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30 January 2023

FASCINATING Information About Mitzrayim – PART I

 The following is excerpted from Toras Avigdor by Rabbi Miller zt”l on Parshas Bo [Also included are links to items mentioned within]

Where’s Egypt?

When you begin learning Nach, in the beginning, in Sefer Yehoshua, you see

that the Bnei Yisroel were busy conquering Eretz Canaan. That’s a good part of the

first many chapters of Nach. Al pi Hashem, they were fighting against various kings

and tribes and taking over the land, town by town.

Now, if you think about it for a little bit there’s something quite surprising

about this period in our history. And that is that we don’t hear anything about

Mitzrayim. We’re reading the Sefer Yehoshua and the Sefer Shoftim and Shmuel

Aleph and Shmuel Bais, and we find no mention of Egypt. It’s as if it didn’t exist.

Other countries, other nations, yes. They had trouble with all nations around them;

Aram, Edom, Amon and Moav, the Plishtim. But Mitzrayim? Nothing.


One mention is made. When Shaul went to battle with Amalek, so it’s

mentioned derech agav that one of the Amaleki slaves was an Egyptian. That’s the

one mention – an Egyptian slave boy! It’s unusual. An Egyptian should be a slave?

Egyptians weren’t slaves. They were a master nation. And here’s an instance where

you find a Mitzri slave. But otherwise, besides for that passing story, we would

think that Egypt didn’t exist.


There’s Egypt!

Now, if you know anything about ancient history and especially about Ancient

Egypt, it’s a very big question. Everyone knows that Ancient Egypt was a powerful

country. Already when Avrohom Avinu came to Mitzrayim he found a rich

civilization, and it continued to grow and develop for a long time. And then when a

once-in-a-lifetime famine wreaked havoc on the whole Middle East, Egypt, by

means of its store of granaries, was the only country that remained standing. And

then on the backs of Jewish slaves, they grew greater and greater after that. They

were the breadbasket of the world, the superpower of those ancient days.

And the Egyptians were not such nice people that they kept to themselves;

they always wanted to have hegemony over all the nations around them. And so

how could it be that a little nation of Jews settled right next door to them and yet

for five hundred years there’s no mention of trouble? It’s very strange! Eretz Canaan

had always been the province of Egypt; it’s right next door! In their own backyard,

would the Egyptians allow somebody to conquer their provinces? The nation that

came in from the desert was living in villages and farms, spread out in the open

country, and they were easy prey for a country like Egypt. And yet we hear nothing.

You don’t hear a word out of Egypt. For a country like that to just disappear from

the scene?! It’s a remarkable fact of history.


But actually it’s only remarkable if you haven’t studied this week’s sedrah. You

remember how the Torah describes Pharaoh’s advisors begging him to reconsider

his decision to keep hold of the Bnei Yisroel: הֲטֶרֶםתֵּדַעכִּיאָבְדָהמִצְרָיִם– “Don’t you see

that Mitzrayim is lost already?!” (Shemos 10:7)


Lost already!

And it wasn’t an exaggeration. Mitzrayim was laid so low from the makkos that

it couldn’t even lift up its head; they couldn’t make a peep. Now, if they had been

able to, if they had been the great nation they were formerly, absolutely they would

have interfered constantly. The truth is, had they been anything they would have

intruded constantly in the history of our people.


History’s Hole

But אבָדְהָמצִרְָיםִ– they were destroyed. They were so destroyed that from the

time that the Bnei Yisroel went out of Egypt, that superpower is not heard from

again for hundreds of years! Everything went quiet. There is a five hundred year

gap when Egypt just vanished from history.

Now this gap is so queer, so unusual in the history of the world, that it became

one of the primary causes for a disruption, a big error, in the chronicles of world

history. Anyone who is familiar even a little bit with the studies of the history of

ancient nations knows that the secular historians are fond of making a fuss about a

discrepancy of about five hundred years that they’ve found between their

calculations and ours.

Now, the truth is, I don’t feel much of a need to reconcile their chronology

with ours because we are the ones who have an exact chronology according to

generations. We have enumerated in our Tanach every generation in sequence

from the beginning of time.


And Josephus, writing at the end of the second churban,

says that we have in writing all the generations of our priests from Aharon Hakohen

down to his time. Now, if you have our Torah chronology and also from Aharon

Hakohen down to the Churban Bayis Sheini, that means you have from 

Adam Harishon to Churban Bayis Sheini!


So we have pedigrees, clear-cut pedigrees, from the beginning of history. And

therefore it’s gratuitous, it’s entirely unnecessary, for us to bother our heads to

reconcile our chronology with theirs. Let them worry about reconciling their

records with ours because we are the ones who have an exact chronology according

to generations, every generation in sequence, from the beginning down to today.


Inventing History

People are so naïve, so weak-minded. They don’t realize what’s behind the

secular histories. The secular histories are riddled with errors. First of all, many of

the earlier historical works were rigged for the purpose of justifying the Gospels of

the New Testament, books which are full of falsehoods anyhow. Calculations and

chronologies were created and manipulated to promote a false narrative. And they

did quite a poor job at it. It’s a joke! The Christian books weren’t written by scholars.

Anybody who knows a little bit about their books can recognize the ignorance of

the early Christian writers and the untruths as they create generations out of thin

air.

And the Ancient Egyptian records are even more lacking. You have to

understand that the ancient Egyptian records are like a palimpsest. You know what

a palimpsest is? It’s an old scroll written on parchment, and then someone needed

some page to write on, so he erased part of the parchment and wrote something

on top of the old letters. So experts who want to discover what the original writing

was, they photograph the present writing, then they erase it carefully, and they try

to find underneath the furrows that were caused by the stylus of the original writer.

