So, I have more problems from my Western Civ Class. The lecture notes from the section on the Hebrews just seem to blast Biblical History. I don’t know how to respond to his notes really.
Read them or glance over them. I don’t have any background so I have really no response to the things he says in the notes
His perspective is pretty common these days. He’s fairly far over toward the skeptical end of OT scholarship, but not quite at the far end (after all, he admits that David existed, which many don’t).
The weakest part of his argument is the repeated use of the argument from silence. IMHO the argument that archaeologists could trace the encampments of the Hebrews in the Exodus if they had really existed is just nonsense. Does he (or rather do Finkelstein and Silberman) really think that every movement of a group of people in the ancient world has left an archeological trace? People were moving back and forth between Palestine and Egypt all the time.
I think it is true that the numbers given for the Hebrews in Exodus are simply impossible (unless we are to believe that God worked several miracles in terms of population growth, number of people crammed into one spot, etc., and then that all record of this vast migration was wiped from the earth except what is written in Exodus). Probably the number of Hebrew warriors who left Egypt was closer to six hundred than to six hundred thousand. But I see no basis for denying the historicity of the event altogether. It fits what we know of the era.
There is one huge mistake–the claim that there is no record of the Israelites from Egypt in the 13th century. The Stele of Merneptah from the late 13th century claims that the Egyptians had wiped out “Israel.” I’m not sure what your professor and his sources are doing here. Perhaps there has been new evidence discrediting the Stele, but I haven’t heard that there is. Certainly the Stele is hard to fit into the Biblical narrative, but it is certainly evidence that the Egyptians knew of an “Israel” in the 13th century.
Egyptian control over Palestine began to falter after the 13th century. An Israelite settlement in Palestine would fit, IMHO, and that would make Merneptah’s Stele some kind of reference to the Egyptian oppression of the Hebrews recorded in Exodus. There’s also the possibility that the Exodus occurred much earlier, in the 15th century, in which case the Stele may refer to an event not recorded in Scripture.
These guys are simply unwilling to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt. If they can’t find positive archaeological evidence for something, they assume it didn’t happen. I’m quite willing to believe that in many cases it didn’t happen exactly as one would suppose from a straightforward reading of Scripture. But in many cases Scripture can actually be read so as to harmonize with the archaeological record. For instance, your professor says that the Bible portrays Israel as united before the death of Solomon, as if the division between north and south arose only then. That is not what the Bible says at all. There are abundant references to north-south tensions and divisions from Judges on. Furthermore, if you read Samuel and Kings it makes sense that Judah was the smaller and less prosperous area. Throughout the narratives of the divided kingdom, Judah usually seems to be a “little brother” of Israel, and when the two kingdoms conflicted the north generally seems to have had the upper hand.
There’s a lot more that could be said, but I’ll leave it there for now. . . .
Edwin
