Egyptian culture
Vern Peterman · Sep 26, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 13
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826231313451

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, as I mentioned, we're going to take a look at Egyptian culture here. And one of the things you'll probably notice, there's a lot of fascination about Egyptian culture. Just, you know, a lot of strange things and, you know, kind of the big symbols that stand up in people's minds, they think of mummies and pyramids and sphinxes and things of that sort. As we step into it here, the Eye of Ra.

The Egyptian culture and the Bible. The Bible has a lot of contact all the way from the time of Abraham, that's the first connection in Genesis chapter 12, all the way through the book of Revelation. And there's ongoing contact off and on during that period of time. Abraham, Jacob to the Exodus, kings of both the United and Divided Kingdoms.

They look to Egypt as an ally in defense. Here it's strange. They got out of Egypt, established a nation, then looked to Egypt, and the Lord kept telling them, don't look to Egypt. Don't trust in their horses and their chariots and all that. And Egypt actually, militarily, kind of continued on a decline, and they proved to be less and less of a favorable ally. It was not a good relationship, but they continued to do so.

And we read of Egypt again as Joseph and Mary escaped from Herod by going there with the infant Jesus. Best guess, probably went to Alexandria. That would be a large colony of Jews. And then Acts, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation mention Egypt as well. So it goes all the way from the early chapters of Genesis, starting with chapter 12, all the way into the book of Revelation.

This is Tutankhamen. Now that's the pretty picture. This is the ugly one. That's what's on the inside of the mummy case there. So anyway, it doesn't look so good anymore. This is the Rosetta Stone. You ever heard of the Rosetta Stone? The Rosetta Stone, famous stone, and it's used oftentimes as a kind of a symbol of this is something that helps us to understand what's going on. Let me explain why.

It was a stone found by Napoleons troops as they went into to Egypt it was really kind of a crazy venture but they went into Egypt and they found this stone 1799 and there was a French scholar who studied it because from the about the year 400 AD until about the time this was found people were clueless as to what was going what had gone on in Egypt what was the history of Egypt And the reason was you go to the ruins and there's all these hieroglyphics and it just looks like a bunch of crazy pictures.

And you couldn't make any sense of it. And they'd have animals and the animals would be like a cross between a falcon and a crocodile and they'd have a hawk looking at you and it'd be facing different directions. They couldn't figure it out. It's just very cryptic.

You're going to learn hieroglyphics this morning. It had three languages because what it was was a time just a couple centuries before the New Testament. It was between the Testaments. And what they had was hieroglyphics on the top. Now you notice the part that's broken, but there was enough there to see it. And the same thing in another script called Demotic, and the same thing on the bottom in Greek. And they could read the Greek really well, because they had people that had been studying that for quite a while. and the Demotic they were not quite as familiar with, but they could read that, and then that gave them a clue because it was the same thing in hieroglyphics. Now they could figure it out, and this was the key. Here is what the hieroglyphics look like, kind of a close-up of the hieroglyphics, and I'll show you other samples.

One of the things you'll notice, where you see the birds, which direction are the birds facing? You see any birds there? Hard time picking it out? Here, let me make sure that we're on the same page here. About here? Here? Here? Which direction are they facing? Okay, keep track of that. We'll see that in a minute, that that's important.

Here was the Demotic script, which is basically a very unusual script now. It was the way that people wrote more commonly. The hieroglyphics was the language of the priests, was the writing of the priests, okay? Here is the Greek in all capital letters.

So they had those three that they worked with Hieroglyphics were written in all directions Whoa, but remember what I asked what direction are the birds facing? Here's the birds and they would be other creatures Occasionally as well you look for the direction that they're facing and that's the start of the sentence Ah, see? So they could have the writing going, and that's one thing that people who are looking at this stuff thought, man, we could figure out what this stuff is, because it would be going all directions. When you look for where the face is facing, and that's the beginning, and then you start from there and read from there, because it can go up and down and left and right.

It's crazy. It's nuts. But that's how they would do it, and it made it more cryptic to people who didn't understand that one simple principle. So now you're on a good start to learn hieroglyphics. All right. Now, this would be, for example, see this one, which direction is the bird facing? The other way. The sentence starts on that end. See?

You already know hieroglyphics. There you go. Okay, here is the alphabet you have on your color sheet. Here is the way they would spell things, and it's just basically like our alphabet, but with other symbols, right? So now you're well on your way to reading hieroglyphics. All those crazy little symbols of, you know, birds and pluses and strange things. That's what it is. Just go through and spell things the way we did, just different symbols.

