maybe this time we'll talk about the subject
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,2313.msg14203.html#msg14203
" One thing that this little episode does tell us is that the "real story of the Exodus" occurred around the Amarna age."
Duane,
My previous reply was directly to your quote about the "real story of the Exodus", yet your thread was originally specifically about the documents alleged to have been looted, only to be digressed upon in the discussion as related to the Exodus by LKJ at cassiopaea. Yet you did not inform us that your interest was the Amarna based Exodus and the Hyksos.
As such it appears that Jerry's comment to Loren about the knife was related to Tut's knife that Loren brought up -- which seemed remotely on the topic via the tomb contents.
But now we are all redirected to the Exodus.
I read most of the cassiopaea link that you provided and it appears, as usual that Laura has a lot of greet information and insights. However, in this case, I have to take issue with her notion of the Hyksos developing an
organic reactionary propaganda internally, that became the basis of the Jewish religion. Instead, I claim that the Sabbah brothers analysis trumps such claims, on a number of levels which I am attempted to lay out in my other thread. Instead, they claim, and as fitting with Jerry's and my schema of the False (contrived) Dialectic, that the 18th Dynasty kings were playing both sides of the fence. The Egyptians had no hesitations about marching to and fro through Canaan, leaving plenty of their artifacts lying about there, recording such on their temple and tomb walls, etc. And as the Sabbah brothers assert, they would never have allowed former slaves to escape only to set up house next door to them. Especially if the slaves had made off with all the Egyptian goodies.
And then we are told that the Jews hated such as the Egyptians so much that they later provide us with Freemasonry, chock full of Egyptian symbolism.
The Sabbah brothers agree that that the Abraham and Sarah narrative belong within the Amarna period, as well as Adam and Eve for that matter. In this regard, I can see that this alludes to the curiously odd foreign marriage into the Egyptian linage via the Mitanni. However, the ruling class of the Mitanni were Indo-Aryan, and not Semitic. This Identity confusion is also what we have been introducing in our series and the forum.
A second area that I disagree with, at a fundamental level, is her otherwise great, and related, info on Abrahmic religious fundamentalism. Again, I say the source and impetus for such as the latter day apocalyptic movements stems from a higher level, of which she seems to be insulating the Roman Church (and thus its sponsors from responsibility by several layers of plausible deniability) by various superficially independant operators.
Reviewing Freud's 'Moses and Monotheism', Assmann agrees that the monotheisms of Akhenaten and Moses were similar in their intolerance of polytheism, and their iconoclasm. However, he disagrees with Freud's claims of other similarities (p. 64):
... in the Amarna religion there is hardly any magic and very little ritual, whereas in the Mosaic religion there is a plethora of rites. The stress on ethics in the Mosaic religion is obvious, but in Amarna, the ethical aspect of God is absent in the most striking manner. In Amarna, the traditional concept of a hereafter is discarded, replaced by a new one according to which the human person lives on in the form of his ba, leaving the tomb during the day and entering it at night. Above all, however, Akhenaten’s god is the sun and nothing but the sun, whereas the god of Moses is the liberator from Egyptian bondage, an actor in history. In fact, the two religions are worlds apart.
Is Assmann being disagreeable for the sake of disagreement here?
Yes, I think Assmann is being specious here. There are many centuries of various political influences that would likely affect Judaic theology heavily.