PALEO-JUDAISM 401 - MY TAKE, PART 1
GOD NEVER DOES THE SAME THING TWICE
Archeology, Biblical criticism, wandering story tellers and Truth
By A.Henry Greenfield
“God never does the same thing twice.”
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav
For Robert Eisenman and Sholem Asch
AN INTRODUCTION FOR INTELLIGENT LAYMEN BY AN INTELLIGENT LAYMAN
The scientific iconoclast Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) once wrote that “one measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” He thought the great sin of science was to, metaphorically, draw circles in the ocean and call the inside of the circle “true” and the outside “false”. “Every science,” he wrote, “is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.” Biblical archeology, and for that matter Archeology itself had a difficult struggle getting recognized as a science, and it has done so by cutting itself off, in its mainstream anyway, from literary Biblical studies (which anticipated it – accurately, as it would happen) by a century, from religion, from poetry and from common sense.
It has done so because its early, great pioneers were “intelligent laymen” like Schliemann (who bumbled upon Troy) and Champollion (who deciphered hieroglyphic Egyptian through study of the Rosetta Stone, itself stumbled upon by French soldiers). Even at far later times, such astonishing finds as The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library were found by by Arab peasants and nomads. Even granting that the latter ‘discoverers’ probably burned for fire kindling or used for toilet paper a sizable portion of what they found, it is nevertheless true that archeologists, by then a “profession” did not find them.
Yet they, as academics, have become the (rather Orwellian) arbiters of Biblical history, emerging only from their pocket-protector universe and gentleman-gardening ‘digs’ to dabble, since 1990, in a kind of historical revisionism that fills the well known vacuum so abhorred by nature that constitutes a sophisticated attack upon contemporary Zionism with the unlikely premise that ancient Israel never existed at all, and what we should really be concerned about is the “restoration of Palestinian history”.
Some who have aided and abetted this process in the ‘professional’ community are appalled, even denouncing it as “almost anti-Semitic”, but the tide is with the Orwellian cynical propagandists of “Palestinian Pseudo Science”.
What I have attempted to do here is several-fold. I take living traditions more seriously than dead ones, and, recognizing that the ancient Near Eastern languages absolutely revel in euphemisms, for (as examples) time, numbers and bodily functions, I have attempted to reread Biblical texts and translations with these realites in mind. I have tried to think like them, and write like them. Naturally, I have to make a few assumptions. For example, when I see Egyptian wall paintings showing Pharaoh three times larger than the depictions of his servants, I assume the Egyptians of the time, painters and viewers alike, ipso facto not being blind, knew perfectly well that the proportions refer to perceived importance and power, not physical size.
Likewise, I take all big, particularly round dates and numbers as references to “many” and ”few” – and to “important” and “unimportant”. I also do not assume that “intelligent laymen” or peasants or nomads have stumbled over their last great discoveries that Change Everything. I also do not divorce Middle Eastern history from what was going on in the rest of the world at the same time.
I also do not hold the Hebrew Scriptures to a higher standard than the Epic of Gilgamesh or the boasts of Egyptian royal propaganda enshrined in stone. We have two surviving accounts of the siege of Lachish (701 bce), the living tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures (2 Kings 18-19; 2 Chronicles 32; Isaiah 32), and an account from the court annals of the Assyrian King Sennachrib, preserved in the ruins of his now long-dead empire; a dead tradition. I assume (for such is extremely likely) that once upon a time there were actual court annals of the kings of Israel and Judah, and that the authors of Kings and Chronicles as we know them had access to at least some of these court documents, as well as other lont records and oral traditions.
They doubtless modified according to their own ethical take on history, as we all do. I assume both the Assyrian and Israelite accounts were as factual and as fanciful as most official histories of events, no more, no less. The Egyptian account of the Battle of Qadesh and the Hittite account of the same event reach opposite conclusions, the Egyptians won in their annals, and the Hittites won in theirs. Court records, then and now, are like that. I hold the Hebrew Scriptures up to the same standard.
One of the small circle of close associates I showed working drafts of this work to asked me, half-joking, how many times I intended to rewrite the Bible. I shot back, “Until I get it right!”
