Patriarchs 2.2
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 08, 2001
Abstract
Reformations?
In Abraham and Lot dividing the land, the division is between gods not between men. The valley as far as the wicked city of Sodom is Lot’s domain while Abraham bases himself in the hills at Hebron. The “Father of the Heights” is in the heights and the rival god, Lot, is in the depths below. The implication is the contrast between a god of this world and a god of the nether world. The Babylonians had a god called Loz who was a co-ruler of the underworld with Nergal and his consort Ereshkigal, unless it was another name for Nergal, who was also called Lugalmeslam or king of Meslam. Meslam was the underworld, where the sun went at night. Furthermore, Lotan was another name for Leviathan, the monster of the deep, identifiable in Psalms 74 with the Tehom (Tiamat) of Genesis 1:2. So, although Lot and Abraham are shown as having amicable relations together, we are seeing a diluted version of the struggle between the upper and the lower regions of creation. Naturally the men who chose to serve Lot in his city of Sodom were the wicked who would be destroyed at the Eschaton. And so they were.
Professor Sayce, the Assyrialogist, tells us that the sentence about raining fire and brimstone in the tale of Sodom and Gomorrha appears in an Akkadian hymn addressed probably to the air God, Rimmon.
In the Zoroastrian eschaton, the “divas”, the heathen gods, are destroyed with Angra Mainyu. Later, Angra Mainyu as Ahriman was shown as a lion-headed serpent. In Babylon, the Persians associated this concept of chaos with the native legend of Tiamat, the chaotic deep. In Judaism, the serpent is Leviathan (Rehob):
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.Isaiah 27:1
A steward of Abraham is mentioned (Gen 15:2) called Dammasek Eliezer, who was to be his heir since he had no children. Though the name is often translated “Eliezer of Damascus”, everyone knows it does not and cannot mean this. The steward had nothing to do with Damascus because he was born in Abraham’s family. The Septuagint and the Syriac are no help here because they also have no idea what the original meant. The straightforward explanation is that Abraham’s steward is not Dammesek but Hammilk, the “king” Eliezer!
Actual human kings were considered to have been appointed by the local god and so stood for him on earth. John Gray in Near Eastern Mythology says that in Canaan, the king is the Servant of El, just as King David was the Servant of God. The status of the king is that of the executive of the will of the divine king—the god. Abraham was the god and Eliezer was his steward, the king! In Deuteronomy, each nation has its god in El’s council in heaven and, in Isaiah 24:21-23, the “kings of the earth” were to be punished with the “host of heaven” “on that day”. The enemies of the Jews are “the kings”, and “kings and nations”. Hammilk was also a Phœnician god, so here again their are several layers of syncretism.
Abraham is the case of a popular god brought down to earth as a hero in the interests of syncretistic monotheism. Here he is made the heroic and perhaps eponymous founder of the Hebrew people. His original worshippers could retain their allegiance to the hero as the Pagans did to their Pagan gods made into Christian saints, and at the same time indirectly transfer their worship to Abraham’s own god, Yehouah.
In his commentary in Peake, Hooke thinks the covenant ritual of Abraham (Gen 17) survived until Jeremiah (Jer 34:18), apparently not even imagining that it had been retrojected into the modified mythology of the Abraham narratives. He notes a similar ritual between Ahur-nirari and the Syrian king, Mati-Ilu (which might be read as “My Land is God’s”) The cleverest biblical scholars are so blinkered by their acceptance of the biblical stories as unquestionably presented by God, even if he has not sought freshness but has reused ancient myths of Pagan gods, that they simply cannot see that the Jewish scriptures are simply an expansion on a fifth century treaty imposed on the Jews by the Persians.
The ritual is marked at this point by the institution of circumcision as a token of the covenant. This however is from the Priest’s Code and is part of the later redacting. The bible has other explanations (Josh 5:2-9, Ex 4:24-26). Uncritical readers of the bible must think that circumcision in the ANE was a peculiarity of the Hebrews, instructed by God to use this curious form of mutilation to ditinguish themselves from others. It is yet another example of the ineptitude of the Holy Ghost.
Circumcision was a widespread ritual in many parts of the world but not among the northern tribes who constituted the Indo-European race and the Mongols. The Egyptians and the Phœncians, both superior civilisations to the Israelites, and respectively their southern and northern neigbours themselves used circumcision as a religious ritual and cultural mark.
The Persians did not circumcise at first, and nor did the Greeks, although Dom Gregory Dix in, Jew and Greek, says, without citing his sources, that, when they took to the Aramaic language, the Persians adopted circumcision, but the Babylonians did not. If this is so, it is about the time that Darius II set up the Jewish Temple state. Darius had moved the capital to Babylon by then, at least for part of the year.
