Why do you think they wouldn’t have left archaeological evidence of their presence? They certainly would have. Archeologists are able to recover the scantest camp sites and evidence of the smallest traveling bands. They would have left evidence.
And the Habiru were not the Israelites anyway. They were not an ethnic group at all, that was simply a designation for a general class of semi-nomadic peoples who lived on the outskirts of cities.
What is a “proto-Israelite,” and how would they be different from any other Canaanite at the time. Avaris was destroyed hundreds of years before tnhe Israelites emerged from indigenous Canaanite culture, and they had no connection at all to the Hyksos or to Avaris – at least no more than any other Canaanites did.
Dio, that is a truly amazing assertion. Your position is that a group of nomads can’t have existed in the wilds of the Ancient East because – even though we have writings from several different nations of the time that they do – we have yet to find a single 3000 year old campfire with a metal plaque that says, “Yes! This is us! The Habiru! We don’t call ourselves Habiru, nor anything because we’re not an organized people, just a group of wandering goat hearders, but Habiru is what you’d know us by if you happen to dig up our campfire in 3000 years!” I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I don’t see that happening any time soon. If we happened to find a 3000 year old campfire in a desert, I’d guess that we’d be able to say little more than what sort of animal they were eating, thanks to the animal bones that were nearby. Determining what tribe he may belong to, when we don’t know the names of any of the local tribes at the time, let alone whose ancestor he might be, is pretty impossible.
Who ever said that the Israelites are an ethnic group? What practical relevance does ethnicity have to whether or not the Israelites might have originated from a group of nomads?
We know there was no human presence in the Sinai. If they were there, they would have left archaeological evdience. It isn’t possible for them to have left no trace. Human habitation always leaves traces. It isn’t there.
I don’t understand this question. The Israelites have no other definition than as one distinct cultural group which emerged from the Canaanites. They didn’t come from outside Canaan, but from within it. We know this from the archaeology. At best, they could have been an example of one group of indigineous, Canaanite “Habiru” (though there is no actual evidence that the Israelites were ever called Habiru), but the word habiru did not refer to a culture or ethnicity, but to a way of life, just like “nomads,” or “fishers.”
And there weren’t any habiru in the Sinai at the alleged time of the Exodus.
Having now gone and double-checked, I will grant that my memory was wrong. The Habiru were on “the edge of Egypt”, but that’s the Egypt that includes Canaan as a sub-region. The Habiru were East of Canaan, not South as I remembered. And the Midianites never got closer to Sinai than Timna, so far as we have yet discovered. Again, I had remembered it as there being Midianite remnants on the Eastern shore of the Sinai peninsula.
Indeed. A cultural group is not an ethnicity. The Israelites are just a group of Canaanites with a largely fictional story about being separate, different, and/or special from the rest of the Canaanites. From that, there’s nothing in particular to distinguish them from Habiru or anyone else.
The story could have come from anywhere. There could have been one group of four people who wandered the deserts of Sinai 3000 years ago. Regardless of how good archaeology may be at detecting nomadic tribes, four random wanderers is, I’m quite certain, outside the scope of what is feasible to ascertain the existence of. But if they had a good tale to tell, and its that story that formed the basis for the Exodus, then those four people are the proto-Israelites.
Asserting anything about ethnic groups or habitation or whatever is missing the point that so far as the Biblical story goes – which is what we’re talking about – all we care about is the 4 people. Those 4 people may not even have ever had children, so there would be no descendants. The story of the Israelites may be entirely separate from lineage, not just ethnicity. Ultimately, all we can say is that the Biblical story of the Exodus, if it has any basis in history, is something that occurred to groups of people so small and in such a disparate way as what is recorded, as to be undetectable via archaeology. But, from what can be told via archaeology, there may be some best guesses as to where the component parts may have come from, that would be true, historical events. But, of course those are guesses and it all may have been fiction from day 1.
That’s all true, but there isn’t any evidence for it, and a garbling of the Hyksos story is as reasonable an explanation as anything else.
I do think that seome elements of the Moses myth could have derived from mountain (or volcano) worshipping cults from the Trans-Jordan. This would have married the Hyksos legend with desert tribal traditions, and perhaps legends of a lawgiver. These would have put “Mt. Sinai” in the Trans-Jordan instead of in Sinai, but it would make sense if it was an attempt to syncretize an origin story for what was originally a confedration of different tribes.
Italian archaeologist Emmanuel Anati posits that the biblical Mt. Sinai is not the modern day Mt. Sinai but Har Karkom, a mountain in the Negev that has scads of archaeological remains dating back tens of thousands of years and known to have been held as sacred in pre-monotheistic times. I have no idea how respected this theory is in the study of biblical archaeology, but Anati himself doesn’t seem to be a nutter (credentials include education at Hebrew University/Harvard U./Oxford, has lectured at the Vatican, the Sorbonne, Harvard, Pisa, and [his primary chair] Lecce, and chaired antiquities related projects for UNESCO). If so it would be more feasible as well as explaining the lack of remains in the Sinai Peninsula.
