Posted on 07/19/2008 12:38:15 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Joseph exacted a promise from his sons upon his death bed that they would take him with them if they ever went home... He lay in Egypt for many years, but the Bible is very specific that he was disinterred and carried to the Promised Land, so both tombs can be true.
Nobody is arguing that.
The Exodus took place from Egypt, into 'The Wilderness'.
The Israelites then spent considerable time encamped at the foot of 'The Mountain of God' before beginning 'The Wanderings'.
That is where Moses received the tablets; and where the Tabernacle, Altar, Ark, and all the rest of the items for the worship service were made. It is also where Aaron & his son's were consecrated as priests...and where two of Aaron's sons were struck down by God for offering 'strange fire' to Him.
It is arguing that the mountain is in northern Saudi Arabia, rather than the traditional, relatively nearby, site of Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.
The Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) is that long, skinny finger of water the juts off to the NE from the Red Sea, (a drowned portion of the Great Rift) and separates the Sinai Peninsula from Arabia.
You can’t both argue that the Israelites did their exodus from Egypt AND Saudi Arabia and that both countries are trying to cover up evidence of it.
This is an understandable impression because of the author's sloppy and misleading writing style, wherein she wrote "One reason may be that the explorers have discovered a mountain on which are located the remains of religious altars, ancient Semitic inscriptions, and evidence of major encampments by nomads at the base of the mountain—all of which are elements, of course, of the Biblical narrative of the Revelation at Sinai. If the Exodus really took place in northern Saudi Arabia as Mr. Mahoney and his interviewees maintain, then the Arab claim to be the sole "indigenous" inhabitants even of the Arabian Peninsula itself, let alone "Palestine," could be thrown into doubt.
What she has done with her careless writing is to muddle the distinction between the point of origin of the Exodus and the subsequent route of the Exodus. What she should have said was "If the route of the Exodus took them through northern Saudi Arabia..."
I haven't seen the movie on which the article is based, but I'm certain it clearly differentiates the two. There is no scholarly dispute that I'm aware of that the Exodus originated FROM Egypt, but there are several competing theories as to the actual routes which might have been taken by the Hebrews on that long journey. One can do a lot of wandering in forty years.
I guess I’ll buy that her lousy writing style conveyed something other than she meant to convey.
A couple of points. There can really be no dispute that the Jews had their origin in the middle east. Nor that they occupied modern day Israel and beyond. Any suggestion that today’s Jews are merely european interlopers is flatly wrong.
The exodus story is more interesting. If it is historical and not legend, there should be solid evidence of it, especially if it’s asserted to have been from a period of 400 years of slavery in a fairly advanced civilization. Despite the claims of this article, such evidence in Egypt does not exist, and archaeologists have been pouring through the Egyptian historical records long before the state of Israel was created.
It’s simply impossible to erase the records of 400 years of Egyptian history, and the plagues which brought Egypt to its knees and allowed the Exodus to occur couldn’t have happened. This was the Golden Age of Egyptian history in order to fit the biblical timeline. In a country that documented every season’s harvest totals or crop failures, it’s impossible to believe it wouldn’t have documented the 10 plagues and the release of its slave population which it never documented that it had in the first place.
In an ironic twist, I believe there was an Exodus, not from Egypt but from the Iraq/Saudi Arabia area. The bible is full of references to the Tigris and Euphrates, and even Abraham’s home is said to be in Ur, which is in Iraq.
The “pillar of fire by night, and pillar of cloud by day” that guided the exodus corresponds timewise nicely to the volcanic eruption of Thera in the Mediterranean Sea, which is one of the biggest in recorded history. And it would point to Canaan if you were coming from Mesopotamia.
But not Egypt.
So, I’m going to catch it from all sides. I believe there was an exodus. I just don’t believe it was from Egypt.
What’s a Palestinian?
Not from me (at least not on this subject... /grin), although I don't believe you are correct.
