Rhea

Was watching a show one night, which was comparing a vocanic eruption in th mediterranean to the events of the exodus. Showing the the effects of the volcano would produce the events of the exodus.

(Except it seemed to have an vastly wrong date - but that didn't bother them)

And some archeological findings in the desert (which everyone was sayin wasn't one then? Yet they all say "wandered in the desert"...) supporting a wandering tribe.

(Except the dates were even more vastly wrong - in the other direction - but that didn't bother them)


And how it must be true because nobody could get all those details right and remember them without writing them down, and only a moses figure would have know how to write.

(Except volcanoes are pretty memorable, but that didn't bother them)




And I began to wonder...

So say there was a slave uprising, and the pharoah did let them go.
And a mere generation before, there had been this volcano that we know happened.
And all of these events happened - the darkness, the plagues, the receding of the sea.
And later someone writing a story used their knowledge of the tale of those events to add embellishement.

What we'd have is a tale of a god-driven, plague-ridden exodus with evidence that doesn't quite match up date-wise, along with an Egyption record that fails to mention these dramatic points.


Do we think a story teller might ever reach into history for embellishment by fantastic events? Is this possible? How does one come up with ways to embellish a story? I suppose this is one possible.

beth

The main thing I see is that there is absolutely no archeological proof of the pyramids being built by a mass population. It seems that free men built them.

Godless Dave

It isn't just possible, it happened all the time. Or the exodus itself could have happened earlier but when it was written down it was reworked to sound more recent.

A good comparitive example is "Parsifal", an epic poem written in the high Middle Ages. It's an Arthurian romance, so its time period would be ca. AD 500. But his equipment and customs are those of a knight in the high Middle Ages. He even goes on a Crusade to the Holy Land!

To be even more general, the most well-known Arthurian romances were written in France and even set in France, even though Arthur being British is part of the whole story.

As for "only a Moses figure could have written it down", WTF? No one is disputing the Hebrews had a written language. That's one reason their mythology survived.

Rhea

They claimed none of the slaves would have been educated, only the palace educated Moses could have written things down. To them this was a proof that the bible had it right.

1. The events match what a volcano could do.
2. Somebody wrote it down.
3. It must have been written down right away, or no one could have gotten it right.
4. Moses is the only one in the bible story who knew how to write.

Therefore Moses was real as described in the Bible!

lpetrich

I would not be surprised if the Thera eruption had been dimly remembered in Exodus; the description does seem to fit.

But that book contains some other stuff that is much less supportable, like ~400,000 Israelites wandering in the Sinai Desert -- and not leaving any trace of their passage. And the departure from Egypt not attracting any notice. It would be too big to hide, and it could have been given some positive spin, like "good riddance to those pesky jinxed slaves!"

Also, much of the Law of Moses specifies various temple gear that would be awkward to lug around; these laws most likely date from later, settled times, with a stationary Temple.

The story of the Golden Calf was most likely a swipe at the northern kingdom of the Dual Monarchy phase, which had had a bull as a religious symbol.

Rhea

Well I don't get that, either. see my thread a while back in BC&A

If it was desert how did they feed themselves. If, as some say, it _wasn't desert back then, why did they call it one?


Hrm.

Flynn McKerrow

Why would a palace educated Moses have learned how to write Hebrew? You'd think he would have learned how to read and write the Egyptian language, using heiroglyphics.

Or am I missing something here?

Viti

The whole Pentauch (sp?) sounds like oral traditionas and myth written down at a later time...how anyone reads those books and doesn't think of the oral traditions of a dozen other cultures is beyond comprehesnion.

As was already mentioned, if there was a factual person at the base of the King Arthur legends he was some sort of clan cheiftan around 500 ad...thats the dark ages and the Britons were probably barely beyond tribal and settling into small villages. The stories were written as romances in the middle ages and so you hear about fairy castles and knights in shining armor and such. The eraliest references to Arthur were bard songs so became more and more embellished.

spurly

Lady Shea, do you really believe they were written in the middle ages? I don't see the congruency of that. Jesus referred to these books, and most people believe the gospels these quotes were found in were dated no later than the second century AD. (I personally believe they were written before the end of the 1st century AD). Not only that, weren't fragments of these books found in the dead sea scrolls?

How do you back up this claim?

Kevin

Undercurrent

I would love to see chapter and verse where Jesus mentions the legend of King Arthur. I mean, hell, they both seem to speak the same version of english .