If we were made in God’s image, when why aren’t we invisible?

Moses and the Exodus 3.1
When Was Exodus Written?

Moses is… the most re-written… remodel1ed to the standards of the latest Jewish revisers some centuries before Christ…
T R Glover

Historical Criteria
Jewish Forgeries

Abstract

Books were written in Greek professing to give accounts of Egyptian and Babylonian culture, but in the light of modern discovery they were inaccurate. The Jewish one, the bible, was divinely accurate. In it Jews had been in the Nile Delta of Egypt since before 1600 BC, but Greek writers know nothing of these Egyptian Jews. Herodotus, a Greek born about 484 BC, is the “Father of History”, even though Moses was supposed to have been writing a thousand years earlier. Exodus in biblical chronology was written before 1200 BC, making it the first history written. No one thinks it was. It was really written after 300 BC. Jews and their Temple did not exist until the time of Darius II in 417 BC. The Egyptian priest, Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek, in which he related the fables of the Jews. What he wrote could have been the earliest form of the Jewish scriptures. The great Jewish leader Moses was recorded nowhere else before.

Historical Criteria

The biblicists use different criteria for the Jewish scriptures than they use for other historical accounts in the ancient Near East in the same period. They recognize that Egyptian Pharaohs glorified themselves and their reign by building grand temples inscribed with their public benefits and deeds, and monuments and stelae similarly inscribed. Other great kings of the ancient Near East did the same. None of this applies to the Jewish scriptures, however. While all these other public declarations are heavily laced with propaganda, the bible is true!

Unfortunately, it is just as much propaganda as the others—or more so. It was aimed at winning over a dissident people to the side of the Persians. The Persian kings realized they could not get a subjugated people to love them but they thought they could get them to love a common god—the universal God of Heaven. That was why they wrote the books of the Jewish bible. Their ploy worked far better than they had reason to expect. Doubtless they would be astonished to know that their propaganda still survives though the civilisation that founded it was destroyed 2,300 years ago by the Greeks.

In all honesty, there is no even remotely contemporary evidence, literary, inscriptional or archaeological of Moses or the Exodus outside of the Jewish scriptures, and the internal chronology of the scriptures is useless historically because it is manifestly symbolic. Despite this utter lack of evidence, the biblicists tell us it does not mean the account is not true.

Herodotus, a Greek writer born in Asia Minor about 484 BC, was known as the Father of History, even though the work of Moses was supposed to have been written a thousand years earlier. In his famous Histories, written about 450 BC, he knew of the peoples of Syria but did not mention Jerusalem or Judah nor the Jewish settlements in Egypt. Notionally, based on the bible, the two peoples had been in contact on the Nile Delta of Egypt since before 1600 BC, but Greek writers betray no knowledge of these Egyptian Jews. Herodotus was silent on Abraham, Israel, David, Solomon, Moses, the temple, and all of that famous long “history”. The fact is that Jews and their Temple did not exist when Herodotus wrote. They were not founded until the time of Darius II in 417 BC.

Aristotle did not mention the Jews, not even in connexion with his comment on the Dead Sea, but his student, Clearchus of Soli, around 300 BC, quoted Aristotle as describing a Jew he had met in Asia Minor. This Jew, like many subsequent ones, tried to compare favourably the principles of the Greeks with the teachings of the Jewish God. Clearchus is the earliest Greek writer to give a decent transliteration of “Jerusalem”, but, despite his information, the Greeks remained unaware of the Jews as a separate nation in the Levant. The extract implied he was the first of his kind met by the Greeks. Alexander brought Jews and Greeks together, and revealed the Jews to the Greek world. From the date of Clearchus, the Jew he spoke of might really have been met after Alexander’s invasion, making even more significant the Greek world’s ignorance of the Jews before it.

Nothing is known of the Jews until Alexander won the battle of Issus (333 BC), took Tyre and Gaza by siege, then went to Egypt and the oracle of Ammon. Josephus relates that the High Priest Jaddua refused to obey the conqueror’s summons from Tyre because of his oath of fealty to the Persians. To punish him Alexander marched on Jerusalem from Gaza, and Jaddua, told by God in a dream, met him at Sapha, dressed in his robes of office and wearing the mitre bearing the sacred name. To the astonishment of his generals, Alexander saluted Jaddua and adored the name, for Jaddua had appeared to him in a dream in Macedonia and urged him to march against the Persians. Alexander went with the High Priest into the temple, offered sacrifices, was shown the prophecies of Daniel concerning himself, and gave permission to the Jews, not only of Judah but of Media and Babylonia, to live under their own laws.

