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| The Crossing of the Red Sea by Nicolas Poussin |
The story of the Patriarchs begins with a call by God to Abraham (initially called Abram) to leave the anachronistically named city of “Ur of the Chaldees” in Mesopotamia and go to Canaan:“In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying,Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:” (Gen. 15:18).
The primary purpose of the patriarchal history is to trace the transmittal of this covenant from generation to generation.While Genesis frequently says or implies that the covenant passed from Jacob to Joseph, and then from Joseph to his son Ephraim, in a portion of the story known as the Blessing of Jacob, there is an indication that the covenant passed into the hands of Judah.This inconsistency, one of many, shows how the later feuds between the kingdom of Israel (under the leadership of Ephraim) and the kingdom of Judah heavily influenced the telling of the patriarchal history.
Biblical chronology places the patriarchal period in approximately the first half of the second millennium B.C. but we have no direct contemporaneous proof in the historical record for the existence of either the Patriarchs or the twelve sons of Israel. Many of the places and relatives of Abraham, however, have names that point to the first millennium B.C. as the time in which the stories were written. Everything we know about the Patriarchs and their families comes from either the Book of Genesis or folk tales and legends.
When Abraham was seventy-five he brought his wife Sarah (initially called Sarai) and his nephew Lot from Mesopotamia to Canaan.When they arrived, they found the land engulfed by famine and continued on to Egypt.
In Egypt,Abraham feared that the pharaoh would have him put to death in order to take his beautiful Sarah as a royal wife. So Sarah pretended to be Abraham’s sister and she became a member of the royal court.Despite the Pharaoh’s lack of knowledge about Sarah’s marital state, God brought down a series of plagues to punish the Egyptian monarch for his indiscretions with Abraham’s wife, and when the king learned the truth, he returned Sarah to her husband, gave Abraham great wealth in repayment, and ordered him and his family out of the country.
Abraham returned to Canaan and, when he arrived there, determined that the land where he settled was not large enough to support both him and his nephew Lot. So he gave Lot first choice of land and agreed to take what was left.Lot looked about and decided to cross over into the Transjordan,the territory east of the Jordan River,where he settled in at the city of Sodom.Abraham remained on the Canaanite side of the Jordan.
Sodom had become a city known for evil and corruption and God decided to destroy it.But Abraham intervened and God agreed to leave it alone if it contained ten honest men living within. Two angels went to scout the place out and, in disguise, received hospitality from Lot. After an attack on Lot’s guests by the citizens of the town, the angels determined that Sodom failed God’s test and gave warning to Lot to leave without looking back.Lot’s wife couldn’t help herself, though, and turned around to see what was happening. As a consequence, she was transformed into a pillar of salt. Lot’s two daughters thought they and their father were the last people left on the earth and, in order to preserve the race, the daughters became pregnant by Lot.The children born of those unions became the ancestors of the people of Moab and Ammon, two nations that didn’t exist until long after the patriarchal period.
In Canaan, as in Egypt, Abraham again encountered a monarch who he thought would kill him in order to take Sarah as a wife. So again they pretended to be brother and sister.Many years later,his son Isaac had a similar experience in the same city,with a monarch having the same name.
When Abraham reached the age of eighty-seven, Sarah allowed her hand maiden, Hagar the Egyptian woman, to have a son by Abraham to provide an heir. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. Abraham loved Ishmael but God told him that Sarah would have a child when she reached the age of ninety and this child would be heir to the covenant. As a consolation, he told Abraham that his older son would also be the founder of a nation. Ishmael became the ancestor of the biblical Ishmeelites, who in turn were identified with the ancient Arab people. Abraham thought the idea of a child so late in life was quite amusing and laughed heartily.When the son was born Abraham named him Isaac,which inHebrew means,“he laughed.”
Isaac married Rebecca and she became the mother of twin sons, Jacob and Esau. During her pregnancy the children struggled in the womb over who would be first born.Then God told her,“Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated fromthy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23).
Esau emerged first and by tradition should have been heir to the covenant, but Jacob,with the help of hismother, tricked his father and cheated his brother out of the covenant. The younger son became the founder of the House of Israel and Esau became the father of the Edomites. Jacob’s brother was furious over the deception and vowed to kill him after the period of mourning ended. Jacob decided that the smart thing to do was flee north to Syria and live with relatives.
