STEPHEN M GRANT

The world’s three ‘great’ monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have a common root. They are referred to as ‘Abrahamic’ as all three agree that Abraham was the founding patriarch of the Jews and Arabs. He is regarded as the father of the people of Israel, and by the Muslims as the ancestor of Mohammed through his son Ishmael, son of Abraham by his wife’s Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. There is little point in relating the outline of this well-known story, but I was always struck by the part where Abraham had to go to the point of killing his son. One can’t help but ask why an omniscient god would want a father to go through the sheer torture of burning his son alive – one that he didn’t father until he was over 100 years old and his wife 90 at that - in order to prove his faith and to see if he loved his son more than him. The story tells that the good and merciful lord recanted at the last minute, content that Abraham had demonstrated the depth of his faith. It doesn’t matter from what perspective or in what context, historical or otherwise, one reads the story - as an essay in manipulation and cruelty, it really does take the biscuit.

For that matter, turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt merely for looking over her shoulder (especially in the light of human curiosity being a supposedly god-given trait) is also somewhat severe by any standards.
Anyway – enough of that already.

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Looking at things from today’s perspective, it seems unlikely that these three religions could have a common origin, but they do. It transpires of course that the reason has nothing to do with a god, and everything to do with man.
 

The peoples of 8th century BC Judah, just like people from many other parts of the world, worshipped many deities. Judah was ruled by King Hezekiah (727-698 BCE) who was intent on making Judah a strong and independent nation, and who famously and ingeniously resisted a determined siege on Jerusalem by the Assyrians. This time and this king are important because this was when the foundations of the Abrahamic religions were laid. He introduced a number of religious reforms to centralise power and worship in his capital.  Critically, he abolished idol worship and concentrated worship on one god, Yahweh.
 

His vision was one nation, one centre, one temple, one altar, one god, one king. He was extending his diplomatic and administrative reach, and in doing so was often obliged to allow and even build temples to other Gods. But Hezekiah had shown a path. After his death, King Manasseh, followed by his son Amon, reigned for over 50 years and idolatry and the pantheon returned. He is of course roundly condemned for this by the pious,  but historians note that he achieved a great deal in terms of stability and infrastructure, and in ensuring the centralized Aaronite priesthood had its power curtailed.

When he died, the Assyrian Empire was beginning to wane. Egypt was recovering from Assyrian rule and concerned with its own emergence from the shadows, the Babylonian Empire was yet to rise and a remarkable boy called Josiah ascended to the throne - reputedly aged eight. Nevertheless, and due probably to his mother and no doubt more than a few 'advisors', he had an ambition to unite the country and to assert Judah as an independent nation. He revived the ideas and ideals of Hezekiah, with the important difference of being able to do so in a period when Judah was being left alone by its neighbours. Josiah was the archetypal centralist. All control was to be centred in Jerusalem.

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He banned the worship of any god but Yahweh, but went much further than Hezekiah. He destroyed the temples, killed the priests and even had the bodies of priests exhumed and burned. He wanted not merely to suppress the worship of other Gods, but to eradicate it altogether. He realised the concept of one nation, one king, one God. The nation consisted of many large, extended families that represented local powerbases often equivalent to small tribes. Josiah broke this cultural power and source of possible resistance with intervention – his local representatives could over-rule the family elders, and promoted the breakup of these ‘micro tribes’ with gifts of land and independence. It is often argued that Josiah and his priests are responsible for the advent of the nuclear family in replacement of the tribal model.

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Women were given a voice and elementary rights, and proclamations were made that slaves were to be better treated. Josiah and his revolutionary approach swept the land, and he won the support and loyalty of the common people. Yet there were still detractors and critics, and he could not have them all disposed of. Proof was needed. The hand of God was needed. And then the Book of Law was ‘discovered’ by no less than Josiah’s High Priest.

It’s a trick that happens again and again throughout the history of religion. Whenever some kind of proof or dictat is required, a book is discovered or God provides a direct, timely and remarkably convenient revelation.

There is now little doubt amongst biblical scholars that it was Josiah’s Priests who wrote the Book of Law – the book we know today as Deuteronomy. Such is the transparent nature of the book and its clear and obvious support of Josiah's reforms that this position was in fact first mooted back in 1805 by one W. M. L. de Wette.

