Reading the bible with a knowledge of how the world works and using a bit of interpretation would give you that impression. Reading it straight does not.
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Reading the bible with a knowledge of how the world works and using a bit of interpretation would give you that impression. Reading it straight does not.
Aren't their consensus that the tsunami caused by Santorini blowing up was a very likely source for the story about the Red Sea retreating and then drowning the Egyptians? In that case there must have been Hebrews in Egypt proper.
So?
Reading your comment without any knowledge of how the world works or interpreting it would give me the impression that you want me to read books while standing up without bending my arms.
Read anything without knowledge or understanding of context or ability to interpret it, and you won't get it. And if you were in innocent enough to a state to read anything straight, you wouldn't have been exposed to the world enough to know how to read anyway so it's a moot point.
Isn't the consensus that it's the oral history of the hebrews and in the centuries between events happening and them being written down events were changed or influenced by other stories, exaggerated or downplayed through error and effort to improve the story, at times for political gain (see judges and kings) or just lost and mixed up (again, Kings but also genesis and it's hot love of self-contradiction), then consolidated, translated and chinese whispered too.
So - generations of people read the bible and came away convinced that the Canaanites were totally different from the Hebrews. Your post seems to imply that it is obvious in the bible that the two groups were essentially flavours of the same thing. If that had been the case then we wouldn't have had generations of people with the wrong opinion. It came as a bit of a surprise even to archaeologists that the two supposedly separate people were archaeologically very similar.
They were different people. That doesn't mean wholly unconnected.
Elephant & Castle and the Angel Islington are different underground stations, they're both in london. Thinking they're different stations doesn't mean thinking they're not in the same place.
Canaanites, isn't even one thing. It's semetic peoples from a specific geographic area in a specific period, i.e. philistines, hebrews, etc and a specific tribe or tribes (as it's pretty unclear) as named so in the bible.
My post implies that it's pretty obvious that the semetic peoples in modern day palestine who hated each other, were pretty obviously essentially semetic tribes not fundamentally different and completely unrelated things. So one had an ancestor who wandering in from mesopotamia and the other, probably also had people descended from him as you can't marry your cousins forever and the whole bible thing or each person have a tribe solely descended from him and no one else is a simplification and almost certainly meant symbolically/politically rather than literally anyway, they were semetic people with variations of pan-semetic culture, mythology, customs etc.
That they hated each is not proof that they were alien or had nothing to do with each other. But neighbours with cultures that were big on patrilineal descent based tribal identity and not sharing land/resources with those bastards over the ridge.
You know, 'tribalism'.
hell, the bible claims they're descended and take their name from one of noahs grandsons. That's totally saying it's completely unrelated. Especially given how few generations are listed between Noah and Abraham.
Of course the earliest parts most likely were originally oral history with all its inaccuracies. With regard to Genesis that likely even is based on two seperate creation myths.
The tsunami Santorino caused did reach the Egyptian coast opposite the Red Sea unobstructed though and they have found undersea canals linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, so that tsunami most likely has been felt in the Red Sea too. And it was a pretty powerful tsunami. It is thought it was that tsunami which hit Crete and caused havoc there---perhaps even played a role in the disappearance of the Minoans---and the tsunami which hit Crete deposited sediment at ridiculous heights on the cliffs (cannot remember the height, but it was much higher than normal tsunamis would reach).
So the story of the retreat of the Red Sea and the later return of it fits archeology.
Now we talked about Egyptians and Hebrews possibly fighting in Canaan the original event might have been a battle taking place on the coast and the Egyptian army being hit by the Santorini tsunami---but that is just my guess.
If you want an example of two peoples which were pretty much the same fighting endless (and pretty pointless) wars just look at Denmark and Sweden; back in the day there wasn't even that much a difference between the languages.
The thing is, seeing the red sea part, drain, or just hand a landbridge/sandbank, doesn't have to be attatched the 'origin' of the Moses story.
it could have come from anywhere. Big important stories, especially origin of our people ones, have a tendency to eat up smaller stories and steal their best bits.
We can't start looking for Moses based on any one thing, as we can't know what thing was Moses first or first to Moses.
The big part of the story, seems to be the 'lead us from Slavery', the miracles, parting the sea, all that camping trip in Arabia advice and etc are decoration to that main bit of lead us from captivity and the 'gave us laws and bound us together' stuff.
So looking at the times when semetic peoples had to leave Egypt, the fall of the Hyskos being the big one, but there were others, is probably of more use than identifying locast based crop failures or red sea partings.
yeah, that's my point.
