Judaism
Exodus and Numbers: An Hellenistic Romance
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 11 May 2009, Friday, 12 June 2009
John Van Seters
For every reference to an event or a series of events in Dtn, there is a counterpart in J.J Van Seters
Professor John Van Seters is a distinguished professor of biblical literature at the University of North Carolina. Refuting the idea that Genesis, Exodus and Numbers consists of snippets from different documents, using the methods of history of religions theory, form criticism and modern methods like archaeology, he shows in two important books, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian, and The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers that they have been written by an author identified as the author of the J source in the Documentary Hypothesis. There was no E source, he avers, but just the Yehouist (Yahwist) who is J-E with some parts commonly attributed wrongly to P. P was never a complete separate source, but a redactional extension of the Yehouist, who also added the book Leviticus, for that was his interest at a later period than the Yehouist when the priesthood felt able to ratchet up the demands they made upon their congregations. The crux of Van Seters’ work is that he shows unequivocally that the Yehouist is later than Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomists, and is indebted to the prophets especially Jeremiah and Isaiah.
Thus Second Isaiah 52:12 describes the exodus from exile in similar terms to the description of the exodus from Egypt in Exodus 13-14. Which of them is original? Shortly before, in Isaiah 45:2, Yehouah had made Cyrus, the shah of Persia, his champion to go before him, just as the kings of the ANE did as the vanguard of the army. The same notion appears in Deuteronomy 20:4, 31:6,8 where Yehouah is promising to defeat enemies. So, Exodus seems dependent on what seem, in terms of the bible’s own chronology, to be later works, and one of which is plainly Persian or post-Persian. Van Seters is arguing that the Yehouist’s redaction of Exodus-Numbers is contemporary with Second Isaiah. The similarities of language between the Balaam oracles of Numbers and Second Isaiah substantiate such a relation. For example, both use El as an alternative to Yehouah, an uncomon practice in the bible, but one popularized from the neo-Babylonium period when ilum, the equivalent of El, was often used to refer to a god. The theme that God does what He says (Numbers 31:19) is a constant theme of Second Isaiah (40:8; 44:25-26; 45:23; 46:10-11; 55:8-1).
Exodus-Numbers, though presenting themselves as early books and early history of the Jews, are actually among the latest of the biblical books written, as John Van Seters (The Life of Moses, 1994) shows by an exhaustive analysis. Van Seters shows that the unifying editor of these books is the author of the J source, the Yehouist (Yahwist). Van Seters thinks he wrote in the exilic period, after Deuteronomy, which he takes to be the book discovered in the time of Josiah. In fact, Deuteronomy is Persian, so the Yehouist was writing later still. It translates into the period of the Ptolemaic Greek kings. So Van Seters’ close arguments about the authorship of Exodus-Numbers support the thesis of these pages. If it is valid, that Deuteronomy was brought by Ezra from the Persian chancellery in the late fifth century BC, then the Yehouist was writing later still—most likely in the time of the Egyptian Ptolemies.
That is not Van Seter’s hypothesis. He accepts the biblical myth that Deuteronomy was found in the time of king Josiah around 620 BC. For Van Seters, the Yehouist was writing only a few decades later in Babylon. On this basis, Van Seters brings the myth of Moses from the mid to late second millennium to the middle of the first millennium, but, if Deuteronomy is later still, not late seventh century but late fifth century, then much of the bible was written and substantially redacted from Persian times into Hellenistic times! In particular, Exodus-Numbers had to follow Deuteronomy, and so could easily have been written after Alexander’s conquests in the third century BC, as a minimum a full millennium after the time it purports to record. It is noted elsewhere on this website that slaves escaping from Egypt after 400 years of captivity would not have been familiar with Babylonian myths, so the idea that Genesis is contemporary with a notional exodus led by Moses is absurd. It is not absurd, though, if Moses was really Ezra, and the exodus was really from Mesopotamia.
The Real Exodus
In the thesis in these pages, the “return”, the enforced colonization of Yehud by the Persians happened around the final quarter of the fifth century, over 100 years after the death of Cyrus, whom the Persians presented as the saviour of deported people, and the restorer of abused religions. By the time that Cyrus took over the neo-Babylonian empire, the exiled Jews had been two whole generations in slavery away from their land of origin, taking the exile to have begun in 586 BC.
Not everyone who lived in Judah by any means had been deported to Babylon. Only the nobility, the literate and the skilled had been removed. The aim of these deportations, which were the common means of pacification in the ANE, was to leave a people leaderless, demoralized and unable to cause trouble. The deported leaders were usually put in charge of an unruly people somewhere else. The people regarded them as colonists favoured by the empire—and so they were as long as they maintained order, a task that they had to concentrate upon to retain the support of the imperialist regime, and therefore their own safety.
After over fifty years, it is quite unlikely that many of those deported originally were still alive—people rarely lived until they were sixty—or at any rate active. They had died in captivity or were old and infirm. Moreover, they are most unlikely to have been able to maintain any of their own traditions, as the bible maintains. They were in a tricky and uncertain situation, and would have had to concentrate on the job in hand, trying to stay alive in a strange place surrounded by enemies. If any had retained both life and a yen to return, they would have been too old to travel such a long way. As for the younger generations, they would have been absorbed into the local culture, taken up local customs and names, and integrated into the much more sophisticated life of an old and cultured society. Few can have wanted to return to a country they did not know, and as desiccated uplands, could hardly compare with the fertile plains of what was Eden—Beth Eden in Mesopotamia—where they had lived for the last half century.
