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The Genesis of
Israel and Egypt
*CONTENTS*
*THE DELUGE*
Legend and Stratigraphy - The Violence of Nature in a Bygone Epoch -
Ancient History in Chaos A Catastrophic Perspective
*THE DAWN OF HISTORY*
Where does Egyptian History Begin? - Menes, Abraham, and the God Thoth -
An Age of Fire and Flood - Dates and chronologies
*KING DJOSER AND HIS TIME*
Who was King Djoser? - Djoser and the Seven Years' Famine - The Story of
Joseph - Joseph and the Seer Imhotep
*EXODUS*
The Plagues of Egypt - The Drowning of Pharaoh and His Army - The
Intermediate Period - The Stratigraphy of Palestine
*MOSES AND HIS WORKS*
The Authorship of Genesis - Egyptian Elements in the Creation and Flood
Stories - Moses the Lawgiver
*EPOCH OF THE JUDGES*
The Age of Hercules and Samson - The Iron Using Philistines - War
Against the Assyrians
*EPILOGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author Information:
Emmet J Sweeney is a secondary teacher in London. He has an MA in Early
Modern History from the University of Ulster and has been involved,
during the past 15 years, with a radical revision of ancient history.
Bibliographic Information:
ISBN: 1 85756 350 6
Page Extent: 106 pp
Price: £ 6.95
Publication Date: March 1997
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Published by:
Janus Publishing Company Limited
Edinburgh House,19 Nassau Street, London, W1N 7RE. UK
Tel: (0171) 580 7664 Fax: (0171) 636 5756
Email: publisher at januspublishing.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The Genesis of Israel and Egypt
A book by Emmet John Sweeney
*Buy Online from Amazon
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* Did a great flood really devastate the Earth and did it leave its
mark in ancient stratigraphy?
* Was Joseph of the many-coloured coat a famous Egyptian Seer who
designed the first Pyramid?
Outline
The Genesis of Israel and Egypt proposes a radically new view of ancient
history and the forces that shaped it. The book begins with the great
flood which has been recorded in the traditions of virtually the entire
human race. However, as the author clearly explains, a flaw in the
methodology has resulted in contemporary events being placed centuries
apart.
The author shows how the Abraham, the father of the Israelite nation, is
related in terms of character and personality to Menes, the first
pharaoh of Egypt and the two should be regarded as contemporary.
However, according to Sweeney these two neighbouring peoples are out of
synchronisation by 1000 years.
What emerges is a fresh and detailed picture of ancient history which is
concise, specific and intriguing.
Introduction from the book
Since the scientific study of ancient times began, scholars have made
repeated attempts to identify, from the Egyptian hieroglyphic sources,
Biblical characters who were associated with Egypt. All these attempts
came to grief, and eventually the whole idea was abandoned. In time it
was to be suggested that such identifications were impossible, since the
characters mentioned by the Hebrews - Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and
the rest - were not the great men that the Scriptural sources implied.
Indeed, if they existed at all, they were minor figures whom the
Egyptians did not bother to mention. This opinion gradually took root
among scholars, and soon became the new orthodoxy. Any attempt now made
to find 'proof' for the Bible in archaeology is immediately consigned to
the realms of the lunatic fringe. Quite simply, such work is not taken
seriously.
But there have been dissenting voices. An academic storm was raised
during the 1950s by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, who argued that the
catastrophic events described vividly in the Old Testament (i.e., the
Deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus, etc.) did actually occur, and
occurred very much as they were described. Velikovsky held that the last
of these events, the Exodus, which touched directly on Egypt, was in
fact a major landmark in Egyptian history. He demonstrated quite
convincingly that this event /was/ recorded by the Egyptians, and showed
that modern scholars had missed the identification because they had
fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the events described in the
Book of Exodus. The Catastrophist position adopted by Velikovsky brought
to light an enormous distortion in ancient chronology. These momentous
events were effaced from the history books because an erroneous and
virtually arbitrary chronology, based mainly on the writings of Manetho,
had been adopted for Egyptian history. The histories of the other
ancient lands were then reconstructed in line with the distorted
Egyptian chronology. This 'modern' history of the ancient world had
virtually no point of contact with the Biblical and Classical histories,
and clashed repeatedly with them.
