by
Damien F. Mackey
“The name of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather of Moses.
The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed, figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t,
the daughter of Danel and the devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story
as Pû'ã, a midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses”.
Michael Astour
Law and Government
Moses
The great Lawgiver in the Bible, and hence in Hebrew history, was Moses, substantially the author of the Torah (Law).
But the history books tell us that the Torah was probably dependent upon the law code issued by the Babylonian king, Hammurabi (dated to the first half of the 18th BC).
I shall discuss this further on.
Also, the famous Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, seems to have been based upon Moses:
Moses and Lycurgus
(4) Moses and Lycurgus
For Egyptian identifications of Moses, see e. g. my article:
Realisation of who was the Egyptianised Moses
(4) Realisation of who was the Egyptianised Moses
The Egyptians may have corrupted the legend of the baby Moses in the bulrushes so that now it became the goddess Isis who drew the baby Horus from the Nile and had him suckled by Hathor (the goddess in the form of a cow – the Egyptian personification of wisdom).
In the original story, of course, baby Moses was drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess, not a goddess, and was weaned by Moses’ own mother (Exodus 2:5-9).
But could both the account of the rescue of the baby Moses in the Book of Exodus, and the Egyptian version of it, be actually based upon a Mesopotamian original, as the textbooks say; based upon the story of king Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia?
Sargon tells, “in terms reminiscent of Moses, Krishna and other great men”, that [as quoted by G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 152]:
.… My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me ….
Given that Sargon is conventionally dated to the C24th BC, and Moses about a millennium later, it would seem inevitable that the Hebrew version, and the Egyptian one, must be imitations of the Mesopotamian one. Such is what the ‘history’ books say, at least.
The fact is, however, that the extant Sargon legend is very late (C7th BC); though thought to have been based upon an earlier Mesopotamian original.
Dean Hickman has re-dated king Hammurabi of Babylon to the time of kings Solomon and David (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying Hammurabi’s older contemporary, Shamsi-Adad I, as king David’s Syrian foe, Hadadazer (2 Samuel 10:16) (“The Dating of Hammurabi”, Proceedings of the Third Seminar of Catastrophism and Ancient History, Uni. Of Toronto, 1985, ed. M. Luckerman, pp. 13-28).
For more on this, see e. g. my articles:
Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
(4) Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
and:
(4) Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as contemporaries of Solomon. Part Two (b): Zimri-Lim's Palace and the four rivers?
According to this new scenario, Hammurabi could not possibly have influenced Moses.
Greek and Levant 'Moses-like Myths'
Michael Astour believes that Moses, a hero of the Hebrew scriptures, shares "some cognate features" with Danaos (or Danaus), hero of Greek legend.
He gives his parallels as follows (Hellenosemitica, p. 99):
Moses grows up at the court of the Egyptian king as a member of the royal family, and subsequently flees from Egypt after having slain an Egyptian - as Danaos, a member of the Egyptian ruling house, flees from the same country after the slaying of the Aigyptiads which he had arranged. The same number of generations separates Moses from Leah the "wild cow" and Danaos from the cow Io.
Mackey’s Comment: The above parallel might even account for how the Greeks managed to confuse the land of Ionia (Io) with the land of Israel in the case of the earliest philosophers.
Astour continues (pp. 99-100):
Still more characteristic is that both Moses and Danaos find and create springs in a waterless region; the story of how Poseidon, on the request of the Danaide Amymona, struck out with his trident springs from the Lerna rock, particularly resembles Moses producing a spring from the rock by the stroke of his staff. A ‘cow’ features also in the legend of Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Tyre upon the disappearance of his sister Europa, who was sent by his father together with his brothers Cilix and Phoenix to seek her with instructions not to return without her. Seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Cadmus was told to settle at the point where a cow, which he would meet leaving the temple, would lie down. The cow led him to the site of Thebes (remember the two cities by that name). There he built the citadel of Cadmeia. Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite and, according to the legend, was the founder of the House of Oedipus.