Essentially, one never gets it right, completely. The first draft of the Ten Commandments, whoever drafted it, Moses or whoever, probably consisted, as Thomas Cahill sagely observed, of ten words (or, I’d say, phrases) spoken to an essentially tribalist-oral audience. Middle Eastern languages are filled with euphemisms, and add the overlay of time, cultural and linguistic changes and deliberate expansions, they might have consisted of something like: I’m God. Others aren’t. Don’t bullshit. Party on weekends. Be good to your folks. Don’t murder unnecessarily. Don’t steal women. In fact, don’t steal anything. Don’t put down others. Don’t envy.
I’m not trying to be especially funny. Some people will read this book and go for the rope or the stake, seeking my home address. Not smart; I can be a bad-ass when I need to. What seems “funny” is part of what medieval artists imaged as “The Ship of Fools” - a kind of God’s eye view of the world, which is filled with pathos and irony, if you look from that angle.
Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that folk-stories from other periods developed in much the same way—the tales of the 18th Century Baal Shem Tov and other Chassidic Masters resemble nothing so much as the development of stories about Elijah and Deborah in the Hebrew Scriptures, only they are closer to living memories; two of my own four great grandfathers were students of students of the Baal Shem’s own students in the village of Velke Kapos in what is now Slovakia, Rabbi Akiva Dov and Rabbi Elazer HaKohen Samovics.
One sees something of the same phenomenon, highly influenced by Jewish tradition, in 18th and 19th Century Masonic ritual mystery plays. The York Rite “Royal Arch” Degree, for example, is a participatory reenactment of the “rediscovery” of what has come to be called by archeologists and Biblical critics alike “The Deuteronomistic History” embedded in the larger Hebrew Scriptures and originating in the reign of Josiah, King of Judah for over thirty years, some two thousand six hundred years ago.
The Masonic ritual probably comes pretty close to the reality at the time of Josiah. So, in the tradition of the popular renditions of the late Martin Buber, to say nothing of these Masonic mystery plays (still regularly enacted today) I made up some stories of my own. Like all stories of Dov Baer or Israel Baal Shem Tov, or Josiah, for that matter, they are rooted in real wunder rebes doing real things.
Finally, I considered coming down to what are becoming known as contemporary “urban myths” and, having observed that Elvis Presley has had more reported post-mortem “sightings” than the New Testament’s accounts of post-mortem sightings of Jesus Christ, that the urban myths coincide right down to the empty tomb story, yes, I considered doing the Second Coming of Elvis.
But the problems of my own mishpaka with the archeo-mythologists are enough for one essay; I’ll save Elvis for another time, working title “He Has Risen”.
I put all this together. When the Biblical stuff gets boring, blame me and not the originals, which were mercifully brief and to the point.
The rest, as they say, is history. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
August 4, 2003 c.e.
"Your standard criticisms of religion are so much like satires of third-grade Sunday school teachings that they make me want to ask when you last read a theological treatise and what its title was.”
Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters
The ancient Davidic kingdom, once thought to be fantasy, is now being confirmed in the archeological record. In spite of desperate rationalizations by nihilist historical deconstructionists, the Egyptian Pharoah Mernrptah’s ‘victory’ stele of circa 1210 bce not only mentions the early Israelites, but, carefully read, accurately identifies the location of this people as reflected in the archeological record. Further, the stele accurately identifies these Israelites of this remote period as not yet a nation-state but rather a people in an identifiable area of Canaan, reflecting the accuracy of the Biblical Book of Judges.
There was a major critical body of opinion that the Davidic Kingdom never existed (though the often unflattering, matter-of-fact accounts in the canonical Books of Kings suggest otherwise), until the 1990s, when Avraham Biran and his archeological team found, at a dig in upper Galilee, an apparently three thousand year old stele of an obscure victory by a Syrian king over a “king of Israel” and “the House of David”. A similar more fragmentary account on a Moabite stele had been found a century earlier, and if a people’s existence may be defined by the accounts of enemies, the early Israelites certainly were pretty much as advertised.
