Out of Egypt by Ahmed Osman
September 9th 2006 04:51
Just before Second World War began, Freud came up with a controversial book called Moses and Monotheism, in which he postulated that Moses was actually a follower of Akhenathen’s cult( the first known instance of monotheism in world history), who after the death of the Pharoah, fled from Egypt with a few Hebrew slaves and was killed by them in the desert. It was repression of the memory of this murder that animates Judaism and Christianity. Well, it would be only a matter of time before someone would declaim against bias in this argument and hand over the trophy to the nativists.
Ahmed Osman’s Out of Egypt, as the title suggests, is a book whose theory is that not just Moses but almost every major other figure in the Bible is Egyptian. David is Thutmose III and Solomon is Amenhotep III. Joseph is his minister Yuyi. Moses is not some follower of Akhenathon but Akhenthon himself. And Jesus lived sometime in 13th century.
A huge problem with the historical verification of bible is that independent sources don’t confirm the events in it. If you work out the dates from Jewish sources and look for what other sources in the same time period have to say about a particular Biblical event, you come up with zilch. Egyptian sources have nothing to say about Exodus and Roman sources have nothing to say about Jesus. That is why, biblical scholars who are intent on proving historicity of the Bible regularly try to make the sources fit the Bible and not the other way round. A major revisionist attempt was underway which questioned the authenticity of conventional time frame of Egypt handed down to us by Manetho.
Osman’s book is the other side of the same coin. He tries to fit the Bible into the Egyptian framework even though that changes the entire biblical narrative somewhat. Moses is the son of Solomon and David is the great grandfather of Solomon. The editor of the Bible was working of course, not to elucidate Jewish history as he understood it best but covering up affiliations with the Egypt. What about the later Jesus who was born in 4 BC? He was a spiritual manifestation.
Well, the book was controversial and many churches vented their fury against it. But for me, it was huge fun. Pseudo-histories which claim to debunk conventional wisdom and reveal a secret hitherto unknown always are.
Ahmed Osman's Out of Egypt
Ahmed Osman’s Out of Egypt, as the title suggests, is a book whose theory is that not just Moses but almost every major other figure in the Bible is Egyptian. David is Thutmose III and Solomon is Amenhotep III. Joseph is his minister Yuyi. Moses is not some follower of Akhenathon but Akhenthon himself. And Jesus lived sometime in 13th century.
A huge problem with the historical verification of bible is that independent sources don’t confirm the events in it. If you work out the dates from Jewish sources and look for what other sources in the same time period have to say about a particular Biblical event, you come up with zilch. Egyptian sources have nothing to say about Exodus and Roman sources have nothing to say about Jesus. That is why, biblical scholars who are intent on proving historicity of the Bible regularly try to make the sources fit the Bible and not the other way round. A major revisionist attempt was underway which questioned the authenticity of conventional time frame of Egypt handed down to us by Manetho.
Akhenaton Picture Courtesy: University of Stnaford
Osman’s book is the other side of the same coin. He tries to fit the Bible into the Egyptian framework even though that changes the entire biblical narrative somewhat. Moses is the son of Solomon and David is the great grandfather of Solomon. The editor of the Bible was working of course, not to elucidate Jewish history as he understood it best but covering up affiliations with the Egypt. What about the later Jesus who was born in 4 BC? He was a spiritual manifestation.
Well, the book was controversial and many churches vented their fury against it. But for me, it was huge fun. Pseudo-histories which claim to debunk conventional wisdom and reveal a secret hitherto unknown always are.
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