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Exodus
English: Israel’s Escape from Egypt, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Exodus is the second book of the Pentateuch (and Old Testament of the Christian Bible). It outlines God’s punishment of the Egyptians and Israel’s departure from bondage in Egypt, facilitated by the miraculous parting of the Red Sea, and their subsequent travel through the wilderness, as led by God through the intercession of the prophet Moses.
Although no Egyptian historical records tell of the parting of the Red Sea and Israel’s escape from captivity, the New Oxford Annotated Bible claims
There can be little doubt that the story rests upon actual historical occurrences.¹
Other respected, mainstream scholars concur that, while it was once fashionable to give too much credence to the alleged historicity of Jewish scriptures and, later, to conversely discount them as myth,
It is reasonable to believe that a good part of the biblical stories have a historical background.²
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¹ New Oxford Annotated Bible , 1991, p. 69.
² Mircea Eliade, Ioan Couliano and Hillary S. Wiesner, The Eliade Guide to World Religions, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 169.
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Guardian Angel
Guardian Angel, German postcard 1900 via Wikipedia
The term guardian angel refers to the Catholic belief that we are guided from birth to death by an angel, assigned by God to each particular individual.
Similar ideas are found in the ancient world. In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates speaks of some kind of otherworldly agency that tells him what not to do but never what to do.
The Old Testament also speaks of angels that intercede for mankind, the most famous example being that of Moses leading the people through the wilderness. Here God tells Moses that an angel will lead him. And many Muslims believe that they are guided by two angels.
In Shamanistic and Amerindian belief, the guardian and guide may be in the form of an animal spirit.
Today, the belief in guardian angels is quite widespread and does not pertain to any single religious group or denomination.
Historically speaking, it’s long been believed that dark or evil angels can confuse people and compel them to sin, even to suicide. No doubt as a product of mankind’s sexist history, women, especially, were thought to be driven to the point of madness by evil spirits posing as loving presences.
Contemporary psychiatry generally downplays or ignores the possibility that evil spirits could influence a person’s behavior. Psychiatry does recognize the phenomenon of “magical thinking” but usually within the interpretive framework of a cognitive error or mental illness.
Many exhibiting so-called magical thinking probably do make all sorts of interpretive errors. But the issue here is the underlying cause. The medical psychiatrist looks to inherited, (apparently) abnormal predispositions and adverse environmental conditions which may, indeed, be present. However, psychiatry tends to overlook the possibility that these contributing factors could be part of a much larger dynamic, a dynamic that might involve evil spiritual influences.
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Moses
Moses Pleading with Israel, as in Deuteronomy 6:1-15, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 via Wikipedia
In the Old Testament, Moses (13th – 15th century BCE) is the son of Amran of the tribe of Levi. He became a major prophet and lawgiver as well as the leader of the Iraelites during their 40 years in the wilderness.
Like many heroes, mythic or not, Moses escaped premature death from a hostile power. As a baby he was placed in the Nile river in a basket, to be later discovered by the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter. Although the Jewish people and the Egyptians were generally at odds with each another, Pharaoh’s daughter, who is unnamed in the Old Testament, takes pity on the baby and rescues Moses from certain death.
Raised as an Egyptian, in the book of Exodus Moses eventually led the Jewish people out of slavery through the Red Sea and received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20: 1-17).
Tradition ascribes authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses.
Related Posts » Adam, Akhenaton, Aliens and Extraterrestrials (ETs), Bahai, Burning Bush, Freud, Hero, Miracles, Moses and Monotheism, Pyramids, Torah
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Moses and Monotheism
Sigmund Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions can be found at the Freud Museum via Wikipedia
Moses and Monotheism is the last work written by Sigmund Freud in 1939, prior to his doctor-assisted death by morphine.
The book fancifully reconstructs the Biblical story of Moses, according to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.
Freud claims that Moses was an Egyptian who introduced the Jewish people to the Egyptian monotheism of Akhenaton. This eventually caused unrest among the Jews who, according to Freud, murdered Moses.¹
The resultant collective guilt necessitated a religion of atonement for slaying what Freud calls the ‘primal father’.
The book is variously regarded as a ludicrous view of history to a groundbreaking exercise in postmodern reconstruction.
The main critique of Freud’s view, however, is that Akhenaton’s monotheism advanced Aten, a solar diety, while Yahweh is far greater than the universe he creates, as made evident throughout the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 55: 8-9).
While it is easy to fault Freud for applying his own theories to the Bible, not a few New Age thinkers and contemporary religious zealots also offer facile reconstructions of the past to support their views, and far less cleverly than Freud did. Now called pseudohistory, a good example can be found in the idea that UFO‘s instead of real human work gangs built the Egyptian pyramids. Although there is plenty of hard archeological evidence that human beings built the pyramids, some pseudohistorians, for whatever reasons, simply overlook this fact.
Another example can be found among Christian fundamentalists who zealously proclaim that ‘the end is near’ whenever anything bad happens. Extremist Christians have been doing this for centuries. Nero, The Black Death, Napoleon, Hitler, the atom bomb, Y2K, 911… all have been taken as signs that the end of time was imminent. While we can perhaps understand why his might have happened earlier on in history, there’s really no excuse for it now.