In Syria, Jacob acquired two wives and two concubines by whom he had twelve sons and a daughter.The two wives were sisters, Leah and Rachel, and the two concubines were Zilpah and Bilhah, handmaidens to the two sisters. Jacob loved Rachel most and she bore him the two youngest and favorite sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Leah had six sons, among whom was Judah, and a daughter named Dinah.The two handmaids had two children each.
The territories associated with each of the children in the tribal allotments have some geographic connection to the order of birth, the matriarchal divisions, and political relationships among the various factions.
The first four children born, sons of Leah, correspond to the four southern most tribes in the full Israelite confederation. Reuben lay at the southern portion of the Jordanian side and Simeon encompassed the southern portion of the Canaanite side. Judah stood on the northern boundary of Simeon and became the political center of the united monarchy and later of the southern kingdom of Judah. Levi, although distributed throughout the other territories, had its political center within Judah at Jerusalem (after Judah took Jerusalem away from Benjamin).
Rachel had only two children, Joseph and Benjamin. The tribe of Joseph’s separated into two parts, one for each of his sons,Ephraim and Manasseh.The territory of Ephraim led the opposition against Judah’s domination over Israel and, after Solomon’s death, it became the political center of the northern kingdom of Israel. Manasseh became the largest territory in the kingdom, part in Canaan and part in Jordan. The Bible often describes each of the two pieces as the half-tribe of Manasseh.
Benjamin, Rachel’s other son, held the territory between Judah and Ephraim and included the city of Jerusalem. Saul, the first king of the united monarchy, came from Benjamin.
Together, the Rachel tribes correspond geographically to the central portion of the House of Israel and the southern half of the northern kingdom. At some point, Jerusalem became the capital of Judah and the physical status of Benjamin became ambiguous, probably because Judah obliterated it.
The organization of the main Leah tribes in the south and the Rachel tribes in the center reflects the later political divisions between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Five of the six remaining lesser tribes—Dan, Naphtali, Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun— occupied the northern portion of Canaan, above the Rachel tribes.The sixth—Gad—occupied the central portion of Jordan, between Reuben and Manasseh.
Curiously, the Bible provides little anecdotal information about the sons of Jacob.With the exception of Joseph and Leah’s four oldest children, we have little more than a birth order and a couple of blessings describing their nature. For Leah’s first four children, the few stories we have are mostly brief and negative, reflecting the later political factionalism between Judah and Israel. Only for Joseph do we have a full-blown epic.
Joseph had the gift of prophecy and told of dreams that indicated he would become the head of the family.His brothers hated him and they secretly sold him into slavery, telling their father that awild animal had devoured him.Through God’s intervention, however, Joseph rose from servitude to become Prime Minister of Egypt.
In the course of a famine in Canaan, Jacob sent his children to Egypt to buy grain. When they appeared before the royal court, Joseph recognized his brothers, but they didn’t recognize him.This gave Joseph an opportunity to put them through a number of tests to determine their nature and character.After he was satisfied that they had redeemed themselves, he revealed his identity and forgave them. Jacob, joyous at learning that Joseph lived,moved the family to Egypt where the pharaoh gave them a land allotment.
Joseph had married the daughter of the chief priest of Heliopolis, one of the chief cult centers in Egypt, and he had two children by her, Manasseh and Ephraim. Joseph expected that Manasseh, the older of the two, would become heir to the covenant, but Jacob passed it on to Ephraim.
Jacob adopted both children as if they were his own sons, and during the Canaanite conquest each received territorial allotments, giving the tribe of Joseph a double portion. At the same time that Joseph received two portions, Levi, the priestly tribe, received no territory of its own. Instead, it had enclaves within the other tribal allotments.
This meant that there were thirteen tribes with twelve land allotments, causing some confusion over which tribes constituted the Twelve Tribes.Traditionally, when referring to the House of Israel as a unified entity, the Twelve Tribes include Levi and count Joseph as one tribe, but when describing Israel on the basis of territorial distribution, Levi is omitted and Joseph counts as two tribes.
