booboo91 said:

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Evidence for Exodus:

1) "Overall" the Hebrew/ Jews get their history correct in the Old Testament/ New Testament (written by Christians- former Jews). They took it seriously. Working from more recent date to back in time. They were correct about their dealings and history with the Romans (50-90AD) Greeks (200/300s BC), Persians/Babylonians (400/500 BC), Assyrians (700s), King Solomon and King David and Temple really existed (900/1000 BC), Hebrews in Canaan in (1200s) right where the bible says they should be! (Egyptian Merneptah Stele). If the Hebrews get everything else right, why are they wrong here with Exodus?




2) We know Egypt was the dominant regional power, we know they had slaves, we know the Hebrews were in the area. We know many of the tribe names the Hebrews battled in the area are accurate.

3) We know Aaron and Moses are Egyptian Names

4) We know the ballpark timeline when the book of Exodus was written down and when the events happened, were not that far apart. 200-300 years. See good article from Jimmy Akin Jimmy Akin - Did the Exodus Happen

5) Finally, why would the Hebrews make a story that they were slaves if it were not true? This is huge! No one else does this.

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Great work!

JJMt said:

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Good point. There are also lots of scholarly articles rebutting that argument, as I'm sure you've figured. The low numbers also lead to nonsensical results in other Biblical passages - I'll try to find and post them if I can and if I remember.

It seems unlikely that a group that small would have been able to defeat cities as big as Jericho or especially Hazor, which was gigantic and extraordinarily powerful at that time.

In addition, the low estimate is hard to reconcile with the explosion of settlements in the Hill Country shortly after, or the reference to "Israel" in the Merneptah Stele in Egypt. If only 25,000 or so Israelites came in the Exodus, then who populated all those hundreds and thousands of settlements in the Hill Country? How did Israel become prominent enough for the Egyptians to mention it in the Merneptah Stele only 200 years later?

It also seems that the Israelites were most likely the Apiru or Habiru that the Canaanite city kings and princes were complaining about to Pharaoh in the Amarna letters. It wouldn't seem that a mere 25,000 people, or even warriors, would have been able to create that big a ruckus.

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W.F. Albright advocated that there were pre-Exodus inhabitants of Jews from various tribes in the land of Canaan, with whom a confederation was formed under Joshua.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/484507?journalCode=jr

Forgive the secondary source. But it is the University of Chicago years ago.

And I could see a situation where rival tribes of Jericho, for instance, who may have not been decedents of Abraham, joined the rebelling invaders.
We saw this in Mexico when rival tribes joined with the Spanish and Cortez. Cortez had a small amount of men to take on the Aztecs. Who knows how much disease aided the Spanish efforts? I doubt much at the start. But the Spanish still had other rival oppressed tribes backing them. The rival tribes backing them would have been wiped out, too, by disease if it was a true factor early on.

Perhaps other slaves joining the movement of other former slaves against the oppressor?

We know places like Jericho had prostitutes. I'm fairly certain that they also had slaves, per the history of the world.

Well yes and well no. Best I can tell from historical estimates, there were about 30 million people in the entire world around 1500 BC. The idea that 2 million of them were Jews leaving Egypt in a single group seems a huge stretch. So if it can be reconciled and still be consistent with the text, then I'm all for it.

Also, our modern population and military numbers can skew our perspective a bit. Ancient populations and militaries were much smaller. The median number for the entirety of Sparta's military was 3500 men. Roman lesions were about 5000 men and were virtually unbeatable. Later Byzantine armies were enormous if they cleared 10,000 men. It really isn't until the French revolution and Napoleon that you start seeing tens and hundreds of thousands of men being deployed routinely, at least outside of East Asia. Even then, the Mongolian army that conquered all of Asia and the Middle East only had 40,000 full time soldiers. So a fighting force in the far ancient Middle East with 5500 warriors is about as formidable as anything you'd see back then.

Very good point. ^

JJMt said:

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But Persia's army at Thermopylae was 100,000-150,000 men. Also, an article just popped up on my feed yesterday about a Persian army of 50,000 men that was completely lost in Egypt. So at least some of the ancient armies were gigantic.