Interesting, huh? Once you learn which direction it faces and what symbol means what, you're a long way into the process of being able to read the hieroglyphics. It was a language that only the priests taught each other. By the year 400 AD, the last priests had died off. Nobody knew how to read it until about 1800 when they discovered this.

And now you do. Oh, just different styles. In other words, it would be like in English we have different ways of spelling theatre. E-R and R-E. It's just different styles is all it is. And you'll find a couple of those where there's different ways. Yeah, two H's, two N's. Notice that V and W are the same. They also had a few others that were like C-H, T-H combinations, things of that sort, but this is the basic alphabet.

All right, Egypt maintained a continuity of culture in some degree for about 3,000 years. But with 525 BC, the Persians came in, and we'll kind of see the progression of the different empires and how they got closer and closer into Egypt. until they finally overcame them. The Persians came in. Then you start getting a mixture of Persian and Greek and then Roman culture mixed in with the Egyptians. And, as we'll see shortly, it went the other way too. Egyptian religion going into other places. Alright, so here you see it from very early continuing on.

About 400 AD was the end. After that, the last priest died out. They forgot how to write hieroglyphics. Nobody knew what it was. It was like, you know, totally puzzling. So the whole, the secrets of the Egyptian culture had just been locked up until the last couple centuries. Okay.

It's this last, you know, period of time in here where you have the Persian, Greek, and Roman culture mixed in. From the time of Abraham in Genesis 12, the Book of Revelation, a period over about 2,000 years, Egypt is mentioned in the Bible over 650 times. Lots and lots. Most of those references are reminding the Jews that they were taken out of Egypt. Isn't that amazing? Kept reminding again and again. You came out of there. You came out of there. I took you out of there. God telling them that he took them out of Egypt. Here's the Egyptian historical timeline. You've got it in your handout as well.

This period of time up in here, the dates are less certain. And Egyptologists, people studying Egypt, will sit there and in their journals argue back and forth about what divides exactly where. So when you see that particular block of dates in there, they're still calculating, still arguing, still trying to figure it out. It's one of the reasons why it makes it difficult to be absolutely certain, for example, which Pharaoh did Moses talk to? Those kinds of questions. All right.

It was this period in here where you've got Abraham to Joseph, right about in there. I think that shows up on your handout, doesn't it? And then right the next section in there where you've got slavery, because remember after Joseph, here Joseph and his family were welcomed into Egypt under Joseph. Shortly thereafter, another, because remember they had different dynasties in Egypt. And so a new dynasty would come in and they would say, Joseph who? Okay.

And then turn against the Jews and turn them from being, you know, having an exalted and authoritative position to being slaves. And it was 400 years of slavery. 430 years to the day, exactly. To the Exodus, under that period of time. Now, notice it says 1550 to 1069. It was actually fairly early in that, about 1440 when the Exodus took place. It wasn't very far into that new kingdom when the exodus took place. Then you have this period of time where they looked to Egypt as a military ally. And as we'll see in a little bit, it was a declining value because Egypt kept doing more and more poorly militarily. And Jeremiah actually went to Egypt. And it's interesting. Here's Jeremiah.

He's got a ministry of telling people bad news. Can you imagine that? I mean, just terrible bad news. They threw the guy down in a mud pit and just left him there for a long time. But anyway, when he went to Egypt, he was telling people, don't rely on Egypt. Went down there to tell them that, you know. So this guy had a tough ministry of telling people things they didn't want to hear.

All right. And then in this period of time, a Jewish colony was established, remember, under Alexander the Great. And Alexander needed some allies in Egypt. And so one of the ways he did that, he says, hey, I'm friendly with the Jews. So let's bring the Jews down here and let's establish Alexandria. Nice name. And we'll have a Jewish colony. And so a major Jewish colony was established there in Alexandria. And then finally, we find Egypt as a place of escape there with the time of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus down into Egypt.

Okay, lots of changes over 3,000 years as you'd expect. Changes in dynasties and some changes in practice. A general decline in the last, say, 1,000 or so years in the military power of Egypt. But there are some common principles and facts that are useful. We can't hope to keep track of all the details unless you just happen to make that a personal hobby. But there are some things that are useful and I want to go over those.

