Maybe the ones you know. Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen. The Israelites you think of, the ones in the OT never set foot in Egypt. That part is all made up.
And this is what I got from the AI: "Abraham and Moses are considered to be legendary figures, as there is no proof of their existence outside of the Bible. 135
Many details in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Abraham, are known only from the Bible and have not been corroborated by the historical record. For example, in the account of the war between the kings of the Five Cities of the Plain and four kings led by the ruler of Elam, none of the nine monarchs involved are known outside of the Biblical story. 2
The texts that mention Moses are accepted to have not been written until the Babylonian Exile (late 6th century BCE), whereas the event itself would have occurred 700 years earlier. There is no real corroborating records of such a thing from any other sources. ".
Preston, it's great to meet you, so I have a few questions to see if you are free-thinking and keeping an open mind, or if you have already concluded your case based on what appears to be pretty shoddy dependency.
Did you know the Hyksos were likely founded by Yakbim, a Semitic name cognate with Joseph's name Ben-Yaakov? Did you know that Yakbim may be identified with Salitis, a Semitic name cognate with Joseph's title Shalit (governor)?
Was Manetho wrong when he put Moses's name into his history? He's often wrong, but in minor predictable ways. Is Manetho not counted as evidence that a credible tradition informed him that the Hyksos departure was led by Moses? Was Ptolemy of Mendes incorrect to attribute the same to Moses?
Were Sesostris I and Khnumhotep II wrong to depict their trade with rich Semitic merchants in the lifetime attributed to Abraham, 20th-19th centuries BC? Has anything about the life of Abraham been conclusively proven as anachronistic to that period?
I recently tracked one of the Five Kings, Amraphel, as being Amar-Sin of Ur (short chronology). One telling point is that Amar-Sin died suddenly "from the bite of his shoe" and thus couldn't complete his ziggurat; while when Amraphel died Abraham argued over the shoe-latchet from the spoils.
The AI's relying on an "accepted" narrative is a laughable telephone-game that goes back to 19th-century German "JEDP" atheists. Conservative and liberal historians have disagreed on this awhile. I already told you that their sole reason for putting Moses in the 14th or 13th century, as the AI's source says, was because they didn't believe Moses could speak of a city of Ramses before Ramses II. However, Exodus 15 (Song of the Sea) and Judges 4-5 (Judgment and Song of Deborah), which both include Moses, are recognized by many scholars (via their poetry) to have been written close to their own events in the 16th-14th century. In general:
According to Solomon Nigosian, there are three prevailing views among biblical scholars: one is that Moses is not a historical figure, another view strives to anchor the decisive role he played in Israelite religion, and a third that argues there are elements of both history and legend from which "these issues are hotly debated unresolved matters among scholars".
The reason people don't find records is they're looking in the wrong century. As soon as you look at the Hyksos expulsion you find all the backup you need. Did you know that every line of the Davis translation of the Tempest Stele of Ahmose has a parallel line in Exodus 8-12? It's as if Ahmose was right that a tempest like never before in Egypt, accompanied with days of darkness which made torches unusable, was actually sent in 1539 BC by "the great god" as he calls him. Right when the Hyksos left and there was a pharaoh power vacuum (seized by Ahmose) with the sudden deaths of Pharaoh Apophis and Crown Prince Apophis, and the impotence of successor Khamudi.
You say Moses was Arab, but did you know the likely etymology of "Arab" is metathetical for "Eber", the father of the Hebrews (a term that originally included Arabs)? Do you feel comfortable backdating the first secular appearance of the word "Arab" from the 9th century BC back to the 16th-13th centuries? If you say you are, you're using a double standard when you refuse to backdate the Christian data that is better attested. Or perhaps you'd prefer to give the Bible conditional credit for deriving Arab from Arabah (wilderness), which comes from Moses's follower Joshua in the 1490s? Do you discount the Arab tradition that they are descended from Ishmael the son of Abraham, when Ishmael is a Semitic name dating from ca. 2000 and used continuously by the Arabs since then? With all your reliance on certainty about Arabs, your primary supports for it are the same as the supports for Abraham and Moses.
It's not useful to seize upon u/Mrexreturns writing his althist to present more of the same. OP is an interesting subject but we may be derailing it a bit. The real question I'd have for you is: do you pursue truth at all costs (free-thinking, open-minded), or is there anything else that might prevent you from committing to pursue truth at all costs? Nothing whatsoever can be successfully substituted for truth, nothing is worth it.
It's not useful to seize upon u/Mrexreturns writing his althist to present more of the same. OP is an interesting subject but we may be derailing it a bit. The real question I'd have for you is: do you pursue truth at all costs (free-thinking, open-minded)
I can ask you the same question. I believe all these biblical characters are made up. Obviously you will object, since you're an OT believer, and I suspect also a Talmud believer. I'm not. I consider the OT just a bunch of stories put together over a long period of time. But I don't want to debate any of this with you.
