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What if they preserved first-hand eye-witness accounts of the American Revolution?
Now you have put your finger on it. Also you have shown how belief has skewed your reasoning. You are taking the account of the american revolution based on a lot of contemporary evidence and using it as an analogy for the Exodus which is (as we discussed earlier) not.
Now I agree that there are a number of events in history which exist in single and somewhat doubtful records. The Boudiccan rebellion, the siege of Troy, the Arthurian defence against the saxons and the Robin hood thing.
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That's all nice but the eye-witness account of the Exodus wasn't really like a phone game. I believe it was written as it occurred.
You will see that what you believe is neither here nor there but has to be evaluated as best we can. Troy was considered mythical until Schleimann apparently found it. (I still cannot rule out a reappraisal, but he deserves the benefit of the doubt) while the Boudiccan rebellion not only reads convincingly and was written within living memory of the event but hard evidence of the burning of London and st Albans has been found.
Arthur and Robin Hood, despite a lot of people believing it out of sheer tradition have to be regarded as mythological, though Arthur might just be based on a real event, but much amended.
I was prepared to give the exodus that much credence, but the fact is that the story has been shown to be really unfeasible quite apart from the doubtful story - line, Moses' antecedents looking suspiciously like the earlier Sargon of Akkad, the forced dating of the exodus to a time long after the Amarna correspondence and the Hittite empire and the Hyksos expulsion and the general reorganization of the Near East political map a few mere centuries before David and Solomon. Plus the indications that a one God Israel was not on the scene until quite late.
As against this case you have offered nothing other than a confused demand for proof that the contemporaries would not write about the events (when our supposition is that they would, if they had occurred) an insistence of eyewitness by Moses which has no real basis and an appeal to some downbeat elements in the story (as though such things did not occur in other stories, mythical, semi - mythical and - more or less - factual) which (you argue) people inventing a story would not have put in.
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I understand. But I think that over the last hundred or so years, what many past archeologists said just had to be false statements in the Old Testament, upon further archeological research, have actually proven to be correct. We just need more time to discover more things.
I have heard this before (usually linked to claims that they (1) denied David and Solomon - which I never read - and which despite all the claims still don't seem to have been solidly proven, even though I am prepared to give Troy -like benefit of doubt) and in fact this claim, which is often heard in connection with hard evidence for historical impossibility (the Nativity is one) being dismissed in favour of the pious hope that 'something' will turn up later to prove the Bible true after all (2). But in fact the archaeological evidence, apart from that for what was never in dispute - an iron - age Israel and Judea, Assyrian attacks and the exile- is doing more to call into question the claims of the earlier history of Israel than to confirm them. And I think that the Exodus is long overdue for reconsideration.
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Also, I don't believe we are dealing with oral tradition when it comes to the exodus though. Also, I don't know of too many people back then that would brag about coming from slavery and their deliverer (Moses) was a murderer. Not to mention the historical account paints Moses as someone not confident enough to speak to Pharaoh so God has Aaron speak for him.
I don't believe that it is oral tradition either - apart from a possible memory of the Semites being slung out of Egypt by Ahmose. I believe that it is - like the new testament - polemic; designed to invent a history of a people chosen by their God - the one and only - to grab as much of the near east as they could from the neighbouring states.
It only remains to say that discussing Moses' supposed differences from the religions of the time seems pointless in view of the case made to show that -no - the exodus was not a real event, iand t was not recorded by any eyewitness, let alone Moses who is a doubtfully real character anyway.
(1) Atheist professors of the archaeological persuasion, devil of a doubt.
(2) e. g that census of Quirinus was carried out in the time of Herod - which will no more happen than my waiting for evidence that we actually WON at Yorktown, Ain't gonna happen, fella.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 07-09-2012 at 11:31 AM..
Reason: Much - needed editorial review.
I wonder what she would think about this:
2Ki 18:26 And Eliakim son of Hilkiah said--and Shebna, and Joah--to the chief of the butlers, `Speak, we pray you, unto your servants [in] Aramean, for we are understanding, and do not speak with us [in] Jewish, in the ears of the people who [are] on the wall..
2Ki_18:26-37
It was very conceivable that Rabshakeh's boasting might make an impression upon the people; the ambassadors of Hezekiah therefore interrupted him with the request that he would speak to them in Aramaean, as they understood that language, and not in Jewish, on account of the people who were standing upon the wall. אֲרָמִית was the language spoken in Syria, Babylonia, and probably also in the province of Assyria, and may possibly have been Rabshakeh's mother-tongue, even if the court language of the Assyrian kings was an Aryan dialect. With the close affinity between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, the latter could not be unknown to Rabshakeh, so that he made use of it, just as the Aramaean language was intelligible to the ministers of Hezekiah, whereas the people in Jerusalem understood only יְהוּדִיה, Jewish, i.e., the Hebrew language spoken in the kingdom of Judah. It is evident from the last clause of the verse that the negotiations were carried on in the neighbourhood of the city wall of Jerusalem. (Keil & Deleitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament).