What's the basis for the world population estimate you cited? I'm extremely skeptical of lots of estimates about ancient times. The estimates are based on limited data, limited perspectives, and a bias that things back when had to have been dramatically smaller and people dumber, which was not necessarily the case at all.

As an example, although not directly relevant to this discussion, a scholar made an estimate of literacy in the Mediterranean area (I think her study was around the time of Christ, but am not sure of that). Unsurprisingly, she concluded that the area generally had a very low literacy rate. From that, skeptics have concluded that the Jews were also largely illiterate. However, that conclusion never seemed sound to me and has also been contradicted by lots of evidence. It didn't seem sound initially because the Jews, by definition, were not like everyone else in the Mediterranean basin. They held themselves out as a people different, and were "people of the Book". Literacy has been a central part of Jewish culture as far back as we can determine. Now, archaeological evidence is being found that supports widespread Jewish literacy, such as ostracons from the time of King David written by multiple different low level military officers regarding logistics and supplies.

Getting back to the point of the number of people in the Exodus, given the size of Avaris, given that it was primarily Semitics, given the number of Semitic slaves all over Egypt, given the number of Semitic slaves captured in just one Egyptian military campaign (>100,000), and given the fact that the Hebrews intermarried with non-Hebrews and that the Bible states that non-Hebrews joined in the Exodus, the 2,000,000 number mentioned in the Bible does not seem prima facie unreasonable.

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Yeah...but not that much literacy, historically speaking, when under slavery.

I'm certain Moses was raised in the royal household.
That's what the text says.

Like I said, I don't have strong opinions on the matter, but the 2 million number is problematic even from the Biblical text. For instance, why would a 2 million strong crowd with 600,000 fighting men be fleeing from Pharoah's army across the Red Sea? Chariots are awesome but they aren't that awesome. That many men would wipe the floor with any ancient army that I can recall, including that one from the Persian Empire that you mentioned. Also, when the Israelites arrived in the Promised Land, God told them they were not yet numerous enough to inhabit it fully. Yet it wasn't until 1950 that the Holy Land was home to a million people in modern times. So the idea that 2 million was too few to inhabit the land over 3000 years ago doesn't make sense.

Agreed, tend to see the numbers of the local tribes, villages and Nomads in land of Canaan to be much smaller. And thus the influx of 700K Hebrew men (2 Million people men/women) seems to be way off, we would see huge change.

When we read the bible we see when the Hebrews are taking the promise land, it was a multi century process, they integrated with the other nations, took their wives, they continue to worship false gods, it took them 100s of years to change into the Hebrew nation that we know under King David. And even then we still see the tribes and groups fighting each other. My point -We would not see huge drastic change in Archeological records.

Also in Bible we see God sent Hornets to drive out some of the inhabitants and the Hebrews just walk in. No battle needed, no destruction of walls. We see in modern times huge plagues of locust, flys, mosquitos in USA
(1875 Rocky Mountain Locust) and around world. Seems feasible a swarm of Hornets or Wasps could drive folks from their homes and small villages for a time. If this happened- We would not see huge drastic change in Archeological records.

Joshua 14 10-13 And I sent the hornets ahead of you that drove them (the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girga****es, Hivites and Jebusites) out of your way; it was not your sword or your bow." "I gave you a land that you had not tilled and cities that you had not built, to dwell in; you have eaten of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant."

I mention this because what the Archeologist are looking for is change, and when they do not see drastic change, they doubt the Exodus story and thus they say the Hebrews were always in Canaan. I think Exodus story is overall true and the Archeologist are missing the subtle change that occurred over time.

Archaeologist WF Albright is a good source here. He was actually a Christian. So he took into account basically what Herodotus advocated for historical records.

WF Albright affected the method of archaeology at large. Very underrated.

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Fleeing before Pharaoh's army is not that surprising, though. Pharaoh's army not only had chariots, but they had weapons and were trained warriors and organized. 600,000 untrained, disorganized and weaponless men is not a mighty fighting force.

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The largest credible estimate I can find for that period was an Egyptian invasion force numbering 20,000 men. 20,000 versus 600,000 is no contest in any kind of close range combat in an open area.