Many also assert that the entire Pentateuch was written at this time and there is quite a lot of evidence to support this,. On the other hand, there is nothing - other than what one might describe charitably as anecdotal evidence - to support Moses’ authorship. Perhaps the most telling point is that Abraham is described in Genesis as a man who worshipped only the one true  God – supposedly thousands of years before Josiah outlawed the others were outlawed.
 

The Assyrian Empire having collapsed, Josiah had the opportunity to expand northwards to the old kingdom of Israel. In order to justify and explain Josiah’s policies and ambitions, his priests revised and expanded traditional stories (Joshua, Judges, the Patriarchs) and particularly the story of the Exodus, which served as a rallying cry against the possibility of a belligerent Egypt, itself gaining strength as it recovered from Assyrian rule.

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As for the Exodus, (hundreds of thousands of people wandering the desert for 40 years – some say 2 million), 150 years of modern intense archaeology – much of it funded by modern Israel in order to find evidence to underline their historical claims - has turned up precisely no evidence of their passing. Not a camp site. Not a grave. Not a cooking pot or comb. Nothing.

Let’s be perfectly clear on this point. It simply is not possible for over half a million people to live in a region for forty years and leave no trace. The fact is that they were never there – it simply didn’t happen. It’s myth. To the north, evidence has been found of a large Egyptian city (The City of Ramses) which would have had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000. This has been seized upon by some as evidence of the enslavement and therefore the subsequent Exodus. The obvious questions, such as how hundreds of thousands  were forced to build a city for 20,000 whilst leaving no evidence of themselves whatsoever, are simply and conveniently ignored.

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Exodus is almost certainly based on the expulsion of the Hyksos in around 1570BC. It was precisely the tale needed by the Priests and their King to rally and unite the people against a perceived enemy. I say almost certainly, because other credible attempts have been made to date it later, to the Armqna period, with a traditional view that it was Ramses II. The point is that no matter what scenario frames the story, the biblical account flounders.

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As an interesting aside  - in around 1625 BCE, Thera (Santorini) had erupted and pumice and ash from this explosion has been found in Egypt and the Nile Delta - not to overlook ice cores from Greenland. Memories of this catastrophic event would be passed from generation to generation, and provide an uncannily accurate origin for blackened skies and the pillar of smoke, which would have been visible from the Delta. Like hundreds of thousands of tourists, I’ve been in the caldera and I can report that it must have been a big bang. A very big bang. Geologists estimate that it would have affected the weather of the entire planet. That big a bang. The tidal wave would have engulfed the Delta – the sea receding and then returning with vengeance is as good a description of a tsunami as you will find. This couldn’t have happened in the Red sea of course, but the common name for the Nile Delta was the sea of reeds – the reed sea. And so the stories were all there, many of them with a basis in truth, ready to be adapted for Josiah’s purposes – and adapt them they did.

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Ultimately, Josiah was tricked and killed by the Assyrians and Egyptians at Megido (more commonly known today as Armageddon from the Hebrew Har Megido, hill of Megido), and his successors tried to undo his work and return Judah to its old ways. However by 587 BCE, the new Babylonian Empire had grown to an unstoppable power. They burned Jerusalem and took its population into captivity. In 540 BCE, the Persians conquered Babylon and allowed the captives to return to Jerusalem. They became known as the Yehud – the Jews. Abrahams’ journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan is the same as that of the returning Yehudim – another startling ‘coincidence’. The place at which King Josiah was murdered became associated with devastation and disaster, and today the name 'Armageddon' has come to mean something altogether different from a mere hill.

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There were a great many problems to be overcome by the returnees, not least the disappearance of the Davidic line during the exile. A central authority was needed, and so the priests do what priests have always done – they wrote one. And so (or rather, ‘and it came to pass that’) the Torah was written. It was adapted from the memories, mythology and folklore of the region for sound socio-political purposes. Entirely human purposes.

The story of Moses in the bulrushes has was lifted straight from  the myth of Sargon – a baby discovered in a basket on a river. This myth is Babylonian. The coincidences and the evidence just keeps stacking up, and none of it supports the biblical story.
 

Time to stop beating about the bush – burning or otherwise. Yahweh, Jehovah, God – is man-made. The Pantheon was rubbed out, leaving one God with one temple and one Priesthood under one King. There is one God because a human being called Josiah said so and had his Priests adapt, manufacture or otherwise concoct whatever evidence was required to support his plans.

It's all about control, subjugation and political & territorial ambitions, the way it has always been. Today, we’d recognise this as a centralisation and propaganda job well done.

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