I think it was Golde Meir (who was not a Torah literalist) who said she thought it odd God would lead his chosen people around a desert for 40 years only to settle them on the only spot without oil.
Earlier I had typed up a post referencing this. Then decided that it didn’t fit the request
So I decided not to hit the submit button. 
I saw it a year ago when I was recovering from surgery. Daytime TV is bad and the Bad Science Channel (The History Channel) was one of my favorites. I really did enjoy this one, even if the scholarship is questionable.
Yeah, this is a film made by Simcha Jacobovici, the so-called “Naked Archaeologist,” who is actually has no credentials at all as an archaeologist or a historian, but is a filmmaker.
He’s the same guy who did the “Jesus Tomb” special, and hosts his own faux archaeology show, and is a propoent of, among other things, Mosaic authorship of the Torah.
The “Exodus Decoded” special is not complete nonsense in that it explores some genuine Hyksos associations with the Biblical Exodus legends, but Jacobovici really overreaches with a lot of it, and really distorts the case.
Jacobovici is quite intelligent, and is good at cobbling together narratives and arguments that appear plausible on a superficial level. He’s also a smart debater and can knock real experts off balance sometimes, but he really brings nothing in terms of new evidence. He just knows how to tell stories and use smoke and mirrors (and selective facts) to spin fancy yarns from what is really scanty or non-existent evidence.
I know, that’s why I specified it was mythology. What I think is interesting though, perhaps ironic, but hard to put into words- is that Freud tried to weave and tailor facts and history and folklore into a narrative to support his own dogma (psychoanalysis) by claiming ancient Jews had woven and tailored facts and history and folklore into a narrative to support their own dogma (Judaism). I’m not at all sure he saw the similarity in his interpretation and those of the ancients.
I have wondered if there’s a connection twixt Akehnaton and the monotheism of ancient Israel. Is it known when the Hebrew religion became monotheistic? (I’ll count henotheism as monotheism if their own worship involved a singular supreme deity.)
What I thought was utter BS about the Jesus Tomb was the claim that the odds of those names appearing in one family were [something astronomical]. I am not a historian specializing in ancient Israel, I neither speak nor read Hebrew or Classical Greek thus I’ve never read primary sources in their original language, I’ve only a sporadic interest in the 1st century, but in the readings I’ve done on Herod the Great I knew that from the Herodian family alone you get every single one of those names: Mary (Mariamne, Miriam, however you want to write it) was not only the most common name for girls in 1st century Israel but was the name of two of Herod the Great’s wives, while James (the same name was Jacob, the patriarch for whom Israel is named), Joseph and Jesus (the same as Joshua- the great military leader and judge of the OT) were names that would have been found in pretty much EVERY large Hebrew family. It would be no more uncommon than having two large families in the same town whose members included a Mary, James, Joseph, and John. (I substituted John for Josh since Joshua is probably less common now than its equivalent would have been among first century Jews.)
You never get to see him naked either!
Thank goodness.
That’s a tricky question to answer without controversy, but archaeologically speaking, the Israelites don’t appear to have become truly montheistic until after the Babylonian exile. Polytheistic shrines and idols are found right in the heart of Israel and Judah (even in Jerusalem) until (IIRC) around the 8th Century BCE.
Conservatives will argue that all these shrines are not evidence against monotheism, but merely evidence of chronic backsliding.
I would argue that Judaism as a completely distinct religion from polytheistic and henothestic Canaanite traditions (and Yahweh is derived right from the Canaanite pantheon. He even had a girlfriend named Asherah at one point) is almost totally a post-exilic development.
If you’re going to reference them don’t call them the Bad Science Channel, that’s rude and childish. They’re the Nostradamus/Trucker/Aryan Prison Gang/Logging and history Channel.
Actually I was channel surfing the other night and saw the Howard Zinn/Matt Damon produced special that involved actors reading monologues from history- mainly excerpts from diaries, speeches, court trials, etc.- and thought to myself Holy crap… that’s actually history! (True, Howard Zinn has no shortage of critics [I’m one in fact], but at least he never tried to prove Nostradamus predicted the Masons would kill the Mayans and take over the world using loggers and prison gangs.) I wonder if this was a fluke or if they’re planning to retake some of their channel.
I came across this article that makes several claims for the plausibility of the exodus:
Is there merit to these claims?
Frankly, no. I noticed a number of factually erroneous claims just in the first couple of paragraphs.
It goes to the Hyksos well again, makes a specious assertion that the Hyksos were “closely related to the Hebrews,” by virtue of being “semitic,” then makes the totally false claim that the Hyksos “including the Israelites” (who did not actually exist yet) were enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years. Complete bunk. The Hyksos were driven out of Egypt, chase back to Canaan and destroyed. They were not Israelites, and the attempt to conflate them with Israelites (or even more speciously, “Hebrews”) via the the word “semitic” is just fallacious. That word applied very broadly to a wide variety of Ancient Middle Eastern peoples, including Canaanites, Phoencians, ancient Arabic people, Akkadians,a nd many others. The Hyksos were likely Canaanites, but their ethnic identity is not known for sure.
