History Forum / General / Ancient History / September 2003

a Translation of the Book of Genesis - from the Ethiopian Bible:

http://members.aol.com/abaselama/zefitret.htm

(Followin are prefatory notes to  by Rastafarian translator, Ras Feqade Tebbaqi
I)

 The Book of Genesis is one book that the faithless Babylonian
pseudo-Christian scribes and scholars have literally ripped to pieces in their
folly.

 Completely unable to accept the factual account that JAH created the world,
and Himself played a most active Role in guiding the faith of Enoch, Noah,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, etc., they have instead preferred to dissect
the manuscript into artificial divisions, by means that truly beg credulity.
They take as their starting point, the quite incidental fact that the Creator
is sometimes referred to as YHWH, and at other times as ELOHIM, in the Hebrew
version. This entirely irrelevant feature of the text has caused them to
postulate as certitude, without even the slightest scrap of archaeological
evidence, that the manuscript was originally a composite of two or more
separate documents treating on roughly the same events, one supposedly penned
by a "Yahwist" and another by an "Elohist", as if these were followers of two
separate cult deities! The variety of exegetical deductions, emendations, and
guesswork that the dry scholars so confidently manage to produce from this
single incorrect inference, quickly reaches the point of being ludicrous,
considering that no reference to a single one of these alleged
'proto-documents' has ever been discovered in any known writing of Antiquity.
Indeed, the "experts" are about as positively sure of the exact contents of
each of these imaginary 'proto-sources', to which they give quaint titles such
as "J", "E", "P", etc., as if they had found ancient copies of these
non-existent works lying in their own attics!

 The ulterior end-goal of all these authoritative pronouncements of the
scholastic scribes is, of course, to 'prove' ostensibly that the Hebrews had
once been a polytheistic group of Canaanite shepherds, who only gradually
adopted Monotheism as a result of contacts with the 'more civilised' Sumerian,
Egyptian and Persian religions...(!)  Be that as it may, I leave it to the
individual reader to decide his or her own opinions; but in the opinion of
-this- translator, the viewpoint of these Euro-scholars is rendered all the
more disgusting, by the scholars' masquerading as genuine doctors and clergy of
the Christian faith. How many sheep have been led astray by these wolves in
shepherds clothes, they who pretend to teach the true import of the Book of
Genesis, is, as they are so fond of saying, "impossible to say"...

 The time is now long overdue for a completely new 'exegesis' (what an ugly
word sound!) of Genesis, one made from the standpoint of faith in the Ethiopian
canon. This Ethiopian canon alone includes an additional Book that is, indeed,
none other than one of the earlier source-texts that was clearly used by the
Hebrew historian who later compiled Genesis! I refer, of course, to the Book
known in Ethiopia as Kufale, that was known to the Early Apostles, and even
included among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It has, like Genesis, suffered at the
hands of European scholars, who summarily fail to recognise that it is the
older book, and actually the very source-text of Genesis they have been
hypothesizing about all this time. This Book is generally known in English by
the name 'Jubilees', and occasionally is called 'Little Genesis.' That it is
infact the older scripture of the two should have been plain from a simple
comparison of the parallel passages, but that would have obliged the modern-day
Pharisees to abandon or at least rework their cherished 'J - E - P' dogma.
Jubilees dates itself to the time of the Exodus, circa 1250 BC, while Genesis
could well be at least 300 years or so later than Jubilees. (The dates falsely
assigned by the faithless exegetes of European Christendom are usually around
500 BC for Genesis and 100 BC for Jubilees, by the way.)

 Now, since it should be obvious that Jubilees was the main source for around
90% of the information used by the historian who compiled Genesis some 300 or
more years later, then if we are to do any hypothesizing, it ought to be about
what the source or sources were for the remaining 10% of information in Genesis
that was -not- taken from Jubilees. Instead of dissecting the lines that refer
to JAH by the Hebrew titles of either Yahweh or Elohim, it would make far
better sense to separate out all the verses that do not have any parallel in
the earlier Book of Jubilees, and label those verses as being from our
theoretical 'alternate source' document...