>>>PBS = NAZI channel
Well I don’t know about that. The History Channel used to be the Hitler Channel though. I’m afraid it’s become the Alaska Channel since then. I miss Panzers.
I don’t think it’s a news bulletin the literal story of the Exedous is doubtful. Decades of archeology indicate strongly the Pyramids were built as public works projects employing Egyptian volunteers building up spiritual credit for serving their Pharaoh-God while living on government rations.
C.B. Demille style slave crews would slow the work down. They’d be more trouble then they’d be worth when professional workmen were volunteering.
The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none. And slaves aren’t big on quality control.
That said I have wondered that another theory might be more likely. That some bands of Hebrew tribesmen had been allowed to settle in Eastern Sinai to work the land and help defend the frontier, that they failed to adapt to Egyptian ways and ultimately broke their oaths of loyalty and escaped back to Judea. Instead of “Pharoah’s hosts” in pursuit there might have been a local garrison, or more likely the Egyptians would have said good riddance.
You sure are assuming a lot. You are assuming slaves of the time would be rebellious and difficult workers, delivering shoddy work.
Nothing could be further from the truth. They were born into slavery, and were the professional workers, their crafts handed down father to son. Many slaves achieved higher social status, just as the bible describes.
I’ll have to go back over the story, but I don’t think the Israelites made the pyramids, according to the bible. They are mentioned as working the fields and making straw bricks.
Slaves of those times weren’t beaten and worked till death. It was simply their station in life, and they lived in acceptance of that social order within that society. They WERE the professional craftsmen, not subordinates of them.
The Pyramids were built over 1,000 years before Moses.
(1) That the Bible says that the Jews were the slave laborers who built the Pyramids. The Bible makes no mention of the Pyramids.
(2) That there was some large Egyptian middle class of skilled workmen.
A more accurate picture of Egyptian life was this: 95% of the population were subsistence farmers. There was an elite of priests, scribes and fine craftsmen and these urban upper classes had slaves and eunuchs to serve them and to oversee their households and lands.
The pyramids were built not by volunteers, but by farmers whose taxes were extracted from them in kind by pressgang labor. The work was supervised by artisans and architects, but there was not some vast army of well-to-do craftsmen who decided to work for a few years for free.
Looking at Genesis/Exodus, it appears to me that the proto-Jews (who were not yet “Jews” until Sinai) were largely herdsmen literally on the edge of society.
Not certain about this, but that is certainly the implication of the last chapter of Genesis -— relegated to various semi-arid field areas fairly far from the Nile.
The leg-warmer wearing, left-wing panty-waists over at PBS had better read up on repelling caravan attacks.
“Pyramids were built as public works projects employing Egyptian volunteers building up spiritual credit...”
Also the pyramids were probably built well before the times suggested for the Exedous. Furthermore, this may have been a way to employ farmers during the flood period when their farmland would have been inundated by the annual rise of the Nile River.