[Chapter Three: Children of Merneptah―Moses, Miriam, and Seti II]

Chapter Four: Judges of El

Moses spends 20 years in the wilderness writing, refining, and promulgating the law, beginning when he is exactly 40 years old, and then conveniently and mysteriously dies at the biblically assigned age of 60. In this sense he is the first of the "judges" who ruled the people of Israel from the Exodus until the establishment of a proper monarchy under Saul. Many of these judges appear to have begun their rule after periods of 20 years and it is obvious that the end points of these periods determined their rededication to the worship and principles of the Elohim and YHWH, though only one person I know of has actually noticed this period and he is a strict fundamentalist who insists that the period is 40 years, despite the absurdly long and problematic time the Judges become as a result. It is further evident that this 20-year cycle was not simply drawn out of somebody's hat, for it is precisely the period of the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that travels one-third of the way through the zodiac every 20 years. The reader may consult the magnificent Hamlet's Mill of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for further information on this 20-year cycle.

If 945 is the correct date for the start of construction on Solomon's temple, then King David took the throne in 965 BC and Joshua invaded Canaan in 1165. This leaves 9 years between 1145 and 985 inclusive that we must identify with specific events or, at the very least, with pairs of events between which these 9 points in time must have fallen, if we are to establish a consistent picture of the nature of Hebrew history between the Conquest and the first king of Israel and if we are to have any hope of matching events described in the bible with those that were occurring in the wider world around them, even if these matches only reflect general conditions in Palestine as they resulted from the ebb and flow of foreign power in the area.

As we have already collided with the notion suggested by others that the references to 20-year periods in Judges not identified with specific historical events refer not to years that need to be added to other periods mentioned there, a process that leads to an inordinately long period in excess of the stated 480-year long timeline (240 in our reconstruction), but to a point at the end of a 20-year period when Israel rested from its battles, it may be useful to enumerate these references. This list began with the work of Colin Heath, who has constructed a table that gives chapters and verses where this chronological data may be found, and has been supplemented with other historical information.

The Period of the Judges from Joshua until the Ascension of Solomon

The second judge in the series that began with Moses is Joshua, son of Nun, whoever or whatever he may have been. Joshua was more concerned with the conquest of Canaan than he was with the niceties of religious and civil law, and his methods were as barbaric, at least as described in the Old Testament, as any modern invader. His exploits are punctuated by a series of geologic events that Immanuel Velikovsky used to begin his development of the thesis that the Earth had been subjected to planetary catastrophes that, in this particular case, he assigned to the planet Venus. Velikovsky uses a 52-year calendar cycle known to the Mayans to place the Battle of Gibeon 52 years after the Exodus, and, coincidentally enough, half of that places this event that involved the fall of "great stones" from the sky as well as claims of even more extraordinary astronomical events 26 years after the Exodus of 1185, at 1159 BC, the precise year of a tree ring minimum that has been tentatively ascribed to an unknown volcanic eruption. As we shall see in Chapters Eight and Nine, this event was only one of many that punctuate the narrative of the Hebrew bible. As we continue this exposition, we shall see that these events can be used to identify the exact points in time when certain events of a naturalistic nature―primarily floods, famines, and fires―occurred.

What appear to be elements of the Ugaritic religion survive in the bible as late as Joshua and even down to the beliefs of many of the inhabitants of Israel during the period of the divided kingdom. In the book of Joshua the supposed conqueror of Canaan speaks directly to "the Lord." As the Reverend Robert Taylor points out in the Diegesis,

That it was none other than the sun which the Jews themselves understood to be meant, and actually worshipped, under his characteristic epithet of The Lord, see "confirmation strong as proof of holy writ" in the Jewish general's address to the Sun:―

Then spake Joshua to the Lord, and said, Sun, stand thou still in the midst of heaven. And there was no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of man.

Taylor is fudging a bit here, for Joshua goes on to address the moon after addressing the sun:

"And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies.

This would not be a problem if the word used were Elohim (normally translated "God"), which is in the plural. In Chapter Nine we will identify Yahweh (translated "Lord") with the sun, but here "He" appears to represent both the masculine sun and the feminine moon. We must assume here that at some point the text actually mentioned both names, Yahweh for the sun and some variation on the Western Semitic Nikkal, perhaps, for the moon, and that the latter was excised by the later editors of the bible while leaving in the theologically acceptable "miraculous" event and failing to realize that they were revealing a clue to the original text of the passage and the polytheistic nature of the early religion of Israel. Nikkal, or Ningal, was mainly worshipped at Ur, the hometown of Abraham.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman in The Bible Unearthed note that despite the fact that the bible claims there were four generations from Levi to Moses, it also tells us that there were twelve generations from Levi's purported brother Joseph until Joshua, the next generation after Moses. Actually the pair claim that Joshua was "contemporary" with Moses, which is peculiar. The table shows the two sets of descendants of Jacob as well as the concurrent Egyptian kings.

