Did the Biblical Exodus ever happen?

Actually, the Via Nova Traiana ran 350 km. from Southern Syria, through the provincial capital of Arabia Felix at Bostra, past Petra to Aila on the Gulf of Aqaba.
In the 4th century, the Roman legion, Legio X Fretensis was stationed here.By the way Buz, the Gulf of Aqaba is pictured on the right hand side of the image you linked to. It is the right-hand gulf of the Red Sea which , together with the left-hand Gulf of Suez, brackets the Sinai peninsula.Aila is at the apex of the Gulf of Aqaba.Your image is a bit misleading since it shows mostly the mountainous tip of the Sinai.Cheers

Hi again Buz,The Midianites were nomads too. As such their 'lands' may have been wherever they pastured their herds. According to what I have read some Biblical scholars see the Midianites as a group of tribes with a common culture rather than as a kingdom with set borders.Some scholars put Midian within Sinai, others place it across Sinai and to the East of it. Currently it's a matter open to debate.

Hi Buz,Just a little heads up mate. You cite the Bible as your evidence.The point is that this topic is about substantiating the Biblical Exodus story.Logically, you really can't cite the Bible as evidence for itself - or any of its stories.The point here is to discuss any extra-Biblical evidence which might corroborate the Exodus.Has anyone here read about the supposed similarities between the Exodus story and the Hyksos expulsion?
Hyksos is apparently just another Egyptian term for 'Asiatic'.
Could the Israelites have been the Hyksos? Could they have been one of many groups of people settled in Egypt during a period of foreign occupation?The Egyptians saw the Hyksos as foreign occupiers and thus their leaving of Egypt interpreted was later told of as an 'expulsion', giving it the historical resonance of a victory for the Egyptians.The Israelites (or as the Egyptians migt have called them and other Asiatic 'aliens' - the 'Hyksos') would in turn have depicted it as a flight from persecution rather than an expulsion. Thus their 'escape' would then take on the dimensions of their own 'victory'?Just some thoughts.Cheers

Hello again Buz,I'm a Catholic myself, so I don't have a "...vested interest in non-accountability to a higher power." In fact I believe in personal accountability to God.That out of the way, your own statement underscores your lack of evidence.You rightly stated that human waste had to be buried? Waste for nearly 2 million people is no little thing. Burial pits should literally be strewed all along their route. Also fire pits would have been a necessity - especially at night. Temperature drops quickly in that part of the world when the sun sets. In addition, despite having only mana to eat the Israelites, like any other people, must have had garbage - i.e. material no longer useful to them no? Broken pots, old cloth, broken tools or even lost items dropped along the way like coins (especially helpful in dating the period), carvings, bones of dead animals (they had flocks remember?), small implements.....And all this would have to be in rather great quantities given the supposedly enormous size of the Israelite host.Has anything like that been found along any of the proposed march routes?If not then one must ask why.Several possibilities present themselves:1. the Exodus is ot historical and just an illustrative, allegorical story.2.) the routes often touted do not describe the actual route taken.3.) the numbers of the Israelites described in the Bible are typical ancient over-indulgences of the facts. The number of Israelites was much smaller.4.) Perhaps the Israelites did not travel in one enormous group but rather in several smaller groups along different routes? This is a tactic often taken by large groups of nomadic peoples so that no one large host consumes the available forage in one area. Mongols and other steppe peoples tended to do this a lot when moving their enormous hordes about the steppes.
Note that even if the Israelites ate only mana, they had to have an enormous amount of animal stock - asses, mules, horses, camels, cattle, sheep, goats etc. These definitely could not live on mana.However each of the alternatives above (except 1 of course) presents the same problems. Lack of physical trace evidence as I and others have already pointed out.I would personally love it if such physical evidence were found. Alas such evidence does not currently exist.Wyatt & cos. 'evidence' is rather subjective and certainly open to multiple other interpretations. Nor does his grasp of physical geography or the mechanics of erosion jive with the evidence he offers.

Buz,I belong to a historical recreation group (SCA). If you've ever ground grain to make flour as I have then you would certainly realise that no mill stone, bowl or other utensil is going to last 40 years. The Israelites may have had divine guidance and largess gifted to them, but there is no scriptural evidence they were gifted with high-tech artifacts that would stand 40 years+ wear and tear (yes that's 40 years and MORE. unless you are stating the Israelites took brand new implements with them for their journey?).

Buz,Archaeology and simple, basic archaeological principles aren't silly.If we can still find middens today from that era or older, why shouldn't we expect to find middens left by an enormous concentration of people?Middens aren't latrines by the way. They are piles of refuse and can contain anything from shucked oyster shells to broken artifacts and the other expected detritus of any group of people concentrated in one area.Erosion would account for the dispersal of some middens assuredly, but at least a great many more would survive even in a slightly dispersed arrangement. The sheer volume of waste of a couple of million people are astounding. It isn't just modern society that has rubbish dumps.Cheers

