Though the foundations on which the Christian faith stands are found in the New Testament, by its inclusion in the Bible, the Old Testament does form a prelude to it. The rationale given for doing this is that Jesus, around whom the Christian faith revolves, is said to be the Messiah predicted by the Old Testament's Hebrew prophets, even though he does not even fulfill the criteria they give for recognising him, nor do the Jewish people accept him as such.
One problem for many who read the Old Testament is that it is increasingly being found not to be historically accurate in a literal sense, and so it is often sidelined as being both irrelevant and inaccurate. The reality is that much of what it says happened did happen, but not necessarily in the places, times and to the people it states. As it is however the foundation of modern Israel’s claim to its land, which is behind the continued unrest and instability of the Middle East, it is of vital concern to every one of us.
Israeli archaeologists in recent decades have been going over almost every square metre of the area trying to verify its history. The result, combined with the cross-referencing available to modern scholars, has shocked them. A Tel Aviv University archaeologist, Ze’ev Herzog, created a sensation on October 29, 1999 with his cover story in the weekend edition of Israel’s national daily newspaper, Ha’aretz. He wrote “This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom”. These results were quickly suppressed, although these were respected Israelis who did the research.
Another acclaimed book, The Bible Unearthed, by two of Herzog’s colleagues, Finkelstein and Silberman, backs up these statements in great detail, and has garnered much attention. In the first place, they show from many aspects that although the earliest books may have been written a couple of centuries earlier, the bulk of the Hebrew Bible was only written as late as the 7th century BCE. In describing the stories of early characters like Abraham or Isaac, the general consensus along historians is that the political scene and even the customs are in fact those of the 7th Century.
For instance, the kingdom given to Esau, son of Isaac, is supposed to have been Edom. But it did not exist as any sort of entity until nearly 1,000 years later. Camel caravans are described in the stories of both Abraham and Joseph, who are supposed to have lived around 2100 and 1840 BCE respectively, but camels were not domesticated until around 1200 and not widely used until a few centuries later. Revealing, too, is that their burdens of “gum, balm and myrrh” were precisely the products carried only later in the Arabian trade of the 8th-7th centuries. There are many such examples given of anachronisms that point to the 7th century.
More serious is that archaeologists can find no trace of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem (supposedly around 950 BCE), nor of his other great buildings - not in Israel at least (that ruins in Egypt match the Old Testament's description of Solomon's temple in every detail is telling, however). Some say the temple must have been completely destroyed to build new buildings, but so have other buildings but traces remain. In fact, the first mention of Israel as even a people in any inscription is on a stele of 1207 BCE. And more telling still, digs show that Jerusalem did not exist as a city in David and Solomon’s time in the 10th century. It was at most a country village, as the whole of Judah was sparsely settled, with about 5,000 inhabitants - certainly not enough to sustain an army able to conquer all the surrounding kingdoms, as David is supposed to have done. It was only in the 8th century that Judah became substantially populated, and Jerusalem a city.
It was Canaan and such more fertile areas in the north that were more populated and prosperous, throughout the ups and downs of 2,000 years, and being conquered by Assyria, Egypt and later Babylonia. Canaan built and destroyed cities while Judah remained a quiet backwater of sheep-herding tribes.
By the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, however, the population had grown and Jerusalem was a relatively large city, with a central temple. King Josiah, newly crowned King of Judah in 639 BCE, wanted to spread out and conquer the kingdoms to the north. He needed to inspire his people to believe that it was possible — that they could “regain” the lands conquered by Joshua and lost by the sins of Solomon, that they could unite all the tribes in one kingdom.
It seems to have been at that time, therefore, that their history was written and describes. Isolated patriarchs drawn from oral traditions and ancient legends were brought together in a connected narrative that, on the surface, reads as a chronological history, but today, when analysed in the light of recorded history of the surroundinhg nations and archaeological evidence, its reliability as trustworthy history has come under question. Furthermore, there were ulterior motives behind documenting their history - not just to unite the people with a view to making them a gret nation, but also to keep them on the straight and narrow by weaving into the narrative that Jehovah would punish them should they step out of lime.
