This page is a Transcript of:

Mr. Russell Gmirkin and Dr. Ma’at:
Who Really Wrote the Hebrew Bible and Why?

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Transcript Note

This transcription often ‘translates’ verbal language into written language as seemed fitting to me, while retaining meaning, of course.

Note: … means some conversation not transcribed. It could represent a few words or a few minutes.

Italics indicate addition or slight changes in translating spoken to written, so it reads better. Occasionally some clarifying info is added by me, also in italics.

This transcript has been generously proof read and had any necessary corrections for clarity and accuracy, particularly of Mr Gmirkin’s content (and thank you very much) made by him.

Getting the exact words one wants when speaking sometimes doesn’t happen, and then the moment is gone. I was very appreciative that Mr Gmirkin offered to proof this transcript and accordingly open it to him to improve any parts he has the time or desire to modify as he sees fit. This is the transcript that follows.

0:00 = Zero minutes : Zero Zero seconds

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1:50 Program starts …

2:05 Dr Ma’at: – Mr Russell Gmirkin how are you doing tonight sir?

2:10 Mr Gmirkin: – Hi Dr Ma’at, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr Ma’at: It’s a pleasure to have you. Doc and I’ve been seeing you on brother Mobali Makasi’s show, and that’s what actually prompted me to reach out to you because of the information that you presented on his show. And I also saw or heard that you also have done interviews on the Dagger Squad show with brother Garfield Reid. And so I said I have to get Mr Gmirkin on the show to spread his knowledge to my listeners. So thank you so much Mr Russell for coming on tonight.

2:50 Mr Gmirkin: – Well I’m very happy to be here and it’s wonderful to talk to you and I’ve listened to some of your YouTube presentations and they’re very lively and it’s nice to be part of that whole thing.

Dr Ma’at: Yes sir, thank you so much. All right family, so before we jump into the discussion I’m going to read Mr Russell Gmirkin’s biography

3:10 At this point Dr Ma’at reads the biography here:

https://www.routledge.com/authors/i15023-russell-gmirkin

reproduced below

Russell Gmirkin

Author and Lecturer

Independent researcher Russell Gmirkin is a well known Dead Sea Scrolls and biblical scholar. His 2006 book Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus proposed that Jewish scholars wrote the Pentateuch around 270 BCE at the Great Library of Alexandria drawing on various Greek historical sources found there. His latest book Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible identifies Plato’s Laws as a key source for Mosaic law and for the notion of the Bible as an authoritative national literature.

Biography

An independent researcher and original thinker, Russell Gmirkin has investigated some of the most important unsolved problems of modern biblical scholarship. Gmirkin has published significant articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he is perhaps best known for his research on the late date and Greek sources of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its laws. His 2006 book called Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch was one of the first to discuss specific Greek sources used by the biblical authors. His latest book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, identifies Plato’s Laws as perhaps the most influential such Greek text, a source for many of the Laws of Moses and for the very notion of an approved national literature (the Bible).

Some of the key innovations found in Gmirkin’s writings include the identification of the authors of the Pentateuch (Genesis–Deuteronomy) as the same group of Jewish scholars that tradition said translated these books into Greek for the Great Library of Alexandria around 270 BCE; the model of a collaborative composition of the Pentateuch by Samaritan and Jewish legislators, storytellers, poets and priests under official governmental oversight and direction; the identification of various late Greek sources by the biblical authors, including Plato (350 BCE), Manetho (285 BCE), Berossus (278 BCE) and others; and the model of the creation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as an ethical national literature assembled and approved according to directions laid out in Plato’s Laws.

Gmirkin lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Carolyn Tracy, a talented writer, actress, torch singer, comedienne, and conversationalist extraordinaire.

6:50 Dr Ma’at – So lets jump right into it Mr Gmirkin. So many of us are familiar with the King James Version of the Bible and we know it’s comprised of the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament has 39 books and the New Testament has 27 books. But when you say and I think we kinda touched on it in your bio. When we talk about the Hebrew Bible, can you explain specifically what we mean or what you mean by ‘The Hebrew Bible’?

