The one now called Moses is a pivotal figure in the three Abrahamic religions. His time is given at about 1200 B.C. The pyramids themselves were ancient before Moses came along. It is assumed that Ramses the 2nd was the Pharaoh at that time. Moses lived a scant century after the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaton ( Amenhotep lV.) Akhenaton is called the ‘heretic’ Pharaoh. He attempted to convert the country from its pantheon of regional gods to the worship of one single god which was symbolized by the sun. Akhenaton is deemed to be the first ruler to have conceived of monotheism; the worship of the one and only Creator, the uncaused cause of all causation from which all else flows. Being consumed with religious devotion, Akhenaton neglected matters of state and was overthrown by an alliance of the existing priestcraft and the military. The similarities between the religious tenets espoused by Akhenaton, and those given to the Hebrews by Moses are cited by many religious scholars as evidence of the former’s influence on the latter. For the purposes of this website we are accepting the assumption that the one called Moses was author of the Pentateuch, or the first five books in the text we now know as “ the Bible.” But we have to go back even further in Time to see just how this stage was set.

The book of Genesis gives a highly editorialized historical account, coupled with the incorporation of ancient legends for which historical verification is largely lacking. This characterizes it as a walking contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction. Moses’ task at the time of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt was to recapitulate, revise, restate, reorganize, and codify Judaism at a critical moment. If the Jews were in danger of extermination at that time, Moses then, is truly their savior. However it is seen, the work that Moses accomplished has survived largely intact for 3,000 years, and includes the spawning of two subsequent religions known as Christianity, which is now some 2,000 years old, and Mohammedism, which is itself an updating of core Abrahamic teachings.

It is not possible to characterize or limit any of the great religions in a simple, or brief manner. No doubt there will be many criticisms and challenges to any attempt to do so. Nonetheless some background is necessary to put the story in perspective.

Religion in general represents mankind’s efforts to search for, and give meaning to, Life itself. The Jews shared a common culture of the ancient Near East, but also stood apart from it. In the Book of Genesis the one omnipotent God interacts with humankind as creatures of freewill in a covenant relationship. Unlike other religions of the time, Judaism avoided magical rites associated with enhancing fertility, the productivity of the soil and nature, the curing of diseases, etc. With Judaism, evil is introduced into the Divine world by human beings, with the implication being that by their own conduct, humankind can repair the evil they produce. Morality and the human potential for understanding ... not immortality... were the concerns of the Biblical author(s.) The introduction of immortality would come later.

In this scenario, by eating from the tree of knowledge first, and not the tree of Life, Adam and Eve lost forever the opportunity for humankind to become immortal. Whereas in the other religions of the time, priest-magicians were called upon to petition and influence the gods, the Hebrew concept was that each individual had a personal relationship to God, and had a personal responsibility and obligation to overcome their own negative instincts and actions. It was possible therefore, for any individual to atone for transgressions in the here and now, thereby absolving themselves from the wages of iniquity and ‘sin.’ As a religious system, this represents a very practical approach. An approach at least as good as other dogmatic belief systems. Perhaps even better than some others, politics aside.

The entire concept of continuing consciousness beyond the event called death is absent in the Hebraic religion. Instead, Divine reward for a life well lived is longevity. Sarah begets a child by Abraham at 93 years of age. Enoch lived 365 years. His offspring, Methuselah, lived to be 969 years old. The assumption must have been that people who died at what we would call a normal age had lived less than ideal lives. We also have it that God would punish particular offenders from time to time with pain and sufferings such as Job’s boils, Lot’s wife turning to salt, and even a massive flood once for the whole damn bunch. Disobeying the Lord God Jehovah carried major consequences for “Your God, my God, is a vengeful God.... Vengeance is mine saith the Lord...an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” All of this within the realm of life in the here and now.

