10. From The Garden Of Eden To Canaan Via Harry Potter

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According to both fundamentalist and critical scholars, God was such an idiot
that first he called Abraham from Ur of Chaldea to Canaan because he wanted to
replace the evil Canaanites with the descendants of Abraham who could only be
saints, then brought a great famine over the world just to force Joseph’s brothers
to bow down to his feet so that all the descendants of Abraham ended up slaves in
Egypt, and God did all that in order to prove his mighty power by bringing the Is-
raelites out of Egypt. Of course, the Israelites could have ended up being the upper
class in Egypt just as they are in most countries today, but then what opportunity
would God have had to use his mighty power? Since God has nothing to do with
so much power, why not enslave your favorites to create some opportunities to use
your power just to have some fun and not die of boredom? Since according to this
view, it would be so boring for God not to do anything with that mighty power, he
decided that the Egyptians should turn the Israelites into slaves as an appreciation
for the fact that Joseph saved them from starvation by depriving them of every-
thing they had and turning them into slaves in order to use his mighty power to
prove that he can bring the Israelites out of Egypt:
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his
people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than
we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the
event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”
Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.
They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they
were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came
to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the
Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and
in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed
on them (Exod 1:8–14).
From the Garden of Eden to Canaan
Via Harry Potter

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Who says that this biblical God does not know how to bless his favorites? Now
God is back to square one and has to come up with another Abraham to take his
descendants from another garden of Eden back to Canaan. Although we do not
know much about the early life of Abraham, fortunately we have quite a fascinat-
ing story about how the second Abraham was born:
ThekingofEgyptsaidtotheHebrewmidwives,oneofwhomwasnamedShiphrah
and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see
them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But
the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them,
but they let the boys live. … Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy
that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every
girl live” (Exod 1:15–17, 22).
Now we have a reversal: While the ladies of the patriarchs wanted boys for their
fights because boys have better fists, the Egyptian monarch wanted to get rid of
the boys precisely for the same reason. Quite a privilege to be born a boy in this
patriarchal societies! Any wonder that the feminists are so outraged about how
privileged men are in these patriarchal stories? It was under these circumstances
that the baby Moses was born:
Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman
conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him
three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for
him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed
it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see
what would happen to him. The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the
river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the
reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was
crying, and she took pity on him, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,”
she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse
from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” Pharaoh’s daughter said to
her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said
to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So
the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought
him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses,
“because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water” (Exod 2:1–10).

From the Garden of Eden to Canaan via Harry Potter
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Critical scholars start to rave that this story is proof that the Bible is just sec-
ond-hand mythology because very similar stories about abandoned children who
later become great heroes are found in ancient mythology and the closest that
comes to mind is the story about Perseus. According to this story, Perseus was
the son of Danaë, the daughter of the king Acrisius, king of Argos—the city, not
the one who built the famous ship on which the Argonauts embarked. Just as it is
in the case of Laius the king of Thebes, the oracle at Delphi revealed to Acrisius
that the son of his daughter would kill him and replace him on the throne. In or-
der to prevent his daughter from having children and since sterilization was not
available at that time, he locked her up in a bronze chamber so that no male could
have access to her, but probably because bronze was expensive at that time and he
wanted to save money on materials, he did not provide the chamber with a roof.
That tuned out to be a costly oversight because Zeus came to Danaë in the form of
a shower of gold and impregnated her. Because Acrisius—just like Laius—was too
merciful to kill the child, he did not expose the child on some mountain as Laius
did with Oedipus, but rather placed the mother and the child in a wooden box and
dumped the chest into the sea probably thinking that the chances of survival were
virtually zero. The waves, however, carried the wooden chest to an island where
it was fished by a fisherman whose brother was the very king of the island, who
raised the child and fell in love with the mother. Perseus, however, was against the
marriage probably because his subconscious wanted so badly to have sex with his
mother himself—as Freud has enlightened us now. In order to get rid of this rival,
the king decided to send Perseus on an impossible mission to kill Medusa—one
of the monstrous women called Gorgons. Perseus, however, not only succeeded
to kill Medusa, but when he returned to Argos, while throwing a discus during a
competition similar to our Olympics, he hit his father with the discus—by acci-
dent, of course!—and killed him fulfilling the oracle. Being an accident, instead of
being banned from the city as a murderer, he ended up the king of the city. Unlike
biblical prophecies, Greek oracles never fail to get fulfilled.
Although there are obvious parallels between the Greek story and that about Mo-
ses, ancient readers, however, who were familiar with the language used in these
stories, would have found the biblical story quite unlike the other stories. The
reason both fundamentalist and critical scholars are unable to understand ancient
stories is because they only have the concept of objective reality and when they

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read that a wooden chest or a basket is placed on water or is taken out of water,
they understand an object of that form that is placed and floats on a body of liquid
that falls down from the sky when it rains. As it was explained when mythology
was discussed, for ancient people, any society was made up of four categories of
people indicated by the four realms in nature: sky, earth, underground, and wa-
ter, understood as a surrounding body called ocean that represented foreigners.
Therefore, by water these stories do not try to describe that at some point these
children ended up in a body of liquid that falls from the sky and then were taken
out of it, but rather to explain where they came from, that is, they were foreigners
or grew up as foreigners and therefore they were viewed as evil and dangerous as
all foreigners are viewed even today by civilized people like Americans and Eu-
ropeans. What everyone expected from such foreigners was to cause the greatest
evils to the society and not to be credited with great accomplishments. Therefore,
to come from water meant to have the worst possible origin, and for someone
who started in life from the worst possible position to manage to reach the top
was the best proof of his outstanding abilities and deserved to be admired as a
hero. Whether Moses ever floated on water in a basket or Danaë and Perseus in a
wooden chest—that involve physical impossibilities and therefore such details are
reality blockers—as both fundamentalist and critical scholars fantasize, ancient
readers would have found irrelevant because what was important for them was
that Moses, being taken out of water, it meant not only that he was a foreigner,
but came from the most hated foreigners whom the monarch himself had singled
out as the most dangerous, something that today would be called not just illegal
immigrants, but terrorists. Can anyone imagine a worse starting place in life? Al-
though up to this point the stories about Perseus and about Moises seem to be
similar, nothing else about Moses has any parallel in ancient literature. Although
Perseus had both royal and divine ancestry and therefore had a legitimate claim to
the throne, Moses was of slave origin and therefore had no legitimate claim what-
soever. Similarly, while Perseus and Oedipus were raised by foreign monarchs,
Moses was raised first by his own mother and then he grew up at the royal palace.
As an adopted son of the daughter of the monarch, he had no legitimate claim to
the throne since only sons of the monarch himself would qualify to become mon-
archs, and not the sons of the daughters, particularly adopted sons who were not
even biological descendants of the daughter. Although Greek heroes provide great
deliverances for the community when they returned from their exile, Moses not
only does not provide any great service for the Egyptians that would qualify him

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to become the monarch, but he murdered an Egyptian and ended up in exile and
therefore became what would be called today one of the most wanted criminals:
One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their
forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked
this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the
sand. When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said
to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” He
answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as
you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “Surely the thing is
known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from
Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Midian (Exod 2:11–15).
If the biblical writer has such poor imagination that had to copy popular mytho-
logical stories because was not able to write something original, obviously he was
not able even to copy stories that were popular at that time. Therefore, at a closer
examination, it becomes obvious that Moses not only is not a Hebrew Perseus
or a hero, but is an anti-Perseus or an antihero. The writer of Exodus not only
did not have Perseus in mind or other popular stories at that time when writing
about Moses, but clearly has Genesis in mind, not only because how Moses ended
up being born as a slave in Egypt is explained in Genesis, but Moses is clearly an
anti-Jacob and an anti-Joseph. In other words, Moses parallels Joseph and Jacob
only to do things in reverse. We would expect the next hero to be a descendant
of Joseph and the chosen and blessed Ephraim, but about the birth of Moses we
read: “Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The
woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she
hid him three months” (Exod 2:1–2). While the names of the parents are not even
mentioned, what we know about Levi is not only that he was never chosen and
blessed, but that he was one of the two sons whom Jacob quite explicitly cursed on
his deathbed when he said: “Cursed be their [Simeon’s and Levi’s] anger, for it is
fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel! I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them
in Israel” (Gen 49:7). While Noah’s blessed son name/Shem had the role to bring
all the people together and keep them at his feet just as Joseph brought all the Is-
raelites at his feet and then brought them under his authority in Egypt, the cursed
son Levi had the role to “scatter” people and free them from that authority just as
God scattered people at the tower of Babel. Can the contrast between the blessed