Why then was circumcision the sign of the covenant? It might have been sanctioned by the Babylonian Persian kings to distinguish worshippers of lesser gods from themselves, who did not practice it and worhipped Ahuramazda, or it might have been reintroduced by the priesthood to satisfy ancient habits—it was so well established that it had to be justified within the refashioned religion of the Jews. The passage in Exodus suggests it was of Midianite origin, possibly an admission that it was indeed approved by the Persians as a distinguishing mark, if “Midianite” is a biblical code word for “Mede”.
It seems likely that the pre-eminent worshippers of Yehouah practised circumcision because it was the habit in Canaan, and the Persians were happy for it to continue as a token substitute for child immolation. The story of Isaac being spared by Abraham justified the abandonment of child sacrifice practised by the Canaanites until the Persian period. Outside of the Persian sphere of influence, the Phœnicians seemed to have continued it—in Carthage.
In the debate between Abraham and Yehouah which occurs in Genesis 18, Abraham is treated almost as an equal by Yehouah, and, indeed, Yehoauh defers to the greater wisdom of Abraham! It suggests that Yehouah and El were perhaps the original gods in debate. Later, Yehouah was elevated into El’s seat, leaving Yehouah debating with himself. The problem seems to have been resolved by making the original El here into Abraham. Abraham seems more sensible and Yehouah more impulsive, so Abraham seems to be the original El brought down to earth. El was the “father of the gods” suggesting Abraham’s name.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is the eschaton writ small for the purpose of this cautionary myth. Proof is that Lot’s daughters find that no men remained in the world except Lot himself. They had to couple incestuously with their father when he was drunk to regenerate humanity. Their offspring turn out as the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, only. The clumsy editor hopes that his readers are too stupid to notice. Most of them were! Lot had been saved by Abraham in Genesis 14 but contrived to return to Sodom and again be ruined suggesting once more that Genesis 14 was an insertion. Lot’s wife is a standing stone, an Asherah, the wife of a god, again suggesting that Lot was a god himself originally, and this myth is an explanation of it meant to deride it in the eyes of its devotees.
There are three places in Genesis where a patriarch trades his wife to a foreign king as his sister—Abraham in Egypt (Gen 12:10-20), Abraham in Gerar (Gen 20:1-18) and Isaac in Gerar (Gen 26:1-14). In the last two of them the king, Abimelech, is the same king and the situation is the same place (Gerar) suggesting that the same story has been used for two patriarchs, implying compiling by editors from other sources. Abraham’s journey to Egypt seems to have no more purpose than to allow the story to be told. It seems likely that the J editor intended to omit it in favour of using the plot for Isaac for whom he was short of material, Isaac being a fictional link between Abraham and Jacob. The E-story of Abraham in Gerar might have been the original tale because it is complete but not embellished with the famines and resultant wealth of the J versions. Doubtless all were put into the recompilation of the bible by the Maccabees after the civil war. The editors might already have seen the work they were reassembling as so sacred that they felt unable to miss out any of the fragments they found, though they had no compunction about adding what they thought was missing.
That Abraham should discard his son, Ishmael, and his housemaid mother, when Sarah became unexpectedly pregnant was a disgraceful and dishonorable thing to do, and if it were to be believed it proves that God was intent on creating strife in the world, since he is supposed to be clairvoyant. Even if it was how things were done in those days, it does not tie in with the modern concepts of honour and duty that God should also have foreseen. Since the passage justifies Jewish and Christian contempt of the Arabs, it should be rejected by any honorable people. Religious people defend it nevertheless on many spurious grounds as they can invent, but mainly because they take this unsavoury story to be God’s word! Thus, according to Hooke:
- It has its place in the history of revelation
- Ishmael was not a child of promise
- He came from an act of impatience and unbelief
- The son of a bond woman could not inherit with the son of a free woman
- The Arab tent dwellers remain in the ambit of the divine purpose
So, it’s all right then!
Isaac is little more than a link between Abram and Jacob but, if these stories have been composed late, the suggestion of human sacrifice could imply that some of the rites of the original Israelite religion of Canaan involved offering human infants as sacrifice, but that the new Persian religion rejected it. The offering of Isaac shows that the Hebrews offered child sacrifices, as we know they did, once Hebrews are accepted as the people of Abarnahara.
