The Newest Testament: A Secular Bible

By M . B . Goldstein

Dr. M. B. Goldstein was encouraged at a young age to question the beliefs of his people. Free to discover God in his own way, Goldstein passionately searched for God through history, science, and mental and spiritual analysis. Now, in his comprehensive study of the psychological analysis of faith, Goldstein shares insight and knowledge he gained in his unique spiritual journey, seeking to help anyone who wishes to learn more about the history and philosophy of religious belief.

Dr. Goldstein, a retired psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, relies on twenty years of extensive researchincluding the study of more than five hundred of the most important works of religion, history, and philosophyto offer a step-by-step investigation of the important contributions to the major religions and philosophies of belief. As Goldstein traces six thousand years of history through to modern humanity, he highlights the differing views existing among religious and scientific communities regarding the creation of the universe, the human involvement with faith, and the ways God beliefs have evolved over time.

The Newest Testament provides an introspective look at religion and beliefs by exploring and attempting to bridge a divide through understanding, facts, and intelligent faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480801561

M . B . Goldstein

M. B. Goldstein received a bachelor of science degree in pharmacy from Long Island University and a medical degree from The Chicago College of Midwestern University. He spent more than fifty years in the health-care field as a pharmacist, family physician, psychiatrist, and professor of psychiatry. He is also the author of the novel The Judgment of J.D. Now retired, he lives in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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Copyright © 2013 Dr. Martin B. Goldstein Associates

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0155-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0157-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0156-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913766

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/14/2013

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I

HISTORY AND GOD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

PART II

SCIENCE, SYNTHESIS, AND GOD

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

PART III

PSYCHOTHEOLOGY

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

SUMMARY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RELIGIOUS BOOKS

DICTIONARIES

REFERENCES

PERIODICALS

To the father I never really knew, yet to whom I owe everything.

To my mother, who gave me all she had to give.

To my wife, who helped in many ways, and

to Susan, our most precious production.

But especially to my grandchildren, who reading this,

hopefully, will grow wiser.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (11:1)

The further back you can look, the further forward you will be able to see.

Winston Churchill

PREFACE

These words represent the journey of a lifetime. Hopefully they have been kept short enough not to overwhelm, nor to turn aside interest. I am the product of two grandfathers. One a saint, the other a sinner. One, who I knew only through the tales of his daughter, like numerous ancestors was ordained in the laws of his religion, but in the manner of Maimonides refused honor or fortune through Scripture and labored as a grocer. My father’s father was a man of sentences, a journalist and author, who taught me to question the belief of my people. That if I was born in India, I did not have to be a Hindu; in China, neither an Atheist nor a Buddhist; in Japan, not a Shintoist; in Europe, not a Christian; in Israel, not a practitioner of Judaism; in Arabia, not a believer in Islam. In a land of religious freedom I was free to discover God in my own way. I searched for God through history, through science, and, influenced by my chosen profession of psychiatry, through mental and spiritual analysis. A search for God may be called a form of Scripture. How does a person have the audacity to call his writing a form of Scripture? I invoke the authority of the twelfth century Spanish biblical commentator and grammarian Abraham ibn Ezra, the inspiration of Robert Browning’s poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, who interpreted God’s command to Moses to write the first Bible (Deuteronomy 31:19-26) in the plural form (ye, not you), to mean that each man has the obligation to write of his experience of God. Since I bear the Hebrew-Egyptian name of Moses, the law giver, and the English name of the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, as well as three Catholic popes and the saint of Tours - symbolic of charity - and especially that of Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), who dared to call his work the Additional Bible (Mishneh Torah), I have assumed the obligation to update Scripture.

An American precedent was set by Thomas Jefferson in 1804, when he literally shredded the four Gospels of the New Testament of all their supernatural and mystical portions and produced his personal Bible. The third president of the United States, who authored the Declaration of Independence, had among his many varied pursuits an avid interest in religion. Following his readings of the enlightened philosophers, he greatly admired the high morality of Jesus Christ stripped of divinity. The forty-six page Jefferson Bible was entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one year old when the Jefferson Bible was compiled by cutting out the verses dealing with miracles, virginal birth, and resurrection. He became a transcendental poet and an ordained Unitarian minister, who fostered individualistic spiritualism. For almost sixty years Emerson made notes in his Journals, and in his notation of April 8, 1836 he wrote, Make your own Bible. With a professional interest in the psychology of religion, I have responded to that challenge.

PART I

HISTORY AND GOD

INTRODUCTION

Let us experience a quest for God.

The most intriguing thing in the universe is the human imagination, for it can think up gods who can create worlds, and just as easily do away with them.

We need the comfort of family, the prototype of our earliest experiences to explain what our intellect and science have not uncovered. Is anything better than an omnipotent, omniscient parent capable of creation? One who has all the attributes we dream for ourselves: immortality, freedom from disease, immeasurable power and wealth, infinite knowledge and continued serenity.

We have to have God-concepts because we strive to be gods ourselves. This is the meaning of life, the very function of the human experience: to strive toward godliness. While there may be no gods, there definitely is godliness. This is what we really revere. This is what we pray to. This is what we want: to be like the gods of our imagination.

Human beings are social animals. We are gregarious. We are uncomfortable being alone. We search the heavens for signs of others like ourselves because we fear that we earthlings are the only inhabitants of the cosmos. Incapable of merely enjoying our uniqueness among known life forms, we yearn to find older, wiser cultures to have big brothers to guide us.

In our history we have had leaders who openly demanded to be treated as gods: pharaohs, caesars, conquering generals and teachers wanting to be deities. It is a bold human striving to walk in the path of the perceived divinity. Others could always challenge human mortality and expose non-god-like frailties. Still others would gladly create god-like images of those venerated who made no such claim.

Why would people worship other people, living or dead, or want to be worshipped themselves? Because we have the need to be both student and teacher. A parent. An ideal. A universal encyclopedia with all the answers to all the questions. A healer of all wounds. Because we are children who want gifts, and a god is the eternal giver, exalting not only in the receiving but in the ego gratification of giving.