One is Egypt had a system of power which placed the pharaoh as the ruler and the deity. That was common throughout the history of Egypt. The sense of deity tended to decline towards the end, as you can well imagine, as the culture got invaded by other cultures. The religion had about 700 gods. How would you like to keep track of those? 700. I don't know how you memorize all those, but that's what they had.

What you wanted to do if you were an Egyptian was try to figure out how do I keep the right relationship and manipulations with these gods in order to make certain that I have this afterlife. Because you got to get mummified and then these gods have to work together to get you, you know, brought into the afterlife in this mummified body. So you had to have the right relationships with these gods. The Egyptians saw eternity as spent in whatever earthly accommodations were provided for the dead.

So whatever you build, that's where you're going to be forever. So that's why you want to make it nice. As a matter of fact, they had a sense of don't invest in this life, invest in the afterlife. So there was something about that that kind of seemed right. The problem is that they thought whatever they built, like this, that's where you're going to spend eternity. So make it nice. So they thought we're going to spend eternity here in whatever you make here. So that's why they have this pyramid with all these tunnels and things inside the things, so you've got a place for the spirits to be in this afterlife. So you have these eternal accommodations.

Here's a close-up of this pyramid, because what's interesting, from a distance, let me back up, from a distance, you see a little bit of roughness. When you get up close, look how rough that is. There's big blocks, and then you see some access places into the pyramid when you get closer. Here's a little more distance on the pyramids there. Sunset. A little shadow. Nighttime. Got them all lit up. Fascinating stuff. And there's daytime with the Sphinx. All right.

The slaves, who were typically a graded number, were put to work on public projects. And to a great extent, those public projects were putting together those fancy facilities so that the pharaohs especially, and all the workers that went along with the pharaohs, could spend their eternity together.

The people who were particularly close in assistance to the pharaoh were also killed at the same time. When the pharaoh died, they died, because the pharaoh would then have assistance in the afterlife, in the same various court support things. And so them being killed at the same time was not a bad thing in their view. It wasn't like, oh no, they're going to kill me. It was like, oh, I'm going to go help the pharaoh. So that was a part of their whole scene and why you would find not just the pharaoh mummified, but all the other priests and court support that you would have for this pharaoh. That was the thought anyway.

So anyway, here's the temple at Karnak. By the way, have you ever seen the movie The Mummy? They took it in some of these facilities here. Temple at Karnak, here's a daytime shot of part of that. Inside, and again you see some of the, it's a little hard to see, some of the hieroglyphics on the wall.

The mummies, a key part of the religion because you wanted to give the gods, according to the Egyptian view of things, you wanted to give the gods something good to work with to resurrect. And so, interestingly enough, they took really good care to make sure the bodies were all properly prepared and wrapped up and all that sort of thing.

They would take out the internal organs and put them in jars store those up so they're preserved well, so that God's had an easy time putting it back together. They didn't understand, however, that the brain was where we did our thinking, so they pulled that out and threw it away. Because they thought your heart, you know, this thing that beats, they thought that's where you did your thinking. So they took the brain, they thought, what's this big fatty blob, and they just pulled it out, they bore a hole through the nose, pulled it out, and threw it away. Anyway, they would preserve everything, and they had this This Egyptian Book of the Dead was their manual on how you do all this stuff.

Mummifying, it would be about 70 days of preparation before putting the pharaoh in his tomb. So it was a major process. It wasn't a let's get it done in a few hours kind of deal. It was a long, long process of getting everything prepared. Yeah? What about the people that died? Did they mummify them? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Because they got everybody ready. And then they would put kind of gold sleeves on all the fingers and toes, because otherwise they get all crunched up and everything. So to keep them all straight, they'd put these gold sleeves on them and wrap them up in there. So it's all the bodies would be found with these gold sleeves on the fingers and toes.

Yeah, but they would go through and do the same thing with high court officials, you know, people that were involved with the pharaoh and they would get the same kind of treatment because they have to be preserved into this afterlife as well. That was their thought. What's interesting is as believers now, our resurrection is keyed to our having been identified with Christ in His resurrection, right? Whereas for these people, there is an identification with the Pharaoh in some sense, that that's the association that they were looking for.

And so they looked at that, but they relied on these 700 gods. They even had a god of mummification. That's the jackal. You ever see the jackal? Hey, that's their god of mummification. And they would have these gods that they would rely on in order to look to these bodies being resurrected into the afterlife in these same, I mean, they'd have whole cities underground or built into these tombs. tunnels and rooms and facilities, recreation, food to eat, I mean everything.