Archaeologically, we have no evidence for the existence of either Jacob or his sons or the tribes associated with his sons.Nor do we have any extra-biblical evidence for the existence of the tribes at any later date.At best, we have occasional place names, but place names provide no reliable proof for the existence of eponymous ancestors.
In the time of Solomon, according to the Bible, tribal boundaries were eliminated and replaced by twelve new administrative districts, probably to reduce the influence of the Ephramite opposition to Solomon’s rule.When Solomon died, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south.The Bible presents a confusing picture about which tribes belonged to which kingdom, raising some serious questions about whether there everwas such an entity as the Twelve Tribes.Some portions of the Bible, especially the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, cast substantial doubt on whether all the tribes can be traced to a common ancestor.
This is not to say that some sort of Israelite confederation didn’t exist or that at some point in time it didn’t consist of twelve political entities.The evidence, however, is that whatever these political entities were, they did not spring from a common patriarchal relationship.
While it used to be almost universally taken for granted that the Patriarchs and the sons of Israel where historical figures and that Genesis mixed some basic historical truths with a variety of legends, a growing segment of the scholarly community now accepts that the patriarchal stories may have no historical core at all.
At the same time, while the J, E, and P sources frequently can be separated from each other, they also seem to share some common traditions and themes from earlier sources. Often, the differences involve only a matter of emphasis or tinkering with details, such aswhere an event occurred. In this part of the book,wewill look at a number of the stories in the patriarchal and tribal history and show the mythological sources that lay behind them. One of the most important of these sources was the Egyptian Osiris cycle, which provided a significant literary framework for both the patriarchal history and the later stories about the Exodus. For a more expansive and detailed look at how the Osiris myths influenced the patriarchal and Exodus histories, see my earlier work,The Bible Myth.
The Osiris Cycle
The Osiris cycle formed the core of Egypt’s most important religious beliefs, particularly about the afterlife.The cycle can be divided into two portions.The first concerns the stories about how the god Set killed his brother Osiris in order to become king of Egypt; the second concerns the efforts of Set to stop Osiris’s sonHorus from succeeding his father to the throne.The two portions probably originated as separate and independent myths.
In the first part of the cycle,Osiris (who originally signified the grain) married his sister Isis and became king of Egypt when the god Geb (the earth) stepped down and gave Osiris the crown. Set, brother to Osiris and Isis,wanted to be king, plotted to kill his brother, and successfully carried out his mission.After killing him, he hacked the body into pieces and buried the parts around the country (the planting of seed). Isis sought to recover all the parts of her husband’s body (harvest the crop) and found everything but the penis (the original seed before it sprouted into grain), which she reconstructed through some form of magic (the new seed within the grain).Through Isis’s help, Osiris survived his death but only in the form of an afterlife. Despite this condition, he fathered a child with Isis and the child was named Horus.
In the second part of the cycle, Isis hidHorus away to keep Set from finding him andwhen the child reached adulthood he returned to avenge his father’s murder.After a series of contests and conflicts,Horus defeated Set and his allies and became king of Egypt.
Egyptians believed that all kings were a form of Horus and that when the king died he became Osiris and the new king became the new Horus. Osiris served as judge of the afterlife, determining who could cross over and who couldn’t. In theory, when a king died, the Osiris that judged him was the previous king,who should have been the newly deceased king’s biological father.
There is no canonical version of the Osiris cycle. For the most part, it is pieced together from numerous inscriptions and verses in a variety of texts. Many contradictions exist but the broad themes of the story remain consistent.There is, however, a collection of stories known as The Contendings of Horus and Set, dating to about the twelfth century B.C. but based on long-standing traditions, which details numerous incidents in the struggles between Horus and Set.We also have a Greek version of the Osiris myth from Plutarch (c.first century A.D.) which, though some what Hellenized and modified to reflect some Greek ideas, still preserves many of the basic traditions that go back more than two millennia.
Overlaying the Osiris cycle is some confusion by the Egyptians as to the identity of Horus and Set.The Egyptians recognized at least three major Horus deities, each with separate characteristics, and the Egyptians tended to merge them into a single character.The Horus born to Isiswas known as both Horus the Child and Horus the Son of Isis.The son of Isis was born lame and struggled in the womb with Set.A third Horus, known as Horus the Elder,was also brother to Osiris and Set but hewas born before Set and fought with him constantly. Plutarch’s account has appearances by all three Horuses, each in a separate identity.
