Moses Myth: And You Thought Historizing Jesus Was Tough! (hell, Mormon, genesis)
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The further I dig into this topic of how much myth is contained in the Bible the deeper a hole I dig for myself. I eventually may never be able to climb out of it.
Now much literature is surfacing about how the mythological Moses came about and untangling this knot makes figuring out Jesus' historicity look like a bowtie in comparison.
Some of it is explored in a monumental new book by DM Murdock on Moses---500 pages of small print that goes into incredible detail of how the Moses mythology emerged from a Bronze/Iron Age plethora of cultures, not just Jewish. And figures like Dionysius get dragged into the mix that makes for a read that is so complex in all its intricacies that it is like trying to solve a murder mystery in which a thousand characters are suspect. Can you imagine trying to figure out who killed the butler when you have to investigate a thousand suspects? I don't think we'll ever truly fathom the extent of how much myth got mixed with historical fact over a period of 3000 years.
There's plenty of literature online dealing with how the Moses mythology came about--Israel's position among an army of pagan nations surrounding her was tenuous. Central to all this is how she interacted with them and how thoughts and ideas on religion got exchanged between Jewish representatives and ambassadors and those of other nations, and from kings and scholars in councils down to slaves chatting with each other on caravans and telling each other stories of their own gods and how the Jewish slaves then told their friends and how all this over centuries eventually and ever so slowly got interwoven into Jewish mythology, religion and lore.
The problem is, where do we stop? With Moses? Or do we have to carry it forward through Joshua supposedly conquering Canaan when history says that all the while Joshua was supposedly battling the Amorites Canaan was actually under tight Egyptian rule with Egyptian armies covering nearly every square mile of it; through Samson, though David, through Solomon, through Elijah right up to the Babylonian captivity when all this storytelling and mythology finally gets written down and somewhere along the way the Israelites finally do somehow get into the land, but exactly how is lost to time.
I believe the Bible is such a complex piece of literature that to truly understand what lies behind its creation would take a historical study the size of a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I despair of ever comprehending such a book.
So does DM Murdock have any solid proof for such conclusions? Sounds like all theory and no fact to me. Just another attack on the Bible in the last days. Her credentials aren't very impressive either.
Having read all of your books, I feel at ease now with the discomfort I have felt during many church services over many years. With the Bible stories revealed as myths with underlying truths, how can one be sure that Jesus Christ himself was not a myth? At the moment, I feel a discomfort in even asking that question. On the other hand, apparently Pope Leo (1513-1521) is quoted as saying “It has served us well this myth of Christ.”
Answer:
Dear Ken,
Of course mythology was wrapped around Jesus. Stories like miraculous births and cosmic ascensions are regular themes in mythological literature. I also doubt that Jesus ever performed miracles. A close analysis of the miracle stories of the New Testament shows a remarkable identification with miracles attributed to Moses and Elijah in the Old Testament or with the “signs’ that would accompany the messianic age as described in Isaiah 35. I do not believe that the resurrection had anything to do with the physical resuscitation of a deceased body, but I do believe that an experience that transcended all known human limits was real. Mythology is frequently the only language we have to use in order to make sense out of a transcendent experience. Having said that, I still see no reason to doubt the historicity of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth or the conclusion that seems to have come from many sources that a deep and transforming God experience was met in him.
The Pauline writings, especially Galatians, written about 52 CE, relate Paul’s memory of the experience he had with the leaders of the Christian faith within a decade after the crucifixion. Paul specifically mentions conferring with Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. Mythology does not normally develop in so short a time span as a decade. Mythology also does not have the hero born in an insignificant, dirty little town like Nazareth. Nor does it kill the hero before installing him into the heart of the new faith tradition. These references also ring with historicity and authenticity. No, I think you can count on the fact that Jesus was not a mythological figure but a person of history, while at the same time recognize that it was also compellingly true that mythology was wrapped around him before the gospels were written between the years 70-100 or 40-70 years after the crucifixion. Biblical scholars probe that mythology for clues to his reality, but most are quite sure that he was real!
he was mentioned in the final Holy book The Quran.
