Here’s part of a review of the book. Elsewhere it says that
Mr. Greenberg, a lawyer, ran for governor of NY
in 1978 on the libertarian ticket. Apparently he has
been dismissed as a ‘crackpot’ in the New York Times
Book Review on account of his earlier book,
The Moses Mystery. On the other hand he went to
Brooklyn College, my alma mater. People
like that don’t make mistakes! Sounds like
an interesting book.
New York Press (12/27/00, Vol. 13, No. 52)
The Egyptian Bible
by John Strasbaugh
In his day job, Gary Greenberg is a senior trial lawyer for the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society here in the city. He sometimes appears as a commentator on Court TV.
But it’s his avocation that brings him to our attention. Some guys race birds, some guys build model trains, some guys coach championship Little League baseball teams.
Greenberg is an avocational biblical scholar. And a controversial one.
In his 1997 The Moses Mystery: The African Origins of the Jewish People (reprinted in paperback as The Bible Myth), Greenberg argued that there was no archaeological or documentary evidence for most of the stories the Old Testament tells about the origins of the Jews-no Abraham living in “Ur of the Chaldees,” no 400 years of enslavement in Egypt, no Exodus and wandering 40 years in the desert. Instead, he believes the Hebrews originally were Egyptians, devotees of Akhenaten’s monotheism-Moses was his high priest-who had to flee after Akhenaten died and Horemheb violently rejected the new religion.
These were not brand-new notions. Egyptian roots for the biblical Hebrews were theorized back in the 19th century. Afrocentric spins on the origins of Western Civ were a nickel a bushel in the 1990s. And archaeologists have long pointed out that there’s no physical record of many cities and places named in the Bible, while existing remains often conflict with biblical dating schemes. (Last year, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog stirred up a maelstrom of denunciation in Israel arguing this last point in the tony Ha’aretz. The problem in Israel with this kind of talk is that if the Bible is bunk, then the legitimacy of the state’s claim on the lands it occupies is diminished.)
Familiarity did not stop Greenberg’s critics. A brief yet haughty pan in The New York Times effectively wrote him off as a crackpot. The reviewer “went ballistic,” Greenberg grins today. Academic Egyptologists and biblical scholars, who get tetchy when outsiders blur the distinctions between their two discrete fields, weren’t pleased with him either.
Undaunted, Greenberg argues in his new book, 101 Myths of the Bible (Sourcebooks, 319 pages, $24.95), that the Hebrews’ Egyptian roots left numerous literary traces in the Old Testament, in the form of ancient Egyptian myths variously disguised, warped by 1000 years of handling, or ineptly edited by the Bible’s redactors. The result, he says, is that much of what you read in the Old Testament (“I’m not into the New Testament,” he says) is bull, from the two different versions of Creation in Genesis to the fictional Patriarchs to nonexistent places like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Greenberg comes to his study of mythology and folklore the old-fashioned American way: DIY.
“I’ve always been interested in the intersections between myth and history,” he says. “There’s a lot of myth that contains history. There’s a lot of history that’s mostly myth. I started as a kid-my father gave me the Greek myths, and I sorta got it, but it was just reading the stories. As I got older I started reading other stuff. I was starting to do some independent study, and it resulted in looking at some early parts of the Bible. I wanted to look at the Flood myth.”
So he took some classes?
“No, I was a math major. Brooklyn College… Got interested in these subjects and started drafting manuscripts in these subjects. I did a little networking, started going to academic conferences.”
Greenberg is the current president of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York, a group that meets at the Taipei Noodle House on 2nd Ave. near 52nd St. roughly monthly to hear lectures like “Egypt in the Late Period: Gold Treasures from Tanis” and “An Amorite Caravan in Egypt: An Evaluation.” Would that I had the time.
