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Using the dating of the Biblical Exodus and comparing it to the Egyptian dating of the Hyksos expulsion throws up a gap of about 400 years. Using the dating systems of the books of Judges and Samuel, this gap can extend to between 554 and 612 years.

However, there is clear historical record of post Hyksos Egypt extending its empire into Canaan, the land into which the Hebrews entered and lived, according to Biblical sources, for 400 years before establishing the kingdom of Solomon.

The Hebrews living in Canaan were therefore under Egyptian rule. It is also here in Canaan that we can make a comparison between Yahweh and the Canaanite Moloch (Baal) and extrapolate a polemic inversion of the story of Pharaoh ordering the death of all the "first born" in Exodus.

The worshippers of Moloch sacrificed their first born children to their deity through immolation. Worshippers of Yahweh in Canaan were also known to carry out child sacrifice on occasion, especially in times of hardship, although immolation (holocaust) was supposedly frowned upon. Slitting the child's throat, however, was acceptable.

The sacrifices were carried out and the remains interred at sacred sites known at Topheth. Sometimes - although rarely, judging by the vast predominance of infant human bones found at Topheth sites by archaeologists - animals were sacrificed as substitutes.

The Unification
Modern historical disciplines studying the biblical era uniformly conclude that Exodus could not have been written earlier than the 7th century BCE, and certainly not by the Biblical Moses who at best is a fictional combination of Egyptian personalities.

In Israel itself, 7th Century BCE is the period in which the archaeological evidence presented by Herzog suggests the emergence of Jerusalem as a cultural centre occurs.

By all accounts, it is a cultural centre struggling to find an identity and nationality for itself and, given the discovery of the Jewish texts displaying Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah, it is not difficult to piece this jigsaw together.

In 639BCE, Josiah, king of Judah, is known to have introduced wide-ranging religious reforms and brought additional areas of "Israel" under his control.

It is during this period that "polemics" against and "inversion" of a wide variety of religious and cultural sources are brought together to form a religious and political unity.

For Josiah's "inquisitors", where history is unheroic, such as the expulsion from Egypt in the form of the Hyksos, history is inverted. Where religion is bereft of moral unity, the cult of Aten is interweaved, satisfying existing belief systems within the region and bestowing upon the king, Josiah, the position of divine right through a lineage to Solomon and David - both replacements for Aten's ancestors and his temple-building reputation. Josiah also destroys the Topheth Temple said to have been built by Solomon in the Hinnon valley just outside Jerusalem, to the south.

Within this unifying mechanism, there are obfuscations to mitigate existing belief systems, which require the true name of God to be kept secret, and for which there is precedence in the cults of Baal and ISH-KUR, all part of the mish-mash of the region, and all designed to plaster over the holes in the new Yahweh-based system. An important separation of the identities of Baal-Moloch-Yahweh is implemented, although the evolution of ISH-KUR to Hadad to Baal to Yahweh does not remain disguised owing to the later polemic against Babylon written up as Genesis.

Well known in Egypt, including at the time of the Aten cult was the following passage from the Book of the Dead:

I have not robbed.
I have not coveted.
I have not killed people.
I have not told lies.
I have not trespassed.
I have not committed adultery.
I have not cursed a god.

Josiah's unification process takes Moses, an Ideogram combining the Ahmose who expelled the Hyksos, and the Mermose who led the Egyptian army to great victories, and credits him with receiving the Ten Commandments in tablets of stone. In reality these laws are an elaboration of the above declaration.

Add to this the fact that the obscure Egyptian king's "Hymn to Aten" is almost "word for word" Psalm 104 in the Bible and we have another compelling "coincidence".

These and other "coincidences" apparently convinced the renowned Psychologist Sigmund Freud, writing in his 1939 book "Moses and Monotheism", that the Jewish monotheistic faith had its roots in the Akhenaton cult religion.

Josiah's unification should of course be applauded. It outlawed the Moloch cult and emphasised the spiritual morality of the Ten Commandments. The polemics and inversions adding a heroic slant to the history of his people are understandable and politically astute.

But beginning c. 200CE, somewhere along the line, and unlike the Aten cult, supremacy of race is added to the Jewish faith.

In summary, however, it is Herzog's discovery of Yahweh's consort Asherah in Jewish texts and his declaration of an archaeological absence of Solomon or David that is the scalpel with which to slice through all the fictions of the biblical Exodus and its suggestion of divine right and supremacy. For that reason, Herzog must not be forgotten.

Even though his scholarship is ignored by the politics of modern day Israel, it contains a lesson for the rest of the world, and in particular for those nations who support Israel's supremacist doctrines.

Israel, modern, needs to face up to the fact that it has no "divine right" to the land it occupies. Israel must rely instead upon an equitable settlement in light of its undeniable modern day colonisation and conquest - a reality its opponents must accept but without straying outside the boundaries defined by international law - i.e. the 1967 borders.

It is a realist position, which most modern day western civilisations have come to terms with without claiming divine right or racial supremacy. They have accomplished this by recognition of human rights and an international standard of law limiting their behaviour (in most cases), reserving instead to a faith in the democratic institutions upon which their modernity and equitability is based.

Given the religious and cultural battleground upon which Israel is placed, its absence of recognition of modern reality, and in a world armed with nuclear weapons, until Israel - armed with those weapons - separates itself from doctrines of "divine right" and "racial supremacy", it will continue to be the breeding ground for a fight against racial and political injustice - at the centre of the modern-day world's geo-political processes - which could bring our entire global civilisation to destruction.

That surely, in the name of humanity, is reason enough to bring to an end such "biblical" fixations and dogmatism. It does not require us to abandon faith in God in order to do that. Our intuition of The Creator is as old as humanity and is not dependent upon a dusty old tome written by men and in the words of men.