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.
Of course not, it was 1539. Right when Apepi's dynasty collapsed.
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.
I'll follow up, thanks. Copyright 1985, 1987 PDF edition. TOC looks better than Ezzat's. But most lists of 100 etymology "matches" I review are 90% false and 10% useless.
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.
Not really. There are similarities that both Egypt and Israel took from Hammurabi; but the best expression of Egyptian standards resembling the decalogue occurs in a Book of the Dead of Hatshepsut ca. 1475 BC, after the decalogue is given in 1539 BC. The actual spell 125 is not very decaloguy either. If he fast-forwards the decalogue 1100 years, well then sure, but conservatives don't.
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.
Haven't heard. But since Paul quotes Epimenides and Aratus, sometimes with attribution, what would be wrong if it were true that Solomon quoted Amenemope without attribution? However, the argument that Amenemope is older is based on one "unquestionable" dating to the 21st dynasty conducted by Jaroslav Cerny, so I'm not going to make a ruling based on a single source, given that others place it much later. However, I do like prima facie the theory that Prov. 22:17 "yom af-atah" ("[this] day, even to thee") might be a corruption of "[Amen-]Em-Opet"*, so that might influence me to favor Egyptian priority. And what of it? 22:17 admits they are "words of the wise" and not necessarily Solomon's, just like 24:23, 30:1, 31:1. Plus, even if one is copying the other, in either direction the copyist is clearly reorganizing and modifying the material to his own purposes, so it's original wisdom in both passages. I'll keep that question open too, as it might be a good Bible study later.
I'm a Jesus guy. Jesus is King of the Jews but he never lied. If he says the Hebrew Scriptures cannot be broken and not even a serif will disappear from them, I believe it, not only because he's always proven himself, but because the Scriptures have passed every test I or anyone has ever thrown at them. I sought out the worst tests and regularly found they were just sour grapes created by people who don't care. I compared them to objections to the Talmud and Quran, and found that there were sour-grapes motives there too, and lack of seeking original culture or comparative religion. But I came to find out that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures have passed every test of historical authenticity, predictive verification, and moral purity, and the Talmud and Quran, while beautiful and uplifting, don't pass every test. So Jesus is vindicated for me every day I test him. This means I am free to consider the most outrageous blasphemies against him because he's defeated every one of them I've ever considered and because if even one of them stuck I'd need to change my views to acknowledge the full truth. I pursue truth wherever it leads, and, if Jesus were wrong when he said Moses was a great lawgiver and that he himself called Moses down from heaven to talk to him in AD 32, when he said that Abraham was feasting in glory and was still alive to God, I'd accept the truth about it. But funny thing, he always looks and speaks better than every whiner who complains that Jesus didn't know what he was talking about. It's only because of Jesus that I know that all mere men are liars, and he's the only source I have for finding the real truth. I have nothing to fear from learning more. It's only salesmen who talk big and deliver little who have things to fear from the truth.
xv: "As a newcomer to the field of Semitic and Biblical studies, I was guided in the initial stages of my research by two colleagues."
1: "I freely acknowledge that my discovery must remain theoretical until confirmed by archaeological investigation .... Of course, in breaking new ground it is likely that I have committed a number of errors, which hostile critics may seize upon in an effort to discredit my conclusions. I sincerely doubt, however, that such errors are likely to be of such magnitude or substance that they will alter my case."
3: "My argument rests almost entirely upon the assumption that the Hebrew Bible has been consistently mistranslated."
6: "I look forward to the day when archaeologists will excavate some of the sites I mention and hopefully provide further evidence that the true land of the Hebrew Bible is West Arabia, not Palestine."
7: "Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide .... All the co-ordinates of the places involved, as described in the Hebrew Bible, were also traceable there — a fact of the first importance, as these co-ordinates have never really been identified in the countries hitherto believed to have been the lands of the Bible. Moreover, I could not find such a concentration of Biblical place-names, usually in their original Hebrew form, in any other part of the Near East."
9: "‘Jegar-sahadutha’ (Aramaic ygr shdwt’) ... ‘Galeed’ (Hebrew gl‘d) and ‘Mizpah’ (Hebrew h-msph) .... All three names are
still carried today by three little-known villages in the same
vicinity on the maritime slopes of Asir, in the region of Rijal
Alma‘ (Rigal Alma‘), west of Abha (Abha). Their names are:
Far‘at Al Shahda (’I shd’), meaning ‘god is the witness’ or ‘god
of the witness’, the Arabic pr‘t or pr‘h denoting a mound or
hill, equivalent in meaning to the Aramaic ygr; al-Ja‘d (’l-g‘d),
which is an Arabicised metathesis of gl‘d; and al-Madhaf (mdp; cf. msph)."
14: "The battle of Carchemish ... took place near Taif, in the southern Hijaz, where two neighbouring villages, Qarr (qr) and Qamashah (qms), still stand. Thus, I would maintain, the Biblical ‘Carchemish’ is certainly not the Hittite Kargamesa, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, as is traditionally believed."
23: "In [Beersheba] whose name features prominently in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis, and whose origins must therefore go back at least to the late Bronze Age, archaeological excavation has revealed on the exact site materials dating from no earlier than the late Roman period."
