On this stela from El-Amarna, Egyptian King Akhenaten is seen with his wife Nefertiti and their daughters bearing offerings to the sun-disk Aten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Defying centuries of traditional worship of the Egyptian pantheon, Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten decreed during his reign in the mid-14th century B.C.E. that his subjects were to worship only one god: the sun-disk Aten. Akhenaten is sometimes called the world’s first monotheist. Did his monotheism later influence Moses—and the birth of Israelite monotheism?

In “Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?” in the July/August 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, University of California, Santa Barbara, emeritus professor of anthropology Brian Fagan discusses this tantalizing question.

Egyptian King Akhenaten, meaning “Effective for Aten”—his name was originally Amenhotep IV, reigned from about 1352 to 1336 B.C.E. In the fifth year of his reign, he moved the royal residence from Thebes to a new site in Middle Egypt, Akhetaten (“the horizon of Aten,” present-day Tell el-Amarna), and there ordered lavish temples to be built for Aten. Akhenaten claimed to be the only one who had access to Aten, thus making an interceding priesthood unnecessary.

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In the BAR article “The Monotheism of the Heretic Pharaoh,” Donald B. Redford, who excavated Akhenaten’s earliest temple at Karnak (in modern Thebes), describes how Akhenaten instituted worship of Aten:

The cult of the Sun-Disk emerged from an iconoclastic “war” between the “Good God” (Akhenaten), and all the rest of the gods. The outcome of this “war” was the exaltation of the former and the annihilation of the latter. Akhenaten taxed and gradually closed the temples of the other gods; the images of their erstwhile occupants were occasionally destroyed. Cult, ritual and mythology were anathematized, literature edited to remove unwanted allusions. Names were changed to eliminate hateful divine elements; and cities where the old gods had been worshipped, were abandoned by court and government.

Akhenaten destroyed much, he created little. No mythology was devised for his new god. No symbolism was permitted in art or the cult, and the cult itself was reduced to the one simple act of offering upon the altar. Syncretism was no longer possible: Akhenaten’s god does not accept and absorb—he excludes and annihilates.

Did Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten’s adamant worship of one deity influence the Biblical Moses, leader of the Israelite Exodus? Was Akhenaten’s monotheism the progenitor of Israelite monotheism? According to BAR author Brian Fagan, we are talking about two different kinds of monothesisms:

“Israelite monotheism developed through centuries of discussion, declarations of faith and interactions with other societies and other beliefs,” Fagan writes. “In contrast, Akhenaten’s monotheism developed very largely at the behest of a single, absolute monarch presiding over an isolated land, where the pharaoh’s word was divine and secular law. It was an experiment that withered on the vine.”

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When Tutankhaten—the second son of Akhenaten; we know him as the famous King Tut—ascended to the throne, he, working with his advisers, restored worship of the traditional Egyptian pantheon and its chief god, Amun. Tutankhaten also changed his name to Tutankhamun, meaning “the living image of Amun.”

To learn more about the monotheism of Egyptian King Akhenaten, read the full article “Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?” by Brian Fagan in the July/August 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?” by Brian Fagan in the July/August 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on June 8, 2015.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

The Amarna Revolution

Epilepsy, Tutankhamun and Monotheism

Where is Queen Nefertiti’s Tomb?

Has Queen Nefertiti’s Tomb Been Located?

Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination

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Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?

Moses’ Egyptian Name

The Monotheism of the Heretic Pharaoh

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Bill Schlegel on the Location of Zoar

The sixth-century C.E. Madaba map.

Steve Collins’s interpretation of the location of Zoar^* on the Madaba Map is faulty. The Zered River, which drains into the southeastern part of the Dead Sea is depicted and clearly labeled on the Madaba Map. Zoar is located south of the mouth of the Zered River. The Madaba Map is not depicting only the “northern half” of the Dead Sea, as Collins asserts. Nor is the Lisan (Tongue) missing from the map because of “low water levels.” Perhaps exactly the opposite is true—the Madaba Map depicts no Lisan because of high water levels.

Collins’s attempt to move Zoar from near the mouth of the Zered to near the mouth of the Arnon is faulty as well (by the way, the Arnon River is depicted on the Madaba Map, further north). He cites Deuteronomy 2:4-5, 9, 34:1-3 and Joshua 13:8-28 as evidence that because Israel was not to displace Moab or Edom, Zoar can’t be as far south as the mouth of the Zered. Collins fails to realize that the territory of Moab forbidden to Israel was in the heights above the Rift Valley. The Rift Valley and the Dead Sea are distinct regions which were not forbidden to Israel “as far as Zoar.”

Moving Zoar to the mouth of the Arnon doesn’t improve Collins’s case for Sodom anyway. From the Arnon mouth to Tall-Hammam, where he wants to place Sodom, is still over 40 miles.

The best location for Zoar is on the southeast side of the Dead Sea.
—Bill Schlegel

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Steven Collins Answers Bill Schlegel

With all due respect, Mr. Schlegel’s take on the location of Zoar is a classic case of “seeing what one wants to see” and “believing what one wants to believe” in spite of the facts. I will address his points vis-à-vis my location of Zoar [at/near the confluence of the Arnon River (Wadi Mujib) with the Dead Sea] in the order of his objections.

His first protestation has to do with the sixth-century C.E. Madaba Map. I’ve studied this map in detail for many years. Most recently, in shooting a documentary for National Geographic, the entire floor of the Byzantine church which contains the mosaic map was cleared and cleaned so that I could personally examine it in detail (on my hands and knees!). One of the first things I noticed was that some of the traditional ‘readings’ and ‘assignments’ of certain places on the map were obviously in error, and based on interpretations of the geography loaded with assumptions that are likely false. The locations on the map noted by Schlegel are among them.

Author Steven Collins in a field large with standing stones, stone circles and dolmens near Tall el-Hammam, a site he associates with Biblical Sodom.

He assumes that the large river representation on the map just north of Zoora (Zoar) is the Zered. However, the letters preserved on the map, although usually read “-ARED” are actually “-AREA.” There is no delta. But even if it was “Zared,” the placement of the Zered River on any map is made based on one’s predisposition about Zoar, and not on any objective information about the Zered River’s location. If one placed Zoar on the Arnon/Wadi Mujib, then, it could be labeled “Zared!”

So, what’s actually represented on the Madaba Map? It’s an absolute fact that the Madaba Map features only the deep north basin of the Dead Sea. This is detailed quite nicely in Neev and Emery’s geological work The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah and Jericho¹ and numerous other geological resources. Based on numerous data-sets dealing with ancient Dead Sea levels, it’s clear that during the Roman and Byzantine Period the level of the Dead Sea was even lower than today—about -440m. As Neev and Emery point out, at the time when the Madaba Map was made there was no shallow south basin, thus no Lisan Peninsula. Zoar was then a deep-water port on the Bay of Mazra’a at the south end of the north basin. Also, there was a Roman road going east/west over the Lisan (not possible when the south basin is filled). Today, at the present historic low-level, you can easily see Roman and Byzantine ruins along the eastern shoreline of the Dead Sea, right next to the water!

Mr. Schlegel’s suggestion that “Perhaps exactly the opposite is true—the Madaba Map depicts no Lisan because of high water levels” is made in abject ignorance of the facts. As Neev and Emery state: “As Zoar of the first century A.D. was a seaport, it had to be on the shore and must have been north of [the paved Roman road traversing the Lisan] or near the head of the Bay of Mazra’a [at the south end of the north basin]. The absence of any geographic indication for the [Lisan] peninsula’s existence on the Madaba Map leads to a similar conclusion. Such an outstanding and picturesque tongue-like shore would not have been overlooked by the artist-cartographer of that map.” They further state that “Postures of two cargo vessels portrayed on the Madaba Map imply that the main traffic was between Zoar, port at the southeast corner of the north basin, and the north coast as close as possible to Jericho, the gate to Judea. The Bay of Mazra’a was always the main, if not the only, natural deepwater haven … If Zoar were at Es-Safi, it never could have functioned as an efficient harbor.”

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Given that the Madaba Map shows only the deep north basin, the large ‘river’ representation to the north of Zoar is none other than the Wadi Mujib (Biblical Arnon River/Gorge). It’s exactly where it’s supposed to be, including being virtually due east of Hebron on the map! There are just two major wadis emptying into the north Dead Sea basin: the Wadi Mujib and the Wadi Zarqa-Ma’in farther north. Thus, the north (and correctly smaller) ‘river’ represented is the Wadi Zarqa. If this is not the case, then the Madaba Map would have to be declared a geographical distortion unusable for cartographic purposes.

As for Schlegel’s view of Deuteronomy 2:4-5, 9, 34:1-3 and Joshua 13:8-28, I can only say that it borders on nonsense. His statement that I fail “to realize that the territory of Moab forbidden to Israel was in the heights above the Rift Valley,” and that the “Rift Valley and the Dead Sea are distinct regions, which were not forbidden, to Israel ‘as far as Zoar’” is just wishful thinking. The territories of Moab and Edom (and the Ammon, for that matter) followed their wadi/river borders right into the Rift Valley. Indeed, in the time of Moses, even the valley floor northeast of the Dead Sea was called the Plains of Moab!

That the Reuben/Gad tribal allotment stretched from “the Kikkar of the Valley of Jericho, City of Palms, as far as Zoar” is clearly marking out its south border at the Arnon River/Gorge, the natural and perpetual border between the Transjordan Israelites and Moabites. The Roman/Byzantine Zoar is in the same vicinity, just south of where the Wadi Mujib/Arnon empties into the Dead Sea. The ‘port’ of Zoar was likely moved to the Bay of Mazra’a to avoid the oft’-catastrophic flash floods disgorging from the Wadi Mujib during seasonal rains. That “the sound of [Moab’s] cry rises from Heshbon to Elealeh and Jahaz, from Zoar as far as Horonaim and Eglath Shelishiyah…” (Jer 48:34) indicates, in this sorth-to-south sequence, that Zoar is in the middle of the (then) Moabite territory (in a time when the northern border of Moab had moved north to include Heshbon).

