Truth
Dennis Prager on the Exodus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 05 April 2002
Archaeologically, the tradition about Mount Sinai and the desert wanderings remains unsupported.B S J Isserlin, The Israelites
Rabbis and Academics Suck!
Dennis Prager who (astonishingly) hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles, argues in an article in Jewish World Review. that “If the Exodus did not occur, there is no Judaism”. He seems somewhat biased, but sadly has some sort of dyslexia whereby he cannot recognize vowels because he always writes G-d instead of God. This disability must have left him bitter at the inability of modern science to cure it, although it seems that prayer can have been no more successful.
The way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles
Rabbi Wolpe made his declaration before 2000 worshippers at the Conservative Sinai Temple, and the speech was reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. So, Prager is annoyed that archaeologists and even some Jewish clergy do not believe the biblical exodus occurred. Despite this, he will continue to tell his children, and, he hopes his grandchildren, what Jews have told their children and grandchildren for 3000 years.
We were slaves in the land of Egypt and with a mighty hand, G-d brought us out.
Tch! There is that defect again. Since Prager boasts of being a pious Jew, we might imagine he is shy about saying God’s name, and G-d is not some strange defect, but God is not God’s name, so it must be a type of dyslexia.
Prager thinks that because some archaeologists and evidently even some of the Jewish clergy will not accept what they read in a book without evidence of it in real life, they “have the same bias against traditional religious beliefs that most of their academic colleagues have”. By academic colleagues Prager tells us he means the people Dr Robert Jastrow, in his book God and the Astronomers, said did not want to acknowledge anything that might even suggest the existence of God. They were, Jastrow tells us, annoyed that the universe seems to have been started in a big-bang. Because the universe had a beginning, it could imply a creator and therefore annoyed the astronomers. Prager adds:
This anti-religious bias is hardly confined to astronomers. It pervades academia, home to nearly all archaeologists.
Jastrow must work with some strange scientists, if his claims are true. Anger is not an emotion that scientists would show at any results of their experiments unless the experiment had gone wrong technically. If they were trying to demonstrate an hypothesis that they had formulated and it failed, they might be disappointed, but scarcely angry. Scientists want to know about the world as it is, and take sides only over competing hypotheses so long as the practical work does not distinguish between them. God is not a hypothesis, it is an excuse!
Evidence in the Desert
Prager drones on that because archaeologists have found no evidence of Israelites in the Sinai desert, they say no Israelites made the trip from Egypt to Canaan. He says that conclusion strikes many as so unwarranted—even arrogant—as to demand explanation. According to Exodus, the Israelites spent only 40 years in the desert over 3000 years ago. What could possibly remain from a mere 40 years in a desert 3000 years later?
Prager, like everyone who get obsessed with some occult belief, ends up being dishonest. His excuse here for the absence of evidence of the Israelites in the Sinai desert is utterly dishonest as he must know, even though he depends on the ignorance of his readers not to notice. His excuse would carry some weight if we were talking about only a few Israelites 3000 years ago, but we are talking about two million, according to the story which Prager insists is true. Two million people wandering about a Desert for 40 years undoubtedly would leave something! But they were not even wandering. For most of the time they were in one place, and two million people camping in one place for nearly forty years undoubtedly would leave signs. No sign of them has been found! That is the point, Mr Prager. Not only that, but the Egyptians kept records about the most trivial of things but do not tell us that two million slaves escaped one night.
Getting increasingly desperate, Prager asks, “Since when does the alleged lack of physical proof mean something never happened or doesn’t exist?” The answer is most often. If there is no physical proof that something does not exist then the sensible person will not accept that it does. That is why most scientists do not believe in G-d, sorry God!
He continues: “I have no doubt that many of the archaeologists who are so certain that the Jews never wandered out of Egypt are quite sure that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe. But on what basis?” Once again, in the predictable fashion of all apologists unable to argue the facts, Prager sets up a straw man to shoot down. Whatever Prager has “no doubt” of we can forget about, because Prager has “no doubt” about a load of religious fantasy that has little real-life evidence for it.
Archaeologists surely might consider there could be life in the rest of what Prager presumably counts as “G-d’s” universe, but he has to say they “are quite sure” of it. On the basis of the immensity of the universe and the evidence we have that the molecules that constitute life are widespread in it, they might indeed be “quite sure” but few will say they are certain! Prager however is sure about everything his religious beliefs hold, however unlikely. Prager admits, as if it were stupid: “They choose to believe it because logic suggests to them that intelligent life exists out there”. Who is the cracked pot, those who believe on the basis of logic or those who believe on the basis of absence of it?
3000 Year Old Fairy Tales
In fact, Prager seems not to understand what logic means. He says:
Well, logic suggests to many of us that Jews were slaves in Egypt and that there was an exodus. For thousands of years Jews have been retelling this story. It is possible that it is all a 3,000-year-old fairy tale, but do logic and common sense suggest this? Why would a people make up such an ignoble history? Why would a people fabricate a myth of its origins in which it is depicted so negatively?