7:20 Mr Gmirkin – Well the Hebrew Bible is what is more commonly known as the Old Testament. That’s the Christian term for the Old Testament and the Christian Bible is the New Testament. And naturally Jews and others, they don’t like to be referred to as the ‘Old’ Testament. So it’s more of a polite, academic neutral term – ‘The Hebrew Bible’ or the Jewish Bible, which refers to the books from Genesis forward. And the most important of those are the 5 books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy that are also known as the Pentateuch. Those were possibly the first books that were written because most of the other books of the Bible refer back to the books of Moses. So they are the most important books but the book collection as a whole is known as the Hebrew Bible.

8:33 Dr Ma’at: – OK, beautiful, beautiful. And so Mr Gmirkin, … How exactly was the Hebrew Bible, those documents, put together? Could you explain that process to us please.

9:00 Mr Gmirkin – Certainly. Well it used to be believed that the Hebrew Bible evolved over centuries and centuries of time from practically the time of Solomon down to the Hellenistic Era, which is the time after Alexander the Great conquered the east.

Well, under some of the latest research, including the research I’ve written, the whole Bible was basically put together in the 270s BC and later – very very late.

9:45 Mr Gmirkin continued: – It started with the first 5 books of the Bible, the books of Moses, that in my opinion were written in Hebrew at the Great Library of Alexandria, drawing on all sorts of interesting Greek writers such as Homer and Plato and the Babylonian priest Berossus and the Egyptian (or Kemetic) priest Manetho and others.

10:15 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So they did all this research at the Great Library and they wrote the five Books of Moses, and then they immediately translated it into Greek. So you had the Greek and Hebrew editions both presented to the public at the same time by a team of scholars from Judea who had been invited there by King Ptolemy the Greek king who ruled Egypt at that time.

10:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So after they wrote the books of Moses, and published them in Hebrew and Greek, and returned to Jerusalem, then they started putting together a whole national literature that we know as the Hebrew Bible.

11:10 Mr Gmirkin continued: – In doing that they were following a literary agenda laid out by the philosopher Plato. In his book Plato’s Laws, he said that the most important task was to create a set of laws for a new nation, and the lawmakers, whatever they did they had to convince the citizenry that those laws were ancient and they were Divine and they had never been changed. And that way, under superstition or belief, the citizens would always obey the laws and support them.

11:55 Dr Ma’at: – And so that was really the impetus for creating the Books of Moses, with the Mosaic Laws.

12:00 Mr Gmirkin: – And then Plato said beyond that you should create a whole national literature, of every genre—hymns and history and poetry and proverbs—and they should be carefully censored so that they were consistent with that myth of the ancient origin of the Laws and it would be semi-Divine, they would be used in national education exclusively and the people would not be exposed to any other literature and in this way their whole national consciousness and memory would be reprogrammed within a generation, so they would come to believe after the next generation that were raised in those schools that only used those sacred texts, that those laws had really been written a thousand or two thousand years earlier.

13:05 Mr Gmirkin continued: – And so it was a means of erasing the national memory and replacing it with one that viewed the Laws as eternal and divine.

13:15 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So you had that same two stages with the creation of the books of Moses at Alexandria and then the creation of a sacred national literature very shortly afterwards in Jerusalem. And it all remarkably followed this Platonic agenda for creating a nation whose laws would be honoured throughout time.

13:45 Dr Ma’at: – A lot of us, we were brought up in the church and we were taught that it was Moses who wrote the first five books of the Bible. But ironically in Deuteronomy, Moses talks about his own death and people began to question basically how could he write about his own death, after he is dead?

14:15 Dr Ma’at cont: – But we were taught that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible so what is your evidence to substantiate that it was Jewish scholars at the Great Library of Alexandria who authored the Hebrew Bible?

14:32 Mr Gmirkin: – First, let me make a couple of comments about Deuteronomy and Plato’s Laws:

1. Part of Plato’s Laws said that the lawmaker should assemble all the citizens of the new nation that was being founded and recite to them all the new laws and constitution at the foundation of their new colony. That’s the exact same plot as is in the book of Deuteronomy, so that has Plato’s fingerprints all over it.

2. And another aspect of Plato that you find there is the laws are described by the word Torah or Teaching or instruction, and Plato originated the idea that laws should not just be a tyrannical command but that they should have educational values. And so the laws were educational as well as prescriptive. So there’s another Platonic content.