I don't know, it's really strange. The one thing that is preserved over thousands of years is jars of honey. That was the one thing that didn't decay. So anyway, here's them showing them going through the mummification process and their concern with all the different parts. You see the jars off to the side there where they take the internal organs and put them in the jars. So great concern over this.

The military, once having established its territory, Egypt, unlike a lot of the other ancient empires, how they were always kind of, let's make it, let's get a lot of territory, Egypt didn't seem to be terribly interested once they kind of got their initial territory and expanding that a whole lot, because their focus was, okay, we've got enough to protect ourselves, now let's do our Egyptian thing, including their practice of religion. And so the, The military wasn't really designed to go out and get big empires. It was designed just to defend ourselves.

It was also used for slave capture because they had to look for all those facilities to get built. You have to have lots of slaves and they better work hard. What you see in the pictures, and we'll see them shortly, is they would capture black slaves, Nubians. And you'll also see Asiatics, which included, of course, the Jews and others more into the Middle East. Those were the two groups that they would typically gather up as slaves. This was a buckle from Tutankhamen. It shows the chariot.

So that's one of the things that they would do is invest lots of craftsmanship and artistry into developing things that the pharaoh would have in the afterlife, because he wanted to make his afterlife even better than the life that he had on earth. After all, a few decades on earth, but forever in this afterlife they would supposedly create. Abraham went in and out of Egypt. He went there with Sarah, and Sarah was added to Pharaoh's harem.

How come? Remember? What's that? Yes. Was Abraham lying completely? Why? What was going on? He was a half-sister, okay? And that by itself, you know, wasn't a problem. He forgot to say, hey, she's also my wife. It was not a problem to the Pharaoh or to Abraham's culture that she was half-sister, but that she was a wife to Abraham, that wasn't good. That wasn't acceptable in Abraham's culture or the Egyptian culture. So anyway, what's interesting is rather than the Lord talking to Abraham directly about it, the Lord let Pharaoh know you've got a problem. Real interesting.

This is the obelisk, which is the one remaining structure from the City of On. later on called Heliopolis. In Jeremiah 43, 13, by then they were calling it Heliopolis. But this was the home city of Joseph's wife, because his wife was the daughter of the priest of On. And that's the one structure left from the old city of On, which later on was called Heliopolis. The pharaoh named Joseph Zephanaz, Penea, and gave him the daughter, excuse me, gave him Esenath, the daughter of Potiphar, a priest of Ant, as his wife. So you can see various references there in Genesis. Anyway, that's the lone item from the City of Ant.

Here I was telling you about the black slaves, which are the Nubians, and then the lighter skinned ones, which were the Asiatics, including the Jews. So that's the way you'll see them pictured in the And the tomb drawings and paintings and things of that sort, the dark skinned ones and the Nubians and the Asiatics will be lighter skinned.

And that included the Jews. This, by the way, is that particular tomb painting is 1470 to 1445. So it would have been within years, maybe as little as five years of the time of the exodus. So Moses would have been around during the time this was painted.

The Jews made lots of bricks. Imagine 430 years of slaves, up to 3 million people total population by the time of the end, and their primary assignment was brick making. So they made lots of bricks, and they would make them like this, put the pharaoh's stamp in each brick, and that was typical of that era. Even over in Babylon, they have the emperor's The king's stamp, that was typical practice. They did that here with the pharaoh's mark.

Here's a brick mold from the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So anyway, interesting, we still have that around after several thousand years. But that brick mold would have been typical. You take the mud, you stomp the straw in it, and then you put it in the mold. Get it in shape, lift up the mold, put it down, put another one in, and do that the rest of your life. Imagine that. Bible and Spade is a publication I've gotten since the mid-1970s. I'd recommend it. I'll give you a name to be careful of.

If you see anything that claims to be Bible and archaeology, Bible and history, name Ron Wyatt, I'd stay away from it. I don't know if you ever run across that, but if you see the name, I just say, no thanks. Ron Wyatt is a Seventh-day Adventist dentist who turned into a sort of archaeologist and went around finding things that archaeologists hadn't been able to find for centuries or decades. All of a sudden found everything, and he's not well regarded among archaeologists or even the Seventh-day Adventists.