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and the cursed be stronger? As we remember, Levi was the son of the woman
whom Jacob never loved and he never showed any appreciation for her children.
Although Moses did end up on the water just as Joseph ended up in an Egyptian
prison, Moses became a member of Pharaoh’s household and therefore a high
official by adoption and not by proving some outstanding abilities with interpret-
ing dreams or killing some frightening monsters that terrorized the community.
Although Joseph’s ambition as a high Egyptian official was to see his brothers
crawling on their knees to his feet to beg for food and even wanted to turn his full
brother into a slave, Moses sided with his Hebrew brothers who were now slaves
and turned against an Egyptian official who was oppressing them. Is it conceivable
that Joseph would have ever done that? Eventually, Moses himself ended up as a
fugitive just like Jacob, but not by stealing blessings from his fellow Hebrews, but
by defending them trying to prevent them from fighting with one another, some-
thing that is quite surprising taking into account that fighting among brothers was
such an established family tradition that Jacob and Joseph elevated to new heights.
As a new Jacob, Moses did not find refuge with Laban in that family of saints in
Harran but rather went to the descendants of Jacob’s brother Esau with whom Ja-
cob did not want to have any dealings. And as Moses arrives in Midian—surprise,
surprise—he finds his future wife just as Jacob did, that is, at a well:
When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh.
He settled in the land of Midian, and sat down by a well. The priest of Midian had
seven daughters. They came to draw water, and filled the troughs to water their
father’s flock. But some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and
came to their defense and watered their flock. When they returned to their father
Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come back so soon today?” They said, “An
Egyptian helped us against the shepherds; he even drew water for us and watered
the flock.” He said to his daughters, “Where is he? Why did you leave the man?
Invite him to break bread.” Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave Moses
his daughter Zipporah in marriage. She bore a son, and he named him Gershom;
for he said, “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land” (Exod 2:15–22).
Of course, for a critical scholar like Robert Alter there is no surprise here but rather
something that a reader should have expected, that is, due to literary conventions
at that time, someone could only take the Jacob’s story, replace Jacob with Moses,
replace Laban with Reuel, replace Harran with Midian, replace Rachel with Zip-
porah, and bingo!, you have another literary production that everyone wants to

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read and copy. What can one expect from these dumb biblical writers who had no
imagination but to copy stories and just replace names in them if they were not
so original as to cut them to pieces with scissors and paste them together without
even being able to read them to see whether the pieces connected at the seams?
At closer examination, however, the Moses story is exactly the opposite of Jacob’s
story. While in Jacob’s story, it is Jacob who is the hero who removes the stone
from the well and feeds the sheep of his future wife, Moses just watches as the
poor ladies draw water to water their flocks and springs into actions only when he
sees some male shepherds use their fists against women to use the water that they
had worked hard to draw in order to water their own sheep. Although all these
shepherd males and females were strangers, Moses simply could not sit and watch
when some wanted to use violence to take advantage of others just as he could not
sit and watch when an Egyptian used violence against one of his Hebrew brothers
or when another Hebrew was doing the same to another Hebrew fellow. What we
learn about Moses at this point is that he did not think that violence should have
any place in human relationships, no matter who they are. While preventing the
men from using violence against women is the only heroic detail in the story, ev-
erything else is downright boring. There is no love at first sight, and although the
father of the girls does invite Moses to come to him, before offering Moses bread,
the evil descendant of Esau does not ask Moses how he was going to pay for that
bred, and while he offers him one of his daughters as wife, he does not ask him to
work for him as a slave for seven years before he can get married. And although
this evil Midianite had seven daughters and not just two, he did not swap them on
the wedding night to make Moses marry all of them and then pay for them work-
ing as a slave for forty-nine years as someone like Laban from that holy family of
saints would have done. Moreover, the marriage itself is quite boring because God
does not make the woman barren but allows her to become pregnant with just
one child so that the child had no opportunity to hone his fists by fighting in the
womb with another brother and manage to defeat even God as Jacob did. And the
reason this story is so boring is not only because Moses was not from a holy family
of saints himself, but he went to the descendants of the evil Esau who also was not
chosen and blessed by God and therefore God did not have anything to do with
these Midianites to make their life more interesting. Although Moses is himself a
shepherd just like Jacob, he is not interested to find ways to make the flocks of his
father-in-law his own:

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God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led
his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God (Exod
2:24–3:1, emphasis mine).
What God must have remembered was that God never intended that Abraham’s
descendants should end up slaves in Egypt and therefore decided to take them
back to Canaan from Egypt where they had been taken by Jacob, or rather, by their
wives as a result of their fights. Since Moses had to undo what Jacob did, is there
any wonder that their stories are just opposites?
While tending the sheep of his father-in-law to the edges of the wilderness that
had become his safety hideout from Egypt, Moses came upon an amazing site:
“There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he
looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I
must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned
up’” (Exod 3:2–3). While both fundamentalist and critical scholars start to fan-
tasize about theophanies and encounters with gods, ancient readers—since they
were not absentminded readers as their modern counterparts—would have start-
ed to scratch their heads to remember a clue provided by the writer to understand
the meaning of this passage and would have recalled this image from Genesis:
“Therefore the LORD God sent him [Adam] forth from the garden of Eden, to till
the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the
garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard
the way to the tree of life” (Gen 3:23–24, emphasis mine). True, Moses did not see
a “cherub” placed there by God but an “angel of the LORD,” and this angel was not
in the middle of a sword that was turning throwing flames without the flames to
be consumed, but rather it was in the middle of a bush that was throwing flames
that also did not get extinguished, Moses did not fail to realize that he had come
to the eastern border of the garden of Eden or the garden of the LORD called
Egypt, particularly taking into account that both the “cherub” and the “angel” were
at the east of the garden and they were guarding that road to the great life that
foreigners wanted to find in those gardens of Eden where his ancestor Joseph and
all his fellow Hebrews ended up. Moreover, Moses did not see a brick wall like the
Chinese wall, or a concrete wall as the Israeli wall, or a razor wire wall that the

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Europeans are building now, or the “beautiful wall” that the Americans want to
build in order to keep foreigners away with some guards armed to their teeth to
drive foreigners away if they approach the border showing curiosity to see that
marvelous sight that these civilizations offer, but Moses realized that he had met
a border guard who had the sacred duty to guard the holy ground of his country
to prevent foreigners to defile that holy ground with their filthy feet. When God
created the world, he did not mark any places as being holy while the others were
filthy, but he declared every part of the world as being equally “very good,” and if
people claim some places as being theirs and declare them holy and guard them
with swords in the name of God, it is because they set themselves as gods over
something that can only belong to God. Can anyone doubt that what these border
guards are doing and saying is the very sacred mission that Pharaoh as their god
had entrusted them with? Although Moses understood very well why he was told
to stay away from going further to step on that holy ground in order to become a
slave or an illegal immigrant as he would be called today, he also heard the voice
of the same God who told him exactly the opposite, that is, not only not to stay
away from that holy ground, but precisely to go there with the following mission:
Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt;
I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their
sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to
bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with
milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the
Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to
me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to
Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Exod 3:7–10).
So, finally God saw what happened to the Israelites in that country with plenty
of food where God brought them in order to show how special and blessed Jacob
and Joseph were to him, and now the same God decided to send Moses to take
the Israelites out of that place in order to undo those blessings that the same God
had piled up upon Jacob and Joseph! Can anyone believe that God can be such
an idiot? Apparently both fundamentalist and critical scholars do, because that is
precisely the way they understand these stories. And when Moses realized that
the same God who appeared to Jacob and promised him that he was special and
that he would give to him that land of Canaan, Moses was so excited that, just as

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Jacob took a stone and anointed it to mark the place so that he would never for-
get such an exciting moment in his life, so also Moses placed an obelisk in that
spot and anointed it with oil, right? Well, not quite, because, unlike Jacob and
Joseph who never doubted that whatever came to their minds—including those
dreams—came directly from God, Moses openly admits that he has no idea who
this God is and has no idea what he should say in case the Israelites asked him
what apparently they never asked Jacob, that is, who was that god with whom he
could talk all the time:
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God
of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name [wom:<,
šimô]?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He
said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God
also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of
your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has
sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations. Go
and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them, “The LORD, the God of your
ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying:
I have given heed to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt. I declare that
I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the
Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing
with milk and honey’” (Exod 3:13–17).
As good slaves, the Israelites knew that they should do only what they were told by
the name/Shem who was at the top of the pyramid, and understandably, when
Moses would go to them and order them to leave Egypt, before the slaves obeyed
that order, they would want to make sure that the order came from the proper
authority. Therefore, Moses wanted to know what was the name/Shem that God
provided for himself. And God promptly identified himself by telling Moses that
he was the one who he was and not someone else. Anyone still unclear about the
identity of this God? If that is true about God, is it not true about everyone and
everything else? Can anyone say that Moses is not who he is or that a cat is not
what a cat is? As if realizing that things might not be as clear-cut, God explains
further that “he is,” as if Moses could not say about himself that “he is.” Can any
idiot doubt that someone who “is,” is not? At this point critical scholars start to
fantasize that the Israelites had been worshiping different deities at different times
and their sacred writings are a hodgepodge of documents chopped down to piec-