Ancient Israel appears to have been a confederation of (mostly) West Semitic tribes and rebel warlords, refugees from the descendants of the defeated Semitic Egyptian Hyksos dynasty in Egypt (the common memory of which by the time of the 'Judges' (better "Heroic Chieftans"), and disgruntled Late Bronze Age Canaanites (scholars prattle over the proportions of each group), gradually politically united by powerful sheiks (those 'Judges' again) and later by a series of kings.
This people was then gradually shaped ideologically by prophets and priests following in the tradition which dispensed with the worship of the forces of nature—and the forces of nature personified- in favor of a unifying principle of one underlying, invisible, and universally sentient force, power or authority, unimaginably more important than any government of priesthood, called by many names but being, above all, One. Whether a segment of this people came out of Egypt influenced (as Freud thought) by the Priesthood of Aten, the one solar god, or by later Neo-Platonic pantheism, is a moot point. One reads the Amarna letters and realizes that Canaanite vassals more-or-less thought of Canaan as suburban Egypt.
In ancient Israel ethic and monotheism were uniquely (though probably gradually-the evolution of ideas is harder to pin down than the history of ceramics) wedded into a unique and gradually refining ideal, perfected under the duress of war, defeat and, penultimately, exile. What matters here most is that these developments, along with Greek philosophy and European technology, are the pillars upon which Western Civilization arose, including ideas such as individual liberty, initiative and the very freedom of thought that has allowed critical thinking to come into being.
That political priests and kings sometimes embraced this vision of ancient monotheistic Israel for cynical political reasons is most likely, but of little consequence. A unitary divinity was certainly helpful to an aspiring unitary monarchy and priesthood. Akhnaten in his day may have had the same notion; Constantine the Great in his almost certainly did. In the 1950s the U.S. “Pledge of Allegiance added “one nation, under God” to its text for similar reasons. “Unity under God” can be rationally debated as a political agenda, but only by people, from Karl Marx to Nelson Rockefeller, born under the influence of the Star in the West, Reason.
In any case, in ancient Judea, out of this came the hereditary official “Party of the Righteous” called, in the pro-Roman cut of the New Testament, “Sadducees” (from Tzadikim—the “righteous”) of the New Testament, eventually the tool of Alexander’s fragmented empire and then of Rome. But out of this came also a mostly rural priestly class of “Nazirites” or “Zadokites” and “desert Sadducees” who adhered to spiritual principles and Jewish nationalism. Into this mix was added a school of Messianic expectation—more akin to British Arthurian mythos (that of “the once and future king”) than Greek or East Indian avatar ideals at first, but given a mystical component by yet another party undoubtedly influenced by the Babylonian Exile and post-exilic Babylonian Judaism. Thus arose yet another party called in Aramaic “Perisayya” (or “The Persian Party”), and known in the New Testament as “the Pharisees”.
The pandering to gentile yokels by the Romanized Jew Paul, and the later “Roman edit” of the New Testament makes both “Pharisees” and Sadducees” the whipping boys of the eventual gentile “followers” of Jesus. The probably truth is that Jesus, his brothers James, his twin brother Thomas , and their compatriots were allied with the radical wings of both parties.
These included the pro-Hasmonean priestly class (known variously as Hassidim, Essenes, or Zealots depending upon their level of militancy—and militarism) that had earlier fomented the successful rebellion against the Alexandrine Greek rulers of Syria and Palestine after the conquest of Persia (under the Maccabees), only to be supplanted in Roman times by the Arab family of Herod.
Also included were the more nationalistic elements among the “Pharisees” or “Persian Party”, which, after the fall of the Temple, formed the core of legalist (and sometimes collaborationist) Rabbinical Judaism, but which had a militantly nationalist wing as well. This wing was clearly still active as late as the rebellion of 120 e.v. as evidenced by the foremost rabbi of that time, Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, and the mystic early Qabalist Shimon bar Yohai, the reputed author of The Zohar.
