The Master Baiters

self inflation through manipulation

Today I’ll be looking at Palestine and the Levant in the 14th c BCE when it was ruled by vassal lords under the Egyptian king, Amenhotep III. I’ll be tying Biblical names of people and places to historical accounts from the Amarna Letters that might or might not be the same, and presenting my evidence.

My title of Master Baiters is because I’m following the thread of a technique of domination rather than specific people. These hidden masters found disgruntled, landless populations and motivated them to attack, terrorize, torture and murder settled peoples with the ‘bait’ of taking their land.

It’s not the people manipulated into doing the dirty work who concern me but the mind conspiring to turn them into weapons against others for their own power and amusement. Of course, the hands themselves are best positioned to know what’s controlling them. You don’t have to allow yourself to be Yews/ ewes/ used.

To balance the darkness of this and show what a scripture free of contradictions could be, I’d like to start a passage from A Course in Miracles. In this scripture, we are all the Love of God—not just God’s Beloved as a passive recipient but the actual Love of God emanating and expanding and creating, which is our function.

I trust the contrast will be obvious:

My Self is holy beyond all 
the thoughts of holiness 
of which I now conceive.
Its shimmering and perfect
purity is far more brilliant 
than is any light that I 
have ever looked upon. 
Its love is limitless, 
with an intensity that holds
all things within it, in the calm
of quiet certainty. Its strength
comes not from burning impulses
which move the world, but from
the boundless Love of God Himself.
How far beyond this world
my Self must be, and yet how near
to me and close to God!   

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who were the hebrews?

In the NIV study Bible, Genesis 14:13 refers to Abram the Hebrew and the footnote reads:

Abram, the father of the Hebrew people, is the first Biblical character to be called a Hebrew. Usually an ethnic term in the Bible, it was normally used by non-Israelites in a disparaging sense. Outside the Bible, people known as the Habiru/Apiru (a word probably related to Hebrew) are referred to as a propertyless, dependent, immigrant (foreign) social class rather than as a specific ethnic group. Negative descriptions of them are given in the Armarna letters (clay tablets found in Egypt).

Wikipedia describes the Habiru as "rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries, bowmen, servants, slaves, and laborers." The root means "dust, dirt" because they were “nomads, mercenaries, people who are not part of the cultural society." Spelled as ‘SA.GAZ’ in some of the Amarna Letters, it means raider and in others it’s spelled SAG.GAZ … The only Akkadian word which fits such spelling is "šagašu" (barbarian)."

(thank you to Amy of What’s In a Name, Really for the pictorial leavening ;-)

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enter the jackal

Many years ago, I picked up a secondhand copy of The Armarna Letters translated by William Moran. They are messages sent back and forth between the Egyptian king Amenhotep III and his vassal lords, written in cuneiform Babylonian dialects with provincial characteristics. The northern letters are in Hurro-Akkadian from the Hurrians. The southernmost ones from Egypt curiously tie most closely to the Hittites from the far north, who were attacking the vassal states. It’s described as:

a pidgin in which the Babylonian component is mainly lexical, whereas the grammar is profoundly West-Semitized, most notably in the word order and, most important of all, in the verbal system. The language can only be described as an entirely new code, only vaguely intelligible (if at all ) to the West Semite because of the lexicon, and to the Babylonian because of the grammar.

Could the Egyptian scribes have been infiltrated by the Hittites? Was this a coded language between scribes, since the rulers likely dictated their letters?

The politics in the letters concern two threats: the Hittite resurgence against Egypt and the usurping of cities by a vassal lord named Abdi-Ashirta, depicted as a jackal in cuneiform. He is loyal and subservient in his initial letters, saying to the King that he is the dirt under his feet, a dog of his house.

Behind the King’s back, he organizes the nomadic Habiru “through exploitation of social unrest and disaffection” which is “then solidified by his able son and successor, Aziru.” He uses them as a mercenary army to put other cities under siege until they turn on their own lords and kill them ‘in order to have peace’.

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a bird in a trap

Abdi-Ashirta is indignant that the King has written, “You are an enemy of Egypt and you committed a crime against Egyptians.” He protests that he simply defended Sumur and didn’t expel the vassal lords, who are lying through their rotten teeth. In the next letter, Abdi-Ashirta sends the King 10 women and that seems to placate him. Or perhaps Amenhotep, who was obese with rotten teeth (unlike his statues) was too distracted.

