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patrick457
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And regarding the ‘thousands’, I dug up a couple of posts (made by me) about a year ago. Sure comes in handy, these posts.
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patrick457
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chuckfrmvalyfrg
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Rolltide ,
Can you help me out here , on the archaeolgical evidence part ? Why should we be surprised at a dearth of archaeological evidene for the Jewish Exodus ? Even if the 600k estimate is accurate , how much archaeological evidence would a nomadic people wandering the Sinai ( a desert , correct ) for what , 40 years , actually leave ? When I read . " wander " , I don’t think permanent settlements . And what does a permanent settlement even look like for nomads ? Tents ?!?
I read somewhere else about an explanation for this lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus , but where exactly escapes me . Thanks !
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melbanglican
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There would almost certainly be some evidence. Apparently, archaeologists have regularly found evidence of ancient Bedouin all over the Sinai.
After all, 600,000+ people would leave a lot of refuse and excrement, bodies(lots of them, according to Exodus), rubbish and many semi-durable items (broken equipment, dead livestock, etc.).
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steve53
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Patrick- that could go a long way in explaining Josephus’ very large numbers.
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Contarini
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I think it’s pretty clear that the 600,000 number can’t be taken literally, so I wouldn’t base much on that assumption. Quite possibly the historical event we know as the Exodus seemed fairly trivial to the Egyptians. (And yes, that would mean not only that the numbers we have are not correct but that the Exodus didn’t happen exactly as described in the Bible.)Friends
I’ve often heard claims that there are no Egyptian claims of an Exodus of Jews at any time. I didn’t know it was so massively silent that there are literally no records at all. How can ~600 000 people just up and leave with no record? That’s about 1/4 or 1/5 of the population of Egypt. These great imperials recorded every last event, every last deal, on stone or clay tablets that we find, still relatively polished like samples in Mesopotamia, after 3500 years.
We cannot claim that the evidence must be lost. Where is it?
I’m also not sure how you know that the Egyptians recorded “every last event.” They recorded events that they had some reason to record. Why would they record the escape of some foreign laborers? It was an embarrassing incident best forgotten, from their perspective. Ancient inscriptions are mostly propaganda and serve the goal of glorifying the empire. You can never take them at face value.
It is in fact just barely possible, in my opinion, that the Stele of Merneptah is the Egyptian account of what we call the “Exodus.” Granted, that’s not the dominant interpretation (except by those who think that the “Exodus” never happened), since Israel is mentioned together with various city-states of Canaan. So people assume that Israel was in Canaan by tjhen (conservatives claim that this confirms the Biblical account; skeptics claim that it best fits with the view that Israel was never in Egypt at all). But if, as the Biblical account indicates, the Egyptians saw Israel as a potential ally with other invaders, and if they recognized that the Israelites had come from Canaan, and if they did send a punitive expedition after the Israelites, then it’s conceivable that they might declare victory (regardless of how this corresponded to reality) and lump Israel together with various Canaanite enemies.
Two curious points about the stele that have aroused much controversy:
- Israel isn’t referred to with the marker that indicates a territory or city, but with the marker that indicates a people group; people argue over just what this means, but it could be interpreted as saying that they were a semi-nomadic group without a fixed territory at this point.
- The stele says that Israel has been wasted and that “its seed is no more.” Apparently this is a formulaic phrase that occurs elsewhere and generally means that the grain supplies of the enemy people had been destroyed. However, it’s tempting to connect it to the genocide described at the beginning of Exodus.
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Contarini
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Or the priestly writers went through great detail describing a census that they attributed to Moses.
Yes, I know this offends many people’s view of the Bible.
Edwin
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Contarini
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Yes. You are assuming that if the Bible isn’t 100% accurate down to the numbers recorded (which were extremely hard to record and transmit accurately and very easy to mess up through scribal error, apart from the tendency of ancient people to inflate numbers wildly in the first place), then it’s worthless as a historical source. That makes no sense at all to a historian. Historians used flawed sources all the time. There are, from a secular point of view, no other kind. (And I’m not sure that Christians are bound to believe otherwise–to me the glory of our faith is that God does use flawed human instruments.)
