 |
אברהם
12:1/9 Departure from Charan
12:10/20 In Mitsrayim (Egypt)
14:1/24 The War of the Kings
15:1/29 The First Covenant
17:1/27 The Second Covenant; Circumcision of Yishma-El
18:1/19:38 Annunciation Yitschak (Isaac); destruction of the Cities of the Plain
20:1/18 2nd version of Av-Raham in Mitsrayim
21:1/21 Yitschak and Yishma-El
21:22/34 Avi-Melech and Phichol
22:1/19 The Akeda (non-sacrifice of Yitschak)
22:20/24 Genealogy of Rivkah (Rebecca)
23:1/24 Purchase of the Cave of Machpelah
25:1/11 Keturah and the death of Av-Raham
25:12/18 Genealogy of Yishma-El
For the sake of simplicity, this entry is treating Av-Ram and Av-Raham as a single person, whose name changed at a particular moment in his life, rather than as two separate people. The probability, however, is that there were two different sets of myths and legends, belonging to two different ethnic groups, later merged (not terribly successfully) into the Genesis tale, in one of which he was named Av-Ram and his wife Sarai, in the other Av-Raham and Sarah.
 |
| Brahma, the Hindu god of creation |
Biblical legends tell of a tribal sheikh who, as a young man, fled Ur Kasdim (contemporary Iraq) with his family, after the destruction of the city in a time of war; from there they fled to Charan in Syria, where Av-Ram saw a god (probably El Shadai - אֵל שַׁדַּי) in a vision, commanding him to go to Kena'an (Canaan) and make that his tribal home. In so doing his name was changed from Av-Ram ("great father") to Av-Raham (likewise "great father", but now in a different dialect of the same language), his wife's from Sarai ("princess") to Sarah ("princess"), and by the symbol of circumcision the covenant between the god and Av-Raham's successors was secured. Av-Raham travelled through Kena'an, settling for a while in Mitsrayim, and amongst the Pelishtim (Philistines), before making his final home in Kiryat Arba of Chevron, from where he joined a band of kings in holy war, and where he is now buried. The story, like most Biblical tales, is flawed at every juncture.
It is unlikely that Av-Ram was ever near Ur Kasdim in his life, but it was the place where the tribe of Yehudah, with Bin-Yamin, the last surviving remnant of the Beney Yisra-El confederacy after the loss of the ten tribes in 722 BCE, were exiled by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE, and from which they returned to Yehudah under Zeru-Bavel (זְרֻבָּבֶל - Zerubbabel). There is thus a poetic logic and symmetry to the "historical" patriarch having come from the same place, though it is historically quite implausible. It was during that period of exile that many of the Psalms and Prophetic works were written, several literary works such as Esther as well. In Babylon, and at the end of exile when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and liberated the Beney Yehudah, they came in contact with both Zoroastrianism and, more particularly, the new cults of the Orient - Buddhism and Confucianism - both of which predicated a new, post-pantheist, post-anthropomorphic, homocentric religion. To the Beney Yehudah this became the cult of YHVH, the Omnideity, the One God who is All Gods, the Universal Pulse: though not yet abstract and ethical monotheism. They brought this new religion back with them as a kind of proto-Judaism, though Judaism itself does not come into being until 70 CE. However, in reforming the practices in Kena'an, they simply re-anthropomorphised the new god, absorbing back into him all the ancient rites and practices, so that the great religious advances being made in the East - and to a lesser extent among the Pythagoreans and Essenes and other Gnostic sects, and later the Platonists - remained unrealised. A new religion came into being, which I have labelled proto-Judaism, founded on the central pillar of YHVH: we can regard all re-telling of ancient legends as having been re-written, or at least re-told, with polemical intent, from this time forth. In this allegorical sense only, we can say that Av-Raham began his life in Ur Kasdim (Ur of the Chaldees).
