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Who Lies Sleeping?

Moses and the Exodus 3.2
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

The Letter of Aristeas

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.

The Letter of Aristeas

The story of the Exodus has been built up in layers, and, soon the Ptolemies realised they were taking the wrong tack. They were alienating the Jews when they needed them as allies, just as the Persians did. They began sponsoring the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood financially, and offered to help them write up an accurate history of the people and their temple. These they would place in the massive library they were collecting in Alexandria in Greek and Hebrew, the Jerusalem priests having decided to use sixth century Hebrew as their sacred language though everyone was speaking Aramaic in everyday life.

Sir L C L Brenton (1807-1862), introducing his Septuagint, explains that the Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, paraphrased by Josephus in Antiquities, related in mythical form how the Jewish Torah was translated into Greek. The name, Septuagint, of Jewish scriptures in Greek comes from this story. It relates to the time when Demetrius of Phalerus was the librarian of the Alexandrine Library in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 BC) and specifically to the time of Queen Arsinoë (278-270 BC). Aristeas is presented as a Greek official of the royal court, and this Demetrius seems to have died in 283 BC, so doubt is immediately cast on the letter’s authenticity. Anyway, the Greek king, Ptolemy, allegedly sent him with a delegation to the high priest in Jerusalem saying he wanted to translate the Jewish law into Greek for the wonderful new Alexandrine library. It would benefit the many Greek speaking Jews of that city, some of whom had been “uprooted” from Jerusalem by the Persians, and others who were brought into Alexandria more recently as captives by “our fathers”—Alexander’s conquering Greeks. Indeed, the king released more than one hundred thousand Jewish captives himself, and sent costly presents to Jerusalem as sweeteners.

The mention of the Persians in this context was probably propaganda intended to relieve the Greeks of the whole burden of displacing Jews from the Palestinian hills, and to distance the first century Jews who would be reading this “letter” from their own founding fathers, the Persians. When the Persians had set up the temple state, they had moved in new colonists and thereafter had no wish to alienate them and risk driving them back into the sphere of the Egyptians.

Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical History, 8:32) drawing on Aristobulus, explains it’s name as the Septuagint (Seventy, LXX) because the high priest, Eleazar, sent seventy-two elders familiar with both languages, six from each of the twelve tribes, to Alexandria with an official copy of the law. Then they translated it from Hebrew into Greek in seventy-two days, it was read to the Alexandrine Jews to great acclamation, and was presented to the king. The Jews had to ask permission to take copies of it. Pseudo-Aristeas, writing 150 years later, speaks of the translation of the law (nomos), of the legislation (nomothesia), and of the books of the legislator, implying, especially by the latter, the Pentateuch. But the implication of books is hindsight, for this “law” could only be the law code of Deuteronomy—that was the law until the Ptolemies expanded it. So, an Egyptian king had the translation made, and Jews had the copies they used from the royal library at Alexandria.

Changes were made during translation, or soon after, with the additions of Exodus and Numbers. In Deuteronomy 18:10; 31:25, Moses entrusts the law to the Levites, but, in this myth, six experts from each of the tribes were involved in the important matter concerning its tranlation. If the caste of Levites were solely responsible for the law from Persian times, then they had been by-passed, otherwise their sole responsibility for the law had not yet been settled. Before long, with the publication of the saga of Moses in Exodus-Numbers, the Exodus myth was used to give the Aaronite priesthood and the Zadokites the chief responsibility for sacerdotal matters, and the Levites were downgraded to functionaries. It looks as if the original Jewish magi, the Levites, had been bypassed to set up a new priesthood with more power (Num 18:2-6).

Given the large number of Jews in Alexandria, many of whom ought to have spoken Hebrew having been taken into slavery and just ransomed from it—it is hard to know why translators had to be requested from Jerusalem unless they had to be Levites. Hebrew might have been better understood in Jerusalem but Greek must have been better understood in Alexandria. The myth puffs the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood, and the names of the translators are given as Jerusalem names not Egyptian or Greek ones. Giovanni Garbini, whose expertise is in language, highlights the passage in the letter that gives away the truth—that the books were not simply being translated but were being re-written or even written! Demetrius is described as saying:

Scrolls of the law of the Jews, together with a few others, are missing from the library, for these books are written in Hebrew characters and language. But they have been transcribed somewhat carelessly, and not as they should be, according to the report of the experts, because they have not received royal patronage.

