Wednesday Studies No. 8
Takeaways from the study of Moses
Using the study of Abraham as a model…
1. Moses was an Egyptian in mind, Hebrew in his soul. This means that everything he knew came from an Egyptian filter. His writing was at first Egyptian, hieroglyphic based. His background of reading was from one of the largest libraries of the known world. It’s possible that as a prince of Egypt he was trained to read cuneiform and the other developed scrips of the day. He may have even read foreign literature.
2. Heiroglyphs changed very little over the thousand years that it was used, but there was at least three major styles, the formal heiroglyph, the hieratic scrip, and the demotic script. Technically the last two are not hieroglyphs.
3. Heiroglyph mean “sacred language”, suggest that a written language was a means to communicate to God. Heiroglyphs lasted from 3300 BC to 394 AD. We know the last official expression of heiroglyph was “The Graffito of Esmet Akhom”, it was written at Philea, an island temple complex, where the Egyptian religion ended. The complex was shut down by Justinian in 560 AD taken over by Christian Churches
4. Interesting that “sacred writing” died out, and was replaced by Books of Sacred Writing, the Bible.
5. Fun fact, Heiroglyphs were meant to be read “into the faces”, and complex words were structured as a “rebus”
6. Heiroglyphs were completely unreadable by 420 AD and were not understood again until 1820 although many Arabic and late medieval scholar had made attempts. That’s 1400 years of mystery broken by the Rosetta Stone, written in three languages, Heirogylphs, demotic script, and Greek.
7. What did we learn from reading Heiroglyphs? For one thing, the Egyptians were remarkable travelers and sent scribes and ambassadors around the world, and they brought knowledge back to Egypt. They were also informed about the most dynamic event in world history for the time. The end of the Bronze Age.
8. From 3200 BC to 1200BC, with the complete collapse occurring the last 200 years, 1400 to 1200 BC. Rabbinical scholars place Mose from 1390 to 1271.
9. Moses was Egyptian and a child of the Apocalypse.
10. The Sea Peoples, from 1300 to 1100 BC hordes of people from the sea brought down kingdom after kingdom. Cities and town that had lasted a thousand years all disappeared within 70 years.
11. The most important of the Sea Peoples to the Bible and our understanding is the Peleset, who turned into the Philistines. They were originally Mycenaean, that is to say Ancient Greek. Centuries of interaction, war, interbreeding was with the people that Homer wrote about.
12. Understanding the other side of the conflict of the early Israelites, can be helped by reading Homer
13. Homer lived about 850 BC (same time as David) and he was writing about things that had occurred 450 years earlier around 1300 BC , the fall of Troy occurred during Moses lifetime.
14. Back to Moses, he fought with the tactics of the Sea Peoples, fast runners against chariots. He held his arms up against the Amalekites Exodus 17:12
15. Amalekites were from Amalek, the grandson of Esau, the red handed one, the one Jacob feared.
16. The failure to subdue the Amalekites is the explanation of the current day.
17. The stories that seem so brutal in the Old Testament are not out of context, the are the realities of the times, proof of the truth of the Bible.
