Egyptian Enslavement of the Hebrews ?

[Barsoom]

It is all possible. But because it is an oral and recorded story, maybe long before the story was chosen to put into the Bible so the reasonable thing is that there is some even small real story about it.

That's not how it works. This is a magical story, a myth. If you look at myths from other religions, or the stories of saint's lives, or the tales of Alexander and Charlemagne, we don't try to establish the truth behind the magical elements, we take those as embellishments. The life story beneath the magic, the biography, that one we can try to study historically.

The figure of Moses is interesting enough without taking all those magical elements as truth. He might be historical, or he might be a personification but in any case we don't have to believe that he was a lost prince picked up from a basket afloat on the NIle to see that his is a story of redemption. How that redemption ties in to lawgiving is a good subject to study. How it got tied to (most probably ahistorical) wandering in the desert is another.

But if you really want to try to find the truth of magical embellishments, I've got a list of things you might want to research:
- Did a dinosaur survive in the Caucasus for St. George to fight?
- Is there geological evidence that Sjaelland once lay in a lake in Sweden?
- Is there a rock porous enough to stick a sword in it yet sticky enough that you can't pull the sword back out?

 

[Orinsul]

The sword thing is really easy, all over the world there were swords stuck in stones. It's not even rare.
The trick is in the construction of the sword and the carving of the hole to put it in.
Or just hammer the sword in, that'll get it in and hard out. Think about nails, is there any magic in that you can hammer a nail into something yet can't pull it out with your hands?

Although after the King Arthur stories fame began to be more powerful than respect to relics and town sculpture, most now have chains to double fix them to the stones just in case, and even still most of the swords in easy to reach places have been pinched.
In the 1800s there were dozens, Durandel is the last I know of which is still in the rock, but there might well still be others.

 

[Cavalry]

If you look at myths from other religions, or the stories of saint's lives, or the tales of Alexander and Charlemagne, we don't try to establish the truth behind the magical elements, we take those as embellishments. The life story beneath the magic, the biography, that one we can try to study historically.

that's because it take a lot of effort to decode a myth and most of the historians don't have the logic skill to research, to think outside a box, and knowledge in other fields. But there are some relation in the myths, for example we can found sign of a great flood in middle east myths, Noah story is just one of these.

The Exodus story is much more interesting because it is the Bible!, a history of many peoples. And here we have the assistant of the Bible, the oldest books of human, and the good Egyptian records to help rebuild some lost history.

The good news, archaeologists still don't have the permission to dig in the Jerusalem Great Temple, where all the most holy and precious things of the Israel were buried! The greatest things still wait to be discovered!

 

[Barsoom]

that's because it take a lot of effort to decode a myth and most of the historians don't have the logic skill to research, to think outside a box, and knowledge in other fields. But there are some relation in the myths, for example we can found sign of a great flood in middle east myths, Noah story is just one of these.

The Exodus story is much more interesting because it is the Bible!, a history of many peoples. And here we have the assistant of the Bible, the oldest books of human, and the good Egyptian records to help rebuild some lost history.

The good news, archaeologists still don't have the permission to dig in the Jerusalem Great Temple, where all the most holy and precious things of the Israel were buried! The greatest things still wait to be discovered!

The Bible is not the oldest book in existence, not even close. Nor is it a history of many peoples, the OT is the national myth of just one, the Jews of Judea. The NT is a collection of stories about Jesus that were specifically written for his non-Jewish followers, which was artificially tacked on to the OT and which has led many Christians to view the OT as an allegory - that's fine as far as it goes but it doesn't go together with reading the OT as a historical document.

It is true that historians haven't always understood how myths worked but not because they lacked logic skills, to the contrary, they were too logical, too fixated on truth instead of looking at the story. Most of them focused on finding the truth behind the myth instead of understanding it as a myth. That changed a couple of decades ago, though, and there is now a solid research tradition based on the idea that myths tell us about the society in which they were told. So Exodus is a great source for historians of the 5th century BC when it was composed. It is not a reliable guide to whichever century it was that Moses walked this earth.

 

[Barsoom]

The sword thing is really easy, all over the world there were swords stuck in stones. It's not even rare.
The trick is in the construction of the sword and the carving of the hole to put it in.
Or just hammer the sword in, that'll get it in and hard out. Think about nails, is there any magic in that you can hammer a nail into something yet can't pull it out with your hands?

Although after the King Arthur stories fame began to be more powerful than respect to relics and town sculpture, most now have chains to double fix them to the stones just in case, and even still most of the swords in easy to reach places have been pinched.
In the 1800s there were dozens, Durandel is the last I know of which is still in the rock, but there might well still be others.

Wait, are you saying there are actual, historical, really existing swords in rocks? Which no one could pull out (until a young squire etc.) - or no, that's why they're now double-secured? Pics please.

Never mind, apparently you can stick a sword into a stone but it's quite easy to pull out. Also, that sword is probably not Durandal but it's medieval anyway.

