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To Dawn
 Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of
cruelty are in their habitations. Cursed be their
anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it
was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and
scatter them in Israel.
Genesis, 49: 5-7

I
n his Essays and Notes to the West-Eastern
Divan (1819), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 –
1832) included a study about Moses the man. It is a
panoramic view admirably presenting this
mythological figure as a child of the real world. Of
course, apart from the Bible there is not a shred of
archaeological evidence for Moses or the exodus from
Egypt, which is strange if the census figures given
in Exodus and Leviticus are even remotely
something to go by.
One doesn’t need to read Bishop Colenso to realize
that for such a “multitude” there couldn’t be enough
ground to put their feet down, if indeed all the people
had gathered at the entrance to the tent of the
tabernacle: “How many would the whole court
have contained? The area of the court
outside the tabernacle was 1,692 square
yards. But the ‘whole congregation’ would
have made a body of people nearly 20 miles
– or, more accurately, 33,530 yards – long,
and 18 feet wide; that is to say, packed
closely together, they would have covered an
area of 201,180 square yards. In fact, the
court, when thronged, could only have held
5,000 people; whereas the able-bodied men
alone exceeded 600,000. It is inconceivable
how, under such circumstances, ‘all the
assembly,’ could have been summoned to
attend ‘at the door of the tabernacle,’ by the
express command of Almighty God” (Bishop
Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined,
1865).
With an eye on the map – always a good method to
check on the historicity of mythological material –
Goethe came to the realization that “each stop is
just two miles apart, a distance which doesn’t
even suffice, that such immense procession
of people should gain the momentum to
break camp.”
In the conditions of the Sinai, especially with
modern forensics, such “procession” would have left
enough traces of its existence to be detected, even
after four thousand years, and be it only for the heaps
of ossified turds along the way, initially hidden under
a shovel full of sand, according to the law (Deutoronomy
23: 13) but now laid bare by the weather conditions.
This is the day and age of satellite tracking, yet the
scholars still have not a clue where some of the most
crucial places are located. For Mount Sinai, where
Moses allegedly had hammered out his business
agreement with the god of the Midianites (Exodus 3: 1),
also known as the Ten Commandments, the maps
in my Oxford Bible indicate two different places, four
hundred miles apart! 
Nevertheless, the faithful and the tourists have –
should I again say “of course?” – already made up
their minds and buy picture postcards and holy
trinkets at a site that since the crusades is running a
brisk business in phony artifacts.
The Jewish Bible and especially
the Pentateuch in its present form are mainly
concoctions of the scriptural cottage industry under
Ezra (480 – 440 BC) dating from well after Exile (580 – 538
BC). Some of the materials still preserve shadows of
their polytheistic origins (Psalms 74: 14-15; 89: 9-10; Isaiah
51: 9-10; the book of Job). Yet what is one to think that the
most ancient book of the entire Bible, the Book of
Judges, which is the only one that undoubtedly
predates the period of Ezra and probably of Exile,
barely ever mentions Moses by name, I counted three
times? The first and second Book of Kings refer to
Moses even less, just one time. And what could
possibly be the meaning of those absurd census figures
in the book of Exodus? If I ventured a guess, I would
think that the post-exilic author extrapolated his
figures from the census of taxpaying Jews living in the
far-flung dispersion under the sway of Babylon.
So was there ever an escape from bondage in Egypt
in the first place? And when was this supposed to have
happened?
Most of the so-called “Bible-scholars” are more
interested in religious propaganda than in facts, or
perhaps I should say they see their mission in finding
facts that support the propaganda. So it doesn’t strike
me as too much of a surprise that they like to home in
on Ramses II (1184 – 1153 BC), as their favorite pharaoh. I
guess for most of these people Ramses is pretty much
the only pharaoh whose name they can spontaneously
recall and pronounce. Yet a little later the same
biblical scholars and some of the secular archeologists
agree on 1410 BC as the date for the campaign of
Moses’ lieutenant Joshua – which would
precede Pharaoh Ramses and the alleged exodus by
at least two centuries. It doesn’t make sense.