26: "Ideally, the full text of the Hebrew Bible must be so analysed, but this involves work for more than one lifetime."
26: "The fact that the Hebrew Bible relates the history of the ancient Israelites in West Arabia does not mean that Judaism had no base in Palestine in Biblical times. It did .... There are clear Biblical hints regarding the growth of a strong Jewish community in Palestine, starting perhaps in the tenth century B.C. ... The reconstruction of the early Jewish history in Palestine is not possible from these texts, nor indeed from any other records so far available."
51: "Kraeling, p. 80 ...: In late Roman times there was a district Geraritike, evidently so named because it was composed primarily of the old Gerar territory."
53-54: "The site of the Biblical Gerar in Palestine has not yet been satisfactorily identified, and no place there continues to carry anything resembling this name."
54: "Msrym denotes any of several locations in West Arabia, including the village of Misramah ... or that of Masr."
55: "Strabo reports ... Gallus reached a place called the ‘Seven Wells’ .... Philby noted the existence of Shaba‘ah."
60: "There is no Gerar near Gaza, in Palestine. Among several which are found in Asir, however, one (al-Qararah) is the Gerar of Genesis 20 and 26 and 2 Chronicles 14, and another (any of four called Ghurar, al-Jarar, Ghirar or al-Qararah) is that of Genesis 10."
WP: "Tel Haror is generally accepted as the site of ancient Gerar. Nevertheless, some other places in the vicinity, between Gaza and Beersheba, have also been suggested."
63: "In the field of Biblical archaeology and its related discipline, palaeography, there is ample opportunity not only for error, but for perpetuating it almost indefinitely."
64: "It is wrong to draw historical conclusions on the basis of inconclusive archaeological evidence."
68-69: "The ‘Moabite Stone’ (the name itself is a misnomer) was set up in Qarhoh (qrhh) by Mesha, king of Moab (ms‘ mlk m’b) - so the inscription on it says .... The Qarhoh in question is apparently the present-day Jahra (ghr), in the area where the stone was found."
WP: "The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, .... was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868."
69: "Mesha describes himself in the inscription as not only king of Moab, but also as a dybny, i.e., as a native of dybn. Dibyan (dbyn) today is also a village in Wadi Adam, not far from Umm al-Yab. So far, readers of the ‘Moabite Stone’ have assumed that dybn is the present village of Dhiban (dbn), in Transjordan, north of where the stone was found. I would suggest, however, that this Dhiban was called after the old Dibyan of the Hijaz after Mesha and his followers arrived to settle there."
72: "The Amarna place-names only make a collective fit in
West Arabia. The interested reader may care to examine a table of thirty such names, identified one by one by location."
76: "By now, I hope the reader is willing to concede that there may be sufficient evidence to justify at least a reassessment of the hitherto universally held belief that the events described in the Hebrew Bible relate mainly to Palestine. My next task is to establish the Arabian setting of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, hoping to convince the reader further .... I intend ... to show how this Tihamah is actually the Tehom mentioned in more than thirty passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible."
WP: "Tihamah is the Red Sea coastal plain of the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Bab el Mandeb. Tihāmat is the Proto-Semitic language's term for 'sea'. Tiamat was the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea and of chaos. The word appears in masculine form in the Hebrew Bible as təhōm (Genesis 1:2), meaning 'primordial ocean, abyss'."
76-77: "Hayam (hym) ... denotes porous, sandy soil unable to retain water, that is to say soil which remains ‘thirsty’ .... In Arabic, the name of the West Arabian coastal desert should have been Hayam. Its actual name, Tihamah, is a survival of the Biblical Tehom (thwm)."
77-78: "Tehom makes the best sense, wherever it occurs in the canonical Hebrew Bible, as the old Semitic name for the West Arabian coastlands which are called today Tihamah."
78: "The mistranslation here is that of the Revised Standard Version, hereafter RSV .... 1 He will bless you (ybrkk) with the blessings of heaven above (brkt smym m-'l), blessings of the deep that couches beneath (brkt thwm rbst tht), blessings of the breasts and the womb (brkt sdym w-rhm) (Genesis 49:25b). 2 Blessed by the Lord (or by Yahweh) be his land (mbrkt yhwh ’rsw), with the choicest gifts of heaven above (m-mgd smym m-‘l), and the deep that couches beneath (m-thwm rbst tht) (Deuteronomy 33:13b)."
79: "One finds that they actually involve not ‘blessings’, but definitions of the territory or territorial claim of this tribe: 1 He shall settle you (ybrkk) in the Rakkah of Samayin from above (b-rkt smym m-‘l), in the Rakkah of the Tihamah of Rabidah below (b-rkt thwm rbst tht), in the Rakkah of Thadyayn and Rahm (b-rkt sdym w-rhm). 2 From Barakah shall be his land (m-brkt yhwh ’rsw), from the Miqaddah of Samayin (m-mgd smym); from the ridge (m-tl); and from the Tihamah of Rabidah below (w-m-thwm rbst tht) .... I concede there could be a play on words in each of these two definitions of the territory of the Joseph tribe .... In the two passages just cited, the Hebrew ybrkk (see note 8) can mean both ‘he shall settle you’, and ‘he shall bless you’."
