by
Damien F. Mackey
Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew
scriptures, shares
"some cognate
features" with Danaos (or
Danaus), hero of Greek legend.
Law
and Government
The
great Lawgiver in the Bible, and hence in Hebrew history, was Moses,
substantially the author of the Torah (Law). But the history books tell
us that the Torah was probably dependent upon the ‘law code’ issued by
the Babylonian king, Hammurabi (dated to the first half of the C18th BC).
I shall
discuss this historical anomaly a little further on.
For
Egyptian identifications of Moses as a legal official in Egypt, see e.g. my
article:
Moses a Judge in Egypt
For Moses
the Lawgiver appropriated by the Greeks (Spartans), see my article:
Moses and Lycurgus
The
Egyptians may have corrupted the legend of the baby Moses in the bulrushes so
that now it became the goddess Isis who drew the baby Horus from the Nile and
had him suckled by Hathor (the goddess in the form of a cow - the Egyptian
personification of wisdom). In the original story, of course, baby Moses was
drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess, not a goddess, and was weaned by
Moses' own mother (Exodus 2:5-9).
Anyway,
Moses became for the Egyptians
Hor-mes, meaning
'son of Hathor',
which legendary person the Greeks eventually absorbed into their own pantheon
as Hermes, the winged messenger god. [
The Roman
version of Hermes is Mercury]
Could
both the account of the rescue of the baby Moses in the Book of Exodus, and the
Egyptian version of it, be actually based upon a Mesopotamian original, as the
textbooks say; based upon the story of King Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia?
Sargon tells, "in terms reminiscent of Moses, Krishna and other great
men", that [as quoted by G. Roux, Ancient
Iraq, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 152]:
.…
My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a
basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river
which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer
of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me ….
Given
that Sargon is conventionally dated to the C24th BC, and Moses about a millennium
later, it would seem inevitable that the Hebrew version, and the Egyptian one,
must be imitations of the Mesopotamian one. Such is what the ‘history’ books
say, at least, despite the fact that the extant Sargon legend is very late
(C7th BC); thought, though, to have been based upon an earlier Mesopotamian
original. See my article:
Did Sargon of Akkad
influence the Exodus account of the baby Moses?
For
Sargon of Akkad as a possible biblical character, see e.g. my article:
Nimrod a "mighty man"
What is
more certain and accurate, I think, is Dean Hickman re-dating of King Hammurabi
of Babylon to the time of Solomon (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying Hammurabi's
older contemporary, Shamsi-Adad I, as king David's Syrian foe, Hadadazer (2
Samuel 10:16).
I have been
able to take this further since in articles such as:
Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as
Contemporaries of Solomon
According
to this new scenario, Hammurabi well post-dated Moses and could not possibly have
influenced the Torah (Law).
(a) Greek and Phoenician 'Moses-like Myths'
M. Astour
believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares "some
cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend. He
gives his parallels as follows [Hellenosemitica,
p. 99]:
Moses
grows up at the court of the Egyptian king as a member of the royal family, and
subsequently flees from Egypt after having slain an Egyptian - as Danaos, a
member of the Egyptian ruling house, flees from the same country after the
slaying of the Aigyptiads which he had arranged. The same number of generations
separates Moses from Leah the "wild cow" and Danaos from the cow Io.
My comment: The above parallel might even account for
how the Greeks managed to confuse the land of Ionia (Io) with the land
of Israel in the case of the earliest philosophers:
Joseph as Thales: Not an
"Hellenic Gotterdamerung" but Israelite Wisdom
Astour
continues (
op. cit., pp. 99-100):
Still
more characteristic is that both Moses and Danaos find and create springs in a
waterless region; the story of how Poseidon, on the request of the Danaide
Amymona, struck out with his trident springs from the Lerna rock, particularly
resembles Moses producing a spring from the rock by the stroke of his staff.
