Was the Exodus story plagiarizes from an Egyptian priestly story by the authors of the Old Testament?
Who was Moses? Well, according to the Hebrew Old Testament, Moses was born into the house of Levi, he was the son of Amram, and his mother was Jochebed, she was also his aunty as she was his father’s sister. Which is forbidden in God’s Law, the Torah, that Moses would receive from God. Leviticus 18:12-16 makes it quite clear that marrying your aunt is incestuous.
What we know about the story of the Exodus, with Moses, and the Israelites departure out of Egypt is confirmed by the consensus of Jewish and Western scholars to of been written no earlier than the 5th-century BCE. Yet, conservative Christians today will attest that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch/Torah or the first five books of the Hebrew Old Testament. We are led to believe that Moses lived in the 13th or 14th-century BCE, a millennium or more before any of the Pentateuch books were written. Also, the OT tells us that the Israelites slaughtered every man, women, and child of the Canaanites on the order of their God. Well, that is a lie for a start, as we hear of the Canaanites right through the Bible, as well as the Canaanite bloodline is still among us in Lebanon today. What is more, if the genocide of the Canaanites did take place, then we would not of had the Hebrew language and alphabet, as its origin came from Canaanite script. Furthermore, the earliest Hebrew language text, first appeared in the 9th century BCE, and went extinct by the 2nd-century CE, and was revived in 1881.
The scholar Knohl writing in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin wrote: … The circumstances of the Jacob-el group’s exodus from Egypt are recounted in many documents, most notably by Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing during the Second Temple period around the third century BCE. His writings are preserved in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius *(Against Apion 1.73.7, quoting Manetho’s Aegyptiaca), who lived in the first century CE. (* the brackets and citation are mine.)
According to Manetho, a group called the Hyksos came from Canaan, overran Egypt, were driven out, went back to Canaan, and ultimately settled in Jerusalem. Later, the pharaoh named Amenophis, who wanted to come face to face with the gods, was told by his counsellor that only if Egypt was cleansed of lepers would he be able to see the gods. Amenophis collected all the lepers in Egypt together and settled them in a remote city, Avaris, which had previously been the Hyksos’s capital. The lepers rebelled against Amenophis and appointed a leper priest called Osarseph as their leader. Osarseph had previously served at the temple of the sun god (the biblical “On”) in Heliopolis, and he gave the lepers a new religion that was hostile to the Egyptian religion. They despised the Egyptian gods and sacred animals, which they slaughtered, roasted, and ate.
When the lepers were attacked, Osarseph sent messengers abroad to conscript a militia. He approached the Hyksos in Jerusalem, and they arrived in thousands from Canaan to help Osarseph and the lepers, at which point Osarseph changed his name to Moses. Together, the lepers and the Jerusalemites formed a military power that took over Egypt, looted the Egyptian temples, profaned the idols, and slaughtered and ate the sacred animals. Amenophis fled Egypt and went to Ethiopia. Years later, Amenophis left Ethiopia with a huge army and returned to Egypt. Together with his (now grown up) son Ramses, he fought the joint forces of the lepers and the Jerusalemites, and pursued them into the Syrian mountains.
We have here a story of an ethnic group in Egypt that threatened the indigenous Egyptian religion and objected to the worship of Egyptian idols and sacred animals. This group was reinforced by people arriving from the north, from the direction of Canaan, and together they seized power over Egypt, until Pharaoh Amenophis, aided by his son Ramses, drove them out.
Thomas Römer, a scholar working in Paris, noticed the similarity of plot and argued that it was very reminiscent of Pharaoh’s words at the beginning of the book of Exodus:
And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them. . . . And he said to his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: come, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it comes to pass that when any war should chance, they also join our enemies and fight against us and so go up out of the land (Exod. 1:7, 9–10).
Here, too, is a scenario whereby an enemy from within joins forces with an enemy from without. Römer concludes from these literary affinities that the writer of the exodus narrative borrowed these plot lines from Manetho. Either way, this provides convincing evidence that a correlation between these narratives truly exists… A short extract from the bulletin, for more information, follow the citation links below.
Israel Knohl is the Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. https://websites.harvard.edu/hdsbulletin/files/2019/09/logo_top.png
Also see Bible Archaeology Society of the expulsion of the Hyksos.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/the-expulsion-of-the-hyksos/
According to Plutarch (Manetho, Fr. 80) Manetho the Egyptian was associated with the Greco-Egyptian God, Serapis.
Was Osarseph the real biblical Moses, and were the Hyksos the true Israelites, what do you say?
P.P. Jero Jones
R&I – TP
Jero Jones
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/