You say that, and yet the reward for completing the Pyramids in Civ II and Civ III is a free Granary in every city. Explain that, if the pyramids had nothing to do with grain storage!
What does Ancient Rome have to do with Exodus?
Hmm. If you mixed the metaphors, you might say the proto-Jews left Egypt because the proto-Jets sucked.
Note it didn’t start out as slavery just basically refugees, but their growing power worried Pharaoh, who subjected them to labor, which became harsher as time went on. God made it so the more harsh they were treated the more they multiplied and spread. Which deepened their servitude.
So it may not have started out as outright slavery, but trying to repress them to a second class status at first. The first step in this process in Ex 1:11 sometimes said they had a slavedriver over them, but in more literal translations it is often translated as ‘taskmaster’ or sometimes supervisor.
Biblically they made bricks and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh, but no mention of the pyramids.
Monolatry might be a better term, but it’s a tiny quibble.
With that out of the way, I must say that there are some good answers in this thread. I’d like to add some stuff based on books I’ve read: Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins by Jacob L. Wright, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, both by Eric H. Cline
Historians love their offices. They (basically) only deal with written sources. If there’s a lack of reputable written sources, they tend to be quite cautious.
I’m not a believer. That does not mean I’m not interested in Biblical history. The Bible has survived with only minor changes/interpretations/translation errors for a little more than 2000 years. That in itself is kinda remarkable. The impact it has had on the world is unparalleled, not only in terms of belief but the way it has shaped all aspects of society even in places where very few or no one worships Yahweh/El.
As I said, I’m not a believer, but I find it strange that many believers try to explain the supernatural in the scrtipture by mundane causes (e.g. algae blooming).• After all, if (generic) you believe in a supernatural being, than there’s no need to try to explain the supernatural: it’s magic and God moves in mysterious (and ineffable) ways. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: There’s no need to try to explain how dragons breath fire (asbestos lungs?). They breath fire because that’s what dragons do.
If someone was to ask (generic) you to write the history of your homeland, and your only sources are the stories you’ve been told throughout your life, and to write it from memory, I’m sure there would be lots of mistakes. Some really big and cataclysmic events will probably stand out. In the U.S. this outsider thinks that the Declaration of Independence. the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 stand out.
What I’m getting to is that a lot of the stories in the Tanakh seem to converge in one way or another with the Late Bronze Age Collapse. And we do know quite a bit what happened, if not exactly why.•• And I find it quite plausible that such an event would linger in the collective memory for many, even hundreds of years after.
The records from Ugarit don’t seem to make place for any Israelites. They mention places that are also in the Tanakh, but not people or events that correlate with the biblical narrative. My guess is that Joshu’s conquest of Canaan and the dividing into twelve territories, is a story, masking as historiography, to try to bring some sense to what had happen, long after the fact.
The constant struggles for territory, the ongoing condemnation of false gods by the angry and vengeful Yahweh, paints a picture of the Levant that seems quite similar to the chaos the ensued after The Late Bronze Age collapse.
It’s quite probable that the Canaanites/Israelites where polytheist until quite late, maybe as late as the Hasmoneans consolidated power. In any case, the Jewish cult of Yahweh (as opposite of El, Baal, Astarte and a whole bunch of others), was of course Judea and Jerusalem. The Samaritans where considered as different a religion as Islam would be some 700 years later.•••
That Moses and the Jews, who according to the Bible would have been millions of people, their possessions and live stock escaped Pharaohs’s wrath and fled, albeit with a very long pit stop, to Canaan, which was part of Egypt, is preposterous. And maybe there were some slaves with semitic origin in Egypt, but that correlation doesn’t prove anything written in Exodus.
The writers of the Genesis and Exodus seem to think that their country is a little backwater province, without much importance. Abraham sends Eliezer to Ur of ther Chaldees to get a wife for Isaac, in spite of the fact that time and aqgain, the Tanakh prohibits marriage from other people. Similarly, having Moses be Prince of Egypt is a way of elevating him to literally royal status and giving him the (supernatural) power to renew the covenant with Yahweh. Aside: I think the god of Abraham is El. Yahweh is brought into play by Moses. No I don’t think either of them existed.
Atheist who claim that it’s all fairy tales and fiction are missing the point. I’ve said this before on this board and I repeat it. The writers were not trying to convey facts, they were telling what they thought was The Truth. If bending facts and giving things a shine to sell the story… Well that’s as old as humanity.
• I’m NOT calling you out @DrDeth, you just provided a convenient example.
•• It was not only the ‘Sea Peoples’ at least according to Cline.
••• Flippant remark: What would happen if the few surviving Samaritans insisted that they should rule their ancient homeland, i.e. the ancient Kingdom of Israel?
That’s not accurate. At all.
I find it reasonable that a slave rebellion took place in Egypt. It would require a strong spiritual and charismatic leader. Maybe his name was Moses. It’s impossible to know thousands of years afterwards.
I can accept that a pandemic could occur that killed many Egyptians. Some things in the Biblical story are parables and exaggerated.
The escaped tribes lived in the desert as nomads until they grew strong enough to seize a new homeland. Was it 40 years? That’s a couple generations to increase the population and train soldiers.
