Matt Giwer
2009-02-07 08:11:21 UTC
Shock Secret Identity of Israel's Yahweh Revealed!
In a September 22nd, 2002 speech to visiting Christian Zionists, Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asserted, "This land is ours... God gave us the
title deeds..." However, recent scholarly research, including discoveries by
an archaeological team from the University of Tel Aviv, not only deconstruct
the Biblical Old Testament and Torah stories upon which this claim rests,
but grant previously unthinkable credence to an ancient historian's claim
that the Israelites of Exodus were actually the Hyksos, and therefore of
Asiatic origin.
To trace the foundations of this ongoing Biblical bonfire, we must go back
to 1999.
All hell broke loose in Israel in November of that year when Prof. Ze'ev
Herzog of Tel Aviv University announced: "the Israelites were never in
Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land, and did not pass
it on to the twelve tribes". Moreover, the Jewish God YHWH had a female
consort - the goddess Asherah!
His conclusion that the kingdom of David and Solomon was at best a small
tribal monarchy, at worst total myth, has made enemies for him in the camps
of traditional Jewish and Christian belief systems. He asserts: all evidence
demonstrates that the Jews did not adopt monotheism until the 7th Century
BCE - a heresy according to the Biblical tradition dating it to Moses at
Mount Sinai.
Tel Aviv University's archaeological investigation at Megiddo and
examination of the six-sided gate there dates it to the 9th Century BCE, not
the 10th Century BCE claimed by the 1960's investigator Yigael Yadin who
attributed it to Solomon. Herzog, moreover, states that Solomon and David
are "entirely absent in the archaeological record".
In addition, Herzog's colleague, Israel Finkelstein, claims the Jews were
nothing more than nomadic Canaanites who bartered with the city dwellers.
The team's studies concluded that Jerusalem did not have any central status
until 722 BCE with the destruction of its northern rival Samaria.
However, the real bombshell is Herzog's discovery of numerous references to
Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah. Inscriptions, written in
Hebrew by official Jewish scribes in the 8th century BCE, were found in
numerous sites all over the land. For Yahweh, supposedly the "One God", to
have had a female consort and, of all people, the goddess Asherah, is
dynamite of wide ranging significance.
The Secret Identity of Yahweh
The use of Yahweh as the name of God has always fuelled speculation and
philosophical argument. YHWH, sometimes pronounced Jehovah, is taken to mean
"I AM" or "I AM WHO I AM". There is also the puzzle of the rule that his
mysterious real name is not to be spoken.
The identification of the goddess Asherah (Asherat) as His consort somewhere
within the original Jewish faith leads to some explosive conclusions about
the identity of the Jewish/Christian God of the Cosmos, the one Monotheistic
God with whom we are so familiar from western religion.
But before looking at Asherah, and what she means to the identity of Yahweh,
it is worth taking a look at another goddess, Ashteroth. Her significance
will become evident a little later. Referred to as an "abomination" in 2
Kings, Ashteroth was an important deity in the Near East pantheons.
To the Sumerians she was IN.ANNA (Anu's beloved) and is an important
character in the Sumerian Epics. To the Assyrians and Babylonians she was
Ishtar; Ashtoreth was her name for the Canaanites; to the Greeks -
Aphrodite; the Romans - Venus. The most important equivalent however is the
Egyptian goddess Hathor, who the Greeks identified with Aphrodite. Hathor
was the wife of Horus, the God of War. Hathor is identified with the symbol
of the cow, and statues of her in the 26th Dynasty (572 - 525 BC) in Egypt
actually depict her as a cow. Asherah, (whose name means "she who walks in
the sea") supposedly consort of the supreme god El, was also referred to as
Elath (the goddess). According to the Ugarit tradition, whose clay tablets
contain the earliest known alphabet, she was consort of El, and mother of
seventy gods. She is also associated with Baal and is supposed to have
interceded to her husband, the supreme god, on Baal's behalf, for the
building of a palace - in order to grant him equal status with other gods.
In the cuniform tablets of Ras Shamrah (Circa 1400 BCE) the head of the
Pantheon was El; his wife was Asherat-of-the-sea (Asherah). After El, the
greatest god was Baal, son of El and Asherah. Curiously, Baal's consort is
his mother, Asherah. In the Lebanon traditions Baal is equated with Jupiter.
Carvings of Asherah in Syria show her wearing Egyptian head-dress. She was
also referred to later as "the cow" - a reference to her great age.
Significantly, Baalat (an important Goddess at Byblos) is depicted in
carvings as having cow's horns, between which is a halo. Baalat is in fact
the form of Asherah when she appears alongside Baal. But what does this say
about the identity of Yahweh? The Bible has always presented a confusing
picture of Yahweh. In the light of Herzog's discoveries and conclusions that
Yahweh's consort was Asherah, it deserves a closer examination.
Exodus 6:3 states "And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob,
by [the name of] God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name "I AM" was I not
known to them." In the King James Version, "I AM" is translated as Jehovah
(Yahweh) but means the same: "I AM". The use of "God Almighty" is a
traditional translation of Shaddai, thought to have meant "Omnipotent", but
arguably it could be linked to the Akkadian root word Shadu, meaning
literally "mountains".
