Truth
No Proof or Evidence of Exodus: Jewish Apologetic
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 16 May 2002
The actual evidence concerning the Exodus resembles the evidence for the unicorn.Baruch Halpern, Pennsylvania State University
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe sensibly admits that the story of the exodus is a myth. Before 2000 worshippers at the Los Angeles Sinai Temple, he said that “the way the Bible describes the exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all,” and the speech was reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Jews hearing the sermon do not seem to have been outraged by it in the least but those reading about it in the LA Times exploded with apoplexy. Rabbi Ken Spiro was one of them, and fired off a refutation for his employers at aish.com, but it is as honest as all apologetic writings—it is not.
Spiro begins in a typical fashion by debasing the science of archaeology. Excavation is merely a mechanical skill, and interpretation of the finds is subjective. Spiro tells us that any “two world-class archaeologists will often come to different conclusions” over any artefact—particularly when religious beliefs are involved. What this overlooks is that, while there is certainly subjectivity involved in some assessments of archaeological finds, archaeologists will more often agree rather than disagree, and, as Spiro rightly says disagreements are often rooted in religion.
What he does not say is that some people like to call themselves scholars even though they have no interest in any scholarship that might challenge their religious beliefs. In the archaeology of Palestine, regrettably there are a large number of pious Jewish and Christians “scholars” who have now spent 100 years denying anything discovered that contradicted what the bible upheld, and what is worse, deliberately spoiling archaological sites that seemed not to uphold the bible. Some sites have had hundreds of years of history dug out, carted away in truckloads and dumped.
Spiro shows which camp he is in by the whole tone of his article:
When Los Angeles Times reporter Teresa Watanabe writes that “the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade”, she is revealing her anti-Biblical bias.
All biblicists call their opponents biased but make out that they are not biased at all. In fact, the bias in this field is to believe that the bible is unquestionable. Proper scholarship questions everything, because the proper scholar has to doubt all sources until there are sufficient grounds built up to justify them. Religious works are intended to convert and hold people to the religion. It does not usually mean that they are good history. Scholars doubt and disprove hypotheses until they are upheld by the evidence because that is what science does, but biblicists aim to prove that the bible is true because that is their belief—God wrote or inspired it so it must be true or essentially true. Biblicists are therefore not scholars whatever they think they are, or whatever they think God thinks they are doing by deliberately twisting evidence.
Evidence, Propaganda and History
Anyway, Rabbi Spiro admits there is a shortage of Egyptian documentation of the exodus period. It is a challenge to the bible which has a large part of the Jewish Torah devoted to this event described in astonishing detail for a work placed at a minimum of 1400 BC. Spiro expects his audience to be utterly uncritical of what he says. The excuse he finds is that most inscriptions found in the ancient world have a specific agenda—to glorify the deeds of the king and to show his full military power. The escape of two million Israelite slaves one night would not have been glorious and so went unrecorded.
By a miracle, no doubt, at the same time, the two million slaves who had been employed for several centuries making bricks were suddenly given amazing skills including that of recording accurate history even though, in fact, most must have been illiterate. Not only do they record astonishingly detailed history on an almost daily basis so that it seems nothing important was missed, but they precede the earliest known historian in the modern sense, the Greek writer Herodotus, by a thousand years!
Herodotus is called the “father of historians” for his Histories about the war between the Greeks and Persians. Abraham is dated about 2000 BC and his stories in the bible seem as detailed as those of the exodus, which is even more astonishing considering it is the story about only a single family’s travels. This is 1500 years before Herodotus! Why should Herodotus have the accolade as the “father of history” when whole chunks of bible are so much older? Why isn’t Moses the father of history, if he wrote the Torah about 1400 BC? The reason is simple. Herodotus had the title because he was indeed the father of history, and the bible was not written in its modern form until at least two centuries after Herodotus. The bible was actually influenced by the Histories of Herodotus, and also by Homer, as several scholars have shown, but no biblicist will accept.
Spiro tells us that pre-Herodotus, civilizations recorded events but as propaganda rather than as an objective historical record. It does not suggest to him that the bible itself might have been propaganda. That is biblicist scholarship for you. He points out that on Sennacherib’s monuments there are no dead Assyrians although there are plenty of dead enemies. It is a bit like the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the exodus account. No dead Israelites featured there! So we come to the point—the excuse:
The last thing the ancient Egyptians wanted to record is the embarrassment of being completely destroyed by the God of a puny slave nation. Would the Egyptians ever want to preserve details of the destruction of fields, flocks, and first borns—plus the death of Pharaoh and the entire Egyptian army at the Red Sea?
