The Story Of Moses
Everyone, it seems knows the story of Moses, how he sent plagues down on the Egyptians and eventually led the Hebrew people to the promised land.
I question the authenticity of this story and find it rather interesting how the story has been further embellished in the recent blockbuster Disney movie, The Prince of Egypt.
According to some scholars, Moses is a suffix meaning "son of" and it is found in many Egyptian names, such as Tuthmosis (son of Thoth) and Ramesses (son of Ra.)
In the Bible, Moses' mother hid her baby son in a basket in the reeds along the river bank. This was allegedly done, to save him from the Pharaoh who according to the story had ordered all new born Israelite boys to be killed.
This Bible story is almost exactly the same as the Legend of Sargon which goes like this, "Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade (Akkad), am I. My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not...My changeling mother conceived be, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me in the river which rose not over me...Akki, the drawer of water took me as his son and reared me."
The Bible version goes like this, "And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags (reeds) by the rivers brink."
I find it interesting that as in the case of Noah's Ark and The Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Moses is so much like another much older story that arose from the part of the middle east that the Hebrew people had come.
The Bible does not delve into Moses' youth, but the historian Josephus tells of Moses taking over the Egyptian army at the brink of the Egyptians being defeated by an invading Ethiopian army. In Josephus' story, Moses saves the day and under his leadership the Ethiopian army is destroyed. Egyptian records tell no similar story, just as they tell no stories similar to the plagues of Moses, the exodus or any other Moses annals.
It is often argued that it would not be in the Egyptians interest to record any of this "history" and this is a good argument, so again it is left up to the seeker of the truth to make up his or her own mind until hopefully someday more archeological evidence is found.
Even now, the recently discovered tomb of the sons of the Pharaoh Ramses (speculated to be the Pharaoh that ruled during the time Moses is said to have lived) is being excavated in Egypt, which could possibly produce new information. The Bible tells us that the Pharaoh's first born son died in one of the plagues called down on Egypt by Moses (the taking of all Egyptian first born sons.) Maybe there is some evidence in the hieroglyphics in this tomb that could tell us how the Pharaoh's first son died, this might substantiate or dispute the Bible story.