Toto

[quote]Originally posted by Omnedon1:
<strong>? it works for me. What do you see when you click on it?

Marduk

"I see no reason why an exodus from Egypt would have been made up by the Isrealites."


Which sounds better?

Our ancestors moved into a foreign country, trashed the palce and the natives and were eventually kicked out by the original inhabitants. or

our ancestors were poor oppresed slaves in an evil country and our Lord set us free to find our true promised homeland.
???
Now I don't mean this to belittle the Jews, every nation has skeletons in their closets and dirty little secrets they don't want to bring up (Native Americans & the US, Jews and Germany, Japan and Korea)
The Egyptians used the building of great monuments to organize, unite and civilize their people and nation, the Jews used a book. Not too shabby for that point in history, it isn't their fault that people alive today insist that it is a factual history book.

[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: marduck ]</p>

spin

davidH:
---------------
I don't see why you should question what is said about the Exodus - especially when many other towns and peoples and events described in the old Testement have been found in other ancient writings.
I see no reason why an exodus from Egypt would have been made up by the Isrealites.
---------------

While noting reasonabledoubt's comment on this message, I will take a different tack.

DavidH doesn't think there's any necessity to question what is said about the exodus. He probably doesn't find any problem with the logistics of any of the exodus the million people tramping through the desert, draining waterholes, dying of thirst. Just think of the toilet problems at every overnight stop. No mounds of shit have ever been found. Perhaps you might want to recant about taking the text literally. Once you do, you have no criterion as to what to preserve and what to throw out, except by historical/logistical/anthropological/economic means.

1) There are many "factual" errors in the supposedly historical books of the bible, if one wants to try to deal with them as historical books. Anachronisms regarding Philistines. Geographical errors regarding Hittites. Genealogical information about races is wrong. Archaeology definitively kills the conquest. Jerusalem in the tenth century was a one cow town and showed no sign of ever having been a major administrative centre of the area. Etc, etc.

2) The earliest copies of the biblical texts come from Qumran, ie they can be over 1000 years after the time they refer to, and there is no way to connect the texts with the supposed events when there is no contemporary indications that the events ever happened. We are left with reasonabledoubt's Munchkins. Hey, they might exist. Perhaps Baum had a vision. It's more reasonable though to work with what can be shown and not hope against evidence that things will change.

3) The texts were not written with a modern notion of history, but were dealing with traditions for educational purposes. They explain how things came to be and where the Jews came from. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with history. It is only the mores of modern interpreters who want the texts to be historical by necessity.

leonarde

Posted by marduck: But I DO think that if you take the Old Testament
in its entirety, you are left with an initial
period of Jewish conquest (ie "moved into a foreign country, trashed the place...."): the
battle which involved the fall of Jericho may be
wrong about the details (ie legendary accretions
are in the OT) but:
1)Jericho existed as a city 9000 to 11,000 years
ago.
2)It was surely taken and retaken many times throughout history, including by the Jews.
3)This is, however imperfectly, rendered in the
OT.

When you are talking about the events of 3000 to
4500 years ago it is very difficult to pinpoint
who the "native" people were: the Samson narratives, the David and Goliath story both make
clear that, in skirmishes at least, the Jews were
competing with the Philistines. But the Philistines were certainly NOT the long-time residents of that area: in very roughest terms they came to that part of the world in the second
half of the second millenium BC (ie probably the same time that Exodus is supposed to have occurred).
The Phoenicians were (unlike the Philistines)another Semitic people: but those all
came (the Semitic peoples)from the Arabian Desert
either directly or indirectly (in the Abraham
account a circuitous route for him).
The "really" native people(s) (ie pre-Semitic residents of Palestine) are, as far as I know, largely lost to us. In Europe the same thing is
true: the pre-Indo-European "natives" are, with
a very few exceptions (ie the Basques of Spain
and France), unrecorded beyond the skimpiest of
remains.
As to when the Hebrews/Israelis/Jews were "thrown
out" of Palestine, that is not so easy to pinpoint
: the Babylonian Captivity was certainly NOT a
matter of being thrown out by a NATIVE pre-Jewish
population: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and
then the Persians were outsiders to those who
lived in Palestine.
The later diaspora was under the impetus of Roman
suppression of the rebellion of the late 60s of
the 1st Century but surely we don't want to call
the Romans the "natives" of Palestine?
Cheers!

spin

leonarde:
----------
But I DO think that if you take the Old Testament
in its entirety, you are left with an initial
period of Jewish conquest (ie "moved into a foreign country, trashed the place...."): the
battle which involved the fall of Jericho may be
wrong about the details (ie legendary accretions
are in the OT) but:
1)Jericho existed as a city 9000 to 11,000 years
ago.
2)It was surely taken and retaken many times throughout history, including by the Jews.
3)This is, however imperfectly, rendered in the
OT.
----------

There was no Late-Bronze Age conquest of Jericho, if you would care to read the latest archaeological work done there by Italians from La Sapienza University in Rome.

