Hey, I get that they drew on previous mythological traditions, such as the flood narrative (or rather narratives), the creation myth (myths), and a great leader adrift in a basket. I just don’t see any reason to believe any of it—even those sections devoid of fantastical elements—is based on true events except for those events that were nearly contemporaneous with their codification in the OT (looking at you, Book of Daniel!) or can be independently verified through archaeological finds or non-biblical sources.
Keep in mind that biblical scholarship started from “of course it’s all true, it’s the history of the world as delivered by our creator” and only lately (on a biblical timescale) did it become acceptable to question “uh… maybe it’s not entirely that?” Thus, even as it gets walked back, there remains a bias towards “well, surely some of it must be true, we just need to find out what” such that the merely plausible (and sometimes even the barely but still nominally possible) gets touted as some “kernel” of truth when in fact it is mere speculation, assuming unnecessary variables in an effort to “find” that “kernel” that for some reason people assume just must be there. It’s motivated reasoning.
But it’s not. That’s a really complicated explanation. The Occam’s razor interpretation is we have a detailed historical account of an event, its probably at least partially inspired by a real historical event.
So I think “basic plot” and “folklore” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Many scholars think elements of the Exodus tradition predate the Babylonian exile, but there’s disagreement about how early, how coherent, and how much of the current narrative existed in that form. The exile appears to have been a major moment of shaping and consolidation, rather than a simple retelling of an already fixed folklore narrative.
My feeling (and it’s consciously Minimalist) is we shouldn’t speak more confidently than the evidence allows, and we do not have direct evidence of an oral Exodus story circulating centuries earlier in a stable form. No textual fragments or inscriptions or anything.
All the actual artefact evidence we have points to quite the opposite - the Exodus narrative is unattested in pre-exilic material culture, absent from inscriptions and early memory texts, and only appears in fully developed written form centuries later.
And when it does, it uses contexts that reflect exilic and post-exilic identity formation - communal survival under foreign rule, the centrality of law in the absence of political sovereignty, and the articulation of a shared origin story grounded in divine deliverance.
And we do have clear pointers that parts of the narrative are more likely exilic - the Sargon birth narrative repurposed for Moses, for instance.
I think it’s probably relevant that Judah was a client state of Egypt in the late First Temple era and that many Jews who fled the Babylonian conquest wound up there, even constructing a new temple in Elephantine that lasted quite awhile. I can see the moralizers of the time, aghast at the polytheistic rites being carried out there, insisting that the punishment for their sins was winding up back in the same place their ancestors fled from.
I should have left out the preamble about the Bible surviving for more than 2K years. It’s my old training and working (for almost 20 years) as a journalist that tripped me up again. I thought it was obvious that it was a bit hyperbole. Of course there have been changes, some of them significant. But it’s undeniable that “The Bible,” both the OT and NT has been The Holy Book for more than 2K years. Yes, of course the OT ≠ Tanakh. Yes, the infighting from as early as the middle of the first century CE, about the words and interpretations of Jesus (who of course used the Tanakh as his Holy Book) has changed the NT in numerous ways.
It’s still perceived as the Eternal Holy Book since Time Immemorial for many believers. And I find that remarkable.
I’m sorry I caused this thread drift.
The (TL;DR) argument I was trying to make was that the timeline in Exodus - not the actual dating in the book - correlates very well with The Late Bronze Age Collapse. From my reading (linked above) this was such a cataclysmic event for the Levant, the rest of the Golden Crescent and the Eastern Med, that memories would probably linger, through oral tradition, for half a millennium. When writing writing/inventing the History of the Nation, this would (IMO) have been a significant backdrop.
The LBAC was a broad regional phenomenon, but Exodus does not preserve its distinctive archaeological or social features - stuff like palace destruction, the invasion of the Sea Peoples (it treats the Philistines as Canaanite indigenes without noting their origin), trade-network failure, population fragmentation, or elite displacement.
Broad chronological overlap is insufficient to demonstrate memory transmission over half a millennium. The narrative’s themes, structure, and late textual attestation fit better with exilic identity formation than with the preservation of collapse-era oral history.
And the archaeology of Israelite emergence doesn’t reflect a status as collapse refugees - instead the highland settlements emerge gradually and have continuity with Canaanite material culture, there’s no indication of a preceding Völkerwanderungen at all.
I’m not denying the possibility of some LBAC influence, but I’m saying there’s zero demonstrability there.
Except we have no evidence of the real historical event—or at least no evidence of a *continuity of sources pertaining to the real historical event—apart from the Exodus narrative. Moreover, what evidence we do have that is relevant to the truth or falsity of the narrative indicates the Exodus narrative is false, yet suspiciously well-tailored as a national myth for an occupied people. Which they were when the story was codified.
The “kernel of truth” explanation is only the most simple if it explains the existing evidence without adding unnecessary assumptions. Except the purported existence of any “kernel of truth,” absent evidence for it, is itself an unnecessary assumption. All the evidence we have points to “false, but really on point for what they needed when it was written whether it was true or not” and we know that people have been making up stories to suit social narratives for thousands of years at least. So that’s the simplest explanation: the made it up without regard for its truth or falsity because it suited their needs at the time.
*And here (to explain what I mean by a continuity of sources) I want to emphasize that, even if evidence were to show that at some point in the late bronze age a semitic some people lived in Egypt and migrated to the levant, that would not by itself represent a “kernel of truth” unless you can point to evidence that the Exodus narrative drew on this actual event, rather than just coincidentally matching a couple details. Consider, for example, the story of The Beverly Hillbillies: I have no doubt that at some point prior to that series coming out, a family migrated from somewhere in the vicinity of the ozark mountains to somewhere in the vicinity of Beverly Hills in California. But you don’t get to dig up such an example and then tell me “See! There’s a kernel of truth and the TV series was clearly based on this family that moved from the hills of Arkansas to Beverly Hills in 1930.” without some kind of evidence of a nexus between this very minor “historical” event and the TV series given that everything we know about television tells us people made up not just whole episodes, but whole series of television all the time just to generate ad revenue.
Not really. Biblical literalism is a fairly new school of interpretation of scripture.
Of course it’s deniable, if you say “both the OT and NT”, because it’s simply absolutely factually false that the NT has even existed for “more than 2K years”.
Okay, but it’s 2026 in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ. Can we all agree that the new testament has existed for nearly 2000 years? Wasn’t it written within a hundred years or so of the death of Jesus?
And the Jewish Bible had been codified and even translated into Greek by 0 AD.
Also the kernel can be arbitrarily small. The kernel of truth of Noah’s flood and the Tower of Babel is that local floods happen and multiple languages exist.
Can I just say that this has been one of the most interesting threads I have participated in on this board? So many well-informed and polite posters! It makes a fella proud to be a Doper.
Which would be a problem if we were talking about something that happened 250 years ago, but we are talking about something that happened at least 2500 years ago. Almost everything that happened then is unrecorded either in written records or archeology.
The fact we do have this one detailed source for an event that happened then is a very rare exception. That doesn’t make it 100% true and reliable, of course. But the Occam’s razor conclusion is about that it was probably inspired by a real event.
And some of the accepted historical figures that historians don’t spend much time arguing over are known from a single written source that is hardly more impartial than the books of the Bible.
Sure, but if the only source we have on a story is Tacitus speaking second hand about records that don’t exist anymore or a single fragmentary list of kings complied in the reign of someone claiming to descend from them, that’s not all that different or more reliable than some of the records in Nevi’im.
