sighhswolf

Kosh,
There is a web site that has lots of information (and some junk science) and opinions of biblical history. www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/religion.html
There are some very interesting articles
dealing with Egyptian religion, Christianity
and it's birth, Gnostic Scriptures, DSS,
Nag, Moses geneology, exodus, archeology.

The information is for the most part speculative, and opinionated but very interesting.
And the authors raise some extremely difficult questions involving the validity
of Biblical history.

There are quite a few correlations drawn as to the relationship of Moses and the Egyptian dynasty, specifically addressing
the biblical account of the Exodus.

There are some other sites that put forth
a very different picture of Moses and the Hebrews.

Carol Meyers a professor of Biblical studies at Duke says in response to the validity of
the "exodus" story as related by the bible:
"The ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the red sea,are missing the boat, in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections."
She says "that wasnt considered lying or deceit, it was a way to get ideas across".

Rabbi David Wolpe at the sinai Temple in westwood has answered the question concerning the validity of the story of "exodus" in the Bible this way: "The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, IF It Happened at All."

Seems that even the Jews are split over this issue of the Biblical accounts of exodus.

Dever wrote a paper 3 decades ago, that defended the Exodus story as truth, while he was at seminary.
But given the last 20 years or so and the lack of archeologic evidence, " no one would do that today".

We know that the ancient Hebrews were polytheistic at one point, and then changed to a monotheistic belief later.

The expulsion of certain groups of people for the disavowal of the State religion points to the adoption of a monotheistic form of worship as being the instigation for the deportation of very large portions of population.

Seemingly these events occurred within the
same time frame as the Exodus story.

The correlations are hard to dismiss.

Mendeh

Yes, that's right. The biblical Rameses is the city of Piramesse - or Avaris, as it was known before that, which we know was home to a lot of foreigners, definitely 'Asiatics,' and thus possibly some of the Biblical Israelites.


Marduck - is that our good friend Wallace Budge you be a' quotin'? Haven't I told you about that before?

Right, now let's look at the similarities between the 10 Commandments and the Negative Confession (or, more accurately known as the Declaration of Innocence). Firstly, their respective purposes. The Declaration of Innocence was a spell that was recited by the deceased on arrival at the afterlife when his heart was to be weighed against the feather of Maat. They are not just precepts for living - it is just as important to get the different gods' names correct as it is that you haven't partaken in any of the sins. The Ten Commandments have none of this idea - they are simply precepts for living, and not spells as seen in the Book of the Dead, of which the Declaration of Innocence forms part.

The Ten Commandments are a pretty short collection. The D of I runs on for a very long time, with a huge list of sins and names to be recited (That's why the Book of the Dead was required - it was a crib book, as there was no way anybody could be expected to remember, word for word, all of the spells it contained. It wasn't in itself a guide for living justly). Most cultures have taboos against the sins listed in the Ten Commandments, and the D of I is a very long spell. Surely, then, it's obvious that in such a long spell, you could find Egyptian versions of many or all of the Ten Commandments.
And Akhenaten didn't consider the Declaration of Innocence valid - he did away with almost all of the gods except the Aten. If Akhenaten had connections to Moses, the Declaration of Innocence is precisely where you shouldn't find similarities with the Ten Commandments.
Finally, I strongly suggest, if that is Budge you're using, that you get a more up-to-date translation of the Book of the Dead - I can highly reccommend the Raymond O. Faulkner translation, which as well as being in modern English, doesn't try to sound all KJV, and has a far more accurate translation. (With none of this 'watchers' claptrap, or thous and seemests.)

Marduk

"Moses, the Declaration of Innocence is precisely where you shouldn't find similarities with the Ten Commandments."


That's the point, remove the names of the many deities, being a monotheist, and poof! you got the 10 Commmandments, all in there, then toss in the stuff about 'no other gods', why reinvent the wheel.

