Is there any hard evidence to show that tens of thousands of jews were roaming a desert for 40 years, as is claimed in the bible?
You’re talking about an event that, if it did occur, took place a hell of a long long time ago. The solidly verified history of the Jewish people starts a ways after whatever Israelites who were originally enslaved in Egypt had made their way back. I believe many scholars interpret the whole sequence of events in Egypt, including all tales of Moses, as being tales in which individuals actually represented tribes or factions, as is thought to be the case with Esau and Jacob.
I don’t believe there is any empirical evidence supporting the existence of Moses, nor of incarceration in & escape from Egypt.
Did I mention that this would be really ancient times we’re discussing here? The contents of the Torah were not (even by legend) in existence yet. (And the actual writings probably came into existence after the kingdom of David, not during the latter years of the life of Moses). Nearly all that we could consider to constitute Jewishness was yet to come. Records of any sort were pretty damn rare back then.
On Penn & Teller’s Bullshit (which is not the best source of information, I know) they speak with several experts on both sides of that particular incident and find that there is no evidence that this event actually occured and beyond that there is no evidence of jews being enslaved to egyptians outside of the bible either. I did a quick search and found nothing that did not reference the bible as it’s source of information regarding the jews in the desert scenario so take that to mean what you will.
No, there isn’t any non-biblical evidence of the Hebrews being enslaved in Egypt nor of the alleged wondering in the desert. None whatsoever.
Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen of course (or some distorted version), but no…there is no evidence of any of this stuff, sensationalist stuff on Discovery Channel to the contrary (they ran a show called something like Science of the Bible, or Biblical Archeology…something like that…showing supposed science behind the plagues of Egype, the exodus, ect.).
-XT
I once read that the phrase “forty days and forty nights” wasn’t meant literally. It was a slang term for “a long time.” I’ve always wondered if the same could apply to the phrase “forty years”-- that it means: “No one really knows how long it was, but it was a lot of years.”
Just a bit on the number 40. Symbolism baby. Always associated with rebirth.
Wondering how far it was to a good deli or Chinese, presumably. 
Archeologists have found where very small groups of pople lived in the desert, but no large groups from that time.They also found writings the support the idea that slavery was not as stated but did find that people had come from all over the area to work on the pyarmids because the pay was apparently good… They have also found the tomb of the Pharoh Ramses and his sons and none seemed to have been killed by the angel of death and the body of the pharoh was found earlier and he had not drowned.
Historians have found nothing to prove Moses existence,if he had been raised by a Pharoh’s wife it would have been noted somewhere. There is a writing that the Israelites were fighting in another country when they were supposed to have been held in slavery.
To stay in the desert for 40 years would have been unreasonable since they could have well found somewhere else to live.
Monavis
They had the world’s most famous food-delivery service. And, of course, found a reason to complain about it. \
They spent some of the time in the Wilderness of Sin.
But the important question is why?
And the answer, of course, is
somebody had lost a quarter.
Jews in the desert?
OY VEY!
I thought this Thread was about Palm Springs, why isn’t it?
The Jews were held captive by the Babylonians. It seems plausible that they more fully developed many of these stories at that time as ways of looking back on past precedents of their people and how they had come through hard times: steeling themselves to survive the present suffering. It also explains all the anachronistic references to things like camels and building materials that were not characteristically Egyptian but were very Babylonian.
You sure? After all, we don’t know who was the mother of Tutankhamen. If we don’t know who raised a reigning king (albeit short-lived) why do you think a random foundling would have been noted?
I think something along the lines of the story of Moses’ discovery in the basket and being taken in by the princess could have happened. IIRC, there’s a very similar story in Egyptian mythology, and a spoiled, pampered princess could have anything she wanted. If she found a baby and decided to keep it (almost as a pet, in a way) no one would have tried to stop her. The boy wouldn’t have been considered a prince, but he would have been under the princess’s protection.
Actually, there is plenty of evidence that the Egyptians took and kept slaves from that area and during that period. They were notorious for it and it was a common practice anyway. There is period, written evidence of such, not to mention “dig” evidence. Of course, they didn’t identify them as Israelites or Jews (there is one obelisk that gives a reference to a people thought to be the proto-israelis.) Now, since the Egyptians raided every other local people for slaves, it passes any sort of likelyhood that the ONLY tribe they didn’t raid were the proto-Israelis. In fact, it’s just plain impossible. So yeah, Egyptians kept “Israelis” as slaves prior to the Exodus. However, no one called them “Israelis” or anything like that (“Habiru” is a maybe) for a long time, not even themselves, so we won’t find a papyrus scroll with an inventory “40 sheep, 8 cows, 4 Hebrew slaves- left suddenly after a rain of frogs,…” 
*The narrative behind how the Israelite slavery began in Egypt is still unclear in many sources. A few historians believe that this may have been due to the changing political conditions within Egypt. In 1650 BCE, Egypt was conquered by tribes, apparently Semitic, known as the Hyksos by the Egyptians. The Hyksos were later driven out by Ahmose I, the first king of the eighteenth dynasty. Ahmose I reigned approximately 1550 - 1525 BCE, founded the 18th Egyptian dynasty, and a new age for Egypt, the New Kingdom. Thutmose III established Egypt’s empire in the western Near East. From then on, the chronology can only roughly be given in approximate dates for most events, until about the 7th century BCE.
