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  • Dismay: The Christian Right
  • Errors of Prophets: When Prophets are Wrong
  • Egyptian Origins of the Ark of the Covenant
  • The Word Logos is Light
  • Aramaic Gospels: The Dove, Jonah, and the Baptism
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  • Economics of Jesus: Capitalist or Socialist
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Dismay: The Christian Right

Marcus Borg is brilliant and arguably the greatest Christian theologian of our time. I just finished rereading the epilogue in his book Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. The epilogue is a better read than the rest of the book, which is also very good, but Marcus Borg’s candid dialogue in the epilogue gives it impact. Below is an excerpt from the epilogue, which so accurately sums up the Christian right and the state of Christianity in America.

Errors of Prophets: When Prophets are Wrong

Prophets are not omniscient. I find it troubling how much weight religions invest in this notion that prophets are somehow infallible. There’s an interesting example in the Gospels of the New Testament involving John the Baptist, who Jesus said was “the greatest among the prophets.” This exalted status as a prophet makes this example all the more interesting.

In Matthew16:14 Peter tells Jesus that some of the people are saying that Jesus is Elijah. A few days later the disciples ask Jesus “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come [before the end]?” The scribes were asking this because there was a prophecy in Malachi 4:5 that said God would send Elijah before the end of the world. Jesus answers:

The text of Matthew clearly indicates that Jesus was implying that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of the Malachi prophecy. According to Jesus in this text John the Baptist was Elijah.

Now, let’s take a look at the Gospel of John where John the Baptist is answering questions about who he is:

Obviously there is a conflict here. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that John the Baptist is Elijah, while John the Baptist himself declares in the Gospel of John emphatically that he is not Elijah. Who is right? John the Baptist, the “greatest prophet”? Or is Jesus right? For a fundamentalist Christian this text poses a problem where the “greatest prophet” makes a statement that is in direct conflict to an interpretation by Jesus. To a non-fundamentalist this shows that there was a wide range of understanding about Old Testament prophecies among the Apostles. And this raises another question. John the Apostle, according to Matthew’s gospel, was at the event in Matthew 17 where Jesus proclaimed that John the Baptist was Elijah. So why would the apostle John later write in his own Gospel that John the Baptist was not Elijah?

Egyptian Origins of the Ark of the Covenant

I remember when I started studying ancient near-eastern linguistics about a decade ago. One of my primary interests at the time I started studying was the Egyptian influence on the Jewish religion, and more specifically on the text of the Torah. My rationale was that if a people and a religion claimed to have its origin in Egypt, we should expect to see Egyptian influence in the text. As I learned more about the Hebrew and Egyptian languages, I began to develop the following premise as a model: if for some reason the Greek source texts we have for the New Testament were lost, and all we had were English translations, we could use some of the technical religious language to deduce what the source language of the New Testament was.  For example, if we came to the word Baptize, a Greek word, we’d know that this was a technical religious word with Greek origins, and that in Greek it simply means Dip. What happens frequently when religious texts are translated is that the technical language of the religion and its practices tend to stick in the original language. This is due to the ritualistic practices cementing the term in its original form. So at some point the word ceases to be translated and is simply transliterated.

However, I quickly found that almost all of the lexical material for classical Hebrew tends to reference eastern Semitic languages instead of western Semitic languages, such as Egyptian. And from an academic perspective this makes sense since the Torah really wasn’t solidified until after the return from the Jewish exile in Babylon under Nehemiah and Ezra. So from this perspective, we would expect to see eastern Babylonian influence on the text. But I was continually haunted by the fact that the Jewish people had a story claiming that they spent hundreds of years in Egypt and were led out by an Egyptian, Moses, who was educated and raised by Egyptian priests, who eventually wrote the Torah according to tradition. Under such circumstances, how could there not be Egyptian influence?

Naturally, I learned Egyptian after learning classical Hebrew. But as soon as I gained some proficiency in Egyptian, I began to notice that there were indeed Egyptian influences on etymology and religious themes (see my article on the origin of Yahweh as a prime example of this); and to my dismay these influences were frequently overlooked in the monumental Hebrew lexicons, such as Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon.

