Archive for January 9th, 2007

Jan

Goodbye Yosef, hello Moshe!

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And so, we now wave goodbye in the Torah cycle to Yosef and move on to the book of Sh’mot (Exodus) and the life of Moshe (Moses). As an adopted child, the tale of Moshe has always held a bit of fascination for me.

Here’s a fellow born into a family of slaves, but through events he is unaware of most of his life, grows up knowing only the wealth and luxuries of life in the court of Pharaoh. We all know it happened, but how often does one take time to really ponder what it took for Moshe to walk away from that?

I mean, think about it. Food was plentiful. He could probably have married any woman - Egyptian or Semitic - he fancied. If he wanted to travel down the Nile on a yacht charter, he only needed to give the order. Life was easy, especially before he was anywhere close to an age where ascending to the throne was in the picture. Even then, the responsibilities of a Pharaoh were nothing strenuous compared to the duties of a Hebrew slave.

The B’rit haDashah book of Messianic Jews (Hebrews) calls this “forsaking the pleasures of sin for a season” and goes on to say that such selflessness was credited to him as righteousness. Yet does enjoying the only life you’ve ever known, a life of luxury, really qualify as sin? Say, on the same level as murder?

For most, perhaps not. But Moshe had a call on his life from haShem. To ignore that call? Sure, it would have been sin. But if one takes time to contemplate just how hard it was to walk away from all that, only then can one appreciate just how much Moshe gave up and how it could be “credited to him as righteousness” in the eyes of haShem.

Moshe is fascinating. I’m certainly glad to be digging into his life once again in the Torah cycle.

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Jan

If only CSI had been around in the Thutmosian Dynasty

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Thanks to the desire of most archaeologists to go beyond the limitations of their science to draw broad, unfounded conclusions, most of the world now believes that key figures in Torah history never really existed. They want hard evidence, which is what science is about, but in the absence of it, they step too far by concluding that something never happened.

Take Yosef, for example. In his book The Exodus Case, Dr. Lennart Moller advances the theory that the character the Torah calls Yosef, son of Ya’akov (Yisrael), is one and the same person as the fellow the Egyptians called Imhotep. Of course, the only way to prove it would be to have a CSI team come in with their DNA testing equipment and compare the remains of Yosef to the remains of Imhotep.

There’s only one catch. The ancient Hebrews took Yosef’s body and buried it in a mystery location, far away from his initial Egyptian tomb. The body of Imhotep has also never been found and is believed to have “gone missing” not very long after his death. So the two stories fit, but there’s only coincidence and faith to support the linkage on that point.

Yet, in the absence of hard evidence, forensic archaeologists would say, “There was no Yosef, there was no Imhotep.” A more responsible approach would be to say, “There’s no hard, scientific evidence by which we can prove or disprove this theory.” But such humility is rare in the field.

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