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es and pasted together with different names of different deities depending on the
time when each document originated and this passage marks a turning point in
the religious development of the Israelite religion when Yahweh was finally intro-
duced as the only deity and is provided with the proper name. If this passage is
meant to introduce a new deity or to provide a new name for the deity, then the
only thing that it accomplishes is to leave someone with a blank mind because the
only thing that one can get from this explanation is that, whoever was sending
Moses, was the God who called Abraham and his descendants and sent them to
where Moses was asked now to bring them back from, and that presupposes that
one already knows all the preceding stories told in what we call Genesis. If the
writer knew that this was the deity that the patriarchs worshiped all along, why
did he not use this name all the time? That Genesis and Exodus are actually a con-
tinuous story that simply could not fit on a single scroll no one with common
sense would doubt. Enter theologians! They also find this passage the most pro-
found theological and philosophical statement that by far overshadows the most
profound philosophy because what God stated here is that he is the ultimate being
and the source of all being so that he not only exists by himself, but everything else
derives its being from God’s being so that God’s being is the ground of all being. Do
not your brains start spinning? What the biblical author said in a short statement
theologians and philosophers explain in bulky books of thousands of pages. And
the reason God provided Moses with such a profound philosophical explanation
about himself was because he knew that when those slaves are provided with a
tautology for the name of their deity, they immediately would understand that
whoever talked to Moses must be the creator of the whole universe who is the
ground of all being whom they had worshiped all the time, and who among them
would dare not to obey the order from the boss of the whole universe and follow
Moses out of Egypt? A commonsense explanation about why God answered with
phrases that not only cannot be a name and the phrase is true about everyone and
everything, is because God cannot be identified by using names, and that is the
reason in the Bible people use all kinds of names to refer to God. Although names
are used to identify people and to refer to them, names can have a referential func-
tion and therefore can have meaning only if the entity that that name refers to is
already known, otherwise names do not mean anything just like the words from a
foreign language. If one takes a phone directory and looks at all those names, what
idea comes to mind when reading a name unless one can think of a person who

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has that name, but even then, one cannot be sure that that is the person the name
refers to unless knows the address and the phone number. When it comes to using
names to identify the biblical God, however, things are even more complicated
because no one has ever known God personally, and therefore when someone
uses a name to refer to God or to describe God, what could that name mean? Does
this mean that no one can understand anything about God and can judge and
decide what God might say or do? Although the biblical God does not use names
and identity cards to prove his identity, he does have an “image” and that is not a
hidden image or an image that no one has ever seen or is able to see, because is the
image that every human can contemplate in oneself and in all other humans, and
that is the rationality and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. And
that is precisely what God uses not only to help Moses understand who he was,
but also what the Israelites could use to understand who was the one who was
sending Moses. The Israelites knew that their God had sent Abraham and his de-
scendants out of Ur of Chaldea to live a free life in Canaan, but now they were
bitterly oppressed in Egypt where they were slaves. That humans can be irrational
and promise to do something but then do exactly the opposites is possible just as
pagan gods often do, but is it conceivable that the God who created humans and
endowed them with rationality can be so irrational as to take people from a place
to enable them to live a free life only to take them somewhere else and experience
the worst oppression as slaves? This was no doubt the questions that was on the
minds of most Israelites every day as they suffered all kinds of abuses from their
masters. If what they were suffering was God’s doing, how could God be so irra-
tional and demonic, and if this is not what God did, why was he silent and did not
do anything to change the situation? Although the Israelites may have been quite
confused at this time as to who and what their God was, some of them who had
not given up the belief that that God of Abraham was real and not just Abraham’s
imagination, hoped that someday the same God would send someone like Abra-
ham to tell them that he had been called by the same God to take them from
where they were and bring them back to where that God had promised Abraham
that his descendants would be. True, there were those who argued that the God of
Abraham promised that only one descendant of Abraham would be chosen, bless-
ed, and boss, while all the other descendants would be slaves to that chosen and
blessed descendant who was Joseph, but now that all of them were slaves to the
Egyptians, where was that promise? If God gave Joseph those dreams to be boss,
then fulfilled those dreams and endowed Joseph with the pleasure to enjoy being

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boss, why did the same God create them to be slaves and then endowed them with
such a loathing for being slaves instead of endowing them with the pleasure of
being slaves? Are bees not the most diligent and hardworking slaves that one can
imagine? Is there any sign that bees do not enjoy that slave work and that they
would want to do something else? Those Israelites who found oppression evil,
they believed that they found oppression evil because they had been created by a
deity who has endowed them with this rationality that finds oppression intolera-
ble, and if there is a deity that says that oppression is intolerable and needs to be
eliminated, that deity can only be the deity who created humans with similar
minds. Has anyone ever seen what this deity looked like and could Moses bring a
picture of the one whom he encountered on this occasion so that everyone could
see that the image they knew about this God matched the picture that Moses
brought? Of course not, and no one expected Moses to provide such credentials,
but those Israelites who thought that they had a mental image of God in the sense
of how God viewed their oppression, when a messenger comes to tell them what
matches what they have in their minds and they think that their minds came from
God, they know that the messenger has been in contact with that God and is not
an impostor. Did Moses believe that the Israelites would be so excited about the
message of liberation that he was going to bring? Apparently not, because this is
how he replied to God: “Then Moses answered, ‘But suppose they do not believe
me or listen to me, but say, «The LORD did not appear to you»’” (Exod 4:1). Al-
though Moses does not doubt that God was talking to him, he does not believe
that he can persuade the Israelites about the success of the mission because he is
not persuaded himself and therefore God has to do some persuading with him
first. Although Moses does not explain why he is reluctant to embark on the mis-
sion that God was entrusting him with, as God is trying to persuade him using
some object lessons, it becomes obvious that Moses did not want to accept the
mission because he did not believe that he could succeed in the way he under-
stood it, and therefore God is teaching him that the way God understands how
liberation can be achieved is different from the way Moses understood it. There-
fore, God resorts to some object lessons to explain to Moses how liberation is
possible:
The LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A staff.” And he
said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw the staff on the ground, and it became
a snake; and Moses drew back from it. Then the LORD said to Moses, “Reach out

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your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it,
and it became a staff in his hand—“so that they may believe that the LORD, the
God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob, has appeared to you” (Exod 4:2–5).
By this illustration, God explained to Moses how all pyramids of power work and
that they are all based on fear. The staff or the club can represent either a weapon
that kills or it can be an instrument to support yourself and to guide the sheep.
As an instrument of power, it can be used to kill and therefore is used to control
people because it instills in them fear and therefore it can be viewed as a serpent
that looks like an innocent stick but inspires fear. When people do things out of
fear, they do them not because they want to or because they think that what they
do is good, but because they are forced to. It is for this reason that snakes have
been the universal symbol of power in all cultures and on all continents where
humans have lived because all pyramids of power use weapons and fear in order
to keep people under control. It was because snakes inspire fear that Moses ran
away from the staff that had become a snake, or rather, from the staff as a weapon
for which the snake was a powerful symbol. At the same time, most liberators
understand also that killing and fear is the means for liberation in the sense that
killing can be used to overthrow oppressors so that the power of the oppressor
must be annihilated by a similar power, that is, the power of the liberator. When
God asked Moses to go to Egypt in order to liberate the slaves, Moses obviously
understood that God was sending him to defeat the oppressors and then set the
slaves free, and the reason Moses did not want to go was because he did not be-
lieve that liberation can be achieved through violence, and he did not believe it
because he had tried it and failed. Moses never forgot that he used that club he
was holding in his hand to kill the Egyptian who was oppressing one of his fellow
Israelites, and then discovered that his fellow Israelites not only did not hail him
as their liberator, but denounced him as their new oppressor, and as a result, he
ended up as a fugitive himself from the power that he tried to overthrow and now
he was running away from that power just as he was running away from the club
that had become a snake. By asking Moses to grab the snake by the tail, however,
God wanted to teach Moses that liberation is not about killing others, but about
overcoming that fear that is keeping you captive. Snakes are not powerful animals
compared to elks or buffaloes and yet, people would not hesitate to come close to
elks or buffaloes although they are very dangerous while stay away from snakes