A person not only needs to have a god to beseech for godliness unto humanity, but also has the desire to be a god unto others. We are both parents and children all at once, parenting and being parented in our needs.

And generation after generation we have been taught - and yes even brain-washed - to believe in the Super Power in the sky.

In the history of the dichotomy of human thought, added to the divisions of good versus evil, are the wishes to be both supplicant and supervisor, giving rise to the need to be master and servant at the same time. This is the passive-aggressive nature of the human-God experience: the creation of one God in our image.

By reducing the infinite equations of universal power to a single parental figure, human beings in the infancy of their development sought to communicate with an environment felt to be totally out of their control. God was born to be the mediator toward control: the creator; the destroyer; the savior. And by the single act of replacing the unimaginable with a recognizable symbol of authority, humankind gained a threshold of familiarity with its frightening world and its first step toward godliness.

If the power of the universe was God, humanity’s quest would be to become like God.

Early on, the gods, and even the one God, had the negative qualities of violence and unrest. Only with the demands of the maturation of human society for a higher standard of divinity did the God-concept reach the levels of love and compassion we require of the God of today.

Tiring of war and disease and famine we have rid our God of all the things we hate within ourselves. So now God represents only good. God has been raised to the ideal we aspire to.

But, by limiting God to all that is good in the world, we have also limited his power. We have to attribute the forces for evil elsewhere. Since so much evil continues to exist, along with natural disasters - we are also loath to blame God for - we have greatly diminished God’s power as our own has increased.

We can no longer tolerate the thought of evil emanating from God. The power of the God-concept wanes in influence as we rid from it the ability to effect harm as well as dispense favors. Now even the most devout relationship in regard to tragedy is in the seeking of comfort through divine presence rather than true relief through actual intervention.

The mystical aspects of the God-concept yield to the existential: God has been removed from the evil of the world and only is meant to deal with the good.

The age-old question of why bad things happen to good people can be answered if the mystical God is not a factor. First of all, bad things happen to all people, not just so-called good ones. Bad things happen to people because they have insufficient information to avoid them from happening, do not recognize the information, or blatantly disregard the information.

To avoid having a hereditary disaster such as a fatally ill child, premarital DNA testing can now determine whom to marry, or not, or to adopt children to avoid such a possible catastrophe. If God is left out of the equation, answers are forthcoming. In the face of evil, the God of goodness brings only confusing questions. Answers lie elsewhere.

How did this omnipotent God of ancient times, who ruled the world with force and fear, become reduced to a mere dispenser of hope and solace? Because the progress of civilization demanded it. The more mature the individual, the less parenting he or she requires. The more potent we become, the less potent the deity need be.

Our God is what we need him to be. We can dole out enough evil on our own, so we look to God only for good, because we cannot, or will not, cause sufficient good by ourselves.

Modern humanity has turned God into an emasculated social worker. Pray to Him and love Him and you will feel better. It won’t change anything, but you will feel better. Like a Buddhist meditation all prayer or love of God gets you these days is a sense of calm and serenity. But, it changes nothing to such an extent that even the hope for change has been compromised.

That feeling is epitomized in the sarcastic prayer of grace: Thank you Lord for the food we are about to eat. If we didn’t work hard for it, we wouldn’t have it, but thank you anyway.

The all-powerful God of the Old Testament can no longer give us miracles or move mountains. The all-loving God of the New Testament cannot give us world peace. The best we can hope for from any religious experience today is peace of mind and contentment.

Buddhism recognizes no creator. Its ritual purpose is to alleviate discomfort. With the absence of the active participation of God, the Abrahamic religion’s practice has been reduced to the same thing.

Any gods who may have been here at some time seem long gone, and with the absence of divine intervention the result of all religious practice is the same. It just makes us feel better - and that’s why it has lasted so long - despite any real evidence of the presence of a true deity.

The pressures of competitive contemporary life have given rise to a pandemic of depression. No society is immune. It is shared by those blessed with abundance and the responsibility of maintaining it with those in need trying to attain it.

In the quest to combat worldwide depression, we have turned toward drugs and other modalities to alleviate our suffering. We have embraced the Feel Good Pharmaceutical Age. God is now being offered as an alternative anti-depressant. Believe in God, and you will be saved…from feeling bad.

If there truly is no God, what is there? What runs the show? What caused it all?

The obvious truthful answer is that we do not know. We never have. And it’s our purpose to proceed to find out.

Until now, God has been a proposed answer, but his appearance time has run out. The statute of limitations on God the entity has run out. If we keep waiting for God to appear to save us, we may destroy humanity and all its works because of our own lack of godliness.

The difference between God and godliness is between the entity and the symbol. Humankind really worships the symbol of infinite goodness, mercy, power, wisdom, and knowledge, because we have been deprived of God the entity.

The more we know about this universe, the less the presence of God the entity becomes in reality testing.

In an age of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and religious fanatics who would kill each other over the differences in their conception of God the entity, the striving for godliness becomes even more important.

While we talk about the greatness of God, by our acts of destruction and desolation God the entity seems to be a myth and powerless, and our own sense of godliness to be inadequately forthcoming.

To avoid self-annihilation, we must forsake the bickering over the makeup of the Super-Power entity and find the super power within ourselves to refrain from this violence.

CHAPTER 1

The familial influence on our general perception of deities is noted in the evolvement as multifamily child rearing gave way to monogamy. When children had many parents in tribal cultures, there were many gods. As parental figures grew fewer in number, so did the number of gods prayed to. With one main parental entity in the family there came one God.

The primitive cultures remaining today, in which a village raises a child, continue to recognize many gods.

As the familial structure breaks down in sophisticated societies, with many marriages ending in divorce, godlessness is on the rise. Totally godless societies, like under communism, have proven to be devoid of godliness as well as God.

Those religions which urge families to remain intact and frown on divorce, no matter what the circumstances, understand full-well the message of the saying, a family that prays together stays together.