And El Shaddai is only one of the versions of God described in Genesis. El
Shaddai literally translated means, "God the one of the mountains", but
there was also El Olam (God the everlasting one) El Elyon (God most high) El
Ro'i (God of vision).
The obvious question is, why did YHWH reveal himself to the patriarchs as El
Shaddai? The answer lies in the religious traditions of Canaan, where
Abraham is said to have lived for a time, and which were brought to Canaan
by the Phoenicians. (In turn, the root of Phoenician religious tradition is
Sumer).
God-the-one-of-the-mountains has a Sumerian equivalent. ISH.KUR, the
youngest son of Enlil, means God the one of the far mountains. Ishkur was
also known as Adad or Hadad in Hebrew, brother of Nannar/Sin, and was the
pre-eminent God of Canaan - El-Shaddai.
According to biblical scholars who focus on the "P Source" for the old
testament, Yahweh as a name is first used with Moses in Exodus, and is
indicative of monolatory (exclusive worship of one of many Gods) rather than
monotheism. The name Yahweh can also be translated as "I am who I am",
literally a way of saying "mind your own business", a way of disguising his
true identity. Yahweh does not appear until Exodus and, strangely, the god
Baal is entirely absent in Genesis. (El Shaddai is still venerated in the
Jewish faith in the form of the Teffilin, one of two small leather
cube-shaped cases containing Torah Texts, traditionally to be worn by males
from the age of 13. The Teffilin are worn in a manner to represent the
letters shin, daleth, and yod, which together form the name Shaddai.)
In Exodus 33:2 it states "And I will send an angel before thee; and I will
drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite,
the Hivite, and the Jebusite:
33:3 Unto a land flowing with milk and honey: for I will not go up in the
midst of thee; for thou [art] a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee on
the way."
This Yahweh is prone to violence and seems to despise his chosen people. He
is a perfect match for ISH.KUR (Hadad), whose land is occupied by the
Amorites and Hittites, and is a known demonstrator of violence and contempt
for his worshipers.
ISH.KUR's image, traits, and symbols match those of Baal. He is also
anti-Babylon and anti-Egypt, as is Yahweh. And like Yahweh's, the real name
of the Canaanite Baal (Hadad) must not be spoken.
On the basis of Herzog's discovery, the evidence within the Bible itself,
the Sumerian, Phoenician and Canaanite traditions, the following is a
logical conclusion and solution to the identity of the Jewish God of the Old
Testament: ISH.KUR = Hadad = El Shaddai = Baal = Yahweh. (The Canaanite's
Baal was also known as Moloch, who we will examine later.)
This indicates, as does Herzog's work, that the Jewish people evolved from
polytheism to monotheism with the promotion of a god who had been known by a
variety of names, into one supreme God, Yahweh (whose real name must not be
spoken), and that they adopted for this purpose, not the supreme God of the
Pantheons, El, but his son - ISH.KUR, Baal, Hadad, El-Shaddai, an entity who
was in open revolt against his father El, and ultimately aided in this
revolt by his mother and consort, Asherah, (also known as Baalat, Ashteroth,
Elat).
This female entity was later merged by Greek and Roman traditions into
Aphrodite and Venus, and known earlier to the Egyptians as Isis. Once we
understand this, the etymology of the name Israel - Is (either Isis or tomb)
Ra (Head of the Egyptian Pantheon) El (Lord - Baal) - makes far more obvious
sense than the convoluted "Yisrael" yarn from the Hebrew faith.
But what does all this do to the validity of the "Title Deeds" from God that
Ariel Sharon refers to? Quite apart from the obvious conclusion that the god
assumed to have given the "promised land" to his chosen people was just one
god from a pantheon and not the alleged monotheistic only God of the cosmos,
Herzog's findings corroborate theories that have been "out there" for some
time.
The Hyksos
Like Herzog, the historian Josephus (c. 37CE - c. 100CE) denied the account
of the Hebrews being held in captivity in Egypt, but he went a drastic step
further about the racial origins of the Jews, whom he identified with the
Hyksos. He further claimed they did not flee from Egypt but were evicted due
to them being leprous.
It must be said that Josephus has been vilified over the ages as a Roman
collaborator by both Jewish and Christian scholars who have argued that the
dating of the exodus of the "Hebrews" from Egypt in the Bible positively
rules out their identification as Hyksos. However, Jan Assmann, a prominent
Egyptologist at Heidelberg University, is quite positive in his writings
that the Exodus story is an inversion of the Hyksos expulsion and
furthermore that Moses was an Egyptian.
Likewise, Donald P. Redford, of Toronto University, presents striking
evidence that the Expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt was inverted to
construct the exodus of the Hebrew slaves story in the Torah and Old
Testament. His book, which argued this theory, "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in
Ancient Times" was Winner of the 1993 Best Scholarly Book in Archaeology
Award of the Biblical Archaeological Society.
