Links to the first and second parts of this article.
Every year, at the night of the fourteenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan, Jews all around the world, celebrate the night of the passover. Normally, the celebration is done in a family gathering. It is based on reading the Haggadah, a text with somewhat obscured sources that walks the gatherers through the ceremonial celebration. In the heart of the Haggadah, there are four questions, asked by the youngest among participants, who is wondering, why is this night different from other nights? Why are we all gathered together? Why do we eat special food? And then the other participants, reading parts of the text in turns, virtually answer these questions by telling the story of the exodus of the children of Israel.
I’m sure you all know how this story goes. The children of Israel were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, and then came along Moses, a son of the tribe of Levi, who grew up in the palace of Pharaoh, and as he became an adult, escaped to the desert after he killed an Egyptian guard, and while he was in the desert, the god of the Hebrews talked to him and sent him to take the children of Israel out of Egypt.
So the text of the Haggadah, tells this story, including how the Egyptians were hit by 10 plagues, and how when the Egyptian army chased the sons of Israel, the sea was parted and the sons of Israel escaped into the Sinai desert while the Egyptian army drowned as the sea closed back in them. Only that the Haggadah is telling this story without mentioning Moses at all. Quite the contrary, it emphasizes that it was God himself that took the children of Israel out of Egypt, without the aid of any angels or human messengers.
That is very odd, don’t you think? It’s like George Washington was omitted from the story of the American independence war. So why did the writers of the Haggadah expel Moses from the story in which he was the main character?
There are several explanations, given by Jewish scholars over the generations, to why was moses omitted from the Haggadah, but they all look exactly as what you would expect from explanations by the people who made the omission in the first place, and their theological descendants. So here is another possible explanation that is much more consistent with the findings of the historical research: Moses was from the tribe of Levi. His story belongs to the traditions of the tribe of Levi. But another part of this tradition is the Solar calendar that was used in the Temple in Jerusalem, and that the Jewish holidays, and firstly and foremostly the Passover are supposed to be observed by. But this calendar was abandoned in favor of lunar calendars. First the Seleucid calendar and then the Hebrew calendar that is based on the Assyrian/Babylonian calendar. So those who remained faithful to the traditions of the tribe of Levi, were probably claiming that the Passover was celebrated at the wrong date, and so was all the other Jewish holidays. Were the people who wanted to remain faithful to the solar calendar expelled from Judaism at a certain point?
In the fourth part of this article, I am going to tie it all together for you, and show you that the real story of Judaism, may be quite different than the way it is usually told.