پیشگفتار:
با آنکه
بُنیادِ دین های ابراهیمی یهود، ترسایی (مسیحیت) و اسلام بر داستان های تورات اُستوار شُده است، ولی تا
کنون هیچ سندِ روشنی بدست نیامده است که «دُروستی» این داستان ها و تاریخی بودن
وجودِ شخصیت هایِ کلیدیِ دین یهود و پیامبران آن، همانند موسی، داود و سلیمان را
ثابت کُند. تا پیش از آغاز پژوهش هایِ دانشی و سامانمند (سیستماتیک) دربارۀِ
داستان های تورات در سدۀِ هیجدهم، باستانشناسانِ باختر میپنداشتند که داستان های
تورات بیانگر رویدادهایِ پیش آمده و راستین در دوران کُهن هَستند، ولی با گذشت 200
سال از آغاز جستجوهای کاوشگرانه در سراسر خاورمیانه و بویژه اسرائیل، آنها به این
نتیجه رسیده اند که داستان های تورات سندهای تاریخی نیستند و ارزش این داستان ها
تنها در تراز افسانه های (Myths) یونان باستان است. آنچه که
باستانشناسان را به این نتیجه گیری رهنموده است، در برگیرندۀِ این فرنودهاست (دلیل
هاست):
پیشگفتار:
با آنکه بُنیادِ دین های ابراهیمی یهود، ترسایی (مسیحیت) و اسلام بر داستان های تورات اُستوار شُده است، ولی تا کنون هیچ سندِ روشنی بدست نیامده است که «دُروستی» این داستان ها و تاریخی بودن وجودِ شخصیت هایِ کلیدیِ دین یهود و پیامبران آن، همانند موسی، داود و سلیمان را ثابت کُند. تا پیش از آغاز پژوهش هایِ دانشی و سامانمند (سیستماتیک) دربارۀِ داستان های تورات در سدۀِ هیجدهم، باستانشناسانِ باختر میپنداشتند که داستان های تورات بیانگر رویدادهایِ پیش آمده و راستین در دوران کُهن هَستند، ولی با گذشت 200 سال از آغاز جستجوهای کاوشگرانه در سراسر خاورمیانه و بویژه اسرائیل، آنها به این نتیجه رسیده اند که داستان های تورات سندهای تاریخی نیستند و ارزش این داستان ها تنها در تراز افسانه های (Myths) یونان باستان است. آنچه که باستانشناسان را به این نتیجه گیری رهنموده است، در برگیرندۀِ این فرنودهاست (دلیل هاست):
1. بازگفت های (روایت های) تورات دربارۀِ چگونگی و وجود یهودیان در مصر باستان و یا وجودِ پیامبری به نام موسی در تاریخ این کشور در پارادُخش (تناقض) با تاریخ نگاشته شُدۀِ مصر باستان است (که روزنگاری شُده است)؛ نام موسی یا به انگلیسی موزس (Moses) یک نام مصری است و مانی (معنی) آن «پسر» است. و چند فرعون مصری با پیشوند هایی همانند «توت موزیس» (Thutmusis) به مانی «پسر توت» یا «پسر خدای یادگیری»، در مصر باستان فرمانروایی کرده اند، ولی در تاریخ نگاشته شُدۀِ مصر باستان کوچکترین اشاره ای به داستان های تورات برپایۀِ وجودِ یک پیامبر یهودی به نام موسی در دربار فرعون، بردگی یهودیان در مصر، هفت بلای آسمانی با هدفِ کیفر دادن به فرعون و مصریان و گریز بردگان یهودی از این کشور نَشُده است.
2. اگر برپایۀِ بازگفت های (روایت های) تورات، پادشاهی داود و سلیمان بازتاب دهندۀِ اوج «توانمندی و شکوفایی» فرمانروایی قوم یهود در خاورمیانه بوده است، که تورات و قرآن با آب و تاب از این داستان یاد کرده اند، چرا پس از گذشت 200 سال کاوشگری و زیر و رو کردنِ وجب به وجبِ خاک اسرائیل، هنوز باستان شناسان نتوانسته اند هتا یک کوزه شکسته ای را از آن دوران «شکوفا» از زیر خاک بیرون بکشند که دستکم بیانگر وجود کسی به نام داود و سلیمان در اسرائیل بوده باشد، اگر نخواهیم بر « توانمندی و شکوفا» بودن یا نبودنِ «فرمانروایی های» آنها پافشاری کُنیم.