Also it's cheating to make a point succinctly and clearly after someone has rambled on for paragraphs without getting it through.
bitter hatred being between groups who are basically the same is a cliche thing so bitter hatred between two peoples is not proof or even suggestive of anything.
I think you people are seriously mixing things up. The Genesis is one thing, with heavy Babylonian influence, emerged probably during the Babylonian captivity, later edited in Israel. Maybe there was some basis to this which was general to all Semitic peoples but we don't know. There are good chances that there was nothing like the Genesis before the Babylonian captivity.
Then you have the tribal "forefather" narratives about Abraham and his family, which may be based on some ancient tribal tradition but most of it are very deep, very monotheistic moral and philosophical stories that could only have been conceived much later. The only thing that could really have ancient roots is the idea of a forefather called Abraham and of his lineage, which seems a pretty normal thing for any primitive tribe.
Then you have Exodus and everything that comes after. Note that the transition between this and the Abraham stories isn't very smooth. Suddenly this is not about Abraham and his family anymore but about a people, that somehow ended in Egypt but how exactly and why isn't very convincing, it seems the authors were struggling with that part. Suddenly we are in Egypt, there is a people, there is Moses who leads the people but the people seems to have an agenda of his own, doesn't always follow Moses, can act independently to some extent. This is a very different story written with a different purpose, which isn't very relevant for 2nd millenium Hebrews but very relevant for post-Babylonian captivity Hebrews. It takes a stand and gives answers on many issues that were relevant for Hebrews at this time: monotheism, role of prophets, place of the Hebrews in the world. This can only have been written much later than any date that could be attributed to the described events, and it is highly methaphorical and philosophical. The described Exodus is how an exodus should have undergone: an eschatological event ascertaining the special relationship of Hebrews to their God. Very different from the contemporary reality of a rather inglorious "exodus" of Jewish elites from Babylone when Cyrus freed them. This is the historical reference authors of Exodus had in mind, certainly not millenium-old stories about some "tsunami", even if we assume there were any. There were probably some tellings about a charismatical leader or a magician called Moses who was active during the times when the Hebrews were still nomads, and who had some connexion to Egypt(which in itself isn't surprising, because there was contact between the two peoples), but that's about it. Whatever was there, was completely transformed by authors for whom historical accurateness was the least of concerns. It seems pointless to try and establish any historical parallels between the described events(the plagues, the opening of the sea...) and history, at least beyond the very existence of a person called Moses. Maybe there were some parallels, but all of these things could have been made up just as well. They are methaphors, symbols.
Then you have Joshua and the invasion of Canaan, which is basically the story of a nomad tribe conquering land to settle itself there. Now from this point you do have an historical narrative, and this is probably the oldest part in the entire Bible. It's heavily deformed and mythologised, but it seems to be rooted in hard facts. From this point on, historical parallels begin to make sense. Not before.
Then you have the tribal "forefather" narratives about Abraham and his family, which may be based on some ancient tribal tradition but most of it are very deep, very monotheistic moral and philosophical stories that could only have been conceived much later. The only thing that could really have ancient roots is the idea of a forefather called Abraham and of his lineage, which seems a pretty normal thing for any primitive tribe.
Then you have Exodus and everything that comes after. Note that the transition between this and the Abraham stories isn't very smooth. Suddenly this is not about Abraham and his family anymore but about a people, that somehow ended in Egypt but how exactly and why isn't very convincing, it seems the authors were struggling with that part. Suddenly we are in Egypt, there is a people, there is Moses who leads the people but the people seems to have an agenda of his own, doesn't always follow Moses, can act independently to some extent. This is a very different story written with a different purpose, which isn't very relevant for 2nd millenium Hebrews but very relevant for post-Babylonian captivity Hebrews. It takes a stand and gives answers on many issues that were relevant for Hebrews at this time: monotheism, role of prophets, place of the Hebrews in the world. This can only have been written much later than any date that could be attributed to the described events, and it is highly methaphorical and philosophical. The described Exodus is how an exodus should have undergone: an eschatological event ascertaining the special relationship of Hebrews to their God. Very different from the contemporary reality of a rather inglorious "exodus" of Jewish elites from Babylone when Cyrus freed them. This is the historical reference authors of Exodus had in mind, certainly not millenium-old stories about some "tsunami", even if we assume there were any. There were probably some tellings about a charismatical leader or a magician called Moses who was active during the times when the Hebrews were still nomads, and who had some connexion to Egypt(which in itself isn't surprising, because there was contact between the two peoples), but that's about it. Whatever was there, was completely transformed by authors for whom historical accurateness was the least of concerns. It seems pointless to try and establish any historical parallels between the described events(the plagues, the opening of the sea...) and history, at least beyond the very existence of a person called Moses. Maybe there were some parallels, but all of these things could have been made up just as well. They are methaphors, symbols.
