THE HEBREW TRIBES AND EGYPT
Having established that the Copper Scroll had so many key connections with Egypt, I began to wonder why this relatively isolated community of abstemious, devout Jews living at Qumran might possibly have come to have this scroll in their possession. What conceivable links might they have had to ancient Egypt? Indeed, could there be any connection between the treasures the Qumran-Essenes were writing about in the Copper Scroll and Egypt? The Qumran-Essenes had always been thought to have come from pure Hebrew stock,1 but even this assumption had to be called into question.
I started looking back at the connections between the Hebrew tribes and the adjacent land of Egypt and was surprised to discover the sheer extent of interaction between the two peoples. (It may be helpful to look back at Figure 1, the relational map of the Middle East).
From as early as 3000 BCE, right up to 1200 BCE, Egypt had maintained an armed presence in Canaan, often using it as a stepping stone to further conquests to the east. Trade routes along the Mediterranean coast were well established and commercial interaction brought people and goods to the northern parts of Egypt. The Hebrews, as a semi-nomadic tribe with herds to feed, were drawn to Egypt, particularly at times of drought and famine. Egypt was, after all, a country whose advanced irrigation systems and grain storage facilities put them in a better position to deal with natural disasters than any other country in the Middle East.
All the major characters of the Bible, from Abraham and Sarah to Jesus and Mary, had strong links to Egypt. Jacob, Joseph, Joseph’s brothers, the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, as well as Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua, Jeremiah and Baruch, all lived for long periods in Egypt and were influenced by its culture and religions.
When we look at the Biblical references to Egypt, it is quite apparent that the authors are unable to avoid frequent and detailed references to Egypt. In fact, as they are chronicled, it can be seen that both the Old and the New Testaments have an ongoing ‘hate–love’ relationship with Egypt.2 Throughout the Bible, Egypt is a place for the Hebrews to flee to, a place of sanctuary – for Abraham, Jacob, Jeroboam, Jeremiah and Baruch, Onias IV and Jesus. Or it is a place to flee from, in the case of Moses and the Exodus. The following few verses from Isaiah illustrate the enmity and reverence exhibited in the Bible towards Egypt:
And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt; every one that maketh mention thereof shall be afraid in himself; because of the counsel of the Lord of hosts, which he hath determined against it. In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts: one shall be called the city of destruction. In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord…
Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hand, and Israel mine inheritance.’
Isaiah 19: 17–19, 25 (my italics)
In delving into the histories of these Biblical characters, from both Biblical and historical sources, I continually asked myself how their stories and supposed motivations might give a clue to the provenance and location of the treasures of the Copper Scroll. I was looking for any characters in the Old Testament who might have had access to enormous amounts of wealth. Here is a summary of my findings from the Biblical accounts. (More detail can be found in the notes.)
Abraham was the first of the Hebrew Patriarchs (Fathers) and the generally accepted founder of monotheism (the belief in one God to the exclusion of all others). Leaving the city of Ur in Chaldea (southern Babylonia), he travelled to Canaan and visited Egypt with his wife Sarah around 1500 BCE. Although he was a tribal chief, his wealth was mainly in livestock – but he did come away from Egypt ‘rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold’.3
So Abraham is a possible candidate, with access to modest amounts of ancient treasure.
JACOB
The third of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the father of Joseph, Jacob returned from Canaan to his uncle’s home in Haran, in Mesopotamia (northern Syria), to find a wife, coming away with two – Leah and Rachel. Together with them (and their two handmaidens) he fathered twelve sons and one daughter. Later in his life he took the name ‘Israel’. He was encouraged to come to Egypt with all his family, by Joseph, and settled in the most favourable part of the land.
Jacob became a highly respected friend of Pharaoh, who gave him a state funeral on his death. His wealth could well have gone to his two favourite grandsons, Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph.
