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by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Excerpted from
Ancient Science Future Science: Finis Gloria
Mundi: The Living Fourth Way
from
TheCassiopaeaExperiment
Website
The Ark of the Covenant: that most mysterious and powerful object
that we are led to believe was the object of the Templars sojourn
and searches in Jerusalem. What do we really know about the Ark?
In order to come to any idea about the Ark, we will naturally have
to make a careful examination of the religious structure in which it
is situated: Judaism. When I began to study the issues that
concerned me: religious questions, philosophical problems, and so
on, I really had no idea that I would uncover something so horrific
and far reaching as what I came to realize about religions in
general and monotheism in particular. Please don’t misunderstand me
or think that I am promoting paganism or any other form of worship
of “gods” or images of god. I am quite convinced that the source of
all existence is consciousness, and that this consciousness is, at
its root, what we would call God, or Divine Mind. What we are
concerned about here is the imposition of monotheism in the form of
any one group claiming that their version of who or what god is or
is not is the only correct one. And the further result of this is
that Judeo-Christian monotheism prevailed with its twisted
conception of linear time borrowed from Zoroastrianism.
People have been reading the Bible for ages. It has achieved a
status in our culture assigned to no other single body of text.
There are more copies of the Bible on the face of the planet than
any other single book. It is quoted (and misquoted) more often than
any other book. It is translated into more languages than any other
book ever written as well. More people in recorded history have read
it, studied it, taught it, admired it, argued about it, loved it,
lived by it, and killed and died for it. It is the singular document
at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, and yet the common man
doesn’t really seem to ever ask: Who wrote it, really? They think
they know: it is divinely dictated, revealed or inspired
In spite of what the average person believes about it, many
investigators – mostly theologians - have been working on this
question for about a thousand years – when they aren’t being burned
at the stake for even asking it. What is ironic is the fact that
most of them have only been seeking closer communion with God by
trying to get closer to the original text “from the Hand of God,” so
to say.
When one studies literature in a classroom setting, it is important
to also study the life of the author, even if only through the clues
of the literary works under examination. One is enabled to see
significant connections between the life of the author and the world
that the author is depicting. In terms of the Bible, these things
become crucial. Nevertheless, the fact is, when we are talking about
such “fuzzy” things as religion and history, we immediately come up
against a certain problem.
Historians, when writing about history, not only discuss the
theoretical facts that are being proposed as the timeline, but also
the means by which they arrived at their ideas. Generally, they draw
their conclusions about history by reading "sources," or earlier
accounts of the matter at hand. In some cases these are eye-witness
accounts, in others, accounts told to a scribe by a witness, and so
on.
Historians try to make a distinction between sources as "primary"
and "secondary." A primary source is not necessarily an eye-witness
account - though it would be nice if it was - but is defined by
historians as one that cannot be traced back any further and does
not seem to depend on someone else’s account. Secondary sources are
those that are essentially copies or "re-worked" primary sources.
Often, they consist of material from several sources assembled
together with commentary or additional data.
Well, obviously this could present a problem if the primary source
is completely falsified.
Primary sources can legitimately require interpretation and
assessment; this is the role of a good secondary source, providing
the distinction between source and interpretation is made clear.
Indeed secondary sources - analyses - are vital to the average
reader who may not have the necessary linguistic, historical and
cultural background to assess the primary sources. But, all too
often, historians deal with their sources exactly as J. K. Huysmans
has described:
Events are for a man of talent nothing but a spring-board of ideas
and style, since they are all mitigated or aggravated according to
the needs of a cause or according to the temperament of the writer
who handles them.
As far as documents which support them are concerned, it is even
worse, since none of them is irreducible and all are reviewable. If
they are not just apocryphal, other no less certain documents can be
unearthed later which contradict them, waiting in turn to be
devalued by the unearthing of yet other no less certain archives.
[Huysmans,
1891, Ch II].
The Bible is an Extraordinary Book: A book which claims
infallibility; which aspires to absolute authority over mind and
body; which demands unconditional surrender to all its pretensions
upon penalty of eternal damnation, is an extraordinary book and
should, therefore, be subjected to extraordinary tests.
But it isn’t.
Neither Christian priests nor Jewish rabbis approve of applying to
the bible the same tests by which other books are tried.
Why?
The Truth is that The Bible is:
A Collection of Writings of Unknown
Date and Authorship Rendered into English From Supposed Copies of
Supposed Originals Unfortunately Lost.
So wrote M. M. Mangasarian, former Congregationalist and
Presbyterian Minister, who studied at Princeton Theological
Seminary, and very early in his life renounced his Christian
affiliation and pursued a remarkable career as a proponent of Free
Thought.
