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: הֲטֶרֶם†תֵּדַע†כִּי†אָבְדָה†מִצְרָיִם†– “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 אבָדְהָ†מצִ†רְָיםִ†– 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: כִּי†אָבְדָה†מִצְרָיִם†– “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 ?אָבְדָה†מִצְרָיִם
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, וְיָדְעוּ†מִצְרַיִם†כִּי†אֲנִי†הַשֵּׁם†– Mitzrayim should know
that I am Hashem! (Shemos 7:5). Or לְמַעַן†תֵּדַע†כִּי†אֵין†כָּמֹנִי†בְּכָל†הָאָרֶץ†– 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 כִּי†אָבְדָה†מִצְרָיִם†, 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!
No comments:
Post a Comment