3. Another thing is that Plato invented the idea of having persuasive introductions where you would introduce the laws with all manners of persuasion so the citizens would want to believe and obey those laws and that’s found throughout Deuteronomy as well. So really Deuteronomy is the most Platonic of all the five books of Moses.

16:05 Mr Gmirkin continued: – But a number of laws and constitutional content within the books of Moses, within the laws of Moses, come out of Plato. In fact he invented a new form of government. He called it nous or intelligence after the name of his God, but Josephus called it a theocracy.

16:40 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Basically it was a form of government that was a rule by God, and God’s agents would be priests and theologians. He said there should be a high priest, and a supreme council, and they would administer the government and they would also supervise the literature and make sure that all the citizens believe the proper religious and ethical values. Well, this very closely corresponds to the high priest and the Jewish Sanhedrin or senate (council) that was instituted around 270 BC or very shortly before. That was a new form of theocratic government, what we would call today, ‘The Kingdom of God’, the rule by God. That was a form of government that Plato invented.

17:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So in my book on Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, I surveyed all the laws of the Ancient Near East, of the Bible and the Greek world and I found that a few laws in the Bible come from the Ancient Near East, like the laws of Hammurabi and some Middle Assyrian laws but just a very light sprinkling (of them), while the majority of those laws have remarkable parallels with Athenian laws and also specifically with Plato’s laws.

18:20 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So you can point to various laws and say this corresponds very closely to the Greeks, it was not written a thousand years earlier by Moses.

Mr Gmirkin continued: That’s my central argument which has been very well received in Europe, more so than in America where they haven’t got the memo yet, it hasn’t been very well read here.

18:55 Dr Ma’at: – Beautiful, beautiful, so that was your evidence to say hey the Jewish scholars got it from the Greeks, it wasn’t Moses, like you say that wrote it thousands of years ago they got it directly from the Greeks around the time that Alexander conquered the east. So thank you very much for that.

Dr Ma’at continued: – So what about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Typically people will say that the Dead Sea Scrolls were used or the information from the Dead Sea Scrolls can be found in the first five books of the Bible. So can … you tell us about the Dead Sea Scrolls and how they relate to the first five books of Moses?

19:46 Mr Gmirkin: – Yes. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the caves near the Dead Sea or kind of overlooking the Dead Sea, near an archaeological site named Qumran. These scrolls were hidden in jars that were sealed probably around 4 BC, some people say as late as 70 AD. And they have a collection of ancient scrolls. There were biblical scrolls, there were scrolls written by a peculiar sect that had different religious beliefs and just you know, a variety of texts. Some of them biblical and some closely related to the Bible. They’re the oldest biblical texts that we have. And they date from, … I think the oldest is around 220 BC, a little fragment of Jeremiah and then down to the first century BC. So, I propose that the books of Moses and the Bible were written about 270 BC. All these fragments from the Dead Sea (Scrolls) are later than that. And they’re the first real evidence for the existence of the Bible. You really can’t prove from archaeological finds or inscriptional finds or any external objective evidence, that the books of Moses were any older than that.

21:30 Mr Gmirkin continued: – The very first tangible evidence for the existence of biblical writings is the Septuagint translation from Hebrew into Greek of the five books of Moses around 270 BC. Before that there’s not a whisper of evidence of any biblical writings. So the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that these writings are ancient but they don’t date back to the time of Moses or to pre-Hellenistic times before Alexander the Great.

22:10 Dr. Ma’at: – OK, So you’re telling me, I just want to make sure that I have my time-line correct. You’re saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls are dated later than the Pentateuch and Septuagint. (Mr Gmirkin: Yes.) So it wouldn’t have been that the Dead Sea Scrolls influenced them, they are just evidence of former biblical writings, it wouldn’t be that the Dead Sea Scrolls influenced them because they came … later (Mr Gmirkin confirms timeline/order of writing) OK, …

22:40 Dr. Ma’at: – Some people say that the Dead Sea Scrolls are phoney, it’s not real, I’ve even heard that they’re not authentic.

