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Exodus is a myth

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There Was No “Exodus”

The Truth Is…

Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence.

Everyone knows the story of Exodus; Moses “leading” the children of Israel out of Egypt, etc, etc, etc. No need to elaborate. There is no evidence that the events described in Exodus ever happened.

The primary evidence that it didn’t happen is the fact that there is no evidence that ANY of the events associated with Exodus happened.

These alleged events, central to the history of the Israelites are not corroborated in documents external to the Bible or in archaeological findings.

No Written Evidence of Existence of Hebrews in Egypt

According to Exodus 12:40, the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years. Yet for all this time, there is no literary OR archaeological evidence outside the Hebrew Scriptures that records the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. There is no mention of Jews or 10 plagues in this extensive history of Egypt.

Most Important: The Egyptian records themselves have no mention of anything recorded in Exodus. Egyptians wrote extensively, in their distinctive hieroglyphs, and practiced detailed art that depicted many scenes of Egyptian life yet none depicts any of the 10 plagues. Because they left such a rich legacy, the Egyptians are more familiar to us than perhaps any other ancient civilization.

As the archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman noted:

[W]e have no clue, not even a single word, about the early Israelites in Egypt: neither in monumental inscriptions on the walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri. Israel is absent – as a possible foe of Egypt, as a friend, or as an enslaved nation

Most historians today agree that at best, the stay in Egypt and the Exodus occurred in a few families and that their private story was expanded and “nationalized” to fit the needs of theological ideology.

Israeli archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog, provides the current consensus view on the historicity of the Exodus:

The Israelites never were in Egypt. They never came from abroad. This whole chain is broken. It is not a historical one. It is a later legendary reconstruction – made in the seventh century [BCE] – of a history that never happened.

William Dever, an archaeologist normally associated with the more conservative end of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, has labeled the question of historicity of Exodus “dead.”

No Archeological Evidence of a 40 Year Sojourn in the Desert

Midcentury archaeologists usually “took the historical narratives of the Bible at face value”; Israel’s first archaeologists were often said to approach a dig with a spade in one hand and the Bible in the other. The Old Testament frequently served as the standard against which all other data were measured: If someone found majestic ruins, they dated them to Solomon’s time; signs of a battle were quickly attributed to the conquest of Canaan. Eventually, though, as archaeological methods improved and biblical scholars analyzed the text itself for inconsistencies and anachronisms, the amount of the Bible regarded as historically verifiable eroded.

Modern archaeological research has found no evidence that the Sinai desert ever hosted, or could have hosted, 1.5+ million people, nor of a massive population increase in Canaan, estimated to have had a population of between 50,000 and 100,000 at the time. The wilderness of the southern Sinai peninsula shows no traces of a mass-migration such as Exodus describes, and virtually all the place-names mentioned, including Goshen (the area within Egypt where the Israelites supposedly lived), the store-cities of Pithom and Rameses, the site of the crossing of the Red Sea, and even Mt Sinai itself, have resisted identification.[2]

Surely more than 1.5+million people wandering around for forty years would have left some traces (pottery, bones, fecal matter, wagon parts) for archaeologists to find. Remember, God allowed the initial cohort of 1.5+ million to die. Only second generation “Israelites” entered Canaan. Thus there would have been over 1.5 million well preserved (desert you know) human skeletons, not to mention the skeletons of the live stock. Yet not a single bone has been found. Nor has any trace of fecal matter (a primary tool of archeologists and DNA analysis. See Archaeological Study of Human Fossil Feces called Coprolite” for proof of this.) been found and there would have been plenty of it, especially from the thrice dead cattle that Israelites took with them.

This is not for want of trying. Both Jewish and Christian “scholars” have been desperately trying to find evidence to “prove” that Exodus took place. “Between 1967, when Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and 1982, when it was returned in the peace treaty, Israeli archaeologists made dozens of expeditions throughout the peninsula. Yet, not a single shred of evidence for an ancient Israelite presence was found.

Ezion-Geber, where the ancient Israelites supposedly encamped (Numbers 33:35), is another site that has been identified by archaeologists. Yet here too no artifacts dating to the time of the Exodus can be found. Finally, despite numerous digs on Mount Sinai, on the southern tip of Sinai Peninsula, no evidence has been found of any ancient Israelite presence there.

No Evidence of Effect of Loss of 1/3 of Egypt’s Population

The bible says that the “Exodus” consisted of 603,550 able-bodied adult males (not counting Levites) wives, non-fighting men, Levites and children would have brought the total to 1.5 million or more; equivalent to nearly half of the entire Egyptian population of around 3-6 million. After 430 years, the Jews would have been well integrated into the fabric of Egyptian culture and economy. If they were slaves, they would have been even more critical to the economy. The loss of such a huge proportion of the population would have caused havoc to the Egyptian economy, but no evidence of such effect has been found.

Think of it this way… if, in the United States, approximately 100 million workers (~33% of our population) of the lowest job skills suddenly disappeared tomorrow and, at the same time, roughly 25% of our population suddenly dropped dead all at the stroke of midnight (i.e. “first born), and our entire remaining Army drowned in the sea, not to mention loss of all crops and cattle, don’t you think this would have affected our economy and reduced us to a third world country?

No Evidence of 1,500,000 People Arriving, All at Once, at The “Promised Land”, Canaan.

The archaeology of Palestine has equally failed to substantiate the Bible’s account of the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites arriving from Egypt some forty years later – of the 31 cities supposedly conquered by Joshua, only one (Bethel) shows a destruction level that equates to the Biblical narrative, and there is general agreement that the origins of Israel lie within Canaan itself.[3] Even those scholars who hold the Exodus to represent historical truth concede that the most the evidence can suggest is plausibility.[4]

Even with God’s Help, Logistics Make Exodus an Impossible Event.

COMMUNICATION
1.5 million people walking in rows of 10, with three feet between rows would form a line 113 miles long. Since the families came with their “flocks and herds”, the line would easily have been 150 miles long. The “Children of Israel” were the same in number as the American city of Philadelphia. Philadelphia is spread over 130 square miles.
Seriously… How did Moses communicate with all “the children of Israel”?

SUPPLIES
The Jews took many spoils from their Egyptian captors including cattle (which, btw, were killed thrice over by the plagues). Using the statistics presented in the New International Version we find that the quantities of materials required for construction of:

The Tabernacle
The Ark
The Table
The Lampstand
The Altar of Incense
The Altar of Burnt Offering
The Basin for Washing
The Courtyard

required, at least…

1 ton of gold
3.75 tons of silver;
2.50 tons of bronze; and
over a mile of linen
over a mile of yarn

Where did all these raw materials come from? How were they transported? Dragging these spoils along would have strung out the group well beyond the 150 miles.

WATER
Although God presumably provided food in the form of “Manna” and quail, there is no mention of Him providing water other than from a single rock. Huge quantities of water would have been necessary to support 1,500,000 people and all the livestock they stole from the Egyptians. The similarly sized city of Philadelphia requires 250 MILLION GALLONS OF WATER A DAY distributed via 3,300 miles of underground pipes. But the “Children of Israel” were moving around – hence the water supply would have to move with them. Remember they were in a desert! One rock spouting water did not supply 1.5 million people. Even if it did, it would have gushed at a rate of 175,000 gallons a minute onto the desert floor. Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park “gushes” a maximum of only 8400 gallons a minute. Wanna take a sip?

Seriously, what was the source of the water that maintained a city the size of Philadelphia and their livestock for a period of 40 years? How was it distributed?

SANITATION
The excrement from 1,500,000 humans and their stolen livestock would have produced a monumental volume of excrement EVERY DAY and its associated health problems. And this continued for over forty years! And yet there was no dysentery, diarrhea, cholera? Even today, around four million people a year die due to disease linked to a lack of safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
Seriously, how did the “Children of Israel” deal with the huge sanitation problem that naturally occurs whenever large groups of people have to live close together?

WRITING OF THE TORAH
According to religious tradition, everything found in the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was given by God to Moses, some at Mount Sinai and some at the Tabernacle. This dictation and recording resulted in the Torah we have today. Note that no serious, unbiased religious scholar believes that the Torah was written by Moses during the period of the Exodus. Read about theDocumentary Hypothesis.

Those five books contain over 100,000 English words. If Moses wrote in Cuneiform, the only form of writing known in that area in that era, it would have taken over 5,000,000 characters to represent the books of the Torah.Here is what the cuneiform symbol for “head” looks like:

The symbol represents an Old Assyrian version of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Early 2nd millennium is about the time Moses would have been transcribing God’s words.

For reinforcement of how difficult writing in cuneiform is, here is a section of the peace treaty between Hattusa and Ramses II, circa 1250 BCE.

The above photo represents the state of the art of writing in 1200 BCE. Note the thickness of the “tablet”. Very thick in order to prevent breakage as it is transported via ox cart over bumpy roads no doubt. Think how many similar tablets Moses would have had to produce. Think of the problems of transporting these back to Canaan given the massive weight and size of the thousands of “tablets”. There can be little doubt that Moses was writing in some form of Cuneiform given the state of writing at the time he recorded God’s words.

Now then, upon what did Moses record these words? Writing in wet clay with a stylus was the method of writing in that era. To make the writing permanent, the clay had to be fired. But Moses didn’t have access to clay, only sand. He didn’t have a kiln to fire the clay into solid tablets that could be transported either.

The accumulation of these tablets would have added tons to the transportation burden.

How were these writings preserved during the 40 years?

We don’t have the stones containing words written by God himself onto stone, but somehow we have managed to keep intact the entire texts of the Torah? We have apparently been able to preserve God’s word on how to make Aron’s breastplate:

“And thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cunning work; after the work of the ephod thou shalt make it; of gold, of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine twined linen, shalt thou make it.” Exodus 28:15

Those stones survived long enough to be translated. But where are thy now? Thousands of tons of writings created by icon Moses and not a one of these holy stones, words from the mouth of God himself, none of them survived? The Children of Israel couldn’t even keep track of the two most sacred stone tablets written by the finger of their God. How then, did they ever maintain, intact, thousands of stone-like tablets of Cuneiform scrawled upon by Moses?. When and by whom and where were they translated?Why don’t we have ANY of them now?

