lycanthrope

Hi all

My christian friend told me the events of exodus must be true because of the Passover where if you trace modern passover feast all the way back to the first one in Egypt.

Anyone learned in Semite history can give me an opinion of how the Passover really began?

Archaeopath

I know it's hardly an academic source, but Wikipedia places the origins of Passover as a series of Egyptian rituals. Might be a place for you to start

Joan of Bark

Ah yes, Passover, when Jews celebrate the mass slaughter of Egyptian babies ...

Just a guess, but there may have been a special meal of some kind in ancient Egypt, which a handful of semitic-speaking peoples passed along to their new countrymen in Palestine after migrating there. That hardly makes the stories of Exodus, with it's purported plagues and 600,000 able-bodied men escaping bondage an accurate description of what occured.

Anat

If we are making guesses, I propose that at some point there was a celebration of shepherds in which a yearling lamb was sacrificed in thanks for the fertility of the ewes and to ensure the survival of the herd. There was also a celebration of farmers for the beginning of the spring harvest. At much later times stories about the retreat of the Egyptian forces from Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age got grafted onto this agricultural festival. At some point instead of telling of Egypt retreating from Palestine the story became about Israelites escaping captivity in Egypt. It is possible the transition happened during or after the Babylonian exile - whether to give hope to the exiles or to justify their priority over those who remained in Judah (archaeology shows that only Jerusalem and its environs got depopulated, in the countryside population remained in place). As a result we have 2Chronicles 30 describing a public celebration of Passover under Hezekiah, while the deuteronomist history gives us in 2Kings 23 describes a public celebration of Passover under Josiah, while completely unaware of Hezekiah's Passover (23:22-23 "For there was not kept such a passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah; but in the eighteenth year of king Josiah was this passover kept to the LORD in Jerusalem.")

Susan2

I agree, and I feel tremendously uncomfortable saying this. And if Christians were to stop and think they too celebrate violence against Jewish children/babies when they celebrate the crucifixion of a 3-4 month old each and every spring; and yes I feel uncomfortable saying that as well. It isn’t my intention to offend but to question the celebrations symbolisms.

It would be nice to think it is just a semitic problem but it is not, it is a world wide problem.

lycanthrope

I'm trying to convince a christian friend on the absurdity of the Exodus, his defence was that since Passover is being celebrated now, it must mean there was a precedent in the past for it. That being the original Passover in Egypt.

IamJoseph

You only know of this from the Hebrew, not from Egypt. So why quote a half complete statement: the text says first the Egyptians slaughtered the Hebrew male babies, with the intention of genocide.

Did the Egyptians also make unleaven bread because they were leaving in haste, and how do you account for the Hebrews being able to leave and return to Canaan - did they ask nicely? What about the festival celebrating booths in the deserts - from Egypt also?

Strange that the world's most vindicated writings, with over 70% already proven, are denied in totality - it is very suspicious.

IamJoseph

I think you will fare better in exposing the absurdity of the Gospels. The Hebrew bible is not limited to 'belief' with not a shred of historical evidence whatsoever. Please prove that Rome conducted a trial as per the Gospels - because I can prove to you that Roman archives lists numerous trials - but no Gospel trail! :wave:

show_no_mercy

There are a number of problems with the "passover" story. You would think that if Moses actually wrote the story and had actually gone up to the pharaoh and asked him to "let his people go", he would have remembered the name of the pharaoh he demanded an audience with.

You would think that this unnamed pharaoh would have recorded such traumatic events in Egyptian history such as the Nile turning into blood, hail of fire, the slaughter of every first born male (not just humans) by some malevolent invisible entity that just happened to "pass over" any door that had lamb's blood plastered on it.

You would think that this unnamed pharaoh would have recorded that after such event, all of the Jews who just so happened to have lamb's blood on their doors had a massive exodus just after the events and left in such a hurry that they didn't even have time to eat their bread after it had "levened" so they had to eat their bread "unleavened".

You would think that this unnamed pharaoh would have recorded that his army got wiped out after chasing these Jews who left in such a hurry that they had to eat unleavened bread. You would also think that if over 1 million Jews were wandering in the desert for 40 years that they would have left massive amounts of trash in the desert in that 40 year period - animal bones, pots, pans, excrement, etc. Woodstock in '69 left massive amounts of garbage over one weekend, imagine 40 years of garbage.

You would think that if Passover were an actual "day", then the Jews would remember the specific day, and not simply "the first full moon after the first day of Spring". The fact that it's tied to closely to the first day of Spring means that it must have originally been some sort of harvest festival.

But hey... at least Metallica made a cool song about all of these events, even if they didn't happen.

DCHindley

Dingy Dang ... my carefully crafted crap reply has been lost in the server meltdown.

It is my reasoned opinion that the history of the Jewish people as presented in the Jewish scriptures is the product of 2 revisions of the story. The first, occasioned by the return of the Judean elite classes from Babylon in the rule of Cyrus and his successors, forced them to deal with a large number of Israelites who had never left the land (the am ha aretz).

Archeology tells us that before the captivity, inhabitants of both the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel worshipped more than just the god YHWH, and had shrines, sacred pillars and groves all over the place, etc. After the captivity, the elites created their own history that emphasized a freeing from bondage to a foreign ruler, and imposed it upon the native masses, a history that involved worship of only one god, YHWH, to whom they had attributed their release from captivity.

In Ezra/Nehemiah, this mythic return was celebrated by the returned elites by means of the festival of booths. The story they created for the common people, on the other hand, included the elaborate story of their escape from Egyptian captivity, capped by the passover story, so they too could share the sense of release the elites felt about their own change of fortune. This morphed over time into the feast of passover for those able to come to the temple in Jerusalem, or as a commemorative Seder ritual if they could not.

Later, in the time of the Hasmonean rebellion against the Syrian king Antiochus, at a time when many Jews had Hellenized like the neighboring peoples, the rebellion galvanized the traditionalists and they created a new celebration of their redemption from "oppression," Hanukkah (lights).

I believe that gentiles who were attracted to Jesus' message of national renewal to be capped by a new fruitful kingdom of God in the holy land, that would exercise rule over the gentile nations as a kind of worldwide empire, wanted to enjoy the fruitful kingdom personally. They latched onto the passover ritual as symbolic of their own future release from "captivity." I suspect that these gentiles were at the lower end of the social scale themselves, either tenants and artisans attached to the large estates of the Herodian and Roman elites, an felt they would be far better off as part of the new messianic kingdom than as residents of tributary states not part of it.

DCH