Offline Illumination

Moses, Theft from Egypt

by Acharya S

Argh. Here we go again, as millions of children worldwide are programmed with a bunch of hooey, although Dreamwork's "Prince of Egypt" is being presented as an adult cartoon. No matter, as both children and adults will be brainwashed into believing that, unlike the "Lion King," the "Little Mermaid" and other Disney fare, "Prince of Egypt" is a true story about God's "chosen people" and their escape under the marvelous Moses from those evil, nasty Egyptians! Obviously, this is yet more mindless propaganda designed to empower a certain group of people. Yet, the brainwashing is profound, as interviewers breathlessly question producers about how they felt in creating such an epic, which many might consider to border on "blasphemy," and the illustrators themselves giddily admit that this cartoon was more difficult than others "because it really happened."

Horseshit. The Moses story did not "really happen." Like the vast majority of biblical tales, it is a myth based on older tales, changed to revolve around characters of a certain ethnicity or cultural programming, if you will. The Moses tale is, in fact, a plagiarism taken from Egypt and its satellite, Canaan, among others. Moses, then, is not the "Prince of Egypt" but a "Theft from Egypt." Since the ancient Egyptians obviously cannot address this calumny against them for millennia, I will do it for them. The following is an excerpt from my book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

Moses, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments

The legend of Moses, rather than being that of a historical Hebrew character, is found from the Mediterranean to India, with the character having different names and races, depending on the locale: "Manou" is the Indian legislator. "Nemo the lawgiver," who brought down the tablets from the Mountain of God, hails from Babylon. "Mises" is found in Syria, where he was pulled out of a basket floating in a river. Mises also had tablets of stone upon which laws were written and a rod with which he did miracles, including parting waters and leading his army across the sea. In addition, "Manes the lawgiver" took the stage in Egypt, and "Minos" was the Cretan reformer.

Jacolliot traces the original Moses to the Indian Manou: "This name of Manou, or Manes . . . is not a substantive, applying to an individual man; its Sanscrit signification is the man, par excellence, the legislator. It is a title aspired to by all the leaders of men in antiquity."

Like Moses, Krishna was placed by his mother in a reed boat and set adrift in a river to be discovered by another woman. The Akkadian Sargon also was placed in a reed basket and set adrift to save his life. In fact, "The name Moses is Egyptian and comes from mo, the Egyptian word for water, and uses, meaning saved from water, in this case, primordial." Thus, this title Moses could be applied to any of these various heroes saved from the water.

Walker elaborates on the Moses myth:

"The Moses tale was originally that of an Egyptian hero, Ra-Harakhti, the reborn sun god of Canopus, whose life story was copied by biblical scholars. The same story was told of the sun hero fathered by Apollo on the virgin Creusa; of Sargon, king of Akkad in 2242 B.C.; and of the mythological twin founders of Rome, among many other baby heroes set adrift in rush baskets. It was a common theme."

Furthermore, Moses's rod is a magical, astrology stick used by a number of other mythical characters. Of Moses's miraculous exploits, Walker also relates:

"Moses's flowering rod, river of blood, and tablets of the law were all symbols of the ancient Goddess. His miracle of drawing water from a rock was first performed by Mother Rhea after she gave birth to Zeus, and by Atalanta with the help of Artemis. His miracle of drying up the waters to travel dry-shod was earlier performed by Isis, or Hathor, on her way to Byblos."

And Higgins states:

"In Bacchus we evidently have Moses. Herodotus says [Bacchus] was an Egyptian . . . The Orphic verses relate that he was preserved from the waters, in a little box or chest, that he was called Misem in commemoration of the event; that he was instructed in all the secrets of the Gods; and that he had a rod, which he changed into a serpent at his pleasure; that he passed through the Red Sea dry-shod, as Hercules subsequently did . . . and that when he went to India, he and his army enjoyed the light of the Sun during the night: moreover, it is said, that he touched with his magic rod the waters of the great rivers Orontes and Hydaspes; upon which those waters flowed back and left him a free passage. It is even said that he arrested the course of the sun and moon. He wrote his laws on two tablets of stone. He was anciently represented with horns or rays on his head."

It has also been demonstrated that the biblical account of the Exodus could not have happened in history. Of this implausible story, Mead says:

". . . Bishop Colenso's . . . mathematical arguments that an army of 600,000 men could not very well have been mobilized in a single night, that three millions of people with their flocks and herds could not very well have drawn water from a single well, and hundreds of other equally ludicrous inaccuracies of a similar nature, were popular points which even the most unlearned could appreciate, and therefore especially roused the ire of apologists and conservatives."

The apologists and conservatives, however, have little choice in the matter, as there is no evidence of the Exodus and wandering in the desert being historical:

"But even scholars who believe they really happened admit that there's no proof whatsoever that the Exodus took place. No record of this monumental event appears in Egyptian chronicles of the time, and Israeli archaeologists combing the Sinai during intense searches from 1967 to 1982 - years when Israel occupied the peninsula - didn't find a single piece of evidence backing the Israelites' supposed 40-year sojourn in the desert.