All due respect to modern religion, anyone willing to suspend common sense and believe that it is possible for a 93 year old woman to have a normal child, for an individual to live 969 years, that God punishes His people with natural calamities, and that a hand built boat is capable of holding one pair of every known animal will believe anything. So from the beginning pages, belief in the Judeo-Christian religion requires the suspension of rational thought. Starting with Genesis, the line between rational understanding and sheer belief is crossed. Once beyond this thresh hold, fact and fiction become one and the same. That such is still a requirement of major religions in the modern world is a sad commentary on spiritual progress and growth. We tend to accept the irrational for no other reason than our fore bearers did. Certainly we know more now then they did then. Our inheritance being largely an irrational fiction, one explanation becomes as good as another.

The Jews in Egypt

We have it from Genesis that the one called Joseph ( of the coat of many colors,) was sold by his brothers into slavery. That Jews would sell members of their families into slavery does not commend them well in history, but such was the case we are told. That a person would accept becoming a slave as a legitimate commercial transaction is beyond comprehension.

From this dastardly act great things are to emerge. Joseph was said to have been sold to an Egyptian military officer who took him back to Egypt as a household servant. Joseph it seems, is an exemplary person, intelligent, creative, obedient to his master, and a general asset to the household. He is also very handsome and physically fit, and attracts the unwanted attention of his master’s wife. She tries to seduce him in her bedchamber but Joseph escapes her clutches, leaving behind a piece of his garment torn off in the conflict. The wife then accuses Joseph of attempted rape. Joseph is sent to prison.

While in prison Joseph is seen once again as an exemplary person and is given duties and responsibilities in the prison’s routines. He also becomes known as an interpreter of dreams. When the royal interpreters fail to explain one of the Pharaoh’s most disturbing dreams, Joseph is summoned to take a crack at it. The Pharaoh had dreamed of seven healthy ears of corn and seven withered ears of corn. Joseph interprets this as Egypt will have seven years of abundant crops, and seven years of drought. The Pharaoh then decrees that for the seven good years that extra grain be stored for the seven lean years. It all comes true and Joseph is elevated into the Pharaoh’s court.

Owing to the excellence of the one called Joseph, the Pharaoh decides that his people must be an asset, and so they are invited to immigrate into Egypt legally. Before this time, the Jews in Egypt were primarily squatters who had fled drought elsewhere in the region. The early squatters were mainly cattle herders who grazed their livestock on the fringes of Egyptian agriculture.

So the Jews come into Egypt by invitation. Egypt is somewhat multi-national in that it engages in widespread mercantile trade. This necessitates people from a variety of countries to transit and sojourn in Egypt. Egypt was the land of milk and honey; politically stable, prosperous, and secure. It was by all means the best place to be at the time. Nowhere in history is recorded any story by which the Jews become the slaves of Egypt by force of arms. This assumption is one of the biggest fairy tales of all time.

The picture painted in Genesis is plain enough as far as it goes. Leaping forward in time, the Jews are ensconced in Egypt and are doing very well. But some difficulties arose as time went by. For one thing, the Jews refuse to assimilate. They maintain their own language, their own diet, they did not intermarry, and worst of all, they asserted their religious laws to be superior to that of the state. The Jews are a very cohesive peoples. The facts remain the same to this day in large degrees. In ancient Egypt, in addition to these transgressions, they were outbreeding their hosts. This threatened the demographic stability of the country internally. Furthermore, the Jews denied the existence of immortality per se.

The Egyptian rulers may have overlooked a few differences, but the entire Egyptian political and religious structure was based upon the immortality of the Pharaoh, and by conferrence, the immortality of his subjects. It was the basis of law and order in Egypt. The Jewish precepts maintained that never could God and man be joined, and denied the existence of after life itself. This was an intolerable insult, and a standing libel upon the Crown. In the end this amounted to a treason in the mind of the Pharaoh, ( who was taken as a god incarnate,) the priests, and civil administrators. This endangered the Maat ( order,) which Pharaohs were required to maintain and by which they themselves were judged. If the Maat was to be preserved the Jews had to go.