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She mentions it (I ommitted the details because I was aiming for brevity):
In the Bible itself, the word "Hebrew" (ʾbrît) is not used by Israelites or Judahites to desribe their own language. We find śĕpat kĕnaʿn, "the language of Canaan," in Isa 19:18, and yĕhûdît, "Judahite," is used in the famous reply to the Assyrian Rabshakeh in 2 Kings: Elyakim and Shebnah say to the Rabshakeh, "Speak to your servants in Aramaic [ʾárāmît], because we understand it, but don't speak to us in Judahite within the hearing of the people who are on the wall" (2 Kings 18:26 = Isa 36:11). The Rabshakeh, however, refuses and continues to speak in Judahite (2 Kings 18:28 = Isa 36:13; 2 Chr 32:18 is also similar).
When Nehemiah complains that Jewish men had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, part of his complaint is that half their children spoke ʾašdôdît or the langauge of each nation, and did not know yĕhûdît (13:23-24). The first attestation we have of "Hebrew" being used of the language occurs in Greek....
Does that comport with most of what you quoted? I think it does. She references the passage as "famous" because it has been very helpful in understanding the state of the languages being spoken at the time. Later, she mentions that "the southern or Judahite dialect is the one in which most of the SBH texts are written. Scholars have proposed, however, that a northern dialect occasionally shows through in the Bible...." (ibid, p. 142).
At any rate - the language was extremely fluid, and underwent many changes. One can usually be fairly accurate about a text's date - just as we can date Shakespeare when compared to Asimov or any other modern writer. Even further back than Shakespeare, English is even more alien to us today. One must consider that in the thousand year period in which the Bible was probably composed the language underwent the same changes every language would be expected to undergo in a similar period of time. One can think of the Shibboleth/Sibboleth challenge in Judges 12, as an example of the different "dialects" the tribes spoke from one another.
Now you have put your finger on it. Also you have shown how belief has skewed your reasoning. You are taking the account of the american revolution based on a lot of contemporary evidence and using it as an analogy for the Exodus which is (as we discussed earlier) not.
We can actually use that analogy further, if we wish, with the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, in which he was asked if he did so and he bravely replies "I cannot tell a lie!" Good ol' honest George..
Now - is that story true or false? It supposedly happened several hundred years ago, and we have all heard the story - so tradition would seem to imply that it IS true. The truth of the matter is that the story was entirely made up (yes, the irony of a story teacing a moral of honesty being a lie is funny), and the perpetrator confessed. But to this very day - many people, if they have not read or heard about the confession, are still convinced of the historicity of the cherry-tree story. Honest ol' George still exists in their minds.
In the oral tradition in which we usually learn this story, it is very rarely pointed out that the story is not true. So most people generally know the story, and believe it to be true. And this is just in the span of a few hundred years that such a false story can gain such credence among a large number of people. I suppose it highlight the powerful meaning behind the story more than it's actual historicity.
Perhaps that should give us something to think about. We can still find the story extremely edifying, but it can no longer be held to have actually happened. To many people, however, that is not important. They could retain the importance of such a story much better if they did not put it before the critical eyes of the historian.
Yep. I think this is relevant to the topic as it touches on how we evaluate old tales. Now, if we traced that story to some doubtful source (such as the angels of Mons or 'The Guard dies; it does not surrender.' - both originating in newspapers and for the reason you mentioned 'edifying'. Or rather boosting morale.) then we might tend to discard it as an urban myth, which doesn't mean that George Washington is a myth - just that story. Just as Caiaphas was surely a real person but the story of him prophesying about the gathering together of the Children of God is not credible.
What's the real problem here is this idea of taking what's in the Bible as true until it is disproved. There are many books saying a lot of things and the fact is that all of them have to be read critically - which does not mean with a mind closed to acceptance.
I have said that I am willing to accept the burden of proof (by no means mandatory) to show that the Bible cannot be accepted wholesale and all of it is up for discussion.
More problematical still is when the discussion shows that there are very good reasons to regard a lot of it as simply not working logically or historically and those reasons are simply dismissed and the claim made that it is all true and eyewitness and that's that.
