The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  CHAPTER 5 THE COCOONED CAULDRON OF EGYPT – HOTBED OF CIVILIZATION

  1. Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Hermann Junker, Die Gotterlehre von Memphis (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1939); H. Kees, ‘Der Gotterglaube im Alten Agypten’, Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Agyptischen Gesellschaft 45, (Leipzig, 1941).

  2. The Hyksos were semitic invaders from the east who dominated most of Egypt from about 1640 to 1538 BCE. They made their capital at Avaris in the delta region of the Nile and worshipped Seth, Anath and Astarte.

  3. James Henry Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912).

  4. Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Egyptian Religion (Avenel, N.J.: Gramercy Books, 1996).

  5. Dates of pharaohs are averages from those given by a number of studies quoted in The Sceptre of Egypt – A Background for the Study of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by William C. Hayes, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990.

  6. R.T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead (New York: Gramercy Books, 1995).

  9. Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt.

  10. The ‘snake’, the ‘word’, and the ‘eye’ appear in many guises in Egyptian mythology.

  Assuming you have a strong stomach, lift the musty lid of a typical coffin of the Ninth Dynasty, or just examine the texts running around the outside if you feel too queasy, and you will find references to the ‘Primeval Serpent’, who can speak and who delineates the limits of existence. Here the ‘serpent’ appears to be an agent of God and on the side of good. In contrast, in Hebrew theology the ‘snake’ is viewed in a rather odd way. In the Garden of Eden it is seen as an evil tempter, but in the Midrash (see Glossary) interpretation and in commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, the snake is referred to as an agent or messenger of God, rather than his opponent.

  One possible explanation of this contradiction is that the ‘evil snake’ derives from the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesh-type myths, whilst the ‘favourable serpent’ (who is also a protector), derives from an early Egyptian tradition that percolates in at a later date.

  The ‘snake’ is indeed an ongoing creature of fascination in Egyptian mythology. It appears on inscriptions with beards, as the male ‘serpent’, and in the form of a cobra as the female version, later coming to represent female gods. In its many forms it also plays a dangerous role, as shown in this Pyramid Text, Spell 664:

  If you become dangerous to me I will step on you,

  but if you recognize me I will not tread on you,

  for you are that mysterious and shapeless thing,

  of whom the gods foretold that you have neither arms nor legs,

  on which to go following your brother gods…

  Here is a clear reference to how the snake obtained its form, re-echoed in the Bible in Genesis 4:14:

  Then the Lord God said to the serpent,

  Because you did this, More cursed shall you be,

  Than all cattle. And all the wild beasts: On your belly shall you crawl, And dirt shall you eat,

  All the days of your life.’

  In another facet of the Memphitic doctrine, the definitive ‘motor’ of creation was seen as the ‘word’ that God gave to name everything in the world – without which there would be nothing.

  And then Ptah rested after he had created everything and every Divine Word.

  These concepts are again closely echoed in the Old Testament story of the Creation and Adam.

  Genesis 2:19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air: and brought them unto the man [Adam] to see what he would call them; and whatsoever the man would call every living creature, that was to be the name thereof.

  Genesis 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it he rested from all His work which God in creating had made.

  ‘The Divine Word’ features strongly throughout early Egyptian thought, almost as a spiritual force with a power of its own, and associated with the good and favourable act of creation. Intimately associated with the Egyptian idea of the ‘Word’ being the vehicle of God’s creation is the moral concept of good deeds furthering the ‘Word’, and bad deeds harming the ‘ka’ and hindering divine redemption – concepts readily picked up by Judaism and Buddhism. From Pyramid Text 1098 we find:

  When the doing of what was to be done was in confusion,

  when the doing and the commanding of that which was to be done was asleep.

  I create and command for him who commands the good;

  My lips are the Twin Companies,

  I am the great Word.

  Compare this with the beginning of the Gospel of St John in the New Testament:

  John 1:1–3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

  The same was in the beginning with God.

  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

  Whilst ‘the Word’ is the speaking or naming element the Supreme God uses in creation, ‘the Eye’ is the seeing element. It is dispatched by Atum to seek out ‘Shu’ and ‘Tefnut’, subsidiary creative-vehicle gods, of air that separates earth and sky, and of cosmic order, respectively. Coffin Texts, Spell 80 (Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt):

  …after the appearance of my Eye, which I dispatched while I was still alone in the waters in a state of inertness, before I had found anywhere to stand or sit…

  In the Egyptian ‘order’ of creation, which the Bible closely follows, the seeing Eye (which is the third procedure of creation), is followed next by the creation of light. As we have seen, and will see further on, the Bible faithfully follows the subject and approximates the order of creation in Egyptian cosmology. Immediately prior to the creation of light, there is a reference for the first and only time in the Biblical story to God’s seeing and that what He sees is favourable.

  Genesis 1:12–14 The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good.

  And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

  God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times – the days and the years.’