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so that they have greater fear of snakes than of elks or buffaloes. Monarchs and
their servants are very few compared to the huge population that they control, and
they manage to do that through fear. If a group of people decided not to be afraid
of the police who can kill with their weapons, even thousands of policemen find
themselves powerless in front of a mob that defies them. The reason Pharaoh was
able to keep under control a huge number of slaves with a relatively small army
was because those slaves were afraid of Pharaoh, but if those slaves decided to
leave the country or not to do what they were told to do, the Egyptian army may
have managed to kill some, but would have discovered that they would run out of
bullets before they run out of rebels. Therefore, through this demonstration, God
wanted to teach Moses that he was not sending him to Egypt to use that club to
crack Egyptian skulls to liberate the Israelites, but rather to teach the Israelite to
overcome their fear because it was fear that kept them enslaved in Egypt just as it
was fear of a famine that brought them there. Did Moses get the message? Appar-
ently not, because God had to use another object lesson:
Again, the LORD said to him, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” He put his
hand into his cloak; and when he took it out, his hand was leprous, as white as
snow. Then God said, “Put your hand back into your cloak” so he put his hand
back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his
body—“If they will not believe you or heed the first sign, they may believe the
second sign. If they will not believe even these two signs or heed you, you shall
take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground; and the water that
you shall take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground” (Exod 4:6–9).
Just as the club is actually an extension of the hand, the hand itself is the most
important part of the body that is used for activities that support life, but on the
other hand, it is also the most important part of the body that is used to fight by
closing the hand to make a fist and hit someone else in the chest that is the part of
the body at the level of the arm. In boxing matches the chest is the legitimate body
area where the punches can be directed. By asking Moses to place his hand on his
chest under the cloak, God asked Moses to simulate hitting a chest with his fist as
when fighting that Egyptian whom he killed because the Egyptian used his fists to
oppress one of the Israelites, and Moses used his fist to kill the Egyptian because
he thought that freedom is the result of using your fists. In ancient times, leprosy
was known to be incurable and contagious and when one was diagnosed with that

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disease, the individual was isolated from any human community and prevented
from having any contact with another human being. Although not a crime in
itself, leprosy turned one into a fugitive from human communities just like the
most serious crimes did. Indeed, in ancient Greece, when someone killed a close
relative was declared polluted and forced to live in exile just as a leper did when
was declared unclean in Israel and forced to live away from human communities.
The reason Moses did not want to embark on the mission to liberated his fellow
Israelites was because he understood that liberation should be done by using fists,
and when he attempted it, he discovered that instead of liberating anyone, he had
just turned himself into a criminal and a pariah to live a life just like someone who
suffered from leprosy. By this second object lesson, God wanted to tell Moses that
he understood very well how Moses thought that liberation would take place and
that the reason he was reluctant to accept the mission was because Moses no lon-
ger believed in that kind of liberation. That Moses understood that liberation must
take place through a bloody revolution is most emphatically illustrated through
the third object lesson: “If they will not believe you or heed the first sign, they
may believe the second sign. If they will not believe even these two signs or heed
you, you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground; and
the water that you shall take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground”
(Exod 4:8–9, emphasis mine). The water from the Nile was the main source of
fresh water that nurtured all forms of life, while blood that is out of the body and is
shed on the ground is the symbol of death. That pouring of water suggested irriga-
tion is indicated by the reference to the ground as being “dry,” and when the water
that falls on the ground is blood, it suggests killing human beings. Liberation is
like water for the ground because the ground needs human labor to be productive
just as it needs water, but enslaving humans and killing them is like replacing the
life-giving water for the ground with blood that is the symbol of death. The reason
Moses did not want to go to the Israelites to ask them to embark on a violent lib-
eration was not only because he himself did not believe in such liberations, but he
knew that he would not be able to persuade them to join in because the Israelites
themselves did not believe in such liberations since such liberations only fed the
earth with blood. Through such object lessons, however, God wanted to tell Moses
not only that he understood the reasons Moses refused to go, but that he did not
believe in such liberations himself and he was not sending him to do something
that he himself knew that it would not work. Now, that Moses finally understands
that God is not sending him to attempt liberation in a way that he knew that it

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would not work but rather that God was sending him to achieve liberation not
only in a way that liberations are possible, but they can never fail, Moses had to
come up with a different excuse: “But Moses said to the LORD, ‘O my Lord, I
have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken
to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’” (Exod 4:10). Now
that Moses understands not only that God does not want the kind of liberation
that he himself did not believe in and realizes what kind of liberation God wants,
they begin to talk business, but what are they saying? What does tongue have to
do with liberation? Could it be that Moses understands that he does not have to
prove to the Israelites that he has the biggest club that scares the Egyptians and the
biggest fist to flood the country with blood just like the Nile did with water, but
that he had to prove to the Israelites that he had the biggest tongue? But what was
the tongue good for? Is the tongue good for anything else but for persuasion un-
derstood as using rationality and reasons to convince some to do what you want to
do not only because you want it and is good for you, but because is also good for
everyone else and therefore they should want it as well? That this rationality that
is expressed through language is a gift that humans are endowed with by God, he
makes clear by answering Moses’s objection: “Then the LORD said to him, ‘Who
gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not
I, the LORD? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are
to speak’” (Exod 4:11–12). At this point, Moses finds himself without any excuses
and simply suggests that God should find someone else: “But he said, ‘O my Lord,
please send someone else’” (Exod 4:13). And God does find someone else, but that
someone else turns out to be—surprise, surprise—his own brother:
Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses and he said, “What of
your brother Aaron, the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently; even now he
is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you his heart will be glad. You shall
speak to him and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and
with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. He indeed shall speak for
you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God
for him. Take in your hand this staff, with which you shall perform the signs”
(Exod 4:14–16).
Since Moses understood that according to the liberation that God wanted, he did
not have to deal with the Egyptians but with the Israelites because slavery was not

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so much a problem of the Egyptians as it was primarily the problem of the Israel-
ites and therefore the liberation had to be done through persuasion that involved
language, he realized that he was not the best qualified to do the job because he
had been brought up by the Egyptians and, although he was familiar with the
language of the slaves from his childhood, he was very much in the position that
a foreigner would be when trying to teach the Americans English or democracy.
If God decided to appoint someone to persuade the Israelites to give up slavery,
why would God choose someone who had not even been in the country for quite
a while and besides, someone who could not even speak the language fluently, so
that, after a few words would stumble to find the Hebrew word and eventually
would throw in an Egyptian or a Midianite equivalent? Since Moses had a point,
God decided to choose someone else, not to replace him, but to cooperate with
him. And the one whom God chose to cooperate with Moses was his own brother.
His own brother? Come on God, you must be kidding! You mean to give me as a
helper my brother who thinks that because I have been chosen and blessed by you
now, he would be looking for an opportunity when I am starving to death and
would not offer me a dish of vegetable stew unless I pay him with everything I
have, including my underwear, or would be glad to sell me to some foreigners for
a few bucks? Were the Israelites not blessed with this wonderful slavery precisely
because they were blessed with such brothers? Although the Israelites may have
been very suspicious about brothers to whom God had spoken and had chosen
to bless them with, they would have been shocked to discover that such brothers
now cooperate with one another and speak the same language, or rather, with one
mind. If the God who talked to Abraham and brought him to Canaan where he
wanted his descendants to enjoy a free life was real, that God not only had nothing
to do with the god that talked later to the descendants of Abraham and would pick
one brother over the other and throw with blessing and curses to the right and to
the left so that all of them ended up in the most cruel slavery, but if that God de-
cided to do something and offer Abraham’s descendants another opportunity to
go back to where they came from and be free, that God would no doubt find some
brothers who are like Abraham and undo what those chosen and blessed brothers
did. If Moses was a different kind of Joseph, he not only needed a helper—some-
thing that Joseph never did since he was so smart that he could do everything by
himself and for whom others were good only to crawl at his feet—but that helper
needed a brother who was also a different kind of brother than Benjamin. We al-

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ready noticed that the story about Moses’s flight to Midian and his marriage is a
replica in reverse of Jacob’s flight to Harran and his marriage. Similarly, the return
of Moses to the Egypt and his meeting with his brother Aaron is blatantly a replica
in reverse of the story about Jacob’s return to Canaan and his meeting with his
brother Esau:
Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and said to him, “Please let me go
back to my kindred in Egypt and see whether they are still living.” And Jethro said
to Moses, “Go in peace.” The LORD said to Moses in Midian, “Go back to Egypt;
for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” So Moses took his wife and
his sons, put them on a donkey and went back to the land of Egypt; and Moses
carried the staff of God in his hand. And the LORD said to Moses, “When you go
back to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders that I have
put in your power; but I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.
Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD: Israel is my firstborn son. I
said to you, “Let my son go that he may worship me.” But you refused to let him
go; now I will kill your firstborn son.’” On the way, at a place where they spent the
night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut
off her son’s foreskin, and touched [(aGaTáw, wattagga‘] Moses’ feet with it, and said,
“Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then she
said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision” (Exod 4:18–26).
Although scholars agree that this is an obscure passage and probably we do not
have it in its original form, it is obvious that it is written as the opposite of the sto-
ry about the return of Jacob to Canaan when he met his evil brother Esau whose
descendants were these Midianites with whom Moses found refuge. As we re-
member, Jacob was bitterly exploited by his father-in-law Laban and even after he
worked for fourteen years to pay for his wives, Laban claimed that his daughters
were still his since wives provided to a slave by his master remained with the mas-
ter when the slave went free, and when Jacob had to run away in order to regain
his freedom,467
Laban hunted him down as a slave owner would hunt a fugitive
slave. In the story about Moses living with his evil father-in-law who was a descen-
dant of the super evil Esau, there is no hint that Moses was exploited in any way or
467
Apparently, this is the ancient regulation that Laban used for his relationship with Jacob: “If
his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be
her master’s and he shall go out alone” (Exod 21:4). That Laban gave his daughters as slave women
to a slave was understood even by Lea and Rachel and that is the reason they complained that their
father had viewed not only Jacob, but even his daughters, as his slaves.

