History and the Bible

[PainRack]

I'm currently involved in a debate on SB about the historical accuracy of the Bible. Unfortunately, all my previous links on this subject had been lost, when Mozilla crashed on me.

Anyone got any helpful links for me? In particular, the existence of Jericho and the Jews in Egypt, as the time of Exodus?

[Edi]

The following is what I posted in reply to someone else regarding the Jews' enslavement in Egypt, Jericho and the historical accuracy of the Bible at another board some weeks ago. It should answer most of your points, but pay special attention to the backward projection of power issue.

you should go an read AlphaBeta by John Mann asap. It is a history of the alphabet, and for obvious reasons it devotes a lot of time to the history of Egypt and the Middle East.

It also touches on this issue. Apparently the domain of Egypt reached quite far into the lands that are now Israel and Lebanon, and there is quite a bot of evidence that the events of Exodus would coincide with Egyptian defeats in war and unrest at home leading to the abandonment of the outlying territories. Moses and his followers probably never were in Egypt proper, and broke away from the outer edges, and the pharaoh described in the Bible was probably just the minor lord in charge of the outlying territories. As for the Sinai accounts, I don't remember exactly what Mann said about that, but there are ancient Egyptian mica mines there where very early versions of Hebrew writing have been found, which points to there having been Israeli slaves there. IF some of these escaped and later ended up with Moses's bunch, it would go a long way toward explaining the Biblical events.

Then there is the well known issue of backward projection where Biblical accounts are concerned. A good example is the walls of Jericho being shattered. Archaeological evidence does not support there having even been walls at the time the events would have taken place, but at the time the previously oral accounts were written down, the cities of Israel were far greater than they had been before. Those who wrote the Biblical accounts took a look around them, assumed things had been the same during the events described, and presto, you have some major historical inaccuracy from the get-go, because they did not know any better. I don't see why much the same would not also apply to the Exodus stories.

Remember also that stuff in the Bible has been influenced by a lot of things in the region. For example, Abraham was born in the city of Ur in Ancient Sumeria/Babylon, so there is quite a bit of unaccounted for geographical spread that can only be explained by cultural interaction. The ancients did not live in isolated cultural bubbles any more than we do, their interactive spheres of influence were just smaller than ours and the influence took a longer time to become visible.

Here's a link to the original thread.

Edi

[Guardsman Bass]

First off, David probably existed as a ruler of Judah, although archaeological evidence from Judah indicates that the kingdom's population never exceeded probably about 6-7,000 people until the 8th century B.C. Also, although they are portrayed as wicked in the Bible, evidence suggests that the "Omrides" (ruling line of Israel, the Northern Kingdom) actually made the Northern Kingdom into a regional power.

There is no archaeological evidence to suggest that an exodus ever took place, particularly the lack of any signs of 40 year inhabitance by a large group of nomadic people in the Sinai desert in that time period. One interesting point, though; the area that, about 1000 B.C, began to be inhabited by the people who became the Hebrews, had actually been inhabited in a smaller (but similar) pattern of highland villages twice before, once in about 2000 B.C., another time even before that. It is likely that the ancestors of the Hebrews were pastoralists who dwelt in the highlands that converted to small-scale agriculture when the fertile lowland agricultural city-states (the Canaanites) collapsed, as they did.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Let's not forget that there are supposed to be millions of Jews.

[Guardsman Bass]

Let's not forget that there are supposed to be millions of Jews.

Yep, there are now. There certainly weren't back then. Until the 8th century, Jerusalem probably never had a higher population than 1500. Even when the Babylonians invaded, the entire population of the Kingdom of Judah was around 45,000, and only a few thousand were actually removed.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Let's not forget that there are supposed to be millions of Jews.

Yep, there are now. There certainly weren't back then.

But that's what the Bible claims.

