All three of these major players – Abraham, Joseph and Moses – had one common biblical denominator that distinguished them from other Hebrews in Egypt. According to the Bible, they all met pharaohs.
Abraham was the first of the Hebrew Patriarchs to enter Egypt and to come away with substantial riches from that country. His story starts when he and his father, Terah, journey from Ur in Chaldea to Haran, in Northern Mesopotamia. They cross the River Euphrates, and Abraham takes on the style of an ‘Hebrew’, a person from the other side of the river.
Little is known of Terah’s occupation (although he is referred to as a maker of idols by some sources1), but Abraham, following in his footsteps, is a ‘wanderer’, a semi-nomad with many cattle and sheep. His lifestyle is dictated by the demands of his livestock, necessitating continuous travelling between the tilled and steppe lands, following routes that can sustain the flocks’ feeding. Abraham’s lifestyle contrasts with the Midianite Bedouin, whose main assets are their stubborn but adaptable camels and who are truly nomadic.
Under divine command, Abraham migrated once again, to the land of Canaan – a land later to be known as Israel, Judaea, Palestine, and finally, the modern State of Israel.
When famine engulfed the country, Abraham and his family are forced south to Egypt, to seek food for themselves and their livestock. Here Abraham meets one of the pharaohs. But which one? There was also a more fundamental question that I had to answer – did Abraham, as a person, even exist?
The earliest references to Abraham are found in Genesis 11:26 and, according to most historical authorities,2 were probably written as many as 1,000 years after his time, although some of the texts may have been compiled only a few hundred years after he might have lived.3
From what we are told in the Torah, Abraham was undoubtedly a man of considerable wealth, in terms of livestock and possessions, and of influence and power, in terms of the size of his family clan. His ancestors also probably lived part of their lives in an ambiance of civilization in Mesopotamia.
Around 1800 BCE, areas in Mesopotamia were invaded by Semitic tribes (sometimes referred to as Amorites), centred at a place called Mari in northern Mesopotamia and not far from Haran, from where, as Genesis 12:4 records, Abraham journeyed to Canaan. (See Figure 1: Relational Map of The Ancient Middle East.)
Many of Abraham’s relatives have names that echo the names of cities in the region, and many of the patriarchal names correspond to Amorite tribal names mentioned in texts found at Mari (modern Tel Hariri), near the Euphrates. These texts were deciphered from the many thousands of clay tablets excavated from the area over the past seventy years, and include references to a marauding tribe of Banu-yamina (Benjamites).4
Other texts, known as the ‘Nuzu’ found near the River Tigris in Mesopotamia, give a graphic overview of contemporary life in a town in Mitanni some 300 years later (around 1500 BCE). Comprising a ruling class of Indo-Aryans, the main population were Hurrians – a non-Semitic people referred to in the Bible as ‘Horites’. Certain of their legal and social practices bear similarities to patriarchal references and injunctions in the Torah:
a) the adoption of an heir by a childless couple
b) the reversion, in the above event, of the right of inheritance to a subsequently born son
c) the provision by a barren wife of a concubine for her husband
d) a law against the expulsion of such a concubine and her children
e) the adoption of a son-in-law where there were no sons in a family
f) possession of the household gods constituted title to inheritance.5
It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that memories of Mesopotamian life and society were ‘built in’ to Abraham’s personal story when it came to be written down in the fifth century BCE. G. W. Anderson, formerly Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies at the University of Edinburgh, puts it like this:
It is, therefore, evident that the Patriarchal narratives do not merely reflect conditions, practices, and beliefs in Israel in the period of the Judges and the monarchy, but have preserved faithfully the traditions of a much earlier age.6
There can be little doubt that the ‘persona’ of Abraham existed, and that the biblical descriptions of his character are essentially correct. The Biblical Abraham who finally arrives in Egypt embodies all the characteristics and experiences of his predecessors.
How is it, however, that Abraham, a semi-nomad, is accepted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the Founding Father of their faiths? A man whose apparent genius and insight enabled him to fashion a radical new philosophy virtually single-handed and found a ‘monotheistic religion’ that was to transform the entire world’s outlook on religion?
The simple answer is: ‘I don’t think he did.’
To understand why later scribes found such inspiration from Abraham’s story, it seems reasonable to conclude that there was some truth in the main elements, as handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, and as described in the Old Testament.
However, Abraham does not come across as a ‘messianic’ leader who publically preached a new creed. It even seems unlikey that monotheism was Abraham’s original idea.
How could Abraham, on his own, have evolved the biblical sophistications ascribed to him?
In an attempt to help find the answer to this question, I turned to one of the most articulate and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century, and his views in relation to Abraham and the manner of lifestyle that he followed.
