The Spiritual World of Moses and Egypt: Biblical Background to the Novel Moses: Against the Gods of Egypt
By Brian Godawa
The Spiritual World of Moses and Egypt: Biblical Background to the Novel Moses: Against the Gods of Egypt
1st Edition (1.2)b
Copyright © 2020, 2021 Brian Godawa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.
Warrior Poet Publishing
www.warriorpoetpublishing.com
ISBN: 978-1-942858-83-6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-942858-84-3 (ebook)
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Robert Cruickshank Jr. for his feedback and research connections of common interest. And to my editor, Jeanette Windle.
Table of Contents
Get the novel Moses that is based on the biblical research of this book iii
Table of Contents v
Chapter 1 The Story 1
Scripture and History 1
The Problem of Ancient Names 3
When was the Date of the Exodus? 4
Who were the Pharaohs of Moses’s life? 9
Why is the City of Ramesses Renamed Avaris? 12
The Number of Hebrews in the Exodus 15
Red Sea, Reed Sea, or Something Else? 19
What Was the Mysterious Exodus Route? 29
Where was Mount Sinai? 32
Chapter 2 The Characters 36
Moses 36
Zipporah and the Cushite Wife of Moses 51
Jannes and Jambres 59
Amalekite Giants 63
Chapter 3 The Spiritual World of Egypt 68
The Watchers 68
The Binding of Mastema 73
Host of Heaven 78
Egyptian Magic 90
The Egyptian Underworld 97
Chapter 4 The Gods of Egypt 101
Pharaoh 102
Ra the Sun God 111
Isis and Osiris 116
Horus and Set 118
Chapter 5 The Ten Plagues 128
Chapter 6 From Chaos to Creation 146
Leviathan, Chaos, and Creation 146
Genesis 1 Creation in its Egyptian Context 155
Temple as Creation 163
Get the novel Moses that is based on the biblical research of this book 172
Great Offers By Brian Godawa 173
About the Author 174
The links in this book are my Amazon affiliate links.
Chapter 1
The Story
Scripture and History
Writing a novel about the life of Moses was daunting. First off, I was under the shadow of the 1956 Cecile B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brenner as Pharaoh Ramesses. Though we now know some of the film’s inaccuracies, it remains a dominant influence on people’s understanding of the Exodus story, both consciously and unconsciously.
The problem is that DeMille did the best he could do with the information available to him at the time. He was also bound by constraints of a medium that was primarily visual, which led to creative choices not always in line with the research in order to make the story work as a movie. I do not condemn those choices since I too was bound by the constraints of storytelling in a reading medium, though this medium offered more latitude to integrate historical research.
There aren’t many extrabiblical and archeological facts about the Exodus story that are certain. There is also significant lack of certainty in the interpretation of quite a few of those facts. But I found the information fascinating and worthy of this study regardless of whether one reads the novel or not.
Scripture vs. History
As an orthodox Christian, I believe in Sola Scriptura, that is, “Scripture alone is the primary and absolute source for all doctrine and practice (faith and morals).” But notice this quote says “source of all doctrine and practice,” not “source of all facts whatsoever.” It is self-evident that the Bible does not tell everything that ever happened in the history of Judaism or Christianity, let alone the world. It leaves a lot of details out, especially in the life of Moses.
In the book of Exodus, we are only told of a few incidents in Moses’s life before the Exodus: his birth, his murder of an Egyptian, his flight to Midian, and his introduction to the Midianites. That’s all we know of his first eighty years of life.
The burning bush episode is when all the action starts that leads to the amazing story of the Exodus and the last forty years of Moses’s life. But Moses had been a prince of Egypt for forty years prior. He may have been in line to become Pharaoh! That is significant. It shaped who Moses had become.
According to the Bible, it is not necessary for God’s purposes of doctrine and practice related to the Exodus to know those details that were left out. That doesn’t mean those facts are without value. And it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from other sources of history. But we must be careful and thoughtful about our usage.
Readers of all my Chronicles series know that I draw from many historical sources from the ancient world in order to “fill in” gaps in the story between what the Bible tells us and what is left out. I use them, not as inerrant scripture, but as helpful bridges toward understanding the biblical narrative through the ancient eyes of its original writers and readers. I also do so to give context and meaning to ancient godless narratives through the lens of a biblical worldview. Throughout the course of all my series, I have drawn from pagan stories like The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Baal Cycle as well as ancient Jewish apocrypha like the book of Jubilees and pseudepigrapha like the book of 1 Enoch. I have added to that well of knowledge from ancient Jewish historians like Josephus and pagan historians like Tacitus and Suetonius.