JOSEPH
The great-grandson of Abraham, and eleventh son of Jacob, Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt.4 His reputation as an interpreter of dreams came to the attention of Pharaoh, who had been suffering strange dreams about seven lean cows devouring seven fat ones, and seven full ears of corn being devoured by seven thin ears of corn. Joseph, relating God’s words, told Pharaoh that the dreams meant there would be seven good years of harvest in Egypt, followed by seven bad years, and that measures should be taken to store the seventh-year produce. So impressed with Joseph was Pharaoh, a Pharaoh that I identify as Amenhotep IV, that he appointed him Vizier – the second most powerful figure in the land.
As Joseph kept his privileged position for at least fourteen years, he could well have become one of the richest men in Egypt, especially as Pharaoh Amenhotep IV is known to have been prone to lavish collars of gold on those he favoured.
Here, clearly, was the first Biblical character to have access to enormous amounts of wealth and treasure.
THE LEADERS OF THE TWELVE TRIBES OF ISRAEL
The leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel were the sons of both Jacob and Joseph, who eventually founded the twelve regions of Canaan that formed the Hebrew Kingdom of Israel. They all lived in Egypt for a prolonged period of time, and their descendants finally left with Moses when he led the Hebrews out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
MOSES
The central figure of the Old Testament, being the architect of the Hebrew religion, Moses was born in Egypt, around 1250 BCE, as were his supposed brother Aaron and sister Miriam. After being abandoned in a reed basket in the River Nile as a baby, Moses was brought up by an Egyptian Princess until, as an adult, he took on the cause of the Hebrew slaves. Moses obtained the release of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and began the process of welding them into one nation, with one monotheistic religion, giving them the Ten Commandments, or laws, to live by.
Moses the Egyptian?
Detailed analyses of the Torah (the Hebrew Bible) and other texts, such as the Talmud (commentaries on Jewish law and customs) and Midrash (interpretations of Hebrew scriptures – see Glossary), led me to the conclusion that Moses was not only born and raised as an Egyptian, but was, in fact, a Prince of Egypt – a son of the Royal House of Pharaohs. This is not a conclusion that any religious writer would openly care to admit, but it has been suggested by others, and much earlier in history.5
It would have been anathema for the early Hebrew compilers of the Old Testament to have had to acknowledge that their most important leader and law-giver was not an Hebrew. Nevertheless, controversy has continued through the ages, in Christian and Jewish theology and, to a lesser extent, in Muslim theology. Debate was particularly lively in the so-called ‘period of enlightenment’ in Germany, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The idea that Moses was an Egyptian, and that his teachings on monotheism had close Egyptian affinities, is, therefore, not particularly new. It was a theme of both Popper-Linkeus,6 in 1899, and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, writing in 1931.7 New studies, especially those coming from the work on the Dead Sea Scrolls over the last few years, and my own research, have dramatically added to the available evidence, warranting a reassessment of the idea.8
Moses was, according to the Old Testament, discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter floating in an ark made of bulrushes in a river. He had been abandoned by a Levi family*10 fearing Pharaoh’s decree of death to newborn Hebrews. Unusually the names of his father and mother are not given when Moses is first mentioned in the Bible. Only later on, in Exodus 6:20, do we learn that Moses’ father was named Amram and that his mother, Jochebed, was his father’s aunt. Moses was apparently wet-nursed by a Hebrew, but then brought up from early childhood as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter in the Egyptian Court. Under these circumstances it would have been inevitable that he absorbed Egyptian customs and learning and spoke the language. Of his youth we know little, but we are told that at some stage in his early maturity he apparently rebelled and was forced to flee the Court.
A description of the upbringing of Moses must have presented considerable problems for the chroniclers of the Old Testament. The nature of the story that describes his upbringing has fairy-tale qualities and, it would seem, would only have been required if Moses was born an Egyptian from a non-Semitic stock. Not only had it to be shown that he was born an Hebrew, but there needed to be a plausible explanation as to why he grew up and spent most of his early life in the Court of Pharaoh – living the life of a Prince of Egypt. This was not an easy problem to overcome, and called for all the ingenuity of the writers’ imaginations. What to do? Simple: create a story linking Moses to the ancestry of the Hebrews.
