The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  I also found scholarly corroboration for the link that I believed had existed between the festival of Apet and the early Judaic ceremonies surrounding the Ark of the Covenant. Working through piles of reference materials in the British Library I came across a book published in London in 1884 by the Religious Tract Society and entitled Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments. I might have ignored this slim and unprepossessing volume entirely had I not noticed that its author was a certain A. H. Sayce (who at the time had been Deputy Professor of Philology at Oxford University). Remembering that E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the great authorities on Egyptian religion, had held Sayce in the highest regard (describing him as a ‘distinguished scholar’96) I opened the book at a chapter entitled ‘The Exodus out of Egypt’ and read that, in Sayce’s opinion, ‘the law and ritual of the Israelites’ had been derived from many sources. Amongst these were Various festivals and fasts’ in which

  The gods were carried in procession in ‘ships’, which, as we learn from the sculptures, resembled in form the Hebrew Ark, and were borne on men’s shoulders by means of staves.97

  Encouraged by the support for my speculations that the distinguished nineteenth-century professor had given me, I looked further through the reference works at my disposal and was able to confirm that the ship-like arks carried during the Apet ceremonials had indeed contained gods, or rather small statues of various deities in the Egyptian pantheon.98 These statues had been made of stone and thus, it seemed to me, were not far removed in concept from the stone ‘Tablets of the Testimony’ that had supposedly been lodged inside the Ark of the Covenant and that the Israelites had regarded as embodying their God. As one Hebrew scholar had put it in a seminal paper published in the 1920s:

  The tradition of the two sacred stone tablets within the Ark would point strongly to the conclusion that the original contents of the Ark must have been a sacred stone … [which] was either conceived of as the deity himself, or as the object in which the deity was thought to reside permanently.99

  Nor was this the only connection that I was able to establish between the Ark of the Covenant and the ship-like arks that had been carried in the Apet ceremonies. Those ceremonies, it will be remembered, had taken place in the Upper Egyptian town now known as ‘Luxor’, a relatively recent name derived from the Arabic L’ouqsor (meaning ‘the palaces’). Much earlier, during the period of Greek influence in Egypt (from about the fifth century BC) the whole area including the nearby temple at Karnak had been known as Thebai. Modern Europeans had subsequently corrupted this name to the more familiar ‘Thebes’.100 In the process, however, they had obscured an intriguing etymology: the word Thebai had in fact been derived from Tapet, the name by which the Luxor/Karnak religious complex had been known in the era of Tutankhamen and Moses.101 And Tapet in its turn was merely the feminine form of Apet – in other words, Luxor and Karnak had originally been named after the great festival for which they had been famous,102 a festival that had centred upon a procession in which arks had been carried between the two temples. What intrigued me about this, of course, was the phonetic similarity of the words Tapet and Tabot, a similarity that looked all the less coincidental after I had discovered from one learned source that the shape of the Tapet arks had evolved over the passing centuries, gradually ceasing to resemble ships so closely and becoming instead ‘more and more like a chest’.103

  As noted above, I had long since established that the Ethiopic term Tabot had been derived from the Hebrew tebah, meaning ‘ship-like container’. Now I began to wonder whether it was not entirely possible that the word tebah had itself originally been derived from the ancient Egyptian Tapet – and whether this derivation might not have come about because the ceremonies devised for the Ark of the Covenant had been modelled upon those of the Apet festival.104

  Such links and coincidences, though by no means attaining the stature of hard evidence, did deepen my conviction that the Ark of the Covenant could only properly be understood in the context of its Egyptian background. Amongst other things, as Professor Kitchen had pointed out, that background demonstrated that Moses would have had the technology and skills at his disposal to fulfil God’s command to build an ‘Ark of acacia wood’ and ‘to plate it inside and out with pure gold’.

  At the same time, however, the sacred relic had been much more than just a wooden box lined with gold. I therefore wondered whether an explanation of its baleful and destructive powers might also be found in Egypt.

  Seeking such an explanation I travelled to that country several times and talked to theologians, biblical scholars and archaeologists. I also surrounded myself with rare books, religious texts, folklore, myths and legends and tried to discern whether threads of fact might not lie entangled amongst the wilder fancies.

  As my research progressed I became increasingly intrigued by the personality of Moses, the Hebrew prophet and law-giver who challenged Pharaoh, who led the children of Israel to the Promised Land, and who also ordered the construction of the Ark of the Covenant after he had supposedly received the ‘blueprint’ for its design from God Himself. The more closely I looked at this towering, heroic figure, the more convinced I became that information of fundamental importance to my understanding of the Ark would be found within the records of his life.