Sacrifice of first born sons was common in ancient Palestine. It is verified by the clay jar containing childrens bones found at Gerar in the Shephalah. Mesha of Moab sacrificed his first born to the Moabite god, Chemosh (2 Kg 3:26-27), the Phœnicians did the same as the many urns of charred infant’s bones testify, the Ammonites offered their sons to Moloch (Lev 18:21; 20:2) and the Hebrew kings, Saul (1 Sam 14:43-46), Hiel at Jericho (1 Kg 16:34), Ahaz (2 Kg 16:3) and Manasseh (2 Kg 21:6) also offered up their sons, all of them recorded in scripture apparently as warnings against the practice in the new religion.
Now, if God had signified his desire not to accept child sacrifices almost at the beginning of Jewish history, it seems strange that passages elsewhere in the scriptures show that the practice continued for over a millennium afterwards! It shows that this early passage was actually added after the practice really ceased in the Persian period. It seems likely that the Persians persuaded the people of Abarnahara, who already practised circumcision, that the ritual replaced child sacrifice. In other words, they reinterpreted the origins of circumcision to eliminate human sacrifice. The implication of the story is that the sacrifice was to take place on the temple mount but the priestly author has forgotten that Jerusalem was a city in the hands of foreigners that Abraham himself had to placate with tithes and that David took some trouble to defeat. It was not an open space.
The priestly genealogy of Ishmael has his descendants arranged into twelve tribes as the Israelites were. Solomon, we find, had twelve taxation districts (1 Kg 4:2-7,27; 5:13; 9:23). This administrative division seems to have been common in the ancient near east. According to G Pettinato, the districts of the state of Ebla were twelve in number. The taxation system of the Egyptians under Amenhotep had twelve districts also, and it is sensible for rulers because it allows the taxation of an administrative region to be spread evenly over the year. Each of the twelve sub-divisions paying their quota of tax in different months so that none feels unduly burdened by a continuous taxation or a single payment due to all in a single month. The rulers had continuous income and the region overall paid each month, but each month it was a different “tribe” that paid so the burden occurred only annually for each.
Abraham’s purchase of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite seems anachronistic if Abraham was living around 1800 BC. The Hittites had not long been in Anatolia and were far from being a world power at that time. That a Hittite appears in Palestine in the story puts its authorship much later than it purports to be.
The story of Isaac and Rebekah has stylistic similarities with the extended romance of Joseph, and, like the story of Joseph is probably a late link—here between Abraham and Jacob. It also has the message that the colonists would not marry with the native Canaanites, not on ethic grounds but on religious ones. Isaac is not mentioned at all in the rest of the bible except in Amos. To judge by the Ebla, Nuzi and Mari tablets Isaac is not a Syrian name like the others. It looks like a form of Isaiah, and so is a late addition.
Abraham’s family is settled in Aram. Two wives of Isaac and Jacob are Aramaeans. These were myths brought with them by the people who were forcibly settled in Yehud by the Persians, and they show that the people came from Syria (Aram).
Abraham wants a wife for his son but does not want her to be a Canaanite. He sends a servant to the city of Nahor in what he calls “my country”. In the bible, the Aramaeans (Syrians) are considered the kin of the Israelites, Aram being the grandson of Nahor, Abraham’s Brother. Nahor means the river Euphrates. Nahor remained at home in Harran, so the servant has to return to Syria for a wife for Isaac. Note that Abram and Nahor, his surviving brother constitute the name Abernahara! The country translated as “Mesopotamia” (Gen 24:10) is Aram-naharaim, a name that parallels the name of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara. “Naharaim” is a plural and so the scholars translate it as “two rivers” meaning Mesopotamia. The unbiased translation is “Aram of the rivers” and therefore means precisely that part of Syria (Aram) where there are rivers, the region of Harran and Urfa where the main river Euphrates is fed by several tributaries like the Khabur. This is exactly where the Aramaeans lived, not in Mesopotamia which the scholars say was occupied by Chaldaeans, though here they want readers to forget it.
Abram’s dead brother, Harran stands for the city that was their home in Syria. Nahor has a son, Bethuel, and grandchildren, Laban and Rebekah. The scriptures state explicitly that they lived in Harran (Gen 11:31; 27:43; 28:4,10; 29:4), also called Paddan Aram. Nahor’s children are places in Syria (Gen 22:20-24). Jacob has to retreat from Esau to Paddan Aram before returning stronger and wealthier. This suggests that an original intent to set up the temple state failed from local opposition and the colonists had to be re-equipped and reinforced. Even so, Jacob is full of trepidation, still unsure of the outcome, but the Edomites are molified in advance by propitiatory gifts.