The present writer holds with Velikovsky's catastrophist analysis; and
the book which follows is largely an attempt to show that when we accept
the catastrophist framework all the elements of the puzzle fit into
place. The earliest part of Hebrew history, we will find, can indeed be
made to reconcile - and in a most spectacular way - with early Egyptian
history.
The central theme of my work is thus the parallel origins of two
neighbouring and closely related lands. The histories of Israel and
Egypt were intertwined at the very beginning, and the association
established then continued unbroken for many centuries. Thus I begin by
seeking to establish a link between the histories of the two peoples.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 is concerned with an examination of the first and greatest of
all biblical events, the Deluge of Noah. We see how archaeologists
working in different parts of the world discovered abundant evidence of
cataclysmic destruction in ancient times, consistent with the action of
flood waters. However, there was little academic collaboration, and
destruction episodes, which were in fact contemporary, were placed
centuries apart by scholars using different dating methods and
procedures. Thus, for example, the great flood discovered by Leonard
Woolley in Mesopotamia was deemed to be a local event, since destruction
levels in Syria and elsewhere, which were in fact contemporary, were
placed a thousand years later by scholars who had not paid sufficient
attention to Woolley's work.
In this way the true nature and scale of the Flood of Ur was disguised,
and a totally distorted view of ancient history was pieced together.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 shows how a thousand-year gap between the archaeology of
Syria/Palestine on the one hand, and Mesopotamia and Egypt on the other,
is reflected in the historiography of the two regions. Thus we find that
the epoch of Abraham, the founding father of Israel, and the epoch of
Menes, the founder of pharaonic Egypt, were one and the same. Both these
characters are said to have lived just a few generations after the
waters of a great flood had receded from the face of the earth.
Furthermore, both of them share many of the characteristics of the god
Thoth, or Mercury/Hermes, who in ancient tradition was said to have
bequeathed civilisation to mankind. Indeed, both Abraham and Menes were
regarded as founders of civilisation. The problem here, of course, is
that Abraham is conventionally placed around 2000 BC, whereas Menes is
dated to 200 BC (?? means 3000). How then, could they be contemporary? Our
investigation
reveals that both the Egyptian and Hebrew chronologies have been grossly
over-extended. All literate civilisation, in fact, begins around 1000
BC, and whilst 1000 years have been artificially added to Hebrew
history, over 2000 have been added to the Egyptian.
It was just these unnaturally extended chronologies that kept Egyptian
and Hebrew histories 'out of sync' and contradictory.
Having thus linked Abraham and Menes, we are presented with an entirely
new and unexpected view of ancient times. We now find the histories of
archaic Israel and Egypt fitting together like matching pieces of a
jigsaw. The next 'match' comes with Joseph and Imhotep. Egyptian
tradition tells us that two centuries or so after Menes lived Djoser,
'The Wise' king, whose vizier, Imhotep, was regarded as the greatest of
all Egyptian sages. Djoser and Imhotep, the legend says, lived during a
famine lasting seven years, and it was a dream of the king's that
provided Imhotep with the clue to solving the crisis. Similarly, Hebrew
history tells us that two centuries after Abraham there lived Joseph,
the great seer and visionary, who became pharaoh's vizier, and helped
solve the crisis of a seven-year famine by interpreting the king's dreams.
Historians, of course, have long been aware of the striking resemblances
between Imhotep and Joseph, and a large amount has been written on the
subject. They would undoubtedly have realised the identity of the two
men a long time ago, but the erroneous chronology, which separated them
by over a thousand years, confused the issue.
The next 'match' in the histories of the two peoples comes with the
Exodus. Archaeology tells us that sometime near the close of the Early
Bronze period, a great natural catastrophe, whose effects are still
plainly visible, struck the entire Near East. This period of darkness,
but also of invention and creativity, brought forth the distinctive
'Pessimistic' literary /genre/ in Egypt. Scribes of the time, and of
later years, described the horrific events of the 'Day of
/Shedyetshya'/, the 'Day of Misery', during which the Egyptian nation,
and indeed the whole of mankind, was brought to the verge of
destruction. These terrible events, I hold, occurred around 800 BC, some
seven centuries after the 'traditional' date of the Exodus.