Nevertheless, it seems that some did “return”, or were sent by Persian administrators before the organized colonization of a century later that now bears the name “The Return”. The earlier piecemeal colonization of Judah was not well met by the locals, the people who had been too poor and insignificant to be deported. For much of the fifth century there seem to have squabbles over ownership rights, the “returners” doubtless claiming land that the locals had farmed in the meantime, and considered their own, and quite probably was their own, as the “returners” were not likely to have carried with them deeds of possession. Moreover, there must have been disagreements about religion too, the native Canaanites and Edomites sticking to their older Canaanite fertility gods, but the “returners” having much more sophisticated ideas from Babylon. This century seems to be the basis of the lawless period described in the bible in Judges. Judges were Persian officials.
In Deuteronomy 1:9-18 is an account of the appointment of a governing council of elders, echoed in Numbers 11:16-22, 24-25. Exodus 18:13-27 also has the appointment of law courts and judges after the inspiration of Jethro the Midianite:
The story has led to speculation about Midianite origins, not only of the courts, but of Israelite religion as a whole.J Van Seters, The Life of Moses
It is explicit in the Deuteronomic code (Dt 16:18) which provides for the appointment of officials and judges in different regions, and Midianite seems to mean Mede—and therefore Persian. The brief statement in Deuteronomy 1:18 that the people were instructed in everything they must do in regard to the courts is expanded in scope in Exodus 18:20. No evidence exists outside the bible of any early office of judge like that related in Exodus, but in Phœnician countries in the mid first millennium evidence for the office is abundant.
Now, Joshua the Priest was the first leader of the “returners”, according to the bible, albeit mythologized in a different era as Joshua the conqueror in Joshua. In Judges he supposedly died aged 110. This time period is the time between the death of Cyrus and the actual organized colonization of Yehud. Besides the antagonism between returners claiming what the locals did not consider belonged to them, there seem too to have been rebellions, and support for Egyptian rebellions. There might also have been local support for the revolt of Megabyzes, the noble Persian satrap who was betrayed by Artaxerxes Longimanus over his promise to spare Greek mercenaries fighting for the Egyptians when they voluntarily surrendered, and rebelled against his friend and overlord, Artaxerxes, as a matter of honour.
The “conquest” of Canaan is now accepted by everyone except the most stiff necked as a myth. The appearance of of the “captain of Yehouah’s armies” (Joshua 5:13-15) to give Joshua instructions before the battle of Jericho is a veiled theophany. The captain of Yehouah’s armies is the archangel Michael, Persian Mica (Mithras), who is the visible face of God Himself, just as Jesus Christ is for Christians. The campaigns of Joshua were shown by Van Seters to have been based on Assyrian campaign reports, and many scholars now accept this as being so. Thus, in one such report, the Goddess Ishtar appeared fully dressed for battle, to the king, Ashurbanipal, assuring him of success in his upcoming campaign. Moreover, Assyrian kings wrote on their monuments of commissions they had had from a god, perhaps to punish certain enemies. The god provided the king with the commission, contract or covenant, with a promise of success, and the king undertook to do it. Mithras was the Persian god of contracts.
There are signs, such as that in Exodus 4:10-17, that the editors were virtually deifying Moses. He was being represented as the speaking voice of God, and Aaron was his prophet. It is a sign of the stage during which Moses was made mortal in the form of Aaron and Moses, having originally been Ahuramazda! Moses is Mazda, is Mitra, is Mica, is Michael, the captain of Yehouah’s armies—mortalized! The Persians led their armies with an empty chariot reserved for Mithras, a god of the heavens, and the Israelites were led by Yehouah as a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of light by night, clouds and light being symbols of a heavenly god.
ANE iconography of the second and first millennia BC includes a picture of a god extending a sickle-sword against the enemies of his favoured people and their king, enabling them to defeat their enemies. In Joshua 8:11-26, Joshua held out a rod against the city of Ai until it and its inhabitants were destroyed. Joshua is acting like the god of the ancient icons. Either he was once a god and is reinterpreted as a divinely guided man in the interest of monotheism, or he was misinterpreted as a man from the ancient icons in what R Graves and J Podro (The Nazarene Gospel Restored) call iconotropy.
The actual period of Judges, a manufactured dark age in history in many respects, ended when “the whole of that generation was gathered to their fathers”. It is a biblical formula standing for an hiatus in history too wide for anyone to know what went before. The period is repeated in Genesis 50:26, and Exodus 1:6-8, as the age of Joseph after which the Israelites were supposedly enslaved in Egypt. They never were, as a nation at any rate, but Palestine was for long periods part of the Egyptian empire, so its inhabitants were not free as colonized people. The choice of 110 years as a formula suggest the passages are not independent. Judges was based on a confused period of Palestinian history, and so the mythmakers of Exodus and Genesis have reused it with a similar purpose, and so too the theme of a leader dying and another arising applied to some of the judges in Judges, word for word, implies that Judges was the original.
