In what could be called his last sane moment, before he had ever talked to Yahweh, Moses was leading his flock and saw a bush that was alight and not reduced to ashes, and said to himself: "I will turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." [1] This kind of "why" stood behind my undertaking this book and has, I hope, conveyed my reader rewardingly through its pages.
The work is now finished, with its details fitted into its major parts and there assembled into the whole. Some 3500 years ago, the area subject to the Bible came under an extra-terrestrial force, apparently a great comet, which, amidst the destruction that it wrought, set into motion the human characters whom we have come to know well: Moses, the Pharaoh, Aaron, and especially the Israelites, who were shaped into a chosen people.
The experiences of this people contained the material of a great and true story of disaster and survival. The story centers upon a scientific genius - Moses - and a new god - Yahweh. Yahweh is recognized as a great comet, as an electrical presence on earth, as the hallucinations of Moses, and as all cognate mental and social behavior in the times and places of Exodus, the Wanderings, and the invasion of Canaan. Of Yahweh, Vriezen has stated correctly: "If this God has to be typified in one word, that word must be: Power; or, still better, perhaps: Force. Everything about and around Yahweh feels the effect of this. He as it were electrifies his environment." [2] His electrifying force is more than psychological and metaphorical; "The Great I Am" is electrical in fact. The ideology of mosaism, a set of formulas for tying the aims of Moses to the purposes of Yahweh, proved to be adaptable from one restricted area and culture, the Judaic, to several grand civilizations - Byzantine, West European, Islamic, and American.
The Ark of the Covenant, "the Vehicle of Yahweh," symbolized, as well as played a critical part in, the whole story. Its electrical functions represented the achievements of the Egyptian theocratic establishment from which Moses, one of its luminaries and scientific managers, was expelled. The Ark was the centerpiece around which the aggregate of survivors of the flight from Egypt were organized into a new nation. The Ark gave voice to the new god, Yahweh, distinguishing him from related old gods, and lent credibility to his being one god, the great god, the most active god, a god who moved and rested with his followers, an invisible god, a god of explicit advice, a god who was independent of any sky body once he was defined by Moses,
Numerous miracles of the Bible have been shown to be based upon historical happenings: the escape from the enemy, the finding of food and drink, the punishment of sinners by god's fire, and so on to all significant miracles. They are demonstrable by ordinary rules of anthropology relating to a group interacting with nature to produce recognizable cultural behavior. Much of the non-miraculous but apparently nonsensical - the clothing, the taboos, the prayers, the rites, the devices, the social behavior, the attitudes of people - can be linked to the miracles, the setting, the motives and purposes of the leaders and people. All of this invites a renewed attention to old problems under a new light. We may be in a better position to learn from the Bible and to know what is not to be learned from it. The experiences of Moses and Israel may be better guides through history than they have been in the past.
Yet even such generalities seem bland and anti-climactic following the outburst of arguments and propositions in the individual chapters. But rather than summarize all of these too, which are clearly signalled where they occur in the book, I should like to enter a plea on behalf of their implications. It is that Biblical scholars may join with specialists of other cultures throughout the world in reviewing materials of this electrical period of Exodus. It is, furthermore, that natural scientists, especially geologists and meteorologists, may lend their skills as historians of nature to the researchers in human history. I have no doubt that my book is to be corrected in many ways; I would, however, be gratified if the process of correction be managed so that all benefit in their own field of interest, rather than that I be loaded with the sins of all and sent into the desert to Azazel.
Figure 20: The Moses of Klaus Sluter.
( Sculpture at chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon A. D 1404)
Notes (Conclusion)