The Serpent's Promise by Steve Jones

Author:Steve Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

William Blake, God Writing upon the Tablets of the Covenant

For he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

EXODUS 2:22

The second book of the Bible is the tale of a journey. Exodus tells how Moses led the enslaved Children of Israel in a march out of Egypt, across the seas and the deserts, through starvation and revolt, to Canaan’s side. There they found the homeland promised long before to Abraham. On the way they received the Tablets of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments and built a Tabernacle to ensure that God would dwell with his chosen people for ever.

The story, with its ten plagues, the death of the firstborn, the parting of the Red Sea, and the burning bush is among the most familiar in scripture but unlike some of the Good Book’s other tales is not matched by any evidence that the events recorded ever took place. If they did, the emigrants would have made an impressive sight, as six hundred thousand Israelite men of fighting age and their families – around two million people – marched, with their livestock, across a hostile landscape. They paused several times on the way (and one camp lasted for forty years) until the next generation was at last allowed to proceed to a land that flowed with milk and honey.

When such a Great Trek might have been, if it happened at all, is just as uncertain. Some rabbinical scholars place it at 1313 years before the birth of Christ. Others argue from historical data that it took place three hundred years earlier. Many of the sites named in the Bible as way-stations were first occupied much later than that and Pharaonic records have no mention of such a dramatic episode, which would have reduced Egypt’s population by half.

When the Children of Israel entered the Promised Land they found it populated by alien races. They were enjoined to destroy them. The Lord had said: ‘For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off . . . And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.’ The migrants, says Exodus, obeyed those instructions to the letter. In truth, some of the cities said to have been demolished did not then exist and the relics found in Canaan itself show no sign of an explosion in numbers when the alleged multitude arrived. They suggest instead that Judaism grew within that decaying nation’s own boundaries.

The history of the Bible’s second book is itself disputed. It appears to be an edited version of earlier documents brought together half a millennium before the Common Era by exiles in Babylon who wished to emphasise an identity separate from that of their captors. It was as much a political symbol as an account of real events.

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