There is evidence of Canaanite expatriots living in the east of the Nile Delta about 1200-1400 BC. A nation is unlikely to invent a history of slavery about itself. Some Bible scholars believe that the Exodus involved a much smaller number of people than the Bible states. Moses is an Egyptian name. The Egyptians did not like to write about slaves and military defeats, so if a number of slaves escaped into the Sinai Peninsula and an Egyptian military force failed to bring them back, the Egyptians would probably not have recorded that.
Yes, the Hyksos were probably Canaanite. Canaanites immigrated to Egypt for centuries before the Hyksos expulsion. They weren’t Israelites, though, so what difference does it make? After Ahmose destroyed the Hyksos at Avaris (in the 16th Century BCE, Egypt became extremely xenophobic and stopped allowing immigration altogether. The Israelites did not arise in Canaan until the end of the 13th Century. They were never enslaved in Egypt. Neither were the Hyksos, for that matter.
The Hyksos occupation and expulsion survived in Canaanite memory, in various forms and reimaginings until the Israelites took it up (likely combined with some trans-Jordanian cultic traditions geographically shifted to the Sinai) in the wake of the Babylonian exile and repurposed it for their mythic history.
Says who? I see this meme propogated a lot by apologists, but it’s never actually backed up by anything. Exodus is a liberation story, and it was told by a people who were in captivity. It’s not surprising at all. Moreover, saying “they would not have done it” is not any kind of evidence for anything, and does nothing to erase the large amount of archaeological evdience against the Exodus story.
What do you mean by “Bible scholars,” and what is their evidence? This is not a question where Biblical scholarship is even particularly relevant. This is a historical and archaeological question, not a Biblical one. There are people you could call “Bible scholars” who take a confessional stance that some kind of minimal historical basis for the Exodus could exist, but this is grounded in an argument from absense – a “Moses of the gaps” – not in any kind of actual evidence.
It is the overwhelming consensus of modern Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern archaeologists that the Exodus never happened, that the Biblical story was composed no earlier the 6th or 7th Centuries BCE and that Moses is a wholly mythical character, with partial basis, perhaps, in earlier tribal priestly hero legends, but even that would have been combined with Hyksos legends and would have had no actual connection to Egypt or an Exodus.
Egypt did not take foreign slaves anymore after the Hyksos expulsion, so there couldn’t have been any to escape (and the entire route back to Canaan was closely guarded by military outposts in any case.
Canaan was part of Egypt anyway, so escaping to Canaan was not escaping at all.
Even allowing for the “Moses of he gaps” hypothesis of a tiny band of fleeing Canaanites, they still were not Israelites and did virtually nothing described in the Biblical story. So (aside from the fact that the hypothesis lacks any actual evidence and is proposed purely as an ad hoc attempt to save a historical kernel to Exodus), it’s a scenario that would have nothing to do with Israel or the Bible story and thus, the Bible sory can still be safely said to be complete fiction. At best, the book of Exodus has roughly the same level of genuine historical basis as Homer’s Iliad, which was based on a real war, and may have had some characters based on real historical figures.
I’ve seen you make this claim before and wondered what evidence there is. (Best shown in a separate thread, I guess.)
Some claim that linguistic and artifact evidence links the Judaism origin to the other early monotheism: the Cult of Aten. Has this possibility been debunked? I am definitely no historian so my opinion has zero value, but my common-sense suggests that the more recent of two possibilities for a myth basis is more likely since it requires less special pleading about “memory.”
The Hyksos hypothesis requires no special pleading, but the Akhenaton one does. The evolution of tribal legends, over centuries, is completely normal and expected. The Hyksos hypothesis is considered the most plausible because it best accords with the evidence/ It provides the basic outline of a semitic, Canaanite people migrating into Egypt, gaining power, coming into conflict and leaving.
The Akhnaten hypothesis has nothing to really support it, and (in my opinion) the biggest problem with it is that it ignores the fact that the Israelites were not originally montheistic. They originally used the Canaanite pantheon, then became henotheistic (somewhere aroind the 8th Century BCE. They didn’t become truly montheistic until after the Babylonian exile, so there is no continuous line of monotheistic belief or practice from Akhnaten into Canaan. The Israelites didn’t get their monotheism from Egypt, but from Zoroastrianism 800 years later. There is a about a 200 year gap between Akhnaten and the emergence of the Israelites, with no pre-Israelite Canaanite practices during that time, and not even any Israelite monotheism for another 600 years after that. There is simply no connection between Akhnaten and Jewish monotheism, and without that commonality, there is nothing at all to connect Akhnaten to Israel.
"The Jahwist, also referred to as the Jehovist, Yahwist, or simply as J, is one of the four major sources of the Torah postulated by the Documentary Hypothesis (DH). It is the oldest source, whose narratives make up half of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, plus fragments of Numbers. J describes a human-like God, called Yahweh (or rather YHWH) throughout, and has a special interest in the territory of the Kingdom of Judah and individuals connected with its history. J is believed to have been composed in c 950 BC (thus being the most ancient part…
In the Song of the Sea (also known as The Song of Miriam), one of the oldest parts of the Bible.
