Tuesday 4 February 2014

Genesis: Financial Control

by Seymour Light


Chapter 47 of Genesis begins the story of the 'Hebrews' entering Egypt, and let's start with Douglas Reed's perceptive comment written back in the 1950s as to why a story that never happened should have been composed:
The theme of mass-captivity, ending in a Jehovan vengeance (“all the firstborn of Egypt”), appears when this version of history reaches the Egyptian phase, leading up to the mass-exodus and mass-conquest of the promised land. This episode was necessary if the Judahites were to be organized as a permanent disruptive force among nations and for that reason, evidently, was invented; the Judaist scholars agree that nothing resembling the narrative in Exodus actually occurred....
Historically, therefore, the Egyptian captivity, the slaying of “all the firstborn of Egypt ,” the exodus toward and conquest of the promised land are myths. The story was invented, but the lesson, of vengeance on the heathen, was implanted in men's minds and the deep effect continues into our time.
It was evidently invented to turn the Judahites away from the earlier tradition of the God who, from the burning bush, laid down a simple law of moral behaviour and neighbourliness; by the insertion of imaginary, allegorical incident, presented as historical truth, this tradition was converted into its opposite and the “Law” of exclusion, hatred and vengeance established. With this as their religion and inheritance, attested by the historical narrative appended to it, a little band of human beings were sent on their way into the future.
That's from Chapter 1 of Reed's sombre masterpiece The controversy of Zion which gives I suggest the most centrally-relevant account of what the last 25 centuries of history have been about. He could not publish it in his lifetime, and maybe only now are we capable of absorbing its message.

The first book of the Bible, that of Genesis, gives the essential blueprint of how to manipulate and take financial control of a host nation. Maybe Christians should take a bit more notice of this!

The Hebrews (in Storyland) enter Egypt
The story is clearly fictional, as Reed pointed out, so why was it constructed? It starts with an amiably clueless Pharoah letting Joseph and his brothers in, giving them the best land. Heh, heh, little did he know:
Then Joseph settled his father and his brothers, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded. And Joseph provided his father, his brothers, and all his father's household with food, according to the number of their dependents. 
So Joseph and his family are rescued from starvation and given some of the best land, by the kind generosity of the Pharaoh. Next thing we know - as if Joseph had a copy of the Protocols of Zion in his back pocket - he's in charge of the nation's finances!
And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, for the grain which they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house. And when the money was all spent in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph, and said, "Give us food; why should we die before your eyes? For our money is gone." And Joseph answered, "Give your cattle, and I will give you food in exchange for your cattle, if your money is gone." So they brought their cattle to Joseph; and Joseph gave them food in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the herds, and the asses: and he supplied them with food in exchange for all their cattle that year. And when that year was ended, they came to him the following year, and said to him, "We will not hide from my lord that our money is all spent; and the herds of cattle are my lord's; there is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our lands.(47:14-19)
The Egyptians have become in debt to Joseph, and he has life-and-death control over who gets the money! They give him their real assets - horses, herds of cattle, asses, in return for the money he has made! The transactions mean that they have sold all their herds of cattle to Joseph - and are still hungry!

Where will it end? This edifying tale ends with the enslavement by debt of the entire populace:
Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be slaves to Pharaoh; and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, and that the land may not be desolate." So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for all the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them. The land became Pharaoh's.
They are begging the interloper, Joseph, to let them have their seed to sow upon their own land - what a clever wheeze.

Fictional Camels

There are 21 references to camels in the first books of the Bible, and now we know they are all made up.
Some of them are quite startlingly verisimilitudinous, such as the story of Abraham's servant finding a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24: "Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master's camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water."
But these camels are made up, all 10 of them. Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.
None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place


Anti-morality tales: 
1.Lot and his Daughters

A crowd from Sodom approaches Lot, who has two 'angels' staying with him. The crowd wish to 'know' the angels, and Lot replies: 
Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like. (Gen 19:8)
Lot offers his virgin daughters to be gang-raped by a bunch of strangers.

There is very similar sadistic cruelty here (Richard Dawkins found) to the story in
Judges (19:23-4).

There's a nauseous sequel to this story, where the 80 year-old Lot gets blind drunk so that he cannot recognise his own daughters, yet he can maintain a hard-on, and his two daughters thereby manage to get themselves impregnated. This is (to remind you) the commencement of the great race especially chosen God. Ther sole merit of this story is the comment by Richard Dawkins about why 'this dysfunctional family' should be one especially chosen by God.


2.Abraham pimps out his wife


Entering Egypt, Abraham decided that his wife Sarah was good-looking, so he'd offer her to the pharaoh as a wife. Abraham is rewarded with sheep, oxen, he-asses, menservants, maidservants, she-asses, and camels (Genesis 12:16). God naturally decides tro punish ... the Pharaoh: "LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sar'ai, Abram's wife." As Richard Dawkins asked, why should the innocent, deceived party namely the pharaoh be the one who gets punished? Abraham emerged from Egypt loaded up with silver and gold ... clearly with Yahweh's approval.
 
This clever wheeze is then repeated with another king (Genesis, 20): He offers his wife Sarah to Abimelech king of Gerar, saying she is just his sister -  'But God came to Abimelech in a dream of the night, and said to him, "Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is married." (20:3). He quickly gives her back to Abraham, and again, Abram ends up receiving "sheep and oxen, and male and female slaves" plus a thousand pieces of silver! Plus, "And Abim'elech said, "Behold, my land is before you; dwell where it pleases you." These are all Hebrew-supremacist stories, where Yahweh gets to push everyone around

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1 comment:

  1. Marvelous analysis. All the nations of the Western world are descended from criminals, which is why the world is in the bind it's in. Whether Christian, Muslim or Jew, all are running on fabricated fiction justifying robbery and murder, forcing gullible people to believe fraud, extortion and mass murder are sacred rituals, and butchering those who don't go along with scam with the wholehearted approval of The Lord. Peace will never come to Earth until this twisted homicidal mania is made to go away forever.

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