Astour believes that "even more similar features" may be discovered if one links these accounts to the Ugaritic (Levantine-Canaanite) poem of Danel, which he had previously identified as "the prototype of the Danaos myth" (p. 100):
The name of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather of Moses. The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed, figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t, the daughter of Danel and the devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story as Pû'ã, a midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses. The very name of Moses, in the feminine form Mšt, is, in the Ugaritic poem, the first half of Danel's wife's name, while the second half of her name, Dnty, corresponds to the name of Levi's sister Dinah.
Michael Astour had already explained how the biblical story of the Rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) was "analogous to the myth of the bloody wedding of her namesakes, the Danaides".
He continues on here with his fascinating Greco-Israelite parallels:
Dân, the root of the names Dnel, Dnty (and also Dinah and Danaos), was the name of a tribe whose priests claimed to descend directly from Moses (Jud. 18:30); and compare the serpent emblem of the tribe of Dan with the serpent staff of Moses and the bronze serpent he erected. …Under the same name - Danaë - another Argive heroine of the Danaid stock is thrown into the sea in a chest with her new-born son - as Moses in his ark (tébã) - and lands on the serpent-island of Seriphos (Heb. šãrâph, applied i.a. to the bronze serpent made by Moses). Moses, like Danel, is a healer, a prophet, a miracle-worker - cf. Danel's staff (mt) which he extends while pronouncing curses against towns and localities, quite like Moses in Egypt; and especially, like Danel, he is a judge….
Roman 'Moses-like Myth'
The Romans further corrupted the story of the infant Moses, following on probably from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Levantines and Greeks. I refer to the account of Romulus (originally Rhomus) and Remus, thought to have founded the city of Rome in 753 BC.
Both the founders and the date are quite mythical.
Did the Romans take an Egyptian name for Moses, such as Musare, and turn it into Rhomus and Remus (MUSA-RE = RE-MUS), with the formerly one child (Moses) now being doubled into two babies (twins)?
According to this legend, the twins were put into a basket by some kind servants and floated in the Tiber River, from which they were eventually rescued by a she-wolf. Thus the Romans more pragmatically opted for a she-wolf as the suckler instead of a cow goddess, or a lion goddess, Sekhmet (the fierce alter ego of Hathor).
The Romans may have taken yet another slice from the Pentateuch when they had the founder of the city of Rome, Romulus, involved in a fratricide (killing Remus); just as Cain, the founder of the world's first city, had killed his own brother, Abel (cf. Genesis 4:8 and 4:17).
Mohammed: Arabian `Moses-like Myths' ...
An Islamic lecturer, Ahmed Deedat ["What the Bible Says About Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) the Prophet of Islam"
(www.islamworld.net/Muhammad.in.Bible.html)],
told of an interview he once had with a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Transvaal, van Heerden, on the question: "What does the Bible say about Muhummed?"
Deedat had in mind the Holy Qur'an verse 46:10, according to which "a witness among the children of Israel bore witness of one like him…".
This was, in turn, a reference to Deuteronomy 18:18's "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and I will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."
The Moslems, of course, interpret the "one like him [i.e. Moses]" as being Mohammed himself.
Faced with the dominee's emphatic response that the Bible has "nothing" to say about Mohammed - and that the Deuteronomic prophecy ultimately pertained to Jesus Christ, as did "thousands" of other prophecies - Deedat set out to prove him wrong.
On the deft apologetical ploy used here, see my article:
Zakir Naik’s apologetical tactic meant to embarrass Christians
(4) Zakir Naik's apologetical tactic meant to embarrass Christians
For some of my own views on the Prophet Mohammed, see my article:
Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History
(4) Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History
Some Conclusions regarding Mohammed (c. 570-632 AD, conventional dating)
Whilst Mohammed supposedly lived much later than Moses, there nevertheless do seem to be Arabic borrowings of the Moses story itself (and even appropriations of certain very specific aspects of the life of Jesus, as we shall read later) in the legends about Mohammed, who especially resembles Moses in:
(i) the latter's visit to Mount Horeb with its cave atop, its Burning Bush, and angel (Exodus 3:1-2), possibly equating to Mohammed's "Mountain of Light" (Jabal-an-Nur), and 'cave of research' (`Ghar-i-Hira'), and angel Gabriel;
(ii) at the very same age of forty (Acts 7:23-29), and
(iii) there receiving a divine revelation, leading to his
(iv) becoming a prophet of God and a Lawgiver.