Jacob dreams of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending. The ladder describes a zuggurat with the worshippers and ministering priests marching up and down its steps. Jacob had the dream resting his head on a stone and, having awoken, he sets the stone up as a pillar, pouring a libation of oil on it, and renaming the place as Bethel from its original name Luz. Luz might well be Loz or Lot, a Babylonian god, and the story is of its rededication to El. Jacob was obviously a giant of a man to have such a huge stone as a pillow—an Asherah or phallic stone—suggesting again that here is a story of a god brought down to earth.
Note that while God destroyed the wicked cities, Lot and his daughters sought safety in a city of refuge called Zoar—or more properly Zara, since Josephus called it Zoara and the modern name is el-Zara. The implication is that Zarathustrianism, the religion of the Persians, was a refuge for the righteous Canaanites escaping the depraved ways of the old Canaanite religions. It also suggests that Zoar was an early shrine to the new Persian version of the Canaanite god. It was denoted as a significant place in the early period of the “return” to Canaan because it was one of the landmarks noticed by Moses from Pisgah.
Genesis 36 gives a history of the Edomites, supposedly descendants of Esau, although Esau has no etymological connexion with Edom. It is probably not a Semitic word but Indo-European. The Edomites had a monarchy long before the people of the Palestinian hills, according to this account. Eight Edomite kings preceded the formation of an Israelite monarchy. In fact, the Edomites had to be displaced to make room for the temple state of Yehud, creating an antipathy against Israel that remains until today. This story recognizes that Edom existed first and Jacob taking Esau’s blessing and birthright, is an acknowledgement of it.
The conflict is also acknowledged elsewhere. In a passage added to the original folklore tales of Judges by some later priest copying Numbers 20:14-21, Edom refuses to allow the Israelites to pass to get to Canaan (Jg 11:17), and Amos 1:11-12 refers to it. All of this is quite contrary to the command of Deuteronomy 23:7, where the problem created by the creation of the temple state makes the lawmaker order that “thou shalt not abhor an Edomite for he is thy brother”. Hooke comments that this could not have been written after the exile when feeling was so bitter, but that is exactly why it was written. If Esau is Edom in the Jacob cycle then the story ends with the brothers reconciled. The Persians did not want their vassals fighting each other.
The Biblicists must think that God deliberately wrote the Jewish scriptures to look as if it were a vassalage treaty by the Persian overlords of the conquered peoples simply to test the faith of the believer. They consider it their duty to help to prove that despite its form, it is really true revelation and not a bondage contract. They hide the discrepancies between truth and the bible until they become liars without apparently noticing—such is the power of faith and a sinecure.
The Price of a Dog?
The law of the Jews was not favorably disposed to sexual activity between males, if Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 are to be believed. The warnings against the Sodomites seem to be a warning against the practices of the native Canaanite religions, which evidently included sacred prostitution. Similar warnings were placed in Joshiah, Hilkiah and Shashan (Dt 22-23). In Deuteronomy 23:18 the female prostitute and the “dog” are linked as if to female and male prostitutes:
There shall be no sanctuary woman (“qedeshah”) from the daughters of Israel,
and there shall be no sanctuary man (“qadesh”) from the sons of Israel.
You shall not bring the cost of a prostitute (“zownah”) or the price of a dog (“keleb”)
into the house of Yehouah your god, for any vow, for surely both of them are an abomination to Yehouah your god.Dt 23:17-18
It seems clear from the parallellism in these verses that “keleb” cannot have originally simply meant a dog, as it later did to avoid the shame. It is unreasonable to argue that ancient Israelite men alone were too godfearing to have been homosexual prostitutes, and stuck to marriage, procreation, and dominating their wives and families.
Female prostitution is mentioned often in the Jewish scriptures, but not the “dogs”. The “hire of a harlot and the price of a dog” were references to sacred prostitution of women or men. A “dog” meant a dog priest and today “dog” is used of a woman available for sex. “Dog-priests” would dress as women and allow themselves to be used in sacred sexual acts, the reason why Jewish priests could not wear women’s clothes. They used their “tails”, in the same way, and could not belong to Yehouah’s chosen people or bring offerings into Yehouah’s holy presence.
The New Jerusalem Bible, which literally translates “dog”, adds the footnote, “a contemptuous term for male prostitute”. This verse is its only occurrence in the Jewish scriptures. Though the later editors of the Jewish scriptures tried to ignore their existence, Israel had had the same practice as “the nations” in this before the Persian law. 2 Kings 23:7 implies that special quarters were available in the temple for “dog priests” before the reforms of the “returners”. The taboo on dogs in the temple will be a reflexion of this older practice.