No other writer states that Jerusalem was visited by Alexander, and it looks strange that a gentile would be allowed to sacrifice in the temple of the peculiarly exclusive Jews. Moreover, the prophecies of Daniel were not yet written. Typically of biblical prophecies, they were written about 160 years later! Arrian mentions no detour from Gaza to Jerusalem but rather implies that Alexander went straight to Egypt. Some recollection of such a visit would surely have been preserved by other Jews. Alexander appears by name in only one Jewish book (1 Macc 1:1-8; 6:2) with no suggestion of a visit to Jerusalem, or of special treatment for the Jews. Nor do the histories of his expedition mention any acquaintance with the Jerusalem temple, its ceremonies and its books, even though they carefully describe his visit to Gordium after the battle of Issus, his relations with the oracle of Amon, and his worship of Bel at Babylon. Nor do those Greeks who took an interest in Jerusalem once it had been revealed to the west ever mention Alexander’s visit.

Not until the second century before Christ, did Hellenist historians and tragic and epic poets—Demetrius, Eupolemus, Artapanus, Aristeas, Ezekiel, Pseudo-Philo, and Theodotus—begin to describe Jewish history, more than a thousand years after it was supposed to have started, and sang of the Exodus, Jerusalem, and the rape of Dinah. The translation of the Jewish law into Greek explains this burst of activity and interest in the Jewish scriptures and rabbis. It took decades and, in a sense, was never finished because the Jewish scriptures were never finished. The Septuagint began being compiled in the third century BC by the then rulers of Judah, the Ptolemaic Egyptians, and was not fully completed until the middle of the second century BC, as the Jewish Encyclopedia admits—perhaps even later still. Nothing at all had been heard of Judaism or the Jewish scriptures before this time.

In the same period, Manetho and Berosos wrote books in Greek professing to give accounts of Egyptian and Babylonian religion respectively, but, what is known of them, in the light of modern discovery, is largely inaccurate. The Jewish one, though, was divinely accurate—it is the Old Testament! It was a time when to have an ancient civilization was a matter of national pride. Kings were anxious to prove their nation had been civilized longest. Manetho and Berosos were contemporaries, Manetho writing for Ptolemaic Egypt, and Berossus for Seleucid Babylon (Chaldaea). Both copied Herodotus and both had the same aim—to puff their nation’s history, as Georgius Syncellus also thought. Manetho, an Egyptian priest from Sebennytos in the Delta, under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282-246 BC) wrote his history of Egypt in Greek with this purpose in mind. It is this exaggerrated book that provided the Egyptian list of kings still relied upon by Egyptologists. In it he incidentally related the fables of the Jews. Lysimakhos of Alexandria wrote similarly, and no one knows when Manetho’s work stopped being glossed by copyists and editors, until Josephus cited it frequently in Against Apion, three centuries later. What he wrote could have been the earliest form of the Jewish scriptures as we know them. The great Jewish leader Moses was heard of nowhere else before.

Berosos was a Seleucid writer who wrote an History of Babylonia around 278-290 BC for Antiochus I, also in the manner of Herodotus. Fragments cited by Eusebius or Syncellus include the Babylonian creation myth, now known as the Enuma Elish, including the defeat of the chaos monster, Tiamat, by Bel Marduk. After the Creation, Oannes (Ea, Iah) acted as a type of Orpheus to give humanity its crafts and skills. Berosus relates the Epic of Gilgamesh but calls the Atrahasis figure (Noah) Xisouthros not Utnapishtim, probably a Greek rendering of Ziusudra, the Sumerian hero. Like Manetho, he also wrote the history of Babylonian kings from mythical times to his own present day, apparently making use of king lists. He mentions Sennacherib, who ruked Babylon from Assyria, and queen, Semiramis (Sammuramat, wife of Samshi Adad V, 823-811 BC), whom the Greeks had made legendary. Otherwise little of it makes any sense.

So these histories are unreliable, except for one that was miraculously supervided by a holy ghost. Though the Jews rejected the Septuagint after about 150 AD, it became the Christian bible, the bible that S Paul read long before he was converted. Though Judaism renounced and excommunicated Greek culture later on, 3,000 words of foreign origin, many Greek, are found in the Talmud, the writings of the Jewish rabbis.

The Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BC), aimed to destroy superstition—the Persian inspired Jewish religion—and introduce the Greek way of life, but a war with the Parthians held him back. He called himself Epiphanes or “the Brilliant” but his Greek subjects changed “phi” to “mu” and made him Epimanes or “not quite mad”. He hoped to be a new Alexander the Great, just as today madmen think they are Napoleon. The Jewish priesthood, the Sadducees or Zadokites, an hereditary body as the Magi were, were averse to losing their lucrative position, and saw even more profit in accommodating the king’s wishes. They carried forward a considerable faction happy to Hellenize the Temple. Another considerable faction, however, were appalled that the tradition, they now accepted as God-given, was being impiously altered, and the Temple was being polluted. The nation exploded in civil war. The family of the Maccabees or Hammers led the rebels with the help of the Romans, via the treaty arranged by Judas Maccabaeus (1 Maccabes 8). Jewish history proper had begun, and some original Jewish tradition was preserved from submergence in Hellenization, although it began to change anyway. The Maccabees never let any traditional Zadokites, if they were the original Persian priests, have Judaism restored.