80: "Yet the fact remains that the two ‘blessings’ of the Joseph tribe, in Genesis and Deuteronomy, do cite place-names, and hence yield a sense that is concrete. Whatever figurative sense might have been intended by punning, it must be regarded as being of secondary importance, if any."
86: "The event is reported in the standard translations as follows: The waters coming down from above (m-l-m‘lh) stood and rose up in a heap far off (nd ’hd h-rhq m ’d) at Adam (’dm), the city that is beside Zarethan (srtn), and those flowing down toward the sea of the Arabah (‘l ym ‘rbh), the Salt Sea (ym h-mlh), were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Jericho (yryhw) (RSV)."
87: "Joshua 3:16 must be retranslated as follows: The waters coming down from al-Ma‘lah stood, they rose up in one dam extending from Wadd, at Adam, the city that is beside Raznah, and those flowing down west of Ghurabah, west o f al-Milhah, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Rakhyah."
92: "Msrym ... is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to Egypt, as commonly assumed. Where it does not refer to Misramah near Abha (see Chapters 4 and 13), it refers to Masr, in Wadi Bishah, or to Madrum (mdrm), in the Ghamid highlands (see Chapter 14). The Biblical ‘Pharaoh’ (pr‘h), as will be suggested later, was not the ruler of Egypt, but a West Arabian god."
93: "Certainly, a ‘Pharaoh’ tribe, called the Far‘a (pr'), is still
to be found in Wadi Bishah today, carrying the name of the
ancient god or chiefs of the region."
95: "The Jordan (also h-yrdn) where Naaman of Aram ‘dipped himself seven times’ .... could only have been a stream or pool of water. In this case, the term yrdn derives from the same Semitic root yrd."
98: "In Arabic, whd yields the substantives wahd (whd) and wahdah (whdh, with the feminine suffix), meaning an ‘area of flat, low-lying land; ravine’, while the Biblical yhwdh, from yhd, must have been an ancient Semitic topographical term carrying more or less the same meaning."
100: "Pashhur (pshwr) ... is today clearly the oasis of al-Harshaf (hrsp), in Wadi Habuna, north of Wadi Najran."
108: "Altogether, of the 130 recognised place-names in the Ezra-Nehemiah lists, which I have correlated with those West Arabian villages cited above, the identification of only a few remains uncertain. What is perhaps even more important, however, is that no more than a handful of names have been identified with locations in Palestine (in Simons, only ten) .... The onomastic proof is so overwhelming that it seems hardly to warrant archaeological substantiation."
That's about halfway through so I'll leave it there for now as a quote list without significant analysis. You might guess my first impressions from my selections. However, my first note is that you're moving from an Egyptian apologist to an Arabian apologist (if you use too many sources partial to Islam you might get suspected of Islam; you're on the most skeptical site on the internet, doubt it). My second note is, as before, that Salibi is quite the literalist, upholding the existence of all the Biblical peoples, just putting them in Asir in Arabia; so it's hardly compatible to use him as evidence that Abraham and Moses didn't exist. It appears you've shifted the goalpost from your initial implication, "Did Abraham or Moses ever exist? perhaps they're all made up for the story", or from your rather contradictory acceptance of both positions, "Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen .... [AI:] There is no proof of [Abraham and Moses] existence outside of the Bible." If your purpose is to debunk Judaism (and perhaps Christianity) by saying it was all Arabian, that doesn't debunk any miracle or claim other than geography, which is not relevant except for some Zionists. So I'm still unsure of your endgame. But still skimming the text.
That's about halfway through so I'll leave it there
I'm not sure why you're doing this, but, you're welcome to finish it whenever you feel like.
If your purpose is to debunk Judaism (and perhaps Christianity)
I'm not trying to debunk anything. I'm just stating a fact; there is no direct archaeological or written evidence outside the Bible that confirms the existence of Abraham and Moses.
Abraham: No direct archaeological proof of his existence has been found, although some scholars suggest that an Abraham-like figure might have existed around 1800 B.C.E. If we are to hypothetically say Abraham existed, then Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. But he was a monotheist, a Muslim. So this is what Muhammad is saying. A Muslim is someone who believes in God as the only true God. And that includes Jews and Christians.
Moses: No texts or artifacts in Egypt or the Sinai have been found that directly connect to Moses.
I wanted to link Carol Meyer's interview, but looks like it has been scrubbed. Anything that people might find believable and that is contrary to the establishment's narrative is being pulled off in no time at all. Same goes for the program "Bible's Buried Secrets", no longer streamable: "(This program is no longer available for online streaming.)". However, the landmark two-hour special NOVA's scientific journey titled "The Bible's Buried Secrets. An archeological detective story traces the origins of the Hebrew Bible" is still available for viewing on YouTube.
Preston, you're on the Conspiracies forum and you're citing PBS and Nova as if they're "contrary to the establishment's narrative". That's self-unaware. You're also upholding Islam, which makes all your contributions suspect due to taqiyya. But I find that taqiyya is sufficiently countered by extra transparency because people learn that they can be free to share the truth without feeling pressured by policy to uphold a single narrative.
"Muslim" now applies to a man of peace but was not used as a personal title that far back. You don't get to say Abraham and Jews and Christians are Muslims unless you use all the titles the same way. "Jew" means man of praise, "Christian" means man of anointing, and Abraham was all of those metaphorically and none of those titularly. If you don't see the word "Abraham", you sure don't see the word "Muslim".
