Stephen T-B

Incoherence is the common theme that runs through every defence I've seen of the Bible's inerrancy - and here it is again. Of course.
I refer to the inexplicable "fact" that the Egyptians and their pharaoh had to wait for the arrival of the Israelites for an introduction to the peculiar horrors their god was able and willing to inflict on those it took a dislike to.
After all, was it not just a few generations earlier that their ancestor had been on the Ark with Noah?
Whichever of the sons it was, his immediate descendants seem to have entirely forgotten about that entire earth-shattering episode, and the god which made it happen.
Furthermore, the fact that they had negates its purpose, which was to obliterate wickedness. Yet in a very short space of time, the Israelites' god is having to do a whole lot more punishing.
"Oh no!" (you might think Pharoah would have said) "not the global-flood-god again which we've heard so much about from our parents, and they from their parents etc etc. I'd better not piss it off or god knows what it'll do."

Pappy Jack

On reflection, and after further reading, it is more probable that freed slaves would most likely either be Egyptians already or else so assimilated into Egyptian society that they would have little incentive to leave; see, for example, Imenuji, the slave of the royal barber Sabestet, to whom Sabestet gave in marriage his niece, Takamenet.

The doubts that surround the very existence of the Hebrew slaves of the Genesis/Exodus story are, of course, a significant hurdle to establishing serious historical credibility for the tale.

In the first place there is the unlikelihood of such a large population as is suggested establishing itself in such a short period of time (less than five centuries, depending on the version of the tale you like) and from such modest beginnings. Given that Egypt was perhaps the leading civilisation of its time, it would be surprising to see a fraction of the resident population manage to achieve a greater rate of increase than the population as a whole. Best estimates that I have seen put the average rate of population growth for Dynastic Egypt at around 0.1% (based on evidence that suggests 30-60 generations being required to double the population). This strongly implies that, even if a large initial population of non-Egyptians established themselves as a coherent, exclusive group within Egypt, its growth over five centuries (20 generations) would be relatively insignificant.

There then arises the question of this hypothetical population's enslavement.

The bible suggests that the Hebrews were made slaves because the then pharaoh saw them as a threat to his rule because of their numbers. This is unlikely if their numbers were the result solely of indigenous population growth (see above).

It is also unlikely that mass Hebrew immigration into Egypt occurred unremarked by the authorities noting it in any extant records whatsoever.

From an understanding of Egyptian society, it is doubtful that the Egyptian state would regard people who had been settled in Egypt for more than four centuries as anything other than de facto Egyptians anyway, subject to Egyptian laws and customs.

And that an effective administration of law and justice existed in Egypt cannot be doubted. We have ample records of both civil and criminal cases involving a whole range of penalties and punishments. None of these involves a mass condemnation of any group to enslavement, nor is there any evidence to suggest that relatives of individuals guilty of even the most heinous of crimes would be condemned by the courts simply because of that relationship. In other words, the hypothetical Hebrew inhabitants of Egypt could only have been enslaved by the courts if they had individually committed crimes that warranted such sentence.

There wais one way in which large groups of people could be enslaved without recourse to the law, however, and that was as a result of war and conquest. In such circumstances men, women and children would be enslaved without hindrance. However, there were procedures for this enslavement: on arrival in Egypt the prisoners would have their names, the names of their parents, and their places of origin noted, and they would be branded to identify them. They would also be unlikely to be kept as a coherent group, but more likely dispersed amongst various government agencies, temples, and even given to individuals as rewards. The unlucky would be assigned to work in state quarries and mines where life-expectancy was short and the chances for family life virtually nil. However, there is no suggestion in the bible that the Hebrews were so enslaved; indeed, they could only have been if they had engaged in outright rebellion against the Egyptian state.

In summary, therefore, the tale recounted in Exodus begins to look shaky from the outset. There is neither the evidence for a large enough population of Hebrews resident in Egypt to constitute in any sense a threat to the state, nor legal or military grounds for the state to condemn them to slavery. To search beyond the insubstantial origins of the tale for archaeological evidence to support its subsequent extravagant myths is hopeless and the lack of any such evidence speaks for itself.

