Babylon Sister

As an archeologist I can tell you that it would be a miracle for a group of people that large to pass through any area without leaving a single trace of their passing. It just won't happen. Especially considering a 40 year time frame.

Vorkosigan

Good response. :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

TomboyMom

Could you be more specific? What archeological finds or research corroborate which assertions in the gospels?
Thank you.

Weltall

My question would be how you could possibly take forty years to cover that distance. I mean, go north until you hit a really big body of water. Keep the ocean to your left at all times and keep going until you hit your destination. How hard is that exactly? I'm guessing the men leading the group were just too proud to stop and ask for directions.

Steven Avery

Maybe the archaelogists would find more if they would look where the Bible says the wanderings occurred.

Galatians 4:25
For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia,
and answereth to Jerusalem which now is,
and is in bondage with her children.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Asha'man

Are you really suggesting that every single archaeologist who has looked into this subject is a complete and total idiot? All of them? :rolling:

Modern archaeologists have done both wide and narrow surveys of the entire Sinai, including both likely and unlikely paths between Egypt and Canaan. They have detected traces of small nomadic groups passing through the desert both before and after the supposed dates of the exodus, but no traces of the Hebrews.

The desert is actually an easy place to look for traces, since there is very little water to create erosion. The Sinai desert is a rocky place, not very sandy, so things don't tend to get buried like they might in the Sahara. Modern tools, such as orbital radar, are quite good at detecting ancient roads even if they have been covered by sand or erosion. (There are some fascinating studies using a radar from the Space Shuttle that identified the spice road that Marco Polo probably used getting to China.)

Additionally, the story of the Exodus contains some interesting anachronisms. The Hebrews supposedly stopped by a line of forts that didn't exist in the 13th century BCE, but had been built by the 8th. Some of the peoples they encountered on the path also hadn't moved into the area until long after the Exodus had to have completed.

The likely conclusion is that the story was simply a fabrication written sometime after the 8th or 7th century BCE, not a remembrance of a historical event from the 13th.

Then you run into the problem of the conquest of Canaan. Again, modern archaeology paints a pretty clear picture. There was no conquest by the Hebrews. Cities like Jericho, famous for the battle over it's walls, had no walls during the 13th century. And the existing artifacts indicate a complete continuity of culture. If the Hebrews had arrived and just killed all the Potters, you would expect the pottery shards to suddenly change to something with Egyptian influence, right? That simply didn't happen. Instead, the evidence clearly shows the Hebrew culture developing slowly out of natives of Canaan.

Again, just like the Exodus story, the conquest of Canaan is probably a fabrication of the 7th or 8th century BCE.