Moses Before Pharaoh

Every African Christian knows the scene. Moses stands in the court of Pharaoh and throws down his staff, and the staff becomes a serpent. Pharaoh’s magicians throw down theirs, and theirs become serpents too. Then the serpent of Moses swallows the serpents of Egypt. The African reads it in Sunday school, he sees it in the films, and he cheers, because he has been told which side he is on. I want to show the nation what it is cheering for, because in that one scene the religion the African carries tells him, in a picture he was taught not to read, that his God was defeated, that his king was humiliated, and that his land was cursed. And it tells him this so well that he says Amen to it.

Here is the inconsistency the nation must sit with. Every African knows, from the beginning and from birth, that it is God who raises kings. That is the oldest teaching of our people and it is true. The same African also believes that God turned the Nile to blood, killed the firstborn of every African house and drowned an African king’s army in the sea, for the sake of another people. He holds both beliefs at once. He does not notice that in the second belief, God is against him. Religion made sure he would not notice, by the simplest method there is: it took the geography out of the story.

The serpent

Begin with the serpent, because the story begins with it and because the story chose it on purpose.

The serpent is not a random sign. In the spiritual system the serpent is the sign of the eternal, of infinity, of life that returns to itself and has no end. The oldest picture of a serpent swallowing its own tail, the circle with no beginning, is Egyptian, painted inside the shrine of a pharaoh three thousand years ago. And on the brow of every pharaoh who ever sat on the throne of Kemet stood the uraeus, the rearing cobra, the sign that the king held the eternal power and was protected by it. The serpent on the king’s forehead was the sign that the spirit was with the king. When the African of Kemet looked at his king, he saw the serpent and knew that God had raised him.

Now read the scene again with that knowledge. The story has Moses throw down a staff that becomes a serpent, and Pharaoh’s own men answer with the same sign, because it was their sign, the sign of their king and their God. And the story has the serpent of Moses swallow theirs. That is not a trick with snakes. That is the god of Israel swallowing the God of Africa, in the one picture every African would understand without a word. The story is saying: the eternal power that was on your king’s brow is now ours, and ours eats yours. We were shown, in that scene, that the Jewish god is greater than the African God of Pharaoh. And we lost. Not in history, because, as I will show, nothing of this is in history. We lost in the story, and the story is what we were given to carry.

Everything that follows in the account is the same lesson repeated. The Nile, which is the life of Africa, is turned to blood. The frogs, the lice, the flies, the cattle, the hail, the locusts. Then darkness, which blots out the sun that the Egyptians honoured as the face of the Creator. Then the killing of the firstborn in every African house. And the story says in its own words what all of this was for: “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment”. Every plague strikes a sacred thing of Kemet: the river, the sun, the cattle, the land, the king. The story is a war of gods, told by the side that says it won, and the African who carries it carries the account of his own God’s defeat.

The geography that was taken out

Religion has one habit it never breaks: it ignores where its figures come from. The moment race or geography is raised, the door closes. Moses is a Jew, and the matter is settled. Open the door and read what the story itself says about him.

Moses is born in Egypt. He is drawn out of the Nile and raised in Pharaoh’s own house as a prince of Egypt. His name is Egyptian; the scholars of the language agree that it is the same word that sits inside the names Thutmose and Ramesses, and that the Hebrew explanation was added afterwards. The New Testament itself says he was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians”. The book of Numbers says his wife was a Cushite, a woman of the land south of Egypt. Everything that made Moses was African. And then the story turns him around and sends him back into the African court to throw down the African sign against the African king.

So Pharaoh is an African; the story shows it and does not hide it. And Moses is an African by everything except the label the story gives him. What the story does is take an Egyptian prince, carrying Egyptian knowledge and the Egyptian sign of eternal power, and have him use them against Egypt in the name of a god who had just announced judgment on Egypt’s gods. That is the shape of a copy. When you copy you enter with nothing; you have to craft, and the crafting must explain why the original is no longer yours to honour. The story explains it by making the original the enemy.

What the record says

I set the record beside the story, not against it. The archaeologists of Israel themselves, Finkelstein of Tel Aviv first among them, have found no trace of an Exodus of this size in any Egyptian record or anywhere in Sinai, and Egypt recorded everything. Ramesses the Second had his battle camp at Kadesh carved on his temple walls in detail. He did not carve ten plagues, a serpent swallowing his magicians’ serpents, or the loss of his army in the sea. The first time the name Israel appears anywhere on earth, it is on the victory stone of the pharaoh Merneptah, about 1208 BCE, about a people already in Canaan and already beaten: “Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more”. And the sanctuary Moses is said to have built on the mountain’s pattern has, as the scholar Michael Homan showed, the plan of an Egyptian army camp, Ramesses’ own camp at Kadesh. The pattern Moses carried down the mountain was Egyptian before it was Hebrew.

I have taught that Moses began at a place of reflection, the burning bush, then ascended the mountain to receive laws, then built a temple, and that this pattern existed long before the Abrahamic religions, in ancient Mesopotamia – Africa. That is the pattern of the spirit king, the one who goes up, receives, comes down and builds. The story takes that office and gives it to Moses. So who was Moses? In the story he is cast in the office of a Physical Spiritual Central Being, and that is the proof that the story is a copy, because the office he is given is the office of the very system he is shown destroying. He receives the Egyptian pattern, builds an Egyptian-plan sanctuary, carries the Egyptian sign of the serpent, and does it all in the name of a god whose first act was to break the gods of Egypt.

Why this is the reason Africa cannot rise

Now the nation can see why I say what I say. A people’s God is its foundation. Our people knew that God raises kings and that the serpent on the king’s brow was the sign of it. Then we were given a story in which that serpent is swallowed, that king is humiliated, that river is turned to blood and that God is judged, and we were given it as our own holy book, and we were taught to cheer for the side that wrote it. A man who cheers for his own God’s defeat every Sunday is not a free man, whatever his passport says. He is a subject, and he is a subject in the one place that no political independence can reach, which is his own spirit.

That is what I mean when I say that as long as Africans are the subjects of other nations’ religions, Africa will never rise. It is not a slogan. It is a description of the scene in Pharaoh’s court and of what it did to us. The story was written so that the people the system was taken from would be remembered as Pharaoh, and we have agreed to be remembered that way. We read our own defeat and call it scripture.

So I ask the nation to do one thing with this story from now on. Read it with the geography in. When Moses stands before Pharaoh, see an African prince raised in the African court, throwing the African sign of eternal power against an African king, in the name of a god who has just announced his judgment on all the gods of Africa. See the serpent swallowed and know whose serpent it was. See that the record has no trace of any of it in the land where it is set. And then ask the one question religion made sure you would never ask: whose side is this story on? It is not on God’s side. God raises kings; He does not curse a land and drown its king’s army for another people’s benefit. It is on the side of the people who wrote it. The African who reads Exodus with the geography in stops cheering. That is not a loss of faith. It is the first day of knowing whose story he has been living inside, and a man who knows that can step out of it. The serpent was ours. It is time to take it back from the story that swallowed it.