by
Damien F. Mackey
“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”.
Michael Astour
Law and Government
Moses
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 18th BC). I shall discuss this further on.
For possible Egyptian identifications of
Moses, see e.g. my series:
Moses – may be staring revisionists right in the face.
Part One: Historical Moses has presented quite a challenge
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).
But 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); though thought to
have been based upon an earlier Mesopotamian original.
See my own explanation of all this in:
Did Sargon of Akkad influence the Exodus account of the
baby Moses?
https://www.academia.edu/35752394/Did_Sargon_of_Akkad_influence_the_Exodus_account_of_the_baby_Moses
Dean Hickman has re-dated king Hammurabi of
Babylon to the time of kings Solomon and David (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying
Hammurabi's older contemporary, Shamsi-Adad I, as king David's Syrian foe,
Hadadazer (2 Samuel 10:16) (“The Dating of Hammurabi”,
Proceedings of the Third Seminar of Catastrophism and Ancient History, Uni.
of Toronto, 1985, ed. M. Luckerman, pp. 13-28).
For more on this, see e.g. my
article:
Davidic Influence on King Hammurabi
According to this new scenario, Hammurabi
could not possibly have influenced Moses.
(a) Greek and Phoenician 'Moses-like Myths'
Michael 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.
Mackey’s 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.
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
(remember the two 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 Danel, 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.
Michael 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. Did the Romans take an Egyptian name
for Moses, such as Musare, and turnd 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 may have taken 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 some of my own views on Mohammed, see
my series:
Some Conclusions regarding Mohammed (c.
570-632 AD, conventional dating)
Whilst Mohammed supposedly lived much later
than Moses, there nevertheless do seem to be Arabic borrowings of the Moses
story itself (and even appropriations of certain very specific aspects of the
life of Jesus, as we shall read later) in the legends about Mohammed, who
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, and also from the era of Jeremiah. Consider
the following by M. O'Hair ("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:
"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 later of Nehemiah, 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 and to Nehemiah)
(a)
experienced exile;
(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 (and Tobit also) 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 basically just the
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.
Mohammed is now for Islam the last and
greatest of the prophets. Thus, "in the Al-Israa, Gabriel (as) took the
Prophet from the sacred Mosque near Ka'bah to the furthest (al-Aqsa) mosque in
Jerusalem in a very short time in the latter part of a night. Here, Prophet
Muhammad met with previous Prophets (Abraham, Moses, Jesus and others) and he
led them in prayer" [ibid.].
Thus Mohammed supposedly led Jesus in
prayer.
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.
See also Barnes, T. D. "The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East II: Land Use and Settlement Patterns, ed. Averil Cameron and G. R. D.; King [Papers of the Second Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 1], volume II (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1994)" (1996-1997), IX: 191-199.; "The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies, ed. Averil Cameron [Papers of the Third Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 1], volume III (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1995)" (1996-1997), IX: 191-199.; "Albrecht Noth's The Early Arabic Historical tradition. A Source-Critical Study, trans. Michael Bonner, in collaboration with Lawrence I. Conrad [Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 3] (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1994)", (1996-1997), IX: 191-199.]:
"'Well into the second century A.H. [A.H. is the muslim time reckoning and means
`Asahhus-siyar'.] scholarly opinion on the birth date of the Prophet
displayed a range of variance of eighty-five years. .. . . . Muhammad, as
Prophet and mouthpiece for the universal deity Allah, is an invention of the
ulama of the second and third centuries A.H".
Our own estimation of the historical
dislocation of the Prophet Mphammed would involve far more than a mere
“variance of eighty-five years”. The fact is that we now have a
‘Mohammed’ who is a semi-legendary version of the original Prophet. Mohammed, a
composite figure, seems to have likenesses even to pre-Mosaïc patriarchs, and
to Jesus in the New Testament. Thus Mohammed, at Badr, successfully led a force
of 300+ men (the number varies from 300-318) against an enemy far superior in
number, as did Abraham (Genesis 14:14); and, like Jacob (Genesis 30, 31), he
used a ruse to get a wife (in Jacob's case, wives). And like Jesus, the
greatest of all God's prophets, Mohammed is said to have ascended into heaven
from Jerusalem.
