DNAReplicator

OK My bad - working from memory and not checking.

My memory is not that bad. His mummy can be seen here. He was Semitic in appearance, and wore a beard (very unusual amongst Egyptian officials). His mummy was also the only one ever found with the hands placed under his chin. He obviously was a close confidant to royalty, but seems not to have gone completely native.

True - but then neither does the exodus as the ejection of the Hyskos:devil1:.

Actually, I do understand your view is that the Exodus story could have arisen as a polemic against the Jews, in which the Jews were equated with the hated Hyskos. Given that the Hyskos were chased from the eastern delta out into the Levant (1500BC), which is the region the Jews were from (600BC), this does not seem too much of a stretch. What I find more difficult is that the Jews would then have adopted this polemic as a founding myth. I guess the idea at least explains the absence of archaeology, but is there a better reason to that this is the case?

simongc

I am with Dr Zoid here , there seems very little or no attempts have been made to look into the Moses story by either side of the Theory . I have looked all over the net and have yet to find any site that attempts to prove or disprove the true story of Moses ; which sort of amazes me in that if MOSES is the real deal then the Bibles off to a great start and hard to knock but on the other hand if the story was proved to be false then the poor old Bible goes wobbly at the knees real quick . If the scientific / theocratic community could knuckle down and sort out the question of Moses' existence and true life story then all the other arguments become virtually irrelevant.

Anat

simongc, what evidence for Moses do you expect to be found? The remains of the reed basket? Isn't it enough that an exodus on a scale approaching what the Bible describes is unsupported?

spin

You seem to be confusing Ay with Yuya here.

The Semitic connection is simply rubbish. Look at the representations of Semitic people in any representation found in pharaonic Egypt. You get a Doh! for listening to idiots like Osman.

Off the top of my head:

1. We know for sure that there were Jews in Egypt after the fall of the temple and later.
2. Manetho's Osarsiph story shows that the Egyptians, at a much later time, ie after the fall of the temple, connected them with the expulsion of the Hyksos tarted up as lepers.
3. It explains why Exodus is talking about Pithom (built by Necho II).

spin

DrZoidberg

Aren't scales always corrupted over time? Just compare two articles about the same demonstration today. They can differ in their tens of thousands. I don't think that the fact that the numbers don't work or fit is enough to discount the whole story. Even if it'd just been a hundred people, it'd still be enough to get this whole Judaism thing started.

Or we could look at it from the other direction. What if the ancient Jews were some sort of hunter gatherers, taken prisoner and used as slaves by some sort of farming community (only agricultural cultures have ever used slaves) some escaped far enough away not to be hunted down, settled, and then over time the story of how they got there got more and more embellished? The country they fled from moved further and further away, and became more and more impressive, until the country they fled from was the "worlds" most powerful superpower really really far away? I wouldn't have any problems with accepting a story like that.

I'm just curious if there are any actual theories, of if it's still just down to pure speculation?

Sheshbazzar

Men believed in YHWH _before_ the Bible was written.

It is anochronistic to retroject those blatant litrary fabrications and falsehoods contained within the much latter composed 'Jewish' nations 'Bible' unto the beliefs held by the earliest of Hebrews.
Most of the 'crap' that is contained within the written Bible, they never even heard of.

As I stated, I believe the contents of the Torah and much of the earlier 'writings' to be political fabrications and 'control' propagada.

The Bible does not accurately describe the YHWH that the earlier Hebrews believed in, and it does not accurately describe the YHWH that I believe in.

YHWH is not the YHWH you read about in the Bible, a composition of a people who have brought 'shame upon his Holy Name' by their lies and by their works.

Juststeve

Sheshbazzar:

If the Bible does not accurately describe the YHWH that the earlier Hebrews believed in, what does? Put another way how do you know what YHWH they believed in?

Steve

DNAReplicator

I was trying to establish that Ay had Semitic roots. If his father was Yuya, then he would have had Semitic roots. I do not think you can claim that Yuya would have been fully culturally Egyptian, given that he wore a beard. That said, I'm not interested in publically perusing any Ay connection to the exodus without much more reading - I unwisely posted off the cuff after getting exited at the Josephus reference.

I would if I did, but I don't.


Firstly, I would agree that the Exodus was written sometime around 600BCE. So if there had been some event that gave birth to the story, it would have suffered from centuries of oral transmission. The only data we have that has not been subject to the vagaries of oral transmission is the archaeology. We have a Semitic peoples being ejected from Egypt in 1500BC. We have monotheism in Egypt around 1350BCE. We have the persecution of monotheism in Egypt for about the next hundred or so years. We have the Hymn to the Aten popping up in Psalms. We have the Merneptah stele.

But Manetho did not know about Aknahton or Horemheb, as the records had been destroyed. I don't know if he knew about the biblical story - it is not even clear if Exodus existed in Greek in his lifetime. So I find it interesting when Manetho recounts folk tales that appear to recall some of the events of this period. They are clearly badly jumbled after centuries of oral transmission, but recognisable. Interestingly, they have parallels with the biblical account, which presumably would have been similarly jumbled.

I think your view is that the biblical account is derived from the Egyptian oral tradition, in which the antipathy towards the Hyskos and monotheism were combined in polemic against Semitic peoples in Egypt (is that right?). My question is why this would be so in 600BC? Equating first centaury polemic with Egyptian polemic over half a millennia earlier needs more explanation. And I suspect you would struggle to explain why Semitic tribes would have adopted this attack as a founding myth.

Surely the most simple explanation is that there was somehow a merging in the oral tradition between the mass ejection of the Hyskos and events post Armana that led to the ejection of Atenists from Egypt. The latter group would have been tiny by comparison, and would have had royal connections. This would explain all the hard data we have, and provides a framework in which the seemly independent oral traditions can be interpreted. How else can you explain Psalm 104?

Sheshbazzar

M personal convictions are not dependent upon what other men may believe, or may have believed.
Any man that walks with YHWH, walks in the security of that light provided by YHWH.

Juststeve

Sheshbazzar:

I didn't ask about what you believe which is your own business. I asked you how you know what "earlier Hebrews" believed in if its not in the Bible. Did you misstate or did you claim to know something you don't know?

Steve