The historical Jesus was both rebel and prophet, better compared to Bar Kochbar than Krishna . To put it succinctly, Jesus and later James his brother and successor were Zealot leaders and, eventually, martyrs. Both priestly Zadokites (the probable authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and “Persian Party” militants (who may actually have been in anti Roman alliance with the Parthian Empire) held messianic expectations rooted in “the Star Prophecy” and other prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. He was at once mystic armed revolutionary (he was certainly surrounded by such) and heir to the priest-king tradition of the Hasmoneans.
He may have considered himself the Davidic Messiah and been proclaimed as such, with somewhat less success but the same fate as the later Shimon Bar Kochba, the hero-messiah of the massive, final revolt against Rome a hundred years later. Later messianic figures, from the much-maligned Sabbatai Sevi, Baruchya Russo, Jacob Frank, to the less well known modern messiah-claimant, “the Messiah of the Cave” Moses Guibbory, who, on June 28, 1932, anointed an American Jew, David Horowitz, as the “Messiah, son of David”, may all be seen as sort of proto-Zionists or Zionists outright; Horowitz played a considerable role in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and in 1977 was given the Defender of Israel Medal by Menachem Begin, and in 1991 Yitzhak Shamir bestowed upon Horowitz a Defender of Jerusalem award.
One is reminded of Theodor Herzl’s eerie dream in the early days of modern Zionism in which he comes before the Messiah who tells him,”You are the one I have been waiting for throughout history.” Urban myths overlap with urban reality, then, and now.
Thus the myth-dream of ancient Israel gave rise to Judaism, Christianity, Zionism, Marxism and a lot of stuff I don't mention here. One starts a circle beginning anywhere.
DIGGING IN THE DIRT-AN OVERLONG INTRODUCTION TO HEBREW BIBLICAL HISTORY
“…Monumental building techniques—such as the use of ashlar masonry and Proto-Aeolic capitals…evidence for widespread literacy is utterly lacking in Judah during the time of the divided monarchy. David and his son Solomon and the subsequent members of the Davidic dynasty ruled over a marginal, isolated, rural region, with no signs of great wealth or centralized administration.” Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
“…there are some examples in history of rural people exerting control over big cities—especially in cases where highland warlords or outlaw chieftains used both the threat of violence and the promise of godfatherly protection to secure tribute and professions of loyalty from the farmers and shopkeepers of lowland towns…” Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
“…even some rather radical scholars would take seriously the notion that some of these ‘Shasu of Yhw’ were among the tribal peoples who became early Israel, and that they may indeed have been guided through the desert by a charismatic, sheikh-like leader with the Egyptian name of ‘Moses’.”
William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
“… although I do not wish to retract anything I have said before, I cannot help feeling that it is somehow not altogether satisfactory. The cause does not, so to speak, accord with the results. The fact we are trying to explain seems to be incommensurate with everything we adduce by way of explanation. Is it possible that all our investigations have so far discovered not the whole motivation, but only a superficial layer, and that behind this lies hidden another very significant component? Considering how extraordinarily complicated all causation in life and history is, we should have been prepared for something of the kind.” Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
One must understand something about the early history of the Hebrew Civilization in which he emerged and with which he fully identified.
Revisionist historians and archeologists such as Israel Finkelstein have, in recent years, made a great deal of noise as if the discoveries of 19th Century Biblical Criticism were new and revolutionary. While distasteful still, no doubt, to the plodding fundamentalists of whatever sect (along with Darwin, Freud and anything else that suggests any meaningful original insights), I doubt that any reasonably open minded boy or girl of 14 who opens the Hebrew Bible for the first time, reads about the ‘discovery’ of a “Book of the Law’ (by the priests in the Temple at the time of King Josiah which, conveniently enough, finds the true religion of Israel to be centered on the priests and King) doesn’t IMMEDIATELY think, “How convenient; sounds like some tinkering around with earlier scriptures and ideas”.
To most, this hardly matters—Josiah and his priesthood of Israel lived circa 610 b.c.e., the time of the end of the ancient Assyrian Empire, the end of the Bronze Age in China, the beginnings of the Nok culture in West Africa, the triumph of the Etruscans in Italy, the time of Draco the tyrant in Athens, the building of Tikal by the Mayans coincident with the Zapotec written language in Mexico, and the time of the compiling of The Upanishads in India. By any standards other than pocket-protector archeologists, this is very ancient times.