So whenever the tribe of Judah was overcome in battle, it was explained as a punishment by Jehovah for their falling away from their religion’s laws, such as by turning to any of the other competing gods, although it happened again and again. Even King David, although it is alleged that he succeeded in completing Joshua’s task of conquering all the lands promised to Abraham, also sinned, as did his son Solomon.
IWhenever they turned to their God, they prospered. For instance, there is the story in 2 Kings 19, where King Sennacherib had led the Assyrians to conquer all the kingdoms in the north, supposedly scattering or capturing the ten “lost” tribes. He then returned in 701 BCE and conquered most of Judah, laying siege to Jerusalem. The embattled Jews turned back to God, praying to be saved. Mysteriously, in one night, the angel of the Lord killed 185,000 of the Assyrians. When the Assyrians awoke to discover this, they fled.
Very recent scholarly work however has revealed a more likely explanation. Historians agree that at that time in Egypt, there was a black Kushite pharaoh, who set up a fearsome army of Nubians. Also on record is that the pharaoh dispatched them, including archers, cavalry, infantry and charioteers, to prevent the Assyrians from taking Jerusalem, possibly so that they would not attack Egypt next. Knowing from experience what they would be facing, this is apparently what made the Assyrians flee. The Hebrew drafters of their history didn't miss the opportunity to portray the Egyptians as villains, and themselves as chosen by God by offering an alternative explanation as to what happened, and why.
A generation later, however, in King Josiah they saw a new David, who would reconquer the lands, and restore the worship at the one central temple. For that, they had to galvanize the people with a sense of mission, as the only one of the twelve tribes that had remained faithful. They succeeded brilliantly in welding all the stories into a glorious narrative that unfortunately has come under question in modern times in the light of historical and archaeological evidence.
There is however another very interesting series of books by a notable Egyptian scholar, Ahmed Osman, that includes "Out of Egypt - The Roots of Christianity Revealed", which does show a way of reconciling the stories to history to a large degree, in the relationship between the Children of Israel of the Eygyptians.
Historically the involvement of the Hebrews with Egypt goes back to the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos around 1630 B.C. Although variously described, the Hyksos seem to have been Semitic, and ruled Egypt for over a century, until they were driven out and the New Kingdom established in 1575 B.C.
Scholars have found no record of the Jews having been oppressed in Egypt around the time claimed, nor of the vast kingdom supposed to have been ruled by David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE. Osman shows, however, that many of the stories of the Jewish history were more or less true, but took place not only about 500 years earlier than supposed, but in Egypt rather than Israel, and even then, dates were compressed or stretched. Osman agrees that they were written down only in the 7th century and that the distortions were probably intentional, to achieve certain aims. The Egyptians, however, had written records of their histories from far earlier, which have helped scholars reach their various conclusions.
Hence, Osman is able to show convincingly that there were two Davids: the local shepherd-king of the 10th c. BCE and the great warrior-king who lived 500 years earlier, but who is known to history as one of the greatest of the later Egyptian pharaohs, Thutmose III. His military campaigns exactly match those reported of David. Names are also clues, as the Egyptians generally included the name of the god they served into the names of royal figures. Thus, Thutmose served Thoth, or Hermes. Mos or Mose meant “child”; thus, “child of Thoth”. But (as both Egyptians and Hebrews omitted short vowels in writing) Thoth in Hebrew would be written Dwd. The story of young David killing the giant Philistine, Goliath, in fact mirrors a famous Egyptian popular epic known to every school-boy in Egypt.
