Category Archives: Pentateuch

Stuff from Way Back #16: Moses and the Exodus (screenplay by King Josiah)

(The Preface of my novel mentioned that the Exodus is now in serious doubt.  Here is a fuller presentation of the arguments.)

Nothing is known about the historical Moses, and even his existence is now seriously doubted.  The stories about him found in Philo, Jospehus and the Midrash and Talmud have long been recognized as secondary and unhistorical, and our sole “primary” source for the leader of the Exodus is the Old Testament, which is itself derivative.  The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch or Torah, are manifestly not historical documents, but rather the final version of a tradition that constantly revised stories handed down through perhaps thirty generations.  Like Homer’s Iliad, most of the Old Testament is oral history that was subsequently written down, though unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose texts were thus frozen, the books of the Bible continued to be revised and edited.

Biblical scholars have discerned four major “authors” or strands interwoven in the text of the Pentateuch: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly and the Deuteronomist; and these sources were themselves assembled and edited into the finished product by a group of compilers, collectively known as the Redactor.  The oldest of these sources, the Yahwist, is dated to the tenth century BC, already two to three centuries after the putative date of the Exodus, and the editing of the texts continued into the sixth and fifth centuries BC and later; even as late as the time of Jesus there still existed no accepted canon for the Hebrew texts that made up the Biblical tradition.  And to this day the tiny Jewish community of Samaritans, the survivors of the northern Jewish state of Israel, possesses a Torah different from that of mainstream Judaism, the product of the southern state of Judah.

The books of the Pentateuch, once ascribed to Moses himself, almost certainly contain no real history.  They comprise instead collections of folk tales, wisdom and cultural information gradually assembled over the centuries into the often incoherent and inconsistent narrative that has come to be accepted as the early history of Israel.   Oral tradition is notoriously unreliable as a mechanism for preserving an historical narrative, since whatever the accuracy of the original account that account will inevitably be modified with each subsequent telling, as old material is forgotten or reshaped by the bard’s own environment.  As such, the facts and history were very malleable.  All the major figures of the Patriarchal period, such as Abraham, were most probably local heroes or cult figures, whose stories were modified and woven into the developing tapestry of a Hebrew national history as those localities came under the control of the west Semitic tribes that had accepted Yahweh.  A few, like Joseph, might be vague reflections of actual historical characters, but none of the exploits attributed to these figures can be accepted as historical fact.  Further, these stories were constantly revised by later editors, who reworked them according to the ideas, institutions and events contemporary to their own environments.  The figure of Moses’ brother, Aaron, for example, was added to the Exodus story much later by the Priestly source to emphasize the dignity and importance of the priesthood, which was frequently at odds with the prophets, who traced their line back to Moses.

A prominent problem with oral history is that the fish will always get bigger with each retelling.  Exodus and Numbers, for example, record that there were 600,000 men following Moses; that would make the Hebrew force more than half the estimated population of New Kingdom Egypt.  But the exaggerations and physical impossibilities recorded in the Biblical narrative are, ironically, not that serious a problem.  The supernatural will naturally and obviously permeate an account of an ancient people redefining their relationship with their deity, and the Bible is after all considered by believers to be divinely inspired.  This has led many to examine the miracles, such as the plagues sent by Yahweh, in terms of natural phenomenon that have been exaggerated and distorted by oral transmission.  This approach has worked well in many instances – the Nile did occasionally turn red and did produce plagues of frogs – and not so well in others – the death of the Egyptian first born can hardly be explained in rational terms.  But this can all be discarded by the non-believer, who need not buy into the alleged miracles.

Obvious mythic stories may also be identified without undermining the basic fact of the flight from Egypt.  For example, the tale of the important infant being set adrift in a basket on a river and then rescued to fulfill his destiny was a common one in antiquity: Romulus and Remus were floated on the Tiber and Sargon of Akkad on the Euphrates.  The same may be said of passages that conflict with the nature of Egyptian society.  The Pharaoh, as an example, was a god incarnate, and even the more humanized god king of the New Kingdom was not about to give audiences to the unimportant, especially not despised Bedouins.  The foreigners erecting Pharaoh’s buildings is the Delta were for the most part not chattel slaves but conscript labor, and there is little reason to believe that the Egyptians, who built border forts in the east to keep not just invading armies but also Canaanite migrants out of the Delta, would dispatch an army after a clutch of them leaving Egypt.  And it is even harder to understand – without divine intervention – how they were able to escape Pharaoh’s professional troops.

None of these contradictions and exaggerations, typical of oral tradition, need injure the historicity of some sort of Exodus, any more than the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid negate the fact that Troy actually was sacked by Greeks.  That there is an Exodus story in fact suggests a real event, since such epic tales were rarely, if ever, made from whole cloth, and partly for this reason Biblical scholars who have otherwise dismissed the Torah as ahistorical accept the Exodus, despite a complete lack of non-Biblical evidence.  (There is the victory stele of Merneptah, erected in 1207 BC, which in a list of enemies smashed in Canaan names “Israel,” using glyphs that generally indicate a nomadic people rather than a place.  This is the earliest appearance of the term Israel in an historical context, but exactly who these people are is completely unclear, and in any case nothing is said of their origins.)

The lack of any mention of the Exodus by one of the most serious record-keeping societies in pre-modern history might of course be attributed to the vagaries of time and destruction or to its insignificance in the affairs of Egypt.  But the archaeological record – or the lack of it – is more difficult to explain away, especially when the remains support an alternate history.  For the Exodus itself there are two archaeological difficulties.  First, while there are indeed royal granaries in Tjeku, almost universally accepted as the site of the Biblical Pithom, they date to a period later than the thirteenth century BC.  This problem might be dealt with, though unconvincingly, by pushing the date of the Exodus forward or assuming another location for Pithom, but the second difficulty admits to no apparent solution.  According to the Bible, before moving into Canaan the Hebrews sojourned at Kadesh (or Kadesh-barnea or Enmishpat), which is now identified with Ain el-Qudeirat, a substantial oasis in northern Sinai, on the Egyptian side of the frontier with modern Israel.  There are pottery remains from the Middle Bronze Age, far too early for dating the Exodus, and there are a series of forts, erected by the united Monarchy and Judah and dating from the tenth to the sixth centuries BC.  There are no remains from the centuries in which the Exodus might be dated and no signs of a substantial group of people settling in the oasis.