On the other hand the archaeology seems to be
shoring up the legend of Joshua’s campaign with an
impressive trail of carbon-dated sites of destruction.
Such evidence would be strong, if the destruction
weren’t largely due to tectonic activity. Maybe the
saga was invented to explain these remnants of fallen
and often abandoned structures to the people of a
much later period – Jericho has a long history, it is the
oldest permanent settlement on the planet, almost
twelve thousand years old. Besides why has such trail
of destruction to be the sign for an invasion? A social
revolution is just as destructive. The diplomatic
correspondence found in the ancient capital of
Pharaoh Akhenaton (1380 – 1362 BC) is telling us of
pastoral Canaanites up in arms against their rulers in
the fortified cities. The word “Habiru” or “Hebrew”
originally may have meant “outcast.” It seems the
Egyptians exploited these conflicts to control the
region.
So what has archaeology to say if we shift the date
for Joshua’s campaign towards the twelfth or eleventh
century BC, in order to vaguely bring it in line with
the date for Pharaoh Ramses?
Well, it doesn’t work: it would be leading us into a
period where the settlement at Jericho was without
any walls and defensive works and doesn’t show signs
of destruction. The regime of Pharaoh Ramses kept a
tight watch on the affairs east of the Sinai; Ramses, the
man who had beaten in battle the Hittites, the
foremost power of his period, was not the man to
allow a tribal chief to piss on Egypt’s Palestinian
backyard.
Perhaps we should also not dismiss out of hand a
more sinister reason for making up Joshua’s story of
conquest and all-out genocide.
For starters, this is a story of divesting an
indigenous population of their homeland. The exilic
editor has Joshua call Canaan his “promised land,”
but this has set an ominous example not only for the
region but also for the politicians of distant posterity.
When American settlers armed with bullets and the
bible divested the natives of their land, they
constantly referred to Canaan and the Promised Land.
The injustice of the act to the conquered is palpable,
whatever the ideological excuse.
But then again – what exactly is the excuse here?
In my opinion the entire book of Joshua is a piece
of fiction, the first Zionist manifesto. Somebody in the
Babylonian exile dreamed up a scheme to regain the
Palestinian homeland but for obvious reasons did not
dare naming Babylon as the oppressor and instead
shifted the story to a mythological past. The book is
full of hate messages and fantasizes to inflict a
holocaust on the indigenous occupants of the former
homeland. Coming to think of it, the entire Pentateuch
may have been part of this utopian project, concocting
a master plan for the return to Zion under the guise of
a mythological tale from Egypt. And the natives to be
slaughtered in this gruesome scenario would be the
author’s own countrymen, the ones who preferred
collaboration instead of exile and now profited from
the redistribution of land under the new order. If
nothing else this would indeed fit the definition of a
“prophetic book.”
Later all these policies came to fruition under
Nehemiah and Ezra and that leaves us with a third
possibility, namely that the book was concocted as a
justification after the event. The politicians of the
second temple needed something, a supporting
authority for their actions, an authority that came
directly from up high and not just from the decrees of
a foreign power.
Considering the archaeological evidence there is
no indication of a distinct difference between the
Hebrew race and the indigenous Canaanites.
The excavation sites yield the same style of pottery
and display the same architecture of domestic
dwellings and places of worship; from the teeth of the
skeletons we extract the same DNA. So for what
earthly reason should the Hebrews have come as
invaders? There is only one noticeable
difference between the settlements: the absence of pig
bones in the garbage dumps at some of the sites. They
are therefore presumed to belong to Hebrew settlers.
What this find really confirms is the existence of a
dietary taboo, which apparently was not common to
every person in the land; however, the carbon dating
reaches way back to a period long before the earliest
evidence that Yahweh’s religion even existed (Israel
Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman , The Bible Unearthed:
Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its
Sacred Texts, 2001).
That is to be expected. Taboos almost always
predate the religious concoctions that incorporate
them in their body of teachings.
In other words, if we wish to hang on to the notion
of a possible exodus of Semitic tribes from Egypt we
have to look for a much earlier date and very different
circumstances although I don’t think this story
deserves any credence at all.