There is irrefutable evidence that the Hyksos, a mixed Semitic-Asiatic group
who infiltrated the Nile valley, seized power in Lower Egypt in the 17th
Century BCE. They ruled there from c. 1674 BCE until expelled when their
capital, Avaris, fell to Ahmose around 1567 BCE. The Hyksos in Egypt
worshipped Set, who like ISH.KUR they identified as a storm deity.
Under the "inversion theory", Jewish scholars in the 7th Century BCE changed
the story from "expelled" to "escaped" and as a further insult to their
enemy, Ahmose, changed and miss-spelt his name to Moses, presenting him as
leader of a Hebrew revolt. But there is also a strong possibility of two
separate origins to the "Moses" character being merged into one, which I
will come to later.
Ahmose's success in 1567 BCE led to the establishment of the 18th Dynasty in
Egypt. ThotMoses III overthrew the transvestite Pharaoh Atchepsut, and under
ThotMoses IV Egyptian conquests extended beyond the Sinai into Palestine,
Syria, reaching Babylonia and included Canaan.
By the end of this expansion, Amenophis III (1380BCE) ruled an Egyptian
empire whose provinces and colonies bordered what is now known as Turkey.
This empire would have included the regions in which most of the expelled
Hyksos now lived.
Amenophis IV succeeded the throne in 1353BCE. He established a new
monotheism cult establishing "Aten" as the one supreme god and he changed
his name to Akhenaton. Married to the mysterious Nefertiti, Akhenaton
declared himself a god on earth, intermediary between the one-god Aten (Ra)
and humanity, with his spouse as partner, effectively displacing Isis and
Osiris in the Egyptian Enead. Declaring all men to be the children of Aten,
historians suspect Akhenaton planned an empire-wide religion. He banned all
idolatry, the use of images to represent god, and banned the idea that there
was more than one supreme god.
It is alongside Akhenaten and his father Amenophis III that we find the
second Moses.
An important figure during this period was confusingly called Amenophis son
of Hapu. He was First Minister (Vizier) to both kings. He is generally
depicted as a scribe, crouching and holding on his knees a roll of papyrus.
He more than anyone was responsible for authoring the religion in which the
old gods were merged into one living god, Aten, who had been responsible for
the creation of the Earth and of humanity.
The symbol of this god, the sun disk, represented Ra, Horus and the other
gods in one. The sun disk, in symbolism, was supported between the horns of
a bull. The Son of Hapu says this about creation: "I have come to you who
reigns over the gods oh Amon, Lord of the Two Lands, for you are Re who
appears in the sky, who illuminates the earth with a brilliantly shining
eye, who came out of the Nou, who appeared above the primitive water, who
created everything, who generated the great Enneade of the gods, who created
his own flesh and gave birth to his own form."
The king's overseer of the land of Nubia was a certain Mermose (spelled both
Mermose and Merymose on his sarcophagus in the British Museum). According to
modern historians, in Amenhotep's third year as king, Mermose took his army
far up the Nile, supposedly to quell a minor rebellion, but actually to
secure gold mining territories which would supply his king with the greatest
wealth of any ruler of Egypt. Recent scholarship has indicated Mermose took
his army to the neighbourhood of the confluence of the Nile and Atbara
Rivers and beyond.
But who was this Mermose? According to historian Dawn Breasted, the Greek
translation of this name was Moses. Does Jewish tradition support this
identification?
According to Jewish history not included in the Bible, Moses led the army of
Pharaoh to the South, into the land of Kush, and reached the vicinity of the
Atbara River. There he attracted the love of the princess of the fortress
city of Saba, later Meroe. She gave up the city in exchange for marriage.
Biblical confirmation of such a marriage is to be found in Numbers 12:1.
"And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman
whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman."
The end of Akhenaten's reign is shrouded in mystery, scholarship about which
is beyond the scope of an article of this length. In summary, however,
theories span from the death of Nefertiti from plague - Akhenaten's own
death from plague or murder - to exile. On clear record, in contrast, is the
return of Egypt to the Enead of the gods and a systematic attempt to erase
all vestiges of Akhenaton and his cult in Egypt.
Meanwhile, the expelled Hyksos, according to various historians, have been
living in Canaan.
It is here that a solution to the Biblical dating problem of linking the
Israelites to the Hyksos appears.
Using the dating of the Biblical Exodus and comparing it to the Egyptian
dating of the Hyksos expulsion throws up a gap of about 400 years. Using the
dating systems of the books of Judges and Samuel, this gap can extend to
between 554 and 612 years.
However, there is clear historical record of post Hyksos Egypt extending its
empire into Canaan, the land into which the Hebrews entered and lived,
according to Biblical sources, for 400 years before establishing the kingdom
of Solomon.
The Hebrews living in Canaan were therefore under Egyptian rule. It is also
here in Canaan that we can make a comparison between Yahweh and the
Canaanite Moloch (Baal) and extrapolate a polemic inversion of the story of
Pharaoh ordering the death of all the "first born" in Exodus. The
worshippers of Moloch sacrificed their first born children to their deity
through immolation. Worshippers of Yahweh in Canaan were also known to carry
out child sacrifice on occasion, especially in times of hardship, although
immolation (holocaust) was supposedly frowned upon. Slitting the child's
throat, however, was acceptable. The sacrifices were carried out and the
remains interred at sacred sites known at Topheth. Sometimes - although
rarely, judging by the vast predominance of infant human bones found at
Topheth sites by archaeologists - animals were sacrificed as substitutes.