Internal Contradictions

Writing of the Torah
The absolute difficulty of producing the Torah is not the only problem with Moses and the Torah. Another issue is that it describes events that occur AFTER Moses could have written them – including his own death! (So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. Deuteronomy34:7) Most of the time, the authors of the Torah use Moses’ name in third person; e.g. “… the Lord said unto Moses …” There are a few instances where the phrase “… the Lord said unto me…” is used. So, it is obvious that it was not some kind of stylistic approach to use the third person because it is not done exclusively. This is more evidence that the Torah was not written by Moses and that Exodus cannot be true because of its’ own internal contradictions.

Age of Moses
The Age and genealogy of Moses indicates that Moses was in Egypt for 300 years but the Bible states he was 80 when he leaves.

Reproduction Rates
Jacob enters Egypt with “All those who were descendants of Jacob were seventy persons” Four hundred and thirty years later, approximately 1,500,000 “Children of Israel” leave Egypt. Using basic population statistics, each woman had 5-6 children. However, this prodigious production of children apparently ended the moment they left Egypt.

The same would be true of their livestock. In order to have sufficient numbers of livestock to support the growing numbers which were increasing at an exponential rate, the livestock would have had to also increase at an exponential rate. Apparently this exponential rate of reproduction also stopped the moment they left Egypt.

Nowhere To Go
Children of Israel “escaped” to Canaan, yet Canaan was a province of Egypt so they were still under the rule of the Egyptians, even though they were in the “promised land”.

God’s Broken Promise
God promised that he would return His people … well, you read it:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Exodous 3:8

BUT… only two of those to whom God made the promise actually made it to the land flowing with milk and honey. God compelled them to roam the deserts instead for forty years, until all of them except two had perished. Of all the multitude who escaped from Egypt, only Joshua and Caleb entered the promised land. Even Moses had to die in sight of it. Their God was worse than the Egyptians ever were. He was quick-tempered, unreasonable, cruel, revengeful, and dishonest. Few of his promises to them were performed. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked by a track of death and bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain by war, and robbed by priests, they found Jehovah a harder despot than Pharaoh. Death was to them a happy release, and only the grave a shelter from the savagery of God.

What Did Happen; i.e. The Truth

From the NOVA series, The Bibles Buried Secrets, read what Carol Meyers, an archeologist and professor of religion at Duke University, has to say about the significance of the Moses narrative in ancient times, the role it plays in American history, and why it continues to resonate with us today. VERY INTERESTING – CLICK HERE!

Summary, in case you don’t follow the link: Canaanites went to Egypt for a variety of reasons. They were generally assimilated—after a generation or two they became Egyptians. There is almost no evidence that those people left. But there are one or two Egyptian documents that record the flight of a handful of people who had been brought to Egypt for one reason or other and who didn’t want to stay there.

There you have it. Some Egyptians, originally from Canaan, left Egypt to return home; THAT IS YOUR EXODUS.

Bibliography

1 James Weinstein, “Exodus and the Archaeological Reality”, in Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs and Leonard H. Lesko (Eisenbrauns, 1997), p.87

2 John Van Seters, “The Geography of the Exodus”, in The Land I Will Show You: Essays on the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Honour of J. Maxwell Miller, ed. J. Andrew Dearman and M. Patrick Graham (JSOT 343, Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp. 255-76

3 Lawrence E. Stager, “Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel”, in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed.

4 James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition, (OUP, 1999)

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Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?

It's a popular story, but all the documentary and historical evidence tells us that no Jews were in Egypt at the time of the pyramids.

by Brian Dunning

Filed under Ancient Mysteries, History & Pseudohistory, Religion

Skeptoid #191
February 2, 2010
Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe

Popular mythology tells us that Jewish slaves built the pyramids under the whips of the Pharaohs
(Photo credit:iStockPhoto.com/ElsvanderGun)

The stories we hear in Sunday school seem to form the basis for the popular belief that Jewish slaves were forced to build the pyramids in Egypt, but they were saved when they left Egypt in a mass Exodus. That's the story I was raised to believe, and it's what's been repeated innumerable times by Hollywood. In 1956, Charlton Heston as Moses went head to head with Yul Brynner as Pharaoh Ramesses II inThe Ten Commandments, having been placed into the Nile in a basket as a baby to escape death by Ramesses' edict that all newborn Hebrew sons be killed. More than 40 years later, DreamWorks told the same story in the animated Prince of Egypt, and the babies died again.

In 1977, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin visited Egypt's National Museum in Cairo and stated "We built the pyramids." Perhaps to the surprise of a lot of people, this sparked outrage throughout the Egyptian people, proud that they had built the pyramids. The belief that Jews built the pyramids may be prominent throughout Christian and Jewish populations, but it's certainly not the way anyone in Egypt remembers things.

Pop culture has a way of blurring pseudohistory and real history, and many people end up never hearing the real history at all; and are left with only the pseudohistory and no reason to doubt it. This is not only unfortunate, it's dangerous. In the words of Primo Levi inscribed front and center inside Berlin's Holocaust Museum, "It happened, therefore it can happen again." 20th century Jewish history is probably the most important, and hardest learned, lesson that humanity has ever had the misfortune to be dealt. Forgetting or distorting history is always wrong, and is never in anyone's best interest.

I've heard some Christians say the Bible is a literal historical document, thus Jewish slaves built the pyramids (the Bible actually doesn't mention pyramids at all, this came from Herodotus. See below. - BD); and I've heard some non-religious historians say there's no evidence that there were ever Jews in ancient Egypt. Both can't be true. To find the truth, we need to take a critical look at the archaeological and historical evidence for the history of Jews in Egypt. In order to do this responsibly, we first have to put aside any ideological motivations that would taint our efforts. We're not going to say such research is sacrilegious because it seeks to disprove the Bible or the Torah; we're not going to say such research is a moral imperative because religious accounts are deceptive; and we're not going to pretend that such research is racially motivated against either Jews or Egyptians. We simply want to know what really happened, because true history is vital.

One of the first things you find out is that it's important to get our definitions right. Terms like Jew and Hebrew are thrown around a lot in these histories, and they're not the same thing. A Jew is someone who practices the Jewish religion. A Hebrew is someone who speaks the Hebrew language. An Israelite is a citizen of Israel. A Semite is a member of an ethnic group characterized by any of the Semitic languages including Arabic, Hebrew, Assyrian, and many smaller groups throughout Africa and the Middle East. You can be some or all of these things. An Israelite need not be a Jew, and a Jew need not be a Hebrew. Confusion over the use of these terms complicates research. Hebrews could be well integrated into a non-Jewish society, but modern reporting might refer to them as Jews, which can be significantly misleading.

Now, there are more than just a single question we're trying to answer here. Were the Jews slaves in ancient Egypt? Were the pyramids built by these slaves? Did the Exodus happen as is commonly believed?

The biggest and most obvious evidence — the pyramids themselves — are an easy starting point. Their age is well established. The bulk of the Giza Necropolis, consisting of such famous landmarks as the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx, are among Egypt's oldest large pyramids and were completed around 2540 BCE. Most of Egypt's large pyramids were built over a 900 year period from about 2650 BCE to about 1750 BCE.

We also know quite a lot about the labor force that built the pyramids. The best estimates are that 10,000 men spent 30 years building the Great Pyramid. They lived in good housing at the foot of the pyramid, and when they died, they received honored burials in stone tombs near the pyramid in thanks for their contribution. This information is relatively new, as the first of these worker tombs was only discovered in 1990. They ate well and received the best medical care. And, also unlike slaves, they were well paid. The pyramid builders were recruited from poor communities and worked shifts of three months (including farmers who worked during the months when the Nile flooded their farms), distributing the pharaoh's wealth out to where it was needed most. Each day, 21 cattle and 23 sheep were slaughtered to feed the workers, enough for each man to eat meat at least weekly. Virtually every fact about the workers that archaeology has shown us rules out the use of slave labor on the pyramids.

It wasn't until almost 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid received its capstone that the earliest known record shows evidence of Jews in Egypt, and they were neither Hebrews nor Israelites. They were a garrison of soldiers from the Persian Empire, stationed on Elephantine, an island in the Nile, beginning in about 650 BCE. They fought alongside the Pharaoh's soldiers in the Nubian campaign, and later became the principal trade portal between Egypt and Nubia. Their history is known from the Elephantine Papyri discovered in 1903, which are in Aramaic, not Hebrew; and their religious beliefs appear to have been a mixture of Judaism and pagan polytheism. Archival records recovered include proof that they observed Shabbat and Passover, and also records of interfaith marriages. In perhaps the strangest reversal from pop pseudohistory, the papyri include evidence that at least some of the Jewish settlers at Elephantine owned Egyptian slaves.

Other documentation also identifies the Elephantine garrison as the earliest immigration of Jews into Egypt. The Letter of Aristeas, written in Greece in the second century BCE, records that Jews had been sent into Egypt to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his campaign against the Nubians. Psammetichus I ruled Egypt from 664 to 610 BCE, which perfectly matches the archaeological dating of the Elephantine garrison in 650.

If Jews were not in Egypt at the time of the pyramids, what about Israelites or Hebrews? Israel itself did not exist until approximately 1100 BCE when various Semitic tribes joined in Canaan to form a single independent kingdom, at least 600 years after the completion of the last of Egypt's large pyramids. Thus it is not possible for any Israelites to have been in Egypt at the time, either slave or free; as there was not yet any such thing as an Israelite. It was about this same time in history that the earliest evidence of the Hebrew language appeared: The Gezer Calendar, inscribed in limestone, and discovered in 1908. And so the history of Israel is very closely tied to that of Hebrews, and for the past 3,000 years, they've been essentially one culture.

