Galit Dayan: "Jews" Lived in Dynastic Egypt

Pharoah’s papyrus scrolls may not seem the most reliable sources for investigating the story of the Israelite’s Exodus, but Egyptologist Galit Dayan has found in them much compelling evidence to support the historicity of the biblical tale.

Two weeks before Passover, on March 17, Dayan presented her research to an audience of more than 200 at Sinai Temple. Dayan, who earned her Ph.D. in Egyptology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is the wife of Jacob Dayan, Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles, told the group that linguistic evidence reveals an ancient and deeply involved Jewish presence in Egypt that eventually disappears. To illustrate, she drew remarkable parallels between the language of Egyptian papyrus (hieroglyphs), the haggadah and the Bible, all of which contain references to the Exodus story. In piecing together these manuscripts, Dayan framed an Exodus narrative based on facts of Egyptian history and language to prove her theory that a mass Exodus did occur and that it happened during the reign of Ramses II.

In each of the Egyptian manuscripts Dayan discussed, the same familiar characters are mentioned: Moses (“an Egyptian name”), Pharoah, the Red Sea/Sea of Reeds (“Yam Suf” in Hebrew), Hebrews, Israelites and the presence of slaves in Egypt.

In one manuscript, known as the Ipuwer papyrus, there is an eerie description of chaos in Egypt: “Plague is throughout the land,” Dayan’s translation reads, “blood is everywhere — the river is blood ... and the hail smote every herd of the field ... the land is without light and there is a thick darkness throughout the land ... the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt — from the firstborn of Pharoah that sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the prison. ...”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dayan said with dramatic effect, “this is an Egyptian papyrus that is describing the same plagues that we have in our haggadah.” She explained her view that the 10 plagues were not random punishments inflicted by the Jewish God upon Egypt, but a “declaration of war” on the entire Egyptian system. Each plague, she said, corresponds to a different Egyptian god and the element of creation over which they held dominion. This means the plagues were not merely grave misfortunes but the most humiliating insults to the Egyptian people.

Read it all here.

Do you see the flaws in this Dayan's presentation?

Moses and his kin cannot be termed "Jews" as that term can be applied only after the Babylonian period. Moses' family was Horite. His brothers Aaron and Korah were Horite priests. Aaron is Harun, a reference to Horus. Korah means "shaved one" as the priests in Egypt shaved their heads and bodies before their term of service in the temples.

The Habiru in Egypt were the Shasu of YHWY. Nubia is the point of origin of the Holy Name.

The examples Dayan cites are all found in published texts from the Ancient Near East.  For example, the Nile water turning to blood relates to the fact that the ruler-priests mixed red ochre powder into the Nile water and mixed it with barley to make it look like blood (See James B. Pritchard's The Ancient Near East, Vol. I, page 4). This "blood water" was ritually consumed in their "communion" with Re, whose solar rays gave life to the Nile. Given the solar symbolism, this pertains to Ra and his son Horus and is a Christological image, not an image of the Passover. See The Urheimet of the Canaanite Y.


Related reading:  The Nubian Context of YWHY; Horite Temples; Moses' Wives and Brothers

Afro-Asiatic Rulers and Celestial Archetypes

Alice C. Linsley


Mircea Eliade wrote extensively on the ritual nature of primitive societies. He noted that annual feasts/fasts and ceremonies were patterned after celestial archetypes and corresponded to events in the heavens such as the solstices and the equinoxes. The same can be said for social structures such as government. While Eliade explored ruler archetypes across many cultures (sometimes comparing apples and oranges), this essay explores the pattern of the ruler only among the ancient Afroasiatics by exploring cognates from Afro-Asiatic languages.

According to the linguist Christopher Ehret, traditional Afro-Asiatic religion was originally henotheistic. Henotheism is belief in a supreme creator God with lesser assisting semi-divine powers in a hierarchical ranking, like a pyramid. While each community was headed by a hereditary ritual leader, each clan had guardians from among the lesser powers (along the line of guardian angels).  In ancient Egypt these powers were represented by animals and insect totems and/or plants. Only one power was represented as a man - Horus - who was called the "son of God" and who was served by a caste of royal priests called "Horites."