Recently, Richard Dawkins, author of the Blind Watchmaker, suggested
that religion was a virus.
Dawkins argued that the widespread presence of religion —despite its
lack of obvious benefits—suggests that it was not an evolutionary
adaptation. [...] Society provides a breeding ground for the “virus”
of religion by labeling children with the religion of their parents.
Children, in turn, absorb these beliefs because they are conditioned
to do so.
Though it is universal, Dawkins said, religion is not widely
beneficial. Rejecting the theory of many of his contemporaries,
Dawkins argued that religion has not helped people to adapt or to
survive. Beyond acting as a source of solace, religion provides no
protection against diseases or physical threats.
“A person who is faced with a lion is not put at ease when he’s told
that it’s a rabbit,” Dawkins said.
Religion, in Dawkins’ view, not
only provides false comfort—it is actively divisive and harmful.
Designated as Christians or Muslims by their parents, children are
apt to face the discrimination associated with these labels, Dawkins
said. Dawkins pointed to the example of Protestant fundamentalists
in Belfast spitting at young Catholic girls merely because their
parents labeled them Catholic. [1]
Dawkins is right in many respects. Even if I do not agree with his
ideas that promote existence as solely the consequence of the
"accidental mechanicalness of the universe," I have to say that he
has zeroed in on the crucial element of religion - or cult - as it
is known in our day: that it is a virus, and a deadly one at that.
One thing that Dawkins said that I disagree with is: “A person who
is faced with a lion is not put at ease when he’s told that it’s a
rabbit.” As it happens, that is exactly the problem we face when we
consider our reality. Many people are "put at ease" by being told
that the lion is a rabbit. It doesn’t help them to survive, or to
solve the problems of humanity, but it distracts their attention
away from asking uncomfortable questions about our reality that the
Powers That Be do not want them to ask. As to why people believe
the
lies of the Monotheistic Cults, Dawkins points out rather succinctly
that religion is a societal norm that stems from children’s
psychological tendencies. “It is their unique obedience that makes
them vulnerable to viruses and worms,” Dawkins said.
Their unique obedience. Religion is a form of coercing obedience a
la Machiavelli.
As the reader might know,[2] I spent a number of years as a
hypnotherapist as part of my search for answers in the “realm of
mind.” That work gave me a unique perspective on just about every
other branch of study I have followed since. The main thing I
learned from this is that most, if not ALL, human perspective is
rooted in emotional thinking. Emotions have a curious tendency to
“frame” and “color” what we see, experience and remember so that
what we think becomes, very often, a matter of “wishful thinking.”
The problem with the subject of the Bible and History is that there
are so many fields that can contribute data - archaeology,
paleontology, geology, linguistics,
and so forth - these types of
things provide DATA, which are discarded in favor of "wishful
thinking." On the other side we have mythology and
history. They are,
unfortunately, quite similar because, as it is well known, the
“victors write history.” And people are prone to do many evil deeds
in difficult situations, which they later wish to cover up in order
to present themselves in a more positive light for posterity.
The oldest extant texts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are those
found at Qumran which date only to two or three centuries before
Christ. The oldest version before those were discovered was a Greek
translation from about the same period! The earliest complete Hebrew
text dates only from the tenth century AD!
Something is wrong with
this picture.
It is generally believed from textual analysis, that a very small
part of the Old Testament was written about 1000 BC and the
remainder about 600 BC. The Bible, as we know it, is the result of
many changes throughout centuries and is contradictory in so many
ways we don’t have space to catalog them all! There are entire
libraries of books devoted to this subject, and I recommend that the
reader have a look at the material in order to have some foundation
upon which to judge the things I am going to say.
Biblical scholars generally date Abraham to about 1800 - 1700 BC.
The same scholars date Moses to 1300 or 1250 BC. However, if we
track the generations as listed in the Bible, we find that there are
only seven generations between and including these two patriarchal
figures! Four hundred years is a bit long for seven generations.
Allowing 35 to 40 years per generation, places Abraham at about 1550
BC and Moses at about 1300 BC. This obviously means that there are a
few hundred years not accounted for in the text. Tracking back to
Noah, using the generations listed in the Bible, one arrives at a
date of about 2000 to 1900 BC - about the time of the arrival of the
Indo-Europeans into the Near East. The geological and archaeological
records do not support a cataclysm at that time, though what could
be described as a global discontinuity of cataclysmic elements is
supported right around 12,000 years ago. In this case, we have lost
8,000 years, give or take a day.