So with a little background on my interest in this topic, one of the easiest places we see this Egyptian influence is in one of the most revered objects in Jewish history, and possibly even Christian history: The Ark of the Covenant. And ironically, to notice the influence you really don’t even need a knowledge of the languages, even though there are some linguistic hooks that solidifies this theory.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have a bias in that I’m a skeptic and a rationalist, so whenever I see an article about the Ark, or see any reference to it in pop-culture, I generally roll my eyes and think its just another kooky exploitation of a mystical religious icon. The movie Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, has done much to solidify our modern notion of what the ark looked like and what it was used for.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Now the theme of the Ark of the Covenant is: two winged heavenly beings called Cherubim, a box, and two poles that were used to carry the box. Now more specifically, even though the image above of the Ark doesn’t show anything between the angels or Cherubim, the text of Exodus says that God appeared between the Cherubim and the technical name for the space between the wings was called the Kippur, which is frequently translated as “mercy seat” or “place of propitiation”, but in Hebrew it’s simply Kippur. So the theme, to reiterate is:

1. Two angels or Cherubim
2. God between the wings of the Cherubim in a place called Kippur
3. The Cherubim and God on top of a box
4. Poles mounted to the side of the box by which priests carried the Ark

Now, let’s take a look at some images from ancient Egyptian art that predates Moses and the exodus from Egypt. The image below shows two winged heavenly beings with wings outstretched on both sides of a god, on top of a box, with poles on the side, being carried by Egyptian priests:

Boat Procession with Winged Beings

This theme is found on Egyptian wall reliefs as well as smaller art objects such as the following where Amun, an Egyptian god, is fixed between two winged heavenly beings on top of a boat. This was to symbolize a real event in which the priests would parade a larger boat, mounted on poles, with Amun seated between two winged beings:

Icon of Boat with Winged Creatures

The examples of this theme are frequent and there isn’t much use in posting more examples here. Instead, I’d like to move onto a more specific form of this theme in which a Khepera beetle, or scarab, is shown seated between two winged beings, or sometimes with the two beings holding wings up to the side of the Khepera beetle:

Khepera

The Khepera beetle, or scarab, is one of the most ubiquitous symbols found throughout the ancient middle east. The word for scarab in ancient Egyptian was pronounced something like “khepera” and had a number of meanings such as: revolve, renew, regenerate, resurrect. The theme of the Khepera beetle between divine beings, sometimes winged, is extremely frequent in Egypt as illustrated by this relief in an 18th dynasty tomb:

Khepera on Boat

Why is this important to The Ark of the Covenant? The reason is because the space between the angels in Hebrew, as we noted above was Kippur. In Hebrew, which doesn’t have vowels written out, only has the consonants: KPR. I find it highly coincidental that the Hebrew Torah describes the space between the two Cherubim as KPR and that there is a frequent theme in Egyptian art in which a KPR, or Khepera, has two divine beings usually with outstretched wings. In fact, the very word Cherubim is probably derived from the Egyptian word Cheriu, or Heriu, which meant “those from above” or “heavenly beings”.

As a result, we should suspect that the real Ark of the Covenant would have looked more Egyptian in nature, most likely with a Khepera beetle, or scarab, between the two Cherubim. This makes additional sense in that the High Priest only accessed the Ark of the Covenant one time per year, and that time was at the “revolution” of the year, or the beginning of the new year. Recall, the Egyptian word Khepera means “revolution” or “renewal”. So, at the beginning of the new year, the High Priest would go in and ceremonially perform a ritual act to signify the end of the old and the beginning, or renewal, of a new year.

Below are some additional images showing the theme in Egyptian art, some original, some artistic replications:

There are numerous other examples proving that the Ark of the Covenant’s design was a borrowed theme. Again, as I’ve said in other posts, this evidence of Egyptian themes in the religious icons of the Hebrew faith adds credibility that the Hebrew religion does in fact have some roots in Egypt.

The Word Logos is Light

I frequently hear Christians misuse the following famous passage from the Gospel of John:

Christians frequently use The Word in this passage to mean the Bible, and then extend this to Jesus, saying that both were “In the beginning”.

First, everyone from a Judeo-Christian background will agree that this verse is referencing the famous introduction to the book of Genesis:

But where does the Word fall into the Genesis reference? We get additional clues of what the Word is referencing in John if we continue reading John 1:

It should be clear what the reoccurring theme in these few verses is: light. So how does this reference the Genesis account? The first words spoken by God in the Genesis story are “Let there be light!” or Yehyeh Or in Hebrew.