I want you to answer one question I have. Do you know Egypt is mentioned in the Bible about 600 times? yet, not once are the Pyramids mentioned. Yet, ancient Egypt is home to countless treasures. To more than 100 pyramids, ancient cities, temples, statues like the Sphinx, and countless other mysteries, none of this is ever mentioned in the Bible. It’s like the writers of both the Old and New Testament in the Bible didn't know anything about ancient Egypt. What is mentioned in the Bible is Pharaohs... but, Egypt never had Pharaohs. That’s another thing which has been made up. Their rulers were known as Kings. There is nothing recorded in Egypt literature archives about Moses, or Israelites, or slavery. In fact Egypt didn't widely practice slavery, and never had slave open markets. Also, nothing recorded about the Exodus, escaping of the Jews to the promised land, in Egyptian literature. How could the Hebrews (Jews) write extensively about the Exodus and Moses, Joseph, Abraham, etc. in the Bible, but not once mention the Pyramids ... the most important achievement of the people in Egypt? Nothing in the Hebrew culture or even traditions (Talmud is the most important book in Jewish culture) resemble anything to do with ancient Egypt. But, plenty of traditions from Babylon where the Israelites were in captivity for 70 years (not 400 years like in Egypt, according to what we're told).
Nope, I've said for years that those who criticize the Talmud with misquotes and strawmen are the ones advancing the Talmud, while accurate criticism of the Talmud must depend on understanding its cultural context as with any other criticism. I have a number of criticisms of the Talmud on grounds of insularity and superstition that don't rely on strawmen.
not once are the Pyramids mentioned.
Argument from silence. The tower of Babel (a ziggurat, the same style as the pyramids) is mentioned as representative. I tentatively accept Etemenanki as this tower. But the purpose of the Bible is not to glorify giant works done in the names of other gods, so much about contemporary religion is deliberately omitted.
more than 100 pyramids
Only 4-5 of them are what people think of as "pyramids". The rest are more moundlike and are mostly unimpressive ziggurats under 50 m.
none of this is ever mentioned in the Bible
Argument from silence. The book is not about the Egyptian people per se but only about Egyptian interactions with covenant people. Egyptology is indeed amazing, but when you look into it you find where the Bible alludes to the same things. First, recognize that "Egypt" is a Greek word and the Old Kingdom had other names for itself, notably "Tawy" in Egyptian. This means the two bounded lands, and is translated in Semitic languages as "Misraim" (Arabic "Misr", its current official name). Given the variety we don't have to assume that description of early culture is limited to use of the names Tawy or Misraim. A good summary of early culture is Gen. 6:1-8, where we see exactly the divine-human sexual union depicted in Old Kingdom deities like Amun. That far back, that's enough correlation to posit an overlap even without specific name mention.
Gen. 10 includes an incredible wealth of worldwide data encoded in names. Here Mizraim is given as a son of Ham and his family is eventually assigned the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. The Middle Kingdom never built large pyramids like the Old Kingdom and so the Egyptians' Semitic slaves had nothing to do with that earlier slave labor; the Semites were instead employed building smaller ziggurats, temples, obelisks, and fortifications like that of Apophis in Avaris against Kamose and Ahmose. Since the text is unqualifiedly iconoclastic, there would be no mention of building statues; but they appear later in Scripture, and the statues of Ur, which included some Egyptian deities, are mentioned in oral tradition about Abraham put to paper later.
But Gen. 10-11 specifically focuses on events that have didactic value. Thus Nimrod (probably Naram-Sin grandson of Sargon) is singled out because of the uniqueness of his unprecedented Akkadian Empire. This rise coincides with the collapse of the Egyptian 6th dynasty into an Intermediate Period of relative impotence compared to Akkad, so it's appropriate to focus on Akkad rather than Egypt when discussing that period (23rd century BC). Centuries later, in the time of Abraham (which I have as 2044-1869 on Biblical chronology), well, Akkad was weak again and Egypt was entering the stronger Middle Kingdom and anxious to trade with Semitic merchants, as I documented. And at that time you see all kinds of references to pharaohs and Egyptians, but not to architecture, which is appropriate for nomads who care about relationship more than structure.
In 1763 the elevation of Joseph corresponds naturally with the founding of the 14th Egyptian dynasty, admittedly run by Canaanites, and likely founded by Yakbim/Salitis; this ran concurrently with the 13th dynasty in the south, just as the Bible indicates Joseph's power in the north was largely independent from the pharaonic successions in the south (e.g. Khendjer). The great building works directed by Joseph are discussed prominently, Gen. 41:48-57, and his legislative reforms, Gen. 47:13-26. The Israelites settle in Goshen in 1754, Gen. 46:28-29, the exact abandoned region now called Tell el-Yahudiyeh. Their primary cities are later named as Pithom (Per-Atum) and Ramses (Avaris), exactly where the Hyksos lived.
