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My first statement on this is quite simple: In my view, the OT/Tanakh as a whole is not an accurate historical chronicle, but rather a narrative which a small circles of priestly scribes compiled at some point during the Second Temple period. In actuality, there was probably at least a several centuries of edits, redactions and interpolations performed upon the various OT books before the entire corpus was set into its "finalized" form we know of today. Perhaps the most important question to ask is: who exactly were these priest-scribes and why did they concoct the specific narrative that became the Jewish religion? Of course I don't have the answer to that, nor will I ever in this lifetime; however one can certainly poke and prod around for clues.
But first, my own timeline-outline understanding of what the "real" historical events and trends behind the OT narrative may have been, based on years of extensive research and deep thought:
1800-1550 BCE
This period was probably the supposed time of the first Jewish patriarch Abraham and his early progeny. In all actuality Abe is a purely mythological figure, possibly based on a real personage known through some sort of old Canaanite oral tradition. This also happens to be the time period of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, which brought on Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. During this period a population of foreigners, probably a mix of Semitic Amorites and Indo-European Hittites (and possibly Minoans from Crete) ruled over the Northern (Nile Delta/Lower Egypt) half of Egypt.
After about 200 years, native rules from the South (Upper Egypt) based in Thebes revolted and launched a series of military campaigns against the foreign occupiers in the North and eventually ousted them. Ahmose, the leader of this great patriotic restoration of native rule and the founder of the 18th dynasty and the New Kingdom, sent the Hyksos packing and on their merry way up into the Levant sometime around 1550 BCE. This was in fact the first great "exodus" of a foreign people out of Egypt. Those foreigners who weren't bounced out may have remained in Lower Egypt as a permanent agricultural peonage class. Some of the stories about Abraham's early progeny may have been based on events that transpired in Egypt during Hyksos rule; some of these patriarchs may have been Hyksos pharaohs (i.e. foreign usurper-rulers) or perhaps influential advisors to them. The evicted Hyksos may have become bands of brigands, warlords and petty chieftains in various locales in and around the Southern Levant and Northwest Arabia; perhaps in areas like Judea, Edom and Moab. Stories about the Hyksos kings would have possibly remained strong within local lore of these areas.
1550-1350 BCE: A New Hope for Egypt
For Egypt, this was a time of great prosperity and imperial expansion. It was the glory days of the 18th dynasty, which saw its peak with the pharaoh Amenhotep III. The splendor and exploits of this great king was possibly the basis for the various grandiose legends that Jewish scribe-priests would much later attribute to their version of King Solomon. Of course the "real" Solomon wouldn't be around until about 400 years or so after the period when Amenhotep III reigned; accurate chronology never really matters to fanciful myth-makers. During the 18th dynasty, Egypt became a great imperial power and and conquered much of the coastal Levant region.
The Pharaohs had learned their grand lesson from the Hyksos debacle; the lesson being that they could no longer hunker down and exist as an isolationist hermit kingdom. They would have to interact with the wider world in one way or another, and this interaction had better be in a proactive, expansionist form. In other words, eat or be eaten. The second millennium BCE marked the beginning of the Age of the Ram. The old Age of the Bull (Taurus: roughly 4000-2000 BCE) policies that worked so well during the Old Kingdom would no longer cut it in this new age of countless wars and imperial aspirations. Several millennia of steady-as-she-goes agricultural existence had given way to a vigorous "heroic age" of hyper-vigorous tribal egos.
The most notable feature of the Ram Age (Aries) was perhaps the massive expansion of Indo-European warrior tribes from out of their original homeland on the Russian steppes and Southeastern Europe, to all across the vast expanses of Eurasia. By the middle of this millennium, Kassites were ruling the old Sumerian-Akkadian cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indo-Aryan Mittani people dominated much of Syria, the Hitties ruled a good portion of Anatolia, and of course the Hyksos reigned in Lower Egypt. And much further east, it was during this era when the Indo-Aryan peoples expanded from Central Asia into the Indian Subcontinent and establish their Vedic culture there; those who remained in Central Asia became the various Iranian peoples who would later play a major role on the world stage.
