I have not read the whole thread so please forgive me if I repeat. My understanding is that there is no trace of the ancient Egyptian language in classical Hebrew. If generations of Hebrews had lived as slaves in Egypt this would be extremely unlikely.
Not many generations. After Joseph and his pharaoh died, the very next ruler decided there were too many Israelites in too many powerful positions, and enslaved them. (As Exodus says) Moses came about 60 years after, the Exodus some 20 years after, and of course even here in modern times, if you live in your own groups/neighborhoods and speak your parents language, you might not learn much of the local dominant language- which since that area was a melting pot- there really wasnt one. Like Rome- Greek was also very common.
However, scholars have IDed around 100 loanwords crossing over- gome (papyrus), ye’or (Nile River), achu (Nile reeds), teba (basket/box), etc. Moses and Aaron are Egyptian names. Like some family in America speaking only Spanish (for example) picking up “Okay, dollar,” etc.
So there is some crossover. That does not mean the story of Exodus is true. It may be based upon some true episodes or happenings of course. Numbers in the OT are often way way off, due to numerology. “40 years” may be 40 months or ???
Judging from the book itself, Job was a well-to-do man who had a good life, but he wasn’t like the king of a great nation or anything like that. A man with a life like he’s described as having had could, potentially, make it into the history books, but only if he was very lucky (or unlucky). If he’s not mentioned elsewhere, it’d hardly be surprising, even if he did exist
For that matter, Egypt has always been a significant nation in the Mediterranean region. Even if you’re not living in their land, your peoples’ traders are still doing business with them. You’d expect a few loanwords just from proximity.
True, good point. Still, there are some loan words, so that doesnt disprove Exodus all by itself.
The numbers are entirely mythical, of course.
There are, however, multiple names of Egyptian origin used for the Levites in the Torah, which Friedman draws on in the book I mentioned above to argue that the Levites specifically were Egyptian emigrants. Moses, Hophni, Hur, Phinehas, Merari, and Pashhur are all Egyptian in origin.
“Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years” Exodus 12:40 (NIV)
Which is why African-Americans still speak Igbo…/s
It’s different for slaves.
You’re alleging the Egyptians possibly commanded their slaves in a language other than Egyptian?
Haven’t read the thread, just addressing the OP:
The story in which a series of plagues and famines befall Egypt and then the Jews go and commit genocide across Canaan is fiction.
Plausibly, there might be some event, in history, that provided the seed of the story but, minus an alternate/related text from a different source and time, it would be dang hard to put together. The leading theories tend towards, possibly, something to do with the Hyksos. I’ve posited that it could be something to do with Punt, the Ge’ez, and Bab-el-Mandeb.
Ultimately, we’re looking at a story where 95% of everything is so absurd and magical that using the 5% that feels sort of reasonable (running around on foot, fleeing slavers) as an excuse to exonerate the whole story is ridiculous. The story as told would require that at least 95% of everyone in Egypt dies. They didn’t. There’d be clear signs in the archaeological record if all the animals (land and water) and first born children of Egypt died off, the crops were all destroyed by a fire, and locusts ate everything else. Basically, we’d see the instant and catastrophic collapse of an entire civilization.
So when we look at that 5% and try to accept it as pointing to something real, we have to look at how far the rest of the story has spun off into nonsense. Why are we to believe, if someone could have said all that offer stuff, that they really knew anything about the part that sounded medium-plausible?
I mean, if I read the story of Aladdin, I could probably find the part where he’s shopping at a bazaar and say, “Well, this part sounds plausible. Maybe there was something to all of this!” And yet, we have every reason to believe that Aladdin was always nothing more than pure fiction, despite the inclusion of moments that strain less credulity.
An extra wrinkle, on top of that, is if we look at a more recent mystery like King Arthur’s origin.
Ostensibly, we might point at the real Arthur who fought at a battle in Cornwall. But if you dive into the question more deeply, you see elements coming in from Celtic fantasies, the activities of Lucius Artorius Castus, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and likely a lot of other random influences.
A long running story, until cemented into a concrete form on paper and ruled a heretic-burning orthodoxy, can meander about all which ways, under all sorts of influences. There could be 6 different primary events that came together into the Exodus, and were then snowballed into epic catastrophes over the course of five centuries.
Even a single alternative, related text from an alternate source and time might reveal almost nothing of the original seeds.
We’re dealing with a time frame where, outside of Egypt, writing was still a new and growing concept. For the moment, the best read is that everything magic didn’t happen. The Jews were the Canaanites, not their murders. They’re just a group that formed a coalition, while the others didn’t. E.g. the American colonies of Britain didn’t form into the USA. Some did, some stayed as Canada and Florida, going off on their own separate paths.
The Philistines, for example, (probably) refused to change the name of their primary deity to YHWH and didn’t join up. Later, they weren’t booted from the region by the Romans and so were still around to be converted by the Arabs to Islam. Now, (plausibly) they’re more or less the Palestinians. But, definitely, they weren’t exterminated by the Jews after the Exodus since, hey, they’re still there and we never see them disappearing in the archaeological record.