Edit: I also found an article about the Egyptian population over time. According to this analysis, the entire population of Egypt at the time was between 2 and 3 million people. So an Exodus of 2.2 million people leaving would almost leave the country empty.

https://brewminate.com/estimating-population-in-ancient-egypt/

Not trying to be argumentative or anti-Scripture. If the account unequivocally said 2.2 million with no other possible interrpretation, then I would call it a matter of faith and leave it be. However, since the language could be interpreted in many ways, then I prefer to look for interpretations that are consistent with the historical record

I found those here

https://ancientegypt.fandom.com/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_Soldiers

https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Warfare/

I don't vouch for the bona fides of these sites. I was just poking around

Agreed

If you look at enough pictures of the terrain in Israel, then you just don't think "Land flowing with milk and honey." Maybe compared to the wilderness for around forty years it was. Then when you look at the mountains described by ancient peoples in Israel, they look like big hills.

So I don't get to intense if a number total is off or may appear off either. God let's his children do the story telling. It's just not the point of these historic passages.
I don't know why we just read our modern standards into scripture, when i just don't see ancient man before Herodotus having such concerns about particulars. These editors and Moses were theological historians. They weren't Ken Burns, as someone wisely pointed out.

If you read Joshua 7 and the loss to AI, you can read some poor judgment from the text,
probably, of how many men were used in the attack of Ai. But the reason the editors give for the loss was because....found in Joshua 7:21

"And Achan answered Joshua, "Truly I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, and this is what I did: 21 when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Shinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, then I coveted them and took them. And see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent, with the silver underneath."

You see. This is a completely different treatment of history and should not be picked apart by we moderns reading modern standards into an ancient text.

It's great when science or history compliment, but we don't report the British lost at Dunkirk in WW2
because one single individual had sinned.

When we treat the text in this way, the scriptures become putty in the hands of the interpreter. And in the case of the skeptic, they try to pick it up and throw it against the wall. When they don't like it, they throw it around as if they were the potter and God was the clay.

Some small contributions.

First, there is some pretty good disagreement on Egyptian chronology / timeline.

One of the competing theories is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl)

I have seen another that is very different to Rohl.

Of course, there are huge critics to any changes to the traditional chronology. My biggest point is not that Rohl or competing chronologies might be correct, but that the evidence that the most widely accepted chronology is very weak. Add in the fact that it is political, that the countries with the most archeological evidence have governments that pay archeologists to find thing to disprove the OT, and the whole topic is very messy.

Second, a competing theory was put forth by an A&M professor that I found to be pretty insightful, regardless of your stance on the historicity of the Exodus. It's just a survey, and he is a philosophy major not a history major, but the book is none the less interesting in that it compiles a lot of information that I have not seen elsewhere.

Book is here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Saying-About-Formation-Israel/dp/0809138387

He surmises that one potential story is that the exodus was not the Jews leaving one particular city, but leaving the cities that were under the rule of Egypt in the area of Canaan to live in the hill countries after slavery, and the eventual conquest of those cities at a later date. He points to differences in architecture between cities and the hill country that begin to form and divert over time, the timing of famines, the loss of that part of the levant to Egyptian rule from a revolt, and other evidence. Some of the parts can be pretty speculative, but also an interesting alternative take. The idea that the exodus was more gradual, and not a situation where everyone woke up one day and left, still leaves room for most of the stories in Exodus about Saini, golden calf, wandering in the wilderness, etc. It also makes sense that one day, after the cities became weaker from foreign wars pulling out soldiers, or plague, or famine, that the people in the hill country, if they were politically aligned, could conquer the cities in the region.

I am not strongly opinioned either way. I wish that the areas in Egypt were open to more archeological exploration related to Jewish history than it is, but the politics just don't allow.

Hopefully you find this information interesting.

^ that's something I've always wondered. Few were bilingual and even fewer were bilingual and could read and write. Even fewer were multi-lingual.
Was everyone's calendar year on the same year?