That's one name I just caution you about. You'll see some stuff and sometimes people grab hold of it and it looks real fascinating, but it's wrong stuff. There's typically something wrong with it and he tends to grab at stuff that's flashy but doesn't have all the legitimate investigation behind it. Anyway, Bible and Spade is one that's a good one and they do support the integrity and inspiration of scripture. and yet are well qualified as archaeologists.

I've communicated with them some over the years and met at least one of the guys on staff. Anyway, they've identified this Hatshepsut as the likely daughter of Pharaoh who drew infant Moses out of the water. And you wonder, why is it that this Pharaoh's daughter gets to take a Jewish baby out of the water when Pharaoh wants the And what you'll see here in a minute is that this particular one had a higher position and she actually held the position like a pharaoh for a period of time. And that would have given her the authority to be able to say, hey, I don't care if she's Jewish or not, I'm keeping this baby.

So, real interesting. Here is the tomb of Hatshepsut. So, not a small tomb. This is the inside of it with some substantial paintings and things of that sort. Now, we're going to go through some maps of the empires to show how Egypt's land compared. Notice, this is about the maximum extent of the Egyptian empire. You see where it goes?

They had a segment of it going up the east into the Mediterranean, and the only real reason was not that they wanted to hold the land, but that they wanted a string of defensive forts that went up there because the possible enemies came from here and up here. So by having a string of defensive forts along that coastal band, they could have some advance notice and some places where they could stop possible enemy attacks. So that was the maximum amount of their empire. They really weren't interested in empire building beyond the land that they had. But that was a defensive move that they had that they soon lost. By the time we come, excuse me, let me back up into here. Here is the 10 plagues.

I think you have that in your handout. This says the Egyptian god defeated. That's kind of a simplistic listing. The truth is, remember, with 700 gods, there's more. So this is the one that's the head of the list. that you see listed, and there's actually several for each one. There's 700 gods, they've got gods for everything. And some overlap, and some, you know, this one works with this one, and that kind of thing. But you've got among those gods, the key ones there. This one, by the way, keep track of that, because we'll be returning that. Serapi, we'll see that in a little bit. It shows up, believe it or not, in the New Testament city of Philippi. We'll see that in a bit.

Okay, here's the Assyrian Empire. Notice it takes in the northern part of that area that Egypt used to have defensive forts in. So Egypt is now starting to lose ground. And in here you've got Israel and Judah. So Egypt is starting to lose some ground here along this Mediterranean eastern shore.

Now, here's the Babylonian Empire. What do you see next? Babylonian Empire comes and then they've lost even more. The Egyptians have gotten the kind of buffer that they had with Judah and Israel taken and a segment of the Sinai Peninsula taken as well. So Egypt is starting to get slivered into pretty badly. Now look at this next one. What happened? Here's the Persians. Now they lost it. So what happened is we see a maximum and they keep losing bits of it. So Egypt was declining in its ability to defend itself even though that's what its primary purpose in having a military was for. It was losing that battle.

By 525 the Persians went in and took them out. Took over Egypt as well. And then Alexander the Great, same thing. He says, hey, Persians were there, we can go in there too. So the Alexander the Great, you see him going down here, heading down through Israel, and then they went into Egypt and then headed east. So Egypt was early on the agenda for Alexander the Great taking over the Persian Empire. 331 BC. Next, when the Alexander the Great's empire collapsed, remember Craig was teaching us about that, he gave no thought to what's going to happen next.

And so the generals just split it up between them. And the Ptolemaic empire, that's the top one you see, the Ptolemaic kingdom, they took over Egypt. It was between them and this group up to the north here, they went back and forth a dozen times at least. with Israel, but the Ptolemaic Kingdom kept control of Egypt. All right. And that was 320 to 30 BC.

Then what's next? Who comes in? Romans. Yep. Romans say it's our turn. Okay. So Romans come in. Here's the empire under Julius Caesar. Notice they've got everything around Egypt, but not Egypt yet. That was just before, like a decade and a half before. And then finally, they come in here. By 30 BC, they've taken over Egypt as well. So now Egypt has had the Persians, and then the Greeks, and now the Romans come in and take over. Egypt has really gone down militarily from the power that they once had, right? The decline continues. All right.

We step into Philippi, and this is only one example, but to give you an idea, notice the Egyptian deities here. What's the top one? Serapis was the way the Greeks pronounced it, but what was the goddess we pointed out before in the plagues? Serapi, that's Serapis. So what's happened now, we've got the Egyptians declining in power, but their religion spreading all the way up to other places, including Philippi. Philippi being up in the European mainland.

