Who Was Abram?: A Layman's Perspective

Copyright © 2021 by D A Ford.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913457

ISBN: 978-1-7371269-1-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7371269-2-8 (e-book)

Cover design by author using Corel Paintshop Pro 2020. Abraham from painting by József Molnár, 1850, wikimedia commons, public domain. Sheep photos by Yoonbae Cho, Wojciech Portnicki, and Martin Schmidii on Unsplash. Background photo from Pixabay on Pexels under Creative Commons CC0 license. Volcano composited from pictures by Marek Piwnicki and Jens Johnsson on Unsplash.

Mud Shoals Press

Mooresville, IN 46158 USA

To Dianne and Sandra.

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations Used in this Book

Introduction

Conflation and Syncretism

Ages, Numbers, and Anachronisms

Where to Begin

As Genesis Tells It

Abram/Abraham

Isaac

Jacob

Joseph

Analysis: Abram/Abraham

Analysis: Isaac

Time Span

Who was Abram, Really?

Abram in Harran

The Commandment to Leave

Others in Harran

The Nile Delta

Into Egypt

The Hyksos

Abram Out of Egypt

The Descendants of Abraham

Abraham’s Request

Jacob and Esau

Jacob and Laban

Jacob and Joseph

The Three Patriarchs

Chronology

The Minoans

Trade Goods

Atlantis, Santorini, and Thera

Atlantis

Santorini

Thera

Size of the Eruption

Effect on Weather

The Big Eruption

Precursor Phase

Phase One (Super-Plinian)

Phase Two (Phreato-magmatic)

Phase Three (Pyroclastic Flows)

Phase Four (Rain and Lahars)

The Delta and the Tsunami

Tsunami on Crete

Tsunami on the Egyptian Delta

The 2011 Tohoku Japan Tsunami

Videos on DVD or YouTube

Tsunamis and the Plagues of Egypt

First Signs

Mosquitoes

Frogs, Snakes

Nile Turns to Blood

Fish Die, Water Undrinkable

Parting of the Waters

Locusts

Fleas, Flies

Stench

Cleanup

Animals Roasted, Not Boiled

Boils, Lesions, Death of Firstborn

Ash Cloud

Darkness, Lightning, Thunder

Rain, Hail, More Lesions

Lamb’s Blood on Lintels

Bread Without Yeast

Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho

A Better Location

Recent Events

Thera Again?

The Destruction

Possible Witnesses

Joseph and His Brothers

Seven Fat Years

Seven Lean Years

Expulsion or Exodus?

King Senakhtenre Tao I

King Seqenenre Tao II

King Wadjkheperre Kamose

King Nebpehtire Ahmose

Expulsion

Or Exodus?

The Wandering

The Habiru

The Shasu

The Crossing

Mount Sinai/Horeb

The Golden Calf

The Ark of the Covenant

Conclusion

Entry into Canaan

Joshua’s Campaign

New Settlements

The Israelites According to the Bible

What Really Happened?

Canaanite to Israelite

Habiru to Hebrew

Two Cultures, Two Paths

The Twelve Tribes

What Happened Next?

Exile in Babylon

Babylon

Decisions

Noah’s Flood

Tower of Babel

Birth of Moses

The Ten Commandments

Regression

Zoroastrianism

Good and Evil, The Book of Job

A Messiah

As Exodus Tells It

Prologue

The Ten Plagues

Analysis

New Hypothesis

The Messiah

Freeing the Shasu

Akhenaten and the Shasu

A Desert God

Late Composition

Monotheism Throughout

Promises, Promises

A Second Reason

Conclusions

Summary

In Closing

New Timeline

Appendices

Three Anomalies

1) Green Glass of Egypt and Libya

References

2) Basalt Boulders in the Sea of Galilee

References (websites)

Pumice Rafts

The Sea of Galilee

3) Baltic Sea Anomaly

References

An Object From Thera?

Tsunami Videos: Japan and Sumatra

References

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob

Ark of the Covenant

Atlantis, Minoans

Catholic Church

Egypt

Job

Moses, Plagues, The Exodus

Santorini, Thera

Sodom, Gomorrah, Jericho

The Flood

Three Anomalies

Tsunamis, Japan and Banda Aceh

Volcanoes

General

Video Collections on DVD

Video Collections on YouTube

Preface

I am not a professional archaeologist, Bible scholar, or member of the clergy. I am just a retired computer programmer with degrees in electronics, computer science, and physics. Ever since I was a kid, I had this curiosity about everything. I would take clocks apart to see what makes them tick. I would try to figure out how radios work, and so on. I grew up with a passion for detail and an unwillingness to let questions go unanswered.

I was raised in a Protestant fundamentalist church. I’m not sure which one, but I think it was Congregational. Everything I was taught as a child about the Old Testament has always bothered me—only a few of the stories ever made any real sense. Now that I am retired, I have time to read books, watch documentary videos—both on DVD and YouTube—and attempt to understand what has always puzzled me.

My first interest was in the plagues of Egypt. Volcanologists tell us that the volcano Thera had blown its top in the late Seventeenth Century BCE and had created several tsunamis. They found evidence on Crete that suggest some of the waves may have reached 200 feet (61 meters) in height. That made me wonder if any of those waves could have made it all the way to Egypt to trigger the Biblical plagues. Egypt is only 480 miles (780 km) away from Thera, so it seems possible.