"The story involves so many miracles - plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, manna from heaven, the giving of the Ten Commandments - that some critics feel the whole story has the flavor of pure myth. A massive exodus that led to the drowning of Pharaoh's army, says Father Anthony Axe, Bible lecturer at Jerusalem's Ecole Biblique, would have reverberated politically and economically through the entire region. And considering that artifacts from as far back as the late Stone Age have turned up in the Sinai, it is perplexing that no evidence of the Israelites' passage has been found. William Dever, a University of Arizona archaeologist, flatly calls Moses a mythical figure. Some scholars even insist the story was a political fabrication, invented to unite the disparate tribes living in Canaan through a falsified heroic past." (Time)

Potter sums up the mythicist argument regarding Moses:

"The reasons for doubting his existence include, among others, (1) the parallels between the Moses stories and older ones like that of Sargon, (2) the absence of any Egyptian account of such a great event as the Pentateuch asserts the Exodus to have been, (3) the attributing to Moses of so many laws that are known to have originated much later, (4) the correlative fact that great codes never suddenly appear full-born but are slowly evolved, (5) the difficulties of fitting the slavery, the Exodus, and the conquest of Canaan into the known chronology of Egypt and Palestine, and (6) the extreme probability that some of the twelve tribes were never in Egypt at all."

The Exodus is indeed not a historical event but constitutes a motif found in other myths. As Pike says, "And when Bacchus and his army had long marched in burning deserts, they were led by a Lamb or Ram into beautiful meadows, and to the Springs that watered the Temple of Jupiter Ammon." And Churchward relates, "Traditions of the Exodus are found in various parts of the world and amongst people of different states of evolution, and these traditions can be explained by the Kamite [Egyptian] rendering only." Indeed, as Massey states, "'Coming out of Egypt' is a Kamite expression for ascending from the lower to the upper heavens."

Churchward further outlines the real meaning of the Exodus:

"The Exodus or 'Coming out of Egypt' first celebrated by the festival of Passover or the transit at the vernal equinox, occurred in the heavens before it was made historical as the migration of the Jews. The 600,000 men who came up out of Egypt as Hebrew warriors in the Book of Exodus are 600,000 inhabitants of Israel in the heavens according to Jewish Kabalah, and the same scenes, events, and personages that appear as mundane in the Pentateuch are celestial in the Book of Enoch." . . .

In addition, the miraculous "parting of the Red Sea" has forever mystified the naive and credulous masses and scholars alike, who have put forth all sorts of tortured speculation to explain it. The parting and destruction of the hosts of Pharaoh at the Red Sea is not recorded by any known historian, which is understandable, since it is, of course, not historical and is found in other cultures, including in Ceylon, out of which the conquering shepherd kings (Pharaohs) were driven across "Adam's Bridge" and drowned. This motif is also found in the Hawaiian and Hottentot versions of the Moses myth, prior to contact with outside cultures. The crossing of the Red Sea is astronomical, expressly stated by Josephus to have occurred at the autumnal equinox, indicating its origin within the mythos.

Moreover, the famed Ten Commandments are simply a repetition of the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and the Hindu Vedas, among others. As Churchward says:

"The 'Law of Moses' were the old Egyptian Laws . . . ; this the stele or 'Code of Hammurabi' conclusively proves. Moses lived 1,000 years after this stone was engraved."

Walker relates that the "stone tablets of law supposedly given to Moses were copied from the Canaanite god Baal-Berith, 'God of the Covenant.' Their Ten Commandments were similar to the commandments of the Buddhist Decalogue. In the ancient world, laws generally came from a deity on a mountaintop. Zoroaster received the tablets of law from Ahura Mazda on a mountaintop."

Doane sums it up when he says, "Almost all the acts of Moses correspond to those of the Sun-gods." However, the Moses story is also reflective of the stellar cult, once again demonstrating the dual natured "twin" Horus-Set myth and the battle for supremacy between the day and night skies, as well as among the solar, stellar and lunar cults. . . . [end excerpt]

As has been demonstrated, the Moses fable is an ancient mythological motif found in numerous cultures. It therefore has nothing to do with any particular ethnic group, and the character Moses is not the founder of the Jewish ideology. Like so many others, this story as presented represents racist rubbish and cultural bigotry.

Furthermore, rabbis and other authorities have known the mythological nature of this and other major biblical tales, yet they say nothing. Indeed, they go along with it, much to their own benefit. Naturally, the person who discovers this ruse and hoax may rightfully become annoyed, to say the least, at the deliberate deception, and ask "What's up with that?"

Acharya S
Archaeologist, Historian, Linguist, Mythologist
Member, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece
Associate Director, Institute for Historical Accuracy

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