Back to the lineage, I’ll note that with Luke’s geneology, the average length of a generation is ~19 years. With Matthew’s it’s 37.
I think it’s reasonable to say that the average child is not born to a person in their late 30s, so Matthew’s genealogy is strongly out of the running and seems to have been written by someone who couldn’t be bothered to do some math.
I disagree. Remember, the genealogy is traced through the males, who could and probably would have begat children at an older age than the mothers would have borne them.
Plus, Abraham is supposed to have had Isaac when he was 100 years old. If you take seriously some of the reported ages like that, it’s going to pull the average up.
The long ages only occur before David, not after. Everyone from David on has normal lifespans, that I am aware of.
And yes, men can and do continue to have children into older age, but the average across dozens of generations would not be 37.
Let’s take for example, the Emperors of Rome:
From Tiberius Claudius Nero to Caligula (all men) is 97 years and 4 men, or 24.25 years per generation - which seems fairly reasonable.
I would agree that an average of 19 is a bit young, but within the realm of reason (the poor might have a faster turnaround rate than the nobility). 37 is not. Your average man isn’t having his final child at 74, nor (I suspect) are they having as many children through their 60s as they were in their 20s.
That is a good point and made me wonder whether the location was misattributed.
From the path that Moses traveled, we know that he crossed some water and then a desert, and then ended up in the Northern Midian. I had always found it a bit strange that he crossed water, since that’s simply not necessary for that trip (though, obviously, if you can then why not?)
But I do note that there was the Land of Punt, which was a trading partner with Egypt, and about which we don’t really know much. Punt would have existed somewhere around the Ethiopia/Somalia/Djibouti region, which is directly across a narrow channel from the Arabic Peninsula which would have been a big desert with not a lot in it at that point in time - much as Sinai was; the Ethiopians have some forgotten history of Jewish culture and faith, which is supposed to track back to ancient times; and Moses was a Levite - where “Levi” or “Priest” is believed to come from an ancient Yemeni word for Priest. (Yemen is the part of the Arabic Peninsula across from Djibouti.)
At the time we’re speaking of, if there were any Semitic peoples in the Southern Arabic Peninsula, they would have been nomads - probably ancestors of the Midianites (who were, themselves, likely ancestors of the Nabataeans).
Apparently, there is a volcanic island - Perim - at the narrowest point between Yemen and Djibouti, and there is an ancient Arabic legend that there was a land bridge there which was destroyed by an Earthquake:
There is an ancient Ethiopian myth that Semitic people immigrated (the Ge’ez) around 1900 BC. There’s nothing to say that they weren’t then oppressed and later enslaved by the Puntites.
Overall, I think I’ll have to look into it more, but I may have the start of a strong theory for the history of Moses. 
As to how this would get moved to Egypt? The Jews generally don’t seem to have been fond of Egyptian rule and the impetus for writing the OT seems largely to have been related to being freed from Egyptian influence and, instead, finding a new comfortable place in the Achaemenid Empire with more freedom. I could see them rewriting Egypt in as the bad guy.
As I said, just like the Talmud.
I wasn’t saying that the Council was a legend. I was saying that citing a “bunch of old guys meeting up” was consistent with local tradition. There may, or may not, have been an actual council. It may, or may not, have decreed the things attributed to it. Nothing in the text is proof of either. The text essentially says, “this is how I want things to be, and this bunch of old guys agree with me.” The only reason to mention it is to give added “authority” to the author.
The author is not saying that no Semetic person ever set foot in Egypt. He is saying that the “Nation of Israel” was never held in bondage in Egypt proper.
I, personally, think the stories stem from the retreat of Egypt from the middle east and the story evolved from, “the Egyptians used to occupy us and they left” to “Our great national hero freed us from the evil Egyptian tyrants and delivered us to the promised land.”
Begat me on my knees…
Enjoy,
Steven
In The Unauthorized Version, British historian Robin Lane Fox talks about what constituted “history” to ancient writers. They mostly operated on the principle of “se non è vero, è ben trovato”: Even if it’s not true, it’s a good story.
He says that Christians pestered Jews to learn which Old Testament books were considered to be canonical, so that they could demonstrate fulfillment of those texts by Jesus. Fox says that the Bible is “a Christian creation.”
In his view, the likeliest areas of primary information in the Bible are Nehemiah, the last half of 2 Samuel, the two books of Kings, the Gospel of John, and the Acts.