3. چرا در تاریخ نگاشته شُدۀِ کشورهای همسایۀِ اسرائیل همانند مصر، آشور، بابل، ایران و فنیقیه کوچکترین اشاره ای به پیوند دیپلماتیک با یک کشور همسایه و «نیرومند» به نام اسرائیل با فرمانروایی داود و سلیمان نَشُده است؟
4. از آنجا که بسیاری از داستان های تورات کمابیش هزار و پانسد سال پس از دورانی رویداده اند که به موسی برمیبَندَند، تورات نمیتواند بدست موسی نوشته شُده باشد. راستی این است که «10 فرمان موسی» رونوشت برداری از 10 فرمان همورابی (Hammurabi) ششمین پادشاه بابل است. و داستان نجاتِ جانِ موسی در کودکی به کمک مادرش و رها کردنِ او به کمک یک تشت چوبین و شناور در رودخانۀِ نیل، رونوشت برداری از سرگذشت سارگون (Sargon) پایه گذار دودمان اکدها در سده 22 پیش از میلاد است. در 200 سال گذشته در میان دینباوران دین یهود و ترسایی کمتر کسی یافت میشود که تورات را نوشتۀِ موسی بپندارد. راستی این است که داستان های تورات در سده ششم پیش از میلاد پس از آزاد شُدن قوم یهود از بردگی در بابل، بدست کاهنان گوناگونی گردآوری و نگاشته شُد که نام آورترین آنها اِزرا (Ezra) بود، تا از فروپاشی آیین و فراموش شُدن قوم یهود پیشگیری کُنند.
نتیجه اینکه، باستانشناسان بر این باروند که داستان های تورات که قرآن نیز از روی آنها رونوشت برداری کرده است، همانند وجود پیامبرانی چون موسی، داود و سلیمان ارزش تاریخی ندارند و ارزش این داستان ها بیشتر از افسانه های یونان باستان دربارۀِ جنگ و آشتی خُدایان آنها در آسمان و هَنایش (تأثیر) این نَبَردها بر زندگی مردمان آن روزگار بر روی زمین نیست.
By RICHARD SMOLEY
— Every
civilisation needs a myth; but woe to the civilisation whose myth has been
found wanting. That is the position of Christianity today. It came to
ascendance at a time when the myths of Greece
and Rome had
lost their credibility. The pagans themselves laughed at the stories of their
gods; Plato sought to censor them. Christianity triumphed because it offered
its sacred scriptures not as myth but as fact. Mystical adepts had always known
that the stories in the Bible were not meant to be taken entirely at face, but
as the religion degenerated into priestcraft, these insights were forgotten or
suppressed.
Today
we have come full circle. Over the last two centuries a staggering number of
scholars – the vast majority Christians themselves, many of them clergymen –
have laboured on the great project of seeing how much of the Bible is
historically valid. The verdict has not, in general, gone in the Bible’s
favour. Little by little its validity as a plausible source for the facts it
claims to recount has been eroded. In the nineteenth century, scientists such
as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin showed that the epochal changes in geology
and biology could not have happened in the six thousand years allotted to them
by Genesis, while the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss (who was a
Lutheran pastor) showed that much that the Gospels said about Jesus was
probably not accurate in any factual sense, but consisted of stories and
legends that had accumulated around him after his life.
But
the inquiry did not end there. Much of the Hebrew Bible consists of history –
the history of Israel
from primeval times to around 500 BCE. It tells of patriarchs such as Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob; of the bondage of the Israelites and their miraculous
liberation by the hand of God; and of David and Solomon and their successors to
the thrones of Israel and Judah.
Until
fairly recently scholars took much of this account at face value. But as our
knowledge of the first millennium BCE in the Near East
has improved, it has become more and more obvious that the Bible cannot be
entirely trusted even in these areas.