Purpose and Methods
By Ptolemaic times, the once mighty Persians had become irrelevant, but there remained an enemy in the east for the Egyptians. It was the Syrian Greek kingdom of the Seleucids, and Judah was in the middle of them, albeit initially part of Egypt. The Persian myths had depicted Egypt as the enemy of the Jews, their enslavers. The Ptolemies wanted them onside against the Seleucids, and favoured the Jewish temple, giving it privileges, and fine presents to build it up. They also offered to publish the Jewish scriptures for the use of the many Alexandrian Jews and for the use of scholars in the Alexandrine Library. It was the chance to change the Jewish books written by the Persians into something more congenial to (then) modern politics. So, the Egyptian and Jewish priests were put in contact by the Ptolemies so that the Jewish books could be “restored” before publication!
The Egyptian and Jerusalem priests, in their conniving, had to include in their revised Jewish “history” the extant myths of the Jews, all of which had a Mesopotamian provenance, but they wanted to make the founder of the Jewish religion, and the initiator of the independent Jewish state—even though it was called Israel—Moses, depicted as an Egyptian prince. Though the revised story was written in the first half of the third century BC, the priests were not dumbkopfs. They were scholars in charge of the temple schools of life and the Jerusalem priests had become the local government and ruling class of Judah with the collapse of Persia, so they too were their country’s intelligentsia. These people knew an abandoned bamah when they saw one, like that at Shechem, and how to invent a mythical history for it to suit their needs. That is what they did.
What no one today, whether supposed scholars and historians or pseudo-historians and pot boilers, seem to recognize when they look with astonishment through the accounts of the biblical exodus is that the actual authors, who were much later than the alleged events, could write into the story familiar landmarks and ancient abandoned structures together with the myths that had become associated with them—in short write convincing myths that rang true because evidence existed. Circles of standing stones remain prominent for millennia. So too do old fortresses and the grander buildings of abandoned cities, usually made of permanent material like stone. Ancient temples and high places, stone built and with platforms and altars were often used for centuries, and remained obvious in a landscape for centuries longer even when they ceased to be used.
If modern archaeologists can find platforms, paved areas, benches, altars and columns as they do at sites of ancient worship like the bamoth of ancient Canaan, and we are 2500 years from when they were in use, then only a few centuries after they ceased to be used, they must have been conspicuous ruins to the people of the time. Structures used by pagan and polytheistic Canaanites centuries before the bible was written down could have still been in use or not long abandoned when it was written. Indeed, if they were still being used when the Persians instituted monotheism and a single place of worship in Jerusalem, the Persian colonists had an incentive to discredit them in the history they had started to write—the Deuteronomic history. By the time Egyptian priests were involved in editing it for publication, the position of Jerusalem in Jewish religion had been established and there was no incentive to change it. It suited the Jerusalem priesthood to keep the ancient evidence of polytheism in the holy works as evidence that the people were always ready to apostatize, as the theme of the Deuteronomistic historians insisted.
The Persians began to write the bible around 400 BC, and the Greek Ptolemies effectively rewrote much of it around 250 BC. Buildings that were still in use around 600 BC by the Canaanites were still prominent in the landscape of Judah, and the legends surrounding them were still being told for the biblical authors to record. The Ptolemaic authors of Exodus and Numbers were doing what pseudo-historians still do today. They were incorporating a lot of unrelated features into a romantic history, but with the intent of creating a new history—a deliberately exaggerated history—for the Jews whom they needed on side as allies and puppets as a buffer state against the Seleucids. The ruling priesthood of Judah were happy to comply since they were the immediate beneficiaries. Before the Egyptian priests connived with Jerusalem priests to publish the Jewish holy books, they were available only to the priests for liturgical and sacerdotal purposes, so the books could be “improved” provided that the core texts and themes remained recognizable when read out in priestly exhortations, and they could be found by those who were literate and wealthy enough to buy them—not many!
Modern scholars are evidently not as clever as the Egyptian and Jerusalem priests of 2300 years ago, because they begin believing the stories are true before they even investigate them. So, for them the story of Joshua sancifying a high place at Shechem is necessarily true. The place was actually devoted to a Canaanite god or gods, not Yehouah, and might have been in use for a thousand years before the Persians imposed Jerusalem as the central and exclusive sanctuary of the Jews.
When Israeli archaologists excavated it around 1990, it was found to be in remarkably good condition. Needless to say, the experts managed to distinguish between a Canaanite occupation and an Israelite one that would never have occurred to them had it not been for their conviction that the bible is true history, and therefore that Joshua actually did conquer the Holy Land for the Jews forever! Biblicists always know whether by instinct or revelation when an image is an idol worshipped as a deity, and when it is merely symbolic of but not worshipped as the true God, Yehouah. Bronze bulls in strata believed to be Israelite are the latter, otherwise they are godless idols of pagan orgies! Israelite images of animals and statuettes of naked women are merely symbolic.
Genesis
It might well be that a version of Genesis was originally a part of Deuteronomy, an introduction to it. In short, it did not exist then in the form it now is, or as a separate book. These “books” were scrolls and limited in length for practical reasons—they had an optimum length, not too short or too long. Perhaps it was at first a version of the first twelve chapters, the rest being later largely Hellenistic romance based on elements from Egyptian tales like The Two Brothers, and legends of the Jews who had come from Beth Eden in Mesopotamia. It corresponds to the Ptolemaic period in Egypt when the country was ruled by Greeks. Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers dealing with either Ishmaelites or Midianites.
Two versions seem to have been mingled, a common feature of the Jewish scriptures probably because the scrolls had at some time been vandalized or even destroyed and had to be reconstructed from fragments and the memories of the priests, who again took the chance to improve some of it. This will have been in the in the Seleucid era when the Jews rebelled against the Greeks in the Maccabaean revolt, and the Library of Nehemiah which was in the temple and housed the collection was savaged. Nehemiah had been sent by the Persians to supervize the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple, after what seems likely to have been an earlier uprising against Persian rule.