More likely, Av-Raham was an Aramaean who came from Charan in northern Syria. There is a perpetual confusion throughout the Bible between the names of people and those of places, most often caused by the word "ben" (בן) which can mean "inhabitant" or even "clansman" as well as "son", and even more complicatingly a member of a craft or trade guild, or the holder of a priestly function – so that the Beney Korach, for example, are not the sons of a man named Korach (though there was a Korach and he did have sons), but members of the royal choir (cf Psalms 23, 121, 129). Ben Charan, or ben Terach, in this instance, much more likely denotes nationality and township than paternity.
 |
| "The March of Abraham", József Molnár |
Many people in the tales of Av-Raham are confused with the names of places. Arphachshad, for example, is a confluence of Arrapkha and Shad, denoting Mount Arraphka in the Akkadian language, in the region of modern Kirkuk - the word Shad (used for both "breast" and "mountain") is the same that yields the name of Av-Raham's god, El Shadai. Likewise Shelach, a son of Arphachshad, was actually the name of a deity, and probably an abbreviation of Metu-Shelach (Methuselah); Ever may have been a name, but the eponymous ancestor of the Beney Yisra-El takes his name from an Egyptian word, Ever, meaning "beyond", and having the same connotation of "foreigner" or "outsider" as the Anglo-Saxon "Walés"; Peleg, rather than being a man, was a city in the mid-Euphrates; Re'u was probably Rakkilu in the mid-Euphrates, and Re'u-Ven, one of Ya'akov's sons, whose tribal region was across the river Yarden (Jordan) on the Mesopotamian borders, is clearly associated; Serug was Sarugi, between Charan and Carchemish; Nachor was Nakhuru or Til Nakhiri, near Charan; Terach was Til Turahi, also near Charan; Shinar is the Akkadian name for Shankhar; Elasar was Ilansra, a royal Hittite city between Carchemish and Charan. And so forth. Every one of these a name associated with Av-Ram's family in Padan-Aram. We shall see more of the same with Av-Raham's "sons" through Keturah in a moment.
What is clear is that the seeming Biblical characters were really gods, shamans, priests, tribal kings, town chieftains, titles of servants (one Biblical character, as you will see if you read on, was named "lady in waiting"; not difficult to deduce that this was her role and title, not her name; Sarah - "princess" - likewise), whole tribes, or simply the generic name for the people of a region, in precisely the same way that Shakespeare refers to "Albion" in "King Lear" and elsewhere, apparently as a person but self-evidently as a generic term for "the English". To go to war, say, with Shin'ar, is to take on a nation, albeit through the person of its leader - like going to war with Germany or Iraq in our day, but saying we have gone to war with Hitler or Saddam. Two definite exceptions: Tidal was Tudkhalya, the king-name of the Beney Chet (Hittites). And Aryoch (Arioch) was Ariaka, which means "Honoured One" in old Iranian.
The above strongly suggests that Av-Raham came from Hittite land, if not actually Hittite stock, and that, as such, he would have been a Sabian (certainly this is the view of the Qur'an), that tribe from Charan which took part in the Sea People's invasion of Northern Syria in about 1200 BCE. Robert Graves claims the opposite: that Aegean culture came to the Beney Yisra-El from the Sabians of Charan as well as from the Dana'ans of Tyre (the tribe of Dan), although mostly from the Pelishtim (Philistines) or Puresati, who were immigrants from Asia Minor, and most specifically from Crete; the truth is, both views are probably correct, because both groups of people were from the same Hittite root-family, and cultural interchange, as we see constantly in the Bible, was commonplace. Charan, which simply means "road", or possibly "crossroads", and signifies a caravanserai along the trade-road, was a major mercantile city on the highway from Nineveh (today's Mosul) to Carchemish, at the junction of the road to Damasek (Damascus), on the Balikh river, some sixty miles west of Tel Halaf.
J.G. Frazer says that: "the heathen of Charan [he calls it "Harran"] (i.e. the Sabians) offered to the sun, moon and planets human victims who were chosen on the ground of their supposed resemblance to the heavenly bodies to which they were sacrificed; for example, the priests, clothed in red and smeared with blood, offered a red-haired, red-cheeked man to the 'red planet Mars' (the Babylonian equivalent was Nergal) in a temple which was painted red and draped with red hangings." We may add that Kayin (Cain), Esav (Esau) and Yishma-El (Ishamel) were all red-heads, and, more significantly, that all three are associated with the land of Edom, that name being in Yehudit a variant of the name Adam (אדום- אדם), likewise meaning "red".
