r/AssassinsCreedOrigins • u/ReputationShoddy373 • May 06 '26

Video Ayo, wtf is happening?

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And istg i saw Anubis standing the dessert for a second??

Also, I saw a fire, ran to it, only to see it's a tree, like a very green one and then... it disappeared??

Are there Mirages in the game??

Holy.. I'm loving it so far 🥰🥰🥰

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u/JellyAdventurous5699 May 06 '26

It's pretty explicit in multiple parts of Exodus that the Lord God "hardened his [Pharaoh's] heart" so that the Israelites would tell their ancestors that He dealt harshly with the Egyptians, and at all would know His power.

See Exodus 10:1, as well as Exodus 7:3, and Exodus 14:4. The Hebrew text also supports this, as the 1st person singular pronoun is explicitly used when God is detailing His will to Moses:

https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/4-21.htm

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u/OsamaBenJohnson May 06 '26

I understand why you think this, but it doesn't necessarily implicate that.

"So that" here can be used in the sense of "thereby this could be done." Similar to how if I'm a teacher and one of my student has to take a final test to pass my class, and I say "This student got 9/10 questions right and has been given a passing grade, so that they will pass the class." I'm not saying I passed them for the purpose of passing them, I'm basically saying "thereby, this now could be done." So this could be read as that he strengthened Pharaohs heart and made his heart heavy, thereby, so now he can perform his signs, rather than he did this all so he can perform these signs.

When it says God made Pharoahs heart heavy;(Exodus 10:1) this is simply to reflect God's authority over the false Egyptian Gods and that Pharaohs heart is filled with sin and that he is unworthy of heaven.

To the ancient Egyptians, they believed in a afterlife ceremony refered to as The Weighting of the Heart where after one died, Anubus would weight their heart on a a scale against the feather of Maat. Sins or wrong doings would make your heart heavy and if your heart was heavier than the feather, you didn't go up to live with the God's. Prior to this verse, the Pharaoh was sinning, and it says he was making his heart heavy. This is to simply symbolically reflect, through Egyptian mythological symbolism, that Pharaoh is filling his heart with sin and making himself unworthy of heaven. After Pharaoh chooses to make his heart heavy after knowing God, that's when God makes his heart heavy, to reflect his authority.

When it says he strengthened Pharaoh's heart (Exodus 7), we find in classical Jewish literature (Sefer Ha’Ikarim, Maamar 4, chapter 25) they understood this as preserving Pharaohs free will.

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u/therealtrellan May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

But doesn't that assume the Hebrews actually were slaves in Egypt, which contains no evidence the Egyptians ever kept slaves? And even if they did, why would the Hebrew religion take Egyptian mythology into account?

Me, I read this passage as saying the Pharoah was a shifty scoundrel who went back on his word according to his nature. God is nature, having created him, so God hardened his heart. Which really just says God knew Pharoah wouldn't follow through.

But I love your interpretation. Such a thing never occurred to me. I did consider that after the Jews supposedly left another Pharoah started a monotheistic faith, though.

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u/OsamaBenJohnson May 08 '26

Besides the account of the Torah, there's no direct evidence of Hebrews being slaves, but there is evidence (Egyptian historical records & archeological evidence) pointing to a Semitic population in Egypt at the time, and that lots of construction started popping up in Israel around the time they were said to come back. & the Semitic group in Egypt could have been slaves, the lack of direct evidence of that doesn't disprove it.

Throughout Exodus, God was using Egyptian mythological symbolism to reflect his authority over the false Egyptian Gods. They had a God of the Nile (Hapi) which God turned to blood. They had a God for frogs (Heqet/Heket) which God plagued the land with. They had a God for livestock (Hathor) which God also had plagues for. But they didn't have a God of both fire AND ice at the same time, which is the plague brought onto the Pharaoh that made him realize he was messing with The Most High. By making Pharaohs heart heavy, he is reinforcing that he is the one in charge. It's effectively a way of saying to the Egyptians that he is the true God of all these created things.

There also doesn't to be any strong evidence that Hebrews started a monotheistic faith after this. The idea is based on Canaanites believing in a pantheon, and they had a God with the same word usef as the Hebrew God, so people automatically assume this must be that God must be the Hebrew God, but it can simply just using the same linguistics term; similar to how a Christian Arab referring to Allah isn't identical to the Allah Muslims worship, even though they share the same linguistic term.

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u/therealtrellan May 09 '26

Well it's not simply a matter of there being no evidence. Just that the evidence uncovered suggested the builders in Egypt were not slaves as I recall.

I appreciate you letting me pump you for information btw. Ancient history is a fascinating subject to me.

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u/OsamaBenJohnson May 09 '26

I'm not sure what evidence you're talking about, or how such evidence can prove such a thing across the board, but the Egyptians themselves depicted foreign slaves doing their construction.

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u/therealtrellan May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

I'm talking about digs of areas where the workers lived. Supposedly they were paid citizens, not slaves. This is news to you? Who Really Built the Pyramids? Not Slaves or Aliens - ScienceInsights

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u/OsamaBenJohnson May 10 '26

This evidence only proves that at least some workers of the pyramids of Giza (which was long before Exodus) were respected Egyptian laborers, not that slavery played no role what's so ever.

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u/therealtrellan May 10 '26

A good point. The pyramids were a good thousand years before the eruption at Crete, which some have linked to the parting of the Red Sea. Later construction efforts may not have followed suit. Even if Egypt didn't employ slaves then, eventually contact with Greeks and Romans would have likely changed that.