Date 07-01-2009
GMTime 04:50:49
Truth
You cannot be slave of both God and Money.Jesus on wealth, Matthew 6:24
Exodus: Christian Apologetic 1
Two million Israelites did not cross the Sinai on their way out of Egypt, despite the biblical implication as to this number (Ex 12:37).Hershel Shanks, Editor, BAR
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 16 May 2002
Abstract
Christianity Today
The period of the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, or judges as devised by the writers of scriptures… never existed.Robert Coote, San Francisco Theological Seminary
Most Jews and Christians cannot accept that the exodus, as related in the bible, is not actually historical. Thy have been led to believe that the bible is God’s word, and even those who do not regard it as infallible, consider it is essentially true in all major particulars.
Kevin D Miller writes in a 1998 cover story for Christianity Today magazine of “a new breed of radical scholars who would turn Moses as well as Abraham, Joseph and even King David into legends and myths by the stroke of their pens.” Here is a Christain author lying as usual. He wants to imply that this “new breed” are being arbitrary, perhaps because that is all Christians themselves can be, but these scholars, unlike most biblicists, make use of evidence not merely fancy given special kudos for being called faith. Miller calls these discoveries “far-out” and “pronouncements” and declares them “a matter of no small concern to believing Jews and Christians.”
Yet Miller immediately has to admit that answering the “new breed” is not easy because “not one shred of direct archaeological evidence has been found for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 400-plus years the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt, or their miraculous exodus from slavery.” Inscriptions from ancient Egypt contain no mention of Hebrew slaves, of the plagues that the bible says preceded their release, or of the destruction of the pharaoh’s army during the Israelites’ miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. No physical trace has been found of the Israelites’ 40-year nomadic sojourn in the Sinai wilderness. There is not even any indication, outside of the bible, that Moses existed.
Christianity Today even admits that for half a century Christian Sunday School teachers have been telling lies to their charges because Kathleen Kenyon, the noted archaeologists who excavated Jericho found no evidence for the truth of the stories in Joshua but Sunday School teachers have been teaching the opposite. Is Miller a new breed of honest Christian? No chance!
Miller finds that there are “scholars” with another story. And what story is that? The story in the bible! So, who are these scholars? Er, Christian and Jewish believers! Miller specifies Kenneth Kitchen retired from Liverpool and James Hoffmeier of Wheaton College in Illinois, plus an unspecified “handful” of others. These Christian “scholars” argue that absence of evidence is no reason to think that the exodus did not happen.
Apologists, like Jeffrey L Sheler, in a book, Is the Bible True? exerpted on the web, say things like:
The absence of direct evidence of an Israelite sojourn in Egypt is not as surprising, or as damaging to the bible’s credibility, as it first might seem. What type of material evidence, after all, would one expect to find that could corroborate the biblical story?
The honest historian would answer: “A lot!” Sheler answers with quotations from several biblicist professors. He reports university of Arizona archaeologist, William Dever, as saying:
Slaves, serfs, and nomads leave few traces in the archaeological record.
If this is truely said by Dever, nothing could be more stupid. What is the biggest and likely to be the most permanent monument from the ancient world? From Egypt in fact? The answer is the pyramids, and who built them? They were built by slaves, or more likely by serfs labouring in the quiet times of the agricultural season.
Biblical Criticism and Defence
The critics of the bible are not really a new breed, Miller now tells us. Julius Wellhausen, in the nineteenth century, showed the law was not given to Moses on Mount Sinai in the second millennium BC, but was composed after the Jews had returned from their exile in Babylon only 450 years before Jesus. Miller calls the work of William Foxwell Albright a “moderating influence” when even some of his own students now admit, perhaps not in so many words, he was a Christian crook whose biblical bias led him to grossly misinterpret almost everything he touched—and that was almost everything.
Miller gives us a little of the psychology of his main contender for the biblicists and it does not dispose us to think he would be any different from Albright. James Hoffmeier remembers a lecturer, on a course he took in the early seventies, teaching that the patriarchs were not historical:
I remember the knots in my stomach when he was lecturing.
This confession of his anxiety over a supposedly historical issue should incline anyone to realise that he could never be a reliable witness. Hoffmeier apparently comes from a missionary family, and is far too emotionally involved in biblical belief to treat the evidence fairly. Most of the vocal Christians and some Jews are the same. They pretend otherwise.
Albright was particularly damaging for pretending almost from the start of his career that he was being honest and objective. He claimed himself, Miller tells us, that surmising about the conquest of Canaan was pointless because archaeology would reveal the truth. It can only reveal the truth, however, to those who want to know it. Albright was not one of them. For him a conquest meant destruction and, when he found any signs of destruction, it automatically proved the conquest. Thus, thirteenth-century devastation layers at a site believed to be biblical Bethel were interpreted by Albright’s student G Ernest Wright to be the work of Joshua’s army.