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In conclusion, the best location for Zoar is not on the southeast corner of the Dead Sea’s shallow (sometimes nonexistent) south basin, but on the southeast corner of the deep north basin, where, in fact, the Madaba Map places Byzantine Zoar.²
—Steven Collins

Bill Schlegel is associate professor of Bible at The Master’s College, Israel Bible Extension (IBEX), where he teaches Biblical history, geography and Hebrew. He is author of the Satellite Bible Atlas

Steven Collins is director of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project and dean of the College of Archaeology and Biblical History at Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he also serves as curator of its ancient Near East collections.

Notes

*Q&C: Geographically Puzzled. Steven Collins response to Shirley S. Reed. BAR July/Aug 2013, p. 10-11.

1. David Neev and K.O. Emery The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho: Geological, Climatological, and Archaeological Background, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1995; pp. 131-138.

2. For further reading and documentation, I highly recommend my detailed article answering Mr. Schlegel at tallelhammam.com under “Related Publications.”

A version of this post first appeared in Bible History Daily in 2013.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

Arguments Against Locating Sodom at Tall el-Hammam

Madaba: The World’s Oldest Holy Land Map

Who Were the Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites in the Bible?

A City in the Moabite Heartland

The post Locating Zoar appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Traditional Views of Jesus’ Last Supper as a Passover Meal

With his disciples gathered around him, Jesus partakes of his Last Supper. The meal in this late-15th-century painting by the Spanish artist known only as the Master of Perea consists of lamb, unleavened bread and wine—all elements of the Seder feast celebrated on the first night of the Jewish Passover festival. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke appear to present Jesus’ Last Supper as a Seder. In John, however, the seven-day Passover festival does not begin until after Jesus is crucified. Jonathan Klawans suggests that the Passover Seder as we know it developed only after the time of Jesus. Christie’s Images/Superstock

Many people assume that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. And indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark 14:12, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the “first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb.” If Jesus and his disciples gathered together to eat soon after the Passover lamb was sacrificed, what else could they possibly have eaten if not the Passover meal? And if they ate the Passover sacrifice, they must have held a Seder.

Three out of four of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) agree that the Last Supper was held only after the Jewish holiday had begun. Moreover, one of the best known and painstakingly detailed studies of the Last Supper—Joachim Jeremias’s book The Eucharistic Words of Jesus—lists no fewer than 14 distinct parallels between the Last Supper tradition and the Passover Seder.¹

The Passover Seder and Sacrifice

The Jewish holiday of Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. The roots of the festival are found in Exodus 12, in which God instructs the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb at twilight on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, before the sun sets (Exodus 12:18). That night the Israelites are to eat the lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The lamb’s blood should be swabbed on their doorposts as a sign. God, seeing the sign, will then “pass over” the houses of the Israelites (Exodus 12:13), while smiting the Egyptians with the tenth plague, the killing of the first-born sons.

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A San Francisco seder. California Rabbi Jack Frankel and his family lift the first glass of wine during a Seder meal, held on the first night of Passover (and the second night in the Diaspora). The Seder commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. Throughout the meal, the biblical story is retold; the food is linked symbolically with the Exodus. Photo by Rodger Ressmeyer, San Francisco/Corbis.

Exodus 12 commands the Israelites to repeat this practice every year, performing the sacrifice during the day and then consuming it after the sun has set. (According to Jewish tradition, the new day begins with the setting of the sun, so the sacrifice is made on the 14th but the beginning of Passover and the meal are actually on the 15th, although this sequence of dates is not specified in Exodus.) Exodus 12 further speaks of a seven-day festival, which begins when the sacrifice is consumed (Exodus 12:15).

Once the Israelites were settled in Israel, and once a Temple was built in Jerusalem, the original sacrifice described in Exodus 12 changed dramatically. Passover became one of the Jewish Pilgrimage festivals, and Israelites were expected to travel to Jerusalem to sacrifice a Passover lamb at the Temple during the afternoon of the 14th day, and then consume the Passover sacrifice once the sun had set, and the festival had formally begun on the 15th. This kind of celebration is described as having taken place during the reigns of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah (2 Chronicles 30 and 35).

As time passed, the practice continued to evolve. Eventually, a number of customs, recorded in rabbinic literature, began to accumulate around the meal, which became so highly ritualized that it was called the Seder, from the Hebrew for “order”: Unleavened bread was broken, wine was served, the diners reclined and hymns were sung. Furthermore, during the meal, the Exodus story was retold and the significance of the unleavened bread, bitter herbs and wine was explained.

The bread and wine, the hymn, the reclining diners—many of these characteristic elements are shared by the Last Supper, as Jeremias pointed out. (Jeremias’s 14 parallels are given in full in endnote 1.) What is more, just as Jews at the Seder discuss the symbolism of the Passover meal, Jesus at his Last Supper discussed the symbolism of the wine and bread in light of his own coming death.

It is not only Jeremias’s long list of parallels that leads many modern Christians and Jews to describe the Last Supper as a Passover Seder. The recent popularity of interfaith Seders (where Christians and Jews celebrate aspects of Passover and the Last Supper together) points to an emotional impulse that is also at work here. The Christian celebration of the Eucharist (Communion)—the Last Supper—is the fundamental ritual for many Christians. And among Jews the Passover Seder is one of the most widely practiced of all observances. In these times of ecumenicism and general good feeling between Christians and Jews, many people seem to find it reassuring to think that Communion (the Eucharist) and the Passover Seder are historically related.

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Historical Doubts about Jesus’ Last Supper as a Passover Seder

History, however, is often more complex and perhaps a little less comforting than we might hope. Although I welcome the current ecumenical climate, I believe we must be careful not to let our emotions get the better of us when we are searching for history. Indeed, even though the association of the Last Supper with a Passover Seder remains entrenched in the popular mind, a growing number of scholars are beginning to express serious doubts about this claim.

Of course a number of New Testament scholars—the Jesus Seminar comes to mind—tend to doubt that the Gospels accurately record very much at all about Jesus, with the exception of some of his sayings. Obviously if the Gospels cannot be trusted, then we have no reason to assume that there ever was a Last Supper at all. And if there was no Last Supper, then it could not have taken place on Passover.²

The sacrifice of the Passover lamb is conducted annually on Mt. Gerizim, in Nablus (ancient Shechem), in the West Bank, by the Samaritans, a religious group that split from Judaism by the second century B.C.E. The Samaritans retained the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) as their Scripture, although with some alterations. The Samaritan Bible refers to Mt. Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the center of worship. David Harris.

Furthermore, several Judaic studies scholars—Jacob Neusner is a leading example—very much doubt that rabbinic texts can be used in historical reconstructions of the time of Jesus. But rabbinic literature is our main source of information about what Jews might have done during their Seder meal in ancient times. For reasons that are not entirely clear, other ancient Jewish sources, such as Josephus and Philo, focus on what Jews did in the Temple when the Passover sacrifice was offered, rather than on what they did afterward, when they actually ate the sacrifice. Again, if we cannot know how Jews celebrated Passover at the time of Jesus, then we have to plead ignorance, and we would therefore be unable to answer our question.

There is something to be said for these skeptical positions, but I am not such a skeptic. I want to operate here under the opposite assumptions: that the Gospels can tell us about the historical Jesus,³ and that rabbinic sources can be used—with caution—to reconstruct what Jews at the time of Jesus might have believed and practiced.⁴ Even so, I do not think the Last Supper was a Passover Seder.

Read “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” by Lawrence Mykytiuk from the January/February 2015 issue of BAR >>

Jesus’ Last Supper in the Gospels

While three of the four canonical Gospels strongly suggest that the Last Supper did occur on Passover, we should not get too comfortable based on that. The three Gospels that support this view are the three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke. As anyone who has studied these three Gospels knows, they are closely related. In fact, the name synoptic refers to the fact that these three texts can be studied most effectively when “seen together” (as implied in the Greek etymology of synoptic). Thus, in fact we don’t really have three independent sources here at all. What we have, rather, is one testimony (probably Mark), which was then copied twice (by Matthew and Luke).

Against the “single” testimony of the synoptics that the Last Supper was a Passover meal stands the lone Gospel of John, which dates the crucifixion to the “day of Preparation for the Passover” (John 19:14). According to John, Jesus died just when the Passover sacrifice was being offered and before the festival began at sundown (see the sidebar to this article). Any last meal—which John does not record—would have taken place the night before, or even earlier than that. But it certainly could not have been a Passover meal, for Jesus died before the holiday had formally begun.

So are we to follow John or the synoptics?⁵ There are a number of problems with the synoptic account. First, if the Last Supper had been a Seder held on the first night of Passover, then that would mean Jesus’ trial and crucifixion took place during the week-long holiday. If indeed Jewish authorities were at all involved in Jesus’ trial and death, then according to the synoptics those authorities would have engaged in activities—holding trials and carrying out executions—that were either forbidden or certainly unseemly to perform on the holiday. This is not the place to consider whether Jewish authorities were involved in Jesus’ death.⁶ Nor is it the place to consider whether such authorities would have been devout practitioners of Jewish law. But this is the place to point out that if ancient Jewish authorities had been involved in something that could possibly be construed as a violation of Jewish law, the Gospels—with their hatred of the Jewish authorities—would probably have made the most of it. The synoptic account stretches credulity, not just because it depicts something unlikely, but because it fails to recognize the unlikely and problematic nature of what it depicts. It is almost as if the synoptic tradition has lost all familiarity with contemporary Jewish practice. And if they have lost familiarity with that, they have probably lost familiarity with reliable historical information as well.

There are, of course, some reasons to doubt John’s account too. He may well have had theological motivations for claiming that Jesus was executed on the day of preparation when the Passover sacrifice was being offered but before Passover began at sundown. John’s timing of events supports the Christian claim that Jesus himself was a sacrifice and that his death heralds a new redemption, just as the Passover offering recalls an old one. Even so, John’s claim that Jesus was killed just before Passover began is more plausible than the synoptics’ claim that Jesus was killed on Passover. And if Jesus wasn’t killed on Passover, but before it (as John claims), then the Last Supper could not in fact have been a Passover Seder.

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A Jewish Last Supper Celebration

What then of Jeremias’s long list of parallels? It turns out that under greater scrutiny the parallels are too general to be decisive. That Jesus ate a meal in Jerusalem, at night, with his disciples is not so surprising. It is also no great coincidence that during this meal the disciples reclined, ate both bread and wine, and sang a hymn. While such behavior may have been characteristic of the Passover meal, it is equally characteristic of practically any Jewish meal.

