It actually HAS been proven to be false, though. Just for the record. The Israelites didn’t even exist until around 1200 BCE, so no 400 year prior history. The Hebrew language did not exist during this alleged time of exile and Exodus either, so Mosaic authorship of the Bible is out on those grounds alone. Hebrew evolved from Canaanite some time around 1000 BCE (or maybe a pinch before), and the specific Hebrew dialect of the Torah (with the exception of a couple of more archaic fragments) is 6th Century BCE.
That’s without even getting into the clear of evidence of multiple documentary sources being syncretized into one narrative.
I’m amazed at how many people are responding to my posts. Hope I didn’t hit a raw nerve. I will have to be brief, so I will miss many of your points.
You guys keep refering to other false myths, such as the Irish fairies, and then when I ask you if people claim to have seen it, you move onto other myths. Please, for God’s sake, please enunciate a false event, which was believed to have been seen by millions of THEIR OWN ANCESTORS.
You admit that there was a Second Temple, since it was confirmed through acheologial means. Lucky for us Jews, since without that archeological confirmation you would assume that we cry on “Tisha B’av” about the destruction of a Temple that never existed. Since you admit that there was a Second Temple, does this not show that the Jewish national history is of evidential value? It sure does. HOWEVER, evidence can always be wrong. In order to evaluate the strength of evidence, we look around and see how often the form of evidence under question has ever been shown to be false. This may unnerve you: BUT THE EVIDENCE THAT I AM PRESENTING - NATIONAL, HEAVILY COMMEMORATED HISTORY - HAS NEVER SHOWN ITSELF TO BE FALSE.
Diogenes: How do you KNOW that the Habiru aren’t the Hebrews (this is a matter of debate amongst archeologists, BTW)?
Diogenes: How do you KNOW that archeology can prove a negative (especially when the fall of Babylong didn’t produce archeological evidence)?
Diogenes: How do you know that the Israelites didn’t exist before 1200 BC (yes, the earliest mention of them is 1200 BC, but that doesn’t mean they didn’ exist before that)?
Diogenes: How do you know that Hebrew didn’t exist during the time of he Exodus (absence of evidence is all you got?!)?
Diogenes. You don’t provide a shred of evidence for anything that you claim. Your all about absence of evidence.
Regarding Nimble’s point, Joseph was buried in Shechem, Israel. His tomb is there, not Egypt.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when there should and would be evidence. If they did exist then, they existed somewhere completely unrelated to where the Exodus narrative says they were at the time, and even then, there’s no evidence to support such a claim.
How do you know people didn’t exist before the dinosaurs? Were you there?
Blut Aus Nord: Sorry for making you tediously enunciate your logic, but can your please tell me why there “should and would” be evidence of the Exodus. Did the Egyptians ever record other embarrising events from which you can infer that there never was an Exodus?
I know this example isn’t exactly like an Exodus, but I mention it for the sake of describing what I mean: The Egyptians, we should not forget, worshiped the sun. Stuningly, we don’t find even a whisper in their writings about a solar-eclipse, even when there must have been hundreds of times during their many-millenium history in which their SUPREME GOD went dark in middle of the day. If you present this “finding”, about the lack of recording of solar eclipses in Egyptian writings, to an astronomer, do you think he would be able to resist the urge to chuckle? The astronomer is presenting evidence about when eclipses should have occured and all you can come with is “absense of evidence.” I, too, am having trouble resisting the urge to chuckle.
I already told you that history is rife with miracle stories supposedly witnessed by other people.
What do you mean by "Jewish national history? Knowledge of the second temple period is just history. It’s not in the Hebrew Bible. I guess you can call the New Testament part of “Jewish national history,” but it’s not the source of knowledge about it. This is a rather strange sort of logical leap you’re trying to make. We’re discussing the factual veracity of historical claims made in the Bible.
You are not presenting evidence. Belief is not evodence even if you write it in all caps.
This particular myth HAS been shown to be ahistorical.
Read the damn wiki link I posted. That’s a summarized account of prevailing views, but basically the hypothesis that the Habiru were Hebrews (something that was never more than hypothetocal in the first place, so don’t get your burdens of proof mixed up) has been abandoned is because of contemporary documentary evidence identifying the Habiru as a social class rather than an ethnic group, and because the Egyptions use a different word (Shashu) to refer specifically to Israelites.
Archaeology can prove negatives when the dates don’t line up and when something isn’t there which is supposed to be there.
Because the archaeological evidence shows them emerging and slowly becoming distinct from Canaanite culture around that time.
Because the oldest Hebrew writing isn’t found before the 11th Century BCE and because the evolution of languages is traceable.
Your entire case is a desperate appeal to an argument from absence.