The family unit emerged from the needs of the human infant, the most helpless of all the newly born of the animal kingdom. While almost all other animals have a chance for survival on their own, the human infant has none. The human infant is helpless. It can find neither food or shelter nor can it clothe itself against the elements. It must have parenting to survive, which has to include some form of positive attention as well as nutrition and protection to prevent death.

The sexual bond between men and women gave rise to cohabitation; the need for protection from natural dangers gave rise to communal living; and child rearing gave rise to the family unit within the community. The more widespread the unit, with many parental surrogates, the greater the exposure to many voices of authority. From the earliest, based on physical power or shrewdness, there appeared a chain of command: the prototype for the hierarchy of the gods.

Even among the earliest recallable civilizations on Earth, the Sumerians, dating from king dynasties before the great flood or over six thousand years ago, there existed a hierarchy among their gods.

The preSemitic Sumerians invented a wedge form of writing, called cuneiform, imprinted on wet clay tablets with a stylus. They have left us records of an agricultural city-state society which recognized generations of gods fashioned from their precursors until a group was dominant. A divine triad of nature gods included Ea (Enki), the water-earth god, the sky god Anu, and the air god Enlil, who controlled the dreaded storms.

Semitic peoples invaded that part of Mesopotamia, now comprising southern Iraq, and c. 2300 B.C.E. Sargon of Akkad, in creating the world’s first empire, conquered the Sumerians. With the establishment of the first dynasty of Babylon some five hundred years later, the Sumerians ceased to exist as a nation; but the tradition of their gods continued. By the time Hammurabi (Hammurapi) established and ruled the ancient Babylonian empire (c.1792 - c.1750 B.C.E.) an emanation from the earlier god Ea, Marduk, was recognized as the supreme deity. Having vanquished all his mythologic foes, Marduk was accredited with the creation of humanity from the substance of a slain god. Man was elevated to be of divine stock.

The young biblical patriarch Abram (later Abraham) grew up in this father Terah’s house in Ur, founded as one of the Sumerian city states, in a culture praying to idols depicting many lesser gods, but also acknowledging from almost four thousand years ago one god above all others, Marduk, god of the sun, heaven, and earth. Abram also lived under a code of laws based on the rights of individuals to protect the weak from the strong.

The Sumerian city-states drew up codes of law to establish social order. The earliest of these was named after the founder of the third dynasty of Ur, Ur-Nammu. It is the oldest legal code known. Later the city of Eshnunna adopted its code, and still later the code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin was enacted. These three Sumerian codes influenced the more elaborate and more famous code of Hammurabi written in Semitic Akkadian, as the Babylonians adopted the cuneiform form of writing.

The code of Ur-Naamu predated the code of Hammurabi by nearly three hundred years.

There is basic resemblance between the content of these codes and the Ten Commandments of chapter 20 of the Book of Exodus of the Old Testament. The laws of these codes were generally humanitarian in nature but the punishment was harsh, based on the principle of an eye for an eye literally.

The commandment Thou shalt have no other gods before me has been interpreted by some theologians to mean that the ancient Israelites also had a number of gods, with Yahweh (Jehovah) merely being their chief, but not exclusive, god.

When the family of Israel (the descendants of the patriarch Jacob, the grandson of Abraham) came to Egypt as a tribe of shepherds wandering for food during a period of famine, the Egyptian nation had been governed by over a dozen dynasties of pharaohs in a culture some two thousand years old.

The ancient Egyptians invented a pictorial form of writing called hieroglyphics and have left us extensive records to decipher. Much of the historical dating of events of the ancient world have been dependent on Egyptian chronology as interpreted by modern day scholars.

As there has been no specific mention of the Israelite bondage and exodus in the vast Egyptian literature that has been deciphered, the Bible remains the only source of these events, and the time periods remain the source of scholarly disagreement. Some archaeologists and even religious leaders have begun to question the validity of the Bible, since corroboration of biblical events have not been forthcoming from other sources.

We do not know for certain who was the first leader to force belief in one God, and only one God, on his people. Generally this has been attributed to Amenhotep IV, a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

Most likely Amenhotep IV and the biblical prophet Moses lived within a century of each other and both seem to have had this compulsion in common. They may even have been contemporaries.

Ideas usually do not occur in a vacuum, and the concept of creating a purely monotheistic society evidently was brewing in Egypt at that time, against majority desires.

Earlier Egyptian kings had shown vague monotheistic tendencies, for they referred more often to their god in the singular than in the plural.

When Amenhotep IV ascended the throne of Egypt, c. 1350 B.C.E., Amon was the chief god and the priests of the cult of Amon were in spiritual influence over the people.

Amenhotep IV was a man of great intellect, force of purpose, and vision. A philosopher king, who still was a despotic tyrant. He was a poet, an artist, a musician with a choir of blind singers, a connoisseur of sculpture and painting as well as a philosopher. He abolished the religion of Amon and all the other Egyptian religions and banished the ancient gods, including Isis and Osiris, Hathor, Ptah, and Thoth. He decreed that only one god, Aton, the sun god depicted as a disc which sent out rays ending in hands, should be worshiped.

The treasures of the priests of Amon were looted and the name of Amon was defaced by the populace on all bas-reliefs. In deference to the sun deity - he had proclaimed the creator of life and elevated to supreme god - Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaton (horizon of Aton).

This experiment in monotheism ended in failure. Soon after Akhenaton’s death, the boy king Tutankhaton (the life of Aton is pleasing) - who in childhood was wed to a daughter of Akhenaton and his wife of legendary beauty, Nefertiti - came to the throne. Under the influence of his co-regent, Eye, and the disgruntled priests, the religion of Amon was restored and the preteenage monarch was renamed Tutankhamon, popularly known today as King Tut.

CHAPTER 2

With the failure of the one god experiment in Egypt the history of intolerance toward multigod worship shifted to the Old Testament.

