Was Moses only a myth?

In atheist circles you see a lot of people, who like to portray the Bible as a fable newspaper or fairy tale book. After all, if the stories in it are not true, then you don't have to take the rest of the story seriously. But what if it turns out that (parts of) a Bible story really happened? Or contains a historical core, with some embellishments by the author?

Then it already becomes more difficult for the atheist critics. Then the Bible might contain truth after all, and of course that is not what suits the beliefs of atheists.

We base our view of history on the things we have found. Written sources, for example, and excavations. When we make new finds, sometimes our picture of history changes completely. Whether it is about Egyptian pharaohs, our first ancestors or the history of the universe.

Always our image of the past appears to change when we find something new. Scientists know this and have to take it into account.

In this article, I look at what this is like with Moses. Are the stories about him historical? Or is it myth? Or something in between?

First of all just this. No people from the time of Moses necessarily wanted to write a purely historical story about their heroes. The Gilgamesh epic, the Iliad, stories about Roman emperors like Augustus and about the deified pharaohs of Egypt are examples. It is not until the time of Herodotes, “the father of historiography” in the 5th century B.C., that more factual historiography enters the picture.

However, many of the stories just mentioned do have a historical core. And why would this be different with Moses? Why do atheists mock the Jewish-Biblical myths, but rewrite-such as Stephen Fry-the Greek myths with great seriousness? Often this has a personal background.

Now our key question: did Moses really exist? And if so, when? The most honest answer is that we don't really know. You can't prove his existence, but neither can you prove that he was just a figment of your imagination. So it comes down to what you believe about it and being honest about that. What you believe affects your conclusions. My story here is no exception

Scientific research on Moses is almost always “colored. For example, all sorts of things have been done to provide evidence that he really existed. One example is that people have been diligently looking for a sea, which occasionally runs dry. This is to prove that the biblical story is true, that the waters of “the Sea of Shell” (or Reed Sea) diverged to let Moses' people through, and the enemy Egyptians did not.

Thus, it has been thought that Moses and his people passed through the Red Sea. This is not correct anyway. In biblical Hebrew, the sea is called yam suph. This indicates a shallow, reed-covered body of water, and the Red Sea is not that. So researchers went looking for such “seas. To the north, they looked at the Bitter Lakes and Lake Sirbonis, but they were not on the route of Moses and his followers.

The Lake of Ballah was. There, strong winds sometimes cause water to move and recede. Moreover, it is on the route from Egypt to Canaan. However, there are no archaeological finds. There should be with such a large movement of people.

Modern scholars therefore no longer believe, that the geographical indications from the Bible are historical. They turn to more symbolic or allegorical explanations. This in itself is nothing new. People have always “spiritualized” texts. I myself take a different approach. Certainly, I also believe there is symbolism in the Moses story, but I also believe it contains historical information.

To find that information is a search. A nice way to penetrate the events behind the story is to examine their historical content. Let me give a simple example. If the Bible writer says that Moses was put in a rush basket in the river, than this is historically quite possible.

This river fits very well with Egypt, the land of the Nile, but the rush basket is an historical thing. In Egypt, baskets were made of rushes and reeds; material that was commonly found on the banks of the Nile. Here the Bible is correct with the reality of the time, so on this basis we need not be suspicious.

Yet examples are also given of biblical data that clash with historical ones. That Moses took 600 000 people with him in his wake, as the Bible writer says, is disputed. Researchers also point out that the journey from Egypt to Canaan could not have been an exodus because Canaan consisted of Egyptian territory.

And then there is the camel. According to several researchers, these did not yet exist at the time of Moses, and thus could not be mentioned in his story. Camels (Hebrew: “gamal”) were not used in Egypt until hundreds of years after Moses.

These examples show, if you look a little further, how difficult it is to make claims about the historical side of the Bible story. I explain why.

1. 600 000 wandering through the desert does not indeed seem very likely. But the number thousand (aleph) in Ancient Hebrew means not only 1000, but also “tribe” or “family,” and the number is also used to indicate a large number. So it could easily be that 600 families are being spoken of. Where the number 600 is a multiple of 12; a symbolic number representing the number of tribes of Israel.

2. Then the claim that Canaan was Egyptian and therefore there could be no exodus because Moses and his people continued to wander on Egyptian soil. By itself, this was true at the time of Ramses II, who is mentioned as a possible pharaoh from Moses' time. At the end of his reign, Egypt had somewhat lost its grip on Canaan due to the invasion of the Sea Peoples. Moreover, Canaan was teeming with vassal princes. They were fighting each other, constantly asking Egypt to fight. The tribes of Israel seem to have stepped into this era of rival Canaanite princes. And then you can still speak of a kind of exodus.

3. Then the camels, which were actually not introduced into the Middle East until the first millennium B.C., according to some researchers. Because Moses lived in the second, camels cannot yet be mentioned there. They weren't there yet, researchers say. But “gamal” the Hebrew word for “camel” also means dromedary, which was already domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula around 2000 BC; later they became pack animals. Then there is also the Bactrian camel, which emerged in Central Asia around 2500 BC. Later this camel was also used in the Middle East, partly due to the long-distance trade on the Silk Road, which connected the Far East and the Middle East. So even this argument against the historical reliability of the Bible story can be disputed.

It just goes to show that we need caution and a broad view when we want to understand what actually happened at the time. And that includes people who believe that the Moses story is myth, or should be understood symbolically; the allegorists.

Namely, they believe that Moses did not exist. Usually these researchers are atheists or “believers who no longer believe that the Bible also tells historical facts.” even in a “dressed up,” “embellished” or embellished form. They have raised all sorts of arguments over time to prove that Moses did not really exist.

They often then compare his story to stories from other cultures. They then conclude that it is an ordinary story copied from another culture.

'Oh, they just nicked it'

They say something like this is going on with the rush basket. There was once a famous Mesopotamian king, Sargon of Akkad, who was put in a basket in the Euphrates to escape a tragic fate. This story is much older than the story of Moses, but could very well have been known as a story at the time of Moses. So, say the atheists and allegorists, it didn't really happen.

'Jumping to conclusions' is how we call it. A rush basket was an ordinary object and it will have been more common to put it in a river. Today, especially in poor areas, children are still being found abandoned. I see no reason to dispute the historical launching of a Hebrew boy in a rush basket.

These are examples, where the historical background of Bible stories and thus Moses is handled too easily. I really do believe that embellishments were added to the Torah by the writers. And there are certainly influences from other cultures as well.

Like the idea that the God of Moses helped his people in wars. Almost every people at the time believed that their god or gods helped in wars. I can definitely see an influence there. Probably the wars won were attributed to the deity afterwards, in a fit of devotion. That happened in other cultures with the necessary manipulation of facts.

Consider the difficult wars that Pharaoh Ramses II had to fight in the north. It wasn't just won there. But you don't see that in the success stories about this Ramses. This distortion of history could also explain why so little can be found about Moses and the exodus of his people. If that was indeed a shameful defeat for Pharaoh, it is quite possible that nothing was mentioned about this in Egypt.

Now what is my conclusion? Certainly, there are influences and embellishments, but we will always be allowed to see, example by example, whether there is a historical core to the story. The question of whether Moses really existed can never be answered with certainty. Your answer depends on what you believe. And I will not hide what I believe. Moses did exist. And an exodus took place. With how many people? That remains a question.