Then, if they have half a brain, they go on to discover the evolving realizations about the nature of humanity and its relationship with the super mundane ‘Whatsit’, which is what the Hebrew Scriptures obviously and patently actually represent, both in terms of ontology and social consciousness. One tends to lean almost instinctively towards, say, Thomas Cahill’s THE GIFTS OF THE JEWS in taking the Biblical story for what it is and what it gradually becomes, in preference to village pedestrian and, one might say, Philistine (or Palestinian) ideological rants like Finkelstein & Silberman’s THE BIBLE UNEARTHED and DAVID AND SOLOMON for insight, because of the obvious: From preliterate ‘campfire tales’ and memorized poetry to more-or-less faithfully copied but now lost court records, one cannot rightly call the Hebrew Scriptures “pure history” any more than personal memoirs or films of World War II or the songs and battlefield diaries of Civil War soldiers. But they may be as close as we can get to pure history, and it will probably serve the truth better to recognize that ALL of “history” amounts to that; no more, but no less, without giving in to the post modernist, deconstructionist insanity that therefore there really is no history, which entirely misses the point.
There is something to be said for the deconstructionist attempts to separate out Middle Eastern Archeology, Ancient Jewish Mythos, and religious beliefs one from the other, but the trick is to do so without losing sight of the remarkable fact that Jews in Oslo Norway and Casablanca Morocco or the outback of Australia have the same sacred language, holy books, many similar social customs and hold to the same historical legends that go back, at least, to the Hasmonean-Herodian period in the Middle East, with fragments, shards and other debris and miscellaneous impedimenta essentially identical in Amsterdam or Tahiti or an ancient archeological dig looking at a period roughly a thousand years earlier, and having in the fullness of time impacted profoundly upon thought as diverse as Christianity, Islam and Socialism. One begins to think that neither Biblical criticism nor archaeology will offer ultimate answers, but rather we may expect such from the far more exacting (though nascent) bio-science that has emerged with research into DNA patterns. Early promising results seem to indicate the Jews of Israel and Norway and Tahiti have common DNA roots, the “Palestinian” Arabs less so—but the much oppressed Kurdish people now living near the “eponymous” Abraham’s home country prior to his legendary trek to Canaan have much the same DNA.
Even F&S acknowledge the cultural and historical, if not DNA, connection grudgingly here and there; At random from the same text they acknowledge “The many sources and episodes that were combined are a testimony to the richness of the traditions from which the biblical narrative was drawn…Older, less formalized legends of liberation from Egypt could have been skillfully woven into the powerful saga that borrowed familiar landscapes and monuments…We may
never know to what extent the stories in the book of Judges are based on authentic memories of local heroes and village conflicts preserved over the centuries in the form of epic poems or popular folktales.
“Never” is a long time to assert, however. One feels constrained to see in Cahill the heart of the matter: “There are real differences—literary differences,” he tells us, “between Gilgamesh and Exodus, and even between Gilgamesh and Genesis. The anonymous authors of Gilgamesh tell their story in the manner of a myth. There is no attempt to convince us that anything in the story ever took place in historical time…The text of the Bible is full of clues that the authors are attempting to write history of some sort. Of course…we know we are not reading anything with the specificity of a history of FDR’s administration.
The people who constructed these narratives did not, like Doris Kearns Goodwin, have access to the card catalogue of the Library of Congress or the resources of the Internet. They had HEARD the story they were writing down, had received it from an oral culture, had in fact received it in two or three variant forms—in the varieties we would expect from tales told over and over down the centuries at one caravan site after another.”
