CHASING ISRAEL IN THE SINAI DESERT
The younger Pharaoh in Cecil B DeMille's movie "The 10 Commandments", adversary to "Moses" (played by Charlton Heston) - the villain we love to hate! The route where Israel crossed was a drug smuggling route when I crossed there myself !
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Returning from exile in the wilderness, Moses, upper left, demands his Pharaoh "brother" let this enslaved real relatives go. When refused, he sends his real brother Aaron, upper right, out to the Nile river with his staff to miraculously turn the Nile river into blood. 9 plagues later on the night of the "Passover" Moses' adoptive sibling, the proud Pharaoh relents, as he stands by his dead son, and Israel marches through the gates and into tomorrow. But Pharaoh has second thoughts and follows them across the wilderness with his chariots. Israel is crossing the sea, thought to be the Gulf of Suez in Cecil B. DeMille's time, on dry land, but the soldiers pursue them, ignoring the mountainous waves on both sides.
Galloping along in their chariots, trying to catch up with the slowly moving Israelites as the last of them get up on level shore out of harm's way, the soldiers of Pharaoh don't quite catch up before the waves come crashing back.
Sarabit-al-Khadim and Me! I was on another expedition to the Sinai this time, not on the one where I toured the real route of Israel's crossing in a 4 wheel drive truck, that I got to see Sarabit-al-Khadim, the place where the first three of the TEN COMMANDMENTS were really thought up, "invented" by Moses -- assuming that "Moses" was really Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten. In honor of his newly invented or thought up "One God". The Aton or Aten. In Hebrew Aden or Adonai. Still an acceptable name for God along with Yahweh or "I AM" (from Imhotep according to Mary Nell Wyatt)
It was at the traditional Mount Sinai that I met a very youthful taxi driver in the parking lot where tourists park not far from the Saint Catherine monastery and catch the bus to and from Cairo, Egypt. I had come on that bus and would have returned on it had I not met the youthful taxi driver who told me that he had lived in this area as a child and teen-ager and knew it like the back of his hand. I told him I had read about Sarabit-al-Khadim, and would like to go there some day. "Why not today?" he said. "I'll not charge you much more than it would cost you to take the bus back to Cairo, and I'll drop you off in Cairo late this evening after you've seen Sarabit-al-Khadim." And so it came to be that I've visited a place Westerners can barely pronounce, and haven't any idea of what really happened there. His car was a rather old Mercedes with smooth tires and only two wheel rear-wheel drive, but it was the pride of his young life and he wanted to keep making the payments on it. And this trip would help. He didn't tell me the "road" we would take existed more in his head than one I could actually see, that sand drifted across it continually, and there was only an occasional rusted road sign on grey wind-blasted wooden posts that were perhaps put up for the guidance of soldiers in World War I. Radio going full blast with soulful but seductive Arabic music, of which I didn't understand a word, he sped along at about 40 miles per hour or more, knowing that if he slowed down for any reason we'd get stuck in the drifting sand, and there'rd we be for the rest of the afternoon. Finally we dipped over the brink of a hill into a little Bedouin tent village, and the taxi drive negotiated with a very thin Arab man who would take me up over the rocks and ledges in the background to see the wonders of Sarabit-al-Khadim. The place of exile of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV AKA Akhanaten for 30 years according to Ahmed Osman's research. Proved to be so by inscriptians found there and a carved stone miniature of his mother Queen Tiye. The daughter of the Biblical Joseph. I was trembling in anticipation of possibly following in the footsteps of a major candidate for the identity of the Biblical "Moses". The thin Arab man was trembling also, but not from fear or expectation. It was Ramadan, he had eaten nothing and drank nothing all day long, and religious custom would allow nothing until after dark and the sound of the prayers was heard over the portable radio. There was no real path up to the top of the ledge. Just areas where it was possible to limb and other areas where it was too difficult to do so. Finally we reached an area of standing stones, caves, squared off rocks, and a few tablet- shaped rocks with rounded tops like a modern gravestone at any cemetery or (you guessed it) like the TEN COMMANDMENTS is written on in most pictures.