A number of scholars now believe that the ritual context for the Last Supper was not a Seder but a standard Jewish meal. That Christians celebrated the Eucharist on a daily or weekly basis (see Acts 2:46–47) underscores the fact that it was not viewed exclusively in a Passover context (otherwise, it would have been performed, like the Passover meal, on an annual basis).

An ancient Christian church manual called the Didache also suggests that the Last Supper may have been an ordinary Jewish meal. In Chapters 9 and 10 of the Didache, the eucharistic prayers are remarkably close to the Jewish Grace After Meals (Birkat ha-Mazon).⁷ While these prayers are recited after the Passover meal, they would in fact be recited at any meal at which bread was eaten, holiday or not. Thus, this too underscores the likelihood that the Last Supper was an everyday Jewish meal.

Moreover, while the narrative in the synoptics situates the Last Supper during Passover, the fact remains that the only foods we are told the disciples ate are bread and wine—the basic elements of any formal Jewish meal. If this was a Passover meal, where is the Passover lamb? Where are the bitter herbs? Where are the four cups of wine?^a

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The Symbolic Explanation of the Bread and Wine at Passover and Jesus’ Last Supper

We are left with only one important parallel (Jeremias’s 14th) that can be explained in terms of a Seder: the surprising fact that Jesus at his Last Supper engaged in symbolic explanation of the bread and wine, just as Jews at the Seder engage in symbolic explanations, interpreting aspects of the Passover meal in light of the Exodus from Egypt: “Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant’” (Matthew 26:26–28=Mark 14:22; see also Luke 22:19–20). Is this not a striking parallel to the ways in which Jews celebrating the Seder interpret, for example, the bitter herbs eaten with the Passover sacrifice as representing the bitter life the Israelites experienced as slaves in Egypt?

However, this last parallel between the Last Supper and the Passover Seder assumes that the Seder ritual we know today was celebrated in Jesus’ day. But this is hardly the case.

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The Development of the Modern Passover Seder

When Jews today sit down to celebrate the Passover Seder, they use a book known as the Haggadah. The Hebrew word haggadah literally means “telling”; the title refers to the book’s purpose: to provide the ordered framework through which the story of Passover is told at the Seder. Telling the story of Passover is, of course, one of the fundamental purposes of the celebration, as stated in Exodus 13:8: “And you shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.’”

The text on this particular page from an illuminated Haggadah created by Zeev Raban (1890–1970) provides rabbinic commentary on a Biblical passage relating to Israel’s sojourn in Egypt. After discussing Jacob’s journey to Egypt, the text continues, “‘And he lived there’—this teaches that our father Jacob did not go to Egypt to settle there permanently, just temporarily, as it is written: ‘And the sons of Jacob said to Pharaoh: “We have come to live in this land temporarily, for there is no pasture for the flocks that belong to your servants, for the famine is harsh in the land of Canaan”’” (quoting Genesis 47:4). From the Raban Haggadah/Courtesy of Mali Doron.

The traditional text of the Haggadah as it exists today incorporates a variety of material, starting with the Bible, and running through medieval songs and poems. For many Jews (especially non-Orthodox Jews), the process of development continues, and many modern editions of the Haggadah contain contemporary readings of one sort or another. Even many traditional Jews have, for instance, adapted the Haggadah so that mention can be made of the Holocaust.⁸

How much of the Haggadah goes back to ancient times? In the 1930s and 1940s, the American Talmud scholar Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991) famously claimed that various parts of the Passover Haggadah were very early, stemming in part from the third century B.C.E.⁹ In 1960, Israeli scholar Daniel Goldschmidt (1895–1972) effectively rebutted practically all of Finkelstein’s claims. It is unfortunate that Goldschmidt’s Hebrew article has not been translated, because it remains, to my mind, the classic work on the early history of the Passover Haggadah.¹⁰ Fortunately, a number of brief and up-to-date treatments of the history of the Haggadah are now available.¹¹ A full generation later, the Goldschmidt-Finkelstein debate seems to have been settled, and in Goldschmidt’s favor. Almost everyone doing serious work on the early history of Passover traditions, including Joseph Tabory, Israel Yuval, Lawrence Hoffman, and the father-son team of Shmuel and Ze’ev Safrai, has rejected Finkelstein’s claims for the great antiquity of the bulk of the Passover Haggadah. What is particularly significant about this consensus is that these scholars are not radical skeptics. These scholars believe that, generally speaking, we can extract historically reliable information from rabbinic sources. But as demonstrated by the late Baruch Bokser in his book The Origins of the Seder, practically everything preserved in the early rabbinic traditions concerning the Passover Seder brings us back to the time immediately following the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.¹² It’s not that rabbinic literature cannot be trusted to tell us about history in the first century of the Common Era. It’s that rabbinic literature—in the case of the Seder—does not even claim to be telling us how the Seder was performed before the destruction of the Temple.^b

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Rabban Gamaliel used to say: Whoever does not make mention of the following three things on Passover has not fulfilled his obligation: namely, the Passover sacrifice, unleavened bread (matzah) and bitter herbs.

(1) The Passover sacrifice, which our ancestors used to eat at the time when the Holy Temple stood—what is the reason? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt. As it is said, “It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover…” (Exodus 12:27).

(2) The unleavened bread, which we eat—what is the reason? Because the dough of our ancestors had not yet leavened when the King of Kings, the Holy One Blessed be He revealed Himself to them and redeemed them. As it is said, “And they baked unleavened cakes…” (Exodus 12:39).

(3) These bitter herbs, which we eat—what is the reason? Because the Egyptians made the lives of our ancestors bitter in Egypt. As it is said, “And they made their lives bitter…” (Exodus 1:14).

Read Andrew McGowan’s article “The Hungry Jesus,” in which he challenges the tradition that Jesus was a welcoming host at meals, in Bible History Daily.

Rabban Gamaliel instructs his students in this illumination from the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Haggadah credits Gamaliel with introducing the requirement that the symbolic significance of the food served during the Seder be explained during the meal. Some scholars who assume the Last Supper was a Seder have suggested that Jesus deliberately explained the significance of the bread and wine in fulfillment of this requirement. But the requirement may not have even been in place in the time of Jesus. There were two leaders of the rabbinic academy called Gamaliel: One lived around the time of Jesus; the other, after the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. Sarajevo National Museum.

On first reading, Jeremias might appear to be correct: Jesus’ explanation of the bread and the wine does seem similar to Rabban Gamaliel’s explanation of the Passover symbols. Might not Jesus be presenting a competing interpretation of these symbols? Possibly. But it really depends on when this Rabban Gamaliel lived. If he lived later than Jesus, then it would make no sense to view Jesus’ words as based on Rabban Gamaliel’s.

Unfortunately for the contemporary historian, there were two rabbis named Gamaliel, both of whom bore the title “rabban” (which means “our master” and was usually applied to the head of the rabbinic academy). The first lived decadesbefore the destruction of the Temple, according to rabbinic tradition.¹³ It is this Gamaliel who is referred to in Acts 22:3, in which Paul is said to have claimed that he was educated “at the feet of Gamaliel.” The second Rabban Gamaliel was, according to rabbinic tradition, the grandson of the elder Gamaliel. This Gamaliel served as head of the rabbinic academy sometime after the destruction of the Temple. Virtually all scholars working today believe that the Haggadah tradition attributing the words quoted above to Gamaliel refers to the grandson, Rabban Gamaliel the Younger, who lived long after Jesus had died.¹⁴ One piece of evidence for this appears in the text quoted above, in which Rabban Gamaliel is said to have spoken of the time “when the Temple was still standing”—as if that time had already passed. Furthermore, as Baruch Bokser has shown, the bulk of early rabbinic material pertaining to the Passover Haggadah is attributed in the Haggadah itself to figures who lived immediately following the destruction of the Temple (and were therefore contemporaries of Gamaliel the Younger). Finally, a tradition preserved in the Tosefta (a rabbinic companion volume to the earliest rabbinic lawbook, the Mishnah, edited perhaps in the third or fourth century) suggests that Gamaliel the Younger played some role in Passover celebrations soon after the Temple was destroyed, when animal sacrifices could for this reason no longer be offered.¹⁵

Thus, the Passover Seder as we know it developed after 70 C.E. I wish we could know more about how the Passover meal was celebrated before the Temple was destroyed. But unfortunately, our sources do not answer this question with any certainty. Presumably, Jesus and his disciples would have visited the Temple to slaughter their Passover sacrifice. Then they would have consumed it along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, as required by the Book of Exodus. And presumably they would have engaged in conversation pertinent to the occasion. But we cannot know for sure.

According to scholar Jonathan Klawans, ancient Jews—including the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes—cared as much about matters of Jewish theology as about laws and practices. Read more >>

Why the Synoptic Gospels Portray the Last Supper as a Passover Meal

Having determined that the Last Supper was not a Seder and that it probably did not take place on Passover, I must try to account for why the synoptic Gospels portray the Last Supper as a Passover meal. Of course, the temporal proximity of Jesus’ crucifixion (and with it, the Last Supper) to the Jewish Passover provides one motive: Surely this historical coincidence could not be dismissed as just that.

Another motive relates to a rather practical question: Within a few years after Jesus’ death, Christian communities (which at first consisted primarily of Jews) began to ask when, how and even whether they should celebrate or commemorate the Jewish Passover.¹⁶ This was a question not only early on, but throughout the time of the so-called Quartodeciman controversy. The Quartodecimans (the 14-ers) were Christians who believed that the date of Easter should be calculated so as to coincide with the Jewish celebration of Passover, whether or not that date fell on a Sunday. The Jewish calendar was (and is) lunar, and therefore there is always a full moon on the night of the Passover Seder, that is, the night following the 14th of Nisan. But that night is not always a Saturday night. The Quartodeciman custom of celebrating Easter beginning on the evening following the 14th day apparently began relatively early in Christian history and persisted at least into the fifth century C.E. The alternate view—that Easter must be on a Sunday, regardless of the day on which the Jewish Passover falls—ultimately prevailed. Possibly the Gospels’ disagreements about the timing of the Last Supper were the result of these early Christian disputes about when Easter should be celebrated. After all, if you wanted to encourage Christians to celebrate Easter on Passover, would it not make sense to emphasize the fact that Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples just before he died?