Finally, I strongly suggest, if that is Budge you're using, that you get a more up-to-date translation of the Book of the Dead - I can highly reccommend the Raymond O. Faulkner translation,

I have the Faulkner Translation in book form, it was eaier to pull these off the web then to type them in myself from the book, I don't think they are that radicaly different regarding the Confessions.

Vorkosigan

I am sort of surprised that no one has referred to The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeaology and the Myth of Israel, an excellent book by longtime Near Eastern archaeologist Thomas L. Thompson. Thompson shares the generally view that Exodus is a story that never happened, but goes much further than Finkelstein does, at least the way I read him. Thompson is also gifted at relating the stories in the Bible to other stories, so one can see how the Biblical version is obviously a fairy-tale.

For example, he points out that the hailstones that killed the amorites were set up in front of the cave where the five kings were executed and can be seen "to this day." Thomas points out that this is a common fairy-tale motif, where the pea under the princess' mattress is in the museum in Copenhagen and can be seen "to this day."

Thomas disposes of the problem of the Solomonic Gates by noting that they reflect a much deeper problem: the lack of reliable chronologies for the period that hampers scientific work on it. He also tackles the famous reference to David, which he shows is not very strong, for two reasons.

First, the scrap simply reads k bytdwd, which means there are no grounds for assigning the k to the hebrew mlk=king. byt could mean "temple" and is frequently found in that form, while dwd is simply "Beloved" and is one of the epithets for YHWH himself!
Second, "house" as used in the Bible does not necessarily refer to a dynastic entity, as in House of Windsor, but a set of extended patronage networks of a wealthy and powerful man. A "house of Jonathon" is mentioned, and he never ruled any kingdom....

Furthermore, Thompson believes that the inscriptions, which are fragmentary, are part of two different inscriptions, while there are a number of scholars who believe they are forgeries.

Michael

Mendeh

The problem is that there's no way to show that there is any relationship between the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Innocence, simply because the taboos listed in both are common in most other human cultures - I expect that you could find similar laws in Aztec, Incan and Inuit cultures, but that doesn't necessarily point to a relationship with the Ten Commandments. Perhaps you could see whether there was any connection between the two scriptures if you could work out where each of the two originally came from. If, for example, we found versions of the Declaration of Innocence in the Pyramid Texts, then that would rule out the Declaration being cribbed off the Ten Commandments, and if we could find a version of the Ten Commandments before the Israelites arrived in Egypt, that would probably rule out the Ten Commandments being cribbed off of the Declaration.

I would say that, applying Occam's razor, it is more likely, given the evidence that we have at the moment, that the two scriptures originated independently of each other. I don't think there's any reason to suppose a very direct link between Akhenaten and Moses.

--

Sorry for getting on your case about using Budge, by the way, but there's something about the man's use of KJV English in his translations that really annoys me.
(Having said that, I have just bought a Hieroglyphic Reading Book that was compiled by him, but thankfully he didn't bother to translate all of it, so I should be safe from his evil influence!)

sighhswolf

As I was reading some information on this topic, I was struck by thought.
If the "Exodus" has never been validated by
archeological digs and artifacts, how does this fact influence the History of the Jewish people, and their worship of Jehovah,
and the subsequent Christian adoption of the "Torah"?
If this story cant be validated through
artifacts that place the Hebrews in the proper place at the proper time, the entire Judeo-Christian form of worship would be based on a fabrication.
How would this effect the Ten Commandments and subsequent Hebrew law? Without the story of the Exodus, the Hebrews as a nation would never exist.

Mendeh

Well, there are finds in Avaris that indicate immigration from the area around Syria-Palestine at roughly the right time, but there's no telling whether they are the Biblical 'Children of Israel'.

The problem is that at the moment, we can't say either way whether some sort of exodus did or did not occur. Personally, I think it likely that the Exodus story is the product of many different 'strings' of mythology coming together as one story - remembrances of a terrible plague in Egypt (which were probably more common than Egyptian sources would have us believe), perhaps a period of slavery or dominance by the Egyptian empire, and an escape attempt across the Reed Sea. But I doubt we'll ever be able to prove anything about Exodus conclusively - certainly not that it was all simply a fabrication.

