Sauron

You think that Israelites starting out as Canaanites is compatible with the OT history of Israel, as it is written?

Care to defend that statement?

Mageth

I thought the ancient Egyptians were renowned for the recording of just about everything. Is that correct, or a misconception on my part?

Sauron

Wrong. The complaint was no graves.

No one expects all the bodies to have survived decomposition over 3,000 years. But graves can be found, even when the bodies have long since vanished.

Keep dancing, leonarde.

Sauron

Since I doubt leonarde will respond, and since I know he's wrong about this, here's the quick scoop on such burials:


http://www.rom.on.ca/egypt/case/about/burial1.html

So mass burials of peasants *do* stand a chance of surviving the centuries - assuming that such a massive die-off ever occurred.

Moving along:

And:

And since the Egyptians employed professional mourners and faced a trial by Osiris for his immortal soul, the general statement that they "looked forward" to death (as leonarde claims) is overly simplistic.

leonarde

Partial repost:The section you quoted from at length was talking about "pre-dynastic" Egypt. Although guesstimates for the (potential) Exodus range considerably (roughly 1600 to 1000 BC) no such guesstimate assumes a pre-dynastic timeframe: just the opposite. The text quoted also mentions "The Egyptians must have found many natural mummies over the centuries before the Age of the Pyramids ." Whereas, again, the Exodus, assuming it happened, was WELL after the Age of the Pyramids began ("well" here meaning more than a millenium, possibly 2 to 3 millenia). You're just WAY off in your (even potential) chronology.

Cheers!

leonarde

Again, there are plenty of ancient Egyptian graves. One simply cannot identify what each person (Biblically referred to or not!) died of, nor when they died. Since the Exodus' century isn't even known, that would prevent any serious evaluation of this (alleged) phenomenon via the graves. But your evaluation is not a serious one.......

Sauron

You are deliberately focusing on the wrong point.

The key take-away from that part of the article is that even crude desert burials have a larger-than-average chance of having the bodies or skeletons preserved, due to dessication. So to recap the events here:

1. The original complaint was no graves.

2. You misconstrued that as being a complaint that there were no bodies and you went on to say that it was unrealistic to expect such bodies.

3. The citation from the Royal Ontario Museum above shows that - even in your mistaken rephrasing - your argument still doesn't stand, since both bodies as well as graves could be expected to still be with us, today.

4. And finally, you don't seem to understand when the dynasties started. The dynastic periods began in 2950 BCE and finally ended in 332 BCE. More than enough time to cover any alleged Exodus. Thus your claim that my ROM quotation is outside the correct timeframe is simply wrong.

Most preserved bodies of Ancient Egyptians from the Age of the Pyramids are natural mummies. There are far more skeletons, however, than mummies, in the tombs of the Age of the Pyramids. Bodies are less likely to be preserved if buried in fine tombs, than if left in the sand. Why?

The "Age of Pyramids" refers to the 3rd and 4th dynasties, which were the age of the Step Pyramid, Bent Pyramid, Red Pyramid, Great Pyramid, and Khafre's Pyramid.


Not at all. You're simply assuming that poor people buried their dead differently in the time after the Great Pyramids were built, vs. the pre-dynastic era. The rest of the article refutes that.

In addition, wealthier people (and rulers) continued using pyramids after the Great Pyramids. There are, in fact, over 100 pyramids in Egypt, and they were used as late as the New Kingdom. Moreover, tehre are other burial chambers, etc. which aren't even pyramids at all. In reality, the great pyramids at Giza don't tell us anything about how poor people were buried, so they aren't a benchmark that's particularly useful here.

Sauron

1. However, there is no sudden spiking of the number of graves, as would be expected if the plague of the firstborn had actually occurred.

2. Tomb inscriptions and/or other writings of the period would have recorded such a cataclysmic dying-off of all the firstborn animals and people. But again, we find nothing at all.

3. Wrong leonarde - if there are human remains, a dating as to when they died most certainly CAN be made. It's called carbon dating.

Wrong. All one has to look for is a sudden spiking of the number of dead, in ANY century. You won't find one, however.

Of course it is serious -- serious enough that you can't seem to respond to it.