But if neither Jews nor Israelites nor Hebrews were in Egypt until so many centuries after the pyramids were built, how could such a gross historical error become so deeply ingrained in popular knowledge? The story of Jewish slaves building the pyramids originated with Herodotus of Greece in about 450 BCE. He's often called the "Father of History" as he was among the first historians to take the business seriously and thoroughly document his work. Herodotus reported in his Book II of The Histories that the pyramids were built in 30 years by 100,000 Jewish slaves [In point of fact, Herodotus only says 100,000 workers. He does not mention either Jews or slaves. So even this popular belief seems to be in error, and the origin of the idea of Jews building the pyramids remains a mystery - BD]. Unfortunately, in his time, the line between historical fact and historical fiction was a blurry one. The value of the study of history was not so much to preserve history, as it was to furnish material for great tales; and a result, Herodotus was also called the "Father of Lies" and other Greek historians of the period also grouped under the term "liars". Many of Herodotus' writings are considered to be fanciful by modern scholars. Coincidentally, the text of the Book of Exodus was finalized at just about exactly the same time as Herodotus wrote The Histories. Obviously, the same information about what had been going on in Egypt 2,000 years before was available to both authors.

Which brings us to the final question: Was there a mass Exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt? There is no record of any such thing ever happening, and the simple reason is that there is no time in which it could have happened. No Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus; and by the time there were enough Jews living in Egypt to constitute an Exodus, the time of the pyramids was long over. And Pharaoh Ramesses can be let off the hook as well: With apologies to Yul Brynner, no documentary or archaeological evidence links any of the Pharaohs bearing this name with plagues or Jewish slaves or edicts to kill babies. Indeed, the earliest, Ramesses I, wasn't even born until more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramid was completed. His grandson, the great Ramesses II, lived even later.

Some historians have attempted to rationalize the Exodus by drawing parallels to certain cities and trade centers that grew and shrank over the centuries for various reasons. Perhaps one of these economic shifts inspired the story of Exodus. Well, perhaps it did, but the nature of such a migration is, quite obviously, fundamentally different than that depicted in Exodus.

The pseudohistory of ancient Egypt is disrespectful to both Jews and Egyptians. It depicts the Jews as helpless slaves whose only contribution was sweat and broken backs, when in fact the earliest Jewish immigrants were respected allies to the Pharaoh and provided Egypt with a valuable service of both trade and defense. The pseudohistory also takes away from the Egyptians their due credit for construction of humanity's greatest architectural achievement, and portrays them as evil, bloodthirsty slavemasters. Pretty much every culture in the world at that period in history included slavery and conflict, and the Egyptians probably weren't any better or worse than most peoples.

Understanding history is essential to understanding ourselves. Although a story like Exodus is profoundly important to so many people throughout the world, the history it describes is false; and the faithful are best advised to seek value in it other than as a mere list of events. Doing so opens the door to a better comprehension of who we are as humans, and it's that shared history that will always unite us — no matter our race, color, or culture. It's just one little more service provided by good science.

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The Jews Were Never Slaves in Egypt

Christians still cling to the opinion that their Bible is infallible. They delight in telling us that the Bible is the inspired word of God, even though it’s well documented that the Bible contains more than 400 contradictions, not to mention that it reflects the Bronze-age morality of the time.

Well, here comes science to kick religion in the nuts once again: the Jews were never slaves in Egypt!

This never happened…

It turns out that there is no archaeological evidence of any kind relating to a separate settlement of religious people in Egypt during that time. There is also no evidence of any kind relating to a mass migration across the Sinai Peninsula.

If things did indeed happen as it says in the Bible (and the Torah), there would have to be some archaeological evidence. But there is none.

Further, there is no evidence of any kind that Egypt even used slaves, and certainly no evidence that they enslaved an entire nation. The workers that built the pyramids are known to be well payed Egyptians. The pyramids weren’t even built in the right time period, being 800 to 2,000 years older than the supposed “Exodus”.

The same techniques used to track the migration patterns of ancient humans by examining DNA also show that there was absolutely no procreation between ancient Egyptians and ancient Israelites during the time that the story was supposed to have taken place. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if an entire nation was enslaved for hundreds of years, surely there would have been some inter-breeding.

In short, this story never happened.

And this isn’t even “news” – of course, the scientific community is across the subject, but even conservative Jewish sources admit that there is no evidence (but they still have faith! And some stuff about metaphors and such…)

To drive the point home, I’m even providing sources for you (although, a quick Google search could give you dozens more…)

Basically, everyone in the know admits that what is written in the Bible and Torah simply didn’t happen, not at all, not even the non-supernatural, core plot…

So next time you hear someone tell you the Bible is infallible (or anything about Passover whatsoever) send them one of these links:

Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth? – Haaretz 2012
Who Built The Pyramids? – Harvard Magazine2003
Grounds for disbelief – Haaretz 2003
Doubting the Story of Exodus – Los Angeles Times – 2001

- See more at: http://www.religiouscriticism.com/bible/the-jews-were-never-slaves-in-egypt/#sthash.IXvRx1E9.dpuf

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The Jewish Exodus from Egypt never happened

The Exodus Myth Staks Studios

Shortly after I started to question my belief in God, I remember talking to my Rabbi about Passoverand the Exodus from Egypt. My Rabbi knew that I was starting to doubt the supernatural aspects of the story and told me in confidence that while the basic story is historical fact, the supernatural elements might not have actually happened. He assured me that even though there might not have been plagues of frogs and that Moses might not have parted the Red Sea, that the Jews were really slaves in Egypt and that there was an Exodus. I have since learned that is not actually true at all. The Jews were never slaves in Egypt.

When I first heard that not a shred of evidence has been discovered in the Sinai Desert that a large number of Jews had wandered for 40 years, I thought that wasn’t such a big deal. I mean it’s a desert, right? Sand storms probably just swallowed up all the evidence. The more I looked into the story however, the more I came to realize that the lack of evidence was actually a pretty big problem. According to the Book of Exodus, there were a lot of Jews wandering this desert and it seems extremely unlikely (bordering on impossible) for this many people to leave absolutely no trace especially when traces have been found for smaller groups of people which predated the Exodus in that same desert.

Still, I didn’t think all that much about it until fairly recently when I stumbled upon an article called, “Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?” By Brian Dunning. This article really got me thinking about the Exodus story again. Dunning’s article reinforced my skepticism about the Exodus story and fueled my feelings of betrayal. I was taught for most of my life that it was a historical fact that the Jews were slaves in Egypt. This “history” was part of my cultural identity as a Jew. Even when I gave up the ridiculous superstitious beliefs associated with Judaism, I could still proudly feel connected to the Jewish culture which was grounded in a deep history of liberation from slavery.

As it turns out, well known Jewish commentator and author, Rabbi David Wolpe has also known about the Exodus Myth. In his article titled, “Did the Exodus Really Happen?” he mentions how other Rabbis wanted him to keep the fact that the Exodus story isn’t true on the down-low. The basic story of the Exodus from Egypt (extracting supernatural elements) was touted to me as one of the most historical aspects of the Bible and yet it never happened.

Further, how immoral is it for modern Jews to continue this myth at the expense of Egyptian dignity? For thousands of years the Jews have blamed the Egyptians for enslaving their ancestors when that never actually happened. By continuing to celebrate Passover without acknowledging the truth of history only perpetuates the shame.

Growing up, I loved celebrating Passover. I don’t think Jews need to stop celebrating it. However, they need to acknowledge that the celebration is based on a fictional story and that the Jews were never enslaved by the Egyptians.

If you are a Secular Jew in the Philadelphia area who wants to celebrate Passover in a secular fashion, check out Kehillah for Secular Jews in the Delaware Valley.

Please check out the Atheism 101 series for frequently asked topics.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-l-wriht/myths-of-moses_b_2972941.html

Jacob L. Wright Become a fan

Candler School of Theology, Emory University

Myths of Moses

Posted: 03/28/2013 4:59 pm EDT Updated: 05/28/2013 5:12 am EDT

Passover began on Monday, and DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" will air this Sunday, as it does every year on Easter. It's thus an auspicious time to reflect again on the mysterious life of Moses.

From antiquity to modernity, from East to West, this biblical figure has inspired an array of fantastic legends. And he continues to exercise our collective imagination.

Yet, who was Moses and where did he come from? The question is an ancient one, likely as old as Moses himself. The biblical authors couldn't easily evade it. By examining their ingenious responses, we can catch a glimpse of how they often radically reinterpreted earlier traditions.

moses

Moses' birth is portrayed in the first two chapters of Exodus. Chapter one reports that Pharaoh sought the death of all Hebrew male infants -- first by commanding the Hebrew midwives to slay the children at birth, and later by decreeing that the boys be thrown into the Nile. Chapter two depicts Moses' birth. The biblical authors of course want us to understand the second chapter in light of the first. Thus Moses' mother hides him for three months because she feared that he would be killed.

Yet at several points our account resists this sequential reading. We are told that Moses' mother hid him because "she saw that he was a beautiful child." Nothing is said here about Pharaoh's decree to slay all Hebrew male children. The narrator reveals that the infant was easy to identify as a Hebrew, but fails to mention a special dispensation that exempted him from the edict of death. The only thing we are told is that Pharaoh's daughter casually offered to pay Moses' mother to be his nurse.

The second chapter also has its own internal logic, and one need not have read the preceding chapter in order to make sense of it. The story responds to what must have been for many a vexing question: Why does Israel's great leader have an Egyptian name? In response to this question, the authors use narrative to argue that Moses was in fact not an Egyptian, but rather a full-fledged "member of the tribe." Not only that, they affirm that his parents belonged to the venerable Levitical clan. He thus had goodyichus (pedigree) to go along with his zechut (merit).

To explain how Moses bears an Egyptian name and lived at the Egyptian court, the authors spin a clever tale: Moses was born to Israelite parents, yet he was abandoned by his mother and later found by Pharaoh's daughter.

Their story suggests that the relations between his parents were in some way illicit. We're not told the name of his father, as we would expect in biblical birth stories. He also disappears from the narrative as soon as Moses' mother conceives. Later we learn that this woman already has an older daughter. Instead of immediately abandoning the infant, she sees that "he was beautiful" and decides to keep him for as long as she can. (The apologetic intention is obvious here.)

Infant exposure is a recurring motif in the legends of great leaders. In fact, scholars have often suggested that the account of Moses' birth alludes specifically to the legend of Sargon the Great. Drawing on the foundling motif, the biblical authors tell, in fairytale fashion, how Moses' mother held on to the beautiful child for three months before eventually abandoning him, and that the most privileged young woman in the land later discovered him when she went with her maidens to bathe in the Nile. Thanks to the ingenious suggestion of his sister, Moses grows up in the home of his biological mother.

