Anat

I agree that there may have been oral traditions about an exodus. However, oral traditions suffer from a tendency to change with retelling and easily become a case of 'Chinese whispers'. An example would be the Philistines. We know from evidence from Egypt and from Hatti that they arrived in the eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the 12th century BCE, but the Bible has them interracting with Abraham and Isaac. Obviously at some point someone made an ectrapolation from hir times to the past, resulting in an anachronism.

Asha'man

Anat provided some good info, but there is a little more to be found. Unfortunately, I don't have it at my fingertips.

As I recall, the HB gives a very clear time span between the Exodus and the building of Solomon's temple, something like 400 years. Following Solomon, there is a pretty detailed chronology of kings in both Israel and Judah, and those kings start to appear in other histories so cross-dating becomes possible. (For example, an Assyrian king builds a monument that mentions King Omri, and we know when that Assyrian king ruled) It all ends up at the Babylonian conquest of Israel, which we have an exact date for (cross-checked via Babylonian records).

Using this approach, a precise date in the 13th century BCE is clearly identified, but it's also completely incompatible with Egyptian history.

Dang, I wish I had the spreadsheet that Pervy put together, it gives a chronology of the entire HB and the verse that established it.

(Found it: the Hebrew Bible puts the Exodus at 1440 BCE, 480 years before the building started on Solomon's temple, but the first Pharaoh named Raamses didn't rule until 1320 BCE, and the city of Pi-Ramesses was even later (Ramesses II ruled 1279-1213). Scholars have generally placed the Exodus in the late 13th century BCE.)

Anat

But of course, with 480 being a multiple of 2 'magic numbers' (12*40) it doesn't have to be taken literally. I guess it should be taken as evidence that Israelite chronologies from pre-monarchic times should be taken with heaps of salt, as they originate from traditions, not contemporary written documents.

dug_down_deep

I rarely take absolute pronouncements like this on faith. Do you have any source material to back up your version of the history?

Is any of this really in conflict with Exodus? Joseph was sold to the Egyptians, but I don't see any indication that everyone else came along.

So if one element is disproven, every other element in the account is disproven? That sounds like fallacious reasoning to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

--doug

dug_down_deep

Of course I don't disagree with you at all. I only disagreed with the point being made that this was "pure myth". That strikes me as pretty loose language.

Thanks for your example, though. It's interesting.

--doug

Sven

Well, if you had read the thread, you would know: "The Bible Unearthed" by Finkelstein&Silverman is a good source.

If they simply returned to the families they left (as you make it sound), why there was a conquest? "Isrealites" as a people did not exist prior to the conquest, according to the bible they only emerged after they (supposedly) conquered Canaan.

What you also forget is that the two cultures (in Canaan and Egypt) had 400 years to develop different cultures. This is the rule if two populations are geographically (partly) isolated. So if there was a conquest, we would not expect a continuation of culture.

:huh: If there was no conquest, there were no people who did a conquest thus there were no people who escaped Egypt. What's fallacious about this?

Asha'man

This is the professional opinion of a pair of professional archaeologists, Finkelstein and Silberman, as written up in their book The Bible Unearthed. They have done extensive work in Israel, as well as re-examined the work of their predecessors.
I think you are missing key points of the story. Joseph was sold as a slave, but later became an advisor to the Pharaoh. When Canaan was stuck in a famine, the rest of Joseph's family came to live in Egypt. While in Egypt, they were all enslaved, and stayed there as slaves for ~400 years. There simply were no 'Israelites' elsewhere in the world (as the story goes), anyone who wasn't in Egypt at the time was considered a non-Israelite people.
You must be missing something, since it seems pretty clear to me. If the Hebrew culture developed in the 10th through 7th centuries BCE, then they certainly didn't come in as conquerors during the 13th, right? They can't have conquered a land when they didn't exist yet. We also know that no Egyptian influence appeared suddenly in the cultural artifacts during the 13th century BCE. Conquest or not, that means that no sizable population that had resided in Egypt for 400 years suddenly immigrated to Canaan. There might have been a few dozen escaped slaves, but not a couple million people defining an entire culture on their own.

Anat

See also How to tell a Canaanite from an Israelite. Dever, Finkelstein and Gottwald agree that the protoo-Israelites arose in Canaan from a population already there (with some disagreement on details, but most of the disagreements arise from misrepresentation of each other's position). Only Zertal insists on an extra-Canaanite origin.

Dean Anderson

480 years - according to 1 Kings 6:1

1Ki 6:1 And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.

Yep - according to the Bible, the Exile under Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon started 406 years after the building of the Temple (i.e. 886 years after the Exodus).

Indeed. Using the well established date of 597 BCE for the Exile, we find that the Bible unambiguously places the Exodus in 1483 BCE, at which time modern Egyptology puts Pharaoh Hatshepsut on the throne of Egypt (for those of you who play computer games, she's the female featured Pharaoh in Civilization IV).

If anyone wants it, simply PM me and I'll send you a copy.

Alternately, if someone knows a simple way to convert it to HTML (it's currently in Microsoft Excel 2003 format) then I'll stick it up on the web...

Chris Weimer

Pervy - send it to me and I'll convert it to HTML. I'll even offer my website for hosting it for free.