I find it difficult to believe the totality number of Israelites in or out of Egypt could be anywhere near 2 million …. fr fucks sake, the entire metropolitan area of Rochester NY [4th largest in NY] is ust over 1 million people. Have you ever seen how much space, food, water and resources 50 000 people can take? [can’t remember offhand but a talking head for a refugee group mentioned ho wmuch space and resources a camp of 50 000 refugees takes up and it is actually pretty impressive on a day to day basis of food/water for consumption and water for cleaning …]
This:
does not support this:
Where does the 2 million figure come from?
Yes, I don’t think anyone in this thread is claiming that that’s remotely plausible. If any Hebrew slaves came out of Egypt, it would have had to have been a much smaller group in order to have not left obvious archaeological traces.
Don’t know chapter and verse offhand, but the Torah states that there were 600,000 men of fighting age. Reasonable extrapolation of the numbers of women, children and elderly gives about 2 million.
Some scholars think that the word elef, which usually means “thousand”, means something like “platoon” in this context. So, there were 600 groups of about 10 fighting men each, reducing the count by two orders of magnitude and yielding much more plausible numbers.
That would make sense. We know from archaeology that the Bible’s description of the Israelites conquering the Promised Land in a quick sequence of overwhelming military victories was myth, and that in reality it was a much slower process, with the native populations mostly being slowly assimilated rather than killed or exiled.
It’s not “well established” there are some reputable historians who think that. But they represent a minority opinion, it’s definitely not “well established”.
Wikipedia says that the text as we have it was likely codified from pre-existing oral and written traditions between 600 and 400 BCE. That time period overlaps with the Babylonian Captivity, which was approximately 597 to 537. So the process might have begun in Babylon, but it continued long after the exiles had returned and no longer had a need for anti-Babylon propaganda, which would seem to undermine ASL’s proposed timeline.
That seems unlikely, as the Bible itself doesn’t really ever transition from henotheism to monotheism. All mentions of other gods seems to treat them as real enemy forces.
The merger between El Elyon and Yahweh does seem to have happened while the Bible was being created. There are remnants of them still being separate.
Gods becoming conflated happens all the time. Yahweh still seemed to have El’s wife Asherah for quite a while, with her condemnation seeming to get grafted in in places.
I don’t find the idea of a small group of slaves who joined the existing tribes of Israel and brought their story with them. There is evidence like in Deborah’s song that there were originally only ten tribes, and the idea of Joseph being added to the Jacob story.
Joseph is the one who gets them to Egypt, then you have this big gap before Moses rises up and takes them back where they were. It makes sense for there to have been a tradition where Abraham and his line just stayed in Canaan.
4+3 is seven, and there are seven seas!!! Explain that!!! 
It is pretty damn accurate. Talking about the OT, which is what we are talking about here.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have several OT books, they differ from the Masoretic Text in only minor items-
“Overall, the scrolls confirm a remarkable stability in the biblical text, but they also reveal that multiple textual versions of Scripture existed by the Second Temple period.”…
"Extent of Variants: The vast majority of DSS biblical fragments agree closely with the MT. For example, the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa) is about 95% identical to the MT of Isaiah.
It contains over 2,600 variants compared to MT, but most are extremely minor — single-letter differences, spelling changes, etc."
And those were written around 2000 years ago, give or take a couple centuries.
Not in the last couple thousand years. Before that- who knows?
Fairly accurately.
[quote=“MrDibble, post:54, topic:1026800”]
. The Samaritan version, for instance, is shown by the same Dead Sea scrolls you cite to be older.
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The oldest surviving manuscripts of that version date no earlier than 1065, almost a thousand years later than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I disagree. He is opinionated and sometimes wrong.
There are also the Hinnom Scrolls – two silver amulets .
The oldest biblical text is on the Hinnom Scrolls – two silver amulets that date to the seventh century B.C. These rolled-up pieces of silver were discovered in 1979-80, during excavations led by Gabriel Barklay in a series of burial caves at Ketef Hinnom. When the silver scrolls were unrolled and translated, they revealed the priestly Benediction from Num 6:24-26 reading, “May Yahweh bless you and keep you; May Yahweh cause his face to Shine upon you and grant you Peace.”6 The Ketef Hinnom scrolls contain the oldest portion of Scripture ever found outside of the Bible and significantly predate even the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls. They also contain the oldest extra-biblical reference to YHWH. Given their early date, they provide evidence that the books of Moses were not written in the exilic or postexilic period as some critics have suggested.
