God's Generals

The Military Lives of Moses, the Buddha & Muhammad

Richard A. Gabriel

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473859067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

It is one of the more startling facts of military history that the founders of three of the four 'great religions'—Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam—were also accomplished field generals with extensive experience in commanding men in battle. One of these, Muhammad, fought eight battles and was wounded twice, once almost fatally. Another, Siddhartha Gautama (later to become the Buddha), witnessed so much battlefield carnage that he suffered a psychological collapse. Moses had become so much a 'god-intoxicated' personality, it is a reasonable suspicion that he, like the Buddha, was murdered. Indeed, had the experiences of these men in war not been so successful, it is quite possible that their achievements as religious leaders would never have occurred. For all three, war and religion were so closely intertwined in their personalities that it is difficult to discern where the influence of one ended and the other began. This book attempts to explore the military lives of Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad, and the role their war experiences played in their religious lives.

Chapter 1

Moses: Israel’s First General

The oldest fragments of the Bible may have been written down as early as 1000 BC and are contained in the Book of Exodus. Before that, the story of the Israelite Exodus existed only as an oral history passed from one generation to the next by tribal storytellers. The account of the Exodus became the central founding myth of the Israelites, explaining the origins of a distinct people and the establishment of a unique monotheistic religion. Over the next 600 years, the Bible was rewritten and redacted by no fewer than four major authors known to biblical scholars as the Yahwist (the earliest), Elohist, the Priestly source and the Deuteronomist. Each of these redactors rewrote segments of the original story in response to the challenges faced by the Israelites at the time of the redaction. The result was that some of the information that appears in the earliest books reflects the historical realities at the time of redaction.

Many of the elements inserted by the redactors found their way into the Book of Exodus. Thus, the claim of slavery in Egypt and the Israelites forced to make bricks ‘without straw’ to build Pharaoh’s new city probably came from the Israelites’ Babylonian experience, where both slavery and making mud bricks were common. Neither was found in Egypt. Slavery was not institutionalized in ancient Egypt and the pharaohs constructed their cities, monuments, and tombs of stone, not mud brick. It was probably not until after the Israelites returned from the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BC (597–538 BC), that the Bible as we know it was finalized. Whatever else it is, the Bible is a disorganized collage of legend, history, law, propaganda, politics, poetry, prayer, ethics, hygiene practices, genealogy, military tactics, dietary advice and even carpentry instructions.¹ Trying to tease the historical story of Moses and his military life from this bundle of tales is a challenge.

Moses The Man

Next to Yahweh, Moses is the most intriguing character of the Old Testament. Held in awe as the founder of one of the world’s great religions, respected as a national patriot who led his people out of slavery and the subject of endless writings and speculations, Moses has become a figure of history. And yet there is scant evidence beyond the Bible itself that the man ever existed. Whoever he was, Moses is regarded as the founder of Yahwehism and, ultimately, Judaism, a claim that may be accepted in the absence of any other explanation to the contrary.

The Bible tells us that Moses was born in Egypt to Israelite parents. His father was Amram, a man who married his aunt, Jochebed, in clear violation of the law against incest found in the Book of Leviticus. Much effort has been expended by theologians and religious historians to explain away this ‘inbreeding characteristic’, also found among the Patriarchs. Both Abraham and Isaac, for example, passed off their wives as their sisters.² The idea that the founder of a great religion should have been the product of incest is so embarrassing that one wonders why the later compilers of the Exodus saga included it, unless there was some truth to it. Its importance is that it supports the claim that Moses was born an Israelite and that he was not, as is sometimes argued, an Egyptian.

We have no knowledge of where within Egypt Moses was born. The claim that he was set adrift in a basket on the waters of the Nile to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised at court can safely be ignored. The story is clearly a fabrication and contains elements that are common to the birth myths of other heroes of the ancient world. The birth myth of Sargon, the great Akkadian king who ruled in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, is so close to the Moses tale that some scholars believe that the Exodus compilers simply cut and pasted the story of Sargon into the Old Testament. The Sargon text appears below:

Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade, am I

My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not….

My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.

She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.

She cast me into the river which rose not over me.

The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water…

Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me.³

Sargon comes to the attention of the king and becomes his cupbearer. Introduced to court life, he becomes invaluable and is made king.

