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I’ve been super busy with non-comic things for a while, but finally came up for air this weekend. This is what happened.
I had a lot of fun drawing this one. I’m particularly fond of the seasick giraffe.
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(My brilliant and incredibly good-looking supporters on Patreon get to see every page in full resolution, just like that, so they never miss a detail. They get the pages early, too. Come support the comic at patreon.com/nathanburney!)
Where along the gradient of fact-to-fiction do you believe rests the story of Moses? I ask, because I recently stumbled across some videos telling the stories of Jim and Penny Caldwell, and of Dr. Kim. They intrigued me. From their publishings, there appears to be some plausibility that the story of Moses could have been based on actual historical events. Are you familiar with these accounts?
There is zero evidence that the story of the Exodus has any basis in an actual historical event. Not a shred. But what about the man himself. Might Moses be based on a real person?
It’s not unreasonable to suppose that he was. Plenty of mythological heroes have their origins in a real person. It’s even part of the process whereby our social organization grew more complex than the segmented lineages of tribe and clan: You start with a local hero whose Worth-O-Meter is off the charts—more than just a great kinsman, he’s done great things for all the lineages in the area. After he dies, the whole community reveres him as a common “ancestor,” gaining a new shared identity and shared sacrifice that bonds them all like a new kind of family. Over time, the mythology grows into something supernatural, as the real person is forgotten. They can even become gods and join the pantheon of a state. (That seems to be where the Greek god Asclepius came from. He started out as a highly respected physician or healer, and after he died people venerated him as a hero. At some point in the early classical period the story became that he was a god, son of Apollo, living on Mount Olympus, the whole shebang.)
So one might easily suspect that Moses, being such an important hero, might have origins in a real-life hero.
The problem is, there isn’t any evidence that Moses had ever even been a folk hero. The people of David and Solomon’s time didn’t tell stories of the Exodus. Neither did the people of Josiah’s time. The first time Moses appears in any mythology is after the exile, when Exodus and most of the other books of the Old Testament were being composed. Pre-exilic Jewish texts make no mention of Moses or his mythology whatsoever. None of Jerusalem’s neighbors mentioned any Moses, either. The story simply doesn’t exist anywhere before the exile.
Think about that. Moses is the main character of the Old Testament. He’s hugely important, the lawgiver of all Yahweh’s laws, the guy who freed the Israelites from slavery, and who led them to the Promised Land. Is anything more central to the Jewish identity than the Exodus? Plus Moses did so many cool things like raining down plagues on Egypt, parting the Red Sea, feeding the multitudes with manna from heaven, getting a desert rock to start gushing water, etc. These are the kinds of things people would have absolutely written about if they were part of anybody’s folklore. Yet nobody, not even the people of Jerusalem, mentioned them at all. That’s because nobody, not even the people of Jerusalem, had ever heard of Moses until the post-exilic period. He hadn’t been invented yet.
As briefly mentioned in this page of the comic, the post-exilic Yehudites desperately needed a new identity and a new founding myth. They needed a great founder, a George Washington. They also needed a great lawgiver to propound all the laws Yahweh was supposed to have made. Necessity is the mother of invention, and so they invented Moses and his mythos.
Of course, they didn’t invent the whole thing from scratch. They borrowed a bits and pieces of other mythical narratives, and used them to help tell the story. The baby in the bulrushes? They heard that one in Babylon. It was originally a story that Sargon the Great spread about himself—down even to the details of coating the basket with pitch so it would be watertight. We’ve already seen how the Covenant Code was mostly lifted from the Code of Hammurabi. The cherubs on the Ark of the Covenant weren’t pudgy little angels, but those Mesopotamian supernatural beings with a man’s head and the winged body of a bull or a lion.
They also borrowed things from their own recent historical experience. The escape from slavery? They’d literally just done that a couple generations back. Pharaoh being worried that the Israelites would become allies of enemies to the north? Not in the 13th century when Moses supposedly lived—Egypt was a stronger power back then, and controlled all of Canaan (which would have meant the Israelites had escaped from Egypt to another part of Egypt). The authors of Exodus didn’t know that, of course. But they sure remembered all the grief Israel and Yehud had gotten from their much more recent alliances in conflicts between Egypt and the empires to the north. And as for Moses’ bronze snake on a pole that healed you if you looked at it… remember those Asherah trees a few pages back?
(The text where Moses supposes his toeses are roses, however, appears to be a much later addition, and is generally not considered canonical, though my younger sister would probably debate you on that point.)
As for the Caldwells and others who have visited Jebel al Lawz, it’s not surprising that they would conclude it’s the site of Mount Sinai. There’s good reason to think that. But when they start saying that it’s proof that the Exodus really happened and that’s where Moses got water from a rock and received the Ten Commandments, they’re way out in speculation land, fueled by a desire to prove the story is true and some glaring leaps of logic. The sad fact is that there is no archaeological or historical evidence that any of it happened. Zero. The interesting point here is that the legend itself wasn’t even a thing before the exile.
