MOSES – PRINCE OF EGYPT
The scene now shifts. We have moved on about 150 years from the time of Akhenaten and Joseph to the time of Pharaoh Ramses II. The Hebrews have long been enslaved by the Egyptians, toiling in the fields and building monumental structures for successive Pharaohs. The dust of the quarries and the sand of the desert has ingrained their very being, just as the customs and superstitions of the Egyptians have ingrained their souls. Deliverance is, however, at last approaching with the birth of Moses.
We know Moses was brought up at the Court of the reigning Pharaoh, generally assumed to be Ramses II. His strong personality and outspoken manner won him few friends at Court and his enemies intrigued behind his back to get rid of him. His name itself is perhaps a clue to his radicalism. There is a linkage to the Tutmoses’ family of pharaohs, and we know that this family almost certainly intermarried with, and was familiar with, the Amenhotep family philosophies that culminated in the thinking of Akhenaten.1
We also know that after the death of Akhenaten, although there was a return to polytheism, there was, nevertheless, a key change in the style of worship and approach to the reinstated old gods. Knowledge of the so-called ‘heretic Pharaoh’, of whom Moses, as a Royal Prince, might have been a direct descendant, would have been available to him – particularly as there is evidence from Manetho (an high priest of Heliopolis during the third century BCE) that Moses received much of his early education from priests at Heliopolis.2 If Moses was sympathetic to those ideas he would have been viewed as a radical at Court and made unwelcome.
This historical tradition fits in well with my theory that Moses learned, quite early on in his life, a philosophy of religion that flourished at Heliopolis during the time of a religious revolution in Egypt and that remained hidden there for centuries after.
Both Josephus and the Old Testament maintain that Moses, later in his life, spent some time in the region of ‘Cush’ in the extreme southern part of Egypt. According to Josephus, he was sent there at the connivance of Pharaoh’s courtiers who wanted to get rid of the ‘dissident’. Their solution was to get Moses sent off to fight against the Ethiopians – the people of ‘Cush’ – in a remote region of Egypt’s southern border. Another angle on the story is recorded in the Old Testament and in Midrash, which relate that Moses found a wife in ‘Cush’.
It is in this distant land of ‘Cush’ that, I believe, Moses got more than a wife. He encountered another outpost of monotheism, on the Island of Yeb (Elephantine) where some of the priests of Aten had originally fled to after Ahkenaten’s death. The wife he married could indeed have been the daughter of a priest of that colony – especially in view of all the difficulties the Old Testament has in naming his father-in-law, and the incongruity of the Bible’s statement that he was a Midianite priest who kept sheep, which I discussed in Chapter 4.
There are, therefore, two defined locations where Moses might have learned about the monotheism of Akhenaten: From the priests of On, and from the priests living on the Island of Yeb. He may also have learned, from one or other of these sources, about the treasures that still remained hidden at Akhetaten.
It is in his period of isolation from Egypt that Moses has his Biblical vision and encounters God in a burning bush. The wording in Exodus 3:6 relating to this event, warrants closer examination.
Moreover He said, ‘I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob…’
This appears to be an unequivocal statement that God is the God of Moses’ father, as well as of the Patriarchs. If Moses was a Royal Prince of Egypt, as I maintain, the ‘father’ being referred to might well be represented by Akhenaten, or a member of his line. We know Akhenaten could not have been his immediate father, but that, as a ‘Prince of Egypt’, Moses was of a pharaonic parentage.
The academic Philip Hyatt’s analysis of the phrase ‘God of thy father’ concludes that the use of the Hebrew word ‘Jahweh’ for God implies that ‘Yahweh’ may originally have been a patron deity of one of Moses’ ancestors – though not necessarily of his father, grandfather or even a more remote patrilineal relation. That the ancestor in question may have been from his mother’s side of his family is seen by Hyatt as more probable because Moses’ mother’s name was ‘Jochebed’, a theophoric name*30 that uses the first element of ‘Jahweh’.3 Could this be the same God of Akhenaten?
On the surface there seems little connection between the name ‘Jahweh’ and the name Akhenaten uses to address his God – ‘Aten’, apart from the fact that they both have two syllables. However, a number of scholars have suggested that a name Akhenaten may also have used to address his God transliterates as ‘Jati’,4 not a million miles away from the Hebrew name ‘Jahweh’.
One only has to look at the works of E. A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Assyrian and Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, who lived from 1857 to 1934, or the American archaeologist James Breasted to see the large number of Hebrew words that are adopted from the ancient Egyptian language.5 Irvin Zeitlin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, agrees with Hyatt: ‘Hyatt’s thesis commends itself because of the strong support it receives from the texts,’ he says.6
The implications of this thesis also tie in with the possibility, alluded to in Chapter 8, that Moses might have been a descendant of Sarah, through her encounter with Amenhotep I, and therefore that Moses had a direct lineal link to the Patriarchs.
Bit by bit Moses learns about his ancestor’s belief in one God and determines to break out of the yoke of idolatry surrounding him.
THE ARBEITWERKE**31
Now fully immersed in this new philosophy of monotheism, Moses, to his surprise, finds that the Hebrew slaves in his land, who had clung on to their belief in God through the years of slavery, share his beliefs. What more natural, then, than that Moses, a dissident at Court, should adopt the Hebrews as his chosen people? A huge cohesive mass of humanity, a potential army, a potential nation.
