Did the Biblical Exodus ever happen?

It's actually surprising how solid the idea of the ominiscient, omnipotentness of god is, given what actually happens in the Old Testament.He makes mistakes, he hardens hearts, he is fooled by various tricks, his mind is changed, he has to travel to get places and can't always make his will known.In short, he is far from omniscient and nowhere near omnipotent. He is a very powerful creature as described, but hardly the last word in power.

those are some pretty scary numbers. I remember reading that in actual fact, if the numbers spoken of were to have realistically travelled according to what was possible back then over known terrain in known groups, then for the forty odd years they supposedly camped out in the desert, not once would the entire procession be able to stop in one place - as you say, by the time night falls and the guys at the front stop and sleep for eight hours, the guys at the back are only just arriving at a campsite...which is now vacated by the guys at the front.So out in this desert, where they were being relentlessly persued by an army at a snails pace which allowed them apparently decades-worth of potty breaks, if they actually all stopped at once it would be a semi-permanent dwelling-mass as large as a whole country/state of the USA which would have left an indelible mark on the countryside. In short, we'd be picking up middens, cartwheels, firepits, pottery, bones, blankets, skeletons, lost socks, false eyes, wooden legs and all the other detritus that humanity drags around with itself. These sites would be there for centuries, millenia even.So...where are they?quite apart from the fleeing jews, you've got three things happening:1) egypt has been decimated by about a decade of famine and pestilence, culminating in the death of some large part of the population (anything up to let's say 1/4 of the population under 18)
2) egypt just lost faraoh and his armies
3) and on top of that, egypt just lost it's captive workforce, the guys responsible for planting crops, repairing buildings, emptying toilets, manual labour and all the dirty jobs that a civilization like egypt requires to function on a day-to-day basisso, you've decimated the (non-jew) population. you've destroyed her armies and her ruler and gelded the workforce - AFTER a decade of let's say "biological warfare".so, what do you think happens to a country with no workforce, no soldiers, no leaders and no telephone sanitizers?that's right - total collapse. civil war, bloodshed, extinction.So, er, where's this period of failure where the egypt we know and love ceased to be for, oh, let's say 300 years at least, if not for good?

Hi Buz, i would like to have an answer to my question Message 26 which talks about evidence that will definitely have lasted thousands of years, but I think you really need to answer fraco at Message 29 where he has done some rather good back of the envelope calculations to estimate, for example, purely the number of goats that would have to be slaughtered.Now I don't know about what you think about such things, but broken pottery, knives, bones, campfires, tools and more will be found even today from such an exodus. It is inevitable.Unlike millions of years old fossils (which we also still find relatively intact), such pieces will not have decayed by anything near as much over a mere 3000 years or so. Even paper, in certain conditions, survives that long.So please, whilst you're talking about "evidence" such as your hokey rock and doctored pictures of "golden calves" that are no such thing, ask yourself the simple question of where all the detritus from the jews went.If they were fleeing, then they would drop lots of stuff and not pick it up - it would all stay there potentially forever. If they were not fleeing, they would stop, make camp and make a mess (which would remain, even if they cleaned up after themselves).Either way, there would literally be mountains of evidence.so where is it?Whilst you talk about "disastrous" results, please realise what you're saying (that's the gist of my question).