Most Igbo people have recently been asking themselves, “How did we get here?” “However, who are our forefathers and mothers?” Do we belong to a certain race or do we have ties to various communities?” People have been striving for solutions like these since the birth of civilization, roughly 300 BC, until the time of the Bible and Epicurus.
Before the rise of foreign religions, anyone from any country would gladly tell you the etiological origins of their people. An etiological myth is one that is created to provide an etymological explanation for a name or to provide a mythical background for a certain area or family. Many etiological myths are similar to folk etymology in that they have a narrative structure that reads as mythical, legendary, or imaginary, and they frequently appear reasonable and cognitively sophisticated for what they are. Despite the fact that neither science nor history has proven any of these current legends. The need to understand where man comes from will never be satiated.
Some African diaspora groups are working hard to rewrite their own histories, or rather to connect missing nuts in their genealogical trees, using the histories of other groups to fill in the gaps. This is akin to how Copernicus and Darwin reshaped the world views of their respective societies 450 and 150 years ago.
Some of our Igbo friends, however, are desperately trying to fit themselves into the Jewish mythological narrative of their creation, having only recently awoken to join the adventure of locating their origin and forefathers. Just as Copernicus revolutionized how people regarded themselves and the world 450 years ago and Darwin did again 150 years ago, so Sasselov argues we are approaching close to another revolutionary moment with the resurgence of the Biafran cause for independence under the leadership of Nnamdi Kanu.
The world and our identities, he believes, will appear to us very differently one morning. The British Marxist intellectual E. J. Hobsbawm, along with T. O. Ranger, published the eponymous book, The Invention of Tradition, in 1983. Editors note in the introduction that many “”Traditions” that “look or claim to be old” are usually very recent in their origin (and even fictitious).
The biblical texts themselves are the result of a creative dialogue between ancient traditions and different communities through the ages, according to Professor John K. Riches of the University of Glasgow’s Department of Divinity and Biblical Criticism[17] “There was a wide range of political, cultural, economic, and ecological conditions under which the biblical texts were written.
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy tell the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and their subsequent journey to the Promised Land. These books were written to show how God intervened in history, to remind the people of Israel of their servitude and deliverance, and to show how the promises God made to them were ultimately fulfilled.
Even today, the Exodus is retold in Jewish prayers and honoured in the festival of Pesach because of its centrality to Judaism. This is in contrast to polytheistic religions, which celebrate the gods’ acts in nature.
The Torah, often known as the Pentateuch, is the collection of five books that includes the Book of Genesis and the books in which the Exodus narrative is narrated. Most modern biblical scholars believe that the Torah was shaped in the post-exilic period[6] (c. 538 – 332 BCE).
Archaeology
Archaeologists and Egyptologists have spent a century digging for clues, but they haven’t uncovered anything that definitively links the Israelites’ Canaanite beginnings to their time in captivity during the Exodus or their subsequent escape and journey through the wilderness[29].
[30] The earliest Israelite communities were rooted in Canaanite culture; cult artefacts from these settlements were associated with the Canaanite god El; pottery found at these sites was made in the Canaanite tradition; and the alphabet used was an early form of the Canaanite language. [31] The absence of pig bones is almost the only difference between “Israelite” communities and Canaanite sites, though whether this is an ethnic identifier or due to other circumstances is still debatable.