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I haven't looked closely into this yet, but I think that the way that dating of ancient finds works is that historians and archaeologists start off with a handful of events that they know with certainty happened on a specific date

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It blows my mind when they are able to line up ancient history with eclipses and comets and such

JJMt said:

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Was everyone's calendar year on the same year?

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Nope, everyone had a different calendar, usually measured differently in each country and tied to the date of the current local monarch's reign (e.g., "in the 6th year of the reign of King XYZ"). And each country measured the start and termination dates of reigns differently, and some had concurrent monarchies. That's a big part of what makes dating stuff in antiquity so hard.

I haven't looked closely into this yet, but I think that the way that dating of ancient finds works is that historians and archaeologists start off with a handful of events that they know with certainty happened on a specific date. For example, there are some Babylonian battles that they are pretty sure on the date. Then, they use Babylonian and Assyrian king chronologies, which they think are fairly reliable, to set the dates of other Babylonian and Assyrian kings.

From there they use lots of stuff to try to synchronize the Babylonian and Assyrian chronologies to events in other countries. For example, there are occasionally (actually, very rarely), letters (on mud bricks) between kings that thereby creates a date for the second king. Also, archaeologists determine the pottery that was common during the reign of a specific king, and if they find the same type of pottery elsewhere, they'll assume that the second location was the same time period.

With Egypt, there are also two "king lists" that I know of, but they are very, very erroneous and basically used as a starting point. In addition, there's something called "Sothic dates" where new kings' reigns were tied to the rising of the star Sothis. However, we're not sure where those readings of the rising of the star were taken, and one location over another can result in significant differences of dates.

The Egyptians also tied the reigns of the pharaohs to a royal bull (our cousins to the west in Austin apparently copied this practice from them). There are records and burials of those bulls, so some have attempted to use them to help establish a chronology for Egypt.

All in all, the archaeologists are pretty confident of their dates for Egyptian pharaohs down to about 1,800 BC, at least. They may disagree over what are called "high", "medium" and "low" chronologies, but those chronologies differ over only a few decades, not centuries.

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Few were bilingual and even fewer were bilingual and could read and write. Even fewer were multi-lingual.

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Just out of curiosity, why do you say that? I assume that you were referring to the Jews in the Exodus? Your statement, although possibly true, is one that we have no data on one way or the other. One thing I've learned is never to discount the ancients. They will always surprise you. (As an example, many are starting to suspect that the ancient Babylonians and possibly the Phoenicians may have had calculus, long, long before Newton.)

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Well, my point is that I doubt many works were translated into other languages on stone or papyrus, especially before 1000 BCE. The lack of checks and balances with other countries in that period might have been more void than the gradual improvement much later. In theory was all to which I was alluding.

The Septuagint, for instance, (Greek translation from the Hebrew Torah or OT), wasn't translated until 3rd to 1st century BCE.

JJMt said:

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Well, my point is that I doubt many works were translated into other languages on stone or papyrus, especially before 1000 BCE.

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Oh, get your point, and agree completely. The only translation of which I'm aware is the famous Rosetta Stone.

Also, only a very, very few papyri survived from ancient times, and none (or perhaps only 1) from the Nile Delta region despite the fact that it was the center of Egypt during the centuries before and after the Exodus time period.

In almost 50 years of excavating at Avaris/Piramesse/Qantir, not a single papyrus has been discovered, even though it was the largest city of the ancient world, with perhaps a population of 300,000. Papyrus does not do well in hot and humid climates, and especially not when buried where the water table is immediately below the surface.

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Cool stuff. Thanks.

As you know, the Persians conquered Egypt on and off for about two centuries before the Greeks came rolling in at about 332 BC.

And the Greeks under Alexander the Great created Koine Greek and basically made everyone speak it that they conquered. And you know this, but you also have to factor in how much the Greeks wanted to make the world Greek. Under what they called hellenization, they probably didn't care about preserving the history of the nations that they conquered.

There were 70 to 72 Jewish scholars who translated the Septuagint into Greek from Hebrew. It wasn't the Greeks who cared about preserving the history in it or anything.

The Septuagint is valued in the reformed tradition because it, as Zobel and dermdoc know, is the Scripture that was quoted in the New Testament by its authors also written in Koine Greek.