In a more general sense, using the Bible as historical source
material presents a number of very serious problems, most
particularly when we consider the “mythicization” factor. There are
many contradictions in the text that cannot be reconciled by
standard theological mental contortionism. In some places, events
are described as happening in a certain order, and later the Bible
will say that those events happened in a different order. In one
place, the Bible will say that there is two of something, and in
another it will say that there were 14 of the same thing. On one
page, the Bible will say that the Moabites did something, and then a
few pages later; it will say that the Midianites did exactly the
same thing. There is even an instance in which Moses is described as
going to the Tabernacle before Moses built the Tabernacle! (I guess
Moses was a time traveler!)
There are things in the Pentateuch that pose other problems: it
includes things that Moses could not have known if he lived when he
is claimed to have lived. And, there is one case in which Moses said
something he could not have said: the text gives an account of
Moses’ death, which it is hardly likely that Moses described. The
text also states that Moses was the humblest man on earth! Well, as
one commentator noted, it is not likely that the humblest man on
earth would point out that he is the humblest man on earth!
All of these problems were taken care of for most of the past two
thousand years by the Inquisition, which also took care of
the Cathars and anybody else who did not follow the
Party Line of Judeo-Christianity.
For the Jews, the contradictions were not contradictions; they were
only “apparent contradictions!” They could all be explained by
“interpretation!” (Usually, these interpretations were more
fantastic than the problems, I might add.) Moses was able to “know
things he couldn’t have known” because he was a prophet! The
medieval biblical commentators, such as Rashi and Nachmanides, were
VERY skillful in reconciling the irreconcilable!
In the 11th century, a real troublemaker, Isaac ibn Yashush, a
Jewish court physician in Muslim Spain, mentioned the distressing
fact that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named a
few kings who lived long after Moses was already dead. Ibn Yashush
suggested the obvious, that someone who lived after Moses wrote the
list. He became known as “Isaac the Blunderer.”
The guy who memorialized clever Isaac this way was a fellow named
Abraham ibn Ezra, a 12th century rabbi in Spain. But
Ibn Ezra
presents us with a paradox because he also wrote about problems in
the text of the Torah. He alluded to several passages that appeared
not to be from Moses’ own hand because they referred to Moses in the
third person, used terms Moses would not have known, described
places that Moses had never been, and used language that belonged to
an altogether different time and place than the milieu of Moses. He
wrote, very mysteriously,
“And if you understand, then you will
recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent.”
So, why did he call Ibn Yashush a “Blunderer?” Obviously because the
guy had to open his big mouth and give away the secret that the
Torah was not what it was cracked up to be, and if the truth got
out, lots of folks who were totally “into” the Jewish mysticism
business would lose interest. And keeping the interest of the
students and seekers after power was a pretty big business in that
day and time. More than that, however, we would like to note that
the entire Christian mythos was predicated upon the validity of
Judaism, being its “New Covenant”, and even if there was apparent
conflict between Jews and Christians, the Christians most
desperately needed to validate Judaism and its claim to be the
revelation to the “chosen people” of the One True God. It was on
that basis that Jesus was the Son of God, after all. In short, it
could even be said that Christianity created Judaism in the sense
that it would have faded to obscurity long ago if there had not been
the infusion of validating energy during the Dark Ages.
In 14th century Damascus, a scholar by the name of
Bonfils wrote a
work in which he said “And this is evidence that this verse was
written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it.” He wasn’t
even denying the “revealed” character of the Torah, just making a
reasonable comment. Three hundred years later, his work was
reprinted with this comment edited out!
In the 15th century, Tostatus, Bishop of Avila, also pointed out
that Moses couldn’t have written the passages about the death of
Moses. In an effort to soften the blow, he added that there was an
“old tradition” that Joshua, Moses successor, wrote this part of the
account. A hundred years later, Luther Carlstadt commented that this
was difficult to believe because the account of Moses’ death is
written in the same style as the text that precedes it.
Well, of course, things were beginning to be examined more
critically with the arrival of Protestantism on the world stage and
the demand for wider availability of the text itself. The
Inquisition and assorted “Catholic Majesties” tried, but failed, to
keep a complete grip on the matter. But, it’s funny what belief will
do. In this case, with the increase in literacy and new and better
translations of the text, “critical examination” led to the decision
that the problem was solvable by claiming that, yes, Moses wrote the
Torah, but editors went over them later and added an occasional word
or phrase of their own!
Wow. Glad we solved that one!
