Well I understand that but this seems such a minor thing. These were nomadic tribes. They moved all over the place so I guess I just don’t get why this particular move makes that big a difference. But since you don’t seem to be some whacko thinking this proves something about God’s plan, I will leave you to your historical / archeological nerdiness. 
The only way? Of course not.
The most likely way? I believe it more likely than the insistance that this highly successful “Founders Tale” was fabricated out of whole cloth.
History is often fashioned from minor things. So, for example, absent a Southern Yahwist-centric element one could easily imagine a history where the Israelite confederation evolved in a much different direction, falling in 732 BCE.
Thanks, I think.
An interesting article. Not sure I’m totally sold on the notion, but it is at least possible.
What makes the field interesting (for those who are not themselves religious or looking to witness or anti-witness) is that the OT narrative represents perhaps the best example of a pre-historic narrative over time fading gradually into the historic - in that it contains a proto or pseudo-historic mythological narrative that, as the time-frame advances towards the present, becomes more and more recognizably historic (and eventually, cross-referenced with archeology and external written sources).
No-one doubts, for example, that the later Kings of Judea really existed, because we have stone monuments from their enemies in the ME boasting of having defeated them and made them pay tribute … however, as you move backwards in the Biblical narrative, the persons mentioned become harder and harder to find any evidence for, and the stories about them become increasingly laden with myth. At some point, the narrative becomes wholly mythic, of course. The issue is what point can one go back to and say 'this person or persons were probably real people, heavily mythologized" rather than “these persons are wholly mythic”.
A quarter century ago, most serious scholars though King David was basically wholly mythic. Now, it seems more likely he’s a real person, heavily mythologized.
I still am of the view that the Exodus falls into the “wholly mythic” category, but I’m not wedded to it.
The “wholly mythic” theory seems to by dying a ‘death of a thousand cuts.’
Not having knowledge of this fellow’s evidence that some group of Asiatics migrated from Egypt, I can’t really comment on the bulk of the hypothesis, but I can at least note one mistake in the article:
Hur was not a Levite, he was from the tribe of Judah. (Exodus 31:2).
I’ve argued before that the most plausible historical event (i.e. thing for which we have an archaeological record) to be the foundation of the Exodus story is the Hyksos Expulsion (basically, a group of Semitic peoples took over Northern Egypt and were later kicked out). They weren’t slaves, but they certainly were in Egypt. And then, presumably, over time they forgot why they’d been in Egypt and figured they must have been slaves, since why else would the clearly dominant Egypt have had a bunch of Jews on their land?
I’m happy to believe that the Jews from this region may have been the Levites, but I’d need to do some investigation for myself before I’d try to sell it to anyone.
Certainly, the evidence is that most of the religion of the Jews comes from the South. We see the oldest references to Yahweh there; the Midianites and Kenites lived there and bred in and exchanged religious ideas, and etc.; and the Exodus, of course. But we know that most of the people who became the Jews were not from the South, and I would argue that there’s evidence for the struggle for religious dominance in the Bible (via the demonization of different Canaanite tribal gods who would have been competing with Yahweh). But whether the Southern Jews are the Levite jews…couldn’t say at the moment.
Good post.
But I think the Exodus is 90% mythic, but (like many films) “Based on a True Story!”.
This sure adds a lot to the debate. :rolleyes:
Which is itself a good point. Compare, for example, the “true story” of the life and times of Dr. John Nash as presented in the film A Beautiful Mind to the real man and you see both how quickly things can diverge from reality (even in a land informed by the Wikipedia) and how willing the average public is to swallow it up (even in a land informed by the Wikipedia).
Yes. But if one accepts Rabbinic tradition, he was the son of Caleb and (significantly) Miriam.
Too early - probably a case of conflation.
And the fascinating exercise is that of trying to infer the “True Story.”
Sometimes it only means that at one time there were people, and these people did something…and sometimes it just means absolutely nothing except “Just Believe Us, Because!”
Why don’t you let the people who want to discuss those somethings do so without you yet again declaring how much you don’t believe in the bible?
A need to proselytize? Where have we seen that before?
Jaywalker Soule:
Which would still mean that the Levites mingled and intermarried with the Judah-ites at the time of the Exodus, and not that Levites alone were emigrants from Egypt, who merged with the other tribes later. It belies the supposed separation of the Levites from the other tribes that the author in your link feels is indicated by the omission of Levites from the Song of Deborah. (And incidentally, he seems to feel it’s significant that no other tribes are “mentioned” in the Song of Miriam - Levites aren’t either, except due to the fact that Miriam is the singer. Unlike the Song of Deborah, the Song of Miriam is one verse long and says nothing at all about any tribes, so it’s quite a stretch to derive anything from that.)
Too early for what? The Exodus takes place well before the point in the Bible where the chronology goes wackadoo. There’s no reason to expect that they’d know how much time had reasonably passed between the expulsion and contemporary time.
The Exodus was probably written around 550-500 BC. They may have had some documentation on the nobility going back to about 1000 BC. Anything before that, though, who knows exactly how much time had passed? The difference, for someone living around 525 BC, between 1200 and 1500 BC is pretty moot.
As example, Abraham settled in Gerar at the end of his long journey from Chaldea (Iraq). Gerar wasn’t settled until 1200 BC, implying that Abraham existed 3200 years ago. That gives only 200 years between Abraham and King Saul, which disagrees with the Bible chronology. The Bible states that Abraham was rocking the planet around 1800 BC. A real group of Semitic peoples - the Amorites - factually moved West from Iraq, passing by Assyria, and then South into Canaan around 1700 BC.
Well assuming that the Abraham story has any basis in history, we’d have to assume that “Abraham” was an Amorite and that he existed around 1700 BC. Some of those Amorites are believed to have continued on into Egypt, making them the most likely explanation for the Hyksos.
Though alternatively, the bulk of the people who took over Northern Egypt could have been Canaanites and Philistines who were displaced by the Amorites. And since they’re all Semitic peoples, the names end up sounding similar.
But basically we have the Bible telling us that the Jews came from Iraq, journeyed down into Egypt and then fled back to Canaan, before starting a stable kingdom around 1000 BC.
In the archaeological record, we see large movements of Canaanitic peoples coming over from Iraq, journeying down into Egypt, fleeing back to Canaan, before starting some stable kingdoms around 1000 BC.
It could entirely be coincidence that the Bible mentions that the Jews came from “Chaldea” (which isn’t true, since there were already Canaanitic people in Canaan before the Amorites moved over) and it could be coincidence that the Bible mentions a large group of Jews in Egypt, but there is historical precedent for either of these two claims. Neither aligns with the Bible. Chaldea was a name that didn’t exist until 600 BC, most of the Amorites came from Western Iraq not from around Southern Iraq, Gerar wasn’t founded until far after the time that Abraham is supposed to exist, and there’s no notable interaction between the Jews and Egypt around 1200 BC.
But if we give the Bible any benefit of the doubt, then the greatest alignment between the Bible stories and the archaeological record are the migration of the Amorites and the Hyksos expulsion.