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that Moses was not treated with the same respect and love as any other member
of the family. Moreover, while Jacob had to take his wives and children and run
away, Moses told his father-in-law about his plans to return to Egypt unlike Jacob
who ran away in secret, and unlike the saintly Laban, this evil Midianite approved
of Moses’ decision without any objection although he was going to be deprived of
one of his daughters and her children. For this evil Midianite, his daughters and
Moses were not his slaves. Just as Jacob had to encounter a hostile god on the way
back to Canaan to prove that he was a super fighter to justify his character and his
new name, so also Moses had to encounter a similar god, but this time no fighting
took place because Moses had long before given up his belief in climbing ladders
by using his club to crush skulls and by using his fists. Although Moses does not
do anything to defend himself, he is defended by his evil and pagan wife who does
for Moses the religious ritual that was the responsibility of Moses to do as a chosen
descendant of Abraham, and that detail sends us back to Jacob’s story, when Ra-
chel, upon departing from Harran, stole the household gods of her father to carry
with her and Jacob only very late disposed of them implying that all that time his
saintly wife that Rebekah wanted for Jacob from Harran because she did not want
Jacob to marry pagan wives like Esau, she worshiped all her life pagan idols. An-
other contrast between the two stories is the reference to “touching” Moses’ feet.
The word used for “touching,” (aGaTáw (wattagga‘), is exactly the same word used to
refer to the “touching” of Jacob’s thigh by the stranger when the joint was dislo-
cated, except this is for a feminine subject while the one in Genesis is for a mas-
culine subject, since Jacob was “toughed” by a man while Moses was “touched” by
a woman. The contrast between the two encounters cannot be greater: While the
supposed god who fought with Jacob “touched” him and blessed him by crippling
him, the god who wanted to kill Moses now does not cause Moses any harm al-
though Moses does not offer any resistance, and the one who “touches” Moses is
his wife, but not in order to cause him any harm, but to defend him. Moreover,
Moses does not cling to anyone to demand any blessings, he does not want to
know any name/Shem, and the only one who had reasons to cling to him and
prevent him from going on his mission is his wife, but she herself does not try to
hold him back. By her complaint that Moses is a “bridegroom of blood,” she could
not have referred to the fact that Moses used circumcision for his children since
Moses obviously failed to perform it since it was she who performed it, but she
wanted to point out that Moses was a different kind of husband than Jacob was. As
we remember, Jacob was a puppet of his wives—primarily of Rachel—so that he
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did whatever his wives told him even with whom he should sleep, and even after
Rachel’s death, Jacob made sure that her sons would rule over the other brothers
to fulfill her ambitions that led to the whole Israel ending up as slaves in Egypt. As
one who had the mission to undo what Jacob did, Moses had to be a different kind
of husband, not in the sense that he was abusive with his wife, but in the sense that
he had to engage on a mission that would put not only his life at risk, but that of
his family as well. Although Zipporah understands now that she is not married
to an obscure shepherd but to someone who had a special and risky mission, she
does nothing to stop Moses or to prevent him from following his God and even
performs a religious ritual468
that Moses had failed to perform and would have
brought God’s disapproval. What the same God would have thought about Rachel
who risked her life to steal the household gods from her father and managed to
keep them for the rest of her life by placing them under her ass and sanctifying
them with her menstruation is not hard to imagine. Just as Jacob met with his evil
brother Esau and he kissed Jacob instead of killing him after the encounter with
the stranger, so also after the encounter with the stranger, Moses met with his
brother Aaron and they kissed each other. Unlike Jacob, however, who refused to
go with his brother because he did not want to associate himself with evil people,
Moses and Aaron never separated after this meeting:
The LORD said to Aaron, “Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.” So he went;
and he met him at the mountain of God and kissed him. Moses told Aaron all the
words of the LORD with which he had sent him, and all the signs with which he
had charged him. Then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the
Israelites (Exod 4:27–29).
If the two thought that Pharaoh would be excited about the idea of setting the
slaves free, they were in for a surprise:
Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the LORD,
the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me
in the wilderness.’” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should heed him
and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go.” Then they
said, “The God of the Hebrews has revealed himself to us; let us go a three days’
journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the LORD our God, or he will fall upon
us with pestilence or sword.” But the king of Egypt said to them, “Moses and
468
The meaning of circumcision will be explained later.

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Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!”
Exod 5:1–4).
After Moses and Aaron informed Pharaoh that the Israelites no longer wanted to
do the slave work, one would have expected Pharaoh to try to negotiate with Mo-
ses and Aaron some better terms on which the Israelites would continue to work
for him, but instead, Pharaoh decided to worsen the conditions so that the Israel-
ites were required to make the same amount of bricks but without being provided
with the raw materials such as the straws that were used to reinforce the mud to
keep its shape while it is soft and not crack while it dries. Usually, slavery is viewed
as cheap labor and therefore a way to make more products with less money, but
this decision of Pharaoh shows that slavery had nothing to do with productivity
but was rather a means to control people because work made them submissive.
Although all animals work to get their food, work for humans can have other
meanings than just to acquire food. Although civilization teaches people that work
is a chore that people have to endure in order to get the money that they need in
order to pay for the things that they really enjoy such as entertainment and food,
work in itself can be one of the best sources of pleasure and satisfaction, indeed,
one of the best forms of entertainment. Usually, this form of activity that derives
pleasure from work is called hobby, a word that in most languages does not have
any equivalent and therefore has been adopted as a neologism from English. Un-
like jobs for which people are paid, hobbies are activities for which people not only
do not get paid, but are activities on which they may spend a lot of money, invest
a lot of time and effort to develop the knowledge and the skills involved, and do
not do things in the easiest ways by taking shortcuts as professionals usually do in
order to be efficient, but do things in the most complicated and challenging ways.
Why do humans spend time and money to make something in a way they enjoy
while there are ways to make similar products with less effort or buy a facto-
ry-made product for a few bucks that is just as good? The answer is: because hu-
mans can afford to be wasteful. Since animals are not endowed with creativity,
their way of life is locked into a routine that is guided by their instincts. Therefore,
the activities of all animals are basically reduced to two: searching for food, and
rest. If food is abundant, searching for food requires less time and work and the
spare time is used for rest, but if the food is scarce, most of the time is spent in
searching for food while there is less time for rest. When the availability of food
drops below a critical level, a species dies because animals depend on food that is
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produced by the environment and are unable to develop alternative sources of
food. Since humans are endowed with creativity, they are independent from the
environment in the sense that whatever they need, they can produce in virtually
any environment. If humans want to, they can grow bananas at the North Pole and
breed polar bears in the Sahara Desert. Indeed, right now humans replicate many
activities on earth in the outer space, which is arguably the most hostile environ-
ment imaginable. Due to their creativity, humans can produce much more food
than they can consume so that they can have much more spare time than they
need for rest. Thanks to modern technology, humans need to work only eight
hours a day and only five days a week, so that, taking into account that humans
cannot sleep more than eight hours a day, they have eight hours a day as free time
for five days and sixteen hours a day for two days when they are awake and need
to find ways to fill those hours without getting bored. Enter alcohol, drugs, sports,
Hollywood, TV, parties, and so on. For those who do not like entertainment, how-
ever, the most relaxing activity from which humans derive the greatest pleasure is
hobbies. Although those who have hobbies also have jobs, the difference is that at
work they do things that are useful for others and do them in ways that achieve
maximum productivity and profits, while what they do for their hobbies is simply
for the pleasure of doing things and sometimes even the usefulness of what they
do is unimportant. This astonishing capacity that humans have to create for the
pleasure of creating was understood by the writer of Genesis and he could only
explain it as having been received from a creator who created the natural world
out of the same pleasure and decided to create human beings endowed with the
same ability to create as being the only image of the deity that humans can have.
Due to their creativity, humans not only can increase their spare time, but they
also can use the spare time for creativity and not just for slumbering as all other
animals do. While freedom for animals means the ability to move to where their
favorite food is—and if the food is provided in an enclosure, animals feel no need
to move beyond that enclosure—for humans, freedom involves spare time that
one can use for activities that provide the greatest pleasure, either for entertain-
ment that involves no creativity, or hobbies that challenge the creative abilities.
One of the major differences between slavery and modern jobs is not that on
modern jobs one does not work as hard as slaves did on the Egyptian pyramids,
but that slavery did not allow for spare time. Indeed, what slaves did, even when
they did not do some work, it was wholly decided by their masters. In other words,
even when slaves were free from work, they were not free from their masters be-