That was not the claim.
And, indeed the Dead Sea Scrolls vs the Masoretic Text have only minor changes, etc. Not exactly the same, which was never the claim.
I thought I was just restating my earlier conclusion. We have evidence of significant aspects of the account being fantastical. We have evidence that it was compiled during a period of turmoil and if not slavery per se, at the very least being “under heel” of a more powerful occupying power. We have mere speculation that it might have been based on a historical kernel.
Eliminate the speculation, and what are we left with? A narrative about escaping captivity through obedience to god and his law (as repeated by his prophet through… his prophet’s brother?) written by a people who were themselves in captivity.
A just-so story to inspire hope through obedience to the national order (as opposed to obedience to occupiers). That, by itself, stands as a perfectly plausible explanation for we have Exodus as written and why, to @Thing.Fish’s point, it comes to us as a national origin story with the nation (such as there was one) in slavery. Because that was the status quo at the time of the narrative’s development.
No need to introduce another variable of a long period of captivity followed by a mass migration that is conspicuously absent from the archeological or extra-biblical record.
That’s Occam’s razor in a nutshell.
Did some number of semitic people endure slavery in Egypt and migrate to the levant? Sure. Maybe. But I don’t see any reason to believe Exodus is a record of it. Or even a record of an oral tradition of it. I’d need to see some evidence of continuity of sources to believe that.
Make up your mind.
No. One of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments is a manuscript fragment of the Samaritan version of Deuteronomy 27.
The initial claim also mentioned the whole Bible…
I did. The differences, IF you bother to read my cites and quoted bits- are minor.
Maybe, the fragment is small and just part of one chapter, and yes, it shows similarities.
But it is hardly the whole Samaritan version.
I don’t think it is as black and white as now having the original text, but it definitely adds another piece to the puzzle.
Context. We aint talking about the NT here, only the OT specifically Exodus. Bringing in the NT is a threadjack. And the word “whole” wasnt in the quote. So wrong again.
Face it- you were wrong.
Moderating:
If you feel a poster is hijacking a thread, flag it, don’t declare it. This is low-level Jr. Modding. You know better, so please don’t do it again. No Warning though.
This is fine:
The following is speculation without more basis than any other speculation:
The above is speculating on motives and intentions without evidence.
I’ve lost track of which “initial claim” is being discussed, but if we are talking about “the story of Jews escaping Egypt” i can’t think of how anything but Exodus and Deuteronomy could be relevant biblical texts. Maybe Genesis, which tells how Abraham’s descendants got to Egypt.
Yes, there are a few random references in the other books to Egypt, but they are either unrelated to the claim (e.g. Solomon married an Egyptian) or brief ref m references to the story told in the Tanach.
Speaking from our internal sources as a POV (which is, of course, not current with the most recent research and discoveries), I’ll link some old columns, which I feel are worth reading and free to do so without purchasing a scholarly work!
I believe it’s based on an unclear statement by @Charlie_Tan upthread:
I’m sure the 2000 year timing is tying into the belief that the NT is/should be involved, but until that poster comes back to clarify, I wouldn’t make that assumption. After all, from a historical POV 400-600 BCE is still “a little more than 2000 years” ago.
The book of Kings (which by and large is more history than it is mythology) does make it clear that “high places” and “Asherah poles” were tolerated by most of the kings of both Judah and Samaria, and at least one of the Samarian kings is accused of having sacrificed one of his children to Moloch. It seems like worship of other gods was tolerated at least up until the reign of Josiah, when worship of Yahweh was centralized in Jerusalem and the lesser temples (like the one at Tel Arad, which interestingly has traces of cannabis residue on its altar) were shut down.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cannabis-found-altar-ancient-israeli-shrine-180975016/
By Samaria, do you mean the ancient kingdom of Israel (to the north of Judah), or do you mean some other political entity?