The real Moses?

The real Moses?

More compelling, however, are the results of four decades of excavation in the West Bank, the heart of ancient Judah and Samaria.  Scholars have long considered the Biblical account of the Conquest inadequate: how could a ragged group of refugees with their families in tow so easily conquer central Palestine and establish a strong and viable state and the dominance of Yahwism in less than a generation?   There were also already suspicions about the towns allegedly conquered by Joshua and company, and it is now accepted that most of them were later insertions in the narrative.  Many, like Jericho, simply did not exist at the time of the Conquest, and many places supposedly destroyed by the newcomers in fact fell during the Catastrophe, which changed the face of the eastern Mediterranean a century later.  More ominous, the towns given to the tribe of Judah by Joshua are identical to the frontier towns of seventh century BC Judah, and indeed, the campaigns of Joshua make more sense in the later environment, specifically the reign of King Josiah (639-609 BC) of Judah, than five hundred years earlier.

What the modern archaeological surveys have revealed is the essential lack of any evidence for the historical narrative presented in Joshua, Judges, Samuel and the earlier parts of Kings.  Instead, the pattern of the settlements in the highlands of Judea and Samaria show three successive waves of settlement from the east: first in the period 3500-2200 BC, then 2000-1550 BC and finally 1150-900 BC.  The intervals between these periods witnessed dramatic collapses of population with most of the settlement sites being deserted.  The material cultures of these settlements are roughly similar and, hardly surprising, on a much smaller and cruder scale than depicted in the Bible or actually found in the Canaanite towns in the western lowlands.  Even the largest villages contained only a few hundred people and had no public buildings of any sort and virtually no luxury items.  Little evidence of serious record keeping and even cult activities has been found and certainly no evidence of Yahwism.

The most likely understanding of this archaeological landscape makes the Hebrews indigenous to the region, a conclusion that dovetails with the absence of any evidence for the Exodus account.  The settlers appear to be primarily pastoralists from the Jordan valley and beyond, and in fact the earliest remains of each incursion are in the eastern fringes of the highlands and reveal dwellings arranged in oval patterns, certainly reflections of the oval arrangement of tents in a Bedouin encampment.  While local climate change during these two and half millennia may have played some small role, the real impetus behind the changes in population was the condition of the cities and villages in the coastal plain.  Pure animal husbandry requires some contact with farming villages in order to acquire certain goods, such as metal tools, and grain to supplement the meat and dairy diet.  If this is not available from traditional farmers, the pastoralists themselves must become more seriously involved in agriculture, which will ultimately lead to more sedentary communities and permanent settlements.  Once the grain surpluses and trading networks revive, old nomadic traditions and the agriculturally unrewarding nature of the highlands drive the populations back to pastoralism, and settlements begin to vanish.  This sort of relationship between farmer and Bedouin has been documented from antiquity to the present.

The settlement and de-settlement patterns in Judea and Samaria do indeed appear to match the history of the higher cultures to the west.  The second interval of settled population collapse (1550-1150 BC) occurred during the period of Egyptian rule, when agriculture flourished and the surpluses allowed highland settlements to be abandoned in favor of pastoralism.  When that stability and security, and consequently the trading network, vanished in the Catastrophe of the twelfth century BC, a final wave of settlement building resulted, producing some 250 sites.  Because the Catastrophe had vaporized the Hittite Empire to the north and turned Egypt into a weakling, until the approach of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the ninth century BC there was no imperial power looming over Palestine, and tiny communities in the central highlands were able to develop and coalesce into an actual state – Israel.  Or perhaps two states – Israel and Judah – since the Biblical account of a single state fracturing into two cannot be trusted.

Thus, the people who became the Hebrews were indigenous to Palestine; they were in fact Canaanites.  So, from where comes the story of the Exodus and the Conquest?  Given the identity between the towns associated with Joshua and those with King Josiah and the recognition that Judges is part of what is called the Deuteronomist History, compiled in the time of Josiah, one can surmise that the epic tales of early Israel were fabricated in the late seventh century BC to support and in a sense sanctify the policies of Josiah, who might be identified as a latter day Joshua.  This was also the time of the Twenty-sixth (Saite) Dynasty, the last gasp of Egyptian power, when for a final time the Pharaohs nosed into Palestine.  This resurgent Egypt, a reminder of the glorious days of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, put the Two Lands back into the big picture being assembled in Jerusalem, allowing old tales of desert wanderings, forgotten conflicts and migrations in and out of the Delta to be woven into a new narrative of Hebrew origins useful to Josiah and his associates in their plans to “recreate” a unified and purified Israel.

King Josiah gets the first reviews.

King Josiah gets the first reviews.

Details found in the Torah in fact fit the seventh century BC far better than the thirteenth.  The kings of the Saite Dynasty were indeed erecting new buildings in the Delta, including Pithom, the Egyptian names in the Joseph story were more popular at this time and in Exodus the unnamed (!) Pharaoh seems to see Palestine as a threat rather than part of the Egyptian empire.  To the east, Kadesh, so prominent in the Exodus, is now the site of a Judean fort, and Edom, whose king refuses the Hebrews passage, only became a state in the seventh century.  It may be that these late details cover an ancient story of departure from Egypt, but they certainly show that the material was being rewritten and do add to the evidence for a seventh century origin for the Exodus and Conquest.

