DM Murdock (aka Acharya S) released in 2014 her paperback book "Did Moses Exist? The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver", mounting a case that there were many "lawgiver" figures in ancient mythology. In her book, she postulates that the original one may well have come from the Pygmies.
The quotes below are taken from pages 269 thru 271 in Murdock's "Did Moses Exist?". (I've only read the parts available on Google Books.) Note that Murdock didn't make any of this up, she is merely quoting other scholars, mostly Dr Jean-Pierre Hallet, a genuine scholar on African Pygmies, from his book "Pygmy Kitabu: A revealing account of the origin and legends of the African Pygmies", from 1973.
Murdock writes, starting on page 269:
- Pygmy Lawgiver
The idea of a divine lawgiver dates back milennia, possibly to the earliest human communities. Among these groups would be the Pygmies of Central and South Africa, whose legends were recorded in modern times by Belgian antropologist Dr. Jean-Pierre Hallet (1927-2004). For decades, Hallet lived on and off among the peaceful Pygmy people of the Congo named Efe, recording their traditions as pristinely as possible and demonstrating they had not been influenced by biblical tales at that point.
...
Hallet and Pelle devote considerable space to the lawgiver legends, remarking:
- ... The Egyptian founders of man's oldest historic civilization identified the Pygmies with their great ancestral gods.
The God of these beautiful Pygmy "gods" is represented as the Giver of the Law...
As stated by Hallet and Pelle, the Pygmies claimed that "in ancient times their lawgiving father-god-king reigned near Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon." The scholars further remark:
- In this neighborhood, according to the Pygmies, they received the deity's laws and commandments. Moses' book of Exodus locates the lawgiving scene at a mountain called Sinai... By placing the lawgiving scene at Sinai, the mountain of Sin, the Bible seems to confirm that the commandments were handed down from the Mountain of the Moon.
- ... The Egyptian founders of man's oldest historic civilization identified the Pygmies with their great ancestral gods.
As stated above, Dr Hallet is most definitely an expert on African pygmies. He lived among them for a number of years, and recorded the lives and customs of the Efe Pygmies in great detail. I've read parts of his "Pygmy Kitabu" at the local State Library and Murdock is representing him fairly as far as I can see.
Obviously given the significance of Hallet's claims, Murdock should have delved into them further to see what other scholars believe. One criticism of her books that many make (including myself) is that too often she repeats information from sources uncritically, and seems to hide behind the fact that she "isn't making things up". And she repeats many weird claims indeed!
On Hallet: I've found few reviews of his book. Here is a short one by Colin Turnbull in American Anthropology journal, 1975. He is very critical of Hallet's claims about the Pygmies being the source of many religions and Hallet's distain for modern anthropology. But Turnbull makes the point that it would be a shame to ignore the book and believes that "writers like Hallet, popular and unacademic, do have something to offer us."
So what do we do with claims like Hallet's? He said that the Pygmies had no outside influence when they told him their myths. Obviously that can't be the case now, even if it were true then (which seems unlikely), so it would be difficult to reproduce Hallet's research. Yet to ignore such fantastic claims would mean we lose fascinating insights to the origin of many European myths. Should researchers spend time to reproduce such work?