A (3:04)

Wow. Okay. So I'm a scholar of Hebrew Bible, Old Testament at Bar Ilan University, and I had long had a fascination with Egypt. I think, just like all of us raised on Indiana Jones or things like that, and this kind of a King Tut popular culture, I think, throughout the world. And then, you know, if you're tied to Scripture, then I think it takes it up a decibel or two, the level of interest. And for a long time, I had wanted to go to Egypt. I'd never been in Egypt, but I wanted to go, not as a tourist and just stare at pyramids. I wanted to go with somebody who could make the connections that would be meaningful for me. And as a Hebrew Bible scholar and as a Jew, quite frankly, someone who really knew the Egypt material inside out and had it connected to the Bible. And that opportunity arose for me In January of 21, when my good friend and colleague and mentor, James K. Hofmeyer, noted Egyptologist and Old Testament scholar, was leading a group of clergymen and scholars to Egypt with just this theme. How does this all relate to the Hebrew Bible? And this was at the height of COVID Nobody had had a vaccine yet, a vaccination yet, but we went. It was. I had almost like my, I would say, my own personal splitting of the of the seas. Ben Gurion Airport here in Israel had been closed for weeks. And then suddenly, just at the date that I needed to get out to go make this trip, it opened and I got out, and then. And then the airport closed again. Again. And so I took that as somewhat of a premonition. And so I got on this trip. I have to say, I always publicly wear my kippah on my head. That's just what I do. And, you know, it's not a simple thing to go to an Arab country where there simply are no Jews, there are no Jews living in Egypt. But I figured, you know, if Jim has 15 Christian clergyman with him, then I'm in good shape. I will have the Lord on my side. I will have a good number of bodyguards around me. And so, inshallah, it will all be good. And it was very good. It was really very good. Not only did I not have any issues at all with my kippah and some interesting discussions with some of the people there, but just. I mean, it was just Eye opening, jaw dropping. It's not like the archeology here in the land of Israel, where, you know, I mean, I love the land of Israel, but you have to use a lot of imagination. You know, when you visit the Elah Valley and the guide tells you, well, this is where David slew Goliath, and this is where this might have stood, and he might have stood here. That's great. But there isn't a whole lot to see other than the landscape itself. But in Egypt, that's just not the case. Anyone that's been knows it's incredibly well preserved and incredibly visual. And when you get a pro who knows what's going on, wow. Stuff just pops to life, one image after another. And in my case, that meant one passage in Scripture after another and after another after another. I was just blown away. And I remember the last day that we were there, I was sitting with Jim on the banks of the aisle. We were having cappuccinos, and I thought to myself, wow, you know, one day, one day when the Messiah comes, maybe I'll. I'll bring fellow Jews to Egypt with a Bible in hand and, And. And share with them what's going on. And then about an hour later, I thought, you know, maybe we don't even need to wait for the Messiah. And then the following two years, in 22 and 23, I actually led such groups. Since then, we've had the war. In fact, as we are recording, as Michael can attest, we had a discussion before we went live. What will we do if there is a missile siren during the course of our discussion? But I came to the conclusion shortly after the outbreak of the war that, well, if we can't bring Jews to Egypt, then we have to bring Egypt to the Jews. And. And so the idea was to take all of this incredibly rich material, most of it visual, and to share it with a wider audience. And the way that I wanted to do that was through this liturgical book that Jews have for the Seder meal. The meal, the great meal that they have on Passover. And to kind of use all of the insights that I have about how the Torah adopts so many things from Egyptian culture and polemicizes against so many things in Egyptian culture. And to do it with oversized, splashy pictures, not just big pictures. There's not a single picture of the pyramids in there, because the pyramids don't. Don't have anything. Okay? The Israelites didn't build the pyramids. So none of this is just sort of gratuitous coffee book. Pictures. Even though the book itself is of some size, the pictures really do illustrate the ideas and the insights into the text that I'm trying to bring home. And this is why I think that the book, beyond its original and primary purpose as a kind of liturgical composition for Jews on the first night of Passover, I think that the book has something to offer for a broader audience of people who are interested in the Old Testament and how it interacts with other cultures, specifically Egyptian culture. I don't think that there's another work out there that brings together as much material, as much scholarly material about the interaction. Again, as I said, what the Torah adapts from ancient Egypt and how it polemicizes with it, and certainly nothing that brings together all of this in such a visually sumptuous way.

