by
Damien F. Mackey
Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares
"some cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend.
Law and Government
The great Lawgiver in the Bible, and hence in Hebrew history, was Moses, substantially the author of the Torah (Law). But the history books tell us that the Torah was probably dependent upon the ‘law code’ issued by the Babylonian king, Hammurabi (dated to the first half of the C18th BC).
I shall discuss this historical anomaly a little further on.
For Egyptian identifications of Moses as a legal official in Egypt, see e.g. my article:
Moses a Judge in Egypt
For Moses the Lawgiver appropriated by the Greeks (Spartans), see my article:
Moses and Lycurgus
The Egyptians may have corrupted the legend of the baby Moses in the bulrushes so that now it became the goddess Isis who drew the baby Horus from the Nile and had him suckled by Hathor (the goddess in the form of a cow - the Egyptian personification of wisdom). In the original story, of course, baby Moses was drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess, not a goddess, and was weaned by Moses' own mother (Exodus 2:5-9).
Anyway, Moses became for the Egyptians Hor-mes, meaning 'son of Hathor', which legendary person the Greeks eventually absorbed into their own pantheon as Hermes, the winged messenger god. [The Roman version of Hermes is Mercury]
Could both the account of the rescue of the baby Moses in the Book of Exodus, and the Egyptian version of it, be actually based upon a Mesopotamian original, as the textbooks say; based upon the story of King Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia? Sargon tells, "in terms reminiscent of Moses, Krishna and other great men", that [as quoted by G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 152]:
.… My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me ….
Given that Sargon is conventionally dated to the C24th BC, and Moses about a millennium later, it would seem inevitable that the Hebrew version, and the Egyptian one, must be imitations of the Mesopotamian one. Such is what the ‘history’ books say, at least, despite the fact that the extant Sargon legend is very late (C7th BC); thought, though, to have been based upon an earlier Mesopotamian original. See my article:
Did Sargon of Akkad influence the Exodus account of the baby Moses?
For Sargon of Akkad as a possible biblical character, see e.g. my article:
Nimrod a "mighty man"
What is more certain and accurate, I think, is Dean Hickman re-dating of King Hammurabi of Babylon to the time of Solomon (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying Hammurabi's older contemporary, Shamsi-Adad I, as king David's Syrian foe, Hadadazer (2 Samuel 10:16).
I have been able to take this further since in articles such as:
Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
According to this new scenario, Hammurabi well post-dated Moses and could not possibly have influenced the Torah (Law).
(a) Greek and Phoenician 'Moses-like Myths'
M. Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares "some cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend. He gives his parallels as follows [Hellenosemitica, p. 99]:
Moses grows up at the court of the Egyptian king as a member of the royal family, and subsequently flees from Egypt after having slain an Egyptian - as Danaos, a member of the Egyptian ruling house, flees from the same country after the slaying of the Aigyptiads which he had arranged. The same number of generations separates Moses from Leah the "wild cow" and Danaos from the cow Io.
My comment: The above parallel might even account for how the Greeks managed to confuse the land of Ionia (Io) with the land of Israel in the case of the earliest philosophers:
Joseph as Thales: Not an "Hellenic Gotterdamerung" but Israelite Wisdom
Astour continues (op. cit., pp. 99-100):
Still more characteristic is that both Moses and Danaos find and create springs in a waterless region; the story of how Poseidon, on the request of the Danaide Amymona, struck out with his trident springs from the Lerna rock, particularly resembles Moses producing a spring from the rock by the stroke of his staff.
A ‘cow’ features also in the legend of Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Tyre upon the disappearance of his sister Europa, who was sent by his father together with his brothers Cilix and Phoenix to seek her with instructions not to return without her. Seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Cadmus was told to settle at the point where a cow, which he would meet leaving the temple, would lie down. The cow led him to the site of Thebes (Greek and Egyptian cities by that name).
There he built the citadel of Cadmeia.
Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite and, according to the legend, was the founder of the House of Oedipus]
Astour believes that "even more similar features" may be discovered if one links these accounts to the Ugaritic (Phoenicio-Canaanite) poem of Dan’el, which he had previously identified as "the prototype of the Danaos myth" (p. 100):
The name of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather of Moses. The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed, figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t, the daughter of Danel and the devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story as Pû'ã, a midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses. The very name of Moses, in the feminine form Mšt, is, in the Ugaritic poem, the first half of Danel's wife's name, while the second half of her name, Dnty, corresponds to the name of Levi's sister Dinah.