Rather than dream up an original story, the writers cast around for a suitable myth or fable of the times that might suit the bill. There was the ancient Mesopotamian myth of Sargon, dating back to 2800 BCE:
I am Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade…my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a basket of sedge, closed the opening with pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the drawer of water…as his own son he brought me up…When I was a gardener Ishtar fell in love with me. I became king and for forty-five years I ruled as king.9
However, the Egyptian story of the birth of Horus fits the bill more closely. This myth relates how the baby Horus was placed in a reed boat by his mother, Isis and concealed in the Delta marshland to save him from his enemy Seth.10 A neat little story, easily transformed to allow Moses to be born an Hebrew but live as an Egyptian.
There was another reason why the latter story was to be preferred. A fundamental difference existed between Sumerian and Mesopotamian – as distinct from Egyptian – mythology. The former tended towards long plots involving complicated relationships, whereas Egyptian myths were shorter stories that were integrated into and formed part of the living language. As such they were more malleable and could be changed and updated, like words and ideas in any living language, without any self-conscious reproach.11
This divergence from Mesopotamian mythology made Egyptian mythology much more adaptable and attractive to another culture, or religion.12 This is another reason why adoption of ideas from Egyptian mythology into Hebrew thinking was easier than those of Sumeria and Mesopotamia, apart from the ready availability of those ideas.
Whilst religious tradition and a number of historians testify to the upbringing and education of Moses, their versions, not surprisingly, differ in detail. Nevertheless the general thread is that he received his formative education from priests – either Egyptian or Midianite.*11 Manetho, a third century BCE Egyptian author, and High Priest at Heliopolis, reports that Moses discharged priestly functions in the temple of Heliopolis.13
Manetho goes on to relate that Moses’ original name was Osarsiph, and that he was named after Osiris, a patron god of Heliopolis. Justin Martyr, an early Church Father, refers to the education of Moses in the following passage:
Moses also is depicted as a very ancient and venerable leader of the Jews by such writers of Athenian history as Hellanicus, Philochoros, Castor, Thallus and Alexander Polyhistor, as well as by the learned Jewish historians Philo and Josephus…
These writers, who do not belong to our religion [Christianity], affirmed that their information was gathered from Egyptian priests, among whom Moses was born and educated; in fact, he was given a very thorough Egyptian education, since he was adopted son of a king’s daughter.14
To quote Paul Goodman, ‘the historical Moses who was to become the leader and teacher of the Children of Israel, appears to have been brought up as an Egyptian and to have taken little interest or share in the servitude of his people’.15
Some historians find difficulty in locating a ‘real’ individual Moses in the ancient texts. Others find more than one Moses with a different emphasis in their concepts of God. Textual research, primarily by scholars such as Julius Wellhausen,16 is based on the name applied to God in different sections of the Pentateuch.*12 The analyses demonstrate that there are at least four or five dominant authors behind the writings of the five books of Moses. This can be explained by relating the Mosaic period authors, or later authors, to influences from differing regional sources. This multi-author conclusion is strengthened by the different Biblical versions of where Moses fled to when he first left Egypt, and by conflicts in the names given for his father-in-law, who is variously Jethro, Reuel, Raguel or Hobab.17
The interesting (and at least consistent) thing is that Moses is said to have married into a priestly family, when he married ‘Zipporah’, and to have dwelt with the Midianites for some period. However, I find it unlikely that a wandering tribe of Bedouin, such as the Midianites, had priests with a highly developed religious philosophy from which Moses could learn anything useful. Moreover, the god that the Midianites worshiped was the idolatrous Baal. Nor does it seem in character for a ‘Prince of Egypt’, someone brought up in the luxuries of Court as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, to serve voluntarily as a shepherd for his father-in-law. Especially as amongst the Bedouin it is still the custom for the women to tend the flocks.18
In fact, in Numbers 31 the Bible relates how Moses later exacted an incredibly cruel vengeance on the Midianite tribe of his putative father-inlaw. He instructed 12,000 armed men to go against the Midianites and ‘they slew all the males’, and all five kings of Midian, and all the male children, and all the women who were not virgins, and distributed all their captured goods and livestock amongst the twelve tribes of Israel. Hardly the way to treat the tribe of one’s wife!