When Abraham and Sarah travelled to Egypt in a time of famine, the story goes that Abraham feared that the pharaoh, finding her beautiful, would kill him to have her for a wife. Hence he passed her off as his sister, even letting the pharaoh marry her. Eventually discovering the truth, however, the pharaoh gives her back, and sends them both off with gifts. When their son Isaac is born, however, it seems the father is really the pharaoh. There are a number of clues pointing to this, in spite of the writer of the history trying to prolong the time frame to disguise this, not quite successfully. And the father would have been this same Thutmose III, or King David. Hence “David’s line” begins here, through Sarah.
Of Isaac’s two sons, Esau, the elder, trades his birthright to Jacob for “a mess of pottage”. His birthright would have been the kingdom of Egypt to which he had some claim, although at that point it would have seemed only a vague dream. Esau in exchange gets the tangible flocks of cattle and other possessions of their father, as the Talmud confirms.
After wrestling all night with an angel and then being blessed by him, Jacob has has his name changed to Israel. The last part refers to his god El, as in Elohim, the rest in Hebrew is Ysra (or sar) indicating a prince or ruler. It is his son Joseph with the “coat of many colours” who is sold into slavery by his brothers, ending up in Egypt. The wife of his master, Potiphar, tries to seduce him, but on being rebuffed, gets hold of his garment and uses it to accuse him of attempted rape and send him to prison. When Joseph, from prison, is able to interpret the pharaoh’s dream and correctly predict seven years of plenty then seven years of famine, he is freed and made right-hand man to the pharaoh.
Joseph’s later story is a perfect match to a specific person in Egyptian history, Yuya, a minister to Amenhotep III. His name is written in eleven variants in his tomb. Evidently Yuya never abandoned his faith in Yahweh or Jehovah, written as Yu or Ya aby the Egyptians. The pharaoh also gave him an Egyptian name, and records show he had a minister named Sef. The result is the name Yusef or Yosef.
Yuya (Joseph) was known to be non-Egyptian, and his well-preserved mummy shows a strong face that could easily be Semitic. There is the story of his brothers, during the famine, coming to him for food. Joseph at first conceals his identity, but then reveals it, reconciles with them and sends them home with the food. Later he sends for his father, who comes with a group of seventy Hebrews who settle in the Land of Goshen in the Eastern Delta of the Nile. Joseph actually served under two pharaohs, and it is the second, younger one, who marries Joseph’s daughter Tiye (by his Egyptian wife). This pharaoh, Amenhotep III, however, matches perfectly the wise King Solomon of the Old Testament.
Thus Solomon is not David’s direct son, by Bath-Sheba, as the Bible says, but his great-grandson. By marrying Tiye, who is half Hebrew, Solomon re-establishes the connection of the Jews with the Egyptian line. To inherit the throne, however, he had to have a royal Egyptian wife. Hence he also marries his sister Sitamun, (thus explaining the Bible’s reference to him marrying an Egyptian princess, whereas, as the King of Israel, it would have been forbidden).
This Solomon (Amenhotep III) has a peaceful reign (1405-1367 BCE), wherein rather than fighting, he makes alliances and strategic marriages. He organizes the country into twelve administrative districts (the twelve tribes?). He also embarks on a massive building program, which partly confirms the list in I Kings - but in the 14th century BCE, not the 10th, and in Eqypt, not Judea. The palace he is supposed to have built in Jerusalem cannot be found by archeologists, but the description tallies exactly with Amenhotep III’s palace in Thebes, built in the 14th century.
The story of the birth of Moses in Exodus is full of inconsistencies and muddled chronology, but Ahmed Osman, with his thorough research and wide knowledge of the relevant languages, makes sense of it. The story in Exodus goes that, to avoid the pharaoh’s order to have all Hebrew boy-infants killed, the mother puts him afloat in a basket in the Nile. Here he is found by the pharaoh’s daughter, who takes pity on him, adopts him and has him nursed by a Hebrew woman who is actually his real mother.