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cause even how they spent their spare time was decided by their master. True,
slave masters were interested in the productivity of their slaves and therefore they
needed to take good care of their slaves by providing them with food, decent liv-
ing condition, and periods of rest, just as they would do with their cattle, but
working animals and working slaves were different because slaves also were en-
dowed with creativity and therefore, they could use their spare times in different
ways than resting like the cattle do. In our case, Moses and Aaron told Pharaoh
that the Israelite slaves wanted to spend some time in the wilderness in order to
worship their God who was different from the Egyptian gods. That slaves would
want to worship a god rather than the slave master was offensive enough, but to
worship even a foreign god must have sounded downright outrageous for the
Egyptian despot. It was at this point that Pharaoh understood that work for hu-
mans can have another function, and that is to create submissiveness. According
to this function, work no longer has the purpose to produce goods that are useful,
but work is done for the sake of working even if nothing is produced. If Pharaoh
was interested in bricks and wanted slaves because he could not get those bricks as
cheaply when employing free citizens, even if he wanted to punish the Israelites by
making them work harder, he should have provided them with more raw materi-
als to produce more bricks with the extra work, but when he asked them to work
harder but without providing them with the raw materials, it means that how
many bricks were produced no longer mattered to him. Then why make people
work harder if you are not interested in what they produce or whether they pro-
duce anything at all? Although slaves were used to produce what their masters
needed such as food, cloths, houses, and so on, most of the slave labor was done
for no useful purpose. Although modern tourists from civilized countries such as
the Americans and the Europeans marvel at the sight of the Egyptian pyramids,
one can hardly imagine more useless undertakings as well as the enormous
amount of labor that was wasted, particularly at a time when machines were not
available and everything was done with manual labor. Why build such enormous
structures just to house a dead body that can rot very well anywhere in the ground?
Just to attract grave robbers? For despots, work for the sake of working is the proof
of submissiveness, and the more submissive one is, the more freedoms enjoys from
the despot as a reward for his submissiveness. If someone is suspected for not be-
ing submissive enough, is punished with more exhausting work to prove his sub-
missiveness and then is rewarded with more freedoms. This philosophy that work
is the way by which humans prove their submissiveness is best illustrated by the
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slogan written by the Nazis above the entrances of the concentration camps: Arbe-
it macht frei, that is, “work sets one free.” Does it mean that those inmates who
accepted to work in concentration camps were allowed by the Nazis to become
free in the sense that they were allowed to leave the concentration camps? Of
course not! Freedom meant the benevolence of the masters within the concentra-
tion camp and work was the way in which subjects could be tested how submissive
they were by how hard they worked to please their masters, and depending on
their proved submissiveness, they were rewarded with freedoms within the camp
that consisted in various privileges, including that of being a supervisor of the
other inmates. Both fundamentalists and critical scholars view Joseph as the real
ruler of Egypt while Pharaoh was just a ceremonial figure to whom no one paid
any attention anymore, although the text makes clear that Joseph was a slave all
the time and could not do anything without Pharaoh’s permission, not even to go
to visit his family in Canaan. True, Joseph worked hard to enrich Pharaoh and he
was reworded with privileges such as these: “Removing his signet ring from his
hand, Pharaoh put it on Joseph’s hand; he arrayed him in garments of fine linen,
and put a gold chain around his neck. He had him ride in the chariot of his sec-
ond-in-command; and they cried out in front of him, ‘Bow the knee!’ Thus he set
him over all the land of Egypt” (Gen 41:42–43). Within the pyramid of power, all
are slaves of the boss at the top, and privileges at different levels are just freedoms
that are granted by the boss based on how submissive one has proved himself to
be through his work in order to be trusted and be promoted. In a civilized society,
the greatest slaves are not at the bottom of the society where people work hard to
earn their living, but at the highest levels of the pyramid of power in which the
highest officials can do virtually nothing independent of the government and of
the boss at the top. In the United States of America, the highest government offi-
cials cannot even leave home and drive their own car without having bodyguards
assigned by the government to accompany them and drive them around. As it is
known, Hillary Clinton used a private email address while she was Secretary of
State, and that was considered a crime serious enough not only to be investigated
by many government commissions including the FBI, but many think that she
should have been placed behind bars for it. If such high officials cannot have pri-
vate emails, is there anything private that they can have? According to new revela-
tions, the presidents of the United States of America cannot even have locks on the
doors of their bedroom so that the bodyguards have access to their bedroom at
any time:

ABRAHAM’S DONKEY
1102
Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He
retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White House
that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he
ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on
the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they
have access to the room.469
Guards who can peep into your bedroom at any time even when you have sex with
your wife or someone else as those presidents are famous for? How is that different
from a prison? That the difference was just in proportions was candidly admitted
by presidents who lived there and therefore spoke from experience:
For much of his adult life, Mr Trump has lived according to his own rules, as a
real-estate tycoon whose wealth allowed his every whim or idiosyncrasy to be
accommodated. Adjusting to the White House—which Bill Clinton once referred
to as the “crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system” and Harry Truman
called “the great white jail”—must have been quite a shock.470
Obviously, Joseph never saw his elevation to the level of the highest slave as op-
pressive, but rather as one of the greatest privileges.
When Pharaoh learned that the Israelites were contemplating freedom from slav-
ery, his knee-jerk reaction was to assign them more work to remind them that as
slaves, only work can set them free, so that this extra work was a gracious opportu-
nity that he offered them to prove their submissiveness and be rewarded with free-
doms within slavery and not freedom from slavery. Moreover, Pharaoh hoped that
the Israelites would turn against Moses with his ideas of freedom from slavery be-
cause they only wanted freedom within slavery just as Joseph himself understood
freedom and was the only freedom that he enjoyed and eventually wanted and
achieved for all his fellow Israelites. Just as Joseph was a supervisor over the whole
Egypt, so also there were Israelite supervisors over the Israelite slaves selected
from among the most submissive slaves, and when they received the impossible
order to make bricks without straws, the supervisors went to Pharaoh to complain
probably thinking that the order that they received was some abuse by some low-
er-level official, only to learn that the order had been issued by Pharaoh himself:
469
“Trump Bannon Row: 11 Explosive Claims from New Book” (BBC: http://www.bbc.com/
news/ world-us-canada-42559436, accessed January 10, 2018).
470
Ibid.
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He said, “You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the
LORD.’ Go now, and work; for no straw shall be given you, but you shall still
deliver the same number of bricks.” The Israelite supervisors saw that they were
in trouble when they were told, “You shall not lessen your daily number of bricks.”
As they left Pharaoh, they came upon Moses and Aaron who were waiting to
meet them. They said to them, “The LORD look upon you and judge! You have
brought us into bad odor with Pharaoh and his officials, and have put a sword in
their hand to kill us” (Exod 5:17–21).
As Pharaoh anticipated, the Israelites supervisors turned against Moses and Aaron
showing that they were not interested in the freedom from slavery that they ad-
vocated, but were quite happy with the freedom within slavery where they were
supervisors and did not have to work. What Moses and Aaron discovered on this
occasion was that the idea of freedom outside of the gardens of Eden was not very
appealing, and naturally, they went to God to complain:
Then Moses turned again to the LORD and said, “O LORD, why have you
mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh
to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing
at all to deliver your people.” Then the LORD said to Moses, “Now you shall see
what I will do to Pharaoh: Indeed, by a mighty hand he will let them go; by a
mighty hand he will drive them out of his land.” God also spoke to Moses and
said to him: “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God
Almighty, but by my name ‘The LORD’ I did not make myself known to them”
(Exod 5:22–6:3).
According to critical scholars, this text proves that before the time of Moses, the
Israelites had worshiped different deities and it was Moses who introduced Yah-
weh in Israel as the only deity, but this text clearly is meant to answer a ques-
tion that every reader of the Bible who uses commonsense would raise: If Yahweh
was the one who talked all the time and to all kinds of people in Genesis so that
what those people did—including Joseph himself who brought Israel into slav-
ery—were orchestrated by Yahweh, then does this god have any brains? Therefore,
instead of introducing a new deity, this text is clearly meant to tell the reader
that everything that people did in Genesis claiming to have been directed by God
should be understood that it had nothing to do with God, but rather that only this
idea of living a free life in Canaan was what God intended from the beginning and

