The Exodus Quest by Will Adams Page B

the rutted ground. Omar clutched the door-handle, stamped on imaginary brakes. But Knox kept his foot to the floor. The pick-up swung round, aware it was a race for the bridge. He sped past it, but it quickly caught up, its engine newer and more powerful.
    ‘We’ll never get away,’ cried Omar.
    ‘Hold tight,’ said Knox, weaving back and forth to prevent the pick-up from pulling alongside, wheels spitting clods of mud. He swung out wide then turned sharply back towards the bridge. He was almost there when a 4x4 surged out of the darkness on the far side, its headlights springing on full and dazzling, so that Knox had to throw up a hand to shield his eyes, slam on the brakes, but too late, tyres losing grip, slithering sideways, missing the bridge and hurtling instead into the irrigation channel, flinging out his arm in an instinctive effort to pin Omar in his seat, their bonnet smashing into the opposite bank, metal crumpling, windscreen exploding in a great cacophony of glass, hurling him against his seat belt, his head snapping violently back, something crashing into the back of his skull, and everything going black.

TWELVE
    I
    Lily put her hand surreptitiously on Stafford’s arm, an effort to calm him down a little, but he merely shrugged her off, refilled his wineglass, and continued. ‘People have Judaism all wrong,’ he declared. ‘They read about Abraham, Noah, Jacob and all those other patriarchs, and assume that the Jews arrived in Egypt with their beliefs and practices fully formed, that they retained them during their sojourn, then left without being one whit influenced. But it can’t have been like that. It wasn’t like that. Look dispassionately at Judaism and you’ll see that its roots lie in Egypt, specifically in the monotheism of Akhenaten.’
    ‘That’s quite a claim,’ said Fatima.
    ‘Just look at the creation account in Genesis, if you don’t believe me. The notion that everything came from the void was an Egyptian conceit, as was the idea of mankind as God’s flock, crafted in His image, for whom He made heaven and earth. There are countless passages in the Bible stolen virtually verbatim from Egypt. Take the Negative Confessions of the Book of the Dead. “I have not reviled the God. I have not sinned against anyone. I have not killed. I have not copulated illicitly.” Replace “I have not” with “Thou shalt not” and you have the Ten Commandments. Psalm Thirty-four is based on an Amarna inscription; Psalm One hundred and four is a rewrite of Akhenaten’s Hymn of the Aten.’
    ‘A rewrite!’ frowned Fatima. ‘They have a few images in common, that’s all.’
    ‘A few images!’ scoffed Stafford. ‘It’s word for word in places. But even if you won’t allow me that, you surely can’t dispute the similarity of the Bible’s Proverbs to Egypt’s Wisdom texts; or that the so-called “Thirty Sayings” are nothing but a rehash of Amenemope’s “Thirty Chapters”. Granted, on their own, each might conceivably be coincidence. But they aren’t on their own. They’re part of a pattern. The very name Hebrew is a corruption of the Egyptian word ’ Ipiru , people who’ve stepped outside the law. Jewish priestly robes are virtual replicas of the costumes of Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs. The Ark of the Covenant is almost identical to an ark found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. And, speaking of the Ark, during the Exodus the Jews housed it in a great tent called the Tabernacle, just like the tent Akhenaten lived in when he first settled in Amarna. Tithes were an Egyptian practice taken up by the Jews. Magic likewise. Did you know that Egyptians wrote down their spells, soaked them in water, and drank the resulting brew, precisely as advocated in the Book of Numbers? Egyptian voodoo dolls are mentioned in the Psalms. And circumcision wasn’t originally a Jewish practice, you realize? It was Egyptian ; they even found a clay model of a circumcised penis in Akhenaten’s tomb. “They