B (8:34)

For those who may be unaware, would you explain the role of a Haggadah for celebrating Passover?

A (8:40)

Yeah, right. Okay. So at the Passover Seder, we have this kind of liturgical booklet that takes us through. There's readings from Scripture, readings from the rabbis about the experience in Egypt, readings about the 10 plagues, and it moves through. The Seder is set up as kind of like a banquet that has 15 courses, not 15 courses of food, though it has many courses of ritual food along the way, but 15 stages of this liturgical composition. Typically, Jewish families will sit at the Seder from nightfall until well after midnight singing the songs. And a great part of the meal is to read the passages of the Haggadah and to explicate them and what they mean and what they could mean for us today, et cetera. And so there's a kind of a cottage industry within the Jewish world of New Haggadot. Every year, often themed, there can be an ecologically themed Haggadah or a feminist themed Haggadah. So I took the rather novel approach. Strange as the sounds of having an Egyptologically themed Haggadah. No one's ever really tried to do this. I mean, it's part of the blessing of our time. Michael, I need to tell you, as a fellow scholar, just the resources that we have at our fingertips, just sitting. Just sitting at home, you know, you can find all the scholarship, and now today, you can find all the images that you want of almost anything and. And kind of bring it all together.

B (10:18)

You have a couple of introductory essays that provide insightful context for the Haggadah. One of them is called When Slaves Sang the Song of the Pharaoh. Would you tell us about this?

A (10:30)

