Christians, and I count myself as one, always wanted that the Old Testament would be true at least to some extent, maybe not the creation of the world in six days but at least something, like the Exodus, David, Solomon and all that, because the mission of Jesus does depend on the Old Testament. Just how important the Bible was to Christians is shown by an old book by G. S. Wegener, 6000 Jahre und ein Buch (1958) that I recently reread. It is so sad how Christians wanted to read the words of God from the Bible, considering that the Old Testament is largely falsified. I also reread some books that try to explain archeological findings in the best way, so that something in the Old Testament would still be true, like The History of Ancient Israel by Michael Grant (1984) and The Bible and the Ancient Near East by Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg (1997, fourth edition, these authors e.g. consider it quite natural that sound waves from trumpets broke the walls of Jerico), but it is useless. The Old Testament is not true and cannot be made true by friendly researchers.
The findings of Israel Finkelstein seem to be quite correct: David and Solomon did exist, but they ruled a very minor area in Judea. The real Unified Monarchy was some hundred years later when the Northern Kingdom of Israel expanded to a local power, the time of Jeroboam II. The Unified Monarchy of the Bible is based on Jeroboam’s Israel, while Solomon is based on Pharaoh Amenhotep III, as many researchers have noticed. The Wisdom of Solomon (Proverbs) are based on the Wisdom of Amenemopet.
It is also true that the general impressions from the Golden Bough by James Frazer apply very well to Judaism and Christianity, even though some details of Frazer’s book can be questioned. Jewish Passover is a redefinition of an agricultural festival where a fertility god was celebrated. Amos 5:26 shows that Israelites carried a dead king and an image of a star god. This resembles of typical fertility cults: in Egypt Isis distributing parts of Osiris and in Sweden Freya traveled around the country. The star-god Kijjun in Amos 5:26 must be Asherah, who is (a distinct goddess but still) a form of Astarte. The dead king may be a dead representation of Baal Hadad/YHWH, i.e., a sacrificed king, or the bones of Jacob, or something of this type. The Exodus story was needed to redefine these pagan practices.
I will solve a very small problem in this post. It is of Exodus. For some time I have came to accept the claim by Manetho that Hyksos did build Jerusalem (Urusalem) and Jebusites, though probably Amorites and not direct descendants of Hyksos, did preserve some legends of the Hyksos expulsion, which later formed the Exodus story: the internal dates from the Bible do give the Hyksos expulsion in c. 1550 BC as the date of the Exodus. The problem I intend to solve, however, is not connected with Hyksos. It is just the explanation to Exodus chapter 15. In this chapter there is Miriam’s song and this song is often though to be very old, like Deborah’s song in Judges. In this song it is told that Pharaoh’s soldiers did drown as water raised. As this is in a song, it must have more historical background than must events in the Old Testament. Thus, what is the historical explanation for this song?
I think it is very simple. The song is not extremely old. I date it to the time of Necho II, the Pharaoh who killed King Josiah of Judah in the Battle of Megiddo 609 BC. Just before this battle Necho II was busy building a canal from the Red Sea to Nile Delta. That would have been in 610 BC. The water level of the Red Sea is several feet above the water level in the Nile, thus a canal connecting these water sources would have been flooded with salt water from the Red Sea and not be useful for watering fields, for drinking water, and in fact, this canal was later filled. However, in 601 BC Necho II tried to build this canal. It went from the Red Sea to the Bitter lakes, which are called the Sea of Reed in the Exodus story.
In 609 BC Necho II led a large army through the costal route, called Via Maris, to face Babylonia and on the way to this battle he defeated Josiah in Megiddo, as Josiah refused to let the Egyptian army pass through Judean lands. Necho II could have taken the other route, called King’s Highway, but he did not. King’s Highway goes through Sinai and around Edom and Moab. It is very much the way the Israelites are said to have gone in the Exodus story. King’s Highway passes the Sea of Reed. Had Necho II taken this route, his army might have drowned, but he did not take that route, so drowning men was an incidence before the expedition to Syria.