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PS:
You may also come across a claim that Moses was originally a big shot at an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine. Unfortunately that seems to be a misinterpretation of some ancient and eroded rock carvings.
People had indeed been mining for turquoise at the mountain of Serabit el-Khadim in the western Sinai Peninsula, since before Narmer and Hor-Aha founded dynastic Egypt. Some time before 1900 B.C., a temple to the goddess Hathor was added to the complex. Plenty of Canaanite people, speaking Semitic languages, worked at the mining complex and visited the temple—many had settled in the Nile Delta, and trading caravans also frequently passed through. At some point before 1600 B.C., they were carving inscriptions on rocks around the temple, and in the mines. Some were exhortations to Hathor, some memorialize the satisfaction of a vow, and some were just the usual graffiti of people carving their name somewhere which people have been doing since the invention of writing. These inscriptions are very cool, because they’re in what’s called Proto-Sinaitic Script, an early adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphics into a phonetic alphabet representing the sounds of ancient Semitic language. It’s a precursor of what would become the Phoenician alphabet and every other alphabetic form of writing.
What does any of that have to do with Moses? In 2017, a scholar excitedly announced that a few of the inscriptions refer to a guy named Moses who was the chief of the miners, who turned his staff into a snake like in Exodus, and who made a bronze snake like in the books of Numbers and Kings. The scholar said another inscription mentioned the miracle of manna in the desert, another mentions a priest of the god Yahweh, and one more referred to the Passover lamb. Big if true, right?
Unfortunately, he seems to have been a little too eager to make such a finding. He dates the carvings much later than their accepted date, pushing them forward to the 13th century B.C. when the biblical Moses is supposed to have lived. He also claims that two of the letters spell M-SH, spelling “Moshe,” the Hebrew name for Moses. But they probably spell M-TH instead, which would be “Math.” The name “Math” makes better sense anyway, because there was no Semitic name “Moshe” at the time, but “Math” was a Semitic name for a twin.
In fact, the story in Exodus where Moses got his name only makes sense if it’s not already a word you’d use for a name. Pharaoh’s daughter names him “Moshe” because she took him out of the water. That’s a play on the Hebrew verb “mashah,” which means to draw something out of water. And that’s in Biblical Hebrew, which wasn’t even a dialect until several centuries after these inscriptions. The name makes perfect sense if you’re inventing it in the Hebrew language during the post-Exilic period. It makes no sense for a Semitic-language speaker in 13th- or 17th-century Sinai. And it’s certainly not a word the Egyptian-speaking daughter of a Pharaoh would have used.
Anyway, the whole theory makes no sense in the context of the carvings. Yahweh wasn’t even being worshipped as a god yet during the Bronze Age. And even if he were, who is carving stories about him at an active temple for Hathor—the patron goddess of Turquoise? Why would these five inscriptions be so contextually different from all the others?
Well, when people actually look at these five inscriptions with a magnifying glass, in good light, it becomes obvious that they’re no different from all the rest. One mentions a chief of the miners named Math who prepared something for “the lady,” i.e., Hathor. The one supposedly about turning a staff into a snake just says that if you tell the folks back home about Math the miner, then “the Lady” will look kindly on you. The one supposedly about making a bronze snake just says that, when you return home, remember that “the Lady” loves folks who tell others about Math. The one supposedly about the paschal lambs just says a guy named something like Bubbaman had performed his vow. The one supposedly about manna in the desert was just some guy scratching his name in the wall—literally just two letters for the name Elem (or something like that) and nothing more. And the one supposedly about a priest of Yahweh—HN YHW—is so worn that hardly any letters can be made out at all, and nothing even resembles the words HN or YWH.
It’s a good lesson in keeping a healthy skepticism of even peer-reviewed expert scholarship. And it’s evidence that people 4,000 years ago could be just as much a publicity hound as any influencer on social media. But it’s not evidence about how the legend of Moses got started. Moses was invented after the Exile, sorry.
“There is zero evidence that the story of the Exodus has any basis in an actual historical event.”
On the other hand, they recently figured out a bit of lead from the 13th century BC, dug up in 1982 on Mt Ebal, contained the curse that Moses told Joshua to put there (see Deuteronomy 11:26-29, Deuteronomy 27:2-29, and Joshua 8:30-35).
I first found the story at link, which links to this story.
I wouldn’t take too much on faith, even if it is in a published paper. Especially when the claims are dramatically inconsistent with the rest of existing scholarship. (Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the rest of existing scholarship is very much mistaken. But that’s just another reason not to take everything on faith just because it got published.)