[quote=NoCapo;24859119]flipflop, the biggest issue for me about water, food and other logistics stem from a literal reading of the account. The Bible claims roughly 600,000 men age 20 and over (fighting men) left Egypt along with their families. A reasonable extrapolation would be that on the order of 2 million people left Egypt. Keep in mind that when Napoleon conquered egypt, there were roughly 3 million people there. Even if we assume that 3500ish years earlier the population was the same (unlikely, but hey...), you now have 2/3 of the entire population of Egypt, one of the most powerful nations of its day, wandering around in the desert. The numbers are simply enormous. Look at the logistics required to support the US troops in Afganistan ( 180,000 ish at the peak).
We are told it would have been very difficult for such a multitude wandering around out on the desert to have lived for more than a few weeks. Yes, and the same could be said about one person out on the desert. They are forgetting God, Who supplied water, meat (quail) and daily bread (Nehemiah 9:20). They believe that encampments of such a multitude would have left some sort of “trash” for them to follow, but they are still trying to figure out which route the children of Israel were on. “Yea, forty years didstthou sustain them in the wilderness, so that theylacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, andtheir feet swelled not.” (Nehemiah 9:21) There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow. As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”! Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof!They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents. And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology. Have a look at this site = www.Sinai-Horeb.com******************** ************** * - SINAI/HOREB
flipflop, the biggest issue for me about water, food and other logistics stem from a literal reading of the account. The Bible claims roughly 600,000 men age 20 and over (fighting men) left Egypt along with their families. A reasonable extrapolation would be that on the order of 2 million people left Egypt. Keep in mind that when Napoleon conquered egypt, there were roughly 3 million people there. Even if we assume that 3500ish years earlier the population was the same (unlikely, but hey...), you now have 2/3 of the entire population of Egypt, one of the most powerful nations of its day, wandering around in the desert. The numbers are simply enormous. Look at the logistics required to support the US troops in Afganistan ( 180,000 ish at the peak).
We are told it would have been very difficult for such a multitude wandering around out on the desert to have lived for more than a few weeks. Yes, and the same could be said about one person out on the desert. They are forgetting God, Who supplied water, meat (quail) and daily bread (Nehemiah 9:20). They believe that encampments of such a multitude would have left some sort of “trash” for them to follow, but they are still trying to figure out which route the children of Israel were on. “Yea, forty years didstthou sustain them in the wilderness, so that theylacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, andtheir feet swelled not.” (Nehemiah 9:21) There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow. As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”! Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof!They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents. And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology. Have a look at this site = www.Sinai-Horeb.com******************** ************** * - SINAI/HOREB
RESPONSE:
(1) And of the 2 million people spending 40 years in the desert, are you really claiming there were no deaths and burials which would leave human remains?
(2) Aside from the Bible story, what evidence do you have that the Exodus occurred?
(3) Perhaps you would enjoy: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts is a 2001 book about the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins of the HebrewBible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine. (Wikipedia)
It's not possible to be sure but the evidence is turning against it. The Jews begin to look as though they emerged out of the other Canaanite tribes (rather as Rome did out of the other Italian tribes) and had nothing to do with coming out of Ur, never mind Egypt.
The attempts to link the sojourn in Egypt with the Hyksos or habiru don't work and neither do the efforts to link the Moses story with Rameses II or Hatshepsut or the tempest stele.
Ron Wyatt's Moses site in Saudi Arabia is intriguing, but over imaginative and the 'calf altar' looks more like a pile of boulders with some herdmans' grafitti on it.
The chariot wheels in the Red sea are still not shown to be anything but unusual coral formations and the Solomon pillars prove nothing but that Solomon believed in the red sea crossing. In fact I have strong doubts about there being any Solomon pillars. One (with Wyatt's fishy translation) has 'vanished' and the other one has no inscription at all.
Finally the Bible account has a chronological problem. The only ancient mention of Israel in the Mereneptah stele recounting the Pharaoh's conquests of various states including Israel (it seems) suggests that Israel was a worthwhile state in his days. But it was later on that the Egyptians defeated the Sea peoples, - the 'Peleset' who, as the Philistines, settled on the coast and became embroiled in disputes with Israel.
But Exodus states that God directed Moses into Sinai rather than going direct to Canaan in order to avoid Philistia and not get involved in fighting them. Thus the exodus is set in a time long after the time when they had already become established as a state,
There are ways to argue all that, but the evidence does seem, as I say, to be turning against the Exodus as a real event.
Long long ago in a lifetime far away, I was a college student who was forced to take a "religion" class as part of our requirements. (We were also required to take a History of Civilization multi term class and a year long science requirement) Any case the class I took was a bible history class taught by a bible "expert" and at the time a notable Middle Eastern archaeologist.
