Moses and the Exodus (original) (raw)
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The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures
Christians and Jews say scripture is the place to start to understand Jewish history. It is not. Critical scholars consider that the Jewish bible is a pious fraud, containing a little history hard to discern among the fiction, propagated for theological reasons. If David once lived, but not as in the bible, the biblical stories about him are fiction. History is scientific, religious history is tendentious. Most university departments of biblical studies employ committed evangelists not skeptics, so religious history is not history. Only when scripture is corroborated by archaeological scholarship should it be accepted as history. Traditional biblical scholars are guilty of giving a religious text a factual historicity it neither seeks nor deserves. The Persian period is the earliest admissible context for the biblical romance. Biblical history is largely myth, so the task is to show what is and what is not history using every relevant method, documentary, archaeological, anthropological, scientific, social. Such evidence shows Israel and Judah remained Canaanite until the Persians came at the end of the sixth century BC. Biblical Israel, its leaders and heroes are mainly fictional. Their victories, defeats, religious policies are inventions written no earlier than the Persian period. Some kings of Israel and Judah appear in official Assyrian king lists, inscriptions and correspondence, but the Persians ruled Assyria and Babylonia, and had access to archives which provided the historical framework for stories about biblical monarchs. The bible was historical fiction even when it was written. Pious Jews and Christians ought to realize this. No trace of the sagas of the Old Testament has ever been found in any archaeological dig from Jericho to Megiddo. A fortified city that fell in a definite moment of history is an archaeological prize. At Jericho, Christian and Jewish archaeologists dug and dug. They found ancient walls thousands of years too old, and none the right age. A thick layer of burnt material above the Middle Bronze Age buildings is the highest surviving layer. No city existed when Joshua invaded. Did Jerusalem only host only one temple? Even the bible admits Jews had temples for Moabites, Ammonites and Phoenicians at Jerusalem, including a shrine to Moloch in the Vale of Hinnom where humans passed through the fire. Biblical editors suppressed the details. The most common archaeological object found in Palestine is the crudely shaped figurine of a naked goddess! The temple at Elephantine in Egypt, according to a letter of 407 BC, existed before the Persian period, before the " return " from exile and so before the so-called second Jerusalem temple. The Yehudim were a religious group from the outset—people who worship the god, Yehouah. Ezra says the natives of Judah, who had not been deported, and wanted to help the Persian colonists build the temple— " we seek your God, as you " —had been put there by Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, deported in to worship Yehouah! There were also " the rest of the nations whom Ashurbanipal exiled and set in the cities of Samaria, and the rest of the province 'Beyond the River' ". Ezra was arguing that the Samarians and the Am Ha Eretz were not proper worshippers of Yehouah—not proper Jews! History tries to show how we got to the present. Modern historians have documentary, scientific and archaeological skills, but ancient historians had little of it. Ancient historians say as much about the aspirations of their time as the history they are discussing. Authors of the Jewish scriptures were unlikely to have been members of the society described in these books. They were foreign rulers writing fictional accounts of the history of a subject people to shame them before God to behave in ways acceptable to the God's choice of king—the Shahanshah. Besides the theme of shame is one of wandering and finding a land—eretz, the " earth " ! It is mythology for colonists, linked to the idea of exile. It gave the various deportees an identity, an history, a cause, and a warning that it could be easily lost without obedience.