Ehret refers to the ritual priests among the Kushites as the '*wap'er'.  They were accorded significant political authority alongside the ruler. The *wap'er presided over the rituals directed toward the High God and acted as the intercessor and prophet of the God. These are the ruler-priests, called har-wa and sarki in ancient Egypt.

Dr. Dan Kashagam, General Secretary of the African Unification Front, explains that Africans had various terms that referred to the different offices of government. A king in ancient Kush titled 'Ko' or 'Nesu Biti', a female Head of State was Gore, a female Head of Government was Kandake, a diplomat was Akiki, a governor was Peshto etc. These institutions were fully developed and already in use by 3,800 BCE... along with very sophisticated state and parliamentary protocols that defined responsibilities of the leaders and the citizens towards each other.

The most famous name for a parliament in Africa is the word "Pharaoh". The word actually translates "great house", a common African expression for a senate or national parliament. Variants of the phrase might be Lesser House - to indicate a provincial parliament. The term pharaoh does not refer merely to a physical building, or a dynastic line, although it may have had dual meaning in later centuries. The actual term for king in ancient Egyptian is nesu biti."

It is to Ko for king and sa for great that we must turn now.  In the following list of cognates, we note how the K and Sa frequently appear in the Afro-Asiatic languages.

malku - king (Ugaritic)
melek - king (Hebrew)
sar - king (Sumerian)  Sar-gon is related to the Chadic word for king - gon lere.
sa-ra - son of Ra or Ra is great (Egyptian)
sarru - king (Babylonian/Assyrian)
sarki - ruler-priest (Chadic and Sudra of India and Nepal)
bo kor - king (Kushitic)  Ko or qo was an honorific suffix for rulers, as in Sheba-qo and Tahar-qo.
kan or khan - male leader, where the Bible derives the word Kain, for the first ruler.
kandake - female leader, spealled Candace in English Bibles.
ko - king  (Kushite/Egyptian)

Dr. Kashagam mentions the term Nesu biti, another reference to king. However, it refers specifically to the ruler of a united kingdom comprising the Upper Nile and the Lower Nile. Nesu biti contains the signs for sedge and bee.  Sedge was the symbol of the Upper Nile and the bee was the symbol of the Lower Nile. The titles Nesu biti and Sa Ra ("Ra is great") appear together in cartouches and point to the celestial pattern which the ancient Egyptians believed that their king exemplified on earth. The Ko was the deified ruler. These Kushite rulers are called "sons of God" in Genesis 6:1-2. They ruled over two lands which is why they wore a double crown. The Kushite rulers united the peoples of the Upper and Lower Nile to one another and united the peoples to the deity Ra (Re).

Christians will note that the celestial archetype applies to Jesus Christ, and is manifested in a pronounced way at his baptism at an ancient Afroasiatic river shrine called Nim-Ra, meaning the "waters of Ra." Rivers among Abraham's Kushite ancestors represent numerous celestial archetypes. The ancient Egyptians were great sky watchers.  They observed that the Pole Star (Vega or Wa'gi in Arabic) and the Sun were sometimes visible at the same time on opposite sides of the Nile. This was an auspicious connection. The Nile would have been considered the place of meeting, a sacred center.

Likewise, the clan of Manasseh held land on opposite sides of the Jordan. On the west side Manasseh and Ephraim were considered of the "house of Joseph." On the east side, Manasseh (M-nasheh) and Gad (Gd)were a confederation of the "house of Jacob." Joseph represents the Hamitic/Kushitic/Egyptian heritage of the people. As the Biblical anthropologist Susan Burns points out, "Joseph is the patriarch of the ceph tribes. Ceph is suph (papyrus)." Jacob symbolizes the Semitic/Aramaic/Mesopotamian heritage of the people, symbolized the gd ha-nasheh, the sinew which was touched by the angel of the Lord.

Susan Burns writes, "This sinew is called gid ha'nasheh in Hebrew. The sciatic nerve begins at the heel of the foot and travels up the back of each leg to the base of the spine. This nerve is enclosed in a protective sinew that is common to all mammals. When the angel touched his own thigh, the thigh of Jacob was damaged. The connection Jacob had with his angel was located in the gid or sciatic nerve."

