David Sklansky
02-22-2007, 12:21 PM
What does that mean for the three religions that assume it is? What follows is part of a post by Insp Clue So that gives a detailed account of some scholars work that strongly indicates the whole damn story, Moses and all, is just not true. And it seems that its falsity is generally accepted by most unbiased experts! Wonder why the public, including me was not aware of that.
Anyway I'm curious how Jews (and Christians and Muslims who will also be affected by its falsity) react to this stuff. Will they deny it or say it doesn't matter even if it is true? If you want to read the complete version, go to the Sklansky Forum.
"What is most important, though, is the point emphasized by Israel Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and his colleague Neal Silberman, in their book The Bible Unearthed: “We have no clue, not even a single word, about early Israelites in Egypt: Neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri.” 7 Similarly, William Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, states in Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?: “no Egyptian text ever found contains a single reference to ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’ in Egypt, much less to an ‘Exodus.’” 8 The ancient Egyptians were such compulsive chroniclers, albeit biased, that it is inconceivable that they would not record any version of an event as momentous as the Biblical Exodus. We should at least expect some self-serving or biased accounts of this extraordinary event, but there is absolutely no reference to any exodus of Hebrew slaves in the voluminous Egyptian writings.
In addition, archaeological excavations do not support the Biblical Exodus story. Modern archaeological techniques are able to detect evidence of not only permanent settlements, but also of habitations of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world as far back as the third millennium B.C. However, there are no finds of a unique religious community living in a distinct area of the eastern delta of the Nile River (“Land of Goshen”) as described in Genesis. In addition, repeated excavations of areas corresponding to Kadesh-Barnea, where the Biblical Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty-eight years of wanderings, have revealed no evidence of any encampments. Finkelstein and Silberman point out that, although the sites mentioned in the Exodus story are real, archaeological excavations indicate that they were unoccupied when the Biblical Exodus would have taken place. For example, the Bible refers to messengers sent by Moses from Kadesh-Barnea to the king of Edom asking him to allow the Hebrews to pass through his land. However, the nation of Edom did not come into existence until the 7th century B.C. 9 Melvin Konner, anthropologist and teacher of Jewish studies at Emory University, sums it up this way in his recent book Unsettled, An Anthropology of the Jews: “Except for the Torah text, there is no decisive proof that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that they rebelled and walked away from the place, or that a leader such as Moses arose and took that people into the desert.” 10 Futhermore, what evidence we do have, as discussed above, contradicts the Biblical account. How, then, did this fable come to be written?
Finkelstein and Silberman present the plausible thesis that the Deuteronomistic version of the Exodus, which brings together and embellishes the chronicles in the first four books of the Torah, was written during the 7th century B.C. The intent of the story was to rally the inhabitants of Judah against Egypt, which had become its most powerful enemy as Assyrian hegemony waned. Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the evil pharaoh in the Exodus story was actually modeled after the domineering Psamethicus I, who reigned from 664 to 610 B.C., approximately during the time that the Deuteronomistic version was written. This account was “powerful propaganda” that created “an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams” in order “to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.” In fact, the Egypt described in the Deuteronomistic account is “uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psamethicus.” 11
According to Redford, the memories of the Canaanite Hyskos ruling Egypt and subsequently being driven out (though not enslaved and not Hebrew) most likely formed the basis for the Exodus story. 12 The sequence of plagues in the Exodus may be related to the ancient Egyptian belief that the inability to worship multiple gods causes illness. The Amarna tablets indicate that Akhnaten imposed monotheism on polytheistic Egypt during his reign between 1372 and 1354 B.C., allegedly causing the populace to suffer a variety of maladies, which abated with the restoration of polytheism by Akhnaten’s successor. 13 14 Jonathan Kirsh notes that the basket-in-the-bullrushes infant-Moses story is clearly a “cut-and-paste” plagiarism copied almost verbatim from a Mesopotamian text. 15 In the words of Daniel Lazare, the stories of infant Moses, the plagues, and final exodus are “unconnected folktales,” linked together “like pearls on a string.” 16 What we have, according to David Denby, is a “self-confirming, self-glorifying myth of origins,” with Moses as “the hero of the greatest campfire story ever told.” "
Anyway I'm curious how Jews (and Christians and Muslims who will also be affected by its falsity) react to this stuff. Will they deny it or say it doesn't matter even if it is true? If you want to read the complete version, go to the Sklansky Forum.