So the Word referenced in John 1:1 is the word Light, not the Bible. With this in mind, other passages become clear, like why Jesus says “I am the light of the world”. Clearly Jesus did in fact believe he came from this primeval light source. However, throughout John he references this light and tells his followers that they have equal access to this light.

In addition, the ancient Hebrews associated the divine name YHWH with the Hebrew verb “to be”. This is most likely what the author of John believed as well. Remember, the phrase “let there be light” in Hebrew is only two words: “Yehyeh”=”let there be” and “Or”=”light”. Then it’s very likely John was trying to imply the following: “and the Word (light) was with God (YHWH=Yehyeh)”.

Language Application

I’m adding an appended section to this blog entry so that I can get a bit more technical for those who have some knowledge of the languages. I personally believe there is a strong possibility that there was an Aramaic original for the Gospel of John based on some indicators in the grammar. The word “with” in John 1:1 is the Greek “pros” which usually means “to” or “toward” in its simplest form. If there is an Aramaic original, the word “pros” in Greek indicates a prefixed Lamed preposition, which in Aramaic is also used to represent a direct object. As a result of this, I think there is a strong possibility that the fragment “the word was with God” and the fragment “the word was God” are two different possible translations of a single statement in the Aramaic original text. In other words, the original Aramaic text under this would have had only one sentence: “the word was [prefixed lamed]-God”. The scribe translating into Greek gave both possible translations, but by choosing the Greek preposition “pros” instead of “meta” or “syn”, he left an unintentional clue. The other option is that originally there was only one statement, but a scribe put a note in the margin of another possible translation, and when this manuscript was copied, the copiest shuffled the comment into the body of the text. This happened very frequently. In the LXX of Daniel there are sections of verses that are twice as long as the Hebrew. If you translate the additional Greek statements back into Hebrew, you begin to see that the letters in the Hebrew words had letter forms similar to the existing Hebrew letters. In other words, there were other possible translations of these texts that scribes put in marginal notes that were eventually shuffled into the main body of the texts by a later copiest. As a result, all copies of that copy branch, the branch we eventually inherited, had the comments mixed into the main body of the text making it impossible for readers to know what the original text had.

Aramaic Gospels: The Dove, Jonah, and the Baptism

The New Testament is written entirely in Greek. But many scholars for the past few centuries have speculated that the Greek gospels we inherited from the 1st century are translations of Aramaic originals that have been lost. Most of the analysis has focused on idiomatic phrases or grammatical structures in the Greek text that would be better suited to Aramaic. Some of these arguments have weight, but I’m going to suggest that the narrative of the New Testament gospels may present a more compelling argument that Aramaic source texts did in fact exist for the Gospels. In this first post on this topic we’re going to analyze the baptism of Jesus and a couple of obscure passages in the New Testament gospels where Jesus makes cryptic references to Jonah, the Hebrew prophet who was swallowed by a fish. Let’s start with Mark 1:9-13 where Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river:

Recall that our English translations of the New Testament are based on ancient Greek texts which were written in the late 1st century, but our oldest fragments are copies that date to the 2nd-3rd century. When studying the New Testament most students have a hard enough time dealing with the Greek. But if we want to see what Jesus taught, occasionally the Greek is an obstacle and we must think in Aramaic which is the mother tongue of Jesus and his immediate followers. With that in mind, let’s do a quick analysis of the word Dove in the New Testament.
The word Dove in Greek is Peristeran, which has no special significance in Greek; it simply means Dove. However, we know Jesus’ native language was Aramaic. So if we were to hear Jesus say Dove in Aramaic or Hebrew, he’d say “Yonah” or “Jonah“.

With this in mind, take a look at the following passage from Matthew 16:

In our Greek text of Matthew the name Jonah is given by Jesus in response to a demand to receive “a sign from heaven“. First, the cryptic nature of the reply should alert us that something special is going on here. In this passage, why does the Greek have Jesus saying the only “sign from heaven” is going to be Jonah, a man? The answer is that the author of the Greek text incorrectly transliterated the Aramaic word Dove, when the author should have translated it.  If we assume this passage has an Aramaic source, Jesus actually is referencing his own baptism where a dove appeared as a sign from heaven. In other words, what Jesus is saying to his questioners is:

“You won’t receive another sign from heaven except the sign of the dove at my baptism; that’s the only sign you’re getting!”