In the myth, Joseph, the archetypal Jew, found favour with Egypt’s rulers and was promoted to vizier. It shows that Egyptians had no dislike of “the Jew”, and “the Jew” was of great assistance to Egypt. Egypt is happy to shelter and succour all the descendants of Joseph’s father, Jacob—Jews! It reflects the politics of the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptian priests will have known of the Semitic occupation of the Nile Delta, and the expulsion of these Semites or Asians (the Hyksos) a millennium earlier because they could still read hieroglyphs. They meant to use it as an explanation of the origin of the Israelites, but will have wanted to show it in a good light, and made the Jewish mystery man, Mosha, who had given them the law in popular legend handed down since the Persians established the state of Yehud, into a fully fledged myth.
They saw the similarity of Mosha and the Egyptian word mose meaning “born of” and invented a story in which an Egyptian prince led the Israelites to Canaan, the land whence they had come. Moses will probably have had a full Egyptian name, maybe Rameses from the existing clues, but changed it in the myth to a hybrid name, Moshe-yahu, to match his new god. Moshe-yahu is Mashiah, “born of Yahu” amd therefore “son of Yahu” or Messiah, which gave rise to the word meshiah or “anointed” from the practice of anointing men as sons of God—priests and then kings when the Jews had their own priest-kings in Hasmonaean times.
We know the Ptolemaic priests knew of the Hyksos period in Egypt over a thousand years earlier because Manetho himself describes it. The pharaoh Ahmose besieged Avaris and expelled the Hyksos around 1565 BC, chasing them into Canaan where they were then enslaved as a colony of Egypt. This event was what Manetho and the Ptolemaic priesthood decided was the foundation of the Jewish state. The only trouble was that the people the Egyptians had recorded in the hill country of Palestine after this period were called Israelites not Jews. So Jews and Israelites had to be identified, whence the invention of David, Solomon and the United Monarchy, which then divided into the two separated kingdoms of Samaria (Israel) and Judah. It seems in reality that Judah was simply a part of Samaria, only becoming independent under Assyrian auspices when Samaria was annexed. This tiny Judah was effectively the city state of Jerusalem, and it was only at this time (c 730 BC) that Jerusalem began to grow into a significant city largely from the influx of Israelite refugees fleeing the Assyrian occupation. So, the Israelites were never enslaved in the delta of Egypt, but only in Canaan as an Egyptian colony and buffer between Egypt and the Asian powers.
A popular name among the Hyksos and the name of several Hyksos pharaohs, at least in part, was Jacob, and, at a time when theophoric names dominated, it implies Jacob was an Hyksos god. It is interesting therefore that a device is used in the Jewish scriptures to rename the descendants of Jacob. Jacob is himself renamed as Israel! Founding fathers are the gods of primitive tribes, so both Jacob and Abraham look like possible gods of the Semitic tribes of Syria about 3000 years or so ago. The Persian colonists of Judah came from the region of Harran, and the biblical story of Abraham acknowledges it.
These colonists were not allowed to worship their own original gods, but were obliged to restore the worship of Yehouah. Again it seems to be mentioned in the bible but deliberately misplaced to Samaria and the Assyrians. This is a common ploy in pseudepigraphy, indeed it is the basis of it. Events are displaced so as not to obviously incriminate anyone at the time, but the lessons remain in an historical allegory. The pseudepigraphs could include myths of the gods of the fathers in which the gods became actual founding fathers, bringing the gods down to earth, in a reversal of the normal social progression from mythical father to god. Thus the colonization, mythologized as the “return from exile” was mythologized also as the journey of Abraham from Ur (really Urfa) near Harran to Canaan. Other Aramaean tribal gods became Abraham’s sons. These legends were extant when the Ptolemaic priests had to devize a myth to align the Jews with Egypt. So, Jacob was renamed as Israel to match the stories the Ptolemies already had.
Hebrews
Anyone living in the Persian province of Abarnahara was a Hebrew just as anyone living in the United States of America is an American. Abarnahara means “Over the River”. Abar is the same as eber, probably cognate with “over” which is its meaning. Nahara means “river&rdquo—the Euphrates, in fact. So Hebrews, from the same word “eber”, are those who live “over the river” in relation to the Persians whose country was to the east of the Euphrates, while Syria and the Levant were to the west of it.
The word, however, was already in use in the west with the opposite meaning! The westerners called those coming from the east of the river Hebrews, or Habiru (Apiru), as it is represented in contemporary documents. As the colonists had done just that, come from the east of the river, they were called Hebrews by the native Canaanites. This was the meaning to the Egyptians too. To them, it did not mean an ethnos, in the sense of a people of a common genetic origin, or race, but just an arbitrary group, and as the people coming from the east were considered as trouble makers, maurauders or landless refugees wanting to settle, the name had a pejorative meaning as rogues or bandits. The colonial mayors and officials who wrote to the Pharaoh in the Amarna letters often complained of them.
