AZPaul3 writes:
Maybe so, but how could we ever hope to identify such evidence? Let's assume the biblical Exodus was real. 4000+- years of weathering, nomadic tribes, marauding armies (ancient and modern) would hopelessly obliterate any signs and contaminate anything that would have remained.
i do not think this is the right approach. while finding remains is
unlikely, it is not
impossible. for example:
Tents, poles, rope, clothing, anything of an organic nature could be expected to wither away after all this time, even in a desert. Pottery shards and metallurgy would be good ones if it wasn't for the fact that the Israelites were not the only wanderers of the Sinai. The Bedouin had criss-crossed every inch of the area for hundreds of years either side of the various proposed Exodus time-lines leaving their own scatterings of pottery and other debris. Can anyone tell the difference between a shard of an Israelite pot made of the desert clays and a Bedouin shard of the same source and age? Can the mostly disintegrated remains of a tent pole be identified as Israelite vs Bedouin?
yes. there are no bedouin remains of the same age, as the bedouin are a modern group of people. however, even assuming you meant something like "canaanite", the answer remains, yes. there are ways. inscriptions are a big hint -- anything that talks about yahweh is probably related to the israelites. anything that said "moshe" or "aharon" or "yehoshua" of the right time and place. really any inscription leading us to believe that some people related to the people in the bible were there at the time.
other remains could easily be left as well. the great thing about deserts is that they can just as easily preserve things as they can destroy. the earliest egyptian mummies were simply buried in the desert sands. we could easily find things like grave sites, garbage dumps, etc.
the old mantra is that absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
except that sometimes it is. the problem isn't so much that we can't find these types of things in the sinai desert. we can't find them anywhere. and if we did, it wouldn't fit with what we already know from the evidence we do have. but the simple
textual evidence is that the exodus was a story invented relatively late into first temple period.
אָרַח
™ Version 4.2
