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Who Lies Sleeping?

The Pentateuch 3

Copying Herodotus?
Ethnicity
The Priestly Books

Abstract

Moses, an Egyptian prince with no known knowledge of Babylonia, begins his books of the Torah with stories known to be from Mesopotamia. Their outlook was that of Mesopotamian people emigrating to Canaan. Allusions to the “Exile” in Deuteronomy proves that the Pentateuch is Persian, from the fifth century BC, 700 years after Moses was putatively writing it. So, it was not written by Moses. The older material consisted of Mesopotamian myths, elements of Syrian myths and folklore. The priests added detailed laws to do with temple worship like Leviticus, genealogies to give credence to their authority, and bogus history to justify the temple cultus from a putative antiquity. It showed the Israelites as serial apostates from the worship of Yehouah, and a lucrative meal ticket for the priests.

Copying Herodotus?

Jan-Wim Wesselius of Amsterdam thinks the structure of the history of Israel from the patriarch Abraham to the arrival in Canaan and the conquest of it in the book of Joshua, derives from the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The parallel is not merely literary but in the framework of the narrative. The genealogy of the family of the patriarchs matches that of the Persian royal family in Herodotus, especially in connexion with their contacts with the land where the great campaign of both works starts, Lydia in the Histories and Egypt in the Bible.

Application of the Histories’ narrative framework, for Xerxes’s campaign against Greece, to Israel campaigning to enter Canaan, automatically leads to an account like the Bible’s. For Israel to get to Canaan in a great campaign from another continent, Egypt was the only starting place. The reason why the Israelites were in Egypt then needed explaining.

The basis of this is found in the Histories in the early life of Cyrus the Great, Xerxes’s grandfather through his mother Atossa—the two dreams describing his future power, the family members wanting to kill him, his being hidden from them for a number of years, the fulfilment of the dreams as a result of the actions meant for preventing it, and his attaining power over Lydia, the land where the great campaign is to start in the time of his grandson. The contact of Joseph’s great-grandfather Abram with Egypt in Genesis 12 quite naturally derives from the contact of Cyaxares, Cyrus’ great-grandfather, with the Lydians. Joseph is Cyrus. The episodes of Exodus, journey through the Wilderness and Conquest issue autonomously from this literary dependence, and are non-historical. The Exodus as recounted in the Bible is most likely a literary-religious fiction.

The derivation of the structure of one work from another one is a well-attested literary phenomenon, the classic example being Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The first half of the Aeneid reflects the Odyssey, the second part the Iliad. Within the Jewish scriptures, the structural similarity between Nehemiah, Ezra and Daniel is notable.

It is incredible, as Wesselius says himself, that nobody has accepted the literary link even though scholars have noted that the theme of both works is the same—a tremendous campaign of millions to conquer a rich and fruitful land on another continent, starting with the crossing of the water between the two continents as if on dry land. Mandell and Freedman, Whybray and Van Seters, and recently Flemming Nielsen, found many agreements between Herodotus and the History of the Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest, but all have been blind to a direct literary dependence.

J Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch. An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (1992) knew of the link, but pooh-poohed it on the grounds that the description of military events leading to the decisive defeat of Xerxes occupies three of the nine books of the Histories, but nothing like it is found in the Pentateuch. It is a case often used by apologists that what is not exactly matching is not matching at all. Wesselius has shown that the scriptural History of the Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest reflects the Histories, like a mirror. Both have the structure:

Origins.
Ordinary history.
Great campaign.

The importance of this is that the date of this part of the Pentateuch must be after 445 BC, the earliest possible year of the Histories, but before most of the Jewish scriptures suddenly emerged around 250 BC. It suggests the bible was composed between late Persian and early Hellenistic times. Wesselius highlights the Passover Letter, from Elephantine of 419 BC, requiring the Jewish community there to celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. He links the letter with Nehemiah because its author Hananiah could be Nehemiah’s brother Hanani (Neh 1:2 and 7:2). If the letter signifies the same reforms being introduced by the Persians via Ezra and Nehemiah in Yehud, the History of the Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest will have been published about 420 BC to accompany the changes being introduced. A later rewriting using Herodotus in the time of the Ptolemies nevertheless seems more likely.

The festival of Passover is older than the writing of the Pentateuch. It is mentioned, B Porten and A Yardeni note in Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt 4: Ostraca and Assorted Inscriptions, on what are probably early fifth-century ostraca from Elephantine, but it was probably the earlier seasonal or fertility festival, not the one associated with the Exodus. Its association with a liberation from Egypt (not necessarily an exodus) will have been in these Persian times, and explanation of the right way to celebrate the new form of Passover would be expected when the change was being introduced, but association with an exodus must be more recent. The Canaanites must have been in the habit of sacrificing their first born sons on the day of Passover. The original Passover story, which preceded any notion of the Israelites being Egyptian refugees, included this custom of killing the first born. When the exodus story was devised, the sacrificial victims were made into Egyptians rather than Israelites to remove an embarassment, and the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, with the substitute of a ram was anachronistically inserted to signify the earlier end of it. The original custom might still have been remembered by some at the time of the Passion of Jesus, the first born son(!) of God, influencing how it was recorded, even though it was simply a judicial murder.