Here are two contradictory reasons for the work of translation. The original scrolls are missing and replacements were evidently needed. Yet, the library’s Hebrew experts knew they were wrong, anyway, so replacements were needed to correct faulty translations! It sets a perfect scene for the legal experts from Jerusalem and Alexandria to get together and remodel the Jewish laws. The translation exercise led them to realise the errors in the originals so they were altered too! No trace of any translations of the law into other languages of countries with Jewish inhabitants have ever been found or noted by contemporaries, and only doubtful dates for some Dead Sea Scrolls testify to earlier versions at all, though we need not doubt that the Persians had supplied them.

The Greek of the Septuagint Pentateuch is good compared with most books of the Septuagint, but its koine words and constructions betray an Egyptian provenance. It seems to have been an Alexandrine Greek dialect, so it was not translated by Jerusalem Jews. The Samaritan Pentateuch, differing from the Masoretic Text in about 6,000 places, has been denigrated as having been translated from the Greek. In many passages, the Septuagint matches the Samaritan but differs from the Jewish Torah. It is an argument that assumes the Masoretic Text is original. Both the Samaritan and the Jewish versions of the Torah could have been translated from Greek, but the Jewish Torah subsequently tinkered with when the Samaritan one was not, notably to eliminate any traces of its Greek origins. Exodus found in Qumran cave four and dated c 100 BC matched the Samaritan version. A copy of Jeremiah found in cave four at Qumran and dated c 100 BC matched the Septuagint. Now, the longer Masoretic version is considered to have been a “Palestinian reworking” (J A Fitzmyer). When the regnal years of some kings of Judah and Israel differ in the Septuagint from the Masoretic Text, the scholars’ inclination is to favour the Hebrew. Yet, besides the scattering of the manuscripts when the Library of Nehemiah was plundered in the civil war, Judaism was changed by the rabbis early in the era to ameliorate messianism and adjust to the loss of temple worship. They are good reasons for “reworking”.

J D Shenkel (Chronology and Recensional Development in the Greek Text of Kings, 1968) favoured the Greek over the Hebrew, the latter having been changed. The supposed consistency of the Masoretic Text over the Septuagint could more convincingly show that the former has had a lot more time for inconsistencies to be removed, and what inconsistencies remain biblicists then explain away by clever devices such as regency years or joint rule that are purely supposition. Since many of the kings are supposition based solely on the bible, it piles supposition on top of supposition. The Greek of many scriptural books other than the Pentateuch seems almost intentionally bad, Isaiah particularly, abounding in Semitic constructions and badly translated words, and often seeming to be such bad Greek paraphrases of the Hebrew that they often seem meaningless.

Eventually the name “Septuagint” was used for the whole of the Greek scriptures that emerged whether they had been translated by the mythical seventy scholars or not. The earliest writer mentioning a Greek version of the Jewish scriptures is Aristobulus, a Jewish priest in the time of the Maccabees who wrote a commentary on the law, fragments of which have been preserved by Eusebius (Praep Ev 8:10 and 8:12). Aristobulus it was who said the law was translated into Greek supervised by Demetrius Phalereus in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Eusebius believed Aristobulus was one of the seventy translators. Aristobulus said the Exodus and conquest stories had already been translated in the time of Pythagoras. Really they had been translated by the Ptolemaic priests about 100 years before Aristobulus wrote, but Pythagoras was a contemporary of Cyrus, on whose authority the Jews claimed the right to return. Before the Ptolemies, the mythical history knew no Exodus, though the Jews had been slaves of Egyptian colonists, and the conquest was an allegory of what is now called the “return”.

In these revised histories of the Jews, in the third century BC, the original story will have been ameliorating for the Egyptians. They could not change the, by then, well established story of Egyptian bondage, but the Egyptians were to be presented as generally generous and helpful to the Aramaeans and Israelites in giving assistance to them in hard times, promoting them to high office and showing Pharaoh as being kind to Abraham and his wife, Sarah, as soon as he realised they were married and not brother and sister. Pharaoh allowed the Israelites to leave, as he did the Hyksos of Avaris centuries before, and the incident of the Red Sea will have been taken from the recent exploit of Alexander, whose army crossed a bay in Asia Minor as the tide came in to save a long diversion, and only just made it across, his men ending up wading deep in the water.

