Living in de Nile

I may have told you wrong about Armageddon, maybe it is the good guys versus the bad guys, but I don't think the good guys win it on their own, Jesus has to come bail them out. Another rainy day research project.

I spent last weekend looking up those elusive Israelites. It seems that the consensus of modern historians rejecting the Exodus story is by no means unanimous. Over the years, numerous theories have been advanced about what might have really happened. Maybe the Egyptians were in Canaan, or maybe the Israelites were in Egypt, but there seems to have been some kind of confrontation between them, and the Israelites prevailed. One story says that the people the Egyptians called "Hyksos" might have actually been the Israelites. This version says that the Egyptians drove the Hyksos out after they tried to take over the neighborhood. Another story says that Moses might have actually been a renegade Egyptian pharaoh who usurped the crown and was subsequently overthrown.

It is generally assumed that the Egyptians kept better records than the Israelites. We certainly have more documentation of Egyptian history, but more is not necessarily better. The Egyptians were notorious for deleting embarrassing chapters from their history books, which is impressive when you consider that a lot of Egyptian history was literally carved in stone. Instead of just selecting a passage and hitting the delete button, they had to go to work with a hammer and chisel. I first heard about this while visiting the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago. This was a traveling exhibit, and we happened to be in town visiting my parents, so we went to see it. My daughter was a pre-teen at the time, so it must have been around 1980.

When they first discovered King Tut's tomb, they had trouble putting him in historical perspective because all references to his father had been chiseled from the records. Eventually they found a wall that the chiselers had overlooked and determined that Tut's father was probably Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akenaten, or something like that, when  he got religion. Akenaten tried to persuade the Egyptians to dump all their traditional gods in favor of Aten, the Sun God. I had previously heard of this guy in Fred Sears' history class, but I didn't know that he was Tut's old man until the tour guide at the museum told us. It seems that Akenaten stirred up quite a ruckus with his vain attempt to convert his people to monotheism. After he died, somebody must have decided that Egypt would have been  better off if this guy had never been pharaoh, so they just pretended that he never was. Tut's full name originally was Tutakaten, but his handlers changed it to Tutakamen, replacing the reference to Aten with a reference to a more acceptable deity. (Our spell check program doesn't like my spelling of these names. I tried a few alternate spellings, but it didn't like those either. That's what happens when you try to translate a heathen language that doesn't have a proper alphabet.)

The Apostles' Creed is an abbreviated version of the Nicene Creed, so named because it was written by the Council of Nice back in the three digit years. Both creeds were in our Methodist Hymnal, but we almost always used the Apostles' Creed. As I remember it, the Nicene Creed is longer and has even more weird stuff in it than the Apostles' Creed.

"Three's a crowd" is just one of those old sayings that doesn't mean much. I think what makes a crowd is not so much how many people, but how close they are packed together.