Then you have Joshua and the invasion of Canaan, which is basically the story of a nomad tribe conquering land to settle itself there. Now from this point you do have an historical narrative, and this is probably the oldest part in the entire Bible. It's heavily deformed and mythologised, but it seems to be rooted in hard facts. From this point on, historical parallels begin to make sense. Not before.
Actually just to be sure I looked up the date of the eruption and it was around the 17th century BC as I remembered. What I also discovered was that its magnitude was around that of Mt. Tambora in 1815 and a little less than the Hatepe eruption in New Zealand which created lake Taupo. That means that crop failures are suddenly a very real possibility. 1816 is known as the year without a summer, because the Mt. Tambora eruption blocked the sunlight which caused largespread crop failure and frost/snow in the middle of the summer. Wiki claims that Chinese records tells that around 1618 BC when the Xia dynasty fell there was a year with frost in July, famine and largespread crop failure---i.e. it sounds really similar to the year without a summer.
If it was Santorini doing that---and it seems plausible---then there most certainly will also have been frost/snow, famine and largespread crop failure in Europe that year.
So it actually fits in time with the fall of the Hyskos and you have the Red Sea retreating and coming back and crop failure; wasn't famine also one of the plagues?
The Denmark Sweden example is naturally obvious to me. And boy was it pointless. Just think what could have been done if we hadn't basically said: 'Those Danes/Swedes on the other side of the Smålandian forests smell; lets beat them up and teach them a lesson'. Instead of ~1000 years fighting we could have controlled the Baltic for centuries and maybe even held back Russia---it took Russia, Poland and Denmark to take down Sweden after all.
Sweden's armies, Denmark's navy and the sound tool; that sounds like the basis of something grand.
What do you mean by that?
Human Agency denied again?
Between you and John Green, does weather, economics, plague, climate change and natural disasters determine all human history?
Are we even free? Or just pawns in the great game of natural forces.
Also and seriously this time, if Moses if the story of the Semetic ruling class being over thrown by the oppressed egyptian yoke after the instability of crop failures and natural disaster and cast out of egypt, then he's totally the bad guy.
As far as I konw (probably not much 
) archaeology does not confirm at all the Bible's historical narrative. There's absolutely no archaeological trace of the supposed Joshua-led Israelite invasion of Canaan, of David's and Solomon's kingdoms, and Jerusalem (perhaps the most heavily excavated ancient site in the world together with Rome) was merely a small fortified town until the VII century BC, without traces of a written culture existing before then in what would become later the kingdom of Judah.
What the archaeological record seems to reveal is that ancients Israelites had always been inhabiting the central highlands of Palestine, although with some cultural peculiarities (there's no trace of pig bones in ancient settlements in central Canaan, in contrast with the rest of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt), that they worshipped in the same way that their Semitic neighbours did and that they gradually evolved from a nomadic way of life to a settled existence from the end of the Bronze Age until the VII century BC. That process seems to have happened earlier in the northern highlands (were the biblical narrative places the "sinful" kingdom of Israel) and a couple centuries later in the southern highlands, in what became the kingdom of Judah.
There're no signs of specific "Judaic" worship until the VII century BC either, which is the time period where textual analysis and higher criticism place the redaction of the main core of the Bible, the Jewish Torah.
) archaeology does not confirm at all the Bible's historical narrative. There's absolutely no archaeological trace of the supposed Joshua-led Israelite invasion of Canaan, of David's and Solomon's kingdoms, and Jerusalem (perhaps the most heavily excavated ancient site in the world together with Rome) was merely a small fortified town until the VII century BC, without traces of a written culture existing before then in what would become later the kingdom of Judah.What the archaeological record seems to reveal is that ancients Israelites had always been inhabiting the central highlands of Palestine, although with some cultural peculiarities (there's no trace of pig bones in ancient settlements in central Canaan, in contrast with the rest of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt), that they worshipped in the same way that their Semitic neighbours did and that they gradually evolved from a nomadic way of life to a settled existence from the end of the Bronze Age until the VII century BC. That process seems to have happened earlier in the northern highlands (were the biblical narrative places the "sinful" kingdom of Israel) and a couple centuries later in the southern highlands, in what became the kingdom of Judah.
There're no signs of specific "Judaic" worship until the VII century BC either, which is the time period where textual analysis and higher criticism place the redaction of the main core of the Bible, the Jewish Torah.