Maybe Moses was indeed the founder of a cult. For
some reason or other, he did lead his people into the
wilderness, Jim-Jones-style, from which side of the
border is everybody’s guess, but it was a small band of
outcasts lingering between Canaan and the Egyptian
border controls and waving a lure to recruit new
followers from both sides of the border. A possible
date for this kind of “exodus” could be associated with
a pharaoh of the 15th dynasty – perhaps Khamudi or
rather his assailant Ahmose I (1552 – 1527 BC), (a name
that has “Moses” in it, which was rather common in
Egypt). The period tallies well with the epigraphic
records of tribal migrations and the excavation of
Semitic settlements on Egyptian soil and there are
traces of military actions on the Sinai. Egypt was just
recuperating from a century of foreign occupation.
However neither a single letter in the epigraphs
nor the excavation of a single campsite point to
anything even remotely resembling a mass migration
on the biblical scale. And where are the great building
projects the text is speaking of?
If there ever was a real Moses, he was a polytheist
and worshipper of fetishes, like everybody else in the
Bronze Age. The first article in the Ten
Commandments explicitly states that Moses “shall
have no other gods before me” yet this did not
stop the man, in a time of crisis, taking recourse to a
forerunner of Asclepius the Healer (Num. 21: 9). So,
when King Hezekiah (716 – 687 BC) or rather King Josiah
(649 – 609 BC) ordered the destruction of the shrine
ministering to the “Nehushtan” (2 Kings 18: 4), these
 

zealots ironically destroyed the last remnants of a cult

that may have preserved genuine traditions about
Moses. Other than that we only read of Moses the man
what the bigots in Ezra’s inspired team want us to
know.
With one quite remarkable exception: Exodus 
(Exodus 4: 24) has preserved for us a fragment of oral
tradition of which the surrounding circumstances are
now entirely lost: “And it came to pass by the
way in the inn, that Yahweh met Moses, and
sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a
sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her
son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely, a
bloody husband are you to me. So he let him
go: then she said, a bloody husband you are,
because of the circumcision.”
Yahweh trying to kill his chosen protégé? When
was that? Before or after the slaughtering of Yahweh’s
“own people,” the Midianites? The custom of
circumcision is older than any existing religion known
to us –was this an attempt at an etiological
explanation of the custom?
We shall never know, but I suspect we are looking
at the remains of a folktale, a Mishnah of terse little
stories and pithy sayings concerning Moses the fox,
who defied the powers to be and even made the
immortals dance to his tune, which is quite different
from the story of the psychopath in Ezra’s account, as
Goethe already had noted:
“In cold blood, Moses murders an
Egyptian, because he had smitten an
Israelite. Yet this patriotic murder is
discovered, and Moses has to flee the
country. For someone capable of such action,
there is no need to inquire in his breeding,
since he has made his appearance in the
state of raw nature. He is said to have been
favored by a princess and to have received
an education at court. Nothing of this has any
effect on him; he has become a remarkable
and strong man, but under the skin he
remains a savage no matter what the
circumstances. And as such we meet him
again in exile: curt and introvert, and barely
able to communicate. His strong arm earns
him the affection of a Midianite priest and
prince, who welcomes him into his family.
Now he learns about life in the desert, the
place of action for his future as commander
and chief. On the map the Midianites occupy
the land at Mount Horeb, on the western
board of the smaller inlet to the Red Sea,
from where they stretch their territory
towards Moab and the Arnon. From early on
we hear of them as traders, sending their
caravans to Canaan and Egypt. This is the
culture that shelters Moses, where he lives in
isolation as a shepherd. It is the saddest
condition in which an excellent man can find
himself, who is born to anything else but
thinking and speculating and who is spoiling
for action” (Goethe).
I must admit, I find it difficult to see any
“excellence” in Moses’ character.