Postcard73

Quoting Who Were the Early Israelites:

"All authorities today agree that the major break in the archaeological sequence in Palestine that would have to be correlated with a shift from 'Canaanite' to 'Israelite' culture occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, ca. 1250-1150 B.C." (Dever, 8)

Prior to this determination, 1446 B.C. was held as the date of the Exodus. This date was based on 1 Kings 6:1, which states that work on the Jerusalem Temple began in the fourth year of Solomon's reign and 480 years after the Exodus. Solomon died in 930 B.C., so he ascended to the throne in 970. His fourth year would have been 966, and 480+966=1446 B.C.

Thus archaeologists have two specific periods, one evidential the other traditional, on which to focus in examining the historicity of this story.

spin

We do tend to grind over the same old stuff, don't we?

First there was a historical exodus from Egypt of a group that came into Egypt took over for a few hundred years and was eventually kicked out at the beginning of the 15th century BCE, hotly pursued by the Egyptians, into Canaan where the group sacked various cities. This exodus was of those we call the Hyksos. This is a well documented exodus of people from Egypt. So, there is no doubt that there was an exodus. The only problem is that it was not a Hebrew exodus.

When Nebuchadrezzar attacked Judah, numerous Jews fled to Egypt. When the Persians took control of Egypt they used amongst others Hebrew mercenaries who lived in Egypt but were never assimilated and there was antagonism between the local Egyptians and the Hebrews as can be seen in the problems one can read about at Elephantine where a Hebrew temple was destroyed by the locals and the Jews sought permission to build another one. In this antagonistic context the Egyptians made the connection between the Jews who came from Palestine and the Hyksos who were driven out there once before. One can read some of the literature as it is preserved in Josephus's "Contra Apion". It was also during this period that speculation about Moses was rife and we have him leading the Egyptian army against Ethiopia.

So, we have a Hyksos exodus into Canaan equated by the Egyptians with the Hebrew population which was in Egypt causing problems for the locals as the Hyksos once did, so it seemed to the locals that the Hyksos were back again. How the Hebrew exodus story came about seems relatively clear. Its date also seems clear as well, post-exilic.

The exodus story as told in the Hebrew bible has a few interesting anachronisms. The city of Raamses, naturally enough named after Ramses II who was pharaoh during the 13th century, did not exist -- at least by that name -- at the time one calculates for the Hebrew exodus. The city of Pithom didn't get built until centuries later again (Check out Donald Redford's "Egypt, Israel and Canaan").

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Old reflections on the exodus:

As I said in an earlier thread, a million people (600,000 men implies more than a million people all together), let's say walking ten abreast two metres ahead of another ten (and so on) would mean a line of people two hundred kilometres long, the distance from Suez to Jerusalem. Imagine a million people trying to get access to a water hole, such as those found in the Sinai: with continuous access for everyone day and night, people would be dying of thirst for lack of access time. And what sort of archaeologist could miss the shit of a million people? The exodus as portrayed in the bible is patently absurd and I find it intellectually offensive to find people trying to justify such absurdity, grinding over the same attempts to make it seem vaguely plausible, except for the fact that they have never contemplated the implications of such a story. The best we get is some people who try to arbitrarily pick portions of the story as containing truth and rejecting the more farcical parts as displeasing to their own personal logic.

The situation in Palestine is just as patently bad. There are artifacts that show continuous habitation of the same culture from Bronze Age to Iron Age. When a culture intrudes itself on another, as in the case of the Philistines into Canaan, there are clear signs of difference. The pottery is different, the structure of villages is different, the use and types of food are different. There is no such break of cultural artifacts in Palestine for the Hebrews though there is for the Philistines. Conquest by a million people just didn't happen.

There are no traces of Egyptianised influence on the Hebrew language which supposedly had sojourned in Egypt for centuries. Time and time again when two cultures come into contact for long periods of time the "high" culture leaves a profound effect on the "low" culture's language. Where is the Egyptian cultural remains in the Hebrew language? There isn't anything obvious at all -- no trace of those hundreds of years. (The best one can do is point to a few possible Egyptian names in the Hebrew onomasticon.) A student of the history of the English language can easily trace the historical influences on the original Anglo-Saxon base and even say when the influences took place. Hebrew is only barely distinguishable from its Canaanite brother languages.

There is no sign in the language that the Jews were ever in Egypt. There is no sign of a conquest in the archaeology. There is only absurdity when one tries to rationalise the biblical exodus. There is a clear model on which the Hebrew exodus was built.


spin