Bible Criticism Refuted or No?

Great Debates
41

So what? Johnny Appleseed planted some trees. That’s not hard for me to believe. Moses supposedly parted the Red Sea so millions of people could walk across dry land. That’s not so easy to believe. Pocahontas fucked some explorer. Again, not too hard to believe. Making enough water pour out of a rock for millions of people to drink- hard to believe. So what if you can prove some guy named Moses lived. Unless you can prove the miracles, who gives a shit? He’s just another goatherder with a bigger-than-average posse.

If someone wants me to believe in Moses, they’re going to have to bring some pretty heavy duty evidence. This “if you believe in Johnny Appleseed you have to believe in Moses too” bullshit is just embarrassing.

42

The origin story of the Jewish Kingdom involved David. He was the best and the top, and he seems to have existed, even if he wasn’t as great a king as recorded. If you have a theme of the underdog winning with the support of God, a very appropriate one at the time the Bible was written, you can’t start at the top.

43

To be fair, I don’t think that’s what they are saying.

It seems to me that they want to believe that the myth has some kernel of truth to it buried somewhere. The evidence doesn’t bear this though. The story is either made up oral tradition, or the actual man probably has so little in common with the myth of Moses that he would be unrecognizable as him.

And speculating about what some hypothetical bronze age sheep herder who might or might not have been called moses, might or might not have dipped his foot in a local pond, might or might not have escorted a hot girl sheep herder through a sandy path, who might or might not have scribbled his name on a piece of rock somewhere in ancient Canaan, sounds like a waste of time to me.

44

I see this sort of argument from so-called conservative evangelical Christians all the time: “If you don’t believe every word of the Bible is God’s inerrant Word, you don’t accept a word of it, and probably have absolutely no morals whatsoever.” It’s called the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle.

Absent circumstances nearly as improbable as the Six-Day Creation garbage, the literal Biblical account of the Exodus is an impossibility. Kadesh-Barnea, for example, could not have supported a settlement of over a million people for over 30 years with the technology of the time, and even if by some wild chance they were able to live there that long, there would be surviving archaeological evidence of their presence that is frankly not present. But this does not mean that some historical figure to whom the name Moses is today given did not in fact exist, and was the foundation on which the vast farrago of legends surrounding the Exodus was built. (Nor, of course, does it prove his existence, either – he could be as fictional as Aragorn son of Arathorn.)

A really good parallel might be this: sometime around the First Century B.C. there lived somewhere in the Holstein-Brunswick area of northern Germany a leader who established hegemony over the Germanic tribes of the area. He had numerous sons and set them as leaders of the individual tribes, from whom their later chiefs descended. He was apparently seen as a strong and wise king, and appears to have lost one eye in an accident while seeking after new knowledge, perhaps new technology for his people. His totemic creatures (akin to Richard I’s lions or America’s eagle) were wolves and ravens. His wife was a legendary termagent. After his death numerous legends grew up around him, and he came to be seen as a mythical figure. We call him Woden.

Even at the time the Biblical accounts were put together, there was some skepticism of the ‘magical’ supernatural manifestations. The Elohist source attributes the parting of the Sea of Reeds, a swampy area on the Sinai Isthmus, to a strong wind. There are several other instances throughout the account of the Exodus where what is claimed as miracle in the P or J sources is given a naturalistic explanation by the E source. Presumably at one of the several times when Egypt was convulsed by internal dissention, a group of families claiming common descent from Jacob took advantage of the unrest to make tracks, and their leader may well have been someone whose name resembled the Egyptian for “Sonny” (Mos[h]e-). In the course of crossing the Sinai and reconnoitering the land their legends said they had come from, they allied with some Midianites and the Kenites (cf. Caleb), and probably with other groups claiming descent from Jacob. That much is plausible and matches historically sound migrations from the Tuscaroras to the Voortrekkers. Anything beyond that would be legend that has accreted to the putatively historical story. We can see the final stages of that accretion today in cmkeller’s note that Orthodox Jewish belief claims that God told Moses what would happen during and after his death so that he could close out the book of Deuteronomy properly – a belief unique to Orthodox Judaism and probably dating no later back than the Middle Ages.

45

By the way, I’ve proven that Santa Claus is real. Of course, some of the legends about him are untrue. It turns out his real name is Steve, he lives in Florida, wears shorts and sandals all the time, and drives a Buick LeSabre. He’s also clean shaven, never gives presents, and hates children.

46

Indeed. It so happens that I’m becoming a historian (among my many hats in my academic setting) and I need to point this out: It makes me bang my head on the wall or go :smack: myself when blind spots like this come and make me realize how inadequate my teachers were. My weak defense is that I paid most attention to European and the Americas’ history.

