The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim (10 page)

(Exodus 1:15-22)

Moses’ mother hid her infant son as long as she could, and when he was 3 months old, in a plot to spare him from the Pharaoh’s decree, she placed him in a pitch-smeared basket woven from papyrus and set him adrift on the Nile River. Although this is not implicit in the text, it can be subjectively surmised that this was no arbitrary act of blind hope on her part. When she released him to the currents of the Nile, she ordered her daughter Miriam, Moses’ older sister, to follow along in the bulrushes along the shoreline to assure that no harm came to the child and that the basket reached the destination she had hoped: the Nile backwater pools of the palace, where the Pharaoh’s household came to bathe.

The idea of a “savior in a basket, floating down the river” was not exclusive to the story of Moses.

In an Akkadian clay cuneiform tablet purporting to be the biography of Sargon the Great of Akkad, around 2400
BCE
, legend states that his mother was a temple priestess. Giving birth to him in secret and setting him in a basket to float, she abandoned him to the Euphrates
river. Akki, a gardener, rescued him from the river and raised him. After working as a gardener for Akki, Sargon rose to the position of cup-bearer to Ur-Zababa, the king of Kish, and from there went on to rise in power, sacking Uruk and establishing himself as the emperor of Sumar in place of Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk.

Osiris, around 2500
BCE
, the sacrificial savior god of Egypt, was murdered, after which his decapitated crowned head was placed in a papyrus basket and floated down the Nile.

Romulus and Remus, according to Plutarch, were twins descended from Prince Aeneas, a fugitive from the legendary city of Troy after its destruction by the Achaeans. Their maternal grandfather was his descendant
Numitor
, who inherited the kingship of Alba Longa. Numitor’s brother
Amulius
inherited its treasury, including the gold brought by Aeneas from Troy. Amulius used his control of the treasury to dethrone Numitor, but feared that Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, would bear children who could overthrow him. In an attempt to solidify his claim to the throne with no other royal candidates rising to challenge him, Amulius forced Rhea Silvia to perpetual virginity as a Vestal priestess. This didn’t end up working, as she bore children anyway. According to the legend, Mars, the god of war, seduced Silvia and impregnated her. In other accounts, it was Hercules or even Amulius himself who impregnated his niece. Under confinement by Amulius, she gives birth to twin boys of remarkable beauty, upon which her uncle ordered all of their deaths. Rhea was buried alive, and Amulius ordered the death of the twins by exposure; both means would avoid his direct blood-guilt.

“She-Wolf Suckles Romulus and Remus.”
Capitoline Wolf,
traditionally believed to be Etruscan, fifth century
BC
, with figures of Romulus and Remus added in the 15th century by Antonio Pollaiuolo
.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:She-wold_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg
).

Amulius charged a servant with the deed of killing the twins, but the servant could not follow through with the act. Instead he placed them in a basket and left it on the banks of the Tiber River, which flooded and carried the twins downstream, unharmed. The river deity Tiberinus made the basket catch in the roots of a fig tree that grew in the Velabrum swamp at the base of the Palatine Hill. The twins were found and suckled by a she-wolf, Lupa, and fed by a woodpecker, Picus. A shepherd named Faustulus discovered the twin boys and took them to his hut, where he and his wife Acca Larentia raised them as their own children. Romulus went on to found the city of Rome.

This remarkable woman was the daughter of Thutmoses I, born in or around 1535
BCE
. She went on to marry her half-brother Thutmoses II, fathered by Thutmoses I and to a “lesser” wife. He was weak and somewhat sickly in his reign, and she loathed the man. When he died, she became co-regent of Egypt with her stepson, Thutmoses III (from, yet again, a lesser wife), and eventually deposed him and took over the monarchy as ruler herself. Thutmoses III learned to hate his stepmother,
and when she died, he had all Hatshepsut’s imagery stricken from every painting, obelisk, and relief, eradicating her from Egyptian history and the afterlife. Thutmoses III went on to bring Egypt’s United Kingdom during the 18th Dynasty to its golden pinnacle.

In 1526, Hatshepsut would have been a mere child of about 7 to 10 years of age. When she found the baby Moses in a basket, floating into her bathing pool off the Nile; she claimed him and named him, but had no way to care for him on her own. It was then that Miriam emerged from the bulrushes and offered to help, taking the child back to his mother to have him cared for until the royal princess was old enough to legitimately adopt him, which she did a few years later.

This remarkable woman, who reigned in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, is most probably the stepmother of the biblical Moses, whom she found floating in the Nile in a basket made of bulrushes
.

Photo courtesy of the author. Copyright 2011.

It can be speculated that a man named Senmut, very close to Hatshepsut and the tutor to her daughter, was none other than Moses himself. Though the evidence is only circumstantial, one must read a bit between the lines and hail to Egyptian mythology to make the connections.