However, from the very beginning the historical accuracy of the Bible becomes suspect.

In chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis of the Old Testament it was written that Abraham’s family lived in Ur of the Chaldees. But this is quite impossible as the Chaldeans were a people speaking a Semitic language who settled in southern Babylonia no earlier than the year 1000 B.C.E., or roughly at the time of David, second king of Israel, according to popular chronologic understanding. Since in the very first chapter of the New Testament, in the Gospel according to Matthew, we are told there were fourteen generations in direct descendence between Abraham and David, we know that Abraham lived many centuries earlier.

Abraham lived in Ur of the Sumerians, or Ur of the Akkadians, or most likely in Ur of the first Babylonians, but not in Ur of the Chaldees.

Scholarly interpretation of this time line discrepancy led to the belief that later editors of original Scripture had interjected their own time city names. Similarly the cities of Pithom and Raamses built by the Israelite slaves as mentioned in the first chapter of Exodus may actually refer to Tanis, identified with Avaris, an earlier Hyksos capital, and not Pi-Ramesse of the nineteenth dynasty pharaohs.

It is currently felt by some authorities that the earliest editors of the Old Testament lived during the reign of King David in Judea and were prone to write God’s name as Yahweh (Jehovah). After the death of David’s son Solomon the kingdom split in two, and the next group of editors in Israel to the north tended to refer to God as Elohim. Now differentiated as the J or E editors.

The scribes of King Josiah, c.620 B.C.E., were described in the twenty-second chapter and beyond of the Second Book of Kings as involved in codification of what may have come down as the Book of Deuteronomy.

Priestly writings of the descendants of Aaron, Moses’ older brother, may have transcended the time of the Babylonian exile and been composed during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E.

The final editor may have been the scribe Ezra, identified as the Great Redactor. Since we know our current Old Testament is almost word for word the same as the Dead Sea Scroll Bible which is over twenty-one hundred years old, it may also be quite similar to Ezra’s Bible which he reintroduced upon return from exile. It is written in the seventh chapter of the Book of Ezra that he returned to Jerusalem in the seventh year of the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes (c.457 B.C.E.).

Many current minimalist theorists feel that lacking archaeologic and other physical source corroboration the Bible should be regarded as a book of literature and not factual history, and that all authorship is suspect. However, over twenty-five hundred years ago, in chapter 31 of Deuteronomy it was written, or rewritten from a much earlier period, that Moses wrote the Law and delivered it to the priests to be borne in the Ark of the Covenant. Moses commanded the priests that every seven years, at the time of the feast of tabernacles (Sukkot), this Law was to be read before all the people of Israel.

From the time of the original writing until, as we are told in the fourth chapter of the First Book of Samuel, the ark was captured at the battle of Eben-Ezer c.1050 B.C.E. by the Philistines, the Israelites were repeatedly exposed to Moses’s writings over a period of at least two centuries.

If nothing else this represents initial socio-psychological evidence of the plausible authorship of Moses of at least an early portion of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament).

To understand the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we must understand Moses, because without Moses there would be no such God. We must also understand Ezra, who gave us the final interpretation of what came before him.

The patriarch Jacob wrestled with a man, as is written in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis, whom he overcame, was blessed and renamed Israel. Jacob’s descendants, including his great-great- grandson Moses, were known as the children of Israel, or Israelites. On his death bed Jacob proclaimed his son Judah, as is written in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis, to be master over his brothers, and the people also became known as Jews. They spoke a Semitic language called Hebrew and were often referred to as Hebrews.

Of all the heinous acts committed by the Roman legions, the most intellectually vile were the destruction of a portion of the great Library of Alexandria and the Temple in Jerusalem, which contained a library of sacred books.

Under the protection of General Titus, the Jewish historian Josephus (Joseph ben Matthias) undoubtedly had access to the scrolls of the temple library since lost, and he recorded facts no longer available to us from any other source. Therefore we do have information about Moses’ life besides what is written in the Book of Exodus and the following biblical books.

Chapter 7 of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament conveniently divides Moses’ life into three 40 year periods, which may be depicted geographically: Egypt, Midian, and Sinai.

In Egypt, Moses escaped infanticide by literally floating into the arms of royalty. Raised by a barren daughter of Pharaoh as her own son, he was still tutored in the ways of his own people by his wet nurse, his biological mother, Jochebed. Moses gained military distinguishment during an Ethiopian campaign, in which he was reported to have taken his first wife.

Although growing up with a speech impediment and usually described as gentle and mild mannered, he was prone to outbursts of violence. Upon seeing an Egyptian mistreating a Jewish slave Moses promptly slew him.

The Egyptian laws against murder evidently even applied to a prince, so Moses fled Egypt to escape punishment. He traversed the Sinai desert to the land of Midian on the northwestern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

In Midian again Moses played hero, rescuing maidens in distress from local bullies, and he married one of them named Zipporah. They had two sons, Gershon and Eliezer.

Moses’s father-in-law Jethro was a kinsman, a descendant of the eponym tribal founder Midian, a son of Abraham and Keturah, a wife taken after the matriarch Sarah’s death. Jethro was a priest and sorcerer under whom Moses toiled as a shepherd and apprentice. Chapter 18 of the Book of Exodus tells us of the great influence Jethro had on Moses in teaching the Lawgiver how to reorganize the judiciary of the Israelite tribes into a more efficient system.

After the death of the Egyptian pharaoh he feared, Moses, while doing his lonely shepherdly duties, is beset by apparitions and auditory experiences which motivate him to overcome his speech impediment and lowly station to beseech the new Egyptian monarch to release the Israelite slaves so that he and his spokesman brother, Aaron, can form a new nation.

At eighty years of age Moses became involved with forming a monotheistic theocracy governed by himself alone, at first, and then under Jethro’s tutelage by a system of judges.

Scholars continue to argue about when, or even if, the Exodus from Egypt occurred. I claim no special archaeological or Egyptological expertise on the subject, only the expertise of logic. The most documented invasion into, and excursion out of Egypt during those centuries by a Semitic people was that of the Hyksos.