Astour had already explained how the biblical story of the Rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) was "analogous to the myth of the bloody wedding of her namesakes, the Danaides".
He continues on here with his fascinating Greco-Israelite parallels:
Dân, the root of the names Dnel, Dnty (and also Dinah and Danaos), was the name of a tribe whose priests claimed to descend directly from Moses (Jud. 18:30); and compare the serpent emblem of the tribe of Dan with the serpent staff of Moses and the bronze serpent he erected. …Under the same name - Danaë - another Argive heroine of the Danaid stock is thrown into the sea in a chest with her new-born son - as Moses in his ark (tébã) - and lands on the serpent-island of Seriphos (Heb. šãrâph, applied i.a. to the bronze serpent made by Moses). Moses, like Danel, is a healer, a prophet, a miracle-worker - cf. Danel's staff (mt) which he extends while pronouncing curses against towns and localities, quite like Moses in Egypt; and especially, like Danel, he is a judge….
(b) Roman 'Moses-like Myth'
The Romans further corrupted the story of the infant Moses, following on probably from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians and Greeks. I refer to the account of Romulus (originally Rhomus) and Remus, thought to have founded the city of Rome in 753 BC. Both the founders and the date are quite mythical. The Romans may have taken an approximate form of the Egyptian name for Moses, (Sinuhe, or Sa-nu(mu) Musare), and turned it into Rhomus and Remus (MUSA-RE = RE-MUS), with the formerly one child (Moses) now being doubled into two babies (twins). According to this legend, the twins were put into a basket by some kind servants and floated in the Tiber River, from which they were eventually rescued by a she-wolf. Thus the Romans more pragmatically opted for a she-wolf as the suckler instead of a cow goddess, or a lion goddess, Sekhmet (the fierce alter ego of Hathor).
The Romans took yet another slice from the Pentateuch when they had the founder of the city of Rome, Romulus, involved in a fratricide (killing Remus); just as Cain, the founder of the world's first city, had killed his own brother, Abel (cf. Genesis 4:8 and 4:17).
(c) Mohammed: Arabian ‘Moses-like Myths'
An Islamic lecturer, Ahmed Deedat ["What the Bible Says About Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) the Prophet of Islam" (www.islamworld.net/Muhammad.in.Bible.html)], told of an interview he once had with a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Transvaal, van Heerden, on the question: "What does the Bible say about Muhummed?" Deedat had in mind the Holy Qur'an verse 46:10, according to which "a witness among the children of Israel bore witness of one like him…". This was in turn a reference to Deuteronomy 18:18's "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and I will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."
The Moslems of course interpret the "one like him [i.e. Moses]" as being Mohammed himself.
Faced with the dominee's emphatic response that the Bible has "nothing" to say about Mohammed - and that the Deuteronomic prophecy ultimately pertained to Jesus Christ, as did "thousands" of other prophecies - Deedat set out to prove him wrong.
For the gross historical anachronisms associated with ‘Mohammed’, see articles such as my:
Further argument for Prophet Mohammed's likely non-existence
In such articles the prophet Mohammed is shown to have been (at least in part) a composite biblical character and a non-historical entity.
Some Conclusions regarding Mohammed (c. 570-632 AD, conventional dating)
It is not surprising that the biography of ‘Mohammed’, much of whose foundations were actually Israelite (biblical), as I have argued, borrowed in part from the Moses story, as is even more the case with the so-called ‘Buddha’. On the latter see e.g. my series:
Buddha just a re-working of Moses. Part One: The singular greatness of Moses
beginning with:
Mohammed especially resembles Moses in:
(i) the latter's visit to Mount Horeb (modern Har Karkom) with its cave atop, its Burning Bush, and angel (Exodus 3:1-2), possibly equating to Mohammed's "Mountain of Light" (Jabal-an-Nur), and 'cave of research' (‘Ghar-i-Hira'), and angel Gabriel;
(ii) at the very same age of forty (Acts 7:23-29), and
(iii) there receiving a divine revelation, leading to his
(iv) becoming a prophet of God and a Lawgiver.
Mohammed as a Lawgiver is a direct pinch, I believe, from the Hebrew Pentateuch – but also from the era of the prophet Jeremiah whom Mohammed also much resembles.
Consider the following [O'Hair, M., "Mohammed", A text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 65, first broadcast on August 25, 1969. (www.atheists.org/Islam.Mohammed.html)]:
"Now the Kaaba or Holy Stone at Mecca was the scene of an annual pilgrimage, and during this pilgrimage in 621 Mohammed was able to get six persons from Medina to bind themselves to him. They did so by taking the following oath.