Battistero Neoniano, Ravenna, Italy 451-75 CE

And really this translation makes much more sense because the passage is dealing with a “sign from heaven”, which would naturally refer to a creature living in the heavens such as a bird, not a man. So the Greek text which has been handed down through history has preserved the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of the Aramaic correct reading of Dove. Cryptic narratives in the Greek can sometimes only be explained if we translate the Greek back into Jesus’ mother tongue of Aramaic.

Why would a scribe decide to transliterate the word Jonah instead of translating it as dove? I think the reason is simple. As the years passed, the number of myths and stories about Jesus performing miracles and signs began to increase. The gospels were written decades after Jesus was crucified and they wanted to incorporate all of these miraculous signs into their gospels. But there was a conflict here: why would Jesus say you’re not getting any other miraculous signs except the sign of the dove at my baptism and then proceed to perform miracles which culminated in the miracle of a resurrection? In order to reconcile this conflict, they decided that the statement about the dove was really a prophecy of the greatest miracle of the resurrection, referencing Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale. The scribes smoothed out this apparent conflict in the statement of Jesus by transliteration instead of translation. This exposition can be seen in two passages, Matthew 12 and Luke 11, which parallel this “Jonah/dove” passage and attempt to expound the cryptic meaning inherent in the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of Dove. In Matthew 12 and Luke 11 the Jonah passage is expounded as a prophetic passage of Jesus spending three days in the tomb, just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale. This type of metaphorical interpretation of Old Testament stories became increasingly popular among the 2nd century Christian authors who attempted to make every Old Testament story point to Jesus (see the book of Barnabas as a good example of this type of work).

Obama, Antichrist, Rush Limbaugh, and Socialism

The wonderful thing about Google is that everyone in the world dumps their souls into it without realizing that their searches can be analyzed. We unwittingly query what we care about. Google Insights allows us to take a peek into the demographics and the insanity of the political environment, without bias. The only bias is that this data only applies to people who have a computer and use Google. The following is an example of how this tool can be used to analyze political movements.

I decided to see if I could calculate, based on the sentiment I see in the public discourse today, what people might have been googling during the election. I created a Google Insight on the search terms Socialism, Rush Limbaugh, and Antichrist during the election period. Here are the results:

Google Insight: Rush, Socialism, and Antichrist

There is an obvious spike in the number of people googling these search terms, and the volume of searches is almost the same for all three searches. Let’s take a look at some demographics. Here’s the map for those searching antichrist:

Antichrist Search Volume

First, the obvious thing should be that the bible belt, the dark blue region in the middle of the United States, has been searching antichrist at a greater volume during the elections than any other region of the United States.  But we need a deeper understanding of why this region is searching antichrist. Here is a list of the top related searches for this Google Insight which exposes the fundamentalist Christians’  fears, hatred, and biases:

Google Antichrist Search Terms

In almost every case Obama is included in their searches for antichrist. This should cause every rational, educated citizen to be concerned that such a sentiment exists in a civilized modern nation. What we see here is a fear-based reaction to a political environment. Fear is at the heart of these searches. This is where political commentators like Rush Limbaugh thrive; they find the fear, insert political causes, and reap the reward. Conservatism today is riding a wave of fear.

Tea Party Riots 2009

Rush Limbaugh

Conclusion
The irrational behavior seen in the town hall meetings and the Tea Party protests can be attributed to fear-based religious fanaticism, which their searching habits expose. I’m not criticizing these people, but I’m deeply concerned by the data. We see evidence of this fear-based mentality in Glenn Beck naming his movement “The 9/12 Project”, referencing the day after September 11. The search volumes above expose this deep-seated apocalyptic fear as an uneducated understanding of religion, which is being exploited by college drop-out conservatives like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. The right needs to adjust their rhetoric to target thinking listeners, while the left needs to recognize that they need to adjust their own rhetoric in order to make the moral voters realize that their politics of compassion are more in line with the Christianity taught by Jesus than the right’s “survival of the fittest” Darwinian economic policies.