That the Old Testament is a sacred text for millions of Hebrews, Christians and Muslims ought not to obscure this historical reality of its composition and nature.  The early books of the Bible are clearly not history, and the details in them simply cannot bear the weight of the conclusions that have been laid upon them.  Trying, for example, to locate Mt. Sinai is an utterly futile exercise, since all the textual clues date from a later age that itself had not the vaguest idea where Sinai was, and the very existence of the mountain is now doubted by most scholars.  Most important, the god portrayed in the Pentateuch is a historical mishmash, revealing elements of the primitive henotheistic tribal deity of the age of Moses, the institutionalized national god of the states of Israel and Judah and the more perfectly monotheistic universal lord of the later prophets.  From this hodgepodge of stories and images of god the believers, ancient and modern, (and Hollywood) have taken what they will, inevitably creating a Moses and an Exodus that reflect the society and values of the interpreter, rather than what might conceivably have actually existed some three thousand years ago.  Moses and his god are a work in progress, constantly being reinvented, from the time of King Josiah to that of Cecil B. De Mille.

Hear, O Israel!

(I am considering shelving my current project, a scholarly book on Marathon; the twenty years of missed bibliography are overwhelming me and I am having doubts about humanity’s need for another classical tome.  I contemplate returning to a novel of Moses I began over twenty years ago, abandoned because an academic work appeared more important and because of the mounting evidence against the historicity of the Exodus itself.  Well, it is fiction and most people will certainly not rush to abandon a story so important to all the Abramic religions, so what the hell.  But writing fiction is not the same as writing history [well, usually not] and this could all be crap.  So, I will post some of what I have written and invite you to let me know if it works.  This week I offer the Preface [I just can not get away from being an historian] and the Prologue.)

PREFACE

This novel is historical fiction, but only in the sense that it takes place far in the past.  The society and environment of thirteenth century Egypt depicted in it are real, but except for the Pharaohs all the characters and events are fictional, including Moses and the Exodus itself.

Nothing is known about the historical Moses, and even his existence is now seriously doubted.  The stories about him found in Philo, Jospehus and the Midrash and Talmud have long been recognized as secondary and unhistorical, and our sole “primary” source for the leader of the Exodus is the Old Testament, which is itself derivative.  The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch or Torah, are manifestly not historical documents, but rather the final version of an oral and written tradition that constantly revised stories handed down through perhaps thirty generations.  Biblical scholars have discerned four major “authors” or strands interwoven in the text of the Pentateuch: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly and the Deuteronomist; and these sources were themselves assembled and edited into the finished product by a group of compilers, collectively known as the Redactor.  The oldest of these sources, the Yahwist, is dated to the tenth century, already two to three centuries after the putative date of the Exodus, and the editing of the texts continued into the sixth and fifth centuries and later; even as late as the time of Jesus there still existed no accepted canon for the Hebrew texts that made up the Biblical tradition.

The books of the Pentateuch, once ascribed to Moses himself, almost certainly contain no real history.  They comprise instead collections of folk tales, wisdom and cultural information gradually assembled over the centuries into the often incoherent and inconsistent narrative that has come to be accepted as the early history of Israel.  All the major figures of the Patriarchal period, such as Abraham, were almost certainly local heroes or cult figures, whose stories were modified and woven into the developing tapestry of a Hebrew national history as those localities came under the control of the west Semitic tribes that had accepted Yahweh.  A few, like Joseph, might be vague reflections of actual historical characters, but none of the exploits attributed to these figures can be accepted as historical fact.  Further, these stories were constantly revised by later editors, who reworked them according to the ideas, institutions and events contemporary to their own environments.  The figure of Moses’ brother, Aaron, for example, was added to the Exodus story much later by the Priestly source to emphasize the dignity and importance of the priesthood, which was frequently at odds with the prophets, who traced their line back to Moses.

Much more fundamental, the historicity of the Exodus and the Conquest are now seriously doubted.  There is absolutely no non-Biblical evidence, textual or archaeological, for the Exodus, and the last forty years of excavations in Palestine have produced no evidence whatsoever of an outside conquest of the area in the later second millennium.  Rather, the archaeological remains are constantly at odds with the Biblical stories, especially regarding towns, many of which simply did not exist during the periods to which they are assigned by the Bible.  The evidence instead strongly supports the proposition that the people who became the Hebrews were ultimately indigenous to the area and came west from the Transjordan at the end of the end of the thirteenth century.  Less certain, but still more credible and better supported by the evidence than the Biblical account, is the suggestion that the traditions of a flight from Egypt and a violent conquest of Canaan, as well as much of the Biblical history of Israel and Judah, were in fact assembled for political reasons in the late seventh century under King Josiah of Judah.

That the Old Testament is a sacred text for millions of Hebrews, Christians and Muslims ought not to obscure this historical reality of its composition and nature, and as an historical source such a work must be approached very cautiously.  Certainly, the details found in the Biblical account of the Exodus cannot bear the weight of the conclusions that have been laid upon them.  Using, for example, clues in the text to locate Mt. Sinai is an utterly futile exercise, since all those clues date from a later age that itself had not the vaguest idea where Sinai was, and the very existence of the mountain is in fact doubted by most scholars.  Most important, the god portrayed in the Pentateuch is a historical mishmash, revealing elements of the primitive henotheistic tribal deity of the age of Moses, the institutionalized national god of the states of Israel and Judah and the more perfectly monotheistic universal lord of the later prophets.  From this hodgepodge of stories and images of god believers, ancient and modern, (and Hollywood) have taken what they will, inevitably creating a Moses and an Exodus that reflect the society and values of the interpreter, rather than what might conceivably have actually existed some three thousand years ago.  Moses and his god are a work in progress, constantly being reinvented, from the time of King Josiah to that of Cecil B. DeMille

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many scholars still entertain some notion of an escape from Egypt, arguing that the Bondage is too unlikely and the Exodus too compelling and central to the Hebrew tradition to be pure inventions.  They consequently accept from the sweeping narrative of the Pentateuch the bare fact that sometime during the history of New Kingdom Egypt, possible in the thirteenth century BC, a group of west Semites left the Nile delta.  Rejected, however, are all the Biblical details and scale of the event, which after all went completely unnoticed by one of the most meticulous record-keeping civilizations in history.  Since names are very persistent in oral tradition, the group may well have been led by a man named Moses, but if so, it is nevertheless impossible to know anything about him and what role, if any, he played in bringing the god Yahweh to these people.