Not consider anyone equal to Allah;
Not to steal;
Not to be unchaste;
Not to kill their children;
Not willfully to calumniate".
This is simply the Mosaïc Decalogue, with the following Islamic addition [ibid.]:
"To obey the prophet's orders in equitable matters.
In return Mohammed assured these six novitiates of paradise. The place where these first vows were taken is now called the first Akaba".
"The mission of Mohammed", perfectly reminiscent of that of Moses (and of Jeremiah), was "to restore the worship of the One True God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, as taught by Prophet Ibrahim [Abraham] and all Prophets of God, and complete the laws of moral, ethical, legal, and social conduct and all other matters of significance for the humanity at large."
The above-mentioned Burning Bush incident occurred whilst Moses
(a) was living in exile (Exodus 2:15)
(b) amongst the Midianite tribe of Jethro, in the Paran desert.
(c) Moses had married Jethro's daughter, Zipporah (v. 21).
Likewise Mohammed (also partly applicable to Jeremiah)
(a) experienced exile;
(b) to Medina, a name which may easily have become confused with the similar sounding, Midian, and
(c) he had only the one wife at the time, Khadija. Also
(d) Moses, like Mohammed, was terrified by what God had commanded of him, protesting that he was "slow of speech and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10). To which God replied: "Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be your mouth and teach you what you are to speak' (vv. 11-12).
Now this episode, seemingly coupled with Moses’s (with Jeremiah’s) call, has come distorted into the Koran as Mohammed's being terrified by what God was asking of him, protesting that he was not learned.
To which God supposedly replied that he had 'created man from a clot of congealed blood, and had taught man the use of the pen, and that which he knew not, and that man does not speak ought of his own desire but by inspiration sent down to him'.
Ironically, whilst Moses the writer complained about his lack of verbal eloquence, Mohammed, 'unlettered and unlearned', who therefore could not write, is supposed to have been told that God taught man to use the pen (?). But Mohammed apparently never learned to write, because he is supposed only to have spoken God's utterances. Though his words, like those of Moses (who however did write, e.g. Exodus 34:27), were written down in various formats by his secretary, Zaid (roughly equating to the biblical Joshua, a writer, Joshua 8:32, or to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch).
This is generally how the Koran is said to have arisen.
But Mohammed also resembles Moses in his childhood in the fact that, after his infancy, he was raised by a foster-parent (Exodus 2:10).
And there is the inevitable weaning legend [Zahoor, A. and Haq, Z., "Biography of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)", (http://cyberistan.org/islamic/muhammad.html), 1998.]: "All biographers state that the infant prophet sucked only one breast of his foster-mother, leaving the other for the sustenance of his foster-brother".
There is even a kind of Islamic version of the Exodus. Compare the following account of the Qoreish persecution and subsequent pursuit of the fleeing Moslems with the persecution and later pursuit of the fleeing Israelites by Pharaoh (Exodus 1 and 4:5-7) [O’Hair, op. cit., ibid.]:
When the persecution became unbearable for most Muslims, the Prophet advised them in the fifth year of his mission (615 CE) to emigrate to Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) where Ashabah (Negus, a Christian) was the ruler. Eighty people, not counting the small children, emigrated in small groups to avoid detection. No sooner had they left the Arabian coastline [substitute Egyptian borders], the leaders of Quraish discovered their flight. They decided to not leave these Muslims in peace, and immediately sent two of their envoys to Negus to bring all of them back.
The Koran of Islam is, to a great extent, an Arabic version of the Hebrew Bible with all its same famous patriarchs and leading characters.
That is apparent from what the Moslems themselves admit. For example [ibid.]:
The Qur'an also mentions four previously revealed Scriptures: Suhoof (Pages) of Ibrahim (Abraham), Taurat ('Torah') as revealed to Prophet Moses, Zuboor ('Psalms') as revealed to Prophet David, and Injeel ('Evangel') as revealed to Prophet Jesus (pbuh). Islam requires belief in all prophets and revealed scriptures (original, non-corrupted) as part of the Articles of Faith.
The reputation of Ibn Ishaq (ca 704-767), a main authority on the life and times of the Prophet varied considerably among the early Moslem critics: some found him very sound, while others regarded him as a liar in relation to Hadith (Mohammed's sayings and deeds). His Sira is not extant in its original form, but is present in two recensions done in 833 and 814-15, and these texts vary from one another. Fourteen others have recorded his lectures, but their versions differ [ibid.]:
It was the storytellers who created the tradition: the sound historical traditions to which they are supposed to have added their fables simply did not exist. . . . Nobody remembered anything to the contrary either. . . .
