A Harbinger of the Exodus?
David Salkeld
A puzzling aspect of Velikovsky's published works is the scant
attention he gives to the man known as Moses. This is strange when one
recalls that he went from Tel Aviv to the USA in 1939 to comb
reference libraries for data on Moses, Oedipus and Akhenaten, in
preparation for a book he planned on Freud. These researches
eventually emerged in the book Oedipus and Akhnaton [1]. But although
two of his other books - Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos - treat
the Exodus in some detail, they barely mention Moses. Accepting Irving
Wolfe's thesis [2] that Freud's book Moses and Monotheism angered
Velikovsky, one might expect that he would use his own writings -
presenting his catastrophic interpretation of the Exodus - to bolster
the case for Moses as a Jew, and monotheism as a Jewish concept. But
his published works contain no such case, and there has been no
indication of such material in his archives. Why not?
Velikovsky's reasons are not known and this paper does not speculate
on them. Instead it starts with a question which his hypothesis
prompts but which his writings avoid: 'Could any man have led the
Israelites out of an Egypt reeling from a cosmic disaster'? Now
Velikovsky's argument was that if the biblical account is based on
fact, the Exodus must have been a time of great natural disasters.
From that premise he was led to a hypothesis that: (1) there were
physical upheavals of global scope in historic times; (2) the
catastrophes were caused by extra-terrestrial agents; and (3) these
agents could be identified [3]. But taking his premise as our
tentative starting point, we see that if the biblical account is based
on fact, a man did lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Thus the question
should be re-phrased on the lines: 'What conditions would have to
pertain for a man to act as Moses is said to have done'? And if such
conditions are not beyond the bounds of reason: 'Is there any evidence
that those conditions did in fact obtain'?
Part 1 of this paper explores the first of these two questions; the
second is addressed in Part 2.
Part 1
The Size of the Exodus
An important starting point is to reconsider how many Israelites took
part in the Exodus. The book of Numbers gives two slightly
contradictory accounts - see Table 1: 603,550 men in chapter 1, and
601,730 in chapter 26. In both chapters the number of men in each
tribe (Levites apart) is given; the tribal strengths sum correctly in
both cases; and each tribal strength is exactly divisible by one
hundred, except for Gad in chapter 1 (45,650) and Reuben in chapter 26
(43,730). Such precision is suspect. It seems as though Exodus 12:37 -
'And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about
six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children' - may
have been independently 'interpreted' by two mathematically-minded
redactors.
'About six hundred thousand' is itself an almost certainly misleading
figure. Tribal strengths were 'males of twenty years old and upward,
all that are able to go forth to war in Israel' [Numbers 1:3]. Old and
infirm men were probably excluded, so the total of adult males would
be higher. Males under the age of twenty can only be guessed at, but
demographic statistics suggest that they would number approximately as
many again [4]. Egyptian limitations on male births did not apply to
girls, so female Israelites would probably outnumber males: whence if
Exodus 12:37 is taken literally, the Israelites would have totalled
2,000,000 to 2,500,000! In fact the '600,000' figure is a
mistranslation.
"The word translated (and indeed understood by the redactor) as
'thousands' was actually here (and demonstrably elsewhere in the
Bible) a term for a military unit. This unit averaged ten men" [5].
Thus the 'about 600,000' of Exodus 12:37 becomes about 6,000; and the
total leaving Egypt reduces to between 20,000 and 25,000. The Hebrew
word used for the progress toward the Sea of Passage means 'advancing
five abreast' - a practical number when marching. Progress would be
limited by the pace of nursing mothers, and of sheep and cattle: the
slowest elements could not average more than 1 mph. Had there been
2,000,000 people, in files of five spaced four feet apart, the column
would have been almost 400 miles long, and been uncontrollable; while
the crossing would have taken between two and three weeks, which
flatly contradicts the biblical record. On the other hand, 25,000
people would yield a column about 4 miles long, and a crossing time of
four to six hours, consistent both with the biblical record and with
common sense.
In what follows it is assumed that the number of Israelites leaving
Egypt numbered between twenty and twenty-five thousand men, women, and
children.
Leadership Training and Experience
Accepting this reduction in numbers by a factor of 100 brings the
problems of command and control from an impossible to a credible
scale. Typically an army corps numbers 20,000 to 30,000; is commanded
by a 3-star general with a staff of about 700; and formations have
their own intrinsic command trees, ensuring that no officer or NCO has
an immediate 'span of control' over more than about ten subordinates.
Each formation spends much of its time in training, on its own or with
others. Even then the amount of work involved in moving a corps into
the field is enormous. On 6 June 1944 the Americans and British, after
two years of intensive training and using the largest armada ever
assembled, managed to put 100,000 men onto the beaches of Normandy. By
comparison, far fewer than 10,000 British soldiers were put ashore on
the Falkland Islands during the 1982 campaign.
Against that background, Moses' task of organising and controlling
20,000 or more males and females of all age groups, and leading them
into what is best described as a desert campaign, lies at the outer
reaches of what is humanly possible. To bring it within the bounds of
credibility we must assume that Moses had substantial training and
prior experience in leading large numbers of men in desert
campaigning, and that the whole company of Israelites had been
organised and rehearsed for many years along military lines. But is
either of these essential conditions consistent with the records of
the life and times of Moses; and are such records believable? Of the
three extant sources, Jewish legends [6] are too heavily laden with
embroidery to be of real help. However the Torah and Josephus [7]
provide rather more sober accounts, and deserve consideration. Table 2
summarises relevant elements from those two accounts, items from
Josephus being included only when they are not found in the scriptural
record.
Of Moses' military training and experience the Torah says nothing.
Moreover, Josephus' story of Moses leading the Egyptian army against
the Ethiopians is usually regarded as a Ptolemaic era invention [8].
The main grounds for dismissing Josephus are (i) the only Nubian
invasion as far as Memphis and the Delta was led by Piankhy, dated
conventionally 751-730 BC [9]; and (ii) the Nubians did not build
their new capital Meroe (on the 'Isle of Meroe', an area within the
fork of the Atbara and Nile rivers, south of the 5th cataract, and
about 200 miles north of Khartoum) until after the last king of the
25th Dynasty, Tuanatamun, died at Napata in 656 BC [10].
Tribe strength of each tribe as recorded
in Numbers 1 in Numbers 26
_________________________________________________________________
Reuben 46,500 43,730
Simeon 59,300 22,200
Gad 45,650 40,500
Judah 74,600 76,500
Issachar 54,400 64,300
Zebulun 57,400 60,500
Ephraim 40,500 32,500
Manasseh 32,200 52,700
Benjamin 35,400 45,600
Dan 62,700 64,400
Asher 41,500 53,400
Naphtali 53,400 45,400
_________________________________________________________________
Totals 603,550 601,730
_________________________________________________________________
Levi not given 23,000*
* the figure for Levi is said to include all males from one month
upwards.
Table 1: Tribal Strengths (Males of 20 years and above) as recorded in
the Book of Numbers
Table 2: The Life of Moses According to
The Scriptural record
Josephus
_________________________________________________________________
Levi and 3 sons (Gerson, Kohath, Merari) into Egypt
Amram
-60 [quotations below are from Antiquities of the Jews, book II,
chapters X & XI.]
Miriam Aaron Moses
0
Moses nursed by own mother; then taken to Pharaoh's daughter: 'and he
became her son' [Ex. 2:10]
Under Thermuthis, Pharaoh's daughter, Moses is 'educated with great
care' [including instruction in military arts, astronomical lore,
history, etc]. Appointed general for campaign against Ethiopian
invaders who had 'proceeded as far as Memphis and the sea itself'. Led
army across Nubian desert, surprising and beating the enemy. Laid
seige to Meroe which surrendered to him when he married princess
Tharbis.
5
Killed an Egyptian ...
Hearing of it, Pharaoh 'sought to slay Moses' [Ex. 2:15], who flees to
Midian, drives shepherds from well to aid Jethro's daughters, meets
Jethro, marries Zipporah. Leads Jethro's flock 'to the backside of the
desert ... to
Horeb' [Ex. 3:1]. Sees burning bush. The sacred name revealed to him.
Pharaoh dies: new king stricter.
Returns 'unto my brethren ... in Egypt (to) see whether they are yet
alive' [Ex.4:18]. By then, 'all the men are dead which sought thy
life'.
Meets and briefs Aaron at Horeb. Returns with him to Egypt, his
mission and 'signs' (rod-serpent, leprous/clean hand) disclosed to
Israel's elders by Aaron: 'and the people believed' [Ex. 4:31].
Moses and Aaron confront Pharaoh. Plagues fall on Egypt, followed by
Exodus of Israelites ...
25? Egyptians fear Moses could 'raise a sedition and bring innovations
into Egypt'; and tell king he should be slain. The king, similarly
minded and urged by the sacred scribes, is ready to have Moses killed.
Learning of the plots against him, Moses flees through the desert to
Midian.
Josephus' writings suggest that he knew Egypt's history from an almost
exclusively Jewish standpoint; so he may not have known that Piankhy's
invasion, 800 years before his own time, came long after Moses. Even
had he suspected this was so, he also knew that Nubians repeatedly
invaded Egypt, and might have assumed that earlier incursions had
reached the Delta too; or he may simply have used the 'prophetic
present'. Antiquities of the Jews is clearly aimed at impressing
learned Greeks (and Romans) with the primacy of Jewish civilisation
('the history of five thousand years') and the superiority of its
legal code ('the wisdom of Moses, our legislator') [11]. By
underlining the military prowess of Nubia, Josephus was bolstering the
greatness of Moses' victory and hence of the Jewish race. That may
demonstrate Josephus as having been a biased historian (he certainly
was), but does not mean that his basic story is fictional.
What of Meroe? Josephus's account of Moses leading an Egyptian army
across the desert to attack the Nubian capital makes good military
sense in a late Middle Kingdom setting [12]. Egypt was then on the
defensive, behind a chain of huge fortresses on both sides of the Nile
from Semna to north of Aswan: the HQ was at Buhen, by the 2nd cataract
[*!* Image: Figure 1]. Nubia's forts were grouped around the 3rd
cataract (HQ at Kerma): her capital Napata lay 180 miles further up
the Nile, round the Dongola bend. The depth of defences meant that a
river-borne assault by either side would sustain heavy casualties;
thus as Josephus says [13], the Egyptian court could anticipate that
Moses would be killed leading the army by the traditional (Nile)
route.
Buhen, impregnable to siege and large enough for an expeditionary
force of up to 9000 men to assemble and prepare for a trans-desert
march, would be the natural starting point for such a venture. A
small, well-trained army could march from Buhen to Napata in less time
than a boat, even if unhindered, could sail between the two [*!*
Image: Figure 2]. Since the Egyptian posture was defensive and Napata
so far behind the front line, the Nubians would be unlikely to deploy
large screening forces around Napata. An attack from the desert would
then enjoy military surprise and reach the city well before
reinforcements could arrive from Kerma; but a siege would have to
succeed quickly before the main Nubian army could be alerted and sail
upriver. Thus Josephus': 'Moses was uneasy at the army lying idle'
[14] is fully consistent with this military appreciation.
While a cross-desert attack on Napata makes good military sense, to go
as far as Meroe makes none at all: so why does Josephus write of
Meroe, and not Napata? Few modern atlases show Meroe, the ancient
capital on the Isle of Meroe. But Encyclopedia Britannica says:
"The site of Napata is indicated by the villages of Sanam Abu Dom
on the left bank of the Nile and Old Merawi on the right bank ...