The fact that destruction occurred continually in these parts for thousands of years did not bother Albright or the gawpers who believed everything he said. Even the bible claimed that the people who lived in the Palestinian hills called Israelites fought the Philistines. They also fought the Egyptians. The Assyrians came through several times, and there were occasional incursions by Indo-Europeans like the Scythians. Besides that the city states fought among themselves, sometimes had accidental fires that burnt down whole cities and even set their own cities on fire when they were scourged by plagues or pests.
Even liberal scholars were convinced by the Christian crooks that the bible was supremely historical. In 1981, the biblicist historian of Israel, John Bright could state:
There can really be little doubt that ancestors of Israel had been slaves in Egypt and had escaped in some marvelous way. Almost no one today would question it.
Hoffmeier says Albright convinced scholars that the bible was substantiated from archaeology because everyone was prepared to accept that the bible was innocent of any deception. In short, it was accepted as history and merely needed confirming. In the last two decades, a generation of scholars have not been happy that the bible has been confirmed by archaeology, and stood up and said so. N P Lemche and T L Thompson found from close examination of the evidence for particular parts of the bible “history” that it was no more than mythology or romance set in an abstract first millennium BC setting. They thought only indisputable evidence would prove bible stories to be historical. What had happened was that the scientific attitude had asserted itself at last over the gullible attitude of belief. Historical documents have to be verified as genuine before they are believed as history. Nor will biblical critics readily accept what is in the bible so long as they can find known events in Near Eastern history which could account for them just as well or better.
J Maxwell Miller and John H Hayes quite reasonably maintain, in Israelite and Judean History, that the exodus cannot be treated as history because there is no other support for it except the bible. J M Miller in A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, points out no direct, extra-biblical evidence of the Egyptian stay or of the exodus has ever been found, and the bible often neglects to record details that might provide the exodus with a place in history such as the name of the pharaoh that “knew not Joseph” (Ex 1:8) and any contemporary events. The authors either did not know the contemporary situation, were not concerned about it because it was not theologically relevant or preferred not to include hostages to fortune in their romance. It is hard to believe that known details would have been omitted as irrelevant, and some details that seem irrelevant to theological purpose are included. The rational deduction is that details such as the name of the Pharaoh were unknown to the authors.
Now despite this lack of secure information in the story and external to it that leads critical historians to doubt its authenticity, Christian apologists like to give another impression showing that they are utterly unscientific and incapable of even trying to be objective. They say:
A considerable amount of external evidence exists that lends plausibility to and provides possible time frames for the most basic elements of the exodus and Egyptian stay.
William Dever, a leading authority on what he prefers to call Syro-Palestinian archaeology rather than biblical archaeology, was a student of the Albright school but learnt from experience that his teachers were wrong. He rejected the study called "biblical archaeology" on the grounds that the bible prejudices the archaeologist. Nevertheless, he is utterly offended by scholars who are logical enough to be consistent and demand satisfactory evidence from the ground before anything in the bible—a devotional book not a history book—should be believed as history. In a discussion in BAR (July-August 1997), Dever writes:
Joshua has little to do with any historical events. If you guys think I—or the Israeli archaeologists—am looking for the Israelite conquest archaeologically, you’re wrong. We’ve given that up. We’ve given up the patriarchs.
Dever defended a united monarchy under David and Solomon but says in reply to Thomas L Thompson:
I don’t care in the least whether Solomon ever existed. I’m probably more of a disbeliever than you. I don’t really care about the tradition. I don’t believe any of the myths.
Since then Dever has become more and more shrill in his attacks on those who indeed do not believe the myths, and seek to show that they are myths because they have insufficient historical evidence to back them up.
Hoffmeier and Kitchen hope to lead a fight back using their credentials as learned Egyptologists. They are however also both committed to supernatural beliefs, and for anyone familiar with the effect of beliefs in the past on the honesty of so-called scholars, their pleadings will be looked upon with extreme suspicion. From their position of scholarship they sought to defend some of the bible stories
Kitchen Affirms Genesis
Kitchen highlights the account in Genesis 14 of Abraham defeating a coalition of kings from the east, claiming it fits only the conditions pertaining to the period 1800 to 1600 BC. Before that time, the region of Mesopotamia was closely governed by the dynasties of Ur, and after that time, the empires of Babylon and Assyria controlled the region. Only during the first half of the second millennium could kings of small city-states have roamed the countryside, as did the potentates Abraham encountered, looking to expand their domains.