But of who was Av-Ram High Priest and/or sheikh? Our version of the tale says YHVH, but this we must read as a late alteration, substituting for the original deity. The title Av ("father") for a god, and the fact that his wife is Sarai (שרי) or Sarah (שרה), which is a variant of Asherah (אשרה) - at Batsrah (Isaiah's Bozrah, today's Basra) in the Hauran a goddess named Sharit or Sharayat, probably yet another variant of Asherah-Ishtar-Astarte, was worshipped - allows us to recognise in Av-Raham's god an Aramaean version of Ba'al (see Avi-Melech) or his Babylonian equivalent Bel, given the attributed link to Ur in Kasdim (Mesopotamia). Indeed, this may even reflect the arrival of Ba'al-worship itself in Kena'an.
But of who was Av-Ram High Priest and/or sheikh? Our version of the tale says YHVH, but this we must read as a late alteration, substituting for the original deity. The title Av ("father") for a god, and the fact that his wife is Sarai (שרי) or Sarah (שרה), which is a variant of Asherah (אשרה) - at Batsrah (Isaiah's Bozrah, today's Basra) in the Hauran a goddess named Sharit or Sharayat, probably yet another variant of Asherah-Ishtar-Astarte, was worshipped - allows us to recognise in Av-Raham's god an Aramaean version of Ba'al (see Avi-Melech) or his Babylonian equivalent Bel, given the attributed link to Ur in Kasdim (Mesopotamia). Indeed, this may even reflect the arrival of Ba'al-worship itself in Kena'an.
Is the marriage then between an Aramaean priest-chieftain and an Arabic matriarchal priestess-princess, the equivalent of Henry II of England (but based in French Poitiers) marrying Eleanor of French Aquitaine? The question is important because Av-Raham in Mitsrayim (exactly as he would do with Avi-Melech in Gerar, and as Yitschak would do with Rivkah later, suggesting it was not a historical event so much as a cultic rite) would try to pass Sarai off as his sister rather than his wife. The principal gods of Mitsrayim, Eshet (Isis) and Hor (Horus), were indeed siblings, and the Pharaohs tended to imitate the custom in their human marriages, so that Av-Ram and Sarai living together both as siblings and as spouses would not have caused the moral outrage and the disgust of incest that it does today.
But there is more to it than just this. This tale of Sarai echoes one recounted in the Egyptian "Tale of the Two Brothers", precisely the same source from which we get the original tale that becomes in the Bible Yoseph and Poti-Phera's wife. So that alongside the Babylonian and the Sabian, the Canaanite-Phoenician and the Hittite, we can also state with certainty that from the very outset Yisra-Eli mythology borrowed from all available sources, and the Yisra-Eli religion likewise.
One last thought on this issue, which further substantiates the goddess-role of the patriarchal wives. The goddess was always Nature, and Fertility, which was why she was also the moon-goddess, lunation and menstruation being intertwined. Every one of the patriarchal wives is initially barren, but produces a child by miraculous intervention of the god – or actually goddess. Sarah's barrenness in the Av-Rahamic story is equivalated in that of Rivkah (Genesis 25), Rachel (Genesis 29), and also of Shimshon's (Samson's) mother Chanah (Hannah) in Judges 13 and 1 Samuel 1, who was likewise barren until "blessed" with a son; she was the wife of the High Priest Eli: once again the Sun-Father, Moon-Mother, Earth-Son trinity that recurs again and again through all of this mythology, and which demonstrates that Christianity is at least thirty-five thousand years older than the story of Jesus would suggest!
The word "blessed" is key to this; every woman is in fact barren, until the goddess blesses her with fertility, and regardless of whether this happen at fourteen or forty or ninety-nine; the point of the story is to celebrate the miraculous divinity of the fertility goddess, and not the banality of human pregnancy.
But there is more to it than just this. This tale of Sarai echoes one recounted in the Egyptian "Tale of the Two Brothers", precisely the same source from which we get the original tale that becomes in the Bible Yoseph and Poti-Phera's wife. So that alongside the Babylonian and the Sabian, the Canaanite-Phoenician and the Hittite, we can also state with certainty that from the very outset Yisra-Eli mythology borrowed from all available sources, and the Yisra-Eli religion likewise.
 |
| "Abraham and the Three Angels", Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, 1656 |
The word "blessed" is key to this; every woman is in fact barren, until the goddess blesses her with fertility, and regardless of whether this happen at fourteen or forty or ninety-nine; the point of the story is to celebrate the miraculous divinity of the fertility goddess, and not the banality of human pregnancy.