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¹ Some scholars suggest that Freud borrowed this idea from Ernst Sellin, deduced from Hosea 12:13-14.
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Yahweh
Yahweh One of the names given to God in the Hebrew Torah and Christian Old Testament (OT).
Due to its unsurpassed holiness, from postexilic times pious Hebrews declined to pronounce the name in reading and only the consonants YHWH were written.
The vowels we commonly see today were later added by religious scribes.
The precise meaning of the Hebrew name Yahwey is open to debate. Some say it builds on the Hebrew word haya meaning “be, become” or “cause to be.”
In a Masoretic Text a vowel is included, bringing the word closer to donay and suggesting the meaning “Lord.”
In the story of the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:14) God reveals himself to Moses, saying his name is “I Am who I Am.” And many other names and titles are used for God throughout the OT, such as “Ancient of Days” (Daniel 7:13), “Father” (Jerimiah 3:19) “Maker” (Isaiah 17:7) and “Lord of hosts” (Amos 4:13).
» Archetypal Image, Aton, Bible, Christianity, Jesus Christ, Manichaeism
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Akhenaton
Akhenaton The first ruler in recorded history to advocate a type of monotheism.
Originally Amenhotep IV, this 18th dynasty Egyptian King changed his title to Akhenaton (“he who is beneficial to Aton”) and reigned from 1350-1334 BCE.
He replaced the many Egyptian deities, particularly Amun, with the sun god Aton.
While this was a form of monotheism some scholars contend that worshipping a solar deity differs from worshipping a wholly-other creator God.
Sigmund Freud compared Akhenaton to the Jewish prophet Moses.
The debate continues, however, as to what representations of Aton attempted to represent. Some adhere to the more limited solar cosmology while others suggest a more universal conception of the godhead.
Along these lines R. C. Zaehner and others make a distinction between theism and pantheism.
Interestingly, Akhenaton became self-aggrandized to the point of proclaiming himself as the only true mediator of Aton. This is surprising because a good number of artistic depictions of Akhenaton from this period learn toward realism, stressing human detail rather than godlike or saintly gloss.
Prior to Akhenaton, Egyptian rulers were depicted in stylized, refined forms. Akhenaton, however, is sometimes visibly unattractive, marking a first for Egyptian art and influencing realism in general.
Akhenaton’s most well-known wife was Nefertiti. Together they rode in grand and imposing public processions, demanding servility and worship as their carriages passed by onlookers.
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Aliens and Extraterrestrials (ETs)
Aliens and Extraterrestrials (ETs)
The belief in aliens from other planets dates back for centuries, as does their alleged sightings.
47,000 year-old rock carvings in the Hunan province of China could be interpreted as evidence for UFOs.
Airborne “fire circles” were reported to the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III (1504-1450 BCE).
In the Middle Ages an English abbot and several monks were alarmed when they saw
‘…a flat, round, shining silver discus’ soar over their abbey. And in 1733 a certain ‘Mr. Cracker’ and ‘another gentleman…about 15 miles north of where I saw it’ spied a UFO with color like ‘burnished, or new washed silver.’ It sped ‘like a star falling…but it had a body much larger.’”
Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained (Readers Digest, 1992, p. 209).
Some speculate that the burning force emanating from the Hindu god Siva’s third eye could be an ancient depiction of an alien death-ray, not unlike the lightning bolts of Zeus and Jupiter.
Biblical accounts of the “pillar of light” in the sky that lead Moses out of Egypt are sometimes taken as evidence of alien visitation.
Others maintain that religious miracles stem from an entirely different source than our physical universe and are qualitatively different than ET phenomena.
Along these lines, Keith Thompson in Angels and Aliens (Fawcett: 1991) asks whether angels and aliens belong within the same ontological category.
Today, media coverage on aliens has reached a new level. New theories and claims are appearing on TV and the internet. And ETs are a significant part of pop culture.
ET theorists variously envision aliens as saviors or destroyers of humanity.
Omnec Onec says she is a 246 year-old extraterrestrial raised on Venus who in 1955 traveled to Earth to spread the message of brotherhood and love. Meanwhile some Biblical fundamentalists see all aliens in terms of demonic deception.
It’s been suggested that psi abilities† increase with exposure to aliens. If so, the question remains as to whether such abilities would be used for good or ill. » Alien, Angels, “ET’s, UFO’s and the Psychology of Belief,” Heaven, Possession
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† Along with phenomena such as ‘missing time,’ the apparent forgetting of whole series’ of events and returning to lucidity as if no time had passed.
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Burning Bush
Burning Bush An Old Testament story in which an angel of the Lord is said to have appeared to Moses within a “burning bush.”
The fire doesn’t consume the bush, and when the supernatural being speaks, its voice is likened to that of God’s.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight-why the bush does not burn up.” When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am” (Exodus 3:1-4 NIV)
Another reference to the burning bush is made in Deuteronomy 33:16 where God is described as “him who dwelt in the burning bush” (NIV).
Just what happened here is a matter of much theological debate. Does God as the Holy Spirit speak to Moses? Or was it some other angel (i.e. messenger) of God?
Moreover, some take this story literally, others see it as myth and a third interpretation sees it as a combination of fact and fiction. » Angels, Fallen Angels
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