Egypt never had Pharaohs
The title pharaoh for a person is first attested with Thutmose III, a little after the Hyksos expulsion, but it's a very old Egyptian word and originally meant "great house" and referred to the palace and the administration rather than an individual, starting in the 12th dynasty, the one that Abraham traded with. Because of the collectivist focus of culture, the king was regarded as one with the people, land, palaces, and administration and was not to act "independently" but as the collective will of the people. In modern English, we might use similar titles like "the court" when referring to what an individual judge does in the name of a collective; judges might refer to themselves as "the court" when their more literal meaning is that they are identified with a people as their appointed agents. That is the way in which "pharaoh" is used from Gen. 12 on, and it's consistent with the Egyptian use of the word from the contemporaneous 12th dynasty on, where it is usually translated something like "great house". Good observation, because this is easily misstated if one is not careful!
There is nothing recorded in Egypt literature archives about Moses, or Israelites, or slavery
Manetho is Egyptian literature and mentions Moses. The Merneptah Stele of 1208 is Egyptian archives and mentions Israel. The subjugation of the Semites to build warworks under Apophis is also well-documented and corresponds to the brickmaking work of Exodus. If you mean they didn't bother to mention the same names contemporaneously with their lives, it was not expected that they should care about foreign names in formal literature or architecture. But we do have a number of crossovers of Semitic names in Egyptian records, too many to list. "Moses" is likely cognate with the many pharaohs with the same root, Dedumose, Kamose, Ahmose, Thutmose, Ramose (Ramses), etc. "Yah" appears in the name of Jtwnjr’yh, an 18th-century Semite who got his own special burial in Egypt and dedicated copy of the Book of the Dead, whose Hebrew name was Adoni-Roe-Yah. Egyptian god names were often different for the same Semitic deity concepts, but the linkages can be traced; so for instance Seth was identified as the Semitic god Baal-Zephon, exactly the name the Bible gives to the Semitic outpost in Ex. 14 (at that time this was understood as a title for Yahweh, the leader of the divine council; separation of Yahweh and Baal concepts happened demonstrably later). There are a few more such correlations I've noted.
In fact Egypt didn't widely practice slavery, and never had slave open markets.
Correct, Gen. 15 should not be read as speaking of 400 years of slavery because in context it indicates that slavery was a culmination of the 400 years. But the law that all land and people belong to pharaoh (the great house) is ancient, and mentioned in Genesis, and is defacto slavery (what they didn't practice is an oligarchy where each master had his own slaves, as the Levantine nomads had). In the war between Apophis and Kamose, Apophis had laborers build fortifications at Avaris (also Nefrusy, Per-Atum, Tjaru, and On/Heliopolis). This is the point at which the straw breaks the camel's back and the despoiled people seek a redeemer figure.
Also, nothing recorded about the Exodus, escaping of the Jews to the promised land, in Egyptian literature.
I told you and linked you, look up the Hyksos expulsion where hundreds of thousands of Semites left Ramses and crossed the Red Sea into the Levant. It's standard Egyptology, it's just not recognized by many as the same as the Exodus. Other Semites left at the same time besides the Israelites; some are named in Deut. 2.
the Pyramids ... the most important achievement of the people in Egypt
To your subjective judgment and argument from silence, they're not mentioned because the ziggurats were idol temples and were not to be glorified by the covenant people, and so are only mentioned in connection with their failure at Babel. They would hardly have called them "pyramid", a Greek word, anyway, as you note about "Egypt"; they would have called them "migdal", typically translated tower. We think of the three great pyramids as tourist traps, but to the Egyptians they were just overblown cemeteries that didn't affect daily life.
Nothing in the Hebrew culture or even traditions (Talmud is the most important book in Jewish culture) resemble anything to do with ancient Egypt.
Rather a sweeping assertion. I've loaded you up with Egyptian references and customs that don't reflect the later times to which the text has been forward-dated.
But, plenty of traditions from Babylon where the Israelites were in captivity for 70 years (not 400 years like in Egypt, according to what we're told).
I've never seen credible assertions that the Torah has data dated to Babylon and not to any earlier period. I told you the theory was invented by 19th-century German atheist historical-revisionists who hated the Bible and wanted its testimony dead. The whole book of Deuteronomy closely parallels suzerainty contracts popular ca. 2000-1500 that were not used in later periods. But when people try to argue for a late date on some decontextual wording or uncertainty, it's always easily answerable.
One mistake Christians have made is to insist that Gen. 15 means 400 years of slavery. On the dates and chronologies given this is impossible, and on the later references to this (including Paul) it's clear that it refers to a total sojourn in Egypt starting with Abram's first visit (1969) until the Exodus (1539). The meaning of the text is that these three things named, including slavery, will occupy a round total of 400 years (later calculated as exactly 430). The Biblical description of slave labor itself is chiefly confined to the reign of Apophis in wartime, just as history says.
Add: Since I have this page open, another very fun one is the highly valuable synchronism of the Stele of Neferhotep made in Lebanon by a diplomatic mission on his behalf: since Governor Yantinu of Byblos (Yantinammu) is depicted, it's clear there was a journey of Egyptians to the Levant at this time that had the opportunity to strike up business relations and possibly vassalage. Lo and behold, the Bible says that Joseph's family did make exactly such a trip, for other reasons, and were regarded by the Canaanites as Egyptians, internally dating it to 1737, right in Neferhotep's reign when the Stele was constructed.
