Moses: Encyclopedia II - Moses - Moses in history

Moses - Moses in history

Also see the article on the Bible and history

Most mainstream historians find links between the biblical Moses and the Exodus and historical Ancient Egypt as problematic and highly controversial. Due to the fact that the events that transpired in Egypt may have been written down centuries later, it is difficult to separate eyewitness testimonies from allegories and inaccuracies brought on by oral traditions. Descriptions of the Ancient Egypt in the Bible often contain accurate historical details, such as the description of the Pharaoh's harem in which Moses could have been raised, and many authentic Egyptian personal and place names; and at the same time Biblical accounts are muddled with gross inaccuracies. It should be noted that the Bible becomes extremely accurate historically after the events simultaneous with the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt, and biblical accounts of historical events from about 1000 BCE forward correlate almost exactly to their Egyptian counterparts.

In relation to Moses, most importantly, no historical support for the general enslavement of any Semitic nation, especially on the scale suggested by the Bible, has ever been found. There is also no archaeological evidence that any group of people, much less about 600,000 people, wandered a desert for 40 years. Biblical purists chalk this up to Egyptians eliminating failures from their history and not making records of such events. A hypothesis such as this is obviously unprovable; however historically Egyptians did not altogether erase records of their failures, and often recorded them truthfully as such, or simply embelished them to appear as victories.

Most scholars however do not attempt to fully compare biblical accounts of Ancient Egypt with our historical understanding, but rather look into the persona of Moses himself, attempting to locate historical mentions of his specifically. While many theories have been proposed, all have been rejected by the historical community, and even biblical scholars disagree on their interpretations.

Many attempts to date the events described in the Bible have been made. The theories range from as late as the 12th century BC, to as early as the 16th century BC or earlier. Most views on the Exodus conclude:

• It occurred around the end of the Hyksos era, at the time Asiatics were expelled from Egypt, a view supported in the Roman Period by the Jewish historian, Josephus;
• It occurred about 1420 BC, based on records of the apearance of "Habiru" in Canaan forty years later; modern understanding of many Hebrew scholars however is that these Habiru had little to do with Biblical Hebrews;
• It occurred during the 13th century BC, and the pharaoh during most of that time, Rameses II, is considered to be a pharaoh with whom Moses squabbled - either as the 'Pharaoh of the Exodus' himself, or the preceding 'Pharoah of the Oppression' who is said to have commissioned the Hebrews to "(build) for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses." These cities are known to have been built under both Seti I and Rameses II, possibly making his successor Merneptah 'Pharaoh of the Exodus.' This however runs counter to the famous stela of Merenptah in the Temple of Karnak, which contains the oldest known non-biblical mention of Israel. The word is mentioned in the context of eight historical lands conquered by the Pharaoh, and thus is generally understood to refer to the land of Israelities, which could not have already been populated by Hebrews and called Israel at the time of Exodus.
• Another theory places Moses as a noble in the court of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Many scholars from Sigmund Freud to Joseph Campbell suggest that Moses may have fled Egypt after Akhenaten's death (ca. 1336 BCE) when much of the pharaoh's monotheistic reforms were being reversed. The principal ideas behind this theory are: the monotheistic religion of Akhenaten being a possible predecessor to Moses' monotheism, and a contemporaneous collection of "Amarna Letters" written by nobles to Akhenaten (Amarna was Akhenaten's capital city) which describe raiding bands of "Habiru" attacking the Egyptian territories in Mesopotamia. (Transformations of Myth Through Time, Joseph Campbell, p. 87-90, Harper & Row). However, as stated above, the identification of Habiru with Hebrews is extremely problematic, and aside from the monotheistic aspect, the religion of Akhenaten or the period of his rule do not even remotely resemble anything Bible tells us of Moses.
• In the 3rd century BC the Hellenistic Egyptian historian Manetho, considered the story of Moses to have been associated with a certain Osarseph, who led leprous Asiatics to Canaan. It has been considered that there may be a connection between Osarseph and a certain Irsu or Bay, a Syrian who rose to be Chancellor and king-maker of Egypt in the late 19th Dynasty. A similar assertion is made by the Roman historian Tacitus in the Book 5 of his Histories.

No historical records that directly corroborate the Biblical account have ever been found. Many Biblical scholars have suggested that contemporary records of Moses have been deliberately destroyed, but mainstream scientists reject the claim as unempiric and unscientific. Historical records of the period of Egypt's 18th Dynasty are some of the best preserved in the entire history of ancient Egypt. Even the ultra-heretical pharaoh Akhenaten, mentions of whom have been systematically destroyed after his death, is very well known to Egyptologists, and a wealth of information on him still survives. Same can be said of the glorious 19th dynasty of Rameses the Second. Few overal records remain from only one of the suggested timeframes, the Hyksos era (16th century BC) during the tumulous Second Intermediate Period.

All universally accepted extra-biblical references to Moses date from many centuries after his supposed lifetime. Whether or not they are reliant on Jewish tradition or also have access to additional sources is unknown. Polyhistor, Josephus, Philo, and Manetho refer to him, as do others. Manetho alleged Osarseph was not a Jew, but an Egyptian renegade priest, a view, strongly rejected by Josephus.

Finally, there is the challenge of interpreting the many miracles in the Moses story. Most scholars simply dismiss the miracles as legend, but some offer alternative explanations, explaining The Ten Plagues as exaggerated versions of actual pestilences such as draught and earthquakes. For example, according to a BBC documentary, the massive volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in 1600 BC could have generated a tsunami wave that struck the Nile Delta, parting the sea, and triggering the ten plagues. [3]

There is also a psychoanalytical interpretation of Moses' life, put forward by Sigmund Freud in his last book, Moses and Monotheism, in 1937. Freud postulated that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman who adhered to the monotheism of Akhenaten. Freud also believed that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, producing what he believed to be a collective sense of patricidal guilt which has been at the heart of Judaism ever since. "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son," he wrote. A recent alternative suggestion resulting from interpreting Biblical and Egyptian history (by Egyptologist Ahmed Osman) proposes that Moses and Akhenaten are the same person (Moses and Akhenaten, Dec. 2002). Freud's forays in Egyptology have been almost universally rejected by scientists, and advances in Egyptology have long proven his theories to be false.

Several professors of archaeology claim that many stories in the Old Testament, including important chronicles about Moses, Solomon, and others, were actually collected for the first time by scribes hired by King Josiah (7th century BC) in order to rationalize new monotheistic belief in Yahweh; and that no surviving written records from Egypt, Assyria, etc., refer to the stories of the Bible or its main characters before 650 BC. Such claims are detailed and denied by Who Were the Early Israelites? by William G. Dever (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 2003). Supporting this general view is the book by Neil A. Silberman and Israel Finkelstein is The Bible Unearthed (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001).

Traditionalists point out that many of the details of the Pentateuch are consistent with the time period, such as the price of a slave (30 shekels as opposed to around 60 at the time of the Babylonian captivity), the practice of blood covenants and the discovery of what appear to be chariot wheels on the bottom of the Red Sea. Skeptics view most of these as inconclusive or otherwise inconsequential, pointing to similarities between the story of Moses and the neo-Assyrian legend of Sargon of Akkad, for example.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Moses in history", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki