Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (19 page)

However, there is compelling evidence to link the two faiths which does suggest that some Atenists later merged with the Hebrews and contaminated their religious practices. There is one pagan practice that both religions seem to have retained. We have seen in Chapter Four how the sole concession Akhenaten seems to have made to the old ways was the continued veneration of the bull. Just such an animal seems to have been revered by the early Hebrews.

A sacred bull is echoed in the biblical story of the golden calf. According to Chapter 32 of Exodus, when Moses is absent communing with God on Mount Sinai, his people, fearing some ill has befallen him, ask his deputy Aaron to make images of the gods to protect them. Agreeing, Aaron collects golden jewellery from the people and makes a 'molten calf. In fact, contrary to the popular Hollywood image, it is not one calf they make but many, as the others are said to follow Aaron's lead (Verses 31 and 35). Aaron declares that these calves are, 'thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt' (Verse 4). Furthermore, they do not seem to be life-size representations either. We are not told how big they are, but Verse 4 seems to suggest that they are small enough to be held in the hands. When the people gave Aaron their golden earrings to make the idol, 'he received them at their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool'.

That the early Israelites historically did venerate such idols is supported by archaeological evidence. A number of hand-size
carved bulls have been found at early sites throughout Palestine. Perhaps the most interesting was a bronze bull, some 200 centimetres (8 inches) long, found at a site excavated by Israeli archaeologist Dr Amihay Mazor (of Hebrew University, Jerusalem) in the Samarian Mountains just to the north of Nablus. This was the biblical Shechem, one of the holiest sites in ancient Israel where Abraham and Joshua both raised altars to God. The artefact dates from the twelfth century
BC
, a time after the period that Moses apparently lived, and consequently a time when the Hebrew faith was said to have been fully established. This can be gathered from an inscription on a large granite stela found by Flinders Petrie in 1896. It came from the funerary temple of the nineteenth-dynasty pharaoh Merenptah near Thebes and is dated as the fifth year of his reign. Now in the Cairo Museum, it has become known as the Israel Stela because it includes the first and only known mention of Israel in an Egyptian text. (See Chapter Eight.) Its unique importance is that it shows that Israel already existed during Merenptah's reign in the late thirteenth century
BC
(
circa
1212 to 1202
BC
) – a time before the date of the bronze bull (the 1100s
BC
).

If the Old Testament story of the Israelite conquest of Canaan is remotely true, then the site of Shechem was the
most
sacred Hebrew site of the period. According to the Book of Joshua, after Canaan is conquered by Joshua he erects an altar to give thanks to God:

So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by the sanctuary of the Lord. And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold this stone shall be a witness
unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the Lord which he spake unto us: it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest you deny your God. (Joshua: 24. 25–27.)

If the Bible is right then Shechem is the religious heartland of the Israelites in their earliest days in Canaan. The bronze bull – coming from a contemporary site in this very area – is clear evidence of the continued veneration of the pagan bull, certainly by some Hebrews, well after they had apparently settled in the 'Promised Land'.

Of all the hundreds of pagan religious practices that there were in the world, that both the Atenist and Hebrew religions should seemingly be tainted by one that is exactly the same, is surely more than coincidence.

Standing alone, the story of the golden calf is a mystery: why should a people, who had recently witnessed the awesome power of their God free them from captivity in Egypt, lose faith so easily and revert to idolatry? More importantly, why should they have chosen a calf to venerate? If there is any historicity reflected in the story – and the archaeological evidence suggests that there is – then the answer to both questions must be that they had only recently abandoned the calf as an object of veneration. As the biblical narrative provides no prior evidence of such a practice among the Hebrews, we can only construe that it was an external influence, and judging by the reference in Exodus 32:28, which tells us that the idolaters were only a faction (3000 individuals that the tribe of Levi were ordered to kill), then they also seem to have been a Gentile (non-Hebrew) element among the Israelites. The only Gentiles we know of during this early era who would have had enough in common with a monotheistic religion to embrace the Hebrew God are the Atenists. The very people that also venerated the bull.