For example, you commented that "Despite the claims of this article, such evidence in Egypt does not exist, and archaeologists have been pouring through the Egyptian historical records long before the state of Israel was created. ... It’s simply impossible to erase the records of 400 years of Egyptian history, and the plagues which brought Egypt to its knees and allowed the Exodus to occur couldn’t have happened. This was the Golden Age of Egyptian history in order to fit the biblical timeline. In a country that documented every season’s harvest totals or crop failures, it’s impossible to believe it wouldn’t have documented the 10 plagues and the release of its slave population which it never documented that it had in the first place.
This is a plausible argument, and you may indeed be correct. However, it relies on some basic assumptions which may or may not be valid. One, you assume that the Egyptian's well-known obsession with documenting "everything" would guarantee that such events would be recorded.
However, Egyptian history offers several known instances of concerted official attempts to "erase from human memory" certain undesirable and embarrassing people or events, e.g. the treatment accorded Hatshepsut, the first female Pharoah, or Akenahten (Amenhotep IV), who tried to replace the old gods (and more importantly, their priests who controlled the power and the loot) with a monotheistic religion. Their monuments, names and references to them were systematically scrubbed from almost every surface where they could be found.
Likewise, we now know that the official Egyptian records of Ramses II's "great victory" at Kadesh were a creatively slanted ancient example of state propaganda. Ancient Egypt was a totalitarian culture with an almost completely illiterate populace, and the Egyptian ruling class knew just as well as our present-day political elites that whoever writes the history controls the past, and thus the future.
It's no great stretch to believe that if an Egyptian pharaoh had really been defeated and humiliated as described in the Bible, he'd have spared no effort to wipe the evidence of it from existence and rewrite or sanitize the historical record to his advantage.
The other assumption upon which your argument is predicated is that our knowledge and archaeological evidence is sufficiently complete. I don't believe that it is.
I believe that despite the seemingly vast amount of information we have about past civilizations, far more has been destroyed or lost to the mists of time. While there is undoubtedly much that is still hidden and awaiting discovery, what we have is still only a small remnant of what once existed. Had the great libraries of Alexandria and Babylon not been destroyed our understanding of history might be very different today.
You noted that "The bible is full of references to the Tigris and Euphrates, and even Abraham’s home is said to be in Ur, which is in Iraq." However, as recently as a century-and-a-half or so ago, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, and even Homer's Troy were considered to be legends. Subsequent discoveries confirmed their historical reality, and since then many more "legendary" sites mentioned in the Bible have been identified. Who knows what discoveries lie in the future?
Re: Joseph’s tombs
Biblically, it is not inconsistent that Joseph had two tombs. As Vizier to Pharoah, Joseph was buried in a lavish tomb in Egypt. A couple hundred years later, when the Hebrews left during the Exodus, they took Joseph’s bones with them to be reinterred in the Promissed Land.
The Egyptian tomb attributed by archaeologist David Rohl to Joseph was empty and had been desecrated contemporaneously with the time of the Exodus.
Re: “from Saudi Arabia”???
The article says the Jews left from Egypt TO Saudi Arabia instead of the Sinai.
I’m not convinced that I’m right. I’m also far from convinced that I’m wrong.
If it happened like it was recounted, the Exodus should have ended the Golden Age of Egypt and it didn’t.
Plus Pharoah was killed in the pursuit of the Israelites according to the biblical account, and while there is no record of that happening, either, the dead Pharoah could not have been part of a grand coverup if the account is true.
My inclination is to believe that the Books of Moses simply are the first written documentation of what had been oral history passed down over the generations. It wasn’t intentionally false, but it wasn’t something directly dictated by the mouth of God, either.
That’s just my opinion, and those that have a different premise will certainly argue forever that the Exodus came from Egypt and that’s that.
I don’t think it matters in the overall scheme of things. I’d like to know a definitive answer, but I’m willing to remain somewhat uncertain indefinitely.
I am quite sure of this. If there was evidence of the Israelites being slaves in Egypt for 400 years and bringing the regime down in order to leave, we’d have some compelling evidence of it already, and no Egyptian official would be able to hide that evidence. That’s just not possible.
A major (possible) misconception is that Abram's (later, changed to Abraham) home was Ur in Iraq.
However, there is theory & evidence that "Ur of the Chaldees" was in the upper reaches of the Tigris & Euphrates.
The Chaldeans LATER moved toward southern Iraq, from what was their more northern homeland area at the presumed time of Abraham.
