Does the original Hebrew word translated as “slaves” really mean slave slaves, as in chattel sold at auction, beaten with whips, etc.? Could it mean something less absolute, like being a subject population with no rights, having to pay a tribute in drafted labor, something like that?
No, you misunderstand that quote (you didn’t actually read the whole chapter, did you?), and that’s not the relevant quote anyway. The relevant quote is Deut. 1:2-3:
([There are] eleven days’ [journey] from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadeshbarnea.)
And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first [day] of the month, [that] Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them;
The Israelites arrived Kadesh Barnea two years after they left Egypt (nearly a year of which was spent at Mt. Horeb. Moses then spoke to the Israelites at KB “on the 40th year.” Moses then narrates that he had taken a group of 12 men (one from each tribe) on a series of scouting expeditions while the rest of the Israelites stayed at KB. In the verse you quoted, Moses was only talking about his own little scouting detail which had left KB 38 years before, and during which time the “fighting men” had all died at the KB base camp. The “we” in Deut. 2:14 does not refer to the bulk of the base camp, only to Moses and the guys he took with him to scout ahead.
I’ve read it and reread it and I can’t come up with that interpretation.
Moses does send out spies in 1:23 although from the text it doesn’t seem that Moses went with them. The spies return in 1:25 with fruits from the land and report that the land is good but giants live there. The Israelites are afraid and don’t want to go. God tells them that only Joshua and Caleb will live to see the promised land. The Israelites try to make amends by fighting the Amorites but since God isn’t with them, they are chased back to Hormah (wherever that is) and then they retreat to Kadesh where they stay for “many days”. That’s the end of chapter 1. No where (that I’m aware of) are spies sent out again.
In chapter 2,
I see no indication that this is referencing the 12 spies. It would have been pretty ballsy of 12 people to provoke the descendants of Esau to war. God gives the same instructions regarding the Moabites in verse 9. In 13, God tells them to cross the Zered valley. Then in 2:14
Then God gives a similar warning about leaving the Ammonites alone. It certainly seems to me that he is telling the whole camp, not just a band of spies.
Read it again. You’re still misunderstanding it. I am not giving you my “interpretation.” I’m telling you how the text is understood by basically everyone.
You’re also glossing over the fact that Moses is narrating all this stuff to the Israelites AT Kadesh Barnea in “the 40th year.”
KB was that base camp. Moses is talking about people he took out scouting with him.
I’m not glossing over “the 40th year”. That’s the whole point to the story. It was only an 11 day journey but it took the Israelites 40 years. Moses is retelling the story to the people because all of those that lived throught it were now dead. Please explain 1:24-25 which says
It seems obvious to me that Moses wasn’t on the spy mission your appeal to authority notwithstanding.
The first sentence appears to indicate that Moses is speaking, not at KB as you allege, but “…beyond the Jordan in the wilderness, in Arabah opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel …”.
The King James Version:
Wherever Moses was speaking to the Israelites from in the 40th year, it appears on first reading at least to be somewhere other than KB.
Is there some scholarly source that explains this whole spending 38 years at KB thing?
The 11 day journey was from Mt. Horeb to KB. Deuteronomy 2:14 refers to how long it took them to able to get from KB to the Zered Valley, in the Trans-Jordan.
Now, your interpretation is not the traditional one, but if you want to argue that the 38 years is how long it took them all to travel en masse the approximately 105 miles between KB and Zered, that’s fine, but it still just leaves a very slight reiteration of the same problem, which is that 2 million people slowly dragging themselves 100 miles over a period of 38 years would still leave gobs and gobs of archaeological evidence, and there isn’t any.
Yes, my bad on that one. He was speaking to them at Zered, 100 miles away from KB, 38 years after they had arrived at KB and started sending out emissary missions.
On the irish side of my family history, myth says that at roughly that time, my ancestors went from Syria to Spain, then to Ireland. Interestingly, genetic testing and analysis suggests this to be true. (Source, Bryan Sykes, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.)
While this has little direct relevance to the question, it does suggest that perhaps there were multiple peoples scarpering out of Dodge at about that time. There is the ‘not slaves, but conquerers’ theory of the Israelites.
My own view is that there is no way that the exodus account is historical.
It may be a mythologized re-working based loosely on some real events, but the real events in issue, absent archaeological proof, are unknowable.
I have no trouble believing in the escape from Egypt of a small group of followers of a prophet figure who goes on to create a mass movement among the nomads dwelling in the wilderness surrounding the cities of Caanan. The huge numbers and lengthy dates (the stereotypical use of “40 years” for example) would then simply be figments of the storyteller’s art.
Some of what the Bible describes as slavery strikes me as more like enlisting in the army; you can’t just leave before your time’s up, but you’re not a slave, either. But the treatment of the Children of Israel in Exodus was pretty awful. There’s no indication they were sold, but they were beaten, and it’s hard to get too much worse than having your newborn children drowned in the river.
Putting all that to one side, being a subject population with no rights isn’t prestigious, either. The story is very much at odds with the usual practice of saying that your tribe is descended from the gods, or even, “Great-great-grandma was an Indian princess.”
The exodus included such things as food provided by heaven that would only be for that day, none could be saved more then 2 days. This was made so God can get His people home, what makes you think that any conventional sign would remain?
I have no problem believing that a nomadic tribe of Semitic ancestry sojourned in Egypt for a time and later settled in what’s now Israel. I seriously doubt it was numbered in the hundreds of thousands, probably more like a few clans, but it’s easy enough to imagine the tale growing with every retelling.
This bears on the mythology rather than the historicity of the event, but Freud had a very interesting take on the topic in his book Moses and Monotheism(published in his exile in London). Freud believed that Moses (mosah- son of*, possibly [this according to Freud] 'Thoth-mosa]
Freud was not a professional historian, though he did have more knowledge of Egyptian history than most. (He was a passionate collector of Egyptian antiquities.)
If I were writing a novel it’d go thusly:
*Most famously Ramses the Great, before his name was Hellenized/Latinized and the adjective added, was ‘son of Ra’, or ‘Ra-mosah’.
James Cameron produced a documentary for the History Channel called *Exodus Decoded *(wiki and official site and a debunking article). It’s mainly memorable for having superb CGI and a much higher budget than other History Channel fare and an odd absence of Nostradamus being referenced.
Otherwise it made some interesting arguments for an exodus type event having occurred during the reign of Ahmose I ca. 1500 but nothing remotely conclusive. One of the main problems with the documentary is his trying to give rational explanations to completely miraculous things like the death of the first born (and only the first born) or the Ark of the Covenant.
There are stories in my own family that are fantastically interesting but when I did genealogy research turned out to be majorly overblown- a sand of truth and the rest secretion to make a pearl. I can only think that to a people where literacy is a novelty and something only the priests possess and who exist in a land where elaborate mythology is in no short supply, it’s ridiculous to assume everything happened as recorded.
Absolutely no historians or archaeolgists give Freud’s theory any credence. The most prevailing opinion by far is that the Exodus myth was loosely based on Canaanite memories of the Hyksos rebellion.
Egypt actually controlled Canaan at the alleged time of the Exodus, by the way, so it was no escape at all to go there fromEgypt. It was essentially just moving from one part of Egypt to another.
Remember all except a few of the original escapees died before entering Canaan. What happened to the skeletons? They were all buried, as is custom, and it is a wonderful climate for preservation.
In addition there would be clothing, shoes, tools, fires, and many other things, many of which would get worn out and discarded or lost. That many people would leave quite a trace, food or no food, poop or no poop. Where are the signs? Or did God send the angelic maid service in?