Wednesday 12/21/16
Today I would like to give an outline of Jewish history from
the time of Joseph down to King David.
Ten or more years after his brothers sold Joseph down into
Egypt, Joseph became a chief counselor to the Pharaoh. Following on that, the
Israelites prospered and multiplied in Egypt, for four hundred years, down to
the time of Moses when the Bible said there was a new pharaoh who “knew not
Joseph.”
Fitting the Bible history into world history, we see that in
1700 B.C. the Hyksos, a Semitic people, speaking
the same language as Joseph, conquered Egypt, moving in with their own pharaohs
for four hundred years. Then, in 1292 B.C. a genuine Egyptian, Ramesses I,
drove out those Semitic Hyksos people. His son, Ramesses II, who ruled from
1279 to 1213, would have been the pharaoh who knew not Joseph or the language
spoken by Joseph. He was the one who had the Israelites building the cities of
Pithom ans Raamses, reducing them to what the Bible called “the whole cruel
fate of slaves.”
The forty years the
people spent in the desert following Moses stood for what was seen as a normal
life span. In the Bible, those forty years were followed by their symbolically
passing through death to the Promised Land when they pass through the flooded
Jordan.
From 1200 to 1050 B.C. the twelve tribes, like America’s
original thirteen colonies, led separate lives, only uniting under one of the
Judges when the twelve tribes were all under attack. Then, in their desire to
have standing they chose Saul for their king. He was followed by David, who ruled
for seven years from Hebron, then took over in Jerusalem in 1000 B.C.
Seeing history as a written record, we see that in their
time in Egypt and afterwards, they wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Interestingly it was the Phoenicians who developed the world’s first alphabet.
I was the Phoenicians, before the Greeks took over, who controlled marketing
around the Mediterranean. A manager of a Phoenician copper mine in the Sinai
desert was finding it difficult to record the hours each miner worked and the tons
of ore he dug.
It occurred to that manager that his word for a door, that
was bab, was actually a series of
three sounds: buh, a, and buh. He decided on using two simple hieroglyphics to
stand for those sounds. He took the
hieroglipic for a house. It was just two squares next to each other; and he turned
it on end to make the letter B. Then, he took the hieroglyph for a deer, an
aleph. It was just a narrowing triangle with two horns pointing upit upside
down making an Å. Those two letters were the beginning of the Alphabet. The Greek,
Hebrew, and Roman alphabets were just adaptions of what the manager of that
copper mine devised.
No comments:
Post a Comment