Google Insights can be created at:  http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Economics of Jesus: Capitalist or Socialist

I find it strange that the economic principles of Jesus are rarely studied, especially in America where an entire political party is built largely on Christianity. Jesus actually spends most of his time teaching about money in one form or another, and states that money is antagonistic to the kingdom of God: “You can not serve both God and Mammon (the god of money)” - Matthew 6:24.

Before going too far I’d like to make a bold claim. I’d like to suggest that Galatians 2:10 is the most important verse in the New Testament for understanding what Jesus taught. When this verse was penned by Paul, Jesus had already been crucified. The book of Galatians is one of the earliest books of the New Testament, dating to the middle of the first century. Paul is describing a falling out he is having with the 12 apostles. He has suggested to the apostles that he go and preach the gospel to the non-Jewish people of the west. What is so interesting to me is that in this candid, very early book of the New Testament, he discloses that the 12 apostles ask him to remember only ONE thing. What would you expect them to ask Paul to remember? Jesus is God? Jesus died for your sins? Here’s the verse:

Let’s examine a few verses to see if we can draw some preliminary conclusions that will help us understand why this doctrine of poverty was at the heart of early Christianity. Let’s start in Acts 4:32-35, where the Christian community of the 1st century was struggling to organize after the crucifixion of Jesus.

We see in the early Christian community a tendency for sharing of possessions and money among the community. Is this something Jesus taught them to do, or was it just a community trying to survive? Let’s look at Mark 10 to see if this practice in Acts was learned from Jesus:

So this rich man was turned away because he refused to give up his wealth. Additionally there was a severe penalty for not fully participating in the redistribution of wealth described in Acts 4 as illustrated in Acts 5:1-11 where Ananias and Sapphira were killed for withholding money from the community. Let’s return briefly to the passage of  Galatians 2:10 where Paul says the apostles asked him to “only remember the poor”.  Is there any evidence outside of this verse that poverty really was the central doctrine of Jesus?  In Luke chapter 4, the first public proclamation of Jesus is “I have come to preach the Gospel (the good news) to the poor.” In other words, Jesus saw that his primary objective was to address the poor. Whatever his message was, the poor were the ones who were supposed to hearing it.

From a statistical standpoint, the word “poor” appears 25+ times in the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and an additional 15+ times in the other books of the New Testament.

A number of scholars have suggested the following theory, some explicitly, some tacitly, but I’m going to suggest that the odds are incredibly in favor of this option: what if there was a religiopolitical party in the 1st century called “The Poor”? In fact there was, and they claimed that Jesus and James were its principle leaders. The party came to be known as The Ebionites, which in Hebrew means “The Poor”. I won’t go into all of the controversy around this group, but what I will say is that in the second and the third centuries the Christians of the west hated them, because beliefs of western Christianity had deviated so far from the Ebionite belief system that common ground was impossible, so they attacked the Ebionites as being heretical. The Christians of the west were now sponsored by the empire and the wealthy class, while the Ebionites of Jesus’ home country were in poverty, their religion was built on poverty. The converts of Paul in later generations couldn’t understand them from an imperial roman viewpoint.

Let’s return to Galatians 2:10. Now that we know there was a religio-political movement in Palestine during the first century called “The Poor Party”, or “The Poor”, that claimed to have descended directly from Jesus, could we read the passage from Galatians 2:10 like this:

James, the older brother of Jesus, became the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified. Unfortunately we only have one authentic letter from him. The following is one of the most important verses from James, which supports a view of poverty as the central doctrine, and more importantly suggests the name of their group was in fact “The Poor”:

In other words, the noble name by which they are called is “The Poor”. The context of James’ passage demands this reading. In the context of this passage he is referencing the suffering of the poor and immediately shifts into an argument that challenges the listener, who were poor, “don’t they slander the noble name which you are called?” The NIV translation and some others have intentionally tried to manipulated the Greek into saying “Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?” But the words “of him to whom you belong” is not in the Greek and has been supplied. Unfortunately translation is interpretation, and sometimes this is theologically driven which hides what the text really means.

In other words, this passage is referencing the ancient religiopolitical party called “The Poor”, or The Ebionites.