1350-1292 BCE: The Egyptian Time of Troubles (Amarna Period) and the emergence of proto-Monotheism
After the passing of the great Amenhotep III came his son, Amenhotep IV, who was better known to history as Akhenaten. This new king instituted a series of radical reforms that completely upended Egypt's old tradition order. Akhenaten created a completely new state religion based on the worship of one supreme solar god known as "the Aten." The old polytheistic priesthood based around the head god Amun-Ra, was effectively marginalized and put out of work. Akhenaten moved the capital from Thebes to a new capital city he built from scratch, situated about halfway between Thebes and Memphis. The old priesthood accounted for much of Egypt's incumbent ruling order and their ousting massively disrupted Egypt's domestic and cultural affairs. During Akhenaten's reign, a series of plagues, famines and economic disruptions wreaked havoc upon the Egyptian people and the government was unable to secure their imperial holdings in the Levant; because of this, the Levantine vassal states experienced constant raiding and plundering from brigand tribes known in the Amara Letters as "Hapiru" (the "Hapiru" were likely nomadic Amorites; perhaps descendants of the exiled Hyksos). In these letters we can see these vassal rulers desperately begging in vain for Akhenaten to send Egyptian reinforcements to help ward off these ferocious and bloodthirsty bandits. It seems like Akhenaten didn't have the support, will or resources to protect his dependencies. This series of calamities would have thoroughly convinced the average Egyptian that Akhenaten's radical changes greatly angered the gods and thus all this misfortune was divine punishment for these misdeeds. The old Priesthood would have easily capitalized upon this mass discontent and leveraged that in their efforts to forcibly remove Akhenaten from power and subsequently erase every vestige of his ill-fated regime. This is precisely what happened. The Theban priesthood and their military supporters overthrew Akhenaten and installed his young son Tutankhamun (Thoth-Ankh-Amun), the famous "King Tut" most elementary school students know about today. His reign didn't last very long and he was succeeded by a rapidly-succeeding revolving cast of military rulers which marked the end of the 18th dynasty. Some aspects of the Book of Exodus mythos was probably lifted from the actual events of this period. The "ten plagues" that befell the Egyptians may have been the plagues that happened under Akhenaten's reign. These plagues may have in fact been a result of the massive volcanic eruption of the Aegean island Thera.
1292-1200 BCE: The Empire Rises Again and the Second Exodus
With the 19th dynasty, Egypt sees a rapid restoration of order both at home and abroad. Ramesses II The last great native Egyptian pharaoh, led the reconquest of Canaan and it's very possible the events described in the Book of Joshua were actually a retelling of Ramesses' military campaigns in the region. That, or "Joshua" was a Canaanite vassal-warlord fighting on behalf of Ramesses expeditionary forces. Either way, there may have indeed been yet another Semitic exodus out of Egypt during the reign of Ramses. In this case, the people being exiled may have consisted of a Semitic agricultural serf class which had remained in the Nile Delta region after the Hyksos expulsion more than three centuries prior to the 19th dynasty's rise.
It was among these foreigners that perhaps the remaining members of the disgraced and deposed Aten cult sought refuge. In his book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud audaciously suggested that Moses was actually an native-born Egyptian, perhaps Thothmosis being his real name. In other words, he was not a Hebrew as the biblical narrative claims. Not only that, but this Moses was a high-ranking member of the Egyptian nobility and may have been a close follower of Akhenatan; perhaps a high priest of Aten, or at least an important official in Akhenatan's court.
This Moses would have been forced to flee after his master's deposal and if he sought refuge in the Delta region, he would have come into contact with many of the aforementioned serfs, ne'er-do-wells and other people of rock bottom social status. It's perhaps in this environment that Semitic people following a bellicose Canaanite storm god would have come into contact with the idea of a universal creator god concept. If there's any truth to this scenario then the god of Moses would have been Aten, a god with nearly nothing in common with the typical local nature gods of practically everywhere else. Anyway, by the time Ramesses came to power, this Moses would have likely been dead. But perhaps his memory and some of his teachings were kept alive among the rebel cult. Did Ramesses then put the Atenistm problem to bed for good by putting them to good use? By that I mean Ramesses' army may have escorted this entire population out of Egypt and into Canaan in exchange for them helping Egypt reconquer the region. Basically, there was no preposterous miracles or just-in-time plagues needed for this population transfer to take place. The new exiles would have surely been put in favorable positions of power and been afforded the best lands in exchange for aiding the pharaoh. Of course the Second Temple account obfuscates this likely-true history by demonizing the Egyptians and presenting them as being godless and arrogant adversaries of the Hebrews. I suppose it's quite easy to rewrite history 800 years or so after the fact.
