Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [47]
2500 A third Egyptian pyramid is erected at Giza by Menkure of Egypt’s 4th Dynasty.
2500 Sumerian cuneiform script simplified from earlier language of thousands of ideograms.
2350 The Akkadian empire, founded by Sargon I, rules Mesopotamia for the next two centuries.
c. 2000-1700 Abraham leaves Ur in Chaldea.
2000 Babylonians introduce decimal notation; Babylon has replaced Sumer as the dominant power in the Middle East.
1970 Founder of Egypt’s 12th (Theban) Dynasty, Amenhet I dies after a thirty-year reign.
1792 208 years of Egypt’s Theban Dynasty ends with death of Amenemhet IV.
1792-1750? Hammurabi rules Babylon and enacts a famous law code.
1700 Babylonians employ windmills to pump water for irrigation.
1660-1550 Semitic Hyksos tribesmen invade Egypt from Palestine, Syria, and farther north. Excellent archers, they wear sandals and use horses and chariots to dominate the Nile Delta for the next century.
c. 1650? The “cult of Yahweh,” the earliest form of Judaism, begun by Abraham and carried on by his son Isaac is continued by his grandson Jacob, also named Israel.
LET MY PEOPLE GO
EXODUS
And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.
(Ex. 34:28 KJV)
* Why did God try to kill Moses?
* Did the Hebrews build the pyramids?
* Which sea did the Israelites cross?
* When you sell your daughter as a slave, do you have to give a warranty?
How do we know Moses was a real man? Lost in the desert for forty years, he wouldn’t stop and ask for directions.
At least when we get to Exodus, we have a perfect picture of biblical life and what people from the Bible actually looked like: Moses looked like Charlton Heston and the Pharaoh looked like Yul Brynner.
Cecil B. DeMille’s religious epic, The Ten Commandments (1956), has probably shaped more common (mis)conceptions of the Bible and what it says than the last forty years’ worth of scholarly dissertations, Sabbath homilies, and Sunday school classes put together. While those glorious cinematic visions—the Nile running with blood, the sea separating, those divine laws whirling out of the flames—were all visually exciting, there are some problems with the images. First of all, the “Red Sea” is now viewed as a mistranslation. Next, there is the problem of the missing Mount Sinai, sometimes called Mount Horeb. Nobody knows precisely which mountain is featured in Exodus, although the author of a controversial recent book, The Gold of Exodus, claims a pair of amateur archaeologists have discovered the site in the Arabian desert, a claim not verified by authoritative studies at this writing.
Another missing item is the single most important object in the history of ancient Israel, the Ark of the Convenant, the elaborate box God told Moses to build to hold the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. It simply disappeared from the Bible without mention. After Jerusalem is destroyed in 586 BCE, the fate of the Ark is never discussed.
Then there is another troubling question: How can a million or two men, women, and children wander around for so long without leaving any trace of having been there? No signs of semi-permanent dwellings or debris. Not a broken piece of pottery. No burial places. In other words, when it comes to the sojourn in the wilderness, researchers have (so far) found none of the remains typically left in the wake of ancient settlements. Always keep in mind Rule One of archaeology: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Yet there is Moses—or Moshe in Hebrew—the central (human) figure in the Hebrew Bible, the great law bringer, and for Christians, the symbolic model for Jesus. Moses is saved after a king orders the Jewish babies killed. Moses parts the waters; Jesus is saved after a king orders the Jewish babies killed. Moses parts the waters; Jesus calms and walks on the waters. Moses spends forty days in the wilderness; Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness. Moses