Prolapse

Hello, this is my first post here, and I tried to search for "exodus" and didn't really get anything useful....

I have recently been pointed towards the following website as evidence for the exodus:

http://www.bibleandscience.com/evidenceofexodus.htm

Can anyone help clear this up for me? I was under the impression that there wasn't any strong evidence for it...

Some help?

lpetrich

The recent book, The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, describes how recent archeological work relates to the Old Testament / Tanakh.

Some of the Bible is solid history, but where it starts becoming historical has been a very contentious question. The fundamentalist viewpoint is that that starting point is Genesis 1:1, but that is clearly untenable.

The Noah's Flood story may have been inspired by some local floods.

The Tower of Babel is likely some Just So Story for accounting for ziggurats and multiple languages (there are other such Just So Stories in the Bible, like Genesis 2 for why snakes crawl on their bellies).

The patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) are likely a similar sort of Just So Story, but one that accounts for the Twelve Tribes. The accounts of the feature pack-animal camels and other anachronisms that suggest that they were heavily rewritten during the monarchy period.

The Exodus is mostly mythology. There is no trace of a big population leaving Egypt at the appropriate time (1300 BCE or thereabouts) and wandering in the Sinai; 2 million people would have left behind some rather big campsites. Also, there is no Egyptian record of this departure, though it would likely have been depicted as a triumph for Egypt (a certain present-day Iraqi Information Minister has had many ancient predecessors).

Moses had lots of anachronistic laws projected back onto him, like specifications for temple gear that would have been impractical to lug across a desert. The golden-calf story is likely a swipe at the northern kingdom's taste for golden-bull statues as religious artifacts.

The Conquest is mostly mythology; cities in the Promised Land are often much smaller or absent when it supposedly happened. However, it may be a vague memory the massive strife and destruction at around 1200 BCE in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt's armies fought hordes of "Sea Peoples", but they were relatively successful; but the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaean city-states were destroyed, and that destruction even included some of the Promised Land.

Kings David and Solomon were real, but exaggerated into great heroes, claim Finkelstein and Silberman. According to them, they had ruled only a small territory near Jerusalem.

However, F and S are confident in the Bible's overall accuracy about the Dual Monarchy period and the subsequent conquests and deportations, though it must be conceded that that history is rather heavily editorialized.

Prolapse

Thanks, I appreciate the response!...

Any idea what the website I posted is talking about then?...I tried to make heads and tails of it, but didn't really get very far...

I didn't really find any very convincing evidence on the website, but I don't think that'll fly as a very convincing argument...

Celsus

This thread on another discussion board impressed the hell out of me:

The Exodus: 'A Dead Issue.'

Joel

mike_decock

WOW

Thanks for that link.

-Mike...

Prolapse

Thanks for the link! Definitely helped clear things up a little....