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quranreadalong · 6 years

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SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: MOSES’ EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, PART 1

I’m sure this is going to shock you, but the next surah deals with Moses, yet again. Since we have seen our bud Musa about a thousand times now, and will see him a thousand more times, I think it’s worth exploring him a bit. Outside of Islamic sources, I mean. Who was the “real” Moses? How did his story come to be? What did it mean to ancient Jews? Speaking of whom, how did the religion of Judaism itself come to exist as we know it?

First, the bad news: Moses was not real. Yes, this means that the Prince of Egypt is based on events that did not actually happen, but you can still enjoy it. I mean, look at it!

The Exodus story is an origin myth for the Jewish people. There was no mass Hebrew slavery in Egypt, nor did they build the pyramids. The various plagues did not happen, nor did the deaths of either Jewish boys or Egyptian firstborn sons. There was no enormous, 40-year-long trek through the desert from Egypt to Canaan. All archaeological and genetic evidence shows that the Jews have simply always lived in what is now Israel/Palestine. They were Canaanites, starting out as semi-nomadic pastorialists and transitioning to a settled life, just like other peoples in Canaan. So where did the Moses story come from and how did it become so central to the religion? This requires a shitload of lore and backstory to the D&D game gone awry that is the Abrahamic religious group. The lore of Moses is actually more interesting than the Biblical story of Moses!

Let’s set the stage first. Until the 700s BC, there were two related but separate Hebrew-speaking kingdoms in what is now Israel/Palestine (and into Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan), one called Israel and the other called Judah. The Bible claims that they were originally one united kingdom that broke into two after the time of King Solomon, but there’s no historical evidence to substantiate this. It’s not even clear how related the two kingdoms were--most scholars think that Israel was significantly more developed and wealthy than Judah. They both worshiped YHWH, along with other gods, and perhaps that is what made them distinct from other small states. Regardless, by the 700s BC, they were directly next to each other, like this:

As the map shows, the capital of Israel was Samaria, which today is in the West Bank. The capital of Judah was Jerusalem. Israel was far more developed and populous compared to its southern neighbor--the Bible frames Judah as the central player in the saga because it was written primarily by people from Judah, which we’ll talk about later. But in the mid-700s BC, Israel’s status as the more impressive (and therefore more threatening) Hebrew kingdom worked to its detriment, as it was targeted by regional enemies. Assyrians were the ones to land the fatal blow; they invaded Israel and easily overtook it, due to the fact that the kingdom had already been weakened and invaded for decades prior to this. The Assyrians took so many people into captivity, and so many others fled the war south for Judah, that the territory was significantly depopulated. Unlike some other Biblical events, we know that this really happened, as it was recorded by scribes of the king Sargon. This captivity is only tangential to our story here, since the majority of the “lost” Jews never returned. They’re sometimes called the “lost tribes”; in reality they probably just assimilated into various Assyrian provinces or Judah over the centuries and stopped identifying as their “tribe”. But the point is that after 720 BC or so, Judah is now the sole existing Jewish kingdom. 100 years later, they would face their own problems.

The entire area at the time was caught up in a regional power struggle between Assyria plus their Egyptian allies and the Babylonians, the latter of whom were based in what is now Iraq. The Babylonians themselves were ruled by the Assyrians until they broke free in the 600s BC. And for one single, glorious century, the Babylonians went on a tear of fucking shit up. Most of this fucking shit up was accomplished by Nabopolassar, the first emperor of the independent empire, and his son, the more famous Nebuchadnezzar.

The entire Middle East, as it is now, was a clusterfuck at this time. In a single ten-year period the unfortunate kingdom of Judah was taken first by the Egyptians from the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians from the Egyptians. The event of interest here is the Battle of Carchemish, which transferred ownership of Judah from Egypt to Babylon, essentially ending Egyptian involvement in the region. By this time, the Babylonians had already largely destroyed the Assyrians.

For a few years, things were okay. The conquered Jews of Judah (thus the name “Jews”) paid tribute to their new overlords and everyone just existed in the typical unhappy master-puppet state relationship of ancient times. But then in 601 BC Nebuchadnezzar mounted a costly attempt to conquer Egypt itself. It threw the region into even worse chaos, as some of the Babylonian provinces now turned against their masters and supported the Egyptians. Once the conquest of Egypt failed, Nebuchadnezzar pulled his armies back to Babylonian territories and decided there would be hell to pay for those who had supported the Egyptians.

