© Charles Chandler

 

Tanakh	commentary
Numbers 1:47-54 Numbers 3 Numbers 4	First Census
Exodus 18:1-12	Isaac brought Zipporah, with Gershom & Eliezer, to see Moses at the mountain of God, which would have been Horemheb at Mount Seir. Curiously, Jethro said, "Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people." Which affair? Perhaps "all gods" was originally Elohim, and perhaps the reference is to something a Canaanite cult did, but of which we have no additional information. This phrasing... Now Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, had taken Zipporah, Moses' wife, after he had sent her home, along with her two sons. ...implies that Gershom & Eliezer were Zipporah's, and not Moses' as well (i.e., children by another father).
Exodus 18:13-27 Deuteronomy 1:9-18	Moses' father-in-law ordered him to designate chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties, & tens, and to let them hear the lesser cases, only bringing the toughest cases to Moses, who would represent them before the Lord. This has been taken as one of the inspirations for the development of representative governments.1:105 Interestingly, the very same reform was being enacted in Egypt at this time — Horemheb wanted to redistribute the power that had been consolidated at Amarna, which he accomplished by shifting authority to local judges. If he pushed the same agenda in the Levant, the echo in the Torah would have been about someone telling Moses to delegate authority to lesser judges. Jethro's assertive tone, especially as concerns something like the organizational structure of Moses' camp, necessitates a stature above father-in-law. For someone more powerful than Moses in the Levant to mandate a distributed power structure, at a time when Horemheb was mandating the same thing in Egypt, strongly suggests that the one doing the mandating in the Levant was Horemheb's senior representative, which in the present thesis would be Isaac, son of Amenhotep III & Sarah, adopted son of Abraham, and inheritor of the Covenant in 1345 bce, who went by "Jethro" (i.e., his excellency) in the Elohist fragments, written by Atenists who didn't want to use the official name "Ra'El" since Ra was a pagan god to them.
Numbers 16 (Korah's Rebellion) Numbers 17 (Aaron's Staff Buds) Numbers 18 (Duties of Priests and Levites) Numbers 19 (Laws for Purification)	Korah led a rebellion against Moses, resulting in the execution of 250 of the leaders, and another bout with the plague. If this was after lesser leaders were appointed as described in Exodus 18:13-27 and Deuteronomy 1:9-18, the rebels misinterpreted the reform, at the expense of their own lives — Horemheb wanted to take power away from the Atenist elders, but he never said that the lesser judges would be able to disagree with him. Despite the Israelite genealogy given for the rebels, they were probably Atenists, considering the harsh treatment that they were given, including 14,700 deaths due to the plague. So this was Horemheb eliminating all of the senior Atenists except Moses & Aaron.
Exodus 32	Golden Calf
Exodus 33	Horemheb threatened to kick the Atenists out of Seir, and to not travel with them. So the Atenists gave up the rest of their jewelry. Then Horemheb promised to lead them, but also stipulated that no one was to know that he was with them.
Exodus 35 Exodus 36 Exodus 37 Exodus 38 Exodus 39 Exodus 40	They built the Tabernacle, and in the first month in the second year (1311 bce), on the first day of the month, it was erected. In the last paragraph they set out for the Promised Land.