If we accept another element of the Moses saga that he was born close to the court of Pharaoh, it may have been that he was born among the Israelites living in and around Raamses and Pithom during the time of the Oppression. Ramses II ruled for sixty-seven years, and if he was the pharaoh of the Oppression, Moses could have been born just before Ramses’ reign and still had sufficient time to lead the Exodus under Merneptah, Ramses’ son and heir. If so, then from beginning to end, Moses would have been 72 years old, close to the 80 years claimed for him at the time of the Exodus.

One of the reasons why Moses was sometimes thought to be an Egyptian is that his name is Egyptian. ‘Moses’ is the Greek translation of the Egyptian word ‘mose’, meaning child, and is an abridgement of an usually more complete theophoric name such as Ptahmose (child of Ptah) or Amunmose (child of Amun). The name is a common one found on many Egyptian graves. It may seem curious that an Israelite couple should give their child an Egyptian name. But there is considerable evidence that some Israelites acculturated to Egyptian manners and ways, part of which was taking Egyptian names for their children. Moses, a fourth-generation Israelite resident in Egypt, probably was given an Egyptian name by his parents for similar reasons. Possessing an Egyptian name suggests that Moses’ family had already acculturated to some degree. It does not, however, prove that Moses was an Egyptian.

If Moses was an Israelite, one would think that he would be able to speak his ethnic tongue. We do not know what language the Israelites spoke. That it was some semitic tongue that dated back to the Patriarchal Period is almost certain. It was not, however, Hebrew. It was only after their arrival in Canaan, while still retaining some elements of their old language, that the Israelites developed a form of speech that eventually became biblical Hebrew. Hebrew seems to have grown out of a dialect of the northwestern Semitic languages spoken by the Canaanites.⁴ There is no reason to expect that the Israelites lost their language while in Egypt, but it is not unlikely that the more acculturated among them may have lost considerable fluency in the same manner that second generation American ethnics often understand the language of their parents and speak a few words of it, but have difficulty making themselves understood in the native tongue. This would explain why the Bible says Moses spoke with ‘aral sefatayim’ or ‘an uncircumcised lip’. This is often taken to mean that Moses suffered from some speech impediment, or that he stammered. More likely Moses spoke ‘like a foreigner’, that is his poor command of the Israelite tongue made it difficult for him to communicate with his Israelite kinsmen. Moses was likely an acculturated Israelite who had lost fluency with his native tongue and spoke it with an Egyptian accent.

The Bible tells us that Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, educated at his court, and grew to be a ‘prince of Egypt’. None of this is rooted in biblical evidence, for the Bible reveals nothing at all about Moses’ childhood experience or his education.⁵ The Bible says only that ‘the man Moses was exceedingly important in the land of Egypt’.⁶ This description hints that Moses may have been some sort of leader in Egypt, either of his own people or as a governmental official of some authority. The Egyptian government often educated the children of foreigners in state schools as a way of insuring that they had someone to deal with directly on ethnic questions. If Moses was educated in this manner, he would have been sent to one of the Houses of Life near the palace, a scriptorium where reading and writing were taught, and where Egyptian history and religion were also subjects. He would have lived at the scriptorium and would have attended between the ages of 8 and 12 years. These circumstances may have contributed to the tradition that Moses was educated at the court of Pharaoh. To his countrymen, however, Moses would have appeared as an Egyptian nobleman wearing fine clothes and speaking Egyptian, even as he struggled with his own tongue.

We are not to imagine, however, that Moses rose in this manner from some lowly position. More likely, his family already had attained some status in Egyptian and Israelite society. Otherwise, it is difficult to imagine how any of these opportunities would have been offered to him. He was, then, most likely the son of an Israelite family that was already very much acculturated to Egyptian ways. The Bible states clearly that in outward appearance Moses was an Egyptian. When Jethro’s daughters encountered Moses at the well after he fled from Egypt, they ran home and told their father that an ‘Egyptian saved us from the interference of the shepherds’.⁷ Biblical scholars suggest that Moses may have been wearing Egyptian clothes, or that his speech was Egyptian, or that he spoke the Israelite tongue with a heavy accent, all marks of an acculturated Israelite.