(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
article, "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. [This article, modified, can now be
read at:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part One: The Chosen People
and:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part II: Christ the King
The way that Egyptian chronology is
structured at present - thanks largely to E. Meyer's
now approximately one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie (Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen
der Königlich preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Akad. der Wiss.,
1904).) 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 pharaoh Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to
king David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the
woman-pharaoh - 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
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 Moslems, supposedly,
Mohammed, the Lawgiver in 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). Solon resembles Solomon especially in roughly the
last decade of the latter's reign, when Solomon, turning away from Yahwism,
became fully involved with his mercantile ventures, his fleet, travel, and
building temples for his foreign wives, especially in Egypt (10:26-29; 11:1-8).
Now, it is to be expected that the pagan
Greeks would remember this more 'rationalist' aspect of Solomon (as Solon)
rather than his wisdom-infused, philosophical, earlier years when he was a
devout Jew and servant of Yahweh (4:29-34).
And Jewish Solon apparently was!
Edwin Yamauchi has studied the laws of
Solon in depth and found them to be quite Jewish in nature, most reminiscent of
the laws of Nehemiah (c. 450 BC) ("Two reformers compared: Solon of
Athens and Nehemiah of Jerusalem," Bible world. New York: KTAV,
1980. pp. 269-292).
That date of 450 BC may perhaps be some
sort of clue as to approximately when the Greeks first began to create their
fictional Solon.
Solomon was, as I have argued in my
"Solomon and Sheba" article ("Solomon
and Sheba", SIS C and C Review, 1997:1, pp. 4-15), the most
influential Senenmut of Egyptian history, Hatshepsut's mentor; whilst
Hatshepsut herself was the biblical Queen [of] Sheba. This article can now be
read at:
I have also identified
Hatshepsut/Sheba as the biblical Abishag, who comforted the aged David (I Kings
1-4), and the beautiful virgin daughter of David, Tamar. See my series:
and:
https://www.academia.edu/36014908/The_vicissitudinous_life_of_Solomons_pulchritudinous_wife._Part_One_ii_Was_Abishag_indeed_married_to_King_David
The
vicissitudinous life of Solomon's pulchritudinous wife. Part Two: “Tamar” in
the Song of Solomon
Professor Henry Breasted had made a point
relevant to my theme of Greek appropriation - and in connection too with the
Solomonic era (revised). Hatshepsut's marvellous temple
structure at Deir el-Bahri, he said, was "a sure witness to the fact that
the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the Greeks later
would be credited as the originators" (A
History of Egypt, 2nd ed., NY (Scribner,
1924), p. 274).
One need not necessarily perhaps always
accuse the Greeks of a malicious corruption of earlier traditions, but perhaps
rather of a 'collective amnaesia', to use a Velikovskian term; the sort of
forgetfulness by the Greek nation as alluded to in Plato's Timaeus.
There is also to be considered that the
Phoenicians and/or Jews had migrated to Greece. In 1 Maccabees 12:21 [Areios king of the Spartans, to Onias the high priest,
greetings: "A document has been found stating that the Spartans and the
Jews are brothers; both nations descended from Abraham." Areus, der König
zu Sparta, entbietet Onias, dem Hohenpriester, seinen Gruß. "Wir finden in
unsern alten Schriften, daß die von Sparta und die Juden Brüder sind, dieweil
beide Völker von Abraham herkommen." 1. Macc. 12:20, 21, The New American
Bible, 1970], for instance, the Spartans claim to have been, like the
Jews, descendants of Abraham. By this late stage the earlier histories would
already have been well and truly corrupted. The Abrahamic emigrants would
naturally have carried their folklore - not to mention their architectural
expertise - to the Greek archipelago where it would inevitably have undergone
local adaptation.
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