That’s a job for experts. It’s one kind of writing imposed on another kind of writing.

Now that’s what happened in the Egyptian chronology. 


When the makkos

devastated Egypt for a full year, so during that desolation almost all of the Egyptian

records were destroyed. And later when they began to rebuild and write again, it

was like writing on top of old records. And so when Herodotus, the ancient Greek

historian, began to copy his history from ancient Egyptian records, what did he do?

He took the two sets of records that were overlapping and he thought they were

consecutive. He pieced together the ancient Egyptian chronicles that were before

this period and after the period and he considered them one continuum because

he didn’t know there was a five hundred year gap in between when Egypt was

desolate.


Ages In Chaos

This subject is explained at length in the work “Ages in Chaos.” It’s a secular

Jewish writer and therefore I won’t give him the honor of mentioning his name and

I’m not recommending that you read it either, but that’s the place where it’s spoken

about most fully. He states there that there’s a very big mixup in the secular

chronology because all of the secular histories of antiquity are based on Egyptian

records, and that’s why they are hundreds of years out of line – because it was

something unfathomable, that the once proud powerhouse, the land of Ancient

Egypt, should be so utterly destroyed.


Now, our little cheder boys and our little Beis Yaakov girls, on the other hand,

already know all about it. They all learn the Chumash and remember what the

Egyptians themselves were saying: כִּיאָבְדָהמִצְרָיִם†– “Our Egypt has gone lost.” But

the secular historians, what could they do? They’re bumbling around in the

darkness of a long-lost history and they’re tripping on every little thing, making

mistakes at every turn.


The truth is that today even the secular historians admit it. They’ve begun to

begrudgingly admit it because of ancient records they’ve found. Our possuk doesn’t

need any proofs from the goyim but today they’ve already found ancient papyri

with the testimony of Egyptians who lived through the makkos. 


We have the Papyrus of Ipuwer. 

In the early 1900’s a certain gentile professor published these

papyri, composed by an ancient Egyptian sage who witnessed these events with

his own eyes. “The river is blood … Blood is everywhere … Men shrink in disgust

from tasting … That is our water … What shall we do? Everything is in ruination!”

You can read the descriptions over there. “The land is turned over like a

potter’s wheel … there is no end to the noise … trees are destroyed … no fruit nor

herbs are found … gates, walls and columns are consumed by fire … the land is left

over to its weariness like the cutting of the flax … the cattle moan … all the animals,

their hearts weep … there is no light in the land.” 


(The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage From a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden; Alan H. Gardiner)

[https://www.amazon.com/Admonitions-Egyptian-Sage-Hieratic-Papyrus/dp/0265233127]


Papyrus of Ipuwer  [https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=icc_proceedings]


Ages in Chaos [https://www.amazon.com/Ages-Chaos-Immanuel-Velikovsky/dp/0899667279]  


Wiki: Ages in Chaos:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_in_Chaos = Ages in Chaos is a book by the controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky, first published by Doubleday in 1952, which put forward a major revision of the history of the Ancient Near East, claiming that the histories of Ancient Egypt and the Israelites are five centuries out of step.


We Know All About It

Now that’s news to the secular historians – these papyri were published quite

recently – but we know all about it; we grew up on these stories. (Bo

10:15). Whatever little bit was left after the hail, was completely destroyed by the

locust. There was nothing left at all. Destruction and darkness, that’s all. No Nile, no

vegetation, no food, no safety and security.

It’s a remarkable thing how low Egypt was laid. The makkos were one blow

after another, until everything the Mitzrim relied on was completely destroyed.

Egypt was so ruined that it didn’t have the nerve to get up out of the dirt! For five

hundred years, they laid in the dirt prostrate!


The Lesson

The question is what was the purpose of such a destruction? After all, in order

to allow the Bnei Yisroel to go free, no makkos and no miracles were necessary.

Egypt could have had an internal revolution or some other misfortunes that would

have divided them and the Bnei Yisroel could have left in a natural manner. Didn’t

the slaves in America go free without ten makkos? There could have been an

Egyptian Abraham Lincoln too; why not? There could have been a civil war and the

Bnei Yisroel would walk out to freedom without the land being destroyed. So what

was the purpose of ?אָבְדָהמִצְרָיִם


When Hakodosh Boruch Hu began the series of the ten makkos, one plague

after the other, He introduced them with a preface that reveals their purpose. The

Torah states as clearly as could be, וְיָדְעוּמִצְרַיִםכִּיאֲנִיהַשֵּׁם– Mitzrayim should know

that I am Hashem! (Shemos 7:5). Or לְמַעַןתֵּדַעכִּיאֵיןכָּמֹנִיבְּכָלהָאָרֶץ– in order that you

should know there is none like Me in all the world (ibid. 9:14).


 It means, “I’m the Boss here”.

The ten makkos were ten courses of instruction in emunah, reminders of

Hakodosh Boruch Hu. But not only for Egypt – after all, the people of Mitzrayim are

long gone; they’re not learning anything. It’s the Am Yisroel, the ones who still

study sefer Shemos, who are expected to learn the lesson of כִּיאָבְדָהמִצְרָיִם, of why

the most powerful nation of the time was laid so low that their disappearance

caused a gap to appear in world history. By means of studying the destruction of

Mitzrayim and why it happened, we are the ones who gain; we’re the ones expected

to be recipients of that lesson!



TWO SCREENSHOTS FROM DOCUMENT:





 







SO MAY THE SAME OCCUR TO OUR ENEMIES AGAIN IN OUR END DAYS!




















 









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