spin

Ipetrich
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However, as I'd pointed out, this defeat is too big to hide, and they would likely have presented it as a triumph. "We successfully drove out those disease-ridden, rebellious slaves," or something like that.

Manetho's account is something like that -- and it may have been invented as a reply to the Exodus account.
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Manetho's account has a historical context. It talks of a pharaoh who retreats into Nubia. This is a historical event from the time of Ashurbanipal's invasion of Egypt, when the Nubian king Tanutamani retreated to Nubia and the Nubian kings never returned to Egypt. Manetho's account goes back that far, ie the tale of Osarsiph and the lepers doesn't go back before 650 BCE. It is obviously a reworking of the Hyksos account, but almost certainly as polemic against the Jews in post-exilic Egypt; it has nothing directly to do with a period at least six hundred years earlier.

Remember that Jeremiah has Jews going to Egypt, and remember that the prophets hardly know anything about Moses who is mentioned 598 times in the Tanakh but only four or five times in the prophets, so the Moses tradition and the exodus hadn't made a big splash when the prophets were writing.

There are Jews at Elephantine in the 400s BCE put there by the Persians, so naturally there would be conflict between native Egyptians and Jewish forces from the Persians. On the arrival of the Greeks the Jews were well received, again making them hated by the native Egyptians.

doodad

What is the spiritual significance of the exodus?

spin

doodad:
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What is the spiritual significance of the exodus?
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The biblical story or the Hyksos expulsion?

To you or to the writer's audience?

Spiritual? (Incidentally, where exactly is your "spirit"? Is it something you carry with you? Or is it like Hubbard's thetans? Or is it a load of hogwash?)

One can imagine if the context that I have suggested for the Jewish writing of the exodus story is correct then obviously the purpose of the story, the significance to me, is edification in the face of the Egyptian polemic.

[ March 23, 2002: Message edited by: spin ]</p>

jayh

Israel Finkelstein, Director of Nadler Institute of Archeology of Tel Aviv University suggests that the traditional interpretation of the story is wildly wrong.

"The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman 0-684-86912-8

Apparently Egyptians had considerable periodic influence in Canaan, people from Canaan periodically migrated into Egypt in lean times and also were periodically driven out.

Briefly put, Finkelstein's premise is that the Isrealites were themselves a Canaanite tribe, the whole history of Abraham, Egypt, conquest of Canaan were created much later, much around the time of king Josiah (when a book of the law was 'found' in the temple).

There is zero evidence of a trek thru the Sinai wilderness (even though there is plenty of evidence of Egyption and Canaanite outposts), many of the cities mentioned in the accounts of Joshua's conquest were either nonexistant or inconsequential in Joshua's time, but were major cities in Josiah's time.

This is too brief of a summary, see:

<a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/90/story_9034_1.html" target="_blank">http://www.beliefnet.com/story/90/story_9034_1.html</a>

<a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/07/solomon/" target="_blank">http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/07/solomon/</a>

spin

jayh:
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Finkelstein's premise is that the Isrealites were themselves a Canaanite tribe, the whole history of Abraham, Egypt, conquest of Canaan were created much later, much around the time of king Josiah (when a book of the law was 'found' in the temple).
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One of the interesting things about Abraham is that although he is the one who is supposed to have been responsible for the covenant, it is Jacob/Israel who gets the most attention. It's never the people of Abraham in the prophets its always the people of Israel. Abraham doesn't get much interest until rabbinical times (or christian times, whichever one is earlier).

And regarding Josiah, isn't it strange that John Hyrcanus did basically the same thing as Josiah with regard to Samaria and the other places of non-standard worship?

I'm fairly confident that Kings was written under the Hasmoneans (from some ealier work perhaps), but Chronicles was early rabbinical, obviously not priestly, for if you compare Kings with Chronicles you'll find basically the same amount of priestly content, but very much more about the Levites in Chronicles. There was probably a proportion of Pharisaic Levites, given the number of Levitical Pharisees mentioned in rabbinical texts (there was also one or two priests).

Grumpy

Could our Egyptologist friends tell us if there are records of similar disasters or failures which were not covered up? Not that it would prove anything, but at least we'd have a baseline of exactly how embarrassing a defeat would have to be to be expunged from history.

Jayhawker Soule

I don't know about disasters/failures, but the attempt to expunge the history of Hatshepsut was clearly unsuccessful.

[ March 24, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

jayh

The silence speaks volumes. Major disasters may or may not be recorded in official records, but are detectable to archeologists through incompleted projects, population shifts, harassment by neighboring nations, changes in quality of life indicators etc. It is impossible to 'erase' all these things.

Karim

Hello,
I'm new to the board so hi everybody.
I'm sorry this text showed as a new Topic when I intended it to be a reply. so don't consider it as a new topic. I wanted to be part of this one.

The Old Testament mentions "the people of Israel journeyed from Ram'eses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very many cattle, both flocks and herds" Exodus 12:37. The problem is whether to consider the bible a book of fiction or not. We have here over two million people at least who both Egyptians and their hosts the Moabites forgot to mention. Archeology doesn't however, rely only on written documents. Architecture can help, constructions buildings....So we must at least find signs of this activity.
Example: The United Kingdom of Israel is supposedly dated to the 10TH century BC. At that time Jerusalem wasn't a city yet and Juda had around 2000 people. This is 480 years after the exodus supposedly happened. So if we think of the population size of these places we wonder how big was the Egyptian army to dare challenge 2 million people and what was the size of palestine to pose a serious challenge to the new comers. The answer is simple the number is wrong so are the dates and the locations. Yet if we follow the school of Copenhagen and we admit that the OT was a post exilic document, this will lead us to admit that the writer(s) of the OT could have been talking about something that probably had nothing to do with the hebrews and happened probably nowhere near Palestine or Egypt.
Second option The OT mentions "A mixed multitude also went up with them". What the hell is this multitude? I believe that the notion and the nation of the hebrews was not existing at that time. Remember even Yahweh requested a mark to tell Israel from Egypt. Yahvew Exodus 11:7 says"The lord makes a distinction between the egyptians and isael" and then Exodus 12:13 "the blood shall be a sign for you"
So to me The first important question is Who are the people of Israel. The OT wanted to make them a distinct people, but that doesn't make a lot of sense.

spin

It was very difficult for pharaonic Egyptians to simply cover anything up. Nobody could cover the temple of Hatshepsut up. She existed and that was evident, this however, like the period of Akhnaten, was a conflict between a pharaoh and a previous one.

When we move to historical events, we find near disasters being transformed into glowing victories, such as one I mentioned earlier, ie the "victory" of the Egyptians against the Hittites at Qadesh at the time of Ramses II. Another example is the victory over the "sea peoples" under Ramses III. The sea peoples (including the Philistines) had basically taken all the Egyptian possessions in Asia and were bearly stopped at the doors of Egypt, but still the pharaoh "crushed" his enemy.

When things got plastered over temples they were descriptions of events that everyone had heard of and thus needed some description. That there is no description of a non-Hyksos exodus indicates that the Egyptian people had never heard of such an event. There was no problem of turning defeats into victories.

The evidence in general is overwhelming: there was an exodus; it was the Hyksos, the only exodus known to the Egyptians. It was a glowing victory to the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty, when they threw out these Asiatics who had infiltrated into the delta region, but were eventually sent scurrying back to Asia.

It should be best to see the exodus account as a reference to the Hyksos expulsion.