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Related to the question of when Christians should recall Jesus’ last days was a question of how they should be recalled. Early on, a number of Christians—Quartodecimans and others—felt that the appropriate way to mark the Jewish Passover was not with celebration, but with fasting. On the one hand, this custom reflected an ancient Jewish tradition of fasting during the time immediately preceding the Passover meal (as related in Mishnah Pesachim 10:1). On the other hand, distinctively Christian motives for this fast can also be identified, from recalling Jesus’ suffering on the cross to praying for the eventual conversion of the Jews.¹⁷

Is it possible to identify the first-century man named Jesus behind the many stories and traditions about him that developed over 2,000 years in the Gospels and church teachings? Visit the Jesus/Historical Jesus study page to read free articles on Jesus in Bible History Daily.

Jesus is the Paschal lamb in the Gospel of John, which associates the crucifixion, rather than the Last Supper, with the Passover festival. According to John, Jesus died on the “day of Preparation for the Passover” (John 19:14), when the Passover sacrifice was being offered but before the festival began at sundown.
In Matthias Gruenewald’s altarpiece (1510–1516) for the monastery of Isenheim, Germany (but now in the Unterlinden Museum, in Colmar), the crucified Jesus is explicitly linked with the Paschal sacrifice. To the right of the cross stands a wounded lamb, which carries a cross and bleeds into a chalice. The disciple whom Jesus loved comforts Jesus’ mother at left. Mary Magdalene kneels at the foot of the cross, her alabaster ointment jar beside her. At right, John the Baptist points to Jesus. His prediction that Jesus will overtake him (“He must increase, but I must decrease,” John 3:30) is inscribed beside him in Latin. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.

The German New Testament scholar Karl Georg Kuhn has argued that the Gospel of Luke places the Last Supper in a Passover context in order to convince Christians not to celebrate Passover. He notes that the synoptic Last Supper tradition attributes to Jesus a rather curious statement of abstinence: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Paschal lamb with you before I suffer, for I tell you that I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God…[and] I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:15–18; cf. Mark 14:25 [“I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God”]=Matthew 26:29). The synoptics’ placement of the Last Supper in a Passover context should be read along with Jesus’ statement on abstinence; in this view, the tradition that the Last Supper was a Passover meal argues that Christians should mark the Passover not by celebrating, but by fasting, because Jesus has already celebrated his last Passover.¹⁸ Thus, until Jesus’ kingdom is fulfilled, Christians should not celebrate at all during Passover.

New Testament scholar Bruce Chilton recently presented an alternate theory. He argues that the identification of the Last Supper with a Passover Seder originated among Jewish Christians who were attempting to maintain the Jewish character of early Easter celebrations.¹⁹ By calling the Last Supper a Passover meal, these Jewish-Christians were trying to limit Christian practice in three ways. Like the Passover sacrifice, the recollection of the Last Supper could only be celebrated in Jerusalem, at Passover time, and by Jews.^c

Without deciding between these two contradictory alternatives (though Kuhn’s is in my mind more convincing), we can at least agree that there are various reasons why the early church would have tried to “Passoverize” the Last Supper tradition.²⁰ Placing the Last Supper in the context of Passover was a literary tool in early Christian debates about whether or not and how Christians should celebrate Passover.

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Both of these Passoverizations can be placed in the broader context of Exodus typology in general. W.D. Davies and N.T. Wright have argued that various New Testament sources depict the events of Jesus’ life as a new Exodus. Early Christians interpreted Jesus’ life and death in light of the ancient Jewish narrative of redemption par excellence, the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Surely the depiction of the Last Supper as a Passover observance could play a part in this larger effort of arguing that Jesus’ death echoes the Exodus from Egypt.²¹

This process of Passoverization did not end with the New Testament. The second-century bishop Melito of Sardis (in Asia Minor) once delivered a widely popular Paschal sermon, which could well be called a “Christian Haggadah,” reflecting at great length on the various connections between the Exodus story and the life of Jesus.²²

Passoverization can even be found in the Middle Ages. Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic custom of using unleavened wafers in the Mass is medieval in origin. The Orthodox churches preserve the earlier custom of using leavened bread.²³ Is it not possible to see the switch from using leavened to unleavened bread as a “Passoverization” of sorts?

Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder? Most likely, it was not.

Interested in Jesus’ Judaism? The Bible History Daily post “Was Jesus a Jew?” includes the full article “What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus?: To wrench Jesus out of his Jewish world destroys Jesus and destroys Christianity.” by Anthony J. Saldarini as it originally appeared in Bible Review.

When Passover Begins: The Synoptics versus John

“Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?” by Jonathan Klawans originally appeared in Bible Review, October 2001. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in October 2012.

Jonathan Klawans is Professor of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) and Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), which received the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies.

Notes

a. Some may also ask, where is the unleavened bread? The Gospels do not specify that Jesus fed his disciples unleavened bread, which is what Jews would eat at Passover. This however does not preclude the possibility that Jesus used unleavened bread at the Last Supper, as Jews commonly refer to unleavened bread (called in Hebrew, matzah) as simply “bread.” See, for example, Deuteronomy 16:3 and Nahum N. Glatzer, The Passover Haggadah (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 24, 64.

b. See Baruch Bokser, “Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder?” Bible Review, Summer 1987.

c. See Bruce Chilton, “The Eucharist—Exploring Its Origins,” Bible Review, December 1994.

1. The book first appeared in 1935 and was revised and translated various times after that. The 14 parallels are listed in the 1960 third edition, which was translated into English in 1966. See Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, 3rd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1966), esp. pp. 42–61. His 14 parallels may be summarized as follows: (1) The Last Supper took place in Jerusalem, (2) in a room made available to pilgrims for that purpose, and (3) it was held during the night. (4) Jesus celebrated that meal with his “family” of disciples; and (5) while they ate, they reclined. (6) This meal was eaten in a state of ritual purity. (7) Bread was broken during the meal and not just at the beginning. (8) Wine was consumed and (9) this wine was red. (10) There were last-minute preparations for the meal, after which (11) alms were given, and (12) a hymn was sung. (13) Jesus and his disciples then remained in Jerusalem. Finally, (14) Jesus discussed the symbolic significance of the meal, just as Jews do during the Passover Seder. For brief surveys summarizing the question see Robert F. O’Toole, “Last Supper,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 4, pp. 235–236 and Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 423–427.

2. For a representative statement denying the historicity of the Last Supper traditions, see Robert W. Funk and The Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 139.

3. For an excellent treatment of what we can and cannot know of the historical Jesus, see the recent book by my colleague Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

4. For an excellent summary of Judaism in Jesus’ time—one which makes judicious use of rabbinic evidence—see E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 B.C.E.–66 C.E. (London: SCM Press, 1992). For more on the use of rabbinic sources, see Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1977), esp. pp. 59–84.

5. There are those who attempt to harmonize John and the synoptics by supposing that they disagreed not about when the Last Supper occurred, but about whether the date of Passover was supposed to be calculated by following a solar calendar or a lunar one. Annie Jaubert presents this theory in her book, The Date of the Last Supper (Staten Island: Alba House, 1965). This view cannot be accepted, however. It is too difficult to conceive of Passover having been celebrated twice in the same place without any contemporary or even later writer referring to such an event. Surely it would have been remarkable if two Passovers were held in the same week! Moreover, while we do know of solar calendars from the Book of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, we do not know how any of these calendars really worked. Jubilees’s calendar, for instance, explicitly prohibits any form of intercalation (the adding of extra days in a leap year). And without intercalation, by Jesus’ time, Jubilees’s 364-day solar calendar would be off not just by days, but by months. It is only by hypothesizing some manner of intercalation that we can even come up with the possibility that in Jesus’ time the two calendars were both functioning, but off by just a few days. Thus in the end, Jaubert’s book presents a good theory, but it remains just that, a theory. For more on these questions, see James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time (London: Routledge, 1998).

6. On the question of Jewish authorities and their role in Jesus’ death, see John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).

7. For more on the parallels between the Didache and the Jewish Birkat ha-Mazon, see Enrico Mazza, The Celebration of the Eucharist: The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), esp. pp. 19–26 (where he discusses these parallels) and pp. 307–309 (where he provides translations of the texts).

8. A useful version of the traditional text of the Haggadah, with introduction and translation, can be found in the widely available edition of Nahum N. Glatzer, The Passover Haggadah (New York: Schocken Books, 1981). Those interested in appreciating how the Haggadah brings together material from various historical periods might look at Jacob Freedman, Polychrome Historical Haggadah for Passover (Springfield, MA: Jacob Freedman Liturgy Research Foundation, 1974).

9. Finkelstein published his theories in three articles: “The Oldest Midrash: Pre-Rabbinic Ideals and Teachings in the Passover Haggadah,” Harvard Theological Review (HTR) 31 (1938), pp. 291–317; “Pre-Maccabean Documents in the Passover Haggadah (Part 1),” HTR 35 (1942), pp. 291–332; and “Pre-Maccabean Documents in the Passover Haggadah (Part 2),” HTR 36 (1943), pp. 1–38. Glatzer summarizes some of Finkelstein’s claims in The Passover Haggadah, pp. 39–42.

10. Goldschmidt, The Passover Haggadah: Its Sources and History (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1960). Glatzer’s edition of the Haggadah (cited above) is based in part on Goldschmidt’s research, but the first edition of Glatzer’s Haggadah was published in 1953, years before Goldschmidt’s final 1960 version of his article.

11. See especially the collection of essays, Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1999). Those who read Hebrew will want to consult Shmuel Safrai and Ze’ev Safrai, Haggadah of the Sages: The Passover Haggadah (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Carta, 1998).

12. Baruch Bokser, The Origins of the Seder (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984).

13. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath, 15a.

14. This view can be traced back well into the middle ages—it is advocated in a 14th-century Haggadah commentary by Rabbi Simeon ben Zemach Duran. This view has also been advocated more recently by, among others, Daniel Goldschmidt, Joseph Tabory, Israel Yuval and Baruch Bokser. Bokser, Origins of the Seder, pp. 41–43, 79–80, and 119 n. 13; Goldschmidt, Passover Haggadah, pp. 51–53. See also the articles by Joseph Tabory and Israel Yuval in Passover and Easter, esp. pp. 68–69 (Tabory) and pp. 106–107 (Yuval). Goldschmidt, Tabory and Yuval go even one step further, suggesting that Jeremias had it backwards. It was not that Jesus was reinterpreting a prior Jewish tradition. Rather, Rabban Gamaliel the Younger required the explanation of the Passover symbols as a way of countering Christian manipulation of these symbols.