Senmut was very close to Hatshepsut and was her strongest ally, advisor, and friend, a lowly born man who rose to power with Hatshepsut. It is speculated that his lowly birth was as a Hebrew slave, and his close stepson relationship to Hatshepsut was nothing short of the love between mother and son, and the nepotism that came along with it. The name Senmut itself means
“mother’s brother.”

To understand the significance of this mother’s brother title, it is necessary to look, briefly, at Egyptian religion and the Pharaoh: The ancient Egyptians believed that the first king of Egypt was Osiris, married to his sister Isis. Set, the brother of Osiris, murdered him out of jealousy, and claimed the throne. Incorporating a spell of magic, Isis brought Osiris back to life for one night, made love with him, and conceived a child, after which Osiris returned to his death state. The child she bore was Horus, the reincarnation of Osirus, who reclaims his rightful place on throne. The child born to Isis was, all at once, her son, her husband, and her brother. All kings of Egypt were then said to be “Horus,” the reincarnation of Osiris.

And this is the significance of the name given to Moses—
Senmut
. He was being “set up” by his mother, Hatshepsut, in the Egyptian economy to be the future king, the royal heir of his “grandfather-Pharaoh,” Thutmoses I, who had no living royal male heirs. But he had one royal daughter, Hatshepsut. The future king could only inherit the throne through the royal daughter. Hatshepsut convinced her father, the Pharaoh, to make her little adopted boy his future heir. Nefure, as the symbolic Isis, had her little “Osiris/Horus,” who was named Senmut, his “mother’s brother.”

When Senmut/Moses makes the decision to identify himself with his slave people, the Hebrews, he forever cut himself off from the adopted pharohonic line of Hatshepsut.

“By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”

(Hebrews 11:24)

Some of Senmut/Moses’ many titles conferred on him by Hatshepsut were: Overseer of the Works, Overseer of the Fields, Overseer of the Double Gold House, Overseer of the Gardens of Amun, Controller of Works, Overseer of the Administrative Office of the Mansion, Conductor of Festivals, Overseer of the Cattle of Amun, Steward of the King’s Daughter Neferura, Chief of the King, Magnate of the Tens of Upper and Lower Egypt, Chief of the Mansion of the Red Crown, Privy Councillor, Chief Steward of Amun, Overseer of the Double Granary of Amun, Chief Architect, and none other than Hereditary Prince and Count.

“11 One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. 12 Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, ‘Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?’ 14 The man said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Then Moses was afraid and thought, ‘What I did must have become known.’ 15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian….’”

(Exodus 3:11-15)

Shortly before Hatshepsut’s death in 1483
BCE
, Senmut mysteriously and completely disappears from the royal courts of Egypt and the historical records. Having been groomed to be the next Pharaoh, it becomes clear that Senmut/Moses’ adopted half-brother, Thutmoses III, the co-regent with his stepmother Hatshepsut, had every motivation to eliminate Moses after he murdered the Egyptian taskmaster. So Moses—formerly Senmut, Hereditary Prince and Count of Egypt—fled to the wilderness for his life. He would not return to Egypt for 40 years, but when he did, it was with a much different influence on the royal courts of Egypt.

But Moses, at this point in his life, despite “identifying” himself with his Hebrew people, was thoroughly Egyptian, and he carried with him to the land of Midian a wealth of stored Egyptian knowledge that simmered in his head for 40 more years. The king-in-the-making, “mother’s brother” to the Pharaoh Queen, general in the armies of the Pharaoh, with a deep-set ambition to rule, was now married to the a daughter of the high priest of Midian and monarch to herds of sheep and goats in a dusty Arabian back water.

Moses possessed a belief in the gods of Egypt, and this wouldn’t change until his miraculous encounter with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great “I AM,” Yaweh, who, in the form of a burning bush, pressed him into service as the great emancipator of his people of heritage, the Hebrews.

But did Moses see that blazing desert shrubbery as the only God? Was that encounter one of a spiritual nature or one that would come to fit the mold of an extra-terrestrial encounter that challenged all his beliefs in the pantheon of gods with which he was raised and whom he knew so well? The pages of scripture tell us that this calling was of Divine Origin, and that Jehovah God Himself was the power behind the upcoming miraculous events.

The big question, if you step outside the box of faith, is whether or not Moses was encountering the God of the Universe or a being that only fit his perceptions and understanding of that which had been rooted in his mind since his earliest days.

In Thebes, the little town of Medinet Habu has, nestled on its low crest, the ruins of the magnificent 18th Dynasty Mortuary Temple of Rameses III. Medinet Habu, a small village situated a little more than 2 miles to the south of the Ramesseum, was called Djanet by the ancient Egyptians and, according to popular belief, was the place where Amun appeared for the first time. From ancient times, Medinet Habu was the place of worship dedicated to this god, as evidenced by the crumbled ruins of a temple of the 18th Dynasty dedicated to Amun of Djanet, built during the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmoses III, atop the ruins of a still more ancient temple. This was what later induced Rameses III to order the construction there of his own memorial temple.