Sinai

Abraham Was Not From Ur – in the south

Let’s fast forward about 1,000 years from Babel. After the tower was abandoned, it appears that a group of Sumerians traveled by sea around the Arabian peninsula, and then overland across the wadis extending west from the Red Sea to found the 1st dynasty of Egypt.

This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Early Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie noted a sharp difference between two groups of people buried at a large site near the village of Nakada in Upper (southern) Egypt. One group had been interred with very basic grave goods in simple pits covered with palm branches. The second group had been ritually dismembered, buried in pits lined with brick along with objects of value, such as lapis lazuli jewelry, and then covered with palm logs.

Petrie eventually theorized that the second group, which he dubbed the Falcon Tribe, had invaded and conquered the native inhabitants with superior technology, such as the pear-shaped mace found buried with some in the second group. Make no mistake, in the 4th millennium B.C., the pear-shaped mace was a weapon of mass destruction.

Other evidence, from artwork to architecture—for example, Egypt’s first pyramid, for the pharaoh Djoser, is clearly modeled on the Sumerian ziggurat—linked the so-called Dynastic Race with Mesopotamia. This theory was widely accepted until World War II. After Hitler, however, the Dynastic Race concept was a little too much like the Nazis’ ideas about genetics and bloodlines for comfort.

But then in 1995, Egyptologist David Rohl published his first book, A Test of Time. Rohl makes a strong case for the Dynastic Race theory, even documenting ancient graffiti in Egypt that appeared to show the Falcon Tribe carrying their boats overland from the Red Sea toward the Nile.

Now, is it a coincidence that the name of the first king of the first Egyptian dynasty, Narmer, is awfully close to that of Nimrod, the would-be emperor of Uruk? Scholars have to guess at vocalization in many cases. It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that the names Narmer and Enmerkar (or “Enmer the Hunter”) were the same.

Peter D. Goodgame explored this idea in greater depth in his book Second Coming of the Antichrist. I bring it up here only to suggest one possible explanation for the decline of Uruk as a regional power at just about the time of the Tower of Babel on the timeline of history. After the humiliation at Babel, Nimrod/Enmerkar may have decided to head for new lands and a fresh start. Since his father, Cush, was apparently the founder of Ethiopia, nearby Egypt, which had been settled by Cush’s brother, Mizraim, may have been a logical place to start over.

Think about that. Did Cush throw his brother and his brother’s family under the bus to give his son, Nimrod, a new start?

As the first dynasties in Egypt established themselves and began to build monuments that would surpass those left behind in Sumer, empires rose and fell between the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Akkad, under Sargon the Great, established a kingdom around 2350 B.C. that stretched from the Persian Gulf almost all the way to the Mediterranean, but it collapsed less than two hundred years later under the weight of invasions from the barbaric Guti, who swept onto the plains of Sumer from the Zagros Mountains in northwest Iran.

The Guti, who we don’t know much about because they didn’t write, controlled Mesopotamia for about fifty years. They were finally thrown out by Utu-hengal, a king of Uruk, which set off a struggle for dominance between the city-states of the region. Ur finally emerged supreme, and what scholars call the Third Dynasty of Ur gave the region its last native Sumerian kings for a brief period, until about 2000 B.C. Then Ur was sacked by its ancient rival, the Elamites, who occupied what is now the far west and southwest of Iran, the region along the east side of the Persian Gulf.

Into that power vacuum moved a group of Semitic-speaking people called the Amorites. Scholars think the Amorites originated in central Syria, around a mountain called Jebel Bishri, which is on the west side of the Euphrates between Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. However, scholars still debate that point more than a century after the first scholarly books were published about the Amorites.

Academics aren’t even sure the Amorites conquered the various existing Akkadian and Sumerian city-states. They may have been part of Mesopotamian culture all along and just somehow came out of the confusion around the turn of the millennium in control of the political machinery. What we do know is that around the beginning of the 20th century B.C., Amorite kingdoms emerged in what had formerly been Subartu (Assyria), Akkad, and Sumer, and, along with Amorite kingdoms in the Levant, they dominated the Fertile Crescent for the next four centuries.

That was the world of Abram of Ur. We’ll have more to say about the Amorites, but know this: Their influence on history is much greater than you’ve been told.

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Here’s another bit of inaccurate history we’ve been taught: Abram, later Abraham, didn’t come from the Ur in southeastern Iraq, the one that was in imminent danger of being torched by the Elamites. Although it seems to make sense that he might have been a refugee from the collapse of Ur, it’s far more likely that Abraham was born and raised in a part of the world that was close to the Amorite heartland, near the border between modern-day Syria and Turkey.