John Barclay Burns of George Mason University on the web has reviewed the significance of dog (“keleb”) as a symbol of male passivity and perversion. The “dog” did signify a male homosexual prostitute, and shows that homosexual temple prostitution must have been happening before the law was introduced. Mesopotamian texts speak of male cult figures whose sexuality was equivocal who engaged in sex-related practices. One text refers literally to the “woman-like” who agreed to divide his earnings with the tavern-keeper presumably for being allowed to ply his trade. Taverns were permitted places of resort for prostitutes of both sexes.
The “assinnu” was a homosexual member of Ishtar’s cultic staff with whom a man had intercourse. A “zikaru” was a “real” man, a “kuluyu” was an effeminate man, and the “kurgarruhsang”, was a transvestite who acted and danced in the worship of Inanna-Ishtar. The “kuluyu” was certainly a male prostitute in the saying, “the word of the male or female prostitute of the city”. The “assinnu” lacked libido, either from a natural defect or castration, and the word was written in the cuneiform signs as “dog-woman”. However, the cognate Akkadian word for dog, “kalbu”, seems not to have been used in this way.
Fifth-century BC tariffs from the temple of Astarte in Kition, Cyprus, include the “klbm”, “dogs”, who were paid for their participation in the feast of the new moon, but the texts do not say what they are paid for. This is in contrast to Deuteronomy 23:18 where the “keleb” is forbidden to bring payment into the house of Yehouah. J C L Gibson thought the word was an alternative for “qdsh”, which he equated with the Hebrew “qadesh”, literally, “holy man”, thus a sacred male prostitute.
D W Thomas noting the parallelism, took “qadesh”, “a sacred male prostitute”, in verse 17 as the controlling word, and understood “dog” in terms of a male adherent or the devoted follower of a deity. The Amarna letters, he argued, used “kalbu”, “dog”, as a term signifying abject devotion. Abdi-Ashratu, a Canaanite kinglet, assured the Egyptian pharaoh that he was the “dog” of his house, to be construed as a loyal and devoted vassal:
The whole of Amurru land, I watch for the king my lord.
Further, a suppliant to Marduk depicted himself thus:
Like a little dog, O Marduk, I run behind thee.
Thomas also noted that the Phœnician word “klbylm”, “dog of the gods”, was parallel to “abdylm”, “servant of the gods”. He concluded that it had nothing to do with the sexual habits of dogs and had no sense of dishonour. It was a faithful follower, probably of the goddess Asherah. The authors of Deuteronomy seemed not to agree, but G von Rad and A D H Mayes did, and took both verses to mean cultic prostitution carried out by devotees but having no pejorative connotation.
O Margalith speculated that the prostitutes and the “dogs” drinking the blood of Ahab (1 Kg 22:38) meant the cult of Cybele-Dionysos, with its frenzied female and castrated male votaries, had been introduced to Israel by Jezebel and opposed by Elijah. 1 Kings 21:19 was a warning to Ahab that if he tolerated the introduction of this cult he would be its next victim, his bloody corpse devoured by the said votaries.
A collection of cuneiform tablets known as the Middle Assyrian Laws was probably made towards the end of the reign of Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 BC). In them passivity in a freeborn male either forced, connived at, or consented to, disgraced the passive one by categorizing him with females and slaves, while penetration demonstrated masculinity and mastery.
Laws 19-20 mention only men. If a man slanders his comrade, either out of malice or as the result of a quarrel, “everyone has sex with him”. That passive homosexual intercourse is meant here is clear from the fact that the same word is used in law 18, “everyone has sex with your wife”. The root is “naku”, used of initiating illicit sexual intercourse and so literally “fuck”. The punishment is for unproved slander, not for promiscuity, heterosexual or homosexual, and no moral or legal judgment is made on the passive partner. The juxtaposition of laws 18 and 19 shows that passivity equals femininity.
Law 20 considers homosexual acts between male equals: “If a man has sex with his comrade… ” and this is proven, then his accusers “shall have sex with him and turn him into a eunuch”. Only the active partner is punished here. “Naku” has no connotation of rape, so the law does not imply violence, but it does mean initiating illicit intercourse. One of the men was seen as the seducer, and seduction of a male equal into passive intercourse was the crime. A punishment for the passive partner is not mentioned. In Leviticus 20:13 both men are sentenced to death.
To adopt the role of the powerless was to share their state. The male who submitted to penetration was no better than a woman. Leviticus 18:22 should be understood in this context: the free Israelite adult male who permitted penetration and the one who took advantage of this reprehensible passivity were equally guilty. It was an “abomination”.