New Merawi, 1 mile east of Sanam Abu Dom and on the same side of
the river, was founded by the Sudan government in 1905 and made the
capital of the district of Dongola ... Meroe was probably also an
alternative name for the city of Napata, the ancient capital of
Ethiopia, built at the foot of the Jebel Barkal." [15]
New Merawi appears on many maps, often spelled as 'Merowe'.
Thus Napata was probably the Egyptian name for a city the Nubians
called Meroe. When Cambyses's invasion prompted the Nubians to found a
new capital further up the Nile, they again called it Meroe. The
Egyptians used that name thereafter, so we can understand how
Josephus, confusing an ancient and largely truthful Jewish tradition
and later Egyptian usage recorded an attack on Napata as an attack on
Meroe [Appendix 1]. In this light the Meroe objection actually
supports Josephus's story; however, his account would still be highly
contentious were it not for three other pieces of evidence.
[*!* Image: Figure 1. Locations (where known) of the 17 Egyptian forts
listed in a late MK papyrus discovered at Thebes by James Quibell in
1896.
LABELS: 15, 16, 17. Aswan. Elephantine 14. Biga 13. First Cataract. 12
Baki. Dakkek. Ikkur. el Alaki. 11 Aneiba. Abu Simbel. Ballana. Qustol.
Wadi Halfa. 8 Buhen. 7 Iken?. 6 Mirgissa. Dasnarti. Second Cataract. 5
Shalfak. 4 Uronarti. 2 Semna. Kumma 3. Egypt-Sudan frontier. 1.
kilometres. 0 50 N]
[*!* Image: Figure 2. Map of Nubia region showing possible route of
Moses' trans-desert strike against Napata, and why the later Meroe was
not his target.
1st Cataract. Aswan. Aneiba. Buhen. 2nd Cataract. Semna. 3rd Cataract.
Kerma. Napata. Merowe. 4th Cataract. Abu Hammad. 5th Cataract. Atbara.
Meroe. 6th Cataract. Khartum.]
As Josephus has it, the success of Moses owed less to arms than to
court diplomacy. His marriage to a Nubian princess secured Egypt's
southern border at no cost in lives, endearing him to the army, but
not productive of any commemorative stelae. However, although he came
from Pharaoh's household, Moses was not of royal blood; by wedding
royalty he usurped the royal prerogative. The court would not wish to
annul a marriage so vital to Egyptian national security, but at the
same time might interpret it as the first step in a bid for the crown.
We can thus understand the court's fear [Table 2] that Moses would
'raise a sedition'; but what 'innovations' did some Egyptians suspect
that Moses might introduce?
Genesis records that during the great famine, when the Egyptians had
expended all their money and cattle to buy corn:
"Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh ... the Egyptians
sold every man his field .. the people, (Joseph) removed them to
the cities .... Only the land of the priests bought he not, for the
priests had a portion assigned to them of Pharaoh." [16]
This land reform probably ensured better crop management, and surely
ingratiated Joseph with the priests and Pharaoh. But it would have
aroused great bitterness among dispossessed landowners, downgrading
them to common citizens. If, as is likely, these men saw lands they
had owned being granted to Jacob and his household, the Children of
Israel would become a focus for their abiding resentment. Their
descendants' hostility towards the Israelites can then be more readily
understood.
By ancient custom, kings who win military victories reward their
officers with grants of land. Moses had no lands to grant; but on his
return from success in Nubia he would have a unique opportunity to
propose to Pharaoh that land be restored to nominated officers -
thereby alleviating a major cause of enmity towards his race. Pharaoh
would never release crown land as this might boost the young
pretender's popular standing, but he might have been amenable to a
proposal that some of the priests' land be shared with former land
owners. It matters not whether Moses proposed any such plan: the
episcopacy would have felt threatened by the mere possibility. It is
therefore interesting that Josephus specifically identifies the
'sacred scribes' as those who feared that Moses might bring
'innovations'.
A second, less speculative point lies in the reasons given for Moses's
flight from Egypt. His status as a prince and office as a judge over
the Egyptians would give Moses a high degree of protection against any
charge of unlawful killing, leaving the biblical account unpersuasive:
Josephus' story is more credible, and is supported by the biblical
record. It says that the Lord told Moses in Midian: 'Go, return into
Egypt: for all the men are dead which sought thy life' [Exodus 4:19].
If the crime had been murder 'the men' cannot have been the victim's
relatives, for blood feuds outlast a generation. Nor were they the
law's representatives: murder enjoys no Statute of Limitations. But if
the 'crime' was that a youthful, victorious Moses was seen as a threat
to Pharaoh's throne and the temple lands, then the threat would
dwindle as Moses grew older, remembered only by men who had felt
personally threatened. With their deaths, Moses could return to Egypt
in relative safety.
A third and strong point in favour of Josephus's version is also to be
found in the biblical record. After the Exodus, Miriam and Aaron:
'spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman he had married:
for he had married an Ethiopian woman' [Numbers 12:1]. Repetition
argues that the charge was factual, while the pluperfect tense
suggests that Moses considered himself no longer married to the woman.
She could not have been Zipporah unless Jethro, priest of Midian, was
a Nubian: had that been so it would surely have been recorded.
Manasseh and Ephraim were Joseph's sons by an Egyptian mother, so
Moses could hardly be charged with miscegenation. But if Moses married
Zipporah while still married to a Nubian princess, he could have been
accused of bigamy: only then does the biblical anecdote make sense. It
is difficult not to conclude that the Torah originally included an
account of Moses in Nubia similar to that of Josephus. Although the
redactors later excised it to minimise Egyptian aspects of Moses's
career, they overlooked this one crucial associated scriptural
reference.
The foregoing discussion finds sufficient consistencies between the
Torah and Josephus to suggest that the latter deserves greater
credibility than he is usually accorded. On that basis I now assert
that Moses could well have led a thousands-strong Egyptian army in a
successful desert campaign; and that this experience, reinforcing the
military training which he must have received as a member of the royal
household, would equip him with the know-how to organise the
Israelites along army lines. That they were so organised is clear from
Exodus 12:17: 'this selfsame day have I brought forth your armies out
of the land of Egypt' (see also Exodus 7:4 and Numbers 33:1). But
though Moses would need such experience to formulate a viable plan for
moving twenty thousand or more Israelites from Egypt to Canaan through
the Sinai desert, that would be only one among many essential
pre-conditions.
The Time Factor
It is indisputable that moving even twenty thousand people of all ages
out of Egypt, with their flocks and household goods, would present a
huge logistical task. Although Jacob is recorded as following a
nomadic life in Canaan, the Israelites in Egypt seem to have led a
more settled existence for at least four generations. In this time
most of them would inevitably have lost their nomadic expertise at the
same time as they acquired new skills [17]. In any case the Exodus was
not just another bi-annual trek between summer and winter pasturage,
crossing familiar ground from one well-known watering hole to the
next; but a forced march into mainly waterless, definitely hostile,
and supposedly unfamiliar terrain, with the added difficulties of
having first to run the gauntlet of the Egyptian army, and then of
self defence against powerful desert marauders.
Safe exit from Egypt would depend critically on the factors of Time
and Space which beset every military operation. For the entire party
to be able to quit Egypt before the army could be interposed it would
have had to be organised and drilled with something approaching
military precision. Given the serf-like status of the Israelites and
the tribal factionalism which characterised their society, this degree
of organisation would have taken years to achieve. Moreover, it would
be quite impossible unless preceded by unanimity among the tribes to
coordinate their preparations. In turn, this implies that Moses must
have previously convinced the tribal elders that their God was going
to create an opportunity for flight, and that he was God's appointed
leader in this hazardous, seemingly impossible enterprise.
In conjunction with Velikovsky's hypothesis, this indicates that
Moses:
(a) Had reason to expect a cosmic event, and could predict with
adequate accuracy when it would occur (in order to draw up a viable
timetable for Exodus preparations).
(b) Could persuade the sceptics that despite his Egyptian
upbringing he was totally devoted to the Israelite cause.
(c) Was able convincingly to represent himself as being in the line
(of Abraham, and Jacob) of those to whom God spoke directly.
This section considers the first of these three propositions. The
other two will be discussed in the subsequent section.
In Worlds in Collision Velikovsky introduced his interpretation of
events surrounding the Exodus by first discussing, in a chapter titled
'The Most Incredible Story', the Beth-horon event when Joshua is said
to have commanded the Sun to stand still [18]. Velikovsky posited that
such a disturbance in the apparent motion of the Sun could only have
been due to a disturbance in the terrestrial rotation, which might be
caused by the close passage of a massive cometary body.
He noted an earlier verse describing great stones falling on
Beth-horon, consistent with Earth passing through the comet's tail;
and argued that as the lengthened day and falling-stones phenomena
'were recorded to have occurred together, it is improbable that the
records were invented' [19]. He found a pre-Columbian Mexican codex
relating how during a cosmic catastrophe the night did not end for a
long time, and that a greater cosmic catastrophe had occurred 52 years
earlier. A longer day in Canaan requires a lengthened night in Mexico,
and since about 52 years elapsed between the Exodus and Beth-horon
events, Velikovsky hypothesised that the natural disasters surrounding
the Exodus were caused by a large cometary body in a still closer
brush with Earth.
If Velikovsky's hypothesis is correct (that a body moving on a
cometary orbit passed Earth very closely at the time of the Exodus and
at a greater but still fairly close range 52 years later), it is not
improbable that the body would also have passed at fairly close range
52 years before the Exodus. Moreover this pattern - of two or three
close passages, followed by a long period when at minimum separation
the body was at a relatively safe distance - would tend to repeat
itself at an interval probably of hundreds of years. Such a pattern
would have been detected and established by ancient astronomers; in
which case Moses's Egyptian education would have included those events
(though described, no doubt, as the visitations of a God).
In what follows, Velikovsky's 52-year periodicity for the cosmic
intruder, and Moses's age as recorded in the Torah, are used. Whether
these data are correct in terms of current solar years is open to
question [20]. However, if there were transitions between lunar and
solar year calendric systems, Moses's lifetime would surely have been
the period of greatest confusion. It is by no means certain what
corrections (if any) should be applied to ages given in the Torah:
moreover similar (but not necessarily identical) corrections may need
to be applied to the data from which comet periods were deduced. Moses
is recorded as having been 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. If
Velikovsky's comet had approached Earth 52 years earlier, Moses would
have been about 28 years old, probably in the early years of his
exile. If he then recognised the flyby as the same type of visitation
described by his Egyptian tutors, he could anticipate at least one
further visitation 52 years later. Thus a close cometary flyby event
during the early years of Moses' exile could have acted to him as a
harbinger of a similar event half a century thereafter. That
conclusion holds even if Moses's age at Exodus is lowered
substantially, provided that the period between cometary passages is
also suitably reduced.
It must be stressed that as yet this harbinger event - a logical
extension of Velikovsky's hypothesis - is unproven. But if it actually
happened, inspiring Moses to conceive of using the next visitation to
lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he would have had ample time for the
necessary planning, preparation, and training. Thus the hypothesised
Harbinger solves the Time Factor problem. But that would still only be
another essential preliminary. Moses's biggest difficulties were that
he had first to allay the understandable suspicions of his own people
- to prove himself 'more Hebrew than the Hebrews' -and then to
establish dictatorial control over the tribes to achieve command of
the Exodus enterprise. How he might have tackled these much more
intractable problems is discussed in the next two sections.