Plus, it's illogical to appeal to Muhammad, who believed in Abraham, and then to argue that Abraham was a mere hypothetical. Yes, we accept that monotheist nomads don't leave memorials. The evidence for Abraham is (1) the chain of tradition by which the Bible came to us, (2) the fact that the Bible is reliable on every point on which it is testable, (3) the fact that the Bible's testimony is consistent with the early period and not with a later. Now, despite the validity of the first two evidences, some people quibble on the third, ignoring the Bible's chronology (Abraham 2044-1869) and pushing him later than the Sesostris period in which rich Semites from Canaan regularly got rewards and negotiations from the Egyptian pharaoh. Do you believe in the existence of Abisha the Hyksos? He visited a pharaoh of this period, 20th century, 12th dynasty, in exactly the same way Abraham did. It's possible he was Abraham in a later visit than those recorded in Scripture; his name is cognate. Egyptologists grant the provisional existence of people on much less evidence than that, but certain people raise a red flag anytime it means admitting that the Bible is a good historical record, because they think it'll mean they have to come to grips with the Bible's moral demands. If you actually uphold Islam you shouldn't use secularism to rail against Judaism and Christianity when the same is opposed to Islam the same way.
I told you Manetho mentions the name Moses. I told you that his name is the same as the root of Kamose and Ahmose, with whom he was contemporary (also another Ahmose, the mathematician), and with Ramose, the name of the city he lived in. I linked you all kinds of contemporary evidence that came up in a search of just one or two days. And you come back with establishment denunciation as if there's no robust Biblical archaeology community debunking all of it.
If you're a Muslim, there's nothing to argue about the existence of Abraham and Moses; in that case you're either betraying Islam by questioning them as if the questioning tears down your opponents, or you're practicing taqiyya and hoping your duplicity isn't caught, which would also betray Islam. If you're not a Muslim, you are running so many contrary stories at once that your position doesn't have any logical weight. (Sources for no Abraham, sources for a robust Abraham but in Arabia only; citing the Bible when convenient and rejecting it when convenient; citing the Bible for the character of Abraham but rejecting its dating of Abraham; etc.) So I'm not sure what benefit there is in continuing. The point of my quoting your book source is to have a large number of salient quotes for analysis, because it's quite an intriguing etymological study; but, without my stating a conclusion on the evidence, it still belies you because it totally argues for the existence of Abraham and Moses in every detail except traditional geography.
So, here's my one conclusion. It appears you are not someone interested in pursuing the truth at all costs, but only in popularizing narratives that advance a reactionary agenda (denigration of Christianity, also Judaism) whether or not they are the truth. Only one reality happened, and we have sufficient evidence to know the broad strokes of that reality, such as that Jesus rose from the dead and had a message and gift for us. Do you want to know the truth at cost of everything else, or do you think there is something more valuable than truth (in which case that something may be untrue and be deceiving you all along)?
you're citing PBS and Nova as if they're "contrary to the establishment's narrative"
🤔.... I didn't think you would have any issues with PBS and Nova. Okay, feel free to take it apart.
You're also upholding Islam
I'm not sure what gave you that impression, but if I'd agree with you then we'd both be wrong.
I told you Manetho mentions the name Moses
I'm sure you're aware none of Manetho’s original texts have survived; they are lost literary works, known only from fragments transmitted by later authors. What I said, the historical context of Moses in the Bible is that he is considered a legendary figure, although some scholars believe that a Moses-like person may have existed in the southern Transjordan in the mid-to-late 13th century BCE.
you are running so many contrary stories at once
What? I'm not running any stories. I'm just stating the facts, no contemporary Egyptian sources mention Moses or the events of the Exodus, and no archaeological evidence has been found in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure. The institution of the law in ancient Israel has turned up nothing. The assumption that Moses is the founder of a nation is sorely lacking in evidence. Ancient records are silent about Moses inscriptions. Seals and other texts from ancient Israel and Judah never mention Moses or any of the other Israelite patriarchs. Records from the Babylonian and Persian periods say nothing, the ancient coinage from the province of Judah/Judaea says nothing. The Elephantine Papyri from the Persian era Judeans and Israelites in Egypt show zero awareness of Moses and the Torah. The same goes for the Hermopolis Aramaic letters, Papyrus Amherst 63, the Padua Aramaic papyri and so on.
It appears you are not someone interested in pursuing the truth at all costs, but only in popularizing narratives that advance a reactionary agenda (denigration of Christianity, also Judaism)
Why? because I'm daring to suggest that Moses was not a historical individual? I realize that today it is daring to suggest that our stories about Moses developed as late as the Hellenistic period. The dating of the Hebrew Bible is a topic that remains unresolved. Many traditions and myths found among its pages are old indeed, but the text itself did not reach its final form until the Hellenistic period. If this claim is false it should not be hard to disprove. A single manuscript find could change everything, but I'm not holding my breath. Dr. Gad Barnea a historian at the University of Haifa, after examining every surviving Jewish document from the Persian period, recently stated that there is literally zero evidence for any knowledge of, and any familiarity with the Bible at that time. We may not know how far back the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Esther, Daniel and other Bible heroes go. All we can say is that no one seems to have written anything down about them until after Alexander the Great and his Empire introduced Greek literature philosophy and culture to the near East. So what about Moses? we mainly know of Moses from the books of the Pentateuch. The book of Deuteronomy is thought to tell the oldest version of his story with Exodus Leviticus and Numbers being later accretions. The story they tell is filled with improbable and fantastic elements not to mention historical anachronisms and internal contradictions that indicate a work of creative literature.