Whilst I am on this point, we might just tidy up an anomaly that worried Sigmund Freud. He, you will recall (in Chapter 4), postulated that Moses was a contemporary of Akhenaten and had actually encountered him.7 This theory is inconsistent with an Exodus date of around 1200 BCE, or historically related data. By dating Moses to around 1375 BCE, rather than the now generally accepted dating of around 1200 BCE, Freud set himself a riddle. Why would a high-born Egyptian choose to adopt a throng of ‘culturally inferior immigrants’? Especially as there was then a well-known Egyptian contempt for foreigners. Freud cites this riddle as the main reason why historians have tended to reject the idea of Moses as an Egyptian.
The answer to Freud’s riddle lies in his wrongly equating Moses with Akhenaten, rather than with Ramses II. If, as I propose, the Hebrews had already come under the influence of a pupative form of Amenhotep I’s monotheistic religion, through Abraham, and a refined version through Joseph and Jacob’s direct contact with Akhenaten, their attractiveness to Moses becomes much more feasible. Here was a body of people who already had absorbed many of the ideas Moses had imbibed from his Tutmoses/Amenhotep ancestry.
The Name of an ‘Hebrew’
I think it useful at this juncture to take a look at the possible derivation of the word ‘Hebrew’, as it gives us some clues as to how Moses might have viewed what must have been a motley collection of arbeitwerke living in Egypt. There is absolutely no record in Egyptian literature or inscriptional works referring to the name ‘Hebrew’. If there is mention it is to a class of slaves or foreigners.
There are numerous theories, many of them philologically based, as to how the word ‘Hebrew’ arose. One of these is that it comes from the name ‘Habiru’, derived from the Sumerian term for groups of incursive Semites coming into Mesopotamia from the west, around 2150 BCE. From this period onwards a number of different strands of ‘Habiru’ – some mercenaries, some traders, others semi-nomadic tribes – have been identified.
In the Tel-El-Amarna tablets, discovered in Egypt in 1887, there are requests from Egyptian dependancies in Canaan and Syria, calling for military reinforcements to help repel invaders who are referred to as ‘Habiru’. The use of this term, from other references, appears to refer to loose-knit bands of warrior groups that harassed parts of the Near East during the Second Millennium. If it did refer to the Hebrews it would imply that there was more than one group of them (i.e., additional to the Biblical Hebrews), and that they had left Egypt not later than 1350 BCE.
What seems clear is that the Hebrews of Egypt were not the same grouping as the ‘Habiru’, who continued to maraud in and around Canaan whilst the Hebrews were still kept in slavery.
Another possibility derives from the use of the word ‘Aperu’, which appears frequently on monuments in Egypt and refers to groups serving as labourers or mercenaries. This may well be the correct explanation.
However, one theory, which does not appear to have been considered previously, is the possible derivation from the Egyptian word ‘Khepru’. One has to bear in mind that attempts to spell in English words that have not been heard by a living person for thousands of years are, at best, close approximations and, at worst, suspect. A relevant example is that of the English transliteration of the name of the Amenhotep pharaohs, which is often read as Amenophis.
We know that the ‘Highest God’, in early Egypt, went through a series of transformations from initial comprehension in the Primeval Waters, and one of these later manifestations was in the form of ‘Khnum’, the ram god of Elephantine, who shaped mankind on a potter’s wheel. Growing alongside all these transformations was the concept of the ‘soul’, of the divinity in a form no mere human could begin to comprehend. The sun, for example, was the ‘soul’ of the ‘High God’. This ‘soul’ was called ‘Khepru’, and in the light of the development of monotheism through the patriarchal descendants in Egypt, it is not inconceivable that Moses looked on his new found people as a collective holy manifestation of God’s purpose, and referred to them as ‘Khepru’ – ‘Hebrew’ – equating them with the name of God. The idea that ‘God gave His name to his people’ is a familiar concept in Hebrew literature.
At the emotionally moving ‘unconsumed burning bush’ encounter, Moses is instructed by God to go to Pharaoh and seek the release of the Hebrews from slavery. He is told that God will support him in his endeavours and lead the people to Canaan, a land of milk and honey.
Moses protests that he is not eloquent enough for the task, so Aaron, his Biblical ‘brother’, is recruited to be his spokesman.
The excuse that Moses puts forward for needing a spokesman in talking to Pharaoh prepares the ground for the solution to another problem in the Biblical story. How to explain why Moses could not speak easily to the Hebrews? He would have had little difficulty in speaking to Pharaoh, but, brought up as a high-caste Egyptian, his language would be quite different even from the everyday Egyptians, let alone the Hebrews. The Biblical writers could hardly state that he used an interpreter when speaking to the Hebrews, as the story must have come down to them. Their explanation, that he stuttered and needed someone to speak more clearly on his behalf, gets over the reason why Moses could not speak directly to the Hebrews – he did not speak their language.
Fresh from his encounters at the distant southern borders of Egypt, Moses returns to Court bent on obtaining the release from slavery of his new found people.