To me he comes across as a complete thug, your
common terrorist from the Middle East. The
man “warred against the Midianites,” the very
same people who in his hour of need had offered him
shelter and their women  (Numbers 31: 7-11), and yet, “as
God commanded Moses,” his people “slew all
the males and the kings of Midian, and took
all the women and their little ones, and all
their cattle, flocks, and goods. And they burnt
all their cities wherein they dwelt with fire.”
How so? Had this “God” not originated from the
Midianites themselves (Exodus 2: 11-15; 2: 21) and now he
demands the slaughter of his own people? Auschwitz
comes to mind. And Moses? Moses complies!
This is the founder of the first of the three
Abrahamic religions? Really? Why should I, or
anybody listen to anything this psychopath is telling
us? Compared to Moses, our Osama Bin Laden was a
philanthropist. No matter how we look at
it, Exodus (Exodus 12: 29; 12: 35) is telling the
horrendous story of the earliest act of unmitigated
terrorism on record.
After Pharaoh had turned a deaf ear to the
petitions of the Hebrew elders, “Moses’ people,” says
Goethe, “under the pretext of preparing a big
festival” cajole “their neighbors to provide gold
and silver ware, and the very moment when
the Egyptians believe the Israelites to be
occupied in harmless festivities, they fall
victim to a kind of reversed Sicilian Vesper:
the foreigner murders the native, the guest
his host, […], their special task force in a
brutal twist singles out the firstborn in order
to keep the surviving heirs busy with
litigations, and so in a hasty escape evade
immediate vengeance. The ploy succeeds;
the assassin is expelled instead of being
punished.” 
Goethe draws a comparison to the Sicilian Vesper
and one really must ask, what is the feast of
“atonement” meant to atone for?
Surely, if Passover commemorates the escape from
Egyptian bondage, it also commemorates how this
was supposed to be accomplished. They smeared the
blood of lambs on the lintels as a sign for the “Angel
of Death” to look somewhere else. Yet, as we all
know, an angel knows his own, only the human
terrorist is in need of directions.
And this terrorist has a face; his name is Caleb:
“Only later, the king assembles his
forces,” Goethe says, “but the horsemen and
chariots, usually the terror of the foot-
soldiers, are given battle on swampy ground
and lose the uneven contest against the swift
and lightly armed Israelite rear-guard;
probably the same determined and
courageous task force which had exercised
its skills in the general massacre: we shall
continue to follow their trail and will not fail
to recognize the brutal signature of their
deeds” (Goethe).
 Goethe thought of Moses as the captain of his
people and criticized him as a tyrannical figure with
“unfortunately even less talent for strategy
than for administration. Moses feels his
insignificance in the greater scheme of
things, realizes that he can’t make a
difference with his strong arm alone, and yet
is incapable of designing a plan. And even if
he were able, he is too awkward to express
his intentions or execute his designs in a way
that would show him in a favorable light.
Frequent discontent and mutinies, uprisings
which even involve his brother Aaron and his
own wife, flare up time and again, a
testimony how little Moses is suited to fill his
position,” and when “Miriam eventually passes
away, this happens only a short time after
she had revolted against Moses, hardly a
coincidence” (Goethe).
 

Acute observations, but the rabbis around Ezra

clearly had different ideas about the protagonist.
Instead of a politician and strategist, they give us the
portrait of a charismatic – although not overly
charismatic – shaman, who was feared in the tribe for
his magic powers (Exodus, 2: 12; 12: 29; 12: 35).
When Caleb and Joshua’s men do the
fighting, Moses is casting spells on the enemy from a
distance (Exodus, 17: 8-11). With his connection to the
numinous he establishes a reign of terror, whipping
his own people up to a mutual killing frenzy – the
figures given go into the ten thousands (Exodus, 32: 27).
In the end Goethe came to the conclusion, that
“Moses himself disappeared not unlike Aaron,
and we should be very mistaken, if not
Joshua and Caleb, in order to bring the thing
to a conclusion, had decided to end the for a
long time insufferable rule of a bigoted mind
and dispatch Moses himself to follow the
many unfortunate souls whose untimely
demise he had on his conscience” (Goethe). 

Possible, even plausible! But is it history?