THE ASCENT OF MAN
In his book The Ascent of Man, and the BBC Television series of the same title, Dr J. Bronowski traced the evolution of man from the dawn of civilization, along what the poet W. B. Yeats called the ‘monuments of unageing intellect’, up to the 1970s.7
Around 10,000 years ago man, who had battled through the Ice Ages and wandered for a million years, found conditions at last suitable for it to be possible to settle in one place and still survive. He was thus presented with a crucial decision: whether or not he would cease to be a nomad and become a villager. As Dr Bronowski put it:
We have an anthropological record of the struggle of the conscience of a people who make this decision: the record is the Bible, the Old Testament. I believe that civilization rests on that decision.8
He continues:
There are some nomad tribes who still go through these vast transhumance journeys from one grazing ground to another: the Bakhtiari in Persia, for example. And you have actually to travel with them and live with them to understand that civilization can never grow up on the move.
Dr Bronowski’s conclusion is that everything in nomad life is immemorial.
He notes a remarkable parallel between the life of the Bakhtiari, who, like other nomads, think of themselves as a private family, the sons of a single founding father – exactly as the Jews referred to themselves as the children of Israel, of Jacob. As with the children of Israel, the flocks are all important in dictating the mode of lifestyle and wanderings of the tribe. The story that the Bakhtiari relate of their founding father tells of a legendary herdsman, Bakhtyar, whose origins echo time and time again the biblical story of the Patriarchs – Abraham, his son Isaac and his son Jacob.
The women of the Bakhtiari bake bread – in the same biblical manner of unleavened cake on hot stones, which we now know as ‘Matzoh’. Their simple technologies for making yogurt, spinning wool or making repairs is light and easily transportable and suitable only for immediate use on their journeying – and of no permanency. Anything of more substantial nature is bought by barter and trading. There is no capacity for innovation or to develop new ideas.
As Dr Bronowski puts it: ‘The only habits that survive are the old habits. The only ambition of the son is to be like the father … Nothing is memorable. Nomads have no memorials, even to the dead. (Where is Bakhtyar, where was Jacob buried?)’9
Although the Patriarchs are traditionally associated with various resting places – Abraham with
Hebron 30km south of Jerusalem, Isaac with Beersheba in southern Israel, and Jacob with Bethel some 15km north of Jerusalem – there is no archaeological certainty to these locations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that Chaldea, whence Abraham’s tribe started their wanderings, was in the region that was influenced by the culture and mythology of what is now Iran (and was previously Persia) – the land of the ancient Bakhtiari. Could someone leading a semi-nomadic life be the founder of three great religions? Dr Bronowski’s views strongly mitigate against this possibility.
Human progress is, in general, a process of slow methodical endeavour, each advance building on previous extant understanding and slowly edging back the frontiers of knowledge. Occasionally a blip of acceleration occurs when geniuses like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci or Einstein make a giant leap of imagination, but even they need to be immersed almost to the point of obsessive abstraction in their work, and nurtured by the stimulation of like-minded colleagues. As Professor Hans Eysenck, the IQ guru, puts it: ‘Einstein would not have prospered in an igloo, or Mozart in a kraal, or Shakespeare in a wigwam!’10
The same is true, I believe, of religious progress. All religious ‘geniuses’ have, at a formative period of their lives, found themselves in an intellectually stimulating environment operating at or near to the frontiers of man’s experience.
Another ‘essence’ of a religious founder is the need to stand apart from their contemporaries and to take the opportunity to evolve, through reflection and perhaps divine inspiration, the structure of their own innovative religious philosophy.
There appears to be no reference to a time when Abraham isolated himself from his clan and worldly responsibilities.
Self-evident, also, for the founder of any religion, is the need to communicate his ideas and inspire others to follow and believe. In the Old Testament, Abraham does not exhibit the characteristics of someone who preaches to a wide, or even select audience. You cannot found a religion unless you go out and preach the new gospel.
In fact we see that by the time of the writing of Isaiah, Abraham has been repositioned as a friend, rather than the chosen founder. In Isaiah 41:8 we find:
But you Israel, My servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
Seed of Abraham My friend.
Nevertheless, encountering ‘fixed’ idols and shrines to many gods on his sojourns in centres of population, the very inability to carry them on the wanderings of a caravan may have moved Abraham’s mind to the contemplation of a more easily ‘transportable’ god. Gazing heavenward at the wondrous stars in the desert night sky, perhaps the embryo of inspiration came to him.
My overall conclusion is that, whilst Abraham may have been the initiator or progenitor of Judaism, he shows few if any of the characteristics of a founder or architect capable of laying down a blueprint of its basic beliefs.
So where did the depth of monotheism that apparently bound the Hebrews together come from if not from Abraham? If Abraham is an unlikely candidate as founder of the Israelite religion, who was?
The most likely answer to the first question is that Abraham, or his grandson Jacob, obtained much of their religious sophistication from elsewhere – and that that elsewhere was Egypt.
DATES OF THE PATRIARCHS
We cannot determine which pharaoh Abraham, or subsequently Joseph, met without a reasonably accurate assessment of the dates that they lived through. The chronologies of the pharaohs are fairly well agreed,11 but those for the Patriarchs differ from source to source, and religious sources, particularly, tend to push them well back into the Middle Bronze Age (2100–1600 BCE).
The dates of Abraham’s life that can be gleaned from the Bible are none too certain. Some parts of the Old Testament associate Abraham with the Babylonian period of 1900 BCE, others with the Hurrian period of 1500 BCE and yet others with the Amarna period of 1400 BCE.