There is a relationship between nasheh and nahushtan, the bronze serpent on Moses' rod. Reeds, sinews, veins, lightening and rivers are like serpents. It is easy to see how prehistoric man might have thought of lightening as God's serpent. Where it struck there was a connection between heaven and earth. That place would be considered the sacred center, just as the Nile was the sacred center between the Pole Star and the rising sun, and the Jordan was the sacred center between M-nasheh/Ephraim and M-nasheh/Gad.

In the older Proto-Saharan languages spoken by Abraham's Kushite ancestors N at the end of the word designates 2.  Appa is father, but appan means fathers. At the beginning of the word N designates 1 and refers to the deity, as in the Egyptian ntr - god/deity. The original root for vein, river, serpent, sinew and lightening was NS. The S originally would have been a pictograph of a serpent or anything serpentine. It also indicates "great" and can mean "Man" (Egyptian - sa), and throne (Proto-Saharan es or is). NS suggests connection between heaven and earth, or between deity and man. The serpent was a sacred symbol to the Kushites, especially to the metalworking clans such as the Hittites who called themselves NS (Nes).

Manasseh was divided because Joseph's other son was of the House of Potiphar and probably stayed in Heliopolis. This is consistent with the marriage and ascendency pattern of firstborn sons among Abraham's Horite people. The firstborn of the ruler's half-sister wife ascended to the throne of his biological father. So Isaac ascended to the throne of Abraham. The firstborn son of the ruler's cousin/niece wife ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather, after whom he was named. So Joktan, Abraham's firstborn son by Keturah, ascended to the throne of his maternal grandfather, after whom he was named. Joktan the Younger was the progenitor of the Joktanite Tribes of Arabia.

 Related reading:  The Peoples of Canaan; The Sacred Center in Biblical Theology; The Kushite Marriage Pattern Drove Kushite Expansion; The Nilotic Origins of the Ainu

Christ as Alpha and Omega

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty." Revelation 1:8

"He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life." Rev. 21:6

"And behold, I am coming quickly, and my reward is with Me, to give to every one according to his work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last." Rev. 22:12

The alpha and the omega, the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet, do not correspond to the Phoenician exactly and do not resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the alpha and the omega are used to describe Jesus Christ because the Apostles recognized in Him the fulfillment of an ancient conception that is traced back to Egypt through the Canannite Phoenician language, from which Hebrew emerged.  The prophet Isaiah tells us that Hebrew is a “language of Canaan” (Isaiah 19:18), which has been confirmed the study of ancient inscriptions.


The Greeks recognized that hieroglyphs were symbolic and depicted the esoteric theology of the ancient Egyptian priests. In fact, the word hiero is derived from the word hiereus, meaning priest. The priests were wise in astronomy, geometry, animal behavior, medicine and metaphysics. That Helioplois was a center of astronomical knowledge is reflected in the high priest's title, “Chief of Observers” or “Greatest of Seers."

When Herodotus visited the priests at Heliopolis (449-440 B.C.) he praised them for their wisdom. When Strabo visited in 25 B.C., he wrote "At Heliopolis we saw large buildings in which the priests lived. For it was said that anciently this was the principal residence of the priests, who studied philosophy and astronomy." This suggests that the esoteric knowledge of the ancient Heliopolitan priests was by Herodotus' time lost or obscured by the prevalent Hellenistic worldview.

Plotinus, a 4th-century A.D. Egyptian-born philosopher, interpreted hieroglyphic writing from the viewpoint of his priestly training under Ammonius Saccas, a priest of Heliopolis.[1] It is not clear how well Ammonius understood the meaning of the hieroglyphic writings, but his association with Heliopolis and his name, which means Teacher, suggest that he was recognized as a learned man.

Heliopolis is the Greek name for the ancient Nile shrine which was dedicated to Horus. The Egyptian name was lunu, which means "place of pillars" because the temples were constructed with many wooden pillars. Arabs call the place Ain Shams, which means "the well of the Sun." The well was the Nile and when the Sun rested over the waters at noon, it was midway between the mountains on the east of the Nile and the mountains on the west.

According to Egyptologist Maspero, King Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, investigated the earlier sources of the Pyramid Texts. Maspero notes that “the likeness between what was copied in the various Pyramid Texts suggests that some of their information were directly derived from old written sources." Those sources are represented by the pictographs found at Hierakonpolis (Nekhen).

