I’m confused. What’s the connection between your first sentence (which mentions “things that are known”) and the rest (which mentions a lack of evidence)?
If someone says that he just blew up a building and I go look and see that the building is still there, unscratched, and standing in one piece that’s not a lack of evidence. If a person says that he worships Odin and I go to his house and find shrines to Buddha, several books on Buddhist writings, nothing but vegetarian food in the pantry, etc. that’s not a lack of evidence. Both of these are direct evidence that this guy is not telling the truth, particularly if we have plenty of reason to think he very well might lie.
We know that the Israelites weren’t monotheistic before 600 BC because we have direct archaeological evidence of it. We know that the Israelites didn’t conquer Canaan any time before 800 BC because we have direct archaeological evidence that no one did (except the Egyptians) and that the Israelites didn’t even exist as an organized, political entity until the 9th or 8th century BC.
Why do we take Egypt’s word that they destroyed the Hyskos? That’s just like something they would say.
I agree that the Exodus and Moses is mostly, or even completely, legendary, but frankly nothing is (or can be) proven about the existence or non-existance of a proto-Moses or the influence of a hypothetical foreign tribe integrating itself with the Canaanites/proto-Isrealites. Dio can claim it as fact as often or as loudly as he wants to, but it’s unprovable.
I can claim it as fact that the Moses of the Bible did not exist. Everything else is sheer speculation. Can I disprove every speculative, hypothetical historical source for the Moses myth? No, but so what? I can’t disprove a hypothetical source for King Arthur either, that doesn’t mean I can’t say definitively that the Arthur and Camelot of legend never existed.
In the case of Moses, we at least have a plausible, known historical personality in Ahmose as the source of that particular hero legend. We have no evidence at all for a “proto-Israelite” hero or group coming out of Egypt.
Hey, that’s all I’m asking. I don’t really have a problem comparing Moses to Arthur, actually, in terms of historicity.
But that’s what he’s been saying all along. That some people choose to misinterpret him is hardly any of his fault.
In a way Arthur is more historically accurate in that the Romans did leave Britain and the Angles and Saxons did invade. In other words, even if it is almost certainly true that no round table of knights served a king chosen by pulling a sword from a stone, there was a period of struggles as Romanized Brits lost control of the island to Germanic invaders. Moses, on the other hand, not only is unlikely to have existed, but the people and background of his existence don’t seem likely to have been there either.
I should’ve mentioned that I realize his invoking of the single authorship study is silly and I am more interested in his specific critiques of Friedman.
Fine. Then say that instead of your broader claim which makes you sound as though you were there and you can show us the films.
What the heck is so broad about “there was no Moses”. Why is “of the bible” a required qualifier? Who the hell else are we talking about? It was pretty clear to me that Dio wasn’t talking about Moses, my pot smoking neighbor, or Moses the best potter in Judah.
Moses Malone brought some holy wrath down on the heads of many NBA players.
Actually there is evidence that Arthur existed. For instance there are the Welsh Battle Chronicles which name about a hundred kings of the time. It names Arthur among those hundred. We know that the other 99 really existed from other archeological and written evidence. Anti-Arthurians are asking us to believe that the Chronicles were serious factual histories in regard to the 99 but that they made one up - Arthur.
Why would they make one up among a list of real figures? There’s no internal evidence that they made up Arthur - they just list him routinely along with the others as an historical king.
This completely misses the point. Yes, there was probably a king named Arthur. It’s the evidence for all the other stuff he supposedly did that is lacking. All the Camelot and round table stuff. So when someone says “King Arthur” is made up, they’re not saying there was never some guy named Arthur who was considered a king, they’re saying that there is no evidence that that guy named Arthur was actually the same guy in all the legends.
Same thing with Moses. Nobody is saying that there was never a Jewish guy named Moses. Of course there was. The point is, how much does this guy have to do that matches up with the bible before you can say the “Moses of the bible” existed? What if a guy named Moses existed, and led a group of people across a desert, but never was a prince in Egypt and never parted the Red Sea and never performed any miracles? Would you say he was the “Moses of the bible”? What if he led some people across the desert and gave them ten commandments and made water come out of a rock, but never did any of the other stuff? Is he then the “Moses of the bible”? There has to be a line at which you say that some Jewish guy named Moses, who certainly did exist, can no longer be considered the “Moses of the bible” because his story just doesn’t match up. That’s why Dio can say with certainty that the “Moses of the bible” did not exist. Too many of the things attributed to the “Moses of the bible” are impossibilities.
