Part Two: The Promised Land 2000BC to 1000BC

By Glyn Thomas

The advent of printing in the 15th Century allowed common usage of the Bible, establishing its authority as the sole record of ancient history without competition from other sources for over 4 centuries. It was only in the 19th Century that we rediscovered how to understand ancient cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts from the Mesopotamian and Egypt

• Language: English
• Publisher: Truth Publications
• Release date: Apr 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781738443956

Glyn Thomas

Glyn was fascinated by ancient history from an early age - how civilization developed, how life on earth developed, how our planet was terraformed and how the universe evolved. During a career working mainly in senior financial roles for large multinationals, the combined impact of dealing with corporate correspondence and keeping abreast of professional material precluded any opportunity to read for pleasure. Upon retirement in 2013, Glyn was able to immerse himself in the disciplines that beckoned - astronomy, archaeology and ancient history. To his astonishment and delight, our knowledge of these subjects has been utterly transformed over the period of his working life. Glyn has an unusual outlook on life, from a childhood awareness of immortality his quest has been to understand. Brought up as a Christian, he found the biblical record challenging to believe. Glyn has frequent dialogue with many religious friends but none are able to provide credible explanations for his many questions. More fundamental Christians seem to view 'science' as an adversary, unaware that religion originated as science and politics - early priests were astronomers and civil servants. Protestants widely proclaim their belief in the bible as being God's Word without knowing or questioning why for most of the Christian era, the church prohibited laity from reading it. Study of the bible reveals numerous factual errors and inconsistencies. Surely, if one adopts the bible as the foundation of one's belief in eternity and personal salvation - it needs to be a lot more reliable. Furthermore, theologians and biblical academics are fully aware of many changes to the texts made to reinforce dubious aspects of dogma - yet no priest or pastor would ever share their knowledge with their congregation. So, Glyn set about finding the Truth, what was Jesus original teaching? Glyn found his journey of discovery incredibly uplifting. Reassuringly, despite the selective screening of books included in the New Testament and the extensive editing of those which were admitted - echos of the original truth may be found in many places. This quest led not only to the discovery of Jesus original teaching but the need for substantial revision to the conventional view of ancient history and our earliest civilizations. A hugely rewarding result that the author wishes to share with others - hence this series of little books. This the author was moved to write and share his findings. As was said "Seek and ye shall find."

Book preview

The Eye of Ra and the Promised Land.

Not to be confused with the eye of Horus. The Eye of Ra represents the power of the sun and the protection of Egyptian royalty. The symbol is used for this book to represent Egyptian suzerainty over the entire Promised Land for almost the entire 2nd Millennium BC.

After the Flood, lands were allocated amongst the sons of Noah – Africa to the descendants of Ham and the Fertile Crescent to the descendants of Shem. Canaan, one of Ham’s sons, broke the rules by settling in land promised to Shem’s family. Some 8,000 years later, the leading power, then under ecological and economic pressure, sent its crown prince with an elite squad of 600 naar to reconquer that promised land. ‘Naar’ means mounted on camels. Subsequent control was partial and fleeting – until nearly 4,000 years later, when those declaring themselves descendants of that crown prince finally established effective and lasting control in the mid 20th century.

I dedicate this book to Alberto Zancanaro, a dear friend, a congiunti with whom theological discourse has caused me to dig deeper and to think harder about what I discover.

Quintology Publishing

www.quintologypublications.com

Copyright © 2024 by Glyn Thomas & Gregory Thomas

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher except for brief passages in reviews or in citations and references.

Printed by Ingram Spark and affiliates – Lightning Source UK Ltd,

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom (see inside back page)

Third Edition, published March 2024.

Earlier editions entitled:- The Levant in the Second Millenium BC

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7384439-4-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7384439-5-6

Typeset, layout and cover design by Gregory Thomas

www.gregthomas.design

Contents

Map The Levant in the 2nd Millennium BC

1Recap of Part One and introduction to Part Two

2New theory for the Exodus from slavery in Egypt

3Geo-political history of Palestine during the 2nd Millennium BC

4Egyptian decline enables pre-monarchical Israel to emerge.

5Conclusions reviewing Egyptian power during 2nd Millennium BC

6Where do the Israelites fit into recorded history & archaeological findings?

7Where did the Israelites originate from?