This was the belief of most scholars for many years until famed archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley made his spectacular discoveries at Ur in Iraq. That Ur, with its magnificent ziggurat and stunning “royal tombs,” seemed much more appropriate as the ancestral home of the patriarch of the world’s great monotheistic religions than some place in Turkey that hasn’t been found yet.

A recent discovery about some of the remains found by Woolley at Ur gives us a glimpse into the world of Abram. It also illustrates a tendency among scholars to view the ancient world through rose-colored glasses. Woolley and his team, who worked at Ur in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, found 1,850 burials dated to the second half of the third millennium B.C. Seventeen were so elaborate that Woolley, displaying a flair for marketing, dubbed them the Royal Tombs of Ur.

One tomb in particular is worth our attention. It was the tomb of a noblewoman by the name of Pu’abi, an Akkadian name that means “commander of the father.” She’s believed to have died around 2600 B.C. Pu’abi was buried wearing a fabulous golden headdress adorned with carnelian and lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli wasn’t easy to get back in the day; it was only found in Afghanistan and shipped to Sumer by way of Meluhha, a civilization on the west coast of India.

Among the other treasures buried with Pu’abi, Woolley found the famous Golden Lyre of Ur, one of a dozen stringed instruments in the tomb when it was opened in 1929. Sadly, the Golden Lyre of Ur is one of the priceless treasures of antiquity that was lost when the Baghdad Museum was looted in 2003. It was found in pieces in the museum’s car park.

To the point: Also buried with Pu’abi were fifty-two other people arranged in rows inside her tomb. These were apparently servants sent to the afterlife with her to ensure that Pu’abi had everything she needed for eternity.

How nice for her.

Now, Woolley, interpreting the scene with a romantic bias, decided that the servants had gone to their eternal rest willingly, drinking some toxic elixir and then peacefully lying down to await whatever came next. But in 2011, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used CT scanners to examine six skulls from different royal tombs. They reached a much darker conclusion.

Digital imaging technology and modern forensic science made it clear that the actual cause of death in all six cases was blunt force trauma. Instead of quietly drifting off to their eternal rest, the victims had been bashed in the back of the head with the business end of a battle-axe.

That dumped a large bucket of ice water onto Woolley’s vision of an idyllic death scene. Keep that in mind the next time you get really aggravated at the sense of entitlement displayed by politicians, pop divas, and first-round draft choices. At least when they die, they don’t take dozens of people with them.

Well, because of Woolley’s truly incredible discoveries, Jews and Christians revised the standard map of Abraham’s journeys to show a long trek from southeast Iraq to southeast Turkey, and then on to Canaan.

Harran

Prior to Woolley, scholars assumed that Abraham’s Ur was somewhere near Harran, about ten miles inside Turkey along the Balikh River, a tributary of the Euphrates that joins the great river at the Syrian city of Raqqa. Harran was a merchant outpost in Abraham’s day, and it was perfectly situated for it. It sat on a trade route from the Mediterranean to Sumer, linking the cities of Antioch and Carcemish with Nineveh, Babylon, and beyond.

This is consistent with what we know of Abram’s livelihood, who seems less like a shepherd and more like a traveling merchant who conducted business with men at the highest levels of government, as evidenced by his interactions with local kings in Canaan and the pharaoh in Egypt.

Harran is also the name of one of Abraham’s brothers. It’s probable that his brother was named for the city and not the other way around, since the city first appears among records recovered from the ancient city of Ebla dated to about 2300 B.C., some 300 years before Abraham.

The great scholar of Near Eastern history and ancient languages Cyrus H. Gordon made a strong case for Abraham’s origins along the upper Euphrates rather than in the heart of Sumer. Gordon, writing in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1958,⁠1 highlighted a then-recently translated Akkadian tablet from the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit, a decree from mid 13th century B.C. by the powerful Hittite king Hattusili III to the king of Ugarit, Niqmepa. This decree regulated the activity of Hittite merchants operating in Ugarit, and identified the merchants in question as citizens of Ura, a city near Harran that specialized in tamkârûtum, or foreign trade.

Niqmepa had apparently complained to Hattusili about the traders from Ura. In response, Hattusili decreed that the merchants could conduct business in Ugarit only during the summer months (no great loss—that was the only time of the year when farmers had crops with which to pay); the merchants would have to return home to Ura in the winter; and they were barred from buying real estate in Ugarit.