And so in 597 BC, Jerusalem was besieged. It did not last long, as the Jews were hopelessly outnumbered. The city fell easily and most of the upper-class residents of Jerusalem were kicked into Babylon. The Babylonians appointed a puppet ruler to keep Judah in check, but the puppet king Zedekiah resented his masters and turned against them, again allying with the Egyptians. And again there was hell to pay. Only ten years after the first siege, Jerusalem was besieged again. This time, Nebuchadnezzar ensured that there would be no more rebellions... by destroying the entire city. The Jewish temple was destroyed and thousands more were taken away. Judah ceased to be its own kingdom and was fully absorbed into Babylon.

It is in this era that the story of Moses was put into the form we now know. In fact, this era would completely reshape the Jewish religion as a whole, transforming it into what we now recognize as Judaism.

Prior to this, the Jewish religion was similar to that of its neighbors. It had developed over a period of thousands of years already, based on a polytheistic religious system developed by the Sumerians and introduced to the Levant region by Akkadian influence. In its earliest form, this religion was vaguely similar to Greek polytheism, with a head god (El), his wife (Asherah), and their kids (the various other gods).

As the different parts of the Levant and Middle East developed (or re-developed) their own identities, they began to create patron gods for themselves, giving the gods their own personalities and characteristics. Sometimes different gods worshiped by different groups were originally one god. The patron god of the Phoenicians, for example, was Baal; the Arameans of Syria had Hadad. Originally they were just one storm god named “Baal Hadad” which is strangely similar to Bella Hadid and now I feel uncomfortable. As different cultures claimed different gods, El fell out of the spotlight a bit. Over time, he was replaced by his kids in importance. Many groups even gave his wife Asherah to his sons!

The patron god of the Jewish people was Yahweh, a warrior god. No one is quite sure where “Yahweh” came from, but it is possible that he was brought to the Israel region by a nomadic group called the Shasu, who apparently lived in clusters from the Sinai region into Jordan; the Shasu themselves may have gotten him from some now-lost Egyptian group or else came up with the name themselves. His name is not Hebrew (the “I AM” etymology was retroactively applied to it) nor does it resemble any of the languages spoken in the Canaan region. An inscription written around the 8th century suggests that there were temples to Yahweh not just in Jewish lands, but also in Edom (in Jordan, again perhaps related to the Shasu). It’s unclear if other Canaanite peoples like the Edomites also had Yahweh himself as an important god or if he was considered the same as the Edomite god Qos or what. No one really knows!

Wherever he came from, Yahweh, like Baal and the others, was made a son of the god El. Over the span of centuries, he solidified into the most important god in Israel and Judah; in later years he would be conflated with El and take over his daddy’s old stories. The older portions of the Torah make it clear that in this period, Yahweh was regarded as the patron god of the Jewish people, with other gods being the gods of other people. The monotheistic religion of Judaism did not yet exist.

Traces of this era are still found in some Biblical texts. Take this verse from Deuteronomy, which was likely written after Israel fell but before Judah fell:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.

I mean, seems normal and typical of the Bible. Here’s the only issue. The bolded words are not in the original text. What it really says is this (long explanation of how it was changed to “sons of Israel” here):

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods. Yahweh’s portion was his people, Israel his allotted inheritance.

The original text says that El divided the nations and gave each one to one of his sons with Asherah. Ugaritic texts state that there were 70 of them; Yahweh got the Jews. The fact that Yahweh was one among many is the reason why the early Jewish myths, like the creation account, have Yahweh using the pronoun we instead of I, and why the snake tells Adam and Eve that they shall be like gods. This is also seen in the early Psalms, like 82:1, where Yahweh stands among the gods, or 89:6, where Yahweh is praised: who among the sons of El is like him? This happens over and over.

At some point before Jerusalem’s destruction, some movements seem to have sprung up that sought to stop the worship of other gods. You may recall the story of Jezebel, who was a Canaanite woman who was married to the King of Israel and tried to get him to change Israel’s patron god to Baal, like the Canaanites. The people of Israel, led by the priest Elijah, were furious and resisted it. The story’s message is that worship of gods other than Yahweh was not just bad but treasonous, even though other gods were still believed to exist. Historians are doubtful about whether Jezebel was a real person, but the focus on worshiping Yahweh alone was a real historical shift. When the exiles later sat down to put the Bible together, these movements would be seen as prophetic in hindsight, and the fact that people ignored their message would be seen as the reason for the destruction of Judah.

It was also around this time that worship of Asherah began to be frowned upon; the Bible has many commands to stop using “Asherah poles” (it’s believed they were trees or just decorated sticks in tribute of her) and to stop praying to her. She is now almost totally forgotten and unknown by the majority of adherents to Abrahamic religions.

That was the situation at the time of the fall of Jerusalem: other gods were acknowledged and worship of the others hadn’t fully stopped, but Yahweh was the god of the Jewish people, the favored son of El... who was well on his way to becoming El himself.

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