Jewish Forgeries

Hellenized Jews cleverly sought to forge ancient works in the name of Pagan authorities, and in Pagan form as propaganda for Judaism. The poet Phocylides of Miletus of the sixth century BC, has his name on a fragmentary book which includes, maxims of various kinds, that closely echo the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch. It is a first century AD forgery.

Jewish and Christian apologists claim other verses by Greek poets suggest a Jewish inspiration. Most of these lines are forgeries from a source called On the Jews or On Abraham, a glorification of Judaism supposedly by Hecatæus of Abdera (c 300 BC), a companion of Ptolemy I Soter (323-282 BC), and near contemporary of Manetho.

In the Graeco-Roman world, there was a widespread belief in the primacy of Egyptian culture and its pantheon, that many of the gods of Greece had come from Egypt, and the priests of Egypt were sages and wise men who had access to the secrets of the universe. If the Ptolemies had not created this impression, they were keen to emphasize it. When they ruled Judaea in the third vcentury BC, they had a great chance to change the Jewish scriptures from emphasizing the Persian to emphasizing the Egyptian, and they did.

Pseudo-Hecatæus related Jewish origins and customs in what purports to be a digression from his main work on Egypt, apparently the work of the genuine Hecatæus. He had a legend of the Egyptian origin of the Jews who, according to a surviving fragment, fled Egypt after plagues and made their way with Moses to Jerusalem. Manetho, shortly after, expanded the story, then Lysimachus added his contribution, according to Josephus in Contra Apionem. Moses was a rebellious Egyptian priest who made himself the head of a colony of lepers, and was expelled from Egypt with his leprous gang by some Pharaoh. The leper colony does not have to be taken literally. Leper was an insulting word.

Hecatæus offered several versions derogatory to Moses, showing that these “historians” were seeking an alternative to the Egyptian bondage and liberation story propagated by the Persians. Aristeas the Exegete, Josephus, Clement of Alexandria, Diodorus Siculus and Origen all quote from Hecatæus. In the third century AD, Origen noted that Herennius Philo doubted the authenticity of this book in the second century. Extracts in Josephus show the author cited was ignorant of Greek augural lore. They cannot be what any educated Greek writer must have known. The attitude to the destruction of Pagan temples and altars is unimaginable in a Greek author, and the impossibly Jewish ideas it attributes to the Greek playwright, Sophocles, shows it to be a Jewish forgery. Even so, extracts in Diodorus Siculus tell us that Moses founded the Jewish state, temple and priesthood. The high priests ruled, and the Jews had never had a king. It is true when Moses is read as Mazda, and Judah is seen as founded by Darius II.

The forger of Hecatæus attempts an excuse for the absence of any references to Judaism until then. Josephus quotes Hecatæus as writing that earlier poets and historians have not mentioned the Law or the Jewish people because the Law was holy and “not to be discussed openly by profane mouths”, these latter words being an explanatory gloss. Josephus also says that the High Priest, Hezekiah, in the time of Ptolemy I, a man “expert in business” went with a group of followers under an agreement with Ptolemy to Alexandria. It sounds right. Ptolemy doubtless wanted to pander to the large number of Jews in Alexandria, and to the Jerusalem priesthood, at the same time. A period of Ptolemaic indulgence with Jerusalem culminated in the revision and translation into Greek of the Pentateuch, actually the law—Deuteronomy—at first, in the decades coming up to 200 BC. Just at that point Seleucia took over Jerusalem, and a new stage began. The trouble is no high priest named Hezekiah is otherwise known in this period, but perhaps it was expedient to erase his memory.

When were the works of Hecatæus forged? Jewish attitudes to persecution and martyrdom are implausible before the age of Antiochus Epiphanes. Josephus in Against Apion attributes to Hecatæus the story that Alexander the Great gave Samaria to the Jews tax-free for their loyalty to him. Alexander seems to have made Samaria a Macedonian colony, but 1 Maccabees 11:34 says Demetrius II made a partial gift of three districts in 145 BC. It suggests the forger worked some time after this, so not before about 100 BC. N Walter and B Z Wacholder distinguish two pseudo-Hecatæuses. The first wrote On the Jews towards 100 BC, and another author, also confused with Hecatæus, wrote On Abraham between then and Josephus. The Letter of Aristeas, to Philocrates on the Greek translation of the Jewish law, is similarly dated between 118 BC and 113 BC.

Page Tags: Moses, Exodus, History of the Bible, Jewish Scriptures, Alexander, Egypt, Egyptian, Exodus, God, Greek, Hebrew, History, Jerusalem, Jewish, Jews, Law, Moses, Pentateuch, Scriptures, Septuagint, Temple

Last uploaded: 05 October, 2008.