There are stories about George Washington, too, such as the famous cherry tree story or throwing a dollar across the river etc, which are not historical fact. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an historical George Washington, it just means that not all the tales about him reflect actual history.
At the other end of the logic, only 2000 years ago, we have almost no evidence of the existence of Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor. Absence of evidence is not a compelling argument.
Y’all accept (and so do I) that the bible is notoriously unreliable as historical record, but Egyptian records are not any more reliable. To judge by Egyptian records, the Egyptian armies and pharaohs never suffered a defeat. And practically nothing was recorded about slave history; Egyptian scribes would never have considered it worth recording that some slaves escaped after (or amidst) a series of natural disasters. So, again, the lack of evidence is not a compelling argument.
Note that the lack of evidence IS pretty conclusive that the emigration of over a million people didn’t happen; there would be some trace of that. But if we’re talking a few hundred, say, or even a couple thousand, there’s no reason to expect any remaining physical evidence.
It is extremely rare for a people to make up an origin for themselves that involves them being the lowest of the low (enslaved); almost all origin myths start with the people as the best and top of the heap. It is not impossible (nor even improbable) that an historical Moses led a small band of slaves out of Egypt, and even gave them some laws and legal structure. Or made some poetry (“The Song of the Sea”, say) that endured.
Whether that was “the Moses of the bible” is semantics. Isn’t George Washington the GW of the children’s book about the cherry tree? Whoever Moses was, he clearly became a figure of legend.
And let’s not confuse later history with Moses’ era. The “conquest of Canaan” is a different issue entirely, and has nothing to do with authorship of the first books of the bible. (It’s pretty clear that those are the works of the Deuteronomist, methinks, but no one attributes them to Moses.
If he’s the originator of the story, then yes.
There really was a Baron Munchausen. There really was Johnny Appleseed, Pocahontas, Saint Nick, etc. There probably was a Jesus. Just because the popular version of a person’s life has little-to-nothing to do with the real person doesn’t mean that the real person doesn’t exist. Finding the real person, if he exists, is the goal of a historian, and the myth helps you to know where to search, if information exists to be found. Does it serve any practical use to say that Saint Nick and Santa Claus are the same person? Perhaps not, but it’s historically interesting. If you’re a historian, that’s relevant.
The Exodus story wasn’t written until at least 700 years after the Hykos expulsion, and there isn’t a shred of evdience to support a hypothesis that the character called Moses had any basis in history other than, perhaps, as a garbled re-imagining of Ahmose I). That evidence does exist for the other personalities listed above. Pontious Pilate is mentioned by Roman historians, and an inscription on a building dedication in Caesaria names him as the Prefect of Judea. That pretty much seals it. There is nothing close to the kind of evidence for a historical Moses as there is for Pilate (or for Washington, Appleseed, etc.). In fact there’s nothing at all. The case for Moses is even more compromised by the fact that none of the events or deeds associated with his legend ever happened. The only argument I’m seeing is a giant argument from absence – that we can’t prove absolutely there wasn’t some hyopthetical leader of a group of hypothetical fugitives from Egypt fleeing to Canaan. Well, we can’t prove there wasn’t really a kid named Icarus who tried to fly with fake wings either, or that a one-eyed giant didn’t try to eat a king named Odysseus returning from the Trojan War, but we don’t have a problem calling them myths, and the Moses/Exodus myth has no more supporting evidence for it than the works or characters of Homer.
No, because I’m not arguing that Moses existed. If I was doing that, it would be an argument from absence. I have no evidence one way or the other that Abraham Lincoln ever had sex with a sheep. As such, it would be ludicrous for me to opine that, Abraham factually did or did not ever have sex with a sheep.
President Abraham Lincoln factually never had sex with a sheep.
That’s just making shit up, regardless of how likely it is to be the truth.
No, it’s more than that. It’s like saying for sure that Abraham Lincoln never fought in the War of the Ring.
Just admit it, there might possibly have been a Moses. Sure, his name certainly wasn’t Moses, and he clearly didn’t do the things attributed to Moses, and he may not have lived at the time Moses was supposed to, but you can’t absolutely proved that some guy who was named something and did something didn’t live at some point!
You’ve got me there.