Chapter 4 — The Covenant Nation
While the Mesopotamians kept track of a wide range of religious and philosophical considerations, the Nile Valley folks focused more on developing their own to a much greater depth.
While our understanding of Egyptian chronology and dating is admittedly a house of cards, the records on their beliefs are fairly substantial. There is debate about why they even built the pyramids and similar massive monuments, but we know a lot about their general outlook on things. It’s nearly impossible to discern what the common folks might have thought about anything; nobody keeping records seemed to care much about that. However, we have an extensive record of powerful folks and their self-proclaimed worldview. Further, all the other evidence suggests they weren’t simply posturing.
A critical element in the belief system was the perception of a sort of moral fabric, a life force within the universe that called for justice. All things were measured in terms of how well they accorded with that sense of justice. While it’s possible to declare in any given context what might offer the best manifestation of that justice, there was a fundamental assumption you couldn’t always expect that same act to be just in any other context. In other words, moral justice was a mystical power that often defied human understanding. A great many rituals were aimed at gaining access to the judgment of the various deities who would each be expert in their own areas of interest, but all shared the same sense of justice, despite any possible conflicts that humans were unlikely to understand.
Further, Egyptian mythology includes a highly developed cosmology. There is no suggestion here that other cultures lacked a sense of afterlife or other realms of existence. However, the Egyptians spent a lot more time and effort defining this concept. In their mythology, other realms of existence were utterly outside the human realm. While it’s possible that some people, and certainly deities, did cross the boundary between here and there, the qualitative difference between worlds generally required a human die to leave this one. They had a distinct sense that humans were composed of multiple elements with some parts confined to this space, and that death separated the components of one’s being. The gods came here because they were from a far higher realm, and their presence here was rather confining on them, as if they never really completely came inside this realm.
It would serve little purpose to enter into the debate about when Moses was born in terms of dates, and assigning the Bible narrative to any particular known dynasty is an exercise in frustration. Too many critical elements don’t match no matter where you place him. We must acknowledge a major part of the problem for Western Christians is the highly fraudulent portrayals in movies and popular reinterpretations. For all we know, Moses may have been the general who led a successful, empire-saving war against the Nubians, or simply one more insignificant pseudo-noble in a less important district during those times when Egyptian government was highly fragmented. Since Egyptian records never recorded military defeats, and often portrayed them as faux victories, it’s not possible to date the Exodus with what we now know. Indeed, sometimes for other reasons, the entire process of recording events among the Hebrews, as well, might see events we consider major and definitive simply left out of the narrative. We should never assume the sequence doesn’t include at least the occasional gap.
What we cannot afford to lose here is certain obvious elements in the story. Moses got an education generally not available to the rest of his nation. It’s hard to imagine they didn’t lose some of Abraham’s sophistication and intellectual depth over the generations, despite indications they kept at least part of it alive. For Moses, this was a pagan education with another heavy dose of Black Magic, but a lot more mathematics and surely some military training. Nobody forgot he was not a literal son of the queen, but any sort of public success would have created tension in the ruling house between him and the heir. Like Abraham, once his education was sufficiently advanced, God needed Moses to go and renew the acquaintance with a nomadic and contemplative existence. Further, there was no small matter of exposure to the religion and philosophy of his father-in-law, Jethro.
In the ANE, there was a complete absence of “one right answer” to larger questions of life. Juxtaposing ideas that seem to us mutually contradictory did not rattle them. It wasn’t really fuzzy thinking, but the ability to follow multiple tracks at once. There may well be one best answer, but it was always highly contextual, including the variable of who was answering the question. The concept of absolutes was considered childish. This simply is not obvious, but a critical element in the worldview of folks like Moses. The question was never what was right in any absolute sense, but what would please the one to whom you were accountable.
Idolatry had surely crept into the Nation of Israel, but if nothing else, his time with Jethro cured any of that tendency for Moses. It’s very easy for Western minds to miss the full impact of the Burning Bush. In his world, every light not in the sky had to be from fire, so perhaps a better translation would be the Glowing Bush. A baldly literal reading in English misses most of what happens here. It signified an otherworldly presence and Moses was accountable for taking this signal seriously as a demand he report. He wasn’t silly enough to think this was God, only a manifestation, an angelic messenger. It was sacred ground only because the angel was there, and only while it was there. Any site that served as a customary or reliable place of meeting with God would be treated as sacred more permanently, like Mount Sinai, also known from ancient times as the Mountain of God. It was here at the bush that Moses learned the name that his people were to call their God, which in English is traditionally written Jehovah.
Moses had trouble keeping his grip on all the things God promised here, and was human enough to need frequent reminders. Somewhere between this first meeting and that month or so stay on Mount Sinai, Moses was taught how to recognize the truth. Again, not absolute truth, because the concept didn’t exist in his world. Rather, it was the pertinent truth, what his Master wanted him to know in order to serve. This wasn’t some encyclopedic memory, but the divine insight to recognize truth in any context. Camping around Sinai included a fresh review of all past learning and mythology to winnow out the material that didn’t fit the purpose. While much of it was familiar, we know there were certain elements that were totally new, a fresh revelation directly from God.
There is no question that Abraham was influenced by the mythology and legends of Mesopotamia, and that Moses absorbed a lot Egyptian mythology, not to mention a hard to measure influence from Jethro’s unique religion. The inherent claim of Scripture is that God was in charge and intimately involved in the process, that what was adopted as Scripture was in accordance with His requirements. You can ignore all that and blow it off as simply some thoughtful copying of ideas, and no one on this earth can prove you wrong. The whole assumption behind Hebrew Mysticism is that one can develop a faculty for perceiving things not visible to the normal range of human insight. Most people have the ability to develop mystical awareness, but the full range of perception cannot be universal, though nothing attempts to explain why that is. It simply is. The lore of Hebrew Scripture is not a string of facts and events, nor even the narrative that serves as the mythology of the Hebrew people. It beckons to a full blown mysticism, of connecting with some part of the human being to a place outside the human space, and that it was not the intellect.
The older lore for worship of God was well known, so that Abraham encountered it in Melchizedek, and Moses in Jethro, plus odd figures like Balaam who knew of it. Through Moses, God commanded a certain level of close adherence to specifics that were far more demanding. This does not invalidate the older practices, but places a specific burden on this one nation as their identity. Folks outside the nation could continue as before, but to join the nation was a matter of of adherence to the highly developed national covenant, not of blood kinship. While the Israelis often forgot that fact in the face of ancient custom, it was clear from the start that their identity was not DNA but commitment. Throw aside the commitment and you were ostracized as an outsider; come in from anywhere and embrace the Covenant, and you are an Israeli. Worship God appropriately outside the Covenant and you were an ally. The natural human weakness was to forget that their God owned all Creation, and to imagine that they owned Him.
As time went on, that arrogance blinded them, but the Hebrew religion was born in full mysticism.
Recommended readings: Encyclopedic entries on Egyptian mythology and religion. We assume a familiarity with the Books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy.