Jesus and The Poor

Let’s examine Matthew 6:19-21,24:

Again, from a modern point of view most readers assume Jesus is really saying “you can be rich, just don’t let it rule your life.” But this is not what Jesus was saying. From all the evidence the movement he started took this statement literally, so that you couldn’t be his follower unless you gave up everything and took a vow of poverty. To be a true follower of Jesus meant giving up all your wealth. To be a true member of The Poor, or The Ebionites, meant living a life without money and possessions. In fact, the monastic life probably can trace its roots to the original teachings of Jesus and the apostles. After Emperor Constantine in the 4th century made Christianity the religion of the Empire, all of the original teachings of Jesus regarding a life of poverty were re-interpreted, all those Ebionites who held to the original teachings of Jesus were deemed heretics, and churches became the centers of wealth and pomp. By the 4th century, Jesus’ original religion of poverty had vanished.

When reading the New Testament through the Ebionite/poverty point of view a number of other stories become clear. The feeding of the 5000 from the food that a few attendees had brought to the event was really a demonstration to show that by redistributing the few resources that were available there would be enough food for all to be satisfied, a demonstration that would be considered socialist from modern standards (Matthew 14:13-21). By removing the element of sharing from this story, a powerful demonstration of a community sharing resources becomes nothing more than a magic trick by a magic man, completely deflating the story’s power and purpose.

I frequently hear Christians quote the verse “give unto Caesar the things of Caesar” to support the notion that Jesus supported taxation. We know from other revolts from the same era, such as Simon bar Kokhba’s revolt in the 2nd century, there was a move to mint a Jewish national coinage to avoid using the imperial Roman coinage. Let’s look at Matthew 22:15-22

Jesus and his followers were required to give all their wealth to the poor. It is quite likely that they were trying to back completely out of the Roman monetary system in protest to the heavy taxes Rome was taking. The rationale may have simply been “if we don’t have money for them to take, they can’t take anything.” In other words, what Jesus was saying is “if it has Caesar’s image on it, give it back to Rome; we don’t need their money.”

Conclusion
Jesus’ primary doctrine was social justice. His movement was originally called “The Poor”, or The Ebionites. As illustrated from the gospels and Acts they were implementing a social movement where one of the requirements was to share all that you had, ultimately taking a vow of poverty. This was either a temporary protest against Roman occupation, or a permanent model akin to modern socialism. A secondary conclusion is that Jesus’ teachings are at odds with the teachings of protestant Christian capitalism in the United States. Economic individualism and Darwinian economics, or survival of the fittest economics, is in conflict with Jesus’ core teaching of poverty and sharing. It is also clear that the economic principles Jesus taught were mandated by Jesus and his community before one could join (ex. the rich man being turned away and the death of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5); charity in the original Christian group was not voluntary, but compulsory. I’m not suggesting Christians should support this model; I’m simply asking that they admit that Jesus taught a different economic model than that supported by Christians in America. “Survival of the fittest” economics is completely at odds with Jesus’ economics.

Origins of Yahweh / Jehovah / YHWH / Yahu / Yah

Preface

The origin of the name of God “Yahweh”, or Jehovah, has been unnecessarily obscured. The reasons for this will immediately become clear once we start to dig. Most linguists who know Egyptian, Hebrew and Akkadian have long recognized this problem. Since an understanding of the languages is required to see the problem clearly, I have attempted to make it as accessible as possible without being overly technical. There are some very technically brilliant people who have studied the ancient materials used in this post.

The Torah traditionally connects Yahweh to the verb “to be”, a sort of self proclamation of Yahweh when He tells Moses “I am what I am”, in Hebrew Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. And in a more primitive sense it was probably connected to the first words spoken by God in the Torah “Let there be light”, in Hebrew Yehyeh Or, where the first Word spoken was apparently “be”, hence it was understood that the holy Name was the first utterance of God.