Unfortunately, there were not many extrabiblical historical sources available for the story of Moses. But I explain in the pages to follow some of those sources used for the novel. The ancient Jewish historians Josephus and Artapanus wrote of an interesting episode from Moses’s life, not available in the Bible but incorporated into my novel, about his conquering of the Kushite kingdom while he was a prince and general of Egypt. A legendary text also exists about the two Egyptian magicians, Jannes and Jambres, who faced off with Moses in Pharaoh’s court. Keep reading and you’ll learn about those fascinating details.
Because I write theological novels that use fantastical imagery to speculate about the unseen spiritual realm, I incorporate some of that theology in a creative way. For example, the sea dragon of chaos, Leviathan, a reappearing monster in all my series, shows up at the Red Sea crossing in the Moses novel. I draw this obvious spiritual symbol from Scripture itself in Psalm 74, where Yahweh’s deliverance at the Red Sea was described in terms of him “crushing the heads of Leviathan,” and Israelites feasting on its flesh in the desert as a way of describing the establishment of God’s covenant order through Moses. I have explained Leviathan and his spiritual meaning in the Bible in much detail in my book When Giants Were Upon the Earth (affiliate link), but I have some new material in this book. My goal is to do in my novel what Scripture does, interweaving spiritual symbol and meaning with historical fact into the same narrative.
The Problem of Ancient Names
I want to start with a note about my naming conventions in this novel as well as the others in the series. My goal is to create a balance between familiarity and novelty. Doing research sometimes reveals that commonly accepted names for historical characters and places are wrong or imprecise or victims of translation. Using more accurate names can be a way of bringing a fresh feel to a well-known story. However, too much change can make that well-known story become unfamiliar to the reader and cause confusion.
One of the problems is that ancient names, especially Egyptian names, are notoriously fluid. And when one translates them to English, variations abound. For example, many names of Egyptian gods are known to us through English translations of Greek versions of the original Egyptian. Here is a table of some samples:
| Egyptian Name | Greek Translation |
| Ra | Helios |
| Set | Seth |
| Aset | Isis |
| Heru Sa Aset | Horus |
| Usir | Osiris |
Over time, names change and are combined with other names of gods. But that is not consistent nor are such changes time-stamped. Different ancient cities used numerous versions of names for various deities as well.
I decided to use mostly the Greek versions of these names because many people still know so little about the religion of ancient Egypt. So using Egyptian names would make it too unfamiliar. But sometimes I do use the Egyptian version if I like it better. For instance, I use the Greek Isis and Horus instead of the Egyptian Aset and Heru Sa Aset, but I use the Egyptian Set and Ra instead of the Greek Seth and Helios. Some versions fit the collective memory better than others. Some fit the narrative better.
The gods’ identities evolved over time as well. Ra was a sun god as was Atum. They were eventually combined to be Ra-Atum. But Ra was also merged with Amun, the supreme head of the pantheon in the New Kingdom, to be Amun-Ra or Amon-Re. It can all get quite contradictory and confusing, so as a storyteller I had to simplify and commit to specific incarnations or spellings to fit the purposes of both history and narrative.
The same can be true of a person’s name, place names, and cities as well. One example is the Egyptian adoptive mother of Moses. The Bible does not give her name. The ancient Jewish historian Artapanus calls her Merris. David Rohl suggests that Merris was most likely the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian Mereryt or Merestekhi (which are themselves English translations of the real Egyptian spelling and pronunciation). The Jewish historian Josephus calls her Thermuthis, the Greek version of Egyptian Tawaret. With so many options, sometimes the choice is simply subjective or preferential. And this fluidity of names is true for much Greek and Hebrew as well as Egyptian. In the chapters to follow, I explain some of my creative choices of names based on historical research.
When was the Date of the Exodus?
One of the biggest questions that determines a lot of details in the story of Moses is when the Exodus actually occurred in history. This question is often rooted in debating the historicity of the biblical text. Unfortunately, this issue has become a scholarly quagmire of debate for centuries with no certain conclusion in sight. I cannot reproduce the arguments for all the options as anything more than the basics here, so I refer the reader to Egyptologist David Rohl’s works, the scholarly source from which I’ve drawn the most. His latest book Exodus: Myth or History? (affiliate link) provides an in-depth explanation of this most fascinating area of research related to the stories of Joseph, Moses, the Exodus and the Conquest. I’ve also drawn from filmmaker Tim Mahoney’s excellent documentary series, “Patterns of Evidence.”