Winning the Hearts and Minds
If the Torah and Josephus are broadly correct, Moses was reared within
the Egyptian court system which would have trained him in disciplines
essential for a royal prince - such as those listed in Table 2. All
his training would be directed towards fostering leadership qualities;
but it would have been an Egyptian education, aimed at developing
Egyptian youths of suitable character into men who would hold
positions of legislative and military authority on behalf of the
Egyptian Pharaoh. An Israelite who from birth had been adopted by an
Egyptian princess, and was reared within this system from early
boyhood to young manhood, would emerge groomed as a prince and a judge
over Egyptians; but among his own people a very different attitude
would inevitably prevail. The Hebrew man whose taskmaster Moses is
said to have slain makes this point cuttingly: 'Who made thee a prince
and a judge over us'? [Exodus 2:14].
In the scriptural account, this slaying is why Moses fears Pharaoh and
flees from Egypt - surely an unusual reaction for a prince of the
royal household, and a judge with powers of life and death over
Egyptians. He returns to Egypt after 40 years exile in Midian. At
God's bidding Aaron meets Moses who tells him God's words and reveals
the magic signs. Moses and Aaron gather together all the elders of
Israel. Aaron speaks the words of the Lord and shows the signs to the
people, whereupon they believe that their Lord is visiting them
through Moses, bow their heads and worship [Exodus 4:30-1]. In other
words - men who spurned Moses when as a powerful Egyptian prince and
victorious general he held power which could have alleviated their
lot, unhesitatingly accept him as their leader when he returns, an
aging nobody. And all this simply on the strength of a talk and two
conjuring tricks performed by his brother! If the scriptural account
is the whole truth, those tribal elders must have been among the most
credulous men ever entrusted with authority.
If Moses was out of touch with the Israelites until his return from
Midian, those old and deeply-nurtured suspicions of him would surely
have endured, and made his task virtually impossible. But if in
reality Moses contacted his brother Aaron before or during his flight
from Egypt, and stayed in touch with Aaron throughout his exile, he
could have developed via that channel a wider rapport with the tribes
on which to build his ultimately successful bid for supreme control.
Although contacts between Moses and Aaron are not recorded prior to
their meeting at Horeb, the recorder (Moses) had a vested interest in
representing events as the handiwork of God, not man (i.e. himself).
It is inherently unlikely that he would leave Egypt without contacting
his family, and it is easier to credit that the two brothers met at
Horeb by arrangement than that Aaron went there on God's command after
fifty years of separation.
Based on the work of P. J. Wiseman and A. S. Yahuda, Mackey et al.
argue [21] that the book of Genesis reveals strong Egyptian influences
and remarkably few Akkadian ones. In particular, Wiseman deduced that
the earlier parts of the book are Moses's transliterations into
contemporary Hebrew of ancient tablets preserved by Abraham's
descendants, whereas sections dealing with the times of Joseph forward
were compiled by Moses from Israelite and Egyptian archives. Having
been educated by Egyptian savants, Moses would have been ideally
equipped for this work: it required a knowledge of Egyptian writing
and history, access to the tablets of the Israelites (or copies), and
probably a knowledge of cuneiform. The whole translation and
compilation task would take considerable time.
Mackey et al. do not ask when Moses might have done the work: the
period of his Midian exile seems most likely. Moses might have started
writing a history of Joseph during his palace years, in Egyptian for
Egyptian readership: whether he did so or not it is clear that a
version in Hebrew would have been a major morale-booster for
Israelites under the Egyptian yoke. Forming chapters 37 to 50 of the
present book of Genesis, it would have reached the Israelites via
Aaron, and would have been followed by Moses' compilation in Hebrew of
the Abraham stories (into which he may have added an account [22] of
Abraham in Egypt). This second publication included the promise of a
home in Canaan [23] - a vital spur to the Exodus enterprise, and could
well have paved the way for the release to Moses of the sacred tablets
(or copies of the tablets) which he re-wrote into the Hebrew of his
day and which were in time to become the first eleven chapters of
Genesis.
The upbringing of Moses gave him the means to translate, write, and
edit the Book of Genesis: exile gave him the opportunity. His motives
would have been complex, but two elements can be inferred with high
likelihood. A man reared in the royal court would hardly be human if
he did not aspire to the status traditionally accorded to a prince; so
if, denied princedom in Egypt, Moses sought to gain leadership of the
Israelites, that is an understandable reflex. Moreover, in seeking to
free the Israelites from Egyptian subjugation Moses may consciously or
otherwise have been initially impelled by desire for vengeance on the
Egyptian court. Whatever his promptings may have been, there is no
doubt that by producing one comprehensive account of his race's
traditions he provided the tribes with a powerful unifying totem,
encouraging them to accept its assurance that they were the cultural
equals of their Egyptian masters. At that stage Moses's literacy would
have been his most powerful asset.
The Mantle of Leadership
Any bid for leadership on tribal grounds would have to be based on
descent (probably involving primogeniture) either from Jacob's eldest
son Reuben, or from the great Joseph via Manasseh or Ephraim. As the
second son of a Levite and a fugitive from the Egyptians, Moses was
severely handicapped. Even with his credibility restored though the
'Genesis' work, Moses would have needed an extremely powerful argument
in support of any claim to leadership. Meanwhile Israelite
recollections of his erstwhile status of Egyptian prince, general, and
judge, would continue to weigh against him.
However, it follows from the Harbinger hypothesis that Moses was in a
position to bid for leadership based on his unique relationship with
God. By claiming that the Harbinger was Israel's old God by a new name
(Yahweh), by relating a message of hope from Yahweh to His Children
the Israelites, and by predicting Yahweh's next visitation, Moses
could claim to be The One and True Prophet. This claim would be
irresistible if and when the forecast return proved true, but the need
to organise and train the Israelites beforehand meant that Moses could
not wait so long. A factor in circumventing this problem would be to
focus attention forward to the promised land of Canaan: hence the
stress placed on the promise in Moses' accounts of the lives of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
However, those accounts may have produced other problems for Moses.
Abraham's God may have been Zedek [24], and not El as in the ancient
tablets. It is probable too that descriptions of El and Zedek could
not easily be reconciled: a surmise based on the assumption that the
cometary visitor's previous set of two or three close flybys occurred
in Abraham's time, perhaps generating the night sky image originally
underlaying the Covenant of the Pieces story [25], and destroying the
Cities of the Plain [26]. The cosmic phenomenon behind El seems to
have been very different [27]. Moreover, the comet would be affected
by near contact with Earth, and on its re-appearance as Yahweh,
Harbinger of the Exodus, it probably looked very different from
descriptions of Zedek.
If this speculation is right it explains why Moses repeatedly claimed
that the God who spoke to him was: 'The God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob' [28]: he had to refute visual evidence to
the contrary. It may also explain the title: 'I Am' (Exodus 3:14), a
name so ambivalent that it could equate not only with Zedek but also
with El, so giving the God of Moses an unchallengeable provenance.
This assumes that the Harbinger event was a close but not very close
flyby, involving little change in the visitor's appearance between
that event and the Exodus. Hence, if Moses 'predicted' what Yahweh
would look like, the period of the Plagues would reveal his
description as broadly correct. Fortuitously, this would 'prove' that
Moses was divinely inspired, and help to ensure full compliance with
his final pre-Exodus orders.
I posit that the basis for Moses' control over the Children of Israel
lay in the special relationship with Yahweh he was able to claim. The
Torah does not mention an Israelite 'priesthood' before the Exodus:
any such descriptions originally present would probably have been
excised - to present an idealised picture of monotheistic continuity
from Noah through Abraham to Moses. But as in every society, priestly
organisations must have existed - although the Abrahamic leader/priest
traditions may have ensured that, prior to Moses, Jewish priests were
subservient to tribal leaders. When those leaders came under Moses's
thumb, their now-independent priests might have been opposed to Moses,
as some were after the Exodus [Numbers 16].
Moses seems to have allowed for this potential problem in his
planning. By conducting most of his dealings with the elders through
Aaron, he prepared the ground for elevating the Levites to a special
status as a permanent priesthood among the tribes - thus buying the
allegiance of his own tribe, while making Aaron a scapegoat in case
the Exodus enterprise went badly wrong. Moreover, with Aaron the
channel through whom their sacred texts were passed to Moses for
transliteration into contemporary language, Israel's elders would
become increasingly dependent upon the two Levite brothers, and less
able to resist their takeover of the reins of power.
Nevertheless, among six thousand non-Levite male adults there would
have been many Israelites who would not accept Moses's diktats. To
enforce his authority Moses may have needed to take the drastic step
of removing any such points of resistance. Joshua was called '"cutter
off of heads", alluding to his office of official executioner and as
such having cut off his own father's head' [29]. If Joshua led a 'hit
squad' on Moses' behalf it explains not only his ardent support for
Moses, but also why he was appointed as Moses' successor. In the
modern argot, he 'knew where the bodies were buried'.
Reflections
If a Harbinger Event of the type hypothesised here actually occurred
it would be regarded - not by Moses alone - as the visitation of a new
God. It could have inspired Moses to dream of leading the Israelites
from Egyptian bondage; and to realise that this depended on finding a
formula for merging his new God Yahweh with El, God of the patriarchs.
Interspersion in Genesis of the names El, Elohim, El Adonai, and El
Shaddai, with the name Yahweh, suggests Moses taking care to
demonstrate veneration of the patriarchs' God(s) - so avoiding any
conflict with keepers of the sacred tablets, while accustoming these
same Israelites to acceptance of a new name, and eventually to the
worship of a new God. Through his claim to have sole access to this
new God's mind, Moses was able to gain control of the Exodus
enterprise. Moses had the knowledge and experience essential to that
enterprise: the Harbinger Event provided the time needed for him to
plan - and the Israelites to prepare - to leave Egypt when Yahweh
re-appeared. Thus a cometary visitor as conjectured by Velikovsky when
interpreting many catastrophic elements in the Exodus stories is found
to be no less essential to account for human elements of the story.
It is again stressed that except for the consideration of the account
in Josephus of Moses's Nubian expedition, the foregoing discussion is
wholly speculative. If only Moses, a prolific and versatile writer,
had recorded the Harbinger Event, he would have removed it from the
realm of speculation into the world of hard fact. A contemporary
record would not only establish the Harbinger Event as historical, but
also provide strong evidence for Velikovsky's thesis that the Exodus
Event was closely associated with a cosmically-induced catastrophe.
However, the most cursory consideration shows that if Moses had
recorded the Harbinger Event in terms showing that he had witnessed
the cyclical visitation of a cometary body, describing the appearance
of the body and its effects, and revealing how from this Moses had
developed the Yahweh concept (the means by which he was to take
control of Israel), then in all but the safest hands it would be a
highly dangerous document. Its publication would totally destroy his
credibility and authority, and almost certainly guarantee his
immediate death - and not his alone, but also those of his immediate
kin, Joshua, and many of the Levites, as Moses' co-conspirators in the
plot. Even an encrypted record would provide little safety, because
revelation of the existence of 'secret writings' would be likely to
inflame suspicions.
