 The Genesis of |
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The Genesis of Israel and Egypt proposes a radically new view of ancient history and the forces that shaped it. The book begins with the great flood which has been recorded in the traditions of virtually the entire human race. However, as the author clearly explains, a flaw in the methodology has resulted in contemporary events being placed centuries apart.
The author shows how the Abraham, the father of the Israelite nation, is related in terms of character and personality to Menes, the first pharaoh of Egypt and the two should be regarded as contemporary. However, according to Sweeney these two neighbouring peoples are out of synchronisation by 1000 years.
What emerges is a fresh and detailed picture of ancient history which is concise, specific and intriguing.
But there have been dissenting voices. An academic storm was raised during the 1950s by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, who argued that the catastrophic events described vividly in the Old Testament (i.e., the Deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus, etc.) did actually occur, and occurred very much as they were described. Velikovsky held that the last of these events, the Exodus, which touched directly on Egypt, was in fact a major landmark in Egyptian history. He demonstrated quite convincingly that this event was recorded by the Egyptians, and showed that modern scholars had missed the identification because they had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the events described in the Book of Exodus. The Catastrophist position adopted by Velikovsky brought to light an enormous distortion in ancient chronology. These momentous events were effaced from the history books because an erroneous and virtually arbitrary chronology, based mainly on the writings of Manetho, had been adopted for Egyptian history. The histories of the other ancient lands were then reconstructed in line with the distorted Egyptian chronology. This 'modern' history of the ancient world had virtually no point of contact with the Biblical and Classical histories, and clashed repeatedly with them.
The present writer holds with Velikovsky's catastrophist analysis; and the book which follows is largely an attempt to show that when we accept the catastrophist framework all the elements of the puzzle fit into place. The earliest part of Hebrew history, we will find, can indeed be made to reconcile - and in a most spectacular way - with early Egyptian history.
The central theme of my work is thus the parallel origins of two neighbouring and closely related lands. The histories of Israel and Egypt were intertwined at the very beginning, and the association established then continued unbroken for many centuries. Thus I begin by seeking to establish a link between the histories of the two peoples.
Chapter 1Chapter 1 is concerned with an examination of the first and greatest of all biblical events, the Deluge of Noah. We see how archaeologists working in different parts of the world discovered abundant evidence of cataclysmic destruction in ancient times, consistent with the action of flood waters. However, there was little academic collaboration, and destruction episodes, which were in fact contemporary, were placed centuries apart by scholars using different dating methods and procedures. Thus, for example, the great flood discovered by Leonard Woolley in Mesopotamia was deemed to be a local event, since destruction levels in Syria and elsewhere, which were in fact contemporary, were placed a thousand years later by scholars who had not paid sufficient attention to Woolley's work.In this way the true nature and scale of the Flood of Ur was disguised, and a totally distorted view of ancient history was pieced together. |
It was just these unnaturally extended chronologies that kept Egyptian and Hebrew histories 'out of sync' and contradictory.
Having thus linked Abraham and Menes, we are presented with an entirely new and unexpected view of ancient times. We now find the histories of archaic Israel and Egypt fitting together like matching pieces of a jigsaw. The next 'match' comes with Joseph and Imhotep. Egyptian tradition tells us that two centuries or so after Menes lived Djoser, 'The Wise' king, whose vizier, Imhotep, was regarded as the greatest of all Egyptian sages. Djoser and Imhotep, the legend says, lived during a famine lasting seven years, and it was a dream of the king's that provided Imhotep with the clue to solving the crisis. Similarly, Hebrew history tells us that two centuries after Abraham there lived Joseph, the great seer and visionary, who became pharaoh's vizier, and helped solve the crisis of a seven-year famine by interpreting the king's dreams.
Historians, of course, have long been aware of the striking resemblances between Imhotep and Joseph, and a large amount has been written on the subject. They would undoubtedly have realised the identity of the two men a long time ago, but the erroneous chronology, which separated them by over a thousand years, confused the issue.
The next 'match' in the histories of the two peoples comes with the Exodus. Archaeology tells us that sometime near the close of the Early Bronze period, a great natural catastrophe, whose effects are still plainly visible, struck the entire Near East. This period of darkness, but also of invention and creativity, brought forth the distinctive 'Pessimistic' literary genre in Egypt. Scribes of the time, and of later years, described the horrific events of the 'Day of Shedyetshya', the 'Day of Misery', during which the Egyptian nation, and indeed the whole of mankind, was brought to the verge of destruction. These terrible events, I hold, occurred around 800 BC, some seven centuries after the 'traditional' date of the Exodus.
In the years following this catastrophe, the Egyptians constructed their greatest monuments - the pyramids: these were erected in honour of the celestial deities whose awesome power had so recently been made manifest. Whilst the Egyptians erected pyramids, the Hebrews were engaged in the conquest of Canaan.
Having placed Moses and the Exodus in the eighth century BC rather than the remote antiquity of the fifteenth, we might be more justified in taking seriously the Biblical claim that there was a man called Moses, and that it was he who composed the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Chapter 5, which examines the structure of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch, provides further support for such a belief. Here we discover that the books attributed to Moses are, as we would expect, heavily influenced by Egyptian custom, usage, and language. This is in total contrast to the later Biblical books, where the Egyptian influence is much diminished.
As might be expected, the sources used in a study such as this are diverse in the extreme. I am particularly indebted to the Trojan work of scholars in many fields over the past century, and I have found publications such as Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Breasted's Ancient Records absolutely indispensable as sources of documentary material. The meticulous excavating, cataloguing, and documenting carried out over the years by great figures such as Maspero, Petrie, Brugsch, Schaeffer, and Breasted has been most helpful, and their scrupulous honesty and attention to detail has assisted me in the task of rectifying Manetho's chaotic chronology.
However, it is to Immanuel Velikovsky that the present work owes most. Velikovsky's brilliant exposition of the contradictions inherent in ancient chronology is the key that has unlocked the secrets of antiquity. In Ages in Chaos (1953), he proposed a complete reconstruction of later Egyptian history, beginning with the Exodus, which he believed to date from the fall of the 'Middle Kingdom'. It is largely under the inspiration of Ages in Chaos that the present work seeks to reconstruct the earlier part of Egyptian history. Velikovsky began with the Exodus; we end with the same event.
I am also indebted to those writers of the Velikovskian school who have carried on the work of reconstruction, and have contributed so much to its completion. In particular, I would cite Gunnar Heinsohn, whose Sumerer Gab es Nicht (Frankfurt, 1988), brought forward in a very forceful way the need for a complete overhaul of our concept of the Early and Middle Bronze periods. Heinsohn proved that Mesopotamian history, properly speaking, did not begin until after the Ishtar Flood catastrophe, and this provided a powerful impetus for lowering the age of the Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms.
The limitations of a work such as this are obvious. Because of the wide scope of the evidence surveyed, and drawn as it is from many disciplines, only a small portion of what exists has been examined. Some subjects in the book could certainly have been examined in greater detail, though I am aware that this could have obscured the central argument and weakened its general impact. I concede that errors may have crept into the body of the book. In any work, mistakes are almost inevitable, and this is particularly so in an endeavour such as this. Nevertheless, I hold by the major conclusions reached, and am very conscious that I have the full weight of ancient tradition on my side. The conventional history of Egypt is built on a modern invention, the 'Sothic Calendar'; the history that follows is built on the writings of the Egyptians themselves, and on the writings of their neighbours, the Hebrews. The reader may judge for himself which of the two makes most sense.
Emmet J Sweeney
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