Ktotwf

1. If the Jews weren't slaves, then why care about Yahweh at all? If Yahweh freed them from slavery in Egypt, then he did a massive favor for them, setting himself up as the patron deity of the Israelite state.

1. Would Egypt not have loomed large in the imagination of the people who lived in Israel at the time? Perhaps it was just the natural country to go to if you wanted to forge a nation-myth.

Sheshbazzar

Makes me recall what a friend said to me some 30 years ago;

"If the roots are rotten, the tree is dead.

I think there is a mighty big, and old, dead tree that is all ready to fall.

Celsus

Actually that's nothing less than a blatant lie. Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar engaged each other in a book on the historical Israel (I forget the name), positioning themselves as two poles in the centrist column with the Lemche-type minimalists at one end and the Kitchen-type maximalists at the other. Really though, it's sorta true they had no time for the loopy inerrantists sitting far off the maximalist scale. But that's not the same as not dealing with alternative approaches, which they most certainly do.

Joan of Bark

As Anat wrote, why come up with such a story? I'm open to suggestions.

Celsus

There were almost certainly people living there with roots in Egypt. In fact, not "almost certainly". There were. And perhaps over the years it came to be a national origin myth that spread and became a source of prestige (Egypt was the mightiest power in the land, the source of high 'civilisation') that others coopted either via marriage or simply adoption wholesale to lend their culture more prestige. What we're missing is a pre-6th century document that might shed light on what Judahites really believed, or indeed whether Israelite history bears any resemblance to the revisionism in the Bible. Whatever we say is speculative, but there's numerous plausible reasons one could come up with to explain why or how the story was written as it was.

That the Exodus was rewritten as an allegory of their exile in Babylon should give you a clue as to the motivations of coming up with the story in the form we know it today - slaves escaping a mighty power. For all we know, it was originally as "historical" as Pilgrim's Progress or the Narnia books to them, but eventually became thought of as historical, so powerful was the message to those who read it.

It doesn't matter the degree of truth underlying it or otherwise. The history behind it is irrecoverable.

semiopen

The book is "The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (or via: amazon.co.uk)"

It's very good and not difficult to read. Both Finkelstein and Mazar are sane so it's not very annoying.

I was just reading it last night.

semiopen

You may well be right. I always wanted to be a detective - probably a Columbo type. The central importance of Egypt for the Israelites bothers me and I just think there is something behind it.

Don't forget the Egyptians controlled Canaan for much of the bronze age.

Just mentioning stuff like this annoys some people, but there are also similarities between Moses et al and Pharoes like my acquaintance, Dr. Hobeth claims:

http://arismhobeth.com/

Aris is a little extreme and a theist, but the issue of Moses and Egypt receives significant scholarly attention.

Sheshbazzar

and the dead, rotten and dried up limbs of that tree are even now crashing down around us;
Just like any big old dead tree whose roots are rotting and dead, it will lose its branches one by one, even now these rotten branches are cracking, and crashing down all around us.
Yes, true, the rotten 'trunk' may continue to stand for quite some time, -and the bigger it was when alive, the longer it will remain standing-
But by and by, the entire bulk of it will most certainly come crashing down.

bacht

This is an important point I think. Much ink has been spilled over whether the exodus from Egypt really occured, how many people, which route etc. But as you say the whole story could be a re-telling of the later Babylonian experience.

Or, there was a Hebrew presence in Canaan in the hill country by the end of the 13th C, and later generations sought to provide a suitably grand back-story for the tribes. Maybe the exodus story was created by the Davidic monarchy, they might have been the first redactors of Hebrew history as preserved in the Tanakh.

Celsus

At the time of the supposed Conquest, Egypt controlled Canaan. Which means the Israelites escaped out of Egypt then conquered Egyptian land with nothing but the clothes on their backs and wherever they happened to find enough iron to forge millions of swords in 40 years in desert. Stretches credulity, does it not?

As for the Egyptian obsession, there's nothing unusual about a small nation being obsessed by a larger more powerful immediate neighbour (and sometime foe, sometime ally). It happens all the time.
Erm Velikovsky is ... how do I put this nicely... a complete whackjob.