Now, Preston, this is a speculative forum, and I don't intend to write to be dogmatic (in case my tone misleads). (Add: You asked and I should answer directly, I do pursue truth at all costs, and adjust my views when evidence indicates.) I am very interested in Babylonian influence on Israel and would not gainsay its evidences, even if I might not agree with the conclusions drawn from them. (I was just looking separately into the Zoroastrian wrath demon Khashm-Dev who informs the apocryphal Asmodeus; backdating that name to being a contemporary of Solomon does bear the marks of later narrative-padding, unlike the cases we're discussing here.) The issue is whether we can approach it with free thinking and open minds. You present to me some data about the word "pharaoh" that I was unaware of, and I thank you; I look at the data and recognize that it doesn't affect my general conclusion but does require me to adjust my perception of the different cultural uses of the word. I'm presenting you a lot of data, some long known and some I and others recently uncovered, and I trust you recognize it's not a clearcut scenario to reject the historic people whose stories became the narratives we have today. What you present is mostly argument from silence, and such an argument logically gives way when greater evidence is provided. So I'm interested in where you intend to take the evidence discussion in the pursuit of the truth out there.
Semitic languages as "Misraim" (Arabic "Misr", its current official name)
You should read the book titled "Egypt Knew No Pharaohs Nor Israelites", it is a very good read. "The truth is that ancient Egypt never knew any Pharaohs nor any Israelites. Egypt was never the land of Exodus and Palestine was never the Promised Land." - Dr. Ashraf Ezzat
Dr Ezzat is backed by every reputable expert in the world. He argues that ancient Hebrew history as we know it today is based on one big lie, that events described as happening in Egypt, if they happened at all, really happened in Arabia. Dr Ezzat states that the events of the Old Testament occurred in southwestern Arabia, in a province called Mizraim, or Misr, a location now near modern day Yemen, which is where he says the tribe of Israel was really born. Which means that according to his version, the tales of Joseph, Moses and the Exodus might still be true, but the location in which they are alleged to have happened are false.
Egyptologists, from James Henry Breasted to Donald Redford to Israel Finkelstein. Even some Israeli experts agree, including the head of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Ze'ev Herzog, in a 1999 article in Ha'aretz, said: "The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.". Egypt's written records date back to 1870 BC. No trace of the Israelites.
A good summary of early culture is Gen. 6:1-8, where we see exactly
Why do you keep referring to OT, which is an old forgery? I just proved that to you it's a fraud, there is no mention of Pyramids, Sphinx, etc. But, that is just for starters... the terrain, which in the OT more resembles hilly Arabia rather than flat Egypt. Also, the Bible recounts droughts, which Egypt never had, only fluctuations in the flooding of the Nile. Many of the events ascribed to the area of present day Palestine actually occurred much further south down the coast of the Red Sea. an even more telling detail in the Joseph story was the camel caravan carrying "gum, balm and myrrh", which were products of Arabian trade, not Egypt's. But the most revealing clue the OT is nothing but a forgery was the notion of slavery, which Ezzat claims was never practiced in Egypt until the Greeks and Persians brought the practice with them a thousand years later than the supposed time of Moses and Joseph. Some stories state the pyramids were built by slaves, but history shows us the pyramid builders were willing volunteers, as the village of the pyramid builders attests. Another aspect of this millennia-old OT fraud was the label of pharaoh, which no Egyptian document ever uses. But the leader of the Mizraim tribe was called Faraon, which made the switch from Hebrew to Greek and the creation of a villainous pharaoh many centuries later an easy trick to pull off. Egypt, one of the best documented of all ancient civilizations, never once used the term pharaoh.
The Septaguint deception had been the result of a Greek-Jewish bond very similar to nowadays' American-Israeli one. Controlling and manipulating world superpowers, ancient and modern, is obviously an old Jewish proficiency. They replaced this obscure tribal leader Faraon with the mighty Egypt and its king.
Gen. 10 includes an incredible wealth of worldwide data encoded in names. Here Mizraim is given as a son
Jews wrote the Hebrew Bible. And Jews lie. They lied in the past, they lie today. How many modern examples do you need? just read the Epstein released files. Netanyahu said recently in a speech that the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago. Yet another Jewish lie. Ezzat says no. "The Jewish people were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BC... There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 2200s BCE... The chronicle of events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave results or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues etc.".
In his breakthrough theory "Bible Came from Arabia" Dr. Kamal Salibi has discovered more than one hundred place names in Arabia and North Yemen that amazingly matched the ones mentioned in the Torah, Ezzat writes. "The land Joshua conquered was a small territory in North Yemen. The Egypt of the Bible is not the Egypt of the Nile Valley but an obscure little town in the southwestern desert of ancient Arabia called Mizraim, or Misr in Hebrew and Arabic. "The Exodus took place in a much humbler way and on a much narrower scale in an obscure little village in ancient South Arabia," Ezzat writes.