He grows up in the palace, but when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and kills him, he has to flee the country to Midian. Here he marries Zipporah, daughter of Jethro, and takes care of Jethro’s herds, until a voice from a burning bush, calling itself “The I am that I am”, tells him to go back and bring the Hebrews out of Egypt to the land he will promise them. Moses goes to Egypt, and the story is that one of the miracles he employs to convince the pharaoh of his mission is to cast his staff onto the ground whereupon it turns into a snake. It still takes a series of seven plagues, however, before they are allowed to leave, and even then, they are pursued until the Red Sea is parted, then released, so as to drown the Egyptians in their chariots. There follow the forty years in the wilderness, the manna, the golden calf, the giving of the Ten Commandments, etc. until Moses hands over his mission to Joshua, Son of Nun, who leads them into the Promised Land of Canaan.
To begin with, however, Osman explains that the Hebrew word for “daughter” was indistinguishable, except by context, from the polite word for “wife”. Hence it was actually Pharaoh’s wife who not only found him but was really his mother. Even that version of the story is put in question by the fact that setting a child afloat in a basket was really an allegorical image of initiation. Perhaps to our surprise, however, Osman identifies Moses as the son of Solomon (Amenhotep III) and Tiye, who is known in history as Akhenaten.
In this Egyptian version, as he is not the son of the royal heiress, Sitamun, and is not purely Egyptian, he poses a threat to the 18th Dynasty. When his life is seriously threatened, his mother sends him to live with her Hebrew relatives in Goshen. He grows up there, largely in the city of Zarw, where there is a temple and worship of Aten, in contrast to the worship of Amun-Ra, at that time the dominant religion in Egypt.
At about 16, he appears in Thebes and becomes co-regent with his father. His mother Tiye, in order to secure his claim to the throne, has him marry his half-sister, Nefertiti, daughter of Sitamun. As co-regent, he begins to snub the priests of Amon-Ra and the other gods, and further arouses their hostility by building temples to Aten. Reacting further to that hostility, he starts building his own capital at Tell el-Amarna.
When his father dies, he is 27 and becomes the sole ruler. He changes his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, and becomes more aggressive still, closing down the other temples and erasing the names of their gods. To appease his enemies, he appoints his brother Semenkhkare as co-regent. This does not suffice, however, and in 1361 BCE at 33, in order to avert a civil war, he is forced to abdicate and flee the country. He goes to the wilderness of Sinai, but Semenkhkare is soon killed, and the throne passes to Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten.
Tutankhaten tries to make peace with both sides. He manages to reconcile with the Amon-Ra priesthood, even changing his name to the one we know him by - Tutankhamun - and moving back to Thebes. He seems to have retained something of his Aten faith, however, seeing Aten as the supreme god, and the others as lesser intermediaries. Even this concession is too much for his supposed allies, the Atenists, however. At 19, after only 9 years rule, when he attempts to convert them to his all-inclusive view, and bring back his father from exile, he dies, perhaps killed by the priest Panehesy, also known by the name Phineas, who had been a trusted follower of his father, in what was made to look like a chariot accident.
He is succeeded by his great-uncle and protector Aye (Ephraim?), who also only survives for four years, until an army general named Horemheb takes the throne. This is the “new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph" (Exodus 1:8), unlike the four Amarna rulers, Akhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Aye who had all been descendants of Joseph (Yuya), whom even Genesis calls the “father of Pharaoh”.
Horemheb erased the names of the Amarna kings from the records (which confused archaeologists at first), abolished the worship of Aten, and made it a crime to mention Akhenaten’s name. This could explain how the latter came to be called Moses, which means not only ”child”, but specifically “rightful son and heir”, making it a useful euphemism by which to refer to him.
Horemheb began to persecute the Atenists. He closed off the area around their city, Zarw, and began the oppression remembered by the Hebrews as recorded in the Old Testament's Exodus. He appointed Pa-Ramses (later Ramses I) as overseer, who forced them to rebuild the city and a new residence for himself.