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sojo
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This is true! And further, the Egyptians were notorious in their censorship. There are plenty of incidences of names and possibly old deities being scratched out by the new guard, aren’t there? I remember that in my various ancient civilization. studies.
It is also a point to consider that ancient peoples seldom recorded their “history” in the way we think of history as moderns. It was certainly more of a form of recording stuff as propaganda to bolster the reining power. Modern “objective” history is a relatively new idea, and one could argue that it is still most imperfect in its objectivity.
One way to test the existence of an historical event is to see if it had a big impact on a society. When relatively scared and powerless men suddenly go on fire for a crazy cause (rising from the dead???) - we think, hmmmm… something significant happened. When the Jewish people continue to celebrate the exodus and the Passover in modern times, despite persecution, diaspora, WWII holocaust… we think, hmmmm… something must have made a serious mark on those people! I have attended many Passovers (I’m a Jewish convert to Catholicism), and the racial memory of that event is still very present - the event is quite profound.
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NotWorthy
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How about if I say, “The Divinely Inspired authors went through a great detail describing a census of the people of Israel”. I’m not sure if they would be divinely inspired to mis-interpret the numbers of the census.
I know this offends many people’s view of the Bible.
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NotWorthy
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No, I am assuming that the poster in #16 is using both sides of a logical argument. In one sentence, he defends the exaggeration of numbers in the Bible, in the next he defends the accuracy of the Bible. He seems like he’s trying to have it both ways.
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Arizona_Mike
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Interesting information, thanks!
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promethius
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I’m neither calling it in favor of literalism nor totally metaphorical. What I’m asking, in effect, is why one source which is openly known to be biased (the Egyptian records) is trusted as archeological and historical, even though many of their writings are considered religious, while the writings of another religious group and their (possible) bias as to numbers or significance of events is totally rejected as impossible to be true unless the other (admittedly biased) source agrees with it.The utility and veracity of the Scriptures as historical documents is still very much an open question. Only a little of what is written therein has so far been verified by archaeology (see Cline, ‘Biblical Archaeology’, for a quick but informative demonstration).
First off, it’s not the population count that I’m doubting, but the translation or recording of it. Another post after mine already addressed the issue of translation between Hebrew and English. This is the same problem with 6 day creation literalists… the translators who wrote the scriptures from their original languages sometimes made distinctions of words and terms where no such distinction can be made. 600,000 men is a prime example of that. We simply don’t know if this number is accurate or not…
Regarding the archaeological evidence, that was my point. There IS NO such evidence for the Exodus. Hundreds of professionals have poured a great number of hours into exploring all the traditional routes that the Israelites might have taken and have found nothing.
Much as I’m sure that we would all like to regard the Scripture as infallible in FACT, as well as Faith and Morals,it just ain’t necessarily so. Historians in the Ancient world did not really write their history in the same manner as a modern historian.
This Biblical Literalism seems to many of us around the Western world like such a hard right, fundamentalist American Protestant attitude. Is it widespread in Catholicism? Moreover, I personally don’t understand why it’s so essential to people that the Bible be regarded in this way. For me, the message is far more important than the (beautiful) packaging in which it is contained. The essence of God’s Word is to be found in Ex. 20:2-17, Mk. 12:27-31, Mt. 5:1-11, 22:35-41 and Lk. 18:19-20. Why fuss over what Rabbi Hillel described as ‘commentary’?
Peace be with you.
If we regard the Bible as a historical document, yes, it has some verification that needs to be done, but that doesn’t change the fact that the scriptures are a form of historical record in and of themselves.