8The Promised Land

9The Table of Nations in Genesis chapter 10

10 The origin of The Shepherd

11 The Tower of Babel

12 Abraham’s interactions with Hittites, Philistines & Arameans

13 The story of Joseph in Egypt & the cities of Pithom and Ramesses

14 The Book of Joshua

15 The United Monarchy – Saul, David & Solomon

16 The stunning implications of the name Elizabeth

17 Cyrus conquest of Babylon – aided by Yahweh or by Marduk?

18 Biblical Inerrancy

18 bis New evidence concerning the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah and Jericho

19 An alternative view of our creation

20 Conclusions

Appendix: Key family members of the ancient ‘gods’

Index

Biblical references

Bibliography

Books in this series

Symbols used on covers in this series

1

Recap of Part One and an introduction to Part Two

1.1 Firstly, a quick recap of Part One – God, Enki, Ra/Marduk & Yahweh. The major imperative for the authorship of Part One was my ‘discovery’ of proof of the existence of unimaginable intelligence hard wired into the design of our Universe – specifically in the physical laws governing the atomic structures within the constituent members of the Table of Elements together with dozens of extremely finely tuned mathematical constants, from which often extremely tiny variations would have led either to an utterly inhospitable universe or to a very short lived event – far too short for any life form to have developed.

1.2 It also appears that the properties of compound elements, when subjected to heat and electrical impulses (such as lightening) are designed to fuse into complex compounds including amino acids. With amino acids being the building blocks of RNA and thence DNA – it seems life itself may be hard wired into the properties of the elements. From our human perspective, the unimaginable potential designed into the seemingly simple elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc.) commonly existing in our universe containing the ability to combine in ways generating such profound abilities points to a designer with such an intelligence that it can only be described as God.

1.3 I then compared this awesome intelligence with the behaviour and character of Yahweh as described in the Old Testament and found that Yahweh, in many ways, represents the complete antithesis of Jesus. Moreover, even the Bible itself contains many clues that point to Yahweh being the Hebrew name for one of the many deities from ancient times we traditionally describe as ‘pagan gods’. Again, the Bible itself describes extensive worship of many ‘pagan’ gods by the Hebrews, with Solomon accommodating many ‘lesser gods’ in niches when building the original Temple around 960BC.

1.4 Chronologically, strict monotheism amongst the Jews came only with the small minority who returned from exile in Babylon in 530BC – maybe influenced by the monotheism expressed by Cyrus, their Persian liberator following his occupation of Babylon. The release of the Israelites from Babylonian captivity even led the Prophet Isaiah to preach that Yahweh had anointed Cyrus as the prophesied Messiah (Isaiah 45:1).

1.5 Indeed, given the widespread assumption that the Jews were monotheistic at least after the return from Exile, it is amazing to learn that there still existed in Jesus time, a shrine in Bethlehem for Tammuz (a Sumerian king who ruled before the Flood, who because of his wise rule, came to be worshipped for millennia) – and that beliefs about Tammuz may have been weaved into one of the Gospels.

1.6 In assessing Yahweh, I examined the principal themes of the Torah – the first five books of the Old Testament. These books focus on four main topics – the Creation, the Flood, Abraham and Moses.

1.7 My findings were surprising: there is very strong evidence that the Creation story in Genesis is a blend of oral traditions, which must have originated from Abraham’s education in Ur, documented by Levite priests in the 6th Century BC and of their review, whilst in Exile, of the original record from whence the story of creation originated. The original source being a Sumerian treatise now referred to as the ‘Enuma Elish’, fragments of which have been found dating back to 3800BC and large sections found dating back to around 2500BC. The Genesis version of creation constitutes an incomplete summary of the creation of our planet extracted from the Sumerian history of our solar system.

1.8 Alarmingly, most Christians have been led to believe Genesis is describing the creation of our entire universe!! Evidence suggests that during the Babylonian exile the Levite priests in Babylon had access to copies held in Nebuchadnezzar’s library. Copying from the Enuma Elish by the Levites is evident by their mistakes in using Akkadian meanings for certain Sumerian words – as in attributing the creation of Eve to Adam’s rib. Even worse, most Christian writers mistakenly refer to the Enuma Elish as Neo Babylonian, i.e. from only c600BC, based on the first example discovered that was translated in 1876, which was actually found in the Assyrian capital Nineveh and dates to two centuries earlier.

1.9 Noah emerges in a similar way, echoing Sumerian stories written thousands of years before the time of Abraham. In the Prequel to this series, I include material detailing recent geological work that enables us to precisely date and understand the event we refer to now as ‘The Flood’. Other evidence has revealed that the Flood was not quite the mass extinction level event described biblically. However, a far earlier eruption of a mega volcano, Toba, around 75,000 years ago, came very close to making mankind extinct.