Right, yeah. Oh, okay. This is one of my. My. My personal emotional highlights. As a Scholar. So one of the things that I had, that I had read early on this is before I had ever gone to Egypt, was a study. I think the scholar's name is Homan, who pointed out, I think actually scholars earlier than he had already in the 1930s had pointed out that there is a. An uncanny resemblance between the throne tent of Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh and the tabernacle. Let me unpack that a little bit. The greatest pharaoh of all time was Ramses the Great. And he lived the better part of the 13th century BCE. For about 70 years he ruled. And his greatest achievement, at least by his telling, was a great battle that he had against the arch enemy of the Egyptians at the time, which was the Hittite empire in modern day Anatolia, Turkey. And they had this great battle with the Hittites at a place called Kadesh, which is on the modern day border between Lebanon and Syria. And scholars believe, just based on the accounts we have Egyptian accounts of this battle and Hittite accounts of this battle, scholars believe this may have been the largest chariot battle of all time anywhere. What we do know for sure is that this is the most publicized event in ancient history. Let me explain what I mean by that. So just as a foil, think of the Arch of Titus, right? Titus goes to Jerusalem, sacks Jerusalem, comes home to Rome and builds an arch to commemorate it. One, one arch. There was one arch of Titus, one commemoration of this event. Ramses. We know of at least 10 different places where he put up inscriptions about this battle of Cadet Bangladesh. There are even papyrus versions of this that were found in servants quarters. So this was clearly like a little red book of indoctrination that everyone was meant to know about this enormous achievement. The Hittites aren't so sure that he won, that Ramses won, but Ramses is quite sure that he won. Now, in these various inscriptions that Ramses put up all over Egypt, we know of at least 10 places. One of them or several of them, depict not only written compositions about this battle of Kadesh, but also reliefs. So that if you don't read the hieroglyphs, you can look at the pictures, much like a stained glass window, if you will. And in the reliefs of the Battle of Kadesh, there is a depiction of Ramses throne tent in his encampment at the Battle of Kadesh. Going back to what I started to say, that there's an uncanny resemblance between Ramses throne tent and the tabernacle as depicted at the end of the book of Exodus, in that both have two chambers an inner chamber and an outer chamber. They have the same proportions, they face in the same direction. The king sits in the inner portion of the tent and he is flanked by two falcons who have their wings spread over him, much like the cherubim have their wings spread over the, the Ark of the Covenant. Well, scholars began to notice that not only is this similar, but it's highly distinct. That is to say, the tabernacle looks like no other ancient sanctuary that we know about. And Ramses throne tent looks like no other depiction of a military camp that we know from ancient illustrations. And so these are really very highly distinct and they look like one another. And so Already from the 1930s, there were scholars who posited that maybe what's going on here is that the Torah has appropriated the iconography of the, of the Egyptian pharaohs in order to describe how God has basically unseated Pharaoh, that now it is the Almighty who is sitting, you know, in this throne tent and, and has unseated Pharaoh who's now presumably at the bottom of the sea or something like that. And I, I, I saw this and I, I, I found it really very fascinating. I thought to myself, well, if this is what is true, when you try to make pictures of, of, of the tabernacle and hold them against pictures or illustrations, drawings of Ramses throne tent, I'd like to have a look at the actual compositions that Ramses wrote about his battle at Kadesh, particularly the longest of them called the Kadesh poem. Who knows? Let's go see what we can see. Now, I don't read hieroglyphs, I don't read Egyptian. But all these materials are in good translation due to Kenneth Kitchen and many others, but particularly Kenneth Kitchen. And so I began to read what Ramses describes as having transcribed have having transpired at this battle of Kadesh. And as I'm reading, I'm thinking to myself, wow, you know, it's one step after another. Seemingly parallel to what I know from Exodus 14 and 15, that is the account of the children of Israel actually leaving Israel and then being attacked by the Egyptian chariotry. I mean, just to give our listeners at home a sense of what I'm talking about, I'm going to tell you what Ramses describes. And listeners at home who might be familiar with the biblical text will immediately see, yeah, really one step after another. It seems to be very, very similar. So what Ramses describes is that he and his armies went north from Egypt, and as they approached this city of Kadesh, suddenly they were set upon by chariots Hittite chariots. And they were so shocked by the surprise that all of his soldiers melted away, which is just what we have parallel to that in Exodus 14. And then Ramses says, well, having no soldiers left, I turned to God and I prayed, which is what Moses does. And then Amun, Ramses, God says, well, I'm with you. Go forward. Which is what God says to Moses. And then Ramses then takes on divine powers and he starts to fight the Hittites. And by his own telling, he wipes them out. He says, I would shoot at them the quivers of my bow, and they would seek refuge in the river, the Orontes river, which surrounds the city of Kadesh. And there's a huge picture of this in one of the temples. So that most of the Hittite warriors perish in water. And there are even pictures of their corpses floating away, just like we have, you know, that the Egyptians died on the banks of the Red Sea. And then the real clincher for it is that after Ramses emerges victorious, he says his troops came back because now there was no battle to be fought. And they saw. This is exactly like the language of the end of Exodus 14. They saw Ramses mighty hand, just like it says that the children of Israel saw God's mighty hand. And they saw. It says the Hittite warriors saw the corpses of their enemies strewn before them. Which it says also at the end of Exodus 14. And then it says the Hittite warriors were awed by Ramses and they sang to him a paean, a hymn of praise, which is just what we have in the pentateuch, that Exodus 14 bleeds right into Exodus 15. That blown away by what God had done for them. The children of Israel sing the song of the sea. And then that too proceeds in the same sequential order. So that, that this, I thought to myself, this is like, whoa, this is, this is blow away, blow away stuff. And I think that it's part of the. The general trend that I mentioned earlier of cultural appropriation. You see, I think the Torah had a difficult, a difficult task or challenge in trying to convey. So who is this deity and how can we understand him? Because unlike the Egyptians, the Torah is not prepared to make images of Yahweh of the God of Israel. And you can't really see him and maybe you can't even hear him most of the time. So how are we going to concretize for Israelite imaginations the power of this deity? And the answer is, rather than comparing him to other deities, because the Bible never does that explicitly most of God's struggles in the Bible are not with other deities, but with human kings. And so the way in which the Torah concretizes for the Israelites a sense of what God's power is about is, in Egyptian royal terms, the ways in which Ramses had once tried to indoctrinate an entire generation by sharing with them and publicizing, even in papyrus form, the Ramses inscriptions, the Ramses, the Kaddish inscriptions of Ramses ii, the Torah, then, because this was apparently known, I would claim, by the Israelites at the time, in order for them to translate their own release experience into theological terms, the Torah appropriates the royal Egyptian propaganda and uses it to overturn Ramses and thereby elevate the God of Israel.