Over the course of five years Rib-Hadda sends 70 letters with frantic pleas to send archers and horses because Abdi-Ashirta has put Gubla under siege. People have sold their belongings, their children into slavery just to have food. He survives being stabbed nine times. The entire country of Canaan is falling to the Habiru, he says. He is like a bird in a trap.

Abdi-Ashirta’s son Aziru continues the aggression against Gubla and then takes Sumur and other cities without the King’s intervention in their defense. Aziru is accused of conspiring with the Hittites. He sends presents to the King stolen from other cities. Rib-Hadda ends with the plaintive, “Why has my lord abandoned me?” and then the letters cease. The Habiru, like jackals, have picked off the vassal cities of Egypt with barely a protest from the King.

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who is abraham?

As father of the Hebrews/ Hapiru, is Abdi-Ashirta the Biblical Abram? Does Aziru become Isaac? In the Bible, Abraham is buried in “the field he bought from the Hittites.” There is also Lab’ayu in the Amarna Letters, which sounds similar to Abram’s nephew Laban. Lab’ayu is accused of consorting with the Habiru and protests that he killed his son because of it.

In the Bible, Laban shelters Jacob when he flees Esau’s anger over stealing his inheritance. Jacob goes to work for Laban who declares him his flesh and blood. Jacob works for Laban for seven years to marry his daughter Rachel but Laban tricks him by substituting Leah, who has ‘weak eyes’. He works another seven years to marry Rachel. Then Jacob tricks Laban and his sons out of their flocks. With the help of God, he gets white sheep and goats to bear offspring that are spotted, striped or dark-colored, belonging to him. The name Laban means white.

When leaving to go home, he steals Laban’s gods. When Laban looks for them, Rachel hides them in her camel’s saddle and sits on them, saying she can’t get up because she’s on her period. Jacob and Rachel have Joseph, who struts around in his multicolored cloak like a girl and is Jacob’s favorite. His older brothers by Leah stuff him down a well, where he’s taken as a slave to Egypt. He interprets the dream and becomes the Pharaoh’s tax collector turning free Egyptian farmers into sharecroppers.

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sons of a weak eyed wife

In the Passover Haggadah, Laban is blamed for the exile to Egypt because he set the chain of events in motion. If Jacob had married Rachel first, Joseph wouldn’t have been resented by his brothers and ended up in Egypt. The Seder reads:

Come and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do our father Jacob. For Pharaoh issued his edict against only the males, but Laban sought to uproot all, as it is said, 'An Aramean would have destroyed my father, and he went down to Egypt and he became there a nation, great, mighty and populous.'

From Brittanica on Aramaic:

Aramaic language was originally spoken by the ancient Middle Eastern people known as Aramaeans. Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the language of the Jews as early as the 6th century BCE. Certain portions of the Bible—i.e., the books of Daniel and Ezra—are written in Aramaic, as are the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Among the Jews, Aramaic was used by the common people, while Hebrew remained the language of religion and government and of the upper class.

Are the Arameans the dark and spotted ewes/ Yews/ use? Did a royal coup gone wrong cause the Habiru to leave their home? And where was that home? And what were they called before they became nomadic Habiru?

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who sent the habiru away?

The other similarity to Laban is Lebanon. Under the Wikipedia entry, I find that:

In Byblos, which is considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, archaeologists have discovered remnants of prehistoric huts with crushed limestone floors, primitive weapons, and burial jars which are evidence of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic fishing communities who lived on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea over 8,000 years ago.

It was inhabited by the Canaanites, a Semitic people, whom the Greeks called "Phoenicians" because of the purple (phoinikies) dye they sold. These early inhabitants referred to themselves as "men of Sidon" or the like, according to their city of origin. The Canaanites were city-state settlers, who established colonies throughout the Mediterranean into a form of a Thalassocracy as opposed to an established empire with a designated capital city.

Each of the coastal cities was an independent city-state noted for the special activities of its inhabitants. Tyre and Sidon were important maritime and trade centers; Gubla (later known as Byblos; in Arabic, Jbeil) and Berytus (present-day Beirut) were trade and religious centers. Gubla was the first Canaanite city to trade actively with Egypt and the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC), exporting cedar, olive oil, and wine, while importing gold and other products from the Nile Valley.

Before the end of the 17th century BC, Canaanite-Egyptian relations were interrupted when the Hyksos, a nomadic Semitic people, conquered Egypt. After about three decades of Hyksos rule (1600-1570 BC), Ahmose I (1570-1545 BC), Theban prince, launched the Egyptian liberation war. Opposition to the Hyksos increased, reaching a peak during the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose III (1490-1436 BC), who invaded the area now known as Syria, put an end to Hyksos domination, and incorporated Canaan into the Egyptian Empire.

Toward the end of the 14th century BC, the Egyptian Empire weakened, and the city-states were able to regain some of their autonomy by the beginning of the 12th century BC. The subsequent three centuries were a period of prosperity and freedom from foreign control during which the earlier Canaanite invention of the alphabet facilitated communications and trade.

The Canaanites also excelled not only in producing textiles but also in carving ivory, in working with metal, and above all in making glass. Masters of the art of navigation, they founded colonies wherever they went in the Mediterranean Sea (specifically in Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, and Carthage) and established trade routes to Europe and western Asia. These colonies and trade routes flourished until the invasion of the coastal areas by the Assyrians.

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why egyptians fear shepherds

So Rib-Hadda is no ordinary whiny vassal lord, he ruled the oldest city in the world and Egypt’s first and most prosperous trading partner. And isn’t the Arabic name of Byblos/ Gubla—Jbeil—similar to Jezebel? In 2 Kings the daughter of a murdered ruler is named Jezebel, and her eunuchs are incited to throw her out of window where the dogs eat her while the Hebrew conquerer dines in her house.

The Hyksos / Heka Khasut or foreign rulers have just been evicted by the Egyptian Kings with Moses in their names, in the usual inversion technique of the Torah. The Hyksos are represented by the shepherd’s crook, crown and hill that indicates foreign. They left behind no statues as clues to their looks but only inscribed their names over the monuments left by others.

Josephus says that the Hyksos were Jews, in his refutation of Manetho who claims:

A people of ignoble origin from the east, whose coming was unforeseen, had the audacity to invade the country, which they mastered by main force without difficulty or even battle. Having overpowered the chiefs, they then savagely burnt the cities, razed the temples of the gods to the ground, and treated the whole native population with the utmost cruelty, massacring some, and carrying off the wives and children of others into slavery (Contra Apion I.75-77).

Manetho describes their eviction from Avaris:

Thoumosis ... invested the walls [of Avaris] with an army of 480,000 men, and endeavoured to reduce [the Hyksos] to submission by siege. Despairing of achieving his object, he concluded a treaty, under which [the Hyksos] were all to evacuate Egypt and go whither they would unmolested. Upon these terms no fewer than two hundred and forty thousand, entire households with their possessions, left Egypt and traversed the desert to Syria. (Contra Apion I.88-89)

I seem to remember 240,000 Hebrews wandering the desert in the Bible and coming to Canaan. Were the dethroned Hyksos called the Habiru or Hebrews? As strangers who had infiltrated the courts and become kings of Egypt, the Heka Khasut would have had the motivation and cunning to take over the cities of Lebanon and Canaan.

And it seems like the technique is the same—terrorism of the population without scruple or restraint to force them to turn on their own rulers. To take a city without battle or conquest is to subvert it from within. Perhaps they were first tolerated or even welcomed as immigrants with skills. Like Cain, they couldn’t be molested or turned away, and then they turned on their host. That’s the pornographic wet dream of the Master Baiters, complete control while no one knows that hand belongs to you.

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Simulation Commander, who writes Screaming Into the Void, quotes his avatar Orwell on "the intoxication of power." I describe the antidote as power over ourselves. I explain why buying local and UBI are good in the short term but won't solve the problem, and how technology could help us try out our models in cooperative competition.

I compare the story of Adam & Eve, Cain & Seth to the mythologies of the gods Osiris & Isis, Horus & Set. The geopolitical history of Egypt and the Pharaohs parallels Seth as the usurper and deceiver, who kills his brother. I cite Bloodline of the Serpent Seed by Robert Sepehr and include AI art in the Substack version

Does a psychoanalysis of the patriarchs of Genesis from the view of the slave-wives, raped daughters and disinherited sons. Second in the series of Revolutionary Mystics, it springs from the gnostic gospel of Philip to A Course in Miracles to the Bhagavad Gita to the Tao. Quotes Christopher Frye in A Sleep of Prisoners.