I
must digress here to make an important point. Many of the articles in New
Dawn present what is called “alternative history” – views of the past that
run counter to what conventional scholars believe. This approach is valuable
and refreshing, if only because academics tend to operate like a team of horses
with blinders on. Nevertheless, what I am going to be saying in this article
(and in the following article, “God’s Forgotten Wife”) is not
alternative history. It is conventional scholarship, and it consists of things
that anyone would learn at a mainstream seminary or divinity school, although
these findings have not always trickled down to the public at large.
To
take one fairly simple example, two hundred years ago nearly everyone in the
Judeo-Christian world believed that the first five books of the Bible (known to
the Jews as the Torah, to the Christians as the Pentateuch) were written by
Moses. Today practically no scholar who is not a fundamentalist believes this.
Many scholars do not even believe that a person such as Moses ever lived, or
that an exodus from Egypt
ever occurred in anything like the way it is described. Moreover, a generation
ago it was generally accepted that the accounts of David and Solomon in the
books of Samuel and Kings were reasonably accurate – even contemporary –
accounts. But today it is agreed that these histories were written centuries
later, and the glories ascribed to these two monarchs were vastly overstated.
To
summarise all these findings, an article of this length cannot hope to be complete.
All the same, it is possible to sketch out some of the major findings along
with their implications.
Israel in History: The Archaeological Evidence
The
history of Israel
begins with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The general setting for
their lives is best placed in the early second millennium BCE. The original
texts (there were several) that make up what today we call Genesis were not
written until around the seventh century BCE. Consequently, what we have about
these patriarchs is a collection of legends with an interval of a millennium
between the events and the written accounts. It would be hard to find anything
here that could be called real history.
As
we come closer to the present, the picture becomes clearer, although it does
not necessarily validate the Bible as a source. The descent of Jacob and his
twelve sons into Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan does resonate with a
well-documented period (in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE) in
which Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, Semitic “foreign kings” that came from the
northeast. But here too it is very hard to reconcile the biblical account
(again written almost a thousand years later) with the Egyptian documents. They
portray the Hyksos not as slaves but as rulers; indeed an Egyptian king list
includes one “Yaqub” – identical to “Jacob.”1 They did not
flee a tyrannical Pharaoh but were thrown out by the Egyptians themselves – an
almost complete reversal of the biblical account.
As
for the flight of the Israel to the land of Canaan to escape their Egyptian
taskmasters, this too is hard to accept, because in the period in which this is
supposed to have happened – the thirteenth century BCE – Canaan was an Egyptian
province, complete with governors and forts and garrisons. Egypt would retain control over Canaan until around 1160 BCE.
In
fact the first mention of Israel in any contemporary text comes from a stele
from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Rameses II (often portrayed as
the pharaoh of the Exodus), and it dates to 1207 BCE. It tells of an Egyptian
campaign into Canaan, and in it Merneptah boasts, “Israel is laid waste; his seed is
not.”2 Obviously this is an exaggeration, but it suggests
that at this time the people of Israel
were an already well-established population at a time when Pharaoh still ruled
the land.
Scholars
generally agree that there was no conquest of Canaan
by the Israelites as described in the book of Joshua. How, then, did Israel come to
be? To understand this, we have to grasp something about the geography of Palestine. The country
can be roughly divided into three north-south strips. The first is a fertile
coastal plain parallel to the Mediterranean shore. The second is a band of hill
country east of the plain. The third and easternmost is the Jordan
River valley. It was the second of these regions, the hill
country, that was the Israelite homeland. In the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200
BCE), it was sparsely populated. But at the beginning of the Iron Age in the
thirteenth century, its population rose dramatically. And it is these Iron Age
settlements that scholars believe were the homes of the proto-Israelites. There
was very little in their material culture (alphabet, pottery, and so on) that
differentiated them from the Canaanites of the coastal plain, except that the
proto-Israelites’ culture was more primitive – the pottery was crude and poorly
ornamented, for example – and, strangely, the bones of pigs are almost
completely absent from the animal remains that are found at these sites,
indicating that these people, whoever they were, had a taboo against eating
pork even in the earliest times.
Where
did these hill people come from? Scholars do not agree entirely, but they are
more or less unanimous in stating that most of them were not freed
slaves coming up from Egypt.