In addition to the claim that Av-Ram came originally from Ur, Genesis also tells us that Av-Ram was the son of Terach. His "calling" to enter Kena'an took place at Charan, which modern archaeologists have now shown was one of the three ancient centres of moon-worship, the other two being – extraordinary coincidence! - Ur and Yericho (Jericho). That the High Priest should travel from cultic shrine to cultic shrine makes a good deal of sense, and would help us understand what was really going on when Av-Raham came precisely to the region of Yericho to settle. The goddess worshiped at all three shrines was, by her local names of course, Ishtar in Ur, Asherah at Charan, Rachav (Rahab) in Yericho (see my commentary on Joshua 2). That last name is absent from the text, expurgated by the Rabbinic editors, but in fact the name Sarai or Sarah reflects it, being in reality Asherah itself.
The ceremony of sacrifice at Mount Mor-Yah identifies the later Av-Raham with the Phoenician sun god Ephroneus, or Ephron in the Yehudit text, the brother of the moon-goddess Yah, whose shrine and burial-ground was at the Cave of Machpelah at Chevron, suggesting that a further set of legends were attributed to Av-Rraham when the national epic was created. This pattern is repeated throughout the Av-Rahamic story. His journey to Gerar identifies him with Moloch, as in part does his meeting with Malki-Tsedek at Yevus (Moloch was worshipped with the sacrifice of children at the obelisk of Tsi'un on the neighbouring hill, as we know from the Davidic conquest of what would become Yeru-Shala'im); his relationship with Hagar, the mother of Yishma-El, identifies him with the priestess of the Egyptian cult of Eshet (Isis); etc. Overall the tale reflects the arrival of the moon-goddess cult in Kena'an in the wake of the Aramaean-Hittite occupation, with pre-Av-Rahamic stories such as Kayin and Havel (Cain and Abel), No'ach, and others, probably entering at the same time, and either being added to or amalgamated with existing local beliefs.
What appears to emerge then, prior to the Ezraic redaction which gives us the familiar sheikh-legend, was the sacred king of a matriarchal, moon-worshipping people whose High Priestess, in her position as representative on Earth of the mother-goddess, was named Sarai, or more likely Sarah-Yah, a combination of Asherah with Yah, with the prefix Sarah (שרה) meaning "princess" or "priestess", the human incarnation, or personification, of the Queen of Heaven. Sar-Yah may later have becomes Yah-Sarah-El, and thence Yisra-El (so Robert Graves postulates anyway, though this is probably stretching it.)
 |
| Giovanni Muzzioli, "Abraham and Sarah in the Court of Pharaoh", c1875 |
What is certain from the texts is that Av-Raham spent most of his life as a Bedou, wandering hundreds of miles and settling, or truthfully not settling, constantly amongst different peoples. In relation to the vision in "Lech Lecha" (his being instructed to go to Kena'an in Genesis 12:1), and the "promise of the land of Kena'an", Av-Raham had no natural, which is to say no human-legal, claim to the land; in fact, he must have been entirely landless, and the United Nations would be unlikely to ratify the modern Jewish claim to living, so to speak, in the next-door neighbour's villa, just because the people insisted they had been given it in a dream by their god (though the Moslem claim to Yeru-Shala'im functions precisely thus).
Nomadism is a fact of Av-Raham's life, and this is metaphorical as well as literal: Jews have always been nomads, intellectually as well as physically. Av-Raham wandered into Kena'an but did not initially stop there. He spent time in Mitsrayim but did not stay. Eventually he bought a burial-cave for his tribe from the Beney Chet (Hittites) of Chevron, but didn't settle there himself. He did try, very briefly, to settle in Moreh, and rather more around Be'er Sheva, before he was finally able to acquire Mamre. But of course, this may be entirely irrelevant: if the original Av-Raham was a god and not a man, are we rather talking about the spread of a cult in search of a temple, or the spread of a cult to a variety of local temples? Or are all three - the sheikh, the High Priest and the god - all manifestations of the same single metaphor? Probably the latter, but only in the pre-Tanach, in the sources that were reduced to the human stories which the Tanach has handed down.