1440 BCE The Egyptian reign of Amenhotep II, during which the first mention of the Habiru (possibly the Hebrews) is found in Egyptian texts [4]. Recently discovered evidence (see Tikunani Prism) indicates that many Habiru spoke Hurrian, the language of the Hurrians. The habiru were probably a social caste rather than an ethnic group (Finkelstein 2001, Van de Mieroop 2003), yet even so they may have been incorporated into early Israelite tribal groups.
c.1400 First mention of the Shasu in Egyptian records, located just south of the Dead Sea. The Shasu contain a group with a Yahwistic name.
1300 BCE Some Bible commentaries place the birth of Moses around this time. [5] [6]
1295 BCE Egypt’s 19th dynasty began with the reign of Ramesses I. Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE) filled the land with enormous monuments, and signed a treaty with the Hittites after losing the northern Levant to the Hittite Empire.
The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and its chronology are much-debated. It has long been believed that the Exodus took place in the reign of Ramesses II, but this is speculative- the cities named in Exodus as those built by the Israelites- Pithom and Rameses- were built during his reign, and documents from his reign referring to habiru being used in the building of these cities provide circumstantial evidence in favor of this view, although the Exodus may have happened over a long period of time. Evidence for an Israelite presence in Egypt has been found from about a century after the reign of Rameses II, suggesting the process was much more complex than the picture given in the Bible. (Bietak 2001) Research into settlement patterns suggest that the ethnogenesis of Israel as a people was a complex process involving mainly native pastoralist groups in Canaan (including habiru and shasu), with some infiltration from outside groups, such as Hittites and Arameans from the north as well as southern shasu groups such as the Kenites- some of whom may have been enslaved in Egypt. (Dever 2001, 2003, Mazar 1990)"*
However, the numbers (population, years, etc) given in Exodus are very dubious. :dubious: Not to mention the whole story being so simplified, and then again, there’s the Miracles. :dubious:
There were proto-Israeli slaves in Egypt sure. It seems like it’s possible that during one of the times of upheaval, some of them made a break back to their homeland, and maybe once there brought period technology and modern tactics to their bucolic tribal kin. So, maybe the Exodus is based upon real history, later heavily mythologized. Honestly, there is no evidence of such, but there isn’t a lot of good evidence in that area at all, only the Egyptians kept decent records- unless you count the Bible, which likely wasn’t put into written form until much later. So, we wouldn’t expect to find hard archeaological evidence of the “real” Exodus, and even if we did, it’d be hard to tell it from a find of another nomad camp of that era, barring a graffito: “Moses was here, those Tablets were heavy”.
This is an ancient Egyptian account which survives as a fragment. Supposedly, it relates events that are similar to those described in the biblical account (Exodus). Anyway, would it be reasonable for the Egyptians to talk about the israelites at all? They were just a minor tribe, and had no part in Egyptian society. It would be like the "beverly hills Journal’ printing a story about mexican immigrant maids and landscape workers,
The Ahmes papyrus deals with ealy mathematical concepts.
*Ahmes (more accurately Ahmose) was an Egyptian scribe who lived during the Second Intermediate Period. A surviving work of Ahmes is part of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus now located in the British Museum (Newman, 1956). Ahmes states that he copied the papyrus from a now-lost Middle Kingdom original, dating around 2000 BC. The work is entitled directions for knowing all dark things and is a collection of problems in geometry and arithmetic. The 87 problems are presented with solutions, but often with no hint as to how the solution was obtained. However, bringing in additional documents like the Akhmim Wooden Tablet, P. Reisner and the P. Kahun provide a range of methods that Ahmes drew upon.
Ahmes states without proof that a circular field with a diameter of 9 units is equal in area to a square with sides of 8 units (Beckmann, 1971). In modern notation:
p(9/2)² = 8²
which leads to a value of pi approximately equal to 3.16, within two hundreths of the true value of pi. This irrational number pi tended to go beyond the rational number domain of Egyptian mathematics.*
Are you thinking of Habiru?
The wife of a Pharoh raising a child as her won would have been written about,also if so many Egyptians were drowned,first born killed it would have been an important event. The Pharoh’s wife was not a princess. Where did Aaron Moses brother come into the picture? There were other myths about babies being found in baskets in other cultures Just as there were Ressurections.
Monavis
There’s a very similar story in (not surprising regarding biblical myths) Mesopotamia :
“I am Sargon, the powerful king, the king of Akkad. My mother was a priestess, my father I don’t know. […] I was born in Azupiranu, along the Euphrates. My mother conceived me and bore me in secret. She put me in a craddle of reeds, sealed with bitumen and gave me to the river. The river carried me. The river carried me to Akki, the gardener. […] Akki, the gardener adopted me as a son […] While I was a gardener, the goddess Ishtar fell in love with me and then for fifty six years I reigned as king”