101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Preface xi
Moses, according to the biblical account, was raised and educated in the Egyptian
royal court, and many members of his tribe, Levi, have Egyptian names. King
Solomon married a pharaoh’s daughter and built an Egyptian temple in Jerusalem for
her. Common sense dictates that she had a large retinue of Egyptian priests and servants
to administer to the temple’s needs. Jeroboam, when he fled from Israel to escape
Solomon’s wrath, dwelled in Egypt before leading Israel away from Judah.
And historically, Egypt had a powerful cultural influence on Canaan from well
before the Exodus to late in the first millennium B.C. An eighth-century seal of a
Hebrew official from the court of King Hoshea of Israel (c. 730 B.C.), for example,
shows the official dressed in typical Egyptian garb and standing over an Egyptian
winged-disk icon, indicating that Egyptian ideas heavily influenced the royal court of
the kingdom of Israel.
As we go through the Creation and patriarchal stories, we will see how Egyptian
mythology significantly influenced Hebrew interpretation of and beliefs about its earliest
history. These influences bring us to the question of the origin of Hebrew
monotheism. How, when, and where did it originate?
Biblical monotheism appears to have gone through an evolution. In the earliest
stages, the Hebrews imagined an all-powerful Creator deity, but evidence of belief in
other deities remains buried in the stories, most obviously in the form of angels. This
appears to be the primary form in which Hebrew monotheism originated and the
form in which it has fundamentally survived even into present times. The three major
monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, still believe in a host of supernatural
beings, particularly angels and the devil. They are beings created by the one
all-powerful Creator just as the Egyptian deities were the product of the one allpowerful
Egyptian Creator.
The idea of an all-powerful Creator who brought forth other supernatural beings
has its roots in ancient Egypt. There it was a central belief in most religious cults that
a single Creator was responsible for all of existence, including the appearance of other
deities. The other nations of the Near East had no similar theology. It is the Egyptian
views that initially influenced Hebrew understanding of the first times, and we will see
that many of these Egyptian Creation myths are replicated in biblical history.