Thus if Moses had recorded the hypothesised Harbinger Event, he would
probably write it in the form of an anonymous, seemingly innocuous
story, unconnected with him or his associates. Even then, while
witnesses to the Harbinger and Exodus events remained alive, the risk
would persist that they might read the story and recognise its true
import. Thus Moses would have had to entrust his record into 'secure';
hands - such as Joshua's, already stained with blood and hence
inextricably implicated. If Moses wrote such a record, his
arrangements for safeguarding it are unknowable; but an unusually
secure hiding place would be needed for it to survive till the present
day.
Fortunately, Moses did record the Harbinger Event, and his record has
survived almost intact! We owe its survival to the fact that from
early times it has lain, visible but unrecognised, in (fortuitously)
secure custody. Thus we can be certain the record is not a modern
forgery, but is documentary testimony of great age. It graphically
describes the event and its immediate consequences; provides a wealth
of fascinating insights into the circumstances in which the Exodus
enterprise was first conceived and the Yahweh concept evolved; and in
spite of Moses' best efforts, reveals him unmistakably as its author.
Part 2
The Hiding Place
Where was Moses's secret record kept securely for over thirty-four
centuries? The safest place would be in a collection of broadly
similar writings, where its unique nature could easily be overlooked.
The most notable collection of such writings would be the sacred texts
of the Jews, the Old Testament of the Bible.
By what criteria were those texts determined as sacred, and so
admitted to the Jewish canon? This question is not intended to suggest
that the various books were submitted to a Selection Committee, which
adjudicated on the basis of an agreed set of rules or standards. But
even a cursory acquaintance with the Old Testament reveals a set of
Jewish-oriented characteristics, some of the which are to be found in
each of the books. [Here and elsewhere in this paper, the term 'Jew'
will be used to embrace all the Children of Israel, and their
ancestors: it is not restricted to the peoples of Judah and their
descendants].
The Old Testament books handle Jewish themes: Jewish history, Jewish
religious practises, ethical and moral precepts of the Jews,
exhortations to and prophesies about Jews. A pervasive theme is
exaltation of the Jewish God, counterpointed by condemnation of those
who neglect His Laws. Tables 3 and 4 present a simple analysis: they
show that Jewish authorship is claimed or inferred for each of the
books listed: 36 of the books are about and/or addressed to Jews,
while 33 relate to the Land of Canaan, as a background to the writing
or as the aspiration of exiles in foreign countries.
However, one Old Testament book is shown neither on Table 3 nor Table
4. There are no Jewish characters in the Book of Job. The story is not
set in, and does not even mention Canaan. It does not touch on any
obviously Jewish theme and its 'theology', with Job demanding from God
an explanation for the calamities that have fallen on him, has been
felt by some to verge on heresy if not blasphemy. This poses two
important questions. Why was the Book of Job accepted into the Jewish
canon initially? And secondly, how did so non-Jewish a book retain its
place throughout several revisions of that canon by the Jews? (At the
Second Council of Constantinople, Theodore of Mopsuestia denied that
the book of Job was divinely inspired; but this was a Christian, not a
Jewish council, and in any case the Abbe Grandvaux refuted Theodore's
allegation). Before attempting to answer the questions just posed, the
content and structure of the book will be briefly outlined.
The Story of Job and Construction of the Book
The book is the story of a man who is 'perfect and upright, fearing
Elohim and turning away from evil', offering sacrifices to expiate
sins that his sons may have committed. Satan gets God's permission to
test Job's virtue. Disasters rain down striking first Job's property,
then his family, and lastly his body. Despite this and his wife's
taunting, Job persists in submission to God. As he is scraping himself
among the ashes his friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arrive, see
his grief, and sit with him in silence. These events are narrated in
prose, and form the Prologue.
Job then begins a lament before his friends, expressing himself in
poetry: his interlocutors respond in poetry. There are three cycles of
poetic discourse, each friend speaking three times, each time evoking
a reply from Job (in its present form the third cycle is incomplete:
the final speeches of Bildad and Zophar are mixed with Job's
penultimate speech, but the original purport can be recovered). After
Job's tenth and last speech a new personage named Elihu intervenes,
who after a short prose introduction makes a series of monologues in
poetry, emphasising his theories by addressing himself to Job and the
three friends, and then fading out. Yahweh enters the arena, and in
sublime poetry answers Job 'from the whirlwind', leaving Job
stammering words of humility and abasement. In a very short prose
Epilogue Job recovers his former prosperity: virtue is finally
rewarded [30].
Thus the book divides conveniently into a prose narrative (mainly the
Prologue and Epilogue) and the poetic discourses. As illustrated in
Figure 3, the discourses form the major proportion of the book. The
division is sharpened by usage of the Divine Names. In the discourses
the name of God appears 93 times - as El, Eloah, Shaddai, Elohim, or
one of the first two in combination with the third; but the
tetragrammaton YHWH appears only once, in v.12:9 - almost certainly a
copyist's mistaken repetition of Isaiah 41:20. Yet the sacred name
Yahweh appears 29 times in the prose narrative, 18 of them in the two
chapters of the Prologue, and 9 in the eleven verses of the Epilogue.
This differentiation is remarkable, leading some exegetes to conclude
that the prose narrative and poetic discourses were written by
different authors and at different times, though they cannot agree
which came first. But the unity of the book argues against them:
without the discourses the narrative is banal, without the narrative
the discourses would have been meaningless.
On two points almost all commentators are agreed.Firstly, the Book of
Job is a literary work of the highest quality, ranking with the finest
writing found in any of the world's books [31], but secondly, it is
almost totally enigmatic. Scholars cannot agree whether it is contest
literature (dialectic), teaching literature (like the Book of
Proverbs), protest literature (e.g. the Ipuwer papyrus), written
rhetoric, or even drama: no parallel nor even a convincingly similar
work is found in any language. The Hebrew text appears to be littered
with words and phrases unknown in Hebrew: many are translated by
relating them to roots in other Middle Eastern languages, but
sufficient remain to suggest that the text is corrupt. The land of Uz
in which the story is set is thought by most to be in the region of
Edom, south of Palestine, but some others claim Uz lay in southern
Syria. Not only are Job and his friends non-Jewish, but no connection
with any real or fictional Jew is indicated or suggested. Nothing in
the book seems historical, complicating the issues of when it was
written and who might have written it. In sum, the Book of Job is
regarded as a wholly imaginative work, by an unknown literary genius.
Table 3. Analysis of 'Historical' Books of the Old Testament
written Canaan- theme: Jewish Total
by Jews about Jews based aimed history/
anecdote ritual wisdom prophecy/
exhortation 'score' each book
Genesis 1 1 0.5 0.5 1
4
Exodus 1 1
1 1
4
Leviticus 1 1 1
1
4
Numbers 1 1
1 1
4
Deuteronomy 1 1
1 1
4
Joshua 1 1 1
1
4
Judges 1 1 1
1
4
Ruth 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 1
3.5
I-II Samuel 1 1 1
1
4
I-II Kings 1 1 1
1
4
I-II Chronicles 1 1 1
1
4
Ezra 1 1 0.5 0.5 1
4
Nehemiah 1 1 0.5 0.5 1
4
Esther 1 1
1
3
Dating the Book of Job
If the book could be dated with reasonable reliability, some of these
enigmas could be at least partly resolved. From text analyses it has
been argued that Job was written after the return from Babylonian
exile [32], which would make a Mosaic origin impossible. Those
analyses began with the 'Higher Criticism', the challenge to the
authenticity of the Jewish bible led by 19th century German scholars
Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen: but a recent Review article
provides grounds for suspecting the motivations behind much of that
German scholarship [33] and, though this does not of itself have any
direct bearing on the validity or otherwise of the dating of Job, it
does prompt an examination of the evidence on which a post-exilic date
is based.
Edouard Dhorme's Le Livre de Job [34] has been acclaimed as one of the
finest commentaries ever written on any book of the Bible. His
217-page introduction comprehensively summarises and discusses the
critics' arguments. He considers the treatment of Satan as being
stylistic in Zechariah but stereotyped in Job; concludes that the
prophesies of Zechariah must have come first, but that the book of Job
influenced, and therefore preceded, Malachi. From dates assigned to
those prophetic writings he finds that Job must have been written
between 500 and 450 BC, a date that 'is singularly well confirmed by
vocabulary and grammar' [35]. Most of this confirmatory evidence
actually consists of the number of Aramaic expressions and usages
identified in Job, especially forty non-Hebrew words which have been
translated by assuming an Aramaic derivation. Dhorme notes that it was
in the 5th century BC that Aramaic became the normal language of
Jewish communities in Egypt, supporting his 500-450 BC dating.
Faced with this scholarly conclusion - and Dhorme's scholarship is
impeccable - it might seem pointless to pursue the examination.
However, it must be said that Dhorme's case is neither overwhelming
nor even very compelling though in its day it was well-received and
continues to command a significant consensus. Contrary arguments can
be proposed on the basis of Dhorme's own evidence. He noted a plethora
of errors in all the texts, some of which date from only two centuries
after his supposed date of original writing: it is strange that the
text should have become so corrupt in so short a time. In addition to
the 40 non-Hebrew words with supposedly Aramaic roots, he found 48
with Arabic and 58 with Akkadian roots - languages which did not have
a strong influence on 5th century BC Hebrew. Thus Dhorme was selective
in relying on the Aramaisms, and ignoring other foreign intrusions.
Again, if the book was written in the 5th century BC, it was
incorporated into the Jewish canon not long afterwards, and most of
these 'neologisms' - as Dhorme calls them - could have been translated
into Hebrew with only a little research by the scribes. Why then did
not one of those words (over 200 in total) enter the Hebrew
vocabulary?
Moreover, text criticism is not a static discipline. In his 1984
Preface to Rowley's translation of Dhorme's book, Andersen states:
"Two notable discoveries ... have thrown Job studies into new
perspectives - the Ras Shamra tablets and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The
first set of documents come from a time when the writing of the Old
Testament was in its beginning; the second set after it was
finished. The Canaanite myths from Ugarit provide background for
the language and literature in Job; the Qumran manuscripts -
including an actual Targum of Job, to our great surprise! - throw
light on the text in its later transmission and translation. Yet
even in these two matters of philology and text-criticism, Dhorme's
work remains indispensable for the serious student" [36].
When Andersen wrote that Preface he had already published a commentary
on Job of his own [37], where he considers that: 'Freedman's study of
orthography has now ... made any date later than the seventh century
hard to uphold' [38]. He observes [39] that the author (of Job):
"... has simulated the pre-Mosaic world of the patriarchs and
succeeded in concealing his own day and age by avoiding detectable
anachronisms" [my italics].
He concludes: 'All we can say is that Job could have been written at
any time between Moses and Ezra' [40], giving his opinion, which he
admits he cannot substantiate, that the substance of the book took
shape during the reign of Solomon, and its form was settled by the
time of Josiah.
Andersen's conclusion should be no surprise. Text analysis may be a
powerful tool where the original text is available but in the case of
Job (and in the cases of many Old Testament books) it is being applied
to an nth-hand translation and/or copy of the original. We do not know
who was involved in the processes that led to the various texts which
have come down to us, nor their backgrounds and qualifications, nor
when they performed their work, nor if some of the errors, neologisms,
and unknown terms in the texts are due to these unknown scribes and
not to the unknown author. From this it is clear that textual
criticism alone is unlikely ever to prove a date for the Book of Job -
the Encyclopedia Britannica's dogmatism notwithstanding. If a better
dating is to be found, the problem will have to be approached from a
different direction.