15. Tosefta Pesahim 10:12; see Bokser, Origins of the Seder, pp. 41–43, 79–80.

16. Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, pp. 66 and 122–125.

17. On the Quartodecimans and on fasting before Easter, see Bradshaw, “The Origins of Easter” in Bradshaw and Hoffman, Passover and Easter, pp. 81–97.

18. See Karl Georg Kuhn, “The Lord’s Supper and the Communal Meal at Qumran,” in The Scrolls and the New Testament, Krister Stendahl, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 65–93. Kuhn builds here on work of B. Lohse, published in German (and cited in his article). See also Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, pp. 216–218.

19. Bruce Chilton, A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus Through Johannine Circles (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), esp. pp. 93–108.

20. The term “Passoverize” is used by Mazza, in his brief treatment of the issue; see Celebration of the Eucharist, pp. 24–26.

21. See especially W.D. Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 25–92.

22. Commonly entitled “On the Passover,” the sermon survives in numerous copies and fragments in Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Latin and Georgian. The oldest copy, from the third or early fourth century, is in Coptic. See James E. Goehring and William W. Willis, “On the Passover by Melito of Sardis,” in The Crosby-Schoyen Codex MS 193, James E. Goehring, ed. (Leuven [Louvain]: Peeters, 1999).

23. On the medieval debate between the Catholic and Orthodox churches on this matter, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 177–178. On the archaeological evidence pertaining to this dispute, see George Galavaris, Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1970).

Related Reading in Bible History Daily

Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible

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How Was Jesus’ Tomb Sealed?

The Hungry Jesus

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Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?

Was The Last Supper a Passover Seder?

Easter and the Death of Jesus

The post Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

“After the conclusion of the treaty they left with their families and chattels, not fewer than two hundred and forty thousand people, and crossed the desert into Syria. Fearing the Assyrians, who dominated over Asia at that time, they built a city in the country which we now call Judea. It was large enough to contain this great number of men and was called Jerusalem.”
–Josephus, Against Apion 1.73.7, quoting Manetho’s Aegyptiaca

Excavations at Tel Habuwa, thought to be ancient Tjaru, reveal evidence of the expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmose I at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

In the Second Intermediate Period (18th–16th centuries B.C.E.), towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the West Asian (Canaanite) Hyksos controlled Lower (Northern) Egypt. In the 16th century, Ahmose I overthrew the Hyksos and initiated the XVIII dynasty and the New Kingdom of Egypt.

Archaeological discoveries at Tel Habuwa (also known as Tell el-Habua or Tell-Huba), a site associated with ancient Tjaru (Tharo), shed light on Ahmose’s campaign. A daybook entry in the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus notes that Ahmose seized control of Tjaru before laying siege the Hyksos at their capital in Avaris.

Excavations at the site, located two miles east of the Suez Canal, have uncovered evidence of battle wounds on skeletons discovered in two-story administrative structures dating to the Hyksos and New Kingdom occupations. The site showed evidence of burned buildings, as well as massive New Kingdom grain silos that would have been able to feed a large number of Egyptian troops. After Ahmose took the city and defeated the Hyksos, he expanded the town and built several nearby forts to protect Egypt’s eastern border. Tjaru was first discovered in 2003, but until now, the excavation only uncovered the New Kingdom military fort and silos. This new discovery confirms a decisive moment in the expulsion of the Hyksos previously known from textual sources.

Tomb painting from Beni Hasan, Egypt. A figure named Abisha and identified by the title Hyksos leads brightly garbed Semitic clansmen into Egypt to conduct trade. Dating to about 1890 B.C.E., the painting is preserved on the wall of a tomb carved into cliffs overlooking the Nile at Beni Hasan, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor. In the early second millennium B.C.E., numerous Asiatics infiltrated Egypt, some of whom eventually gained control over Lower Egypt for about a century and a half. The governing class of these people became known as the Hyksos, which means “Rulers of Foreign Lands.”

The Hyksos are well known from ancient texts, and their expulsion was recorded in later ancient Egyptian historical narratives. The third-century B.C.E. Egyptian historian Manetho–whose semi-accurate histories stand out as valuable resources for cataloging Egyptian kingship–wrote of the Hyksos’ violent entry into Egypt from the north, and the founding of their monumental capital at Avaris, a city associated with the famous excavations at Tell ed-Dab’a. After the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt, Manetho reports that they wandered the desert before establishing the city of Jerusalem.

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While Josephus cites Manetho’s history associating the Israelites with the Hyksos, many modern scholars see problems with Manetho’s conflation of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the Biblical narrative. Manetho lived many centuries after these events took place, and he may have combined two different narratives, wittingly or unwittingly, when associating the Hyksos and Israelites. Ahmose’s defeat of the Hyksos occurred centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus. In addition, the basic premise of the Hyksos and Exodus histories differ: the Hyksos were expelled rulers of Egypt, not slaves, and they were forced out, not pursued.

Learn more about the fortress excavated at Tel Habuwa—the largest discovered to date in Egypt.

The expulsion of the Hyksos may not have been a single event, and many still read Manetho’s texts on the Hyksos expulsion as a record of the Israelites’ Exodus. After the Hyksos were defeated by Ahmose, some Hyksos people likely remained in Egypt, perhaps as a subjugated class. The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1489–1469 B.C.E.) recorded the banishment of a group of Asiatics from Avaris, the former Hyksos capital. While this second expulsion would still have been centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, there may exist parallels between these events and the Exodus narrative, or the earlier Biblical accounts of Abraham, Sarah and Lot’s own expulsion from Egypt in Genesis 12:19.

Watch full-length lecture videos by top Exodus scholars, including Hyksos capital excavator Manfred Bietak, online for free.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in March 2013.

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Reinterpreting the Tempest Stela

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Out of Egypt

“Look on My Works”

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The post The Expulsion of the Hyksos appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

This fifth-century B.C.E. relief on a Phoenician funerary monument from Pozo Moro, Spain, is commonly interpreted as a scene of child sacrifice in an underworld banquet. A seemingly two-headed monster, who may well be a Phoenician deity, holds in his right hand a bowl containing a child and grasps with his left hand the leg of a piglet. Photo: Rafael dP. Iberia-Hispania licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

My students were getting at something important in this awkward exchange. The Book of Exodus presumably reflects the views of its Israelite authors on their deity, morality, and the like. Why, we then have to ask, would the Israelites have imagined their deity Yahweh slaughtering children for sins the children themselves had not committed? If they thought children could be killed for the transgressions of others, did they even think children were persons with any type of rights?

What do I mean by “persons” exactly? A person, in my usage and that of many anthropologists, is a human being accorded status and recognition in their society. A person is an individual who is seen as having value—not economic value like a sheep or a llama, but social value, value in relationships with others. A person is typically seen as having agency and afforded certain rights, such as the right to seek redress in cases of harm. Personhood is an abstract concept. One might say it is too abstract to be useful. But discussions of personhood arise generally only in the most pressing situations—when we are discussing what we can do to human beings and their bodies. Can we terminate human bodies, execute them, torture them, commit mass killings against them? These are the situations in which personhood comes up, and if you are someone who is undergoing torture because you are seen as subhuman by the individual torturing you, personhood is anything but an abstraction to you.

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What about child sacrifice? There are many Biblical texts that condemn this practice; doesn’t that tell us that the Israelites did see children as persons worthy of protection? Unfortunately, the matter is more complicated than this, as we also find Biblical texts such as Ezekiel 20 and Exodus 13:1–2 and 22:29–30 (in the English) that suggest that some Biblical writers thought that Yahweh actually demanded child sacrifice. In 2 Kings 3, a king sacrifices his son to avert disaster, and the sacrifice actually works!

Some Biblical scholars would counter that child sacrifice was a foreign practice. The origins of child sacrifice seem beside the point, however. If the Israelites, or some Israelites, thought children should be sacrificed, this seems indicative that children lacked personhood in their eyes. Other indications of this can be found in the fact that parents could sell off children to pay off debts the parents themselves had incurred (Exodus 21:7–11; Nehemiah 5) and that parents could control whether daughters who had been raped had to marry their rapists (Exodus 22:16–17, English) and whether drunkard sons should be executed for being drunks (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). Some Biblical texts describe children getting eaten—eaten!—in times of crisis (e.g., 2 Kings 6:28-29; Ezekiel 5:6-10; Lamentations 2:20, 4:10), and a text or two even portrays Yahweh as threatening the Israelites with catastrophes so severe that they would devour their own children (Leviticus 26:27-29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57).

Child killing, child selling, child eating—the picture that emerges is a bleak one. However, before the savvy reader gets exasperated, let me state that, yes, there are Biblical passages that paint a quite different portrait of children’s status. The Book of Genesis is filled with passages implying that the Israelites were really, really interested in having children. Other books contain examples of the same thing—a desire for and valuation placed on having progeny. Parents make vows to secure progeny and to keep progeny, they feel content in having progeny, and they mourn lost progeny.

But is this longing for progeny the same as assigning personhood to children? We could answer this question more easily if we could speak and interact with real Israelites. Since we can’t do this and since the Israelites revealed their views of personhood indirectly rather than through philosophical treatises on the subject, we are left having to read through the lines. At best, the Israelites held a view of personhood that allowed for collective punishment and saw children as low-level subordinates subject to the wishes and whims of parents—usually fathers. At worst, they were not seen as persons. We seem to see a sort of graduated personhood in some Biblical texts, with older children having more claim to personhood than infants. (Fetuses, as we see in Exodus 21:22–25, where the unborn are assigned only financial value, are out of luck.) This may be why it appears that it was infants rather than older children who were sacrificed.

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We also see in the Bible disagreements between Israelites over the personhood of children. The fact that so many Biblical texts discuss child sacrifice tells us that some Israelites thought this practice was necessary or at least advantageous. This seems a particularly apt conclusion when these texts are read alongside archaeological and other evidence from elsewhere in the ancient world showing that child sacrifice really was practiced in certain locales. However, the fact that so many Biblical texts decry child sacrifice also tells us that many Israelites thought this practice was unacceptable. One can see in this disparity a disagreement over the personhood of children, or perhaps of infants in particular.