YHWH

Pronunciation

In the ancient text there were no vowels, only consonants. Vowel pointing, a system of dots around the consonants that provided the vowels to be read between the consonants, didn’t enter the textual tradition until around 1000 AD, nearly 2000 years after the original text was penned. The scribes that introduced this vowel system were a group of Jewish scribes in Egypt, who provided two of the greatest textual crowns to the modern world: The Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex. So without the vowels in the original ancient text, all we have are the consonants YHWH, traditionally called the tetragrammaton, or “the four letters”.  I’m not going to go into the modern vowel pointings that developed post-1000 AD, because it’s long and involved. The only point I want to stress is that as a language passes through time its sounds mutate rather rapidly from generation to generation. It’s not difficult to recognize a British accent, from an American accent, or even from an Australian accent, and these developed over only a couple hundred years. Had they developed over a longer period entire words would have changed pronunciation and meaning; but in our case mass communication has stabilized the situation some. But a simple example of pronunciation shift as languages evolve over time can be seen in the following words: mega, magna, and big. Mega is Greek, magna is Latin, and big is English. These words all developed from a single word in the ancient past (M and B are both labial, or lip, sounds and shift frequently as languages develop).

Sample from Aleppo Codex

So, back to YHWH. Without the actual vowel pointings, it would seem difficult to reconstruct. However, without complex linguistic analysis, which usually leads to a quagmire, we are actually in a very good situation within this tradition because the name’s pronunciation was preserved in personal names from the era. For example:

• IsaYAH (Isaiah)
• JeremYAH (Jeremiah)
• AbiYAHU (Abijahu)

The list of names is actually quite long with almost hundreds of examples. But the point is that in all cases, the pronunciation is always YAHU or YAH. So how does this fit into YHWH? First, think of W as a U. In Hebrew U, W, and V are all the same letter. So in this paradigm it’s YaHUH. So if we assume the first vowel is A, we come to YAHUH which corresponds to the YAHU preserved in names from the era. Therefore, the pronunciation of Jehova, or YHWH, was YAH or YAHU. Hold on to this fact, because it will play a part later in this story.

Key Numbers in the Torah

There are two primary numbers that occur over and over in the Torah: 7 and 12. The 7 is claimed to derive from the creation 6 day cycle followed by a 7th day of rest for the divine.  The number 12 is seen as deriving from the 12 sons of Jacob and the resulting 12 tribes of Israel. But we find these numbers everywhere in the Torah. 7 and 12 are so ubiquitous one can’t really read a book without encountering multiple references to these numbers. Again, hold on to this fact that 7 and 12 are all over the Torah, and don’t forget the pronunciation of the name YAHU.

Creation Stories

Keep in mind, that before the 1800’s Egyptian hieroglyphs were a mystery, as were all of the other ancient languages of the middle east. In the 1800s  we cracked almost every language from the region, which flooded our knowledge of the ancient middle east. Also, one should remember that the biblical text represents copies of copies of copies of copies ad infinitum. With these new languages as tools scholars could pull a 4000 year old clay tablet out of the ground and read it, without having it pass through the copying process. This meant we could read pure thoughts from the ancient world without scribes inserting changes or errors. With that in mind, let’s take a look at one of the most important finds as it relates to understanding the origin of the Torah from a 3000 year old tablet containing a myth from Babylon called Enuma Elish “When on High” (5th tablet):

What should stand out is that we have in this Babylonian text the moon god creating horns for 6 days and then it reached a 7th day at half moon, and continues on until the moon is full at which point the Babylonian text uses the word “Shabbatum”, or Sabbath. So we have 6 days followed by a 7th, with the word Sabbath describing the full moon. The lunar phases from December 2008 illustrate how the moon takes 7 days to move from new moon to half moon, and roughly another 7 days to reach full moon.

Lunar phases

The Egyptian Word for Moon

In ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs the word for Moon comes in two forms: YAH and YAHU. Both pronunciations occur in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  This matches exactly the pronunciation deduced above for the Hebrew divine name YHWH, which we have proved to have been pronounced YAH and YAHU. See wikipedia for Iah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iah

Putting It All Together

We have ancient texts predating the Torah explaining that the lunar phases of new moon, half moon, whole moon, half moon occur in roughly 7 day cycles, even describing this progression as making horns for 6 days until it reaches half moon by day 7, and then iterating to full moon which the Babylonian text calls SHABBATUM or Sabbath. We know the word for moon in the near east was YAHU. And we also know the number 12 was extremely important to the ancient Hebrews. Why? Because there are 12 lunar cycles in a year. The reference to horns is also most likely why horns are so important in Judaism. Horns are everywhere in the sanctuary service, playing a prominent role in the altar and sacrificial system.