 

[Orinsul]

Wait, are you saying there are actual, historical, really existing swords in rocks? Which no one could pull out (until a young squire etc.) - or no, that's why they're now double-secured? Pics please.

Here's the Durandal in Rocamadour, it can't be the real one though as the story is quite clear that it was thrown down a cursed well in spain, not into a cliff in france.
Also it's not old enough, as Durandal was the sword of Hector of Troy, and Aeneas and Julius Ceasar, and that sword isn't old enough and has all the wrong design.

Which by being up the side of a cliff, is still there. Europe used to be littered with them though, some tied to local myths but most of them to big internationally famous stories, as they're better for tourism. They were a pretty common pilgrimage thing, pretty much every saint or christian (or greek) hero who had a magic sword, some town stuck a sword into a rock and told everyone to come and see it.
I've got a travel book somewhere where the author in 1880s wales went to see multiple excaliburs so they kept doing it for a long time. But the heyday of the trick was the middle ages.
But I suppose it's better than digging up some random body, nicking a finger and then telling everyone it's saint peters which was the other thing they did for tourist traps.

 

[Kovax]

Lightning had a tendency to convert iron to low-grade steel, so sticking a sword on top of a hill was one way of getting a "magic" sword. Problem is, all it took was some young punk walking past after a storm to pinch the sword before you got back to it...

If the sword still holds a bit of a charge (stone can be a passable insulator), the first person to attempt it fails in a surprising manner. The second pulls it out without any effort.

The thing about most myths is that they're often based on a real event, but the changes in society and language leave a lot of misunderstanding and things taken for granted, which gets further distorted over time. What makes perfect sense to a shepherd may take some explaining to a city-dweller, for instance. We can piece together some things from myths and early stories, and other details remain cryptic or missed altogether.

 

[Yakman]

I don't understand the sentence in bold at all. I'm pretty sure the Bible says the Moabites worshipped Chemosh and his ilk.

the Ammonites worshiped Chemosh, iirc.

 

[Castille4tehwin]

I think most myths come from (a) people being unable to explain things so they attribute it to magic, demons, gods, etc. and (b) events in stories are exaggerated and mistranslated until a small embellishment(or error) becomes huge.

 

[Barsoom]

I think most myths come from (a) people being unable to explain things so they attribute it to magic, demons, gods, etc. and (b) events in stories are exaggerated and mistranslated until a small embellishment(or error) becomes huge.

This is much too logical, too utilitarian. Have you never read a story just because you liked it? Every Christmas (or St. Nicholas Eve where I live) parents consciously tell lies to their children, even celebrate a little gift-giving festival which they know is pure fantasy (not Xmas itself, a lot of parents still believe in that, but adding Santa to it). Treating myths as it they're flawed non-fiction means completely overlooking that humans have been enjoying fiction for all of known history.

 

[Arilou]

Not to mention that the point of myths is quite often something altogether different than the "physical" events.

"All myths are true, for a given value of "true"."

 

[Cavalry]

The Bible is not a myth, it is an oral and written serious story with many myths in it. But the Exodus part is very interesting because it is too complicated and details to be invented step by step, and if someone invented it whole at a time then he is very talent and he risk others can go to Egypt and check the story there. Egypt was very big and real to put into a myth story, it is easier to say Israel come from the Heaven or the sun than to say they come from Egypt!

 

[Orinsul]

The Bible is not a myth, it is an oral and written serious story with many myths in it. But the Exodus part is very interesting because it is too complicated and details to be invented step by step, and if someone invented it whole at a time then he is very talent and he risk others can go to Egypt and check the story there. Egypt was very big and real to put into a myth story, it is easier to say Israel come from the Heaven or the sun than to say they come from Egypt!

Most myths were oral history at some point though.

Anyway, Exodus is the boring part, it's Kings where things get interesting. Exodus is pretty much all from one perspective, while Kings was entirely re-written for politics and then ripped up and then put back together with the old bits that were left and the new version for the gaps of where the 'original' no longer survived. So it's brilliant. There aren't many books that state with 100% certainty that two different people are each the one true king at the same time.

As for the Egypt bit, you can't compare records with Egypt.
Either the Hebrews were part of the foreign hyksos conquerors who subjugated and then were expelled from Egypt, or they were sneaky and set their egypt story there, knowing all records of that time were destroyed, so no one could check up on them.
Also LOTS of parts of the bible are set in places that you can go and check the story in. Not just egypt.

 

[Semper Victor]

The Bible is both history and myth. To be precise, it's a rewriting of the history of the Israelite people with myths interwoven into it, to forward a political, religious and social agenda. An underlying agenda that changed and evolved from the VII to the V centuries BC. The result is a very complex document, with many interlocked layers that require very careful study to fully understand them, with many disciplines involved (history, linguistics, sociology, archaeology, etc.).