In all likelihood, they were people fleeing the social breakdown in the Bronze
Age culture of the Palestinian coastal plain – itself only a localised version
of the end of Bronze Age civilisation that was taking place all around the eastern
Mediterranean. They were probably augmented by a small number of nomads who
adopted sedentary ways of life. These hill people were not city dwellers; their
social units were extended families that were themselves organised into tribes,
which in turn formed a loose confederation that resembles the one described in
the book of Judges.
Myth Made History: Moses, David & Solomon
Did
Moses live? There is no reference to him in any contemporary source. The name
Moses is a curious one; it is Egyptian, and it literally means “son,” as we see
in some Egyptian names: Thutmosis (or Thutmose), the name of several pharaohs,
means “son of Thoth,” the god of learning. It would be odd if Moses had been
the prophet’s original name, just as in the English-speaking world there are
many Johnsons and Williamsons, but practically nobody with the surname “Son.”
Possibly his name originally included the name of an Egyptian god that Moses
himself – or later chroniclers – chose to remove.
Scholars
thus have stopped believing in any great migration that resembles the biblical
account. To the extent that they lend any credence to the story of Exodus at
all, they grant the possibility that a charismatic leader led a small band of
former Semitic slaves to the hill country of Palestine and that as Egyptian
power began to wane in that area, this people, along with the hill people that
had already settled there, was able to shake off its chains.
To
move on to the late eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, the period that biblical
historians call “the united monarchy,” when Israel was supposedly ruled by a
single king – Saul, followed by David and David’s son Solomon. According to the
Bible, this was the zenith of Israel’s
power and influence. David supposedly ruled over a territory that stretched
from the Euphrates to Gaza
(1 Kings 4:24), while Solomon accumulated vast riches and a thousand wives. But
the archaeological remains and extrabiblical texts say virtually nothing about
these rulers; some scholars go so far as to doubt whether there ever was a
united monarchy at all. Richard A. Freund, professor of Jewish history at the
University of Hartford, Connecticut, in the US, sums up the situation:
If…
David was so prominently involved in the lives of so many different peoples in
the region, it stands to reason that he would be mentioned in one of these
different non-Israelite literatures. If… Solomon conducted international
relations with Egypt, marrying into the royal family and importing horses, why
wouldn’t there be a record somewhere in Egypt that would corroborate this
relationship?…. But no independent corroboration of these events exists from
archaeological evidence or source not influenced by biblical tradition, save
perhaps an early medieval collection called the Kebra Nagast, the
national epic of Ethiopia.3
The
earliest extrabiblical reference to David comes from an inscription found at
Tel Dan in northern Galilee in 1993. Dated to
the ninth century BCE, it contains a claim by Hazael, king of Aram, that he has killed Ahaziah, king of Israel, and
Jehoram, “king of the house of David.”4 Hazael, Ahaziah,
and Jehoram are all mentioned in the Bible, so this inscription confirms these
men lived and ruled and that there was a house of David in the ninth century
BCE. Nevertheless, this inscription dates more than a hundred years later than
David is supposed to have lived, so it confirms nothing more about him.
Nor
is there much archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon’s Temple, which would have been built around 940 BCE.5
Indeed the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contends that Jerusalem, supposedly Solomon’s magnificent
capital, was actually a rather humble place. “Digging in Jerusalem has failed to produce evidence that
it was a great city in David or Solomon’s time,” he argues. “Tenth century Jerusalem was rather
limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill village.”6
There
is archaeological evidence for a highly prosperous and centralised
monarchy in Israel,
but, Finkelstein contends, it was in the ninth century BCE and not the tenth.
Remains include palaces, storage centres, and even stables. They are centred
around Samaria, the capital of the northern
kingdom of Israel
(the ten tribes that seceded from the house of David after Solomon’s death,
ending the united monarchy). They were the work of the Israelite king Omri and
his heirs – every last one of whom, according to the Bible, “wrought evil in
the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 16:25).7 The most notorious
of the Omrid dynasty was Ahab, whose queen was the proverbially wicked Jezebel.8
It
is thus really only in the ninth century BCE that biblical history and the
extrabiblical evidence begin to converge, and in the eighth century the picture
becomes still clearer. The Bible tells of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel
at the hands of the king of Assyria in 722 BCE
(2 Kings 17:3-23); this is confirmed by an Assyrian stele. The Bible also says
that Hezekiah, king of the southern kingdom
of Judah, was able to
save his tiny nation from destruction by the Assyrians. This too has a parallel
in the surviving Assyrian records – although these happen to mention the huge
tribute of gold and silver that Hezekiah had to pay in return. The Bible, by
contrast, credits the survival of Judah to the miraculous
intervention of Yahweh, whose angel “smote in the camp of the Assyrians an
hundred fourscore and five thousand” (2 Kings 19:35-36).
