The Science Video Thread

If you want a good archaeological breakdown of the history of Israel and the Bible, check out The Bible Unearthed. Its like 10 bucks on Kindle.

Its excellent, and yeah, there is zero evidence that the Jews ever went to Egypt. There's zero evidence of the Exodus. If 40,000 people were tromping around the Sinai peninsula at that point in time, for 40 years, there would be some fucking physical evidence. Archaeologists can locate communities of less than 20 people in the Neolithic based on simple excavation techniques, yet in over 150 years of digging in the Middle East to prove the Bible true, there's not been one single piece of credible, non fabricated evidence come out to show that the stories in the Old Testament especially, but New Testament as well, ever happened.

Nothing. 40,000 people tromping through the desert for 40 years and they haven't found one fucking campsite, one fucking stone tool, one fucking piece of ANYTHING to show people were in that region during that time.

The Bible Unearthed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Origin of the Israelites[edit]
The book remarks that, despite modern archaeological investigations and the meticulous ancient Egyptian records from the period of Ramesses II, there is an obvious lack of any archaeological evidence for the migration of a band of semitic people across the Sinai Peninsula,[14] except for the Hyksos. Although the Hyksos are in some ways a good match, their main centre being at Avaris (later renamed 'Pi-Ramesses'), in the heart of the region corresponding to the 'land of Goshen', and Manetho later writing that the Hyksos eventually founded the Temple in Jerusalem,[15] it throws up other problems, as the Hyksos became not slaves but rulers, and they were chased away rather than chased to bring them back.[15] Nevertheless, the book posits that the exodus narrative perhaps evolved from vague memories of the Hyksos expulsion, spun to encourage resistance to the 7th century domination of Judah by Egypt.[16]

Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus (as suggested by the book of Joshua), most of them had in fact always been there; the Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed into a distinct culture.[17] Recent surveys of long-term settlement patterns in the Israelite heartlands show no sign of violent invasion or even peaceful infiltration, but rather a sudden demographic transformation about 1200 BCE in which villages appear in the previously unpopulated highlands;[18] these settlements have a similar appearance to modern Bedouin camps, suggesting that the inhabitants were once pastoral nomads, driven to take up farming by the Late Bronze Age collapse of the Canaanite city-culture.[19]

The authors take issue with the book of Joshua's depiction of the Israelites conquering Canaan in only a few years?far less than the lifetime of one individual?in which cities such as Hazor, Ai, and Jericho, are destroyed. Finkelstein and Silberman view this account as the result of the telescoping effect of the vagaries of folk memory about destruction caused by other events;[20] modern archaeological examination of these cities shows that their destruction spanned a period of many centuries, with Hazor being destroyed 100 to 300 years after Jericho,[21] while Ai (whose name actually means 'heap of ruins') was completely abandoned for roughly a millennium before Jericho was destroyed, and not being re-occupied until 200 years afterwards.[22]

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It is an excellent overview of the archaeology of the region for lay people who aren't trained in archaeology and it completely demolishes the Biblical narrative.

Tortfeasor_sl said:

I was just going off of Josephus. He's a credible source by most accounts. There are other references to Joseph marrying Asenath in eqyptian texts but I would have to go find em.

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Josephus is as credible as a historian of his time period could be, but that doesn't mean he wasn't working off bad information handed down for generations by his forebears. The fact is that by the time of Josephus' writings, the biblical narrative was considered by Jewish people to be an accurate historical retelling of their history. Because the myth has been told and retold by that point so often that no one questioned it. It had become ingrained. Josephus was writing in 37-100 CE, but the stories in the Biblical narrative date from the 7th and 8th centuries BCE and are purported to actually detail events which occurred as early as 1200 BCE (though the Bible Unearthed demonstrates in totality that the Old Testament was actually written in the 7th and 8th centuries and describes the region as it existed at that time, while projecting these factors back into their own past as a way to establish politically convenient narratives regarding the evolution of the Jewish state at that time period. To understand what I'm saying pretend that Americans wrote out in a holy book that Washington DC was built in, say, the 1300s, rather than the 1800s or whenever it was built, in order to justify the US government's existence in the modern day, that's basically what the Jewish leadership was doing at the time, taking contemporary situations such as city placement, political enemies, etc. and projecting them into the past as a way to explain and justify the contemporary situation).

Blazin_sl said:

Do you have any respectable academic citation for this claim? In just 20 mins of researching ancient manuscripts that have been found you seem to be quite wrong, so curious what source you used to come to this conclusion. I'm by no means saying the OT is a historical account but you are making a rather strong claim that the Jewish people never settled in Egypt.

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I just quoted the academic citation for it. In that post

Here

Israel Finkelstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Israel Finkelstein (born 1949) is an Israeli archaeologist and academic. He is the Jacob M. Alkow Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze Age and Iron Ages at Tel Aviv University and is also the co-director of excavations at Megiddo in northern Israel. He served as Director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University from 1996-2002.[1] In 2005 he received the Dan David Prize.[2]

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Here's his personal webpage with his CV and research history going back, you know, 40 years.