The god Set also had two inconsistent identities merged into one character.The one Set defended Re against Aphophis, the serpent that tried to devour the sun at the end of the day; the other was thought to be Aphophis.One of the main images of Set in Egyptian art shows him as a red-haired donkey-like beast and on many occasions reddish donkeys were symbolically identified with Set. In The Contendings of Horus and Set, the red-haired deity appears as the defender of Re and he is Re’s favorite to succeed Osiris. Isis, however, supports the claim of her sonHorus and uses trickery and magic to aid the child.
As we look at the patriarchal history, we will see, just as we did with the Creation myths, that while the biblical editors transformed gods into humans to eliminate the image of the underlying deity, they occasionally forgot to remove some of the physical characteristics that belonged to the original deity.
Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees.
The Myth: And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. (Gen. 11:31)
The Reality: Ur of the Chaldees did not exist until about the eighth century B.C., about one thousand years after the time of Abraham.
The Mesopotamian city of Ur has a history dating back to at least the third millennium B.C., but the association of the city with the Chaldees dates to only about the eighth century B.C.The name Chaldees refers to the “land of the people of Chaldea,” located just south of Babylon in southern Mesopotamia. Little is known of Chaldea prior to the eighth century B.C. At this time, it temporarily captured the throne of Babylon and ruled the entire region, includingUr.From that time on, although it didn’t rule continuously in Babylon, its name came to be associated with southern Mesopotamia. In 587 B.C., the Chaldeans conquered the kingdom of Judah and transferred the Hebrew elite to Babylon.
Confounding the situation further, the biblical Hebrew does not call the city “Ur of the Chaldees.” The word translated as Chaldees actually reads “chesdim,” meaning either the “people of Chesed” or “land of Chesed.” The identification of this city with Chaldea in the King James Version derives from the Greek translation of the Bible, which used the name Chaldee.
Chesdim appears to be aWest Semitic variation of the name Chaldea, and is the word used in Aramaic for that territory.The Aramaic language came into use in the Near East during the first millennium B.C. and eventually became the lingua franca of the region.We have no evidence for the existence of the Arameans prior to about the tenth century B.C. Some of the last books of the Old Testament were written in Aramaic and that is almost certainly the language that Jesus spoke.
Still further confusing the matter, despite its antiquity and importance in ancient Mesopotamia, Ur is not catalogued in the Table of Nations descended from Noah’s children.
Although the Bible omits the origin of Ur, it does make reference to the birth of both Chesed (i.e., the alternative name for Chaldea) and Aram (i.e., Aramea).They are, respectively, the son and grandson of Abraham’s brother Haran (Gen. 22:20–22). Since Abraham was born only 290 years after the flood, there is no way that the Chaldees could have been associated with Ur in his time frame. The references to Chesed and Aram as his contemporaries are equally anachronistic.
These references to Ur of the Chesdim,Chesed, and Aram obviously stem from a time when:
1.Aramea and Chaldea had come into existence;
2. theHebrews started to adoptAramaic terminology;
3.Chaldea had become a major force inMesopotamia;
4. the collectivememory of Chaldean and Aramaic origins had receded into myth;
and
5. the Hebrews would use the Aramaic pronunciation rather than the native dialect for the Chaldean name.
This suggests a timeframe well after the Babylonian conquest of Judah and almost certainly into the Persian or Hellenistic period (fifth century B.C. or later.) The anachronistic Mesopotamian genealogy of Abraham and his relatives shows that it was a late invention intended to place Hebrew origins in the cultural center of the powerful Mesopotamian empires that followed after the defeat of the Chaldeans by the Persians, and intended to enhance Hebrew prestige within the Babylonian community.
Abraham left Egypt to go to Canaan.
The Myth: And Abram [i.e., Abraham] went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the south.And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.And he went on his journeys from the south even to Beth-el, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Beth-el and Hai….(Gen. 13:1–3)
The Reality:Abraham went into southern Egypt, not Canaan. The above passage raises some puzzling questions about the historical roots of Abraham. It suggests that Abraham went from Egypt into Canaan, towards the region of Beth-el where he originally placed his tent. But the Hebrew text says that Abraham left Egypt and went “into the south.”One can’t get to Canaan by going south from Egypt.