ABRAHAM’S DONKEY
1104
therefore what God wants to do now is consistent with what God had wanted all
the time, and if the descendants of Abraham failed to do that and eventually end-
ed up as slaves in another garden of Eden, that failure must be blamed solely on
humans and not on God even if people claimed all the time that what they did had
been orchestrated by God. Therefore, Moses and Aaron should not be surprised
that neither Pharaoh nor the Israelites were excited about a free life in Palestine,
and if the Israelites eventually decided to choose a free life, it was because they
were forced to choose it as a result of the fact that a society that is based on slavery
eventually makes life unbearable so that they are forced to abandon it just as they
abandoned the city with the tower of Babel and eventually scattered. While Moses
and Aaron believed that freedom came from the top, now they understood that
from the top of the pyramid or the tower of Babel came only the power to keep
the people together in the bonds of slavery and those bonds are released only
when God intervenes and causes people to scatter. Although in the story about the
tower of Babel we are not given details about how exactly that civilized society col-
lapsed, the breakdown of the Egyptian tower of Babel is more explicit and through
the plagues that follow, the text wants to present it as a gradual and long process
at the end of which the society itself comes to a standstill and nothing holds the
people together because the whole society becomes dysfunctional. This process is
suggested by God by the hardening and the un-hardening of the heart of Pharaoh:
The LORD said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your
brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and
your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his land. But I
will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and I will multiply my signs and wonders in the land
of Egypt” (Exod 7:1–3).
As we are familiar by now, in the Bible, this vacillation of humans to do and not to
do something is presented as being caused by God as if humans are just puppets in
God’s hands, but in reality humans display these contradictory behaviors because
they have been endowed by God with rationality and whenever they defy or over-
ride their rationality, they engage in contradictory behaviors and those behaviors
are described as having been decided by God in the sense that God has created
that rationality so that when humans suffer from their misuse of their rationality,
that suffering is said to be intended by God by how he designed that rationality.
Therefore, if Pharaoh displays contradictory behaviors such as agreeing to let the
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slaves go free and at the same time refusing to let them leave, it is not because God
is playing games with Pharaoh’s mind as both fundamentalist and critical schol-
ars believe, but because Pharaoh’s mind itself is confused and on the one hand
believes that the Israelites are evil and therefore it is better for the Israelites to be
expelled from the country, but at the same time he thinks that they are necessary
for him because they are a source of cheap labor. True, God created rationality,
but if Pharaoh’s rationality ended up a mess, it was not because God messed with
his mind, but because the game of power with which he grew up turned his mind
into a mess. If you play with a knife so that you hurt yourself instead of using it
to prepare your own food, why blame yourself for the way you use the knife and
not the one who made the knife? This split mind can be seen from this statement:
“But the king of Egypt said to them, ‘Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the
people away from their work? Get to your labors!’ Pharaoh continued, ‘Now they
are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want them to stop
working!’” (Exod 5:4–5). By claiming that the slaves are more numerous than the
free citizens, Pharaoh implies that slaves are dangerous because they could rebel,
turn the citizens into slaves and become the new masters, but if that is true, then
one would expect a rational ruler to try to expel such dangerous people from the
country, or at least to let them leave and go into a wilderness if they want to go. If
the American and the European governments truly believe that the immigrants
are the source of all evils for their countries and those immigrants want to leave
those countries, why would those governments not allow them to leave? If the
foreigners are terrorists as both Americans and Europeans believe and those ter-
rorists want to leave those countries, why not let them go and even offer to pay for
the trip? The reason, however, Pharaoh does not want to let the slaves leave the
country is not only because he himself does not believe that they are dangerous,
but because he knows that they are useful, and instead of admitting that, appre-
ciate them, and reward them for their hard work, he imposes upon them even
more work so that he himself is pushing them to eventually rebel by making life
unbearable so that even if most Israelites were not interested in the freedom that
Moses and Aaron advocated, eventually they were pushed by the Pharaoh himself
to want that freedom. What Pharaoh does not realize is that by “hardening” his
heart and making work and life unbearable for the Israelites, eventually he per-
suades the Israelites to want that freedom that Moses and Aaron advocated and
therefore he is playing in God’s hands. Pharaoh’s hypocrisy by claiming that the
Israelites were dangerous although he knew that they were useful has a very close

ABRAHAM’S DONKEY
1106
parallel in the hypocrisy of the civilized American and Europeans with reference
to what are called illegal immigrants, who are the modern equivalent of slavery.
As it is well known, the illegal immigrants are presented by western mass media as
dangerous people who are the cause of all evils in the society therefore, any poli-
tician in order to have any chances to be voted by the population is to denounce
the immigrants and to promise to purge the society of all foreigners, but once
the politicians get elected, they never deport any foreigners and never allow them
to become legal residents either because they provide the cheap labor that is the
real source of prosperity that the citizens enjoy. Just as Pharaoh knew that if the
Israelites were allowed to leave the country the cost of bricks and of the houses
would skyrocket, so also the American and the European politicians know that if
the immigrants were expelled from the country, the price of food and of all com-
modities—including services—would skyrocket. Through the plagues and the en-
counter between Moses and Aaron on the one hand and Pharaoh and his officials
on the other, the Bible illustrates how the power structure of the towers of Babel
that rules the gardens of Eden works and eventually collapses. That these plagues
are about power is clearly indicated by the fist plague or miracle:
When Pharaoh says to you, “Perform a wonder,” then you shall say to Aaron,
“Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh, and it will become a snake.”
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did as the LORD had commanded;
Aaron threw down his staff before Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a
snake. Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers; and they also,
the magicians of Egypt, did the same by their secret arts. Each one threw down
his staff, and they became snakes; but Aaron’s staff swallowed up theirs. Still
Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them, as the LORD
had said (Exod 7:9–13).
Although this is considered the first plague and the plagues are understood as
calamities that make people suffer, there is nothing that happens on this occasion
that would qualify as a plague. Although it is true that some snakes are produced,
they do not even scare anyone, let alone harm anyone, and the fact that they swal-
low each other can hardly qualify as a plague. Moreover, this plague is requested by
Pharaoh, and what he requests is a “wonder,” and both fundamentalist and critical
scholars understand that Pharaoh asked Moses and Aaron to prove that they were
magicians and that they were able to produce magic. According to this under-
standing, this encounter between Moses and Aaron on the one hand and Pharaoh
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1107
on the other had nothing to do with the liberation of the Israelite slaves but was
basically a job interview by which Pharaoh wanted to hire the best magicians and
that is the reason he summoned all the other magicians to set up a contest. Ma-
gicians were important in ancient times just as they are today for shows and al-
though Pharaoh must have been interested in shows and Moses and Aaron proved
that they could offer the best show, they did not end up being hired by Pharaoh.
If Moses and Aaron used magic to produce plagues in order to scare Pharaoh,
then why did Pharaoh ask his own officials to produce a similar “plague”? Why
ask some foreigners to shoot you in the foot with a “plague” and then ask your
own officials to shoot you even more in the foot with the same “plague”? That
this encounter had nothing to do with magic is suggested by the fact that on this
occasion Pharaoh summoned all categories of officials, including his “wise men,”
no doubt the same kind of wise men whom the previous Pharaoh had summoned
to interpret his dreams and, on that occasion, they proved clueless until Joseph
stepped in. In ancient times, just as in modern times, “wise” people are people
who had acquired a lot of knowledge usually by having studied with great teach-
ers and having read many books so that they were the equivalent of what today
would be scholars. As we have noticed on many occasions, snakes represent pow-
er and that is the reason they figure prominently on all insignia of despots, in-
cluding the Egyptian Pharaohs. On the other hand, turning a staff into a snake
presupposes magic understood as the ability to override the laws of nature since
in nature sticks never become alive and turn into snakes or other living beings. Fi-
nally, wisdom presupposes knowledge understood as skills and information about
how to produce something that is useful. If this passage—and the plagues for that
matter—has to do with power, magic, and knowledge, the question is what is the
relationship between them? To this question, critical scholars would be quick to
answer that ancient people saw connections because they had mythical minds
and believed in magic because they had not acquired scientific thinking from the
Greek philosophers as we do and therefore, they did not understand the laws of
nature and realize that magic never exists because the laws of nature cannot be
overridden. Poor idiots! Ancient people enjoyed these stories about magic, power,
and wisdom because they had confused minds but no modern people would even
waste time to read stories about magic, let alone enjoy such readings.
Seriously? Does anyone question that the most read and enjoyed modern writing
is the series of books about Harry Potter and those books are precisely about mag-