The use of the term “dog” to signify not only fidelity but also lowly, and groveling self-abasement, and to insult one’s enemies is well-known in the letters from El-Amarna and Lachish. In the Amarna letters, the great kings of Hatti, Assyria, Babylon, and Mitanni wrote as brothers. For the Canaanite vassals, the situation was different. The designation “dog” is used by the petty kinglets of Canaan to their Egyptian overlord, Amunhotep III (c 1388—1350 BC) or Akhenaten (c 1350—1338 BC). They used a standard prostration formula, “I fall at the feet of the king, my lord, 7 and 7 times”, to which was sometimes appended, “both on the stomach and on the back”.
The designation “dog” is employed as a term of insult when one king protests to the pharaoh about the actions of another: the king of Byblos, Rib-Hadda, levels a charge against the king of Amurru, Abdi-Ashirta, “what is A[bdi]-Ash[ir]ta, the dog, that he strives to take all the cities of the king”. Rib-Hadda used the term usually to slander his enemies who include his brother. On one occasion he is driven to the epithet “evil dog”. Abdi-Ashirta depicts himself positively as a watch dog who guards Amurru for the king. In the letters from Lachish (589 BC), the designation “dog” is used by an inferior greeting a superior officer, “what is your servant (but) a dog, that my lord should remember his servant.
That there was an actual image behind this canine metaphor can be seen from one particular position often assumed by the inferior before the superior—two of the tribute-bearing Syrians before the pharaoh Tutmosis III, two servants at the adoration of Ay from El-Amarna, and, Jehu of Israel submitting to the Assyrian king Shalmanezer III. The supplicant kneels with his head between his hands with raised rump. The images of the “dog” as a faithful or groveling servant or as a homosexual prostitute submitting his rear for penetration were not easily distinguished.
Joseph
Professor J A Soggin has closely examined the date of the story of Joseph, and finds it is impossible to give it a contemporary date in the second millennium, when believers think it all happened. The story of Joseph is a late romance. As Soggin says, “Too many elements point to a late date of composition”. There are few signs of the cut and paste assembly that characterize much of the bible. It seems a complete tale. It has none of the signs typical of oral transmission that usually characterize sagas and noted by Gunkel in his examination of Genesis. It is carefully planned and executed as a literary work—a novella. It hinges on interpretation of dreams, putting it in the same category as Daniel 2,4, which was not written until 165 BC. The plot is closely linked with the plots of other late biblical romances like Esther, Tobit, Judith and also the popular romance Ahiqar. F W Golka, in The Leopard’s Spots, confirms that the story of Joseph has all the signs of a composition rather than a compilation.
There are plenty of signs that the Pentateuch was written only after the Persians had conquered the region and had had time to make innovations previously unknown. Donald B Redford in 1970 dated it in the fifth century—in the Persian period. Some of the words used suggest the composition was influenced by Babylon, and therefore pertain to after the “return”. Pithom and Pi-Rameses are called in Exodus “store cities” but the word used is an unusual Akkadian word in the bible, a strange choice of word for an author who was an Egyptian. The expression used by the Egyptians to salute Joseph’s carriage as it passed by, “abrek” (Gen 41:43), looks to be the Akkadian word, “abarakku”, which appears in Phœnician as “hbrk” and means a high official like a vizier.
Inadvertant clues, like this, show that the underlying story, if not the more obvious elaboration of it, was not Egyptian but Mesopotamian. It is odd that Mesopotamian words should creep into this story unless the authors were preferring some words with which they were familiar. In other words, the authors were from Mesopotamia, and since Akkadian was, like Latin, a dead language used in religious contexts only, the implication of its use is that the writers were priests.
Genesis 40:22 says the chief baker was “hanged” proving that the story was written after hanging (crucifixion) had been adopted. The Egyptians did not use this form of murder until the Persian period. So, the story is post-Persian. Almonds were also introduced by the Persians from Asia, so that several passages suggest a late date for the Pentateuch (Gen 48:11, four instances in Exodus, Num 17:8). Money is also mentioned (Gen 47:14,16) at a time long before its use was spread by the Persians who took the idea from Lydia.
D B Redford had noted that the Joseph story is not sound in its information about Egyptian matters, but rather reflects the customs of Canaanite royal households rather than those of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The eastern wind of Genesis 41:5 is the sharab, that blows into Palestine from the Arabian desert. It does not blow into Egypt. Joseph’s Egyptian name is a fake or a poor attempt at transliterating a genuine Egyptian name into Hebrew. Since Redford few people have tried to date it even so early. The place of Israelite slavery, Gothen, is unknown in any ancient Egyptian texts until the Hellenistic period when it was one of the nomes. Similarly Genesis 41:45 mentions On, the Heliopolis of Hellenistic times.