A ‘cow’
features also in the legend of Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Tyre upon the
disappearance of his sister Europa, who was sent by his father together with
his brothers Cilix and Phoenix to seek her with instructions not to return
without her. Seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Cadmus was told to
settle at the point where a cow, which he would meet leaving the temple, would
lie down. The cow led him to the site of Thebes (Greek and Egyptian cities by
that name).
There
he built the citadel of Cadmeia.
Cadmus
married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite and,
according to the legend, was the founder of the House of Oedipus]
Astour
believes that "even more similar features" may be discovered
if one links these accounts to the Ugaritic (Phoenicio-Canaanite) poem of Dan’el,
which he had previously identified as "the prototype of the Danaos
myth" (p. 100):
The
name of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather
of Moses. The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed,
figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in
the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t, the daughter of Danel and the
devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story as Pû'ã, a
midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses. The very name of Moses, in
the feminine form Mšt, is, in the Ugaritic poem, the first half of
Danel's wife's name, while the second half of her name, Dnty,
corresponds to the name of Levi's sister Dinah.
Astour
had already explained how the biblical story of the Rape of Dinah (Genesis 34)
was "analogous to the myth of the bloody wedding of her namesakes, the
Danaides".
He
continues on here with his fascinating Greco-Israelite parallels:
Dân, the
root of the names Dnel, Dnty (and also Dinah and Danaos), was the
name of a tribe whose priests claimed to descend directly from Moses (Jud.
18:30); and compare the serpent emblem of the tribe of Dan with the serpent
staff of Moses and the bronze serpent he erected. …Under the same name - Danaë
- another Argive heroine of the Danaid stock is thrown into the sea in a chest
with her new-born son - as Moses in his ark (tébã) - and lands on the
serpent-island of Seriphos (Heb. šãrâph, applied i.a. to the bronze
serpent made by Moses). Moses, like Danel, is a healer, a prophet, a
miracle-worker - cf. Danel's staff (mt) which he extends while
pronouncing curses against towns and localities, quite like Moses in Egypt; and
especially, like Danel, he is a judge….
(b) Roman 'Moses-like Myth'
The
Romans further corrupted the story of the infant Moses, following on probably
from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians and Greeks. I refer to the
account of Romulus (originally Rhomus) and Remus, thought to have founded the
city of Rome in 753 BC. Both the founders and the date are quite mythical. The
Romans may have taken an approximate form of the Egyptian name for Moses, (Sinuhe, or Sa-nu(mu) Musare), and turned it into Rhomus and
Remus (MUSA-RE = RE-MUS), with the formerly one child (Moses) now being doubled
into two babies (twins). According to this legend, the twins were put into a
basket by some kind servants and floated in the Tiber River, from which they
were eventually rescued by a she-wolf. Thus the Romans more pragmatically opted
for a she-wolf as the suckler instead of a cow goddess, or a lion goddess,
Sekhmet (the fierce alter ego of Hathor).
The
Romans took yet another slice from the Pentateuch when they had the founder of
the city of Rome, Romulus, involved in a fratricide (killing Remus); just as
Cain, the founder of the world's first city, had killed his own brother, Abel
(cf. Genesis 4:8 and 4:17).
(c) Mohammed: Arabian ‘Moses-like Myths'
An
Islamic lecturer, Ahmed Deedat [
"What the Bible
Says About Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) the Prophet of Islam" (www.islamworld.net/Muhammad.in.Bible.html)], told of an interview he once had with a dominee of the
Dutch Reformed Church in Transvaal, van Heerden, on the question:
"What
does the Bible say about Muhummed?" Deedat had in mind the Holy Qur'an
verse 46:10, according to which
"a witness among the children of Israel
bore witness of one like him…". This was in turn a reference to
Deuteronomy 18:18's "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their
brethren, like unto thee, and I will put my words in his mouth; and he shall
speak unto them all that I shall command him."
The
Moslems of course interpret the "one like him [i.e. Moses]" as
being Mohammed himself.