B (20:56)

Another example of how Egyptian culture can help us understand the biblical text of Exodus. Would you explain your note on signs and wonders related to the first nine plagues?

A (21:07)

We often, in a kind of vernacular way, refer to the signs and wonders. That's the actual term that the Torah uses. It doesn't use the term plagues. It uses when we, you know, we have blood and frogs and all those things, they are called signs and wonders. Now, we often speak of these as the ten plagues. Ten. But when you look literarily at how the Torah crafts these in units, it's clear that we really have nine and one. What do I mean by that? I mean that you can see that in the. For example, if we take the first three plagues, blood, frogs and gnats, then what you see is that the first two of those blood and frogs, they are described at great length. Meaning you have a scene where God addresses Moses and tells Moses what to say to Pharaoh, and then Moses goes and says it to Pharaoh, and then the actual execution of the plague, that that sequence, God speaks to Moses, Moses speaks to Pharaoh. Plague is, is, is executed. You have that lengthy form in blood, the first, frogs, the second, but not in gnats, the third. In the third plague, you have that God only addresses Moses and then the execution of the plague happens, even though he says, go say this to Pharaoh. But the Torah skips over Moses's entree to Pharaoh. This sets these three as a unit, and then we have two other units the same way. And it was just as 1 and 2 are long, 3 is short, so too 4 and 5 are long, 6 is short, 7 and 8 are long, 9 is short. So what the Torah is really creating is three units of three. And it's also clear that the tenth plague, the plague of the Firstborn, There's a long introduction to that, and it unfolds in much more, greater drama. And so what we really have is three sets of three plus one. Okay, now, the three sets of three, why three sets of three? And this is just conjecture on my part, but when you look at the significance of various numbers in Egyptian thought, nine is a big one. When Egyptians want to speak about many, nine is their number. You go nine. Why not ten? Well, they would say, why not nine? Now let me explain why not nine? Nine really makes sense. Look, look. One is alone. Two is company. Three is a crowd. Right? That's how. That's how. That's how even, you know, we might speak. Okay, so three by itself is many. Therefore, to say really, really many is three threes. Three threes is a lot. A lot. And so nine is like, really a lot. That's how you say a lot. 9. Okay. And what we see is that, for example, when Egyptians want to speak about their enemies, they speak about the nine bows. As in bows and arrows. They don't. They never. They're never named. It's not like there actually were nine, you know, named enemies. But that's like all the many enemies that we have. 9. And even so I have here in the. In the commentary, in the Hangada, you can even see that. And this is in many statues where the pharaoh. The base, the pedestal on which the pharaoh stands, where his foot, and it's always a bare foot, usually a barefoot, meets the stone, the pedestal. There will be nine bows chiseled into the pedestal itself. And sometimes they're even cast as three groups of three. So I wonder, therefore, whether this is kind of God again, appropriating the Egyptian propaganda and iconography here. God also has his. His many ways of defeating the Egyptians.

B (25:17)

Josh, before we let you go, can you tell us what's going on in your life? Anything that you're working on these days?

A (25:23)

Right? Wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there's many things. But I just had want to share with friends at home that I have just launched a new podcast. It's called the Bible Bar, and I'm the host, and it's the podcast of the Bible Department of Bar Ilan University. And what we're doing, the format, I think. I don't. I haven't seen anyone else who's done this. We are starting from the beginning. We started from Genesis 1. Each week we're moving through another chapter in scripture sequentially, and each week I'm having on another scholar to discuss something in that week's chapter. Some of my guests are going to be my fellow colleagues at Bar Ilan. Many of them are from around the world, so I get the best of everyone's insights on this podcast and it's available on all the major platforms, the Bible Bar. So friends are invited to check it out and see if it's something that they find interesting in.

B (26:21)

Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us on new books and Jewish studies. All the best to you.

A (26:27)

Okay, thank you, Michael.

B (26:29)

Friends, thank you for listening to New Books Network. Until next time, goodbye.