Martin Buber denies that Moses was an Egyptian, but concedes that the evidence of his education and the story of his Egyptian appearance, language, and education in some way ‘at court’, suggest strongly that Moses may have derived from a largely Egyptianized segment of his people.⁸ This segment was most probably the leadership elite of the group, those who like Joseph before them had become virtually Egyptians, even as they remained leaders of their less-assimilated brethren. It is only if Moses was a member of the Israelite leadership class that his return to Egypt from his successful escape after murdering the Egyptian overseer makes any sense. Only a leader would have felt an obligation to return, or expected that he would be followed by the people he left behind.

Elements of Moses’ behaviour are worth examining insofar as they shed light on his personality. One of the more interesting elements is Moses’ bloodthirsty and violent nature. I am not referring here to the murder and mayhem committed by Moses at the command of Yahweh, itself terrible enough, but rather to the violence and killing that Moses committed at his own initiative in the absence of Yahweh’s directives. History first encounters Moses as an adult when he murders an Egyptian overseer. This was no act of rage. It was, instead, clearly premeditated murder. The Bible says, ‘he looked this way and that, and seeing there was no one about, he struck the Egyptian down’.⁹ Moses showed no sign of panic. Instead, he coolly dragged the dead man away and ‘hid his body in the sand’. Moses then calmly went about his business and even returned to the scene of the crime, where he learned his Israelite brethren knew about the crime and might betray him. After he learned that Pharaoh knew of the murder and ‘seeks to slay him’, Moses fled.¹⁰ Moses’ behaviour was that of a man not easily upset by violence, and was a portent of his willingness to use it whenever it suited his purpose.

Another violent incident occurred when Moses returned from Mount Sinai to discover the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. Having convinced Yahweh not to exterminate the Israelites for their sin, Moses took it upon himself to punish them. Moses called upon his Levite praetorian guard and instructed them: ‘Put ye every man his sword upon his thigh, and go to and from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.’¹¹ The Levites were Moses’ clansmen, and formed the police force that Moses used time and again to keep his people in line. Interestingly, it is only among the Levites that we find Israelite men with Egyptian names.¹² Phinehas, the commander of the expedition that exterminated the Moabites, for example, was a Levite with an Egyptian name, as was Hur, and even Moses’ sister, Miriam. Three thousand Israelites were put to death that day, and then only after Moses had crushed the idol into powder, mixed it with water, and forced the apostates to drink it before being killed.

The next murderous outburst came when the Israelites were camped on the border of Moab and Canaan. Some Israelite men took up with the ‘daughters of Moab’, taking them as concubines and fornicating with them. Moses ordered the death of every Israelite man who ‘committed harlotry with the daughters of Moab’.¹³ Some of the Midianite women had apparently joined the Moabites in seducing the Israelites. The Bible says Yahweh ordered Moses to exterminate the Midianites, a particularly cruel command since Moses’ wife, Zipporah, and father-in-law, Jethro, were Midianites. Moses was being asked to kill his blood clansmen and he complied without hesitation or pity. He gave command of the expedition to the religious zealot, Phinehas, son of the high priest. Moses ordered Phinehas to exterminate the Midianites, specifically no one was to be left alive.

Phinehas attacked the Midianites with a cruel vengeance. But even this cold apparatchik could not bring himself to slaughter all the women and children, even as he slew every Midianite male. When Moses saw that Phinehas had spared the helpless, he flew into a rage. ‘Have ye saved all the women alive?’ Moses then ordered everyone but the virgins to be killed. ‘Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.’¹⁴ The young virgins were turned over to Moses’ troops to do with them as they wished. The slaughter and rape were so hideous that the officers of the army that had committed the outrage turned their share of booty over to Moses ‘to make atonement for our souls before the Lord’.¹⁵ It might be noted that while the Moabites were slain because of their sexual proclivities, the Midianites were slaughtered because they seduced the Israelites into worshiping idols, that is, they were killed for religious reasons. It was Moses who ordered the first religious genocide in recorded history.¹⁶

Another aspect of Mos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Moses: Israel’s First General
• Chapter 2: Buddha: The Soldier Pacifist
• Chapter 3: Muhammad: The Warrior Prophet
• Chapter 4: Legacies of War
• Notes
• Bibliography