There is a problem on the Egyptian side as well.  While Egyptian history and society, especially during the New Kingdom, are well documented and we have a good appreciation of the nature of that society and its beliefs, we can never truly understand what went on in the heart and mind of the average Egyptian.  Like all the other pre-Greek inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean world, including the early Hebrews, the Egyptians were mythopoeic, seeing life and will in all the phenomena of nature.  Egyptian, Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian religious texts allow us to construct an intellectual approximation of this mythic universe, but we do not know exactly what this meant in the life of an individual.  It is clear that in their daily lives the ancient Egyptians, who were after all human beings living in an agriculturally-based urban society, had a great deal in common with us, but it is also clear that they viewed the world around them in a way that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to comprehend fully.

The dangers, then, for a novelist seeking to produce a historically credible Exodus are manifold, not the least of which is that the Exodus itself is not historically credible.  And even assuming the event took place, not only do we know absolutely nothing about it and the man who may or may not have inspired it, but also any attempt to create characters a modern reader can understand and relate to emotionally risks distorting the seriously alien nature of pre-classical society.  Moreover, we know that the evolution of Yahweh from a petty desert god to the universal deity of mature Judaism took more than a millennium, suggesting that one should be careful of placing too much responsibility on the shoulders of a single man, which of course is exactly what the Biblical tradition does to Moses.  On the other hand, religion is also an area of human endeavor where it is quite clear that a single individual in a single lifetime can have a tremendous historical impact, and it is perhaps possible that Moses, if indeed he existed, may have played such a role.

This novel presumes that there was an Exodus and offers a possible Moses, one who fits what we know about the historical development of the Hebrew religion and the practices of the time.  The tale may lose the sweep and majesty of the Pentateuch and its cinematic realization in The Ten Commandments, but what remains is something closer to historical possibility.

* * * * * * * * * *

Transliterated from hieroglyphics into Latin characters, Egyptian names come in a wide variety of spellings; I have attempted to use the most common versions.  Place names can be even more confusing, since a site will have an Egyptian name, an Arabic name, often a Greek name and sometimes a Biblical name.  The ancient Egyptian town of Iunu, for example, was known to the Greeks as Heliopolis, to the Bible as On and is today Tell Hisn.  In dealing with this I have followed a policy of enlightened inconsistency, generally employing the Egyptian name, except where the Greek is more familiar (e.g., Memphis rather than Mennufer).

The Egyptian cubit was composed of seven palms and equaled approximately .523 meters; 20,000 cubits equaled an atour, about 10.46 kilometers.  Ten kite equaled one deben, which was about 91 grams.

Richard M. Berthold

Albuquerque, New Mexico

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CHRONOLOGY

(The chronology of Moses’ life is conjectural.

All dates are B.C.)

 

c. 1450 Hebrew tribes at Kadesh and in northern Canaan

1427-1401 AMENHOTEP II

1401-1391 THUTMOSE IV

c. 1400 Hebrew tribes active in central Canaan

1391-1353 AMENHOTEP III

1353-1334 AMENHOTEP IV (AKHENATON)

c. 1345 Yanhamu (Joseph) into Egypt

1336-1334 SMENKHKARE

1334-1325 TUTANKHAMON

c. 1335 Hebrew elements enter Egypt

1325-1321 AY

1321-1292 HAREMHAB

1292-1290 RAMSES I

1290-1279 SETI I

1279-1213 RAMSES II                

1265 Moses born

1237 Moses leaves Egypt

1228 Moses returns to Egypt

1227 Exodus; arrival in Kadesh

1213-1203 MERNEPTAH               

1203-1199 AMENMESSE?

1199 Moses dies

1199-1193 SETI II                    

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PROLOGUE

Memphis

And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set

thee over all the land of Egypt.

Genesis 41:41

The sun hung low over the western desert as Yanhamu emerged onto the broad roof of his house, a tall, almost spectral figure draped in a robe of fine white linen.  Curly hair gone gray and a swarthy face seamed with lines betrayed long years, but the gaunt body was unbent, the narrow head held steady.  Sharp eyes scanned the surrounding world.

The valley and the river were already in shadows, but the parched hills rising from the east bank were momentarily afire, bathed in oranges and pinks by the departing sun.  To the northwest the great man-made mountains of Khufu and Khefren were barely visible in the evening haze, but through the date palms that lined the walls of his estate Yanhamu could easily make out a half dozen pyramids to the south.  His location in the far northern suburbs of Memphis, on high ground hard up against the margin of the Red Land, actually placed him slightly to the west of the tombs that lined the western escarpment for as far south as he could see.  From this vantage point the pyramids were temporary beacons marking the boundary between desert and cultivated field, as the white limestone casing blocks of their western faces blazed with the last rays of the setting sun.