Personal site of Prof. Israel Finkelstein | Humanities faculty | Tel Aviv University

This guy is the head of the Tel Aviv Archaeology department and specializes in bronze and iron age cultures in the region.

Blazin_sl said:

Ok I'm working on reading through it and already he seems to be saying there was indeed Jews in ancient Egypt, I'm not seeing how you got from there was no Exodus as written in the OT, to there was no Jews in Egypt.

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No, he doesn't. Citation required. I've read his book.

Here, since you can't read, let me requote the wikipedia summary

Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus (as suggested by the book of Joshua), most of them had in fact always been there; the Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed into a distinct culture.[17] Recent surveys of long-term settlement patterns in the Israelite heartlands show no sign of violent invasion or even peaceful infiltration, but rather a sudden demographic transformation about 1200 BCE in which villages appear in the previously unpopulated highlands;[18] these settlements have a similar appearance to modern Bedouin camps, suggesting that the inhabitants were once pastoral nomads, driven to take up farming by the Late Bronze Age collapse of the Canaanite city-culture.[19]

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No Jewish invasion from Egypt. No Jewish slaves. There were no Jews in Egypt to do so. They were Canaanites who lived in the hill regions who moved into the rest of the area around 1200 and didn't actually coagulate into a cohesive whole under the 7th and 8th centuries.

That is Finkelstein's position.

Blazin_sl said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Onias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History..._Jews_in_Egypt

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ALL of these links are to events hundreds of years AFTER the period we're talking about. 4th and 5th and 6th century Jews living in Egypt is NOT what we're talking about. Of course Jews may have migrated to Egypt in the 6th century. They started to exist as a culture group in the 8th century and 7th century.

We're talking about Jews being slaves in the period somewhere (depending on the Fundies you talk to) between 2400 and 1200 BCE, when the story of Moses and the Exodus and all that other rot would have taken place. It did not happen. There was no Exodus, no Jewish slaves building pyramids, no Moses, no parting the waters.

I dunno how you came to misunderstand this, and think we were saying that no Jews ever lived in Egypt ever ever. That's fucking dumb, there's lots of old Jewish communities there. Or there were. Many of them have been run off. But during the period when the Bible claims that the Jews were enslaved, you know, the shit we were talking about with the pyramids being built by Jewish slaves and all that, there were no Jews and they were not slaves. Didn't happen. Zip.

Blazin_sl said:

How about we agree on a few definitions before wasting time:
Jew - someone who worships YHWY
Ancient Egypt - Nile Valley pre 200BC
No jews in Egypt - Means there was no settlement of Jewish people lets say SW of Gaza

Does he state that he believes the Temple at Elephantine never existed?

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Again: We were discussing the Biblical story of Jews being enslaved in Egypt, can you tell me when the Jews were supposed to be enslaved in Egypt?

What about when pyramid building ended in Egypt?

Hm?

We are not talking about Egypt in 200 BCE. We are talking about Jews being enslaved in Egypt. There is ZERO EVIDENCE for this occuring. ZERO EVIDENCE that they then went on to conduct the Exodus and wander in the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years and ZERO EVIDENCE that they then re invaded Canaan and took it over from the people dwelling there.

Got it yet?

Let me help you, by quoting my entire statement

If you want a good archaeological breakdown of the history of Israel and the Bible, check out The Bible Unearthed. Its like 10 bucks on Kindle.

Its excellent, and yeah,there is zero evidence that the Jews ever went to Egypt. There's zero evidence of the Exodus. If 40,000 people were tromping around the Sinai peninsula at that point in time, for 40 years, there would be some fucking physical evidence. Archaeologists can locate communities of less than 20 people in the Neolithic based on simple excavation techniques, yet in over 150 years of digging in the Middle East to prove the Bible true, there's not been one single piece of credible, non fabricated evidence come out to show that the stories in the Old Testament especially, but New Testament as well, ever happened.

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Got it yet? No one was saying that AFTER the 7th century BCE when the first Jewish state appeared, that Jews migrated out to place like Egypt.

That's not even remotely the topic of conversation. We are discussing the merits of the Exodus mythology. That shit didn't happen in 200 BCE, bro.

Pyramid building was done by 1700 BCE, as well. So the Exodus would have had to occurred even before 1200 BCE to fit the Biblical narrative.

How is it not fucking clear when the entire paragraph after that first sentence goes into deep detail about the Exodus and Jews being enslaved and no archaeological evidence for it, etc.

And yes, Fundies do believe that the pyramids were built by enslaved Jews, since it was in Charlton Heston's Moses movie that has long been the belief by religious fundamentalists.

Archaeology is science.