It was only later, this account contends, that Pharaoh's daughter "made him her son." It was also then that she gave him the the name "Moses." The name was a very popular one in ancient Egypt; it means "born of" or "child of," and was always combined with the name of a deity, like Thut-mosis or Ah-mosis. The biblical authors however claim that the name is actually Hebrew ("for I drew him out of the water")!

Implying that the princess discovered Moses when she was still a virgin, the narrator dispels any doubt that she could be his natural mother. And although Moses later went to live at the Egyptian court, he remained a Hebrew and proved his undying solidarity when one day he slew an Egyptian whom he found beating his kinsman.

But who really was Moses? The question is difficult to answer. He may actually have been a Levite, as the authors of this account aver. Or he may have been an Egyptian, as their opponents claimed and as his name suggests. (Sigmund Freud and many others before him embraced this view.) Or he may have been neither. Whatever the case may be, the biblical authors tell this new version of Moses' beginnings to counter and correct what was commonly thought about his origins.

Yet the new myth also raised its own set of troubling issues. Addressing concerns about Moses' identity, the explanatory tale casts an unbecoming light on his origins. The nation's founding father was a foundling? His own mother abandoned him? His father's identity is unknown? These assertions were disconcerting for many.

Once again, a group of authors responded to concerns about Moses' origins by composing a new text that supplements and corrects the earlier story. This time the text is just a brief preface (a portion of chapter one), yet it radically reinterprets the tale that follows. Now the reason why Moses' mother hides him is because she feared Pharaoh's soldiers. Instead of abandoning him at the riverbank, she cleverly subverts the king's order to cast all male children into the Nile. By describing the Hebrew midwives' deceptive maneuvers, the preface encourages the reader to interpret the actions of the other women -- Moses' sister and Pharaoh's daughter -- as deeds of daring defiance. What was once a light and delightful story is now a tale of terror.

The composition of these chapters bears directly on a central debate in current biblical scholarship. Some scholars still attempt to isolate several independent sources, or "documents," that cut across these two chapters of Exodus and the rest of the Pentateuch. Yet in insisting that the authors wrote in isolation from one another, these "documentarians" fail to appreciate the evidence for a vigorous and polemical back-and-forth. A different approach has emerged over the past decades. Its practitioners draw attention to the way the Bible evolved through successive stage of supplementation. Such is precisely what we witness in these two chapters from Exodus.

Yet what's more important than academic debates between documentarians and supplementarians is the way in which central texts in the biblical tradition emerged in the course of a vibrant exchange and evolved over time. In the case of our texts, what drives this evolution is a concern with the identity and origins of the nation's august leader. Yet in contrast to past assaults on the American president's identity, the biblical authors shared a desire to honor the name of one who toiled so hard for the welfare of his people.

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Myth of a Massive Exodus of Hebrews from Egypt and their Overnight Genocidal Conquest

HOLDING TIGHTLY ONTO A BLOODY SWORD
J.P. Holding's Defense of the Bible
Myth of a Massive Exodus of Hebrews from Egypt and their Overnight Genocidal Conquest of a Land Flowing with Blood and Honey
by Edward T. Babinski

At "Theology Web" forums, JP Holding continues to defend ancient tales of Biblical massacres as sociologically and psychologically consistent (or at least not commonly unexpected) for their day. Perhaps he forgets that relying on such an argument only makes the Bible appear as soaked in questions of "situation ethics" as the secular philosophies he rejects. Such a "defense" of the Bible certainly reveals no innate superiority of Biblical ethics if he admits it was common for certain ancient cultures to practice genocide.

In fact, Holding shouldn't stop with justifying genocide as a common practice, since neither does the Bible condemn slavery, polygamy, or concubinage, nor refer to any of them as "sins."

Speaking of the non-sin of godly genocide it's interesting to reflect on the case of Puritan colonists in America who arrived at the Biblical conclusion that God had led them to their new home in America which was to them, typologically speaking, a new land of Canaan, and the native Americans were like the Canaanites of old, worshippers of false gods and hence, if the natives refused to convert they were worthy of extermination. Or consider these further examples of "situation ethics" in the Bible: The same Moses who taught “Do not kill” also commanded the Israelites to “kill every [Midianite] male among the little ones.” (Num. 31:17) Even the littlest male child had to die? Hadn't Moses or Yahweh ever heard of adoption?

The word “Blessed/Happy” is used to describe two very different sentiments in Matthew 5:9 and Psalm 137:9, respectively: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God." Fair enough, but what about this other use of the word, "blessed?" "Blessed will be the one who dashes your little ones against the rock.” Is enjoying revenge and listening to the craniums of babies smash on rocks anywhere near as "blessed" as promoting peace? Let's hope not. Not by a mile.

Other verses likewise depict both man and even God's enjoyment over revenge: “The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance, he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked” (Ps. 58:10) “The Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you” (Deut. 28:63)

What's really weird about such verses is that another verse in the same Bible tells you NOT to "rejoice" when your enemy falls in battle: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles... If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink... He who rejoices at calamity shall not go unpunished.” (Proverbs 17:5; 24:17 & 25:21--Of course the "Proverbs" in the Bible consist of collected wise sayings, many of which might not be original to Israel, since scholars agree that parallels to such wise sayings have been found in collections of wisdom from neighboring cultures in Egypt or Babylonia.)

Or consider Psalm 34:14, “Seek peace, and pursue it,” and add the pro-peace declaration at Jesus's birth, “Peace on earth, good will toward men!" (Luke 2:14), and also add a further peace-promoting saying of Jesus, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God” (Mat. 5:9). And then compare those pro-peace messages with two very different saying of Jesus, “Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I came not to bring peace, but a sword.” (Mat. 10:34) “Do you suppose that I [Jesus] came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division… I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were already kindled.” (Luke 12:49,51) Ouch! Bad hair day, Jesus?

Or consider this from Jesus, “Blessed are the merciful” (Matthew 5:7), and then read the following merciless commands of God: “Leave alive nothing that breathes… show them no mercy.” (Deut. 7:2); “The Lord hardened their hearts... that they might receive no mercy.” (Joshua 11:20); “I [the Lord] will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them… A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord’s work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed.” (Jer. 13:14; 48:10--NIV)

There's even this command of Jesus, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44) that you can compare with “Chase your enemies and they will fall before you by the sword.” (Lev. 26:7) "A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed… You are My war-club... with you I shatter old man and youth… young man and virgin." (Jeremiah 48:10; 51:20,22)

BUT ASIDE FROM HOLDING'S "SOCIOLOGICAL DEFENSE" there is no archeological evidence that a massive army of Hebrew invaders marched from Egypt to take over Cana, exterminating Canaanite city after city. No evidence exists of a massive Hebrew Exodus followed by the violent conquest of a multitude of Canaanite cities. Even those who do not deny an Exodus took place admit that the numbers of the Hebrews who left Egypt could not possibly have been as high as those given in the Bible.

In fact today there are plenty of full-fledged professors of archeology, many of them Jewish, who agree that the Exodus story is way overblown, and that the evidence points in the direction of indigenous people in Canaan taking the place of other indigenous people in a relatively slow fashion. Native people who lived in the hills started moving to the valleys and spreading some new ideas and culture there. The process was relatively less a matter of genocidal conquests one after the other than native and natural assimilation of indigenous cultural changes. In fact the Hebrew language is not filled with Egyptian loan words at all, just as one might expect if their ancestors ALL came over from Egypt after having remained there for four and a half centuries. Instead, the Hebrew language is merely a dialect of the same root language that the Canaanites spoke, Akkadian. (The Catholic Encyclopedia understates the obvious when it admits, "Notwithstanding the long sojourn in Egypt [sic], the number of Egyptian words that have found a place in the Hebrew vocabulary is exceedingly small.")

FOR FURTHER READING
"Archaeology and the Exodus" by Rabbi Ken Spiro

"As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Whilting"
eunacom.net/Rabbis_Bible.htm
See also the book, It Ain't Necessarily So by Matthew Sturgis which is an excellent introduction to the current state of archaeological discovery, focusing on its divergence from traditional biblical interpretation. It is actually helped in some way by being written by a journalist instead of an archaeologist, so that terms are better explained, and disputes better clarified.

Amazon.co.uk Review
It Ain't Necessarily So is a well crafted book which ties in with the ITV series presented by former Beirut hostage John McCarthy. The series and the book recount recent archaeological investigations in the Holy Land and try to show how much or how little the diggers find that match the heroic stories of the Old Testament. The results are not encouraging for Biblical fundamentalists as the author concludes that virtually all of the early stories of the Bible are fabrications. However, not surprisingly, the later one delves into the history of the Holy Land the more the archaeological evidence coincides with the Biblical history.
The author is a professional writer with an interest in historical subjects. He has researched the book professionally and presents the facts with admirable detachment. The problem with the book is that it feels researched by a writer rather than written by an enthusiastic expert. Despite this criticism, it provides a readable and fascinating insight into the historical background of the Bible. If there is a scepticism about the Biblical account there is also a proper scepticism about the conclusions of the rather inexact science of archaeology. As a result we are often left with tantalising questions about Biblical times which will probably never be answered.--Dwight Longenecker

Synopsis
In six 30-minute programmes scheduled for transmission in autumn 2001 John McCarthy travels through the Holy Land to examine the validity or otherwise of stories from the Old Testament. Bringing in history, archaeology and new research, his intriguing journey is the subject of this thought-provoking tie-in which looks at: the truth behind Jericho's 'tumbling' walls; the mystery of the Promised Land; who was Solomon; when did the Jews become monotheists; what was Zion; and when was the text of the Old Testament actually written? The book offers fresh, sometimes unsettling, perspectives on the Bible and its history.
The following are remarks included in the book:
'The expected discoveries of specific biblical artefacts and buildings, were simply not made, and certainly not at the rate that had once been hoped. Discrepancies between the biblical account and the ever-increasing archaeological record became more noticeable and harder to ignore'. (p.28)
'The later of archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon's dates removed the destruction of Jericho from the world of the biblical Joshua by several centuries...For Bill Denver...widely regarded as one of the leading figures in the field, Jericho still makes him shake his head...'I always say to people - 'if you want a miracle, here's your miracle - Joshua
destroyed a city that didn't even exist'.'
The almost total absence of direct archaeological evidence for Joshua's battle is too suggestive to be passed over. And if direct evidence is lacking, so too is indirect corroboration'. (pp.46,47,52)
[Regarding the exodus] 'after gaining control of Sinai from Egypt in the Six Day War of 1967, Israeli archaeologists could barely wait to explore the area. But despite intensive searches, no trace of the Israelites' presence [to which the bible refers] has ever been found'. (p.56). 'The absence of any clear evidence for David's city has called into question the fact of its very existence. The few scattered objects and remains dating from the tenth century which have been recovered from the site appear to suggest, at least to some, that Jerusalem at this time can only have been a minor settlement and not a royal capital'. (p.115).
'Some scholars have focused attention on the fact that the biblical story of Solomon is entirely uncorroborated by sources outside the Bible. He is presented as a king with widespread international contacts and influence. And yet not a single mention of his name occurs in any contemporary Near Eastern text...this silence is at the very least curious.' (p.143) 'If the inscription from Tel Dan accurately reflects events, then the biblical record seems to be a tantalising mixture of historical fact, confused details, and deliberate distortion'. (p.158).