A final point is that status in Israelite society was not attached to particular ages as is the case in our society. There were no Israelite quinceañera parties where teenagers danced the night away celebrating their newly achieved personhood. Eighteen-year-old Israelites couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief knowing their parents would no longer be able to have them killed for drinking too much undiluted wine or leaving their sandals in the entryway for the umpteenth time. No, Israelite personhood was based on social role and physical maturity, not chronological age. It was also mutable and in some cases highly ambiguous to us as modern readers. Despite the desire of students of the Bible to find certitude within its pages, the Biblical corpus refuses to satisfy us on this score. More vexing, still, since the clearest statements on the status of children are some of the most troubling, the certitude offered is not always helpful. In other words, today’s teenagers had better hope that their parents look somewhere other than the Good Book for guidance on what to do with them when they find that cheap bottle of vodka stowed away under the piles of dirty laundry.

T. M. Lemos is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Huron University College and a member of the graduate school faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Her most recent book is Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017); it discusses the personhood of children in much greater detail, as well as the personhood of other groups in ancient Israel, ancient West Asia, and contemporary America.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

What Does the Bible Say About Children—and What Does Archaeology Say?

Understanding Israel’s 10 Commandments

Love Your Neighbor: Only Israelites or Everyone?

First Person: Misogyny in the Bible

Did the Carthaginians Really Practice Infant Sacrifice?

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

Children in the Ancient Near East

Were living Children Sacrificed to the Gods? Yes

Were living Children Sacrificed to the Gods? No

Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?

Infants Sacrificed? The Tale Teeth Tell

This Bible History Daily Post was first published in April, 2018

The post Did the Ancient Israelites Think Children Were People? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Fortunately, several Iron Age temples discovered throughout the Levant bear a striking resemblance to the Temple of King Solomon in the Bible. Through these remains, we gain extraordinary insight  into the architectural grandeur of the building that stood atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount nearly 3,000 years ago.

The black basalt ruins of the Iron Age temple discovered at ’Ain Dara in northern Syria offer the closest known parallel to the Temple of King Solomon in the Bible. Photo: Ben Churcher.

As reported by archaeologist John Monson in the pages of BAR, the closest known parallel to the Temple of King Solomon is the ’Ain Dara temple in northern Syria. Nearly every aspect of the ’Ain Dara temple—its age, its size, its plan, its decoration—parallels the vivid description of the Temple of King Solomon in the Bible. In fact, Monson identified more than 30 architectural and decorative elements shared by the ’Ain Dara structure and the Jerusalem Temple described by the Biblical writers.

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The ’Ain Dara temple and the Biblical Temple of King Solomon share very similar plans. Images: Ben Churcher.

The similarities between the ’Ain Dara temple and the temple described in the Bible are indeed striking. Both buildings were erected on huge artificial platforms built on the highest point in their respective cities. The buildings likewise have similar tripartite plans: an entry porch supported by two columns, a main sanctuary hall (the hall of the ’Ain Dara temple is divided between an antechamber and a main chamber) and then, behind a partition, an elevated shrine, or Holy of Holies. They were also both flanked on three of their sides by a series of multistoried rooms and chambers that served various functions.

Even the decorative schemes of ’Ain Dara temple and the temple described in the Bible are similar: Nearly every surface, both interior and exterior, of the ’Ain Dara temple was carved with lions, mythical animals (cherubim and sphinxes), and floral and geometric patterns, the same imagery that, according to 1 Kings 6:29, adorned the Temple of King Solomon in the Bible.

It is the date of the ’Ain Dara temple, however, that offers the most compelling evidence for the authenticity of the Biblical Temple of King Solomon. The ’Ain Dara temple was originally built around 1300 B.C. and remained in use for more than 550 years, until 740 B.C. The plan and decoration of such majestic temples no doubt inspired the Phoenician engineers and craftsmen who built Solomon’s grand edifice in the tenth century B.C. As noted by Lawrence Stager of Harvard University, the existence of the ’Ain Dara temple proves that the Biblical description of Solomon’s Temple was “neither an anachronistic account based on later temple archetypes nor a literary creation. The plan, size, date and architectural details fit squarely into the tradition of sacred architecture from north Syria (and probably Phoenicia) from the tenth to eighth centuries B.C.”

Gigantic footprints belonging to the resident deity were carved at the temple’s entrance. Photo: A.M. Appa.

Certain features of the ’Ain Dara temple also provide dramatic insight into ancient Near Eastern conceptions of gods and the temples in which they were thought to reside. Carved side-by-side in the threshold of the ’Ain Dara temple are two gigantic footprints. As one enters the antechamber of the sanctuary, there is another carving of a right foot, followed 30 feet away (at the threshold between the antechamber and the main chamber) by a carving of a left foot. The footprints, each of which measures 3 feet in length, were intended to show the presence (and enormity) of the resident deity as he or she entered the temple and approached his or her throne in the Holy of Holies. Indeed, the 30-foot stride between the oversize footprints indicates a god who would have stood 65 feet tall! In Solomon’s Temple, the presence of a massive throne formed by the wings of two giant cherubim with 17-foot wingspans (1 Kings 6:23–26) may indicate that some Israelites envisaged their God, Yahweh, in a similar manner.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

Special Report: Current Status of the Tell Ain Dara Temple

The Doorways of Solomon’s Temple

First Person: Did the Kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon Actually Exist?

Tarshish: Hacksilber Hoards Pinpoint Solomon’s Silver Source

Who Is the Queen of Sheba in the Bible?

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Inside Solomon’s Temple

Solomon’s Temple in Context

Solomon & Sheba, Inc.

King Solomon’s Wall Still Supports the Temple Mount

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in October 2013.

The post Searching for the Temple of King Solomon appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

“I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the Lord sent me from Kadesh-Barnea to spy out the land; and I brought him an honest report.”
—Joshua 14:7

According to the Bible, the Israelites stayed at a place called Kadesh following their Exodus from Egypt and wanderings through the desert. Kadesh—also called Kadesh-Barnea in some Biblical passages¹—was where Moses’ sister Miriam died and was buried (Numbers 20:1) and from where Moses sent 12 men to spy out the Promised Land (Numbers 13:26).

KADESH IN THE BIBLE. In the Hebrew Bible, a place called Kadesh—also known as Kadesh-Barnea—was an important stop during the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings. Where is Kadesh? The site of Tell el-Qudeirat in the northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula is considered to be the best candidate. Photo: Israel Antiquities Authority.

Where is Kadesh-Barnea? Investigations since the early 19th century have attempted to find the site. Tell el-Qudeirat, located in the valley of the Wadi el-Ein in the northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula, is the best candidate for Biblical Kadesh-Barnea, according to scholarly consensus today.

Excavations conducted at Tell el-Qudeirat and its surroundings in 1914 by Leonard Woolley and T.E. Lawrence and between 1976 and 1982 by Rudolph Cohen have revealed the ruins of three Iron Age (Israelite) fortresses. However, the archaeologists uncovered no evidence dating before the 10th century B.C.E.—the time of King Solomon. There appears to be no evidence, therefore, that Tell el-Qudeirat was occupied during the time of Moses and the Biblical Exodus.² What do we make of this?

Map showing the location of Kadesh-Barnea. Biblical Archaeology Society

In “Kadesh-Barnea—In the Bible and on the Ground” in the September/October 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, David Ussishkin, Lily Singer-Avitz and Hershel Shanks explore the archaeological evidence uncovered at Tell el-Qudeirat. An analysis of the finds—especially the pottery—from the Iron Age ruins sheds new light on the identification of Tell el-Qudeirat with Kadesh in the Bible.

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Fragments of Qurayyah Painted Ware discovered at Tell el-Qudeirat suggest that there was a presence at the site—believed to be Biblical Kadesh-Barnea—during the time of Moses and the Biblical Exodus. Pictured is a restored Qurayyah jug from Timna, Israel. Photo: Eretz Israel Museum.

BAR coauthor Lily Singer-Avitz suggests that several finds discovered in the later strata, including Egyptian-style seals and seal impressions and local pottery sherds, should be associated with a Late Bronze Age–Early Iron I period presence at Tell el-Qudeirat. Particularly important are the sherds belonging to what is called Qurayyah Painted Ware found in different strata throughout the site. As Singer-Avitz argues:

The Qurayyah Painted Ware was in use during the latter part of the Late Bronze and the Iron I periods, from the 12th to the 11th centuries B.C.E., about the time of the Exodus from Egypt according to those who attribute some historicity to this central Biblical event.

Learn more about Qurayyah Painted Ware and its importance to the site of Tell el-Qudeirat— Kadesh in the Bible—by reading the full article “Kadesh-Barnea—In the Bible and on the Ground” by David Ussishkin, Lily Singer-Avitz and Hershel Shanks in the September/October 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Kadesh-Barnea—In the Bible and on the Ground” by David Ussishkin, Lily Singer-Avitz and Hershel Shanks in the September/October 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Notes

1. The name Kadesh-Barnea in Hebrew is qādeš barnēa‘. The Hebrew root qdš means “holiness,” “separateness”; the meaning of the second word is not known. See Dale W. Manor, “Kadesh-Barnea,” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 1.

2. Rudolph Cohen, “Did I Excavate Kadesh-Barnea?” Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1981; Rudolph Cohen, “Qadesh-Barnea,” in Eric M. Meyers, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 365–367.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

Exodus in the Bible and the Egyptian Plagues

Who Was Moses? Was He More than an Exodus Hero?

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Searching for Biblical Mt. Sinai

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Kadesh-Barnea—In the Bible and on the Ground

The Battle of Kadesh

Did I Excavate Kadesh-Barnea?

Moses

Why Moses Could Not Enter The Promised Land

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on September 14, 2015.