Mr Gmirkin: Well, I’ve been to Jerusalem. I was an invited speaker at the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I spoke on the War Scroll, which is one of the major Dead Sea Scrolls and I went to the Museum of the Scroll and I saw some of the original text there. So, they are very real and authentic although there are some recent forgeries, little tiny fragments that have been recently exposed, that have sold for millions, and now they’ve been shown to be forged. It’s a big business in the forgery realm. But most of the scrolls and the older scrolls are definitely authentic.

23:45 Dr Ma’at: – Ok. What languages are the Dead Sea Scrolls written in? Is it Aramaic, is it Hebrew or is it both?

Mr Gmirkin: Both of those and there are also a few in Greek as well and some of them have a little bit of each.

…

24:05 Dr Ma’at: – So when you say that it was Jewish scholars who wrote the Bible. Do we have names, do we have a sect that we know of? So when you say ‘Who Really Wrote the Bible?’ cause I know you’re getting to come out with, I don’t know if it is an article or a book that you’re working on, I guess titled ‘Who Really Wrote The Bible?’ but what can we expect from that book or article that you’re going to publish soon?

Mr Gmirkin continued: That’s actually going to be a popular book that will bring down to a non-specialised, non-academic level my discoveries in ‘Berossus in Genesis’ and ‘Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible’. Both of those books basically add a footnote after every sentence or two. My ‘Who REALLY Wrote the Bible’ book, is going to be much more readable. I hope to finish that some time this year or early next year. (Note: Not published yet, so this video and transcript and others like it, is what we have for now.)

Dr Ma’at: So Mr Gmirkin when you do write this book I definitely want to bring you back on the show. I would love to promote it, I would love to purchase several copies from you and give those copies away to my listening audience if you don’t mind.

Mr Gmirkin continued: That would be great and my academic books are like $150 or $200 so this popular book is going to be something that you or I could afford. I can’t really buy my own books.

Dr Ma’at: Ok so you’re saying that Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, you’re saying that those books are like 200 bucks.

Mr Gmirkin: Yeah, $150 at least. (Transcription note: I bought Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible’ in paperback, for $70 Australian [$50 US] in May 2022, so check latest pricing.)

How many pages, like is it a thick text book? As you know I’m in academia myself. Is it a thick text Mr Gmirkin?

Mr Gmirkin: Well sure, my Berossus book is 335 pages (Dr. Ma’at: That’s not bad, that’s not bad at all) and my Plato book is about the same, 338. …

26:45 Dr Ma’at: – So let me ask you this Mr Gmirkin. The people in the Bible, so we’ve established from your research that there were Jewish scholars who went to the Great Library of Alexandria who sat down and they wrote the first five books of the Bible and you said that they based a lot of the information or the stories … on Greek literature. So I guess, in a sense, this is another question I have for you, my question is…

27:25 Dr Ma’at continued: – Did the people in the Bible exist? Did they pool from sources that talked about, you know, so we have in the Bible they mention Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, King David, King Solomon, the 12 Tribes of Israel. You know and if we get into the New Testament, you know Jesus and the 12 disciples and Mary and Joseph … so my question is, you know did they pool from literature that described real people, real stories or is it, was it all, I don’t want to say fiction but that’s actually the word that came to my mind.

28:10 Mr Gmirkin: – And the Greek word for fiction is mythos. So you could call them myths if you want and that would be also correct. Well, there’s a mixture. Some of the kings, in the book of Kings we know existed, like Ahab of Israel, he is mentioned in the Kurkh Monoliths about the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE and Hezekiah the king of Jerusalem he’s mentioned in a text of Sennacherib (Sennacherib’s Prism of Nineveh “where Sennacherib says he just “shut him up … like a bird in a cage,”[35] subsequently enforcing a larger tribute upon him.”). So some of the kings were historical and in the book of kings it refers to the annals of the kings of Judah and Israel which are authentic source documents. There is also a source called the Acts of Solomon which indicates that he was also a real historical figure although in my research I’ve been able to determine that, yes he was historical despite all the controversy but he was actually the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III and not a Jewish king at all.

Mr Gmirkin continued: – I’ve got a great article that came out this year and an Australian Blogger named Neil Godfrey whose blog is called Vridar is discussing it on his blog right now in a series all about Solomon.

Mr Gmirkin continued: – But before that, King David and earlier, there’s no sources that the Bible referred to and all of that earlier material, you would have to say is fiction.

