Rhaedas

Why would that matter, if the debate is just using DATA, to use a common complaint of yours.

And why is it when asked for some evidence, you always ask another question (or better yet, post a totally new thread)?

If we were talking about DATA, these threads you start wouldn't be so long.

Dave Hawkins

I'm not dogmatic about the burials correlating with the events of Exodus. How were those dates determined?

Dave Hawkins

I'm just curious. Is curiosity not allowed?

deadman_932

Uh, Dave...why didn't you KNOW about the avaris dates BEFORE you claimed they supported exodus? That's the REAL question.

spin

I put forward the possibility of a debate on the value of Rohl's work, not a male bonding session.

Do you agree that Champollion has nothing to do with modern Egyptological chronological analyses?


spin

Amedeo

Afdave, your evidence is as compelling as the evidence a TV rabbi presented during the first part of Bush the Second's reign: A period of natural disasters (fires, floods) and man-made disaters [somehow not including the 9/11/01 gift to the Americans]. Why? Why? Because God was punishing the President for his promoting two states in Palestine.

The President was obvisouly acting against God's donation of Canaan/Palestine to His People; so, he had to be punished!

What you are saying is that the Israelites must have been in Egypt, since Egypt was divinely battered on account of the Pharaoh's mistreatment of the Israelites.

Think it out again, and notice the little crack in the reasoning process... You assume that the Israelites were there, and then you give a theological explanations for Egypt's disasters. At least the rabbi was not assuming that Bush was -- if only verbally -- promoting two states.

But you should go a bit further: Imagine the Pharaoh's good treatment of the Israelites: They would have remained in Egypt, and they would not not ever seized the lands that God had promised to them. // Obviously they did not go into Egypt to stay. So, the exodus was not prompted by God dishing out plagues on the Egyptians.

Here is a hint that they went into Egypt or Egypt-owned Canaan: Before they left, they had the time and opportunity to plunder (or swindle) the Egytians, as they proudly note in the Bible. (Apparently that's when the Egyptians called them habiri, hebrews, that is, brigands.) After the plunder and some years of preparation outside Canaan, they embarked on the occupation of Philistine, Jesubite, and Amorite cities. (The occupation proceeded from northern "Palestine" toward the south, which included the old Jerusalem.) Why did the Israelites move out of the "paradise" region to begin with??? Raiding the storage rooms of farmers became more and more difficult, since the large estate owners started constructing forts, like the tower of Babel. So, Abraham eyed the farmlands between the Euphrates and the Nile, and the rest is history. The warlords created a profitable feudal system, just as others had done elsewhere.// This is a better myth than yours, shorn of all theological nonsenses.

In the story of Cain and Abel, we recognize two prototypes: the Israelitic shepherds and the Canaanite farmers. The farmers are the bad brothers, and they shall be subdued by the good Abel. So, the Israelites who settled in Palestine consisted mainly of feudal warlords, large castes of rabbis [we see hundreds of them in later courts] , the shepherds, and the merchants.

Johnny Skeptic

Ok, as evidence you used 1) the historicity of the non-supernatural events, 2) the fulfilled prophecies, 3) the accurate portrayal of mankind, and 4) etc. Regarding item 1, there is nothing at all unusual about the writers of religous texts recording secular events that occur where they live. This has been pointed out to fundamentalist Christians by skeptics many times regarding the secular history in the book of Acts. Regarding item 2, I am not aware of any credible evidence that one single Bible prophecy was inspired by God. If God wanted to prove to everyone that he can predict the future, it would be easy for him to show up in person and do so. His refusal to do so certainly does not benefit him or anyone else. At any rate, you are not making any sense regarding prophecy. Secular archaeology does not reasonably prove that supernaturally inspired prophecy is true. If supernaturally inspired prophecy is true, that alone would be sufficient evidence for many people, including me, that the rest of the Bible is true, meaning partly that if you can reasonably prove that prophecy is true, you would not need to discuss archaeology or anything else. Regarding item 3, if you are portraying men as sinners, I agree that every man makes mistakes, but what is your point? Who ever said that making mistakes is sufficient grounds for sending people to hell for eternity without parole, especially if you deprive some people of having evidence that they would accept if they were aware of it? If a God exists, he needlessly withholds evidence that would convince some people to accept him if they were aware of it. What evidence do you have that God is not a sinner. He supposedly inspired James to write that if a man refuses to give food to a hungry person, he is vain, and his faith is dead. Why do you suppose that God inspired James to write that? Since God refused to give food to hundreds of thousands of people who died of starvation in the Irish Potato Famine, it is not likely that God inspired James to tell people to do that which he refuses to do. Regarding item 4, will you please tell us what kinds of evidence you mean by "etc"?

Sauron

Inerrantists like afdave insist that the numbers are literal.

Well Roger - bold, or not, that is the inerrantist position - faithful transmission of the text, up to and including items of scientific or historical interest. You may disagree with them on it. Many people who claim to be christians disagree vehemently with them on it. That's OK.

But don't confuse (a) your personal position with (b) the inerrantist viewpoint. And don't confuse what we're debating here: item (b) is the point of discussion here, not (a).

Yes, we know. That's the problem, actually - you're off-topic again. So maybe you'd like to address the point on the table, instead of steering the discussion to your personal conclusions?

On the contrary. The rules of the argument are set by the inerrantists. If they say the numbers are reliable and faithfully transmitted, then it's game on - we argue using the guidelines they have provided.

What is naive is to try and rescue inerrantist arguments by invoking arguments of textual degradation or copyist errors, such as you are doing now. Textual degradation, copyist errors, etc. are precisely *opposite* of the inerrantist position. It's rather like trying to rescue a argument for vegetarianism by pointing out how tasty animals are.

VoxRat

I passed over this earlier, but it represents some more "used-car salesmanship" that ought to be dissected.

First of all, By whom? No one I know of. But even if it were, (a) that would not be an "understanding" - it would be a dogmatic assumption, and (b) what people may have assumed, and how long they might have assumed it (lightning = gods' wrath, flat earth, Atlantis, Eldorado...) has absolutely no bearing on the scholarship of the research that shows all these things to be myths.

"suddenly"? I don't think so. The impossibility of a 6000 year old earth, of animals being "poofed" into existence from dirt, of global floods, of parting seas... all this has virtually limitless "external evidence", as has been recognized by sane scholars of many unrelated fields (history, archeology, geology, etc... there's that dang consilience thing trying to get your attention again). That's why scholarly books dismiss - or, more to the point, ignore - such nonsense, with no reference to your religious documents whatsoever.

How many times are you going to try to resuscitate this dead horse - the Documentary Hypothesis = the nonhistorical nature of the bible dead horse? When it's been pointed out to you, over and over and over, and you continue to bring it up, you cross the line into dishonest.

I think you underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the H-ness of your O.

Gooch's dad

Dave, you seem to be particularly confused about this issue--when did any archeologists or historians claim that no Hebrews were ever slaves in Egypt?

I don't ever recall reading this anywhere, and I very much doubt that any historian claimed this. So the presence of Hebrew slaves in Egypt isn't particularly surprising. It is evidence, I will grant you that--but not evidence for your hypothesis, unless your hypothesis is the only possible explanation for this evidence.

What it IS evidence for, is the hypothesis "Egyptians had slaves who were possibly or even probably Canaanites". That's all.

The fact that Alberto Fujimori, a man with an inarguably Japanese surname, was president of Peru, doesn't in any way support the hypothesis that the Japanese had occupied Peru in the late 20th century