9 And has the story of Musa come to you?
10 When he saw fire, he said to his family: Stop, for surely I see a fire, haply I may bring to you therefrom a live coal or find a guidance at the fire.
11 So when he came to it, a voice was uttered: O Musa:
12 Surely I am your Lord, therefore put off your shoes; surely you are in the sacred valley, Tuwa,
13 And I have chosen you, so listen to what is revealed:
14 Surely I am Allah, there is no god but I, therefore serve Me and keep up prayer for My remembrance:
15 Surely the hour is coming-- I am about to make it manifest-- so that every soul may be rewarded as it strives:
16 Therefore let not him who believes not in it and follows his low desires turn you away from it so that you should perish;
17 And what is this in your right hand, O Musa!
18 He said: This is my staff: I recline on it and I beat the leaves with it to make them fall upon my sheep, and I have other uses for it.
19 He said: Cast it down, O Musa!
20 So he cast it down; and lo! it was a serpent running.
21 He said: Take hold of it and fear not; We will restore it to its former state:
22 And press your hand to your side, it shall come out white without evil: another sign:
23 That We may show you of Our greater signs:
24 Go to Firon, surely he has exceeded all limits.
25 He said: O my Lord! Expand my breast for me,
26 And make my affair easy to me,
27 And loose the knot from my tongue,
28 (That) they may understand my word;
29 And give to me an aider from my family:
30 Haroun, my brother,
31 Strengthen my back by him,
32 And associate him (with me) in my affair,
33 So that we should glorify Thee much,
34 And remember Thee oft.
35 Surely, Thou art seeing us.
36 He said: You are indeed granted your petition, O Musa
37 And certainly We bestowed on you a favor at another time;
38 When We revealed to your mother what was revealed;
39 Saying: Put him into a chest, then cast it down into the river, then the river shall throw him on the shore; there shall take him up one who is an enemy to Me and enemy to him, and I cast down upon you love from Me, and that you might be brought up before My eyes;
40 When your sister went and said: Shall I direct you to one who will take charge of him? So We brought you back to your mother, that her eye might be cooled and she should not grieve and you killed a man, then We delivered you from the grief, and We tried you with (a severe) trying. Then you stayed for years among the people of Madyan; then you came hither as ordained, O Musa.
41 And I have chosen you for Myself:
42 Go you and your brother with My communications and be not remiss in remembering Me;
43 Go both to Firon, surely he has become inordinate;
44 Then speak to him a gentle word haply he may mind or fear.
45 Both said: O our Lord! Surely we fear that he may hasten to do evil to us or that he may become inordinate.
46 He said: Fear not, surely I am with you both: I do hear and see.
47 So go you both to him and say: Surely we are two apostles of your Lord; therefore send the children of Israel with us and do not torment them! Indeed we have brought to you a communication from your Lord, and peace is on him who follows the guidance;
48 Surely it has been revealed to us that the chastisement will surely come upon him who rejects and turns back.
49 (Firon) said: And who is your Lord, O Musa?
50 He said: Our Lord is He Who gave to everything its creation, then guided it (to its goal).
51 He said: Then what is the state of the former generations?
52 He said: The knowledge thereof is with my Lord in a book, my Lord errs not, nor does He forget;
53 Who made the earth for you an expanse and made for you therein paths and sent down water from the cloud; then thereby We have brought forth many species of various herbs.
54 Eat and pasture your cattle; most surely there are signs in this for those endowed with understanding.
55 From it We created you and into it We shall send you back and from it will We raise you a second time.
56 And truly We showed him Our signs, all of them, but he rejected and refused.
57 Said he: Have you come to us that you should turn us out of our land by your magic, O Musa?
58 So we too will produce before you magic like it, therefore make between us and you an appointment, which we should not break, (neither) we nor you, (in) a central place.
