In the Beginning…

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Gospel of John 1:1

The beginning of the evolution of Christianity, not surprisingly has its roots in the Old Testament and the ancient tribes of Israel. The Torah which chronicles the history of the Jewish peoples has been one of the most widely studied and reproduced books through the course of civilization. The archaeological record however, demonstrates that the events described in these Holy Scriptures have little basis in historical reality. Setting aside the absurd notion that the words of the Torah were spoken by the Lord YHWH himself directly to Moses, one must then search for the true human compositor of these works.

The earliest reference yet found to the Hebrew civilization is on a statue from the Syrian city of Alalakh, dated to about 1550 BCE. The inscription refers to hapiru warriors in the land of Kin’anu (Canaan). This is also confirmed by clay tablets from Pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital of Amarna, referring to marauders in the hill country of Palestine. The stele of Pharaoh Merneptah dated to 1207 BCE also records “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not”. However the title “Israel” is a reference to a people, not a territory.

The weight of evidence suggests the original Hebrews coalesced during the bronze age from successive migrations, from the periphery of the Nile delta and from across the Jordan and Euphrates rivers. In their Semitic tongue, “habiru” meant ‘beyond’, suggesting an origin elsewhere. In Babylonian script “khabiru” referred to a class of slaves. In the language of the Egyptians “apiru” translated roughly to “labourer”. As a people, therefore, the Hebrews combined Mesopotamian and Egyptian stock, almost certainly drawn from the lowest social order, conceivably including runaway slaves and homeless labourers.

As newcomers to what was the land of Canaan, the Semites, speakers of a tongue common to Syrians, Arabs and Mesopotamians, took up migratory occupation of the less fertile hill-country of the interior. Neither their culture, nor their social organization distinguished them from the other tent-dwelling tribes of the area. The only noticeable distinction between the Jews and their neighbours was the ritual blood sacrifice of circumcision. These early, polytheistic, Hebrews eked out a simple existence in a harsh desert landscape on the fringes of such major civilizations as Egypt, Phoenicia, and Babylon, occasionally moving with their animals into the Nile delta in times of draught.

It seems as if they were joined, over time, by refugees from the more sophisticated Phoenician coastal cities. The Phoenician migrants brought with them cultic practices and images of their traditional gods. A major Canaanite god was El, and the phrase ‘El has conquered’ gives us the word Isra’el. God-inspired names were common throughout the west-Semitic language region. Other Canaanite gods included, Shalem, a Syrian sun god – later to be honoured in the name Jeru’salem. The city of Ru’shalimum is mentioned in records of the Pharaoh Sesostris III (1872 - 1847 BCE). The settlement actually pre-dated the occupation of the tribe of Hebrews. The site then appears to have been unoccupied for three hundred years until the Jebusites, otherwise known as Philistines arrived.

But in the Torah we have a story, a tale of tribal fidelity, with a vengeful protector god Yahweh, who had chosen the Hebrews as his very own. For them, he has a divine purpose. In particular, their migration into Canaan is given a heroic re-interpretation. No longer do we have piecemeal migration of refugees over centuries but a single glorious conquest by a cohesive people. The whole land surrounding Jerusalem is promised to the Jews in perpetuity. They have, it would seem, arrived as a single group from Egypt, released from slavery by divine intervention.

The two primary books of the Torah, Genesis and Exodus, refer to the “Pharaoh” exactly 155 times. Curiously, not once is the Pharaoh actually identified by name, the holy books themselves, however are not lacking in excruciating detail of incidental character. For example, the grandmother, of the grandmother, of King Asa of Judah was Abishalom (1 Kings 15.10), but the mighty Pharaoh who was the adoptive father of Moses himself, remains unnamed.
The Egyptians have no record of ever having enslaved the Jews, Hebrews, Israelites or Canaanites. Not surprisingly there is also no reference outside of the holy texts to Abraham, Moses, or pretty much any other supposed historical figure represented in the early books of the bible.

This history, tracing the people of Judah, back through Hebrews in Canaan and Israelites in Egypt, to a noble ancestor called Abraham, and the whole dramatic story of the Exodus was concocted at a date some eight centuries later, after the nobility of the Judean tribesmen had been taken into exile by their Babylonian captors. The majority of the Old Testament was written, not at the dawn of time but in the sixth century B.C., when Greece was already a thriving civilization and Carthage had a maritime army.

In the year 586 BCE the Babylonians under their king Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem, and replaced Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king of Judah. Incidentally, Jehoiachin is one of the few biblical characters which can be confirmed to have existed from external sources. The Babylonians ordered the upper-class of the Jews to be forced to populate the territories surrounding Babylon, in modern-day Iraq, This exile was not technically enslavement as Babylon hoped to assimilate into its culture, those it conquered.

The Babylonian exile continues for about 50 years. The Persian Empire under King Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem. For the Jews who chose to stay he appointed a high-priest from among them to administer the faith. The Persian emperor, wishing to promote Hebrew national unity, supported the standardization of the oral traditions of the Jews into a single written source. These tribal traditions contained rival histories, religious views, and law codes. The differing views had to be kept to avoid alienating each group.

Most biblical scholars believe that the compiler was Ezra, as he was the priest empowered by the Persian emperor to arbitrate and assert the state religion. Ezra was instructed to uphold the religious text that he carried back with him from the Babylonian exile. According to the Biblical Book of Nehemiah, when Ezra read it out to the assembled people returning from exile, many thought that certain things were new and had not been read before. In particular, a law, concerning the Festival of Booths, is reported as never having been carried out before.

Ezra was a priest claiming descent from Aaron, brother of Moses. Ezra was also a scribe and had a great interest in the Torah. "Set his heart on seeking out the Lord's Torah" (Ezra 7:10). An ancient tradition, recorded in the 2nd century CE in the Fourth Book of Ezra, claims that Ezra wrote the Torah himself as the result of a revelation from God, the original having been destroyed when the earlier temple was burnt down by the Babylonians. Jerome reports this tradition in the 4th century CE, stating that there was no objection to people stating Ezra had renewed the Torah.
So here we have a religious text written by a priest of a tribe of slaves, sanctioned by their conqueror, which tells a fabricated history which unlike the truth is pleasing to those other slaves who hear it. According to Ezra’s story the Jews were not a nation of cast-off’s enslaved by a succession of more advanced civilizations, they were God’s chosen people who descended from the greatest kings, which history has never known.

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