.
Conclusion to 2.
The inspired Hebrew Torah was by no means a product of the pagan nations. But instead
it served to bring justice and enlightenment to them.
Christmas 2014