Yahweh’s Companions?
But
it is when we turn to the religious history of ancient Israel that the
picture becomes truly astonishing. After all, the intense interest in the Bible
has a great deal to do with the part that is said to be played by God in
history: specifically the revelation of the one true God, Yahweh, to the nation
of Israel, and his granting of the land of Canaan to them in perpetuity on
condition that they obey his law and worship him alone. But here, too, the
extrabiblical sources create a much more checkered picture. Egyptian texts of
the Late Bronze Age do show some familiarity with a god called “Yhw” (Egyptian,
like Hebrew, did not employ vowels in its script) in connection with some
nomads located in the southern part of Jordan.9 This
resonates with the biblical account, which has Moses learning about Yahweh in
Midian (see Exodus 3), which is in the same area. And it is possible, as we
have seen, that a charismatic leader like Moses could have led a small band to Canaan and used this god as a rallying-cry to unify the
hill folk and create a national identity for them. But even so, the reality
would be very different from the story narrated in the Pentateuch.
Scholars
today generally agree that the revelation of a monotheistic Yahweh to Moses and
his spiritual heirs is not an accurate picture of what happened. Instead, they
contend, Yahweh only gradually – over the course of several centuries – came to
be seen as the sole god of Israel
and as the supreme god of the universe. Frank Moore Cross, one of the most
distinguished Old Testament scholars of his generation, has argued that
originally Yahweh was an epithet of El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon,
in his function as patron deity of a confederation of tribes known as the
Midianite League. Cross says that Yahweh later became differentiated from El
among the proto-Israelites, and eventually came to displace him.10
Margaret
Barker, another biblical scholar, has an even more radical suggestion. She
contends that throughout most of the era of the First
Temple (c.940-586 BCE), both El and
Yahweh were worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem as separate
deities, forming a trinity with Asherah, Yahweh’s divine consort (see the
next article). El retained his position as the high god – the lord of the
universe – whereas Yahweh was the national god of Israel alone. It was only with the
“reforms” of the religion of Judah
that took place under King Josiah in 621 BCE (2 Kings 23) that Asherah was
discarded and Yahweh was conflated with El. In fact, Barker claims, the
Josianic “reform” was actually a radical restructuring of the faith. The Bible
portrays it differently, as a purge of alien elements, but that is because the
Bible was written by the party that instigated the purge. It was this party
that created the Deuteronomic history in the Bible (comprising Deuteronomy,
Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), which has shaped our historical
understanding of this period to this day. Nearly all the biblical texts I have
mentioned above are taken from the Deuteronomic account.
Obviously
there is a great deal more to say about these matters, and endless numbers of
books have been written about them. I have limited my discussion here to the
Hebrew Bible simply because of space. The New Testament is problematic as well,
but for different reasons. Here it is not archaeology or the larger historical
context that is the question: there is ample extrabiblical evidence for the
existence of the Second
Temple, which was still
being completed at the time of Christ and was sacked by the Romans in 70 CE.
Indeed the Temple’s
western wall, today called the Wailing Wall, still survives. There is also
ample extrabiblical documentation of figures such as Herod the Great and
Pontius Pilate. There is no such documentation for Jesus, but this is not in
itself problematic. We might reasonably expect some archaeological evidence for
the existence of David and Solomon, who were supposedly great monarchs, but
Jesus was comparatively obscure in his own day. It is only when we ask who
Jesus was and what his earliest followers thought him to be that the
controversies arise.
In
any event, we have seen a strange reversal over the last two hundred years. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the educated world in the West took
the Bible as history while the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey,
were written off as legend. Then in the early 1870s, the pioneering archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor, and scholars
realised that the Homeric poems – whether or not their specific characters ever
lived – were firmly grounded in the world of Late Bronze Age Greece.