Gordon then pointed out that the Genesis account indicates that while Abraham and his descendants were in Canaan at God’s call, they were also there for the express purpose of conducting trade

Genesis 34:8–10 ESV

But Hamor spoke with them, saying, “The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him to be his wife. Make marriages with us. Give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us, and the land shall be open to you. Dwell and trade in it, and get property in it.”

Gordon observed that men who traded abroad, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, apparently looked for opportunities to settle where they did business, but were generally barred from buying real estate in foreign lands.

So there are enough similarities between the lifestyles of the patriarchs and the merchants of Ura, not to mention Ura’s proximity to Harran, to make the identification of Ura as Abraham’s Ur a strong possibility. Gordon went on in the article to demonstrate the linguistic possibility that the final vowel in Ura was dropped in the transition from Aramaic to Hebrew.

Logistically, Harran was way too far north and east for Abraham’s father Terah to have made it a stop on the way to Canaan if he’d been traveling from Ur in Sumer. There were much shorter routes between Sumer and Canaan—for example, a trade route used by Amorites that linked Mari on the Euphrates to Damascus via Tadmor (Palmyra).

In other words, Mesopotamians in the 21st century B.C. would have mocked anyone from Sumerian Ur who tried to get to Canaan by way of Harran. Ending up at Harran would have required missing one turn completely and then taking another in the wrong direction, away from Canaan. Put it this way: Traveling to Canaan from Ur by way of Harran is like driving from Nashville to Kansas City by way of Minneapolis.

Travel from Ur to Canaan by way of Haran? Not likely.

Finally, Woolley’s Ur was on the wrong side of the Euphrates

Joshua 24:2–3 ESV

And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac.

Ur in Sumer was not beyond the Euphrates. It sat on the west bank of the river. But Ura, in modern-day Turkey, was, in fact, “beyond the River.”

“But what about those Chaldeans?” you ask. “Weren’t they around Babylon?”

Glad you asked.

The Chaldeans were a Semitic tribe, possibly descendants of the Amorites, who founded the Neo-Babylonian empire in the first millennium B.C. That’s the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, not the Babylon of Hammurabi, who lived about 1,200 years earlier.

But the Greek historian Xenophon, who wrote in the 4th century B.C., referred to another group of Chaldeans. They were a warlike people who were neighbors of the Armenians. They lived north of Ura and Harran, between Mesopotamia and modern Armenia. In another book, Xenophon linked the Chaldeans to the Carduchians, who were probably the ancestors of the modern Kurds. The Kurds today occupy territory along the borders between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, an area that includes the places we’re looking at, Harran and Ura.

Gordon also noted that greater Armenia, which was called Urartu from the time of David until the rise of the Neo-Babylonian empire, was in its earliest days known as Ḫaldi (the “ḫ” sounds like “k,” so it’s KALL-dee). In fact, the chief god of the Urartians was named Ḫaldi, father of the Urartian storm-god Teisheba (who was equated with Ba`al-Hadad).

So Ur of the Chaldees was probably Ura of the Ḫaldis. Abraham came from a border region located between the Hittites, the Hurrians, Semitic kingdoms such as Ebla and Mari, Amorite territory, and the Subartans (Assyrians), not the heart of Sumer as we’ve been taught. Understanding Abraham’s origins helps understand the early history of Israel.

Why? Yahweh needed to give the future Israel time to develop its own identity. That wasn’t likely to happen with His people surrounded by the temptations of decadent urban life. Witness what happened to Abraham’s nephew, Lot, when he settled in Sodom.

Further, there is a cryptic comment God made to Abraham that relates to the spiritual history of the world down to the present day.

Genesis 15:7–16 ESV

And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

Iniquity of the Amorites? Wait—what?

God’s of Egyptians - weren’t

By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier to the pharaoh were long gone. The Hebrews had grown from an extended family of about six dozen to a couple million, but they were suffering under the rule of a nation that no longer valued their presence except as forced labor.

So Yahweh set the next phase of His plan in motion. After guiding the life of Moses from infancy to adulthood (you don’t think he survived that trip in the reed boat by accident, do you?), Yahweh appeared to Moses in his exile and tasked him with bringing Israel out of Egypt. And the way God had him do it was a clear message to the gods of Egypt.

