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12-26-2002, 07:43 PM | #1 |
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Are Abraham and Moses Egyptians?
Hi guys, my question is very simple, is there any reasons or basics (anywhere) to support the claim that Abraham and Moses are not just Egyptians but also pharaohs?
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12-27-2002, 05:26 AM | #2 |
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They both (according to Moses) visited Pharoahs.
Moses was adopted into the Royal family and Abraham was apparently well treated also. However by Moses claims Abraham might have been part of the groups which settled Egypt in the middle Kingdom, the Hyksos. To make a workable timeline this allows the hebrews to be enslaved by the pharoah who liberated Egypt from the Hyksos and emmigrating under Rammeses II. Only major timeline difficulty is the Egyptians sleeping through Noah's global flood. |
12-27-2002, 08:56 AM | #3 |
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I don't see why not, as Idiom pointed out Egypt was ruled by foreigners (Hyksos) for a hundred years or so, and Abe's son (Jacob?) was a bigwig in the Pharoah's Palace.
Moses is an Egyptian name as is his sisters Miriam. Achenaten was a monotheist, lots of similarities. |
12-27-2002, 09:37 AM | #4 |
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Not just Moshe and Miriam, but also many of the other Levites mentioned in the Pentateuch: Pinchas, Hophni, Merare - all those are Egyptian names as well. This oddity has led some scholars (e.g. Baruch Halpern) to posit that there were two proto-Israelite groups. One was an autochthonous Canaanite group, as evidenced by the smooth transition in pottery forms. The other came from Egypt - perhaps a kernel of the exodus story is true.
As the model goes, the Canaanite group worshiped El, the chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon. The Egyptian group, in exile and under the influence of Midianite shasu, worshipped yhw (there is a Bronze Age reference from Egypt to the "shasu of yhw"). The two groups then unified, in some unknown way. yhw(h) was identified with el, and the Egyptian group arrogated the priesthood. Note that in the Pentateuch the Levites are also distinguished by having no ancestral lands assigned to them by YHWH. The historicity of Abraham is beyond knowing at present. Surely the patriarchal stories, which trace a single family, are unrecoverable as history. While many bible scholars have stressed the affinities between Genesis (and the early legal material in Exodus) and second millennium BCE documents from Mari, Nuzi, etc., Thompson and Van Seters have shown that the same materials also fit within a neo-Babylonian (i.e. first millennium BCE) context as well. It is unlikely that we will ever come to recognize Abraham as an unambiguously historical figure. For many years scholars and enthusiasts alike have struggled to reconcile the Moses and Joseph stories with what we know of Egyptian history (which is quite a bit). The result is to force Egypt into a procrustean bed of biblical chronology. Joseph's "viceroyship" is often placed in the context of the Hyksos rule (17th-16th c. BCE), and the pharaoh of the oppression is more often than not assumed to be Ramses II (13th c. BCE). However, there's nary a shred of compelling evidence for any of this, and indeed internal chronologies within the Hebrew Bible, if they are to believed, are impossible to square with the Egyptian record. (E.g. according to the HB, the exodus came 480 years before the construction of Solomon's Temple, which would place it smack in the middle of the 15th c. BCE, when Egypt was at its absolute pinnacle in terms of military power, under Thutmose III and Amenhotep II.) The eminent Egyptologist Donald Redford has assessed the situation in a compelling, if at times acerbic chapter in his famous book, "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times". |
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