What I took away from that class is that yes there was an exodus, but not as purportedly described in the bible, not as most Christians believe today.
Essentially, the narrative I came to believe is that when the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten was deposed, one of his top lieutenants (Moses, who was a member of a Hebrew tribe that had migrated into Egypt earlier) left Egypt for obvious reasons, taking with him a number of fellow tribesmen. Later Moses hooked up with long lost fellow Hebrew tribes, and thus began the culture of those whom we now call Jews.
OK now that I retell this account, I can see that there is much more that would need to be clarified.
I have a framework of my own, but I recognize that regarding the timeline of the Egyptians, there is very little wiggle room. That said:
1) there is proven science regarding lakes of blood and CO2 as a cause of the death of the firstborn.
2) If one adds two and two, the eruption of Thera can be seen as the cause of a couple of other of the plagues.
3) The "sea peoples" may have been inspired by the post Iliad Mycenaean, in that Tiryns expanded greatly, even as most other Mycenaean cities were destroyed.
4) Someplace in Judges is a passage that seems to indicate what I stated earlier, as taught by that old professor of mine - that the 12 tribes were NOT 12 tribes in the beginning.
Things like this are why I say that among other things, the Bible is a book of mythology. Not all of it. But certainly there is a bit of mythology in there.
Last edited by chuckmann; 08-13-2014 at 11:57 PM..
We can actually use that analogy further, if we wish, with the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, in which he was asked if he did so and he bravely replies "I cannot tell a lie!" Good ol' honest George..
Now - is that story true or false? It supposedly happened several hundred years ago, and we have all heard the story - so tradition would seem to imply that it IS true. The truth of the matter is that the story was entirely made up (yes, the irony of a story teacing a moral of honesty being a lie is funny), and the perpetrator confessed. But to this very day - many people, if they have not read or heard about the confession, are still convinced of the historicity of the cherry-tree story. Honest ol' George still exists in their minds.
In the oral tradition in which we usually learn this story, it is very rarely pointed out that the story is not true. So most people generally know the story, and believe it to be true. And this is just in the span of a few hundred years that such a false story can gain such credence among a large number of people. I suppose it highlight the powerful meaning behind the story more than it's actual historicity.
Perhaps that should give us something to think about. We can still find the story extremely edifying, but it can no longer be held to have actually happened. To many people, however, that is not important. They could retain the importance of such a story much better if they did not put it before the critical eyes of the historian.
When in high school, I was a Latin scholar. Why I do not know. But I can recall translating some Roman legends about heroes who exemplified the values of the Roman republic. Cant remember the names, but there was the guy who rode his horse into a fiery pit because only if the Romans sacrificed their most valuable possession would the pit disappear. That most valuable possession was Roman courage. Then there was Cincinnatus, who was called from his farm where he was plowing his fields, to become dictator to address some emergency or other. Once the emergency ended, Cincinnatus immediately resigned his dictatorship and returned to his far, even though by law he could have held on to the power for some further period of time.
Yeah these are myths or fairy tales or fables or whatever you want to call them. Lies, though? I suggest that more cultures than not have such stories as a part of their culture.
Now I agree that there are a number of events in history which exist in single and somewhat doubtful records. The Boudiccan rebellion, the siege of Troy, the Arthurian defence against the saxons and the Robin hood thing.
Pouts and stamps me feet and holds me breath 'til I turn blue!
The Iliad is TOO literally true and and if you dont believe that you will be condemned to Tartarus forever!!!!!! No Elysian fields for you !!!!!!
This is what I mean when I say that we all have to learn to make reasonable decisions about the nature of the sources we read, and we have to learn to accept that not everything in any source is absolutely true.
I believe that the Iliad is set within the framework of an actual event. There is no question that Troy VI is the Iliad of Homer, and the archaeology of Durkheim proves it. I also accept that Troy VIIa, the Troy of Blegin, may have been a part of the narrative.
I also believe that the only important thing in the Bible is the message of Jesus. Too many remain rooted in their 15 centuries old traditions and theologies and will scour the Bible to find words and phrases that support those doctrines and theologies.
To me, the issue is that of keeping an open mind. I have my own beliefs as to why things are changing, religion wise. I have my own beliefs as to why we are seeing so much deeper into the mists, why we are finding that in peeling the onion we find no answers, only more questions.
How about you?
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Also you have shown how belief has skewed your reasoning. You are taking the account of the american revolution based on a lot of contemporary evidence and using it as an analogy for the Exodus which is (as we discussed earlier) not. 