The ancient city of Mari was on the Euphrates just at the spot where the eaterners arrived wanting to cross. An ancient tablet found there from the time of the ruler Zimri-lim mentions Habiru, possibly the oldest use of the term we have found, settling in his country. The Egyptians use Apiru, and though no one can be certain it is the same word, it looks like it in appearance and in meaning. It is common in inscriptions from the middle of the second millennium in Egypt. So the word is not the name of any particular people until Persian times, when it means, to them, anyone in Abarnahara. Before then it effectively meant “immigrant” to those already settled west of the Euphrates, and was possibly so used by the native Canaanite population of Judah to describe the colonials from Persia supposedly returning. It never was yet another name for Jews and Israelites originally, as it is now, unless Jews and Israelites had been crossing the Euphrates from east to west for hundreds, if not a thousand years, and were also known throughout the ANE as bandits and trouble makers!
The pharoah, Seti, defeated a horde of Apiru at Beishan in Canaan around 1285 BC, yet Beisham is not “over the river” Euphrates from Egypt, so they were not “over the river” but must have come from “over the river” to encounter the Egyptians. They were more likely to have been Iranian tribes from Central Asia than proto Jews. However, maurauding tribes often push settled people from the places they have raided as refugees ahead of them, so it is possible they were Semites fleeing Iranians or Scythians.
The state of Yehud seems to have been set up as a “nation of priests” with a law, to act as a holy center for all the people subjected by the Iranians, as well as a treasury. The post Persian Jerusalem priestly familes had to change it to concentrate and consolidate power and wealth into their own hands. The Levites were Jewish Magi, and doubtless they were trained in the Jerusalem temple. They had to be downgraded relative to the senior Jewish families, many of whom were led by the high priests. The story of Moses and the exodus gave them the chance, and the stories of David and Solomon the chance to concentrate it further. They did so by claiming descent from Moses’ brother and spokesman, Aaron, and when Solomon’s myth was added, the dynasty of the high priests was denoted as Zadokites, descendents of Zadok the priest, a dynasty that was already 700 years old when it was invented! The Levites became servants of the senior priesthood, minor temple officials, and cantors.
Yehouistic (Yahwistic J) Prequel to Deuteronomy
The main point of detail in Van Seter’s hypothesis is that the outline history of Moses and the exodus in the introductory and closing chapters of Deuteronomy was the basis of the Yehouist’s extended history in Exodus-Numbers. Most scholars had previously assumed that it was the reverse, that the chapters of Deuteronomy were a summary of Exodus-Numbers. Van Seters cogently shows the Yehouist depends not only on the narrative chapters of Deuteronomy but on parts of the Deuteronomic history and the prophets. Indeed, the Yehouist’s aim was to write a prequel to the Deuteronomic history, the core of which had been written by the Persians to show that the Jews were forever apostatizing from the proper worship of their God, Yehouah, imposed by the shahs.
Thus the Yehouistic prequel overlaps Deuteronomy, absorbing it into its historical scheme, and then continues its own story into Joshua, the story of the conqueror of the promised land. In so doing, it changed the exodus from an original exodus from Mesopotamia to Yehud into an exodus from Egypt to Israel! The Jewish foundation myth provided by the Persian colonists—that of the wandering Aramaean, Abraham, travelling from Mesopotamia to Palestine—was replaced by a myth of the wandering Egyptian prince, Moses. The actual exodus was the deportation of several thousand Aramaeans from the region of the upper Euphrates tributories into the Palestinians hills to start work on a temple state as a fortress and fort Knox for the Persian shahs.
Moses and an Egyptian origin was meant to replace Abraham and a Babylonian one. The Yehouist pushed back the original myth of the family of Abraham into the remote past, so that it barely mattered compared with the immense later exodus of millions of Israelites from Egypt, except as an explanation of how the Israelites found themselves there in the first place. In Deuteronomy 8, the wilderness was the place where the people would learn their reliance on Yehouah, so that they would regard Him as the provider of abundance in the promised land, and be loyal and obedient to Him. The difference is that the wilderness journey referred to was not that across Sinai in Exodus-Numbers led by Moses but the one from Beth Eden, the land of the upper tributaries of the Euphrates, to Yehud led by Ezra. The Yehouist or later editors have confirmed the text somewhat. Thus in Genesis 26:5, Abraham, supposedly hundreds of Years before Moses is described as being obedient to Yehouah’s commandments, statutes and laws quite anachronistically in terms of the biblical chronology. It shows that the whole tale of Moses is the real anachronism, and the myth of Abraham was written to exemplify the journey of a Persian colonist travelling from Mesopotamia to Palestine.
Van Seters rejects the impression the bible aimed to give of a long tradition, but the actual tradition was even shorter than the one Van Seters, perhaps out of caution, offered. The actual tradition only began with Ezra and Nehemiah, now unimportant and little read books of the bible, books that only relate what happened in the late fifth century BC when Judaism was founded, and even these were not written down until perhaps the second century BC. Effectively, Van Seters shows the so called Old Testament is only a few centuries older than the so-called New Testament!
The Persians set up the Jewish temple state as Yehud by sending colonists into Palestine with instructions to “restore” the worship of Yehouah, the rightful God of the Juddin, and bring them to obey Yehouah’s law, the law brought by Ezra. They were provided with the myth that they were the remnant of a potentially great people who, however, had consistently apostatized against their own true God, who had therefore punished them repeatedly by bringing them down. All of this was shown in a pseudo history devised to be read to the people when they gathered in the temple. Based on Assyrian records, in it the people kept turning to Canaanite fertility gods instead of their own ethical God, until their God arranged their deportation to Mesopotamia as punishment, but, by God’s grace, the Persians had allowed the remnant to return so long as they upheld and maintained His law.
