Tag: Egypt
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The Enigmatic Moses
Was there a Moses? The most likely answer is, yes ! All the Hebrew Bible sources, from the earliest onwards, while often reflecting different perspectives, are in agreement here. Since there are details in their contributions which are rather ‘awkward’, this makes it unlikely that Moses was ‘custom built’ by the writers/editors, and more likely…
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The Birth of Moses (i)
There was a time when it was taken for granted that Moses wrote the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – the ‘Torah’ if you’re Jewish, the ‘Pentateuch’ if you’re not. These books, however, don’t say that he did. They’re written from a third person perspective; and it’s hard to imagine Moses describing, in…
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Exodus – A God who Mugs and Kills People
Some people have a simple approach to the Bible. If you want to know what God is like, the Bible will tell you all you need to know. There’s a problem with this approach. On some occasions. what we’re told about God is unacceptably shocking. For example, he kills people. At a global level, in…
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Exodus – God reveals his Name
God, in the story we’re told in Exodus 3:13-15, speaks to Moses from a bush “ablaze with fire, but not being consumed“, and tells him that he is “to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt“. Moses is not exactly ‘up for this’, and begins to think up a variety of reasons why the…
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Exodus : the Birth of Moses
Genesis ended with the descendants of Abraham still not in possession of the promised land of Canaan. That story had told how famine forced their entry into Egypt to buy food, and how the presence there of family member Joseph, who had been made the Grand Vizier, led to their settling down comfortably in that…
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Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours
Whereas the earlier stories in Genesis, from Abraham to Jacob, seem stitched together by assembling individual tales to suggest a chronological narrative, the Joseph Story seems more like a brief, carefully constructed novel, described by Prof. John Collins of Yale Divinity School, as “a superb example of early prose fiction“. It’s built around a number…
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‘Once Upon a Time’ (v) Egypt and the Sun
As I noted in my 1st post on this theme, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains many echoes of far older, interesting and amusing creation myths, flood stories and epic poems which, because used to train scribes, were widely spread in location and time across the ancient near east. The Hebrew writers/editors used a number of…
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What do we owe the first philosophers?
We owe the very first Greek philosophers a debt of gratitude. It’s true that they learned much, in the way of mathematics, from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia – geometry from the Egyptians and arithmetic from the Babylonians – but the Greeks introduced something new and different. What contributed to its emergence? The…
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