Table 4. Analysis of Remaining Books of the Old Testament
written Canaan- theme: Jewish Total
'score'
each book
by Jews about Jews history/
based aimed prophecy/
anecdote ritual wisdom exhortation
Psalms 1 1 1
1
4
Proverbs 1 1 1
1
4
Ecclesiastes 1 1 1
0.5
3.5
Song of Solomon 1 1 1
0.5 0.5
4
Isaiah 1 1 1
0.5 0.5
4
Jeremiah 1 1
1 0.5
0.5 4
Lamentations 1 1 1 1 4
Ezekiel/Malachi/ 1 1 1
1 4
Zechariah
Daniel 1 1
0.5
0.5 3
Hosea/Joel/Amos/
Micah/Habakkuk/ 1 1
1
1 4
Nahum/Zephaniah
Obadiah 1
1
1 3
Jonah 1 0.5 0.5
1 3
Haggai 1 1
0.5
1 3.5
The Book and the Canon
Let us return to the original question. Under what circumstances could
this unusual book have entered the Jewish canon? If it could be
attributed to an historically eminent Jew such as King Solomon, the
conundrum would be solved. Other Old Testament books attributed to
Solomon reveal him as a competent, though hardly an outstanding
author, but his prominence within Jewish history accords those
writings an unchallengeable provenance. But Job is an anonymous book.
It is not known if it was written by one hand or several: the Poem on
Wisdom (chap. 28), the Elihu monologues (chaps. 32-37), and the
speeches of Yahweh (chaps. 40-42), as well as the entire prose
narrative, have all been ascribed to other pens [41]. And though
theologians claim that the book's religious themes are Jewish, that is
at least arguable. In reality, Jewish authorship is inferred almost
wholly from the fact that the book is found in the Jewish Canon!
But how could this non-Jewish Book of Job have entered the sacred
canon in the first place? Jewish tradition has an answer: the
Babylonian Talmud attributes its composition to Moses [42]. Now if
that attribution has any credibility, the problem of its entry into
the canon disappears. As the reputed author of the Torah, Moses was
the human originator of the canon. Any writings which later guardians
of the canon held to be by Moses would be sure of a permanent place
within it. For two reasons however, that is an insufficient answer.
Firstly, if those guardians had been called on to judge whether the
Book of Job was the work of Moses, the contrast of its non-Jewish tone
with the ultra-Jewishness of the Pentateuch (the five books positively
ascribed to Moses) would have led them to find against it; and
secondly, in rejecting leadership by prophets and adopting a monarchy,
the Jews were in effect substituting Jewish nationalism for their
previous 'sacred nation' status.
Thus it seems improbable that from the foundation of the monarchy
onward the nation could have accepted into its sacred canon a book so
totally un-Jewish as the Book of Job. However, as it formed part of
the canon from the earliest recorded time, the factors just discussed
strongly suggest that it must have been attributed to Moses and
accorded a status approaching that of the books of the Pentateuch
between the times of Moses and Samuel - so Mosaic authorship becomes
an interesting possibility. But while it is possible to conceive that
a post-exilic literary genius might have composed a fictional
re-creation of the patriarchal epoch, it is almost inconceivable that
any Jew writing in pre-monarchy days would have wished or been able to
do so. Hence in re-examining the provenance of the Book of Job, it is
necessary to allow for the possiblity that it is not a piece of
imaginative fiction, but a historical narrative. It is from that
standpoint that we now ask: 'Who wrote the Book of Job'?
[*!* Image: Figure 3. The Structure of the Book of Job in diagrammatic
form.
The vertical height of each 'block' is proportional to the number of
verses attributed to the speaker.
Prose narrative. Job. Eliphaz. Bildad. Zophar. Elihu. Yahweh]
The Recorder in the Shadows
If the discourse between Job and his three friends as recorded in the
book is a record of an actual series of dialogues - albeit edited into
poetic form for purposes unknown - someone must have recorded what was
said. As the Prologue describes the scene, only Job and his three
friends were present, and none of them can plausibly be proposed as
the recorder. But when the dialogues end we suddenly find (v.32:2)
that another individual is present. Elihu - the son of Barachel the
Buzite, of the kindred of Ram - announces: 'I am young and ye are very
old: wherefore I was afraid and durst not show you mine opinion'
(v.32:6). Evidently, Elihu has been present throughout as a silent
listener. But could Elihu have been Moses, and have recorded the
discourse of the older men? This paper has identified several
characteristics of Moses and his career - on the basis that as a young
prince exiled from Egypt he witnessed a harbinger of the cosmic event
around which he was later to weave the Exodus enterprise. Do any of
Elihu's characteristics as derived from the book of Job coincide with
those of Moses? Their youth is an obvious coincidence: are there more?
Elihu's monologues reveal him as a highly educated young man;
deferential but at ease in the company of his elders; self-confident
and eloquent in speaking; who addresses Job and replies to his
arguments - which Job's three friends did not do. When describing
Elihu's speech both Andersen and Dhorme use the word 'bombastic', i.e.
high-sounding and inflated, which implies a shallow content. But
though more prolix than the contributions of the three friends,
Elihu's monologues are constructed logically; they reveal an
intelligent, imaginative, and poetic mind; though their quality does
not attain that of Yahweh's speech, it surpasses those of the earlier
interlocutors. A more suitable description might be 'imperious' - the
style of one accustomed to speaking with authority. Such a style of
speaking and attitude of mind would not be unexpected from a young
prince recently exiled from the royal court of Egypt. This constitutes
a second 'coincidence'.
Elihu tells the group: 'I will fetch my knowledge from afar' (v.36:3).
Taking this literally, it indicates that Elihu received some or all of
his education in a distant land. Remembering that Moses was brought up
in Egypt, this forms a third coincidence. But Egypt was not the only
centre of learning: might not Elihu have been educated elsewhere? The
prologue depicts Job as: 'the greatest of all the men of the east'
(v.1:3). Dhorme explains the phrase 'men (or 'sons') of the east' as a
general term for orientals and in particular for nomadic Arabs [43].
Andersen asserts:
"Whether the land of Uz is located in the north or in the south ...
Job's homeland is somewhere to the east of Israel proper" [44].
But Uz/Edom lay south of Canaan, not east [*!* Image: Figure 4]. Job
is described as living a settled life there and as Abraham came from
east of Haran, Edomites were no more oriental than the Jews - so the
explanations fail to explain. But to a scribe from Memphis or Goshen,
the Edomites lived to the east. Job, who owned the largest flocks and
herds, could naturally be described as: 'the greatest of all the men
of the east.' Thus if Elihu was the writer of the Book of Job, he
probably came to the Edom area from Lower Egypt - a further and strong
parallel with Moses.
A digression on Figure 4 is in order here. Teman, the homeland of
Eliphaz, is believed to have been the triangular area south of Edom
defined by the modern Ma'an, Aqaba (once Ezion-Geber), and Tebuk. East
of the Ma'an-Tebuk road lies Wadi el Khush Shuah: as a Shuhite, Bildad
may have lived in that area. Just south of the road running east from
Tebuk is Jebel el Na'amah, which may have been the home country of
Zophar the Naamathite. It is entirely conceivable that travellers from
these three places would meet during journeys northwards along the
road which leads ultimately to Damascus. South-east of the Dead Sea
that road passes between Hasa and Bosrah. Hasa was Hazu, and the area
around Bosrah was called Bazu, in Assyrian inscriptions: these names
are redolent of Uz, the land of Job, and Buz, the reputed home of
Elihu [45]. Thus the account in the Book of Job seems remarkably
consistent with the geography of Edom and its southern environs.
Dhorme emphasises that the author of the Book of Job: 'was thoroughly
at home in the land of the Pharaohs' [46]. Whether behemoth and
leviathan in Yahweh's speeches indicate an Egyptian background depends
upon whether one concurs that they represent the hippopotamus and
crocodile respectively. But from the Poem on Wisdom Dhorme cites
v.28:10: 'He cutteth out rivers among the rocks', where 'Niles' is
used poetically for rivers/canals. This suggests familiarity with
Upper Egypt - in particular with cataracts south of Aswan, as the
Nile's banks in Lower Egypt are alluvial. Dhorme observes that when
the writer: 'wishes to describe ephemeral flora, his memory recalls
papyrus and reed (8:11-12)' and that 9:26 talks of 'vessels of reed'
like the papyrus canoes used on the Nile. These references are all
consistent with Mosaic authorship: the Nile, with its bulrushes, was
prominent in Moses's earliest career (according to his record), and he
knew the cataracts from his campaigns in Upper Egypt and Nubia.
Five points of coincidence have been identified between Moses and the
author of the Book of Job - who could have been the character calling
himself Elihu. Although these coincidences do not 'prove' that Moses
wrote the book, they do suggest that this line of enquiry is
profitable and should be pursued. It is therefore time to ask whether
there is direct evidence that Elihu is a nom de plume for Moses. It
has already been said that Moses would have taken pains to conceal his
involvement in the event which led to the Harbinger record, so if
evidence exists, it will be in cryptic form. However, the Elihu
monologues are introduced by prose narrative supplying brief
biographical details of the speaker - and these may be revealing.
[*!* Image: Figure 4. Map of the Middle East to show homeland of Job.
LABELS: Mediterranean Sea. Sea of Galilee. highway to Damascus.
CANAAN. Jerusalem. PHILISTIA. Dead Sea. MOAB. Bosrah (Buz?). Mount
Seir. Hasa. EDOM. Sela (Petra). Ma'an. El Jafr. Wadi Araba.
Ezion-Geber. Wadi el Khush Shuah. Tebuk. Jebel el Na'amah. TEMAN.
MIDIAN. SINAI. Gulf of Aqaba. Gulf of Suez. Great & Little Bitter
Lakes. Alexandria. Cairo. River Nile.]
The Equation of Moses and Elihu
It was noted earlier that Moses felt safe to return to Egypt when told
that: 'all the men are dead which sought thy life' [20]. Immediately
before this he went: 'to Jethro his father in law, and said unto him,
Let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren which are in Egypt
...'. This filial respect shows Moses behaving as much like a son as a
son-in-law. But when first encountered Jethro is called Reuel [47],
and at his last meeting with Moses he is called Raguel [48]. Elihu
says he is: 'the son of Barachel the Buzite' (v.32:2); i.e. the son of
the son of 'R(ayin) Vov(aleph) Lamed'. If this construction is cognate
with Reuel or Raguel, Elihu becomes a son of Bar-Reuel. Perhaps this
is no more than a coincidence.
Elihu claims to be: 'mishpotek Ram', translated as: 'of the kindred of
Ram'. 'Mishpotek' implies: 'of the general family'; whereas 'amor'
means 'our family', and 'Amram', 'of the specific family of Ram'. The
name Abram means 'father of Ram'. However, Moses was the natural son
of Amram [50]: so, having been born into the specific family of Ram,
he could certainly claim to be of the kindred of Ram: that may again
be simply coincidence. But to find that both elements of the brief
biography of Elihu are such near-parallels with the genealogy of Moses
- and are written in words which serve to conceal the similarity -
gives an impression that this may be more than just coincidental.