59 (Musa) said: Your appointment is the day of the Festival and let the people be gathered together in the early forenoon.
60 So Firon turned his back and settled his plan, then came.
61 Musa said to them: Woe to you! do not forge a lie against Allah, lest He destroy you by a punishment, and he who forges (a lie) indeed fails to attain (his desire).
62 So they disputed with one another about their affair and kept the discourse secret.
63 They said: These are most surely two magicians who wish to turn you out from your land by their magic and to take away your best traditions.
64 Therefore settle your plan, then come standing in ranks and he will prosper indeed this day who overcomes.
65 They said: O Musa! will you cast, or shall we be the first who cast down?
66 He said: Nay! cast down. then lo! their cords and their rods-- it was imaged to him on account of their magic as if they were running.
67 So Musa conceived in his mind a fear.
68 We said: Fear not, surely you shall be the uppermost,
69 And cast down what is in your right hand; it shall devour what they have wrought; they have wrought only the plan of a magician, and the magician shall not be successful wheresoever he may come from.
70 And the magicians were cast down making obeisance; they said: We believe in the Lord of Haroun and Musa.
71 (Firon) said: You believe in him before I give you leave; most surely he is the chief of you who taught you enchantment, therefore I will certainly cut off your hands and your feet on opposite sides, and I will certainly crucify you on the trunks of the palm trees, and certainly you will come to know which of us is the more severe and the more abiding in chastising.
72 They said: We do not prefer you to what has come to us of clear arguments and to He Who made us, therefore decide what you are going to decide; you can only decide about this world's life.
73 Surely we believe in our Lord that He may forgive us our sins and the magic to which you compelled us; and Allah is better and more abiding.
74 Whoever comes to his Lord (being) guilty, for him is surely hell; he shall not die therein, nor shall he live.
75 And whoever comes to Him a believer (and) he has done good deeds indeed, these it is who shall have the high ranks,
76 The gardens of perpetuity, beneath which rivers flow, to abide therein; and this is the reward of him who has purified himself.
77 And certainly We revealed to Musa, saying: Travel by night with My servants, then make for them a dry path in the sea, not fearing to be overtaken, nor being afraid.
78 And Firon followed them with his armies, so there came upon them of the sea that which came upon them.
79 And Firon led astray his people and he did not guide (them) aright.
80 O children of Israel! indeed We delivered you from your enemy, and We made a covenant with you on the blessed side of the mountain, and We sent to you the manna and the quails.
81 Eat of the good things We have given you for sustenance, and be not inordinate with respect to them, lest My wrath should be due to you, and to whomsoever My wrath is due be shall perish indeed.
82 And most surely I am most Forgiving to him who repents and believes and does good, then continues to follow the right direction.
83 And what caused you to hasten from your people, O Musa?
84 He said: They are here on my track and I hastened on to Thee, my Lord, that Thou mightest be pleased.
85 He said: So surely We have tried your people after you, and the Samiri has led them astray.
86 So Musa returned to his people wrathful, sorrowing. Said he: O my people! did not your Lord promise you a goodly promise: did then the time seem long to you, or did you wish that displeasure from your Lord should be due to you, so that you broke (your) promise to me?
87 They said: We did not break (our) promise to you of our own accord, but we were made to bear the burdens of the ornaments of the people, then we made a casting of them, and thus did the Samiri suggest.
88 So he brought forth for them a calf, a (mere) body, which had a mooing sound, so they said: This is your god and the god of Musa, but he forgot.
89 What! could they not see that it did not return to them a reply, and (that) it did not control any harm or benefit for them?
90 And certainly Haroun had said to them before: O my people! you are only tried by it, and surely your Lord is the Beneficent Allah, therefore follow me and obey my order.
91 They said: We will by no means cease to keep to its worship until Musa returns to us.
92 (Musa) said: O Haroun! what prevented you, when you saw them going astray,
93 So that you did not follow me? Did you then disobey my order?
94 He said: O son of my mother! seize me not by my beard nor by my head; surely I was afraid lest you should say: You have caused a division among the children of Israel and not waited for my word.