"What is most important, though, is the point emphasized by Israel Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and his colleague Neal Silberman, in their book The Bible Unearthed: “We have no clue, not even a single word, about early Israelites in Egypt: Neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri.” 7 Similarly, William Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, states in Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?: “no Egyptian text ever found contains a single reference to ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’ in Egypt, much less to an ‘Exodus.’” 8 The ancient Egyptians were such compulsive chroniclers, albeit biased, that it is inconceivable that they would not record any version of an event as momentous as the Biblical Exodus. We should at least expect some self-serving or biased accounts of this extraordinary event, but there is absolutely no reference to any exodus of Hebrew slaves in the voluminous Egyptian writings.
In addition, archaeological excavations do not support the Biblical Exodus story. Modern archaeological techniques are able to detect evidence of not only permanent settlements, but also of habitations of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world as far back as the third millennium B.C. However, there are no finds of a unique religious community living in a distinct area of the eastern delta of the Nile River (“Land of Goshen”) as described in Genesis. In addition, repeated excavations of areas corresponding to Kadesh-Barnea, where the Biblical Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty-eight years of wanderings, have revealed no evidence of any encampments. Finkelstein and Silberman point out that, although the sites mentioned in the Exodus story are real, archaeological excavations indicate that they were unoccupied when the Biblical Exodus would have taken place. For example, the Bible refers to messengers sent by Moses from Kadesh-Barnea to the king of Edom asking him to allow the Hebrews to pass through his land. However, the nation of Edom did not come into existence until the 7th century B.C. 9 Melvin Konner, anthropologist and teacher of Jewish studies at Emory University, sums it up this way in his recent book Unsettled, An Anthropology of the Jews: “Except for the Torah text, there is no decisive proof that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that they rebelled and walked away from the place, or that a leader such as Moses arose and took that people into the desert.” 10 Futhermore, what evidence we do have, as discussed above, contradicts the Biblical account. How, then, did this fable come to be written?
Finkelstein and Silberman present the plausible thesis that the Deuteronomistic version of the Exodus, which brings together and embellishes the chronicles in the first four books of the Torah, was written during the 7th century B.C. The intent of the story was to rally the inhabitants of Judah against Egypt, which had become its most powerful enemy as Assyrian hegemony waned. Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the evil pharaoh in the Exodus story was actually modeled after the domineering Psamethicus I, who reigned from 664 to 610 B.C., approximately during the time that the Deuteronomistic version was written. This account was “powerful propaganda” that created “an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams” in order “to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.” In fact, the Egypt described in the Deuteronomistic account is “uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psamethicus.” 11
According to Redford, the memories of the Canaanite Hyskos ruling Egypt and subsequently being driven out (though not enslaved and not Hebrew) most likely formed the basis for the Exodus story. 12 The sequence of plagues in the Exodus may be related to the ancient Egyptian belief that the inability to worship multiple gods causes illness. The Amarna tablets indicate that Akhnaten imposed monotheism on polytheistic Egypt during his reign between 1372 and 1354 B.C., allegedly causing the populace to suffer a variety of maladies, which abated with the restoration of polytheism by Akhnaten’s successor. 13 14 Jonathan Kirsh notes that the basket-in-the-bullrushes infant-Moses story is clearly a “cut-and-paste” plagiarism copied almost verbatim from a Mesopotamian text. 15 In the words of Daniel Lazare, the stories of infant Moses, the plagues, and final exodus are “unconnected folktales,” linked together “like pearls on a string.” 16 What we have, according to David Denby, is a “self-confirming, self-glorifying myth of origins,” with Moses as “the hero of the greatest campfire story ever told.” "