Moses’ first encounter with Yahweh was in Midian. That was at Horeb in the northern Sinai, later part of Edom (contrary to long tradition that puts the mountain in southern Sinai), the har elohim, or mountain of God. Get this: The burning bush incident was the first time since Eden that a human had come face to face with Yahweh on His holy mountain. There is no question that the bene elohim, the Fallen, the seventy rebel angels God allotted to the nations after Babel knew about this meeting. It was a very clear message from Yahweh to the rebels: I have reestablished my mount of assembly on the earth.

The time had finally come. God called Moses back to Egypt to bring His people, Israel, to the place He’d claimed as His own—Canaan.

Yahweh chose to convince pharaoh and the Egyptians to not only let Israel leave, but to encourage them to go. He did it by hardening pharaoh’s heart through a series of increasingly severe trials until the people of Egypt must have been begging pharaoh to let His people go.

There are several studies you can find online that draw links between the ten plagues Yahweh inflicted on Egypt and specific Egyptian gods. For example, the first plague turned the Nile River to blood. This is said to have been directed at Hapi, the god of the annual Nile flood. Plague number two, frogs, was aimed at Heqet, a fertility goddess worshipped since the early dynastic period—the time of Narmer and the first kings of Egypt, about 1,500 or 1,600 years before Moses.

Those match up well enough, but when we get to the third and fourth plagues, the connections are iffy at best. The plague of lice or gnats, depending on the translation you read, doesn’t match up well with any known Egyptian god. The plague of flies is paired by some with Khepri, a god of creation. But Khepri had a scarab beetle for a head, so that’s not a good match, either.

Some of the pastors and teachers who’ve published these studies are very intelligent people whom I respect. However, and with all due respect to those pastor-teachers, they’ve overlooked an even bigger supernatural conflict. Understanding that confrontation will show you why trying to link the ten plagues to specific Egyptian gods is looking in the wrong direction. More accurately, it’s looking at entirely the wrong pantheon.

Yes, Yahweh demonstrated with the ten plagues that His power was superior to that of the gods the Egyptians trusted to keep the Nile flowing and the crops growing. And we know for a fact that Yahweh put a hurt on the gods of Egypt the night He took the lives of Egypt’s first-born.

How do we know? He told Moses.

Exodus 12:12 ESV

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord.

How likely is it that Yahweh told Moses that He was about to punish imaginary beings represented by idols of wood and stone? What would be the point? How would that establish His power and glory?

No, something happened in the spirit realm on the night of the Passover. When Yahweh passed through the land of Egypt, taking the lives of firstborn humans and animals, He simultaneously carried out His sentence on the bene elohim, the entities who had rebelled and made themselves gods in Egypt.

Here’s a fascinating detail we never hear about in church: It appears there was a very old tradition in Egypt, an ancient myth dating back centuries before the Exodus, that a day was coming when the first-born of Egypt would die. The pyramids of the 5th Dynasty king Unas, c. 2350 B.C., and the 6th Dynasty king Teti, c. 2320 B.C., are inscribed with this line from a well-known inscription called the “Cannibal Hymn

It is the king who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on this day of the slaying of the first-born

Similar phrases are found on other coffins from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, including a variant that reads “this night of the slaying of the first-born.” Some scholars believe the context of the Coffin Texts and the Cannibal Hymn points to the first-born belonging to the gods, although that’s not a view shared by all Egyptologists.

What does it mean? Scholars aren’t sure. But it seems that by the time of the Exodus, there was a very old tradition in Egypt of a future nightmare event when the first-born would be killed.

Consider this possibility: Maybe the Coffin Texts and the “Cannibal Hymn” were an ancient warning to Egypt of that coming day of judgment. And forty years earlier on Mount Sinai, Yahweh revealed to Moses that He was Him-whose-name-is-hidden, I AM WHO I AM—the One who would someday fulfill the prophecy of the slaying of the first-born.

That’s speculation, of course, but fascinating. And we’re not at the best part yet.

Scholars today, 3,500 years later, still argue about where the Red Sea crossing occurred. We won’t get into it here. If it hasn’t been settled by now, we’re not going to put the question to bed in a couple of paragraphs. Besides, that’s not important right now. What matters is what Yahweh told Moses to do next.

Exodus 14:1–2 ESV

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.

Okay, this begs some questions: Why did God tell Moses to turn back? Why did He command Moses to camp facing Baal-zephon? What is Baal-zephon? And mostly, what was Ba`al doing in Egypt?

