The Myth of Israel's Dual Origins

 

Alice C. Linsley

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 story of Moses present competing pictures of Israel's origin. One focuses on Abraham the Hebrew, and the other on Moses and the Exodus. Contrary to popular belief, neither Abraham nor Moses were Jews. Both were Hebrew.

Certainly, the historical contexts of the Hebrew rulers listed in Genesis 4, 5, 10, 11 and the Hebrew rulers of Moses's time were different. However, analysis of the kinship patterns of both the early Hebrew and Moses' family reveals that their marriage and ascendancy pattern is identical. It is a pattern typically found with castes.

The Hebrew were a ruler-priest caste that dispersed widely in the ancient world. Their kinship pattern remained the same throughout many generations and wherever they resided.

Schmid notes that “Explicit literary connections between Genesis and Exodus appear only in Priestly texts or in texts that presuppose P.” 

This is an important observation because both Abraham and Moses were Hebrew ruler-priests. The Hebrew clans practiced endogamy so to find a common kinship pattern for both men suggests continuity, rather than dual origins. I delve deeply into the characteristics of the Hebrew kinship pattern in my book The First Lords of the Earth: An Anthropological Study.

The ancestors of both men are to be found in the Nile Valley. That is where the earliest known site of Hebrew worship has been found dating to at least 2000 years before the time of Abraham.

 
 
Related reading:  The Hebrew Were a Caste: Hebrew at the Ancient Sun Cities; Horite and Sethite Mounds; The Hebrew Hierarchy of Sons; Royal Sons and Their Maternal Uncles; Judaism is Not the Faith of Abraham; BIBLICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Competition Between the Horites and the Sethites