Faced
with the dominee's emphatic response that the Bible has "nothing"
to say about Mohammed - and that the Deuteronomic prophecy ultimately pertained
to Jesus Christ, as did "thousands" of other prophecies -
Deedat set out to prove him wrong.
For the
gross historical anachronisms associated with ‘Mohammed’, see articles such as
my:
Further argument for Prophet Mohammed's likely non-existence
In such articles
the prophet Mohammed is shown
to have been (at least in part) a composite biblical character and a
non-historical entity.
Some
Conclusions regarding Mohammed (c. 570-632 AD, conventional dating)
It is
not surprising that the biography of ‘Mohammed’, much of whose foundations were
actually Israelite (biblical), as I have argued, borrowed in part from the
Moses story, as is even more the case with the so-called ‘Buddha’. On the
latter see e.g. my series:
Buddha just a re-working of Moses.
Part One: The singular greatness of Moses
beginning
with:
Mohammed
especially resembles Moses in:
(i)
the latter's visit to Mount Horeb (modern Har Karkom) with its cave
atop, its Burning Bush, and angel (Exodus 3:1-2), possibly equating to Mohammed's
"Mountain of Light" (Jabal-an-Nur), and 'cave of research' (‘Ghar-i-Hira'),
and angel Gabriel;
(ii)
at the very same age of forty (Acts 7:23-29), and
(iii)
there receiving a divine revelation, leading to his
(iv)
becoming a prophet of God and a Lawgiver.
Mohammed
as a Lawgiver is a direct pinch, I believe, from the Hebrew Pentateuch – but also
from the era of the prophet Jeremiah whom Mohammed also much resembles.
Consider
the following [
O'Hair, M., "Mohammed", A
text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 65, first broadcast on August
25, 1969. (www.atheists.org/Islam.Mohammed.html)]:
"Now
the Kaaba or Holy Stone at Mecca was the scene of an annual pilgrimage, and
during this pilgrimage in 621 Mohammed was able to get six persons from Medina
to bind themselves to him. They did so by taking the following oath.
Not consider anyone equal to Allah;
Not to steal;
Not to be unchaste;
Not to kill their children;
Not willfully to calumniate".
This is
simply the Mosaïc Decalogue, with the following Islamic addition [ibid.]:
"To
obey the prophet's orders in equitable matters.
In
return Mohammed assured these six novitiates of paradise. The place where these
first vows were taken is now called the first Akaba".
"The
mission of Mohammed",
perfectly reminiscent of that of Moses (and of Jeremiah), was "to
restore the worship of the One True God, the creator and sustainer of the
universe, as taught by Prophet Ibrahim [Abraham] and all Prophets of God, and
complete the laws of moral, ethical, legal, and social conduct and all other
matters of significance for the humanity at large."
The
above-mentioned Burning Bush incident occurred whilst Moses
(a)
was living in exile (Exodus
2:15)
(b)
amongst the Midianite tribe of
Jethro, in the Paran desert.
(c)
Moses had married Jethro's
daughter, Zipporah (v. 21).
Likewise
Mohammed (also partly applicable to Jeremiah)
(a)
experienced exile;
(b)
to Medina, a name which may
easily have become confused with the similar sounding, Midian, and
(c)
he had only the one wife at
the time, Khadija. Also
(d)
Moses, like Mohammed, was
terrified by what God had commanded of him, protesting that he was "slow
of speech and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10). To which God replied:
"Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or
blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be your mouth and teach you
what you are to speak' (vv. 11-12).
Now
this episode, seemingly coupled with Moses’s (with Jeremiah’s) call, has come
distorted into the Koran as Mohammed's being terrified by what God was asking
of him, protesting that he was not learned.
To
which God supposedly replied that he had 'created man from a clot of congealed
blood, and had taught man the use of the pen, and that which he knew not, and
that man does not speak ought of his own desire but by inspiration sent down to
him'.