There is a still more direct link between Moses and Elihu. The latter
is said - by a young man who currently bears the name - to mean: 'Your
God is my God'. Literally the name means: 'El is Yahweh'. This concept
- that the traditional God (El) of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was the
same as Moses' new God (Yahweh) - was one that Moses had to sell to
the Israelites in order to assert command over the Exodus enterprise
(see Part 1, 'The Mantle of Leadership'; and [28]). Thus, if Moses,
writing a book we know as Job, had to choose a name for himself with
which he could feel wholly comfortable but which would safely conceal
his identity from Israelite readers, he could not have chosen a more
appropriate one than Elihu. Over 1300 different male names are
recorded in the OT; so, if the Book of Job is purely fictional, and
its unknown author chose at random a name (Elihu) for his youthful
eavesdropper, the odds were over 1000:1 against this most appropriate
of choices. In conjunction with the genealogical parallels this third
coincidence makes it difficult to resist the conviction that Elihu in
the Book of Job is Moses. This lends support to the presumption that
the book is historical, and identifies Elihu/Moses as the book's
likely author.
In an early issue of SIS Review Martin Sieff argues [51] that because
the name YHWH, first introduced by Moses, is not used in the
'cosmological sections' of the Book of Job (i.e. the poetic
discourses), '... this strongly suggests that the material was first
compiled before the time of Moses.' He does not discuss the
possibility that the book and the origination of the YHWH concept
might be both contemporary and connected, nor mention the ancient
Jewish tradition of a Mosaic authorship. He does however adduce other
evidence pointing to an early date of composition [52], all of which
lends support to the identification here of Moses as the probable
writer. His attempted identification of Ayish, Khima and Khesil -
names found in Job - was however abandoned [53] when Cardona gave
better interpretations [54]: part II of Sieff's article - 'Leviathan'
- has not appeared in an SIS journal. With Sieff's retirement from the
fray, Cardona's claim that Job is of much later date - based on
evidence similar to Dhorme's - has remained unchallenged until now.
Some Implications of Mosaic Authorship
Dhorme argued that the Book of Job is post-exilic on account of
Aramaic forms and roots in the text. Although some recent
commentators, like Anderson, have given ground on this point, they
still tend to treat the book as imaginative fiction which draws upon
other OT books - the Psalms, Proverbs, and especially Isaiah and
Jeremiah - and so hold it as of later date than the latest of those
writings. But as Anderson himself admits:
"... quite apart from such debatable questions as the dates of the
books which Job is said to quote, the similar material in other
texts could be quotations from Job, making it earlier than these
works. Or both could be drawing from a common tradition. Hence such
arguments are inconclusive" [55].
Thus, ultimately the non-Hebrew words and phrases in Job remain the
strongest part of the case for a late origin. Can those usages be
explained in terms of a Mosaic authorship? To answer this another
question must first be asked: 'If Moses wrote the book under the
circumstances outlined in this paper, in what language would he have
written'? If the book is historical then chapters 3 to 31 (the poetic
discourse) are essentially a transcript rendered into verse form -
either because Edomite as spoken by Job and his three friends sounded
like poetry to Moses, or because Moses felt that this form was best
suited to the subject and/or to his objective of concealment. No
matter what the reason for poetry the key fact is that the discourses
were spoken and originally recorded in the Edomite tongue. As the
record was extended - by inserting the Poem on Wisdom (chapter 26),
adding the Elihu monologues (chaps. 32 to 37) and Yahweh speeches
(chapters 38 to 41), and overlaying the prose narrative - Moses would
have originally written most or all of those extensions in Edomite
also. This incidentally explains why some parts of the book appear to
have been written later than the discourse - they were, yet the whole
has a unitary character - for it is the work of one man.
Some time later, quite possibly after the Exodus from Egypt, Moses
translated his work into Hebrew. A small proportion of words and
phrases would have had no direct equivalents - and been retained as
Edomite expressions in the Hebrew version. Some would eventually pass
into common Jewish use, and their origins would be lost: some others
would have been adopted by those travelling through Edom from nearby
countries, and been assimilated eventually into one or more of their
native languages - Akkadian, Arabic and Aramaic. Thus the neologisms
which in Dhorme's re-construction were 'imported' (for no obvious
reason) from foreign languages, become instead ancient Edomite words
which had been used in Moses's Harbinger record - but which had also,
through normal trade and travel, been 'exported' from Edomite into the
non-Hebrew tongues of adjacent lands.
It was probably while reflecting upon his record of the discourses,
and on the events leading to Job's misfortunes, that Moses recognised
a pattern which had been talked about by his Egyptian mentors - a
recognition marking the birth of the Yahweh concept. That explains why
the divine name 'Yahweh' is not used in the poetic discourse, for the
discourse records dialogues between Job and his friends: when they
were speaking and their words were being recorded, the name Yahweh did
not exist. It is unlikely that the Elihu monologues are words that
Moses actually uttered to Job and the other three: if Moses had spoken
aloud, Job would surely have responded. More probably chapters 32 to
34 contain ideas which passed through Moses's mind during the
discourses, and when he reflected afterwards [56], while chapters
35-37, especially 37, were written to provide a 'terrestrial'
background, against which the Divine/cosmic elements of chapters 38 to
41 (the Yahweh speeches) would become enhanced by contrast.
The assumption that the original book dates from a pre-Exodus period,
was translated into Hebrew and extended by Moses later, and was kept
secreted for one or two generations after his death, helps to explain
why the text contains so many 'corruptions'. When it eventually passed
into the mainstream of Hebrew sacred literature, some keepers of the
text would have tried to interpret the unknown Edomite words, removed
words that might shock the pious, modified words where the Divine name
was adjacent to or associated with an 'obnoxious' term, failed - when
copying - to divide passages of text correctly, or even to make
literal errors [57]. That such corruptions would intrude over a period
of more than a thousand years is understandable given the book's
origin and early history as suggested here: that they could have
arisen during two hundred years of post-exilic history is much less
credible.
A Mosaic authorship also helps explain two other small anomalies.
Though Edom is almost certainly the background to Job, a strong
tradition associates him with the Hebron and Lake Tiberias areas of
northern Israel. It is not easy to explain why a fictional story
emanating presumably from Judea, and relating to inhabitants of lands
further south, should have captured the hearts and minds of breakaway
tribes of the northern Kingdom. However, if the story of Job was
carried by the tribes during their original invasions into north
Canaan, this potential problem vanishes. It is also slightly odd that
Genesis 36 carries a genealogy of Esau's descendants and their Edomite
associates covering four to eight generations and that this record is
repeated in the first chapter of 1 Chronicles, although Esau's line
shows no later intermarriage with the Jews. If, however, Moses became
closely acquainted with some of these people during his Midian exile,
their presence in the Israelite record is less odd. Moreover, one of
the kings of Edom was Jobab (son of Zerah of Bosrah) [58], a name
which may be associated with Job and/or with Hobab (son of Raguel)
[59].
Thus, a Mosaic authorship of the Book of Job provides a single,
straightforward solution to major enigmas of its language, the use of
the Divine name, and the state of the text: this lends weight to the
evidence which finds that the book is much older than commonly
believed, identifies Moses as Elihu, and Elihu as the writer. However,
it is one thing to identify the author with Moses but a different
matter to show that the book records a catastrophe - and not just any
disaster, but specifically the cosmic phenomena which acted as a
harbinger of the Exodus event. This issue is now addressed.
Job as a Record of Catastrophes
Others have noted cosmological themes in the Book of Job. Velikovsky
equated Mazzaroth (vv. 38:32-33) with a 'hairy star' (a comet) and
with Lucifer [60] and observed that the author of Job knew the Earth
hangs 'upon nothing' [61]. Velikovsky [62], Sieff and Cardona
attribute the names Ayish, Khima, and Khesil to planets. But Sieff
also notes that in both places where these names appear in Job: 'they
are directly preceded by vivid accounts of catastrophe on the earth',
and that a similar juxtaposition occurs in the book of Amos. He also
finds several cases of catastrophic imagery in the book: notably
v.9:5, where Job describes a God 'which removeth the mountains and
they know not: which overturneth them in His anger'; and vv. 9:6-7
which celebrate a God 'Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and
the pillars thereof tremble. Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth
not; and sealeth up the stars.'
Sieff concluded that the writer of the Book of Job:
"knew that the earth had suffered great global catastrophes,
encompassing ice and water deluges ... meteorite bombardments,
earthquakes and thunderbolts, tidal waves and tides, orbital
change, spin axis shift and mountain destruction. He further knew
that these colossal events were connected with the movements of the
planetary bodies observed in the plane of the ecliptic ..." [63].
However, Sieff's stance was strongly influenced by reading Worlds in
Collision: if writing today he might alter parts of his Conclusion,
though probably quite a lot would remain. Notwithstanding that Sieff
mis-identified Ayish, Khima and Khesil, his article is well worth
reading for its wide coverage and wealth of useful references. But
perhaps because he found that the Book of Job seems to refer to many
types of catastrophe, Sieff treated it more as a review than a record,
and failed to recognise that the book is a response to one
'contemporary' catastrophe. Here I deal only with evidence which Sieff
used in a different way, or overlooked.
According to the prose narrative, Job was afflicted by a series of
misfortunes that parallel some events surrounding the Exodus. Compare
the fire that fell from heaven consuming Job's sheep and servants, the
great wind that felled the house of Job's children and killed them,
and the desert raiders who kill Job's servants and steal his camels
[Job 1:13-19], with the plagues of hail [64] and of death of Egypt's
'firstborn' [65], and Amalek's raid on the Israelites as soon as they
reached the desert [66]. This suggests that the less numerous plagues
suffered by Job, and those that later fell upon Egypt, could have had
some commonality of cause.
There is a further and intriguing parallel. Job was then afflicted by
'sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. And he took him
a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes'
[Job 2:7-8]. This is usually interpreted to mean that Job sat down in
the 'mazbaleh', 'dunghill', the heap of dust, ashes and dirt found at
the entrance to small Palestinian towns. But according to Dhorme the
text of the previous clause means that Job scraped himself, rather
than scraped the pus [67]. What was Job trying to remove? In Exodus
9:8-10 the Lord says to Moses: '... Take to you handfuls of ashes of
the furnace, and ... sprinkle it toward heaven .... And it shall
become small dust in all the land of Egypt'. Moses does so 'and it
became a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and upon beast.' If
similar boil-producing dust fell on Job he would have wanted to scrape
it off - but wherever he sat he would have been among this ash-like
dust. Moreover, Exodus records the other plagues as being brought
about by Moses stretching forth his rod or his hand: uniquely he
scatters ashes to produce the plague of boils. If Moses had witnessed
Job's plight and recognised a fall of toxic dust as the cause, then by
hocus-pocus with ashes he would reinforce his magical prestige with
the Egyptians, and his status as Yahweh's chosen servant with the
Israelites. Thus the coincidences of ashes and boils in both the Job
and Exodus records are doubly remarkable.