Also, Isis, the Queen of Heaven. That's an interesting title. Isis, the Queen of Heaven. The source of life, the protector of the family. In Harpocrates, the son of Isis was often depicted as an infant held by his mother. Where do we see that? Very interesting influence there. Very interesting influence. That continued, that pattern continued into the Middle Ages, basically, they just switched names.

Alright, then here's the place where the pagan temples were in Philippi, at the main street, the Ignatian Way going through the middle of Philippi, and the theater off to the right, and the Egyptian gods, including Seraphi and Isis, Harpocrates over in the very top part of the map there. Now, let's see. The Egyptians relied on their own works and the works of priests and slaves to make nice places for themselves in the afterlife, especially for the Pharaoh.

Rely on your own works. Rely on the things that we can do. You've got to do it all. They were concerned, boy, we've got to get this all straightened out. And if you were really concerned about a friend of yours that died, because remember, this didn't just go to the pharaoh, it was down to everybody. If you were really concerned about a friend of yours that died, and after the person had died, you could still help make sure they got steered in the right direction by giving the priest a little bit of money. So that kind of helped make sure they got steered in the right direction.

Whereas John 14, 2-4, in my Father's house are many dwelling places, if it were not so, I would have told you, for I go to prepare a place for you. Who prepares the place? It's the Lord's doing, isn't it? It's Christ's doing. If I go and prepare a place for you, with the assumption that the answer is yes, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, you may be also. So it's not just the gods are going to resurrect you, as the Egyptians would have it, and you'll spend the time with your court group, but it is eternity with Christ.

Big difference. He is the one who does the preparing. It's eternity with Him. It's not manipulating the gods and knowing how to pull their strings. It's instead knowing the One who has prepared a place for you and is coming to take you to be with Himself.

Big difference. Big contrast. The other thing is The message of the gospel there for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son That whosoever believed in him should not perish, but have everlasting life Here the Egyptians had their Ankh the symbol of their eternal life their immortality You have that which is life But of all of your own works all of your own preparations and whatever you didn't prepare. That's just too bad and Or, God's plan through Christ. His doing. His accomplishment. His preparation. His work.

Alright, next we'll go into Assyrian culture. Now, we've had some questions. Any more questions? And I don't know everything, so we'll try. Yes, yeah. Think about it, there are some reasons why in spite of having these tombs and things mummified, there are reasons why we don't have all the information we might want.

And one reason is because when they would write things down, there were some things that they wouldn't want to record. For example, If you were the pharaoh who had a whole bunch of your soldiers all wiped out in the Red Sea, would you want to write about that on some tomb writing on the wall? No. You wouldn't. You'd want to keep that quiet or secret or somehow disguise it. So you're not going to write about that. How about people who raid tombs? Guys who go and break into the tombs.

What do you got on the fingers and the toes of each one of these royal mummies? solid gold sheet. You saw that buckle of Tutankhamen, and that's a nice piece of gold. So there's lots of things that they would leave because they want the finest afterlife possible for this royalty and their court.

And so they would have things that people would want to take. So if things were taken, you don't find that. So Egyptologists have a lot of frustrations. One thing is, too, you tend to have things at the higher end of the culture in terms of economy and status, economics and status. That gets recorded. But what was the common people's life like? Not as much gets recorded as that. So there are gaps.

Sometimes what also happens is they take someone's statue and re-chisel it. And so the original record of whatever that was would be either completely lost or substantially destroyed. Sometimes decisions and records from somebody previous would be reversed if somebody didn't like it. You'd get a new dynasty in there and they'd go and chisel out stuff, break up things.

So there's a lot of holes and that's why it's that block of older things was really hard to nail down what happened when. That's why. It's because you get a lot of things either between things being partially recorded, recorded with a bit of a skew in the history. You get the tomb raiders come in and take things, because there's plenty to take. Even now there's stuff in there that they'd like to take, I'm sure. And then you get things changed and corrected by subsequent, so-called corrected, by subsequent pharaohs. who would come in and maybe have a grudge against an earlier one or a change of dynasty.

And so a lot of things, yeah, that would make it real tough to get at what's the fact. And so because of those holes and discrepancies and things, yeah, being able to use the DNA tool is another way to check things. We have a lot of evidence, lots of incest. Incest is very common.