An example of where historians give this single source history credit is in the claim that Easter is a revamping of the pagan celebration of Eostre… even though Eostre is only mentioned in ONE primary source document by the Venerable Bede and he was writing about a sect of paganism which had died out two centuries before his time (in other words, he was very likely mistaken). This ONE source is considered all the proof necessary to slander Catholic celebration of Pascha, but the Bible can’t POSSIBLY be considered to be a historical source for ANYTHING.
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starsmurf
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The number of Jews who took part in the Exodus has been a little “inflated” shall we say. In the actual group led by Moses there probably only about two hundred, as they could not have survived with less than ten animals per person and the wells of Siani could not support more than 2000 animals. Other groups left at different times and met up with this group in the wilderness.Friends
I’ve often heard claims that there are no Egyptian claims of an Exodus of Jews at any time. I didn’t know it was so massively silent that there are literally no records at all. How can ~600 000 people just up and leave with no record? That’s about 1/4 or 1/5 of the population of Egypt. These great imperials recorded every last event, every last deal, on stone or clay tablets that we find, still relatively polished like samples in Mesopotamia, after 3500 years.
We cannot claim that the evidence must be lost. Where is it?
The huge number given is first of all a way of making Israel seem like a powerful nation, even at that point. The other reason is that the Exodus is the defining event of the Jewish faith. The Israelites would want their ancestors to have taken part in this pivotal moment in the Jewish faith.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on this, as I’m trying to write a book. I’ve found explanations for the ten plagues and several of the events in Egypt and on the Exodus. If it would help you, PM me and I’ll send you a basic outline. Believe me, the findings are really interesting and show that the events described are true, historical descriptions!
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NotWorthy
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Why do you need to write a book to explain the ten plagues?
Chapter 1 - There were 10 plagues.
Chapter 2 - They were caused by God to convince the Egyptians to release the Jews.
Chapter 3 - Conclusion - God is Great!
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Contarini
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First of all, you seem to think “archaeological” is some kind of merit badge. It just means “a physical artifact that has been determined to date from a certain past era.” Books can be archaeological artifacts: the Dead Sea Scrolls are an obvious example. For that matter, a medieval Torah Scroll constitutes archeological evidence. But of what? Of the fact that medieval Jews knew the Torah and valued it enough to create an elaborate, expensive scroll for ritual use. It doesn’t constitute archeological evidence for the historicity of the Exodus: nor do the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So when people say “the Merneptah Stele is archeological evidence and the Torah isn’t,” they’re simply saying that we can be pretty sure the Merneptah Stele dates from the 13th century B.C. On the other hand, the earliest real archeological evidence for the Torah that I’m aware of is from the Hellenistic period (there are earlier finds that include phrases that are similar to those found in the Torah, but of course these blessings or legal principles or whatever could have been passed down independently for some time). Everyone agrees that the Torah was in existence by the 2nd century B.C. Before that we are working on more indirect evidence. That’s not some kind of ideological bias or value judgment. That’s just the state of the evidence.
So the question is: how much do we trust a literary text of whose exact date we can’t be sure, when we can’t find archeological evidence to back it up?
I think that many historians are too suspicious of literary evidence, and that secular historians of the Biblical era tend to be particularly egregious offenders in this regard. Conservatives like to point out that there have been a number of Biblical claims (like the existence of a group called the “Hittites,” or the name “Belshazzar” for the person in charge of Babylon when Cyrus captured it) that were widely disbelieved and turned out to be accurate. The people who simply dismiss the historicity of the Bible are guilty of serious prejudice, in my opinion.