Mohammed as a Lawgiver is (like the Spartan Lycurgus) a direct pinch, I believe, from the Hebrew Pentateuch, and also from the era of Jeremiah. Consider the following by M. O'Hair ("Mohammed", A text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 65, first broadcast on August 25, 1969:
www.atheists.org/Islam.Mohammed.html
"Now the Kaaba or Holy Stone at Mecca was the scene of an annual pilgrimage, and during this pilgrimage in 621 Mohammed was able to get six persons from Medina to bind themselves to him. They did so by taking the following oath.
Not consider anyone equal to Allah;
Not to steal;
Not to be unchaste;
Not to kill their children;
Not willfully to calumniate".
This is simply the Mosaïc Decalogue, with the following Islamic addition:
"To obey the prophet's orders in equitable matters.
In return Mohammed assured these six novitiates of paradise.
The place where these first vows were taken is now called the first Akaba".
"The mission of Mohammed", perfectly reminiscent of that of Moses, and later of Nehemiah, was "to restore the worship of the One True God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, as taught by Prophet Ibrahim [Abraham] and all Prophets of God, and complete the laws of moral, ethical, legal, and social conduct and all other matters of significance for the humanity at large."
The above-mentioned Burning Bush incident occurred whilst Moses
(a) was living in exile (Exodus 2:15)
(b) amongst the Midianite tribe of Jethro, near the Paran desert.
(c) Moses had married Jethro's daughter, Zipporah (v. 21).
Likewise Mohammed:
(a) experienced exile;
(b) to Medina, a name which may easily have become confused with the similar sounding, Midian, and
(c) he had only the one wife at the time, Khadija. Also
(d) Moses, like Mohammed, was terrified by what God had commanded of him, protesting that he was "slow of speech and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10). To which God replied:
"Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be your mouth and teach you what you are to speak' (vv. 11-12).
Now this episode, seemingly coupled with Moses’s call, has come distorted into the Koran as Mohammed's being terrified by what God was asking of him, protesting that he was not learned. To which God supposedly replied that he had 'created man from a clot of congealed blood, and had taught man the use of the pen, and that which he knew not, and that man does not speak ought of his own desire but by inspiration sent down to him'.
Ironically, whilst Moses the writer complained about his lack of verbal eloquence, Mohammed, 'unlettered and unlearned', who therefore could not write, is supposed to have been told that God taught man to use the pen (?). But Mohammed apparently never learned to write, because he is considered only to have spoken God's utterances. Though his words, like those of Moses (who, however, did write, e.g. Exodus 34:27), were written down in various formats by his secretary, Zaid (roughly equating to the biblical Joshua, a writer, Joshua 8:32, or to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch).
This is generally how the Koran is said to have arisen.
But Mohammed also resembles Moses in his childhood (and Tobit also) in the fact that, after his infancy, he was raised by a foster-parent (Exodus 2:10).
And there is the inevitable weaning legend (Zahoor, A. and Haq, Z., "Biography of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)", http://cyberistan.org/islamic/muhammad.html 1998.): "All biographers state that the infant prophet sucked only one breast of his foster-mother, leaving the other for the sustenance of his foster-brother".