Ancient Egypt thought of itself as two lands united together, Lower Egypt in the northern delta formed by the Nile and Upper Egypt in the south. This tradition is preserved in the Table of Nations, which makes Ham’s son Mizraim (the Semitic name for Egypt) the father of several children, among whom are Naphtuhim and Pathrusim,which names refer to Lower and Upper Egypt. In the late first millennium B.C.,Egypt’s neighbors tended to equate Egypt primarily with the richer fertile northern delta and confused Upper Egypt in the southwith Ethiopia, Egypt’s southern neighbor.
Abraham went to Egypt because of a famine in Canaan and would have traveled to the fertile delta in northern Lower Egypt for the purpose of obtaining food. If he went into the south, he would have been heading into Upper Egypt, away from Canaan.To get to Canaan from the Egyptian delta one would travel on an approximately easterly to northeasterly route. How then did Abraham get to Beth-el in Canaan by traveling into southern Egypt?
The biblical description of Abraham’s route obviously creates a problem.While the King James Version gives the translation“into the south,” many other versions of the Bible give a different translation. They say that Abraham traveled not “into the south” but“ into theNegev,” the vast desert region in southern Canaan.
This alternative translation resulted from the idiomatic meaning of “south” for “Negev,” in much the same way that Americans use the term “south” to define the southeastern United States. For example, if one flies north from Mexico to Florida, one flies “into the south” because Florida is part of the American South.
But there are some problems with this alternative translation. First, the Hebrew word used is not“negev” but“negevah.”The first form is a noun and could be used in an idiomatic way to refer to Southern Canaan. The second form, however, is an adverb, referring specifically to a direction of movement. Abraham wasn’t traveling “into the South,” which could refer to the Negev, but in a “southerly direction,” which means towards southern Egypt.
Second, a route through the Negev desert makes no sense.Abraham departed his Egyptian locale with great wealth and a large cattle herd.One doesn’t drive cattle into a vast waterless desert waste, especially when there is a major highway leading from Egypt to Canaan that goes along the Mediterranean coast, avoids the desert and provides water for the cattle.The Egyptians called this highway “The Way of Horus” and the Bible refers to it as“ The Way of the Philistines.”
Third, the name Beth-el didn’t exist in the time of Abraham, at least according to the Bible.The city received that name from Jacob, long after Abraham died, and the Bible usually indicates that the city used to be called Luz, although that gloss is missing in the present story. Beth-el simply means “House of God” and could easily refer to any place where there is an altar or temple dedicated to any of the deities, in Egypt or in Canaan.Abraham could have built an altar anywhere and called it Beth-el.
In context then, the King James Version has it right and the alternative translations are wrong. Abraham headed into southern Egypt and not to Canaan.This raises some interesting questions about the roots of ancient Israel.
Prior to Abraham’s arrival in Egypt, we have hardly any information about his background. The Bible says that in Abraham’s seventy-fifth year God told him to move from his home in Mesopotamia to Canaan,where he would “make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” But, no sooner does he arrive in Canaan than he finds a great famine requiring that he move to Egypt.
If God had this great plan to give Canaan to Abraham and wanted his heir to move there to establish his name, why did he wait seventy-five years to tell him to move, and why did he wait until there was a famine requiring him to leave the land right away? Something is wrong with this picture.
As we saw, the early genealogy and history of Abraham was a late anachronistic invention. If we strike that portion of the narrative from Abraham’s biography,we find the story of Abraham beginning in Egypt,where he has some sort of confrontation with the pharaoh.This indicates that the original biblical history of Israel began in Egypt, not Canaan or Mesopotamia.
Biblical redactors, living amidst a culturally sophisticated Babylonian cultural and long out of touch with their Egyptian roots, sought to show that the Hebrew people stemmed from the same intellectual roots and influences as that of the highly regarded Babylonians. Consequently, they took advantage of ambiguities in their early historical traditions and added in a journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan in order to show that they had roots in the Babylonian world long before they resided in Egypt.
Written by Gary Greenberg in "101 Myths of the Bible - How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History", Sourcebooks Inc. USA,2000, excerpts pp. 107-119. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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