“A completely different story” based upon what exactly? There are similar cultural artifacts among the shards of pottery, layout of the towns, carvings of idols, etc.?
How do those “tell a completely different story” when there is nothing in the Exodus account that denies or contradicts the tendency of Israel to do things “like the Canaanites?” In fact, one dominant Old Testament theme is about Israel “playing the harlot” and doing precisely that.
Pick a piece of evidence that incontrovertibly demonstrates Exodus could not have happened and argue that. Absence of artifacts when the artifact remnants are few and not very helpful in making a determination is not much of a case except for those who want to create an alternative narrative and see it their way. The points you insist are important aren’t very significant if hard evidence is the criteria.
It seems that you think there are only two possible states for the evidence to be in: either there is no evidence against the Exodus, or there is incontrovertible evidence against it. This position doesn’t make much sense. I am simply arguing that the evidence, when taken in its entirety, makes me completely comfortable in saying that the Exodus never happened. Lets have a quick summary:
The problems with the Exodus narrative itself are:
-Numerous anacronisms (political concerns which don’t make sense for the time, etc)
-Logistically absurd (the desert couldn’t host them, they would make a caravan 150 miles long, etc)
-Various numbers and dates appear to be introduced for their religious, rather than historical, significance
The archaeological evidence reveals:
-There is no date range that can be squared with the biblical account
-The Israelites are alleged to have visited cities that didn’t exist in their time
-The Israelites are alleged to have destroyed cities that don’t have destruction layers at that time
-There was no sudden arrival of a large conquesting group of Israelites into Canaan, the Israelites gradually split from the Canaanites
Absence of evidence is sometimes evidence of absence, specifically when experts have been diligently looking for that evidence for a very long time. However, that is a somewhat weak argument, so I don’t expect these absences to be convincing. Taken with the other evidence though, they are a sort of icing on the cake:
-No evidence Egypt suddenly lost over half its population and had its army destroyed
-No evidence of major migrations through the desert
You can certainly go through and do some mental gymnastics to explain and rectify these problems, but I think the conclusion is pretty clear. The likelihood that all of these problems are misunderstandings, or that we’re just missing some vital bit of information that would explain it all seems much much lower than the likelihood that the Exodus is simply a myth. So much lower, in fact, that I am perfectly comfortable stating that the Exodus never happened.