Nomadism is a fact of Av-Raham's life, and this is metaphorical as well as literal: Jews have always been nomads, intellectually as well as physically. Av-Raham wandered into Kena'an but did not initially stop there. He spent time in Mitsrayim but did not stay. Eventually he bought a burial-cave for his tribe from the Beney Chet (Hittites) of Chevron, but didn't settle there himself. He did try, very briefly, to settle in Moreh, and rather more around Be'er Sheva, before he was finally able to acquire Mamre. But of course, this may be entirely irrelevant: if the original Av-Raham was a god and not a man, are we rather talking about the spread of a cult in search of a temple, or the spread of a cult to a variety of local temples? Or are all three - the sheikh, the High Priest and the god - all manifestations of the same single metaphor? Probably the latter, but only in the pre-Tanach, in the sources that were reduced to the human stories which the Tanach has handed down.
 |
| Donatello, "Abraham and Isaac", 1421 |
Moira to the Greeks meant "a share", "lot" or "distribution", and came to mean "fate" or "destiny": one's share or lot in life; interestingly the same construct in Yehudit revolves around the word mazal (מזל), which is both "a star" (really a constellation; an individual star is a kochav - כוכב) and "fortune". A reference to the drawing of lots cannot help but remind us of Purim, which in the Persian calendar was the New Year ceremony in which the annual Heavenly Queen Ishtar (Esther) is first overthrown and then supplanted by her successor, before being wedded to the Sun-God Marduk (Mordechai); in Persian a Haman means a sun-idol and was worshipped kneeling, as we know from the Yisra-Elim doing precisely that in Leviticus 26:30 and elsewhere. From other sources we know that Mor-Yah was an epithet for the Goddess of the Sea, a Phoenician Aphrodite, though the Beney YisraEl were never great sea-goers, and appear to have preferred to stay well inland throughout their Biblical history. (Mor, incidentally, also means "sea" in Celtic, as in Ar Mor for Brittany, "The Land Beside The Sea", and as this pre-dates the Romans, it cannot be sourced in Latin mare = "the sea". But then Celtic is another of the Indo-European languages rooted in the Hittite, and so is a cousin of both Greek, Sanskrit and Yehudit).
Robert Graves indulges in many flights of fancy, but it is remarkable how often he hits the mark; and if not that, then it is remarkable just how many there are amongst his discoveries of what must otherwise be quite extraordinary coincidences. He notes, for example, in his researches into Chevron, that Fearn, who is sometimes called Bran, one of the earliest god-kings of the Celtic Britons, possesses both a biography and a name identical to that of the Greek god-king Phoroneus (Ephron), who ruled the Peloponnese, and was worshipped in Argos as their hero-founder. He was the father of Pelasgus, Iasus and Agenor (Genesis tells us that Achnor was Kena'an, and that it was he, not his father Phoroneus, who discovered how to use fire; Achnor is also said to have initiated the Greek worship of Hera in her Canaanite form, Anat: Beit Anatot, or Bethany, later associated with both Yirma-Yahu (Jeremiah) and Jesus, was her principal shrine, no great distance indeed from Chevron). Pausanias says that Phoroneus was the husband of Cerdo, and that the river-god Inachus fathered him on the nymph Melia (the ash-tree). Phoroneus was also credited with being the inventor of fire. His mother was Argeia. Annual sacrifices to him took place on the Cronian Mount at Olympia at the time of the spring equinox.
Graves postulates that Orpheus may have been a variant of the same name, from orphruoeis = "growing on the river bank" = the alder, and there are close associations between the myths of David, who ruled at Chevron for seven years, and those of Orpheus the lyrist: intriguingly, Orpheus is also called Oreph by the Egyptians, and Oreph in Yehudit is the name of the constellation Lyra (Orpah, its feminine form, was the name of Ruth's "sister-in-law" in yet one more of the many "reduced-goddess" tales of the Tanach); Orpheus' dead body was thrown into the river Hebrus, and his spirit taken up to the heavens to become the constellation Lyra, which just happens to be the instrument that David played. The story of Lot's wife looking back as she fled the hell of burning Sedom (Sodom) and Amorah (Gomorrah) is, if not a parallel, then at the very least a remarkable echo, of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Graves postulates that Orpheus may have been a variant of the same name, from orphruoeis = "growing on the river bank" = the alder, and there are close associations between the myths of David, who ruled at Chevron for seven years, and those of Orpheus the lyrist: intriguingly, Orpheus is also called Oreph by the Egyptians, and Oreph in Yehudit is the name of the constellation Lyra (Orpah, its feminine form, was the name of Ruth's "sister-in-law" in yet one more of the many "reduced-goddess" tales of the Tanach); Orpheus' dead body was thrown into the river Hebrus, and his spirit taken up to the heavens to become the constellation Lyra, which just happens to be the instrument that David played. The story of Lot's wife looking back as she fled the hell of burning Sedom (Sodom) and Amorah (Gomorrah) is, if not a parallel, then at the very least a remarkable echo, of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Phoroneus' emblem at Argos was a toad and, according to Pausanias, Mycenae, the main fortress of Argolis, acquired its name because Perseus found a toadstool there. Dionysic ambrosia rites were based on toadstools. In Kena'an it grew under fir or pine trees. Why is all this of interest? Because Phoroneus in the Phoenician becomes Ephron in the Yehudit - and it was from Ephron that Av-Raham "purchased" the Cave of Machpelah at Chevron, the city of David's first kingship.