The reality was that the people of Palestine were Canaanites who had never heard of any ethical God until the Persian colonists brought it, but the pseudo history included a time when the law was discovered by a temple priest in the reign of Josiah, so the colonists were merely “restoring” the law that the people ought to have obeyed, but did not, whence their exile!
The political purpose behind all this was geopolitics—the Persians wanted a state as a buffer between Persia and Egypt, a Persian colony but one too big for Persia to digest, and therefore always potentially dangerous, and inclined to revolution. To retain their loyalty to Persia, the people of the temple state, the Jews, had to be depicted as alien to Egypt, but naturally linked with the land of the two rivers. So Egyptians were depicted in the myth as enemies of the supposed ancestors of the Jews, whom they had held in bondage. This bondage, though, was actually in their own land which was occupied by Egyptians. The supposed ancestors of the Jews were not as a nation actually dwelling as slaves in Egypt. Consequently Deuteronomy said nothing much about any physical removal from Egypt. The people simply had an Egyptian yoke removed from them, a “sign and wonder” of the Jewish God, and an example of His “mighty hand and outstretched arm”—His power. The Israelites, the supposed ancestors of the Jews, were slaves in Egypt because the whole of Canaan was annexed to Egypt and enslaved. They were freed by the lifting of Egyptian occupation. The Yehouist makes them really slaves but the story is full of holes.
Professor Donald B Redford, a Canadian Egyptologist, showed in the 1970s that the Jewish scriptures contained Egyptian words and allusions, names and titles that are anachronistic—they only obtained at a much later date than the events being described. It proved the biblical accounts were far from being contemporary. The best known example is that, in Genesis 37:25, Ishmaelite traders carried incense and spices from Gilead to Egypt using Camels. Egyptians early in the second millennium BC would have been amazed because, although Egyptian artists and writers illustrate scenes of every possible event in their everyday lives, none of them concerns camels until the seventh century BC, a thousand years after the Ishmaelites traders of Genesis. Camels were unknown as beasts of burden until around then. Coins are another example. They were invented in Lydia also about the seventh century, and were popularized by the Persians who were interested in promoting fair trade across their vast empire. Pithom, one of the store cities, was not built before about 600 BC, Redford explains, showing that its inclusion in these works proves they are later than that. And indeed, literature of the refinement of the stories of Joseph In Genesis were unknown before the Greeks invented it, and history, around the fifth century BC. The bible has to be written later than this.
When the Jews fell under the authority of the Greek Ptolemies, kings of Egypt after the time of Alexander, the Persian myth had to be changed. The Yehouist was commissioned to write a new myth in which the primary exodus of the Jews was not from Mesopotamia but from Egypt. So, the authors of the Pentateuch were not historians. Their purpose was first political and second religious, the religious content being used to effect the primary political purpose. History for them is what ought to have happened to fulfil their objectives, and so it has remained for religion ever since. When authors like those of Exodus-Numbers did not know what had happened, history was an exercise in creative ingenuity. They had to invent it to fit in with what was known or already accepted and believed, ideologically or theologically. They were darning the holes in their history with yarns chosen by them to have the right color and texture for the job. History today is basically no different except that the available yarns are much more closely constrained by the circumstance—what we call evidence!
In those days, the yarns were effectively new myths invented to join up the scraps of myth and legend already accepted—in this case myths and legends handed down from Persian times when the Jewish religion was invented—and spun in a way that fitted the geopolitics of the time—the face off between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. The prize was Palestine and the Jewish state as a buffer state allied to one side or the other. The original authors of Exodus-Numbers were scribes working for the Ptolemaic Greek kings of Egypt, attempting to show that the Jews originated in Egypt and that is why they had always been natural allies. So the composition is not the pure history we hope for nowadays, and try to achieve by honesty and science, but was a compromise between what was given, and how it had to be spun to curry favour with the people in the buffer zone, the Jews.
From Gods to God
Some scholars think another source that can be distinguished in the Pentateuch uses elohim as the word for God rather than Yehouah, but this Elohistic source acknowledges the change of name of God to Yehouah when the latter name is revealed to Moses. It implies that the name Yehouah succeeded the name Elohim, and evidently that the Yehouistic writer succeeded the Elohistic one. The thesis presented here is that the law was actually brought to the Jews by Ezra, so Ezra is the real Moses.
1 kg 12:28 has elohim translated as “gods” because of the context when the convention is to translate it as “God”, cf Exodus 32:3-4. The Canaanites had been polytheistic when the Persians imposed monotheism by the simple expedient of declaring “Gods” to be the name of the one God. Elohim literally reads “the gods”, so it would follow that the change was made from “the gods” in the pre-Persian religion to Yehouah, the single God, during the Persian period, after Ezra had made the change. Yehouah is habitually translated as “the Lord”, corresponding with the previous title of a favourite Canaanite god, Baal, and also to the title, Ahura, of the Persian God, Ahuramazda. The Egyptians were stuck with Yehouah Elohim but were able to use it to re-emphasize the inclination the Jews were supposed by the Deuteronomic historians to have to apostatize. The stories of the golden calf (or calves), and such tales as Jeroboam returning to polytheism.
