Yeah. But certainly not as described in Exodus. Some more sophisticated “city” Jewish people getting out of Egypt and come “home” seems in line, as the ancient Hebrews seems to have gotten some sort of revelation/push that started them to take over the Holy Land. So mostly myth and some legend. Certainly the Exodus didnt take that long or that many people (numbers are weird in the OT due to Numerology). But something caused the ancient Hebrew people to get motivated.
Right. Now we know they was a King David… but that is about it. Until Omri or so, the OT is just about all myth and legend.
OTTOMH Hatshepsut was a woman. She was often depicted as a man in murals and statues. But, we know she was a woman. One or two pharoahs tried to destroy all trace of the preceding ruler. We still know about those pharoahs. If a pharoah had a Jewish adviser of high station, or kept the Hebrews as slaves we’d know all about it.
Egypt was a well known location, the Pharoahs were well known, there was a desert between Egypt and Jerusalem. If the Israelites came from anywhere else the story would likely change over time to use places and people that would sound familiar to the listeners. If they didn’t come from anywhere else, meaning as an existing group that migrated to a new location, then it would be pure fiction.
I have no problem calling these stories myths even if there is some portion based on reality. Whether or not anyone like Moses existed there are more important things that can be learned from the story anyway.
I have read (sorry, no cite) that there is no trace of the old Egyptian language in Hebrew. Therefor the idea that the Israelites spent generations in Egypt is implausible. To me, a secular Jew not raised in a religious household, these stories have no more historical basis than the latest Sci-Fi I am reading.
So two of the alleged facts are not correct. Therefore the entire story was made up from nothing? None of it ever happened, not at all, those people had lived in same portion of Palestine forever, never lived anywhere else, and just made up a story about escaping from a harsh life?
These are stories, created to emphasize portions of religious belief. The gods they refer to are no more real than the Greek gods. Small pieces of the history they refer to may or may not have some vague antecedents in some reality. Most of the history is known to be totally unverifiable and extremely unlikely to be true.
I don’t ever remember being taught that these stories represented real history. That would have been totally besides the point. As I grew older I learned that was an obsessive madness on the part of Christians and that baffled me, so that’s another point against belief.
Like many others here, I became an atheist at a very young age. I didn’t know enough about Biblical history as a pre-teen to make any arguments for or against. I’m sure that some people simply accepted the stories as literal rather than metaphorical truths. Religions don’t survive long without that core of believers. Others just retold the stories year after year until they became meaningless background noise. It depends, absolutely.
The YouTuber Useful Charts (in his “who wrote the Bible” series) had me convinced that most Jews saw Esther as ahistorical, being a pastiche with jokes and everything, clearly written well after the time it depicts as a way of attacking the current government. And that this was why Purim is celebrated involves so much humor. There’s the whole Purim Torah which literally involves deliberate misinterpretations.
If that is not the case, then I’m curious why it is so associated with humor and irreverence.
We’ve got plenty of holidays where we sit around and mope about attempted genocide. We wanted just one where we get wasted and laugh about attempted genocide instead.
In Hebrew it is not the “Red Sea” and is indeed literally translated as “Reed Sea” but “Reed Sea” is also what we call the body of water between Sinai and Africa today. That translation error may be the reason that the Red Sea is called the RED Sea today but Reed Sea doesn’t refer to a different body of water.
Wikipedia shows 18 major pyramids being built over a period of 2,000 years. Only bit and pieces of that have anything approaching reliable historical documentation. It would be astounding to me if, looking across such a vast period, it was not the case that some builders were treated well, and others poorly.
Because of the whisper down the lane effect across centuries, probably. As I wrote before, I’m more sure my ancestors were slaves in what’s now Italy. But one can’t be sure:
Secular Jewish Israeli here, I do think many people accept these stories as factual, but most of them don’t have much historical evidence backing them up.
Hanukkah is the exception, it is the story of a completely historical rebellion against the Greeks. As noted above, the part that gets glossed over is that after throwing out the Greeks, the Jewish leaders would succumb to infighting, and a century later this would lead to their conquest by the Romans.
Purim’s story does speak of a time when the Persians ruled a huge empire, so like the Hanukkah story the setting is backed by historical knowledge; but the story itself wouldn’t have been very important to anyone other than Jewish residents of the Persian empire, so the historicity is fairly uncertain. It could certainly be based on real events, but it could also be a legend, or based on other stories that are now lost to us.
Exodus and the Egypt story is a very classic foundation myth. It is in many ways similar to other foundational tales - for example, the story of how the Aztecs came from the legendary Atzlan. The Passover story doesn’t really line up with what the archeological record tells us about the history of either Egypt or Israel; but it does make perfect sense as a story behind which a diverse coalition of interrelated nomadic tibes could unite as they shift to a more sedantary society.
I’m not sure about oral language, but this is wrong when it comes to written language; Hebrew uses a derived form of the Phonecian alphabet, and Phonecian uses simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics to create a phonetic (heh) alphabet.
While I don’t disagree with your conclusion, Exodus doesn’t claim that Israelite slaves built the pyramids (pop culture depictions aside); it says that the Hebrews built the cities of Pithom and Raamses, and doesn’t mention pyramids at all.
The central point to Passover is that God passed over the houses of the Jews and killed other first-borns. Talk about genocide. Good thing it never happened.
We’re talking about people who believe that is actual history and still worship that God? Holy Moses.
From my POV, most commemorative events (again, leaving out Hanukkah which others have discussed in all needed detail) are likely 95+% false in the literal sense, with a tiny nugget of some fact based seed that has been so lost in oral transmission to be unidentifiable.
The parts that were preserved and eventually codified into the written Torah were there because they served a purpose - Nationbuilding and creation of a unified shared culture with more centralized controls.
Of course, taking into account millennia of shared teachings and history, the myth is almost certainly more important that the facts in terms of understanding the Hebrew people. And while it’s certainly unusual, I have encountered a few of the tribe that do take a more fundamentalist approach to the history shared in the Torah. I would rate it as very unusual though in my experience, as most of my kith and kin ask more what you can learn from the stories rather than debating any sort of factual basis - true of even the most devout.
I would assume, at least, that the bits about him and Bathsheba were more or less accurate. A nation might well invent stories about their Great National Hero, but I think that they’re much less likely to include the scandalous parts, unless they’re true.
And it’s not like “rich and powerful man abuses his position to get some nookie” is a particularly implausible story, anyway.
There is a lot of political messaging in the Jewish Bible to the effect that when the Hebrews unite, our enemies melt away. It’s repeatedly done, as here, in a way that goes against modern values. Sometimes it may even go against the values of the compilers of the Bible, but those were the legends passed down at the time.
No. The central thing is how all the events (the burning bush, the plagues, the escape, the wandering, dayenu) culminated in the formation of the covenant between God and the Jews. The killing of the firstborns is dramatic, but it’s just one drop of wine out of ten.
And that’s just the religious bit. In my cultural tradition, the central point is how we free people have a responsibility to make the world better for those who aren’t.