A bekah for every man, that is, half a shekel, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for every one that went to be numbered, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty men.
Exodus 28:26

Now, that verse doesn't say over a million people... but it does say 603,550 people... and that's just the men over age 20. Surely there are approximately that many women over 20 as well... and the children? Whoo!

[Guardsman Bass]

Let's not forget that there are supposed to be millions of Jews.

Yep, there are now. There certainly weren't back then.

But that's what the Bible claims.

A bekah for every man, that is, half a shekel, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for every one that went to be numbered, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty men.
Exodus 28:26

Now, that verse doesn't say over a million people... but it does say 603,550 people... and that's just the men over age 20. Surely there are approximately that many women over 20 as well... and the children? Whoo!

I know; it's pretty funny, considering that that amount is greater than the amount of Hebrews that ever existed in Israel at one time before the Modern Era.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Don't forget that they reached that population from ~70 Jews in only a couple centuries.

[Alliance SpecForceTrooper]

Well,

modern Jews are not in any way related to the ancient Israelites. Modern Jewish ethinicity comes from The Black Sea and the Steppes area. The ancient Jews became the Muslims of today.

[Edi]

As I said, when the orally passed stories were written down, they projected their current prosperity backward in time on an assumption, and exaggerated numbers to boot, to make the religion and its priests look better.

Edi

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well,

modern Jews are not in any way related to the ancient Israelites. Modern Jewish ethinicity comes from The Black Sea and the Steppes area. The ancient Jews became the Muslims of today.

That's not entirely correct, though a very large percentage of it did. A fair portion of the Jewish population are the descendants of the diaspora Jews, however--primarily those who lived in the Arab countries until the Israeli War of Independence. Collectively with the inhabitants of the Latin countries they are called Sephardic--of course, after the Inquisition in Spain most of the Sephardic Jews ended up in Ottoman Turkish territories anyway, and many of the ones who remained in Europe ended up indistinguishable from the population there which is primarily of Khazar origin--though not entirely. Suffice to say that this subject is ridiculously complex.

For instance, the inquisitors actually were right in one respect--they weren't making "Secret Jews" up, they really existed. We know this because there is a group of Secret Jews in Portugal who had developed elaborate rituals to preserve their Judaism while behaving in an outwardly Catholic way who still exist to this day. The tenacity of religious belief can be quite startling at times.

[HemlockGrey]

How did Judaism get to the Khazars, anyway?

[Zed Snardbody]

There is no evidence of the use slave labor in the middle kingdom or onward in Egypt on any large scale, or a seprate population apart from the egyptians themselves. There is limited use in the form of captured nubians in various conflicts and boarder wars through out history.

The main counter to this claim however is that all records of a slave population that escaped were destroyed in order to preserve egyptian pride, which is a load of crap.

The egyptians couldn't even erase one pharaoh from history, let alone a sizable subclass of people.

[Guardsman Bass]

Before about 1500 B.C, Egypt actually did allow people from the area of Canaan to come into the Delta area to work.

[Guardsman Bass]

Maybe I was wrong, but it was after the Hittites fell that they became much more security minded. This is no proof for an Exodus.

[Edi]

The most logical step for the Exodus legend is what I outlined in my quoted post above. If you happen to pick up AlphaBeta by John MAnn (which I highly recommend) it offers some rather fascinating stuff that goes a long way toward explaining the Sinai bits in the Bible, and it has to do with the slave-operated mica mines in a certain part of that region where evidence of Jewish slaves has been found (precursor Hebrew writings). It's been a year and a half at least since I last read the book, but Mann's observations make a lot of sense and solve a rather vexing problem with regard to the historical origins of these myths. He deals with those as part of the overall history of the alphabet.

Edi

[Guardsman Bass]

That's certainly interesting, Edi, and I wonder how it ties into other archaelogical evidence that has been found. For example, as I mentioned earlier, the archaeological evidence shows that before the emergence of the two ancient Hebrew Kingdoms, agricultural settlements emerged in two large groups in that same area (the Canaanite highlands) twice before, then disappeared.