But, where Finkelstein and Silberman get almost as off point as their opposite numbers among Fundamentalists, and Cahill stays on the mark is when he tells us in summary, “These are not, like Gilgamesh, archetypal tales with a moral at the end: they share nothing essential with other ancient myths from Gilgamesh to Aesop to Grimms’ fairy tales.” The Hebrew Bible is to Moses and David as Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” is to – well, THE Julius Caesar. History as entertainment, inspirational myth-dream (not quite the same animal as “myth” per se), and the like, but HISTORY. All history and archeology is political, and, at its worst, a kind of Lysenkoism—-in Biblical Archeology, there was a long history of seeing archeology through the lens of the Bible. Now there is an “anti Ancient Israel” nihilist slant rooted in part in political opposition to Zionism. Neither are scientific; both pretend to be.
The Finklesteins of the academic world act as if not finding the trail droppings of Moses from Goshen to the Promised Land in the archeological record is some sort of astonishing new discovery, the secular humanist equivalent of a revelation. Claptrap. Propagana, really, no less so than the Priestly and other late revisions of the period histories enshrined in The Hebrew Scriptures that have come down to us. If there are “P” “E” and “J” edits, there is something to be said for a “F” edit as well, meaning Finklestein.
Even less agenda-driven writers like William Dever ( see his 2003 excellent work, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?) fall prey to pocket-protector nerdy notions. “Apiru” may or may not come from a different source-term than the source-term for “Hebrew” (I think otherwise.)—therefore they are unrelated, as Dever would have it. Good grief, Maybe he needs to see “Gangs of New York” and figure out how an 1840s New York Irish gang would come to call itself “the Dead Rabbits”—not from anything about rabbits or death, but an “unrelated” (in meaning) Irish term. As one source noted, “In an Irish-English dictionary published in Dublin in 1992, the Irish word ráibéad is defined as a "big, hulking person." It is that word, ráibéad—along with the slang intensifier dead, meaning "very"—that provides the simple solution to the 150-year-old mystery of the moniker "Dead Rabbit."
And one might note all archeologists tend to love the term “eponymous ancestor” in a dismissive manner, as if Washington, D.C. or Marthasville, Georgia mean that the General and the Mayor’s wife were therefore not real people. The archeologist of 4000 might speak of the “eponymous” ancestor of ancient America, Washington, who conquered armies by crossing rivers, threw coins across other rivers, never told a lie and was known as “Father of his country”. Still, Washington was, and that’s that.
Dever attempts to soften the blow by going on about the intrinsic spiritual truth of myth, but he just can’t quite get. First, he defines “myth” quoting Webster as
“A traditional story of unknown authorship, ostensibly with a historical basis, but serving usually to explain some phenomenon of nature, the origin of man, or the customs, religious rites, etc. of a people; myths usually involve the exploits of gods and heroes.”
Now, my (unabridged) Webster’s defines “myth” as “a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some superhuman being or some alleged person or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, esp., a traditional or legendary story that is concerned with deities or demigods and the creation of the world and its inhabitants.” Keeping mind the subject here is the reality or lack thereof of the Biblical Exodus. My Webster is closer to the mark than Dever’s Webster any old day, but this isn’t really the point.
The word Dever actually needs here is “mythos” -- defined (this time I used American Heritage, also unabridged) as “The pattern of basic values and attitudes of a people, characteristically transmitted through myths and the arts.” In specific here, we are back to the myth-dream of ancient Israel, and like King Arthur, the Alamo, the Trojan Horse, and Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, the story is presented bigger than life in myth-dreams, but they nevertheless reduce to a core of reality, usually quite tangible reality. The early Britons probably did have a Romanized war-chief named Arthur, Houston defeated the Mexicans partly because a few Freemasons from Tennessee and a few pro Texas Mexicans died in a small battle at San Antonio, the Spanish-American Empire was crushed in Cuba and elsewhere, and the romantic version we receive doesn’t negate these underlying hard facts.
Robert Eisenman once observed of New Testament times that “There is in this period one central immovable fact, that of Roman power.” I need to paraphrase him but slightly to point out that early Israel emerged in a template context as well; “There is in that period one central and immovable fact, that of Egyptian power.” The archeological record, the Hebrew Scriptures, Egyptian histories, other contemporary histories, the Amarna letters, et al all attest to this.