Why would Moses have fled to Midian, and married into a family of priests who worshipped the contaminating, idolatrous god Baal? The cumulative evidence, in my view, is that he didn’t, and that this proposition was not the complete story.
Could it be that Moses actually fled South, and married into a ‘priestly family’ of another religious following?
An alternative destination is relayed to us in the Midrash,*13 where we are told Moses takes a wife from the land of Cush, a land to the South of Egypt, beginning in the region of Elephantine Island, and equating to Nubia and the Northern part of modern day Ethiopia. The Bible, in Numbers 12:1, confirms the story: ‘…and Moses took a “kush” (Ethiopian) woman for his wife.’
Josephus, the authoritative Jewish/Roman historian, writing shortly after the time of Jesus, is even more specific about Moses’ presence in Ethiopia, and his marriage to ‘Tharbis, daughter of the King of Ethiopia.’
The Ethiopians pursued their advantage so closely, that they overran the whole country as far as Memphis, and from thence to the sea.19
Themuthis (the Greek name for Ramses), the King persuades Moses to lead a force of Hebrews against the Ethiopians. Josephus continues:
The joy of the Egyptians [priests] arose, first, from the hopes of subduing their enemies under his conduct; and, next, from the prospect of being able, after having obtained the ends for which he was advanced to the above post, to effect the destruction of Moses. The Hebrews, on the other hand, were happy in the idea, that, under the direction of so expert a leader, they might probably, in a course of time, be enabled to throw off the yoke of the Egyptians.20
Josephus cannot find confirmation in the ‘sacred records’ of Moses being appointed to the post as a military leader, nor do we have any record of a substantial Ethiopian invasion during this period. The only definite record of an Ethiopian invasion is on a stela fragment (an inscribed stone slab) at the British Museum, which dates an invasion back to c.1680 BCE. Whilst the timing of the military aspects are therefore suspect, the substance of Josephus is that Moses is forced by hostility from the priests of Amun-Ra to flee to Cush, accompanied by a number of Hebrews, where he takes a Nubian wife. The Hebrew word for Nubia (Ethiopia) is ‘Cush’, which is sometimes spelled as ‘Kush’, and significantly this is the same word as used in the Egyptian. The office of ‘Prince of Cush’21 is first mentioned in the reign of Tutmoses I, son of Amenhotep I. It is quite feasible to consider that Moses was banished to the furthest limits of the Kingdom, as Manetho’s evidence implies, and given the title of ‘Prince of Cush’ to keep him quiet and out of the way.
The works of Josephus are probably one of the best sources we have to compare historical evidence with the Old Testament and the events surroundings its evolution. He also gives us a wealth of background fabric to the New Testament. Undoubtedly he wrote with a bias towards the authenticity of Judaism and, although he seems to have got some of the timing of events he wrote about out of phase, the content of the events he discusses appear to be relatively secure. Josephus had access to unique sources. As a Roman citizen he was a confidant of Titus Caesar, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, and from his own writings it is apparent that he witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. From his statement that Titus gave him the opportunity to remove whatever he wanted from the doomed city, and his claim: ‘I also had the holy books by his [Titus’] concession’, it can be deduced that Josephus may have had direct access to the Holy Scrolls of the Temple. He also appears to have visited Nehemiah’s fifth century BCE library of documents held in the Herodian Temple.
There is another ‘physical’ skein of evidence that indicates that Moses was not an Hebrew, and, therefore, might play a part in linking pharaonic Egypt to the Hebrews.
