Do Abraham and Moses Represent Different Origins of Israel?

Alice C. Linsley

There are two narratives running side by side in the Old Testament. The Deuteronomist Historian has a theological perspective and is a latter influence on the Biblical text. It reflects the pain, suffering and yearning of people who were in exile in Babylon. The yearning is for a strong Israel that has a common religion based in Zion. The Deuteronomist is not concerned with upholding pre-Abrahamic tradition concerning Messiah. There is very little in the writings attributed to the Deuteronomist Historian that speak of the Messianic hope of the incarnation of the son of God, of bodily resurrection, and an eternal kingdom.

This source is more "Jewish" then "Hebrew" and Jesus is the fulfillment of the Hebrew hope, which had little to do with the Jewish hope of a earthly kingdom with Zion as the center. This is why I say that Christianity is the only true Messianic faith. Judaism rejects Jesus as Messiah. The Quran denies that God has a son.

In Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible, the Swiss bible scholar, Konrad Schmid, argues that the Genesis ancestor narratives and the Moses story are competing myths of Israel's origin. This is not supported by analysis of the kinship patterns of both men. In fact, analysis of their kinship patterns reveals that Moses and Abraham have the identical marriage and ascendancy pattern and that is the pattern of the Horite Ha'biru (Hebrew). This should not surprise us since the Bible claims that Moses is a descendant of Abraham, and Abraham's people were Horite Hebrew.

Schmid notes that "Explicit literary connections between Genesis and Exodus appear only in Priestly texts or in texts that presuppose P." (From here.) This is an important observation because Abraham and Moses are both of the ruler-priest lines. These lines exclusively intermarried, so we should not be surprised that a comparison of their kinship patterns reveals that Abraham and Moses were both Horites.

Moses’ father was a Horite ruler-priest Amram. Am means of the people and Ram designates a ruler. Amram had two wives. Abraham’s father was Terah and he had two wives. By his cousin-wife Amram had a son and doubtless a daughter, probably Miriam. By his cousin-wife Terah had a son and a daughter. By his half-sister Amram had two sons: Aaron (which is Harun in Arabic, a Horite name) and Moses. By his half-sister wife, Abraham had a son Isaac and through Sarah’s surrogate Hagar, Abraham had another son, Ishmael. Amram’s youngest son was Moses and he was sent away or banished. Terah’s youngest son was Abraham and he too was sent away.

Moses had two older brothers: Aaron and Korah the Younger (Numbers 26:59). Korah opposed Moses' authority in the wilderness because he was the older brother and possibly Amram’s firstborn son. According to Numbers 26, Korah's claim to be the ruler-priest was supported by the Hanochites (descendants of Hanock, the first-born son of Jacob's first-born son, Reuben). As the first-born son of the cousin-bride Korah was to rule the territory of his maternal grandfather, Korah the Elder. He would not assume rule over Amram's territory. That would fall to Aaron, Moses' older brother. This is what Claude Lévi-Strauss discovered in his studies of tribal peoples. He noted that in a patrilineal system, mother and son do not belong to the same clan.

The ruler's first wife was the half-sister, as was Sarah to Abraham. The second wife, married before the ruler came to power, was a patrilineal cousin (as was Keturah to Abraham) or a patrilineal niece (as was Isaac's first wife, the daughter of Yisbak). This means that Moses married his first wife while he was still in Egypt, and this was probably a marriage contracted by Amram. She was a Kushite, a woman of the ruling class. Zipporah was Moses' second wife and his marriage to her strengthened his position as ruler by forming an alliance between the Kushites and their Midianite kinsmen.

With this information, we see that there is one continuous thread from Genesis 4 to Numbers, not competing accounts of Israel's origins. The continuity of the kinship pattern indicates that Moses and Abraham were of the same people. More exactly, they belonged to the same caste of ruler-priests whose unique kinship pattern I have identified as Horite. 


Related reading:  Abraham and Moses; Abraham's Two Concubines; The Cousin Bride's Naming Prerogative; Moses' Horite Family; Another Way to Read Scripture; Righteous Rulers and the Resurrection; The Genesis Record of Horite Rule