Though he had lived in Egypt for over four decades, Yanhamu was still awed and still a little mystified by these monuments to long dead kings and the Egyptian mania for the next life.  According to the priests, the pyramids were already ancient when the kings of Ur ruled the eastern lands.  And apparently already emptied by robbers of the treasure and bodies they were meant to protect through eternity, an irony that delighted Yanhamu.  Tens of thousands had labored for years to erect these immense piles, yet the body of the poor peasant, lying with a simple clay pot or favorite utensil in an unmarked desert grave and preserved by the dry sands, long outlasted those royal corpses.  The Pharaohs of Egypt were perhaps more cautious now; they were hiding their sarcophagi away in rock-cut tombs, especially in the high cliffs opposite distant Thebes.  But they still filled those tombs with staggering amounts of wealth, guaranteeing, in Yanhamu’s opinion, that their owners would rest undisturbed not for eternity, but only until authority broke down in the next time of troubles.

Of course, thought Yanhamu as he watched the sun slip below the horizon, extinguishing the royal tombs, most Egyptians simply refuse to believe that Pharaoh’s authority could break down, despite the evidence of the recent past.  The trouble that followed the death of Akhenaton some thirty years ago is already being forgotten, swallowed by the timelessness that pervades this land.

From his study of temple records he knew that the land had in fact suffered great upsets in the past, times when the god-king had been unable to insure that ma’at – justice and right – lay upon the kingdom of the Two Lands.  Egypt had even endured the humiliation of foreign rule under the Hyksos.  But few outside a small circle of priests were aware of Egypt’s history or that Egypt even had a history.  History implied change, and the Egyptian resolutely refused to recognize that there had been any significant change since the Creation.  Even death was only a sort of transition to another world where life would go on exactly as it had here.  And so the tremendous urge to preserve the body, to keep it as unchanging as the desert, river and sky that constituted the universe of the average Egyptian.  The very human fear that things would not be as they had always been, perhaps that was the real meaning of the vast necropolis that covered the western plateau from the delta to Thebes and beyond.

Soon enough I will be taking up residence in that silent city, mused Yanhamu, trying in vain to locate in the darkening desert the site of his own modest tomb.  And there I will wait with kings for the robbers, who to their surprise will find in the tomb of Yanhamu son of Sabtah nothing more than his body.

As usual this thought brought a smile to his face, and as usual he wondered if his wife and sons would actually keep their promise to inter him in an empty tomb.  For all their years of marriage and his distinctly un-Egyptian influence on her, Asenatis remained at heart an Egyptian, and the tomb was mostly a concession to her sensibilities.  What happened to the empty shell that had carried his life mattered little to Yanhamu, an attitude that set him apart from not only his wife, but virtually everyone he met.

And it was not just this, he knew.  His whole approach to the world about him was different.  He did not look at things in the way most men did, be they Egyptians or Canaanites or Hittites or Nubians.  They saw life and consciousness in everything in nature, in the weather, the rivers, the plants and animals, even the rocks of the earth.  Each and every thing in the universe possessed a unique personality that must be dealt with, just as one dealt with fellow humans.  Yanhamu did not for a moment doubt the existence of the gods, of powers that directed the great natural forces, and he believed that his spirit would survive the death of his body.  But from earliest adolescence he had been unable to accept the seemingly universal notion that the reeds in the river or the stones in his garden or the salt in his cupboard were companion beings, little different from the boatman or the gardener or his wife.

Addressing the inanimate could only strike Yanhamu as foolish, but such was the belief of virtually every person he met.  Even Haremhab, a hard-bitten military man and his close friend, had defended this world view, amazed that Yanhamu should question such an obvious fact of nature.  In his younger days Yanhamu had often wondered about the soundness of his own mind, so pervasive was this belief he could not share, but he had come to realize that whether he or the rest of mankind was right, it made little difference to his ability to get through life successfully.  It left an unbridgeable gulf between him and his fellow man, but as a Canaanite living in Egypt he would in any case have found a divide between himself and most he met, the native Egyptians.  His alienation from the common understanding of the nature of the world was more profound, relegating him to a universe in which conscious life was the oddity rather than the common denominator, but like the inbred Egyptian contempt for outsiders there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He rubbed his hands together.  The joints were swollen and painful again and the salve the physician had given him seemed to be losing its effectiveness.  Relegating the pain to the back of his mind, something he had learned in the hard days of his youth, he crossed to the eastern parapet of the roof.  Spread out below was the estate’s formal garden, which Yanhamu counted as Egypt’s greatest gift to civilization.  The arrangement was traditional: a rectangular pool filled with fish and lotus, surrounded by orderly rows of oleanders, chrysanthemums, jasmine and other flowers.  Further out, hiding the wall and the outside world, were sycamores, tamarisks, pomegranates, acacias and an unbroken line of palms.  Paths of crushed rock meandered about the garden, and all was in perfect order, maintained by an overseer who ruled over this tiny kingdom with as iron a hand as any Pharaoh.

Savoring the smells of the spring blossoms below, Yanhamu looked out towards the river, now at almost its lowest point.  In little more than two months akhit, the Season of Inundation, and the summer flood would begin, and once more the fields would return to the river, turning the villages and estates into little islands.  This was the blessing of Egypt, the annual flood that renewed the farmland with a thick carpet of silt and made this desert country perhaps the most bountiful in the world.  It was hardly surprising that Pharaoh spent so much time in ceremonies connected with the well-being of the river.

Yanhamu hoped that this akhit would not bring a “red” Nile.  There was the occasional year when the flood carried an extra burden of reddish-brown silt, providing the fields with an added measure of renewed fertility.  The peasants welcomed this “blood of Hapi,” a gift of the Nile god who in his cave far to the south poured out the life-giving waters, but like most not intimately involved with agriculture Yanhamu greeted the phenomenon with far less enthusiasm.  For whatever reason, a “red” Nile almost always heralded the imminent arrival of armies of frogs and clouds of insects.  The frogs he could live with, even though their irresistible invasion of every corner of the household meant doing exactly that.  But the flies!  The buzzing, biting, inescapable swarms of tiny flying creatures had more than once brought him to the desperate consideration of the existence of malevolent deities whose attention was focused on him alone.