There is no logic in this. What is wrong with a fairy tale lasting for 3000 years? Are the Greek myths fairy tales? They have lasted for 3000 years. We know from archaeology that the Tale of the Two Brothers, which appears in the bible pretending to be history as the story of Joseph and Potipher’s wife, is older than 3000 years. It is an old Egyptian story, sometimes put in anthologies of short stories as the oldest complete version of its kind in the world. What is more, the story of the preservation of Moses in a basket floated down a river is preceded by the exact same story told of Sargon I of Akkad (2334-2279 BC), almost a thousand years before the myth of Moses was set in time (c 1400 BC). So, the bible itself preserves tales from earlier times, but different contexts, proving that there is nothing illogical about old tales living for thousands of years.
Contrary to all logic, Prager says he believes in the Jews’ slavery and exodus because any people that makes up a history for itself makes sure to depict itself as heroic and other peoples as villains.
There is no parallel in human history to the Hebrew bible’s negative depiction of the Jews’ national origins. The Torah’s depiction of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt to Canaan portrays the Jews as ingrates, rebels and chronic complainers, undeserving of the freedom G-d and Moses brought them. Moreover, aside from Moses, the heroes of the story are nearly all non-Jews. It is the daughter of Pharaoh who saves and rears Moses (later Jewish tradition actually holds her to be his mother); it is a Midianite priest, Jethro, who tells Moses how to govern the Jewish people; and the two midwives who refuse the pharaoh’s order to kill all male Jewish babies are almost certainly Egyptians. As for Moses himself, he is depicted as being raised an Egyptian.
Ignoble History
Prager asks why a people should make up such an ignoble history. Why, indeed? It is not what anyone would expect because people like to make up noble origins for themselves, and, because the Torah’s story does the opposite of what is expected, it must be true, according to Prager logic! What, though, does it therefore suggest in logic? It suggests that the Israelites did not make up these stories about themselves. They did not because the Persians did! Judaism was invented by the Persian kings, and was developed by Greek kings, the Egyptian Ptolemies. The Persians wanted to get the Jews to see the Egyptians as their enemies, and constructed the basic story of escaping from slavery. The Egyptian Prolemies had no choice but to accept this basis, but they softened it in the ways that Prager points out. Prager is too biased and illogical to consider real possibilities, because, like all religious bigots, he already knows the answers. It might have something to do with his dyslexia.
Contrary to logic and evidence again he says people do not tell a story for 3000 years that has no experiential basis. Until modern times when people learned how to explore and write history, everyone believed stories about themselves that had no “experiential basis”. They were called myths. In the modern world most people have grown out of them and sought their real history. Jews and Christians are the only ones who refuse to discover real history and stick to believing mythology.
Prager even says that the Jewish scriptures have allusions to Egypt that only contemporaries could know, and cites the name Moses. If only contemporaries know that Moses is Egyptian, how do we know it now, supposedly 3500 years later? This is the level of this dunce’s logic. Just to cap it, he adds that he will believe the exodus happened because archaeologists say it did not!
He finishes up arguing with the Jewish clergymen he mentioned at the beginning, who say that Jews do not have to believe the myth of the exodus to be Jewish. He says it is “nonsense”. The sensible rebbis will be quaking, we can be sure, at the pronouncement of such an intellect.
A creator G-d who never intervened in human affairs is Aristotle’s unmoved mover, not the G-d the Jews introduced to the world.
There he goes again with his sad dysfunction. And, as a matter of fact, the “G-d” was introduced by colonists sent from Persia. He thinks that no Jew who does not believe the exodus should celebrate passover. It is like telling Christians that they should not celebrate Christmas because Jesus was not born on 25 December and it is an old Pagan festival—even the bishops recognize that—just as the Passover is. It shows that Prager is so stupid, he cannot understand what mythology is. No one is allowed to celebrate a myth because it is not history. No more Santa Clause for you little kiddies!
Prager thinks that, today, criticism of religion is “suffocating,” whereas, fifty years ago, archaeologists showed time and again how archaeology confirmed essentials of the biblical narratives. He means the time when W F Albright and rabbi Nelson Glueck almost made up their archaeology to match the bible.
Today, most archaeologists argue the opposite.
Thank goodness! The religious professionals, whoring for God, no longer have absolute control on the exploration of ancient near eastern history, and gradually the truth will out. That is what annoys and scares these petty religionists. Prager has a last sneer at the archaeologists:
They will continue to find meaning in their lives from excavating ancient ruins and deconstructing the Bible.
Unlike those commendable and intelligent people reading and believing a lot of ancient propaganda, and pretending that it has relevance for the modern world as “G-d’s” word. You have to feel sorry for him because of his disability, though.