Wesselius believes that many of the apparent contradictions in the Deuteronomistic History are deliberate, a literary device. The author deliberately indicated uncertainty about vital episodes such as the early history of mankind and of the world, the entire complex of Exodus, Wilderness journey and Conquest, and events during the early monarchy in Israel, by means of giving alternative versions, different accounts of certain passages, the different names used for God, and so on, and ultimately causing a collapse of the narrative.

Such devices might offer a sort of reconciliation of two viewpoints, or deliberately create ambiguity when otherwise two views would be in conflict or one would have to be discarded, to avoid non-acceptance or external conflict. Especially when the conflict is resolved by collapsing the story, it is meant to show the story is not historical but mythology. The absence of such collapsing of the narrative in the history of the two kingdoms suggests the author saw it as more historical.

The Samaritans, as the Israelites, were the main target of the Deuteronomist and they must have rejected the Deuteronomistic History at some later stage.

Ethnicity

E Theodore Mullen, Jr in Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries (1993), sees the Deuteronomistic History as phony. The Deuteronomistic History is an ethnomythography—an idealized past for the formation and maintenance of a distinct ethnic identity in the present. He thinks a literate elite in Babylon imagined a new community and gave it a history via ancient and invented traditions c 550 BC. In this he was correct, but he was wrong to think Jews conceived of it—it was the Persians—and he was about 100 years too early.

Ethnic identity dominates and shapes the Pentateuch. In a second book, Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch (1997), Mullen says the Pentateuch was written for an audience of contending groups to unify Israelite ethnic identity. Mullen argues Genesis to Numbers was composed in the Persian period as a prologue to the previously composed Deuteronomistic History. Mullen is seeing clearly, but not clearly enough.

F V Greifenhagen in a paper in JRS also observes that much of the Hebrew Bible, including the Pentateuch, serves to establish a particular Israelite ethnic identity, based on a mythology of common origins and kinship. Ethnicity is most important on the margin of states. The best time for the elaboration of Israelite ethnicity would have been during one of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian empires. A phony ethnicity will project an ideal norm that will not necessarily coincide with society. Ethnic boundaries are often rigidly defined circumscribing contact with those considered “others”, but, in reality, movement across, or deviation from, these boundaries often occurs.

The scriptures plainly try to separate the Canaanites from the incomers, the Israelites, but there is also a tension between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Egypt is the important ethnic “other” in the Pentateuch, being mentioned in it 376 times against 96 references to Canaanites.

The Pentateuch promotes a narrative that places Israel’s origins in Mesopotamia, and the sojourn in Egypt is only temporary. This ethnomyth competes with an Egyptian origin tradition for Israel. Elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible seems to know only an origin tradition beginning in Egypt (Amos, Ezekiel 20, and Psalms 78, 106, and 136), as does some of the oldest accounts of Jewish origins in Greek literature.

The narratives of Joseph and Moses on their own could stand as testimonies to Egyptian Israelite heroes, but are linked in the Pentateuch to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, making Israel’s time in Egypt a detour rather than a point of origin. This is an editorial device for the two different narratives of biblical Israel’s origin, with the story of Joseph as a link.

The Pentateuch integrates two conflicting origin traditions by subordinating one to the other. The covenantal prophetic model of Exodus to Deuteronomy (and also the Deuteronomistic History), with its Mosaic myth of Israelite origins beginning in Egypt, is made to fit within the genealogical model of Genesis, with its patriarchal myth of Israelite origins in Mesopotamia.

The Pentateuch constructs a strong sense of discontinuity between Israel and Egypt by insisting that Israel, to be truly Israel, must be purged of all things Egyptian. The plundering motif (Ex 3:21-22; 11:2-3; 12:35-36) could be an attempt to fit the positive image of Egypt as a place of enrichment into the more negative frame of the need to separate from Egypt. The Egyptian Hagar and her son are rejected from the lineage of Israel (Gen 16, 21), the Israelites are persuaded to leave Egypt (Ex 1-14), the blaspheming half-Egyptian son (Lev 24:10-23) is stoned, and finally the entire Egyptian-born generation, including Moses, must die in the wilderness and only an entirely new generation, untouched by Egypt, can inherit the promised land (Num 14). Egypt, in much of the Pentateuch, is treated negatively.