The Hyksos were an invading force which conquered much of Egypt rather easily c.1700 B.C.E., during the Thirteenth Dynasty of pharaohs. Hyksos kings ruled during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth dynasties, until they were were finally totally ejected by the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the teenage King, Ahmose, c.1520 B.C.E..

Most likely the children of Israel came to Egypt during the time of the chaos of the Hyksos dynasties and fled slavery after the Hyksos were driven out. Some scholars believe the Exodus occurred during the Eighteenth Dynasty of pharaohs, two centuries before the reign of Rameses II, the longest reigning pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, who has been popularly acclaimed the pharaoh of the Exodus because of the similarity of his name to the biblical slave cities built by the Israelites. However, name similarity also points to Moses living during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, whose names like Ahmose and four Thutmoses ended in mose .

Reference in the very first chapter of the Book of Exodus to the fact that a new king arose in Egypt who did not know of the good work of Joseph, a son of Jacob, who successfully administered food stores during a period of famine, tends to imply that more than a simple succession of kings occurred. It may indicate that a radically different dynasty of pharaohs came to power, as when the Hyksos were driven from the Nile delta toward Asia.

Further evidence of the relationship of the Hyksos to the Israelite shepherds whose flocks were grazing in biblical Goshen are found in the lost works of Manetho, a priest of Heliopolis c.300 B.C.E., who wrote a history of ancient Egypt. In his work, which was written in Greek and comes down to us from Josephus, he translates Hyksos as shepherd-kings. To continue to believe that Raamses II or his son Merenptah was the pharaoh of the Exodus would mean that we would have to accept that the six generations between Abraham and Moses spanned about six hundred years, a totally unlikely conclusion.

Therefore on logic alone I side with those who believe a gradual or explosive exodus from Egypt occurred within a century of the reign of Akhenaton, perhaps making Moses and not Amenhotep IV the first monotheistic national leader.

Biblical chronology weighs heavily on the side of Moses being first. In chapter 6 of the First Book of Kings it was written that King Solomon began to build his Temple in the fourth year of his reign, exactly 480 years after the children of Israel left Egypt. Popular chronology places Solomon’s reign beginning in c.960 B.C.E., indicating the start of Temple building in c.956 B.C.E.. Four hundred and eighty years prior to this would date the exodus to c.1436 B.C.E., the greater part of a century before the time of Akhenaton.

CHAPTER 3

By his own account, with guile and superior sorcery to Pharaoh’s magicians, Moses bargained with the king. Having wrapped himself within monotheistic power, he literally blackmailed the still primitive and superstitious Egyptian into releasing his kinspeople from bondage. In the face of widespread havoc and death, the mystified monarch finally relented and let Moses’ people go.

Despite much adulation by generations that came afterward, Moses was a man of his time: prone to great exaggeration and brutal tyranny, who like many heroes of antiquity walked and talked, and his particular case, even argued, with his favorite God.

The Book of Exodus tells us that Jacob (Israel) went down to Egypt to unite his sons and their wives and offspring with their long abandoned sibling Joseph.

Altogether an extended family of seventy people, which grew in the course of some 430 years to a multitude of over six hundred thousand when Moses led them out of Egypt.

Since Jacob begat Levi, who begat Kohath, who begat Amram, who begat Moses, there were supposed to be just four generations between Jacob and Moses; therefore it is easily understandable why many today feel biblical numbers were greatly inflated in the style of the times. Four generations for 430 years?

However the familial makeup of the house of Jacob cannot be contested. The Lemba experiment, in our time, proved that.

The Lemba, a dark-skinned South African tribe, recognized themselves as Jews and claimed Israeli citizenship in keeping with Israel’s right of return policy for all Jewish peoples. This claim was contested. Human genome testing with many acknowledged Jews showed a ten percent Cohenim marker present in the general Jewish population which was absent in Gentiles. In those who claimed to be of the priestly (Cohen) family, direct descendants of Aaron, Moses’ older brother, the Cohenim marker was present to fifty percent. These same percentages were also found in the DNA of the Lemba and their priests, obtained from mouth swabs.

Extensive research originating at the University of London eventually proved the Lemba were indeed Yemenite Jews who had fled from Moslem persecution in the city of Sana’a. They boarded boats which sailed down the eastern African coast, and after settling on land aided in the building of the Great Zimbabwe, a massive structure from which the country derived its name. They eventually migrated to South Africa.

The disparate mass of former slaves who traipsed across the Sinai Peninsula under Moses’ stewardship were mainly blood relatives.

Despite this awareness of kinship and shared burden of hardships, Moses was brutal to any who challenged his leadership or who failed to embrace the dominance of his God.

The prime direction of Moses’ leadership was to develop a moral nation under one God at whatever cost required.

Throughout the forty years of wandering, Moses’ authority was repeatedly challenged. Chapters 5, 14, 15, and 17 of Exodus and 11, 14, 20, and 21 of Numbers record this period to be filled with evidence of a leadership in crisis.

At no time could Moses dare to proclaim himself - as the pharaohs did - a ruler over the people. Instead he submitted his stewardship on behest of the invisible authority of God.

One must question the lack of effect of the alleged wondrous miracles of the Exodus that allowed three thousand people just three months later to abandon a God who could bring plagues and part waters in favor of a golden calf. Obviously they were not awed sufficiently by the power of Moses’s God to overcome the idolatry that caused their destruction.

The passive-agressive nature of Moses’ mood swings are evident in the description of his extreme meekness in chapter 12 of Numbers compared with chapter 31 of the same book wherein he displays savagery in warring against his former hosts, the Midianites. After ordering the slaughter of all the males, especially those of royal birth, upon inspection of that success on the battlefield, he sanctioned the killing of all male children and mature women and the rape of all unwed females. And this was done to a tribe also descended from Abraham.

The justification of slaughter of kinspeople in the name of God or religion was also all too common in other parts of the ancient world.

