Damien F.
Mackey
“If only Muslims could find the
name “Haman” or something similar in Egyptian records … as this would allow
them to claim that Haman is indeed an Egyptian name, and thus enable them to
disconnect the Haman in the Qur’an from the Haman found in the biblical book of
Esther”.
Jochen Katz
In conventional terms, this (the
back-dating of Haman to the era of Moses) would be a dislocation of the
biblical Haman backwards in time by approximately a millennium.
But that is what Islam does to ancient
history, time and time again. It mangles it.
See for instance my article:
Prophet
Jonah, Nineveh, and Mohammed
in which a supposed “Mohammed” of
the C7th AD claims to be a “brother” of the prophet Jonah who is actually situated
well back in BC time, and has connections with a “Nineveh” that had long ceased
to exist.
For a proper chronology of Haman
and his historical identity, see e.g. my article:
King Amon's
descent into Aman (Haman)
Now, Jochen Katz has attempted to
restore some sanity with regard to the Qur’anic dislocation of Haman in his
article, “The Haman Hoax”:
Introduction
The Qur’an contains several instances of “historical compression”, i.e.
stories in which two or more separate historical events are combined to create
a new story, or a character from one story is transferred or imported into another
story. For example, in the Qur’an we find Saul and David in the story of
Gideon, or a Samaritan together with Moses in the Exodus narrative. A list of
many more such historical compressions is provided on this page.
Damien
Mackey’s comment: I might
as well include these “historical compressions” here:
In the following some smaller discrepancies
between the Qur'an and the scriptures it supposedly confirms.
10.
Moses or
Jacob?
12.
Abraham's name
Other contradictions in comparison to the
Bible:
15.
Noah's Age
19.
Adoption
by Adaption analyzes various discrepancies inf the quranic version of the
stories of Moses and Joseph.
35.
How many
messengers were sent to Noah's people?
Further discussion: Who are those messengers that were rejected by Noah's people?
Further discussion: Who are those messengers that were rejected by Noah's people?
37.
Two young men?
Jochen Katz continues:
Whether these stories and characters were confused by the author of the
Qur’an out of ignorance or deliberately merged for a certain purpose, these new
stories are presented to the readers as reports of historical events and
therefore constitute historical errors in the Qur’an.
One of the best known examples of such apparent historical confusions in
the Qur’an is the character of Haman in the story of Moses and Pharaoh. Pharaoh
and Haman were two of the most dangerous figures in the history of the Jews.
Both of these men attempted genocide against the Israelites. Pharaoh gave the
command to kill all male newborn babies (Exodus 1) and Haman plotted to have
all Jews killed who were living in exile in Persia (Esther 3).1
However, these two events were separated in two ways: (a) the geographical
distance of several thousand kilometers between Egypt and Persia, and (b) about
a thousand years distance on the historical timeline.
Since the character of Haman is so obviously out of place in the story
of Moses and Pharaoh, this matter has a high embarrassment factor, and Muslims
apparently felt the pressing need to find a reasonable solution to this charge
of a historical error in the Qur’an.
If only Muslims could find the name “Haman” or something similar in
Egyptian records … as this would allow them to claim that Haman is indeed an
Egyptian name, and thus enable them to disconnect the Haman in the Qur’an from
the Haman found in the biblical book of Esther.
In fact, apologists for Islam have managed to devise a hoax that has
impressed and misled many people over the last 15 years. This hoax went through
three main stages of development (associated with Maurice Bucaille, Islamic
Awareness, and Harun Yahya) and all three stages are available on the
internet, plus plenty of variants.2
….
As a foretaste of the things to come, let me mention in this
introduction only two details out of the many false Muslim statements on this
topic.
Maurice Bucaille claims to have consulted a prominent Egyptologist about
the name Haman and a possible transliteration of that name in hieroglyphs. He
then writes:
In order to confirm his deduction about the name, he advised me to
consult the Dictionary of Personal Names of the New Kingdom by Ranke,
where I might find the name written in hieroglyphs, as he had written before
me, and the transliteration in German. I discovered all that had been presumed
by the expert, and, moreover, I was stupefied to read the profession of Haman:
“Chief of the workers in stone-quarries,” exactly what could be deduced from
the Qur'an, though the words of Pharaoh suggest a master of construction.
For comparison, here is the entry in Ranke’s dictionary:
Quite obviously, Bucaille lied. Ranke’s transliteration does not say
“Haman”, nor does Ranke say anything about him being the “Chief of the workers
in stone-quarries”. [The meaning and implications of this entry will be
discussed in great detail in the next two sections of this paper.]
Harun Yahya wrote about ten years ago:3
The name "Haman" was in fact mentioned in old Egyptian
tablets. It was mentioned on a monument which now stands in the Hof Museum in
Vienna, …
This is another lie. There is not even one Egyptian tablet, let alone
many, on which the name Haman was found, nor is the artefact with the
inscription that allegedly contains the name Haman “a monument”; it is a door
post and it does not say “Haman”. Most ironically, there has not even been a
“Hof Museum” in Vienna for more than eighty years!
The whole story is a hoax from start to finish. ….
Damien
Mackey’s comment: Read
the whole of Jochen Katz’s article.
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