This would place them much closer to Harran, both physically & culturally, than if they had migrated from the Ur in southern Iraq.
Finding an event of a duration of probably weeks to months in a history of 4000 years is almost impossible.
It is further impeded by the basic assumptions of Egyptology. The accepted Egyptian time-line is based on three “pillars” which Egyptologists claim to know. One of them was/is that the Exodus and Moses’ interaction with Pharaoh occurred during Ramses II reign. This mistaken pillar was a mere assumption on the part of the father of Egyptology, Champollion, who reasoned that the most important personage of the Old Testament had to have interacted with the most famous of the builder Pharaohs, Ramses the Great. He was wrong.
Ramses the Great, on his wall of victories, recounted how he had conquered the city of Jerusalem... which would not have been possible had he been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.
However, if you reset the accepted Egyptian time-line a few hundred years and place the Exodus about 300 years prior to Ramses II reign, suddenly you find everything reported in the Bible falling into place. You learn that people mentioned in the Amarna letters sent to Pharaoh Tutankhenamen and his father include people such as Jesse, the Young Lion (an appelation of David), and Saul and Jonathon. Events described in the Amarna letters recount the stories also told in the Bible.
Using the current, accepted Egyptian time-line to seek the Exodus is like looking for George Washington and the Revolutionary war in 21st Century America... and concluding they never happened because you can’t find them in 2000.
As for the plagues of the Exodus destroying Egypt’s golden age, Egypt survived many disasters and had a bureaucracy in place that was flexible enough to recover.
That’s interesting and I guess possibly true, but the Tigris River comes out of Turkey and Euphrates out of Syria, and they really don’t come close enough to each other to mention in the same sentence until they’re in Iraq.
Another thing worth considering is that both the Tigris and Euphrates are mentioned in the first couple chapters of Genesis, which was pre-Noah’s flood.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a catastrophic worldwide flood would result in the same rivers being there post-flood.
In the efforts to achieve full transparency, I don’t believe that there was a global flood as recounted in Genesis. I think the legend was the result of a local flood in early history. It may have seemed global to them at the time, but it makes no sense, is not supported by the geological evidence, and certainly not the biological evidence.
The Tigris and Euphrates were approximately where they are before the flood that didn’t happen, and where they are today.
The whole origin of the Israelites, where the Garden of Eden was, etc., has its roots to Iraq. At least that’s what I’m currently thinking.
Where does the Gilgamesh Epic come from that many biblical scholars use to suggest that the Noah Flood is true?
Iraq.
This section that you mention was poorly worded. I am not sure if you are familiar with the book of Exodus, but the story starts in Egypt, moves out of Egypt to Sinai / Northwest Arabia, then back to Egypt, then back to Sinai / Northwest Arabia. The reason I typed Sinai / Northern Arabia is that is where the debate is. Did the Israelites move to Sinai or to Northwest Arabia. This is a big debate between those that believe in a literal Exodus. So the Exodus was from Egypt, but moves to one of the two other areas.
It would be most interesting to do some research and see if higher critical theory enjoys its monopoly at “prestige” universities in part because of moslem money.
There is an active suppression of Israelite history by Arabs, and there are Israeli archaeologist who do not believe in the Biblical Exodus (Finkelstein, Silberman to name 2 prominent); but there are also very good archaeologist / historians who do believe in the Exodus or a form of it (Dever, Kitchen, Hoffmeier). There is a very rigorous debate on this issue right now (actually over the last 30 years). I have read most of the major scholarly books on this from all the sides (I plan on reading the rest over the next 2 years), I think the side that advocates the historical Exodus has the superior argument (based on the evidence of chronology, written documentation, physical evidence, linguistics, etc). Here is my disclosure though, I am a Bible believing Christian.
Here are some real good books on the pro-side:
Hoffmeier: Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition
Hoffmeier: Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition
Kitchen: On the Reliability of the Old Testament
Thanks, I’ll see if they’re at my local library.
This stuff fascinates me and it’s made complicated by what they’ve been told to believe instead of an objective analysis of what we really know.
The truth should be out there, and it’s unlikely to make everyone with an interest in the subject completely happy.
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