A really funny thing is that the Catholic Index blacklisted one of
the proponents of this idea of editorial insertions, who was only
trying to preserve the textus receptus status of the Bible. His work
was put on the list of “prohibited books!” Those guys just kept
shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, finally, after hundreds of years of tiptoeing around this
issue, some scholars came right out and said that Moses didn’t write
the majority of the Pentateuch. The first to say it was
Thomas
Hobbes. He pointed out that the text sometimes states that this or
that is so to this day. The problem with this is that a writer
describing a contemporary situation would not describe it as
something that has endured for a very long time, “to this day.”
Isaac de la Peyrère, a French Calvinist, noted that the first verse
of the book of Deuteronomy says “These are the words that Moses
spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan...” The problem
was that the words meant to refer to someone who is on the other
side of the Jordan from the writer. This means that the verse
amounts to the words of someone who is WEST of the Jordan at the
time of writing, who is describing what Moses said to the children
of Israel on the EAST of the Jordan. The problem is exacerbated
because Moses himself was never supposed to have been in Israel in
his life.
De la Peyrère’s book was banned and burned. He was arrested and told
that the conditions of his release were conversion to Catholicism
and recanting his views. Apparently he perceived discretion as the
better part of valor. Considering how often this sort of thing
occurred, we have to wonder about the “sanctity” of a text which is
preserved by threat and torture and bloodshed.
Not too long after this, Baruch Spinoza, the famous philosopher,
published what amounted to a real rabble rousing critical analysis.
He claimed that the problem passages in the Bible were not isolated
cases that could be solved one by one as “editorial insertions,” but
were rather a pervasive evidence of a third person account. He also
pointed out that the text says in Deuteronomy 34 “There never arose
another prophet in Israel like Moses....” Spinoza suggested, quite
rightly, that these were the words of a person who lived a long time
after Moses and had had the opportunity to make comparisons. One
commentator points out that they also don’t sound like the words of
the “humblest man on earth!”[3]
Spinoza was really living dangerously because he wrote:
“It is […]
clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by
Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses.”[4]
Spinoza had
already been excommunicated from Judaism; now, he was in pretty hot
water with the Catholics and Protestants! Naturally, his book was
placed on the “prohibited books” list, and a whole slew of edicts
were issued against it. What is even more interesting is that an
attempt was made to assassinate him! The lengths to which people
will go to preserve their belief in lies are astonishing.
A converted Protestant who had become a Catholic priest, Richard
Simon, undertook to refute Spinoza and wrote a book saying that
Moses wrote the core of the Pentateuch, but there were “some
additions.” Nevertheless, these additions were clearly done by
scribes who were under the guidance of God or the Holy Spirit, so it
was okay for them to collect, arrange and elaborate on the text. It
was still God in charge here.
Well, you’d think
the Church would know when it was ahead. But,
nope! Simon was attacked and expelled from his order by his fellow
Catholics. Forty refutations of his work were written by
Protestants. Only six copies of his book survived burning. John
Hampden translated one of these, getting himself into pretty hot
water.
He “repudiated the opinions he had held in common with
Simon
[...] in 1688, probably shortly before his release from the
tower.”[5]
In the 18th century, three independent scholars were dealing with
the problem of “doublets,” or stories that are told two or more
times in the Bible.
-
There are two different stories of the creation
of the world
-
There are two stories of the covenant between
God and
Abraham
-
There are two stories of the naming of Abraham’s son
Isaac
-
two stories of Abraham’s claiming to a foreign king that his wife is
his sister
-
two stories of
Isaac’s son Jacob making a journey to
Mesopotamia
-
two stories of a revelation to
Jacob at Beth-El
-
two
stories of God changing Jacob’s name to Israel
-
two stories of
Moses’ getting water from a rock at Meribah
-
and on and on...
Those who simply could not let go of the a priori belief that
Moses
wrote the Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were always
complimentary, not repetitive nor contradictory. Sometimes they had
to really stretch this idea to say that they were supposed to
“teach” us something by their contradictions that are “not really
contradictions.”
This explanation, however, didn’t hold up against another fact: in
most cases one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the
deity by the divine name, Yahweh, and the other would refer to the
deity simply as “God,” or “El.” What this meant was that there were
two groups of parallel versions of the same stories, and each group
was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used.
Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics
that regularly appeared in one or the other line of stories, and
what this demonstrated was that someone had taken two different old
source documents and had done a cut and paste job on them to make a
“continuous” narrative.
Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source
documents must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story
of creation and the rest was Moses himself writing! But, it was
ultimately to be concluded that both of the two sources had to be
from writers who lived AFTER Moses. By degrees, Moses
was being
eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch!
Simon’s idea that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on
the textus receptus was, finally, going in the right direction.
