Noggin

Hello

A plea for assistance. Any scholars out there delve into the egyptian writings... now that we have cracked the rosetta stone and can read the egyptian scrolls?

Seems to me, that if Pharoahs army really became swallowed up by the parted red sea, the egyptians would have written THAT down? No?

Or the locusts.

Or the Nile turning to blood.

Or the killing off of the 1st born son.

Anyone? My guess is that since I have neard nothing mentioned casually in the news these past decades since the rosetta stone, we probably haven't found the evidence that the book of Exodus is actual history. Wouldn't that be wild if we found bonefide egyptian scrolls depicting a red sea parting, armies being swallowed up etc? Or have we already?

Noggin
(Mike)

funinspace

A culture not writing down a defeat would not be that odd. Howeve, 400 years of this Yahweh cult living within Egypt should have left some traces if we are to believe the numbers of people that left per the Exodus. And the Egyptians should have left some real traces of themselves within the departed Hebrew culture. Yet we see neither. It's still an argument by negation, but it's another plank of absent information of many dozens that one finds with the Christian canon, making a nice large deck blaring out BS.

Grizzly

Hi Noggin,

This post would probably get better play in Biblical Criticism and History, where I am moving it.

Cheers

Grizzly

Wads4

No I don't think any Egyptian records of a red-sea parting , or indeed of the Exodus itself were made. Some apologists like to say that the Egyptians would not have recorded a defeat,-maybe.
The locusts, plagues, Nile turning to blood were quite common cyclical events-perhaps worse some years than others,--eg strong algal blooms or maybe high mineral content could have made the Nile appear red,--if so, that would reasonably have been a severe pollution effect that poisoned the water, producing the plagues etc. Death of the first born has been put down to it being the job of the first born in the royal family and others to open the granaries after a period of grain storage, and that the deaths were a lung infection caused by a fungus pollution in the grain being inhaled by them;--though that does sound a bit contrived. Or maybe the whole story is an error or lie. What intrigues me is that in the 1600's BC the native Egyptians ejected the Hyksos "Shepherd Kings" from the city of Avaris inthe delta which they had occupied after the fall of the Middle Kingdom,-and during whose reign Joseph is said to have flourished in Egypt. The Hyksos were ejected and purued out of Egypt and into Canaan; so this was a mass exodus of people from Egypt,-but in the 1600's-rather earlier than traditionally thought. It just so happens that around 1628 BC (geologically dated),--the island of Thera north of Crete, erupted violently. the fall-out could have polluted the Nile, and a tsunami reached the delta and the gulf of Suez, which was the real site of the Red Sea, or "Sea of Reeds",--and caused a tidal effect that may have caught some of the fleeing Hyksos and some of the pursuing Egyptians. .There was also the "pillar of smoke by day, and a pillar of fire by night"--sounds like a large erupting volcano to me.
Otherwise we have to believe there was another large exodus from Egypt about 400 years later. Two mass exoduses out of Egypt?? Sounds fishy. I think the Hyksos expulsion was "adopted" as a story by Israelites much later on,-to give them a heroic pedigree.

NOGO

"NOW" that we ... ???

The "now" is actually more than 170 years ago!

Noggin

Okay, I was informed that the code cracking via the Rosetta stone was more recent... hang on... I shall google:


http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html

says the stone was found in 1799

and that translations began around 1822.

Asha'man

Hey Noggin,

You need to check out The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman. This is a modern work by a pair of archeologists who have done a thorough examination of Israel with respect to the Hebrew Bible.

Their conclusion is that the Exodus never happened. First, as you must already suspect, there is no sign of it in the Egyptian records. There is no sign of a large population crossing the Sinai Desert (but other signs of smaller population movements both before and after have been detected). The account is filled with anachronisms, such as mentions of a series of Egyptian forts that didn't exist in the 13th century BCE but did in the 7th.

More importantly than the Egyptian evidence is the evidence within Israel itself. The land of Canaan simply wasn't conquered by Joshua and crew. No mass destruction of cities was found, and the city of Jericho had no walls at the time. There is a complete continuity of culture across that timeframe, indicating no sudden influx of Egyptian influenced pottery, writing, architecture, etc. Instead, the evidence points strongly to the Hebrews developing out of Canaan natives. In fact, there are even signs of the polytheistic culture slowly abandoning it's other gods, such as Yahweh's consort Ashera, and becoming monotheistic over centuries.

So, even if there was an unrecorded mass exodus from Egypt, they never arrived in Canaan.

Finkelstein and Silberman's conclusion is that the entire Exodus story was a fabrication of the 7th century BCE, designed to provide a legal and moral justification for the Kingdom of Judah to claim ownership of the lands of the Kingdom of Israel, as well as a theological boost to the Yahweh only cult that was gaining strength.

judge

There was a theory, popularised by Emmaneul Velikovsky that the Ipuwer Papyrus other wise know as the admonitions of a slave (?) detailed some of the events of the book of exodus.

There was an old thread where a poster called amlodhi gave a pretty good refutation of this, but I can't find it

velikovsky's arguments have been used by several christian apologists.

Juliana

This is interesting, in the 'Final Observations' of JWC Carotta notes the same:

"[...] In regards to future research, the confirmation of the radical thesis
of Euhemerus has serious consequences. To put it straight forward: If
Jesus was Caesar, if the baby Jesus was not born in the era of Augustus
but was Augustus himself, then following the same reasoning, Moses
did not flee Egypt with the Hebrews under Pharaoh, but rather he was
that Ahmose who drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. If the Gospel tells the
story of the Roman civil war through the lens of the Jewish war, then
the existence of a real connection between the Hyksos of Ahmose and
the Hebrews of Moses is unnecessary, a mere analogy would be sufficient.
If the story of the Egyptian plagues were told from the viewpoint
of those who had been driven out of Egypt, then in reality it was not the
Egyptians who had plagued them, but the Hyksos who had invaded
Egypt and were subsequently driven out. As Caesar distributed grain to
all suffering from hunger, so the manna of Moses would have been the
flour of Ahmose; and as Caesar settled colonies, so Cleopatra later
leased out her land in Judaea to Herodes where he again settled colonies
of Roman veterans, so the promised land of Moses was the gê en aphesei
of Ahmose, the land ‘awarded, leased, loaned’ by the Pharaoh. [...]"

And there is a book by Garaudy "The founding myths of Israeli Politics" which deals with that too, IIRC, but that one is not considered politically correct.

Juliana

Wads4

Thanks, nice to have some confirmation of my intepretation.