Roland

What are the chances that a group of people would be able to keep their religious and cultural distinctions homogeneous and intact after several hundred years in a foreign country, expecially one as distinctive and vast as Egypt?

I mean, how long was it before the slaves in the United States dropped their old religious traditions and beliefs in favor of Christianity, the religion of their oppressors and captors? How would the Hebrews have any cultural identity hundreds of years and dozens of generations after first entering Egypt? As slaves, they certainly wouldn't have had the ability to freely congregate and worship Jehovah, especially since, in the pre-Moses era, there wasn't much in the way of religious traditions or rituals to "Judaism" to begin with.

Johnny Skeptic

Are you arguing that archaeology confirms or does not confirm the Exodus events?

Magdlyn

What are the chances? 0%.

According to the burning bush story, the Hebrews did not even know YHWH for those years they were enslaved in Egypt. They did not have laws- ie: torah, either. Those were "handed down" after the slaves escaped. So what were they as a nation in Egypt, then?

I suspect the Egypt story was made up, based on the much later, but historical Babylonian exile. Maybe? The Egypt one is a myth.

When (some of) the Judaeans returned from Babylon via Persia, after only 70 yrs, they brought back a whole language, Aramaic. The religion of the "Jews" is based on the 7th and 6th century religions of Babylon and Persia, to a large extent.

Before the exile, the Judaeans did not even have names for their months, just numbers. When they returned, they brought back Babylonian month names, including Tammuz, a god whose worship is abhorred by YHWH!

OT ramble:

I remember once telling an orthodox Jewish woman (who lives in Israel) one of her months was named after a "foreign" god. She had no idea. She'd never read Ezekiel 8:14. Oy. Yet she keeps Shabbat, wears headcoverings and long skirts and longsleeved shirts, and doesn't use birth control. She is so busy cooking and cleaning and birthing (what orthodox women do to be close to haShem) and dipping in the mikvah after her periods to wash away that nasty uncleanness, apparently she never had time to read the Tanakh.

VoxRat

Pardon my ignorance...
what is haShem?

Hex

Can I ask a couple of counter-questions, Afdave? (I know you love using them yourself ... )

For (1) above, you didn't cite 'compelling evidence'. You cited from Rohl's "Velikovskyan" revised chronology explainations. No one really took Velikovsky seriously when -he- put it forth, so why should we accept it when Rohl parrots it twenty years later?

For (2) I think the error here comes from the attempts to reconcile the literary 'history' of the Torah to a literal history and chronology of real-world evidence. We have plenty of hard evidence for Shoshenk I (like the stela from Gebel Es-Silsilah (Gebel Es-Silsilah No. 100, Ricardo A. Caminos, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 38. (Dec., 1952), pp. 46-61) or the Karnak Siegesdenkmal, and what do we have for Shishak?


I'd love to see some 'compelling' evidence for him (Shishak) at the time you (and Rohl) posit him being there. I'm sure that, with your confidence and knowledge of the subject, you should have such information at your fingertips.

Thanks!

- Hex

Toto

haShem = the name, i.e., YHWH, the God whose NAME must not be pronounced lest the full force of its magical power destroy something, so he is only referred to indirectly.

Dave Hawkins

Bumping this in hopes that Dean will address it, while waiting for my next post on the DH thread (Monday or Tuesday ... I'm composing a long one).

Rohl's assertion here has nothing to do with Velikovsky AFAIK as someone asserted. It only has to do with Champollion's erroneous reading of a name ring, thus causing him to equate Shoshenk with Shishak.

How can anyone here disagree that Champollion made a mistake here? How can anyone disagree that the resulting erroneous Shoshenk=Shishak formula throws Egyptian chronology of the TIP off by several centuries?

Yours truly,

I.M. Mystified AKA AFDave

deadman_932

Your questions have already been answered Davey.

Oh, and Dave, mr. spin has been challenging you to a debate on Rohl for quite some time. Are you ...avoiding that, Dave?

Why, that would be so uncharacteristic of you.

Here's mr. spin:


Here's Dave's response: