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Re: Gideon Disrespected

Posted By: virolo
Date: Thursday, 15 March 2007, at 10:28 a.m.

In Response To: Gideon Disrespected (Charles Pope)

This is your message board and I am not here to attack you. I find much of what you say to be of value for its original thinking, but I don't in general subscribe to your conclusions. I have read much of your book online, but it has been a while and I intend to revisit it.

It is no use simply to point to one coincidence of fact between two stories and thereby insist they are related. There needs to be more in common between them than just the number 300. I could just as easily point to some other number of people and find two stories where that number was involved, and yet there would be no connection between them. For example take the number 600. That is both the number of cavalry involved in the Crimean War incident immortalized by Tennyson in his poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and it is the number of Confederate POWs who have been termed "The Immortal 600" because of their stalwart endurance of terrible conditions in a Union prison camp. At least both of these groups of men lived in the same century.

I don't accept the identity of Gideon/Jerubbaal with Mamre, Agag, or Taa II. I am a Biblical adherent. I believe the accounts in the Bible are correct as they stand and do not need to be explained differently.

Mamre was a contemporary of Abraham ~1880BC

Taa II was (probably) the father of
Kamose and Ahmose, and was roughly
contemporary with Jacob although
Jacob outlived him by a great deal.
Taa II died during the time Joseph
was in prison ~1680BC

Gideon lived in the middle of the
period of the Judges ~1250BC

Agag was a contemporary of Saul ~1130BC

Concerning Gideon's supposed undeserving "gruesome death" as Taa II was supposedly killed,
1. You are correct in stating that we don't read about this in Judges. In fact, we are informed that Gideon died "in a good old age".
2. The idea that Taa II died violently has been solely due to the identification of his supposed mummy which was found in the cache of royal mummies at Deir el-Bahari in 1881. This identification may be correct but it is still open to question, as there is some evidence that some of the royal mummies found in the other large cache (in the Valley of the Kings tomb of Amenhotep II) may have been mislabelled in antiquity following the looting of the gold from the bodies. It may have been the case that the identities of the mummies was uncertain following the looting, and that the authorities at the time merely did the best they could to identify them during the re-wrapping phase. Or perhaps the supervision of the work was shoddy.
There is nothing in the written records of Egypt to indicate that Taa II died violently, although perhaps the situation of Pharaoh's baker and butler (in prison with Joseph) had something to do with a possible investigation into Taa's assassination.
It is known however, that Amenhotep I was violently murdered, and his supposed mummy was found in the same cache with that of Taa II's.

Finally, regarding your conclusion that the Spartan leader identified with Gideon and accepted the "fatalistic outcome" that went along with that, how can that be possible? The biblical story of Gideon carried no unfortunate outcome with which it would be necessary to identify. It would be more sensible to argue that the story of Gideon inspired Leonidas to hold out against impossible odds in the hope that he might be equally successful.

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