CHAPTER 4

Within one or two centuries of the time of the patriarch Abraham, tribes of people began to migrate south out of Europe via the land of the Hittites, now called Turkey in Asia Minor, and eastward via Media, now Iran, and onward into northwest India. They spoke a language no longer spoken called Indo-European, and were adept at cavalry warfare, utilizing horse drawn chariots with spoked wheels which proved highly maneuverable in combat. They adopted the name of the ancient Persians and called themselves Aryans.

In India they conquered the darker-skinned natives who inhabited the Indus valley since the Stone Age. The Aryans addressed their gods with poetic hymns in the Vedic religion, the precurser of Hinduism. In their hymns to Indra, the Vedic god of war and storms, they spoke of overcoming many fortified places, and most likely they destroyed the excavated cities of Mohenjo-Daro in the Sind area and Harappa in the Punjab.

While the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt were contending with the Hyksos invasion, as father Abraham was leaving the city of Ur which had come under the rule of the sixth king of the Amonite dynasty of Babylon, Hammurabi, who annexed Akkad and Assyria, the initial civilization of the Indus Valley was being dismembered.

As mankind was developing its social-civil structure, the Code of Hammurabi, based partially on older codes such as the Eshnunna Code, was spreading the concept of Lex Talionis (Talion law), an eye for an eye, across Mesopotamia, and while the Israelites were receiving the commandments of chapters 20 to 23 of Exodus, in India the Aryan invaders were collecting the hymns to their gods in the Rig-Veda.

The Aryans drove the earlier inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent southward, and those that could not flee remained as the lowest class of society, known as the Dasyus. Notable among the Aryan tribes were the Bharatas, who settled in the area just north of the present-day city of Delhi, between the tributaries of the Indus and the Jumna rivers.

While there was no system of writing, the hymns were memorized with an elaborate method developed to insure that they were passed on generation to generation unchanged. Approximately at the first millennium B.C.E., over one thousand hymns were arranged in ten cycles, known as Mandalas.

With writing, prose literature called Brahmanas dealing with ceremonial significance, and later writings with speculation on the metaphysical nature of things, the Upanishads, came to be. The earliest gods were nature deities, but later on the Upanishads reached to a cosmic force called Brahman, who was described as eternal, indestructible, and without limit, and who began to take on the characteristics of a monotheistic entity.

However, the religion was polytheistic, with a trinity composing Brahman: Brahma, the creator of the universe; Vishnu, its preserver; and Shiva, its destroyer. Many other divinities could also be included in Brahman.

Hinduism is unique among the major religions as it has no single human or divine founder or book, but simply grew out of the absorption and assimilation of the religions and cultures of the Indian region.

The Aryans wanted a form of apartheid from the native people and four castes, or varnas, were instituted. In order of rank, these hereditary groups included Brahmans, the priests; the Kshatriyas, the princes and warriors; Vaisyas, the landowners and merchants; and Sudras, the farmers, laborers and servants. The caste system, which included literally thousands of subcastes, each with its own code of behavior, was incorporated into the religion. For centuries, a large number of the people, considered below the lowest caste, were deemed the untouchables.

The Vedas were the faith’s most sacred scriptures as were revealed to the sages, or rishis. The earliest nature gods of the Vedas were designated as good (deva) or evil (asura), and some have even come down to present time observance, such as Surya (the sun god); Varuna (the god of the sky); Agni (the fire god); and Vayu (the god of the world).

In all, four Vedas were written down: the Rig-Veda, the Sama-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. Each Veda has three parts: the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads. The Samhitas have to do with hymns and prayers; the Brahmanas deal with ritual and theology; and the Upanishads are dialogues dealing with the philosophy that transcended the Vedic religion into Brahmanism, the rudiment of modern Hinduism. And in Hinduism is developed a doctrine of the universal soul-to-be, with which individual souls will be united after maya, the illusion of time and space, is overcome.

The law of Karma states that every action throughout life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, influences how the soul will be reborn after the body dies, in the next reincarnation, either into an animal or human being. According to Hindu beliefs, animals as well as human beings have souls, and may be worshipped, cows being the most sacred.

Gradually the religion turned toward monotheism, but not exclusive monotheism: made up of a supreme god with lesser deities present. The universal essence of the Upanishads began to take on the persona of a god. One of the later Upanishads, the Shvetashvatara, identified Shiva as such a god.

Three philosophical ideas float throughout almost all the Upanishads: life is full of sadness; the concept of transmigration of souls, which states that one does not escape this sad life by dying, but is reborn into another life as determined by one’s actions in the old, and therefore one may rise upward toward ultimate salvation or fall to a lower position from which to try to rise up again, which is based on the works (Karma) doctrine; and the way to eliminate the endless reincarnations is through salvation. Salvation has to come with the attaining of the mystic - not common or scientific - knowledge, to allow union with the one true spirit.

Beside the Vedas, long poetic stories called the Puranas ascribe human traits to the gods and describe how the world began and how periodically it ends and is reborn. The gods Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishu, the preserver, along with the remote and unapproachable creator of the universe, Brahma, constitute the Hindu trinity and are the most popular gods.

The Ramayana is a long epic poem which tells the story of Prince Rama’s attempts to rescue his wife, Sita, who had been kidnapped by the demon king Ravana. Many of the poems of religious significance have to do with violence and warfare. The Mahabharata, a monumental epic poem of over one hundred thousand stanzas, describes a battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, a feud between cousins. The most famous part of the Mahabharata (great king Bharata) is the self-contained elegant work of literature the Bhagavad-Gita, in which Krishna and the Pandava warrior Arjuna discuss the nature and meaning of existence, and in which Krishna reveals himself as an incarnation of Vishnu, the other monotheistic-like entity.

Thus the Vaishnavite and Shaivite movements which together make up a monotheistic presence in ninety-five percent of modern Hinduism was begun. Vishnu-Krishna or Shiva having come down until this day as the superior, but not exclusive, manifestation of the supreme entity in the understanding of their respective worshippers.