95 He said: What was then your object, O Samiri?
96 He said: I saw (Jibreel) what they did not see, so I took a handful (of the dust) from the footsteps of the messenger, then I threw it in the casting; thus did my soul commend to me
97 He said: Begone then, surely for you it will be in this life to say, Touch (me) not; and surely there is a threat for you, which shall not be made to fail to you, and look at your god to whose worship you kept (so long); we will certainly burn it, then we will certainly scatter it a (wide) scattering in the sea.
98 Your Allah is only Allah, there is no god but He; He comprehends all things in (His) knowledge.
99 Thus do We relate to you (some) of the news of what has gone before; and indeed We have given to you a Reminder from Ourselves.
100 Whoever turns aside from it, he shall surely bear a burden on the day of resurrection
101 Abiding in this (state), and evil will it be for them to bear on the day of resurrection;
102 On the day when the trumpet shall be blown, and We will gather the guilty, blue-eyed, on that day
103 They shall consult together secretly: You did tarry but ten (centuries).
104 We know best what they say, when the fairest of them in course would say: You tarried but a day.
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,915,464 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by truth_teller
Moses is real .
he was mentioned in the final Holy book The Quran.
9 And has the story of Musa come to you?
10 When he saw fire, he said to his family: Stop, for surely I see a fire, haply I may bring to you therefrom a live coal or find a guidance at the fire.
.............
Oh joy.
That explanation makes as much sense as using Mother Goose to verify Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Alright, here's some questions... (assuming that we don't have a literal translation of what happened to moses)
1. Did the Hebrews invent Moses (or any character really), or did they pick up the idea from someone else?
2. If they invented a character, why? To fit into an epic story, as an exaggeration of a real person, as a symbol of a thought process that the Hebrews (or any ancient tribe) wanted to put into literature???
3. Can the character in the story reflect the characteristics of the tribe? Did the Hebrews behave as Moses behaved or David behaved?
The further I dig into this topic of how much myth is contained in the Bible the deeper a hole I dig for myself. I eventually may never be able to climb out of it.
Now much literature is surfacing about how the mythological Moses came about and untangling this knot makes figuring out Jesus' historicity look like a bowtie in comparison.
Some of it is explored in a monumental new book by DM Murdock on Moses---500 pages of small print that goes into incredible detail of how the Moses mythology emerged from a Bronze/Iron Age plethora of cultures, not just Jewish.
I looked up your book. It appears to be something self-published by a bit a of a mythicist hobbyist. I've run into that author before, and she, like others in her camp, reproduces a lot of theories and models from the late 19th and early 20th century. The book is an odd mixture of poor writing, conspiracy theories, outdated scholarship, and a sprinkling of actual critical biblical scholarship, but these kinds of authors tend to try to overwhelm people with volume so they mistake it for erudition. I don't see how a lay reader could sift the valuable information from the worthless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
And figures like Dionysius get dragged into the mix that makes for a read that is so complex in all its intricacies that it is like trying to solve a murder mystery in which a thousand characters are suspect.
Yeah, Dionysus didn't have anything to do with Moses. There is some evidence for a genetic link with some aspects of the Christ tradition, but not for Moses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
Can you imagine trying to figure out who killed the butler when you have to investigate a thousand suspects? I don't think we'll ever truly fathom the extent of how much myth got mixed with historical fact over a period of 3000 years.
There's plenty of literature online dealing with how the Moses mythology came about--Israel's position among an army of pagan nations surrounding her was tenuous. Central to all this is how she interacted with them and how thoughts and ideas on religion got exchanged between Jewish representatives and ambassadors and those of other nations, and from kings and scholars in councils down to slaves chatting with each other on caravans and telling each other stories of their own gods and how the Jewish slaves then told their friends and how all this over centuries eventually and ever so slowly got interwoven into Jewish mythology, religion and lore.