Commemorated how? Written down? Widely believed? You keep hitting this point as if it’s some kind of automatic win, but you haven’t actually shown it to be true. And you also haven’t shown that this history itself is true. Yes, someone wrote it down, but history has many examples of people writing down the wrong thing, mistakenly or deliberately, and that wrong thing being accepted as true by those who read it later.
Let’s say that you do have an event that lots of people saw, and it was recorded by multiple people, and their accounts agree, etc. What evidence do you have that it was actually what you claim it to be? "It was god’ is not the default response. If you want to be able to claim an event had something to do with god, you have to provide evidence that it was in fact god.
Ask anyone in America what type of tree George Washington chopped down, and what he said afterward. National, heavily commemorated history, but quite false.
I did a research paper on the Exodus in high school, and I have a portion that pertains to this argument:
Cites:
Bromiley, Geoffrey W. International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988. Print.
Finkelstein, Israel and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Print.
That’s my take on it, anyway. As for no records of solar eclipses, that may be so, but based on our knowledge of the orbits of the Earth and the Moon, we know that they happened. There IS evidence.
Not to mention it wasn’t written down until anywhere from 500-800 years after the alleged events it describes, and there is no evidence of any “national memory” before then.
Serious, serious goalpost move–unless you’re claiming that millions of Jews fled Egypt. Is that your serious claim? I mean, set everything else aside–how would a million people on the march in the desert handle sanitation? I know manna handled one end of the digestive tract, but what about the other?
No, the question is whether some members of any other ethnic group believe that some of their ancestors witnessed a miraculous event. And yes, lots of Icelanders (not Irish, Iceland) believe they’ve witnessed fairies, and a much larger number believe their ancestors did.
As FinnAgain correctly points out, it’s not the case that all Jews believe their ancestors literally watched as Moses parted the Red Sea. Plenty of Jews take it as a myth ripe with meaning and beauty, but not something to be taken literally. That’s how a lot of folks see stories from that time period.
Weren’t most of Egyptian scientific records burned or lost?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at anyway. We know solar eclipses occur. We know that they occurred in ancient Egypt, and we know from the Greeks and others, that the Egyptians knew all about them. It’s even likely that some of their myths are related to the phenomena.
In other words, we have outside, empirical evidence that the Egyptians knew of solar eclipses, regardless of what anyone says on the subject. There is NO evidence to collaborate the exodus, except the bible story, which is full of anachronisms and historical errors, and whose carefully reconstructed history shows rather unequivocally that it was a collection of oral myths and legends compiled with a specific political agenda by some bronze age, backwater chieftain.
In other words: without evidence that would be expected to exist, you got nothing, bub.
They certainly recorded their subjugation and rule by the foreign Hyksos, as well as several episodes of Sea People depredations. I don’t think the Egyptians were quite as gung-ho at whitewashing their history as you are led to believe.
He was first buried in Egypt, and only his bones moved 400 years later ( :dubious: )
Do you think the Egyptians wouldn’t have raised a tomb for the guy who saved them from famine, who was second only to Pharaoh?
Abele, will you please explain why your method of proof can’t also be used to “prove” every single religion and myth on the planet? Flat-earth? Conspiracy theories? Reptilian overlords?
“People believe it, therefore it is true” is the very definition of begging the question. If we’re trying to find out if the people are right about what they believe, we can’t just assume it to be so. How does your “proof” account for people simply being wrong?
Close, very close but not “even a whisper” missed the known evidence by one, maybe [very maybe ;)] two documents.
A papyrus, its number is pBerlin 1.3588 [The Egyptian Museum and Papyrus collection of Berlin], tells the story of an eclipse that happened when King Psammetich (or Psamtik) I died in the year 610.
The papyrus was written 500 years later by an Egyptian priest but an eclipse had indeed been visible in the year 610, at the 30th of September, to be precise. It was a total one in southern Russia but visible enough above Egypt.
The papyrus was published a couple of times in the literature and shouldn’t be too hard to find in the Egyptian part of a University Library near you; I don’t know if an online source exists.
And though this is the only document that directly deals with an eclipse, we have at least a mention of the terrible threat of a darkening of the sun on another papyrus, pLouvre 3129; but since the text deals with Seth, it’s, imo, more convincing to see the passage in relation to desert storms.
All in all, you are quite right that we have found almost no mention of an eclipse and the absence is indeed generally explained with the terror such an event held for the Egyptian mindset.
Purely off topic and academic question here. I thought that the Egyptians were able to predict eclipses and certain other astronomical events. In fact, I thought they had even managed to suss out the precession of the earth’s axis - something that only happens every 26,000 years IIRC. So if they had a good grip on precession, predicting eclipses should have been completely mundane and accordingly, not stele worthy.