Shards of pottery, small loseable items like coins, beads (parts of necklaces), old leather thongs (leather would dry but not rot in such an environment), broken wooden hafts of tools, broken metallic objects of copper, bronze or iron, small musical instruments like flutes (wood, bone etc.), and best of all graves complete with grave goods.Let's not forget that in forty years there are bound to have been a good many deaths amongst a group of 2 million people. Graves and grave goods should be fairly common place. How many of those Native American camp sites boasted a population of 2 million people? Go ahead and check and get back to me with the largest population estimate for such a camp site.The only site in the AMericas that even approached such numbers was probably Tenochitlan - the site of CITY of a stone-fashioning, metal smelting, advanced mathematics capable peoples.A bit different from a North American 'camp site' wouldn't you say? We get back to numbers again. How can you compare groups of people numbering in the hundreds to a group purported to number 2 million??
The odds of artifacts and graves being found increase exponentially with increase in population and length of stay in a particular area. That's why ancient cities numbereing tens of thousands of people or more yield more finds than occassional camp sites of a few hundred nomadic hunter/gatherers. Where does it say that in the Bible please? Doesn't it state that the generation that left Egypt would not see the Promised Land? True, however there is no indication that ordinary people rather than those of the lines of the Prophets or Kings lived anywhere near the same amount. In fact, the very idea that the Bible singles out such individuals and notes their excessively long lifespans implies that these were not ordinary people but the special friends of God.Or would you dispute that?

Hi Buz,Sorry, but your own example of the historical revisionism of the Egyptians doesn't help your cause. Even when trying to eradicate every tyrace of one person (like Hatshepsut or Akhenaten) the Egyptians could not prevent modern archaeology from uncovering more than just trace evidence of them.Now you're saying that ALL the traces of an entire group of people numbering around 2 million were able to be obliterated by another group?And by the way, Petra was never inhabityed by more than a few thousand people at any one time. It simply wasn't capable of sustaining that number. That's why the Nabateans constructed sophisticated water catchement systems to support even those few thousand.Cheers

Once again I challenge you to provide evidence of such mass plundering of graves.I'll play devils advocate for a moment and assume this was done. Later peoples found every single Israelite grave and removed the corpses and grave goods. Yes?Where did they put the bones? Where did they stash the grave goods?You're asking us to believe that all the bones, alll the distinctive grave artifacts just simply vanished by force of will?

These were the chariot wheels claimed to have been found by Wyatt? So where are they? Why has he not submitted them for testing? Where are the detailed photos? Where are accompanying artifacts (chariot wheels without ANYTHING else around them?)? Where is the GPS coordinate for the site? Why isn't it registered with the Egyptian Government?It is people like Wyatt who bring disrepute to Biblical archaeology and therefore to our faith.They are charlatans seking to agrandise themselves and not God.

In addition, the rock claimed as the rock at Horeb is not at all unusual and I provided many links to similar split rock formations from all over the world.[/qs]These other formations are straw-men examples, Jar. They have no corroborating relationship to the region in this discussion nor do they have anything resembling a waterflow. Even if they did, what would it prove relative to this debate? [/qs]Well Buzz, I am using a Douay Rheims Bible. Here's what it says: And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel: Let them turn and encamp over against Phihahiroth which is between Magdal and the sea over against Beelsephon: you shall encamp before it upon the sea.
And Pharao will say of the children of Israel: They are straitened in the land, the desert hath shut them in.
And I shall harden his heart, and he will pursue you: and I shall be glorified in Pharao, and in all his army: and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord. And they did so.
And it was told the king of the Egyptians that the people was fled: and the heart of Pharao and of his servants was changed with regard to the people, and they said: What meant we to do, that we let Israel go from serving us?
So he made ready his chariot, and took all his people with him.
--- Exodus 14: 1-6Note the bolded part of the quote. Here God specifically says that it is Pharaoh that will think that the Israelites are confused and entrapped, not that they actually are.

Clearly not enough? No. Not at all. Islam does indeed support the fact that the whole of Exodus is as much a part of their religion as any other part of the OT. I'm surprised you don't know that having a copy of the Quran??In fact Islam embraces not only Exodus but all of the Torah (or Tawrat as it is called in Islam). They also do not deny the Covenant of God with Israel.They do state though, like us Christians, that Israel lost the specific title to being the 'Chosen People'.Even a fanatical Islamist would not deny the Tawrat. That would be blasphemy.

What you now seem to be saying Buz, is that there is no way of pinpointing the Exodus crossing using todays geography?If that's so then why do you spend so much time presenting current geography as evidence of the Exodus?

Hi Arachnophillia,I did read that section too. However it seemed to me that the Israelites were railing at Moses for getting them into the fix of having their backs to the sea and the Pharao's army coming in quickly for the kill.They weren't afraid of being lost in the wilderness, but of dying IN it, murdered by the Egyptians in an alien land which they could not even call home.That's how I read it anyway.I'm quite willing to be corrected, but I honestly can't see how those two verses imply that the Israelites were actually lost.How could they be lost? God had given them specific directions:"Let them turn and encamp over against Phihahiroth which is between Magdal and the sea over against Beelsephon: you shall encamp before it upon the sea."Presumably the names were familliar to Moses, if not also to the Isarelites?But if I've missed something from the original Greek or Hebrew texts please let me know.Edited by MiguelG, : Added conclusion to post.

Hey Ringo,I also pointed out to Buzz that the Bible only records the extreme longevity of a relatively few people of importance - kings, prophets etc.There is no verse that states or implies that people in general lived longer then. In fact the very point the Bible makes is to stress this longevity - something which is obviously miraculous when compared to a normal human lifespan.