Circumcision
The first mention of circumcision in the Torah occurs in Genesis 17:9–27, as part of God’s covenant with Abraham. The ceremony was to be performed on the eighth day after the birth of every Hebrew boy – and is still the custom today.
The Old Testament is ambiguous as to whether Moses was circumcised. In Exodus 4, we are told that Gershom, his first-born son, was circumcised as a matter of urgency.22
Some commentators have taken this passage on circumcision to refer to Moses, citing later references to his ‘uncircumcised lips’; these references, however, occur after the event, in Exodus 6:12, 30. The verses immediately preceding give more of a clue. They are about Moses’ warning to Pharaoh that God will slay the first-born of Egypt if he does not free the Hebrews. The immediate need for Gershom, Moses’ first-born, to be circumcised so that he will be ‘passed over’ on that fateful day, seems more to indicate that the passage refers to Moses’ son. But most commentators, for various other reasons, conclude that Moses was not at this stage circumcised.23
This conclusion, from the Biblical evidence, seems to support the case that Moses was an Egyptian.
So, how does the practice of circumcision relate Moses to Egypt? The practice of circumcision had long been customary in Egypt, but not mandatory – a fact confirmed by examination of relics and tomb inscriptions.24 Amongst objects found at the Royal Tomb of El-Amarna is a clay model of a circumcised penis,25 and inscriptions (see Plate 4) on the tombs of Nefer-Seshem-Ptah and Ankh-Ma-Hor, at Saqqara, show circumcised Egyptians at work.26 Other Middle Eastern peoples, such as the Semites, Babylonians, Philistines and Sumerians, did not practise circumcision.
It is likely that many of the Hebrews were circumcised, through assimilation of the Egyptian custom and, later on, compulsorily as slaves – a common practice. Whether Moses, after the Children of Israel left Egypt, decided to adopt the practice for everyone, including himself, to distinguish his people from the surrounding idolaters, is conjecture.
The Bible relates, in Joshua 5:2–8, that all the male Hebrews who came out of Egypt were circumcised, but that those born during the wanderings were not. A mass circumcision was therefore performed on all the males at Gilgal, in the plains of Jericho.
A further clue comes from the passage describing events after the mass circumcision had been performed:
And the Lord said unto Joshua. ‘This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you. Wherefore the name of the place is called Gilgal to this day.’
Joshua 5:9
Now, in a snub to Egypt and as free men, circumcision was entered into voluntarily, and any stigma previously attached to it was henceforth negated.
The Biblical account supports the case that Moses was a Prince of Egypt when it, apparently, says that for much of his life Moses was uncircumcised: in Biblical terms this would indicate he was not an Hebrew. However as the Hebrews were supposed to have been circumcised, the Biblical writers would have wanted to equate Moses with the Hebrews, rather than as an Egyptian – especially as circumcision was later taken as a unique sign of the Covenant.
There is, to put it mildly, a wealth of circumstantial exegetic detail derived from the Bible, together with numerous cogent ‘handed-down’ historical anecdotes, which suggest that Moses was a high-born ‘Prince of Egypt’. Here is a summary of the evidence so far:
a) the testimony of four historical authorities – Manetho, Philo, Josephus and Justin Martyr
b) the tenuous story of his being cast into the Nile as an infant – which I relate to a story closely paralleling an Egyptian fable about the Egyptian god Horus, who was placed in a reed basket and set adrift in the River Nile by his mother Isis to save him from his enemies
c) his Egyptian name – probably meaning ‘child of Amon’ – which alludes to an Egyptian god known as ‘the hidden one’. ‘Mose’ was a known suffix to pharaonic names, such as Ahmose and Tutmoses
d) the Egyptian names of his ‘parents’, Amram and Jochebed
e) the Bible’s claim that he was raised by an un-named Egyptian princess in the Court of Pharaoh
f) his marrying a non-Hebrew named Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest (the Talmud also records Moses marrying a second, un-named, Kushite wife he acquired from lands to the south of Egypt)
g) his apparent speech impediment, which the Bible explains as the reason he needed a spokesman when talking to others. I take this as an ‘excuse’ for Moses needing an interpreter to talk to the Hebrews, whose language he would not have been familiar with
h) evidence that he was uncircumcised, unlike the Hebrews.