Thera is a large volcano in the middle of the Aegean Sea just north of the island of Crete. Its caldera rim makes up the circular island complex known as Santorini.

I originally planned on writing just about the plagues, but soon realized the story could not be complete without taking a look at the rest of the Israelite history—from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all the way to the Exile in Babylon. I also needed to include some background on the intensity of Thera’s eruption, who were the people living on Santorini at the time, and if there was a possible connection between the eruption and the fabled legend of Atlantis. One detail led to another and this book is the result.

I do not claim to have discovered the true history of the Israelites, I don’t think anyone can. I can only say the hypothesis I present here is plausible and may contain a few grains of truth.

D A Ford

October, 2021

Abbreviations Used in this Book

Introduction

I remember one time in grade school (possibly the sixth or seventh grade), we all played a game I will call the Pass It On game. Others may know it as the Telephone game. The game involves telling a story. The story must not be too short or too long and has to be a story that no one has ever heard before, at least not by the people participating. The game goes like this: Take a group of people, no more than a dozen or so, and have them form a semicircle. Be sure to explain the rules first so as not to interrupt the game.

You start the game by whispering the story to the first person on your left. That person in turn must pass on the story to the person on his left whispering it as well so no one else can hear. He also must try to tell it in his own words if possible and not use yours. That second person then passes the story on to the person on her left, again in whispers, and so on.

The last person to hear the story must repeat it out loud to the whole group. To complete the game, you now tell the original story again, this time out loud so everyone in the group can compare the two versions.

There were about fourteen kids in my class, so it didn’t take us very long to play. I don’t remember the story itself, but I do remember how astonished we all were that the story had changed so much. It seems some people are good at remembering the minutest of details while others have difficulty with names, dates, and other generalities. Still others seem to be fond of adding or changing bits and pieces just to make the story more exciting or dramatic.

For example, a story that might begin on a bright and sunny day could end up on a dark and stormy night. Fishes that get away have a tendency to grow in length with each retelling, and so on. I don’t know what this morphing process is called, but it seems to be universal.

But I do know the term etymologists use when individual words themselves change meaning. That term is semantic progression or semantic drift. Examples of this are awful which used to mean full of awe but now means terrible. And decimate which the ancient Romans used to describe the killing of one out of every ten people leaving nine now is used to mean the killing of up to nine people out of ten leaving one (reduce by one-tenth became reduce to one-tenth).

A third example is the word graduate. Originally, it was the schools that conducted the act of graduation upon the students: I was graduated from…. Nowadays, people (out of laziness?) drop the was and simply say I graduated from… which implies the student performed the act.

Conflation and Syncretism

Two processes that seem to occur quite often when stories are retold are conflation and syncretism. I once read that, in stories like Homer’s Iliad and Malory’s The Legends of King Arthur, some of the protagonists may have been real persons in history but that they actually did not exist at the times or places depicted in the stories. The storytellers simply took tales and legends of separate bygone heroes and events and wove them together into one long narrative.

They did that partly to create an entertaining epic poem and partly to preserve the memory of those long-dead heroes and events—heroes and events that would otherwise be lost and gone forever in the mists of time. The storytellers created fanciful histories, so to speak—myths built around kernels of truth.

But when we look at the first two books of the Bible, we see a different kind of narrative. There, the scribes—I won’t call them storytellers because that was not their intent—put in writing stories from their past, not to entertain but to enlighten. They wanted to record and preserve a past, a heritage. They wanted to lay out a history that says:

This is where we came from, this is who we are. This is what makes us not just a tribe or a group of tribes, but a nation separate from all others.

To do so, they needed to pull together pieces of stories, old memories, traces of rituals—whatever they could recall—and stitch them together into a history they thought was reasonably accurate and informative even if much of it was miraculous.

My goal in this book is to try to unravel that history and determine what might really have happened if we leave out the miraculous aspect. We must not forget that in those days people didn’t understand the forces of nature, so they were quick to blame destructive events like drought, floods, earthquakes, and even foreign invasions on capricious, vengeful, or punitive gods. I look primarily at the stories told in Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua because those are the ones that go the furthest back in time.

Ages, Numbers, and Anachronisms

Three common problems anyone encounters when reading the Old Testament are ages, numbers, and anachronisms. First, people could not possibly have lived as long as the OT claims. Rather than trying to justify them, I simply ignore the ages given (although I will use them in this book for illustration).

Second, the writers seem to have had a penchant for the numbers seven and forty. They are used everywhere from seven days to seven times around the city and from forty days and nights to forty years. I find the books much easier to take in if I substitute several for seven and many for forty. There is also the number twelve: twelve brothers and twelve tribes.

And third, the books were written down long after the fact—centuries to a millennium—causing the scribes to use words, ideas, and place-names that were concurrent with their own time and not the past. One example is the word Pharaoh. The scribes or later translators always used that word when referring to any king in Egypt.

That is unfortunate and also misleading because the Egyptians themselves never used that word until around 1300 BCE, about the time of Ramesses I.¹ Before then, all rulers were referred to simply as kings. Not only that, the title Pharaoh was given only to those who were kings of a unified Egypt, Upper and Lower together, and never to