ABRAHAM’S DONKEY
1108
ic, power, and schools or learning? At this point, critical scholars would argue that
modern people—including scholars—enjoy reading such modern books about
witchcraft and magic in spite of having scientific minds because they do not be-
lieve that such things really happen while ancient people enjoyed them precisely
because they believed that such things happened all the time, and they believed
that they happened all the time because they were unable to observe reality and
notice that the things that they read about never happened around them. Poor
idiots! But how do we know that ancient people did believe that magic happened
all the time around them? Well, scholars tell us so and who would dare to question
what they say? I do, and I do because I find it hard to believe that ancient people
were such idiots and I know for a fact that modern scholars are not as smart as
they think. What if magic has nothing to do with hocus-pocus but with … rea-
soned reality? True, if one imagines that the only reality that exists is the natural
world as modern people have come to be indoctrinated by the Greek philosophy,
then there cannot be any magic in nature because in nature there is no rational
mind and therefore whatever happens in nature must happen according to natural
laws. If one takes into account, however, that in the world there are rational beings
endowed with the capacity to create things for a specific purpose, then how such
things come into existence no longer happen according to some natural laws. But
how do things that belong to reasoned reality come into existence? Well, if some-
one wants a table because does not want to eat on the ground like animals, makes
an ax, then start to chop some pieces of wood to turn them into flat boards, then
makes some nails to put the boards together, and bingo!, there you have a table. Is
this magic? Not really! This is some head scratching, some sweating, some skill,
and some hard work. But let us suppose that the one who used the ax to chop the
wood decides to grab a club and start to crush the skulls of everyone around until
only those who crawl at his feet are left with their skulls un-cracked. Then the one
with the club in his hand raises the club and says “let there be a table!,” and all the
people at his feet grab axes, pieces of wood, and nails, and bingo!, there you have
a table. Is this not magic? Well, scholars would argue that this is not magic because
some people actually made the table while magic presupposes that you just say
something and what you say comes into existence out of the blue without the ma-
gician to do anything. But is it not precisely that what the one with the club in his
hand did? Did he do anything else but say that the table should come into exis-
tence without even having the slightest idea how a table can be built? True, the
magician in Harry Potter books would not hold a big stick in his hand but a little
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stick called wand and would not say “let there be table” but would say acio tabu-
la— which in Latin means “here [come] table”—but the fact that the magician
does not do anything to cause the table to appear does not mean that no one else
does anything. If people from all times have considered the Egyptian pyramids as
“wonders,” do they consider them wonders because they believe that they were
created out of the blue by magic, or is it precisely because one person had so much
power that he could order such monstrosities to be built and armies of workers
provided the astronomical amount of labor without Pharaoh to contribute to the
project with a single strike of a hammer? Yes, from the point of view of the slaves
who worked on those pyramids there was never any magic involved because all
the carving and moving of the stones had to be done using their muscles, and if
one of our scholars with scientific mind had told them that they did not need to
work so hard because they had mythical minds and believed in magic and there-
fore all they needed to do was to ask a magician to tell those rocks to turn into
square blocks and move into proper position while they just watched the show,
those slaves would have had a good laugh and would have thought that these
scholars with scientific minds are just nuts. Power is magic not in the sense that it
creates reasoned reality by breaking any laws of nature, but in the sense that the
one who decides what to come into existence does not contribute to the actual
coming into existence with anything else but the word, that is, with the decision.
The only contribution that Pharaohs had to the building of those pyramids is the
orders that they issued, and the reason that those words were so powerful so that
what they said did come into existence was because they had a big stick in their
hands and a lot of people accepted to provide the enormous amounts of work in-
stead of having their skulls crushed for refusing to do the work. The magical word
“abracadabra” is a transliteration of a Hebrew phrase that translates “I will create
as I speak” or “I create through speaking” and apparently it was coined in order to
describe how God created the world in the first chapter of Genesis, although the
actual phrase is not found in the Bible. In the Potter books, however, the spell is
written Avada Kedavra probably on the assumption that Kedavra meant “cadaver”
and that is the reason it is spelled as two words and is used as a killing curse, but
the original word “abracadabra” has no such sinister connotations since it means
to cause something to happen simply by using words. Although the magician uses
words, what causes the words of the magician to take place is the wand that
obviously suggests a club that evidently has the function to make others carry out
what had been said. Without the wand/club in the hand, the words of the magician

ABRAHAM’S DONKEY
1110
would be just that—words. It is for this reason that in the Potter books, wizards are
very protective of their wands just as gangsters are very protective of their guns
because, once they lose their wands, they are powerless because they are disarmed.
Since the magic is produced by the wands/clubs and not by the words, the first
plague is about carrying clubs or “staffs” that are also snakes, not in the sense that
those pieces of wood ever turned into actual living snakes, but in the sense that
they could scare people and kill them by crushing their skulls just as snakes can
kill with their venom if people do not do what they are told. Therefore, this con-
frontation of clubs between Moses and the Egyptian officials had nothing to do
with any plagues but rather had the purpose to clarify who was afraid of whom,
and the fact that the snake of Moses and Aaron swallowed the snakes of Pharaoh’s
officials suggests that it was the slave owners who were afraid of the slaves and not
the other way around. And the reason that Pharaoh was afraid of Moses and Aar-
on was because he understood that Moses and Aaron were advocating creating a
society based on a different reasoned reality than the one on which the Egyptian
garden of Eden was based, that is, on power as magic, and power as magic has
always fascinated people and that is the reason even modern people enjoy so much
books about magic like the series about Harry Potter. What modern readers do
not realize is that the reason they enjoy so much these books is precisely because
they are not modern at all since everything in them is taken from ancient mythol-
ogy. True, modern readers perceive that somehow what they read in these books
has some resemblance to the world in which they live, but because they have lost
the connection with the ancient world, they are no longer aware that the founda-
tion of the modern civilization is actually established in ancient times. The author
of the books may have been an obscure teacher who found herself unemployed,
but she understood the true roots of the reasoned reality on which western civili-
zation is based and decided to ridicule it through a scathing satire of the western
society that these books about Harry Potter are all about. The reason the books are
enjoyed and are not perceived as being just wild fantasy is because they build on a
mentality that seems to be universal: everyone likes power because power is mag-
ic in the sense that things take place because you say so, and in order to have pow-
er, you need to go to a school to receive a degree that places others at your dispos-
al so that they do whatever you want. It is this connection between mythology,
power, and schools in modern civilization that J. K. Rowling understood and en-
abled her to create a satire about a kind of society that made her a failure while she
became famous by poking fun at a society that now enjoys reading what she ridi-
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cules because modern readers—including scholars, not just kids—are too stupid
to understand what she describes.
At this point I imagine that some would object that they are enjoying reading
these books because they see any connection between what is described in the
books and the world in which they live but rather that they enjoy the reading be-
cause they see it as pure fiction and therefore reading is just entertainment, that is,
reading for the sake of reading. For instance, they would say that in the books a
bus on which people travel does not follow the road to avoid trees and buildings,
but rather it is the buildings and the trees that move out of the way so that the
bus does not bump into them, and while students and faculty are having a meal
at that school of magic, all kinds of delicious food just miraculously appear on
the table without anyone doing anything to prepare the food or to bring it to the
table. What do all these have to do with the real world? Ancient people may have
thought that trees and buildings can move out of the way and food can appear on
the table out of the blue ready cooked because they could not observe reality and
notice that trees and buildings were always in the same place unlike animals that
had legs and could move out of the way, but today who would believe that such
things really happen? Well, anyone can see them if is able to read the Harry Potter
books. True, if one just reads about how students and faculty gorge themselves at
the meals, it looks like the food is produced by some magic, but at some point, one
reads that in the basement of the kitchen there are some slaves called elves who
tirelessly prepare all the food that appears on the tables so that there is no magic
involved in preparing the food just as there was no magic involved in building the
Egyptian pyramids. How is a meal at Hogwarts—the school where everything is
done through magic—different from a meal at the White House, or at Kremlin,
or at Elysée Palace, and so on, where presidents and other state dignitaries enjoy
a formal meal where food just appears on the tables without anyone seeing how it
is prepared and by whom? As far as trees and buildings that move out of the way
of a bus or a train is concerned, is it not precisely that how a road or a highway is
designed and is built today by engineers? Do those who decide that a road should
appear in some place ever care whether there are any trees, or buildings, or others
obstacles in the middle of the road or do they ever move a finger to make sure that
those obstacles get out of the way when the road is built? True, if one looks at the
landscape when it is decided where buses and cars should travel it would look like
they would bump into trees, buildings, and rocks, and when one looks later after

10. From The Garden Of Eden To Canaan Via Harry Potter

10. From The Garden Of Eden To Canaan Via Harry Potter

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10. From The Garden Of Eden To Canaan Via Harry Potter