(Continuing:)
Of course not, it was 1539. Right when Apepi's dynasty collapsed.
I'll follow up, thanks. Copyright 1985, 1987 PDF edition. TOC looks better than Ezzat's. But most lists of 100 etymology "matches" I review are 90% false and 10% useless.
Not really. There are similarities that both Egypt and Israel took from Hammurabi; but the best expression of Egyptian standards resembling the decalogue occurs in a Book of the Dead of Hatshepsut ca. 1475 BC, after the decalogue is given in 1539 BC. The actual spell 125 is not very decaloguy either. If he fast-forwards the decalogue 1100 years, well then sure, but conservatives don't.
Haven't heard. But since Paul quotes Epimenides and Aratus, sometimes with attribution, what would be wrong if it were true that Solomon quoted Amenemope without attribution? However, the argument that Amenemope is older is based on one "unquestionable" dating to the 21st dynasty conducted by Jaroslav Cerny, so I'm not going to make a ruling based on a single source, given that others place it much later. However, I do like prima facie the theory that Prov. 22:17 "yom af-atah" ("[this] day, even to thee") might be a corruption of "[Amen-]Em-Opet"*, so that might influence me to favor Egyptian priority. And what of it? 22:17 admits they are "words of the wise" and not necessarily Solomon's, just like 24:23, 30:1, 31:1. Plus, even if one is copying the other, in either direction the copyist is clearly reorganizing and modifying the material to his own purposes, so it's original wisdom in both passages. I'll keep that question open too, as it might be a good Bible study later.
I'm a Jesus guy. Jesus is King of the Jews but he never lied. If he says the Hebrew Scriptures cannot be broken and not even a serif will disappear from them, I believe it, not only because he's always proven himself, but because the Scriptures have passed every test I or anyone has ever thrown at them. I sought out the worst tests and regularly found they were just sour grapes created by people who don't care. I compared them to objections to the Talmud and Quran, and found that there were sour-grapes motives there too, and lack of seeking original culture or comparative religion. But I came to find out that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures have passed every test of historical authenticity, predictive verification, and moral purity, and the Talmud and Quran, while beautiful and uplifting, don't pass every test. So Jesus is vindicated for me every day I test him. This means I am free to consider the most outrageous blasphemies against him because he's defeated every one of them I've ever considered and because if even one of them stuck I'd need to change my views to acknowledge the full truth. I pursue truth wherever it leads, and, if Jesus were wrong when he said Moses was a great lawgiver and that he himself called Moses down from heaven to talk to him in AD 32, when he said that Abraham was feasting in glory and was still alive to God, I'd accept the truth about it. But funny thing, he always looks and speaks better than every whiner who complains that Jesus didn't know what he was talking about. It's only because of Jesus that I know that all mere men are liars, and he's the only source I have for finding the real truth. I have nothing to fear from learning more. It's only salesmen who talk big and deliver little who have things to fear from the truth.
The Bible Came From Arabia, Kamal Salibi, 1985, 1987 ed.
xv: "As a newcomer to the field of Semitic and Biblical studies, I was guided in the initial stages of my research by two colleagues."
1: "I freely acknowledge that my discovery must remain theoretical until confirmed by archaeological investigation .... Of course, in breaking new ground it is likely that I have committed a number of errors, which hostile critics may seize upon in an effort to discredit my conclusions. I sincerely doubt, however, that such errors are likely to be of such magnitude or substance that they will alter my case."
3: "My argument rests almost entirely upon the assumption that the Hebrew Bible has been consistently mistranslated."
6: "I look forward to the day when archaeologists will excavate some of the sites I mention and hopefully provide further evidence that the true land of the Hebrew Bible is West Arabia, not Palestine."
7: "Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide .... All the co-ordinates of the places involved, as described in the Hebrew Bible, were also traceable there — a fact of the first importance, as these co-ordinates have never really been identified in the countries hitherto believed to have been the lands of the Bible. Moreover, I could not find such a concentration of Biblical place-names, usually in their original Hebrew form, in any other part of the Near East."
9: "‘Jegar-sahadutha’ (Aramaic ygr shdwt’) ... ‘Galeed’ (Hebrew gl‘d) and ‘Mizpah’ (Hebrew h-msph) .... All three names are still carried today by three little-known villages in the same vicinity on the maritime slopes of Asir, in the region of Rijal Alma‘ (Rigal Alma‘), west of Abha (Abha). Their names are: Far‘at Al Shahda (’I shd’), meaning ‘god is the witness’ or ‘god of the witness’, the Arabic pr‘t or pr‘h denoting a mound or hill, equivalent in meaning to the Aramaic ygr; al-Ja‘d (’l-g‘d), which is an Arabicised metathesis of gl‘d; and al-Madhaf (mdp; cf. msph)."