The Biblical span of 400 years that covers the historically accepted probable times of the Patriarchs – Abraham to his grandson Jacob – indicates that the lineage between the first and last Patriarch, although a direct tribal descent, was ‘stretched’ out by intermediate descendants other than just Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It also helps to explain the great longevities given in the Old Testament for each of the Patriarchs.
By working back from the time Egyptian control of Canaan started to loosen sufficiently to allow the Hebrews the chance of conquering the land, it is possible to get an idea of when Abraham first entered Egypt.
The Egyptians, after driving out the Hyksos rulers, conquered Canaan and retained a strong presence there from 1550 to 1200 BCE. Many of the military campaigns of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties that were pursued against the Mitannis of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, and later against the Hittites in Anatolia, took the Egyptians through Canaan. There are well-chronicled records of, for example, the drive by Tutmoses III to Meggido in 1482 BCE. An archive of clay tablets discovered at El-Amarna, site of the capital of Egypt in the time of Amenhotep IV, refers to exchanges between Egyptian rulers and vassal kings in Canaan. Local fortified city states such as Lachish, Gezer, Megiddo and Hazor were charged with protecting Egyptian interests in Canaan. These exchanges were written in the first half of the fourteenth century BCE in Akkadian – the lingua franca of the Middle East in that period.
In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE Egypt still had a strong military presence in Canaan, but around 1170–1150 BCE the Egyptians were gone, leaving a power vacuum soon to be filled by the Philistines and the Israelites. This vacuum gives us the likely earliest dates for the Israelites to have entered Canaan. Prior to that time, the Egyptian grip on the country was still too strong to allow any substantial infiltration by outsiders.
However, there is almost no archaeological evidence between 1250–950 BCE to indicate that the Israelites had arrived in Canaan. The only tangible evidence is from a ‘Hymn of Victory’ stela found at Thebes, set up by the Egyptian King Merneptah, which records:
Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.12
The stela places the date at c.1210 BCE, but the reference to Israel is written in the sense of ‘Israel’ being a people, rather than a land. The interpretation is, therefore, that the Israelites had suffered a military defeat but that they were not yet in ‘Israel’.
The date of the departure of the Egyptians from Canaan indicates that the date of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt cannot have allowed them to have arrived in Canaan until around 1170–1150 BCE. Paul Goodman13 gives the Exodus as 1220 BCE, the Encyclopaedia of the Bible14 and G.W. Anderson15 both date it to 1250 BCE. In terms of consistency with the Bible, Paul Goodman’s 1220 BCE becomes more convincing. If we assume the Bible is correct in saying that the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years, they would have arrived in Canaan around 1180–1170 BCE, just about the time the Egyptian presence was ending.
A COOKE’S TOUR OF MIDDLE EASTERN TIME*19
We can now begin to work back from the date of the Israelites’ arrival in Canaan to the date of Abraham’s arrival in Egypt.
According to the Old Testament:
Abraham is 100 when Isaac is born
Abraham spends 100 years in Canaan
Abraham dies at the age of 175
Isaac, his son, dies aged 180
Jacob, Isaac’s son, dies aged 147.
The problem of the ages of biblical characters is one of considerable difficulty for scholars and orthodox believers. The extreme example is Methuselah, whose age is given as 969 years! – the longest living person mentioned in the Bible.16
It could be that a much shorter year was in use. This seems very unlikely, however. The cycle of easily observable heavenly bodies provided a ready-made ‘clock’ for early civilizations.17
The more interesting, and more plausible, explanation that I now propose relates to the integers, the numbers themselves. It appears that the chroniclers of the story of Abraham made up the ages of the Patriarchs as a means of indicating
the thread of continuity between them, and because of the significance of the numbers themselves. If we look at the ages of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob we find the Bible gives their ages as 175, 180 and 147 respectively, each of which has a precise mathematical relationship, being summations of squared numbers.
Abraham: 175 = 22+ 32+ 42+ 52+ 112
Isaac: 180 = 62 + 122
Jacob: 147 = 32+ 52+ 72+ 82
The chroniclers appear to have had an ongoing fascination with squared numbers, as did the Egyptians. The mathematical relationship of these three numbers is too precise to be accidental. In fact, all the main early characters of the Old Testament have ages that conform to squared number relationships whose sequences are probably of significance.18
In further mathematical investigations, I also discovered that two of the most important characters in the Old Testament, Joseph and Moses, were allocated very special mathematical ages.
Joseph (Jacob’s son): 110 = 22 + 32 + 42 + 92
Joseph’s Biblical age of 110 is not only mathematically consistent with the schemes of square numbers, but also has a highly meaningful significance in Egyptian mythological terms.*20 It is the precise figure mentioned in Coffin Text 228 (Spell 170), as being allowed to a person completing the magic spell.
We know that a generation for Egyptians in Biblical times was about thirty years, and anyone living over one hundred years was considered exceptional. In the Twelfth Dynasty (2000 BCE), Egyptian scribes wrote:
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 10