Ironically, when scholars examined the Bible in the same fashion, they came up
with little more than a few isolated inscriptions and the stables of the wicked
King Ahab.
Literal Truth of the Bible Under Attack
Does
this all matter? Does the Bible have to be true in a historical sense? Not
necessarily. As I noted at the outset, esotericists have long acknowledged that
these stories are in many ways symbolic of higher truths. The book of Exodus,
with its ten plagues and miraculously gushing stones, is in all likelihood not
true historically. But the British Kabbalist Warren Kenton, writing under the pen name
Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, gives an intricate and profound analysis of the
mystical dimensions of this saga in his book Kabbalah and Exodus.
What
the original authors of the biblical texts may have intended is a difficult
question to answer, since we do not even really know who they were.
Nevertheless, Christianity has often proselytised on the premise that the
stories in the Bible are literally true. It is reasonable to assess the
Bible in terms of the claims that its proponents have made for it, and those
claims have been found wanting.
All
this said, the scholars who have delved so deeply into the historicity of the
Bible over the last two hundred years have shown tremendous moral and
intellectual courage. They have not, for the most part, been debunkers but have
been serious scholars of Judaism and Christianity who are often profoundly
committed to their faith. Some have turned to archaeology to validate this
faith and have had to admit they were wrong. Joseph Callaway, an American
professor of biblical archaeology, tried to find the city of Ai, supposedly destroyed by Joshua (Joshua
7-8), but he concluded that the city did not exist in Joshua’s time. He wrote:
“For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of
the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based on
the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from the archaeological
remains.”11 Callaway took early retirement from his very
conservative seminary rather than cause any embarrassment on this count.
Many
journalists have lacked Callaway’s integrity, so you can pick up an American
newsmagazine such as Time and read an account of Moses that treats him
as if he were Churchill or John F. Kennedy.12 To bring the
far more elusive truth to light would no doubt cause many readers to cancel
their subscriptions. Sometimes the weaker a myth is, the more stridently it is
defended.
Sources:
Margaret
Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
Frank
Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of
Religion of Israel, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1973.
William
G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?
What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the History of Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 2001.
–
– . Who Were the Ancient Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 2003.
Israel
Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s
New Vision of Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Richard
A. Freund, Digging through the Bible: Modern Archaeology and the Ancient
Bible, Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield,
2010.
Simon
Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
Z’ev
ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah and Exodus, London: Rider, 1980.
Hershel
Shanks, et al., The Rise of Ancient Israel,
Washington:
Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.
D.
Winton Thomas, ed., Archaeology and Old Testament Study, Oxford: Oxford
at the Clarendon Press, 1967.
Footnotes:
1.
Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 10.
2.
Finkelstein and Silberman, 57; see also Dever, Who Were the Early
Israelites?, 202.
3. Freund, 117.
4. Freund, 117–18.
5. Goldhill, 31.
6. Finkelstein and Silberman, 124, 133.
7.
Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version.
8.
For an account of the archaeological findings and their relation to the house
of Omri, see Finkelstein and Silberman, ch. 7.
9.
Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 128.
10. Cross, 44, 71.
11.
Quoted in Dever, 47–48.
12.
A good example is Emily Mitchell and David Van Biema, “In Search of Moses,”
Time, Dec. 14, 1998; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989815-7,00.html; accessed
Sept. 21, 2010. The article is worth careful deconstruction. It does, for
example, ask “Did Moses even exist?” and mentions such evidence as the Merneptah
inscription. But the vast bulk of it is devoted to a retelling, in Time-style
prose, of the biblical account as literally true. The reader is subtly led to
believe that somehow, in the end, all these things did happen. The article is a
cover story, timed to the release of the film The Prince of Egypt. A
more recent article, “How Moses Shaped America,” by Bruce Feiler (Time,
Oct. 12, 2009; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1927303-3,00.html; accessed
Sept. 21, 2010) discusses the political uses made of the Moses story by
American politicians without attempting to touch the historical issue of
whether this figure actually lived.
.
RICHARD SMOLEY’s latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates
the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the
Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A
Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of
Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity.
He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine,
both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.
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November 8, 2010 By davidjones