Moses

Some key teachings of Judaism are:

• God is one and cannot be divided.
• There is no need for intermediaries; anyone can pray directly to God.
• We are all born spiritually neutral (and sin is just a choice).
• Humans were created to help God complete creation; this is primarily done by bringing justice into the world.
• Humans are unique in all creation in that we have free-will. Not even angels have free will. This is what God meant when He said we were created in His image.
• It is not possible to atone for the mistakes of others.
• It is not possible to atone for mistakes not yet committed.
• God will never be man or son of man.
• Human sacrifice is an abomination.
• There is no such thing as original sin.
• There is no such thing as eternal damnation.
• Meshichim (messiahs) are mortal men with no supernatural aspects to them.

Orthodox Jewish Beliefs

There are certain basic beliefs that characterize Orthodox Judaism, although there is a fair amount of flexibility among the major Jewish thinkers.

• the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God who created the world and remains active in history
• reward and punishment
• the divine nature of the Bible - the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings; plus the importance of the Oral Law
• the world-to-come

Answer:

Judaism is a monotheistic faith; this means they believe in one God. Jewish people have a strong sense of community and feel that they are connected to one another no matter the distance. The religious text they use is referred to as The Torah; and they consider the 10 Commandments to be very important.

Jews believe in One God, who created everything and gave the Torah. Jews believe in the existence of the soul and afterlife.

Additional Answer:

In today's world, we have to keep in mind that the term 'Jewish' can relate to a religious belief or a nationality where there may be no religion involved. With this in mind, Judaism has branches just like most other religions. There is no 'creed' but there are 13 'core beliefs' stated by Maimonides's which many follow. They include One God as mentioned above and ends with a belief in a resurrection - to physical life again (see Ezekiel 37). Some believe in a shadowy existence after death with God. This is not quite the same as the heaven and hell concept of many Christian churches.

1) At the Burning Bush (Exodus ch.3-4). 2) At Mount Sinai (Exodus ch.19-20), along with the Israelites.

3) On every occasion that the Torah states "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying...".

See also:

Torah-scroll facts

How was the Torah written?

More about Moses

A:

This should be an easy question to answer. All we have to do is establish who was the pharaoh of the Exodus, then we would know who his predecessors were over the previous eighty years, as the Bible says that Moses was eighty years old at the time of the Exodus from Egypt.

The Bible very clearly places the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt around 1440 BCE (1 Kings 6:1), but we now know from archaeology that Egypt was at that time very much in control of Canaan and remained so until the thirteenth century, which brings us to the time of Ramesses II, or Ramses II, pharaoh from around 1290 to 1224 BCE. No earlier pharaoh could have been the biblical pharaoh who drowned in pursuit of the fleeing Israelites as they crossed the Red Sea. Moreover, it was he who built the city of Ramses (Pi-Ramesses), mentioned in the story of the Exodus, thus ruling out his predecessors. For these reasons, a more modern Jewish tradition redates the early history of Israel and places the Exodus much later.

Unlike the biblical pharaoh, who was drowned in the Red Sea, Ramses II died peacefully as an old man and was buried in a tomb in the Valley of Kings. His body was later moved to a royal cache. For Ramses II to have been the Pharaoh who let the people go, we would have to move the date of the Exodus forward by around two centuries and therefore move Solomon's reign to a historically impossible period. We would also have to have Ramses escape the Red Sea, in spite of Exodus 14:28. Assuming there really was an Exodus from Egypt, which few scholars now accept, Ramses II could not have been that pharaoh, regardless of popular tradition.

Ramses' son, Merneptah, ruled from 1213 to 1203 BCE and died peacefully as an old man, buried in the Valley of Kings. Merneptah's successor was also buried in the Valley of Kings, thus ruling out all possible pharaohs until long after the traditional date of the Exodus and even after Israelite settlers began to appear in the Canaanite hinterland.

It is not possible to identify any historical pharaoh with the biblical Exodus. The history of the Hebrews must have been in some way different to that told in the Book of Exodus.

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The first books of the Bible give us very detailed information about exactly how long each of the ancestral figures lived from Joshua all the way back to Adam. We can list the people back from Moses to Adam, count the years assigned to each biblical ancestor, and also check to ensure that the biblical lifespans were the result of natural chance, or were arrived at by other means.