Marduk

" If, for example, we found versions of the Declaration of Innocence in the Pyramid Texts, then that would rule out the Declaration being cribbed off the Ten Commandments"

I was under the impression that the Coffin Texts, the Book Of the Dead were both part of the Pyramid Text collection written on the walls of Saquarra circa 2500 BCE?
The Ani Papyrus from which my confessions were pulled is dated 1240 BCE. I'm saying if the people who were to become the Hebrews really did live in Egypt for several hunderd years these 'confessions' may have been common knowledge, at least to the preistly class if not the rank & file.

also these 'confessions' are to Osiris and much of the pyramid text is devoted to the old star cult of Osiris, which predates Ra, I think, not 100% sure, anyway that would make them very old indeed.

[ July 29, 2001: Message edited by: marduck ]

Mendeh

Right, so now we need to find the earliest version of the ten commandments, and see if it was written before the Israelites were said to have been in Egypt.

Apikorus

Classical source criticism (cf. Wellhausen) identifies the material in Exodus 34 as an early version of the decalogue, assigning it to the J strand. In that case, the 10 commandments are:

1) No covenants with the natives; destroy their altars
2) Don't worship other gods
3) No molten gods
4) Observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread
5) Firstborn of every womb belongs to YHWH
6) Observe the Sabbath
7) Observe the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Ingathering
8) No leaven with bloody sacrifice
9) First fruits to the House of YHWH
10) Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk

Of these, only 2,3, and 6 are common to the more familiar P list (Exod 20) and D list (Deut 5). It seems that this list constitutes a covenant since the term "berit" (covenant) appears in 34:10 and 34:27, bracketing this list of instructions.

According to classical source chronology, J is the earliest strand (9th c. BCE). Note that Unleavened Bread is celebrated in the month of Aviv (the Canaanite name) and not Nisan (the Babylonian name). Is this then the earliest version of the decalogue?

The provenance of Exod 34 is uncertain, though, and some scholars have recently claimed it is a late (i.e. postexilic) redactional composition which assumes both Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code (Exod 20:22-23:33).

Apparently the tradition that the first pair of tablets were smashed and later replaced (with exact copies) is preexilic, appearing as it does in Deuteronomy (Deut 9:17, 10:1-2).

An amusing factoid: The next time you watch de Mille's epic "The Ten Commandments" see if you can freeze frame just after the bolt of fire inscribes the decalogue. If you read Hebrew you'll notice that the writing doesn't look anything like what you find in the Tanakh. That's because in the movie the decalogue (P/D version) is written in paleo-Hebrew script! So evidently de Mille was advised by some scholars who told him that the square Assyrian script would be an anachronism (it wasn't used until postexilic times; there's a gemara which credits Ezra with the orthography change). I first noticed this in a theater in LA whose walls were adorned with framed movie poster marquees. The poster for TTC shows Charlton Heston holding the two tablets, and I did a double take before I noticed they were in paleo-Hebrew.

Incidentally, the earliest extant fragment of biblical text is found on the tiny Ketef Hinnom scrolls (you can see them in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem). Inscribed in silver, they contain fragments of the priestly blessing from Num 6:24-26. They're written in paleo-Hebrew and are dated to the late 8th c. BCE. Every Friday night, observant Jewish men recite this blessing to their children, moments before reciting the blessing over the wine. I like to do this myself (even though I'm an atheist!); it's a nice and very old tradition.

Some of the scrolls from Qumran are written in the paleo-Hebrew script. But many scholars believe that this reflects an archaizing (rather than truly archaic) orthography associated with the nationalism of the Hasmonean era. Interestingly, the Samaritans have transmitted their version of the Pentateuch in paleo-Hebrew.

[ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]