One might observe that the long, tired and futile unadventurous cycle of Egyptian Civilization, from the Badarian Culture and Nileometer in circa 4000 B.C.E., through the royal egocentric monumental phase, down to the closing of the Temple of Philae in 536 C.E., in other words, four thousand five hundred years, gets interrupted, rather suddenly and briefly, in the relative order of things, by the invasion of Semitic people from Palestine (sometimes called “Hyksos”). They rule the country for a century and leave a lasting scar on the Egyptian psyche; of the near-monotheistic idiosyncratic religious revolution of Akhnaten; or, the mysterious invasion of the so-called “sea peoples” to conclude that a bunch of “Hebrews” (early meaning, roughly, in ancient slang = “rebels” or even “bandits”) from Canaan with their own or Egyptian-influenced monotheistic or proto monotheistic ideas may quite plausibly have followed Moses (which suggests an Egyptian name-fragment) or whatever he was called, back to their ancestral home among the milk, honey and Palestinians. Or not. Akhnaten may have preceded Moses by a mere 50 years, had from his father a vizier with the Semitic name Aper-El and another with the suggestive name Ramose (RA-Moses), and certainly the suggestive survival of the former’s “Hymn to the Aten” in the much later Israelite Psalm 104 suggests more of his revolution may have survived among the Children of Israel than among the Egyptians. Certainly, the Exodus, or something like it, happened in the myth-dream of ancient Israel, which became the myth-dream of Western Civilization. Myth dreams are not archetypes, but Para histories. And this particular Para history is the one upon which rests the progress of humanity, or, upon its failure, our destruction as a civilization, perhaps as a species.
Biblical Archeologists are a (sometimes) helpful group of irritating people by nature. Scholars speaking only to scholars are usually ignorant of human nature to begin with, but some of their notions are downright scary.
We need to dismiss out-of-hand the anti-semitic propaganda of “scholars” like Keith Whitelam and his “Palestinian Nationalist” followers Hamid Salim, Khaled Nashef and the like for what they are. In the ongoing clash between Western Civilization and its values, it is not astonishing that pseudo-scientists have enlisted in the cause of the two driving forces of reaction most clearly highlighted in the Middle East…at least prior to 9/11. These forces are Stalinist-Maoist Marxism (the organizing force behind the Palestine Liberation Organization and a hundred other such secular Marxist ideologies), and resurgent medievalist Islamism.
Quite simply, there is one Arab Nation stretching from Algeria to Iraq, outwards from Arabia proper, one Islamic World where no idea more progressive than Stalinism, medieval monarchism and theocracy have ever held sway, and the hatred of this culture for Western Civilization has origins that should be as obvious as why the State of Israel is loathed as the latter’s Eastern-most stronghold. What is remarkable is that some Westerners have fallen for the propaganda concerning “Palestine”. There is no such state, and there never has been. Indeed, in the lifetime of many alive today, the term “Palestinian” meant the Jews living in what was once ancient Israel, and the Arabs, both secular national socialists (Ba’ath Party, PLO, etc.) and Islamist, sought to exterminate their Jewish neighbors precisely because they are a sliver of Western Enlightenment in the midst of their reactionary, medievalist and authoritarian culture, no appeals to fictional nations involved. Only after having failed to exterminate the Jews did these groups begin to peddle to the West and eventually themselves that they were something more than the descendents of the Islamic Jihad that followed Mohammed’s death out of Arabia proper, with lightning speed as far as France in the West and Indian and Southeast Asia in the East, only to be thrown back just short of world conquest.
That the United Nations third-world informal coalition buys into such propaganda is unsurprising, but the nihilists and antisemites within archeology (a Western science, after all) is simply a part of the abdication that has been called, rightly, the “suicide of the West”.
Given a Biblical account (which is part of a living tradition, after all), and an account by ancient Egyptians (a decidedly long-dead tradition) of the same event, they invariably buy into the Egyptians. Never mind that ALL Egyptian accounts are court propaganda by definition. Never mind that the equally dead Hittites occasionally recount the same events as the Egyptians, but with a totally different outlook. Why, the Hittites say they beat the pizassers out of Ramses II in the Battle of Kadesh, while Ramses court account clearly says the Egyptians won; propaganda vs. propaganda-—never mind that.