1.10 Biblical references to Abraham correlate with a real person about whose family extensive original documents (cuneiform tablets) have been uncovered which reveal he was the heir of a powerful family – and grandson of the High Priest of El Elyon and son of the High Priest of Sin. El Elyon being the Canaanite name for Enlil, the Lord Most High, and the name in Hebrew used to denote God in Genesis before the burning bush incident revealed the name Yahweh. Yahweh is also identified as one of the 70 descendants of Enlil’s father – as described in Psalm 82. Another son of Enlil, Sin (associated with the Moon, whose symbol being a crescent moon turned 90 degrees and represented as a young bull), was known in Canaan as Ba’al. It is possible that Yahweh and Ba’al were different names for the same entity – for the second half of the second millennium BC, both Yahweh and Ba’al had a consort bearing the same name – Ashtoreth. Dozens of figurines of an entwined couple, ‘Yahweh and his Ashtoreth’, have been unearthed in excavations of pre-Exilic Israelite villages.

1.11 Just in case the cryptic note above, about Yahweh’s parentage, sounds bizarre, I include the text of Deuteronomy 32:9 as translated from Hebrew and also from the Septuagint, clearly showing that the author of Deuteronomy saw Yahweh as one of many sons, or descendants or even emissaries of God:

Deut 32:9 – Hebrew When El Elyon gave the nations as an inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. For Yahweh's portion was his people; Jacob was the lot of his inheritance.

Deut 32:9 – LXX When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the emissaries of God. And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel was the line of his inheritance.

1.12 Psalm 82 opens with Yahweh addressing the assembly of the 70 gods, the ‘sons’ of the Most High – El Elyon in Hebrew. Genesis 10 provides a list of the 70 nations between which the lands on earth were divinely allocated.

1.13 Moses, however, does not stand up to any examination – almost every aspect of the story of his life and events fails to pass any tests of logic or historical evidence – the entire saga being most accurately described as ‘myth historicised’.

1.14 Since writing the first edition of Part One, I have come across far more evidence that the entire story of the Exodus is a confused work based on various tribal memories worked up into a confection to support a national foundation story bearing little regard to actual history. Much of the vocabulary and numerous references betray its origin as dating to the period during and after the Babylonian Exile – written a millennium or so after the time purported and without the benefit of access to reliable and accurate records of the period in which the story was set. Any germs of truth present in the story have been so diluted as to render the tale best treated as a work of fiction in its entirety.

1.15 We start this booklet by summarising the history of what is now Israel throughout the second millennium BC, and surprisingly we find the whole area under Egyptian control for almost the whole period, all except from 1655BC up to 1545BC and after 1120BC. This clearly has implications for biblical history. In Chapter 4 , we see how although Egypt defeated the invading Sea Peoples (a federation of Greek tribes) who swept through what is now Turkey before turning south through Syria, Lebanon and Israel – and forced their defeated people to accept Egyptian suzerainty. However, the economic damage they had wrought – led inexorably to Egypt’s decline. Shorn of its Hittite, Mycenae, Cypriot and Lebanese trading partners and particularly its suppliers of refined metals, Egypt’s economic and military strength was badly hit. The cities of the Sea Peoples became the Philistines, who then spread out occupying the lowland areas of Israel until destroyed as an identifiable culture by the Babylonians.

1.16 In Chapter 5 , we assess the evidence of the continuous Egyptian rule between 1550BC and 1120BC over what today is Israel, Lebanon and the western half of Syria and note the extent to which Biblical references can be found that reflect this.

1.17 In Chapter 6 , we look at the evidence from historical records and archaeological findings to show the emergence of Israel and in Chapter 7 evidence of the sources of the nation of Israel.

1.18 Chapters 8 to 17 explore interesting subjects where new light can be shed on biblical events – in particular the reliance that may be placed upon the biblical texts describing the United Monarchy – the period of the kings Saul, David and Solomon.

1.19 A number of readers have suggested I should study the arguments put forward by Inerrants, those believing that the Bible is the ‘Word of God’ and therefore cannot contain any errors. I have duly studied this point of view and include observations and conclusions as Chapter 18 .

1.20 This new edition contains in new chapter 18 bis , information on exciting new discoveries which show the destruction of both Sodom & Gomorrah and of Jericho were part of the same event. This explains both the mass migration into Lower Egypt and the consequent disruption in Egyptian culture.

1.21 Chapter 19 is dedicated to those who loved Chapter 1 of Part One – incorporating some mind-bending scientific suggestions concerning our origins!

1.22 I concluded Part One by noting that if Yahweh was not our Creator (which has serious implications for the books of the Old Testament) then two big issues arise – how should we view the numerous prophesies contained in the Old Testament which are interpreted as pointing to Jesus arrival on Earth and what to make of Jesus references to Jewish scripture recorded in the Gospels. These questions have fundamental implications but I concluded that this important subject fitted better into Part Three focused on Jesus than within the earlier historical focus of this book.