30:10 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Now, there’s a couple of names that are authentic, there’s Judah which was the name of the Southern Kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem that fell about 585 BC. So there was a Judah but not a person walking around named Judah that we know of. There is also king Ahab was the king of Israel but in no inscriptions was Israel a person, a tribal ancestor or a collection of 12 tribes in the Merneptah Stele from Egypt around 1200 BC, just a little tiny, one small nomadic tribe named Israel. In that inscription about the Battle of Qarqar, there’s Ahab who’s the king of Israel. Other than that there doesn’t appear anywhere in any inscription in any time and there’s no reference to 12 tribes of Israel.

31:30 Mr Gmirkin continued: – But if we want to talk about 12 tribes though, lots of Greek nations were organised into 12 tribes, some of them into 10 tribes. Athens which through a period of time when they had 10 tribes starting around 600 BC. And these tribes had fictitious ancestors and everyone was assigned to a tribe and it was basically for military organisation and purposes and things like that.

32:00 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Twelve tribes were even more favoured because you could have certain duties that rotated from one tribe to the next each month Plato’s Laws said 12 tribes was the ideal number. If you’re going to form a nation you should form it into 12 tribes each with their own little territory. And Athens originally had 10 tribes but by about 300 BC it added a couple of tribes so that there actually were 12. There were nation states, city states with 6 tribes, there were a few with 12 tribes. It was a very Greek custom not found anywhere in the Ancient Near East, at any time. So that’s a Greek kind of fictional innovation.

…

Dr Ma’at: Yes, he did. … Brother RaBourne? He tagged me in a post today and he was asking for me to talk with you about the 12 tribes of Israel and where that idea came from and he also asked me to ask you if Western Civilisation established themselves or built their civilisation on Plato’s Laws, on the process that you outlined in your books. So what are your thoughts on that Mr Gmirkin?

33:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Plato, advocated the idea of having ancient divine laws and he did that because the laws of Sparta, they said their laws came from Apollo, and I think Crete, theirs came from Zeus.

34:15 Mr Gmirkin continued: – And the country that had the longest surviving constitution also had this myth that some God had given them their original laws and Plato said this is an awesome idea. If you want your nation to last, convince the citizens by any means you can that those laws were:

• given to them by the gods
• in ancient times to the founding generation
• and they have never been changed through time.

34:40 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So that whole idea (and the same is true of obviously the Mosaic laws, the laws of Moses, that’s exactly how they are presented in the Bible) and Plato also invented the idea of a national literature, really a sacred literature where the whole nation just reads this one set of approved books, censored approved myths. And only those books so that everyone will think the same. Scholars have for hundreds of years have tried to figure out where did the idea of the Bible come from? Well it came right out of Plato’s Laws and he said that the reason why he came up with these ideas is he wanted a citizenry that would be docile, compliant, obedient and he wanted to be able to actually program their consciousness and their soul from the cradle, actually before birth right through to the grave.

35:55 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So he kind of invented, I guess you’d call it propaganda or persuasive techniques so everyone believed the same thing. He invented belief systems and he invented sacred literatures and we’ve got that in the Hebrew Bible and then the Christian Bible picked that up and various other nations have also adopted that sort of a thing. And just like Plato predicted, if you can take children, as young as possible, you can teach them anything and they’ll believe it and they’ll be loyal to it for their whole life and they’ll pass it on to their children and so on and so forth.

36:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – and he had a very profound and I would say sinister understanding of human psychology. He was a social engineer and his dark genius has been cast down through history from his time to our own. And the ancient Jews when they reinvented their nation and created the books of Moses and the Hebrew Bible around 270 BC, they were the only nation who actually implemented Plato’s literary agenda and his agenda for a constitution by legislation. They invented it and sure enough they’re with us to this day eternally just like Plato predicted. He was brilliant, but not necessarily in a good way.

37:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – He wanted philosophers like himself to be kings over the nation he was conceiving in his imagination. So there was one level of expertise by the ruling class who would have all this inside information, they would study international laws, they would study astronomy and science and all that, but they administered a second layer for the general population that was not knowledge and science, it was belief, they were creating a belief system to make the rest of their subjects compliant and obedient and so I think modern religions are basically that second layer of compliance. And programming of beliefs and it’s with us to this day.