Ironically,
whilst Moses the writer complained about his lack of verbal eloquence,
Mohammed, 'unlettered and unlearned', who therefore could not write, is
supposed to have been told that God taught man to use
the pen (?). But
Mohammed apparently never learned to write, because he is supposed only to have
spoken God's utterances. Though his words, like those of Moses (who however did
write, e.g. Exodus 34:27), were written down in various formats by his
secretary, Zaid (roughly equating to the biblical Joshua, a writer, Joshua
8:32, or to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch).
This is
generally how the Koran is said to have arisen.
But
Mohammed also resembles Moses in his childhood in the fact that, after his
infancy, he was raised by a foster-parent (Exodus 2:10).
And
there is the inevitable weaning legend [
Zahoor, A.
and Haq, Z., "Biography of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)", (http://cyberistan.org/islamic/muhammad.html), 1998.]:
"All biographers state that the
infant prophet sucked only one breast of his foster-mother, leaving the other
for the sustenance of his foster-brother".
There is even a kind of Islamic version of the Exodus. Compare the following account of the
Qoreish persecution and subsequent pursuit of the fleeing Moslems with the
persecution and later pursuit of the fleeing Israelites by Pharaoh (Exodus 1
and 4:5-7) [O’Hair,
op. cit., ibid.]:
When
the persecution became unbearable for most Muslims, the Prophet advised
them in the fifth year of his mission (615 CE) to emigrate to Abyssinia
(modern Ethiopia) where Ashabah (Negus, a Christian) was the ruler. Eighty
people, not counting the small children, emigrated in small groups to avoid
detection. No sooner had they left the Arabian coastline [substitute Egyptian
borders], the leaders of Quraish discovered their flight. They decided to not
leave these Muslims in peace, and immediately sent two of their envoys to Negus
to bring all of them back.
The
Koran of Islam is, to a great extent, an Arabic version of the Hebrew Bible
with all its same famous patriarchs and leading characters.
That is
apparent from what the Moslems themselves admit. For example [ibid.]:
The
Qur'an also mentions four previously revealed Scriptures: Suhoof (Pages)
of Ibrahim (Abraham), Taurat ('Torah') as revealed to Prophet Moses, Zuboor
('Psalms') as revealed to Prophet David, and Injeel ('Evangel') as revealed to
Prophet Jesus (pbuh). Islam requires belief in all prophets and revealed
scriptures (original, non-corrupted) as part of the Articles of Faith.
The
reputation of Ibn Ishaq (ca 704-767), a main authority on the life and times of
the Prophet varied considerably among the early Moslem critics: some found him
very sound, while others regarded him as a liar in relation to
Hadith
(Mohammed's sayings and deeds). His
Sira is not extant in its original
form, but is present in two recensions done in 833 and 814-15, and these texts
vary from one another. Fourteen others have recorded his lectures, but their
versions differ [
ibid.]:
It
was the storytellers who created the tradition: the sound historical traditions
to which they are supposed to have added their fables simply did not exist. . .
. Nobody remembered anything to the contrary either. . . .
There
was no continuous transmission. Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and others were cut off from
the past: like the modern scholar, they could not get behind their sources....
Finally, it has to be realized that the tradition as a whole, not just parts of
it as some have thought, is tendentious, and that that tendentiousness arises
from allegiance to Islam itself. The complete unreliability of the Muslim
tradition as far as dates are concerned has been demonstrated by Lawrence
Conrad. After close examination of the sources in an effort to find the most
likely birth date for Muhammad--traditionally `Am al-fil, the Year of the
Elephant, 570 C.E.--Conrad remarks that ["What
Historians have Deduced about the Historical Mohammed.