Like Sage Rat mentions, it is ok to find the real person; however, for the longest time I was assuming that there was a lot of evidence to support the speculations, (until today!) I was confident that there was evidence that there was someone that we could call Moses, I remember reading about speculations that he indeed came from Egypt, that he was likely an Egyptian of renown that found religion (the religion of the slaves) that it was likely that the exodus was not from Egypt proper but from a region closer to Canaan and it was really not too hard to imagine a local limited tale turning into an epic as time goes by.

The problem is that after so many years those speculations should had some results in the field, instead even more evidence has been found that supports what **Diogenes **is reporting.

I feel now like when I found in this message board that Guinness beer was not British but Irish.

(got spanked even by Irish Girl :o )

If we do appreciate the motto of fighting ignorance it is clear to me that for many the speculations are overtaking the evidence in this case and sometimes one has to be blunt to prevent new myths from turning into historical “facts”.

It does look so innocent, but look at the researchers interviewed in the NOVA documentary. They agree that there is virtually no evidence for the Exodus or Moses and when they find evidence of the people that could fit the followers of “the” Moses the time lines are grossly wrong, and yet they come out concentrating on the speculations (a fault that could actually be caused by the editing).

So many (speculations) bones are thrown to the viewers who are believers that one could build a new cathedral out of them. My speculation :slight_smile: here is that if researchers were as blunt with the evidence they had, it would not be surprising that the researchers and archaeologists would find their grant money gone, at least the American ones.

47

Polycarp:

But that’s not how the Bible describes the occurrences in question. That’s not a refutation of the Bible, it’s a refutation of a “de-supernaturalized” version of the Bible.

48

It’s also completely ad hoc speculation. It’s a hypothesis not required to explain anything, and is only proffered from a desire to save some kind of historical core to the Exodus story.

49

Funny thing about that.

50

It seems to boil down to the fact that indeed the Bible was written by humans. Humans declared it to be the word of God,and inspired by God. It depends on how reliable the person who wrote it( to be true). If some one claims today that God told them to do a certain thing or write something that person would not be believed people would expect proof.

There is little difference in believing a Biblical writer (or the Quran that God sent an angel to Muhammed to write a book). One believes in whom ever they choose or that seems right to them. That is why religions are ‘Faith’ based.

51

Worst Rankin/Bass Christmas special … ever.

52

The relationship between Biblical Hebrew and the language of the Canaanites is similar to the difference between modern English, and the English of Chaucer.

53

I think it’s more than that, but even accepting that analogy, if you saw a book written in Modern English, you would know it couldn’t have been written by Chaucer.

54

The Documentary Thesis holds that the Torah, or the Biblical books from Genesis to Deuteronomy were written by four authors who are called J, E, D, and P. These lived from perhaps 900 to 600 BC. Richard Elliott Friedman did not originate this thesis. It has developed over a period of centuries. Nevertheless, his book Who Wrote the Bible is a fascinating explanation of this thesis, with a few contributions of his own. I recommend it for someone who wants to gain a good knowledge of Biblical criticism. It is a good introduction to read before reading the Old Testament.

55

I view Moses as a character similar to King Arthur. We can be pretty sure that there wasn’t really a King Arthur who was conceived when a spell of Merlin made Uther Pendragon look like Gorlois and thus let him mount Igraine and we can be pretty sure there was no round table and love triangle with Lancelot and Guinevere. At the same point there is a human gravity-well that exists ca. 500 that implies there was a great warlord at that time: Anglo-Saxon invasions stopped or at least greatly slowed down for a generation, tales of a great warlord exist from chroniclers and writers who would have existed in living memory of Arthur:

St. Gildas is one who could and probably did interact with the historical Arthur and wrote a screed about how the British (as opposed to the English) ultimately lost out to the Anglo-Saxons because of their sins. He mentioned a great British warrior (one he has little respect for as a person but concedes was all-that on the battlefield) who stemmed the tides of invasion for years but was not a Christian (one more piece of evidence for divine wrath against the Brits) and while he never names him he does refer to another warleader as having been a “horse warrior and charioteer for The Bear”. Gildas, writing in Latin, used Ursus, but in Celtic dialects bear is Arto, or, Arthur.

In the poem Gododdin written about 600 there is a line about a great warrior of the late 6th century of whom the writer says

implying the name Arthur was already associated with military greatness. Nennius writing in the 9th century from no longer extant sources makes reference to Arthur as well, again showing that he was clearly known and remembered by this time.