If this is a serious argument by Kitchen, he has to explain how it is that a bandit king of a small city state like David could have ever built a supposedly large empire in the eleventh century BC. Kitchen’s argument counts David out too. Biblicists like Kitchen will immediately say that David was able to build his empire because Assyria was weak at the time. If that explains David, it also counters Kitchen’s objection. It also shows that these apologists are neither consistent nor honest.
Now Genesis 14 is a quite peculiar chapter that shows every indication of being inserted into the main narrative. It is where Melchizedek appears, and that might be why it was inserted. As a separate unit of tradition, it might have been part of some nation’s mythology and been taken, like other parts of Genesis, to fulfil a need of the author. In other words the whole incident could be mythical, in which case there is no need to find a time when it could have happened, because it did not. Nevertheless, it could easily be a distorted account of one of the several alliances that were built by small states, albeit, not merely single cities, against the Assyrians in the first millennium. Kitchen’s objection, simply does not have enough basis to hold up Abraham.
Kitchen goes on with some sort of palaeocovenantology that he ought to publish to back up his words. He says that treaties and covenants can be dated from their styles quite closely, just as a document can be dated by its style of writing. Kitchen claims:
I have over 90 documents [of ancient treaties and covenants] to compare from 2600 BC down to 600 BC, and so there’s no room for mistake here.
The covenants of the Patriarchs described in the bible only match the time they were supposed to have lived, says Kitchen. He says to Christianity Today that the ones with Abimelech and Laban fit precisely the structure of treaties from the middle of the second millennium—but neither later nor earlier ones. The middle of the second millennium is a vague specification of time. The descendants of Abraham were supposed to have been sojourning in Egypt by then, so Kitchen is again being dishonest.
Moreover, genuine experts in these ancient treaty forms do not make the claims about them that Kitchen does. In fact, they say that the treaty forms were essentially the same for long periods of time and the elements used in them merely varied somewhat according to culture and convenience. Thus the circumstances might condition the curses and blessings, the gods of the participants, whether the vassal was conquered or surrenderd and other factors account for particular changes, but no gradual changes of fashion can be used for dating, as Kitchen claims.
Bearing down on the singularities of names, Kitchen apparently makes a good point in that the names of some of the patriarchs were peculiar to Syrian cultures especially before about the middle of the second millennium BC.
Where did the fiction writers of the middle first millennium BC get these names if they were composing their biblical novellas a thousand or more years after the names had fallen from popular use?
Kitchen does not want to attribute scholarship to anyone other than himself, but no biblical critic is saying that the bible was written by a peasant hoping to write a best seller. They were written by the intellectuals of the time to provide a spurious history for a mixture of people deported into Yehud. Nothing stops the authors from using myths they have at their disposal, and even Kitchen will accept that they did so—myths like the flood. What then is to stop them from using some myths from Syria that perpetuated the names of ancient times because they were the ancient names of heroes and gods?
In Genesis 37:28, Joseph was sold by his brothers to slave traders on their way to Egypt for 20 silver shekels. Kitchen claims that this is the appropriate amount for 1800 BC. Using extrabiblical sources, inflation had driven it up to 30 shekels by the thirteenth century (which corresponds to Ex 21:32), 50 shekels in the eighth century (which corresponds to 2 Kgs 15:20), and to nearly 100 shekels soon after the “exile” in the sixth century. Again, it looks convincing at first glance, but we only have Kitchen’s word for it through Christianity Today.
It all looks too pat. Inflation, for example, is never linear over time, it is not the same in different places, the examples cited are not all for the price of slaves, slaves do not all fetch the same price, irrespective of age, race, health and ability. Professor A H Sayce, in his monograph, Assyria, published by the Religious Tract Society, says that three slaves, one a woman, were sold on 20 Ab 709 BC for three manehs of silver. A maneh is fifty shekels in Syria. So, the price of a slave here is 50 silver shekels. Twenty years later, seven slaves including the two wives of one of them, were sold again for three manehs of silver. Each is therefore only about 21 silver shekels. Then again, about this time, a young girl bought by an Egyptian woman as a bride for her son cost about 14 silver shekels. After the Arabian campaign of Assurbanipal, “a camel was sold for half a shekel of silver and a man was worth a correspondingly small sum,” Sayce says from the Assyrian records.
Considering these possibilities of confusion, and others that the experts might be aware of, it is remarkable that Kitchen’s point seems to stand. The fact about such evidence is that closer inspection has nearly always shown it is spurious or dishonest, and is known to be by the apologists who present it, but they have their own ulterior motive—to preserve their beliefs by hook or by crook.