I would like to note right here that this was not happening because
somebody came along and said, “hey, let’s trash the Bible!” Nope. It
was happening because there were glaring problems, and each and
every researcher working on this throughout the centuries was
struggling mightily to retain the textus receptus status
of the
Bible! The only exception to this that I have mentioned in this
whole chain of events is our curious guy Abraham ibn Ezra, who KNEW
about problems in the text of the Torah in the 12th century and
enjoined others to silence! Remember what he said?
“And if you
understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who
understands will keep silent.”
What do we see as the result of this
silence? Over eight hundred years of Crusades, the Inquisition, and
general suppression, and in our present day, the wars between the
Israelis and Palestinians based on the claim that Israel is the
Promised Land, and that it “belongs” to the Jews. Which brings us to
another startling bit of information.
The great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, (1040-1105), makes the
astonishingly frank statement that the Genesis narrative, going back
to the creation of the world, was written to justify what we might
now call genocide. The God of Israel, who gave his people the
Promised Land, had to be unequivocally supreme so that neither the
dispossessed Canaanites nor anyone else could ever appeal against
his decrees.[6] Rashi’s precise words were that God told us the
creation story and included it in the Torah,
“to tell his people that
they can answer those who claim that the Jews stole the land from
its original inhabitants. The reply should be; God made it and gave
it to them but then took it and gave it to us. As he made it and
it’s his, he can give it to whoever he chooses.”
The fact is, the Jews are still saying this, with the support of
many Christian Fundamentalists whose beliefs are being pandered to
by
George Bush and his purported Christian cronies for their own
imperialist and economic motives.
This leads us to another interesting point: the establishing of “one
god” over and above any and all other gods, is an act of violence no
matter how you look at it. In The Curse of Cain, Regina Schwartz
writes about the relationship between Monotheism and Violence,
positing that Monotheism itself is the root of violence:
Collective Identity, which is a result of a
covenant of Monotheism,
is explicitly narrated in the Bible as an invention, a radical break
with Nature. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the
demand that the people he constitutes obey the law he institutes,
and first and foremost among those laws is, of course, that they
pledge allegiance to him, and him alone, and that this is what makes
them a unified people as opposed to the ‘other,’ as in all other
people which leads to violence. In the Old Testament, vast numbers
of ‘other’ people are obliterated, while in the New Testament, vast
numbers are colonized and converted for the sake of such
covenants.[7]
Schwartz also writes about the idea of the “provisional” nature of a
covenant: that it is conditional.
“Believe in me and obey me or else
I will destroy you.”
Doesn’t sound like there is any choice, does
there? And we find ourselves in the face of a pure and simple Nazi Theophany.
In the 19th century, Biblical scholars figured out that there were
not just two major sources in the Pentateuch; there were, in fact,
four. It was realized that the first four books were not just
doublets, but there were also triplets that converged with other
characteristics and contradictions leading to the identification of
another source. Then, it was realized that Deuteronomy was a
separate source altogether. More than that, there was not just the
problem of the original source documents, there was the problem of
the work of the “mysterious editor.”
Thus, after years of suffering, bloodshed and death over the matter,
it was realized that somebody had “created” what Westerners know as
the Old Testament by assembling four different source documents in
an attempt to create a “continuous” history, designated at different
times as Torah, as well as additional “edited” documents. After much
further analysis, it was concluded that most of the laws and much of
the narrative of the Pentateuch were not even part of the time of
Moses. And, that meant that it couldn’t have been written by
Moses
at all. More than that, the writing of the different sources was not
even that of persons who lived during the days of the kings and
prophets, but were evidentially products of writers who lived toward
the end of the biblical period!
Many scholars just couldn’t bear the results of their own work. A
German scholar who had identified the Deuteronomy source exclaimed
that such a view,
“suspended the beginnings of
Hebrew history not
upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings.”
Other
scholars realized that what this meant was that the picture of
biblical Israel as a nation governed by laws based on the Abrahamic
and Mosaic covenants was completely false. I expect that such a
realization may have contributed to a suicide or two; it most
definitely led to a number of individuals leaving the field of
Theology and textual criticism altogether.
Another way of putting their conclusions was that the Bible claimed
a history for the first 600 years of Israel that probably never
existed. It was all a lie.[8]
Well, they couldn’t handle this. After years of being conditioned to
believe in an upcoming “End of the World,” with Jehovah or
Christ as
saviors of the chosen during this dreaded event, the terror of their
condition, that there might not be a “savior,” was just too awful to
bear. So along came the cavalry – Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) - to
the rescue.
Wellhausen synthesized all of the discoveries so as to preserve the
belief systems of the religious scholars. He amalgamated the view
that the religion of Israel had developed in three stages with the
view that the documents were also written in three stages, and then
he defined these stages based on the content of the “stage.” He
tracked the characteristics of each stage, examining the way in
which the different documents expressed religion, the clergy, the
sacrifices and places of worship as well as the religious holidays.