Why is Machpelah significant? The Babylonians placed terrestrial paradise in the delta of the Euphrates, in an area of land which they called Edinu, and which enters the Tanach as the Garden of Eden - quite logically really, because it was precisely in the flatlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates that the Bread Wheat first emerged, and human civilisation based on agriculture and therefore sedentary living became possible: forget apples and oranges, the fruit of the Garden of Eden was a round slab of pita bread! The Greeks had their equivalent legend in the Cretan Garden of the Hesperides, and in their case the fruit of the Tree of Life was indeed an apple, and their word for apple - malus - gives us our root-construct for Evil. The pre-exilic Beney Yisra-Elim placed terrestrial paradise, the Eden of Adam and Chavah (Eve), at Chevron. And by burying all the patriarchs and most of the matriarchs in the Cave at Machpelah, they placed the foundations of the nation and the cult at the gateway to Paradise, which is why Chevron is equal to Yeru-Shala'im - the site of the Temple - in its holiness as a Jewish shrine; and in fact not equal, but superior, because the Temple could have been built anywhere - the Yisra-Eli god never stipulated; King David chose the site - whereas Chevron's location in terrestrial Paradise is self-evidently god-made.
Throughout this work, Robert Graves' scholarship will be taken extremely seriously, simply because it merits it; throughout this work, his conclusions will be taken with a large handful of Dead Sea salt because, like all scholarship, his is so often flawed, or spurious, or phantastical, or guesswork. One instance of the seriously flawed is his wondering whether the "Hebrews" were so-called because they worshiped "the God of Hebron" or because their patriarch settled there. The link works perfectly in English; but alas not so in the Yehudit language, where Hebron is Chevron - חברון - with a first-letter Chet, but "Hebrew" is Ivri - עברי - with a first-letter Ayin. The suffix On means "place", so Chevron means "the place of Chever" and not "the place of the Hebrews". As to who Chever was - see Genesis 46:17, Judges 4:1/24, 1 Chronicles 4:18 and 1 Chronicles 8:17, or click here.
How Av-Raham refused to walk in the way of the tower-builders, because they were heathens - the towers in questions being those ziggurats or step-pyramids which were the temples of the trimurtic religion of Utu, Inanna and Dumuzi, the Sun-God, the Moon-Goddess, Everand the Ever-Dying Ever-Reborn Beloved Son of aboriginal Mesopotamia, later known as Tammuz.
How he looked at the stars of Mesopotamia one night and concluded that they were the gods; only in the morning the sun came up and the stars were no more, so he switched his allegiance to the sun; but then the moon came up in place of the sun, so he switched again; then this too was replaced, so he concluded that there must be One behind all this, and thereby discovered monotheism.
How in his father's house there stood one great idol and many small ones; Av-Raham broke all the small ones and placed the hammer in the hand of the big idol, telling his father that the idols had quarreled. His father declared this impossible, because they were lifeless stone. "Then why do you worship them?" Av-Raham replied. For this he was called before Nimrod and thrown into a fiery furnace (Ur means "fire" in Babylonian); an angel of god rescued him (a variation of the Daniel story?). The key to all these legends is Dani-El. They belong to the years of exile and simply apply to Av-Raham myths picked up of others.