The Unification
Modern historical disciplines studying the biblical era uniformly conclude
that Exodus could not have been written earlier than the 7th century BCE,
and certainly not by the Biblical Moses who at best is a fictional
combination of Egyptian personalities.
In Israel itself, 7th Century BCE is the period in which the archaeological
evidence presented by Herzog suggests the emergence of Jerusalem as a
cultural centre occurs.
By all accounts, it is a cultural centre struggling to find an identity and
nationality for itself and, given the discovery of the Jewish texts
displaying Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah, it is not
difficult to piece this jigsaw together. In 639BCE, Josiah, king of Judah,
is known to have introduced wide-ranging religious reforms and brought
additional areas of "Israel" under his control.
It is during this period that "polemics" against and "inversion" of a wide
variety of religious and cultural sources are brought together to form a
religious and political unity.
For Josiah's "inquisitors", where history is unheroic, such as the expulsion
from Egypt in the form of the Hyksos, history is inverted. Where religion is
bereft of moral unity, the cult of Aten is interweaved, satisfying existing
belief systems within the region and bestowing upon the king, Josiah, the
position of divine right through a lineage to Solomon and David - both
replacements for Aten's ancestors and his temple-building reputation. Josiah
also destroys the Topheth Temple said to have been built by Solomon in the
Hinnon valley just outside Jerusalem, to the south.
Within this unifying mechanism, there are obfuscations to mitigate existing
belief systems, which require the true name of God to be kept secret, and
for which there is precedence in the cults of Baal and ISH-KUR, all part of
the mish-mash of the region, and all designed to plaster over the holes in
the new Yahweh-based system. An important separation of the identities of
Baal-Moloch-Yahweh is implemented, although the evolution of ISH-KUR to
Hadad to Baal to Yahweh does not remain disguised owing to the later polemic
against Babylon written up as Genesis.
Well known in Egypt, including at the time of the Aten cult was the
following passage from the Book of the Dead:
I have not robbed.
I have not coveted.
I have not killed people.
I have not told lies.
I have not trespassed.
I have not committed adultery.
I have not cursed a god.
Josiah's unification process takes Moses, an Ideogram combining the Ahmose
who expelled the Hyksos, and the Mermose who led the Egyptian army to great
victories, and credits him with receiving the Ten Commandments in tablets of
stone. In reality these laws are an elaboration of the above declaration.
Add to this the fact that the obscure Egyptian king's "Hymn to Aten" is
almost "word for word" Psalm 104 in the Bible and we have another compelling
"coincidence".
These and other "coincidences" apparently convinced the renowned
Psychologist Sigmund Freud, writing in his 1939 book "Moses and Monotheism",
that the Jewish monotheistic faith had its roots in the Akhenaton cult
religion.
Josiah's unification should of course be applauded. It outlawed the Moloch
cult and emphasised the spiritual morality of the Ten Commandments. The
polemics and inversions adding a heroic slant to the history of his people
are understandable and politically astute. But beginning c. 200CE, somewhere
along the line, and unlike the Aten cult, supremacy of race is added to the
Jewish faith.
In summary, however, it is Herzog's discovery of Yahweh's consort Asherah in
Jewish texts and his declaration of an archaeological absence of Solomon or
David that is the scalpel with which to slice through all the fictions of
the biblical Exodus and its suggestion of divine right and supremacy. For
that reason, Herzog must not be forgotten.
Even though his scholarship is ignored by the politics of modern day Israel,
it contains a lesson for the rest of the world, and in particular for those
nations who support Israel's supremacist doctrines.
Israel, modern, needs to face up to the fact that it has no "divine right"
to the land it occupies. Israel must rely instead upon an equitable
settlement in light of its undeniable modern day colonisation and conquest -
a reality its opponents must accept but without straying outside the
boundaries defined by international law - i.e. the 1967 borders.
It is a realist position, which most modern day western civilisations have
come to terms with without claiming divine right or racial supremacy. They
have accomplished this by recognition of human rights and an international
standard of law limiting their behaviour (in most cases), reserving instead
to a faith in the democratic institutions upon which their modernity and
equitability is based.
Given the religious and cultural battleground upon which Israel is placed,
its absence of recognition of modern reality, and in a world armed with
nuclear weapons, until Israel - armed with those weapons - separates itself
from doctrines of "divine right" and "racial supremacy", it will continue to
be the breeding ground for a fight against racial and political injustice -
at the centre of the modern-day world's geo-political processes - which
could bring our entire global civilisation to destruction.
That surely, in the name of humanity, is reason enough to bring to an end
such "biblical" fixations and dogmatism. It does not require us to abandon
faith in God in order to do that. Our intuition of The Creator is as old as
humanity and is not dependent upon a dusty old tome written by men and in
the words of men.