Yet the Pentateuch also shows Egypt positively as a place of refuge, of plenty, and of enrichment—an alluring and attractive place—especially in the Joseph story where Israel leaves the famine-ridden territory of the Canaan to enter an Egypt that promises survival and prosperity. The motif of rebellion in the wilderness (Ex 16, 17; Num 11, 14, 16, 20) recognizes Egypt as a pleasant place, while suggesting such a thought was a rebellion against the divine. Are the Israelites different from Egyptians? By insisting that Egypt and Israel are distinct, the Pentateuch implies that some people needed to be convinced of it. It seems that many Israelites considered themselves Egyptian or closely linked to Egypt. In the Persian period, the obvious aim was to dissociate Israel from any positive leanings towards Egypt so as to encourage loyalty to Persia instead. The mixed perspective could be intended to assuage a pro-Egyptian element in the population while leaving an overall negative impression. If it were omitted the Egyptian faction would have been thoroughly alienated.

Contradictions spring from these ambiguities. Laws that speak of Israel as native to the land conflict with the tradition of Israel’s origins elsewhere, and laws that speak of Israel as a sojourner in Egypt conflict with Israel’s experience of slavery in Egypt. A rejection of Egypt cannot sit comfortably with an origin in Egypt.

The anti-Egyptian propaganda is best explained from a Persian perspective. The Persian empire’s troubles in Egypt during this period, the location of Yehud between the empire and Egypt, and the presence of Judeans in Egypt, explain the Pentateuch’s anti-Egyptian rhetoric. There were Judeans favourable to Egypt, and potentially subversive of the Persian backers of the colonists in Yehud. Canaan had been under Egyptian control or influence for most of its history. The original Pentateuch written in the Persian period sought to denigrate the Egyptians by emphasising the slavery they subjected the Israelites to. The Ptolemies, who were faced with the results of this propaganda in what was again an Egyptian subsidiary state, added a more favourable impression of Egypt than the Persians had left in their version of the Pentateuch, and the Maccabees, whose allies the Egyptians were against the Syrians, will have tended to add additional elements favourable to Egypt.

The Priestly Books

Moses was a misunderstanding of the Persian name for God, whose name was attached to the sacred law of the Jews. About this time, when Joseph was added, the idea of explaining the name Moses arose. At first he was depicted as a Jewish leader who had received the covenant at Sinai or Horeb—in short as a retrogressed Ezra. This story too was then elaborated into a massive saga, but now the Egyptians are again the enemy! The Ptolemies wrote the Moses saga too, but it seems strange that the Pharaoh should be depicted so badly if the story was sponsored by an Egyptian king. It will have been rewritten in the time of the Seleucids whose enemy was the Ptolemies of Egypt.

The Seleucid or northern Greek kings took control of Palestine about 200 BC and apparently sponsored the elaboration of the story of Moses. Exodus and Numbers are therefore early second century BC. The Wisdom of Ben Sira, accurately dated to about 180 BC does not mention Moses. Though he was by then surely accepted as the great lawgiver of the Jews, his dramatic biography had not yet been written.

The great book of priestly laws called Leviticus was most likely written under the sponsorship of the Ptolemies when they were adding the Septuagint to the library of Alexandria. The aim of the priests was to maximize their income because they had been essentially treasurers and taxation officials of the Persian empire. When the empire fell however, they had the chance to raise money for themselves exclusively. Sacrifice might well have been a way that the temple was intended to raise money under the Persians, but certain passages contradict the idea that Yehouah wanted sacrifices made to him (Isa 1:11; Ps 51:16; Jer 6:20; and Amos 5:22). These express the later ideas of the Essenes, signifying a second or first century date.

The priests who set down the laws in Leviticus, provided for fields not to be fully reaped (Lev 19:9-10). They did not want to waste their wealth on welfare handouts and so made sure the cost came from the farmer. A corner was to be left, for the poor to pick so that they would not starve. It seems a humane act on the part of the priests of Yehouah, but it is curious that it also justifies the continuation of an ancient custom to mollify the corn-deity. The spirit of the corn fled before the reapers with their flashing scythes until it was trapped in the last corner. To avoid angering the spirit unnecessarily, the last corner was therefore left as a refuge for the spirit. So, the law in Leviticus merely condoned and gave a justification for an ancient practice.

Christians often claim that the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek as the Greek Septuagint by 280 BC. The books of the Pentateuch, in the form they were in at the time, perhaps were but the rest of the biblical books were translated later, the whole process extending from c 250 to about the time of Herod. The documents found at Qumran show that the Old Testament was still being edited, and even written, in the times of the New Testament.

Page Tags: Torah, Pentateuch, Judah, Yehud, Judaism, Israel, History of the Bible, Jewish Scriptures, Persia, Bible, Deuteronomy, Egypt, Exodus, Genesis, God, Land, Law, Laws, Moses, Persian, Yehouah

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.