I am on the fringes of my knowledge here but I do not believe the ancient Egyptians were Semites. The modern Egyptians are by virtue of influx of the Arabs. Along linguistic lines, Wikipedia has this to say (though I must now take it with a grain of salt ever since that “10% Animal” thing):
It should be noted that Berber, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian, Hausa, Somali, and many other related languages within the wider area of Northern Africa and the Middle East do not belong to the Semitic group, but to the larger Afro-Asiatic language family of which the Semitic languages are also a subgroup.
I would be curious to read more about this. Merneptah was the succeeding son of Ramses II. (By one account he had 177 siblings.)
I cannot help but think there is at least some filament thin truth in the tale. It makes too much sense. I think it’s been mythologized to Sheol and back, but some connection would have been very plausible. (I also think that the tales of Atlantis are based on surviving oral tales of Cretan culture before the eruption of Thera.)
I would be curious to read more about this. Merneptah was the succeeding son of Ramses II. (By one account he had 177 siblings.)
I cannot help but think there is at least some filament thin truth in the tale. It makes too much sense. I think it’s been mythologized to Sheol and back, but some connection would have been very plausible. (I also think that the tales of Atlantis are based on Cretan culture before the eruption of Thera.)
Also, at risk of displaying my ignorance ever more, isn’t circumcision an Egyptian practice? I know there are depictions of it in Egyptian tombs and on monuments predating Judaism by a millennium. Also, there is evidence of much Egyptian cultural influence on religion in what is now Israel, with Isis-like cults and Osiris-like legends working their way into the mix. Since Israel was a crossroads, it could well be that an Egyptian influenced language was totally osmosified into Canaanite dialect, just as the Lemba tribe in sub Saharan Africa spoke similar dialects to their Bantu neighbors and also looked like other black Africans, but tested positive for Semitic (even Cohenim) DNA. Since centuries passed between the (using my own term) limited Puritan Separatist exodus from Egypt (which could not possibly have been 2.5 million people, of course) and the written accounts, enough time to have absorbed the language of the Canaanites would have passed.
A couple of things I’ve heard, I don’t claim any kind of expertise here.
First of all, an ancient egyptian prayer has been found, that is almost identical to one of the Psalms, which is taken as good evidence that the ancient Hebrews did spend some time in Egypt.
Another thing I heard on an archaeology show on TV. One Egyptian artifact found was a badly damaged statue. The theory was that it was the image of a man that had been at one time held in high esteem, then had fallen out of favour, hence his statue had been attacked. The statue showed traces of pigment, showing that in its original glory it was dressed in a multi-coloured coat. The theory was that this was a statue of Joseph, who fell into disfavour in Egypt after the Exodus. IIRC this was presented by legitimate Egyptologists, not Bible bashers. No cite, just what I remember.
Check out the detailed account of the word “habiru” on this page. Note that no scholarly consensus exists that the word even refers to the Hebrews. A picture of the actual stele can be found here. It is now dated to 1207 BC, which is an adjustment of the dates of Merneptah’s reign. That’s another problem with modern archaeology - it keeps changing the dates, leaving the Biblical crowd scrambling to make their “proofs” keep up.
You’re doing what almost everybody does, assume that the books of the Bible must be true because so many people believe in them and then go back to find any historic correspondences of any kind, using those - circularly - to declare that the stories are true. If you take the stories as stories, however - I prefer to call them instructive fables - and apply to them the same critical reasoning as you would today’s genre of historic fiction, or better, historic fantasy, you’d quickly see the fallacy. The use of familiarity with history in a fable does not make the stories of the fable true; it justs adds to the verisimilitude.
(Same with Atlantis and Thera, BTW. Plato’s fictions cannot be made to fit any particular historic event, but historic events can be made to fit with Plato’s fictions, if one twists both hard enough.)
Let me be blunt. The stories in the Old and New Testaments have no more outside historic verification that the stories in the analogous books of Mormonism and Scientology. The former are merely older.
For me, this thread is as good an example as any of the instructive value of the SDMB. It illustrates the adage that “All of us are smarter than any of us,” and although there is still no answer to my OP, I feel edified having read the conversation. As someone once said about an entirely different issue, “We have not succeeded in answering all your problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions . In some ways, we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.” Or, as Sir Walter Von der Wolgelweide said, “Und, so, considering the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we still don’t know.”
I think your point is further strengthened by the lack of any trace of Egyptian religion on Judeism. On the other hand, Jews started returning to Judea only 50 years after the beginning of the Babylonian Exile and that capivity had great effects in all sorts of ways.