In a September 22nd, 2002 speech to visiting Christian Zionists, Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asserted, "This land is ours... God gave us the
title deeds..." However, recent scholarly research, including discoveries by
an archaeological team from the University of Tel Aviv, not only deconstruct
the Biblical Old Testament and Torah stories upon which this claim rests,
but grant previously unthinkable credence to an ancient historian's claim
that the Israelites of Exodus were actually the Hyksos, and therefore of
Asiatic origin.
To trace the foundations of this ongoing Biblical bonfire, we must go back
to 1999.
All hell broke loose in Israel in November of that year when Prof. Ze'ev
Herzog of Tel Aviv University announced: "the Israelites were never in
Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land, and did not pass
it on to the twelve tribes". Moreover, the Jewish God YHWH had a female
consort - the goddess Asherah!
His conclusion that the kingdom of David and Solomon was at best a small
tribal monarchy, at worst total myth, has made enemies for him in the camps
of traditional Jewish and Christian belief systems. He asserts: all evidence
demonstrates that the Jews did not adopt monotheism until the 7th Century
BCE - a heresy according to the Biblical tradition dating it to Moses at
Mount Sinai.
Tel Aviv University's archaeological investigation at Megiddo and
examination of the six-sided gate there dates it to the 9th Century BCE, not
the 10th Century BCE claimed by the 1960's investigator Yigael Yadin who
attributed it to Solomon. Herzog, moreover, states that Solomon and David
are "entirely absent in the archaeological record".
In addition, Herzog's colleague, Israel Finkelstein, claims the Jews were
nothing more than nomadic Canaanites who bartered with the city dwellers.
The team's studies concluded that Jerusalem did not have any central status
until 722 BCE with the destruction of its northern rival Samaria.
However, the real bombshell is Herzog's discovery of numerous references to
Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah. Inscriptions, written in
Hebrew by official Jewish scribes in the 8th century BCE, were found in
numerous sites all over the land. For Yahweh, supposedly the "One God", to
have had a female consort and, of all people, the goddess Asherah, is
dynamite of wide ranging significance.
The Secret Identity of Yahweh
The use of Yahweh as the name of God has always fuelled speculation and
philosophical argument. YHWH, sometimes pronounced Jehovah, is taken to mean
"I AM" or "I AM WHO I AM". There is also the puzzle of the rule that his
mysterious real name is not to be spoken.
The identification of the goddess Asherah (Asherat) as His consort somewhere
within the original Jewish faith leads to some explosive conclusions about
the identity of the Jewish/Christian God of the Cosmos, the one Monotheistic
God with whom we are so familiar from western religion.
But before looking at Asherah, and what she means to the identity of Yahweh,
it is worth taking a look at another goddess, Ashteroth. Her significance
will become evident a little later. Referred to as an "abomination" in 2
Kings, Ashteroth was an important deity in the Near East pantheons.
To the Sumerians she was IN.ANNA (Anu's beloved) and is an important
character in the Sumerian Epics. To the Assyrians and Babylonians she was
Ishtar; Ashtoreth was her name for the Canaanites; to the Greeks -
Aphrodite; the Romans - Venus. The most important equivalent however is the
Egyptian goddess Hathor, who the Greeks identified with Aphrodite. Hathor
was the wife of Horus, the God of War. Hathor is identified with the symbol
of the cow, and statues of her in the 26th Dynasty (572 - 525 BC) in Egypt
actually depict her as a cow. Asherah, (whose name means "she who walks in
the sea") supposedly consort of the supreme god El, was also referred to as
Elath (the goddess). According to the Ugarit tradition, whose clay tablets
contain the earliest known alphabet, she was consort of El, and mother of
seventy gods. She is also associated with Baal and is supposed to have
interceded to her husband, the supreme god, on Baal's behalf, for the
building of a palace - in order to grant him equal status with other gods.
In the cuniform tablets of Ras Shamrah (Circa 1400 BCE) the head of the
Pantheon was El; his wife was Asherat-of-the-sea (Asherah). After El, the
greatest god was Baal, son of El and Asherah. Curiously, Baal's consort is
his mother, Asherah. In the Lebanon traditions Baal is equated with Jupiter.
Carvings of Asherah in Syria show her wearing Egyptian head-dress. She was
also referred to later as "the cow" - a reference to her great age.
Significantly, Baalat (an important Goddess at Byblos) is depicted in
carvings as having cow's horns, between which is a halo. Baalat is in fact
the form of Asherah when she appears alongside Baal. But what does this say
about the identity of Yahweh? The Bible has always presented a confusing
picture of Yahweh. In the light of Herzog's discoveries and conclusions that
Yahweh's consort was Asherah, it deserves a closer examination.
Exodus 6:3 states "And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob,
by [the name of] God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name "I AM" was I not
known to them." In the King James Version, "I AM" is translated as Jehovah
(Yahweh) but means the same: "I AM". The use of "God Almighty" is a
traditional translation of Shaddai, thought to have meant "Omnipotent", but
arguably it could be linked to the Akkadian root word Shadu, meaning
literally "mountains".
And El Shaddai is only one of the versions of God described in Genesis. El
Shaddai literally translated means, "God the one of the mountains", but
there was also El Olam (God the everlasting one) El Elyon (God most high) El
Ro'i (God of vision).