He considered the legal and narrative sections and the other books
of the Bible. In the end, he provided a “believable framework”
for the development of Jewish history and religion.
-
The first stage was
the “nature/fertility” period;
-
the second was “spiritual/ethical”
period;
-
and the last was the “priestly/legal” period.
As Friedman
notes:
“To this day, if you want to disagree, you disagree with
Wellhausen. If you want to pose a new model, you compare its merits
with those of Wellhausen’s model.”[9]
I should also note at this point, that even though
Wellhausen was
trying to save the buns of Judaism and Christianity from the fire,
he was not appreciated in his own time. A professor of Old
Testament, William Robertson Smith, who taught at the Free Church of
Scotland College at Aberdeen, and who was the editor of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, was put on trial before the church on the
charge of heresy for promoting the work of Wellhausen. He was
cleared, but the tag “the wicked bishop” followed him to his grave.
Nevertheless, analysis of the Bible has proceeded. The book of
Isaiah was traditionally thought to have been written by the prophet
Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BC. As it happens, most of
the first half of this book fits such a model. But, chapters 40
through 66 are apparently written by someone who lived about 200
years later! This means that, in terms of “prophecy,” it was written
after the fact.
New tools and methods of our modern time have made it possible to do
some really fine work in the areas of linguistic analysis and
relative chronology of the material. Additionally, there has been a
veritable archaeological frenzy since Wellhausen! This
archaeological work has produced an enormous amount of information
about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other regions surrounding
Israel,
which includes clay tablets, inscriptions on the walls of tombs,
temples and habitations, and even papyri. Here we find another
problem: in all the collected sources, both Egyptian and west Asian,
there are virtually NO references to Israel, its “famous people” and
founders, its Biblical associates, or anything else prior to the
12th century BC. And the fact is, for 400 years after that, no more
than half a dozen allusions can be deduced. And they are
questionable in context. Yet the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews cling
to these tattered references like straws in the hands of a drowning
man. Oddly, the Fundamentalist Christians just simply close off any
awareness to the entire matter by the simple expedient of the
execution of the 11th commandment: thou shalt not ask questions!
The problem of the lack of outside validation of the existence of
Israel as a sovereign nation in the area of Palestine finds
correspondence in the Bible itself. The Bible displays absolutely no
knowledge of Egypt or the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC.
-
The
Bible says nothing about the Egyptian empire spreading over the
entire eastern Mediterranean (which it did);
-
there is no mention of
the great Egyptian armies on the march (which they were);
-
and no
mention of marching Hittites moving against the Egyptians (which
they did);
-
and especially no mention of
Egyptianized kinglets ruling
Canaanite cities (which was the case).
The great and disastrous invasion of the
Sea Peoples during the
second millennium is not even mentioned in the Bible. In fact,
Genesis described the Philistines as already settled in the land of
Canaan at the time of Abraham!
The names of the great Egyptian kings are completely absent from the
Bible. In other places, historical figures that were not heroic have
been transformed by the Bible into heroes as in the case of the Hyksos Sheshy (Num. 13:22). In another case, the sobriquet of
Ramesses II is given to a Canaanite general in error. The Egyptian
king who was supposed to assist Hosea in his rebellion of 2 Kings
17:4 has “suffered the indignity” of having his city given as his
name. The Pharaoh Shabtaka turns up in the Table of Nations in
Genesis 10:7 as a Nubian tribe!
The errors of confirmed history and archaeology pile higher and
higher the more one learns about the actual times and places, so
that the idea that comes to mind again and again is that the writers
of the Bible must have lived in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, or
later, and knew almost nothing about the events of only a few
generations before them. Donald B. Redford, Professor of Near
Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, has published
extensively on archaeology and Egyptology. Regarding the use of the
Bible as a historical source, he writes:
For the standard scholarly approach to the
history of Israel during
the United Monarchy amounts to nothing more than a bad attack of
academic ‘wishful thinking. We have these glorious narratives in the
books of Samuel and 1st Kings, so well written and ostensibly
factual. What a pity if rigorous historical criticism forces us to
discard them and not use them. Let us, then, press them into service
– what else have we? – and let the burden of proof fall on
others.[…]
While one might be unwise to impute crypto-fundamentalist motives,
the current fashion of treating the sources at face value as
documents written up in large part in the court of Solomon, arises
from an equally misplaced desire to rehabilitate the faith and undergird it with any arguments, however fallacious.[…]
Such ignorance is puzzling if one has felt inclined to be impressed
by the traditional claims of inerrancy made by conservative
Christianity on behalf of the Bible. And indeed the Pentateuch and
the historical books boldly present a precise chronology that would
carry the Biblical narrative through the very period when the
ignorance and discrepancy prove most embarrassing. […]
Such manhandling of the evidence smacks of prestidigitation and
numerology; yet it has produced the shaky foundations on which a
lamentable number of “histories” of Israel have been written. Most
are characterized by a somewhat naive acceptance of sources at face
value coupled with failure to assess the evidence as to its origin
and reliability. The result was the reduction of all data to a
common level, any or all being grist for a wide variety of mills.