Prof. Breasted writes the Egyptians possessed a standard of morals far superior to that of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) over a thousand years before the Decalogue was written. So Ezzat is not making this stuff up. Breasted is one of the most respected historians ever. And Ezzat's insistence that much of the material in the OT is fabricated, distorted and plagiarized is true. For instance, the wisdom of Amenemope, preserved in an Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, was translated into Hebrew in ancient times and, circulating in Palestine, was the source for a whole section of the OT Book of Proverbs.
Maybe the ones you know. Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen. The Israelites you think of, the ones in the OT never set foot in Egypt. That part is all made up.
And this is what I got from the AI: "Abraham and Moses are considered to be legendary figures, as there is no proof of their existence outside of the Bible. 135 Many details in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Abraham, are known only from the Bible and have not been corroborated by the historical record. For example, in the account of the war between the kings of the Five Cities of the Plain and four kings led by the ruler of Elam, none of the nine monarchs involved are known outside of the Biblical story. 2 The texts that mention Moses are accepted to have not been written until the Babylonian Exile (late 6th century BCE), whereas the event itself would have occurred 700 years earlier. There is no real corroborating records of such a thing from any other sources. ".
Preston, it's great to meet you, so I have a few questions to see if you are free-thinking and keeping an open mind, or if you have already concluded your case based on what appears to be pretty shoddy dependency.
What does your AI (Artificial Stupidity) say about the Hyksos expulsion that would contradict what I said? The Hyksos were Semitic from the Levant, not Yemen, and they have a number of pharaohs, probably a hundred scarabs, and many artifacts. Excavations of Tell El-Dab'a (Avaris) show no widespread destruction of the city, which instead seems to have been abandoned by the Hyksos. Avaris is Ramses, the same city name Moses uses.
Did you know the Hyksos were likely founded by Yakbim, a Semitic name cognate with Joseph's name Ben-Yaakov? Did you know that Yakbim may be identified with Salitis, a Semitic name cognate with Joseph's title Shalit (governor)?
Was Manetho wrong when he put Moses's name into his history? He's often wrong, but in minor predictable ways. Is Manetho not counted as evidence that a credible tradition informed him that the Hyksos departure was led by Moses? Was Ptolemy of Mendes incorrect to attribute the same to Moses?
Were Sesostris I and Khnumhotep II wrong to depict their trade with rich Semitic merchants in the lifetime attributed to Abraham, 20th-19th centuries BC? Has anything about the life of Abraham been conclusively proven as anachronistic to that period?
I recently tracked one of the Five Kings, Amraphel, as being Amar-Sin of Ur (short chronology). One telling point is that Amar-Sin died suddenly "from the bite of his shoe" and thus couldn't complete his ziggurat; while when Amraphel died Abraham argued over the shoe-latchet from the spoils.
The AI's relying on an "accepted" narrative is a laughable telephone-game that goes back to 19th-century German "JEDP" atheists. Conservative and liberal historians have disagreed on this awhile. I already told you that their sole reason for putting Moses in the 14th or 13th century, as the AI's source says, was because they didn't believe Moses could speak of a city of Ramses before Ramses II. However, Exodus 15 (Song of the Sea) and Judges 4-5 (Judgment and Song of Deborah), which both include Moses, are recognized by many scholars (via their poetry) to have been written close to their own events in the 16th-14th century. In general:
The reason people don't find records is they're looking in the wrong century. As soon as you look at the Hyksos expulsion you find all the backup you need. Did you know that every line of the Davis translation of the Tempest Stele of Ahmose has a parallel line in Exodus 8-12? It's as if Ahmose was right that a tempest like never before in Egypt, accompanied with days of darkness which made torches unusable, was actually sent in 1539 BC by "the great god" as he calls him. Right when the Hyksos left and there was a pharaoh power vacuum (seized by Ahmose) with the sudden deaths of Pharaoh Apophis and Crown Prince Apophis, and the impotence of successor Khamudi.
You say Moses was Arab, but did you know the likely etymology of "Arab" is metathetical for "Eber", the father of the Hebrews (a term that originally included Arabs)? Do you feel comfortable backdating the first secular appearance of the word "Arab" from the 9th century BC back to the 16th-13th centuries? If you say you are, you're using a double standard when you refuse to backdate the Christian data that is better attested. Or perhaps you'd prefer to give the Bible conditional credit for deriving Arab from Arabah (wilderness), which comes from Moses's follower Joshua in the 1490s? Do you discount the Arab tradition that they are descended from Ishmael the son of Abraham, when Ishmael is a Semitic name dating from ca. 2000 and used continuously by the Arabs since then? With all your reliance on certainty about Arabs, your primary supports for it are the same as the supports for Abraham and Moses.
It's not useful to seize upon u/Mrexreturns writing his althist to present more of the same. OP is an interesting subject but we may be derailing it a bit. The real question I'd have for you is: do you pursue truth at all costs (free-thinking, open-minded), or is there anything else that might prevent you from committing to pursue truth at all costs? Nothing whatsoever can be successfully substituted for truth, nothing is worth it.