< insert joke about the destruction of the White House >
Agreed - there have been plenty of changes along the way. But how many of them substantially change what’s in Exodus?
Parts of the Bible are much older than 2000 years, but parts are definitely less than 2000 years old. At the very least, the New Testament wasn’t written until after the end of Jesus’ life, which would have been 30something AD, so we already can’t be “more than 2000 years”. And some of those New Testament writings were significantly later than that.
Even restricting to the Old Testament, there’s a very wide range of dates. The Maccabean Revolt was around 160 BCE, so the Book of Maccabees can’t have been written any earlier than that. But other books predate that by centuries.
Wiki disagrees.
My take on this is that transmission over centuries of oral history changes easily–like the child’s game of “telephone”. But once it gets written down and treated as sacred–it gets treated seriously. After all, the only people involved in copying the written text were scribes who genuinely believed that it is sacred. Additional books (apocrypha) get written, (sometimes accepted, sometime rejected). But the original text remained accurately copied..
The New Testament and Maccabees are irrelevant to this discussion and that comment.
The Book of Maccabees is not in the Tanakh and thus I wouldn’t consider it “Old Testament”.
Actually “Old Testament” and in a way similar to those books but a bit earlier (though still after the period most of the rest of the Bible is concerned with) is stuff like Megilat Esther. But that’s in the third part of the Tanakh, Ketuvim, which basically has a collection of unrelated poems, stories, and songs. Ketuvim means “Writings” and it’s very much seen as a collection of supplemental writings that were considered important enough to keep with the rest of the books.
There’s a big difference, both from a religious perspective within Judaism and from a historical perspective in terms of when these writings were collected and accepted by Jews as holy writings, between the five books of the Torah, the stories in Nevi’im, the writings in Ketuvim, and books that are entirely supplemental like Maccabees.
Third possibility: they did not care what The Truth was. Rather, during a time of national turmoil (occupation for most, exile for certain elites and their families), they wanted to come up with a national myth that would encourage people to obey their national or tribal elites (with god as their avatar) and oppose their Babylonian overlords. Because otherwise, the tribal elites would lose their power and influence and cease to be elites. Thus, they constructed a narrative of an even earlier period of slavery and exile that was actually (as the myth goes) waaaaay worse. And what got them out of it? Obedience to their god (serving as an avatar for the tribal elites, the patriarchy).
It’s a just so story more concerned with the 6th century BCE and the corresponding period of Babylonian exile and occupation than it is with actual history.
Exodus itself is a composite text, so “what’s in Exodus” isn’t strictly meaningful. Most variants are minor, but some passages - especially legal and cultic material - reflect real differences in emphasis and theology across communities. And that’s without even getting into the Samaritan version…
“the Masoretic Text” and “the Bible” are not the same thing, and even there, there are different versions. The Samaritan version, for instance, is shown by the same Dead Sea scrolls you cite to be older.
BTW, here’s Dan McLellan’s take on whether there was a historical Moses. He’s my go-to guy for the non-dogmatic, no-bullshit take on Biblical scholarship. (spoiler: he says no)
You keep saying that. Do you have any cites?
But the Samaritan version and the Israelite version are very similar. From your link:
The London Polyglot lists 6,000 instances where the Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic text.[21] As different printed editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch are based upon different sets of manuscripts, the precise number varies significantly from one edition to another.[22] Only a minority of such differences are significant. Most are simply spelling differences, usually concerning Hebrew letters of similar appearance;[23] the use of more matres lectionis (symbols indicating vowels) in the Samaritan Pentateuch, compared with the Masoretic;[22] different placement of words in a sentence;[24] and the replacement of some verbal constructions with equivalent ones.[25] A comparison between both versions shows a preference in the Samaritan version for the Hebrew preposition al where the Masoretic text has el.[22]
The article then goes on to give half a dozen material differences between the two, mostly centering on a key different in the sects, whether to worship at Mount Gerizim or at other sites. (The Samaritans hold Mount Gerizim as the holy site designated by God for worship.)
Anyway, Exodus is a foundation myth. I’ve heard version of what Smapti mentions:
That is, that Exodus was a way to help consolidate the histories of the local Israelites and some immigrants from Egypt who had helped shape the resulting culture.
My favorite source for what the Bible meant to the people who wrote it is:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Who-Wrote-the-Bible/Richard-Friedman/9781501192401
I’m sure it’s not completely true, but he offers a lot of insight into what the texts would have meant contemporaneously.
Before making claims on the continuity of biblical writers, be sure to read Bart Ehrman.
Then go on to any of his other 33 books on the New Testament and allied subjects. He’s readable, reliable, and eye-opening.
It’s well-established that Exodus was likely developed during the Babylonian exile. I can give you cites for that if you like.
Beyond that, it’s Occam’s Razor. Rather than bend over backwards to assume some historicity from an account that is crammed full of clearly fantastical supernatural events (and where even the non-supernatural elements seem highly implausible, the size of the population departing Egypt, for example, and the length of time spent wandering) and yet curiously applicable to the concerns of its time of authorship, I simply assume that, absent evidence to the contrary, it is an account written for the time in which it was written, not in any respect a reliable history.
Again, Occam’s Razor.
Sure. But nevertheless they’re not the same, and the Israelite version is not the original.