This had the effect of ‘shortening’ the chronology of ancient Egypt by approximately four hundred years. Known as the ‘New Chronology’, it is gradually gaining ground even among the older generation of Egyptologists.
An incidental side effect of the New Chronology — I say ‘incidental’ because these scholars have no religious axe to grind — was that when field archaeologists began to search for traces of the biblical stories some four hundred years earlier, they made sensational discoveries.
The human condition gives us extraordinary latitude for believing what we want to believe, but for anyone who does not have a strong ulterior motive for believing that the biblical stories are ‘just fairy tales’, this new evidence is quite compelling.
It shows that Moses did not live in about 1250 BC contemporary with Ramasees II. Instead he was born in about 1540 BC, and the Exodus took place in approximately 1447 BC. Using astronomical retro calculations, Venus observations recorded in Mesopotamian texts that cross-reference both the Bible and also surviving Egyptian records, David Rohl has provided strong evidence to show that Moses was brought up an Egyptian prince in the reign of Neferhotep I in the mid-sixteenth century BC. Rohl has found complementary evidence in an account by Artapanus, a Jewish historian of the third century BC who may well have had access to now lost records from the Egyptian temples. Artapanus related how ‘Prince Mousos’ became a popular administrator under Khenephres, Neferhotep I’s successor. Mousos was then was sent into exile when the pharaoh became jealous of him. Finally Rohl has shown that the pharaoh of the Exodus was Khenephres’s successor, Dudimose. Excavations at the Dudimose level have revealed the remains of a foreign settlement of slaves or workers — such as are also referred to in the Brooklyn Papyrus, a royal decree authorizing transfer of just such a group at just this time. This settlement may have been built for and by the Hebrews. There are also death pits and evidence of hasty, mass burials which may be traces of the biblical plagues.
Unearthing stone remains may ground us in historical reality, but in order to understand what was really important in human terms, what it felt like to be there, the highest and deepest that human experience had to offer, we must turn again to the secret tradition.
AS AN EGYPTIAN PRINCE MOSES WAS initiated in the Egyptian Mysteries. This is recorded by the Egyptian historian Manetho, who identified Heliopolis as the Mystery school. It is confirmed in Acts 7.22, where the Apostle Stephen says, ‘And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’
The teachings of Moses are steeped in Egyptian wisdom. For example, Spell 125 in the Book of the Dead describes the judgement of the dead. The spirit is required to declare to Osiris that he has led a good life, then deny having committed a list of specific immoral acts to the forty-two judges of the dead: ‘I have not robbed, I have not killed, I have not born false witness’ and so on. Of course this predates the Ten Commandments.
It is no denigration of Moses to point this out. His teaching could not have done otherwise than grow out of the given historical milieu. What is historically significant about Moses is the way he reframed the ancient wisdom with the aim of leading humankind into the next stage of the evolution of consciousness.
When Moses fled into exile in the desert, he encountered a wise, old teacher. Jethro was an African — Ethiopian — high priest, keeper of a library of stone tablets. When Moses married his daughter, Jethro initiated him to a higher level. This is what is being alluded to in the story of the burning bush. When Moses saw the burning bush not being consumed by the fire, this was a vision of the self that is not destroyed by the purging fire that awaits on the other side of the grave.
A sense of mission arose out of Moses’s vision of the burning bush, an impulse to work for the greater good of humanity, to lead us all to a land flowing with milk and honey.
But then, as Moses hesitated before the magnitude of the task in front of him, God stiffened his resolve: ‘And thou shalt take this rod in thy hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs.’ As Moses journeyed back to Egypt, he intended to ask the pharaoh to ‘set my people free’.
As Moses and his brother Aaron stood in the throne room, Aaron suddenly threw his rod down to the ground. It changed, magically, into a snake. The pharaoh ordered his court magicians to match this feat, but as they did so Aaron’s snake swallowed theirs.
As the battle of wills between Moses and the pharaoh unfolded, Moses used his own rod — or wand — to direct the course of events: to bring fire and hail down from the sky, to bring on a plague of locusts, to part the Red Sea, to strike a rock to cause water to gush out of it.
What does this mean? I suspect many readers may be well ahead of me already, but the folk legend that this rod was carved out of wood that originally came from the tree in the Garden of Eden points to its deeper meaning. The rod is part of the vegetable dimension of the cosmos. By mastering it and manipulating it as it runs through his own body, Moses, now an adept, was also able to master and manipulate the cosmos around him.
Later, after Moses had given up trying to persuade the pharaoh to set his people free and had led them out into the Sinai desert, he came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Moses proved to be a hard taskmaster, in some ways harder than the pharaohs. Again and again his people failed to live up to his demands. At one point they were punished by a plague of fiery and deadly serpents (Numbers 7.19). To save them Moses nailed a bronze serpent across a raised horizontal pole.
John 3:14 comments on his passage in the Old Testament: ‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.’
Clearly John is seeing the bronze serpent as foreshadowing the crucified Jesus Christ. ‘Lifted up’ carries with it a sense of being transformed or transfigured. The bronze serpent has been smelted, and so looks forward, John suggests, to the transfiguration of the material body of humanity.
The rod that Moses used to smite the Egyptians and to discipline his own people was an image of the Lucifer-serpent of animal consciousness that has been straightened and subdued by willpower and a moral discipline that is very hard to maintain.
The great gift Moses gave his people, then, was guilt. Morality emerges into history with Moses and with it a call to a change of heart.
If we look at the Ten Commandments from the perspective of the esoteric doctrine, what is most significant is the way that the first two commandments banned the use of images in religious practice and called upon the Jews to worship no other gods. Following Abraham, Moses was working towards a new kind of religion that did away with the practices of older religions with their elaborate, overwhelming ceremonies, the loud clashing cymbals, the blinding clouds of smoke and speaking idols. The old religion aimed to diminish consciousness. The worshippers would attain access to the spirit worlds but in an uncontrolled way, in the great, overwhelming and riotous visions of the followers of Osiris. It was this that Moses was concerned to roll back and replace with a thoughtful, more conscious communion with the divine.
By this ban on images, Moses was helping to create the conditions that would make abstract thought possible.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND THE other laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy form Moses’s public teaching. They are for all the people. In esoteric tradition he also taught seventy elders the Cabala, the secret, mystical teachings of Judaism, at the same time.