The Moses Files

See you in September

Dear subscribers,

I’m taking two months off in order to get some rest, turn my research on the Christianization (started one year ago with this post) into a book, and find fresh ideas.

Tomorrow, I will click on “pause billing”, which should have as consequence that the remaining time on all paid subscriptions is frozen, until I press unpause in September.

Before leaving, however, here is a short article that wraps up my review of Gmirkin’s books, summarizing some arguments that I have made before but recent subscribers may not have read. Enjoy the Summer.

The Curse of the Burning Bush

If we follow the argument of Gmirkin’s first book, the Hebrew’s Exodus from Egypt is a complete fabrication. Not everything in the book of Exodus, however, was made up in the Hellenistic period. The legend of the conquest of Canaan from the land of Midian is probably based on some pre-Hellenistic tradition. According to the “Midianite Hypothesis” (or “Kenite Hypothesis”), this legend gives us the most plausible origin of Mosaic Yahwism. To make a long story short, Moses is the son-in-law of a Midianite priest (kohen) of Yahweh (called Hobab in Judges 1:16, but Jethro in Numbers 18:1 and in most of Exodus, except in Exodus 2:18 where he is called Reuel). The “holy ground” (Ex 3:5) where Moses first meets Yahweh is in Jethro’s territory. Jethro “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh (Ex 18:12), and instructed Moses how to organize the tribes politically (Ex 18:19-25). It was Jethro’s daughter Zipporah (Moses’s wife) who performed circumcision on their newborn son, to appease Yahweh’s wrath (Ex 4:24-26). The mount Horeb which Moses climbs to receive Yahweh’s commandments is rumbling and spitting fire, just like a volcano (Ex 19:16-19). This is consistent with Yahweh’s “volcanic” character. Midian is located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, which happens to be an ancient volcanic area (unlike the Egyptian peninsula later mistakenly named Sinai).

Moses’ father-in-law is called a Midianite in Exodus, but a Kenite in Judges 1:16. The scholarly assumption is that the Kenites were a semi-nomadic people living in the region of Midian. The name of the Kenites (Qayn) means “blacksmith” or “metal-worker”. Midian is a region rich in copper, and copper was mined there by the Egyptians from the end of the 14th century bce. The Kenites’ trade in copper or bronze metallurgy is consistent with their worshipping a volcano god. The Israelites apparently had a special alliance with the Kenites, but not with the rest of the Midianites, who were supposedly exterminated on Moses’ order in Numbers 31. Since Cain and Kenite are one and the same word, it is most likely that the story of Cain and Abel was borrowed from a Kenite etiologic tale attributing the Kenites’ nomadic lifestyle to a divine punishment for an ancestral fratricide. This legend indicates that the Kenites, or tribe of Cain, inspired fear to their neighbors for their law of sevenfold vengeance.

In this hypothesis, Moses’s major innovation to the Kenites’ religion was to make their volcano god portable by putting him (in the form of stone tablets) in a wooden chest (the Ark) carried in battle, and a golden tent (the Tabernacle).

Whether you believe that the volcanic demon named Yahweh is real, not real, or something in between, that’s his origin. How he came to be regarded as “God” is another story. It is the story of “the Great Metaphysical Lie by which the Jews have bewitched half of the planet,” as I called it.

The conspiracy of Ezra

Although Gmirkin dates that deception in the Hellenistic period, most “minimalists” still believe that the brillant idea of turning the jealous god of the Jews into the Cosmic God of humankind (who prefers Jews) first came up to the Babylonian exiles during the Persian period, when they were living under the monotheistic Achaemenids, worshippers of Ahura Mazda, the “God of Heaven”.