Three of four followers of Hinduism today are Vaishnavites.

About 900 B.C.E., on the field of Kurukshetra, some fifty miles north of Delhi, India, a real battle took place between the sons of two kings of the aforementioned Bharata tribe. The reigning king, Dhritarashtra, the blind father, had been preceded on the throne by his younger brother, Pandu, who had since died. The battle was over the kingdom and land that the Pandavas felt was unjustly denied them. The battle lasted eighteen days and almost all the combatants were slain with the exception of the five sons of Pandu and Krishna, the charioteer of the third son, Arjuna, who was the most skilled in warfare of all the Pandavas.

The battle itself is described in the Mahabharata, and the discourse of the Bhagavad-Gita between Arjuna and Krishna just precedes the carnage.

Arjuna looks across at his opponent warriors and sees relatives, friends, and former teachers, and does not wish to fight. But Krishna explains the immortality of the soul that cannot be killed and that does not partake in the travails of the body. Gradually Krishna enlightens the paths to salvation.

In the first six chapters, the ethics of the righteousness of a warrior performing the duty of his class, and all others of their classes, in a spirit of sacrifice, comes forth as more noble than refusal to do so.

After chapter 7, the concept of the Lord, beyond perception, as the invisible sustainer of nature, and in chapters 10 and 11 as the manifestation of all forms in the universe, is such an awesome factor, that man (Arjuna) cannot fully appreciate it.

Krishna becomes altered from the human friend and relative of Arjuna to the incarnation of the Rig-Veda god Vishnu, and throughout the Bhagavad-Gita he implores worship of him alone as supreme deity as the way to salvation (6:47; 11:54; 18:65).

Cleansed of all doubt, Arjuna goes on to his destiny (18:73). The marriage of military duty and devotion to a deity crafted to sanctify the most unpleasant and seemingly unrighteous of humankind’s endeavors: war; even the slaughter of one’s own kinsfolk.

The caste system was codified in the Manu Smriti (code of Manu), and became the basis not only for Hindu religious and social law but was used in 1774-1784 by Warren Hastings, first British governor general, in framing the law of India.

CHAPTER 5

In the fifteenth chapter of Numbers, Moses was clearly defined as a tyrant of his time. A man was discovered gathering sticks on the Sabbath day and was brought before Moses for judgment. Moses ordered the congregation to stone the man to death; and they did.

No matter the severity of the offense, disobedience to Mosaic Law could be met with capital punishment.

Moses forced obedience to the rules of conversion to monotheism upon pain of his wrath and brutality.

Of course, all this carnage was recorded in the name of the God who Moses claimed to converse with.

Even his family was not immune. In chapter 12 of Numbers his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam chided Moses for have taken an Ethiopian wife. They even dared to claim to be prophets on a level with their younger brother. By way of his Lord they were chastised: Miriam was stricken with leprosy and Aaron was driven to repent and to beg for mercy. In his benevolence Moses interceded to forgive Aaron and to heal Miriam.

The message given to the multitude must have appeared to many to have been ambivalent. Moses spoke on a high plane of morality forbidding cruelty and murder, but in the name of the Lord and to promote the unique position of one God, harsh punishment and even killing appeared permissible. Therefore challenge to his authority was understandable.

Did Moses write the five books attributed to him? Undoubtedly not every word, and not in the form of five volumes, but there is evidence he wrote the first version.

It has been said he could not have completed Deuteronomy, for in the last chapter it tells of his death and burial. Or did he just write of what he knew would transpire after his death, because of the instructions he gave to his handpicked successor, Joshua, the son of Nun?

The sages have made much of the alleged plural rather than singular reference in Deuteronomy chapter 31 telling of the writing of the Book of the Law, indicating that Joshua collaborated with Moses.

Indeed Moses was described as being 120 years old and too feeble to readily leave his residence alone, and that during the writing he did summon Joshua.

Did Moses know how to write? The Deuteronomists have insisted yes.

The patriarchs were nomadic shepherds whose ancestors spent time in lands which had cuneiform writing, but no mention has come down to us of anything written by Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. What we know of them is solely through the writings accredited to their descendant, Moses.

Undoubtedly, Moses was exposed to hieroglyphic writing while being raised in Pharaoh’s royal court. The New Testament records Moses to be learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22).

He most likely still conversed with his biologic family in their native Hebrew tongue, and with his Ethiopian and Midian wives and their families perhaps in other languages. So it is easy to appreciate Moses as multilingual.

The Greco-Jewish historian Eupolemus, who served as priest and envoy to Rome for Judah Maccabee, regarded Moses as one of the greatest intellects of his day and the imparter of the alphabet to the Hebrews. It is impossible, with the writings that have come down to us - we know Eupolemus through Clement of Alexandria and the interpretation of Eusebius of Caesarea, two church fathers - to know the truth of this. But the Semitic people of that era have been accredited with the introduction of the alphabet.

Eupolemus confirmed the active intellectual interplay between peoples of that time in stating that the Greeks received the alphabet from the Jews by way of the seagoing Phoenicians.

When one adds these factors to repeated recitation of the Book of the Law, the people believed was written by Moses, carried in the Ark of the Lord for two to four centuries, then Moses’ authorship is most plausible. Also there is the nature of the content.

The Book of Genesis was written as a family log. It begins with a primitive attempt to explain creation, obviously repeated from prewriting times, and gives rise to a familial lineage: nine generations Adam to Noah, ten generations Noah to Abraham, and six generations to Moses.

For twenty-five generations Moses traced himself from the beginning of the world. Throughout these generations the presence of God is felt, but only to Moses does God reveal himself.

In the sixth chapter of Exodus, God tells Moses that the three patriarchs only knew him as El Shaddai (God Almighty), but that Moses could be told his real name: Yahweh (Jehovah).

In chapter 7, Moses is elevated as a god to Pharaoh, with Aaron as his prophet.