There is even a kind of Islamic version of the Exodus. Compare the following account of the Qoreish persecution and subsequent pursuit of the fleeing Moslems with the persecution and later pursuit of the fleeing Israelites by Pharaoh (Exodus 1 and 4:5-7) [O’Hair, op. cit., ibid.]:
When the persecution became unbearable for most Muslims, the Prophet advised them in the fifth year of his mission (615 CE) to emigrate to Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) where Ashabah (Negus, a Christian) was the ruler. Eighty people, not counting the small children, emigrated in small groups to avoid detection. No sooner had they left the Arabian coastline [substitute Egyptian borders], the leaders of Quraish discovered their flight. They decided to not leave these Muslims in peace, and immediately sent two of their envoys to Negus to bring all of them back.
The Koran of Islam is basically just the Arabic version of the Hebrew Bible with all of its same famous patriarchs and leading characters. That is apparent from what the Moslems themselves admit. For example [ibid.]:
The Qur'an also mentions four previously revealed Scriptures: Suhoof (Pages) of Ibrahim (Abraham), Taurat ('Torah') as revealed to Prophet Moses, Zuboor ('Psalms') as revealed to Prophet David, and Injeel ('Evangel') as revealed to Prophet Jesus (pbuh). Islam requires belief in all prophets and revealed scriptures (original, non-corrupted) as part of the Articles of Faith.
On this, see e.g. my article:
Durie’s verdict on Prophet Mohammed
(4) Durie's verdict on Prophet Mohammed
Mohammed is now for Islam the last and greatest of the prophets. Thus, "in the Al-Israa, Gabriel (as) took the Prophet from the sacred Mosque near Ka'bah to the furthest (al-Aqsa) mosque in Jerusalem in a very short time in the latter part of a night. Here, Prophet Muhammad met with previous Prophets (Abraham, Moses, Jesus and others) and he led them in prayer" [ibid.].
Thus Mohammed supposedly led Jesus in prayer.
The reputation of Ibn Ishaq (ca 704-767), a main authority on the life and times of the Prophet varied considerably among the early Moslem critics: some found him very sound, while others regarded him as a liar in relation to Hadith (Mohammed's sayings and deeds). His Sira is not extant in its original form, but is present in two recensions done in 833 and 814-15, and these texts vary from one another. Fourteen others have recorded his lectures, but their versions differ [ibid.]:
It was the storytellers who created the tradition: the sound historical traditions to which they are supposed to have added their fables simply did not exist. . . . Nobody remembered anything to the contrary either. . . . There was no continuous transmission. Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and others were cut off from the past: like the modern scholar, they could not get behind their sources.... Finally, it has to be realized that the tradition as a whole, not just parts of it as some have thought, is tendentious, and that that tendentiousness arises from allegiance to Islam itself.
Mohammed, a composite figure, seems to have likenesses even to pre-Mosaïc patriarchs, and to Jesus in the New Testament. Thus Mohammed, at Badr, successfully led a force of 300+ men (the number varies from 300-318) against an enemy far superior in number, as did Abraham (Genesis 14:14); and, like Jacob (Genesis 30, 31), he used a ruse to get a wife (in Jacob's case, wives). And like Jesus, the greatest of all God's prophets, Mohammed is said to have ascended into heaven from Jerusalem.
Modern Myths about Moses
From the above it can now be seen that it was not only the Greeks and Romans who have been guilty of appropriation into their own folklore of famous figures of Israel. Even the Moslems have done it and are still doing it. A modern-day Islamic author from Cairo, Ahmed Osman, has - in line with psychiatrist Sigmund Freud's view that Moses was actually an Egyptian, whose Yahwism was derived from pharaoh Akhnaton's supposed monotheism [Out of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed (Century, 1998)] - identified all the major biblical Israelites, from the patriarch Joseph to the Holy Family of Nazareth, as Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian characters. Thus Joseph = Yuya; Moses = Akhnaton; David = Thutmose III; Solomon = Amenhotep III; Jesus = Tutankhamun; St. Joseph = Ay; Mary = Nefertiti.
This is mass appropriation! Not to mention chronological madness!
