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Mythological Elements in the Story of Moses
Like the accounts of Abraham, the historical Moses preceded the earliest written account about him by at least three centuries. [a]We expect the same kind of situation with the account of Moses' life in the Pentateuch as we found with Abraham's. We would expect details of his life would be made up, fictitious- for any factual details would be long forgotten.

The story of Moses' birth is borrowed from another ancient semitic legend.
The mosaic laws are based on the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. Even the story of Moses taking the stone tablets containing the ten commandments are derived from this Babylonian myth of Hammurabi.
There are obvious impossibilities and contradictions in some of the accounts regarding Moses.

The Birth of Moses
One such instance is the story of Moses’ birth, given in Exodus:
Exodus 2:2-6,10
The woman conceived and bore a son; and...she hid him for three months. And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes; and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river's brink. Now the daughter of the Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river; and her maiden walked beside the river; she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it. When she opened it she saw the child...And the child grew...and he became her son; and she named him Moses, for she said "Because I drew him out of water."


There is a legend of the founder of the Semitic dynasty of Akkad, King Sargon, which dates to the third millennium BC and is certainly earlier than the story in Exodus. This legend was found on Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets dated to the first millennium BC. This is how the tablets sound like, in English:

Sargon, might King of Akkad, am I. My mother was of mixed blood; I never knew my father...My city is Azupiranu, on the banks of the Euphrates. My mother conceived and she secretly bore me. She put me into a basket of rushes, and sealed its lid with tar. She cast me into the river which did not drown me. The river swept me to Akiki, the drawer of water. Akiki, the drawer of water scooped me up in his pitcher. Akiki, the drawer of water raised me as his son. [1]


Here, like the stories of the flood, creation and paradise, the parallels are amazing:


The mother had a baby in secret.
Due to circumstances the baby had to be put away.
This was done by making a basket out of bulrushes and sealing it with tar.
The baby was put into the basket and left adrift on the river.
The baby was discovered by the person who became his foster parent.
Now, it should be obvious to all that the story of Moses' birth is based on the legend of Sargon. There can be no historical truth in stories which are used, repeatedly on different persons, by ancient cultures to glorify their heroes. As Werner Keller, the author of The Bible as History, admits:

The basket story is an old Semitic folk-tale. It was handed down by word of mouth for many centuries...It is nothing more than the frills with which posterity has always loved to adorn the lives of great men. [2]


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Mosaic Law and the Code of Hammurabi
This is not the only episode in the Moses chronicles that has been borrowed from Babylon. Everyone is familiar with Moses receiving the ten commandments in two stone tablets from God in Mount Sinai. However, this story is originally Babylonian.
One of the most well known ancient code of law was the Code of Hammurabi, so name after the Amorite king Hammurabi who lived around 1700 BC. On the great Babylonian stone monument, known as the stele of Hammurabi, a drawing inscribed on it shows the great Amorite King receiving the tablets of the law from the sun god, Shamash.

The similarity does not end here. On the stele too is inscribed the laws that made up the Code of Hammurabi. The general similarity between the code and The “Book of the Covenant” (Exodus chapters 21 to 23) and the legal codes of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy cannot be denied. The Mosaic laws were obviously written under the influence of the Babylonian code. [3] In some cases even the wordings are uncannily close to one another. For example take this one from the code on the principle of an-eye-for-an-eye:

If a citizen shall put out the eye of another, then let his own eye be put out.
If a citizen shall knock out the teeth of another who is higher in rank, then let his own teeth be knocked out. [4]


This closely parallel’s one of the Lord’s commands in Exodus:

Exodus 21:23-24
And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,


Here is another example, the code gives the following principle:

If a citizen steals the son of another citizen, he shall be put to death.


The principle and wording is closely followed in the verse below from Deuteronomy:

Deuteronomy 24:7
If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel...then that thief shall die...



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Obvious Impossibilities and Contradictions
The difficulty with the story of Moses in the Bible does not end with the finding that some parts were derived from Babylonian myths. Some of the “facts” mentioned in Exodus simply does not sound possible. One of which is this statement about the number of people who took part in the exodus:
Exodus 12:37
And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children.


Thus there must have been, according to the account above, around one million people including women and children. As Manfred Barthel asserted, this would form

a marching column sixty miles long. And there were simply not enough fields and pastures, even in the fruitful land of Goshen, to support such a multitude (let alone in the quarries of Pithom and Raamses). [6]


The number given in Exodus therefore is clearly an example of how the oral tradition tends to exaggerate the myth as it is passed on.

It is also clear that by the time the different strands of tradition were put in writing, many of the details have already been lost or corrupted. How else would we explain the following discrepancies:

The name of Moses father-in-law is no longer known; for we have two different names for him:

Exodus 3:1 (also 18:1)
Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian...
Numbers 10:29 (also Judges 4:11)
And Moses said unto Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses' father in law...



There are two different account of the burial of Moses’ brother-in-law, Aaron:

Numbers 33: 38 (Also Numbers 20:22-29)
And Aaron the priest went up into mount Hor at the commandment of the LORD, and died there...
Deuteronomy 10:6
And the children of Israel took their journey from Beeroth of the children of Jaakan to Mosera: there Aaron died, and there he was buried...


That Moserah and Mount Hor are not the same place can be seen from the fact that Numbers 33:30-37 placed the former six stages before Mount Hor. [7]

It is clear from these difficulties how one should treat the accounts of the supernatural and miraculous in these fables: supernatural incidents such as the patriarchs talking directly to God and miracles such as the parting of the Reed Sea and manna falling from heaven. If the recordings of probable events, such as those presented above are filled with mistakes and contradictions, the writings on improbable events can safely be discarded as myths.

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Notes
a. Now calculating from our table of biblical chronology, Moses lived around the fifteenth century BC. (As a mark of the historical uncertainty surrounding the details of his life, there exists many different estimates for these date. Moses has been estimated to live either in the 15th or 13th century BC.) Taking the latest estimated date for Moses and the earliest estimated date for the composition of the “J” document -in other words the “best case” scenario for believers- we still have a gap of 300 years between “historical” Moses and his story in Genesis!

References
1. Riedel et.al., The Book of the Bible: p27-28
Keller, The Bible As History: p122-123
2. ibid: p123
3. Barthel, What the Bible Really Says: p118-119
Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology:p147
Riedel et.al., The Book of the Bible: p31
4. Barthel, What the Bible Really Says: p119
Riedel et.al., The Book of the Bible: p34
5. ibid: p31-32
6. Barthel, What the Bible Really Says: p112
7. Stiebing, Out of the Desert: p20

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