Why the Atenists might have been among the Hebrews after their flight from Egypt. we shall return to later. Firstly, we must see if there is any firm historical evidence to place the Hebrews in Egypt during, or just prior to, Akhenaten's time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Children of Israel

In the biblical account, the Israelites spend 430 years in Egypt before the Exodus. They are originally made welcome by a pharaoh during Joseph's time, but later, concerned by their growing numbers, the Egyptians enslave them. Eventually, Moses is called by God to lead them out of Egypt and, after the country is beset by a series of plagues and terrible deaths, the pharaoh begrudgingly lets them leave. Suffering a change of heart, he then pursues the Israelites, who manage to escape when the waters of the Red Sea miraculously part. Finally, after wandering for forty years in the wilderness, they are led by Joshua into the 'Promised Land' of Canaan.

Although the narrative concerns what are purported to be monumental historical events, the Bible gives us no idea when they were supposed to have occurred: it provides no dates and fails to name the pharaohs in question. Despite the mass of contemporary records that survive from ancient Egypt, not one historical reference to the presence of the Israelites in that country has yet been found. Not a word about Joseph, whom the Bible tells us was the pharaoh's 'grand vizier' – his chief minister. Not a single mention of Moses, whom the Bible tells us was raised as an Egyptian prince. Nothing concerning the plagues, which included the day turning to night and the Nile turning to
blood. And nothing regarding the spectacular flight from Egypt by a people which, we are told, number over half a million. In fact, there is no ancient evidence independent of the Bible – from anywhere – which directly corroborates any of these events. From the purely historical perspective, there would seem to be no real evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt at all.

There were certainly a people known as the Israelites who had settled in Canaan – an area which included modern Israel, Palestine and the Lebanon – by around 1200
BC
, as demonstrated by the Israel Stela (see Chapter Seven) and archaeological evidence (see below); and that they were the forefathers of the Jews is not in question. Historians, however, have long debated whether or not the Israelites had really arrived there from Egypt as the Bible relates.

The Bible does not come into any known historical context until around 1000
BC
, before which time the Israelites seem to have existed as separate tribes ruled by a series of chieftains called Judges. According to the First Book of Samuel, the prophet Samuel is instructed to unite the tribes of Israel under one king. He first chooses Saul, who ultimately fails to keep the country together. Saul's son-in-law David is then proclaimed king by Samuel and he succeeds were Saul has failed. He establishes the united kingdom of Israel, and captures the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites and makes it his capital. David is succeeded by his son Solomon who builds the first temple in the holy city. After Solomon's death the southern part of the country, around Jerusalem, breaks away from the rest of Israel to form the kingdom of Judah (which the Romans later called Judea), named after one of the Hebrew tribes. It is with the kingdom of Judah that the Judaic tradition thereafter focuses, the name Jew actually coming from the Hebrew word
Yehudi
– meaning a member of the tribe of Judah.

Most modern historians accept that these particular events did occur during the tenth century
BC
, although there is much disagreement regarding the finer details. After this time, however, the Old Testament account becomes increasingly verifiable from external sources. Jerusalem was sacked and the temple destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586
BC
, after Judah was invaded by the Babylonians and thousands of the Jews were carted off to exile in Babylon. They were eventually resettled by the Persians who conquered the failing Babylonian empire in 538
BC
, although thereafter they were subjected in turn to rule by the Persians, the Greeks and ultimately the Romans. Under the Romans, Judah enjoyed enough independence for its king, Herod the Great, to rebuild the temple completely, but after the Jews later revolted it too was razed to the ground in
AD
70. This effectively spelt the end of Judah, as many of its citizens were reduced to slavery and deported.

Historically, it was sometime between the building of the first temple and the exile in Babylon that Judaism as we now know it emerged. It was also during this time that most scholars believe that the account of the Israelite period in Egypt was actually written.

The first five books of the Bible, which cover the period from the Creation to the arrival of the Israelites at the Promised Land, were traditionally believed to have been written by Moses himself. Collectively called the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), they are now thought by biblical scholars to have been derived from various sources, as different elements in the narrative do not share the same literary character. For example, the accounts of Joseph or Joshua do not belong to the same literary class as the stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark. The authors fail to identify themselves, but whoever they were it seems unlikely that they were eyewitnesses
to the events they are describing. Indeed, they may not even have been remote contemporaries, as the Pentateuch contain a great many anachronisms.