As a Prince of Egypt, Moses was a second Biblical character, in addition to Joseph, who would have had access to great wealth and valuable possessions.
OTHER POSSIBLE INFLUENCES ON THE HEBREWS
Mesopotamia, Babylonia and Canaan
What about Mesopotamia and Babylonia and all those other countries mentioned in the Bible that surrounded Canaan? What were their influences?
There were, of course, connections between Canaan and Mesopotamia and Babylonia to the north, but these were relatively minor compared to those with Egypt and largely reflect the very earliest Biblical experience of the Hebrews.
Received wisdom does indeed assign an expected larger background influence on the roots of the three great world religions to Mesopotamia and Sumerian cultures. If one looks at relatively recent treatises, for example the Atlas of the Jewish World by Nicholas de Lange,27 The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Metzger and Coogan,28 The Lion Encyclopedia of the Bible by Pat Alexander,29 or Ancient Judaism by Irving Zeitlin,30 the army of scholars represented in these works barely consider Egyptian influences and talk largely of Babylonian and Mesopotamian antecedents. (I give more detail on the effects of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, or relative lack of it, on the Hebrews in the Glossary.)
Yes, there are many similarities in the biblical ‘lifestyles’ of the Patriarchs to those of the region bounded by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, but very little connection to their religious innovations. There are few references to Northern Mesopotamia (Assyria), and little to indicate the writers of the Old Testament had much knowledge of its geography. As John Rogerson, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at Sheffield University, points out:
This is all the more surprising in view of the traditions that indicate that the forebears of the Hebrews came from Northern Mesopotamia.31
Genesis 11:27–30
Siegfried Morenz, Director of the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in his study on Egyptian religion, is more convinced and even amazed:
hardly any consideration has been given to the fact that the religious forms of the land of the Nile also had an effect upon the New Testament (in addition to the Old Testament) and so upon early Christianity…
scholars have failed to appreciate the influence which Egypt has exerted upon the entire Hellenistic world in which Christianity was destined to take shape.32
What about Canaan itself? Weren’t the Canaanites just as influential as Egypt? What do other scholars say on the subject? The influence of Canaan on the Hebrews only starts to become apparent well after their entry from Egypt in about 1200–1180 BCE, and even then it is remarkably limited in its effects. Irving Zeitlin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, succinctly analyses the position and concludes: ‘…the Israelite cult was her own, and shows no signs of having been acquired in Canaan.’33 Two other eminent historians, Yehezkel Kaufman and John Gray, reiterate Zeitlin’s findings.34
Orthodox religions and their ‘spin doctrinaires’ are the main reasons why conventional Hebrew, and, by induction, Christian and Muslim philosophies downgrade, or even ignore, early Egyptian influences. But by reading ‘on the lines’ and ‘between the lines’ of the holy scriptures, a multiplicity of parallels can be found. When we look at ritual and religious practices there are numerous commonalities. When we examine the early evolutionary development of the ‘core’ religions, we find remarkable linkages to Egypt. (Some of these Egyptian influences have also found their way into fundamental Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist ideas.)
However, no self-respecting Rabbi, or Priest, or Imam wishes to examine in any detail an era that is instinctively considered idolatrous. Few Jewish scholars would be seen dead reading the Book of the Dead (see Glossary).
Let me tread here on rather contentious ground. For Orthodox/Fundamentalist Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Torah – the Five Books of Moses – were handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai in the same Hebrew version we have today. It is immutable, right down to each single 792,077 of the letters. It is ‘Torah min Hashamayim’ – ‘Torah from Heaven’. The same rigidity does not apply for Progressive Jews, Christians or Muslims. For them the Bible is divinely inspired by God, but it is not to be taken literally word-for-word.