I can ask you the same question. I believe all these biblical characters are made up. Obviously you will object, since you're an OT believer, and I suspect also a Talmud believer. I'm not. I consider the OT just a bunch of stories put together over a long period of time. But I don't want to debate any of this with you.
I want you to answer one question I have. Do you know Egypt is mentioned in the Bible about 600 times? yet, not once are the Pyramids mentioned. Yet, ancient Egypt is home to countless treasures. To more than 100 pyramids, ancient cities, temples, statues like the Sphinx, and countless other mysteries, none of this is ever mentioned in the Bible. It’s like the writers of both the Old and New Testament in the Bible didn't know anything about ancient Egypt. What is mentioned in the Bible is Pharaohs... but, Egypt never had Pharaohs. That’s another thing which has been made up. Their rulers were known as Kings. There is nothing recorded in Egypt literature archives about Moses, or Israelites, or slavery. In fact Egypt didn't widely practice slavery, and never had slave open markets. Also, nothing recorded about the Exodus, escaping of the Jews to the promised land, in Egyptian literature. How could the Hebrews (Jews) write extensively about the Exodus and Moses, Joseph, Abraham, etc. in the Bible, but not once mention the Pyramids ... the most important achievement of the people in Egypt? Nothing in the Hebrew culture or even traditions (Talmud is the most important book in Jewish culture) resemble anything to do with ancient Egypt. But, plenty of traditions from Babylon where the Israelites were in captivity for 70 years (not 400 years like in Egypt, according to what we're told).
Nope, I've said for years that those who criticize the Talmud with misquotes and strawmen are the ones advancing the Talmud, while accurate criticism of the Talmud must depend on understanding its cultural context as with any other criticism. I have a number of criticisms of the Talmud on grounds of insularity and superstition that don't rely on strawmen.
Argument from silence. The tower of Babel (a ziggurat, the same style as the pyramids) is mentioned as representative. I tentatively accept Etemenanki as this tower. But the purpose of the Bible is not to glorify giant works done in the names of other gods, so much about contemporary religion is deliberately omitted.
Only 4-5 of them are what people think of as "pyramids". The rest are more moundlike and are mostly unimpressive ziggurats under 50 m.
Argument from silence. The book is not about the Egyptian people per se but only about Egyptian interactions with covenant people. Egyptology is indeed amazing, but when you look into it you find where the Bible alludes to the same things. First, recognize that "Egypt" is a Greek word and the Old Kingdom had other names for itself, notably "Tawy" in Egyptian. This means the two bounded lands, and is translated in Semitic languages as "Misraim" (Arabic "Misr", its current official name). Given the variety we don't have to assume that description of early culture is limited to use of the names Tawy or Misraim. A good summary of early culture is Gen. 6:1-8, where we see exactly the divine-human sexual union depicted in Old Kingdom deities like Amun. That far back, that's enough correlation to posit an overlap even without specific name mention.
Gen. 10 includes an incredible wealth of worldwide data encoded in names. Here Mizraim is given as a son of Ham and his family is eventually assigned the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. The Middle Kingdom never built large pyramids like the Old Kingdom and so the Egyptians' Semitic slaves had nothing to do with that earlier slave labor; the Semites were instead employed building smaller ziggurats, temples, obelisks, and fortifications like that of Apophis in Avaris against Kamose and Ahmose. Since the text is unqualifiedly iconoclastic, there would be no mention of building statues; but they appear later in Scripture, and the statues of Ur, which included some Egyptian deities, are mentioned in oral tradition about Abraham put to paper later.
But Gen. 10-11 specifically focuses on events that have didactic value. Thus Nimrod (probably Naram-Sin grandson of Sargon) is singled out because of the uniqueness of his unprecedented Akkadian Empire. This rise coincides with the collapse of the Egyptian 6th dynasty into an Intermediate Period of relative impotence compared to Akkad, so it's appropriate to focus on Akkad rather than Egypt when discussing that period (23rd century BC). Centuries later, in the time of Abraham (which I have as 2044-1869 on Biblical chronology), well, Akkad was weak again and Egypt was entering the stronger Middle Kingdom and anxious to trade with Semitic merchants, as I documented. And at that time you see all kinds of references to pharaohs and Egyptians, but not to architecture, which is appropriate for nomads who care about relationship more than structure.
In 1763 the elevation of Joseph corresponds naturally with the founding of the 14th Egyptian dynasty, admittedly run by Canaanites, and likely founded by Yakbim/Salitis; this ran concurrently with the 13th dynasty in the south, just as the Bible indicates Joseph's power in the north was largely independent from the pharaonic successions in the south (e.g. Khendjer). The great building works directed by Joseph are discussed prominently, Gen. 41:48-57, and his legislative reforms, Gen. 47:13-26. The Israelites settle in Goshen in 1754, Gen. 46:28-29, the exact abandoned region now called Tell el-Yahudiyeh. Their primary cities are later named as Pithom (Per-Atum) and Ramses (Avaris), exactly where the Hyksos lived.