14: "The battle of Carchemish ... took place near Taif, in the southern Hijaz, where two neighbouring villages, Qarr (qr) and Qamashah (qms), still stand. Thus, I would maintain, the Biblical ‘Carchemish’ is certainly not the Hittite Kargamesa, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, as is traditionally believed."
23: "In [Beersheba] whose name features prominently in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis, and whose origins must therefore go back at least to the late Bronze Age, archaeological excavation has revealed on the exact site materials dating from no earlier than the late Roman period."
26: "Ideally, the full text of the Hebrew Bible must be so analysed, but this involves work for more than one lifetime."
26: "The fact that the Hebrew Bible relates the history of the ancient Israelites in West Arabia does not mean that Judaism had no base in Palestine in Biblical times. It did .... There are clear Biblical hints regarding the growth of a strong Jewish community in Palestine, starting perhaps in the tenth century B.C. ... The reconstruction of the early Jewish history in Palestine is not possible from these texts, nor indeed from any other records so far available."
51: "Kraeling, p. 80 ...: In late Roman times there was a district Geraritike, evidently so named because it was composed primarily of the old Gerar territory."
53-54: "The site of the Biblical Gerar in Palestine has not yet been satisfactorily identified, and no place there continues to carry anything resembling this name."
54: "Msrym denotes any of several locations in West Arabia, including the village of Misramah ... or that of Masr."
55: "Strabo reports ... Gallus reached a place called the ‘Seven Wells’ .... Philby noted the existence of Shaba‘ah."
60: "There is no Gerar near Gaza, in Palestine. Among several which are found in Asir, however, one (al-Qararah) is the Gerar of Genesis 20 and 26 and 2 Chronicles 14, and another (any of four called Ghurar, al-Jarar, Ghirar or al-Qararah) is that of Genesis 10."
WP: "Tel Haror is generally accepted as the site of ancient Gerar. Nevertheless, some other places in the vicinity, between Gaza and Beersheba, have also been suggested."
63: "In the field of Biblical archaeology and its related discipline, palaeography, there is ample opportunity not only for error, but for perpetuating it almost indefinitely."
64: "It is wrong to draw historical conclusions on the basis of inconclusive archaeological evidence."
68-69: "The ‘Moabite Stone’ (the name itself is a misnomer) was set up in Qarhoh (qrhh) by Mesha, king of Moab (ms‘ mlk m’b) - so the inscription on it says .... The Qarhoh in question is apparently the present-day Jahra (ghr), in the area where the stone was found."
WP: "The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, .... was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868."
69: "Mesha describes himself in the inscription as not only king of Moab, but also as a dybny, i.e., as a native of dybn. Dibyan (dbyn) today is also a village in Wadi Adam, not far from Umm al-Yab. So far, readers of the ‘Moabite Stone’ have assumed that dybn is the present village of Dhiban (dbn), in Transjordan, north of where the stone was found. I would suggest, however, that this Dhiban was called after the old Dibyan of the Hijaz after Mesha and his followers arrived to settle there."
72: "The Amarna place-names only make a collective fit in West Arabia. The interested reader may care to examine a table of thirty such names, identified one by one by location."
76: "By now, I hope the reader is willing to concede that there may be sufficient evidence to justify at least a reassessment of the hitherto universally held belief that the events described in the Hebrew Bible relate mainly to Palestine. My next task is to establish the Arabian setting of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, hoping to convince the reader further .... I intend ... to show how this Tihamah is actually the Tehom mentioned in more than thirty passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible."
WP: "Tihamah is the Red Sea coastal plain of the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Bab el Mandeb. Tihāmat is the Proto-Semitic language's term for 'sea'. Tiamat was the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea and of chaos. The word appears in masculine form in the Hebrew Bible as təhōm (Genesis 1:2), meaning 'primordial ocean, abyss'."
76-77: "Hayam (hym) ... denotes porous, sandy soil unable to retain water, that is to say soil which remains ‘thirsty’ .... In Arabic, the name of the West Arabian coastal desert should have been Hayam. Its actual name, Tihamah, is a survival of the Biblical Tehom (thwm)."
77-78: "Tehom makes the best sense, wherever it occurs in the canonical Hebrew Bible, as the old Semitic name for the West Arabian coastlands which are called today Tihamah."
78: "The mistranslation here is that of the Revised Standard Version, hereafter RSV .... 1 He will bless you (ybrkk) with the blessings of heaven above (brkt smym m-'l), blessings of the deep that couches beneath (brkt thwm rbst tht), blessings of the breasts and the womb (brkt sdym w-rhm) (Genesis 49:25b). 2 Blessed by the Lord (or by Yahweh) be his land (mbrkt yhwh ’rsw), with the choicest gifts of heaven above (m-mgd smym m-‘l), and the deep that couches beneath (m-thwm rbst tht) (Deuteronomy 33:13b)."
79: "One finds that they actually involve not ‘blessings’, but definitions of the territory or territorial claim of this tribe: 1 He shall settle you (ybrkk) in the Rakkah of Samayin from above (b-rkt smym m-‘l), in the Rakkah of the Tihamah of Rabidah below (b-rkt thwm rbst tht), in the Rakkah of Thadyayn and Rahm (b-rkt sdym w-rhm). 2 From Barakah shall be his land (m-brkt yhwh ’rsw), from the Miqaddah of Samayin (m-mgd smym); from the ridge (m-tl); and from the Tihamah of Rabidah below (w-m-thwm rbst tht) .... I concede there could be a play on words in each of these two definitions of the territory of the Joseph tribe .... In the two passages just cited, the Hebrew ybrkk (see note 8) can mean both ‘he shall settle you’, and ‘he shall bless you’."