Of all the possible dates suggested for the Exodus, there are two dominant ones that I will address here. The first is the traditional early date of approximately 1447 B.C. The second is the more liberal late date of approximately 1250 B.C.
Up until the mid-twentieth century, the traditional date for the Exodus was computed from the biblical text in conjunction with attested dates of other ancient events or literature. The key scripture is:
1 Kings 6:1
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord.
The scriptural claim here is that the Exodus occurred 480 years before Solomon began to build the temple in Jerusalem. But when did Solomon build the temple? If we can find a fixed historical date for his reign, we can work backward with the numbers to arrive at the biblical date for the Exodus.
In 1943, noted scholar Edwin Thiele provided a chronology to establish some fairly certain dates of biblical events that remains the most respected scholarship on the topic. He had used astronomical science combined with ancient Assyriological documentation in synchronization with the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles to establish the dates of the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel. One of those fairly certain dates was the reign of Solomon beginning approximately 967 B.C. Subtracting 480 years from that date brings us back to 1447 B.C. for the Exodus.
A second biblical passage supports this date as well. Judges 11:26 says that the reign of Judge Jephthah was 300 years after the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. Thiele’s chronology establishes Jephthah’s reign as 1100 B.C., which places the conquest in 1400 B.C., approximately 40 years after the Exodus (1447 B.C.), just like the Bible says (Exodus 16:35).
But there is a problem. The view of a 1250 B.C. Exodus also originated in a “literal” interpretation of the Bible, in particular one text that seemed to argue for the pharaoh of Exodus as being Ramesses the Great, whose reign (1279—1213 B.C.) was a couple hundred years later than the 1447 B.C. date. That verse talked about the Israelites in bondage to Egypt afflicted with heavy burdens by their taskmasters.
Exodus 1:11
They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses.
Rohl explains that the city Raamses (Pi Ramesse in Egyptian) was named after its founder Ramesses the Great, producing a synchronism that lies at the heart of the modern misdating of the Exodus and Conquest.
Ramesses had one of the longest reigns of Egyptian monarchs and engaged in many building projects from his residence in Goshen, which on the surface seems to line up with the biblical story. There’s only one problem. It creates a contradiction in the biblical text with those passages previously sighted. Ramesses reigned in the 13th century B.C., but 1 Kings and Judges indicate a Hebrew Exodus over 200 years earlier in the 15th century B.C. Is the Bible contradicting itself with different timelines?
I do not believe the Bible contradicts itself, so there must be a way of understanding this term that is not apparent in a simplistic “literal” reading of the texts. What the Bible writers intended is not always apparent on the surface of the text. We must plumb the depths.
Well, there is a way that makes sense of all these passages, and we don’t have to make something up or cover up the problem with a word salad. The Bible itself gives us the key. The original name of the city during the time of Moses was not Raamses. It was changed by a later writer/editor of the text to update that city name to its latest version for later readers. Rohl proves that the original name of the city was Avaris (Hawara in Egyptian), and it was later changed to Pi Ramesses (Raamses in Hebrew) during the reign of Ramesses the Great.
This technique was not deceptive. In fact, it was done elsewhere in the Bible because the readers of a later time would not be familiar with the older name of the location no longer being used. So the newest city name was a placeholder for that original city location.
Let the Bible illustrate this again as seen in the story of Joseph.
Genesis 47:11, 27
So Joseph settled his father and his brothers in Egypt and gave them property in the best part of the land, the region of Rameses, as Pharaoh directed…
Now the Israelites settled in Egypt in the region of Goshen.
In this passage, we see a reference to the Hebrews settling in the “region of Rameses,” which is also called “the region of Goshen.” So this is talking about the same exact location where the Hebrews are still dwelling in the days of Moses (Exodus 8:22).
But there’s one big problem. Joseph arrived in Egypt in “the region of Rameses” around 1658 B.C. That’s 400 years before Ramesses the Great became king of Egypt. So the Bible is naming a region for King Ramesses long before Ramesses existed. Is this an error? By no means. Rohl explains this common technique that occurs in other places in the Bible as well.
So when the Genesis 47:11 passage states that Joseph settled his father Jacob “in the land of Ramesses” centuries before the city of Pi Ramesse was built by the 19th Dynasty pharaohs, this statement is clearly recognized by scholars as an anachronism. A later biblical redactor has amended or added the text to locate that part of the Egyptian delta in which Jacob settled in terms of the geography or toponymy of his own day. He did so because the people living in his time would have known the location of Ramesses but probably not its older name of Goshen. So the redactor helps out his readers by editing the text to give the “modern” toponym of Jacob’s Egyptian home.