You know Ba`al was the Canaanite storm-god and the king of their pantheon. He’s mentioned in the Bible from the Book of Exodus through the gospels. Ba`al, which is properly pronounced bah-awl with a glottal stop like, “Uh-oh,” was the main thorn in the side of the Israelites, especially those who were faithful to Yahweh, for the next 1,500 years, all the way down to the time of Jesus.

But during the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt, roughly 1750 to 1550 B.C. (give or take a hundred years), foreigners from Canaan called the Hyksos ruled northern Egypt. Their capital was at a city called Avaris in the Nile delta, and they worshipped the gods of the Canaanite pantheon, headed by Ba`al.

That’s why the well-intentioned efforts to identify Egyptian gods as targets for the plagues are looking at the wrong pantheon. During most of the time the Israelites were in Egypt, from about 1665 B.C. to 1450 B.C., the country was divided. Native Egyptian rulers only controlled the southern part of the country, which, oddly enough (to us Americans), was called Upper Egypt. Their capital was at Thebes. Lower (northern) Egypt was under Hyksos control, and their gods were the ones worshipped by the Semitic inhabitants of the Levant and Mesopotamia

We don’t know whether the Hyksos were still around at the time of the Exodus. At some point, probably while the Israelites were still living in Goshen in the Nile Delta, an Egyptian king decided he’d had enough and brought an army north to drive the Hyksos out of the land. The revolution began under Seqenenre Tao, whose badly battered mummy shows that he probably lost his last battle against the Hyksos. His sons, Kamose and Ahmose, carried on the fight, with Ahmose finally driving out the hated Asiatics after a war that appears to have lasted for at least twenty years.

You’ve noticed the similarity between the names of Seqenenre’s sons and Moses. Yes, Moses is an Egyptian name.

It appears the Hyksos left Avaris under a negotiated truce, but Ahmose apparently changed his mind about the deal. He chased the Hyksos toward Canaan, catching up with them at a Hyksos stronghold called Sharuhen, a town either in the Negev Desert, south of Israel, or near Gaza (Joshua 19:6 puts it in the territory of the tribe of Simeon). After a three-year siege, Ahmose took the town and razed it, ending Canaanite political influence in Egypt once and for all.

As best we can tell, it appears the principalities and powers who influenced the Hyksos brought them to Egypt at precisely the time of the Israelites’ sojourn, and everything else that happened, including the war for Egyptian independence, was part of a bigger plan: Genocide, something the house of Israel has survived many times now.

Consider: Just as Joseph was kidnapped by traders and carried off to Egypt, laying the groundwork for his family to follow and grow into a nation, a group of Jacob’s Semitic-speaking, Ba`al-worshiping neighbors also arrived in Egypt and took over the government from the natives.

Coincidence?

No. Analyzing history through a biblical lens, the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt was apparently a plan by the Fallen to bring a specific group to power in the land where Yahweh had led the Israelites. The purpose was to destroy the people that God had chosen for Himself.

Regardless of how it started, the long war between the native Egyptians in the south and the foreign Hyksos in the north could explain why the Israelites fell out of favor. If power changed hands from Semitic overlords to native Egyptian kings, the Semitic-speaking Hebrews would have been seen as potential enemy collaborators. The narrative in Exodus fits the political situation of the mid-15th century B.C.

Exodus 1:8–10 ESV

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”

The dates are uncertain and scholars disagree over which Egyptian king was the pharaoh of the Exodus, although it’s pretty much agreed that it wasn’t Ramesses II, better known as Ramesses the Great—or Yul Brynner, if you’re old enough to remember the movie. Ramesses lived and ruled about two hundred years later, between 1279 B.C. and 1213 B.C.

It may seem counterproductive for Ba`al to lead the Hyksos into Egypt, set them up as kings, and then allow them to be run off again by native Egyptians within a hundred years or so. But the Egyptians’ hatred of the Israelites was a byproduct of the Hyksos intervention. Besides, despite what you’ve seen in movies over the years, the worship of Ba`al and other Semitic gods continued in northern Egypt long after the Hyksos were driven out.

During the reign of the Hyksos, Ba`al was identified with the god Set, the Egyptian god of storms, chaos, the desert and foreigners—a good fit with Ba`al, apparently. The Hyksos adopted Set and blended the two into a single entity.