Moses the Persian? Exodus 2, the Other and Biblical Mnemohistory
Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 2004
2 This is the main criticism leveled, for example, by B. Britt in an otherwise glowing review, Moses, Monotheism and Memory, RStR 26 (2000), 316. For my own part, I am less comfortable with the millennial memory gap that must be bridged with modern assumptions about trauma and preservation. 3 The term ›mnemohistory‹ signifies, according to Assmann, the history of cultural memory (15 et passim). 4 Scholarly controversies regarding the redactional stages of the Pentateuch and of the HB in general, like the intellectuals surveyed by Assmann, often reflect fashions and individual concerns that have little to do with the text itself. For one recent evaluation that ›pushes‹ the final redacted HB to a ›hellenistic‹ era, N.P. Lemche, The Old Testament: A Hellenistic Book?, SJOT 7 (1993), 163-193. Lemche wishes to bring the HB and the NT together as products of the same period. He suggests, inter alia, (in order to demonstrate that the Persian period »does not meet the requirements of being the time when the historical books of the OT were written down«, 184) that Xenophon's An
HIPHIL, 2009
Did the ancient Israelites write history as it happened in ancient Mesopotamia and Greece? This is a question that has marred historians and biblical scholars alike since the dawn of enlightenment -not least during the last decades -and though the textual material has been available for ages and there has been plenty of time to discuss the subject it is probably right to say that there is less agreement now than there has ever been! One of the obvious problems in understanding the idea of history and the practice of writing history in ancient Israel is, of course, that the author(s) of the main narrative of Genesis through 2 Kings in the Hebrew Bible -unlike the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides and the later Jewish historian Josephus -does not describe the purpose of the account. 2 Another complicating factor is that our conception of "genuine" or "true" history writing is based on the standards of ancient Greek history writing. Herodotus (ca. 485-425 B.C.) has become known as the "Father of History" in the sense that his writings preceded those of any other modern Western scholar who recorded historical events. He used recognized structuring techniques in his writing, unifying time, events and analytical interpretation in ways which distinguished him from mere writers of fictional literature or epic poetry. Thucydides (ca. 460-400 B.C.) followed Herodotus by several decades and began to further perfect historical style and content in his accounts of major events, and it is only natural that, in the course of Enlightenment, they were seen as forerunners of the impartial, critical, and rational research favoured by modern historians. Greek historiography became the yardstick against which all history writing was to be measured and it can come as no surprise, therefore, that ancient Israelite history writing fell short in comparison with such Greek standards. Though certain scholars continue to apply such Greek standards in the discussion on the biblical texts, 3 there 1 Revised version of a paper presented to a seminar on Text and History at Copenhagen Lutheran School of Theology June 18 th 2003. 2 Contrast, e.g., the re-writing of Israel's history by Josephus, who in his Jewish Antiquities tells us about his authorial intent, ev kdihgh, sasqai dia. tou. s ev n tw/ | gra, fein lumainome, nouj th. n av lh, qeian, "in order to refute those who in their writings were doing outrage to the truth," and intended readers, tau, thn de. th. n ev nestw/ san ev gkecei, pismai pragmatei, an nomi, zwn a[ pasi fanei/ sqai toi/ j [ Ellhsin av xi, an spoudh/ j\ me, llei ga. r perie, xein a[ pasan th. n parV hv mi/ n av rcaiologi, an kai. th. n dia, taxin tou/ politeu, matoj ev k tw/ n VEbrai? kw/ n meqhrmhneume, nhn gramma, twn, "and now I have undertaken this present work in the belief that the whole Greek-speaking world will find it worthy of attention; for it will embrace our entire ancient history and political constitution translated from the Hebrew records" (H. St.
Moses and the Exodus Chronological, Historical and Archaeological Evidence
The existence Moses as well as the Exodus is a crucial question because, according to the Bible, the character related to that famous event forms the basis of the Passover which meant the Promised Land for Jews and later the Paradise for Christians. However, according to most Egyptologists, there is absolutely no evidence of Moses and the Exodus in Egyptian documents, which leads them to conclude that the whole biblical story is a myth written for gullible people. However, according to Egyptian accounts the last king of the 15th dynasty named Apopi, “very pretty”, which was Moses’ birth name (Ex 2:2), reigned 40 years in Egypt (1613-1573) and met Seqenenre Taa, 40 years later, the last pharaoh of the 17th dynasty who died in May 1533 BCE in dramatic and unclear circumstances (Ps 136:15). The state of his mummy proves that his body received severe injuries and remained abandoned for several days before being mummified. The eldest son of Seqenenre Taa, Ahmose Sapaïr, who was crown prince died in a dramatic and unexplained way shortly before his father (Ex 12:29). Prince Kamose, Seqenenre Taa's brother, assured interim of authority for 3 years and threatened attack the former pharaoh Apopi, new prince of Retenu (Palestine) who took the name Moses, according to Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian. In the stele of the Tempest, Kamose also blames Apopi for all the disasters that come to fall upon Egypt, which caused many deaths. Ironically, those who believe Egyptologists are actually the real gullible ones. https://www.lulu.com/shop/gerard-gertoux/moses-and-the-exodus-chronological-historical-and-archaeological-evidence/paperback/product-1pyeqjj6.html