|
The Bible isn’t just a religious book. The characters in the Bible lived through a real history that was shared with other nations, but we usually hear only Israel’s side of the story. The other nations of Biblical times were also keeping histories, which tell very different versions of the stories we’ve heard so many times.
10
The Greek Historian Strabo Said Moses Was An Egyptian Priest
The story of Moses and the Ten Commandments is one of the best-known stories of the Bible. With God’s help, the Bible says, Moses brought plagues upon Egypt until the pharaoh set the Jews free.
According to the Greeks, though, Moses wasn’t even Jewish. He was an Egyptian priest. Strabo tells us that Moses didn’t like Egypt’s institutions. He believed that God was in all things and so couldn’t take the form of an animal or a person. This wasn’t divine revelation. Here, it’s just presented as a philosophical musing.
In Strabo’s version, Moses didn’t talk to God or fight the pharaoh. Moses just convinced a lot of people that he was right, and they emigrated freely to Jerusalem.
After Moses’s death, Strabo wrote that Jerusalem was taken over by superstitious, violent people who brought in “tyrannical” laws like kosher diets and circumcision. “Their beginning was good,” Strabo wrote, “but they degenerated.”
|