The title pharaoh for a person is first attested with Thutmose III, a little after the Hyksos expulsion, but it's a very old Egyptian word and originally meant "great house" and referred to the palace and the administration rather than an individual, starting in the 12th dynasty, the one that Abraham traded with. Because of the collectivist focus of culture, the king was regarded as one with the people, land, palaces, and administration and was not to act "independently" but as the collective will of the people. In modern English, we might use similar titles like "the court" when referring to what an individual judge does in the name of a collective; judges might refer to themselves as "the court" when their more literal meaning is that they are identified with a people as their appointed agents. That is the way in which "pharaoh" is used from Gen. 12 on, and it's consistent with the Egyptian use of the word from the contemporaneous 12th dynasty on, where it is usually translated something like "great house". Good observation, because this is easily misstated if one is not careful!
Manetho is Egyptian literature and mentions Moses. The Merneptah Stele of 1208 is Egyptian archives and mentions Israel. The subjugation of the Semites to build warworks under Apophis is also well-documented and corresponds to the brickmaking work of Exodus. If you mean they didn't bother to mention the same names contemporaneously with their lives, it was not expected that they should care about foreign names in formal literature or architecture. But we do have a number of crossovers of Semitic names in Egyptian records, too many to list. "Moses" is likely cognate with the many pharaohs with the same root, Dedumose, Kamose, Ahmose, Thutmose, Ramose (Ramses), etc. "Yah" appears in the name of Jtwnjr’yh, an 18th-century Semite who got his own special burial in Egypt and dedicated copy of the Book of the Dead, whose Hebrew name was Adoni-Roe-Yah. Egyptian god names were often different for the same Semitic deity concepts, but the linkages can be traced; so for instance Seth was identified as the Semitic god Baal-Zephon, exactly the name the Bible gives to the Semitic outpost in Ex. 14 (at that time this was understood as a title for Yahweh, the leader of the divine council; separation of Yahweh and Baal concepts happened demonstrably later). There are a few more such correlations I've noted.
Correct, Gen. 15 should not be read as speaking of 400 years of slavery because in context it indicates that slavery was a culmination of the 400 years. But the law that all land and people belong to pharaoh (the great house) is ancient, and mentioned in Genesis, and is defacto slavery (what they didn't practice is an oligarchy where each master had his own slaves, as the Levantine nomads had). In the war between Apophis and Kamose, Apophis had laborers build fortifications at Avaris (also Nefrusy, Per-Atum, Tjaru, and On/Heliopolis). This is the point at which the straw breaks the camel's back and the despoiled people seek a redeemer figure.
I told you and linked you, look up the Hyksos expulsion where hundreds of thousands of Semites left Ramses and crossed the Red Sea into the Levant. It's standard Egyptology, it's just not recognized by many as the same as the Exodus. Other Semites left at the same time besides the Israelites; some are named in Deut. 2.
To your subjective judgment and argument from silence, they're not mentioned because the ziggurats were idol temples and were not to be glorified by the covenant people, and so are only mentioned in connection with their failure at Babel. They would hardly have called them "pyramid", a Greek word, anyway, as you note about "Egypt"; they would have called them "migdal", typically translated tower. We think of the three great pyramids as tourist traps, but to the Egyptians they were just overblown cemeteries that didn't affect daily life.
Rather a sweeping assertion. I've loaded you up with Egyptian references and customs that don't reflect the later times to which the text has been forward-dated.
I've never seen credible assertions that the Torah has data dated to Babylon and not to any earlier period. I told you the theory was invented by 19th-century German atheist historical-revisionists who hated the Bible and wanted its testimony dead. The whole book of Deuteronomy closely parallels suzerainty contracts popular ca. 2000-1500 that were not used in later periods. But when people try to argue for a late date on some decontextual wording or uncertainty, it's always easily answerable.
One mistake Christians have made is to insist that Gen. 15 means 400 years of slavery. On the dates and chronologies given this is impossible, and on the later references to this (including Paul) it's clear that it refers to a total sojourn in Egypt starting with Abram's first visit (1969) until the Exodus (1539). The meaning of the text is that these three things named, including slavery, will occupy a round total of 400 years (later calculated as exactly 430). The Biblical description of slave labor itself is chiefly confined to the reign of Apophis in wartime, just as history says.
Add: Since I have this page open, another very fun one is the highly valuable synchronism of the Stele of Neferhotep made in Lebanon by a diplomatic mission on his behalf: since Governor Yantinu of Byblos (Yantinammu) is depicted, it's clear there was a journey of Egyptians to the Levant at this time that had the opportunity to strike up business relations and possibly vassalage. Lo and behold, the Bible says that Joseph's family did make exactly such a trip, for other reasons, and were regarded by the Canaanites as Egyptians, internally dating it to 1737, right in Neferhotep's reign when the Stele was constructed.