  Later on, in the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom, the ‘Eye’ takes on a deeper meaning and becomes a symbol of realization and complete awareness of a higher form of existence beyond mere earthly trappings. Its rebus (representation) appears in numerous Egyptian inscriptions.

  Another, more enigmatic, Biblical reference to the power of ‘the Eye’ occurs in Zechariah 3:9.

  For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts – and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.

  This is an apparent reference to the requirement that the coping stone of the Second Temple should have seven eyes to watch over its well-being – seven being a highly significant number in Egyptian and Hebrew belief, viz the seven forms of Osiris, the seven days of creation, etc. (Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt).

  It is impossible to avoid the realization that there are direct Egyptian parallels for all the essential elements of the Biblical story of creation:

  a) creating the sky

  b) making man in the image of God

  c) breathing life into the nostrils of man

  d) creating the birds, fish and animals for the benefit and pleasure of man.

  The Egyptian texts continue in the vein of the Prophet Ipu:

  Consider mankind as the flocks of God. He made the sky for the enjoyment of their hearts, he repelled the greed of the waters, he created
the breath of life for their noses;

  His images are they, the products of His flesh. He rises in the sky for their hearts’ desire, for them He has made the plants, animals, birds and fish – all for their delight.

  11. Morenz, Egyptian Religion; Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt.

  12. Formation of the planets in our solar system is now believed to have come about by the condensation of massive dust and gas clouds that enveloped the sun. The theory has been reenforced by the prediction and confirmation that all the planets should have the same chemical composition as the sun. For example, the amounts of oxygen and hydrogen, as free molecules, hydroxyl radical (OH) or water (H2O) in the planets and in the sun are similar.

  It may seem strange to think of water existing on the sun, but it can retain its molecular bonding as superheated steam up to about 3900oK, and the temperature of sunspots are at about 3300oK compared to a surface temperature of 5785oK. NASA, in Houston, Texas, has recently reported that the Galileo space probe to Jupiter shows only 10 per cent of the expected water content in its atmosphere. Steve Connor, ‘Jupiter Probe Upsets Theories’, The Sunday Times, 21 January 1996.

  13. R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

  14. The elements of the new doctrine are preserved for us in texts written in the time of Pharaoh Shabako, around 700 BCE.

  15. Trinities of gods were formed by a grouping of three Egyptian gods, often as father, mother and child figures comprising a divine family, who were worshipped on a localized basis. The practice arose during the New Kingdom period of the Amenhotep pharaohs. Examples were the combination of Amun, Mut and Khons at Thebes; Ptah, Sekhmet and Nefertum at Memphis; Horus, Hathor and the young Horus at Edfu; Khnum, Satet and Anuket at Yeb (Elephantine). A triad worshipped on a national basis was that of Osiris (worshipped locally at Abydos), Isis (worshipped locally at Philae) and Horus (worshipped locally at Edfu).

  16. James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).

  17. Adriaan de Buck, The Egyptian Coffin Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935).

  18. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

  19. By the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, c.1296 BCE, Osiris is superseding Re as the judge of the dead. The continued adherence to Osiris is attested to by an Osireion (subterranean cenotaph) built in 1290 BCE by Seti I, at Abydos.

  20. Morenz, Egyptian Religion.

  21. ‘Papyrus 3284’, in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

  22. Morenz, Egyptian Religion.

  23. A. Moret, ‘Le Rituel du Culte Divin’, Journalier en Egypte (Paris: Musée Guimet, 1902).

  24. Morenz, Egyptian Religion.

  25. Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1994).

  CHAPTER 6 THE AMENHOTEP FAMILY CONTINUUM

  1. Peter A. Clayton, Chronicles of the Pharaohs (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998); Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

  2. John Romer, Romer’s Egypt: A New Light on the Civilization of Ancient Egypt (London: Joseph, 1982).

  3. N. de G. Davies, The Tomb of Rekh-mi-Re at Thebes (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Egyptian Expedition Publications, 1943).

  4. James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).

  5. The Egyptian goddess Hathor took various bovine forms, including one of motherliness as a suckling cow. In her vengeful aspect of ‘Seven Hathors’, she enacted what was ordained by fate.

  6. Morenz, Egyptian Religion.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.

  9. Morenz, Egyptian Religion.

  CHAPTER 7 ABRAHAM – FATHER OF THREE RELIGIONS, FOUNDER OF NONE

  1. Israel Eldad and Moshe Aumann, Jerusalem Chronicles – News of the Past, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Reubeni Foundation, 1954).

  2. Paul Goodman, History of the Jews (London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1941).

  3. The most likely date for the completion of the Torah – the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), in substantially the form in which we know it today, comes from a Biblical reference in Nehemiah 8:1–10. This relates to a public reading of the Torah in Jerusalem, conducted by Ezra the Scribe, which is believed to have taken place in 444 BCE. A preponderance of modern scholars, emboldened by the dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls, take this date as marking the completion of the written down Torah. Inevitably, the ‘old’ story became embroidered with the rosey tint of hindsight and the message that the then writers wished to convey.