 

[Arilou]

The Bible is not a myth

Correct, it contains myths, but also other types of texts (laws, wisdom literature, a love song, bits and pieces of mythologized history, prophetic writings... With the NT it also contains a bunch of letters)

It is not "a" myth because it's not a single thing, it's a collection of things (and said collection process inevitably has it's own agendas attached to it)

 

[Orinsul]

It'd be way better if it was a myth though.
Imagine all the things you could do with those foundations if you had the freedom to just write a good story with them and not have to worry about all the true or important stuff.
I mean, you sort of don't have to as we have a fair chunk of modern literature doing that, but still, imagine a world where instead of being stuck with the confusion and disorganised bible in the second century, they had the Chronicles of Narnia, maybe acouple Star Wars EU novels too as apocrypha
We could have a europe which instead of being covered in repurposed Zeus and Adonis/Apollo statues, could have been covered in stone Lions.

Although not the actual chronicles of narnia, as they end on an even worse downer than the bible does. But a better narnia.

 

[Barsoom]

The Bible is not a myth, it is an oral and written serious story with many myths in it. But the Exodus part is very interesting because it is too complicated and details to be invented step by step, and if someone invented it whole at a time then he is very talent and he risk others can go to Egypt and check the story there. Egypt was very big and real to put into a myth story, it is easier to say Israel come from the Heaven or the sun than to say they come from Egypt!

No, the level of detail is not an indication that the story is true. Oral histories accumulate detail when they are retold. Don't forget, by the time the Exodus story was written in the form that we know it, it's at least half a millennium after the supposed events (depending on how you date the story, it could be up to a full millennium), it isn't exactly eyewitness testimony. As for going to Egypt, that's a long and hard journey, not many listeners would undertake it. If some do get to Egypt and check what the Egyptians know, what do you think happens? The same thing that happens today, believers will believe whether there is evidence or not. It doesn't make a difference today that not a single Egyptian source recounts even one of the plagues that supposedly devastated the country, not a single source recounts a pharao drowned when the Red Sea closed over him and his troops, what makes you think that it would have made a difference then?

 

[Furion Matsuya]

Didn't the Bible of the Old Testament and Jewish monotheism only pop up in close to their current form during the Babylonian Captivity ?

 

[Orinsul]

No, the level of detail is not an indication that the story is true. Oral histories accumulate detail when they are retold. Don't forget, by the time the Exodus story was written in the form that we know it, it's at least half a millennium after the supposed events (depending on how you date the story, it could be up to a full millennium), it isn't exactly eyewitness testimony. As for going to Egypt, that's a long and hard journey, not many listeners would undertake it. If some do get to Egypt and check what the Egyptians know, what do you think happens? The same thing that happens today, believers will believe whether there is evidence or not. It doesn't make a difference today that not a single Egyptian source recounts even one of the plagues that supposedly devastated the country, not a single source recounts a pharao drowned when the Red Sea closed over him and his troops, what makes you think that it would have made a difference then?

Correlation with what other folks said was going in does though, also correlation with archaeological method. The bible ain't a good source, but it is a source, and when he have no other source so complete, having it to connect things together has been essential in jigsawing the ancient world together.
There isn't really eyewitness stuff for the stuff in the bible, but the bible works really well as an eyewitness for important stuff going on that we have remains of, or remains of records of but without the bible, no witnesses or perspective on.
Somehow people even used the bible to find where mesopotamian ruins were located during the early rounds of archaeology/tomb-raiding there, lords know how, but it's a method that worked.

And a few of the things in the bible, have turned out against everyone's expectations to hold up pretty firmly, sadly it's never the bits you want. It's generally just the boring 'who was living here at this time but later was living over there' stuff. Even if the bible got the names wrong, it generally got the whens and where's right, well close. Also, can we have a moment of thanks and remeberence to the thoughtful ancient people who kindly left unique pots behind them everywhere they went? I mean, that's serious consideration for the future archaeologists.
But could it not have gotten Jonah right? Or one of the fun bits atleast. Or really any of the bits with monsters, dinosaurs are cool and everything, but c'mon, monsters are cooler is it too much to ask of the universe to get some monsters going on.

Didn't the Bible of the Old Testament and Jewish monotheism only pop up in close to their current form during the Babylonian Captivity ?

The oldest bits of the OT are from the first temple period, not when the oral history started but when they were first written down. But most is alot later, some wasn't codified until the roman occupation.

 

[Semper Victor]

Oral history is notoriously untrustworthy. The only genre of oral literature that has showed itself immune to variation are versified sacred texts, like the Vedas or the Avesta. And even in these cases, they required the full-time dedication of a specially trained sacerdotal caste commited to memorize them. In the case of the Avesta, it even came to the absurd situation that by the Sasanian era mobeds who memorized and recited the Gathas of Zoroaster had lost the ability to understand the language they were reciting, but they still transmitted it without changes.

But at the same time, the Sasanians had lost the historical memories of their Achaemenid ancestors; ironically it was the Greeks and Romans (who had written historical records) who kept alive the memories of the Achaemenids. There's little reason to assume that Israelite history was any different in that respect.