I had my large VHS video camera with me as I clambered up over those rocks, and I was glad I did. Who would expect a scene such as this almost in the middle of the Sinai Desert? Temples, and villas, and monuments of all shapes and sizes. And not only Egyptian writing, but another type of writing inscribed on the rocks that scholars have speculated was the first examples of what later become Phonician and Aramaic and Arabic and Hebrew. Certainly it's believable that an Egyptian king lived here. And wrote, and dreamed of returning to the world that had temporarily exiled him for his heretic monotheistic beliefs. Beliefs that would one day in the future win over at least 1/2 the world! Exodus 20:1 "And God (the One God, the Aton) spake all these words (into the ears and mind of the exiled Akhenaten) saying,--" 2 "I AM the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, (and will bring out your Hebrew family and the followers of your monotheistic religious beliefs), ---" 3"Thou (and they) shalt have no other gods before me (the Aton)." 4 "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;---" 5 "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; ---" 6 "And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." 7 "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God, (the Aton, the CREATOR OF ALL, the One God) in vain; for the Lord ADONAI will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain."
How we got back to the paved road with the real road signs on it in the pitched blackness pierced only by normal Mercedes headlights aided only by the memory of my young taxi driver I haven't the foggiest notion. But we did. When we saw the city limits of Cairo it turned out he had no taxi permit for Cairo, so he turned me over to a young female who did with a more obvious taxi, paid her the lowest haggled price he could manage, and soon I was back at my hotel in Heliopolis. The Pillar of Smoke by Day and The Pillar of Fire by Night!
Exodus 13:20 "And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness." 21 "And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar, to give them light; to go by day and night: 22 "He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people."
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Much of the Bible Old Testament is Retroactive Reporting and Redaction to achieve Religious Goals that don't have much to do with actual
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When I first put up my first web page, HEALTHARK.COM, in 1999, I had read Ahmed Osman's book "Moses, Pharaoh of Egypt", in which Osman, an Egyptian lawyer, and a Muslim by religious faith, shows quite a bit of evidence from Egyptian tombs and inscriptions that Yuya, the prime minister under Pharaoh Amenhotep III had a pretty daughter who became the secondary wife of the pharaoh while he was waiting for his sister to become old enough to become his Royal Wife. They had a son who was only 50% Egyptian and 50% Hebrew. (Yuya's mummy is available and is not Egyptian.) Part of the story of Yuya was used by Hebrew "Redactors" to construct the Story of Joseph in the Old Testament. From this comes the idea that Moses, the son of Aminhotep 3 and Yuya's daughter Tiye was hidden in a basket-boat among some reeds as a baby because his father the Pharaoh sought to kill him. And that this son, once accepted became an Egyptian general, and was given an Ethiopian (Cushite) wife. But the "Redactors" intentionally omitted the part where he actually ruled many years as Aminhotep 4, changing his name to Akhenaten after he became a Monotheist. Declarlng the only God, the "One God" to be Aton (or Adon in Hebrew). From this partly suppressed knowledge, Jews are freely allowed to refer to their god as "Adonai" (the plural form of Adon). Moses' escape into the Wilderness of Sinai after supposedly killing an Egyptian (unlikely) comes from Akhenaten's 30 year exile living at the wilderness temple at Serabit al Khadim. Where I have visited myself at great risk during Ramadan, riding with a lone Egyptian taxi-driver who at one time lived near here (he said). A small cameo picture of Queen Tiye, Akhenaten's mother was found at this temple. But this history (if you'd like to call it that) is heavily "contaminated" with other material from the Midianites, whose god traditionally was a mountain god of thunder and storms, and quite likely lived on or near mount Jabal al Lawz in Saudia Arabia, not Mount Saint Catherine, the now traditional site since Constantine's mother made that her first choice. Most likely Akhenaten held a much grander view of the God Aton, Creator and sustainer of all life on Earth, than the petty hostile Jehovah of the Midianites. However, Hebrew priests found such a jealous God to be just the sort of "person" they were looking for, so long as they could claim that "He" preferred only them as his "Chosen People". Not having nearly enough material to "flesh out" either the story of Joseph or of Moses' God he met in the desert (who called himself I AM), the Hebrew "Redactors" discovered the story of Imhotep, and, perhaps reading Mary Nell Wyatt's Egyptian inscriptions both in the desert near the Nile, and at Saqquara, they used the I AM name, the 7 year famine, and Imhotep's skill as a physician and "Wise Man" to supply a great amount of material for the TORAH!
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Why a Golden Calf? |
WWinding Mountain Path |
Ron Wyatt's Ark Search |
Wyatt's Man in White |
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Who Copied Who? BIBLE SCRIBES BORROWED |
Magdalene 1 |
Magdalene 2 |
NT Joseph Jesus' Father |