By Daniel Abraham and Shmuel Phillips
The historicity surrounding the birth of Moses, his being placed in a basket in the Nile, and his subsequent discovery by the daughter of Pharaoh has generated much scholarly debate with competing claims to have discovered the ‘’original version’’ of the biblical passage. However, the current scholarly consensus regarding the origin of this story is weakened by a deeply flawed methodology.
In the Sargon story, Sargon’s mother is a priestess of the goddess Inanna who, prohibited from having children, puts Sargon in a basket in the Euphrates river, where he is eventually rescued by a water drawer named Akki. Akki subsequently adopts Sargon, who grows up to become king of Akkad.
The Horus story describes how the Egyptian god Set murders his brother Osiris. Osiris’s wife Isis places the newborn Horus in a basket and hides him in the Nile among the reeds. Horus eventually grows up to become one of the powerful gods of the Egyptians.
When comparing these legends to the Torah’s account of Moses’ birth, scholars like Dr. Gary Rendsburg believe there is a definite connection to the Egyptian story of Horus: "the sum of the evidence is clear: not surprisingly, a biblical story set in Egypt echoes a well-known and popular myth from Egypt.” He concludes that, "the nature of biblical literature suggests that we should look not to Mesopotamia to explain a feature in a story set in Egypt, but rather to Egypt." [1] Rendsburg draws numerous parallels between these two stories and believes that “The biblical author, in short, subverts the foundational myth of ancient Egypt by portraying Moses as the good Horus and by converting the pharaoh into the wicked Set [2].”
Other scholars, however, such as Donald Redford, strongly contest any attempt to draw comparisons between the biblical passage and the Horus myth due to the late date of the Egyptian source of Horus, among other factors [3].
In light of these difficulties with comparing the biblical passage with the Egyptian Horus myth, the current scholarly consensus speculates that the scribes of Judah – whom they claim to have authored the Torah – must have somehow accessed and mastered the Neo-Assyrian library of Ashurbanipal and adapted the apparently earlier Sargon story to Moses accordingly.
In response to this, Dr. Joshua Berman, in his book Inconsistency in the Torah, first enumerates several conflicting ancient accounts – spanning several centuries – that involve the discovery of an abandoned child destined for greatness. Having described the proper process of scholarly methodology, Berman concludes that the significant range of times and places in which such parallel accounts are set should preclude any declarative historical dating of the biblical passage. [4].
Berman then notes that too often inconvenient material that contradicts popular theories, such as the comparisons of Sargon of Akkad to Moses, is simply ignored, as are further linguistic and chronological implications of these texts. Particularly damaging to the claim that the biblical passage was penned by Judean scribes as an adaptation of the Mesopotamian Sargon account is the prominent appearance of Egyptian loan words such as “Teiva”, “Goma” and the name Moses itself. [5].”
Berman goes on to note several other questionable and problematic aspects of this assumed Sargon-Moses connection, even raising the possibility that
“perhaps…the equation needs to be reversed, and it is the Neo-Assyrians who adopted the genre from the Israelites, After Bakhtin, we know for sure that when the conquered and their conquerors engage cultural exchange is a two-way street…Could it not be that when thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of Israelites were exiled east with the fall of Samaria, that they took with them their legends as well?[6].
At the same time, while many scholars are quick to assume the story of Moses’ birth was carefully crafted to further some author’s agenda, infant abandonment in the ancient world was not a rare occurrence. Josephine Quinn, a professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, concluded that "child abandonment was common in the ancient world…”.[7] It may not be far-fetched to suggest that infant abandonment was a semi-official exchange mechanism, where one set of parents abandoned unwanted children, which were often picked up by other people wanting children who would look for them at specific recognised spots. A similar phenomenon is thought to have existed in other ancient societies. [8]
On this theme, Archaeologist Kenneth Kitchen notes that:
“a ‘birth legend’ (even of a popular kind) does not automatically confer mythical status. Even today, many an infant is abandoned by its despairing mother…and in antiquity it was no less so in tragic reality. Hence Moses’ historicity cannot be judged on this feature; and the story could in fact be true, but not provable [9].”
A further possibility not often considered is that Moses’ mother may have known of these legends and, hoping to take advantage of the Egyptian’s superstitious beliefs, specifically placed Moses in a basket near a group of high-ranking Egyptian women in the hope that they would remember these stories and view Moses as some special or even divine child destined for greatness. If this is indeed what Moses’ mother had in mind, her plan seems to have worked out rather well.