So there probably was a real Arthur who may or may not have been a king in title but had the power of one and who whipped some serious Anglo-Saxon ass in the early 6th century, enough that the combination of military defeat and treaty returned some conquered territories and stopped the invasions until after he was dead and then some (when the Anglo-Saxons came back and completed the conquest). He was probably a Romano-Celtic pagan rather than a devout Christian, which explains why Gildas did not name him (plus he was probably borrowing from some Roman historians who also did not give the personal names of people they didn’t like), plus Gildas wasn’t writing history so much as an indictment of the sinful British. Variants of the name Guinevere even appeared fairly early in the legends so it could have been he was married to a woman by this name or something like it, though the name Lancelot did not enter until centuries later. (Bedivere, by a variety of spellings, is the oldest knight associated with him, mentioned in Gildas.)
The Middle Ages took the existing legends and twisted them like a monkey on acid handling a ball of Play Dough. They took other already existing legends and merged them, as well as probably taking some actual history that survived (such as the invasion of Europe by the British warlord Riothamus) and tacked it onto Arthur. They fleshed out Arthur and Guinevere and gave them some nice tragedy, they tacked on all manner of other tall tales and legends and above all else they gave the tales an overarching moral of chivalry and honor and ultimate downfall. What exists has only a kernel of the original legend but the name survived and the great battles and military prowess.

With Moses I think it was probably something a bit similar: a clan leader of a semitic group who left Egypt for Canaan, possibly inspired by the short lived monotheistic reforms of Akhenaton, and encountering some opposition from royal forces and some major internal conflict twixt monotheists and polytheists, then entering Canaan and taking territory through a combination of military conquest and intermarriage and treaty. Mosa is the Egyptian suffix for ‘son-of’ and could have been part of a name or part of a title- names and titles often get merged (Sallah al dinh Yusuf bin Ayyub becomes Saladin, Kerl becomes Carolus Magnus becomes Charles le Magne becomes Charlemagne, etc.). I don’t believe he parted seas or received tablets from heaven or that the exodus he led was hundreds of thousands of people, but I would be more surprised to learn there was no basis at all for the exodus story than that there was; among other things I doubt the legends would have had the staying power if there was no historical touchstone (places, bloodlines, relics) to connect them to as while it’s easy to embellish the facts it’s difficult to make up a group’s history out of whole cloth and get away with it.

56

There is absolutely no evdience for a semitic group leaving Egypt for Canaan, nor would that make any sense after the Hyksos expulsion since Canaan was occupied and controlled by Egypt, and so was every bit of the route along the way.
Moses is most likely has a remote basis in the Pharaoh Ahmose I. It uses the basket in the bullrushes story as a device to reconfigure an Egyptian heo into an Israelite one. This particulrly element was taken from Sargon’s myth, but it was a fairly standard device to use a baby sent down the river story to explain an obscurely born hero as a secretly a royal one, and the Exodus story just does a reverse on that.

There is no evidence of any human presence at all in the Sinai anywhere near the alleged time of the Exodus. There were no such people as the Israelites during that time. The Exodus, most likely is simply a garbled retelling of the Hyksos expulsion fabricated somtime in the exilic or post-exilic period to give the Israelites a heroic origin myth. There is no evidence at all that it has even a kernel of historical truth to it.

57

That’s inaccurate. Midianite Pottery is found around the Gulf of Aqaba in the 13th century BC. That’s near enough the alleged time of the Exodus to make it plausible that there were people there. Writings about the Habiru also seem to indicate that the whole fairly uninhabitable regions away from the sea or any major rivers like the Euphrates and Tigris had nomadic, probably Canaanitic groups who simply wouldn’t have left archaeological evidence of their presence – which is fully within the time period of the Exodus no matter where you place it.

And particularly if you figure that the proto-Israelites were running from Avaris, the body of water they’d cross would most likely be the Gulf of Aqaba. If they end up by the Midianites, that we have the best evidence for Midianites on the East coast of the Gulf of Aqaba places the proto-Israelites out of Sinai. Possibly just South of Edom at the tip of the Eastern side of the Gulf.

58

The Merneptah Stele — also known as the Israel Stele or Victory Stele of Merneptah — is an inscription by the Ancient Egyptian king Merneptah (1213 to 1203 BC), which appears on the reverse side of a granite stele erected by the king Amenhotep III. It was discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes.

The stele has gained much fame and notoriety for being the only Ancient Egyptian document generally accepted as mentioning “Isrir” or “Israel”. It is also, by far, the earliest known attestation of the demonym Israel. For this reason, many scholars refer to it as the “Israel stele”…

The line referring to Merneptah’s Canaanite campaign reads:

Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, bare of seed.[6]

The phrase “wasted, bare of seed” is formulaic, and often used of defeated nations. It implies that the store of grain of the nation in question has been destroyed, which would result in a famine the following year, incapacitating them as a military threat to Egypt.

Merneptah Stele - Wikipedia

59

Note: By which I was referring to the location, not the time period. The Edomites didn’t exist until much later.

60

I was talking about the time of Hyksos expulsion, which has been the focus of much ofthis thgread. I’m familiar with the Merneptah Stele. It is the first mention of “Israel,” – 300 years after the Hyksos expulsion.

Thgere is still no sign of human presence in the Sinai even in the 13th Century, though, and the Israelites were still never enslaved in Egypt.