Altar with Horns

Cloud by Day, Pillar of Fire by Night

The nature of God in the Exodus story is “a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night”. A full moon in the middle of the day is milky white and has a cloud-like appearance. At night the moon becomes a flame of fire.

Also of interest, is that the Hebrews reckoned days by evening to morning. In other words a new day began in the evening. The reason they reckoned days from the evening is that they needed to see the lunar phase to know which day it was. If it was a full moon or half moon, it was a sabbath. So the modern Jewish practice of reckoning a new day from the evening is a residual marker that the night’s moon was required in order to determine which day it was.

Additional Evidence

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead we find references that parallel the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish where the moon god makes horns for 6 days until reaching a half moon on the 7th and then reaching SHABBATUM at full moon on the 15th day. This passage from the Book of the Dead comes from Plate XXVIII, chapter LXXX:

This passage echoes the passage from Enuma Elish. The word for the festival of the 15th day, SMAT, may be an Egyptian parallel for SHABBATUM, or Sabbath. Recall our example above where mega, magna, and big all derived from a single word in the ancient past. In this case, the M in SMAT would be the B in SHABBATUM, so would be the same word. Unfortunately, to my knowledge the pronunciation of SMAT is still contested. But because of the lunar context I’d argue it most likely was a word similar to SHABBATUM.

The other interesting thing to note from this passage is that each month is associated with a crystal. It seems likely that an association of gems to lunar phases most likely explains the origin of the Ephod’s breast plate which contained 12 crystals, which was later interpreted as relating to the 12 sons of Jacob and the resulting 12 tribes. The first century author Josephus confirms this view of the number 12 equating to the lunar cycles when he writes: “As for the 12 stones, whether one would prefer to read in them the moons (months)… he will not mistake [Moses'] intentions.” Again, regarding the 12 loaves of bread in the sanctuary, Josephus writes: “Again, by placing upon the table the twelve loaves, he signifies that the year is divided into as many moons (months).” - Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book III.

High Priest's Breastplate

Conclusion

The linguistic and literary evidence from the ancient near-east strongly suggests that the roots of the Hebrew faith reside in lunar worship, or at least a deity who was associated with the moon in the early stages and later was disassociated from the moon to create the later version western civilization has inherited: the “unseeable” God of the Torah. My personal view is that instead of defending one origin over another, dismissing useful data in order to defend a doctrine, or worse, slandering those who simply point out the data, I’d suggest that if you are a person of faith and feel that the data affects your faith adversely, rework your faith, not the data. Marcus Borg’s model of theology allows one to digest the historical data without having to give up your faith. While the data presented here may be troubling to some, it also has some positive effects. The data, while suggesting a lunar origin, also provides evidence of Egyptian origins of the Jewish faith, which for some may be of more value in that it supports the narratives of an exodus from Egypt. As a result, with any data presented that affects a religion, this data also affects the historicity of the Exodus in a positive way. My primary agenda is to point out historical data that isn’t being addressed in faith circles. I find it highly likely that in university libraries and seminaries there are dissertations that seek to dismantle the data presented here, but I find there are too many coincidences and correlations in the data, spread across multiple ancient middle eastern cultures to quietly dismiss these points. I think a healthy faith, one that is flexible and tolerant, can incorporate these data points to build a stronger, more resilient faith that can critically study the history of the ancient roots of religion without fear.

Links

Enuma Elish: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/enuma.htm

Egyptian Book of the Dead, plate XXVIII: http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/ebod/ebod34.htm

Yahu, Egyptian word for Moon:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iah

As a rebuttal to Robert Morey’s theory that Allah has some connections to a lunar deity, which is not true, M S M Saifullah, Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi & ‘Abdullah David have put together some very good data on this topic, although I do not agree with their findings on the deity SIN/SYN; I think this deity is clearly a lunar deity. Also, the Hebrew El and Allah in my opinion have roots in the same deity: the Sumerian god Ellil (or Enlil). I’ll address this in a later post. I respect the research of the “islamic-awareness.org” group. They hit the mark on many points, but because of their own religious bias they also miss the mark on other points. Nevertheless they have done some good research on this topic and it’s worth reading: http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Sources/Allah/moongod.html.

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