There is evidence that Horus was regarded as the beginning (alpha) and the end (omega). The beginning and the end of each day was symbolized by a double lion (Aker). In the New Kingdom, the lion was sometimes pictured as a falcon and called Hor-em-akhet ("Horus in the Horizon") because Horus' emblem is the Sun. At the earlier Horus shrine in Hierakonpolis Horus was also known as "Nekheny", meaning falcon.

Hor-em-akhet (Horus) was represented as a child, a falcon, or as the leonine sphinx. The great east-facing Sphinx of Giza was viewed as "Horus in the Horizon" and it lay between the twin peaks of the giant akhet (horizon/mountain) formed by the pyramid of Khufu and the horizon/mountain of the pyramid of Khafre). In the relief scene carved on the "Sphinx Stele" at Giza, Tuthmosis IV is shown making offerings to twin sphinxes which represent the aspects of Horus in the Horizons. Horus' name appears above the animals' heads. These sphinxes are placed back to back with the winged sun disk above and between them, depicting Horus at the sacred center.Horus who is the beginning (east) and the end (west) is also present at the center (the eternal).

The Jews who affirmed Jesus as the Son of God thought in the language and symbols of the Phoenician Canannites. John McClintock observes, "The Hebrews adopted Phoenician as their own language, or, in otherwords, that which is called [ancient] Hebrew language was in fact "the language of Canaan." It is not merely poetic but literal and in the philological truth. One of the proofs for this is taken from the Bible itself: Isaiah 19:18 says "In that day five cities in Egypt will speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the LORD Almighty. One of them will be called the City of Destruction -- City of the Sun (that is, Heliopolis). --John McClintock, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature

Sacred Writings and the Uniqueness of the Bible

David J. Hesselgrave (missionary anthropologist) believes that the sacred books of the major world religions can be categorized into 4 groups. He writes:

1. Mythological writings. These are sacred books that provide narratives and information (generally fiction and often fantasy) that bind peoples together in common loyalties and destinies as, for example, the Japanese Kojiki, Nihongi, and Engishiki.

2. Writings or reports and teachings of the “enlightened.” Common to this class of sacred books is the notion that actual knowledge of the divine and reality comes only through personal enlightenment experience(s). Knowledge of the Divine cannot be conveyed through verbal propositions per se, but personal experiences and understandings can be reported in ways that will facilitate enlightenment and knowledge. Examples would be the Hindu Vedas, the Buddhist Tripitaka, and the Chinese Tao-Teh-Ching.

3. Divine writing. This kind of writing purportedly comes directly from the Divine apart from any sort of human involvement other than, perhaps, the mechanical writing process. The primary example would be the Koran, though the Book of Mormon also fits this category.

4. Divinely inspired writings. The Old and New Testaments are held by orthodox Christians to be different from all other books. As noted above, they are “God-breathed” by the true and living God in such a way that, though the personality, background, ideas and research of human authors are involved, all are directed by God the Holy Spirit in such a way as to make the final product the very Word of God.

The importance of these distinctions cannot be over-emphasized. Practically as well as logically, the type or kind of revelation contained in sacred books is every bit as important as their teachings per se and is determinative of the way in which they are understood and applied; and how they are translated and contextualized. When the absolute uniqueness of God’s revelation in the Old and New Testaments is not recognized, the Bible takes on the characteristics of indigenous holy books, its God remains hidden, and its message becomes relative.

Read more here.

One aspect of the Bible's uniqueness that Hesselgrave fails to note is the consistency of the genealogical patterns that make it possible to demonstrate that the Edenic Promise of Genesis 3:15 is the premise of the entire biblical narrative.  Abraham's ancestors actually believed that promise and their ruler-priest lines exclusively intermarried because they believed that the "Seed" of the Woman would be born of  their lines. This is lacking in all the other sacred books of the world.  Even Mohammed, who apparently wanted to know the relationship between the Arabian tribes and Abraham's 8-9 sons, was unable to pass along any genealogical information such as the Bible provides.  Why this concern with tracking ancestry and descent along the ruler-prists lines?  Because these are the people who received the Promise of Genesis 3:15 and they are the ones from whom the Fulfillment was born.