You don’t think that 60,000 people traveling for 4 years would leave behind archeological evidence of their existence?
What was the approximate population of Egypt when the 2 to 3 million or more (adding in women and children) were said to have departed suddenly?
I found this: How many came out of the exodus of Egypt| AHRC
"The third problem is the number of male descendants of Yaacov who came out of Egypt.
RSV Exodus 12:37 And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children.
According to this passage 600,000 men descended from Yaacov left Egypt. If each man is married with an average of 5 children, this brings the entire population of Israel to 6,000,000. This is not including the mixed multitude that came out with them (Exodus 12:38) or the flocks and herds that they also brought out. This large number of people creates a few problems. The first is the size of this “army” (Exodus 12:41 - hosts meaning army. Also Exodus 12:37 where the men are called gevoriym, or warriors) compared to the size of Pharaohs army of 600 chariots (Exodus 14:7), which brought fear to the Israelites. How could 600 chariots be considered a threat to 600,000 warriors of Israel? Equally puzzling is the fear the Israelites felt at entering the Promised Land where each city probably contained no more than 5,000 warriors compared to their 600,000."
It goes on to talk about the incredible logistics problem and the size of the camp needed (approximately 5 miles by 5 miles.
One thing about ancient sources, however reliable, or otherwise, they are no one believes their large numbers for armies, battle casualties, populations, etc. Before the advent of modern record keeping (and the maths associated with it) numbers like that are at best educated guesses, at worse have symbolic significance totally unrelated to modern understanding of numbers.
Whether or not the Exodus story has some basis in fact its safe to say the numbers mentioned do not, any more than the casualty numbers at the battle of Cannae or the number of Persians at the Battle of Marathon.
But how much can you cut from the reported numbers and still not say “It was probably just a fable with no historical basis in fact”? How far do you have to pare it down to say “There are no recordings of it happening, and no trace whatsoever left behind, but it was still a major event?”
I don’t get this. Is that also true for the battle of Cannae or the Battle of Marathon? Most modern historians would say Livy and Herotodus’ numbers were probably off by at least an order of magnitude. Are those events just fables with no historical basis in fact?
I don’t really buy the “If you dismiss this one, you have to dismiss all of them” fallacy. BTW, “an order of magnitude” would knock the number of Jews leaving Eqypt to 200,000 to 300,000. Knock another zero off and you get 20,000 to 30,000.
How many zeros do you have to knock off before before this story becomes feasable?
Well, realistically, there has to be cost/benefit ratio between how many slaves you support vs. how many you need to get the job done. You have to house slaves and feed them if you expect them to work for a prolonged period of time. On the other hand, if you have too many slaves, you are housing and feeding people you don’t need.
" Modern archaeology shows the pyramids were likely built by a skilled, rotated workforce of roughly 20,000–30,000 laborers, not slaves, working over 20–30 years."
If this is true, then the Egyptians themselves could have provided enough free citizens to do the job provided they were dumb enough to work that hard in the blazing heat for just food and beer.
Ahem, the myth that the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids is a modern, non-biblical one. I don’t know where or when it started, but I only ever heard it from American sources/culture. Actually, the great pyramids were built around 1,300 years before the alleged time of Exodus.
That goes back as least as far as Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.
Ah, that’s interesting, I didn’t know that. It’s significant how many myths about the ancient world were coined by Josephus, and yet he’s still one of the most important sources of the time for modern history.
The Bible doesn’t say the Hebrews built the pyramids. It says “So they [the Egyptians] set taskmasters over them [the descendants of Jacob] to oppress them with forced labor; and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses.”
And it says they had to make bricks with clay and straw. That’s not what the pyramids were made of.
Anyway, the story is clearly not literally true. How truthy does it need to be to count as having a historical basis? That’s a judgement call, and your judgement might be different from mine. I would say that if a group of socially related slaves fled Egypt en mass, and ended up being a significant part of the population of ancient Israel, that it has a historical basis. I think you just need a group large enough that the members don’t all know each other for it to have been written the way it was.
Now, as best as i can tell, even my standards aren’t met, and it’s just a fable. But i think my standards are reasonable, and i think it’s a waste of time to quibble about “600,000”, because records from that time routinely use large round numbers, even when they are mostly true.
I didn’t know that, either. Josephus must have been an interesting man. He seems to have made up an awful lot of pseudohistory that stuck.
I don’t think the Exodus is historical fact, but this question is nonsensical. We do exactly that about Marathon or Cannae or pretty much any other premodern battle: reject the numbers without dismissing the entire battle as a “fable with no historical basis in fact”.
Another “Look, over there!” post. Can we talk about this situation? How far can you reduce the number of Jews leaving Egypt and still keep it off the “Probably never happened at all” list?
“Slaves” in any case is an exaggeration; what the Israelites were subject to was a tax in the form of draft labor.
Arbitrarily far. It’s entirely possible that it was based on the real events that befell a group as small as one family and retroactively changed to apply to a whole nation.
So…your answer is practically never?
When talking about the Jewish (or pre-Moses semitic tribes building the Pyramids):
I think the conversation has lapped itself:
(from near the beginning of the thread back in January!)
But I’m amused that we’re right back to the same argument from a recent thread -
Because there too (and explicit in @Moriarty’s OP ) we are arguing what may be considered “Myth” as distinct from the binary of fact (if any) and fiction - a distinction that many seem to find uncomfortable.
As for archeological records, I find the argument that the lack of evidence is “proof” of it being mythological unconvincing. As said upthread, Egyptian written records seem to be predominantly pro-state/ruler propaganda. And unsettled societies are going to leave less evidence, given the likely historical exaggeration of the population in question.
Still, as I said upthread, still consider it at most a functional, society building origin story that is based off individual grains of oral history. So, TBH, not much different than any of the modern myths of the founding of peoples and nations still being told and embroidered upon today.
Is it strong evidence that it is mythological?