  ‘A magician of the highest order …’

  It is probably the case that every Christian, Muslim and Jew alive in the world today has a shadowy image of the prophet Moses tucked away in some corner of his or her mind. Certainly I was no exception to this rule when I began to think seriously about him and about his role in the mystery of the Ark. My problem, however, was that I needed to flesh out the caricature that I had acquired in Sunday school and, in the process, to gain some real insight into the man who scholars agree was ‘the outstanding figure in the emergence and formulation of the Jewish religion’.105

  Of considerable help to me in completing this task were the extensive and highly regarded historical writings of Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee who lived in Roman-occupied Jerusalem in the first century AD. In his Antiquities of the Jews, compiled from traditions and reference materials unavailable today, this diligent scholar chronicled the four hundred years of Hebrew enslavement in Egypt, which lasted roughly from 1650 until 1250 BC, the probable date of the Exodus.106 The birth of Moses was the key event of this period and was, Josephus said, the subject of a prophecy by an Egyptian ‘sacred scribe’, a person ‘with considerable skill of accurately predicting the future’, who informed Pharaoh that there would arise amongst the Israelites

  one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians were he reared to manhood, and would surpass all men in virtue and win everlasting renown. Alarmed thereat, the king, on the sage’s advice, ordered that every male child born to the Israelites should be destroyed by being cast into the river.107

  On hearing this edict a certain Amram (Moses’s father-to-be) was plunged into ‘grievous perplexity’ because ‘his wife was then with child’. God, however, appeared to him in a dream and comforted him with the news that:

  This child, whose birth has filled the Egyptians with such dread that they have condemned to destruction all the offspring of the Israelites, shall escape those who are watching to destroy him, and, reared in marvellous wise, he shall deliver the Hebrew race from their bondage in Egypt, and be remembered so long as the universe shall endure, not by Hebrews alone but even by alien nations.108

  These two passages were helpful to me because they considerably expanded the biblical narrative on the birth of Moses given in the opening chapters of the book of Exodus. I noted with interest that the great legislator of the Jews had indeed been remembered ‘even by alien nations’. More intriguing by far, however, was the special emphasis put on the prophecy of the ‘sacred scribe’ who, with his ability to foretell the future, could only have been an astrologer at the court of the Pharaoh. In making this point, Josephus seemed to be hinting that – from the outset – there had been something almost magical abo
ut Moses. In the time-honoured tradition of setting a thief to catch a thief, what we had here was a magician predicting the coming of a magician.

  The bare bones of the events that occurred after the child was born are too familiar to require lengthy repetition: aged only three months he was placed by his parents in a papyrus basket coated with bitumen and pitch and cast adrift on the Nile; downriver Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing; she saw the floating crib, heard cries, and sent her handmaiden to rescue the mewling infant.

  Subsequently Moses was brought up in the royal household where, according to the Bible, he was instructed ‘in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’.109 Josephus had little to add at this point, but another classical authority – Philo, the respected Jewish philosopher who lived around the time of Christ – gave a fairly detailed account of exactly what Moses was taught: ‘Arithmetic, geometry, the lore of metre, rhythm and harmony were imparted to him by learned Egyptians. These further instructed him in the philosophy conveyed in symbols as displayed in the so-called holy inscriptions.’ Meanwhile ‘inhabitants of neighbouring countries’ were assigned to teach him ‘Assyrian letters and the Chaldean science of the heavenly bodies. This he also acquired from the Egyptians, who gave special attention to astrology.’110

  Reared as an adopted son of the royal family, Moses was seen for a considerable period as a successor to the throne.111 The implication of this special status, I learned, was that in his youth he would have been given a thorough initiation into all the most arcane priestly secrets and into the mysteries of Egyptian magic112 – a course of study that would have included not only star-knowledge, as indicated by Philo, but also necromancy, divining and other aspects of occult lore.113

  A clue that this may indeed have been so was given in the Bible, where Moses was described as being ‘mighty in words and deeds’.114 In the cogent and dependable judgment of that great scholar and linguist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, this phrase – also and perhaps not coincidentally applied to Jesus Christ115 – contained the coded suggestion that the Hebrew prophet was ‘strong of tongue’, like the Egyptian goddess Isis. What this meant, though Moses was self-confessedly lacking in oratorical eloquence,116 was that he must have been capable of uttering words of power ‘which he knew with correct pronunciation, and halted not in his speech, and was perfect both in giving the command and in saying the word.’117 As such, again like Isis – who was famous for her proficiency in all kinds of witchcraft – he would have been equipped to cast the most potent spells. Others around him would therefore have treated him with a high degree of respect since they would unquestioningly have believed him capable of bending reality and overriding the laws of physics by altering the normal order of things.

  I was able to turn up a considerable body of evidence from the Old Testament to support the contention that Moses had been seen in exactly this way. There was, nevertheless, one important proviso: his magic was depicted throughout as being wrought solely at the command of Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews.