When Ezra presented his law, and the changes it implied, he was speaking a language the locals did not comprehend, as the bible itself makes clear. No doubt he was speaking old Persian, and translaters had to render it into Aramaic, the local language of Palestine. Some of the words will have been confused by the hearers, and yet, as important words, the mishearing persisted. The title “Ahura” was new to the local Palestinian people and probably to the colonists too. Note the assonance of Ahura and Yehouah, especially if the “r” could not be properly rolled by either the speaker or the hearers who tried to repeat it.
Ezra imposed his changes in 417 BC, from the clues that remain, but less than a century later (333 BC), Alexander and his Macedonians had beaten Persia, so quite probably all the Persian changes in Palestine had not been fully effected before the end of Persian hegemony over the ANE. Biblical redacters might have gotten used to using either name separately or both in combination as Yehouah Elohim, or at some stage the bible had to be pieced together from a collection of manuscripts, some old and some new, but most partially damaged—the civil war in Seleucid times is the likely occasion. Now the Elohistic source, such as it was, is partly buried by later editing. Van Seters makes a good case for the Yehouistic author sometimes using Elohim for God because the sense of the separate passages does not hold up otherwise.
Because the imposed God was to be a new god to different people, the local Canaanites as well as an assortment of colonists, He had to be made identifiable to the all. The device used at first was to identify Him with “the god of your father” (Genesis 26:24, 28:13, 46:2-3, Exodus 3:6), so all of them could get used to the new god by thinking it was just a strange name for their old gods.
Plagues
John Van Seters notes that the plague narratives are inventions of the authors of Exodus-Numbers. They are not mentioned in Deuteronomy which speaks only of the “diseases” of Egypt, which were encountered by the slaves, not by the Egyptians. If Deuteronomy followed Exodus, then it is hard to understand how this transformation happened. If Deuteronomy came first, then the authors of Exodus were making much more of the “diseases” mentioned in Deuteronomy. They were expanding and altering the earlier minor reference.
Proof is that the author of Exodus-Numbers, in Exodus 15:25, is alluding to Deuteronomy when he makes Yehouah promise not to put on to the Israelites the “diseases” that will be put upon the Egyptians. The later author modifies and mollifies the earlier author of Deuteronomy. He reads the “diseases” mentioned in Deuteronomy as plagues, otherwise the language is unmistakeably the same, according to Van Seters. Thus Deuteronomy often speaks of “signs and wonders” in the deliverance from Egypt, but not of plagues specifically. Elsewhere disobedience by the Israelites will be accompanied by curses—a sign and wonder for the benefit of the people! The author of Exodus has therefore seen a “sign and wonder” at the deliverance from Egypt as a curse upon the Egyptians.
Three of the plagues (gnats, boils and darkness) were added later to the original seven, giving three groups of three, the added ones last, and ending with the terrible plague of the death of the firstborn standing out on its own. Sevenfold punishment is specified in the Holiness Code of Leviticus 26, which is therefore earlier or at least contemporary with Exodus, but the author uses the formulae of the prophets, and so depends upon, and must be later than, them. Deuteronomy has nothing about plagues, and the crossing of the river—always assumed to have been Jordan, but perhaps originally the Euphrates—by the Persian colonists migrating to Palestine was changed into a miraculous sea crossing following the plagues in the Yehouist’s story.
Dividing the Waters
The Deuteronomic Historian’s account in Joshua of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua is copied from how the Assyrian kings wrote their campaign reports, Van Seters says. Nearly all the campaign reports mention the crossing of a large river, most often, of course, the Tigris or the Euphrates, because armies from Assyria were going to have to cross one or the other. The Persian kings, Darius and Xerxes, similarly had to cross the Bosphorus to invade Europe, and Alexander also had to cross a bay as the tide rose on the way to his conquering of Persia. Yet entry into Palestine from the east only meant crossing the river Jordan, hardly a serious obstacle. The Yehouist had therefore invented a drama set in the Sea of Reeds based on the idea that military campaigns required a successful crossing of a stretch of water. It was not necessarily based even on the crossing of the Jordan, but on the reading of the military accounts.
There is even more mythical imagery behind the event. It is the creation imagery of God the Creator dividing the waters of chaos to form the heavens and the oceans, between which he creates the land. So God’s powers, and particularly his successful creative powers are linked with his victory over chaos. To these ancients in the ANE there was nothing so chaotic as the sea. The pan-Babylonian myth had God conquering the chaos monster, Tiamat, a sea monster, in the Babylonian version, but Rahab and Leviathan in the bible. The body of Tiamat formed the heaven and the earth, so the sea monster was divided in an earlier symbolic version of the biblical myth. In Psalms 74, the Hebrew God is victorious over a watery chaos, but the victory makes no reference to the division of the waters in Exodus, but to the Creation myth. Psalms 89 is another example of the conquest of chaotic waters, and Isaiah 51:9-11 has a similar reference linked to Mount Zion. Thus the story of the waters dividing in Exodus copies ancient military records and combines them with the ancient pan-Babylonian creation myth in which God divides the chaotic waters, or the monster symbolizing them, before the creation can occur. There need be no genuine tradition behind it.
Van Seters exposes the false reasoning of biblicists in their frequent arguments for early dates for biblical extracts, especially poetical ones. Here, the “Song of the Sea” is considered an ancient witness to the antiquity of the exodus events and narrative. It contains, they argued, archaic linguistic, stylistic and grammatical features paralleled only in the LBA literature of ancient Ugarit. Yet, these “ancient” features still occur in much later poetry. They are not at all valid indicators of age, and many scholars have considered the “Song of the Sea” actually to have been a late, not an ancient, composition because it embodies Yehouistic and Priestly characteristics. It has to be later than both, and so seems to be an even later addition than either.
