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ALL OUT OF EGYPT - PAGE: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 comments

PART ONE

All the religions today are in trouble. Separated from their esoteric spiritual sources, they have become more or less corrupted.  And Christianity, the dominant religion of Western civilization, has lost its hold—broadly speaking—on its more intelligent masses.

      There are several interconnected reasons for this. One is anthropomorphism.

Many people are already put off by the idea of a personal God outside the universe who takes sides and interferes with human affairs.  They are offended by a god who is supposed to be all love and forgiveness, but who can be jealous and vindictive.

For no clear reason, he chooses one tribe to be his “chosen people”.  He tells them to take over another tribe’s land. Then he slaughters thousands of people from other tribes if they dare to encroach on that land.  This is supposed to be the universal god of all humanity, let alone of the universe? He even wants to destroy all his “chosen people” when they stray too often from his strict rules of diet and behaviour, and is only dissuaded by Moses’ intercession.

This concept of God is of course not inherent in the New Testament but comes from the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures that have been tacked on as the prelude to the Christian gospels.  The rationale given for doing this is that Jesus is said to be the Messiah predicted by the Hebrew prophets, whereas he does not even fulfill the criteria they give for recognizing him.

The first step in becoming free of this oppressive picture and reaching the real essence of Christianity is to realize that the Old Testament is not historical.  As it is however the foundation of modern Israel’s claim to its land, and this point is at the core of the current political crisis in the Middle East, it is of vital concern to every one of us.

Israeli archaeologists in the recent decades have been going over almost every foot of the area trying to verify its history.  The result, combined with the cross-referencing available to modern scholars, has shocked them.

A Tel Aviv University archaeologist, Ze’ev Herzog, created a sensation on October 29, 1999 with his cover story in the weekend edition of Israel’s national daily newspaper, Ha’aretz.  He wrote “This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel:  the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.  Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom”.[i]

           These results were quickly suppressed after that, although these were respected Israelis who did the research, and judging by what Israeli politicians say these days, one would think they had never been published, let alone on the front page of their national newspaper.

           An acclaimed recent book, however, The Bible Unearthed,[ii] by two of Herzog’s colleagues, Finkelstein and Silberman, backs up these statements in great detail, and has been garnering increasing attention.[iii]

            In the first place, they show from many aspects that although the earliest books may have been written a couple of centuries earlier, the bulk of the Hebrew Bible was only written down as late as the 7^th century BCE.  Even in describing the stories of early characters like Abraham or Isaac, the political scene and even the customs are those of the 7th C.

          For instance, the kingdom given to Esau, son of Isaac, is supposed to have been Edom.  But it did not exist as any sort of entity until nearly 1000 years later.   Camel caravans are described in the stories of both Abraham and Joseph, who are supposed to have lived around 2100 and 1840 BCE respectively, but camels were not domesticated until around 1200 and not widely used until a few centuries later.  Revealing, too, is that their burdens of “gum, balm and myrrh” were precisely the products carried only later in the Arabian trade of the 8^th-7^th centuries.[iv]  There are many such examples given of anachronisms that point to the 7^th century.

            More serious is that archaeologists can find no trace of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem (supposedly around 950 BCE), nor of his other great buildings.  Some say the temple must have been completely destroyed to build new buildings, but so have other buildings and traces remained.  In fact, the first mention of Israel as even a people in any inscription is on a stele of 1207 BCE.

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ALL OUT OF EGYPT - PAGE: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 comments

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