Cheerful Charlie

I don't think anybody has been impressed by your rhetoric. Or failure to deal with the facts on the ground and the claims of the torah as compared to the known facts. The writers of the Torah were not in the least knowledgable about realIsraelite history so they made up some grand, great lies. Total nonsense. How did they kow that future scholars could demonstrate their stories were faux history and not in the least true? Well so much for them. when competent archaeologists tell us the two oasises had to be Kadesh Barnea, we will give them benefit of the doubt of knowing what they are talking about. These are not stupid people.

And are there any sites that do show 38 years of occupation by late bronze age Israelites? No. And are there signs of large numbers of new settles from kadesh Barnea found in israel? No.

Cheerful Charlie

steve_bnk

There was a find some years back including dining halls and residences of people who likely worked on the pyramids. Actual remains of food.

Hard to imagine no evidence of the Exodus.


http://phys.org/news182335053.html


'...The men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world ate meat regularly and worked in three months shifts, said Hawass. It took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build a single pyramid, Hawass said - a tenth of the work force of 100,000 that Herodotus wrote of after visiting Egypt around 450 B.C.

Hawass said evidence from the site indicates that the approximately 10,000 laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from ..'


When considering the level of literal veracity of the OT one can look at Herodotus, also called Herodotus The Liar. known for creatively filling in the blanks and embellishing. He was at the top for his time.

One might say the chroniclers who wrote the OT were historians of their times as Herodotus was an historian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

'...His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been debated. His place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. However, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naive, often charming - all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself.[5] Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain but, according to the ancient account, these predecessors included for example Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus. Only fragments of the latter's work survive (and the authenticity of these is debatable)[6] yet they allow us glimpses into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories, as for example in the introduction to Hecataeus's work, Genealogies...

Yet, one modern scholar, reading between the lines, has described the work of Hecataeus as "a curious false start to history"[8] because, despite its critical spirit, it failed to liberate history from myth. Herodotus actually mentions Hecataeus in his Histories, on one occasion mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his handling of their national history.[9] It is possible that Herodotus borrowed much material from Hecataeus,...'

I ggogled Herodotus Jews.


http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...6134656AAGE4lx

'...The general view is that they were there, but that their "kingdoms" were very actually small tribes. Try putting "Herodotus/ jews" into google and you will find a wide range of pro-con websites. However, Palestine is referenced extensively in Herodotus,and he recaps Egyptian history with great detail. There are no references to Judea and Samaria so they clearly belong to a much later era - and the tale of David may be consigned to mythology...'

Duvduv

Applying the same criteria to the cases I mentioned doesn't seen to result in a change of attitude in your part. And where is the alternative physical evidence for the emergence of all the Israelite tribes?

steve_bnk

Regardless if we can offer alternatives or not, we are under no intelectual requirement to do so, the physical evidence that is available does not support the biblical accounts.


The onus is on the claimant to make a case based on evidence put forth, and we accept or reject.

We do not have to explain origins of Jews, we can even say we do not know.

Duvduv

So you mean that you don't demand the same proof for the other cases I mentioned.

The entire range of events associated with the emergence of the Israelites is not dependent
on whether the field of archeology has given a stamp of approval.
Indeed,archeological findings have not even yielded the.Israelite origins of the Falashas of Ethiopia from the tribe of Dan or anyone else, yet there they are anyway.

steve_bnk

I do not care about 'other cases'. The OP is The Exodus of biblical lore.

Whatever that 'entire range of events' may be, Exodus does not appear to have any legitimacy, at least not in the scope detailed in the bible.

IMO once you go back before the 1st century CE it gets murky as to who the Jews were who may have ended up in Palestine circa 1st century. We have no way of knowing what the real demographics were in Palestine regarding Jews and others. The region was occupied before, during and after the Jews came and went. Apparently Herodotus reported there were people who were circumcised circa 500 BCE, but no reports of a Jewish state of any consequence.

You have not answered the question what you believe regarding Exodus and why. The problem theists have across the forum is once they commit to a specific claim, they are then subject to critique and refutation.

The last step after all is said and done is to declare a belief in god and the bible offered without proof, but certainly claimed to be true without question.

AI said, I look at the bible in the light of Herodotus a known historical figure with known writings and known correlations to real history. He wrote as an historians of his tines did, in a manner consistent with the apparent mixture of myth and possible real events in the bible.

Exodus makes perfect sense as myth and embellishment of a perhaps not so grandiose event heard long after the fact by oral traditions..

Duvduv

There is no more proof for the existence Herodotus than there is for Moses, is there?
But you might as well say that the Israelites landed in Canaan on an intergalactic spaceship which even fooled the Romans, Babylonians. Greeks and Assyrians. Not to mention other Roman writers.

andrewcriddle

The kingdom of David supposedly existed over 400 years before Herodotus visited Palestine. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians. There were no independent Jewish or Samaritan kingdoms at the time of Herodotus' visit to Palestine.

However there certainly were Yahwist communities in Palestine in the 5th century BCE. See for example the reference in an Elephantine payrus dated 407 BCE to the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Herodotus appears to have visited the coast of Palestine and not to have gone inland. This may explain why there are no clear mentions of the Jews.

Andrew Criddle

Duvduv

Since so many texts were composed detailing so much allegedly fictitious history for the Israelites, and people cannot attest to an alternative narrative they might want to consult a shortlived television show called Alien Nation where a shipload of many thousands of aliens got stranded on Earth.

stephan huller

The Jews had their own Temple toYahweh[1]*which functioned alongside that of the local ram-headed deity,*Khnum.[2]The "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE toBagoas, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an anti-Semitic rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.[3]In the course of this appeal, the Jewish inhabitants of Elephantine speak of the antiquity of the damaged temple:'Now our forefathers built this temple in the fortress of Elephantine back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt, and whenCambyses*came to Egypt he found it built. They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple."The community also appealed for aid toSanballat I, a*Samaritan*potentate, and his sons*Delaiah*and*Shelemiah, as well asJohanan ben Eliashib. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the*Book of Nehemiah,*2:19,*12:23.[4]There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum: "1Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said*2to me, saying: Memorandum: You may say in Egypt ...*8to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...".[5]By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the Temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple underNectanebo II*(360-343) took the place of the former Temple of YHWH.In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the Temple of Yahou (a.k.a. Yahweh), and his wife, Tamut, who was previously an Egyptian slave owned by a Jewish master, Meshullam.[6][7]*Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between*Judaism*and the*ancient Egyptian religion*and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine.[8]