Dr Ma’at: You were talking about Plato and his method – it worked! What he envisioned, it worked! … What era did Plato live in?

39:25 Mr Gmirkin continued: – He was born somewhere around 420 BC. He studied under Socrates. He was the disciple of Socrates about 399 BC when Socrates drank hemlock. And Plato continued to live to about 350 BC. So we’re talking about 80 years before the books of Moses were written.

Dr Ma’at: So I asked you that cause I just wanted to get the timeline down. This is over 2000 years ago and to this day his ideas on how to program consciousness are still effecting the world – it worked!

So like you said it was sinister but it was genius, to be honest with you, I mean, it was. I have to call a spade a spade, it was genius because we’re still dealing with that today.

…

40:50 Dr. Ma’at – And so, Mr Gmirkin the first five books, you’re saying they were written in Alexandria by Jewish scholars. So they established the first 5 books … so how do we get the other 34 books in the Old Testament?

41:25 Mr Gmirkin: – There’s this story about the Septuagint translation that said there were 70 scholars that were sent from Jerusalem and that travelled to Alexandria at the invitation of King Ptolemy to write down the laws of Moses for the Great Library of Alexandria.

41:50 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So that all happened, they wrote the books of Moses, they translated them into Greek and then they went home. They went back to Jerusalem and to Samaria which is kind of next door to Judea and Jerusalem. And that’s when most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible was written.

41:15 Mr Gmirkin continued: – And we know that it was written in Jerusalem because the books of Moses, they liked people from Judea, they liked people from Samaria, they liked all 12 tribes, they were all part of the same team. And the Samaritans, which are a sect like the Jews but a little bit different, they had a different temple at mount Gerizim, whereas the Jews had a temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem. Anyway, the Samaritans and the Jews they both accept the 5 books of Moses but that’s all the Samaritans will accept. They don’t accept the rest of the Hebrew Bible. And we know the later part was written in Jerusalem because once you get into the book of Kings and once you get into the Prophets, those later books, they hate the Samaritans, they say all sorts of bad things about them, they say that all the kings of Israel and Samaria, the northern kingdom, they are all wicked and they all worship Baal, and they were all terrible. Basically there was competition between the temple of Jerusalem and the Samaritan temple of Mount Gerizim. That started like, right after the books of Moses were written.

43:40 Mr Gmirkin continued: – And ultimately, like 150 years later the Jews actually destroyed the temple at Mount Gerizim and pushed it off the mountain into the valley. So there was a long-standing controversy, or kind of a battle between the two. But it started out at Alexandria with all 12 tribes, the 10 tribes of Israel and the 2 tribes of Judah. They were all cooperative they were all kind of equal and then the literary center shifted to Jerusalem and they became anti-Samaritan and that’s when the rest of the Hebrew Bible was written, a little bit after 270 BC.

44:30 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Plato said that after you write the books of the laws, then you want to write the rest of your national literature and make sure that that founding myth is in place so that people can get programmed by these approved national books.

45:00 Mr Gmirkin continued: – There’s a few older materials in the Hebrew Bible. They took what was old and useful; some of the Psalms, the book of Haggai, little bits and pieces but most of it was either written or edited or re-written after the Pentateuch.

45:40 Dr. Ma’at – So Mr Gmirkin, I’m thinking about proverbs right now because my mind just went back to Egypt and you said that they wrote it in the Great Library of Alexandria but I’m thinking about Proverbs and not in the book of Proverbs but I’ve read that the book of Proverbs was taken from Amenemope. I believe they credit the book of proverbs to Solomon. But I’ve heard in literature Jewish scholars say no, it wasn’t Solomon it was Amenemope Who was a scribe in Egypt

46:15 Mr Gmirkin: – There’s a section, I don’t know, a couple of chapters about 30 proverbs or something like that yeah, definitely came from Amenemope, … the Egyptian scribe in his well known collection of proverbs. So yes, those Egyptian traditions about proverbs, they are part of the Hebrew Bible.