Various methods were tried as recorded in Genesis. It is incredible that these events escaped recordation by the Egyptians. Perhaps the situation was seen as an embarrassment and deliberately excluded from its history. To their credit, the Egyptians did not resort to wholesale slaughter. A mass exodus had to be politically engineered. But how ?

Enter MOSES

The one called Moses is an interesting character. It is said he was born a Hebrew, but was placed in a basket and floated on the Nile as an infant by his Mother, who sought to spare him from being killed by the Egyptians. As the story goes, Moses is found by an Egyptian princess who takes him into the royal household where he becomes Egyptian by adoption. The ancient Egyptian Pharaohs did this with some frequency. Even Nubian royal children were adopted into the royal household and raised as princes of Egypt, to return in adulthood to their own peoples, to rule in symbiosis with Egypt. The Egyptians were masters of politics. They were operating at the political pinnacle of the middle east. They developed and implemented a structure of government that began over 4,000 years ago. Very sophisticated this civilization.

In our version of these events, Moses is an odd man out in the royal court. As an official guest, but non-blooded member of the royal household, Moses is not part of a hereditary legacy, and can not inherit power or office from the crown. Being recognized by the indigenous priests as a prodigy, Moses is delivered to the Mystery School at Giza for indoctrination, training, and initiation. Not having come from a foreign state, Moses returns to the court after becoming a high priest of the Mysteries. He may have been the liaison between the Pharaoh and the Mystery School.

Being genetically Jewish, Moses had the bonafides from both sides of the equation. He is trusted by both sides. His influence with the Pharaoh, and the legacy of Joseph’s work, gives him unique status in both communities. He is the only one of them able to interface directly with the Pharaoh himself. Moses is delegated by the Pharaoh to find a way to get the Jews to leave Egypt. Moses accepts the assignment. He would use fear and their religion to do it.

According to their legend, the promise of land was given to Abraham by God. The promise had not yet been fulfilled, but remained the long term goal of the Jewish people. They wanted a place where they could live on their own terms, with their own laws, and their own traditions. The “promised land” became the carrot in front of the horse.

There is nothing more powerful than a negative suggestion. Moses tells them that Pharaoh has decreed that the Jews are captive and can not leave. This, he tells them, is the last barrier between Abraham’s covenant with Jehovah. Mean old Pharaoh refuses them their freedom. “Let my people go!” becomes the war cry. Add rumors of a little hocus pocus and voila! Moses is accepted as a religious authority with his own people. The plan is fulfilled. The Jews now want to leave Egypt. Pharaoh lets them go. Egypt sees itself as well rid of them.

POST EXODUS

Moses has now attained the mantle of a living patriarch. As could be expected, his charges are a mixed bag, with competing political leadership, and people of varying degrees of intelligence. In addition, they must be fed on a daily basis, difficult for small groups, much less multitudes. Food and water are hard to come by in the desert. How they were fed is anyone’s guess. But in the case of unifying his people religiously and politically Moses had a powerful weapon. It is called fear. Fear of God being especially powerful in those who believe in direct personal punishment as God’s will, Moses made it a virtue. People would be obedient out of fear of God. To be “God fearing” is a virtue in the Abrahamic religions unto this day.

Fear is the very lowest reason to worship God. May we all pray for those who need to be made to fear before they find a reason to worship God in all its forms, and by all its names. May we pray for all those who need any reasons whatsoever to worship God. Worshiping without needing any reason is the highest form of devotion.

Yet it remains a major tenet of the three Abrahamic religions. At that time the fear of God translated into acts God would take against someone in this life. The concept in subsequent (Christian,)versions became that God would take acts against someone in the afterlife, and this condemnation was for eternity. Neither of these propositions has made followers behave much better. In today’s world many so called ‘holy’ religious leaders teach their followers that God will reward them for the wanton killing of their fellow man. Imagine! Killing earns eternal grace from God! It seems some virtues come too late for the learning even now.

