Moses Was A Black African

[ivrydov]

I've got a book out called Moses Was A Black African & The Jews Came Out Of India.

It'll be free on Kindle Jan. 28.

Velikovsky makes possible with his chronology to establish when the enslavement took place. Twelfth Dynasty, Middle Kingdom. These were southerners from Thebes.

Once you establish the color of the skin of the Egyptians, and there is no dispute about the Thebans, then it is possible to relate the color of Israel's First Family to them.

Dov Ivry

[bsbray]

I would be interested to know how your work reconciles itself with work such as this: http://www.amazon.com/Moses-Exist-Myth- ... 0979963184

I found a summary of some of the information online:

20. This cultural evolution towards patriarchal regimentation set the scene for the construction of the Moses Myth. From relatively peaceful societies where religion had provided a controlled social structure for experience of ecstasy and a cosmology to interpret nature, the new conflicted times required that ecstasy be shunned as dangerous and dissolute, and that nature be placed within the supernatural framework of a violent God of wrath. This agenda of social control used the Moses story as its founding myth of a god of volcano and storm. But earlier Jewish religion was much more Dionysiac, recognising the importance of wine as a source of pleasure. And indeed, Murdock provides a fascinating array of common features between Moses and Dionysus. In an extraordinary list of 46 similarities between Moses and Dionysus drawn from sources such as Homer, Pausanius, Cicero, Diodorus, Apollodorus, Macrobius, Euripides, Strabo, Seneca, Arrian and other ancient and modern writers, Murdock demonstrates such detail of structure and intent as to show that the Moses myth was in large part constructed on Dionysian origins.

...

22. Did Moses Exist? begins with the observation that the Church Father Origen of Alexandria told Celsus that the Egyptians veiled their knowledge of things in fable and allegory. Origen said: "The learned may penetrate into the significance of all Oriental mysteries, but the vulgar can only see the exterior symbol. It is allowed by all who have any knowledge of the Scriptures that everything is conveyed enigmatically." The story of Moses is full of enigmas. The similarities to the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, the story of Sargon, and the story of Dionysus illustrate that we are dealing with myth, not history. The veneration of a bronze snake on a pole is utterly contrary to the Genesis vision of the snake as evil and to Josiah’s later removal of this snake idol from the temple, but the raising up of the snake on the pole then becomes a central image for Jesus Christ, immediately before the famous line John 3:16. The magical wand used by Moses to make water gush from rock is a hermetic symbol like the rod of Hermes, the trident of Neptune and the bow of Mithras, producing what Jesus would call living water and what Paul would call the water of the supernatural Christ. The Ark of the Covenant is a highly mysterious symbol with antecedents in Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek myth.

...

23. To illustrate the controversy in all this material, one commentator has claimed that the suggestion the myth of Moses drew on stories of Dionysus should be dismissed as ludicrous. This example is well worth more detailed debate. There is evidence of the worship of Dionysus dating from the second millennium BCE, but Moses is not mentioned for nearly a thousand years after that. Dionysus was wildly popular across the Mediterranean, with hundreds of early extant mentions and images, figuring prominently in Homer and Hesiod, and filling the Moses role of lawgiver. The Greek historian Herodotus, fifth century BCE, says the cult of Dionysus came to Greece from Egypt, and that Dionysus was one of the main Gods of the Arabs. There is no mention of Moses before the Babylonian captivity. The Encyclopedia Judaica reports the cult of Dionysus was widespread among Jews. Grapes, the object of the Dionysus cult, were grown in Israel for thousands of years before Christ, featuring in the Christ Myth in the water to wine miracle at the wedding at Cana and in the transubstantiation of wine into the blood of Christ in the sacrament.

24. The range of ancient authors listed above indicate the abundant fertile sources for the Biblical authors to construct Moses as a divine hero. Murdock's thesis about the cultural evolutionary antecedents for Moses applies sound scholarship to confront deep prejudice. Dismissal of this new systematic approach to biblical studies is careless, to put it mildly. This example alone of the connections between Moses and Dionysus shows that Murdock has provided fascinating insights into the nature of religious thought, and the need for a comprehensive paradigm shift in discussion of religious origins. Did Moses Exist? is a magnificent and courageous work of sound scholarship, based on deep insight into the actual nature of religious evolution.

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/d ... eview.html


Just as there is plenty of evidence that Jesus is the continuation into modern times of very ancient sun-worshipping religions (and the early church fathers themselves recognized the obvious similarities; during the Enlightenment this began to be examined in more detail), it appears that the story of Moses in the Bible also parallels the story of Sargon (another law-giver who was put in a basket and sent down a river as an infant) and Dionysus.

Here's an example regarding Sargon:

Sargon, strong king, king of Agade, am I. My mother was a high priestess, my father I do not know. My paternal kin inhabit the mountain region. My city (of birth) is Azupiranu, which lies on the bank of the Euphrates. My mother, a high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me. She placed me in a reed basket, with bitumen she caulked my hatch. She abandoned me to the river from which I could not escape. The river carried me along: to Aqqi, the water drawer, it brought me. Aqqi, the water drawer, when immersing his bucket lifted me up. Aqqi, the water drawer, raised me as his adopted son. Aqqi, the water drawer, set me to his garden work. During my garden work, Istar loved me (so that) 55 years I ruled as king.

http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/sargon.php

(Quoted from "Brian Lewis' The Sargon Legend (American Schools of Oriental Research, 1978.")

