butswana

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence...atpyramid.html
I caught this last night. The CG was cool, but the content was lacking. My daughter and I were hoping for a more technical/engineering look.
Let the bitching begin! They stated that the pyramids were not constructed with slave labor as the popular myth states, but by conscription.
No problem. So what is on directly following the show?
Who Was Moses. It stated that the whole bondage/exodus thing didn't happen. Or did it? Same old apologist bullshit. Some crap about a volcano being responsible for thunder, lightning, dark skies, frogs and dead cattle. As well as causing a tidal wave that emptied the REED sea.
Now I'm not a biblical scholar, but I'm pretty sure that the sequence of events was lots of bad stuff happening to Egypt, the Islealites were freed then the waters parted.
So would someone mind explaining to me how the plume from a volcano 500 miles away managed to get to Egypt and cause at least three days of mayhem BEFORE a tidal wave traveling at 400 miles an hour did. Unbelievable.

Joel

I saw a similar show several months ago on the whole Moses/parting of the Red Sea(reed sea) crap. Might even have been the same show....

Anyway, they never came out and said it, but I got the impression they were suggesting that most of the events that were part of the ten plagues could have been caused by the volcanic explosion and then were just incorporated into the Jewish history which later became the Bible. It was even suggested that the Israelites escaped during the confusion after the volcanic eruption and then put their own particular spin on events. (as leaders, historians and governments are known to do.)

Not that I'm saying this scenario is likely to be the truth (I'm still betting that it's all so much fictional crap in the Bible myself), but that was the impression I got when I first heard that theory.

J

Jimmy Higgins

Funny stuff. All of it could be true. A volcano was the holy mountain. That an event did cause the bay they crossed to empty. That it may have been cloudy for a long period of time. That the first born son of the Pharoah did die. However, these events probably all happened at different periods. These events had significance in their time, and were then used as symbology in the Exodus story, which probably started in the Sinai anyways, not mainland Egypt. And the plagues that "hit" Egypt were all symbolic jestures, each attacking a different Egyptian god's power.

This is all really obvious stuff. What's really funny is that we were able to determine about the time the Asians crossed over to North America, and when they split across the North American continent, tens of thousands of years ago. But we haven't found any real evidence of a mass exodus out of a pretty large kingdom. You be the judge.

HaysooChreesto!

A couple of years I went fishing and caught a good size halibut, about 35 pounds. When I got back and told my friends about it, the fish had grown to 45 pounds and put up a helluva fight. Six months later the fish had grown to a 70 pound barricuda. Now, the fish has grown to a 150 pound swordfish that I caught with a spear gun whilst scuba diving with Jacques Cousteau. Amazing how after time that fish has gotten bigger and bigger!

And yes, the show about the Great Pyramid was disappointing. Where were all the aliens, lost civilizations, and levitating rods they used to move those huge stones?

Marduk

" They stated that the pyramids were not constructed with slave labor as the popular myth states, but by conscription.
No problem. So what is on directly following the show?
Who Was Moses."

Keep in mind the Pyramids were already ancient ruins by the time Moses would have lived (pyramids ~2500 bce, Moses ~1500 bce)
and the Old Kingdom of the pyramid builders collapsed around 2000 bce, so Egypt did start the practice of slavery sometime after the OK fell, the OK was quite something for ancient times, no slavery, no conquest hungry waring despots, no human sacrifice, virtual equality for women, and a decent grasp on medicine/healthcare. (except the teeth, these guys had crummy teeth)

ajm51987

Ive noticed the discovery channel and all its children don't provide very good shows anymore. On both discovery and history channel they had some stupid crap on exorsims on sunday.

Jimmy Higgins

Ironically, pyramids are never even mentioned in the Old Testament! You'd think this would be significant. They made a whole story on a tower in Babel. Yet in Egypt, they never see one? More evidence that they were barely in Egypt to begin with.

I still wonder, did monotheism move from Egypt to Midian or visa versa?

Evangelion

Monotheism moved to Egpyt from Midian. It could never have originated in Egypt, since the Egyptians were all conservative polytheists. The concept of monotheism made them feel sick.

Akhenaten tried to institute monotheism as the state religion, but met with vigorous resistance.

Thus:

• During the New Kingdom, the cult of the sun god Ra became increasingly important until it evolved into the uncompromising monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1364-1347 B.C.). According to the cult, Ra created himself from a primeval mound in the shape of a pyramid and then created all other gods. Thus, Ra was not only the sun god, he was also the universe, having created himself from himself. Ra was invoked as Aten or the Great Disc that illuminated the world of the living and the dead.
  
  The effect of these doctrines can be seen in the sun worship of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who became an uncompromising monotheist. Aldred has speculated that monotheism was Akhenaten's own idea, the result of regarding Aten as a self-created heavenly king whose son, the pharaoh, was also unique. Akhenaten made Aten the supreme state god, symbolized as a rayed disk with each sunbeam ending in a ministering hand.
  
  Other gods were abolished, their images smashed, their names excised, their temples abandoned, and their revenues impounded. The plural word for god was suppressed. Sometime in the fifth or sixth year of his reign, Akhenaten moved his capital to a new city called Akhetaten (present-day Tall al Amarinah, also seen as Tell al Amarna). At that time, the pharaoh, previously known as Amenhotep IV, adopted the name Akhenaten. His wife, Queen Nefertiti, shared his beliefs.
  
  Akhenaten's religious ideas did not survive his death. His ideas were abandoned in part because of the economic collapse that ensued at the end of his reign. To restore the morale of the nation, Akhenaten's successor, Tutankhamen, appeased the offended gods whose resentment would have blighted all human enterprise. Temples were cleaned and repaired, new images made, priests appointed, and endowments restored. Akhenaten's new city was abandoned to the desert sands.
  
  Library of Congress Country Studies

Jimmy Higgins

Well this would back up Freud who believed that Moses was a monotheistic priest who was fleeing from Egypt. On the way, he picked up a few converts and they left the country.

One of the things that I really had a hard time struggling with was Midian in the bible. Moses flees there and meets Jethro Tull. The band takes him in and he marries one of their groupies. Yet, Moses later comes back to destroy Midian, at God's request, without a second thought about it. Two Moses anyone? Moses the Messenger and Moses the Conquerer. Same person could not have done both.
(Jimmy Higgins pondering that the more he read the Bible, the more he strengthened his atheistic belief. *ironic*)

Wyz_sub10

There is really no evidence whatsoever that the Israelites were ever slaves in Egypt, that Moses went anywhere or did anything remotely connected to the story in Exodus, or that any kind of plague befell Egypt.

The was no exodus and the Israelites did not exist until centuries after the dateline of Exodus. There were unwanted peoples who left Egypt and settled eastward. But not Isaraelites. Not slaves. And not in Canaan.

And yeah, there's a ton of garbage on the Discovery Channel (still not as bad as TLC).