Moses gives them the laws. Some of these become enshrined as “the Ten Commandments.” The modern world would deem these “the Ten Ethics.” How mere ethics became holy is another of history’s mysteries. One doesn’t need to be religious in order to follow any one of them except the first. “ Thalt shall have no other Gods before me!” Is this an echo of Akhenaton’s vision; meaning ‘I am the one and only original Creator, the source of all that is ?’ Or is it saying that the Lord God Jehovah is first among the many other gods being worshiped? Leave that one for the rabbis. Many atheists meanwhile, substitute ethics in lieu of worship. Folkways, morays, and ethics against murder, theft, adultery, lying, etc. has been the common practice of mankind the world over in all societies regardless of their location. But somehow Moses thought it necessary to codify them formally and call them the Law of God.

The search for the “promised land” takes some 40 years in the wilderness of the deserts. Then by some stroke of luck the Jews find themselves looking down on a fertile, well watered valley. Moses doesn’t concern himself with the fact that it has already been civilized, owned, and occupied by others for hundreds of years. He points them to it. There is the promised land, he says, adding that he is not to be allowed to continue on with them.

Essentially, Moses had performed his task well. He had led the Jews out of Egypt without violence. He had given them their basic laws, authored the first five books of what is now called ‘the old testament,’ and kept these people out of Egypt for more than two generations. There were none left to remember the land of milk and honey, none left that had any reason to want to return. Moses had in actuality made history conform to the Abrahamic legend. His people very naturally believed themselves to be the fulfillment of this word. Moses had delivered them from captivity to freedom, and fulfilled prophecy. The promised land was theirs. But they never thanked Pharaoh for seeing to it that they fulfilled their destiny. He is still seen as one of their historic enemies to this day.

One of the greatest lessons that can possibly be learned is lost here. And that lesson is: With great frequency, a greater good later arises from what is first deemed to be only an avenue of adversity.

At this point Moses disappears from history. Are we to believe that the people he had led for 40 years, without question, just turned away and forgot about him completely? Are we to believe that thereafter they kept no track of him, nor recorded his life and death? Are we to believe Moses had no retinue of aides, staff, servants? That he himself had no wife or family left? Was he to pitch his own tent as an old man? Scavenge his own food ? What beasts of burden carried his load? Are we to believe his people just didn’t give a hoot about his well being thereafter? Hardly likely. But where did he go after departing his flock?

If we are to believe the Bible that the Jews just abandoned the man that gave them their freedom, their laws, and led them to ‘the promised land,’ we must again abandon our own common sense. Yet the Bible is moot on the latter years of Moses. The Bible is forever giving us locations rather than dates. Most biblical texts and events are linked to places. But not Moses. Moses just turns and walks off alone into the sunset. Why does the Bible lose its interest in him at this point? Because Moses stopped writing it. From the sixth book onward, other authors added chapters.

Refardles of the cause, Moses disappears from his own book. Further records about him are unknown. The remaining unanswered question becomes “Just where and when did Moses die?” The next thought that emerges is “Where is his tomb?”

Moses was an initiate of the Mystery School at Giza. He had done his work. All his tasks were completed. He had earned his rest. Neither a true Egyptian, nor a true Jew, he returned to the cloistered walls of the Mystery School at Giza.

His tomb is most likely on the Giza Plateau

While this scenario radically overturns the dogmatic tenets of more than one religion, it is uncontradicted by any known facts. In this regard it stands on equal footing with its older and more accepted counterparts.

Most of the facts regarding the paleo-history of civilized man were destroyed by the burning of the libraries in Alexandria. Some of their content, as well as a library greater than the Vatican’s, going back 10,000 years reposes within Cheops. When we are able to re-access those contents, we will find many facts which contradict modern assumptions.

Until then one story is as good as another.