In his introduction to the book It Ain't Necessarily So by Matthew Sturgis, the Beirut hostage John McCarthy who researched a TV series of the same name states that at around 640BC Assyrian power was waning. The new Judaen king, Josiah: saw the opportunity to restore his nation's fortunes and began a period of political and religious reforms. What better, or more likely a time for all the national stories to be brought together and edited into a new, rounded whole? Picking up where Hezekiah (his predecessor) had left off, Josiah banned all foreign cults and had their alters destroyed. As the temple in Jerusalem was restored, an ancient scroll, supposedly Moses' book of Deuteronomy, was discovered which endorsed his reforms. So the Bible began to appear - a distillation of a whole range of folk tales, myths and oral traditions imbued with the social and theological;l beliefs of Josiah and his clique. So, defenses of the ferocious god of the OT which fundamentalist Christians feel obliged to mount are defenses of the social and theological beliefs of Josiah and his clique. No wonder they tie themselves up in knots in their ludicrous attempts to equate this god with the god of love which evolved at around the time of Christ and which his teachings crystallised.
They are trapped in the hopeless task of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable.
So what stops them saying: OK, the god of the OT Jews was just exactly the sort of psychopathic deity youd expect to find being worship by a backwater Bronze Age people?
I think it is because this cruel, vicious, unstable, psychopathic deity is attractive to them, and that being the case, is it surprising that they empathise with those who conducted the iniquities of the Inquisition? To defend them by asserting that we must judge them in the context of a brutal time is to miss the point: The history of Christianity is a history of manners unmodified by the teachings of Christ.
That is what's so shameful.
Christians never hesitate to tell other people how they should behave, but their own behaviour down the centuries provides us with a catalogue of crimes against humanity.

"It Ain't Necessarily So" is not available on DVD yet, but here are in-depth summaries of each of the three episodes (I hope that "in-depth summaries" doesn't sound too oxymoronic).
Ed

Here, here, and here.

It Ain't Necessarily So
Sunday January 19 2003
Summary:
Part one of a 3-part series where British journalist and former Beirut hostage John McGrath looks at the controverisal debates over the archaeology of the early history of Israel and Judah and its challenge to The Bible.
Story:
What did the prophet Jeremiah mean when he denounced the "Torah" - which
we know as the Five Books of Moses - as "lies from the false pen of scribes"?

It was once almost universally accepted that the Old Testament was a truthful account of the past. Now the early part of the story is generally accepted as mythical - despite the best efforts of numerous television programmes to find Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah and the exact location of the Garden of Eden!

But it now appears that almost the whole thing may be a work of fiction. Archaeologists and biblical scholars are now asserting that the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their conquest of the Promised Land of Canaan simply never happened. Some even argue that the Israelites, far from being divinely -inspired radicals who replaced Canaanite idolatry wit the worship of a single God, were simply a group who emerged from the Canaanites who continued the old religion until an astonishingly late date. It is being said that there is no evidence at all to show that David and Solomon rules Israel from Jerusalem - or that their great kingdom even existed! Although there clearly was a smaller kingdom of Israel at a later date, there seems to be decisive evidence that the Israelites worshipped a goddess, a consort of their main deity, right up until their destruction in 722 BC.

John McCarthy spent five years as a hostage of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon. He was given a Bible to read, and saw in the story told there the roots of the political problems that had led to his incarceration. In this startling six-part series, he returns to the Middle East to discover whether there is any truth at all in the Old Testament account of early Israel, or whether, as he puts it, "people have been at war for thousands of years because they believe a fairy-tale".

In the course of the series he visits numerous archaeological sites (and takes part in some of the excavations), meets distinguished scholars who were too frightened to publish their finds or reveal even the existence of their research, and finally reaches a conclusion as to how, when and why the Old Testament history was written.

Programme 1: THE WALLS COME TUMBLIN' DOWN
John McCarthy introduces himself. Having had the Bible as his reading matter while a hostage in Beirut, and seeing the connection between the story told in the Old Testament and his own predicament, he wants to discover if the history there is really true. At the British Museum he is told that there is no evidence for the ancient Israelites, so he goes to find out. Beginning at the Jordan, he goes to Jericho, where "Joshua's Walls" were supposedly found by John Garstang. He is shown around by American archaeologist, Professor William G. Dever. Dever explains that subsequent excavations by Dame Kathleen Kenyon revealed that Garstang had misdated his finds. To learn how finds are dated, John visits the excavation at Tel Rahov, where Professor Amihai Mazar shows him the stratigraphic structure, and he sees how pottery is collected and examined. Back at Jericho, the current excavator, Hamden Taha, says that he can find no trace of any occupation when Joshua supposedly arrived. But the site is controlled by the Palestine National Authority, and they do not discourage pilgrim tourists by revealing that Joshua cannot have really captured Jericho.

Israeli archaeologist Schlomo Bunimovitz explains that different generations of archaeologists have had different agendas: clerics in the 1930's, and ex-military Israelis in the 1950's and 60's, were interested in validating the Old Testament stories. Now archaeologists are producing a new story, and Professor Ze'ev Hertzog explains that it can no longer be accepted that Israelites came from Egypt and conquered Canaan. John points out that Herzog comes from Tel Aviv, a secular city, and contrasts it with the more religious city of Jerusalem. Herzog says that he is trying to empower today's secular Israelis in their political battles with religious groups, but what he says is then denounced by the leader of the Secular Party (Shinui) as providing anti-zionists with ammunition. Professor Amnon Ben-Tor says that it is unfortunate but unavoidable that this kind of archaeological issue is given a political dimension. John finds that the issue is more disturbing to secular Israelis than religious ones; an Orthodox Rabbi simply asserts that the archaeologists have yet to find the proper evidence. John then visits the excavation at Hazor, where Ben-Tor demonstrates evidence of a destructive fire that appears to correspond to the Biblical description of Joshua's conquest, and argues that the Bible story cannot yet be dismissed. But then Professor Israel Finkelstein points out that at the time in question Canaan was an Egyptian province, a fact of which the Biblical authors seem unaware, and takes John to a substantial Egyptian garrison site near Tel Aviv. John's conclusion is that it seems that something is clearly wrong with the Old Testament story. A conclusion which seems to be re-enforced when he says that in the next episode he will be investigating doubts that the Israelites were even monotheists.

The programme begins at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where a near-riot is taking place as male Orthodox Jews try to prevent a group of women from holding a service. One of the women observes that if they had tried to dance and sign like Miriam, they would be in prison. John points out that it seems the Bible has been edited to change our understanding of what women were doing: although Miriam is called a Prophet, none of her prophetic statements are included.

Oddly, it seems that the commonest objects found in Israelite archaeological sites are female figurines - evidently idols. Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Magonet explains that a number of Hebrew words are translated as "God". One such term, the word used in the first sentence of the Book of Genesis, is a plural. Professor William Dever says it is now known that the Israelites worshipped several gods including a goddess, Ashera, and Diana Edelman says that she was a widely worshipped fertility goddess. Dever tells John that when he first discovered an Israelite inscription proving that Ashera was being worshipped he was afraid to publish it, and kept it secret until others found more evidence that the God of the Israelites did have a Goddess as a consort. Visiting the excavation at Tel Rehov, John is shown an Israelite shrine which seems to be a place for worshipping three or four gods and the goddess.

On the track of more evidence of Israelite religion, John is taken by Zvi Lederman to the fortress of Arad, where a full-size Temple has been discovered - the only one ever found from the Kingdom of Judah. Although strikingly devoid of images, it appears to contain evidence of the worship of more than one deity. At the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem he is told that the Bible's description of Solomon's Temple also indicates the presence of idols and "graven images", as used by other religions in the area.

While the Bible does not conceal the idolatrous aspects of Solomon's Temple, it does seem to conceal the worship of the Goddess. Diana Edelmen argues that this has been done by inserting small grammatical changes - which so mystified the translators of the Authorised Version that the Goddess Ashera became a grove of trees when she was put into English. The programme then picks up John again at Arad, where he hears how the Temple there was deliberately closed down and put out of use by King Hezekiah at the end of the 8th century BC, as part of a process of centralising all worship in Jerusalem. This policy was a response to the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, by the Assyrians and the total political isolation of Judah. It was accompanied by a major assault on the worship of Ashera, an assault later resumed with more vigour by King Josiah. The Bible itself documents the resistance of women to what was being done.

It Ain't Necessarily So
Sunday January 26 2003
Summary:
Part two of a 3-part series where British journalist and former Beirut hostage John McGrath looks at the controverisal debates over the archaeology of the early history of Israel and Judah and its challenge to The Bible.

Story:
PROGRAMME 2: THE PROMISED LAND
Archaeologists now say that the Israelites did not come to Canaan as slaves from Egypt. Where did they come from? In the third part of this startling series John McCarthy looks at the new evidence of Israelite settlement, and the real reason why there are said to be "no human remains".