Miriam’s song tells that Pharaohs’ men and horses drowned in the sea and this sea must be the Sea of Reed, that is, the bitter lakes. There is no natural phenomena (like tsunami or an earthquake) that could drain and fill the bitter lakes so that anybody could drown, but Necho II most probably did open the canal between the Red Sea and the bitter lakes. (There is an Egyptian story of draining a bitter lake by a magician who in this way restored a jewel to the queen, it is mentioned in Gordon’s book. The explanation must be that Egyptians knew that the bitter lakes could be filled or emptied by opening and closing the channels between the lakes and the Nile or the lakes and the Red Sea).
Biblical authors were angry of Necho II having killed Josiah and described the results of opening the canal as God’s punishment to Necho II. The results of opening the canal are as follows. 1) The Nile turns red. That is, not red in color but fills with salt water from the Red Sea. People cannot drink the water. Frogs do not like salt water and escape the river and are seen everywhere. Livestock dies and gets ill from drinking salt water. I guess you see the point: it was not a good idea to open a canal to the Red Sea without gates. Greek Ptolemaios Pharaoh’s did add gates and then the canal worked. Dareios opened the canal without gates and the results must have been bad. There is a legend that Pharaoh Sesostris III had planned a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, but he most probably did not make it. Sesostris made a canal to pass the First Cataract close to Aswan and Elephantine. On that Southern level a canal to the Red Sea might work, the Nile is higher, but the distance from Aswan to the Sea is too long and Sesostris could not build any canal there. In the Delta area, that is, the bitter lakes, the Nile is lower than the Red Sea and a canal without gates creates the ten plagues of Moses.
Why do I think this is the explanation to Miriam’s song? It is because Exodus 15:17 indicates that God settled Israelites to a mountain and there was a shrine on the mountain. This can only mean Jerusalem, but in the time of the Exodus Jews were not settled to any mountain (or anywhere, they were a wondering people in 1200 BC according to Merneptah’s Stele) and there was not any fixed shrine. This passage relates to a much later time. Such a later time is most probably the time of Josiah.
Maybe sometimes in the future researchers can identify Moses. Moses was a real person, an Egyptian, never setting his foot in Judeah, living around 700 BC when Judea was growing fast because of refugees from the fallen Israel and the new local power needed a law and a religion fit for a larger country composed of various peoples. Moses, since there had to be a real man to write the history falsification, knew the law of Hammurabi, practices of Canaan peoples (that Judeans despised, though I doubt Canaanite priests copulated with cows as their god Baal did), and Egyptian traditions of Amenhotep III, Thutmose III (a great conqueror, which the real David was not), Wisdom of Amenopenet, expulsion of Hyksos, and so on. This work was continued by other priests. Very possibly Moses was an Egyptian prophet, maybe even the first, second or third prophet of Amon. One should look for the person from historical figures, Moses was quite learned for his time and you do not expect that the king of Judea commissioned (probably/possibly) a foreigner of no standing to write the law for his country. He wrote the first version of Exodus (Moses 2.) and Joshiah read it to Judeans in 621 BC. The book did not contain the episode where Pharaoh’s soldiers drown. It was added seen afterwards. The other books of Moses were written in Babylonian and Persian time. This is clear e.g. from Genesis as it uses Babylonian archives and Sumerian king lists for the patriarch’s ages and order.
The original Tabernacle did not contain law tablets. It must have existed, but it was connected with the dead king and the star-god. Changing this cult into the Passover was a major reason for writing Exodus, as was condemning Israel’s worship and setting a law.
That’s about it. These problems are simple and unfortunately there was no God’s hand guiding Israel through the history. The 7000 year plan that there is in the Old Testament (and is modeled after Zoroastrism where the basic period is 3000 years instead of 2000 years as in the Bible) was created in Judea in the time of Josiah, it was created to give David (and the House of David) the divine right to govern all Israelites of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. As this plan requires a new covenant every 1000 years, it predicted a Messiah in the first century BC to first century AD. As Jesus appeared at that time, this plan predicted Jesus as the Messiah, but this plan was simply political-religious rewriting of history. Unfortunately, this is the case. The New testament is fairly correct (or at least, to some extent honest, though, no real miracles and not any nice message – the sacrifice was meant for starting a war against Rome and winning it), but the Old testament starts to be history only from the 9th century, before that time it is fiction with a fair amount of history falsification.