The problem is, where do we stop? With Moses? Or do we have to carry it forward through Joshua supposedly conquering Canaan when history says that all the while Joshua was supposedly battling the Amorites Canaan was actually under tight Egyptian rule with Egyptian armies covering nearly every square mile of it; through Samson, though David, through Solomon, through Elijah right up to the Babylonian captivity when all this storytelling and mythology finally gets written down and somewhere along the way the Israelites finally do somehow get into the land, but exactly how is lost to time.
I believe the Bible is such a complex piece of literature that to truly understand what lies behind its creation would take a historical study the size of a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I despair of ever comprehending such a book.
If you want some actually informed and insightful discussions of the history of Israel and the biblical texts, the following are your best bets:
Moses was clearly an invention of a small, inconsequential tribe of desert goat herders who had expansionist ideas, and needed to invent themselves as super humans... ala the Nazi's and their pretend Aryan ancestry baloney.
Actually the Moses myth was likely brought north to the northern hill country from the territory of Edom/Midian by a nation looking for a new place to live. They would have brought the worship of their deity, YHWH with them. The oldest known occurrences of the divine name YHWH are found in 14th and 13th century Egyptian texts discussing peoples in a land named after YHWH around the gulf of Aqaba. He may have been a god of metallurgy at the time, and only would have become a storm deity upon arrival in a land where the rain could be both critical to survival as well as dangerous. Moses is an Egyptian name, and the original version likely would have had an Egyptian theophoric element attached. What has been preserved down to us has been scrubbed clean of such problems, and the marks of that scrubbing remains, indicating some obscured historical and ideological context that is suggestive of quite a bit more complexity than you posit above. There very well could have been a representative portion of the subsequent Israelite ethnos that came out of Egypt under the direction of a Moses or someone that became Moses over the years. While it's simply impossible that millions of people miraculously trudged around in the Sinai for forty years before settling in Canaan, historians aren't so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cupper3
The myth is a compendium of other mythological beings from that time and place, with a mix of neighboring real history thrown in.
Would you mind being specific? What mythological beings and what neighboring real history?
Quote:
Originally Posted by cupper3
Good story, but I am totally amazed that there are still billions of people who think it is real. But then, good stories tend to do that; L. Ron Hubbard proved that with inventing Scientology, and Joesph Smith with Mormonism.
Good thing you're here to drop the right knowledge on everyone, huh?
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,915,464 times
Reputation: 4561
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel O. McClellan
Actually the Moses myth was likely brought north to the northern hill country from the territory of Edom/Midian by a nation looking for a new place to live. They would have brought the worship of their deity, YHWH with them. The oldest known occurrences of the divine name YHWH are found in 14th and 13th century Egyptian texts discussing peoples in a land named after YHWH around the gulf of Aqaba. He may have been a god of metallurgy at the time, and only would have become a storm deity upon arrival in a land where the rain could be both critical to survival as well as dangerous. Moses is an Egyptian name, and the original version likely would have had an Egyptian theophoric element attached. What has been preserved down to us has been scrubbed clean of such problems, and the marks of that scrubbing remains, indicating some obscured historical and ideological context that is suggestive of quite a bit more complexity than you posit above. There very well could have been a representative portion of the subsequent Israelite ethnos that came out of Egypt under the direction of a Moses or someone that became Moses over the years. While it's simply impossible that millions of people miraculously trudged around in the Sinai for forty years before settling in Canaan, historians aren't so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There was a progression and adaptation of neighboring gods. From the Phoenicians, Adonai, Baali, a derivative of Baal, El, Elah which is entomological related to Allah, Eloah, the feminine version of Elohim, of course Yahweh, and we can go on and on.
The point is, the Israelites adapted or adopted mythical characters from the neighborhood, including the gods that were prevalent.
Mose's Leviticus and Deutreonmical rules were an adaptation of the Code of Hammurabi. As was the flood, an adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Not much original in the OT from that part of the neighborhood is there?
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