According to the Bible 12 cities were destroyed by Joshua, yet there is only archaeological records confirming the destruction of 1 city, Huzor. But the Egyptian records say that Pharaoh Seti destroyed the city. Although the book of Joshua describes the conquest of Canaan, another book of the Bible, the book of Judges, says something different. Joshua attacks and conquers, in Judges they are up in the hill country and can’t get down to the planes because there are too many military obstacles in the way. Israeli Archaeologists made startling discoveries in the hill country. They evidence they’ve found of more than 200 sites, is that the area was empty in the late Canaanite period, and it has been filled up with new sites. Movement can be traced from East to West, exactly how the Bible explains the entrance through the Jordan into the Hill country of Canaan. John is taken to the site of one excavated village, from the time of the rise of Israel, where there are the remains of a building considered a new kind of house, the design of which was unknown in the country before these settlements began. Are these the first homes of the Israelites? The other surprise is that pig bones disappear from the archaeological records at this time. At the same time in the lowlands there are a lot of pig bones. It is surprising to see echoes of a Kosher diet in these settlements, which appear when the Bible says the Israelites arrived from Egypt. But people in these settlements came not as slaves from Egypt, but had moved here from other places in Canaan.

There is a contemporary record of a military force entering Canaan from Egypt. But it’s not a force of Israelites led by Moses and Joshua, it’s a force of Egyptians led by Pharaoh. Egypt ruled Canaan and Merenptah crushed disobedience in Canaan around 1207BC. The only surviving picture that exists on ancient Israelites shows them being crushed beneath the hooves of Egyptians horses. So there were Israelites, but we know nothing about them. According to an Egyptian Pharaoh in about 1200BCE, there were people living in the hills called Israelites. It was the first time they’d been mentioned, and he said he wiped them out. Apart from what is written in the Bible, they are not mentioned again by anyone for the next 350 years.

According to archaeologists there are no human remains. Although unofficially there are many remains, but due to religious fanaticism and threats to their life, no research has been done on these remains. But tests have been done on the Arab and Jewish people of the middle east, and found that they have deep ancestral links and that their genetic affinity is very close. Palestinian Arabs see themselves as being directly descended from Biblical Canaanites. This discovery that they share a genetic heritage with modern Jews, seems to connect with the idea that Israelites and Canaanites were the same people. Some Palestinians say that that makes them the true inheritors of any Israelite claim to the land.
John visits a strange site, with a complicated structure of large un-hewn stones, with an installation full of ashes with bones. When tested all the bones belonged to Kosher animals, which were permitted for sacrifice. In the book of Joshua there is a detailed description of a great ceremony, which the site would seem to confirm. Other scholars are uncomfortable with the identification of Joshua’s alter. Not the site, but the story. In 620BC the King wanted to reform worship in Jerusalem, and it looks as though the book of Joshua was produced at this time. The scribes who supported the King and his reform, also said they had found a scroll of God’s teaching, which was evidently unknown until they produced it. According to the prophet Jeremiah they were faking history. Moses instructions to build the altar and what to do there, are in this book, which scholars don’t think was written until 600 years after Joshua’s day. But does that mean it never happened?

Amnon Ben-Tor, excavating at Hazor, is convinced that the authors of the Bible used historical records. Thousands of ancient letters and financial records have been found in the near East, and some of them mention a Ruler of Hazor called JAVEEN? The name of the King of Hazor in the book of Joshua. But he cannot have been Joshua’s enemy, as he died 500 years earlier. There is also the story of Jerusalem becoming the capital city of David around 1000BC, but archaeologists say there is no trace of that city? Some scholars say that Solomon never existed, that Jerusalem was never the capital of David, and that there is no evidence of a united monarchy under David and Solomon as depicted in the Bible. And there is no reference to David’s Jerusalem anywhere outside of the Bible. And the only reference to the Israelites known in Egypt. It is a record of how the Pharaoh Merenptah crushed all opposition in other lands, and it is generally dated around 1200BC, around the time when the Israelites should have been conquering Canaan. But in the Bible the Israelites were not destroyed by Pharaoh, but took over the land and created a great Kingdom ruled by King David of Jerusalem.

But archaeologist have yet to find positive evidence of Israelites in Jerusalem in the 10th Century, or indeed evidence of inhabitants in the City of David during this time.

But does a lack of evidence mean that they did not exist? John goes in search of Goliath’s people. A few years after Merenptah said he had wiped out the Israelites, his successor, Ramses III, had to deal with a massive invasion of people from the sea. Among them were the Philistines. They ended up settling on the Canaanite coast. An excavation of Ashkelon shows the remains of the Philistines. According to the remains Ashkelon was a thriving city. They also show that the Philistines come out of the world of the Ancient Greeks, which makes sense of some things in the Bible which has seemed baffling. In the story of David and Goliath, David is not wearing armour or a helmet, but Goliath is. The Canaanites and the Israelites did not have helmets, but the Greeks did.

There is much evidence of the Philistine culture, along with bath tubs and cooking utensils, which contrasts with the lack of evidence of a population at Jerusalem. The more detail discovered about the Philistines, the more accurate the old testament seems about them, but the Bible describes the Philistines as always being in the region, when in fact they were new invaders. With these invasions many scholars have suggested that the Israelites were Canaanite refugees farming in the hills because of the upheaval on the coastal planes.

Was the existence of King David mythical? Many scholars thought so, but in 1993 veteran Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran was excavating Tel-Dan, the old city of Dan in the far north of Israel. Here he found a basalt stone with an inscription referring to King David, written about 100 years after David’s time. But with the lack of any other references to him, the question of what kind of King he was remained.
John McCarthy then goes in search of Solomon.

It Ain't Necessarily So
Sunday February 2 2003
Summary:
Part three of a 3-part series where British journalist and former Beirut hostage John McGrath looks at the controverisal debates over the archaeology of the early history of Israel and Judah and its challenge to The Bible.

Story:
PROGRAMME 3: SOLOMON
Solomon built the Temple - but did he exist at all? In the third part of this startling series, John visits sites that were supposedly built by Solomon, but which some archaeologists say were built by quite different rulers. Perhaps the tiny community of Samaritans have a more accurate history.

After being unable to find evidence of life in the City of David during King David’s reign, John McCarthy visits King Solomon’s mines in search of signs of Solomon. Once he arrives though, he is told that they were not in fact, Solomon’s mines. The age of King Solomon is recorded in the Bible as the one time when an Israelite King ruled the whole land and it was at peace. The mines were supposed to have given King Solomon his fabulous wealth. But there is no evidence of King Solomon in the area, instead there is evidence of Egyptian use during the 12th Century. But in fact the mines do not even appear in the Bible, they are just a 19th Century story. Jonathan Tubb of the British Museum states there is no evidence for King Solomon and his kingdom.

Magido is a city said in the Bible to have been re-built by Solomon. McCarthy visits the site, where structures excavated in the 30’s were identified as King Solomon’s stables. Baruch Halpern informs John that the ruins probably weren’t Solomon’s, and that they probably weren’t stables. One theory is that in fact the site produced opium, and there is evidence of the export of drugs from the area in that time. And the site is dated as 9th Century, around the time of Ahab. Then at Hazor they discover what appears to be a pipe.

According to the Bible King Solomon rebuilt three cities including Hazor and Magido. In the 1950’s an Israeli archaeologist found complex gate house in all three, and declared them King Solomon’s gates. But the gates were built at the time of Ahab, later than Solomon. Archaeologists have yet to find evidence of Solomon’s temple. Though the site does confirm some of the stories in the Bible relating to Ahab and Jezebel.

Amihai Mazar is searching a few miles from Magido at Tel-Rehov in attempt to find evidence of Israelites living in this area during the 10th Century. Mazar believes that pottery found at this site can be associated with the time of Solomon. But Mazar also believes that Solomon was not as great as the Bible painted him.

There is another theory proposed by the Samaritans, people who claim to be descended from the original inhabitants of Ahab’s kingdom. The Samaritans believe that Jerusalem was not that important until after the time of Solomon, with this theory gaining academic support.

Until the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, the earliest version of the testament was a 1000 years old, but these are a thousand years older than that. Yet stories of Solomon and his temple are much earlier.

The Old Testament description of the ancient Israelites is quite different from the story now being revealed. John McCarthy concludes this series by investigating when and why the Old Testament was written. Was it connected with events that led to the destruction of Jerusalem?'

In 722 BC the forces of Assyria moved south and simply removed Israel from the map. They made a note that they deported 27,290 inhabitants. The history of Israel was over. This also meant that for the first time in ancient near eastern history, the whole region is under one political control with a blending of peoples. But the kingdom of Judah did not submit, and Jerusalem was swelling with many refugees arriving. By the end of the 8th Century BC all the nations surrounding Judah vanished, with all their respective gods being cast down while the Assyrians imposed their own. After battles with Judah, all that remained was Jerusalem and their own god.

A bit more on the above book

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, there's the life and work of the Ancient Near Eastern archeologist, William G. Dever, son of a fundamentalist preacher. After starting his education at a small Christian liberal arts college in Tennessee he went to a Protestant theological seminary that exposed him to critical study of the Bible, a study that at first he resisted. In 1960 it was on to Harvard and a doctorate in Biblical theology. For thirty-five years he worked as an archaeologist, excavating in the Near East, and he is now professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona. In his book, What Did the Bible Writers Know and When Did They Know It?, he writes, "While the Hebrew Bible in its present, heavily edited form cannot be taken at face value as history in the modern sense, it nevertheless contains much history." He adds: "After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible 'historical figures.'" He writes of archaeological investigations of Moses and the Exodus as having been "discarded as a fruitless pursuit." He is not saying that the Biblical Moses was entirely mythical, though he does admit that "…the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. A Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in southern Transjordan in the mid-late13th century B.C., where many scholars think the Biblical traditions concerning the god Yahweh arose. But archaeology can do nothing to confirm such a figure as a historical personage, much less prove that he was the founder of later Israelite region." About Leviticus and Numbers he writes that these are "clearly additions to the 'pre-history' by very late Priestly editorial hands, preoccupied with notions of ritual purity, themes of the 'promised land,' and other literary motifs that most modern readers will scarcely find edifying much less historical." Dever writes that "the whole 'Exodus-Conquest' cycle of stories must now be set aside as largely mythical, but in the proper sense of the term 'myth': perhaps 'historical fiction,' but tales told primarily to validate religious beliefs."