Not surprisingly the barriers that fundamentalist religions have erected and maintained have increasingly marginalized them from academic institutions and biblical research. I quote one example from an acquaintance of mine, who specializes in book translations. At the first lecture she attended for a degree course in Jewish Studies at the University of London, the lecturer commenced with words to the effect that, anyone on the course who believed in ‘Torah min Hashamayim’ might as well leave then, as they would fail their degree.
A similar attitude to Old Testament studies can be seen at almost every academic university throughout the world. From Wellhausen to Friedman35 there is a pile of evidence as high as Mount Sinai demonstrating that, whilst the Bible may have been ‘inspired’ by God, it was written by numerous different hands at different periods in history. To their credit, Progressive Judaism, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, some ‘enlightened’ sectors of orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church, following Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divinio Afflante Spiritu of 1943,36 have taken on board this ‘truth’.
For ‘unenlightened’ Biblical research, much of which was, in earlier times, dominated by devout religious expertise, I describe this phenomenon, which still pervades beyond the walls of academia as follows: All religions have a vested interest in minimizing, and in some instances distorting, the acknowledgeable influences of their antecedents and surrounding cultures, to preserve and maximize the uniqueness of the particular religion and the divine nature of its revelation.
I do not want to get bogged down here in a morass of examples of scholarly bickering that support the above statement. Two examples will suffice.
For nearly fifty years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, religious personalities and historians continued scandalously to suppress their content (and probably still do). People like Father Roland de Vaux, Father Jozef Milik, Frank Moore Cross and others at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, as well as trustees of some of the scrolls at the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem, eked out the results of their researches in an agonizingly slow process, as they sought to maximize their own international kudos and support their inbuilt prejudices.
In another example I have already mentioned, John Allegro, one of the foremost historians working in the field, who was instrumental in bringing the Copper Scroll to Manchester College of Science and Technology and deciphering the engraved text, was literally shunned by his so-called authoritative colleagues because his ideas did not comply with their beliefs.
As part of the original team that worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, a Dominican Institution, he found himself the only religious sceptic, who would later become an agnostic, amongst four Catholics, one Anglican, one Presbyterian, and one other Protestant. Frustrated by the delays in publishing an English translation of the Copper Scroll he went ahead and published his own version.37 He soon became embittered as his senior colleagues attacked him for jumping the gun, maintaining that the contents of the Copper Scroll were a ‘fairy-tale’. Disillusioned and depressed Allegro eventually withdrew from academia and, in a gesture of defiance, wrote a best-selling book to the effect that the early Christians had come to their faith through eating Amanita Muscaria – hallucinatory mushrooms!38
As I proceed it will become abundantly clear that my maxim, that religions tend to distance themselves from their origins, is no more apparent for the ‘core’ religions than in their relationship with early Egyptian culture. However, the really interesting questions are why should ancient Egyptian religion/philosophy feature so strongly as the basis of Western equivalents, as I claim, and how?
Having identified two Biblical Hebrews—Joseph as second-in-command to a Pharaoh, and Moses as a Prince of Egypt – who had obtained or inherited enormous wealth from Egypt, and one character, Abraham, who had been rich in silver and gold, I now looked to see if there was any link between their wealth and the treasures of the Copper Scroll of the Qumran-Essenes.
A simple piece of detective work. Just find a connection between one of the three suspects and the Qumran-Essenes and…‘case solved’! Not so easy, of course. I was dealing with events that took place, at the outside, 3,500 years ago. Even the very existence of Abraham as a person has never been historically proven. And there were surprising twists in the trail ahead, which I could never have foreseen.
The first step was to examine in detail the nature of Egyptian religion, particularly that existing at the times of Joseph and Moses, to see if its influence could be traced down through the ages to the Qumran-Essenes.