There was a conquest about the time the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt.

leonarde:
----------
When you are talking about the events of 3000 to
4500 years ago it is very difficult to pinpoint
who the "native" people were: the Samson narratives,
----------

Especially when this one seems to be based on a solar story -- even the name, which comes from Shamash, "the sun".

leonarde:
----------
the David and Goliath story
----------

Which story is correct the one with David or the one with Elhanan?

leonarde:
----------
both make clear that, in skirmishes at least, the Jews were competing with the Philistines.
----------

The Maccabees talk of Philistines in the area, so the name was at least current in the second century BCE. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the name.

leonarde:
----------
But the Philistines were certainly NOT the long-time residents of that area: in very roughest terms they came to that part of the world in the second half of the second millenium BC (ie probably the same time that Exodus is supposed to have occurred).
----------

The Philistines arrived in Palestine around 1160 BCE to be precise. We have the information from the reports of Ramses III who stopped them at the gates of Egypt both on land and on sea.

One can follow the wave of destruction from the Turkish coast around, flattening Cyprus, Hatti, Ugarit and other places before arriving at their final destination.

leonarde:
----------
The Phoenicians were (unlike the Philistines)another Semitic people: but those all
came (the Semitic peoples)from the Arabian Desert
either directly or indirectly (in the Abraham
account a circuitous route for him).
----------

The Phoenicians were Canaanites just as the Ugaritic people were, just as the Jews were. In fact they all had closely related languages, suggesting a common heritage for a while, before the Phoenicians distinguished themselves then later the Hebrews from the remaining Canaanites.


.

Marduk

"The Philistines arrived in Palestine around 1160 BCE to be precise."


I've read that the Philistines were the relocated Minoans from around Greece, similar arts and crafts etc. any truth to this?

The Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos in the middle of the 2nd millenium BCE is pretty well documented. Even the Biblical narrative supports this somewhat "the Pharoh who new not Joseph" ie. an Egyptian who does not take kindly to foreigners as opposed to the Pharoh who was Joseph's bud (a Hyksos)

[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: marduck ]</p>

Karim

I can't understand who we are talking about. The Israelis, the hebrews or the Jews. The OT writers where creating a nation over time and it's very difficult to elaborate without placing our data in a certain period of time. The Nation that they were fabricating should be located either as pre-exilic or post exilic but to go back to the 14th century BC is mere speculation especially that none of our landmarks are considered granted by archeologists. Listen to William DEVER who is doing his best to defend The Israeli tradition addressing Thompson and Lemche in a debate moderated by BAR in August 97 under the title of Face to Face Biblical minimalists meet their challengers-BAR July/August 1997 - The exodus and the conquest of the promised land are a bad case. I agree with you that the book of Joshua has little to do with any historical events. If you guys think I or the israeli archaeologists am looking for the israelite conquest archaeologically, you're wrong. we've given that up. We've given up the patriarchs. That's a dead issue. But the rise of the israelite state is not a dead issue." So we are here discussing IRON II and down. Even then the United kingdom can barely be proven. SAUL, DAVID and SOLOMON could not make it simply because at the time of the creation of the UNITED KINGDOM 10th century BC neither Jerusalem nor JUDA existed as cities. Yet if we admit the late editing of the OT (3rd century BC)we can really look back at all these events as a justification of a state.
Back to the topic of the exodus, I mentioned in a previous post that even the OT does not mention the Hebrews only as the only people who crossed the red sea."A mixed multitude also went up with them" and this what makes it more interesting. Do we have to talk about the hebrews when we talk about exodus.
Regards

leonarde

Karim,
Are you saying that David, Solomon, and Saul
did not exist? If so, that is literally the first
time I ever heard of such an assertion...
Cheers!

leonarde

Posted by marduck: I did read some time ago that some
Philistine writing(s) had been deciphered and that
it was a form of very early (proto)Greek. The last
I read it had not been pinpointed beyond that.
Cheers!

daemon

Just as a side note, I have to chuckle every time someone suggests that the Egyptians were too embarrassed by their defeat by the Hebrews to mention it in their records. Perhaps they wouldn't want their neighbors to know, but they sure as heck would have wanted their decendants to know a very important lesson: don't piss off the Hebrews! I mean, really, their god killed thousands upon thousands of people, called forth a host of plagues, then destroyed the entire army. Then they ignore them?!

Actually, now that I look at that, Egypt just plain should not have survived; that it did seems reasonable evidence to contradict the miraculous goings-on of the Exodus story.