The post Wilderness Wanderings: Where is Kadesh? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Bodelian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 2708, Folio 39V
A good man? Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, is a devoted family man, well respected for his advice on governing and his benevolent leadership of the tribes of Midian. This early 13th-century illustration from the Bible moralisée depicts Jethro (seated under the arch on the right) rewarding Moses (left) for rescuing his daughters (six of whom are pictured in the center) and their flocks from rival shepherds. Grateful, Jethro invited Moses to stay and break bread with him: “Moses consented to stay with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah as wife” (Exodus 2:21). Later, when Moses returns from freeing the Israelites from Egypt, Jethro proclaims the Israelite God’s glory, saying, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Exodus 18:11). But, asks the midrash, was Jethro motivated by love of God or by fear of a divine force so powerful as to rescue the Israelites from their enemies?

On first reading the biblical text, Jethro seems a simple person, almost monolithic, someone who impresses us most as a family man. When he meets a young refugee, Moses, whom he believes to be Egyptian, he thinks immediately of his daughter Zipporah, who is not yet married (Exodus 2:20–21). Later, when Moses, who is now Jethro’s son-in-law, returns from Egypt at the head of his freed people, Jethro brings to him his wife, Zipporah, and their two children (Exodus 18:5).

Moses has in the meantime become powerful and famous, and Jethro gives him useful advice on how to govern (Exodus 18:17ff). Invited by Moses to join the newly created nation, Jethro gracefully declines by invoking his obligations to his own family and tribe in the land of Midian (Numbers 10:29–30).

One can see Jethro clearly: His demeanor is surely elegant, sincere, irreproachable. He is present only when needed. He speaks only when asked. Everything he does, he does without guile. He never thinks of taking advantage of his position as first counselor to the great leader Moses. No one would ever accuse him of nepotism.

In the midrashic literature,^a as always, the character, or rather the attitude toward the character, seems more complex. To be sure, Jethro is shown in a positive light. After all, if Moses treats him with such deference, such respect, as to kneel before him, Jethro must deserve it. The sages go so far as to exaggerate his virtues. For most, he is considered to have converted to the Jewish faith. They call him Ger shel emet—a genuine convert or a convert to the truth. He is placed “within the shelter or on the wings of the shekhina,” God’s holy presence or glory. They put these words in Jethro’s mouth: “I have served many idols; there is no god I have not served; but none can compare to the God of Israel.” To emphasize his worth, he is compared to Esau. Even though Esau was a kinsman of Jacob, he was less favored than the alien Jethro.

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Better yet, on at least two occasions in the midrash, Jethro is considered more admirable than Moses himself. In the first, when Jethro offers his daughter Zipporah to Moses, Jethro tells Moses: She will be your wife, but on one condition—your first son will be consecrated to idolatry. The stupefying thing is that Moses accepted! In other words, in this account Jethro appears more loyal to his faith than Moses does to his.

On the second occasion, Jethro, having heard all that the people of Israel have suffered in Egypt, and how God has saved them on their flight from the landing saved you.” According to the commentary of one sage (Reb Papos), this passage may be intended as a criticism of Moses and the 600,000 men and women who were with him. It is meant as a reproach for their ingratitude: “Despite all the miracles that were performed for you, you have not believed enough to praise the Lord until Jethro did.”

Having said all this, even though Jethro has no detractors, he does inspire a certain skepticism in some. Is this a way of balancing our understanding of the man? Perhaps. In the Bible, no one is perfect—neither perfectly good nor absolutely evil.

Read an interview BAR Editor Hershel Shanks conducted with Elie Wiesel and Biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross, republished from BAR, July/August 2004 >>

Thus some of the sages ask what are the real motives behind Jethro’s close feelings for Israel. Was it because of the Torah that God gave to His people? Or was it because of the defeat the Israelites inflicted on their enemies, the Amalekites? In other words, was Jethro motivated by love or by fear of this powerful God who makes other nations tremble? “Vayihad Yithro” the Bible says (Exodus 18:9). “Jethro rejoiced” at all the goodness that the Lord had shown to Israel. But vayihad Yithro could easily mean “his flesh crawled [with fear], he had goose bumps.”^b

Nonetheless, the general impression of the man is that he is better than good; he is glorious. Even when he refuses Moses’ invitation to stay with him, he has the perfect excuse, says the midrash: “I will return to my own people and convert them all to the study of the Torah.”

The practical and very timely lesson that our sages draw from this story: When a man comes and asks to be converted, we should not send him away.

Translated from French by Anne Renner.

“Supporting Roles: Jethro” by Elie Wiesel was originally published in Bible Review, June 1998, and republished in Bible History Daily on March 19, 2014.

Notes

a. Midrash is a genre of rabbinic literature that includes nonliteral elaborations of biblical texts.

b. The word vayihad is related to the Aramaic chiddudim, “prickles.” One Jewish Bible commentary explains that Jethro was so overcome with joy that he felt goose bumps. The great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, however, says that despite Jethro’s happiness for the Israelites, he felt prickles of unease over the fate of the Egyptians.

Elie Wiesel

The author of more than 30 novels, plays and profiles of Biblical figures, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. This online publication is adapted from Wiesel’s article “Supporting Roles: Jethro,” which was published in Bible Review in June 1998. At the inception of Wiesel’s Supporting Roles series in Bible Review, BAS editors wrote:

We are pleased—and honored—to present our readers with the first of a series of insightful essays by Elie Wiesel, the world-renowned author and human rights advocate. Wiesel is best known for his numerous books on the Holocaust and for his profiles of Biblical figures and Hasidic masters. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His occasional series for BR will focus on characters in the Bible that do not occupy center stage—those who play supporting roles.

More “Supporting Roles” by Elie Wiesel in Bible History Daily

Cain and Abel in the Bible

Joshua in the Bible

Seth in the Bible

Aaron in the Bible

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Esau

Abraham’s Sons

Moses

Moses

Jacob in History

The Patriarch Jacob—An “Innocent Man”

The post Jethro in the Bible appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Exodus hero Moses. The Biblical Moses, portrayed here as a shepherd in a print by contemporary Israeli artist Mordechai Beck, protectively clasps a sheep in his arms. Photo: Mordechai Beck.

Some might say that God himself was the Exodus hero, but in human terms the biblical Moses takes center stage throughout the whole Pentateuch. Who was Moses? A rather solitary leader, one with his people but set apart, even in his childhood, when he was raised by the pharaoh’s daughter as if he were an Egyptian prince. Set apart also in that he married an alien wife—Midianite or possibly Ethiopian. Even his physical characteristics—a speech defect—set him apart from others and is accommodated by God who arranges a leadership duo with Moses and his priestly brother Aaron. His role was unique—even to receiving the Law and seeing God, as evidenced by Moses’ blinding countenance.

The biblical Moses also has an unusual death. God says he must die alone on a mountaintop outside the promised land. Who was Moses? We might say he was a man who was a son of Abraham who led the people but was not typical of them.

In “The Man Moses,” Peter Machinist proposes that our Exodus hero is a type of anti-hero, outside the stereotype of a tribal or national leader. He might represent the people of Israel themselves, biblically portrayed as being outsiders. Further, Moses’ otherness might also serve to turn the spotlight not on himself but on the message he delivers to the people: the Law. Who was Moses—the biblical Moses? Who was the man chosen to meet God on Sinai and receive the Law on behalf of God’s chosen people?

Below, Peter Machinist explores the character of the Exodus hero—the biblical Moses—in “The Man Moses”.

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The Man Moses

by Peter Machinist

“You shall not cross there,” God decrees as Moses gazes across the Jordan. In this 1928 pastel by Lesser Ury, heavenly light illuminates the promised land that Moses has sought almost all his life but will never enter. Rather, Moses dies on Mt. Nebo—a strange and solitary death for a strangely solitary man. The biblical portrayal of Moses as distant and unapproachable, as the only biblical leader to see God “face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10), presents Moses as representative of the Israelites—a people apart. At the same time, it encourages readers to concentrate more on the law he gave than on the life he lived. Photo: Hans-Joachim Bartsch/Collection Jüdisches Museum Berlin.

The introduction of Moses in the first chapters of Exodus marks a new, second beginning in the Bible’s account of the history of Israel. The first beginning had been in the Book of Genesis with Abraham and the patriarchs that followed him. There the focus was on Israel as a family bound in relationship or covenant to its God. Moses’ beginning marks the extension of the group from family to nation, though a nation still with a strong sense of kinship. Here the emphasis is on the development of a common administration, as well as on the re-presentation of the covenant as a code of law that gives the nation its structure, without which it cannot survive.

The Moses who shepherds in this second beginning dominates the biblical narrative through the remainder of the Book of Exodus, indeed through the rest of the Pentateuch; his only rival, and ultimate superior, in narrative attention, as, of course, in other spheres, is God Himself. But this Moses comes to us as a strange and difficult person. Running throughout the narrative of Exodus, and of the Pentateuch as a whole, is the depiction of a unique individual: one with little or no precedent, solitary, not easily approachable, set apart from the very community he is born to lead.

This quality apart emerges in a variety of ways. For one thing, Moses’ origins may be in the community of Israel, yet they are not of it. The text of Exodus 2 (verses 1 and following) is at pains to assign him a genealogy within the family of Israel—at pains, perhaps, because it then has to recognize that he was adopted into the court of the Pharaoh, given his name by the Pharaoh’s daughter, and raised as Egyptian royalty. It is well known what Sigmund Freud did with this portrait,¹ arguing that the Israelite genealogy was, in fact, a later, pious construction that tried to mask Moses’ true roots as an Egyptian who only subsequently took on the cause of the Israelite slaves as his own. Whether Freud’s thesis—and, as he made clear, he was not the originator of it—is correct or not, it does underscore the ambiguity of Moses’ connection with Israel in the biblical portrayal.

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That ambiguity is fortified by other features of Moses’ family life. His wife, Zipporah, is not from Israel, but from the Midianites of the region of Sinai (e.g., Exodus 2:15–22), and her foreignness is later criticized by none other than Moses’ brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, in the context of a challenge to Moses’ own legitimacy and leadership (Numbers 12). (Incidentally, the label that Aaron and Miriam pin on Moses’ wife, “Cushite,” has the effect of making her even stranger to an Israelite settled in Palestine, since it normally refers to the Ethiopians, a people much farther away from Palestine than the Midianites.) There is also the son Moses has with Zipporah: he is named Gershom, according to the biblical text, precisely because this is to memorialize Moses as outsider (Exodus 2:22).a Gershom has as well a curious genealogical niche. For while he has descendants, they are not arranged in a line of divine promise and authority such as is found with Abraham and his family (e.g., Genesis 26:2–5). Indeed, in Judges 18:30–31 (following here the textual tradition that reads the ancestor’s name as Moses, not Manasseh), we learn that Gershom’s descendants were priests to an idolatrous cult in the Israelite tribe of Dan.