Scholars expended substantial effort on questions that they had
failed to prove were valid questions at all.
-
Under what dynasty did
Joseph rise to power?
-
Who was the Pharaoh of the Oppression?
-
Of the Exodus?
-
Can we identify the princess who drew
Moses out of the
river?
-
Where did the
Israelites make their exit from Egypt: via the
Wady Tumilat or by a more northerly point?
One can appreciate the pointlessness of these questions if one poses
similar questions of the Arthurian stories, without first submitting
the text to a critical evaluation. Who were the consuls of Rome when
Arthur drew the sword from the stone? Where was Merlin born?
Can one seriously envisage a classical historian pondering whether
it was Iarbas or Aeneas that was responsible for Dido’s suicide,
where exactly did Remus leap over the wall, what really happened to
Romulus in the thunderstorm, and so forth?
In all these imagined cases none of the material initially prompting
the questions has in any way undergone a prior evaluation as to how
historical it is! And any scholar who exempts any part of his
sources from critical evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some
or all of his conclusions.[…]
Too often “Biblical” in this context has had the limiting effect on
scholarship by implying the validity of studying Hebrew culture and
history in isolation. What is needed rather is a view of ancient
Israel within its true Near Eastern context, and one that will
neither exaggerate nor denigrate Israel’s actual place within that
setting.[10]
Please take careful note of Redford’s comment:
“any scholar who
exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation runs the
risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions.”
The
seriousness of this cannot be understated. You see,
people have died
by the millions because of this book called The Bible and the
beliefs of those who study it.
And they are dying today in
astonishing numbers for the same reasons!
In the end, if those who read and/or analyze this book and come to
some particular belief about it are wrong, and they then impose this
belief upon millions of other people, who are then influenced to
create a culture and a reality based upon a false belief, and in the
end, it is wrong, what in the name of God is going on? (No pun
intended!)
The problem with using the Bible as history is the lack of secondary
sources. There is considerable material from the various ancient
libraries prior to the 10th century BC, “grist for the historian’s
mill,” but these sources fall silent almost completely at the close
of the 20th dynasty in Egypt. Thus, the Bible, being pretty much the
only source that claims to cover this particular period, becomes
quite seductive; never mind that the archaeology doesn’t really
“fit,” or can only be made to fit with a large helping of assumption
or closing of the mind to other possibilities.
But, might there be a REASON for this silence of other sources?
That’s one good question about “what is.”
The person who is using the Bible as history is forced, when all
emotion is taken out of the picture, to admit that he has no means
of checking the historical veracity of the Biblical texts. As Donald
Redford noted above, the scholars who admit, when pressed, that
rigorous historical criticism forces us to discard the Biblical
narratives, nevertheless will use them saying “what else do we
have?”
Again, I ask: why?
In older times, we know that the many books written about the Bible
as history were inspired from a fundamentalist motivation to confirm
the religious “rightness” of Western Civilization. In the present
time, there is less of this factor involved in Biblical Historical
studies. Nevertheless, there is still a tendency to treat these
sources at “face value” by folks who ought to know better!
I could go on about this in some detail, but I think everyone
reading this is with me here in having a clue about what I am
saying, even if they don’t agree. But, the point is, again, “Who
wrote the Bible and WHY?”
We come back to that curious assertion of Rashi’s that the Genesis
narrative was written to justify genocide. If we put that together
with Umberto Eco’s implication in his book, The Search for The
Perfect Language, that validation of the Hebrew Bible was supported
by early Christian scholars primarily to validate Judaism, which was
necessary in order to then “validate” Christianity as the “one true
religion," we begin to get the uneasy feeling that we have been
“had.” What this amounts to is that we are all “Christian” so that
the “rights” of the Jews, the unappealable decrees of
Jehovah/Yahweh, could be “inherited” by the Christian Church
as
instituted for political reasons by Constantine! Nevertheless, by
the very act of validating Judaism, and “creating” Christianity in
the form of the Egyptian religion, the Western world, in its greed
for power, may very well have taken a tiger by the tail.