I was asked by Dr. Norman Simms of the University of Waikato (N.Z.) to write a critique of Osman's book, a copy of which he had posted to me. This was a rather easy task as the book leaves itself wide open to criticism. Anyway, the result of Dr. Simms' request was my article, "Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses" article [The Glozel Newsletter, 5:1 (ns) 1999 (Hamilton, N.Z), pp. 1-17], in which I argued that, because Osman is using the faulty textbook history of Egypt, he is always obliged to give the chronological precedence to Egypt, when the influence has actually come from Israel over to Egypt.
[This article, modified, can now be read at:
Osman’s ‘Osmosis’ of Moses. Part One: The Chosen People
(4) Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part One: The Chosen People
and:
Osman’s ‘Osmosis’ of Moses. Part II: Christ the King
(4) Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses. Part Two: Christ The King
The way that Egyptian chronology is structured at present - thanks largely to Dr. Eduard Meyer's now approximately one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie (Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen der Königlich preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Akad. der Wiss., 1904).) could easily give rise to Osman's precedence in favour of Egypt view (though this is no excuse for Osman's own chronological mish-mash).
One finds, for example, in pharaoh Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to king David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the woman-pharaoh - dated to the C15th BC, 500 years earlier than David - must have influenced the great king of Israel. Or that pharaoh Akhnaton's Hymn to the Sun, so like David's Psalm 104, had inspired David many centuries later.
Only a proper revision of ancient Egyptian history brings forth the right perspective, and shows that the Israelites actually had the chronological precedence in these as in many other cases.
It gets worse from a conventional point of view.
The 'doyen of Israeli archaeologists', Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, frequently interviewed by Beirut hostage victim John McCarthy on the provocative TV program “It Ain't Necessarily So”, has, together with his colleagues, virtually written ancient Israel right off the historical map, along with all of its major biblical characters.
This horrible mess is an inevitable consequence of the faulty Sothic chronology with which these archaeologists seem to be mesmerized.
With friends like Finkelstein and co., why would Israel need any enemies!
The Lawgiver Solon
Whilst the great Lawgiver for the Hebrews was Moses, and for the Babylonians, Hammurabi, and for the Moslems, supposedly, Mohammed, the Lawgiver in Greek folklore was Solon of Athens, the wisest of the wise, greatest of the Seven Sages.
Though Solon is estimated to have lived in the C6th BC, his name and many of his activities are so close to king Solomon's (supposedly 4 centuries earlier) that we need once again to question whether the Greeks may have been involved in appropriation.
And, if so, how did this come about?
It may in some cases simply be a memory thing, just as according to Plato's Timaeus one of the very aged Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon (Plato's Timaeus, trans. B. Jowett, The Liberal Arts Press, NY, 1949), 6 (22)) and /or Desmond Lee's translation, Penguin Classics, p. 34]:
"O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes [Greeks] are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. …"
Perhaps what the author of the Timaeus really needed to have put into the mouth of the aged Egyptian priest was that the Greeks had largely forgotten who Solomon was, and had created their own fictional character, "Solon", from their vague recall of the great king Solomon who "excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" (1 Kings 10:23).
Solon resembles Solomon especially in roughly the last decade of the latter's reign, when Solomon, turning away from Yahwism, became fully involved with his mercantile ventures, his fleet, travel, and building temples for his foreign wives, especially in Egypt (10:26-29; 11:1-8).
Now, it is to be expected that the pagan Greeks would remember this more 'rationalist' aspect of Solomon (as Solon) rather than his wisdom-infused, philosophical, earlier years when he was a devout Jew and servant of Yahweh (4:29-34).
And, Jewish, Solon apparently was!
Edwin Yamauchi has studied the laws of Solon in depth and found them to be quite Jewish in nature, most reminiscent of the laws of Nehemiah (c. 450 BC) ("Two reformers compared: Solon of Athens and Nehemiah of Jerusalem," Bible world. New York: KTAV, 1980. pp. 269-292).
That date of 450 BC may perhaps be some sort of clue as to approximately when the Greeks first began to create their fictional Solon.