***
In the next installment I'll be examining the Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I'll be looking at how these events radically reshuffled the political landscape of the Mediterranean and the Near East regions and how the authors/editors of the Hebrew Bible threw their own historical spin on said events.
But first, my own timeline-outline understanding of what the "real" historical events and trends behind the OT narrative may have been, based on years of extensive research and deep thought:
1800-1550 BCE
This period was probably the supposed time of the first Jewish patriarch Abraham and his early progeny. In all actuality Abe is a purely mythological figure, possibly based on a real personage known through some sort of old Canaanite oral tradition. This also happens to be the time period of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, which brought on Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. During this period a population of foreigners, probably a mix of Semitic Amorites and Indo-European Hittites (and possibly Minoans from Crete) ruled over the Northern (Nile Delta/Lower Egypt) half of Egypt.
After about 200 years, native rules from the South (Upper Egypt) based in Thebes revolted and launched a series of military campaigns against the foreign occupiers in the North and eventually ousted them. Ahmose, the leader of this great patriotic restoration of native rule and the founder of the 18th dynasty and the New Kingdom, sent the Hyksos packing and on their merry way up into the Levant sometime around 1550 BCE. This was in fact the first great "exodus" of a foreign people out of Egypt. Those foreigners who weren't bounced out may have remained in Lower Egypt as a permanent agricultural peonage class. Some of the stories about Abraham's early progeny may have been based on events that transpired in Egypt during Hyksos rule; some of these patriarchs may have been Hyksos pharaohs (i.e. foreign usurper-rulers) or perhaps influential advisors to them. The evicted Hyksos may have become bands of brigands, warlords and petty chieftains in various locales in and around the Southern Levant and Northwest Arabia; perhaps in areas like Judea, Edom and Moab. Stories about the Hyksos kings would have possibly remained strong within local lore of these areas.
1550-1350 BCE: A New Hope for Egypt
For Egypt, this was a time of great prosperity and imperial expansion. It was the glory days of the 18th dynasty, which saw its peak with the pharaoh Amenhotep III. The splendor and exploits of this great king was possibly the basis for the various grandiose legends that Jewish scribe-priests would much later attribute to their version of King Solomon. Of course the "real" Solomon wouldn't be around until about 400 years or so after the period when Amenhotep III reigned; accurate chronology never really matters to fanciful myth-makers. During the 18th dynasty, Egypt became a great imperial power and and conquered much of the coastal Levant region.
The Pharaohs had learned their grand lesson from the Hyksos debacle; the lesson being that they could no longer hunker down and exist as an isolationist hermit kingdom. They would have to interact with the wider world in one way or another, and this interaction had better be in a proactive, expansionist form. In other words, eat or be eaten. The second millennium BCE marked the beginning of the Age of the Ram. The old Age of the Bull (Taurus: roughly 4000-2000 BCE) policies that worked so well during the Old Kingdom would no longer cut it in this new age of countless wars and imperial aspirations. Several millennia of steady-as-she-goes agricultural existence had given way to a vigorous "heroic age" of hyper-vigorous tribal egos.
The most notable feature of the Ram Age (Aries) was perhaps the massive expansion of Indo-European warrior tribes from out of their original homeland on the Russian steppes and Southeastern Europe, to all across the vast expanses of Eurasia. By the middle of this millennium, Kassites were ruling the old Sumerian-Akkadian cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indo-Aryan Mittani people dominated much of Syria, the Hitties ruled a good portion of Anatolia, and of course the Hyksos reigned in Lower Egypt. And much further east, it was during this era when the Indo-Aryan peoples expanded from Central Asia into the Indian Subcontinent and establish their Vedic culture there; those who remained in Central Asia became the various Iranian peoples who would later play a major role on the world stage.