So we see clearly that the Bible writers or editors will speak of older locations using newer names of those locations for newer readers, called “anachronisms.”
Another biblical text that seems to synchronize the Exodus with Ramesses is 2 Chronicles 12:9, which says that the king of Egypt, named Shishak, plundered the Jerusalem temple during the reign of Judah’s king Rehoboam in 925 B.C. Biblical scholars have linked this name Shishak to the Egyptian king Shoshenk I of the 22nd Dynasty. This has become one of the few “absolute dates” that modern scholars have accepted for synchronization between Israel and Egyptian timelines. Working back through the king lists of Egypt then confirms Ramesses as the Pharaoh of the Exodus.
I hate to be redundant, but there are some big problems with this scheme that David Rohl examines which prove disastrous for the late date view. While similarity of names between languages may often occur, it is not always the case. It is a logical fallacy to link names merely because they sound similar. As it happens, there is another Pharaoh with a name similar to Shisak, and it isn’t Shoshenk. There must be other facts to prove identity.
Rohl deconstructs the arguments for this alleged pillar of certainty to show that it does not hold up under scrutiny. The entire edifice of the Ramesses-as-Exodus-Pharaoh theory falls beneath a tidal wave of problems. He uncovers bad translations, mistaken interpretations, and historical incongruities between the reigns and campaigns of Shishak in the Bible and Shoshenk in Egypt. He ends up revealing that the biblical Shishak is actually Ramesses II, who had an Egyptian nickname of Shysha (Shisha in English), which is the etymological connection being sought for—and with a Canaanite campaign to match the biblical facts.
Rohl explains that the Ramesses-as-Exodus-pharaoh view must engage in a “conjuring trick” to harmonize the date of 1250 B.C. with the 1 Kings and Judges passages that otherwise clearly place the Exodus 200 years earlier around 1447 B.C. They take the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1, and make it a rounded off number symbolic of the numbers 40 times 12. 40 represents a generation and 12 is the number of generations between Moses and Solomon. They go on to propose that a generation in those days was really more like 23 years. So if you multiply 23 by 12, you get 276 years. Go back 276 years from 967 B.C. (the date of the fourth year of Solomon), and we arrive at 1243 B.C., the date of Ramesses the Great.
That’s a rather desperate and unconvincing conjuring trick indeed!
There are more evidences and issues that Rohl works through to discredit the later date of 1250 B.C. and prove his argument that the Exodus occurred in the traditional early date of 1447 B.C. But one of the most powerful of the arguments is archaeology.
Twentieth century archaeological excavations have almost universally discredited the thirteenth-century date for the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan. Liberal scholars appeal to it to prove that the biblical events never happened. The fall of Jericho occurred centuries before the late date Ramesses scenario. It wasn’t even inhabited when Joshua was supposed to have overthrown it in the scheme of the late date. And most of the thirty cities that Joshua conquered were also not inhabited in the thirteenth century either. Canaanite cities did not have fortifications in the days after Ramesses as the Bible says they did. The biblical conquest narrative simply contradicts archaeological facts if one places the Exodus in 1250 B.C.
But Rohl’s work and the documentary Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus (affiliate link) show that a shifting of the Exodus date back to 1447 B.C. synchronizes all the archaeological and historical evidence with the biblical narrative of Exodus and Conquest. It’s a powerful argument for the historical reliability of Scripture.
So I went with the date of 1447 B.C. for the Exodus. Which leads to the next question.
Who were the Pharaohs of Moses’s life?
With apologies to Yul Brenner’s memorable performance in the movie The Ten Commandments, the pharaoh of the Exodus was most likely not Ramesses the Great. Then who was? The answer can lead us into another quagmire of unending questions and complicated answers without much certainty, so I will try to summarize this as well to explain my choices for the novel. After all, I have to have a specific Pharaoh in my story or I don’t have a specific story to tell. I have followed David Rohl’s work in this area as well.
If the Exodus occurred in 1447 B.C., different researchers have suggested various options in accordance with conventional Egyptian chronology as to who was pharaoh at that time: Amenemhet III, Amenhotep II, Thutmose III, Neferhotep I, and others. Why so many options? That’s because there is a problem with conventional Egyptian chronology.
Egyptian chronology is notoriously unreliable and a mess. Starting around 3000 B.C., for 2800 years of Egyptian history there are over 30 dynasties of almost 400 different pharaohs. Scholars have tried to compile a list of the pharaohs with dates based upon king lists found on papyrus and engraved on monuments. The problem is that many of these lists are damaged, incomplete, contradict each other, and do not always differentiate overlapping reigns. The differences of interpretation create disparities between some chronologies of hundreds of years.