But it remains true that an obelisk set up by a Pharaoh in 1200 B.C. gives us much more reliable information about what happened in 1200 B.C. than a text that could was very likely written hundreds (conceivably close to a thousand) years later. That doesn’t mean that we take the obelisk at face value. Of course it’s royal propaganda. When Merneptah says, “Israel has been defeated” we can’t be sure that the Egyptians really defeated the Israelites. We can’t even be 100% sure that they fought the Israelites, though that seems likely. But we can be sure that there were Israelites around by 1200 B.C. (Or actually not quite, since there’s always the question of how to transliterate Egyptian writing–some claim that the hieroglyph is referring to “Jezreel,” or that it’s a completely different word referring to Libyans. So archeology certainly has its own uncertainties. However, assuming that we’ve determined provenance and transliterated the word correctly, the bias of the stele doesn’t prevent it telling us something.)
But on the other hand, when the Bible says that there were Philistines around in the time of Abraham, it is quite possible that the Biblical authors said this because they knew about Philistines living in that area much later, and either used the term loosely for “the people living on the southern part of the Mediterranean coastline” or anachronistically assumed that the same people must have lived their earlier. So the reference doesn’t give us evidence as to when the people we know as Philistines moved into the area.
Historians tend to be very suspicious of anything that the source is clearly trying to make us believe. One of the major historical criteria could be called “the lady doth protest too much.” If your source goes on and on about how important it is to do something, chances are it’s because not many people were doing it. If it gives you a very long story to explain why a certain person’s actions were honorable and above-board (David’s involvement or non-involvement with the killing of Abner, for instance), you figure that there must have been a pretty strong belief that the person in question was actually guilty, and you wonder if maybe they were guilty and the author is giving you propaganda. And so on. Historians prefer to look for the things that are assumed or conceded, or even the things that the author seems to be trying to hide. Yes, this can be a tricky business. But it’s not simply a matter of anti-Biblical bias. It’s a matter of basic historical methodology.
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Contarini
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What “historians” do this? I don’t find this “pagan Easter” thing to be a particular obsession of historians. Historians are the ones pointing out that the evidence is relatively slim.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “sect of paganism” anyway. If you’re talking about generic Anglo-Saxon paganism, it had not died out two centuries before Bede, as Bede’s history itself makes clear. It had mostly died out by Bede’s time–there were no pagan kingdoms in England in his lifetime, which is by no means the same thing as saying that there were no pagans.
The Torah, on the other hand, is thought by most historians to have been written many centuries after the events it describes. Bede’s relationship to the pagan practices he’s describing is much closer to that of the Gospel writers (or, at most, the earliest post-apostolic writers) to the events they are describing. A completely different picture.
I won’t dispute that there’s some tendency among secular/liberal Biblical scholars to be more skeptical than their equivalents who study other things. But it’s not the glaring discrepancy that many conservative Christians claim. There’s a pretty consistent set of criteria that scholars use to evaluate reliability. (John Meier’s famous list of criteria for the “historical Jesus” would more or less be accepted by scholars across various historical periods–at least the same principles would be applied.) Obviously this isn’t a hard-and-fast objective issue, and so you can find a lot of variation and bias.
Edwin
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Contarini
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He never said that the Bible is 100% accurate. He simply said that it is in fact a historical source. Which it is. There’s no contradiction there. The point that Egyptian sources are biased too is a very good one. They are “better” only insofar as they can be determined to date from the relevant period, where the Torah is a literary compilation that may not have reached its final form until the Hellenistic era. (I myself go with the Ezra theory, but that’s a relatively “conservative” or at least moderate view these days.)
A really interesting example where we do have Biblical and non-Biblical sources for the same event is the “Mesha stele” from Moab, which describes the Israelite invasion recorded in 2 Kings 3. When you put them together, they don’t really contradict that much, even though each account portrays its side as victorious. The Biblical account plays up the rescue of the army from death by thirst and the initial success of the invasion, but then succinctly admits that the invasion was ultimately unsuccessful. The Moabite account naturally emphasizes Moab’s ultimate victory.
Edwin
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NotWorthy
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So, the Scriptures are accurate only if they are plausible? Its implausible for 600,000 Israelies to wander the desert even if its under the guiding hand of God, so the Scriptures aren’t accurate in this matter.
I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.
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edwest2
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