Today, we think of Set, sometimes called Seth or Sutekh, as an evil god who cut up his brother Osiris into fourteen pieces. He was usually depicted as a bizarre character with a human body and an anteater-like head. But as we’ve mentioned, Set wasn’t always a villain. In the time of the Hyksos and for a few centuries after, Set helped the sun god, Ra, by defeating the evil serpent Apep/Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, which tried to eat Ra’s solar boat every night as it disappeared over the horizon. In this tale, Set’s nightly victory over Apep echoed the Semitic myth in which Ba`al vanquished the chaos god of the sea, Yam, and his sea-dragon servant, Lotan.

Points to you if you noticed the similarity between the name Lotan and the Bible’s Leviathan. It’s a classic deception by the Fallen, claiming the deeds of Yahweh as their own.

When Apep delayed Ra’s boat, there were storms; when he ate it, there was an eclipse. But Apep’s victories were always temporary, and every evening Set was back on the front of the boat to spear the serpent.

Later in Egyptian history, though, after being conquered by the Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians one after another between 800 B.C. and 525 B.C., the god of foreigners was no longer welcome around the pyramids. That’s why later Egyptians considered Set evil.

The worship of Ba`al-Set continued in northern Egypt for at least four hundred years, long after the Hyksos were run out of the country. In fact, the pharaohs of the Ramesside dynasty, who were the first Egyptian kings to be called pharaoh (which means the term wasn’t used in the days of Joseph or Moses), were worshipers of Ba`al-Set. The father of Ramesses the Great was named Seti I—literally, “man of Set.” Several other kings of the Ramesside period, including Seti II and Setnakht (“Set is strong”), were also named for the god.

There is some speculation that because Ramesses the Great was a redhead (true!), his family may have been descendants of the Hyksos invaders. Whatever the reason, Ramesses II set up a stela at Pi-ramesses, near the site of the old Hyksos capital Avaris, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Set doing… something. Scholars aren’t sure of what, exactly. The unimaginatively-named Year 400 Stela portrays Seti I presenting wine to Set, who’s depicted like the images of Ba`al found in the Levant, with a human head instead of the more familiar anteater-head from later Egyptian history.

The Year 400 Stela features Seti I (right), father of Ramesses the Great, and the god Set (left), who was identified with Ba`al in Egypt for most of the 2nd millennium B.C.

Since the stela points back four hundred years to about 1650 B.C., it could mark the arrival of Ba`al-Set in the Nile Delta. Counting back 215 years from the Exodus date of 1450 B.C., this is just about the time Jacob and the family arrived in Egypt.

Again, we ask: Coincidence?

When Yahweh led the Israelites out of Egypt, He ordered them to turn around and camp on the shore of the Red Sea facing something called Baal-zephon all night. Why? Specifically so they’d cross the Red Sea right in front of it.

Here’s the funny part: As worshipers of the desert-god Set, the Egyptian army probably thought they had the Israelites right where they wanted them

Exodus 14:3 LEB

And Pharaoh will say of the Israelites, ‘They are wandering around in the land. The desert has closed in on them.’

Caught in front of Baal-zephon between areas controlled by their god, Ba`al-Set, master of the sea and god of the desert—the Egyptians must have figured the Israelites were hopelessly trapped!

Which brings us back to our earlier question: What was Baal-zephon, and why was it so important? Why did God tell Moses to turn around so this confrontation happened right there?

Here’s why: The name of Ba`al’s holy mountain, which is more than five hundred miles north of the Nile delta, was Mount Zaphon.

Hmm. Zephon, Zaphon. Same name, different transliteration into English. Coincidence?

No! The Red Sea crossing was a supernatural smackdown! Ba`al was the god of storms, the god who vanquished the primordial chaos god of the sea, Yam. Because of this, Ba`al was the god of maritime navigation and the patron god of sailors.

So Yahweh didn’t just deliver the Israelites “out of the hand of pharaoh,” He delivered them out of the hand of Ba`al. And to make sure nobody misunderstood the message, He did it in front of a site dedicated to Ba`al, and by mastering the sea—Ba`al’s domain.

This was a called shot! Just like Babe Ruth at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series, the confrontation at the Red Sea was engineered by Yahweh to serve notice to the Fallen: My people are freed from their bondage and now we are coming for you.

That was the reason for the crossing. Yahweh used it to demonstrate His power, yes, but for a specific purpose—to make it crystal clear to the Israelites that I AM was unparalleled, unchallenged, and sovereign. It was a demonstration of His authority over the divine entities who’d chosen to abuse the responsibilities He’d given them after Babel. And it was a clear message to the gods that the days of their rebellion were numbered.