For the moment, however, it was a scene of complete tranquility that confronted Yanhamu.  The land was soft in the twilight and the haze created by thousands of cooking fires, and the cool stillness of the evening was broken only by the barking of dogs and the occasional quacking of the ducks found on every estate.  Work in the fields, the endless toil of bringing water to the crops, had mostly ceased, and even Memphis, the bustling northern capital, was shutting down for the night.  This was the peace that Yanhamu – and every other old man in the world, he suspected – relished.  The revolutionary years of Akhenaton’s reign had been filled with excitement and were an experience he would not have missed, but that was for eager young men.  Old bones found comfort in traditional Egypt, quiet and unexciting, undisturbed in its dream of eternal sameness.

General Haremhab had done his job well, restoring ma’at to a land that had reached the brink of civil war.  Actually, it was Pharaoh Haremhab now, and his old friend’s elevation to the throne confirmed for Yanhamu the nonsense of dynastic succession.  Haremhab was an old army man, lacking even the vaguest connection with the royal family, and yet his performance as the most recent incarnation of the god Horus was magnificent compared to that of his pathetic royal predecessors.  The official line emanating from the temple of Amon-Re was even now styling him the first legitimate king since Amenhotep III.  So much for bloodlines.

Both he and Haremhab had gotten their start under the “heretic” Akhenaton.  Yanhamu had followed the example of generations of his Canaanite countrymen and fled local trouble and family problems by migrating to Egypt.  Rather than sinking like most into the food-producing masses, however, he parlayed his contacts in Canaan into a minor government job, where a talent for economic administration quickly appeared.  He was also fortunate enough to enter Egypt during Akhenaton’s revolution, a time when the traditional rigid patterns and xenophobia of Egyptian society were temporarily shelved, at least among the court circles.  Learning to speak and read Egyptian, he had rapidly advanced in power and by the time of Akhenaton’s death was virtually managing the national economy.

Those had been heady days of freedom indeed, as Akhenaton turned Egypt on its head with his religious revolution.  His aim of course was not the shattering of the tight molds of Egyptian culture; that was incidental to his real purpose.  Those close to the king knew him to be purely and simply a religious fanatic, consumed with the cause of his new god, the Aton.  Changing his name from Amenhotep, “Amon-Is-Content,” to Akhenaton, “It-Goes-Well-with-the-Aton,” he moved the court out of Thebes and built a new capital, Akhetaton, halfway down the river to Memphis.  From there he directed a campaign against the other gods of Egypt, especially the powerful Amon-Re, dispatching stonecutters to chisel the name of the “Hidden One” off monuments and walls.  Henceforth only two gods would matter in the Two Lands: the Aton and his incarnate son, Akhenaton.

Ironically, the Aton had reminded Yanhamu of the traditional gods of the desert dwellers.  Ironically, because one could hardly find a people more culturally distant from the Egyptian king than the nomadic herdsmen and sometime farmers of southern and eastern Canaan.  Yet, Akhenaton’s understanding of divinity was in many ways similar to that of the tribes wandering the fringes of the desert.  Each of the clans had a single, often nameless god with whom its members had made a sort of contract: you specifically watch over us and we will ignore other gods and worship only you.  These were family gods for people whose widest political horizon was the family, and their appellations revealed that fact: the god of Noath, the god of Cabor or simply the God.  And Akhenaton’s sun god was like that, a sort of family deity with whom the Pharaoh had an exclusive relationship.  Like the desert clans the king did not deny the existence of other gods, but only attempted to elevate the Aton as the sole important god of Egypt besides Pharaoh.

Yanhamu smiled.  Only?  Only demoting gods that had been with the Egyptians for thousands of years, a task not even a god-king might hope to accomplish.  Akhenaton’s misfortune had in fact been that he was not some desert clan chief, but Pharaoh, and his family numbered not in the hundreds, but in the millions, all of them following their own notions of heaven.  Nor was Akhenaton acting only against the religious convictions of his people.  Amon-Re, chief among the old gods, had powerful earthly defenders, and his temple, with its immense financial resources, was already a challenge to the government and army long before Akhenaton was born.  The priesthood of Amon-Re were not about to surrender their god, and more importantly their wealth and power, without a fight.

There, Yanhamu knew, was the real struggle.  The army and parts of the government initially supported the Pharaoh, but not because they were transported by his religious vision.  For the hard headed men who dealt with Egypt’s concerns here on earth Akhenaton’s revolution was the opportunity to check the swelling power of the temple of Amon and reassert the independence of the throne.  The Pharaoh must have been at least vaguely aware of this more mundane conflict, but if so, he never showed the slightest interest.  Instead, he remained shut away in Akhetaton, surrounded by the converted and seemingly converted, directing his war against the name of Amon-Re and dreaming of the triumph of the Aton.

It was only a dream. Akhenaton’s ideas were too radical, his assault on Egyptian tradition too blatant.  The priesthood of Amon held the support of the people and had little trouble depicting the Pharaoh as a heretic and perverter of ma’at and discrediting all those who followed his cause.  The sensible and the ambitious among the king’s supporters soon saw the inevitable outcome of the struggle and were deserting him even before his early death.  His short-lived successors, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamon and Ay, though members of his family, were all tools of the temple, and now Haremhab, ever the realist, was working diligently to restore order to the land and power and glory to the name of Amon-Re.  The Aton was forgotten, vanished from the consciousness of Egypt, as the walls of Akhenaton’s abandoned city were now vanishing beneath the desert sand.

Yanhamu was startled out of his reverie by sounds behind him.  He turned and saw the cleanly shaved head of his household steward, Kasa, emerge from the stairwell.  With painful slowness a thin and stooped body followed.

Here is something else that was already old when the kings of Ur ruled, thought Yanhamu, watching the ancient servant creep across the roof towards him.

“Your evening drink, Master,” announced Kasa in a reedy voice.  He held out a blue faience goblet decorated with scenes of Pharaoh smashing the enemies of Egypt.