The obvious question is, why did YHWH reveal himself to the patriarchs as El
Shaddai? The answer lies in the religious traditions of Canaan, where
Abraham is said to have lived for a time, and which were brought to Canaan
by the Phoenicians. (In turn, the root of Phoenician religious tradition is
Sumer).
God-the-one-of-the-mountains has a Sumerian equivalent. ISH.KUR, the
youngest son of Enlil, means God the one of the far mountains. Ishkur was
also known as Adad or Hadad in Hebrew, brother of Nannar/Sin, and was the
pre-eminent God of Canaan - El-Shaddai.
According to biblical scholars who focus on the "P Source" for the old
testament, Yahweh as a name is first used with Moses in Exodus, and is
indicative of monolatory (exclusive worship of one of many Gods) rather than
monotheism. The name Yahweh can also be translated as "I am who I am",
literally a way of saying "mind your own business", a way of disguising his
true identity. Yahweh does not appear until Exodus and, strangely, the god
Baal is entirely absent in Genesis. (El Shaddai is still venerated in the
Jewish faith in the form of the Teffilin, one of two small leather
cube-shaped cases containing Torah Texts, traditionally to be worn by males
from the age of 13. The Teffilin are worn in a manner to represent the
letters shin, daleth, and yod, which together form the name Shaddai.)
In Exodus 33:2 it states "And I will send an angel before thee; and I will
drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite,
the Hivite, and the Jebusite:
33:3 Unto a land flowing with milk and honey: for I will not go up in the
midst of thee; for thou [art] a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee on
the way."
This Yahweh is prone to violence and seems to despise his chosen people. He
is a perfect match for ISH.KUR (Hadad), whose land is occupied by the
Amorites and Hittites, and is a known demonstrator of violence and contempt
for his worshipers.
ISH.KUR's image, traits, and symbols match those of Baal. He is also
anti-Babylon and anti-Egypt, as is Yahweh. And like Yahweh's, the real name
of the Canaanite Baal (Hadad) must not be spoken.
On the basis of Herzog's discovery, the evidence within the Bible itself,
the Sumerian, Phoenician and Canaanite traditions, the following is a
logical conclusion and solution to the identity of the Jewish God of the Old
Testament: ISH.KUR = Hadad = El Shaddai = Baal = Yahweh. (The Canaanite's
Baal was also known as Moloch, who we will examine later.)
This indicates, as does Herzog's work, that the Jewish people evolved from
polytheism to monotheism with the promotion of a god who had been known by a
variety of names, into one supreme God, Yahweh (whose real name must not be
spoken), and that they adopted for this purpose, not the supreme God of the
Pantheons, El, but his son - ISH.KUR, Baal, Hadad, El-Shaddai, an entity who
was in open revolt against his father El, and ultimately aided in this
revolt by his mother and consort, Asherah, (also known as Baalat, Ashteroth,
Elat).
This female entity was later merged by Greek and Roman traditions into
Aphrodite and Venus, and known earlier to the Egyptians as Isis. Once we
understand this, the etymology of the name Israel - Is (either Isis or tomb)
Ra (Head of the Egyptian Pantheon) El (Lord - Baal) - makes far more obvious
sense than the convoluted "Yisrael" yarn from the Hebrew faith.
But what does all this do to the validity of the "Title Deeds" from God that
Ariel Sharon refers to? Quite apart from the obvious conclusion that the god
assumed to have given the "promised land" to his chosen people was just one
god from a pantheon and not the alleged monotheistic only God of the cosmos,
Herzog's findings corroborate theories that have been "out there" for some
time.
The Hyksos
Like Herzog, the historian Josephus (c. 37CE - c. 100CE) denied the account
of the Hebrews being held in captivity in Egypt, but he went a drastic step
further about the racial origins of the Jews, whom he identified with the
Hyksos. He further claimed they did not flee from Egypt but were evicted due
to them being leprous.
It must be said that Josephus has been vilified over the ages as a Roman
collaborator by both Jewish and Christian scholars who have argued that the
dating of the exodus of the "Hebrews" from Egypt in the Bible positively
rules out their identification as Hyksos. However, Jan Assmann, a prominent
Egyptologist at Heidelberg University, is quite positive in his writings
that the Exodus story is an inversion of the Hyksos expulsion and
furthermore that Moses was an Egyptian.
Likewise, Donald P. Redford, of Toronto University, presents striking
evidence that the Expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt was inverted to
construct the exodus of the Hebrew slaves story in the Torah and Old
Testament. His book, which argued this theory, "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in
Ancient Times" was Winner of the 1993 Best Scholarly Book in Archaeology
Award of the Biblical Archaeological Society.
There is irrefutable evidence that the Hyksos, a mixed Semitic-Asiatic group
who infiltrated the Nile valley, seized power in Lower Egypt in the 17th
Century BCE. They ruled there from c. 1674 BCE until expelled when their
capital, Avaris, fell to Ahmose around 1567 BCE. The Hyksos in Egypt
worshipped Set, who like ISH.KUR they identified as a storm deity.