David Rohl is part of a scholarly movement called The New Chronology that has successfully brought legitimate doubt upon conventional Egyptian dating and proposed a different chronology to solve the problems of the consensus view. This scenario shifts the royal dynasties by as much as three hundred years. And well, yes, you guessed it, that has created another quagmire. But Rohl’s books provide a scholarly defense of the New Chronology as it relates to the Bible. And when it comes to the pharaohs in Moses’s life, he provides some rather interesting offerings.
The Bible never gives the names of the pharaohs in question. So we are left with synchronizing other historical evidence to try to deduce their identities. One of those helpful pieces of evidence comes to us from an ancient Jewish historian of Persian descent named Artapanus. He was commissioned to write a history of the Jews for the Ptolemaic pharaohs in the second century B.C. He used the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt for his sources. That famous library surely had ancient documents that went back to the time of Moses. Sadly, Artapanus’s writings did not survive the Great Alexandrian Fire, nor did his sources. But we do have excerpts of his work quoted or paraphrased in two church fathers, Clement and Eusebius of Alexandria.
Artapanus claims that Moses’s great-grandfather was named Palmanothes and the royal princess who adopted him was named Merris.
…likewise of the king of Egypt, his son Palmanothes succeeded to the sovereignty…He begat a daughter Merris, whom he betrothed to a certain Khenephres [Chenephres], king of the regions above Memphis (for there were at that time many kings in Egypt); and she being barren took a supposititious child from one of the Jews, and called him Moüsos (Moses): but by the Greeks he was called, when grown to manhood, Musaeus.
Rohl points out that the Greek translations of the Egyptian names here are so distorted we cannot be sure which Egyptian pharaoh the name Palmanothes refers to. But Merris’s husband’s name Khenephres reveals a more probable Egyptian connection.
The Greek Khenephres is re-vocalized in Egyptian as Kha-nefer-re. Khaneferre was the coronation name of Sobekhotep IV, the 29th ruler of the 13th Dynasty and the only king in the whole of pharaonic civilization named Khaneferre. That was one of the dynasties which also fit Artapanus’s claim of Egypt being a divided kingdom at the time with different pharaohs in Upper and Lower Egypt. Kheneferre Sobekhotep IV brought unity back to Egypt. He was probably the pharaoh who sought to kill Moses when Moses went into exile in Midian. Unfortunately, we have very little information on this pharaoh.
But Artapanus tells an extra-biblical story of Moses becoming a prince of Egypt under Kheneferre and commanding the Egyptian army. We will look at this story later, but here is what Artapanus tells us next.
But when Khenephres [Kheneferre Sobekhotep IV] perceived the excellence of Moses he envied him, and sought to slay him on some plausible pretext.
So according to Artapanus, Sobekhotep IV was the pharaoh who tried to kill Moses when he fled to Midian.
Rohl draws from a well-known king list called the Royal Canon of Turin to reveal that there are approximately 42 years between the death of Sobekhotep IV and the accession of a ruler named Dudimose to the throne. Since we know Moses had returned to Egypt after 40 years in Midian, then the pharaoh who ruled Egypt when Moses returned was most likely this Dudimose.
Roman historian Tacitus calls the Pharaoh of the Exodus, Bocchoris, another incoherent Greek bastardization of the original name. Ancient Jewish historian Josephus quotes Greek historian Manetho about Egypt being “smote” by God under a Pharaoh he names Tutimaos (Dudimose). We will take a closer look at that passage below.
Unfortunately, we have even less historical information on this pharaoh of the Exodus. But an Egyptian artifact called a stela, a stone with engravings on it, has been discovered that depicts Dudimose’s son Khonsuemwaset as a charioteer and leader of the army of Edfu. But since he was most likely Pharaoh’s firstborn and thus probably died in the tenth plague, I depict Pharaoh as riding his son’s chariot after Moses in his son’s honor. And since it was most common for pharaohs to lead their armies at the head, it is most likely that Dudimose drowned in the Red Sea. Psalm 136:15 states that Yahweh “overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,” which strongly implies that Pharaoh was drowned with his army.
Ramesses of the late date view of Exodus did not drown in the sea and he did not die until many years after the alleged Exodus of that view. We have his mummy in the Egyptian museum in Cairo. There is no historical indication that his rule suffered the massive loss of his chariot forces or his army and therefore his power.
So let it be written. So let it be done.