80: "Yet the fact remains that the two ‘blessings’ of the Joseph tribe, in Genesis and Deuteronomy, do cite place-names, and hence yield a sense that is concrete. Whatever figurative sense might have been intended by punning, it must be regarded as being of secondary importance, if any."
86: "The event is reported in the standard translations as follows: The waters coming down from above (m-l-m‘lh) stood and rose up in a heap far off (nd ’hd h-rhq m ’d) at Adam (’dm), the city that is beside Zarethan (srtn), and those flowing down toward the sea of the Arabah (‘l ym ‘rbh), the Salt Sea (ym h-mlh), were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Jericho (yryhw) (RSV)."
87: "Joshua 3:16 must be retranslated as follows: The waters coming down from al-Ma‘lah stood, they rose up in one dam extending from Wadd, at Adam, the city that is beside Raznah, and those flowing down west of Ghurabah, west o f al-Milhah, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Rakhyah."
92: "Msrym ... is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to Egypt, as commonly assumed. Where it does not refer to Misramah near Abha (see Chapters 4 and 13), it refers to Masr, in Wadi Bishah, or to Madrum (mdrm), in the Ghamid highlands (see Chapter 14). The Biblical ‘Pharaoh’ (pr‘h), as will be suggested later, was not the ruler of Egypt, but a West Arabian god."
93: "Certainly, a ‘Pharaoh’ tribe, called the Far‘a (pr'), is still to be found in Wadi Bishah today, carrying the name of the ancient god or chiefs of the region."
95: "The Jordan (also h-yrdn) where Naaman of Aram ‘dipped himself seven times’ .... could only have been a stream or pool of water. In this case, the term yrdn derives from the same Semitic root yrd."
98: "In Arabic, whd yields the substantives wahd (whd) and wahdah (whdh, with the feminine suffix), meaning an ‘area of flat, low-lying land; ravine’, while the Biblical yhwdh, from yhd, must have been an ancient Semitic topographical term carrying more or less the same meaning."
100: "Pashhur (pshwr) ... is today clearly the oasis of al-Harshaf (hrsp), in Wadi Habuna, north of Wadi Najran."
108: "Altogether, of the 130 recognised place-names in the Ezra-Nehemiah lists, which I have correlated with those West Arabian villages cited above, the identification of only a few remains uncertain. What is perhaps even more important, however, is that no more than a handful of names have been identified with locations in Palestine (in Simons, only ten) .... The onomastic proof is so overwhelming that it seems hardly to warrant archaeological substantiation."
That's about halfway through so I'll leave it there for now as a quote list without significant analysis. You might guess my first impressions from my selections. However, my first note is that you're moving from an Egyptian apologist to an Arabian apologist (if you use too many sources partial to Islam you might get suspected of Islam; you're on the most skeptical site on the internet, doubt it). My second note is, as before, that Salibi is quite the literalist, upholding the existence of all the Biblical peoples, just putting them in Asir in Arabia; so it's hardly compatible to use him as evidence that Abraham and Moses didn't exist. It appears you've shifted the goalpost from your initial implication, "Did Abraham or Moses ever exist? perhaps they're all made up for the story", or from your rather contradictory acceptance of both positions, "Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen .... [AI:] There is no proof of [Abraham and Moses] existence outside of the Bible." If your purpose is to debunk Judaism (and perhaps Christianity) by saying it was all Arabian, that doesn't debunk any miracle or claim other than geography, which is not relevant except for some Zionists. So I'm still unsure of your endgame. But still skimming the text.
u/PrestonHart3rd
I'm not sure why you're doing this, but, you're welcome to finish it whenever you feel like.
I'm not trying to debunk anything. I'm just stating a fact; there is no direct archaeological or written evidence outside the Bible that confirms the existence of Abraham and Moses.
I wanted to link Carol Meyer's interview, but looks like it has been scrubbed. Anything that people might find believable and that is contrary to the establishment's narrative is being pulled off in no time at all. Same goes for the program "Bible's Buried Secrets", no longer streamable: "(This program is no longer available for online streaming.)". However, the landmark two-hour special NOVA's scientific journey titled "The Bible's Buried Secrets. An archeological detective story traces the origins of the Hebrew Bible" is still available for viewing on YouTube.
Preston, you're on the Conspiracies forum and you're citing PBS and Nova as if they're "contrary to the establishment's narrative". That's self-unaware. You're also upholding Islam, which makes all your contributions suspect due to taqiyya. But I find that taqiyya is sufficiently countered by extra transparency because people learn that they can be free to share the truth without feeling pressured by policy to uphold a single narrative.
"Muslim" now applies to a man of peace but was not used as a personal title that far back. You don't get to say Abraham and Jews and Christians are Muslims unless you use all the titles the same way. "Jew" means man of praise, "Christian" means man of anointing, and Abraham was all of those metaphorically and none of those titularly. If you don't see the word "Abraham", you sure don't see the word "Muslim".