(d) Modern Myths about
Moses
From
the above it can now be seen that it was not only the Greeks and Romans who
have been guilty of appropriation into their own folklore of famous figures of
Israel. Even the Moslems have done it and are still doing it. A modern-day
Islamic author from Cairo, Ahmed Osman, has - in line with psychiatrist Sigmund
Freud's view that Moses was actually an Egyptian, whose Yahwism was derived
from pharaoh Akhnaton's supposed monotheism [Out
of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed
(Century, 1998)] - identified all the major biblical Israelites, from
the patriarch Joseph to the Holy Family of Nazareth, as 18th dynasty Egyptian
characters. Thus Joseph = Yuya; Moses = Akhnaton; David = Thutmose III; Solomon
= Amenhotep III; Jesus = Tutankhamun; St. Joseph = Ay; Mary = Nefertiti.
This is
mass appropriation! Not to mention chronological madness!
I was
asked by Dr. Norman Simms of the University of Waikato (N.Z.) to write a
critique of Osman's book, a copy of which he had posted to me. This was a
rather easy task as the book leaves itself wide open to criticism. Anyway, the
result of Dr. Simms' request was my "Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses"
article [The Glozel Newsletter, 5:1 (ns) 1999 (Hamilton, N.Z), pp. 1-17], in which
I argued that, because Osman is using the faulty textbook history of Egypt, he
is always obliged to give the chronological precedence to Egypt, when the
influence has actually come from Israel over to Egypt.
A
revised version of this article can now be read as:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part One:
The Chosen People
The way
that the conventional Egyptian chronology is artificially structured at present,
is thanks largely to Eduard Meyer's now approximately
one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie, Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen der Königlich
preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin (Akad. der Wiss., 1904).
For a refutation of this hopeless system, see e.g. my article:
The Fall of the Sothic Theory:
Egyptian Chronology Revisited
Meyer’s
erroneous thesis could easily give rise to Osman's precedence in favour of
Egypt view (though this is no excuse for Osman's own chronological mish-mash).
One finds, for example, in Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to king
David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the woman-ruler -
dated to the C15th BC, 500 years earlier than David - must have influenced the
great king of Israel. Or that pharaoh Akhnaton's Hymn to the Sun, so like
David's Psalm 104, had inspired David many centuries later.
Only a proper
revision of Egyptian history brings forth the right perspective, and shows that
the Israelites actually had the chronological precedence in these as in many
other cases.
It gets
worse from a conventional point of view.
The
'doyen of Israeli archaeologists', Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University,
frequently interviewed by Beirut hostage victim John McCarthy on the
provocative TV program "It Ain't Necessarily So", is, together with
his colleagues, virtually writing ancient Israel right off the historical map,
along with all of its major biblical characters.
This
horrible mess is an inevitable consequence of the faulty Sothic chronology with
which these archaeologists seem to be mesmerized.
With friends
like Finkelstein and co., why would Israel need any enemies!
The
Lawgiver Solon
Whilst
the great Lawgiver for the Hebrews was Moses, and for the Babylonians,
Hammurabi, and for the Spartans, Lycurgus, and for the Moslems, supposedly, Mohammed,
the Lawgiver in Athenian Greek folklore was Solon of Athens, the wisest
of the wise, greatest of the Seven Sages.
Though
Solon is estimated to have lived in the C6th BC, his name and many of his
activities are so close to king Solomon's (supposedly 4 centuries earlier) that
we need once again to question whether the Greeks may have been involved in
appropriation. And, if so, how did this come about? It may in some cases simply
be a memory thing, just as according to Plato's Timaeus one of the very
aged Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon [Plato's Timaeus,
trans. B. Jowett (The Liberal Arts Press, NY, 1949), 6 (22) and /or Desmond
Lee's translation, Penguin Classics, p. 34]:
\’O
Solon, Solon, you Hellenes [Greeks] are never anything but children, and there
is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to
say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed
down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. …’.
Perhaps
what the author of the Timaeus really needed to have put into the mouth
of the aged Egyptian priest was that the Greeks had largely forgotten who
Solomon was, and had created their own fictional character, "Solon",
from their vague recall of the great king Solomon who "excelled all the
kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" (1 Kings 10:23).