Under the "inversion theory", Jewish scholars in the 7th Century BCE changed
the story from "expelled" to "escaped" and as a further insult to their
enemy, Ahmose, changed and miss-spelt his name to Moses, presenting him as
leader of a Hebrew revolt. But there is also a strong possibility of two
separate origins to the "Moses" character being merged into one, which I
will come to later.
Ahmose's success in 1567 BCE led to the establishment of the 18th Dynasty in
Egypt. ThotMoses III overthrew the transvestite Pharaoh Atchepsut, and under
ThotMoses IV Egyptian conquests extended beyond the Sinai into Palestine,
Syria, reaching Babylonia and included Canaan.
By the end of this expansion, Amenophis III (1380BCE) ruled an Egyptian
empire whose provinces and colonies bordered what is now known as Turkey.
This empire would have included the regions in which most of the expelled
Hyksos now lived.
Amenophis IV succeeded the throne in 1353BCE. He established a new
monotheism cult establishing "Aten" as the one supreme god and he changed
his name to Akhenaton. Married to the mysterious Nefertiti, Akhenaton
declared himself a god on earth, intermediary between the one-god Aten (Ra)
and humanity, with his spouse as partner, effectively displacing Isis and
Osiris in the Egyptian Enead. Declaring all men to be the children of Aten,
historians suspect Akhenaton planned an empire-wide religion. He banned all
idolatry, the use of images to represent god, and banned the idea that there
was more than one supreme god.
It is alongside Akhenaten and his father Amenophis III that we find the
second Moses.
An important figure during this period was confusingly called Amenophis son
of Hapu. He was First Minister (Vizier) to both kings. He is generally
depicted as a scribe, crouching and holding on his knees a roll of papyrus.
He more than anyone was responsible for authoring the religion in which the
old gods were merged into one living god, Aten, who had been responsible for
the creation of the Earth and of humanity.
The symbol of this god, the sun disk, represented Ra, Horus and the other
gods in one. The sun disk, in symbolism, was supported between the horns of
a bull. The Son of Hapu says this about creation: "I have come to you who
reigns over the gods oh Amon, Lord of the Two Lands, for you are Re who
appears in the sky, who illuminates the earth with a brilliantly shining
eye, who came out of the Nou, who appeared above the primitive water, who
created everything, who generated the great Enneade of the gods, who created
his own flesh and gave birth to his own form."
The king's overseer of the land of Nubia was a certain Mermose (spelled both
Mermose and Merymose on his sarcophagus in the British Museum). According to
modern historians, in Amenhotep's third year as king, Mermose took his army
far up the Nile, supposedly to quell a minor rebellion, but actually to
secure gold mining territories which would supply his king with the greatest
wealth of any ruler of Egypt. Recent scholarship has indicated Mermose took
his army to the neighbourhood of the confluence of the Nile and Atbara
Rivers and beyond.
But who was this Mermose? According to historian Dawn Breasted, the Greek
translation of this name was Moses. Does Jewish tradition support this
identification?
According to Jewish history not included in the Bible, Moses led the army of
Pharaoh to the South, into the land of Kush, and reached the vicinity of the
Atbara River. There he attracted the love of the princess of the fortress
city of Saba, later Meroe. She gave up the city in exchange for marriage.
Biblical confirmation of such a marriage is to be found in Numbers 12:1.
"And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman
whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman."
The end of Akhenaten's reign is shrouded in mystery, scholarship about which
is beyond the scope of an article of this length. In summary, however,
theories span from the death of Nefertiti from plague - Akhenaten's own
death from plague or murder - to exile. On clear record, in contrast, is the
return of Egypt to the Enead of the gods and a systematic attempt to erase
all vestiges of Akhenaton and his cult in Egypt.
Meanwhile, the expelled Hyksos, according to various historians, have been
living in Canaan.
It is here that a solution to the Biblical dating problem of linking the
Israelites to the Hyksos appears.
Using the dating of the Biblical Exodus and comparing it to the Egyptian
dating of the Hyksos expulsion throws up a gap of about 400 years. Using the
dating systems of the books of Judges and Samuel, this gap can extend to
between 554 and 612 years.
However, there is clear historical record of post Hyksos Egypt extending its
empire into Canaan, the land into which the Hebrews entered and lived,
according to Biblical sources, for 400 years before establishing the kingdom
of Solomon.
The Hebrews living in Canaan were therefore under Egyptian rule. It is also
here in Canaan that we can make a comparison between Yahweh and the
Canaanite Moloch (Baal) and extrapolate a polemic inversion of the story of
Pharaoh ordering the death of all the "first born" in Exodus. The
worshippers of Moloch sacrificed their first born children to their deity
through immolation. Worshippers of Yahweh in Canaan were also known to carry
out child sacrifice on occasion, especially in times of hardship, although
immolation (holocaust) was supposedly frowned upon. Slitting the child's
throat, however, was acceptable. The sacrifices were carried out and the
remains interred at sacred sites known at Topheth. Sometimes - although
rarely, judging by the vast predominance of infant human bones found at
Topheth sites by archaeologists - animals were sacrificed as substitutes.