It's not at all certain that the Habiru have anything to do with the Hebrew anyway. It's likely a coincidence in the names rather than anything else. Or something applied by one group of Canaanites to another group who they didn't much like, and taken up by the second as a sign of identity. Claiming your neighbours are criminals by giving them the name of a gorup of criminals is hardly unusual behaviour.
Yes, perhaps I should have specified that there is no indication of Jews/Hebrews/Israelites being considered a separate group before 1200 BC. The archaeological evidence is very interesting, it argues for in situ development rather than a sojourn in Egypt. Thank you, and Semper Victor, for pointing that out.
I thought there was some evidence for a transition from tribes to kingdom at around 1000 BC, though definitely not of building on the scale ascribed to David and Solomon by the Bible. I could be wrong, though. Anyway, this matches with Amallric's explanation of the purpose of the Exodus story.As far as I konw (probably not much
What the archaeological record seems to reveal is that ancients Israelites had always been inhabiting the central highlands of Palestine, although with some cultural peculiarities (there's no trace of pig bones in ancient settlements in central Canaan, in contrast with the rest of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt), that they worshipped in the same way that their Semitic neighbours did and that they gradually evolved from a nomadic way of life to a settled existence from the end of the Bronze Age until the VII century BC. That process seems to have happened earlier in the northern highlands (were the biblical narrative places the "sinful" kingdom of Israel) and a couple centuries later in the southern highlands, in what became the kingdom of Judah.
There're no signs of specific "Judaic" worship until the VII century BC either, which is the time period where textual analysis and higher criticism place the redaction of the main core of the Bible, the Jewish Torah.
There's no consensus because there's no consensus that there even were Hebrews in Egypt. What you describe is what you get if you start from the Biblical narrative and then search for confirmation from other sources. If you treat the Bible as just one source alongside the records of neighboring peoples and archaeology, the puzzle isn't what explains the Red Sea flood but what explains the entire Egypt story arc. Amallric's post-Babylonian hypothesis explains the theological function of it quite well.
The archaeological evidence pretty much rules out mass migration. So if you're searching for a historical core for that story, you have basically two choices. One is that there was a confrontation with Egyptians in Canaan. The other is that the tribes that evolved into Israel at some point incorporated an outside group. That group would have to be small and culturally not dominant to fit the archaeology, though, so a conquest on the scale of Joshua is not on the cards.
In my previous post, I tried to give some context to where and when to place an exodus if it happened at all. With the evidence brought up by Gordy and Semper Victor taken into account, we would also have to specify that it would only have concerned a very small group that settled among a population that stayed put throughout. Again, if it happened at all. Amallric gives us a good reason why later Jews would have made the whole thing up.
On a particularly pedantic point the "Angel Islington" is not an underground stations. It's a building. But that aside they are not "in the same place" or even particularly close to each other. They might be in the same city but that's hardly the same thing as "the same place".
Yes, I'm aware of that. But you are missing my point. I'm not arguing that Hebrews aren't a Canaanite sub tribe. I'm saying that your view that the bible makes it obvious is untrue. Had this been the case, the mainstream view would always have been that Hebrews and Canaanites were essentially the same people. This was a view that was arrived at by archaeologists fairly recently (relatively speaking) and not biblical scholars.
No, I agree it is not at all certain. AFAIK linguists point at Hebrew as having an origin to the east of Israel not in Egypt. I was just saying that 'Habiru' is a piece of evidence that Hebrews might have been in Egypt. It is far from conclusive.
During the late Bronze Age, there were two settlement patterns in Palestine. One was to be found in the coastal plain and the Jezreel valley in the north, which together formed the main route that linked Egypt with Mesopotamia, and it consisted of "royal" settlements sometimes fortified and sometimes not, where petty kings ruled over a peasant population dispersed around the countryside in small hamlets. These tiny kingdoms (if they can be called that) paid tribute to Egypt and their relationship with the pharaohs are well recorded in surviving Egyptian records, especially the Amarna letters. The other pattern happened in the central highlands, where a semi-nomadic population led a mixed lifestile of seasonal agriculture and animal husbandry of goat and sheep flocks. This population lived extremely dispersed and had not even established permanent hamlets or villages, and there were barely any fortified towns in them; the king of what would later be Jerusalem ruled over such an insignificant entity that he begged pharaoh Akhenaton for a troop of fifty Egyptian soldiers to pacify his "kingdom"...