Chapter 37, the last of Elihu's monologues, touches on lightning and
thunder, snow, whirlwinds from the south and cold winds from the
north, and 'the bright light which is in the clouds': all these,
except possibly the last, are easily understood as extreme, but
natural phenomena. However, in the Yahweh speeches (chapters 38-41),
Moses moves the debate to a higher plane. It has been noted that
Mazzaroth, Ayish, Khima and Khesil are names of cosmic bodies: Job
talks of them in chapter 9 but Yahweh/Moses refers to them in greater
detail in chapter 38 - after a peroration covering and going beyond
the Elihu material. The next chapter returns to larger fauna - wild
goats and asses, peacocks and ostriches, the horse, and also an
unknown animal (v. 9) translated as unicorn in the AV. Chapter 40 then
introduces behemoth - 'the chief of the ways of God', which 'eats
grass as an ox', 'moveth his tail like a cedar', 'can draw up Jordan
into his mouth', and whose 'nose pierceth through snares'.
Whether elephant, woolly mammoth, or some other creature, there is no
question that behemoth is an animal: it is equally certain that
leviathan of chapter 41 is not. 'Out of his mouth go burning lamps,
and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out
of a seething pot or cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame
goeth out of his mouth' [Job 19-21]. 'He spreadeth sharp pointed
things upon the mire. He maketh the deep to boil as a pot: he maketh
the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him;
one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his
like, ...' [Job 30-33]. Thus while behemoth is 'chief of the ways of
God' (in the animal kingdom), leviathan is unlike anything on Earth:
he is a 'creature' of the heavens, the cosmic dragon who features in
the mythologies of races all round the world. It is when Yahweh
introduces leviathan that Job ceases to demand an explanation for his
misfortunes, and instead acknowledges: 'I have heard of thee by the
hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee' [Job 42:5].
In verse 42:5, Moses has Job identifying the spectacle of leviathan
with God. In the leviathan image Moses recognised the return of a
'God' which had been described in his Egyptian education, realised
that a second visitation could be predicted, and re-named the 'God'
Yahweh. Whether Job himself identified leviathan and God cannot be
known but that Moses made this equation, and on it was to build the
Exodus enterprise, seems almost certain: for the Prologue to the Book
of Job provides an astonishing degree of confirmation.
Verses 1:6-7 read:
"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the
Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the
Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth...."
Velikovsky found that Seth and Lucifer were names equivalent to Satan
and associated with the beautiful Morning Star [68]. Regardless of
which particular entity it was to which the ancients applied their
phrase 'Morning Star', it was unquestionably cosmic. Thus,
Satan/Lucifer was a cosmic spectacle; and vv.6-7 describe an 'event'
in the cosmos following something which affected the Earth. Then
vv.1-2 of chapter 2 recount exactly the same sequence:
"Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to
present himself unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Satan, From
whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord and said, From
going to and fro in the earth ...."
Dhorme called this phraseology 'stereotyped' - and hence
post-Zechariah. But it reads more like a laconic account of a
short-period comet passing close to Earth before or after becoming a
brilliant spectacle in the heavens, and then repeating the cycle a
second time. The writing style is not unlike that used in Joshua 10:11
for a meteorite fall, (which further supports an early rather than a
late date of composition). It is surely beyond belief that the author
of Job could by chance have adopted the one narrative account that
matches in every respect the concept of two successive near-earth
passes by a cometary body or meteorite swarm required by the
Harbinger/Exodus thesis advanced here. Rather it suggests that the
author witnessed two passages of a cosmic body and up to a point
understood what he had seen, as Moses must have done. His Lord/Satan
usage reflects not only an equation of the cosmic and divine -
inherited from Hebrew learning and Egyptian training - but also his
need to conceal from the Israelites the cosmic dimension of Yahweh,
the new God whose catastrophic attributes had underwritten the Exodus
enterprise.
[*!* Image: Figure 5. Shapes of comets, as depicted in a Chinese
painting on silk recovered from a tomb of the Han Dynasty dated 168
BC.]
The Appearance of Yahweh
What did the new God of Moses look like in his Harbinger and Exodus
manifestations? Comets visible from Earth exhibit an extraordinarily
wide diversity of pattern - see e.g. Figure 5. Whether the cosmic
agent of Moses' time was a meteorite swarm of the type described by
Clube and Napier, a much more massive body with a tail of debris as
Velikovsky hypothesised, or some quite different entity, it would have
undergone even more substantial changes in appearance in passing close
enough to affect the Earth. No one description would then be adequate;
different observers could retain scrupulously accurate but diverse
images of the visiting angel or deity.
However, one image observed in many places during the
Earth-bombardment phase of a cosmic visitation could be specially
relevant. Figure 6 reproduces a painting by P. I. Medvedev depicting
the fall of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite in 1947 [69]. This might seem
to resemble the conventional image (Figure 7) [70] of a comet, but the
similarity is illusory. Cometary images form in space whereas, though
the Sikhote-Alin event originated in space, the phase depicted in the
painting is endo-atmospheric. In reproduction as Figure 6 much quality
has been lost, but it appears that the meteorite produced in the
atmosphere an image with rotational turbulence, strongly resembling
that of a tornado.
Meaden has theorised [71] that early religion in Britain may have been
based on the impression that in a tornado the male god of the sky was
impregnating the female earth goddess. One illustration in his book
[72], reproduced as Figure 8, displays a marked similarity to
Medvedev's painting: in both depictions the phallic appearance is
evident. Tornadoes are more common than is generally realised, though
in any one place they are a rare, unforgettable experience: a man
might possibly witness one such event in his lifetime, hear the
typical bull-like roar, and after the storm passed examine the
localised but severe destruction it had caused. But the likelihood of
seeing a tornado greatly exceeds that of witnessing at close hand the
fall of a meteorite large enough to cause damage on a similar or
greater scale. In each case it is implicit that the observers should
survive the event.
Thus it is possible that the image of a cosmic God mating
destructively with Earth at infrequent intervals might have been
sustained and reinforced by more frequent tornado visitations in the
interim. This possibility is not further explored here. It is raised
only because the Book of Job describes Yahweh as answering Job 'out of
the whirlwind' [73], which could suggest that behind Yahweh lay the
tornado, a meteorological and not a cosmic phenomenon. However, the
whirlwind from which Yahweh answers is introduced by Elihu (vv.
37:21-22):
"now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the
wind passeth and cleanseth them. Fair weather cometh out of the
north: with God is terrible majesty."
Others developed this theme: 'a fire shall devour before (our God),
and it shall be very tempestuous round about him' [74]; 'behold, a
whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding
itself' [73]. These conjunctions of wind and fire, found also in the
first two chapters of Job and commented on earlier, prove that the
whirlwind of Yahweh had cosmic dimensions during at least some of its
visitations - and perhaps all of them.
[*!* Image: Figure 6. Fall of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite on 12th
February 1947.
D. Salkeld, after the painting by P. I. Medvedev in the USSR Academy
of Sciences.]
[*!* Image: Figure 7. The 'classical' comet image; in this case the
Great Comet of 1843, as drawn by Piazzi Smyth in March 1843 at the
Cape of Good Hope (the comet was not visible in Europe).]
[*!* Image: Figure 8. The phallus of the storm god.
A tornado funnel cloud over Hayling Island on 27th October 1984. D.
Salkeld, after photo by H. R. Lambie.]
Summary and Conclusions
The accounts in the Old Testament and Josephus relating to the time of
Moses have been examined from a constructive rather than a
deconstructionist standpoint, and a surprising number of inner
consistencies revealed. A corrected interpretation of the number of
Israelites who left Egypt during the Exodus makes it credible that
Moses could have organised and controlled the operation, provided that
he had the requisite military experience to supplement his princely
education in Egypt. Standard objections to the reported desert
campaign led by Moses are found to be groundless, and Josephus's
account to be probably true in essence. Thus, there are good grounds
to think that Moses had the attributes essential to command of the
enterprise, and hence that aside from its miraculous aspects the
Exodus could well have been an historical event.
Velikovsky offered a 'natural' explanation for many apparently
'supernatural' elements of the Exodus story. Part 1 of this paper
shows that an exiled Moses would have had to establish his credentials
with the Israelites, and how he achieved this by transliterating their
tribal records into contemporary Hebrew and compiling them to form the
Book of Genesis. It explains why Moses had to foresee the
circumstances that would allow an escape from Egypt, to predict far in
advance approximately when such conditions would obtain, and to find a
way to assume uncontestable command of the Exodus. On a basis of
Velikovsky's theory that the Exodus coincided with natural disasters
caused by the close flyby of a cometary body, it conjectures that
Moses observed the previous passage, identified the body as a 'God'
from his Egyptian lore, estimated its return date, and represented
himself as the prophet of Israel's traditional God under a new name -
Yahweh. However, it recognises too that any overt account of the
Harbinger would have been lethal for Moses, and suggests the type of
code he would most likely have used if recording the event.
It must be emphasised that if one gives credence to the Exodus as a
historical event, then Part 1 indicates that an explanation of the
plagues of Egypt based on the fortuitous conjunction of suitable
environmental conditions (e.g. high flood levels, silting, and
pollution of the Nile; a consequential explosion of frog, insect, and
locust populations; gales, and intense electrical storms; an opaque
sandstorm; and a severe earthquake) becomes highly improbable. Such a
conjunction could not be forecast, and so would certainly not allow
the years of essential logistic preparation. Thus, if the event was
historical it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it must be
associated with some type of occurrence which could be predicted with
fair certainty many years ahead. The only candidate so far identified
is the passage of a short-period comet, as proposed by Velikovsky and,
in different guise, by Clube and Napier.
Part 2 then indicates that the Book of Job is a work of great
antiquity, very different from all other books in the sacred canon and
of form akin to a coded record. It reveals Elihu in the book as its
likely author and from numerous parallels confirms Elihu as a nom de
plume for Moses writing as a young man soon after the Harbinger event
- thus explaining why this apparently foreign book was welcomed into
the Jewish canon. It suggests that Moses recorded the discourses
between Job and three friends before he had recognised the cause of
Job's misfortune; that with recognition were born both the Exodus and
Yahweh concepts; and that he added the Elihu monologues, Yahweh's
speeches, and the prose narrative, at a later (possibly post-Exodus)
date.
The paper demonstrates how effects of the harbinger foreshadowed those
of the Exodus event. It shows that the Book of Job records a
catastrophe caused by a cosmic body that orbited twice within the
lifetime of Moses and that as an agent of disaster this body was
Satan/Leviathan, yet as an agent of deliverance it was also a
manifestation of Moses' new God, Yahweh. Finally, it speculates on the
role that whirlwinds, similar in some ways to falling meteorites,
might have played during long intervals between close visits by this
cosmic god.
The arguments of Part 1 stand on their own merits: whereas the case
presented in Part 2 derives from - and rests partially on - that of
Part 1. If, however, the Book of Job is not history but fiction, many
remarkable coincidences have to be explained. As the book's unknown
author could not have read Worlds in Collision, how did he choose a
setting in which Satan's visitations match so closely those of a
periodic comet? Why, when Egypt's plague of boils was said to have
been triggered by ashes, does he sit his fictional Job afflicted with
boils in the ashes - a different but redolent association? What are
the odds against his choice of name and lineage for Elihu (another
fictional character) all fitting the historical character of Moses as
deduced here? Above all, how did this fictional work, none of whose
major characteristics is in any obvious way Jewish, and whose theology
verges on the heretical, win an unquestioned place in the canon of
Jewish sacred literature? These are only some of the problems which
attend a 'fictional Job' stance. If, however, the Book of Job is
historical and was written by Elihu/Moses, then these problems are
resolved.