There was no continuous transmission. Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and others were cut off from the past: like the modern scholar, they could not get behind their sources.... Finally, it has to be realized that the tradition as a whole, not just parts of it as some have thought, is tendentious, and that that tendentiousness arises from allegiance to Islam itself. The complete unreliability of the Muslim tradition as far as dates are concerned has been demonstrated by Lawrence Conrad. After close examination of the sources in an effort to find the most likely birth date for Muhammad--traditionally `Am al-fil, the Year of the Elephant, 570 C.E.--Conrad remarks that ["What Historians have Deduced about the Historical Mohammed.
(d) Modern Myths about Moses
From the above it can now be seen that it was not only the Greeks and Romans who have been guilty of appropriation into their own folklore of famous figures of Israel. Even the Moslems have done it and are still doing it. A modern-day Islamic author from Cairo, Ahmed Osman, has - in line with psychiatrist Sigmund Freud's view that Moses was actually an Egyptian, whose Yahwism was derived from pharaoh Akhnaton's supposed monotheism [Out of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed (Century, 1998)] - identified all the major biblical Israelites, from the patriarch Joseph to the Holy Family of Nazareth, as 18th dynasty Egyptian characters. Thus Joseph = Yuya; Moses = Akhnaton; David = Thutmose III; Solomon = Amenhotep III; Jesus = Tutankhamun; St. Joseph = Ay; Mary = Nefertiti.
This is mass appropriation! Not to mention chronological madness!
I was asked by Dr. Norman Simms of the University of Waikato (N.Z.) to write a critique of Osman's book, a copy of which he had posted to me. This was a rather easy task as the book leaves itself wide open to criticism. Anyway, the result of Dr. Simms' request was my "Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses" article [The Glozel Newsletter, 5:1 (ns) 1999 (Hamilton, N.Z), pp. 1-17], in which I argued that, because Osman is using the faulty textbook history of Egypt, he is always obliged to give the chronological precedence to Egypt, when the influence has actually come from Israel over to Egypt.
A revised version of this article can now be read as:
Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part One: The Chosen People
The way that the conventional Egyptian chronology is artificially structured at present, is thanks largely to Eduard Meyer's now approximately one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie, Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen der Königlich preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin (Akad. der Wiss., 1904).
For a refutation of this hopeless system, see e.g. my article:
The Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited
Meyer’s erroneous thesis could easily give rise to Osman's precedence in favour of Egypt view (though this is no excuse for Osman's own chronological mish-mash). One finds, for example, in Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to king David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the woman-ruler - dated to the C15th BC, 500 years earlier than David - must have influenced the great king of Israel. Or that pharaoh Akhnaton's Hymn to the Sun, so like David's Psalm 104, had inspired David many centuries later.
Only a proper revision of Egyptian history brings forth the right perspective, and shows that the Israelites actually had the chronological precedence in these as in many other cases.
It gets worse from a conventional point of view.
The 'doyen of Israeli archaeologists', Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, frequently interviewed by Beirut hostage victim John McCarthy on the provocative TV program "It Ain't Necessarily So", is, together with his colleagues, virtually writing ancient Israel right off the historical map, along with all of its major biblical characters.
This horrible mess is an inevitable consequence of the faulty Sothic chronology with which these archaeologists seem to be mesmerized. With friends like Finkelstein and co., why would Israel need any enemies!
The Lawgiver Solon
Whilst the great Lawgiver for the Hebrews was Moses, and for the Babylonians, Hammurabi, and for the Spartans, Lycurgus, and for the Moslems, supposedly, Mohammed, the Lawgiver in Athenian Greek folklore was Solon of Athens, the wisest of the wise, greatest of the Seven Sages.
Though Solon is estimated to have lived in the C6th BC, his name and many of his activities are so close to king Solomon's (supposedly 4 centuries earlier) that we need once again to question whether the Greeks may have been involved in appropriation. And, if so, how did this come about? It may in some cases simply be a memory thing, just as according to Plato's Timaeus one of the very aged Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon [Plato's Timaeus, trans. B. Jowett (The Liberal Arts Press, NY, 1949), 6 (22) and /or Desmond Lee's translation, Penguin Classics, p. 34]:
'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes [Greeks] are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. …’.
Perhaps what the author of the Timaeus really needed to have put into the mouth of the aged Egyptian priest was that the Greeks had largely forgotten who Solomon was, and had created their own fictional character, "Solon", from their vague recall of the great king Solomon who "excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" (1 Kings 10:23).