“Thank you, Kasa, but you know it isn’t necessary for you to climb those stairs.  Next time get one of the house boys to do it.”

The bent back straightened slightly.  “It is my duty to attend the Master of the house.”

Receiving the expected solemn pronouncement, Yanhamu shrugged and took the drink.  As ever, his sense of mischief was tweaked by Kasa’s seriousness.

“Tell me, Kasa, what do you remember of Akhenaton?”

The old servant’s eyes went wide and darted to either side, searching for any temple agents who might be hiding on the roof.

“I do not recognize the name, Master,” he said in almost a whisper.

“Is your memory failing so rapidly, Kasa, that you forget our younger days, when you joined this house?  Who was it who then ruled over the Two Lands?”

“Pharaoh has always watched over the land, and Amon has always been his strength.”

The almost whisper had changed to an almost shout, and Yanhamu could imagine his neighbors on their rooftops looking up in surprise at this sudden pious proclamation shattering the evening quiet.  He had no doubt that his servant’s mind was as sharp as ever, but he also knew that like most Egyptians Kasa was careful and conservative when it came to political affairs.  And there were matters cautious people simply did not discuss these days, especially people in the household of a foreigner who had found his fortune in the service of the heretic king.

“Quite true, Kasa, quite true.  You may go.”

A perceptibly relieved chief servant bowed slightly and turned to face the long trek to the ground floor, moving a bit more spryly in his eagerness to escape the Master’s dangerous games.  He was utterly loyal to the man who had provided so well for him and his family all these years, but he was no closer now to understanding him than he had been when he entered the household back in the bad days.  The Master only underlined Kasa’s convictions about foreigners: this one had spent his life in Egypt in service to the kingdom, but still remained alien.  The constant questioning of everything, so typical of outsiders, was bearable, but this open disrespect for the gods was an invitation to trouble.  The Master was a good man, but how great was divine tolerance?  Kasa was convinced that only his frequent prayers and offerings stood between the house and disaster.  He had best head directly for the shrine in the alcove of the great room.

Yanhamu watched the retreating back for a moment.  No doubt off to beseech Amon-Re not to send a plague upon the household of the impious one.

He sighed and turned back to the view over the valley.  Details were disappearing rapidly in the deepening dark, and the now dim panorama would soon be replaced with isolated and more intimate images created by the odd lamp and exposed fire.

Why do we need to take ourselves so seriously, he wondered, his fingers idly tracing the carved figures on the goblet.  Is it fear that if we did not act with complete seriousness others might not believe us important?  Or perhaps that we might have trouble believing it ourselves?  Priests were easily the worst of the serious lot, no doubt because what they did was on the face of it pretty absurd when compared to other occupations.  Of course they portrayed it as the proper attitude of respect and awe when dealing with the gods, but Yanhamu suspected it had more to do with convincing themselves and their congregations that activities normally associated with children and the feeble-minded were indeed of the utmost importance.  Otherwise who would listen to grown men who spoke to statuary?  More than most, this society was steeped in religion, but the Egyptian also had a strong sense of humor, and any departure from the utter solemnity maintained by the priests might cause the temples to echo with laughter.

He sipped the beer, cool from evaporation and pleasantly bitter on the tongue.  A fine beverage, which in sufficient quantity could undermine the demeanor of the most solemn priest, something he expected happened often enough when the faithful were not present.  He certainly remembered witnessing drunken priests of Aton during his frequent visits to the court at Akhetaton, though never in the presence of Pharaoh, who was very serious about his god.  Ironically, the revolutionary nature of Akhenaton’s fanaticism created a freer, less serious atmosphere in the royal city, one that encouraged openness and experimentation.  Artists, given the opportunity to break free of thousand-year-old canons, had flocked to Akhetaton to produce works that were almost shocking, at least to the average Egyptian.  Far from following the traditional rigid forms, their depictions of the king actually played upon the abnormalities of his strange, androgynous body, emphasizing the elongated head, narrow shoulders and wide hips.  Many of these creations had struck Yanhamu as grotesque, but the unconventional approaches could also lead to objects of exquisite beauty.  Much to the dismay of Kasa, Yanhamu kept a copy of one of these works, a painted head of Queen Nefertiti, in his sleeping chamber.  He wondered briefly what had happened to the original.  If not destroyed by some servant of Amon, it was probably now sitting in a tomb somewhere.  How typically Egyptian to create beauty and then bury it away.

Setting the goblet down on the parapet, he stretched until the joints in his arms cracked.  As he began massaging his hands again, his ear caught the sound of music and voices in the distance, and he could see off to the left that the gardens of Senmut’s house were a bright island in the darkness.  The walls of the estate hid the party itself, but Yanhamu could imagine the pompous bureaucrat strutting about, constantly reminding his fawning guests of just how important he was to Pharaoh and the government of the land.

Haremhab, my poor friend, he thought.  Sparring with the temple and facing Egypt’s enemies must be a pleasure compared to dealing with puffed-up fools like Senmut.  Is it impossible to form a government that does not immediately fill up with inefficient little men who take themselves too seriously?  The governments of both Akhenaton, the detached fanatic, and Haremhab, the man of action, rested, he knew, on identical foundations of Senmuts, all striving to inflate the importance of their positions by creating unnecessary work and growing piles of reports.  These people seemed to be part of the nature of things, a burden that even an incarnate god could not lift from the kingdom.

On the other hand, he considered, picking up his drink, the Senmuts of the world are the heart of every large organization, and the High Priest of Amon must be as hampered and frustrated as Pharaoh in his efforts to get things done.  Perhaps I underrate you, Senmut.  Perhaps I should see you as another manifestation of the balance the gods have built into the universe.  In that case I salute you and your fellow papyrus eaters.  Kings and priests will come and go, but you will be with us always.  He drained the goblet, only half filled by a servant concerned for his master’s health, and let loose an immensely satisfying belch.