Biblicists counter this by what they call the “local colour”, but they are using the usual Christian “arguments” of plausibility and congenial context when such stories in such terms could be dated at any time BC. The local colour is pretty wishy washy. Biblicists say the emblaming of Joseph reflects Egyptian mummification, the local colour, but the practice of embalming in Egypt was better known in the later, more worldly, period of the Greeks and Romans than it was before. So, in the late period, it was a known Egyptian practice, but it was also a late Jewish practice, so need not have reflected Egypt at all. Joseph gave instruction he had to be returned home, and embalming was also a specific practice for treating bodies that had to be transported, since carrying a body putrifying in the heat could not have been pleasant. Sunday school teachers and Christian fundamentalists do not want to give alternatives to their preferred explanations. Theirs is the sin of omission! Take note! An omniscient God must notice it, even if they do not.
One clue to the date is that there is mistrust against Joseph’s brothers, who are carefully quizzed and obliged to admit their other brother, Benjamin, and their father. They are treated the way Moslems are currently being treated by the west. Plainly there must have been a division present in the near east of the time that left the Egyptians feeling distrusting. Moreover, the distrust of the Israelites by the Pharaoh of the Exodus, reflects the same distrust. The Egyptians thought the Israelites might be a fifth column in their own land. For most of the times accepted for these biblical events, Egypt actually controlled Canaan as a colony, and it seems unlikely that Israelites could have been thought of as likely enemies or allies of some serious enemy. The Egyptians were the allies of the small hill states against Assyria, so the Assyrian period does not fit either.
There are only one serious occasion this distrust could have reflected. It must have been long after Canaan had been an Egyptian colony, and reliable buffer of Egypt. Palestine must have been under the control of an enemy of Egypt for long enough for the Eyptians to have doubts about Canaanite fidelity. The only such enemy was the Persians from the fifth century BC The Ptolemies took over from the Persians to reassert Egyptian hegemony over Palestine, but the Persians had spent over a century preparing the Jewish temple state as a buttress against Egypt, and had given them laws and holy myths, that they had become attached to. The Ptolemies ran Egypt, and supported the publication of the Jewish scriptures in the third century on behalf of the Jewish priesthood whom they made a strong effort to win back to favour the Egyptians as saviours and protectors.
The biblical suggestion that the Egyptians would not share a table with Israelites is unknown anywhere else. It sounds like a misrecording of the reverse situation. That after the Persian period, the Jews would not share a table with foreigners. It would sound churlish that the Canaanite brothers of Joseph would not share a table with their benefactors, and so the storyline has been reversed, with the intention of making out that the Jews had their habit from the Egyptians not the Persians. And, the Egyptian priests, like the Magi, had the same habit, doubtless under their influence from the time of Cambyses. The Jewish state was set up by the Persians as a temple state and the people were to be a nation of priests. All of them had to adopt the strict purity codes of the Magi.
In the terms of Ezra, the sons of Joseph were not admissible as Jews, because their mother was Egyptian and worshipped Egyptian gods, yet here they went on to become two large northern tribes—Ephraim and Manasseh. The story is written after the time of Ezra, in reality, so it might seem odd that these two tribes were ever thought of. The point is that the Egyptians of the Ptolemies were trying to re-align Jewish loyalty from the Persians to the Egyptians, and so were trying to impress Egyptian-ness on to the formerly Persian culture of the Jews. In the later romance of Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth is converted to Judaism. The myth of Exodus from Egypt had the same purpose. Jews were to think of themselves as Egyptian, not Persian. The story itself presents Egypt as a saviour of the Jews under direct command of God. It was God’s will that the Jews should feel indebted to Egypt (Gen 45:8).
Joseph is peculiarly wise and interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams as plenty and plague, advising him to stock up in times of plenty and dole out in times of famine. The seven year cycles of plenty and famine are fable but the advice is like telling granny how to suck eggs. The Pharaoh and the Egyptian priesthood owned the land and always had control of what happened to the produce from it. That they had not thought of storing up for times of need is absurd. It is like the myth of the great prehistoric Welsh navigator, Llew, arriving at Jericho and finding there the newly arrived Israelite tribes speaking Welsh and eating pigs. “Fellow Welshmen”, he declared, “Never eat pig, for it is the sacred animal of winter”. Whereupon he told them the whole cycle of Camelot myths that eventually metamorphosed into the Jewish scriptures. The Israelites were so amazed, they never ate pig again, but forgot why, except for Welsh Jews who are well known to enjoy fried bacon with laver bread for breakfast. The story of Joseph is of precisely the same kind.