The Edomites, Moabites, Kennites, Midianites are, likewise, other Canaanite groups that weren’t murdered and probably now persist (via their ancestors) as Syrians, Jordanians, etc.
I appreciate Smapti and Chronos’ replies to my question about Job; it was kind of you to reply!
The Philistines were not really Canaanites, though.
Neither were the Jews.
I have always assumed that most Palestinians descend from Israelites who stayed behind after the Roman expulsion, and whose descendants then converted to Islam.
(And from other people, too, because people breed across ethnic lines all the time.)
Israelites and all the other non-Jewish inhabitants of the area - a large Hellenized grouping of both Greek and indigenous origin, Samaritans, Phoenecians, Nabateans…
Yeah, i mentioned them when i said, “other people”. But I’ve always found the Israeli Palestinian conflict poignant in part because they are cousins at war.
People sometimes say ‘cousins at war’ to emphasize tragedy, which I get, emotionally. Historically, though, the relationship is much more distant for most Israelis - or was in 1948, of course there’s been a lot more blending in Israel since then. Despite that, the shared ancestry exists at the level of antiquity, mainly, not at the level of medieval or early modern continuity.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t “all” fiction because enslaving the people you conquered was business as usual for a good part of human history.
I’ve read about the size and weight of the stones, the meager technology available to move and mount the stones, and the number of people needed to complete pyramids within the lifespans of the pharaohs building them. A huge number of people would have been needed to find the stones, transport them to the pyramid sites, shape the stones, and mount the stones. The Egyptian population alone did that? Were they all enlisted?
Just looked this up: The average pyramid stone, specifically the Great Pyramid of Giza, weighs around 2.5 tons. The pyramid of Giza was made up of 2.3 million of these stone blocks, with some of them weighing as much as 15 tons.
Historians think so. The vast majority of Egyptians were fellahs, and because of the very seasonal Egyptian agriculture caused by the Nile flood which happens only once a year (in spring), there were long swathes of time after the harvest they didn’t have anything to do. In those times, they were enlisted to build the pyramids, but they were not slaves. They got a salary of bread and beer and were well nurtured, because starving people couldn’t have done the hard physical labor.
There are even extent accounting records of paying them, i believe.
Anyway, the Bible doesn’t say anything about the Israelites building the pyramids,
I think I heard that, too. Archaeologists also found remnants of the pyramid workers’ housings that show that they didn’t live their lifes as slaves.
The Philistines weren’t Cannanites, they were one of the groups of Sea People who invaded the area during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Archeological evidence points to them being Mycenaean in origin.
And they don’t become the Palestinians, either; they’re destroyed as a group by the Babylonians around 600 BC and unlike the Jewish people do not come back during the Persian conquest. They may have rebelled against Babylonian rule and had Ashkelon and other cities razed to the ground as a result, but one way or another they just weren’t there as a unified people when the Persians arrived.
We do see the Philistines disappear from the archeological record, though, and they have absolutely nothing to do with Palestinians (except that when Romans later conquered Judea they decided to name the province after the ancient now disappeared enemy of the Jews they conquered).
The descendants of those groups were part of a Hellenic, then Roman world for a very long time, from Alexander’s conquest in the 300s BC until the Arab conquest in the 600s. They were somewhat assimilated and Hellenized, then Romanized and eventually converted to Christianity, and then with the Arab conquests converted to Islam and Arabized.
Between the Roman conquest and the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt the Jewish population of the Levant dropped from 3 million to a few hundred thousand.
No, Jews weren’t completely removed by the Romans. But certainly huge numbers of them were.
IME most people who say that line are referring to the Biblical story of Isaac and Ishmael and the Islamic belief that Arabs descend from Ishmael, not historical fact.
Most wars (aside from those fought by Great Powers) are between neighboring people with some ethnic and historical connections. That’s not remarkable to anyone except the British and the Americans who routinely fight those kinds of distant Great Power wars.
But Ben Carson does! Who are you gonna believe, huh? /s
A few years back I watched this TV show about superheroes. It started with the telling of an attack on a black neighborhood in Tulsa. I said to myself “hm, that seems awfully real” and of course it WAS a real event. An event I hadn’t ever been taught about in school, and one that never came up otherwise, that I’d noticed.
The entire rest of the show is fictional, of course, and some of the Black Wall St Massacre was fictionalized for the story, but there was a real event inspiring some of the narrative.
It’s worth knowing that.
If the Jews or Proto-Israelites were enslaved by or simply left Egypt at some point in their history, it’s worth acknowledging that as well.
I’ll go back to reading and learning what you all know about this topic, it’s interesting!
..and the perfectly voluntary emigration to other Roman areas and Babylonia.
That is not in doubt. They FAFOed all right.
So, what I said.