During this very period when the New Testament came into being,
(incorporating some older texts, based on internal evidence, but
highly edited and mostly a “cut and paste” job), we find the Western
world in the midst of the dark ages from which, again, very few
secondary sources survived.
Isn’t that strange?! The Old Testament is written about a Dark Age,
though a few hundred years after it, and the New Testament is
written about a Dark Age, also a few hundred years after it. Both of
them incorporate some probably valid stories though mostly they are
edited, cut and pasted, with a lot of glossing and interpolation
from the perspective of a definite “political” agenda.
Do we see a pattern here? Could there be a reason?
At the end of it all, what we observe is a basically Draconian,
monotheistic system in place over most of the globe. It is the
wellspring from which nearly every aspect of our society is drawn.
It has been the justification for the greatest series of bloodbaths
in “recorded” history.
Could there be a reason for this?
Considering this, one would think that the knowledge of who wrote
the Bible, and when they probably did it, would be considered
crucial to anyone who wishes to be better equipped to make decisions
of faith and belief upon which every aspect of their lives may
depend.
As we have already discovered, what began as a search for answers
about the puzzling contradictory passages in the Pentateuch led to
the idea that Moses didn’t write them. This then led to the
discovery that several widely divergent sources were combined into
one, and that even this was done at different times, in different
ways. Each of the sources is clearly identifiable by characteristics
of language and content. New breakthroughs in archaeology and our
understanding of the social and political world of the time have
helped enormously in our understanding of the milieu in which this
document was created. Because, in the end, the Bible’s history is
really the history of the Jews.
The Old Testament is a book that is a combination of several
sources, J (Yahweh), E (lohim), D(euteronomy), P(riestly) and the
final editor who combined all of these and added his own touches.
It is theorized, based on the evidence, that,
-
the E version was
written by a Levite priest advocate of the Mosaic line of priests at
Shiloh,
-
and J was written by an advocate of the
Aaronic line of
priests and the Davidic royal house at Jerusalem.
The conclusion is
that they were each written down from oral sources of myth and
legend with some history mixed in after the purported split of the
two kingdoms, and then recombined after the Syrian conquest during
the reign of Hezekiah. However, it is also entirely likely that
there never was a united kingdom of Israel in Palestine, but that
these stories of a great kingdom were tribal memories of something
else altogether. The author of J is estimated to have lived between
848 and 722 BC and the author of E between 922 and 722 BC. Thus it
is that E is probably the older document and J represented either a
different perspective, or changes that were added.
In the Bible, the story of the unification of the tribes of
Israel
under David, followed by the great reign of Solomon, followed by
schism in the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam, is the central theme.
The “hope of Israel” is based on the idea of reunification of
Judah
and Israel under a Davidic king. Of course, all of this is based on
the giving of the land to the Children of Israel when they were
“brought out of Egypt” by the hand of God during the Exodus to begin
with. Moses represents the divinely inspired leader who revealed the
god of the patriarchs to the nation as the “Universal Deity.” Does
the testimony of the spade support the Exodus on either side of the
story?
The Exodus story describes how a nation enslaved grows great in
exile and then, with the help of the Universal God, claims its
freedom from what was then the greatest nation on earth: Egypt.
Powerful imagery, yes? Indeed! So important is this story of
liberation that fully four-fifths of the central scriptures of
Israel are devoted to it.
The fact is: two hundred years of intensive excavations and study of
the remains of ancient Egypt and Palestine
have failed to support
the Exodus story in the context in which it is presented.[11]
Notes:
[1] ASYA TROYCHANSKY, Harvard Crimson, Thursday, November 20, 2003
[2] See: St. Petersburg Times Magazine section on February 13, 2000
for a 20-page article on my work as a hypnotherapist and exorcist,
written by Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas French.
[3] Friedman, Richard Elliot, Who Wrote the Bible, (New York: Harper
& Row 1987).
[4] Quoted by Friedman.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ashe, Geoffrey, The Book of Prophecy, (Blandford, London 1999)
p. 27.
[7] Schwartz, Regina M., The Curse of Cain, (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press 1997).
[8] Of course, by now the reader has realized that it is not really
a “lie," properly speaking. It is just a highly mythicized account
of the doings of some people in a certain historical context. But
after the mythicization, and the imposition of the belief in the
myth as the reality, as well as the passage of a couple of thousand
years, figuring out who is who and who really did what is
problematical at best.
[9] Friedman, op. cit., pp. 26-7.
[10] Redford, Donald B., Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), pp. 301, 258, 260-1,
263. (Italics ours)
[11] Ibid.
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