Solomon was, as I have argued in my "Solomon and Sheba" article ("Solomon and Sheba", SIS C and C Review, 1997:1, pp. 4-15), the most influential Senenmut of Egyptian history, Hatshepsut's mentor; whilst Hatshepsut herself was the biblical Queen [of] Sheba. This article can now be read at:
Solomon and Sheba
http://www.academia.edu/3660164/Solomon_and_Sheba
I have also identified Hatshepsut/Sheba as the biblical Abishag, who comforted the aged David (I Kings 1-4), and the beautiful virgin daughter of David, Tamar.
See e.g. my article:
The vicissitudinous life of Solomon's pulchritudinous wife
(4) The vicissitudinous life of Solomon's pulchritudinous wife
Professor Henry Breasted had made a point relevant to my theme of Greek appropriation - and in connection too with the Solomonic era (revised). Hatshepsut's marvellous temple structure at Deir el-Bahri, he said, was "a sure witness to the fact that the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the Greeks later would be credited as the originators" (A History of Egypt, 2nd ed., NY (Scribner, 1924), p. 274).
One need not necessarily perhaps always accuse the Greeks of a malicious corruption of earlier traditions, but perhaps rather of a 'collective amnaesia', to use a Velikovskian term; the sort of forgetfulness by the Greek nation as alluded to in Plato's Timaeus.
There is also to be considered that the Levantines and/or Jews had migrated to Greece.
In 1 Maccabees 12:21 [Areios king of the Spartans, to Onias the high priest, greetings: "A document has been found stating that the Spartans and the Jews are brothers; both nations descended from Abraham."
By this late stage the earlier histories would already have been well and truly corrupted. The Abrahamic emigrants would naturally have carried their folklore - not to mention their architectural expertise - to the Greek archipelago where it would inevitably have undergone local adaptation.
The Jewish philosopher, Aristobulus, was one who claimed that the Greeks had borrowed heavily from the Hebrew Torah. Thus we read an article by E. S. Gruen (2016), “Jewish Perspectives on Greek Culture and Ethnicity:
file:///C:/Users/Damien%20Mackey/Downloads/10.1515_9783110375558-011.pdf
[Pp. 181-185. Note: Whereas the author himself, E. S. Gruen, believes that the Jews greatly manipulated the Greek texts to make these conform to their own point of view – I believe, on the other hand, that the Greeks appropriated, but distorted, the original Hebrew writings]:
Aristobulus, a man of wide philosophical and literary interests … wrote an extensive work, evidently a form of commentary on the Torah, at an uncertain date in the Hellenistic period. …. Only a meager portion of that work now survives, but enough to indicate a direction and objective: Aristobulus, among other things, sought to establish the Bible as foundation for much of the Greek intellectual and artistic achievement. Moses, for Aristobulus as for Eupolemus and Artapanus, emerges as a culture hero, precursor and inspiration for Hellenic philosophical and poetic traditions.
But Aristobulus’ Moses, unlike the figure concocted by Eupolemus and Artapanus, does not transmit the alphabet, interpret hieroglyphics, or invent technology. His accomplishment is the Torah, the Israelite law code. And from that creation, so Aristobulus imagines, a host of Hellenic attainments drew their impetus. Foremost among Greek philosophers, Plato was a devoted reader of the Scriptures, poring over every detail, and faithfully followed its precepts. …. And not only he. A century and a half earlier, Pythagoras borrowed much from the books of Moses and inserted it into his own teachings. ….
….
Other philosophers, too, came under the sway of the Torah. So at least Aristobulus surmised. The “divine voice” to which Socrates paid homage owed its origin to the words of Moses. …. And Aristobulus made a still broader generalization. He found concurrence among all philosophers in the need to maintain reverent attitudes toward God, a doctrine best expressed, of course, in the Hebrew Scriptures which preceded (and presumably determined) the Greek precepts. Indeed, all of Jewish law was constructed so as to underscore piety, justice, selfcontrol and the other qualities that represent true virtues—i.e., the very qualities subsequently embraced and propagated by the Greeks. …. Aristobulus thereby brought the whole tradition of Greek philosophizing under the Jewish umbrella.