It is possible that the events described in Exodus have some amount of legitimate historicity to them, but I'm sure it should take a lot of teasing-out to find what kinds of changes have occurred since the Exodus took place, if it took place as stated, and if even any time period for it can be agreed upon. I'm interested in how all of this information can be synthesized into something that is both a convincing narrative and supported by evidence.

[ivrydov]

Put it this way. If his wife Zipporah does not exist, the Jews do not survive 1,900 years in exile. Her folks were metalworkers and lived among and supplied their services to many peoples. She was the example of how to survive in exile.

When the Jews got in exile, 90 per cent of the breadwinners were farmers. And after about 800 years, they lost access to land in most places. The population took a big dip.

They acquired metalworking and that gave them a core centre of economic activity. They were essentially a monopoly in the Muslim world throughout the years. The same was true in Ethiopia. In China they had names like Stone and Gold. And when the Spanish expelled the Jews all the cannon-makers of Spain ended up in Turkey.

I say what I have to say about Moses in the book I put out on him.

I do books on the Jesus myth. The latest one is called DREK: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Christianity (But Were Afraid To Ask). If anyone is looking for it, it will be a few days before it comes up again because I just changed the title from something else. I brought this out in December just before the other one.

[bsbray]

I understand your point and especially as we move into modern times, I have more and more trust for the recorded history of any nation of people.

Of course the primary source for information on Moses or his wife or any other relations is the Bible. Some researchers into the documentary hypothesis or Wellhausen hypothesis have found reason to believe that the OT was not only compiled from separate sources, but also likely heavily edited aside from simple compilation, in the last centuries BC.

In Genesis, the only book whose narrative precedes that of Exodus with the possible exception of Job, is undoubtedly filled with accounts that have been heavily mythologized. Only a fundamentalist would take Genesis at its word that the world was created in six days or that Eve was created from a rib taken from Adam. In my opinion the flood story has a grain of truth to it somewhere but was also heavily mythologized, and in later books of the Bible we see the same thing. In my mind Samson is a notable example of this. Is it a historical fact that Samson killed exactly 1000 men with the jawbone of a donkey? Or, as some have suggested, is this the retelling of a more ancient myth, or a combination of myths?

In reference to the story of Moses specifically, we could say about the Greeks that they too would never have developed metallurgy, if not for Hephaestus. If only the Greek myths were slightly more realistic, and had survived into modern religions, we might take that idea more seriously. Since the story of Moses in the OT has the uncanny similarities with the story of Sargon, who at least according to conventional chronology should have preceded Moses by hundreds of years, I see this as evidence that the story of Moses may have been just as mythologized as the story of creation, or of Adam and Eve, the flood, Samson, etc. That is not to say that the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt, but that we may have to think twice about how literally to take this part of the OT.

[ivrydov]

The Torah is the history book of our nation. It is what it is. It's a lot more than other nations have from their ancient times.

No authorization was ever given for it to be translated. It is for Israel's eyes only. Other nations and the Chinese and Indians prove this are quite capable of producing their own wisdom literature.

It has nothing to say to the rest of the world and its impact on progress in civilization has been zero. You go from the Dark Ages to the enslavement of the Africans plus the despoiling of the Indian natives to the Holocaust and the Gulag. There is no trace of any influence from this book and some of the instructions in it such as the Ten Commandments are quite good. Any progress was made through rational thought and science.

There is a play on words in the latter part of the Torah involving Keturah, the third wife of Abraham, and the status of incense in Egyptian culture. If you take that out of there, the whole back end of the Torah collapses, with only slight exaggeration. But only someone who knew the status of incense at that time could write that. When they left Egypt they lost contact with that culture and no one could possibly have written that turn of phrase.

Also as Sartre among others have pointed out, you write for your audience. The early part of the Torah was written in India. When they mention precious stones at the Garden of Eden they are specifying stones that would be known to contemporary readers in India. I explain this point in the book The Jews Came Out Of India. The same principle is followed all the way though. If you want to know who wrote something when look at the contemporary audience he was writing for. It's not foolproof but that's how humans function.

Also Hebrew tenses are tricky. There is no past and future. They work the same as the universe, what goes around comes around. That's why the prophets are hard to follow -- are they coming or going? (This doesn't come through in translation. You go from a three-dimensional world in color to a black and white film on a screen. You've moved out of real life.)

I'll give you one abstruse example. Males are capable of breastfeeding. There are documented cases of where fathers in dire straits put the newborn to their breasts and the milk flowed. You are supposed to have prolactin in your body, but males only have a bit of it. It's almost a case of mind over matter.

In the Torah Moshe makes reference to the "nursing father." He must have seen it. Otherwise people would not have known what he was talking about. You jump to Job and there is a reference describing the healthy man as one whose breasts are filled with milk. Was he referring to the past or is that supposed to be the future?

By the way if I may slip in a plug in, the book DREK is now up for Jesus myth fans.