The part that had to be presented as harsh, because of the established folk tale, was made into a drama directed by God with impossible miracles to mark it all as myth, but believers can believe anything, and, when Egypt was taken over by the Romans, the guardians of the truth vanished, and soon so did the temple in Jerusalem itself, so that only the impossible myths remained, recorded apparently as true history. Not only that, but the myth became the cement that kept Jews distinct, with their Passover ceremony celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, and thus keeping alive an absurdity.

The next layer was added by the Seleucid kings of Syria, the new rulers of Judah, whose enemies were the Egyptian Ptolemies. They wanted to make the Egyptians anathema again to the Jews, and perhaps added the wicked Pharaoh, the plagues and modified the incident of the swamping of pharaoh’s army. It seems, from Maccabees, that during the civil war of the Hasmoneans against the Greeks and Hellenised Jews in the second century, that the Library of Nehemiah, presumably left by the Persians for their colonists and added to, as noted here over the succeeding years, was attacked and the sacred texts damaged and scattered. When the Maccabees won the war, they attempted to piece the remains together again, but took the chance to add new compositions, where they had been lost or new ones seemed appropriate. It is the reason why some incidents appear as doublets or even triplets, from different earlier versions, and why some stories are virtually complete romances, hardly edited at all. The Exodus story is mainly a late romance as is evident from even a reading of the English versions.

The collaboration of the Alexandrine library with the Jerusalem priesthood under the patronage of Ptolemy allowed the Torah to be extended from a single book of Deuteronomy to something much closer to what we now have, except perhaps for Genesis, which Aristobulus seemed to know nothing about. There was no Genesis in the original Pentateuch, but it was still five books because then Joshua was the fifth one. As Garbini notes, the beginning of Exodus probably contained some elements of Genesis which otherwise was contained in separate writings. When it was enlarged by compiling them all together and adding new compositions like the Joseph saga, it became a new book, and Joshua had to drop out of the Pentateuch, if it was to be the first five books of the Jewish scriptures. Joshua is obviously the continuation of the saga of Moses, and so looks uncomfortable separated from the Pentateuch, accounting for the development of the theory of the Hexateuch. That is, of course what it really is, but the tradition of the Pentateuch was too strong to admit of a Hexateuch.

Elsewhere in the Letter of Aristeas, the author, supposed to have been the contemporary historian, Aristeas, confirms our suspicions:

I have previously sent you an account of what I regarded as the most memorable matters. We received this account of the people of the Jews from the most renowned high priests in renowned Egypt.

The author is excusing the extension of the story by saying it came from reputable Egyptian priests. Egypt had a long history that everyone admired, and its priests were guardians of it. Any Egyptian Moses must have been in their archives, and naturally they were claiming he was, whence their authority to write about the Exodus properly. So, here is confirmation that Exodus and Numbers were written in collaboration with the scholars of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Leviticus will have been added at this time too, and the conquest by Joshua adapted and added to.

G Larssen (JBL, 1983) dates the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch to the latter half of the third century BC, under the Ptolemies. He says “P” is a collection of old and new source material “supplemented with new written texts”. Opinion puts the date of the Pentateuch to the end of the third century BC.

The texts which were to be put into Greek at Alexandria were new texts which gave a new face to Judaism.
G Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel

The repeated mention of Hebrew characters in the Letter of Aristeas is now known to mean the old Hebrew (Phœnician) script, and not the Aramaic characters that are paradoxically now used for Hebrew. Hebrew script was used in some of the Qumran fragments. Garbini has shown that this script is phony in that it never was used continuously from the sixth century. It never evolved from then, when it stopped being used. It was only revived again at the end of the third century, coinciding with the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. So, in fact, the Pentateuch was being translated twice, into Greek, and into Hebrew written in the archaic script. The old disused alphabet was copied as it was on old inscriptions for re-use in this Hebrew revival. Jews stopped using it again about the time of the Bar Kosiba revolt, when the Samaritans started to use it.

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: 19 April, 2008.