After the Patriarchs, the great Hebrew leaders were Joseph, Levi, Moses and Joshua. The priestly tribe of Levites was said to be descended from Levi, great grandfather of Moses who, along with Joshua, fulfilled the covenant that God gave to the Patriarchs. We find a fascination with elegant series and the number 17 in their lives.

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Joshua

110

5x5 + 5x17

Moses

120

7x5 + 5x17

Levi

137

7x5 + 6x17

Joseph

110

5x5 + 5x17

In each case, the age assigned to these leaders can be broken down to the sum of two numbers, the first a multiple of 5 (either 7x5 or 5x5), and the second a multiple of 17 (either 6x17 or 5x17). Patterns do exist in random sets of numbers, but not such consistent and elegant patterns. If these great Israelite leaders could have died at any random age between 100 and 150 years, there would be less than 1 chance in 6 million that these four persons would have died at exactly these ages, even accepting that humans could live to such improbably great ages. We could greatly reduce the odds by allowing, for example, Levi to die at either 137, 120 or 110 years, and so on, but the odds would remain so high as to rule out chance. So, these ages were assigned by numerology, not nature, and must not be regarded as historical information. The lifespans of Joseph and Joshua are shown in order to show how elegant the biblical numerology was, but they are not in the ancestry of Moses.

We saw that 17 was an important number in early Hebrew numerology, and this continues with the Patriarchs, the most important Old Testament characters, and they share a very special pattern befitting their roles. If each of the Patriarchs could, by chance, have died in any year over a range of, say, one hundred years, there would be just one chance in one million that all three of them would have died on exactly the right year for the following configuration to work in the way it does:

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Jacob

147

(7x7) x 3

Isaac

180

(6x6) x 5

Abraham

175

(5x5) x 7

Examining these supposed lifespans, we find that:

• Each lifespan involves a perfect square (7, 6 and 5) in a numeric series,
• The third factor also forms a series (3, 5, 7)
• In each case the sum of the factors is 17.

We can then look at each of the remaining ancestors, back to Adam:

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Terah

205

7x5 + 10x17

Nahor

148

7x9 + 5x17

Serug

230

12x5 + 10x17

Reu

239

7x5 + 12x17

Peleg

239

7x5 + 12x17

Eber

464

7x8 + 24x17

Shelah

433

7x6 + 23x17

Arphaxad

438

5x6 + 24x17

Shem

600Note 1

Noah

950

13x9 + 49x17 [7x7x17]

Lamech

777

7x9 + 42x17 [7x6x17]

Methuselah

969

Note 2

Enoch

962

Note 2

Jared

895

Note 2

Mahalalel

895

5x9 + 50x17

Cainan

910

6x10 + 50x17

Enos

905

8x9 + 49x17

Seth

912

5x9 + 51x17

Adam

930

7x9 + 51x17 [3x17x17]

Note 1: Shem is a special case, because he became a father at 100 and died at exactly 600 years. This simple combination is just as unlikely to result from numerology as from nature. It may be that in the course of transcription, the original values became lost, and the values of 100 and 600 were substituted after the original meanings of the patterns were lost.

Note 2: Methuselah is special because he was the Bible's oldest living human and because there is a different pattern in his life: he became a father at 187 (11x17) and died at 969 (57x17). There is only 1 chance in 289 that the oldest living man would become a father at a multiple of 17 and then die at a multiple of 17 years. The patterns for Jared and Enoch have not been decoded at this stage, but it is likely that another, quite special pattern was shared by Methuselah, his father and grandfather.

To say how long Moses lived after Adam, we add, not their lifespans, but the ages at which each person in the Old Testament genealogy became a father. While there is adequate detail in the Bible to list the ages of the biblical ancestors, there are important gaps and ambiguities in the ages at which fatherhood occurred. Moreover, the Bible often indicates that its characters became fathers long after people of the time would have already died, a physical impossibility if we reject the biblical ages. If these were real, historical people, they no doubt lived to an average of around fifty years, and probably became fathers by the time they were twenty years old.

From the creation of Adam to the death of Moses is listed in the Bible as around 2600 years. If we accept that the biblical ages were assigned by numerology, not nature and assign 20 years from each generation to the next, then only around 550 years had actually passed, unless we add additional generations.