Twelve Generations From Joseph to Joshua

The recognition that there were eleven generations from Levi to Moses solves a problem that had been bothering me for a while, ever since I realized that the father of Moses, Amram (or Amran), was most likely the same gentleman as the father of Seti II, i.e. a mispronounced and truncated form of Meren-Ptah. The half-scale age of Amram fits fairly nicely with the reign of Meren-Ptah and his age appears to derive from the same original source as those of the other patriarchs found in the bible, all of which turn out to be extremely accurate once the units on which they were based have been properly determined. But Kohath the father of Amram fits neither linguistically nor chronologically, the father of Meren-Ptah having been Ramses II who ruled into his 90s. Kohath lived to the ripe old age of 66 by the current reconstruction. The solution, of course, to this problem is that Kohath was not the father of Amram at all but an earlier ancestor (contemporary with Queen Tiy) whose near term descendants had been suppressed in order to remove the Amarna period and the early 19th Dynasty from the Hebrew record. After all, how would it have looked if the editors of the bible had admitted that Moses was the grandson of Ramses II? The implication of all this is that the kings of the 19th Dynasty were descended from Kohath and that these descendants of Levi represent an alternate royal line that reclaimed the throne at the beginning of that dynasty, replacing the military government of Horemhab.

The Assyrians Attack

Upon the death of Joshua in 1150 at the unmiraculous age of 55, Israel was almost immediately invaded by Cushan-rishathaim, identified by George Rawlinson as Asshur-ris-ilim of Assyria, lately called Ashur-resh-ishi I,  before he was shot down on chronological grounds. We have seen this process before. Someone notices a correlation between the Hebrew record and the world at large, and then the identification is rejected because it doesn't fit the inflated biblical timeline. You would think these folks would learn after a while. A good analogy to this situation would be the existence of two maps that scholars were trying to align, one based on a grid drawn in kilometers and the other in miles. And for some reason no one ever figured out that the squares weren't the same size. One wonders what psychoanalytical explanation Freud or Velikovsky would have given for this kind of scotoma.

Modern dates for Ashur-resh-ishi are 1133-1116 BC., a little late (perhaps 16 years) by the current reconstruction but close enough to validate the identification with the king finally defeated by Othniel in 1145. However, as George Rawlinson says in his work on Assyria, Volume 2 of The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World,

Asshur-ris-ilim, the fourth king of the series, the son and successor of Mutaggil-Nebo, whose reign may be placed between B.C. 1150 and B.C. 1130, is a monarch of greater pretensions than most of his predecessors. In his son's Inscription he is called "the powerful king, the subduer of rebellious countries, he who has reduced all the accursed." These expressions are so broad, that we must conclude from them, not merely that Asshur-ris-ilim, unlike the previous kings of the line, engaged in foreign wars, but that his expeditions had a great success, and paved the way for the extensive conquests of his son and successor, Tiglath-Pileser. Probably he turned his arms in various directions, like that monarch. Certainly he carried them south-wards into Babylonia, where, as we learn from the synchronistic tablet of Babylonian and Assyrian history, he was engaged for some time in a war with Nebuchadnezzar (Nabuk-udor-uzur), the first known king of that name. It has been conjectured that he likewise carried them into Southern Syria and Palestine, and that, in fact, he is the monarch designated in the book of Judges by the name of Chushan-ris-athaim, who is called "the king of Mesopotamia (Aram-Naharaim)," and is said to have exercised dominion over the Israelites for eight years. This identification, however, is too uncertain to be assumed without further proof. The probable date of Chushan-ris-athaim is some two (or three) centuries earlier; and his title, "king of Mesopotamia," is one which is not elsewhere applied to Assyrian monarchs.

We have already seen that the period of Cushan's domination was only four years, and by Rawlinson's chronology his rise to power was contemporaneous with the death of Joshua, so that his invasion would have taken place in the early years of his rule, in 1149 BC. Sometimes the orthodox chronology gets worse rather than better.

Ruth among the Judges

The book of Ruth begins with a statement that it takes place after the beginning of a famine during the period of the judges and ends with a short genealogy that makes her an ancestor of David. David is the fourth generation from Boaz, who is the second husband of Ruth, the father of Obed, and the grandfather of Jesse, the father David. Ruth is from Moab, where her father-in-law, husband, and husband's brother die, so we can see that the effects of whatever caused the famine were severe and killed many of the inhabitants of the Near East. If these events were the result of the cataclysm of 1036 from the table in Chapter Eight, then the famine must have occurred during the rule of the Philistines over Judah. In fact, according to the current reconstruction, the famine would have begun in the very year that the Philistines took control, so we may suspect a causal link between the two events. 1036 may also have been the year that Samson, according to the authors of Hamlet's Mill an almost entirely legendary character, began his 10-year rule. As a lion killer, like Hercules, Samson appears to have been another incarnation of the sun god.

There is little else in the story of Ruth of a purely historical character. Its primary function in the current account is to demonstrate the consistency of the catastrophic cycle presented in Chapter Eight, showing that even in a period as obscure as that of the late judges, written evidence survives of the expected cosmological event.

[Chapter Five: Abraham and the Kingdom of Ugarit]

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