Never mind the irritating habit of thinking that the building of self-glorifying monuments is an indication of “highly developed” civilizations. If you read some of these guys, they actually measure civilization by how big its bureaucracy is. Our friends F&S actually do this with no trace of irony or apology. Or, likewise, shoving together gazillions of huge rocks in a big pile so the corpse of an eviscerated dead king can be stuck in a box on the theory that scraping out his brain and pulling out his guts and turning his corpse to leather will somehow insure him of immortality is the height of sophistication of a “developed state”.
By this standard, a quiet, respectful burial is ignorant if not unsound, but all this self-glorification is not only a mark of civilization but shining sanity. Never mind the notion of “developed states” (variously defined by scholars) being, ipso facto, dominant political and ideological centers of civilization (an idea favored by New Yorkers who have never read, say, Mao Zedong on guerilla warfare, and who missed the Afghan Wars altogether.) Again, twaddle, claptrap, bunkum.
But no, the Egyptians do tell us that there were troublesome Semites around, that they were expelled from the country and they came from Canaan and lived in Goshen. But it isn't EXACTLY like in Exodus, so…Exit Exodus. In other contexts they note the propensity of ancient writers to exaggerate numbers, use euphemisms at every turn, even (as in Egypt) to draw gods HUGE, kings BIG, aristocrats PRETTY BIG, peasants SMALL, slaves SMALLER and defeated enemies TINY, without any likelihood that the literate Egyptian took this as other than an expression of power rather than physical size, they hold Exodus to a different standard…maybe Moses left Egypt (or some part of the Canaanite Egyptian-controlled Empire- which was pretty much all of big-city Canaan through early Biblical times) across a stream with a hundred followers (the Jordan perhaps, as with the Elijah Cycle), or Joshua was a warlord with 50 men-at-arms who fought 50 surly Canaanites, and, properly understood, this is all that the Mosaic record’s oral or ostracon-written early drafts meant, polished up by later writers and fully understood by everyone till the coming of Calvin and his second coming in Pat Robertson.
Suddenly, unlike the standards applied to dead cultures like Egypt or Sumer, the living record of a living culture, the Hebrew Scriptures, are held by archeologists and higher critics alike to some perverse different standard of truth: Does anyone believe that the Disney version of the Alamo, let alone the John Wayne version, are either “accurate” or the 11 day siege of 1836 is “mythological”? But so the quibblers would have it of the Hebrew Scriptures.
They are astounding people, these diggers after truth. Till they dug up an enemy’s reference to the House of David, they had it King David was mythical. Good grief, had Akhnaten not built a rather flimsy capitol city, had it not been turned face down in the preserving sands of Egypt by his extremely irate successors, we probably would never know he or his revolution even happened. Generations of Egyptians were forbidden to speak Akhnaten’s name. Much about him remains a mystery. We know not where his corpse rests. On the other hand, he corresponded with the Canaanite king of Jerusalem long before David’s time, so *someone* there must have been literate.
Ramses II, the big monument builder (and butt of early Hebrew storytellers), on the other hand, might as well rest in a glass case naked as the day he was born, in the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to be gawked at by Boy Scouts and tourists from Montana. Many ancient Egyptian nobles find their way to such an ignoble end, strung up like Mussolini. Sic Transit et al.
The archeologists might learn a bit from such details. My guess is these issues will resolve themselves through DNA research and perhaps, as it happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Amarna Letters, the Nag Hammadi Library, the Cairo Genizah manuscripts, etc. et al in the last century or so, there is no reason to believe that other intact early source materials in Egypt, historic Canaan or elsewhere might not turn up a shard library or whatever that resolves what is merely factual and what is mythical and, in sorting this out, coming to some conclusions about the mythos that, when all is said and done, is the type of truth that most matters to us. By such time, the archeologists who confine themselves to stone and bone may need some psycho historical reexamination themselves.
(This continues on the next page.)