The Unification
Modern historical disciplines studying the biblical era uniformly conclude
that Exodus could not have been written earlier than the 7th century BCE,
and certainly not by the Biblical Moses who at best is a fictional
combination of Egyptian personalities.
In Israel itself, 7th Century BCE is the period in which the archaeological
evidence presented by Herzog suggests the emergence of Jerusalem as a
cultural centre occurs.
By all accounts, it is a cultural centre struggling to find an identity and
nationality for itself and, given the discovery of the Jewish texts
displaying Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah, it is not
difficult to piece this jigsaw together. In 639BCE, Josiah, king of Judah,
is known to have introduced wide-ranging religious reforms and brought
additional areas of "Israel" under his control.
It is during this period that "polemics" against and "inversion" of a wide
variety of religious and cultural sources are brought together to form a
religious and political unity.
For Josiah's "inquisitors", where history is unheroic, such as the expulsion
from Egypt in the form of the Hyksos, history is inverted. Where religion is
bereft of moral unity, the cult of Aten is interweaved, satisfying existing
belief systems within the region and bestowing upon the king, Josiah, the
position of divine right through a lineage to Solomon and David - both
replacements for Aten's ancestors and his temple-building reputation. Josiah
also destroys the Topheth Temple said to have been built by Solomon in the
Hinnon valley just outside Jerusalem, to the south.
Within this unifying mechanism, there are obfuscations to mitigate existing
belief systems, which require the true name of God to be kept secret, and
for which there is precedence in the cults of Baal and ISH-KUR, all part of
the mish-mash of the region, and all designed to plaster over the holes in
the new Yahweh-based system. An important separation of the identities of
Baal-Moloch-Yahweh is implemented, although the evolution of ISH-KUR to
Hadad to Baal to Yahweh does not remain disguised owing to the later polemic
against Babylon written up as Genesis.
Well known in Egypt, including at the time of the Aten cult was the
following passage from the Book of the Dead:
I have not robbed.
I have not coveted.
I have not killed people.
I have not told lies.
I have not trespassed.
I have not committed adultery.
I have not cursed a god.
Josiah's unification process takes Moses, an Ideogram combining the Ahmose
who expelled the Hyksos, and the Mermose who led the Egyptian army to great
victories, and credits him with receiving the Ten Commandments in tablets of
stone. In reality these laws are an elaboration of the above declaration.
Add to this the fact that the obscure Egyptian king's "Hymn to Aten" is
almost "word for word" Psalm 104 in the Bible and we have another compelling
"coincidence".
These and other "coincidences" apparently convinced the renowned
Psychologist Sigmund Freud, writing in his 1939 book "Moses and Monotheism",
that the Jewish monotheistic faith had its roots in the Akhenaton cult
religion.
Josiah's unification should of course be applauded. It outlawed the Moloch
cult and emphasised the spiritual morality of the Ten Commandments. The
polemics and inversions adding a heroic slant to the history of his people
are understandable and politically astute. But beginning c. 200CE, somewhere
along the line, and unlike the Aten cult, supremacy of race is added to the
Jewish faith.
In summary, however, it is Herzog's discovery of Yahweh's consort Asherah in
Jewish texts and his declaration of an archaeological absence of Solomon or
David that is the scalpel with which to slice through all the fictions of
the biblical Exodus and its suggestion of divine right and supremacy. For
that reason, Herzog must not be forgotten.
Even though his scholarship is ignored by the politics of modern day Israel,
it contains a lesson for the rest of the world, and in particular for those
nations who support Israel's supremacist doctrines.
Israel, modern, needs to face up to the fact that it has no "divine right"
to the land it occupies. Israel must rely instead upon an equitable
settlement in light of its undeniable modern day colonisation and conquest -
a reality its opponents must accept but without straying outside the
boundaries defined by international law - i.e. the 1967 borders.
It is a realist position, which most modern day western civilisations have
come to terms with without claiming divine right or racial supremacy. They
have accomplished this by recognition of human rights and an international
standard of law limiting their behaviour (in most cases), reserving instead
to a faith in the democratic institutions upon which their modernity and
equitability is based.
Given the religious and cultural battleground upon which Israel is placed,
its absence of recognition of modern reality, and in a world armed with
nuclear weapons, until Israel - armed with those weapons - separates itself
from doctrines of "divine right" and "racial supremacy", it will continue to
be the breeding ground for a fight against racial and political injustice -
at the centre of the modern-day world's geo-political processes - which
could bring our entire global civilisation to destruction.
That surely, in the name of humanity, is reason enough to bring to an end
such "biblical" fixations and dogmatism. It does not require us to abandon
faith in God in order to do that. Our intuition of The Creator is as old as
humanity and is not dependent upon a dusty old tome written by men and in
the words of men.
--
If Jews are a race by birth and intermarriage why are not the
Latter Days Saints a race?
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4099
http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/GAZA-pics/ a13
Sat Feb 7 03:07:34 EST 2009
If Jews are a race by birth and intermarriage why are not the
Latter Days Saints a race?
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4099
http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/GAZA-pics/ a13
Sat Feb 7 03:07:34 EST 2009