“But fortunately I don’t have to be with you always, or even briefly,” he said aloud.  Being an ex-minister of the better-to-be-forgotten Pharaoh meant being anathema to career officials, despite his lingering friendship with the man who was now Pharaoh, and Yanhamu expected and received few invitations to social gatherings.  Besides, even had he not been tainted by his association with Akhenaton, he would still be shunned by good society because of his origins.  All his years in Egypt and all his love for the land did not make him an Egyptian; he was and ever would be in their eyes an Asiatic.  Worse, he was from Canaan, a place that Egyptians felt especially demonstrated the innate superiority of their civilization.  And worse still, he came from one of the poor, semi-nomadic tribes of the region, which branded him as Habiru, in Egyptian estimation at best a tramp or migrant worker, at worst a bandit.  As far as class-conscious little men like Senmut were concerned, no amount of wealth or degree of success could overcome that disability.

Asiatics, and in particular the Habiru, Yanhamu certainly knew, had always been treated with contempt, but the situation had worsened considerably in the wake of Akhenaton’s reign.  Lost in his religious vision, the eccentric king had completely neglected Egypt’s foreign affairs, a factor that contributed to the ultimate desertion of the military to the side of Amon.  Lacking any attention from Egypt, the petty princes of Syria began falling away from Pharaoh’s control, aided from the north by the powerful empire of the Hittites.  Emboldened by the realization that Egypt was doing nothing to preserve her empire, the Hittites themselves were soon on the move and easily swallowed Syria and the Phoenician cities.  Disaffection had meanwhile spread throughout Palestine, and one by one the Egyptian garrisons were overwhelmed, their desperate pleas for more troops unanswered.  The surviving forces were finally withdrawn, and the land was abandoned to local rebels and adventurers, like the notorious Yashuia, leading large bands of Habiru.  Overnight the Egyptian empire had vanished, a casualty of Akhenaton’s devotion to the Aton.

Among those creating havoc in Palestine were many tribes known to Yanhamu from his youth, including his own.  While it seemed to him that they spent most of their time in bloody conflict with one another, he also remembered well his father’s hatred and envy of their settled neighbors.  If anything could unite the desert clans, it was their distrust of the town dweller, and any breakdown in the settled power structure was a signal for an assault on the cultivated lands.  Tribes in northern Canaan and around Kadesh in Sinai, he knew, were already stirring up trouble in central Palestine when he forsook his homeland for Egypt.  With the violence escalating in the face of Egyptian indifference, before long he was followed by a growing stream of refugees, many of them Habiru, who settled in the Nile delta, particularly the eastern fringes.  Egypt had been long accustomed to migration from Palestine, but not in such numbers, and the efforts of frontier officials to control the influx were thwarted by Akhenaton’s lax administration.

As he thought of the Habiru immigrants, Yanhamu found himself unconsciously staring off to the northeast, towards the settlements hidden in the distance and darkness.  Living there were many families from his own tribe, as well as large numbers of Simeonites, who had fled to Egypt after their failure to hold the city of Shechem.  Other tribes were represented, but he was not sure of their identities.  It took a desert mind to remember all the names and complex relationships of the Habiru clans; after a half century of dealing with documents Yanhamu no longer had the sharp memory of the illiterate.

Nor the interest, he thought.  These are not my people, whatever the blood connection.  Years before he had visited a Habiru encampment near Tjeku on the frontier and had been surprised and amused to discover that many of the families considered themselves to be of the “tribe of Yanhamu.”  It was pleasant to speak his mother tongue again, but he quickly realized that beyond the language he had little in common with these squabbling herdsmen and their petty tribal affairs.  He could not help comparing them to the hardworking Egyptian farmers and craftsmen.  Egypt had many shortcomings, but it was bringing ideas and beauty into the world.  The warlike Habiru had yet to leave any more sign of their passing than looted towns and animal droppings.

No, Egypt was his home, and if it never fully accepted him, it would accept his children.  They had inherited their mother’s features and language and despite their father’s origins thought of themselves as Egyptians.  Yanhamu had told them as much as he could remember of the tribal traditions he had learned from his father, but the boys had easily sensed the contempt in his words and dismissed them.  He had as little time for the desert gods of the Habiru as he did for their Egyptian counterparts, and apart from a healthy dose of skepticism his sons had consequently received an orthodox Egyptian religious education at the hands of Asenatis and the ardent Kasa.  Both had taken Egyptian wives, and their children were as distant from the Habiru and their culture as any full-blooded Egyptian.

Which is just as well, thought Yanhamu.  It hardly takes a professional fortuneteller to see that the future of the Habiru in the Two Lands is filled with trouble.  Egypt is back on course, and life is going to get hard for strangers.  Especially for strangers being blamed for all the trouble in Palestine and Syria. 

He knew, and Haremhab and the temple of Amon knew, that Egypt’s imperial problems were Akhenaton’s responsibility.  But when did any country willingly blame itself for its failures when there were convenient outsiders at whom to point the finger?  With order returning to the Nile valley popular feeling against the Habiru was growing, supported by the official attitude of the government and temple.  And the reconquest of Palestine could not be that far off, which meant a further increase in hostility towards Canaanites.  Yanhamu himself had no fears; he enjoyed the protection of Pharaoh, and in any case he was an old man.  With his family secure what happened in the next generation was a matter of interest, but not concern to him.

He yawned and stretched again, trying to ease the lower back pain that had come with standing too long.  The evening chill, carried on the rising north wind, was beginning to penetrate his thin gown, and a sudden shudder caught his body.

Time to retire, perhaps for another losing game of Senit with Asenatis, he told himself.  That or suffer Kasa’s reproaches.

Yanhamu looked a final time towards the northeast, then turned towards the stairs.

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