Biblical Views: The Pharaoh, the Bible and Liberation (Square)

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After the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February, Google executive Wael Ghonim tweeted: “Good morning, Egypt. I truly missed you for the past 30 years!” This revolution, which was nonviolent and democratic, was an entirely modern phenomenon. But the backdrop of the Great Pyramids and the frequent references to Mubarak as the Last Pharaoh bring to mind a time span much longer than 30 years. The rule of the pharaohs in Egypt began around 3000 B.C.E. In the big picture we’re talking about 5,000 years of authoritarian rule by pharaohs, kings, emperors and dictators. In this long […]

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Endnotes

See Lawrence E. Stager, “The Patrimonial Kingdom of Solomon,” in William G. Dever and Seymour Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), pp. 63–74; and J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001).

See the fascinating treatments of these issues in Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007); Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009); and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005).