When Horemheb died, Pa-Ramses prepared to claim the throne. This led Akhenaten to try to re-claim it for himself. It seems he used his rod of power, which he had used as pharaoh and which was topped by a brass serpent, and according to the Koran’s version, convinced many of the priests of his legitimacy by demonstrating secret rituals (hence the story of Moses casting down his rod and it turning into a serpent). When Pa-Ramses intervened with his military might and staged a kind of coup, Akhenaten (Moses) gathered his followers and fled in 1335 BCE, in what the Israelites called the Exodus, towards the Promised Land of Canaan.
The naming of Akhenaten as the founder of the Jewish religion, however, seems positively restrained compared with Osman's real bombshell, his revelation that Tutankhamun had, in fact, been Jesus Christ. It is probably the most contentious point in Ahmed Osman’s thesis. Seeing him as the innocent young man who actually held the key to peace, but who died at the hands of those he trusted at a tender age, Osman is convinced he was the original Jesus and puts up a very strong argument. He sees Jesus also as the Teacher of Righteousness of the Essenes’ Dead Sea Scrolls, who was also killed, and is usually identified as Jeshu ben Pandira. Ben means “son of”, and Pandira is not a Hebrew word, but an ancient Egyptian royal title, as Pa-ntr-ra, or Pa-neter-ra, Son of Ra, one of the titles of Akhenaten, his father. So Jesus, Jeshu ben Pandira and Tutankhamun are idetified by Osman as being one and the same.
Not only that, he identifies him as Joshua, Son of Nun, the successor of Moses in the Hebrew story. Joshua, like Jeshu, is a variant of Jesus, and in the first Christian centuries, many authorities referred to Joshua as Jesus. The vast military campaign Joshua is supposed to have carried out in the 13th c. BCE, according to the books of Joshua and Deuteronomy, has come under serious question. For instance, two of the cities he is supposed to have destroyed had been destroyed earlier (one of which was Jericho), and the other two were not destroyed until much later, supporting Osman's argument that Joshua's military campaign as recorded in the Old Testament is perhaps a military campaign of Tutankhamun in the same region of which the recorded details are scant.
Something not commonly known today is that the early Fathers of the Church also accepted that Jesus had appeared, not once, but twice: first in the person of Joshua the son of Nun, who succeeded Moses as the leader of the Israelites in the 14th century BC, and again when, in his second coming and in power and glory, he appeared to the disciples in the 1st century AD.
"Jesus", the Greek form of "Joshua", appeared for the first time in the Greek translation of the Old Testament made in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. When the Gospels were written, also in Greek, it was understood that Jesus Christ was the same person as the Israelite leader who succeeded Moses.
It is known that many early Christian groups apparently believed Jesus had lived much earlier, and were awaiting his return; the Essenes, and the Apostle Paul for instance. Nothing Paul says about Jesus relates to the Jesus found in the four New Testament Gospels. Paul never quotes him, the principles taught by Jesus are absent from Paul's gospel; Paul expected his second coming to take place during his own lifetime (1 Thess. 4:17), however the gospels, written long after Paul had died, indicated that Jesus had already lived, died and risen again in the form of Jesus of Nazareth at least three years before Paul came onto the scene with his gospel. The confusion between the two forms of the name first arose in the 16th century, when the Bible was translated into English. Only then was the name "Joshua" given to the Old Testament character, while "Jesus" was used for his New Testament appearance.
Osman believes the cause of what he sees as these radical distortions of history would have been the Hebrews’ desire first to conceal their connection with the Egyptians, and then to cover up the fact that their priest-king, Jesus/Joshua/Tutankhamun, had not only been killed, but by one of them.
Some scholars now believe this all points to there having been a long but in the end unsuccessful attempt by the Hebrews to take over Egypt, and that the story was written up in their scriptures as an elaborate fiction. Dates, names and places were drastically altered, and the Egyptians demonised as oppressors. Whether it was all a deliberate deception, an example of oral traditions evolving into misrepresentations of history over time, or a collection of stories based loosely on actual events to illustrate a spiritual principle, modern day readers must separate fact from fiction and draw their own conclusions.
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