The attempt to argue that Hyksos = Semites = Israelites is akin to trying to argue that the Celts were European, and Italians are European, therefore the Celts were Italians.
I saw a lot more wrong with that article than this, but it discredits itself so quickly right at the top, that it’s not really worth delving any more into it.
If you think that the biblical account must be either literally true or have no truth at all, then you’ll argue for no truth at all. The 600,000 males imply a total population more than a million, which would be almost impossible to not have left any trace. However, if we accept that there could be some truth to the biblical account, but it’s not a perfect record, then the story can be perfectly plausible.
We do have to reduce the numbers, thought. There is some argument that the word usually translated “thousands” might mean “tens” – I’m citing this from memory – and so we’d get a much smaller population, that might not have left much in the way of traces.
It is not be surprising that there are no Egyptian records of a defeat (in whatever form) by a slave population. There are significant battles that we know from archaeological records did happen, that the pharoah’s lost, and that are not recorded in Egypt. The Egyptian kings recorded their triumphs (often exaggerated), not their defeats.
Also arguing for some validity to the story are words/phrases/names in the Hebrew biblical text that clearly indicate Egyptian origin. And, of course, the oft-made argument: no other primitive people sets their origin story as arising from slavery. Origin stories are always about the glory of the people, not about humble (below humble in that age) beginnings.
I think there’s little doubt that there were some Hebrews (or some tribes) who escaped slavery in Egypt and moved to Canaan.
The question of the conquest of Canaan (the book of Joshua) is a whole different matter, where archaeological evidence is pretty clear that happened over centuries, not over decades.
There’s no evidence of Israelites being enslaved in Egypt.
The presence of Egyptian influence in Canaan is completely unremarkable, given that the Egyptians conquered and occupied the region for centuries.
The archaeological evidence strongly argues for the Israelites arising from indigenous Canaanite culture long after they had supposedly been enslaved in Egypt.
There is no archaeological evidence for even a kernel of genuine Israelite history behind the Exodus story.
The story that does exist uses an anachronistic, 7th Century BCE geography.
There was no Israelite conquest of Canaan. The destructions of cities like Jericho happened long before the Israelites even existed.
Going from Egypt into Canaan was not an “escape” from Egypt. Canaan was effectively part of Egypt.
There are enough similarities to the Hyksos expulsion, that hypothesizing smaller scale “escape” events as the source of the story are not necessary, especially since the story in the Hebrew Bible is clearly of a much more recent vintage than 1250 BCE.
It is, of course, not possible to absolutely prove that some kind of pre-Israelite, Canaanite forbears did not make a trip from Egypt across the Sinai into Palestine, but there is no evidence in favor of such a hypothesis, so that would be an argument from absence ta very best.
Is there extrabiblical evidence for the Babylonian captivity and or the return?
I love the the Nostradamus/Trucker/Aryan Prison Gang/Logging/Bigfoot/UFO/Loch Ness Monster and history Channel. I love how they end their MonsterQuest shows with: While science has not been able to prove the existence <insert Monster>, we have not been able to disprove it either.
I have wasted more than one afternoon watching it.
I thought something similar to you when I heard about the speeches. I will probably catch a few of the shows (luckily with them they show everything over and over.)
Plus according to Exodus the Pharoh and all his men drowned, but the mummy of Ramses the 2d showed he live to be 90 years old and they have his tomb( and now the tombs of all of his sons.)
This is simply not true. For instance, the Aubin Codex version of the history of the Mexica(Aztec) has them fleeing enslavement by tyrannical rulers in Aztlán, their place of origin.
I have often wondered why there is no mention of the pyramids in the Bible. For people who claimed to have lived in the region how could you miss them?
Whatever the historicity of the events in the Bible, the people who redacted the text certainly “lived in the region” - Israel is not so very far from Egypt (and was in some periods ruled by Egyptians as part of their empire). The writers would certainly be well aware of the pyramids, or at least have heard accounts of them.
I assume that there is no mention of them in the Bible because, massive as they are, they played no part in any Biblical narrative: they were already ancient relics when the dramas of the Bible were (allegedly) being played out.
I don’t know too much about the extra-Biblical evidence. There is archaeological evidence for the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem in the form of Babylonian arrowheads, and the like, but I believe the evidence for the “captivity,” per se is largely circumstancial – clear cultural and linguistic influences and the like. There’s also an artifact called the [url=]Cyrus Cylinder, which offers a sort of corroboration for Cyrus repatriating captured peoples and restoring temples after he conquered Babylon, although he does not mention Judah or the Jews specifically.
Finkelstein and Silberman say that that the captivity probably only included the most prominent members of the given city that was conquered, not really the whole population en masse.
This is interesting - a controversey over what is alleged to be the only firm archaeological evidence for the existence of the Biblical Davidic line of kings.