Thus, for only one of a very few times would Moses allow himself to be fused onto the deity level, because he gained his moral authority by being a prophet and proclaimer of the Lord while remaining mortal. Moses could never be God, but in his writings he did create a God who was his alter ego.

Moses led the Israelite people out of Egypt and wandered with them forty years to allow the generation of slave and pagan mentality to die off and a new free people to emerge in Sinai.

It was now Moses’ job to write the constitution of a new nation; beginning with the rules of civility, the Ten Commandments. The Torah, the five books of Moses, were to serve as both history and religious and civil law to teach slaves and descendants of slaves how to live in their own free and just society.

Moses also redefined God. For he was the first to gain an intimate relationship with God. The first not to stand in total awe of God, but to engage the Almighty in discourse, even to question God’s command and ultimately to pay the price of not being allowed to live in the promised land because of his redefining God’s command, as written in Numbers, chapter 20.

Moses described the national God, a deliverer, a giver of laws, and Moses himself became the prototype of a prophet of the Lord. And the nation of the national God came to regard themselves as His chosen people. Chosen to be the guardians of His Law; for Moses at all times had led the people to believe that his writings were inspired by God. By this sanctity did he retain his leadership, which was severely challenged during the perils of the forty year march.

In the Old Testament, Moses is considered to be the greatest of all prophets. In Hebrew parlance whenever Moses is spoken of he is given the surtitle Rabbenu. There are various titles given to those who decipher Scripture, such as rabbi (teacher), rabban (chief teacher), but only the most revered are called rabbenu, teacher to us all.

How else could illiterate slaves and descendants of slaves relate to their leader who had such a vast knowledge of the ancient world to call upon. Who humbled the mighty Pharaoh with a series of plagues; who parted a sea to lead them to freedom; who buried the unworthy and brought forth food and water in the desert to sustain them; and who appeared to be in closer relationship to God than humanly possible.

And yet there is the nature of Moses’ God. Just like Moses himself, with a three M personality: moral, merciful, and yet murderous. Moses projected his own personality characteristics onto his version of God.

Moses originated the manner of attributing all natural and man-made occurrences to the whim of one God. A great victory was the reward for righteousness in the eyes of the Lord and every defeat and catastrophe was punishment for evil doing. The notion that monotheistic adherence would be rewarded and that polytheistic paganism would be punished was passed on as the creed of the prophets to come.

A disappointed God could burn down the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and even bring total destruction upon mankind, such as occurred with the great flood.

CHAPTER 6

A people disappointing their deity was not unique to the Israelites. As early as the time of the patriarch Abraham’s father, Terah, or even his grandfather, Nahor, or his great-grandfather, Serug, and close to where they lived, some three thousand lines were written on twelve tablets, later found among the ruins of Nineveh, which came to be known as the greatest literary epic of ancient Mesopotamia. It tells of the adventures of the warlike king of Erech, Gilgamesh, and his friend Enkidu. Enkidu became suddenly ill and died, and this caused Gilgamesh to become obsessed with the fear of death. The history of many, if not most, cultures of that area confirm that a great flood occurred and that some ancestors survived it. Like Noah and his family, Gilgamesh’s ancestor Utnapishtim and his wife were the only survivors of the great flood. Also, much like in the Genesis tale of the Garden of Eden, Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh about a plant that gave eternal life. Gilgamesh obtained the plant, but when he left it unguarded a serpent carried it away. Then the ghost of Enkidu informed Gilgamesh that death led only to an underworld of dusty gloom.

For the Sumerians, the epic of Gilgamesh represented the tragedy of life. They believed that their gods had created human beings to be their slaves and they lived basically pessimistic lives in expectation of disaster. Try as they would, they could not continually please their gods who might show justice on occasion, but ultimately the people would be at the mercy of their capricious creators. And at life’s end they were to face an afterlife of primeval chaos.

To this end they held gods like Enlil, the lord of the storm, along with Marduk, as the greatest of deities.

Could Moses have been aware of the epic of Gilgamesh and have adopted its contents in his description of Noah and the great flood? It is quite possible. Evidence of Egyptian translations from cuneiform tablets have been uncovered, and the similarity of the god Ea’s commands to Utnapishtim to build a vessel to escape the flood are quite comparable to the commands given to Noah.

Added to the proofs of authorship of the Torah is the age and availability factor.

As mentioned earlier, biblical chronology leaves itself readily open to criticism. If Moses was indeed just three generations descended from Jacob’s son Levi how can it be that Joshua, the son of Nun, was recorded as being eleven generations removed from Levi’s younger brother, Joseph (I Chronicles 7:22-27)?

Even if we allow a generation for the difference in age between Levi and Joseph, this leaves a seven generation difference in age between Moses and Joshua. If Moses was 120 years of age when he wrote his book then Joshua, his second in command, could have been not much older than twenty, at most, allowing fifteen years per generation, not a very creditable number. Any reference to earlier activity by a Joshua not identified as the son of Nun would therefore have to be attributed to a different, older Joshua.

Why did Moses wait until he was at death’s door to write his book? These were his memoirs. He chose to spend forty fears wandering in a desert he knew only too well - having traversed it forty years earlier when he fled Egypt the first time - to allow the polytheistic mentality to die off and to slaughter the remnant. Now they were all dead, and he was free to tell it his way.

His older siblings, Miriam and Aaron, were dead. All the elders were dead. All who challenged him were dead. All nonbelievers had been killed. Those who remained were too young to remember the Exodus from Egypt. Moses was able to relate the coming out of slavery to the miracles of his one God.

Moses had to be the one who wrote the first account of the Exodus, no matter how imaginative, because there was no one else left alive who witnessed it.

In essence, Moses, through his book, which may have been the very first written in alphabet form, gave posterity an autobiographical God.

Moses crafted his God out of what he knew, out of what he felt, and out of what he wished for. This left his God brutal, ceremonially primitive, and yet moral and benevolent. A very complex man of his time with a forward vision created a very complex