The Jews as wannabe Egyptian priests

The Torah as an attempt to create a priestly caste for hire.

In this post I will propose that the Jewish religion as we know it today is the result of an attempt to become something like the priestly class of ancient Egypt.

The Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was finished in Alexandria around 250 BC. I have seen the suggestion on Substack, and found it quite compelling, that the Hebrew Bible itself may have been created in Alexandria at around the same time as the Septuagint. Apologies, I cannot find the link for this. But the very Egypt-centered narrative of the Torah, and its heavy borrowings from older (e.g. Babylonian) sources that would no doubt have been available at the Library of Alexandria, are consistent with this story. It seems likely that much of the narrative could have been created in Egypt in the period leading up to the Septuagint translation. Consistent with this theory: there are copies of the Septuagint from the 2nd Century BC, but none of the Hebrew Bible from before that. There is evidence of a Passover festival happening in Egypt in the 4th century BC (the “Elephantine Passover papyrus”), but of course the religion could have been invented in stages.

The Egyptian priestly class were responsible for official duties at temples in Egypt and were used by the Pharaoh as a caste of administrators. They had high status in Egyptian society. Other than being a Pharaoh, being a priest was the highest thing you could aspire to. Priests were associated with the performing of magic. We find echoes of this in the story of Moses, whose staff turns into a snake; the creation of a snake was a known magic trick used by Egyptians, it relied on a burning chemical.

My thesis is that whoever created the Torah had the ambition that the Jews would become a "priestly caste", not necessarily for the Egyptians but for other nations that they resided in. Thus, the Jewish lifestyle was to involve heavy studying of texts, like Egyptian priests; it required circumcision, like Egpytian priests; it involved onerous acts of ritual purification, like Egyptian priests had to do prior to their ceremonies.

There would be no reason to take on all these onerous duties if the "upside" of being an Egyptian priest were not forthcoming, i.e. if the high social status and wealth were not part of the deal. So I propose that whoever created the Torah was trying to create something like a priestly class that would be helpers and advisors to kings. We can see this hope in the story of Joseph, who interprets the Pharaoh's dream as portending seven good years followed by seven years of famine; and who is subsequently appointed to an important position in the Pharaoh's administration. Of course this is clearly a form of wishful thinking; normally, no king, or at least no good king, would appoint senior advisors who are ethnically foreign, and particularly not from clannish and self-serving group such as the Jews.

This idea— that the Jews were auditioning for a role as a “priestly caste for hire”, explains the performative quality of the Jewish religion, noted by Jesus in the Gospels:

Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers!

The Jews do seem to aspire to becoming a special high-status caste assisting the King, in whatever nation they happen to live in. In fact, Jews have often functioned as a class that helped kings and nobles to extract things from their peasantry; this was particularly prominent in Poland, where nobles would often turn over the administration of their estates to Jews. In addition to running the estates, Jews would run liquor stores under license; these were a chief method for the nobles to extract a surplus from their peasants. (Read Solzhenitsyn's "Two Hundred Years Together" for more details on this). In more Western parts of Europe, Jews often helped kings as tax farmers (for example, in sixth century France); and later, helped kings to fund their wars by acting as moneylenders.

Of course, there will have been older forms of the Jewish religion than this. But I think the Judaism of the Torah is motivated by a desire to imitate the Egyptian priestly caste. I think this dooms the Jews to be always in the role of the scorned lover. It would be ruinous for any nation to take on a priestly or advisory caste who are ethnically foreign; and the history of Jewish expulsions bears this out.