46:45 Mr Gmirkin continued: – There’s some Egyptian content in some of the Psalms as well. And the book of Ezekiel has a chapter or two that comes straight out of Babylonian text – the chariot visions in Ezekiel chapter 1 where Ezekiel was transported to heaven and there was chariots and there was seraphim with eyes. That wasn’t originally about Yahweh, that was about the Babylonian deity Marduk. Somehow the late authors of Ezekiel took that old source text and incorporated that into the book of Ezekiel.

47:40 Mr Gmirkin continued: – So there’s bits and pieces, here and there that are older, yeah, proverbs and other things.

…

48:00 Dr. Ma’at: – What about in Psalms, … I read from … Anthony T. Browder, one of our scholars, he says there is a psalm in there that is very similar to a psalm or poem that one of the Egyptian kings Akhenaten wrote … So would you say that the Hebrew Bible was definitely influenced by Egyptian Mythos?

49:00 Mr Gmirkin: – Yes, that one psalm (Psalm 104) seems to have a pretty close relationship to, I guess it was a psalm of Akhenaten like you said. There’s another psalm that comes from … a polytheistic Yahwistic text that mentions Yahweh along with Baal and other gods that came from Yahweh worshippers way up in Hamath. Not in Israel, not in Judah but there were Yahweh worshippers in other kingdoms in the 700s BC and some of that has filtered down into the modern book of psalms. Yes there are some Egyptian influences, including part of the Exodus story.

50:05 Mr Gmirkin continued: – which seems to respond from an author named Manetho who wrote in Egypt around 285 BC and I can get into that a little bit, it’s kind of interesting.

Dr. Ma’at: – Please do. When you say Exodus I’m thinking about, I’ve read that the only Exodus out of Egypt they said was Hyksos so was he, the Manetho writers story based on the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt and the Jewish scholars doing that in the Hebrew Bible or are you saying something else Mr Russell?

50:40 Mr Gmirkin: – Yes. Manetho actually wrote 2 stories about Egypt and Judea. In the first there was the wicked dynasty of Hyksos or ‘foreign shepherd kings,’ that arose in west Egypt… and they were expelled into Judea … where Manetho said they established true Solomon’s temple. And Genesis and Exodus they describe the Israelites in the land of Goshen as shepherds

51:25 – But he (Manetho) also had a second story. Set later in the times of Ramses, so just before then, there was a wicked Egyptian priest named Osarsiph who was a priest of Seth-Typhon, the Egyptian God of chaos. He was actually a foreign god but he was the god of chaos. And he ruled Egypt and the head of this band of lepers, along with, and he also brought the Hyksos or shepherd kings back into Egypt from Judea and they had a 13 year reign of terror and overthrew the gods and temples and finally Ramses fought them and expelled them back to Judea. So both of those stories are based on Egyptian literature, they don’t know anything about the Bible but the Bible knows about them.

52:25 Mr Gmirkin continued: – The story of the Exodus has lepers a couple of times, and Manetho said that some people in his day said that Osarsiph was the same as this Jewish character named Moses. So some people were saying they were the same. But Moses was not in the original ‘Egyptian’ story which is about Osarsiph but some people are saying that Osarsiph must have changed his name to Moses and led those people into Judea.

Mr Gmirkin continued: Anyway, both stories from Manetho they influence the Exodus, except the Exodus turned it all on its head. They said the Israelites didn’t enslave Egypt, they didn’t attack their gods but it was the other way around, the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites and the Egyptians attacked the Israelite God and they wanted to leave and they weren’t expelled they were trying to get out so it’s kind of a polemical response to Manetho which they’ve probably properly considered slanderous and an attack on the Jewish people. There was some animosity between the Egyptians and the Jews.

53:55 Dr. Ma’at: – Mr Russell, I want to plus one what you said a little because when you think about it and now that kind of explains why when you read the Old Testament it seems like the Egyptians were demonised in the Old Testament so there was a real issue, I want to say beef, between the Egyptians and the Jewish people and so that explains why in the Old Testament the Egyptian culture as you will, was demonised.