In the years following this catastrophe, the Egyptians constructed their
greatest monuments - the pyramids: these were erected in honour of the
celestial deities whose awesome power had so recently been made
manifest. Whilst the Egyptians erected pyramids, the Hebrews were
engaged in the conquest of Canaan.
Having placed Moses and the Exodus in the eighth century BC rather than
the remote antiquity of the fifteenth, we might be more justified in
taking seriously the Biblical claim that there was a man called Moses,
and that it was he who composed the Pentateuch, the first five books of
the Bible. Chapter 5, which examines the structure of Genesis and the
rest of the Pentateuch, provides further support for such a belief. Here
we discover that the books attributed to Moses are, as we would expect,
heavily influenced by Egyptian custom, usage, and language. This is in
total contrast to the later Biblical books, where the Egyptian influence
is much diminished.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6, which completes our investigation, looks briefly at the epoch
of the Judges. Here we discover that everything about this period, from
the character of Samson to the military technology employed by the
Philistines, shows that the Book of Judges deals with events of the
eighth century BC. The Amalekites, we discover, who oppressed Israel for
many years, are known to Egyptian history as the Hyksos, the 'Rulers of
foreign lands', and to the Classical authors as the Imperial Assyrians.
As might be expected, the sources used in a study such as this are
diverse in the extreme. I am particularly indebted to the Trojan work of
scholars in many fields over the past century, and I have found
publications such as Pritchard's /Ancient Near Eastern Texts/ and
Breasted's /Ancient Records/ absolutely indispensable as sources of
documentary material. The meticulous excavating, cataloguing, and
documenting carried out over the years by great figures such as Maspero,
Petrie, Brugsch, Schaeffer, and Breasted has been most helpful, and
their scrupulous honesty and attention to detail has assisted me in the
task of rectifying Manetho's chaotic chronology.
However, it is to Immanuel Velikovsky that the present work owes most.
Velikovsky's brilliant exposition of the contradictions inherent in
ancient chronology is the key that has unlocked the secrets of
antiquity. In /Ages in Chaos/ (1953), he proposed a complete
reconstruction of later Egyptian history, beginning with the Exodus,
which he believed to date from the fall of the 'Middle Kingdom'. It is
largely under the inspiration of /Ages in Chaos/ that the present work
seeks to reconstruct the earlier part of Egyptian history. Velikovsky
began with the Exodus; we end with the same event.
I am also indebted to those writers of the Velikovskian school who have
carried on the work of reconstruction, and have contributed so much to
its completion. In particular, I would cite Gunnar Heinsohn, whose
/Sumerer Gab es Nicht/ (Frankfurt, 1988), brought forward in a very
forceful way the need for a complete overhaul of our concept of the
Early and Middle Bronze periods. Heinsohn proved that Mesopotamian
history, properly speaking, did not begin until after the Ishtar Flood
catastrophe, and this provided a powerful impetus for lowering the age
of the Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms.
The limitations of a work such as this are obvious. Because of the wide
scope of the evidence surveyed, and drawn as it is from many
disciplines, only a small portion of what exists has been examined. Some
subjects in the book could certainly have been examined in greater
detail, though I am aware that this could have obscured the central
argument and weakened its general impact. I concede that errors may have
crept into the body of the book. In any work, mistakes are almost
inevitable, and this is particularly so in an endeavour such as this.
Nevertheless, I hold by the major conclusions reached, and am very
conscious that I have the full weight of ancient tradition on my side.
The conventional history of Egypt is built on a modern invention, the
'Sothic Calendar'; the history that follows is built on the writings of
the Egyptians themselves, and on the writings of their neighbours, the
Hebrews. The reader may judge for himself which of the two makes most
sense.
*Emmet J Sweeney*
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