1350-1292 BCE: The Egyptian Time of Troubles (Amarna Period) and the emergence of proto-Monotheism
After the passing of the great Amenhotep III came his son, Amenhotep IV, who was better known to history as Akhenaten. This new king instituted a series of radical reforms that completely upended Egypt's old tradition order. Akhenaten created a completely new state religion based on the worship of one supreme solar god known as "the Aten." The old polytheistic priesthood based around the head god Amun-Ra, was effectively marginalized and put out of work. Akhenaten moved the capital from Thebes to a new capital city he built from scratch, situated about halfway between Thebes and Memphis. The old priesthood accounted for much of Egypt's incumbent ruling order and their ousting massively disrupted Egypt's domestic and cultural affairs. During Akhenaten's reign, a series of plagues, famines and economic disruptions wreaked havoc upon the Egyptian people and the government was unable to secure their imperial holdings in the Levant; because of this, the Levantine vassal states experienced constant raiding and plundering from brigand tribes known in the Amara Letters as "Hapiru" (the "Hapiru" were likely nomadic Amorites; perhaps descendants of the exiled Hyksos). In these letters we can see these vassal rulers desperately begging in vain for Akhenaten to send Egyptian reinforcements to help ward off these ferocious and bloodthirsty bandits. It seems like Akhenaten didn't have the support, will or resources to protect his dependencies. This series of calamities would have thoroughly convinced the average Egyptian that Akhenaten's radical changes greatly angered the gods and thus all this misfortune was divine punishment for these misdeeds. The old Priesthood would have easily capitalized upon this mass discontent and leveraged that in their efforts to forcibly remove Akhenaten from power and subsequently erase every vestige of his ill-fated regime. This is precisely what happened. The Theban priesthood and their military supporters overthrew Akhenaten and installed his young son Tutankhamun (Thoth-Ankh-Amun), the famous "King Tut" most elementary school students know about today. His reign didn't last very long and he was succeeded by a rapidly-succeeding revolving cast of military rulers which marked the end of the 18th dynasty. Some aspects of the Book of Exodus mythos was probably lifted from the actual events of this period. The "ten plagues" that befell the Egyptians may have been the plagues that happened under Akhenaten's reign. These plagues may have in fact been a result of the massive volcanic eruption of the Aegean island Thera.
1292-1200 BCE: The Empire Rises Again and the Second Exodus
With the 19th dynasty, Egypt sees a rapid restoration of order both at home and abroad. Ramesses II The last great native Egyptian pharaoh, led the reconquest of Canaan and it's very possible the events described in the Book of Joshua were actually a retelling of Ramesses' military campaigns in the region. That, or "Joshua" was a Canaanite vassal-warlord fighting on behalf of Ramesses expeditionary forces. Either way, there may have indeed been yet another Semitic exodus out of Egypt during the reign of Ramses. In this case, the people being exiled may have consisted of a Semitic agricultural serf class which had remained in the Nile Delta region after the Hyksos expulsion more than three centuries prior to the 19th dynasty's rise.
It was among these foreigners that perhaps the remaining members of the disgraced and deposed Aten cult sought refuge. In his book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud audaciously suggested that Moses was actually an native-born Egyptian, perhaps Thothmosis being his real name. In other words, he was not a Hebrew as the biblical narrative claims. Not only that, but this Moses was a high-ranking member of the Egyptian nobility and may have been a close follower of Akhenatan; perhaps a high priest of Aten, or at least an important official in Akhenatan's court.
This Moses would have been forced to flee after his master's deposal and if he sought refuge in the Delta region, he would have come into contact with many of the aforementioned serfs, ne'er-do-wells and other people of rock bottom social status. It's perhaps in this environment that Semitic people following a bellicose Canaanite storm god would have come into contact with the idea of a universal creator god concept. If there's any truth to this scenario then the god of Moses would have been Aten, a god with nearly nothing in common with the typical local nature gods of practically everywhere else. Anyway, by the time Ramesses came to power, this Moses would have likely been dead. But perhaps his memory and some of his teachings were kept alive among the rebel cult. Did Ramesses then put the Atenistm problem to bed for good by putting them to good use? By that I mean Ramesses' army may have escorted this entire population out of Egypt and into Canaan in exchange for them helping Egypt reconquer the region. Basically, there was no preposterous miracles or just-in-time plagues needed for this population transfer to take place. The new exiles would have surely been put in favorable positions of power and been afforded the best lands in exchange for aiding the pharaoh. Of course the Second Temple account obfuscates this likely-true history by demonizing the Egyptians and presenting them as being godless and arrogant adversaries of the Hebrews. I suppose it's quite easy to rewrite history 800 years or so after the fact.
***
In the next installment I'll be examining the Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I'll be looking at how these events radically reshuffled the political landscape of the Mediterranean and the Near East regions and how the authors/editors of the Hebrew Bible threw their own historical spin on said events.