That was just a part of the project. Aristobulus not only traced philosophic precepts to the Torah. He found its echoes in Greek poetry from earliest times to his own day. The Sabbath, for instance, a vital part of Jewish tradition stemming from Genesis, was reckoned by Aristobulus as a preeminent principle widely adopted and signaled by the mystical quality ascribed to the number seven. …. And he discovered proof in the verses of Homer and Hesiod. …. Aristobulus … interpreted a Hesiodic reference to the seventh day of the month as the seventh day of the week. And he (or his source) emended a line of Homer from the “fourth day” to the “seventh day.” ….
The creative Aristobulus also enlisted in his cause poets who worked in the distant mists of antiquity, namely the mythical singers Linus and Orpheus.
Linus, an elusive figure variously identified as the son of Apollo or the music master of Heracles, conveniently left verses that celebrated the number seven as representing perfection itself, associating it with the heavenly bodies, with an auspicious day of birth, and as the day when all is made complete. …. The connection with the biblical origin of the Sabbath is strikingly close ….
Aristobulus summoned up still greater inventiveness in adapting or improvising a wholesale monotheistic poem assigned to Orpheus himself. The composition delivers sage advice from the mythical singer to his son or pupil Musaeus (here in proper sequence of generations), counseling him to adhere to the divine word and describing God as complete in himself while completing all things, the sole divinity with no rivals, hidden to the human eye but accessible to the mind, a source of good and not evil, seated on a golden throne in heaven, commanding the earth, its oceans and mountains, and in control of all. …. The poem, whether or not it derives from Aristobulus’ pen, belongs to the realm of Hellenistic Judaism. It represents a Jewish commandeering of Orpheus, emblematic of Greek poetic art, into the ranks of those proclaiming the message of biblical monotheism.
Aristobulus did not confine himself to legendary or distant poets. He made bold to interpret contemporary verses in ways suitable to his ends. One sample survives. Aristobulus quoted from the astronomical poem, the Phaenomena, of the Hellenistic writer Aratus of Soli. Its opening lines proved serviceable. By substituting “God” for “Zeus,” Aristobulus turned Aratus’ invocation into a hymn for the Jewish deity. …. The campaign to convert Hellenic writings into footnotes on the Torah was in full swing.
In that endeavor Aristobulus had much company. Resourceful Jewish writers searched through the scripts of Attic dramatists, both tragic and comic, for passages whose content suggested acquaintance with Hebrew texts or ideas. …. Verses with a strikingly Jewish flavor were ascribed to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and others to the comic playwrights Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon, again a combination of classical and Hellenistic authors.
On Aeschylus, see my series:
Ezekiel and Aeschylus. Part One: Aeschylus a Greek appropriation of Ezekiel?
beginning with:
(4) Ezekiel and Aeschylus. Part One: Aeschylus a Greek appropriation of Ezekiel?
The fragments are preserved only in Church Fathers and the names of transmitters are lost to us. But the milieu of Jewish-Hellenistic intellectuals is unmistakable. …. Verses from Aeschylus emphasized the majesty of God, his omnipotence and omnipresence, the terror he can wreak, and his resistance to representation or understanding in human terms. ….
Sophocles insisted upon the oneness of the Lord who fashioned heaven and earth, the waters and the winds; he railed against idolatry; he supplied an eschatological vision to encourage the just and frighten the wicked; and he spoke of Zeus’ disguises and philandering—doubtless to contrast delusive myths with authentic divinity. …. Euripides, too, could serve the purpose. Researchers found lines affirming that God’s presence cannot be contained within structures created by mortals and that he sees all, but is himself invisible. …. Attribution of comparable verses to comic poets is more confused in the tradition, as Christian sources provide conflicting notices on which dramatist said what. But the recorded writers, Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus, supplied usefully manipulable material. One or another spoke of an all-seeing divinity who will deliver vengeance upon the unjust and wicked, who lives forever as Lord of all, who apportions justice according to deserts, who scorns offerings and votives but exalts the righteous at heart. ….
