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

Myths of the Founders 133
tell thee of ” (Gen. 26:2). Why? Egypt was the breadbasket. That’s where Abraham
and Jacob’s children went during the famine. There seems to be a conscious effort here
to downplay both the connection to Egypt and Abraham’s connection to Beer-sheba.
The E source tends to reflect ideas from the northern kingdom while the J source
tends to favor the southern kingdom. That the two sources present conflicting claims
over which patriarch went to Gerar and how Beer-sheba got its name suggests some
esoteric political feud in the period after Israel and Judah split into separate kingdoms.
One can tell that both the Abraham and Isaac Gerar stories have a late origin
because they each claim that Philistines controlled and lived in and about Gerar. The
Philistines didn’t arrive in Canaan until the twelfth century B.C., about six hundred
years after the time of Abraham and Isaac. So, the Gerar stories are false. But what
about the first story, taking place in Egypt?
As we saw in Myth #49, when Abraham left Egypt he headed south into Upper
Egypt, not into Canaan. This suggests that the story of Abraham and the pharaoh
stems from an Egyptian source. Following the traditional Jewish chronology of the
Bible, Abraham arrived in Egypt during the latter half of the eighteenth century B.C.
For the Egyptians, this was a troubling time that Egyptologists refer to as the Second
Intermediate Period.
During this era, a coalition of non-Egyptians residing in the Egyptian delta began
to seize power. Known as the Hyksos, they eventually took control over most of
Egypt and ruled for almost two centuries. The legitimate Egyptian kings in Thebes
either kept control over some portion of Upper Egypt or served as vassals to the Hyksos
rulers in Lower Egypt.
In an interesting mythological/literary twist, the Hyksos kings worshipped the
Egyptian god Set, the only recognized mythological rival to Horus. The Hyksos-
Thebes conflict mirrored the Horus-Set conflict, and later Egyptian literature tended
to identify foreign invaders as agents of Set. The Hyksos interregnum had a powerful
impact on the Egyptian mind and generated much mythic and literary imagery.
The Hyksos built their capital at Avaris and dedicated the city to Set. About 450
years later, well after Egypt expelled the Hyksos, Pharaoh Ramesses II changed the
name of Avaris to Pi-Ramesses. This city was one of the two cities that Hebrew slaves