I believe that Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were real people. I don’t necessarily believe that any specific detail of their story is true, except for this one.
Miriam died, and after she died, a bloody conflict between Moses and Aaron left only one brother surviving.
I believe that this ancestral memory was kept alive in the surviving descendants of such an intense and exciting experience.
If Moses were alive today, he would be diagnosed with schizophrenia. He heard a voice and issued commands from it to govern the people.
Julian Jaynes believed that this state of being was the normal mode of being for “bicameral minds” which all humans possessed prior to the Iron Age.
What’s fascinating about the story of the society governed based upon the imaginary voice Moses heard is that in that society other people were able to replicate his same schizophrenia. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others all experienced the same symptom experienced by Moses and attributed to their schizophrenic delusions the same name.
Which is to say that the very original concept of the service being done by the priests who were members of Moses’ nephew’s lineage was to keep alive not Moses himself but the disembodied voice which spoke through him in such a successful fashion as to cause people who were more distantly related to sometimes spontaneously experience his same mental illness.
The difference between a religion and the cult of a madman comes entirely down to the quality of the guidance being offered by the not-real voice which exists only in the head of a crazy person.
The guidance offered by the voice heard by this I-believe-real ancient human seems to be pretty good to me. And it feels as though legitimately a conflict exists at the root of most of the planet which is between a group of people who says that Mohammad the Ishmaelite has the best interpretation, a group of people who says that Ezra the Scribe has the best interpretation, and a group of people who says that Saul of Tarsus has the best interpretation.
The key cornerstone of the policies of King Saul as I view him is the objective of spreading this mental illness to even more distantly related humans than the Prophets based on the idea that this particular fantasy world is his personal favorite.
Whereas in my view the objective pursued by Ezra the Scribe is to propagate the belief that this ailment has been permanently cured in everyone and that going forward the words of human close-relatives of Moses will serve the same purpose as the abstract voice which has been permanently silenced.
I believe that the story of Hercules represents symbolically the pathway by which an exceptional human might become mythologized in a fashion similar to the fashion in which Moses and his siblings were mythologized. That he is human and his exceptional-ness is divine represents to me an intentional effort to keep things separate as a flouting of the common trend of elevating ancient heroes into divine status. Saul submits to this trend in the figure of Joshua of Nazareth, who appears within his mind in a similar fashion to the manner in which the God of Israel appeared in Moses’ mind. Ezra applies this trend to the collective of Judah, and those who came after him continue to treat the words of humans of Jewish descent as precisely equivalent to the disembodied voice heard by certain specific people of Israel in the ancient past.
The story of Mohammad is that his schizophrenia referred to itself using a different name.