This population led a lifestyle similar to modern beduins, and their life pattern was quite usual in the Middle East until the XX century, where peasant communities in marginal areas would not have doubts if things became difficult about abandoning their lands, vanish into the desert and adopt a fully nomadic lifestyle. Archaeologists have detected in the central highlands of Palestine several waves of occupation and abandonment by such populations during the whole Bronze Age, the latter of which happened during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages.
Also, archaeology has failed to detect any significant difference in worship patterns between fully sedentary "Canaanite" populations of the coastal plains and semi-nomadic "Israelite" populations of the central highlands: they both worshipped in "high places" (as the Bible calls them) to a series of celestial deities typical of the western semitic pantheon, centered around Baal, Asheroth and the "heavenly host", of which YHWH was but one among many (as stated in Ugaritic documents from much farther north).
The religious "reformation" that installed YHWH as the sole God and turned all the other deities into "false gods" seems to have happened especifically in the kingdom of Judah during the VII century BC, first by king Hezekiah with disastrous results, and after a return to the ancient worship pattern by kings Manasseh and Amon, king Josiah of Judah (639-609 BC) made it definitive. It's most probable that the nucleous of the Hebrew Bible was written during his reign as part of an overall, ambitious political program by this king to take advantadge of the crumbling of the Assyrian empire during his reign.
This population led a lifestyle similar to modern beduins, and their life pattern was quite usual in the Middle East until the XX century, where peasant communities in marginal areas would not have doubts if things became difficult about abandoning their lands, vanish into the desert and adopt a fully nomadic lifestyle. Archaeologists have detected in the central highlands of Palestine several waves of occupation and abandonment by such populations during the whole Bronze Age, the latter of which happened during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages.
Also, archaeology has failed to detect any significant difference in worship patterns between fully sedentary "Canaanite" populations of the coastal plains and semi-nomadic "Israelite" populations of the central highlands: they both worshipped in "high places" (as the Bible calls them) to a series of celestial deities typical of the western semitic pantheon, centered around Baal, Asheroth and the "heavenly host", of which YHWH was but one among many (as stated in Ugaritic documents from much farther north).
The religious "reformation" that installed YHWH as the sole God and turned all the other deities into "false gods" seems to have happened especifically in the kingdom of Judah during the VII century BC, first by king Hezekiah with disastrous results, and after a return to the ancient worship pattern by kings Manasseh and Amon, king Josiah of Judah (639-609 BC) made it definitive. It's most probable that the nucleous of the Hebrew Bible was written during his reign as part of an overall, ambitious political program by this king to take advantadge of the crumbling of the Assyrian empire during his reign.
Thanks for another informative post. On this side of things, it's worth noting that the Bible contains several layers of writing. Your time period saw extensive rewriting but so did the post-Babylonian exile stage a couple of centuries later. That's particularly relevant for the exodus story, as Amallric explained. Also, there's evidence in the Bible and in the archaeological record of a two-stage progression from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism. Henotheism is "the belief in and worship of a single God while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities that may also be worshipped" (from Wikipedia). The bit you're talking about is the second transition. Jahweh might have been a special god of the tribe before that, possibly along with a female companion deity. Even the commandment not to have "other gods before me" might be read in this way, as asserting supremacy rather than sole existence.
Yes, the famous Moabite stele seems to point towards that transition pattern, with YHWH being the supreme deity for Israelites, but not the only one (same as Assur would be the supreme deity for Assyrians or Amon for New Empire Egyptians). Other near eastern Semite peoples gravitated towards other deities in the ancient Semitic pantheon, for example Baal among Phoenicians.
So because one view is tradition it must be obvious? Not say one of many equally viable interpretations but the one that was traditionally gone with? Like every other traditional interpretation of anything else.
That the bible makes the view of them being wholly seperate is also untrue. It directly states them as being closely related and all the rest is just as open to interpretation as anything else.
The bible, it should be remember, no where even suggests that the Snake was the Devil, it's pretty straight up that the Snake was a Snake. Yet tradition, and anyone reading it from the traditional perspective should see it obvious that the Snake is the Devil. Just the same as everything else, no one is reading the bible 'straight' and reaching traditional conclusions, if you could read the bible 'straight' by luck you'd probably get some right, but you wouldn't get the same interpretation of every point or story as the traditional obvious conclusions, and you really wouldn't get the same interpretation as anyone else reading it 'straight'.
You can't claim anything like that as the 'obvious' conclusion unless its something thats directly said which this aint.
Also to Semper Victor, Proto-Semetic religion was centred around El, who like Ba'al was also a generic name for any god/lord. But it wasn't centred around Ba'al, Ba'al is his kid.
And most arguments paint the rise of El into YHWH as a slow evolution over centuries than a reformation, cemented by political action not created by it.
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