Semitic Egyptian Viziers
Christianity Today now switches to the plausibility defence. This hopes to show that what is plausible can be considered true. They cite Nahum Sarna, professor emeritus of biblical studies at Brandeis University and author of Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus, as saying that a great deal of what we know about life in Egypt in the second millennium BC is plausible set against the biblical story.
- A papyrus dating from the second millennium BC lists 40 slaves by their Semitic names. One of the names listed is Shiphrah, a name applied to one of the midwives mentioned in the exodus account.
- The Instruction for Merikare, an Egyptian text dated to 2040 BC, suggests that asiatics did indeed inhabit the eastern Delta at certain times, just as the Israelites do before the exodus.
- A tomb painting at Ben Hasan in Egypt dated to 1890 BC depicts traders coming to Egypt by donkeys with both their families and their wares, further supporting the mobility of certain groups of people.
- A painting from the tomb of an Egyptian official known as Rekhmire shows slaves making mud bricks, just as the Israelites do in the biblical accounts. This particular painting is dated to the fifteenth century BC.
- The Louvre Leather Roll, dated to 1274 BC, deals with shortfalls in brick making and mentions Egyptians granting slaves time off for religious holidays.
- Finally, the papyrus Anastasi V from the thirteenth century BC “contains a report from an Egyptian officer on the Eastern frontier who is trying to track down two runaway slaves who have escaped into the wilderness.”
Arguments like this “plausibility” argument offered by people who believe the story told in the same book that the earth was flooded to a depth of 5000 meters in a worldwide flood do not persuade the critical reader that they are being serious. For them, a vast volume of water is plausible when it is not to anyone else, so why are they so fussy about fine details like these? Well, the more sensible ones are happy, if not glad, to drop the Flood story as a myth, but they are unable to accept as mythology the story of the exodus because the origin of God’s chosen land and people is in it.
Joseph’s high ranking is plausible for several reasons. Joseph therefore is history! Hoffmeier again feels he has to prove what no one doubts but can hardly be considered evidence for the patriarchs, although that is the impression he wants to leave. He is talking to the Christian gallery, not to anyone who understands evidence. Christians believe anyway, so any evidence is unnecessary, but it comforts them nevertheless.
Kevin Miller asks:
Is it realistic to think that a Semitic-speaking foreigner like Joseph, and later Moses, could have risen to the highest levels of Egyptian government?
It is not a question that a biblical critic would asks, since they are aware of the Hyksos who ruled Egypt in the seventeenth century BC, and know that by the time this story was rewritten there were many Jews living in Egypt under the Ptolemies. It is, therefore, a question set up as a straw man, one of the most popular Christian apologetic tricks. Hoffmeier answers it, seeming to refute a point that was only put by the Christian himself to seem to be able to answer it affirmatively. An Egyptian tomb discovered in Sakkara, Egypt, in the late 1980s had the coffin of a Semite named Aper-el along with the coffins of his wife and children. His titles include “vizier,” “mayor of the city,” “judge,” “father of god,” “child of the nursery.”
K Miller tells us:
A study on foreign children reared in the pharaoh’s nurseries during the eighteenth dynasty shows that some of these children became court officials, and that a few eventually attained high government posts.
The similarities to the stories of Joseph and Moses (and Aper-el) are obvious. He wants us to conclude that the biblical stories are therefore true. An Egyptian Queen was called Cleopatra and two Roman generals were called Antony and Caesar. Are the plays about these people by a man called Shakespeare therefore true? They seem plausible enough. Hoffmeier extends his biblical beliefs into his day job, according to Miller who says, in a report to the Institute for Biblical Research Hoffmeier explained: “He believed…” That is the pathetic level of “biblical” research. It is whatever you believe. At least this is consistent for a Christian. Usually they are not.
Hoffmeier’s real point is to show that Moses and Joseph might yet be lying in undiscovered tombs because Aper-el’s name was the first of a high-ranking, Semitic official to be found there, even though Sakkara has been excavated and explored for more than a century. For this reason, “it is wrong to demand, as some have, that direct archaeological evidence for Joseph should be available, if he were in fact a historical figure.”
Perhaps some have felt that such prominent men in Egypt as Joseph and Moses should have left tombs, but most will not expect it. What is meant is that there should be mention of these people in the extensive records that Egyptians habitually wrote and that Kitchen and Hoffmeier make a living out of deciphering. Had they been found, these believers would have been whooping and gloating that their critics had been proven quite wrong. Their frustration is that they have to depend on analogies, and analogies are too often wrong. Hoffmeier immediately feels he has to apologise for this too: “Joseph lived during a period when surviving Egyptian documents of any kind are sparse and Joseph operated in the Nile Delta, an area that remains ‘underexcavated’ to this day.” Why is God so mean with His evidence?