1.23 I have come to realize that Christian theology is long overdue a massive overhaul – to remedy numerous erroneous ideas adopted in the early centuries of the church but more importantly to recognise specific fundamental information about our universe and ourselves that has been revealed to us in the past few decades. These aspects are explored in Part Four.

2

New theory for the Exodus from slavery in Egypt

2.1 Research undertaken for this booklet has led me to what I suspect is an entirely new explanation for Israelite memories of the Exodus and of slavery under Egyptian pharaohs. Despite wide reading, I have found no hint that anyone else has proposed the explanation set out herein – which makes it especially worthwhile to write for you.

2.2 In this section, I summarise the main issues that have led me to this new theory. Readers of the previous booklets were agreed that the breadth and depth of detail was helpful in understanding the issues addressed. Accordingly, you will not be disappointed by the wealth of historical evidence presented herein which leads to the novel conclusion.

2.3 The first issue involves trying to establish when the Old Testament books were first written and the extent to which they were edited by subsequent redaction and modification. Historically, the history as set out in biblical texts established primacy because from the Reformation onwards, when printing became mechanised (Gutenburg, 1440) and the volume of both books and readership soared – the history set out in the bible faced no competition. Classical scholars could understand Latin and Greek but any discrepancies between the historical detail in non-biblical records was scattered and inaccessible to all but a few scholars.

2.4 Total ignorance of pre-Greek history and languages prevailed until discovery of the trilingual Rosetta Stone in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops. The Rosetta Stone provides a lengthy decree in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the contemporary Egyptian script of the Ptolemaic period (when carved in 196BC) and Ancient Greek. However, it was not until 1822 that the first translation of the hieroglyphics was published which allowed other inscriptions to then be translated.

2.5 Similarly, cuneiform text was deciphered by study of the Behistun Inscription, a trilingual text in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform. Although first known to Europeans through reports of Robert Sherley in 1598, an Englishman retained as a diplomat by Austria, the Behistun Inscription defied easy translation due to its location. The inscription is located in a remote part of Iran near the top of a 100m high vertical limestone cliff on the ancient trade route from Babylon to Media. The inscription itself is vast: the Old Persian text contains 414 lines in five columns; the Elamite text includes 593 lines in eight columns, and the Babylonian Akkadian text is in 112 lines. The text covers an area of cliff face 15m by 25m. Next, a German surveyor, Carsten Niebuhr, visiting the area in 1764 representing King Frederick V of Denmark, copied the Old Persian text which he published in 1778 and which led to a general understanding of Old Persian. This facilitated the later translation of the Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian versions. This was enabled by Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer visiting the inscriptions in 1835, who returned in 1843 equipped with ropes and scaffolding to copy and make plaster casts of the cuneiform texts.

2.6 Having initially mastered Egyptian hieroglyphics and then Akkadian cuneiform during the 19th Century, archaeological expeditions from 1860’s to the outbreak of WW1 fortunately yielded a treasure trove of original documents – mainly in the form of large baked clay tablets. It is estimated that museums in London, Berlin and Pennsylvania hold a few million. So many, that it is claimed that maybe only 10% have been translated so far.

2.7 The contribution of these early cuneiform tablets cannot be underestimated. Some have been dated back to the mid fourth millennium BC – i.e. around 3500BC. This compares with biblical texts, the oldest fragments being the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran, with a few dating to around 300BC.

2.8 I have been delighted to discover that we now have an immensely detailed historical knowledge, derived from translation of a wealth of material, revealing the history of second millennium BC. Comparison with the biblical record reveals stark differences – hardly surprising given we are comparing original contemporary documents from the events in question with regularly recopied and evidently edited texts which cannot themselves have been in any written form during the millennium in question.

2.9 But surely, one may exclaim, the biblical record extends back before David (who captured Jerusalem in 1000BC), through Moses (c1500BC) to Abraham (c2000BC) and even further back to Noah and Adam?

2.10 In this booklet, we consider a wide range of historical physical evidence and identify many textual clues in the biblical texts that raise questions. Key questions include:

• When were the original texts of Jewish scripture written?

• In which language were they originally written?

• Is there evidence that the versions we have today have been altered – edited or redacted since the originals were written?

Much detailed evidence is provided in later chapters but let us just address language here – which provides a cut-off date for date of the earliest Hebrew texts.

2.11 Language is a good point to start. Original religious works were treasured and carefully guarded by the senior priests – the idea of translating the text to a different language or of redrafting sacred text into contemporary language would have been regarded as sacrilege. We