Now, Preston, this is a speculative forum, and I don't intend to write to be dogmatic (in case my tone misleads). (Add: You asked and I should answer directly, I do pursue truth at all costs, and adjust my views when evidence indicates.) I am very interested in Babylonian influence on Israel and would not gainsay its evidences, even if I might not agree with the conclusions drawn from them. (I was just looking separately into the Zoroastrian wrath demon Khashm-Dev who informs the apocryphal Asmodeus; backdating that name to being a contemporary of Solomon does bear the marks of later narrative-padding, unlike the cases we're discussing here.) The issue is whether we can approach it with free thinking and open minds. You present to me some data about the word "pharaoh" that I was unaware of, and I thank you; I look at the data and recognize that it doesn't affect my general conclusion but does require me to adjust my perception of the different cultural uses of the word. I'm presenting you a lot of data, some long known and some I and others recently uncovered, and I trust you recognize it's not a clearcut scenario to reject the historic people whose stories became the narratives we have today. What you present is mostly argument from silence, and such an argument logically gives way when greater evidence is provided. So I'm interested in where you intend to take the evidence discussion in the pursuit of the truth out there.
You should read the book titled "Egypt Knew No Pharaohs Nor Israelites", it is a very good read. "The truth is that ancient Egypt never knew any Pharaohs nor any Israelites. Egypt was never the land of Exodus and Palestine was never the Promised Land." - Dr. Ashraf Ezzat
Dr Ezzat is backed by every reputable expert in the world. He argues that ancient Hebrew history as we know it today is based on one big lie, that events described as happening in Egypt, if they happened at all, really happened in Arabia. Dr Ezzat states that the events of the Old Testament occurred in southwestern Arabia, in a province called Mizraim, or Misr, a location now near modern day Yemen, which is where he says the tribe of Israel was really born. Which means that according to his version, the tales of Joseph, Moses and the Exodus might still be true, but the location in which they are alleged to have happened are false.
Egyptologists, from James Henry Breasted to Donald Redford to Israel Finkelstein. Even some Israeli experts agree, including the head of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Ze'ev Herzog, in a 1999 article in Ha'aretz, said: "The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.". Egypt's written records date back to 1870 BC. No trace of the Israelites.
Why do you keep referring to OT, which is an old forgery? I just proved that to you it's a fraud, there is no mention of Pyramids, Sphinx, etc. But, that is just for starters... the terrain, which in the OT more resembles hilly Arabia rather than flat Egypt. Also, the Bible recounts droughts, which Egypt never had, only fluctuations in the flooding of the Nile. Many of the events ascribed to the area of present day Palestine actually occurred much further south down the coast of the Red Sea. an even more telling detail in the Joseph story was the camel caravan carrying "gum, balm and myrrh", which were products of Arabian trade, not Egypt's. But the most revealing clue the OT is nothing but a forgery was the notion of slavery, which Ezzat claims was never practiced in Egypt until the Greeks and Persians brought the practice with them a thousand years later than the supposed time of Moses and Joseph. Some stories state the pyramids were built by slaves, but history shows us the pyramid builders were willing volunteers, as the village of the pyramid builders attests. Another aspect of this millennia-old OT fraud was the label of pharaoh, which no Egyptian document ever uses. But the leader of the Mizraim tribe was called Faraon, which made the switch from Hebrew to Greek and the creation of a villainous pharaoh many centuries later an easy trick to pull off. Egypt, one of the best documented of all ancient civilizations, never once used the term pharaoh.
The Septaguint deception had been the result of a Greek-Jewish bond very similar to nowadays' American-Israeli one. Controlling and manipulating world superpowers, ancient and modern, is obviously an old Jewish proficiency. They replaced this obscure tribal leader Faraon with the mighty Egypt and its king.
Jews wrote the Hebrew Bible. And Jews lie. They lied in the past, they lie today. How many modern examples do you need? just read the Epstein released files. Netanyahu said recently in a speech that the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago. Yet another Jewish lie. Ezzat says no. "The Jewish people were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BC... There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 2200s BCE... The chronicle of events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave results or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues etc.".
In his breakthrough theory "Bible Came from Arabia" Dr. Kamal Salibi has discovered more than one hundred place names in Arabia and North Yemen that amazingly matched the ones mentioned in the Torah, Ezzat writes. "The land Joshua conquered was a small territory in North Yemen. The Egypt of the Bible is not the Egypt of the Nile Valley but an obscure little town in the southwestern desert of ancient Arabia called Mizraim, or Misr in Hebrew and Arabic. "The Exodus took place in a much humbler way and on a much narrower scale in an obscure little village in ancient South Arabia," Ezzat writes.
Prof. Breasted writes the Egyptians possessed a standard of morals far superior to that of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) over a thousand years before the Decalogue was written. So Ezzat is not making this stuff up. Breasted is one of the most respected historians ever. And Ezzat's insistence that much of the material in the OT is fabricated, distorted and plagiarized is true. For instance, the wisdom of Amenemope, preserved in an Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, was translated into Hebrew in ancient times and, circulating in Palestine, was the source for a whole section of the OT Book of Proverbs.
Jews lie. They always have, and they always will.