REVIEW: THE MOSES LEGACY Phillips

THE MOSES LEGACY Graham Phillips MOSES STAFF FOUND

If Moses existed, he was one of history’s most influential figures - but many historians doubt the reality of the Exodus story and even question the existence of Moses himself.  In The Moses Legacy, Graham Phillips takes the reader on an exciting journey into biblical times, using archaeological evidence and a new reading of the Old Testament to recreate early Hebrew history.  He finds that much of the Exodus story can be corroborated including the flight from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, and concludes that Moses had indeed existed.  But Graham proposes that Moses had in fact been two separate historical figures who later became confused as one.  The first Moses, a dissident court official named Tuthmosis, originally converted the Israelites to monotheism.  He was banished from Egypt around 1460 BCE.   The second Moses, an exiled Prince, had the same name, Tuthmosis, and was the man who confronted the pharaoh and led the Israelites out of captivity.  He lived around a century later. The word Moses, meaning the son, Graham suggests, was a later shortening of this original name.

Having identified the two historical figures behind the Moses story, Graham then seeks to discover the very place where the Hebrew religion originated.  According to the Bible, Moses first discovered God on Mount Sinai when he spoke to him at a burning bush.  Also called the Mountain of God, it was here that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, revealed the holy laws and instructed him to make the Ark of the Covenant.  It was here too that God infused Moses’ staff with power to bring down plagues of hail and fire, to turn day to night, to change the Nile to blood and to part the Red Sea.  Legend identifies Mount Sinai as Jebel Musa in eastern Egypt, but the Bible itself never directly says where it is.  Biblical scholars have fiercely debated the location.

According to Exodus, at the Mountain of God Moses uses his sacred staff to create a miraculous spring.  Numbers describes the same event but calls the location Kadesh, now identified as a mountainous pass on the borders of Edom in southern Jordan.  It is presently surrounded by the later ruins of the Nabatean city of  Petra, and a Bedouin shrine commemorates the Moses event at its original location.  Above it, rises Jebel Madhbah, a mountain precisely matching the descriptions of Mount Sinai given in the Bible.  Here, a team of British and Jordanian archaeologists recently excavated the remains of an ancient Hebrew sanctuary dating from the very time Moses is thought to have lived.  Remarkably, in the nineteenth century, a tomb was discovered there that may actually have been the final resting place of one of the historical Moses figures. Inside, along with other artifacts, was a 3500-year-old staff inscribed with hieroglyphics identifying its owner as the court official Tuthmosis, the very man Graham identified as the first Moses.  He believes that it was the second Moses who was buried in the tomb, the staff having been inherited by him when he became the leader of the Israelites.  The staff is now in the Egyptian gallery of the Birmingham Museum in England and, after careful research, Graham is certain that it is the actual staff that the Bible asserts Moses used to perform the miracles of the Exodus.

More info at http://www.grahamphillips.net/Books/Moses.htm

ITEM YB82 in the Nebiru Crossing bookstore; ISBN 0283073500, 2002 softcover, condition: very good; 327 pages; illustrated