Someone offered this theory in another thread on this board, that to the escapees it was a big deal but the Egyptians were like oh look some slaves escaped no biggie get a general to go on a conquest to round up more. To explain why this incident is not mentioned in Egyptian sources, also why there would be no evidence found to support it.
Seriously? You’re going to draw a line there? Would a Roman citizen two millennia ago, a participant in the Cult of Hercules, draw that line?
Where is this “Troy”? Is he a neighbor of yours? I know you aren’t talking about Skiron and the city of Ilion. 
Because of the flooding of the Nile, Egypt had a more reliable, less famine-prone, agriculture than Palestine. Thus the Biblical story of the Hebrews settling in Egypt during an extended famine.
One can say that the authors of the Bible choose Egypt because it made the fabrication more plausible. Or one could say the Egypt connection makes an extremely ancient legend more likely to have a bit of truth in it.
What other long standing major power/advanced civilization in the region would it have made more sense to use?
As far as defining central myths go it is a great one. Compare and contrast with others of its time. This set up the hero not as a god or a demi-god and did not focus on cautioning against human hubris in the face of fragile immortal egos. The human instead was a realistic and very flawed human who struggled with doing the right things before stepping up to the plate and (common to OT myths) who was willing to argue even with God. And was not struck down for doing so!
Its sets a peoplehood coming out of mere slaves who had to learn how to be free, with some difficulty, including the temptation of Golden Claves. It puts responsibility on us individuals as flawed humans capable of doing great things and free to make horrible mistakes. It sets a brotherhood up with all who are oppressed, for that was us.
It provides a justification for the basic axioms of the society, the ten commandments. And a rational for who was its priestly class.
A people’s chosen myths define who they aspire to be and what they value. They serve functions. Gotta love a good one.
I come in late but:
Is this story more untrue than other biblical stories?
Listen to:
Who cares what the ROMANS think? By Pallas, they were practically Etruscans, and that’s only a step away from being Teleri.
The quotation imbedded at the end of this passage demonstrates everything wrong with modern biblical scholarship. Unless you are looking at an actual palimpsest, there is quite obviously no reason to presume that traces of an earlier revision lie hidden in the final copy of a text. I think things have been trending away from this methodology for a while now, but much of twentieth century biblical scholarship was like staring at a TV someone is watching now in the hopes of being able to see clues of what else they were watching before they changed the channel.
I can’t believe no one else has said this: Bravo, sir! Bravo!
It is threads like this one that make me nostalgic for Diogenes who would have contributed greatly to this topic, as he did in this thread.
There are scholars who argue in favor of it being historically based and those who argue against that. Among the arguments in favor of historicity are linguistic, cultural, and architectural links between Egyptian and Hebrew civilizations. Here is an interview with a scholar who makes that argument.
Kicked your boys’ arses flat, though. I ain’t sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
The story as related in the Bible today is probably corrupted. The basic structure on the other hand is probably accurate, and it almost certainly is based upon the ending of Egytian rule in Canaan.
So its not fabricated.
“More true” than some others in the sense that a scaled-down version of the Exodus is plausible: it is conceivable, though not in evidence, that a group of slaves fled Egypt and settled in Canaan. In that way the story may be more historical than obvious fables like the Garden of Eden or the Tower of Babel.
It’s probably on par with the stories we have about the heroes in Judges like Gideon, Samson, Deborah, etc. – hero myths that were adopted as history, but possibly with a historical kernel of fact the way some scholars think that King Arthur might be based on an actual king that the legends later became attached to.
“Less true” than some of the later history we find in the books of Kings and Chronicles, some of which (like the Omri dynasty) intersects with actual archaeological evidence.
The best analogy would be Troy. …the story as told in Iliad is almost certainly based on real events, either a series of Trojan wars or one large memorable war.
Moreover Trojan War events occurred around the same general time as the exodus (part of a century long unraveling of culture in the late Bronze Age Med).
I think the biblical account shows signs of confusing dates-Joseph gets sold into slavery in Egypt-he then becomes the king’s trusted advisor-then (mysteriously) the Jews become slaves in Egypt-Moses rises up, and the Jews make their epic 70 mile trek to Palestine (taking 40 years to do so). As Velikovski suggests, the history repeats in an 800 year interval (see “Ages in Chaos”).
Heh. Speaking of fabricated.
It might be based on the ending of Egyptian rule in Canaan, so dismissing the possibility of it being fabricated is it bit premature.
It seems surprising to get real literal with one story in the bible, which itself is known to be credulous about lots of unsupported things.
The same thing happened (as pointed out in a current CS thread) with the Ghostbusters. In the first movie, the Ghostbusters become heroes when they defeat a giant, supernatural, walking image of corporate America. In the second movie they become heroes (again?) by creating and controlling a giant, supernatural walking image of American nationalism. What are the odds that two such similar events would occur or would be created independently as fiction? Clearly there must be some underlying historical event (or at least an ur-myth) that has been redacted and altered to reflect two competing political ideologies, probably by two competing tribes or cultural groups sharing the same history. Later editors must have tried clumsily to edit together the two variant accounts into a single narrative. By carefully reading between the lines and taking notes of similarities and differences between the two versions we have now, we can undoubtedly get close to reproducing this hypothetical “G” source, which will tell us much about the early history of occult practices in New York.
Numbers are often used for their symbolic value in Biblical myths.
40, the standard number of weeks of human gestation, is almost always associated with a rebirth of some sort in these stories. 40 years in the desert before a people was reborn, 40 days and nights of the Great Flood before the world was reborn, 40 years that Moses spent in Midian after he killed the Egyptian overseer and ran away before coming back reborn as a leader of the Jewish people and 40 days and nights he spent on the mount before the Law was birthed … so on.