Dever's conclusions about what archaeology tells us about the Bible are not very pleasing to fundamentalists or conservative Evangelicals, and I gather that Dever and his colleagues of high standing likewise dismiss fundamentalists and hard-core conservative Evangelicals who want to consider themselves scholars without accepting that which good scholars must do: engage in extensive critical analysis. Those testifying for Dever's book (on the back cover) are: Paul D. Hanson, Professor of Divinity and Old Testament at Harvard University; David Noel Freedman, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Michigan; Philip M. King, Professor at Boston College and author of Jeremiah; William W. Hallo, Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University; and Bernhard W. Anderson, Professor of Old Testament, Boston University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. Like Dever, these are not a bunch of radical revisionists, but moderates in the field of Christian archeology. Dever's latest book is, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?

Biblical interpreters like Holding will gain no encouragement after reading it, nor after reading Dever's latest work, Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel.

http://etb-biblical-errancy.blogspot.in/2012/04/myth-of-massive-exodus-of-hebrews-from.html

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The first Exodus (i.e. Moses opening the gates of Palestine to 600,000 Jews by parting the Red Sea) was a hoax. The Second Exodus (i.e. Zionists opening the gates of Palestine by inventing a fake nazi genocide of 6,000,000 Jews) was a hoax too. Creating Exodus myths is just a jewish tradition...

Exodus1 hoax

Exodus2 hoax

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The Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt – Jewish Slave Myth Examined

The myth of Jewish slaves being forced to build the pyramids of ancient Egypt has recently been challenged by new evidence that paid workersbuilt the tombs.

The innovative pyramids of ancient Egypt have stood the test of time, as their architects intended, to help usher dead pharaohs into the afterlife, along with their possessions. Over 4,000 years later, the elaborate tombs still stand – although plundered by pyramid robbers – and the people responsible for their construction are still a matter of controversy.

Jews, Ancient Egypt and Mass Exodus

“The stories we hear in Sunday school seem to form the basis for the popular belief that Jewish slaves were forced to build the pyramids in Egypt, but they were saved when they left Egypt in a mass Exodus,” said Brian Dunning. But, according to findings, “no Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus; and by the time there were enough Jews living in Egypt to constitute an Exodus, the time of the pyramids was long over.”

Furthermore, says Amihai Mazar, professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built.” It wasn’t until over 600 years after the last of the large pyramids had been built that Israel came into existence, and over 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid had been completed that Jews are evidenced to have been in Egypt.

The Myth of the Jewish Slave

So where did the myth of the pyramid-building Jewish slaves come from? Herodotus of Greece – “The Father of History” or “The Father of Lies” – inadvertently facilitated the myth in 450 BCE. During his time, creating a good story was more important than adhering to the facts. But the historian took his responsibility seriously, being one of the first to meticulously document his work. He believed that about “100,000 workers” constructed a single pyramid in 30 years – nowhere did he specify Jews or slaves. “And the origin of the idea of Jews building the pyramids remains a mystery.”

Egyptian Paid Laborers Built Elaborate Pyramids

It is now estimated that about 10,000 – 30,000, rather than 100,000, paid workers were responsible for building a single pyramid in ancient Egypt. Local Egyptians from poor families worked on the tombs “out of loyalty to the pharaohs,” said Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum. They were respected and earned the right to be buried near their pharaohs.

In the 1990s graves of the laborers were found by a tourist, who came across what appeared to be a wall but was actually a tomb. Egypt’s archaeology chief Zahi Hawass concluded, “No way would they have been buried so honorably if they were slaves.” Workers built their own tombs with leftover supplies. Hieroglyphics on the inside walls of the tomb indicated that there were bread makers and beer makers among the pyramid laborers, and their bodies were perfectly preserved by dry sand.

The Treatment of Pyramid Workers

The workers were well fed: “laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms.” They also worked in 3-month shifts. There is evidence that brain surgery had been done on a worker, who went on to live at least two more years. And some lived to old age. Nevertheless, “their skeletons have signs of arthritis, and their lower vertebrae point to a life passed in difficulty.”

But the most undeniable evidence that Egypt’s pyramids were built by paid workers and not slaves is the pyramids themselves: due to a shrinking budget, pyramids gradually got smaller over time. In other words, money paid to pyramid laborers to construct elaborate tombs helped destroy ancient Egypt’s economy.

Today the world recognizes the novelty and intricacy of Egypt’s pyramids: The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the United States one-dollar bill includes an Egypt-inspired pyramid. It is only fitting that those who built such masterpieces be given credit after so many centuries of obscurity.

Sources:
National Geographic Documentary: Egypt Unwrapped, Pyramid Codes
Pyramid Legends
Great Pyramid Tombs Unearth Proof Workers Were Not Slaves
Egypt Says Jewish Slaves Didn't Build Pyramids
Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?
Ancient Egypt by Professor Derek K. Hitchins

The Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt

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Tomb discovery helps solve ancient slavery riddle of the pyramids

By Neil Millard

UPDATED: 12:01 GMT, 11 January 2010

The location of tombs discovered in Egypt helps prove the men who built the great pyramids were not slaves after all, say archeologists.

A set of tombs belonging to the workers who built them has been discovered which sheds light on how they lived and ate more than 4,000 years ago.

The thousands of men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world regularly ate meat and worked three-month rotating shifts.

They were so well regarded they were also given the honour of being buried in mud brick tombs within the shadow of the sacred pyramids they worked on if they died during construction.

Burial: Dr Zahi Hawass in the tomb of the workers who built Khufuís's pyramid

The tombs, revealed today by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, date back to the country's fourth dynasty between 2575 BC and 2467 BC.

It was during this time that the great pyramids were built, according to the head of the Council, Zahi Hawass.

Graves belonging to workers who helped build the pyramids were first discovered in the area in 1990 but further discoveries such as this show the workers were paid labourers rather than slaves.

Bones belonging to a worker who built Khufuís's pyramid discovered in a tomb

Mr Hawass said: 'These tombs were built beside the King's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves.

'If they were slaves they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's.'

He added that archeological evidence at the site indicated that the 10,000-strong army of workers ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep a day, sent to them from farms in northern and southern Egypt. The workers were rotated every three months.

Enlarge

Pottery was discovered in this tomb where Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed ancient artefacts

Privileged: The tombs were discovered on a hillside overlooking an Egyptian town

The discovery also helps experts study the social classes that made up Egyptian society.

Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, said: 'It is important to find tombs that belong to lower class people that are not made out of stone and tell you the social origin and wealth of a range of people.'

Workers' tombs of this era were usually conical in shape and made from mud brick. They would then be covered in white plaster, probably echoing the nearby limestone-clad pyramids of the kings.

The most important of the new discoveries was a tomb belonging to a man named Idu.

It was a regular structure with a plaster-covered mud brick casing. The tomb containing skeletal remains and featured burial shafts encased in white limestone and clay pots.

Tomb discovery helps solve ancient slavery riddle of the pyramids | Mail Online

__________________

« Meanwhile, the war against the Soviet Union has allowed us to dispose of new territories for the final solution. Consequently, the Führer has decided to displace the Jews not towards Madagascar but towards the East. Thus, there is no longer any need to consider Madagascar for the final solution. »

- Franz Rademacher, Feb. 10th 1942, Nuremberg Doc. NG-3933

« Revisionists are just the messengers, the stupid impossibility of the 'Holocaust' story line is the message. »

- Hannover (CODOH)

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https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t893728/

The Exodus and The Holocaust – Jewish Myths

It’s not surprising that Steven Spielberg is going to direct a Moses movie titled Gods and Kings.

The first tagline underneath the header of my Holocaust Denying website used to be “I deny the Exodus too.”

But really, “The Holocaust” is more like “Exodus II”.

Both are insane, scientifically impossible Jewish myths, somehow related to a poor, persecuted Jewish minority being imprisoned by horrible oppressive Gentiles and miraculously escaping.

What is the true story of the Exodus? Why are Jews always persecuted? Is it because they are such nice people? “God’s Chosen?” Or maybe they are the persecutors, and their being expelled from every country they’ve ever settled in is a reaction of the host population against their parasitic Semitic supremacism (Semitism).

“The Holocaust” and “The Exodus” are myths forced upon most American children at an early age. These children rarely question the reality of these events when they become adults.

Spielberg’s films such as Schindler’s List and his upcoming Jewish supremacist Moses film help brainwash Americans into supporting Zionism and its disastrous wars in the Middle East.

Six Million Jews weren’t gassed, and Moses didn’t part the Red Sea.

Never Happened

Spielberg's Implied Auschwitz Gassing in Schindler's List

Steven Spielberg (S.S.) implies that these Jews were killed and turned into smoke in the chimney the camera pans up to.

In reality, the morgue of this crematorium basement doubled as a bomb / gas decontamination facility and shelter.

Air raid shelter entrance

Additional reading:

“The Holocaust” and “The Exodus” – Similar Jewish myths.

The Exodus and The Holocaust – Jewish Myths |

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Doubting the Story of Exodus

Many scholars have quietly concluded that the epic of Moses never happened, and even Jewish clerics are raising questions. Others think it combines myth, cultural memories and kernels of truth.

By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times April 13, 2001

It's one of the greatest stories ever told: A baby is found in a basket adrift in the Egyptian Nile and is adopted into the pharaoh's household. He grows up as Moses, rediscovers his roots and leads his enslaved Israelite brethren to freedom after God sends down 10 plagues against Egypt and parts the Red Sea to allow them to escape. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and, under the leadership of Joshua, conquer the land of Canaan to enter their promised land.

For centuries, the biblical account of the Exodus has been revered as the founding story of the Jewish people, sacred scripture for three world religions and a universal symbol of freedom that has inspired liberation movements around the globe. But did the Exodus ever actually occur?

On Passover last Sunday, Rabbi David Wolpe raised that provocative question before 2,200 faithful at Sinai Temple in Westwood. He minced no words. "The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all," Wolpe told his congregants.

Wolpe's startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua's leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua's fabled military campaigns never occurred--archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.

Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan--modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel--whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt--explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges.

"Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we've broken the news very gently," said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America's preeminent archeologists. Dever's view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but "no one would do that today," he says.

The old emphasis on trying to prove the Bible--often in excavations by amateur archeologists funded by religious groups--has given way to more objective professionals aiming to piece together the reality of ancient lifestyles. But the modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze'ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua's conquests ever occurred. In the hottest controversy today, Herzog also argued that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described as grand and glorious in the Bible, was at best a small tribal kingdom.

In a new book this year, "The Bible Unearthed," Israeli archeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University and archeological journalist Neil Asher Silberman raised similar doubts and offered a new theory about the roots of the Exodus story. The authors argue that the story was written during the time of King Josia of Judah in the 7th century BC--600 years after the Exodus supposedly occurred in 1250 BC--as a political manifesto to unite Israelites against the rival Egyptian empire as both states sought to expand their territory. Dever argued that the Exodus story was produced for theological reasons: to give an origin and history to a people and distinguish them from others by claiming a divine destiny.

Some scholars, of course, still maintain that the Exodus story is basically factual. Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research in Maryland, argued that the evidence falls into place if the story is dated back to 1450 BC. He said that indications of destruction around that time at Hazor, Jericho and a site he is excavating that he believes is the biblical city of Ai support accounts of Joshua's conquests. He also cited the documented presence of "Asiatic" slaves in Egypt who could have been Israelites, and said they would not have left evidence of their wanderings because they were nomads with no material culture. But Wood said he can't get his research published in serious archeological journals.

"There's a definite anti-Bible bias," Wood said. The revisionist view, however, is not necessarily publicly popular. Herzog, Finklestein and others have been attacked for everything from faulty logic to pro-Palestinian political agendas that undermine Israel's land claims. Dever, a former Protestant minister who converted to Judaism 12 years ago, says he gets "hissed and booed" when he speaks about the lack of evidence for the Exodus, and regularly receives letters and calls offering prayers or telling him he's headed for hell.

At Sinai Temple, Sunday's sermon--and a follow-up discussion at Monday's service--provoked tremendous, and varied, response. Many praised Wolpe for his courage and vision. "It was the best sermon possible, because it is preparing the young generation to understand all the truth about religion," said Eddia Mirharooni, a Beverly Hills fashion designer.

A few said they were hurt--"I didn't want to hear this," one woman said--or even a bit angry. Others said the sermon did nothing to shake their faith that the Exodus story is true.

"Science can always be proven wrong," said Kalanit Benji, a UCLA undergraduate in psychobiology. Added Aman Massi, a 60-year-old Los Angeles businessman: "For sure it was true, 100%. If it were not true, how could we follow it for 3,300 years?" But most congregants, along with secular Jews and several rabbis interviewed, said that whether the Exodus is historically true or not is almost beside the point. The power of the sweeping epic lies in its profound and timeless message about freedom, they say.

The story of liberation from bondage into a promised land has inspired the haunting spirituals of African American slaves, the emancipation and civil rights movements, Latin America's liberation theology, peasant revolts in Germany, nationalist struggles in South Africa, the American Revolution, even Leninist politics, according to Michael Walzer in the book "Exodus and Revolution." Many of Wolpe's congregants said the story of the Exodus has been personally true for them even if the details are not factual: when they fled the Nazis during World War II, for instance, or, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Daniel Navid Rastein, an Encino medical professional, said he has always regarded the story as a metaphor for a greater truth: "We all have our own Egypts--we are prisoners of something, either alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, overeating. We have to use [the story] as a way to free ourselves from difficulty and make ourselves a better person."

Wolpe, Sinai Temple's senior rabbi, said he decided to deliver the sermon to lead his congregation into a deeper understanding of their faith. On Sunday, he told his flock that questioning the Jewish people's founding story could be justified for one reason alone: to honor the ancient rabbinical declaration that "You do not serve God if you do not seek truth."

"I think faith ought not rest on splitting seas," Wolpe said in an interview. "For a Jew, it should rest on the wonder of God's world, the marvel of the human soul and the miracle of this small people's survival through the millennia."

Next year, the rabbi plans to teach a course on the Bible that he says will "pull no punches" in presenting the latest scholarship questioning the text's historical basis. But he and others say that Judaism has also traditionally been more open to non-literal interpretations of the text than, say, some conservative Christian traditions.

"Among Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, there is a much greater willingness to see the Torah as an extended metaphor in which truth comes through story and law," said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That's when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University's archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank. The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua's conquests in the 13th century BC and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers. If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys' final results were published three years ago.

The settlement research marked the turning point in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed that Egypt's voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 BC inscription did mention them in Canaan. Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries BC.

Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of the pharaoh's charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea.

And some of the story's features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at UC Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a "formulaic genre of catastrophe" found in other Near Eastern texts.

Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. "People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections," she said. "That wasn't considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across."

Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would have meant there were a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, guarded by fortresses along the way.

Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said "you'd have to be a bit crazy" to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a swift military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan. But Schiffman, chairman of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, still maintains that a significant number of Israelite slaves fled Egypt for Canaan. "I'm not arguing that archeology proves the Exodus," he said. "I'm arguing that archeology allows you, in ambiguity, to reach whatever conclusion you want to."

Wood argued that the 600,000 figure was mistranslated and the real number amounted to a more plausible 20,000. He also said the early Israelite settlements and their similarity to Canaanite culture could be explained as the result of pastoralists with no material culture moving into a settled farming life and absorbing their neighbors' pottery styles and other cultural forms.

The scholarly consensus seems to be that the story is a brilliant mix of myth, cultural memories and kernels of historical truth. Perhaps, muses Hendel, a small group of Semites who escaped from Egypt became the "intellectual vanguard of a new nation that called itself Israel," stressing social justice and freedom.

Whatever the facts of the story, those core values have endured and inspired the world for more than three millenniums--and that, many say, is the point.

"What are the Egypts I need to free myself from? How does the story inspire me in some way to work for the freedom of all?" asked Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades. "These are the things that matter--not whether we built the pyramids."

RaceandHistory.com - Doubting the Story of Exodus

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<nyt_kicker>NORTH SINAI JOURNAL

<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

A worker removed sand from the remains of a military fort. The ruins roughly coincide with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt.

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By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: April 3, 2007

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" " style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">

<nyt_text>

NORTH SINAI, Egypt, April 2 — On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt’s chief archaeologisttook a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency’s latest discovery.

Enlarge This Image

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

A grave containing a female skeleton near the military fort. Egyptian archaeologists say no evidence has surfaced to confirm the Exodus story.

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

Egypt is one of the world’s primary warehouses of ancient history. People here joke that wherever you stick a shovel in the ground you find antiquities. When workers built a sewage system in the downtown Cairo neighborhood of Dokki, they accidentally scattered shards of Roman pottery. In the middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, tombs have been discovered beneath homes.

But Egypt is also a spiritual center, where for centuries men have searched for the meaning of life. Sometimes the two converge, and sometimes the archaeological record confirms the history of the faithful. Often it does not, however, as Dr. Hawass said with detached certainty.

“If they get upset, I don’t care,” Dr. Hawass said. “This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”

The story of the Exodus is celebrated as the pivotal moment in the creation of the Jewish people. As the Bible tells it, Moses was born the son of a Jewish slave, who cast him into the Nile in a basket so the baby could escape being killed by the pharaoh. He was saved by the pharaoh’s daughter, raised in the royal court, discovered his Jewish roots and, with divine help, led the Jewish people to freedom. Moses is said to have ascended Mt. Sinai, where God appeared in a burning bush and Moses received the Ten Commandments.

In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.

But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded.

“Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,” Dr. Hawass said, as he led the journalists across a rutted field of stiff and rocky sand.

The site was a two-hour drive from Cairo, over the Mubarak Peace Bridge into the Northern Sinai area called Qantara East. For nearly 10 years, Egyptian archaeologists have scratched away at the soil here, using day laborers from nearby towns to help unearth bits of history. It is a vast expanse of nothingness, a flat desert moonscape. Two human skeletons were recently uncovered, their bones positioned besides pottery and Egyptian scarabs.

As archaeological sites go, it is clearly a stepchild to the more sought-after digs in other parts of the country that have revealed treasures of pharaonic times. A barefoot worker in a track suit tried to press through the crowd to get the officials leading the tour to give him his pay, and tramped off angrily when he was rebuffed.

Recently, diggers found evidence of lava from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 B.C. and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula, officials here said. The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road.

But nothing was showing up that might help prove the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or wandering in the desert. Dr. Hawass said he was not surprised, given the lack of archaeological evidence to date. But even scientists can find room to hold on to beliefs.

Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, the head of the excavation, seemed to sense that such a conclusion might disappoint some. People always have doubts until something is discovered to confirm it, he noted.

Then he offered another theory, one that he said he drew from modern Egypt.

“A pharaoh drowned and a whole army was killed,” he said recounting the portion of the story that holds that God parted the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape, then closed the waters on the pursuing army.

“This is a crisis for Egypt, and Egyptians do not document their crises.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/world/africa/03exodus.html?_r=0

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ANCIENT EGYPT KNEW NO PHARAOHS NOR ANY ISRAELITES

IF YOU THINK THAT HISTORY IS ALL ABOUT THE PAST … YOU’D BETTER THINK AGAIN.

IF YOU THINK THE STORIES THE HEBREW BIBLE HAD TOLD ABOUT ANCIENT EGYPT WAS THE WHOLE TRUTH … YOU’D BETTER THINK ONCE AGAIN.

AND IF YOU BELIEVE THAT ANCIENT EGYPT WAS RULED BY PHARAOHS … THEN YOU’D BETTER READ THE NEXT LINES

DR. ASHRAF EZZAT

ANCIENT EGYPT KNEW NO PHARAOHS

PROLOGUE

ANCIENT EGYPT, THE RISE AND DEMISE

THE STORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT, THE ISRAELITE VERSION

ANCIENT EGYPT RESURRECTED

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ROYAL TITULARY

THE GREAT HOUSE VS. THE WHITE HOUSE

READ “ANCIENT EGYPT KNEW NO PHARAOHS NOR ANY ISRAELITES – PART TWO”