The Song of the Sea is usually dated to about 1200 BC.
Of the four sources of the Torah, the D source certainly, and the P source probably are monotheistic. According to Who Wrote the Bible? author Richard Elliott Friedman, the D source dates to the reign of king Josiah (641–609 BC) and the P source dates to the reign of king Hezekiah (729-696 B.C.).
The Babylonian exile ended in 538 BC.
There are scholars who agree with you, Diogenes the Cynic. They are called “minimalists,” but theirs is not the consensus.
No, it’s the consensus, and you don’t know what “minimalist” means. It’s a more radical voew than what I’ve presented.
The archaeology show that the Israelites were not monotheistic until after the exile, and your dates for the J source are way off. Sorry. I’m too tired to go into it any more tonight. I’ll expand tomorrow.
Archaeology shows that some Israelites worshiped idols, but this idol worship was condemned in texts written before the Babylonian Captivity.
“J may have originated as early as the time of King David (c. early-tenth century B.C.) but since many, of its themes reflect the conflict between Judah and Israel after Solomon’s death, its origin was more likely sometime after the split between Judah and Israel (late-tenth century B.C.) and before the Assyrian conquest and destruction of Israel in 722 B.C.” http://www.csulb.edu/~cwallis/100/worldreligions/Mythsofthebible.html
Archaeology shows only polytheistic practice before the 8th century, and then it went to henotheism before the exile. There are no Jewish monotheistic writings before the exile.
There never was a united Davidic kingdom to be divided, and no Solomonic dynasty. Israel Finkstein argues that topographical descriptions given in the J source match most closely with the 7th Century BCE, after the northern kingdom was sacked by the Assyrians, and Judah, to the south, was flooded with norther refugees.
The evidence for a 10th century origin is basically nothing. There wasn’t even a city of Jerusalem in the 10th century. If there was david (which is entirely possible), he was a minor local chieftain or warlord, not a king of a large territory.
One thing has puzzled me for a long time: in speaking of the Exodus myths, most everybody talks about “about a million people” which seems like an enormous underestimation. Exodus 12 says “about 600,000 men”, and most groups have at least one woman per man, so a million two hundred thousand. There were at least two children per couple (and to have grown from the seventytwo people who originally arrived, in four generations every single Hebrew woman had to have born at least fifty children, but never mind that since it does not sound very likely) so that’s two million four hundred thousand. And if each couple had only one member of the older generation, parents or aunts or what have you, still living thats three million, not counting the “mixed multitude” of “every man’s servant, that was bought with money” (what kind of miserable, oppressed slaves had slaves of their own, and where did they get the money to buy them?) not to mention several million sheep, goats, cows, and donkeys. So where does the idea of “about a million” come from?
Well, OK, but that still means less than one child per adult, not a single parent or grandparent or aunt still living, and leaves out the “mixed multitude” altogether.
Of course, three million means, if the Egyptians had built a six lane superhighway from Rameses to Gershon, which I don’t suppose they did, so the Hebrews could walk fifty abreast, the line would be thirtyfive miles long. The trip is about thirty miles, so the people at the rear would have had to walk sixtyfive miles, without food or water, in one day. Something isn’t right…
The Israelites also supposedly spent 38 of their 40 years at Kadesh Bornea. Two million people is a city, and a city of 2 million people in one place would have left some kind of archaeological remnant, yet not a single potsherd or bone or any other trace of human presence has been found there from the time. There wasn’t even a small settlement of a few hundred or a few dozen. Nothing.
"Shishak is best known for his campaign through Israel and Judah, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible (1 Kings 14:25;2 Chronicles 12:1-12).
"Shishak had provided refuge to Jeroboam during the later years of Solomon’s reign, and upon Solomon’s death, Jeroboam became king of the tribes in the north, which became the Kingdom of Israel. In the fifth year of Rehoboam’s reign (commonly dated between 926 and 917 BC)…
"In the very early years after the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, on chronological, historical, and linguistic grounds, nearly all Egyptologists identified Shishak with Shoshenq I. This position was maintained by most scholars ever since, and is still the majority position. The fact that Shoshenq I left behind “explicit records of a campaign into Canaan (scenes; a long list of Canaanite place-names from the Negev to Galilee; stelae), including a stela [found] at Megiddo” supports the traditional interpretation.[1]
"While Jerusalem is not mentioned in the list of towns that Shoshenq seized, the Karnak reliefs of this pharaoh are damaged in several sections and some town’s names were lost; therefore, many scholars believe that it would have been mentioned here.
Here again you are presenting one theory as though it is the consensus. It is not. Shoshenq is buried in a gold sarcophagus of that was looted from his raid. The existence of that much gold implies a united kingdom.
Jerusalem owes its existence to the fact that it is built on a hill so it is easy to defend, and it is watered by a stream. We do know from the Amarna letters that Jerusalem was inhabited before 1100 BC. There would have been no reason for it to be uninhabited in 1000 BC.