Here’s a link to the original paper where you can see the images Galil was interpreting and his methodology. The only thing it makes clear, unfortunately, is that Galil really really wants it to be an inscription about Yahweh, and that it dates to the 13th century BC when, according to biblical calculations, the Exodus would have taken place. And that’s not just my personal take. Experts in biblical archaeology have been ripping him to pieces ever since he first announced what he thought he’d found. And this isn’t the first time, either—he’s made similar claims about other purportedly early inscriptions which the experts have found unpersuasive. And he had a hard time finding someone to publish this one. Scholars are already writing their responses to criticize the heck out of this in academic journals.
To reach his desired conclusion, Galil had to make a lot of assumptions. First, he’s assuming that the item was originally found on an altar dating to that period. But he has no way of knowing for sure, because it was sifted out of a heap of discarded rocks and soil from eight years of excavation way back in the 1980s. He’s really just guessing that it must have been on top of the altar.
Second, he’s assuming that the dating of that altar is even correct. Adam Zertal, who conducted the earlier excavation, was wholly convinced of the literal truth of the Exodus story, and that affected his research and conclusions. When the article you linked to refers to him as “controversial,” that was quite the understatement. Zertal had found a hilltop altar of the sort found on hilltops all over that part of the world, and eagerly announced that it had to have been Joshua’s from the Exodus story, and his conclusions were not exactly supported by the rest of the archaeological community. But Galil accepts everything Zalil said as gospel truth, because that’s the same narrative he keeps wanting to tell.
Third, he’s assuming that the faint scratches and indentations are actually writing. But nobody besides his own team can see the letters he claims are there. His team’s response has been that they’ve been looking at it for a really long time, so of course they can see what’s there even if nobody else can. Scholars who genuinely hoped it might be something have had to conclude that there’s nothing there, saying that the Galil’s article is nothing but speculation and projection.
Fourth, he’s assuming that the writing he describes is the kind of writing that would have been used in the 13th century. He himself leads the article by announcing that the script is a older than any other Hebrew inscription. Yeah, he’s got it being written about 300 years before Paleo-Hebrew script came along. And about 500 years before the first inscriptions in what would become the Hebrew language, as well as the first inscriptions of the YHWH tetragrammaton that he claims to see here. The actual written language used in Canaan in that time wasn’t any of that, anyway. It was Akkadian.
Fifth, he’s assuming that the biblical Joshua and his people would have been literate in the first place. Yeah, nah. Writing is scarce in late Bronze Age Canaan for a reason. The people actually living in what would later become Isra-El were not going to be even slightly literate for several hundred years.
Sixth, he’s assuming that the people and events of the biblical Exodus story really happened. History just doesn’t back that up. The story doesn’t even make sense—note the part where they’d basically have been escaping Egypt to go to Egypt. The people who wrote the story had no way of knowing the political makeup of 13th century Canaan, and neither did their audience, so it didn’t matter. But we know it pretty well nowadays.
Seventh, he’s assuming that linguistic shifts that wouldn’t take place for another thousand years were already in current use. He claims to see the name “El,” for example, and that it was just a synonym for “Yahweh.” In 1250 BC? Sorry, thanks for playing. In 1250 BC people in Canaan had never even heard of Yahweh. Later, in the time when David and Solomon supposedly lived, nobody in Canaan had ever heard of Yahweh. He doesn’t start to appear at all until something like the mid-800s. And he doesn’t become synonymous with El for a few more centuries after that. The fact that he wants to see something that could only have been written a thousand years later just tells you how much this is all wishful thinking.
In the end, Galil’s claims made for a neat press release, but that’s about it. The only evidence was his own imagination.
Had to: https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.php
Is the Bible’s emphasis on genealogy meant to lend legitimacy in the minds of a people still largely tribal and worshiping ancestors? Adam, Eve, and Noah are everyone’s ancestors.
That’s basically it, yeah. Remember that another purpose for this mythology is to differentiate the Judeans from the other Canaanites all around them. Hence the story of Ham – Ham was supposedly the ancestor of the Canaanites, he was cursed by Noah for seeing him naked (which was a euphemism for raping him in his sleep), so his descendants are therefore the rightful servants of the descendants of Shem – the Judeans.
I thoroughly enjoy that you’re having fun while writing & drawing these: the seasick giraffe was the first thing I focused on. And I should mention that I really appreciate the way you draw ancient people as people first: in the 3D scene some panels back, you could have taken starter sketches of people at a contemporary cocktail party. Some standing around awkwardly-some dancing joyfully. And, in particular, the (presumably stylish) young woman watching the meat-carver holding the inside of her elbow with the other hand behind her back. Many, many other examples there and elsewhere, but I won’t go on. Just wanted to thank you for humanizing them.
School Fees to be forwarded under separate cover just as soon as I see some overtime
Thank you very much, OtterBe!
I agree that it’s important to show that people have always been… you know… people. Not grunting cavemen, not ignorant savages, not some exotic other, but us.
It’s good to show them some respect, but it also benefits us here in the present, because now we can learn from their experiences, instead of writing them off as irrelevant curiosities.
Good luck with the overtime! Just let your boss know it’s for a good cause :)