Plus, it's illogical to appeal to Muhammad, who believed in Abraham, and then to argue that Abraham was a mere hypothetical. Yes, we accept that monotheist nomads don't leave memorials. The evidence for Abraham is (1) the chain of tradition by which the Bible came to us, (2) the fact that the Bible is reliable on every point on which it is testable, (3) the fact that the Bible's testimony is consistent with the early period and not with a later. Now, despite the validity of the first two evidences, some people quibble on the third, ignoring the Bible's chronology (Abraham 2044-1869) and pushing him later than the Sesostris period in which rich Semites from Canaan regularly got rewards and negotiations from the Egyptian pharaoh. Do you believe in the existence of Abisha the Hyksos? He visited a pharaoh of this period, 20th century, 12th dynasty, in exactly the same way Abraham did. It's possible he was Abraham in a later visit than those recorded in Scripture; his name is cognate. Egyptologists grant the provisional existence of people on much less evidence than that, but certain people raise a red flag anytime it means admitting that the Bible is a good historical record, because they think it'll mean they have to come to grips with the Bible's moral demands. If you actually uphold Islam you shouldn't use secularism to rail against Judaism and Christianity when the same is opposed to Islam the same way.
I told you Manetho mentions the name Moses. I told you that his name is the same as the root of Kamose and Ahmose, with whom he was contemporary (also another Ahmose, the mathematician), and with Ramose, the name of the city he lived in. I linked you all kinds of contemporary evidence that came up in a search of just one or two days. And you come back with establishment denunciation as if there's no robust Biblical archaeology community debunking all of it.
If you're a Muslim, there's nothing to argue about the existence of Abraham and Moses; in that case you're either betraying Islam by questioning them as if the questioning tears down your opponents, or you're practicing taqiyya and hoping your duplicity isn't caught, which would also betray Islam. If you're not a Muslim, you are running so many contrary stories at once that your position doesn't have any logical weight. (Sources for no Abraham, sources for a robust Abraham but in Arabia only; citing the Bible when convenient and rejecting it when convenient; citing the Bible for the character of Abraham but rejecting its dating of Abraham; etc.) So I'm not sure what benefit there is in continuing. The point of my quoting your book source is to have a large number of salient quotes for analysis, because it's quite an intriguing etymological study; but, without my stating a conclusion on the evidence, it still belies you because it totally argues for the existence of Abraham and Moses in every detail except traditional geography.
So, here's my one conclusion. It appears you are not someone interested in pursuing the truth at all costs, but only in popularizing narratives that advance a reactionary agenda (denigration of Christianity, also Judaism) whether or not they are the truth. Only one reality happened, and we have sufficient evidence to know the broad strokes of that reality, such as that Jesus rose from the dead and had a message and gift for us. Do you want to know the truth at cost of everything else, or do you think there is something more valuable than truth (in which case that something may be untrue and be deceiving you all along)?
🤔.... I didn't think you would have any issues with PBS and Nova. Okay, feel free to take it apart.
I'm not sure what gave you that impression, but if I'd agree with you then we'd both be wrong.
I'm sure you're aware none of Manetho’s original texts have survived; they are lost literary works, known only from fragments transmitted by later authors. What I said, the historical context of Moses in the Bible is that he is considered a legendary figure, although some scholars believe that a Moses-like person may have existed in the southern Transjordan in the mid-to-late 13th century BCE.
What? I'm not running any stories. I'm just stating the facts, no contemporary Egyptian sources mention Moses or the events of the Exodus, and no archaeological evidence has been found in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure. The institution of the law in ancient Israel has turned up nothing. The assumption that Moses is the founder of a nation is sorely lacking in evidence. Ancient records are silent about Moses inscriptions. Seals and other texts from ancient Israel and Judah never mention Moses or any of the other Israelite patriarchs. Records from the Babylonian and Persian periods say nothing, the ancient coinage from the province of Judah/Judaea says nothing. The Elephantine Papyri from the Persian era Judeans and Israelites in Egypt show zero awareness of Moses and the Torah. The same goes for the Hermopolis Aramaic letters, Papyrus Amherst 63, the Padua Aramaic papyri and so on.
Why? because I'm daring to suggest that Moses was not a historical individual? I realize that today it is daring to suggest that our stories about Moses developed as late as the Hellenistic period. The dating of the Hebrew Bible is a topic that remains unresolved. Many traditions and myths found among its pages are old indeed, but the text itself did not reach its final form until the Hellenistic period. If this claim is false it should not be hard to disprove. A single manuscript find could change everything, but I'm not holding my breath. Dr. Gad Barnea a historian at the University of Haifa, after examining every surviving Jewish document from the Persian period, recently stated that there is literally zero evidence for any knowledge of, and any familiarity with the Bible at that time. We may not know how far back the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Esther, Daniel and other Bible heroes go. All we can say is that no one seems to have written anything down about them until after Alexander the Great and his Empire introduced Greek literature philosophy and culture to the near East. So what about Moses? we mainly know of Moses from the books of the Pentateuch. The book of Deuteronomy is thought to tell the oldest version of his story with Exodus Leviticus and Numbers being later accretions. The story they tell is filled with improbable and fantastic elements not to mention historical anachronisms and internal contradictions that indicate a work of creative literature.