54:25 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Yes and the reason for it goes back to this, there was a Persian Ruler and his name was Cambyses (son of Cyrus the Great) and first Darius (the great) conquered Egypt and then the Egyptians I think overthrew Darius. Cambyses came back and he did deface temples in Egypt, you know, knocked over statues, he was a bad invader, he attacked the Egyptians in their culture. And he had Jewish soldiers who were in his army, he conscripted units of Jewish soldiers on the way. And some of these Jewish soldiers they were put in military colonies in Egypt and they were very loyal to the Persians. And so the Egyptians considered these Jewish soldiers to be agents of oppression and an occupying force. And the Egyptians remembered the outrages of Cambyses, how the Persians had attacked their local gods and they kind of equated that with the Jews. So they had a real beef, they did not like the Persians and they didn’t like the Jews who were their mercenary forces or conscripted at any rate. So yes they had a beef and it comes down into Manetho and even in later times, you bet.

56:05 Dr. Ma’at – Yeah it makes sense now because when I was reading the Bible they talked about Egyptian culture and the king had hardened his heart, I don’t know if you remember the story the king had a hard heart and they were enslaved, let my people go and these curses came and so I’m like OK, now it definitely makes sense. But go ahead … Dr it seems like you wanted to … expound upon that.

Mr Gmirkin continued: Well that’s true, the Egyptians considered the Hyksos (shepherd kings) to be a curse and a plague. The Hyksos and Osarsiph and Cambyses (the Persian ruler) those were three foreign powers who came in and attacked the religion and they were considered a plague on Egypt and they had kind of a mythos how there would have to be recurring or cyclical ejection of foreigners from Egypt. That was their version, their hostile version of the Exodus as it were, where they booted out these foreigners out of their land who wound up in Judea.

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59:00 Dr. Ma’at: – So Mr Russell what do you think people should do with this information? So let’s suppose someone picks up your book Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible and they read the text about Who Really Wrote the Bible? What do you want for your readers? I call it breaking the chains. Are you trying to unlock the mind, what are your goals? What should the reader do with this information?

59:35 Mr Gmirkin: – Every person is on a journey of self-liberation and knowledge is exactly that’s what unlocks the chains. That’s what makes you free. Everyone is programmed in one way or another by society or by their family or their church or whatever group it is, to be pre-disposed to believe a certain way. And one of the hardest things to do for anybody is to examine and scrutinise their own beliefs and challenge them.

1:00:20 Mr Gmirkin continued: – There’s a difference between what you know and what you think you know and most people are not skilled at detecting that difference. One of my unique skills is I’m able to chart out assumptions of fellow scholars or myself and I test the assumption to see if it’s really real or not and a lot of times it isn’t and that’s a very fruitful ground for original research.

1:00:55 Mr Gmirkin continued: – Everyone really needs to think about their own beliefs and how much it’s based on actual knowledge and how much is just programmed and go for facts, science, reality and not just try and support the belief that they grew up with. And they really should not impose that on other people … errors, mistakes and misinformation is contagious. … So really we’re all on a journey of spiritual self-liberation and if there’s any way that I can assist anybody, that’s my mission, I’m at people’s service. And hopefully with the advance of knowledge there will be an advance of civilisation.

1:02:05 Dr. Ma’at: – Yes advancement and a more enlightened civilisation. So thank you so much Mr Russell for those powerful powerful words that was a powerful message.

Think free family think free, you know we got to liberate ourselves mentally and I know a lot of people say we want the revolution, we need the revolution but the revolution family it starts in the mind first. We need to have a mental revolution before we have a physical revolution I say. Alright family, so Mr Russell thank you so much for coming on the platform tonight. Family take a moment out to share this show. Mr Russell did a wonderful job. He dropped a lot of information and a lot of jewels and a lot of things to think about, a lot of things to go and research on your own. Family, don’t just listen to him go and do your due diligence. Don’t listen to me, go do your due diligence and study, examine, scrutinise, question things OK. I know some of your belief systems you’re taught not to question but we have to question. By questioning what I mean is an intellectual tool, it’s a tool that we use to gather data, to gather information and knowledge, right. And remember guys, intelligence is the application of knowledge. So once we have the knowledge we have to apply the knowledge right. In order to call ourselves intelligent so don’t just take our word for it family. Go out and do your own due diligence. And again share this show, if you’re watching on Facebook, be sure to head on over to YouTube and type in Dr. Ma’at, subscribe to my YouTube channel, hit the notification bell so that as soon as I go live you will be notified.

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