Moses and Sinai
Moses hardly features in the Deuteronomy account. The anonymity of the parents of Moses is uncharacteristic of Jewish traditions for which geneology is important. It suggests the tale is invented outside of those traditions. Even Moses’ mother is not named until later on.
The whole story of Moses being found in an ark made of rushes and pitch yells out that it is fiction. It is a copy of the myth of Sargon of Akkad. Pitch is somewhat more representative of Mesopotamia than Egypt, and the name Mose cannot have an Hebrew aetiology because the ethnos of the child was hidden from its Egyptian saviours and the daughter of pharaoh, who named him, in the tale. Though then brought up as an Egyptian prince, by some miracle, Moses knew he was an Israelite, and even murdered an Egyptian in defence of one of his own. The Jewish priests had to have a Jewish (Israelite) Moses, so this unlikely and derivative plot is inserted into the myth the Egyptians preferred.
Furthermore, Herodotus (Histories 1:108-114) has the story of Cyrus being rescued from an infant death at the wishes of the king, being brought up as the son of a poor herdsman, then being revealed as a prince, a typical fairy tale with similarities to the birth narratives of both Moses and Jesus.
Compared with Deuteronomy, Moses is utterly recast in the Yehouist account. In Deuteronomy, he is essentially the mouthpiece or messenger of God, in mythical terms an angel, in historical terms a prophet. He is a typical messenger sent to prophesy judgement having many parallels, and much in common, with Jeremiah. In Exodus-Numbers, he is a leader giving strategic orders. In a few places in Deuteronomy he has the same role, the spy story and the conquest of Sihon and Og, and in his exhortation to conquer the west. It suggests an intermediate alteration of the original Deuteronomy, a stage when what was originally given in the Persian account of the exodus from Mesopotamia as commands of the Persian God Ahuramazda was changed to the words of Moses relaying the commands of Yehouah. In Exodus-Numbers the Priestly authors (P) eventually make him into a magician performing magic as signs and wonders, hinting at Hellenistic magic which arose following the Persian period when many unemployed magi brought magic into the Greek world. In Deuteronomy, God was directly responsible for all the “signs and wonders”.
Nor are the sabbath law and the passover directly connected with the exodus in Deuteronomy. The links are made in the extended myth of the Yehouist, and subsequent editors of Exodus-Numbers—P sets the first passover in Egypt, but the priests had no special involvement in it in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 16:5 refers to passover as a one day long festival held in spring at a local sanctuary. It was not a family rite, as Exodus 12 made it. A beast or sheep was slaughtered and eaten as a nocturnal meal, whence the association of passover with the full moon. Deuteronomy associated it with the centralization of worship at Jerusalem (Persian), and Exodus with the escape from Egypt. Removing the passover from a very early tradition makes it far more comprehensible. Exodus-Numbers not Deuteronomy also connects the passover festival with the feast of unleavened bread. The law of the firstlings covered briefly in Deuteronomy is covered in detail in Exodus-Numbers and explained. Deuteronomy 15:19-23 has no mention of the first born of human beings, only the first born of animals, and even this has no reference to the exodus.
Priority of Deuteronomy
The idea of a “holy people” is Deuteronomic.J Van Seters
However, Van Seters thinks the expression “a kingdom of priests” is later than Deuteronomy on the grounds that it appears in Third Isaiah. Of course, Van Seters imagines Deuteronomy is late seventh century. Third Isaiah being from the Persian period is late in this context, but not when Deuteronomy is seen to be Persian itself. Deuteronomy and Third Isaiah could have been contemporary, or nearly so.
Numbers 33:1 is a fictitious itinerary based on the genre of such itinerary writings. It is, in short, a literary composition, and is post-P. The “manna” story is an expansion of Deuteronomy 8:3a, and so on and so on.
Van Seters has the detail, but he is not alone. L Perlitt found that the parts of Exodus concerned with the idea of a Sinai covenant between God and the people, including the commandments and associated legal material were Deuteronomic. Thus the text of Deuteronomy 16:1-7 differs from Exodus 12:1-14 in respect to the treatment of the sacrifice. The priestly author of Exodus changes the text from boiling the flesh to roasting it in the fire. The Persian practice was boiling not roasting.
H H Schmidt found very many Deuteronomic features in Exodus-Numbers—too many to have been editorial glosses of a supposed earlier work. In particular, the pattern of disobedience by the Israelites, God’s anger, their punishment, their cry for salvation and God’s mercy, which constitute the whole Deuteronomic message can hardly be coincidence. Judges exemplifies the message repeatedly, the only important difference in Exodus-Numbers being that the Yehouist has supplied Moses as an intercessor. But the cry for help is characteristic of Judges.
The whole of the Dtr account is a clear and tightly constructed narrative sequence.J Van Seters, The Life of Moses
The Yehouist has taken individual episodes from this, expanded them and interspersed it all with new material. Careful comparison of each parallel episode and the overall structure confirms the priority of Deuteronomy. The tendency of scholars driven by faith rather than scholarship was to accept the bible’s own chronology as the order of composition. Critical examination shows Deuteronomy to be the earliest layer, and Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers as being among the last biblical books written. Scholars increasingly accept it to be true.
