Did the Biblical Exodus ever happen?

actually, i suspect the first thing you'd do, being a good scientist, is get some geologist friends to look at it and try to find problems. then you'd likely do some more research, write a study, and submit it for peer review. well, yes, because you're looking at the physical evidence instead of the biblical evidence.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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אָרַח

ah, gotcha. cheers.

quote:

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וְאָמַר פַּרְעֹה לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, נְבֻכִים הֵם בָּאָרֶץ; סָגַר עֲלֵיהֶם, הַמִּדְבָּר

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and pharaoh will say of the children of israel, "they are confused in the land, the desert has shut on them"

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yes, that's what it says. and the very next verse says that god will then "strengthen pharaoh's heart". the implication is very much that pharaoh is being tricked. however, short of a miracle, pharaoh's assessment is correct. they are trapped, enough that the israelites comment on it a few verses down.

quote:

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And they said unto Moses: 'Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to bring us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we spoke unto thee in Egypt, saying: Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it were better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.'

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-- Exodus 14:11,12

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so even the israelites think they're trapped. the only reason they're not is, as i said above, a miracle: god parting the waters, and allowing them to walk out of egypt on newly dry land.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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אָרַח

i think what you're missing is a pretty subtle point, and not so much to do with the language. it's more to do with the implications of the text, and context.god did indeed give them very specific directions. those directions, evidently, led them into a bottleneck such that their only way forward was across a body of water. and the egyptians blocked the way back. for all intents and purposes they were trapped, and by god's own directions and actions. all, evidently, as part of a demonstration of god's power. god is setting it up so that only a miracle will save them.this is quite consistent with the rest of exodus, leading up to this point. pharaoh is quite content to let moshe's people go, until god hardens his heart. then god sends a plague to punish egypt, a miracle to demonstrate that god is in total control. he does this ten times, each time with pharaoh relenting, until god hardens his heart again. god is essentially screwing over the israelites, intentionally, to prove a point.and this is the culmination. he traps them at the edge of a sea, with the egyptians ready to very literally kill them, hardening pharaohs heart one last time... and then provides a most illogical escape route. right across the sea, on dry land. and then kills the egyptians, for good measure.it's all building drama. it's part of the story. the only reason they weren't trapped was god's miracle.now, far be it from me to support buzsaw, but if you're looking for geological features, they should such that there would be no escape route. of course, i think he's looking entirely in the wrong place.

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אָרַח

as do a lot of "creationists". i wonder why that is. doesn't it kind of remove the whole point if the supposedly miraculous is easily explainable by natural phenomena? where does god go in all this?

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אָרַח

okay, perhaps that's correct. chariots considered, the sea itself might have been more than enough to trap them, geographically speaking. the point i was mostly intending to dispute was the difference between actually being trapped, and pharaoh merely thinking they were trapped.

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אָרַח

okay, yes, that's probably correct.

as i understand it, buzsaw isn't allowed to post until he gets actual evidence. or, at least, that's how he tells it. so he's responded to me in a PM, which i will now post here: this is not actually what i was talking about. the issues is that יַם-סוּף is read traditionally as "the red sea" we know today, but i'm not aware of any particular reason to think it actually means the red sea. even most literalist/fundamentalist readings make it the gulf of suez (or, iirc, for wyatt fans, the gulf of aqaba) which is much smaller than the red sea. but even this is quite out of the way for fleeing israelites. you'd be looking much further north, and to a body of water that almost certainly no longer exists. i think it's a little ambiguous. i do think god intentionally trapped them in a literal sense, but that this had more to do with the pursuing egyptians than with the geography.

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אָרַח