leonarde

The problem with agents provocateurs is: they are so boooring...

Sven

Do you really think that we think that all dead first-borns from entire Egypt had to be buried in one mass grave? Or what were you trying to say here?

Doctor X

It would have generated some comment and some record. In fact, it would have generated considerable comment and record.

Evidence of such there is none.



--J.D.

Rhaedas

{Quote and reply deleted for consistency}

You can always admit there's no evidence to support it so far, but you still believe it, you know. It won't help your case, but it's better than circular logic and personal attacks.

Sauron

How silly.

The fact that they would have died in various places doesn't preclude burying them together. A village could have one one large mass grave. Then another village five miles away could have had their own mass grave. Large cities could have had HUGE mass graves - probably several of them, scattered through neighborhoods. Yet there aren't any such mass graves during the period of the alleged Exodus. You sure as hell haven't offered any such proof.



If the firstborn of every family had died simultaneously, Egyptian society would have been faced with an overwhelming, immediate need to manage a huge number of corpses. And that's just human corpses, of course. They would have had to manage thousands of dead horses, cattle, dogs, sheep, and all the other animals - get them buried before they started breeding disease.

And contary to your childish assertion, it doesn't follow that these people who died would have been ready or prepared to die. Many of the dead would have been children, young women, or men in the prime of life -- all far from the usual point in life where preparation for death would have begun. And of course, this assumes that the individuals in question would have had the financial wherewithal to do anything out of the ordinary for their burial. Egypt was primarily a peasant society, so even under normal circumstances, any ritual preparations would have been simple and inexpensive. When you bump up the number of dead people to staggering proportions -- as per the alleged circumstances of the plague of the firstborn -- then you quickly overwhelm a society's ability to deal with the death of its members. Mass graves would have been the best way to deal with thousands of dead peasants.

Keep dancing, leonarde. Keep dancing.

Sarpedon

Ummm..leonarde, primitive people who are obsessed with death go to great lengths to insulate themselves from it. Most burial rituals in virtually all cultures are about appeasing/isolating/rendering harmless the spirit of the deceased. People do not simply bury people where ever they fall. They take them to a special place, that is usually enclosed, (when have you ever seen a cemetary without even an ornamental fence) and protected with prayers and spells. In other words people DO tend to bury people together. That tradition endures to this day. So...if a bunch of people died at the same time, in the same town, and people wanted them out of the way before putrification sets in, they may be buried in a single pit. If not, they could reasonably be expected to be buried near one another. People dont bury other people where they expect to be going about their daily business.

I really think you lack the anthropological background to be speculating on what people 3000 years ago in another culture would be doing, if you don't even understand why people treat their dead in the ways that they do. Death is the foundation of all religion. Burial was the first religious rite. If you don't understand it, you can't understand religion.

Postcard73

Principia's derailment has been moved to the dark corners of IIDB.

Scott (Postcard73)
BC&H Moderator

spin

Here's a topical article on the history of biblical archaeology and modern views of the exodus from Harper's in case anyone has still got interest in the subject.


spin

rlogan

That was a great article.

It was all wrong, insofar as archaeology has proven the bible.

From the article:

Thus there was no migration from Mesopotamia, no sojourn in Egypt, and no exodus. There was no conquest upon the Israelites' return and, for that matter, no peaceful infiltration such as the one advanced by Yohanan Aharoni. Rather than conquerors, the Hebrews were a native people who had never left in the first place. So why invent for themselves an identity as exiles and invaders? One reason may have been that people in the ancient world did not establish rights to a particular piece of territory by farming or by raising families on it but by seizing it through force of arms.

Sarpedon

The dark corners? do you mean ~E~?

rlogan, are you being facetious? or have you not read the rest of this post...we have moved from a general discussion of the archaeology and the bible to a more specific discussion of the events described in Exodus, Deutoronomy, and Joshua, and have established that archaeology has NOT proven these events. Would you please clarify what you mean, lest I misconstrue you?