Simply as a matter of interest, here are some of the other names of people and places who crop up in the legends of Av-Raham:
Eylam (Elam): that kingdom at the end of the Persian Gulf which we now call Iran.
Chedarlaomer: an Elamite king-name.
El-Paran: Eilat: a port on the Red Sea.
Admah - Adamah (also referred to in some readings of Psalm 83:11) and Adam (mentioned again in Joshua 3:16) are all names for Tel Adamiya, on the eastern banks of the river Yarden (Jordan), near the mouth of the river Yavok (Jabbok).
Shin-Av (Shinab) was the Amorite king known from the cuneiform tablets as Sanibu.
Shin-Av (Shinab) was the Amorite king known from the cuneiform tablets as Sanibu.
The Tsevo'im (Zeboyim) were the inhabitants of Wadi Sebaiye in the Negev desert.
Bela was the Edomite king of Dinhava (Dinhaba - Genesis 36:32), and also the name of a town that is elsewhere called Tso'ar (Zoar); probably Zukhr, called Zoara by Josephus and Segor by the Crusaders , is now Tel-El-Zara, north-east of the Dead Sea. (Biblical references to Bela can also be found in Genesis 46:21 and 1 Chronicles 5:8)
Malki-Tsedek is a variation on Adoni-Tsedek, the king of Yeru-Shala'im mentioned in Joshua 10:1. Tsedek was the patron-god of Shalem; though the Ammonites called him Zaduk. To the Beney Yisr-El he was the planet Jupiter.
The mentioning of all these name-variations is done as evidence to support claims elsewhere about Lot, Av-Raham's enigmatic "nephew". Genesis 36:21 and 1 Chronicles 1:38 refer to Lotan as being the eldest son of Se'ir of the Beney Chor (Horites), and Egyptian records place the Chorim around Mount Se'ir, exactly where Lot chose his portion when he and Av-Raham parted company. If Av-Raham was a god and not a tribal sheikh-priest, then surely we must seek evidence that the same was true of Lot? And where better to look than in the other great scriptural account of Av-Raham, the Muslim Qu'ran, where no less a personage than al-Lat is mentioned (Sura 53:19), who rode with her sisters al-Uzzah and with Manat, all three of them daughters of al-Lah, exactly as the Valkyrie "rode" with Wotan or Odin, depending on whether you are in the Norse or the German version. Quod est demonstrandum?
Because not really demonstrandum at all, but one likes to hope. There is other testimony though. There is the curious incest tale, paralleled in the Ionian myth of Adonis (a variation of the Babylonian myth of Tammuz) whose mother Smyrna, known elsewhere as Myrrha, made his father, King Theias of Assyria, drunk with wine and lay with him for twelve nights (iconotropically it may be the ithyphallic Osher-Osiris lying dead in a grape arbour mourned by Eshet-Isis and Nephthys, each with her son at her feet). The story of Lot and his daughters after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain gives us a second instance of this same myth (Genesis 19:30-36), and the oddities of the Onan legend may do so as well (Genesis 38). In this instance, Theias is the Phoenician Theos, which of course means precisely "god"; and thus King Theias can be taken as a dilution of a god-myth, with the twelve nights read zodiacally in the manner of all angel legends.
*
The Sacrifices
 |
| "Abraham slaying Isaac", Marc Chagall |
The turtle-dove and the wild pigeon were sacred animals in the cult of the bull-god El, but they came to have huge significance to the Beney Yisra-El. The wild pigeon (columba livia) was called Yonah (יונה - Jonah) in Yehudit, and became a kind of national emblem, according to Hosea 7:11 and 11:11. It lived in rocks and caves according to Jeremiah 48:28 and Songs 2:14. The migratory turtle-dove (turtur communis) was, on the other hand, the emblem of the Beney Yishma-El and the Beney Edom, in other words the descendants of Av-Raham's other son. No such significance was attached to other creatures sacrificed. The heifer was scared to the Canaanite moon-goddess Anat, the she-goat to the Philistine goddess, mother of Cretan Zeus, whom the Greeks called Amaltheia, and the ram to the Sumerian sky-god as well as the ram-headed Ammon of Egypt. It is not possible for anything in the Bible to be free of metaphysical significance; if we read the Bible as Judeo-Christian theology, we may choose to ignore these significances; if we read it as literature, we have an obligation to take them into account.
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment