Brian writes "Of course, the Israelites were never in Egypt and the Exodus certainly never happened..." - With all due respect, I wish I was as certain of that as you are...please let me know how you know this for a fact.
I thought everyone who has studied this knows it for a fact, but unstead of me repeating myself you can read my opinions
here
You probably will invoke the lack of archeological evidence and/or the lack of Egyptian writings of what would have been a great event (albeit a negative and humiliating one for the Egyptian side - that in itself may hint as to why there is no Egyptian description for posterity about the Exodus, i.e. why *should* they have recorded this defeat by a group of slaves and their invisible Gd).
This is a tired old argument, no offence intended, but the major problem with this argument is that the Egyptians really wouldn’t have needed to record this defeat for there to have been any evidence of it. Now it doesn’t really matter which pharaoh we say was the pharaoh of the Exodus, the Bible doesn’t actually say who it is but if the defeat was as enormous as the Bible claims, if two or three million people suddenly got up and wandered out of Egypt one day then it would leave a fingerprint of some sort in the archaeological record. There are none.
People seem to forget that the Egyptian Empire didn’t stop at the Red Sea, it encompassed Palestine as well, so the Israelites had no where to run too.
An approach that should be considered is that of Israelite national memory. The Bible speaks of approx 600,000 military-age men taking part in the exodus; this extrapolates to 2 million people.
You do know it is humanly impossible for a group to grow from 70 up to 2-3 million in 400 years? It is even more incredulous for it to happen in 215 years if we take another tradition’s record.
Let's assume the Bible is a forgery (all or in part)that was written at the latest by 300BC (the Septuagint "fixes" Exodus) by some commitee. The commitee will go out on a limb by writing about this mass exodus that has "always" been a part of the national history of the Jews and then say to them, in effect, "this is what happened to us and it's always been part of our national memory/identity". More than one person would surely stand up and say, "hey, how come I've never heard about this ancient history that we Jews are supposed to have had?? *MY* grandfather never told me about this identity-forming event..."
Almost every culture that I have studied has an ‘origins’ myth, these explain where the ethnic group came from, when these ancient myths were made up the population were not as critical of these tales as we modern humans are, they had much more important things on their minds.
In addition, if this story had been contrived, why would the Jews willingly bring upon themselves the very difficult obligations involved in observing the Passover festival. Ask any jew (especially the wife!) today what is involved in this (triple-cleaning of the house, kashering the stove, passover-only dishes, passover-only food, no bread/beer/pasta etc.)and you will appreciate that *something* happened in the past to cause this people (even non-religious Jews) to commemorate each spring without fail. Jews have been called many things, but gullible or unquestioning or stupid has not been among them - see the talmudic dialectics for example).
Many cultures have obligations like this, it doesn’t mean that the celebrated event is true. Does the celebration of Xmas mean that there was a virgin birth in which God’s son was born, does the Easter celebration mean that Jesus really did rise from the dead, do people worshipping Jesus as the Messiah promised in the Tanakh mean that he is the Messiah? I think not. Cultures have festivals, it doesn’t follow that observing these festivals mean that the event actually happened.
Perhaps something happened, but it certainly didn’t happen the way the Hebrew Bible claims it did.
Jews rarely agree on much - the old joke about how America with 280 million people does just fine with 2 major political parties
Well we don’t want to confuse Americans by giving them more than two choices do we, imagine if they had more than two at the last election! (Just joking guys before you lynch me)
while little Israel with approx 5 million Jews needs some 30 political parties holds a kernel of truth... happy new year to all.
If you would like to discuss the historicity of the Exodus we should really continue the discussion at the thread I linked to at the beginning of this post since it is off topic here. I would welcome the opportunity to resurrect the discussion of the Exodus.
Happy New year to you as well.
[This message has been edited by Brian, 12-30-2003]
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