The Joseph romance, originally based on some elements of the Jacob cycle, will not have reached its present form until the time of the Maccabees about 150 BC. The name Jacob occurs often in the story and the doublet about the brothers getting rid of Joseph suggests a basis in an earlier tale expanded at the time of the Ptolemies, when they sponsored the Jerusalem temple to show the friendship of Egypt for Judah. The myth of Joseph is an Egyptian folk tale (or tales) used as a narrative bridge between the cycle of stories about the patriarchs and the cycle of stories about Moses. The story of Potipher’s wife is known in an old Egyptian story called The Two Brothers.
The origins of the Joseph story in the bible are much simpler than the extended romance we now have.
A wandering Aramaean was my father, and he went down into Egypt and he sojourned there few in number.Dt 26:5
Jacob and his children went down into Egypt.Josh 24:4
There is no mention of Joseph. The extended Joseph romance was probably added to enlarge upon and essentially replace the original terse tradition of wandering Aramaeans when the saga of Moses was devised. The Persians will have presented the Jews as slaves of Egypt, not because they were ever in Egypt but because they were ruled by the Pharaohs. The Persians wanted to show that the Jews had good reason to be opposed to their former Lords and Masters, the Egyptians. From 300 BC, however, Yehud was ruled by the Egyptians and the temple was favoured by the Ptolemies in about mid-century and many expensive gifts were given to the temple. This also was when the Torah was said to have been translated into Greek, the language of the Egyptian kings.
This then will have been the time when the story of Joseph was added, flattering the Egyptian king as a liberal willing to accept foreigners as his ministers and, particularly, appointing a Jew to the highest position in the land, all at the command of the Jewish God.
Conclusions
In summary, it is true to say that not one of the events or characters of the early scriptural books have been confirmed by documental, inscriptional or archaeological evidence. The literary genre of the stories and this absence of objective evidence cry out that these are myths of national identity, and the most likely time of their composition is after the Babylonain “exile”. Try to get a Christian to believe evidence, though! They persist that God is making a revelation even though he contrives to make it look like a forgery. What is God’s purpose in doing that?
The truth is that they put their faith in the scriptures not in God, and so they will defend the scriptures even though they can no longer be defended on the evidence. If they once accepted that the ancient set of tall tales, myth and romance was Persian propaganda, their faith in God would evaporate. That, of course, shows that they have little faith in God but it is a proper reaction. After all the God was set up for a human purpose, so why shouldn’t this be recognized again?
As to the differences in the practices of the patriarchs with the later religion—again used as an argument for ancient provenance rather than myth-making—there are two reasons. One is that the proto-scriptures were not all written at once, they were composed over a period of about 100 years and might have covered several phases of “returners”. In that time, changes were made that have left their fossils in the mythology.
The other reason was that the aim of the Persian governors was to depict the Jews mainly faithless, to persuade them to make amends for the supposed failings of their forefathers. So the old religious practices of the native Canaanites, the Am ha-Eretz, were depicted as apostasy from the worship of the true god, but when later “returners” implemented the priestly law and bound worship of Yehouah to the temple, the tales of earlier “returners” served to add to the myth by showing even God’s servants as disloyal. The practice of marrying a sister hinted at in the stories of Abraham and Jacob but later banned serves to show even these Patriarchs of dubious dedication to the true god.
Hooke points out that people do not invent myths of their own humiliation, though that is the constant theme of the Jewish scriptures beginning with Genesis. It should be sufficient to show that Jews did not write these scriptures. It was their rulers—the Persians.
A steady theme of these sagas is that the younger brother is preferred to the elder and rightful heir. It symbolizes and justifies the intrusion of the new state of Yehud and its new god.
From Apikorus
I have read (on the web) at least one hyperskeptical speculation that Genesis 14, which has long been deemed of uncertain provenance (not fitting within the usual JEPD classification), might have been intentionally added during the Hasmonean era, since the priest-king theme obviously would work in the Hasmoneans’ favor. That the character of Melchizedek is not present in the Book of Jubilees bolsters one’s skepticism here. Alas, there is an apparent seam in Jubilees where the Melchizedek pericope likely once appeared, and the fact that Melchizedek is present in Genesis in all three major text traditions (proto-rabbinic, Septuagint, and Samaritan Torah) suggests that Genesis 14 was already intact by the Hasmonean era.
-->
Moses and Exodus
