steve_bnk

I am surprised this thread had legs.

it looks like it has run its course, ending in skeptics vs diehard theist.

I would like to see duvduv actually lay out his beliefs regarding Exodus with details.

Duvduv

The fact of an invasion by another people that was problematic enough to cause the correspondence is what is significant.
By the way, Charlie, have you ever wondered about where the location of all the cemeteries of millions upon millions of people are in many places? Of course this is no indication that they did not exist.
I think your interests call for the holy Church of Archaeology to dig up the entirety of ancient Canaan to get to the bottom of things (no pun intended).
And if 50 archers could take care of the Habiru, how could they have possibly engaged in an invasion, and why would the locals have even bothered to worry about them at all?!

Cheerful Charlie

There is another aspect to all this. If there was no Egyptian captivity, no exodus, no Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, if the destruction of all those large cities did not happen, then no Moses on the mount, no 615 laws, mitzvahs of God. God does not hate fags. No more need for Culture War. So all of this from the Christian perspective is do or die. As an atheist then I have long had a great interest in seeing this all become settled over the last two decades by large numbers of sober Near East archaeologists.

The sober world of Near East archaeology is delivering a rather stiff death blow to Judaism, Christianiy, Islam, and Mormonisn.

The problem for atheists like me is, this fact is not known by millions of believers who are wrongly assured that the Bible has been proven true.

Google 'Bible proven true by archaeology' The many cities and kings destroyed by Joshua (see Joshua 10 for list) were not so destroyed as proven by archaeology.
Its all mythology.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

Grave sites are plentiful and are well known to aecaeologists.

Ever read the Amarna letters? I have, I own a copy of the collected translated letters. Some petty chiefs of small villages in the area started attacking their neighbors to built their own little empires. Their less numerous and bellicose neighbors saw themselves as part and parcel of the Egyptian empire, and demanded their Egyptian masters do their job, protect them from depredations of aggressive neighbors. The numbers of people involved were small. Earlier, the area was conquered starting with Thutmoses I
and later depopulated by various pharoahs who deported large numbers of people
to Egypt, leaving Palestine a conqurered and depopulted region, whose state was revealed by these letters.

A well known fact well understood by archaeologists and Near East historians. Which real history is not known by the Bible writers.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

Duvduv

And tell us whether the areas discussed in the Amarna letters have been corroborated by archaeology confirming invasion or replacement of population?
I suppose an inventory of many such invasions worldwide could be done without archaeologically confirming them.

steve_bnk

The story of Job is an obvious allegory for Jewish captivity or oppression. The biblical wisdom literature in the bible tends to be prefaced as teacher to student or father to son. My Oxford commentary says Job was probably part of a larger set of teaching materials.

Noah is inarguably a plagiarism of Gilgamesh.


The OT we have s only what survived.

Myths tend to have a basis in reality, or within a good lie there always is a bit of truth.

I expect there may have been a real Moses as a charismatic leader. Or the character could have been added or exaggerated as oral went to written to add authority to Leviticus.

Years back I went through the Genesis genealogy using MS Project to lay out all the times. To me a pattern jumped out in terms of the times for lifespans, births, and marriages. It seemed obvious to me the genealogy was a writer putting oral history to paper and creatively filling in time spans and dates. Nothing nefarious or intentionally deceitful

I expect there was an Exodus, but not as depicted.

There probably was a King David, but based on archeology his domain was not so grand as the biblical depictions.

I expect the Jews won a big battle at some place, but walls were not blown down by a horn.

etc.

outhouse

More or less what I follow.

Karen Armstrongs book on "the history of god" actually deal a death blow to all Abrahamic religions much more so then the known mythology above. As long as one has a open mind that will actually accept knowledge. We see theist have closed minds.

semiopen

I think the Gilgamesh issue makes it difficult for someone who holds that the bible was dictated by God to Moses. This is hardly the only problem with that view.

If we get beyond that, there is no reason to hold that the 600,000 men were actually there.

The Plagues_of_Egypt is another little problem,

For example there is Psalm 74 with seven plagues -

In Psalms 105 the number of plagues seems to be eight (maybe nine) [after looking at the literature, this is usually described as seven or eight] -

The simplest explanation is that the Psalms were written before the Plagues in Exodus were finalized.

Duvi's argument about the deficiencies of archaeology was pretty feeble but it's not like that is the only enemy of a literal interpretation. It's similar to the creation, it's not just the big bang.

Duvduv

Do you really think that no one had come across this anomaly in Psalms in the last 2600 years until now? Do you not think it was more than ample time for someone to fix up the anomaly, at least in the days of the Tannaim and Amoraim?
As it happens the plagues you are concerned about were considered a continuation of the previous plague, not an independent one, having no independent warning to Pharoah.
But lest this Forum become a yeshiva class examining the myriads of commentaries on every potential anomaly in every page of every book of the Jewish bible, I suggest we let it go.

Sarpedon

No, the Hyksos king's expulsion is NOT recognized as history. It is only considered history if you take the Upper Egyptian Pharaoh's account uncritically. I do not accept the Exodus story uncritically, and I do not take the Pharaoh's story uncritically. What we had was a power struggle between Upper and Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt prevailed, and claimed that Lower Egypt had been ruled by foreign rulers, who they expelled. To conclude that this is necessarily true is faulty. To conclude that by 'expelled' means that the 'hyksos' were forced to leave egypt and returned en masse to Asia is faulty, especially given that in Tutankamun's records of what was done to Akhenaten uses the same term, despite no one literally being expelled.

Akhenaten had been dead for some time before then.

It does not matter what the origin of the writing is. Without corroboration, either by other documentary sources or archaeological evidence, it is not to be taken at face value.

I'll calm down when people take an honest and evenhanded approach to scholarship.