  According to the book of Exodus, Moses’s first encounter with Yahweh took place in a wilderness near the land of Midian (to which he had fled to escape retribution after his anger at the persecution of Hebrew labourers had led him to kill an Egyptian overseer). From the geographical clues that were given, it was clear that this wilderness must have been located in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, most probably within sight of the peak of Mount Sinai itself118 (where Moses was later to receive the Ten Commandments and the ‘blueprint’ for the Ark). The Bible, at any rate, spoke of ‘the mountain of God’ and placed Moses at its foot when the Lord appeared to him ‘in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.’119 God instructed Moses that he should return to Egypt in order to lead his people out of their bondage there.120 Before agreeing, however, the prophet asked the name of the strange and powerful being who had addressed him.121

  This daring question in itself contained evidence of Moses’s identity as a sorcerer for, as the great anthropologist Sir James Frazer observed in his seminal work The Golden Bough:

  Every Egyptian magician … believed that he who possessed the true name possessed the very being of god or man, and could force even a deity to obey him as a slave obeys his master. Thus the art of the magician consisted in obtaining from the gods a revelation of their sacred names, and he left no stone unturned to accomplish his end.122

  The Lord, however, did not respond directly to the prophet’s question. Instead he replied briefly and enigmatically with these words: ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ By way of further clarification he then added: ‘I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’123

  The phrase ‘I am who I am’ (or ‘I am what I am’, ‘I am that I am’, depending on the translation) was, I discovered, the root meaning of the name Yahweh used in the Old Testament – and subsequently bastardized in the Authorized King James Version of the Bible as ‘Jehovah’. This name, however, was no name; rather it was an evasive formula based loosely on the Hebrew verb ‘to be’ and written as four consonants which transliterated into the Latin alphabet as ‘YHWH’. Known to theologians as the tetragrammaton, these letters revealed nothing beyond the active existence of God and thus continued to conceal the divine identity from modern researchers every bit as effectively as they had once done from Moses. Indeed so potent was their mystery that no one today could even claim to know exactly how they should be pronounced; rendering the tetragrammaton as ‘Yahweh’ by the insertion of the vowels ‘a’ and ‘e’ was, however, the accepted convention.124

  The importance of all this from the biblical perspective was that the deity knew, and pronounced, the name of Moses; Moses, by contrast, only managed to obtain from Him the ritual incantation ‘I am who I am’. Henceforward, therefore, the prophet was bound to answer to God and to do his bidding; likewise all his sorcery in the future would derive from the power of God, and from the power of God alone.

  It was understandable that the later redactors of the Scriptures should have wanted to present the relationship between omnipotent God and fallible man in precisely this way. What they could not do, however, was erase the evidence that that man had indeed been a sorcerer; neither could they cover up the most convincing demonstrations of his sorcery – the plagues and pestilences that he was soon to inflict upon the Egyptians in order to force Pharaoh to release the children of Israel from captivity.

  In working these terrible miracles Moses was assisted by his older half-brother Aaron, who frequently served as his agent and spokesman. Both Moses and Aaron were also equipped with rods – effectively magicians’ wands – which they used to work their spells. That of Moses was sometimes referred to as ‘the rod of God’125 and first appeared when the prophet complained to Yahweh that neither Pharaoh, nor the children of Israel, would believe that he had been divinely commissioned, unless he was able to provide some kind of proof. ‘What is that in thine hand?’ God asked. ‘A rod,’ Moses replied.126 God then told him to throw it on the ground ‘that they may believe that the Lord God hath appeared unto thee’:

  And he cast it on the ground and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand.127

  Once again the emphasis put by the scriptural text on the primacy of God’s role in all of this was understandable. Once again also, however, the connections with Egyptian occult practice were quite unmissable. The turning of an inanimate stick into a snake, and then back again into a stick, was a feat frequently carried out by the magicians of that country; likewise the power to control the movements of venomous reptiles was claimed by Egyptian priests from the very earliest times; last but not least, all Egyptian magicians – amongst them the sage Abaaner and the sorceror-king Nectanebus – possessed marvellous rods made of ebony.128

  Looked at in this
light, I did not find it surprising that the first contests between Moses and Aaron on one side, and the priests at Pharaoh’s court on the other, were fairly evenly drawn. To impress the Egyptian tyrant, Aaron threw down his rod – which, of course, became a serpent as soon as it hit the ground. Undaunted Pharaoh called for his own sages and sorcerers, ‘and with their witchcraft the magicians of Egypt did the same. Each threw his staff down and these turned into serpents.’ Then, however, Aaron’s rod – imbued with the superior power of Yahweh – swallowed up the rods of the magicians.129

  In the next encounter Moses and Aaron turned the waters of the Nile to blood. Remarkable though this trick was, Pharaoh remained unimpressed because ‘the magicians of Egypt used their witchcraft to do the same.’130

  The plague of frogs, which followed, was likewise matched by Pharaoh’s sorcerers.131 But the plague of mosquitoes (gnats in some translations, lice in others) was too much for them: ‘The magicians with their witchcraft tried to produce mosquitoes and failed. The mosquitoes attacked men and beasts. So the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” ’132

  Still the hard-hearted king refused to let the Hebrews go. He was punished for this with a plague of flies133 and soon afterwards with a pestilence that killed livestock.134 Moses next caused a plague of boils to break out (he did this by throwing a handful of soot into the air135) and then, by using his rod, he procured thunder and hail, a plague of locusts and three days of ‘thick darkness’.136 Finally, the Hebrew prophet arranged for the death of ‘all the first-born of the land of Egypt: the first-born of Pharaoh, the first-born of the prisoner in his dungeon, and the first-born of all the cattle.’137 After this: ‘The Egyptians urged the people to hurry up and leave the land because, they said, “Otherwise we shall all be dead”.’138