  One historian, John van Seters, takes an extreme view that the texts were not completed until the fifth century CE, but in the light of modern thinking this view is hardly tenable. John van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

  4. James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).

  5. Ibid.

  6. George W. Anderson, The History and Religion of Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  7. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). Dr Jacob Bronowski was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Director of the Council for Biology in Human Affairs at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California. His television series was first screened in the early 1970s.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Hans Eysenck, Test Your IQ (London: Thorsons, 1994).

  11. David Rohl, in his book A Test of Time (London: Century, 1995), postulates, with some efficacy, wild divergences in the conventionally accepted dates of Egyptian dynasties from the second millennium BCE onwards. He suggests that some of these dates are as much as 200–300 years out of phase, but his theory finds little support from other historians, and his date of c.1450 BCE for the Exodus is unconvincing.

  12. Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

  13. Goodman, History of the Jews.

  14. David Alexander and Pat Alexander (eds.), The Lion Encyclopedia of the Bible (Berkhamsted: Lion Publishing, 1978).

  15. Anderson, The History of Religion in Israel.

  16. Obviously these longevities are suspect and, in contemporary terms, impossible. The New Guinness Book of Records (Stamford, Conn.: Guinness Media, 1995) gives the oldest authenticated age of a human as 120 years and 237 days, for Shigechiyo Izumi, who lived on Tokunoshima Island, Japan. Born on 29 June 1865, he died in 1986 and attributed his longevity to God, Buddha and the Sun. Jeanne Louise Calment, of Arles, in France, who was reputed to have been born on 21 February 1875, died on 4 August 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. The Bible itself, in Psalm 90:10 states that:

  The days of our years are threescore years and ten;

  And if by reason of strength they be four score years…

  17. By the year 2100 BCE the Sumerians were using a 360-day year, based on a 12-month solar calendar. The ancient Egyptians also used a solar calendar and later added a ‘little month’ of five days – each of which celebrated the births of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys. Around 2773 BCE, and possibly as early as 4228 BCE, they cottoned on to the helical rising of Sirius as occurring at the same time as the annual flooding of the Nile and the conjunction of the sun, thus giving them a regular interval of 365 sunsets and sunrises, which they took as the length of their year. See Alexander Hellemans and Bryan Bunch, The Timetables of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

  Hellenic astronomers added the missing quarter day to the Egyptian calendar by adding a leap day every four years. This addition was only fully accepted by the civilized world when Julius Caesar made it a ma
ndatory part of the Roman Calendar in 46 BCE, and to correct for the seasons had to make that year last 445 days – the longest year on record! The final ‘tweaking’ was made by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, who decreed the dropping of the leap year in years that end in two zeros. (See the Glossary for further details on calendars.)

  Another explanation for the anomalous Biblical years is that the chroniclers of the Old Testament needed to fit the ages of Biblical characters to a time-scale that allowed them to count back, generation by generation, to a preconceived idea of the date of creation at 3760 BCE.

  This preconceived date is in itself, a source of difficulty for Biblical fundamentalists. ‘Big Bang’, the currently accepted scientific theory of the beginnings of the universe, occurred about 15 billion years ago. The earliest earth life forms are dated to 3.5 billion years ago – 1 billion years after the earth was formed. Animal life-forms started emerging onto the land from the seas about 450 million years ago, and the human species began to evolve away from their ancestral chimpanzees about 8 million years ago, began walking upright about 4 million years ago and started making stone tools about 2.4 million years ago.

  18. Starting with the first man in the Bible, Adam, we find:

  Adam: 930 = 52+ 62+ 162+ 172+ 182

  Seth (Adam’s son): 912 = 52 + 62 + 92 +152 162 + 172

  Enosh (Seth’s son): 905 = 62 + 162 + 172 + 182

  Kenan (Enosh’s son): 910 = 22 + 62 + 102 + 152 162 + 172

  Mahalalel (Kenan’s son): 895 = 22 + 112 + 152 + 162 172

  Jared (Mahalalel’s son): 962 = 22 + 142 + 152 + 162 172

  Enoch (Jared’s son): 365 = 102 + 112 + 122

  Methuselah (Enoch’s son): 969 = 102 + 162 + 172 + 182

  Lamech (Methuselah’s son): 777 = 82 + 102 + 172 + 182

  Noah (Lamech’s son): 950 = 92 + 162 + 172 + 182

  Terah (Abraham’s father): 205 = 32 + 142

  British physicist/mathematician and computer consultant, Roger Smolski, points out that Joseph-Louis Legrange, in the eighteenth century, showed that every positive integer can be written as the sum of, at most, four integers (except for some numbers below 20 if 12 is disregarded). He notes Adam’s age can be reduced to 232+ 202+12; Seth’s to 162+162+202; Kenan’s to 302+32+12; Mahalalel’s to 232+142+112+72; Jared’s to 292+112; Abraham’s to 102+52+52+52. So if there is any significance in the choice of Biblical ages it is in the sequence of the square numbers.