You know, brothers and sisters, mother and father, with sons and daughters, all kinds of incestuous relationships, real common during that era. But being able to check those out, when are they saying mother figuratively and when are they saying it literally, things like that, especially when you're dealing with the hieroglyphics which are often a little cryptic.

Yeah, good question. Other questions? Yeah. What was the common man's perception of the afterlife? It seems like it's very dependent upon money, how well you end up. Yes, yeah. But what you do is, rather with the Pharaoh, where you're able to get lots and lots of resources put into it, you end up having a poor afterlife too.

Instead of having really fancy, nice gold stuff, remember that Tutankhamen with all the gold and the neat colors? Boy, that's a fancy looking thing. Instead they'd have something made out of wood, a real cheap, quick painting. Just like now we have pine boxes to bury people in and things like that where you can get something fairly inexpensive.

But their problem was rather than saying, okay, this person gets a cheap burial, it's this person gets a low afterlife. And part of the problem was that you then had a higher risk of maybe the gods weren't going to be real favorable to you. So it was not just you get a low afterlife status, but you also may get risked that things don't happen right. And so that's why you'd hope to have your friends pay some extra money after your life to help out if you didn't have money. And so you could pray for the dead and you could you know, give money to have the priest pray for the dead, that kind of thing. So it was interesting. Yeah, they still had the same sense of afterlife, but the money was definitely a problem. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Right.

It was a real problem because a lot of times, if you had a death like that, they weren't prepared for it. A pharaoh would be in his position for decades and they'd be preparing his tomb for his whole life of rule. Whereas if you have a young son like that, it would just be a hurry up and get it done. So would they put him in the tomb they were preparing for? Yeah, they would have something that was sort of half prepared make that as some part of the preparations, but they may not be ready for them. That's one reason why it would be all the more grievous to lose the firstborn like that, because you're not ready. You've got to scramble, and it means you're diminishing their afterlife for eternity by taking the firstborn early like that.

And to have everybody in all of Egypt have that happen was a horrible scramble. Imagine the The priests are going out of their minds trying to keep up with this stuff, with people dying like that, and especially with the firstborn, you've got to scramble to try to do it right according to the Egyptian religion. You can see why the Bible makes it clear in Exodus that the plagues were an attack against the gods. It doesn't just say it's against the Egyptians, it actually says against the gods. And you can see, you know, it's just square headlong against their whole religion, where They're trying to prepare for this afterlife and they got priests that are all set up and they do all the right stuff and now you just totally overwhelm them.

There's no way they can keep up with it all. And so you can imagine the priests could only do some small percentage of what they thought was necessary to assure a decent afterlife. With totally inadequate resources and burial facilities, I mean it just totally blew them away, I'm sure. They must have been ruined. in terms of their perspective, here's my first born son in each of these families, and completely inadequate preparations. It must have blown them away.

Yeah, good question. Other questions? What's interesting is that we tend to look at something like a statue is sort of a memorial type thing. Whereas they didn't look at it as memorial, to them it's dwelling place. They looked at statues that look good was a prophecy to them of that's how the afterlife is going to be for this person. And so part of the Sphinx thing was you've got this tomb, but it's also, that's a prophecy of, you know, I got this good looking grand dwelling for this pharaoh or whoever the court being is going to be. And so they have different ones. You notice that there's pyramids, there's sphinxes, they have temples of different sorts. So they didn't have one-size-fits-all kind of answer. You could have different kinds of dwellings.

But when they would make a statue, whether it was on the wall or as a relief or a separate statue, either way, they're trying to And they would make it a prophecy. That was their sense of, if I make it in drawings, if I make it in relief form, if I make it in statute, then that prophesies what will be true. That was their sense of it. So it was just another attempt to try to prophesy a future in the afterlife for these people. Weird, huh? Very strange. Their sense of things is if you wrote something down, it would come true. If you spoke somebody's name, they would resurrect. That was their thought. Real interesting. Well, let's call it.

Lord, thank you that we have a sure hope that doesn't depend upon us. It doesn't depend on our financial resources or our status. It instead depends upon you. And what a wonderful thing that is. Lord, how marvelous that we don't have to have some exalted position to have some kind of hope. But instead, Lord, we can look to you for every resource. You, indeed, are the one who provides this afterlife in a place that you've prepared and not we ourselves. And we look forward to that. for all that you have done for us. In Jesus' name, Amen.