Although the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (originally one book) were certainly composed after the Persian period, they shed some light on that process. The book of Ezra contains extracts from several edicts attributed to succeeding Persian kings to allow the Judean (Jewish) exiles to return to Palestine and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple. They are certainly not genuine documents, but their content reveals the politico-religious strategy deployed by those who forged them (my Catholic “Jerusalem Bible” calls them “proto-Zionists”). In the first edict, Cyrus the Great calls Yahweh both “the God of Heaven” and “the god of Israel, who is the god in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2–3). We find the same duality God of Heaven/god of Israel in the next edict by King Artaxerxes who allows “the priest Ezra, Secretary of the Law of the God of Heaven,” to offer a gigantic holocaust to “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12-15). We later find twice the same expression “God of Heaven” (Elah Shemaiya) interspersed with seven references to “your god,” that is, “the god of Israel”. “God of Heaven” appears once more in an edict signed by the Persian king Darius to confirm Cyrus’ prior edict and recommend that the Israelites “offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons” (6:10). The expression appears one more time, when the Judeans tell the local Persian governor who disputes their right to build the temple: “We are the servants of the God of Heaven and Earth” (5:11). When no Persian is involved, the book of Ezra only refers to the “god of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the god of your fathers” (once), and “our god” (ten times). In other words, in the thinking of the biblical author, only the Persians are supposed to believe that Yahweh is “the God of Heaven”. In the book of Nehemiah, when Nehemiah wants to convince the Persian king let him go to Judea to oversee the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he offers a prayer “to the God of Heaven” (Nehemiah 2:4); but once in Jerusalem, he asks his fellow Jews to swear allegiance to “Yahweh our god” (10:30).

This unmistakable pattern unlocks the deepest secret of Judaism, and exposes the real nature of “Jewish universalism”: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews,[1] whereas Gentiles should be told, again and again, that he is the supreme and universal God—who happens to love Jews and hate their enemies.

This dialectical relationship between Jewish monolatry and Mesopotamian monotheism also shows up in the book of Daniel, written in the same Hellenistic period. The eponymous hero is selected from the Judean exiles in Babylon to be educated by the chief eunuch of King Nebuchadnezzar. When he proves capable of interpreting the dreams of the king, the latter falls at his feet and says: “Your god is indeed the god of gods, the Master of kings” (2:47).

The expression “the god of gods” echoes the expression “king of kings” by which the Persian emperor designated himself. The parallel between the two expressions perfectly represents the way the Jews relate to the various empires who conquered them: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Lagids, the Seleucids, and later the Romans may have the king of kings, but they, the Jews, have something better: the god of gods, whom they ultimately imposed on those empires.

The prostitute of Jericho

The book of Joshua, written in the Persian or Hellenistic periods according to the “minimalists”, reflects the same conscious ambiguity. It never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” but always as “Yahweh the god of Israel”,[2] “Yahweh my god” or “our god” when Israelites are talking,[3] or “Yahweh your god” when the Israelites are talked to.[4] The only explicit profession that Yahweh is the supreme God, in the whole Book of Joshua, comes from the mouth of Rahab, a prostitute who hides two Israeli spies for the night inside Jericho’s walls, and later lets the Israelites into the city in exchange for being spared with her family during the massacre that follows. As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the book ever claims. This story, which likens the prostitute of Jericho to the Trojan Horse, illustrates that the Israelites are satisfied with the belief that Yahweh is their god, while Gentiles will be conquered by the belief that Yahweh is the God of Heaven and Earth—who happens to love Israel and hate all Israel’s enemies.

My French Catholic Bible (published by the Dominicans of the École Biblique de Jérusalem) adds a footnote to that passage, saying that Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel … made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Gentile Church to the prostitute of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.

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[1] “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” writes Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924), pp. 74-75.

[2] Joshua 7:13, 9:18, 13:14, 13:33, 14:14, 22:16.

[3] Joshua 9:23, 14:8, 22:19.

[4] Joshua 1:11, 1:12, 1:15, 3:3, 3:9, 4:5, 4:23-24, 8:7, 9:9, 22:3-4, 22:5, 23:3,5,8,11, 24:2.