The staff of Moses is said in ancient Jewish folk tradition to have been given to him by the angel Metatron, who is the messenger spirit between God and human beings. The staff was originally a branch of the Tree of Life, from which Metatron plucked it when the world was young. Sometimes the staff itself is called Metatron; like Ningizzida, the Mesopotamian messenger god, who is depicted alternatively as a caduceus or in human form with two snakes coming out of his shoulders, the god and his symbol are confused. Metatrons rod is thus one version of the magic staff shared by many circum-Mediterranean and Asian religions, and is a direct analogue of the caduceus of Hermes/Mercury. As we can see, the motif of a snake-entwined staff/rod goes back at least to the Mesopotamian messenger god, Ningizzida/Ningishzida, a forerunner of the Greek Hermes and Roman Mercury, who in turn are syncretized with the Egyptian Thoth and replicated in Metatron. Metatron himself is equated with Yahweh in the apocryphal text 3 Enoch 13, in a sense placing his rod in the Jewish tribal gods hands. In this regard, Moses and Yahweh are equivalent, as they are intertestamental literature making the patriarch a god. Moreover, Moses and Aarons rods—essentially the same as the magical staffs of other deities and heroes—was a branch of the Tree of Life, which we have seen to be also the grapevine. This branch/rod was specified in antiquity likewise to have served as the Life-giving Cross of Christ. (D.M. Murdock. Did Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver. p 387) Ningishzida the Mush Another underworld and serpent deity is the Mesopotamian agricultural and fertility god Ningishzida, who was understandably the subject of magical incantations by priests, including one text invoking his mouth as that of a magician and a snake ... The original Sumerian of this text repeats the terms mash-mash, mash, and mush ... Mash-mash is rendered magician, while mash is pure, and mush is snake. One manuscript (ms.) reads snake (mush), rather than magician (mash), indicating that these terms were considered interchangeable to some extent. The alliteration in this passage suggests what must have appeared to be a very magical incantation, pregnant with meaning a power... ...The oldest of its kind extant, [the libation vase of Gudea, which depicts Ningishzida as twin entwined snakes guarded by two Mushushu, or dragons] dates to the 21st century BCE, long before the purported historical Moses. This god, therefore, is extremely old, and it is clear that he was addressed by the essentially same title as Moses many centuries before the Jewish bible was written. Mosheh and the Serpent There exists good reason to suggest that the mythical and syncretic Moses is based significantly on not only the sun and wine god but also the serpent deity, including and especially Ningishzida as Mush, mush-hush or Msh, as he appears to have been passed along in the Ugaritic texts. In this regard, [historian Michael Astour] summarizes his case that Mosheh/Moses seems to be derived from the ancient serpent god, rather than the Egyptian term for born: For the Herbrew Moshe, too, the association with the Canaaneo-Sumerian serpent god seems to be much more convincing than with the pale banal Egyptian hypocoristic [diminutive] from some name composed with ms(w) born. The ophic features of Moses are very pronounced: his sacred emblems are the serpent wand and the bronze serpent on a pole; his tribe is Levi, whose name signifies serpent ... he is a healer in the full sense of this word, knowing both how to cause and to heal diseases. We have seen how Moses and Aarons staffs turn into snakes (Exod 4:3, 7:10), how Yahweh sent fiery serpents against the Israelites (Num 21:6), and how the patriarch raised up a magical bronze serpent, Nechushtan (2 Ki 18:4), as a talisman against death by snake bite (Num 21:9). We have noted too that the entwined snakes symbolizing the healing deity date to at least the third millennium BCE, with the magical and healing serpent-controlling spells part of an ancient priesthood. (D.M. Murdock. Did Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver. pp 475-477)
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 06:58:49 +0000
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