This paper does not establish any date or period for the Exodus
(though the military situation when Moses led an Egyptian
expeditionary force into Nubia seems best to fit a late Middle Kingdom
setting). Nor does it identify the short-period comet which forms an
essential ingredient of its thesis. It does however powerfully support
the case for the Exodus as an historical event, vindicating
Velikovsky's premise that the Israelites left Egypt in the wake of a
cometary-type catastrophe. It argues too that the Book of Job is not
just a well-written if somewhat tedious type of Wisdom literature, but
an ancient history of an unusual and illuminating kind. And last but
by no means least, its controversial explanation for the origins of
Yahweh worship may help to trigger fresh debate on a relatively
unexplored aspect of catastrophism.
Did Job see Moses recording his words on a wax tablet or papyrus and
recall that this young man had come from a land where royal statements
were carved in granite? If so, there is added richness to his lament
(vv.19:23-4):
"Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a
book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock
for ever!"
In Moses's Harbinger record, Job's words have already lasted for three
and a half millennia. Perhaps this 'greatest of all the men of the
east' is resting contented at last.
Notes and References
1. I. Velikovsky: Oedipus and Akhnaton (London, 1960).
2. I. Wolfe: 'Velikovsky and Catastrophism: A Hidden Agenda', C & C
Review XIV (1992), pp. 27-34.
3. I. Velikovsky: Preface to Worlds in Collision (New York & London,
1950).
4. See e.g. S. J. Olshansky et al.: 'The Aging of the Human Species',
Scientific American April 1993, figure on p. 22.
5. W. W. Hallo: 'Essay on the Book of Numbers' in the Plaut Commentary
on the Torah, (Union of American Hebrew Congregations). I am indebted
to David Roth for this reference.
6. L. Ginzberg: The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1913).
7. Flavius Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews (trans. William Whiston,
Edinburgh & New York, 1861), Book II, chaps. IX-XVI.
8. Encyclopaedia Biblica: article on 'Moses'.
9. A. Gardiner: Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford, 1961), pp. 335-340.
10. Ibid.: pp. 349-350.
11. Josephus: op. cit., Preface.
12. W. B. Emery: Egypt in Nubia (London, 1965), pp. 141-167.
13. Josephus: op. cit. chapter 10, section 2, lines 6-7.
14. Ibid.: chapter 10, section 2, lines 74-75.
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. 18, p. 172.
16. Genesis 47:18-23. See also J. J. Bimson: 'A Chronology for the
Middle Kingdom and Israel's Egyptian Bondage', SIS Review III:3, p.
66, 'The Land Reform'.
17. The urbanisation of the Children of Israel in Egypt is indicated
by Exodus 1:11 '... they built for Pharaoh treasure cities': and by
accounts of the craftsmanship skills of e.g. Bezaleel and Aholiab
(Exodus 31:2-6).
18. I. Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision, p. 51.
19. Ibid., p. 54
20. See e.g. H. Wiencke-Lotz: 'On the Length of Reigns of the Sumerian
Kings', C & C Review XIV (1992), pp. 20-26; also D. Slade: 'Darkness
over Sinai', C & C Workshop 1992:2, pp. 18-19.
21. Damien F. Mackey, F. Calneggia, & P. Money: 'A Critical
Re-Appraisal of the Book of Genesis', C & C Workshop 1987:1 and
1987:2.
22. Genesis 12:10-20 tells of Abraham going down to Egypt because of a
famine in Canaan, and Pharaoh being plagued with great plagues while
Abraham was there. It reads like an echo of Jacob's journey to Egypt
and plagues preceding the Exodus.
23. The promise is repeated to Abraham five times (Genesis 12:1-2,
13:14-17, 15:18, 17:8, and 22:15-18), and by him to his servant
(Genesis 24:7). The Lord gives Isaac the same promise (Genesis 24:2-4)
and reiterates it (v.24). Jacob receives the promise twice (Genesis
28:13; 35:12) and repeats it to Joseph (Genesis 48:3-4). This 10- or
11-fold repetition of the theme would have powerfully impressed a
Hebrew audience.
24. D. Cardona: 'Jupiter - God of Abraham', Kronos VII:1, p. 72.
25. Genesis 15: 12-18. The imagery of v.12, and especially of v.17, is
strongly cosmological.
26. B. Newgrosh: 'Venus Before Exodus', C & C Workshop 1987:2, pp.
36-44.
27. See for instance D. Talbott: 'Reconstructing the Saturn Myth', The
Cataclysm 1:1 Jan. 1988 (thereafter re-named Aeon).
28. Exodus 3:6, repeated in v.15, and again in v.16. This triple usage
may indicate that Moses's hearers did not easily digest his message.
29. Ginzberg: op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 169, note 2 (and see also note 526
on p. 95).
30. E. Dhorme: A Commentary on the Book of Job (translated from the
French by Harold Knight, 1984). The 2 paragraphs in the text précis
Dhorme's chapter 2: 'Analysis of the Book of Job'.
31. e.g. 'Magnificent and sublime, as no other book of Scripture'
(Martin Luther); 'The greatest poem of ancient or modern times'
(Alfred Lord Tennyson); 'The Book of Job is not only the finest
exposition of the Hebrew poetic genius; it must also be accorded a
place among the greatest masterpieces of world literature'
(Encyclopaedia Britannica).
32. e.g. see D. Cardona: 'The Mystery of the Pleiades', Kronos III:4,
p.37. Cardona thinks Job shows 'indications of literary dependence' on
the Books of Psalms and Jeremiah, but these books may equally well be
quoting from Job, or all could be drawing from a common tradition, so
this - Cardona's strongest argument - is wholly inconclusive.
33. I. Wolfe: 'Velikovsky and Catastrophism: A Hidden Agenda', C & C
Review XIV (1992), pp. 27-34.
34. Dhorme: op. cit. The French original, Le Livre de Job, published
in 1926, was translated into English in 1967. The 1984 edition
includes an important Preface by Francis I. Andersen, and a
Prefaratory Note by H. H. Rowley who modernised and harmonised
Knight's translation.
35. Ibid.: p. clxix.
36. Ibid. Preface by Andersen, p. I.
37. F. I. Andersen: Job - An Introduction and Commentary (1976).
38. Ibid.: p. 62. See also p. 57, including footnote 3.
39. Ibid.: p. 62.
40. Ibid.: p. 63.
41. Ibid.: pp. 42-52. See also Dhorme: op. cit., pp. lxxii-cxi.
42. Baba Bathra, 14b.
43. Dhorme: op. cit., p. 3 - footnote to v.1:3.
44. Andersen: op. cit., p. 59.
45. Dhorme: op. cit., p. xxiii.
46. Dhorme: op. cit., pp. clxxi/clxxii.
47. Exodus 2:18-21
48. Numbers 10:29
49. Genesis. 22:21.
50. Exodus 6:20.
51. M. J. Sieff: 'The Cosmology of Job', SIS Review 1:4, pp. 17-21.
52. Ibid.: section titled: 'The Historical Context'
53. Editor's note at top of p. 70 in SIS Review III:4.
54. Cardona: op. cit. [32], pp. 28-37.
55. Andersen: op. cit. In a footnote to p. 50, Andersen says S. B.
Freehof: 'compares Elihu with a stage-struck young man who comes into
an empty theatre and pretends to take part in the drama after all the
actors have gone.' This is not altogether unlike my own
interpretation.
56. Dhorme: op. cit., pp. cxcii-cxcvi, giving numerous examples of
these 'corruptions' from the Massoretic text. Subsequent pages give
still more examples from the Septuagint and other texts.
57. I. Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision, p. 199.
58. Genesis 36:33, repeated in 1 Chronicles 1:44.
59. Numbers 10:29-32.
60. Ibid.: p. 249.
61. I. Velikovsky: 'Khima and Kesil', SIS Review III:3, pp. 69-70;
reprinted from Kronos III:4, pp. 19-23.
62. Sieff: op. cit., p. 21 - Conclusions
63. Exodus 9:23-24.
64. Exodus 12:29-30; and see also Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision,
pp. 73-76.
65. Exodus 17:8-13.
66. Dhorme: op. cit., p. 18; footnote to v.2:8.
67. I. Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision, p. 200.
68. The painting is reproduced as Figure 3:4 in Bailey, Clube &
Napier: The Origin of Comets, from which the figure in this paper is
copied - and acknowledged with gratitude.
69. See e.g. Plate 14 in Clube & Napier: The Cosmic Winter.
70. G. T. Meaden: The Stonehenge Solution (London, 1992), chapter 5.
71. Ibid.: Plate 7, facing p. 96.
72. Job 38:1 and 40:6.
73. Asaph in Psalm 50:3.
74. Ezekiel 1:4.
_________________
Appendix - Herodotus and Meroe
In The Histories (translated by David Green, the University of Chicago
Press, Chicago & London, 1988, pp. 142-3), Herodotus reported that
four days' journey beyond Elephantine the river Nile ceased to be
navigable:
"You will then disembark and travel along the bank for forty days,
for there are sharp rocks in the Nile and many reefs through which
you will be unable to sail. Having marched through this country in
forty days, you will embark again in another boat and sail for
twelve days, and then you will come to a great city, the name of
which is Meroe. This city is said to be the mother of all Ethiopia.
From this city, making a voyage of the same length of sailing as
you did from Elephantine, you will come to the Land of the
Deserters .... There were two hundred and forty thousand Egyptians,
fighter Egyptians, who revolted from the Egyptians and joined the
Ethiopians ... in the time of King Psammetichus. When these people
had settled among the Ethiopians, the Ethiopians became more
civilised, through learning the manner of the Egyptians. For four
months of travel space then, sailing and road, beyond its course in
Egypt, the Nile is a known country. If you add all together, you
will find that it takes four months of journeying from Elephantine
to these Deserters of whom I spoke."
This talks of making a voyage of the same length of sailing from Meroe
to the Land of the Deserters. In The Sign and the Seal (Heinemann,
London, 1992), Graham Hancock located this Land of the Deserters as
the Axum region of Ethiopia, reached from Meroe via the Atbara and
Takazze rivers. Seemingly, it took 12 days to sail from where the Nile
became navigable beyond the sharp rocks to Meroe; and 56 days to sail
from Meroe to Axum. Taking the 'sharp rocks' as the 1st Cataract, the
distance from its southern end to Meroe is three-quarters as far as
from Meroe to Axum. Why did it take 4-5 times as long to sail 30%
further? En route to Meroe one had to pass the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th
Cataracts and traverse the 150 mile Old Dongola to Abu Hammad stretch
involving sailing ENE against the prevailing north wind, hence surely
the slowest sailing.
Possibly the sharp rocks included the 1st and 2nd Cataracts; but if
so, as the Nile was navigable for 200 miles between the two Cataracts,
why does Herodotus not note that 35 of the 40 days 'travel along the
bank' could be covered under sail in 5 days and the comfort of a boat?
Possibly he did not make the journey nor examine the ground, and his
report is second or third hand - but that seems evasive. An
alternative solution is that Meroe meant the old capital (Napata) just
downstream of the 4th Cataract. From Napata to Axum is over twice as
far as from south of the 1st Cataract to Napata; each involves passing
two Cataracts; and most of the ENE sailing comes in the Napata to Axum
leg. Herodotus's times are then plausible. Josephus may have drawn his
geographical details of Meroe from Herodotus, explaining their common
confusion over the city's original whereabouts.
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