According to Genesis 37:25, Joseph and his brothers encounter a company of Ishmaelite traders, 'who came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt'. The Egyptians depicted every type of animal in their art, but never once show camels as a means of transport until the seventh century
BC
. Like the other contemporary works from the Asiatic, they show asses being used to carry goods. The oldest literary reference to domesticated camels is by the people of the Arabian Gulf around 850
BC
, and not from Egypt for another two centuries. This was long after David's time, yet the Bible itself tells us that Joseph had lived hundreds of years
before
David.

Another example is early references to the Israelite enemies the Philistines. Genesis describes Joseph's great-grandfather, Abraham, living in the Land of the Philistines at Beersheba, in southern Canaan. According to Genesis 21:32–34, Abraham makes a treaty with the Philistine king Abimelech. The name Philistine comes from
Peleset,
an Egyptian word meaning 'Sea Peoples', and they are first recorded arriving in the Eastern Mediterranean in the reign of Ramesses III around 1180
BC
. Archaeology, which has shown them to have been of Aegean origin, has produced no evidence of Philistine migration into Canaan much before the twelfth century
BC
. Although this is around 150 years before David's time, the Bible tells us that Abraham had lived well over 500 years before the Israelites even left Egypt.

In the 1970s Professor Donald Redford, in his
A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph,
argued that the Egyptian elements in the story reflect the seventh century
BC
at the earliest. For instance,
in Genesis 42:16, Joseph uses the oath, 'by the life of the pharaoh', which would not have existed in that form until the seventh century
BC
; and an Egyptian who appears in the Joseph story is an officer called Potiphar, a mime which only occurs as an Egyptian name at the same late date. Other scholars consider that the entire Pentateuch was written as late as the seventh century
BC
, due to a number of tell-tale clues. For instance, money, in the form of coins, is referenced repeatedly, although the oldest known form of coinage was that used by the Lydians around 650
BC
. This does not mean to say that the events were invented in the seventh century
BC
, only that they were committed to writing in their present form at that time.

Many biblical authorities consider that the stories were handed down verbally for generations and, like many oral accounts, were embellished or reinterpreted. Fundamentalists would disagree, of course, believing that every single word in the Bible is absolutely true. Regardless of whether or not the events were originally the result of divine intervention, the Old Testament, as it appears in the most popular English edition, is the product of a series of translations from one language to another – and even these individual languages changed over time. That certain elements in the narrative would also undergo change is almost inevitable.

These are minor problems, however, compared to actually translating a completely foreign tongue. A perfect example of a totally misleading mistranslation occurred in the Exodus account concerning the place were the sea parted to allow the Israelites to escape Egypt. In the original Hebrew it was written
Yam Suph,
which was mistranslated as 'Red Sea'. It actually means 'Sea of Reeds' and appears to have been a location in the Nile Delta (see Chapter Ten).

Then there are examples of scribal errors that have been
copied and recopied. A good example concerns Abraham's father, Terah, in Genesis. According to Genesis 11:26, he was 70 years old by the time Abraham was born and, according to Genesis 11:32, he lived to the age of 205. However, in Genesis 12:4 – after we are told Terah has died – Abraham leaves home, aged 75. This means that Terah could have been no older than 145 when he died. Even if we attribute such an incredible age to divine intervention, we cannot accept both accounts. At some point, it seems, someone must have mistranslated what the original author had said.

The entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb shortly after it was discovered in 1922. It lay only thirteen meters across the valley floor from the mysterious Tomb 55. (
Griffith Institute.
)

Lord Carnarvon (left) and Howard Carter (right) dismantling the entrance to Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. Within a few weeks Carnarvon would be dead, some believe the victim of an ancient curse. (
Griffith Institute.
)

‘Wonderful things!’ The southern end of the Antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb. This was the first glimpse of Tutankhamun’s treasures seen by an ecstatic Howard Carter on the evening of 28 November 1922. (
Griffith Institute.
)