As for the character of Moses’ leadership, here too there is difference. He is assigned, for example, a traditional title in Israel, that of prophet—a title first given to Abraham (Genesis 20)—but he is unlike Abraham and the others, for as Deuteronomy comments: “There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10; cf. Numbers 12:6–8). To be sure, in another biblical encounter, Moses is not allowed to see God’s face, but only His back (Exodus 33:20–23); still that encounter leaves Moses a preternatural, even divine sheen, which once more sets him apart: “When Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, his face was all aglow with radiance (qaµran), and they were afraid to come near to him” (Exodus 34:30)—just as, one may add, they had been afraid to go near to God and His quaking mountain of Sinai (Exodus 19).

Even apparent defects or negatives in the character of Moses become occasions on the part of the biblical authors to find superlatives of uniqueness. Thus, in the confrontation with Aaron and Miriam, the sinful effrontery of their challenge to Moses emerges all the more clearly in the description of Moses at the opposite extreme: “The man Moses was very meek, more than all humanity that was on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). And when God commands Moses to free the Israelites from Egypt, and Moses protests his competence to challenge the Pharaoh because of a speech defect—a “heaviness of mouth and heaviness of tongue” as the text says (Exodus 4:10)—this defect is turned, by God, into the basis of a new arrangement, wherein Aaron shall do the speaking, and Moses will direct him as though he were God Himself (Exodus 4:16).

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Finally, there is the matter of Moses’ death, at the end of the Pentateuch in Deuteronomy 34. It flatly contradicts the pattern of expectation that the biblical narrative had accustomed us to, namely, that promises would be fulfilled and lives would reach closure. For Moses is not allowed to die in, let alone enter, the land promised to Israel already in patriarchal days—the land that he had been divinely commanded to return Israel to, without any indication, initially, that he would be barred from it (so Exodus 3, 6:2–9). Indeed, at the end Moses cannot even be buried in the promised land, as key patriarchal figures had been, including Jacob and Joseph, who had died outside of Israel (Genesis 49:29–50:14, 24–26; Joshua 24:32–33). Rather, Moses dies and is buried outside of the land, across the Jordan River in Moab, a region otherwise often at odds with Israel; and he is buried in a spot unknown, placed there not even by human hands, but by God alone. Now the Bible, it has to be noted, tries to explain this end; yet it succeeds in doing so only by a series of incomplete and obscure reasons (Numbers 20, esp. 6–13; 27:12–14; Deuteronomy 3:26; 4:21; 32:50–52)—a situation that later Jewish commentaries, in turn, made desperate efforts to fill out and discuss, if not to clarify.² All of this, thus, only serves to underscore what an extraordinary fate Moses is given in the biblical text, and how well it echoes and rounds out the equally strange picture of his origins in, but not of, Israel.

For the Bible, in sum, Moses is indeed a man apart—apart not only from the people he guides and the land to which he directs them, but apart also, in many fundamental ways, from the kinds of leaders the previous generations of patriarchal figures had been. He remains the permanent outsider, a unique and towering figure.

Watch full-length lectures from the Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination conference, which addressed some of the most challenging issues in Exodus scholarship. The international conference was hosted by Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego in San Diego, CA.

The question that remains is why should this be so, and what does it mean. Three possibilities, at least, come to mind. First, one might say that, considered from a broader historical perspective, Moses’ characterization is not completely surprising. The stories circulating in many societies often picture their founders as different from the rest, even as distant—in short, as heroes. Yet if Moses in some sense belongs to this common type, in other ways he is an unusual, perhaps rare mutation of it, since, in his excessive modesty, distance, inexplicable fate, and strangeness, he is a kind of anti-hero: someone who does not easily serve in the native tradition as a role model, someone who cannot really be emulated.

Moses’ strangeness in the Bible may also be understood as a mirror of Israel as a whole, for Israel, too, is portrayed as the quintessential outsider, without easy parallel or precedent, to the other nations around it and to the religions and cultures they represent. Indeed, Israel is an outsider to the very land which its God promises it and which it then has to make its own in a continual struggle. Or, as the prophet Balaam exclaims, “Behold a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Thirdly, and lastly, by focusing on Moses as outsider, and especially as remote, inimitable outsider, the Bible ends up by shifting the emphasis away from who Moses is to what he communicates, namely, to the Law and to God as its source. We face, then, the paradox that the towering character of Moses may be stressed in the Bible, at least in part, precisely to efface him, so that his message may emerge more clearly and sharply. In other words, there is no cult of personality here—that is, no cult of human personality—and this comports with a more general strain of ambivalence in the biblical corpus toward human leaders and the limits of human authority (e.g., Judges 8:22–24; 1 Samuel 8–10; Hosea 8:4, 13:9–11). If the ultimate emphasis, therefore, is on Moses’ message, on the laws he mediates from a totally nonhuman source, we must observe, as a final point, that this is a message which, against the person Moses, is not remote or inimitable. For the laws it offers are laws designed for the human community: laws that, however difficult, all can carry out (e.g., Deuteronomy 29:10–14; 30:11–14), and must carry out if they are to complete the process by which “God created humanity in His image” (Genesis 1:27).

Who, then, is Moses, as the biblical authors see him? Despite the complexities of their portrayal, he is at the core the appointed one who brings Israel to “serve God on this mountain [Sinai]” (Exodus 3:12), and so to receive the Law for their lives.

This essay is a revised version of one originally published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin 27:2/3 (1998); copyright the president and fellows of Harvard College.

“The Man Moses” by Peter Machinist originally appeared in Bible Review, April 2000. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in February 2012.

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939; New York: Vintage Books, 1955; German original: Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion [1939]).

2. See James L. Kugel, The Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 856–859, 885–887; S.E. Loewenstamm, “The Death of Moses,” in G.W.E. Nickelsburg, Jr., ed., Studies on the Testament of Abraham (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), pp. 185–217.

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The Man Moses

Moses

Moses

Moses’ Egyptian Name

The post Who Was Moses? Was He More than an Exodus Hero? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

WHAT IS COPTIC, AND WHO WERE THE COPTS? Dated to the fourth–fifth century C.E., the Codex Grazier is written in the Coptic language—the fifth and final stage of ancient Egyptian language—and contains part of the Book of Acts (Acts 1:1–15:3).

The Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Even though it looks very different from texts written in Old Egyptian using hieroglyphs, the two are related.

In his article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Leo Depuydt gives a short history of the development of ancient Egyptian language and shows where the Coptic language fits in that timeline, as well as answering the question: Who were the Copts.

What Is Coptic?

The Coptic language developed around 300 C.E. in Egypt. It is Egyptian language written using the Greek alphabet, as well as a couple of Demotic signs. This script was much easier to learn than the earlier writing systems used in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts.

Coptic was the lingua franca of Egypt when Egypt was predominantly Christian. Many assume that the Coptic language was developed primarily to spread Christianity, but Depuydt disagrees. He supports the great Belgian Coptologist Louis Théophile Lefort’s theory that the Coptic language was created by another group—the Jews.

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Who Were the Copts?

Egypt’s Coptic period—also called Egypt’s Christian period—lasted 500 years, from the fourth century to the ninth century C.E., when the majority of Egypt’s population was Christian. The major shift in religion—from the old Egyptian religion to Christianity—occurred in Egypt between 200 and 400 C.E. This change was undoubtedly accelerated when Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion in 313 C.E.

We refer to Egyptian Christians from this period as Copts. (This was not a term they called themselves, nor did they refer to their language as “Coptic.”)

Another shift in religion brought about the end of Egypt’s Coptic period in the ninth century. Arabic-speaking Muslims conquered Egypt in 640 C.E. Although Christianity and Coptic remained the predominant religion and language for several centuries after the conquest, eventually most of Egypt’s population adopted the new religion, Islam, and language, Arabic, of their conquerors.

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Egyptians stopped speaking Coptic between 1000 and 1500 C.E. Depuydt estimates that there were few Coptic speakers in Egypt during the 12th or 13th centuries and that by 1500 C.E., nearly everyone spoke Arabic. However, far from going extinct, the Coptic language survived—as did a Christian minority in Egypt—and is still read by the clergy of the Coptic Church today.

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The Five Stages of Ancient Egyptian Language

As mentioned earlier, the Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Now that we’ve looked at the end of Egyptian language, perhaps we should look at its beginning.

The Egyptian language holds the record as being the longest written language in the world: It was spoken and written for more than 3,500 years. It is also possibly the oldest written language in the world. The earliest attestations of primitive Egyptian language date to before 3000 B.C.E., making it a potential rival of the oldest form of Sumerian.

Egyptian language can be divided into five main stages, which mark how the spoken language changed over the course of three and a half millennia. These stages are: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. Depuydt summarizes the stages:

The first three [stages] are (1) Old Egyptian, (2) Middle Egyptian and (3) Late Egyptian and date roughly to, respectively, the (1) Old Kingdom (2600–2100 B.C.E.), (2) First Intermediate Period, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (2100–1500 B.C.E.), and (3) New Kingdom (1500–1000 B.C.E.). All three are written either in hieroglyphic writing, which consists of pictures denoting meanings or sounds, or in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing … The fourth phase of Egyptian is Demotic, written in a highly cursive form of hieroglyphs also called demotic and attested from about 650 B.C.E. onward … The fifth and final phase of the Egyptian language is Coptic, which is written with the Greek alphabet augmented by a handful of signs borrowed from Demotic. Full-fledged written Coptic emerged around 300 C.E. Coptic ceased being spoken sometime between 1000 C.E. and 1500 C.E., but the clergy has remained able to read it (more or less) down to the present day.

To learn more about Egypt’s Coptic Christian period and the Coptic language, read Leo Depuydt’s full article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of BAR.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” by Leo Depuydt in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Ancient Amulets with Incipits

Is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife a Fake?

“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Papyrus Unmasked

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The Gospel of the Lots of Mary

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The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?

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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on November 22, 2015.

The post What Is Coptic and Who Were the Copts in Ancient Egypt? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.