Definitely, but I wouldn’t say ‘pestered.’ I think that it was more of a way to formulate a strong response to Christian claims. That’s why the deuterocanonical books were likely excluded. They provided perhaps a bit more ammunition for Christian claims, so they got axed as non-Scriptural. Similarly, it was determined that prophesy essentially ended at Ezra as a way to downplay Christian claims of prophesy. It might have been a way to nix John the Baptist from the equation. He seemed to enjoy quite a bit of popular support in the era and Christians were claiming that he put his seal on Jesus as Christ. By saying prophesy had ended at Ezra, they could claim John was either a non-prophet or simply a sage who was mistaken rather than a prophet of God declaring Jesus as Christ.
Luke 3:23, NIV, emphasis mine:
Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph…
Nope>"the Israelites were never in Egypt, " which is false.
Nope> “The Isrealites” are, in this case, a nation. In that sense “The Isrealites were never in Egypt” is true. Some Semetic persons were doubtless in Egypt, and Babylon, and Phoenicia, etc. But the people who made up the “Nation of Israel” were never anywhere but the east coast of the Mediterranean, despite a few individuals who found themselves in foreign lands.
This is either not true or semantic word twisting.
Was the entire nation of Israel taken to Egypt, lock stock and last goat? No.
But of course the Israelites were raided by the Egyptians and taken back as as slaves. Because EVERYONE in that area was raided by the Egyptians and taken back as as slaves. The Israelites were not somehow immune.
Sage Rat:
Omri was of the northern kingdom, not the Davidic line. The House of David might have been mentioned in the Mesha Stele - it’s a somewhat controversial reconstruction idea - but in all likelihood, it does not say Omri was part of it.
Exactly. The area is question was ruled by Egyptians for several centuries. If they hadn’t brought slaves that would have been noteworthy.
I found the statement strange, but figured it must imply some cross marriage between the two lines. Further reading the Wikipedia article, I see that it is mentioned that the translation is fairly highly contested right there. (I’m sure I’ve read the page multiple times, but there are lots of little gotchas like that all over everything. 
)
Sure, it’s evidence, “evidence” is a very broad term - by the same standards, the existence of the Japanese Imperial Treasures is “evidence” that the Sun once hid in a cave in Miyazaki Prefecture.
I forgot to mention in my original post that the OT includes cites, when it comes to the kings:
While these works are lost, it is not particularly far-fetched for a monarchy to keep records of their kings. Nor is it particularly far-fetched for a person to be named David nor that that person would produce children.
Obviously, still doesn’t conclusively mean that David existed, and certainly not that he did anything mystical during his life but prove himself a war hero and seduce all the right women (which really seems to be the long-and-short of it if we read between the lines), but it is more likely that he existed if we have reason to think that they were taking records from earlier on and it’s a strange lie to create, since it’s sort of boring and there are more pointful lies to make.
Though, one also suspects that there are likely to be reasons that these records disappeared from the face of the Earth following this. It is unlikely, for example, that there was a unified kingdom of Israel and Judah during this time and the records would probably reveal that fact. And, of course, the records would probably also mention what all temples were built and which gods they were built to, by each king.
It is evidence that by the 9th century foreign kings referred to a ‘nation’ that was an ally of Israel as the “House of David.” (There is a minority that debates that interpretation, but the large consensus is that this is so.)
This does not mean that David was real, if we believe the Biblical timeline, this would have been about 150-200 years after David’s rule when this was written. According to that timeline, it would have been roughly 7 kings removed from David, so it was not immediately written at the time of David. It’s possible that David was a mythical figure in the same way that Julius Caesar might say that he was the descendant of Ascanius, the grandson of Venus.
Personally, I would wager that David was real in the sense that a person named David existed ca. 1000 and exhibited a certain degree of political control over some portion of what is now called Israel. The lack of archaeological evidence to point to him being a major power player in the region makes me think that his exploits Biblically were exaggerated and likely some oral stories that involved other people got shifted onto him over time. I would guess that after the fall of the Egyptian New Kingdom, there was a power vacuum filled by various warlords and David was likely one of those warlords. This is when you start to see the rise of Philistia which were immigrant groups brought in by Egypt who after Egyptian collapse began expanding their own base. I would conjecture and this is purely conjecture that things were likely very brutal and unstable and the Israelite i.e. more original inhabitants were likely in the target of the new Phoenician invaders and David arose out of this chaos and brought a measure of stability to a relatively small group of villages and towns farther inland and got inserted into the oral tradition due to this stability and perhaps ability to stand up to the Philistine expansion. I think that as time went on he likely achieved a more mythic status as stories were added on to this very base story.
Of course, I could be completely wrong and he could just be some Arthurian creation (of course, maybe Arthur was real too, who knows?) or a figure from some forgotten mythology or a patriarchal figure of a later line of kings that was inserted for legitimacy. Barring new discoveries, it’s just too hard to say.