Spiro, you will notice is no scholar but he is a biblicist. That is how he earns a crust for his five children—pretending that religious lies are history. He has an excuse for the Egyptians not recording failures, but the point of propaganda, as he knows from experience, is to tell lies. The Pharaoh who lost his army to the direct intervention of the God of the puny slaves would most likely have inscribed it as a victory. After all many Egyptians must have lost their brothers and fathers and the loss would have needed explaining to the Egyptians. A terrible battle would have been admitted but it would have appeared as a victory. Spiro himself notes that the battle of Kadesh on the Orantes River between the Hittites and the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II was claimed as a victory by both sides. No victories are ever cost free unless the God of the punies intervenes, something which He seems to have ceased to do.
In any case, Spiro is talking about monumental inscriptions. These were meant to be seen by all, and so were rendered in a light favourable to the Pharaohs, but the Egyptians were also meticulous accountants and book keepers using papyrus. A lot of papyrus has survived because of the dry climate of Egypt and they show that the Egyptians recorded everything. Two slaves escaping were recorded, but Spiro wants us to believe that two million were not.
Evidence Absent and Contradictory!
Spiro now tells us that the Torah has great credibility because it…
…is unique among all ancient national literature in that it portrays its people in both victory and defeat. The Jews—and sometimes their leaders—are shown as rebels, complainers, idol-builders, and yes, descended from slaves.
The Bible is an anti-Semitic book. Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story. Alone among the epics, it is out for truth, not heroics.Israel Zangwill
There is not a second’s pause here to consider whether this uniqueness tells us something about the authors of the stories in the bible. What it ought to tell any scholar is that the authors were not themselves Jews. The book was written by someone who wanted to depict the Israelites as having been self-destructively irreligious. The aim of any such authors must have been to keep the people orderly and lawful. That is why they were presented with a law, ostensibly form God and were told they had to obey it because they had a long history of apostasy. Who could have done this? The Persians in the fifth century! No biblicist will consider this even as a possibility. It might challenge their faith.
Spiro has another excuse, and one which has to be accepted to a degree. It is that the archeological record is incomplete, not just in what might remain after a long time but also in what has been found of whatever does remain. Only a fraction of archeological sites that might say something about the bible have been excavated. So we have the apologetic mantra:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
He cites Kathleen Kenyon, a world-renowned archeologist who dug in Jericho looking for traces of Joshua’s conquest of the land. She found none and concluded that the bible was false. Spiro tells us that she dug only one small section of Jericho, but today, many archeologists claim there is indeed clear evidence of inhabitation in Jericho from the time of Joshua—“though the controversy lingers.” Who are the “many” archaeologists that Spiro speaks of? We can guess that they are biblicist archaeologists who are doing their utmost to fit the historical facts into the biblical jar. He admits that the controversy lingers, and indeed it does. If Jericho was inhabited at the supposed time, there should be clear signs of destruction and sudden cultural change, and even a narrow trench should supply such evidence.
Exodus or Liberation?
Spiro gets more and more dishonest, as apologists must to trick their naïve and trusting readers. He tells us that we must read the biblical text with the corresponding Talmudic comment. So when we read in Exodus that the bodies of the pharaoh’s charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea (Ex 14:30), the Talmud will explain the contradiction for us. After the Egyptians drowned, the sea threw them onto the shore, so that the Jewish people could be relieved at the knowledge that their enemies would no longer be in pursuit. Spiro is a rabbi and puts his faith as much in the Talmud as in the Torah, but the Talmud does not pretend to be contemporaneous with the events as the Torah does. The Talmudic commentaries are mainly more recent even than the Christian New Testament. In short, the rabbi writing this commentary could have been no wiser about the events than we are today. The Talmudic commentary therefore is meaningless as evidence. Spiro knows this but he depends upon his readers not knowing it.
The Los Angeles Times reported that people in the temple congregation, secular Jews and several rabbis interviewed, thought it was beside the point whether the exodus is historically true or not. From the phenomenological viewpoint that they seem to take, the real point is the cultural practices that the myth justifies, namely the practices that make people Jewish. Spiro disagrees. He wants his myths to be accepted as historical even if they are not. He cites the Ten Commandments:
I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery.Exodus 20:2
More dishonesty. This does not mention an “exodus,” and is better explained in history if the expression “brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery” really means that the land of Canaan was taken out of the possession of the Egyptians, as certainly happened in history, probably more than once. Admittedly there is no dramatic movement of two million slaves, but that is absurd anyway, but two million people who were slaves to the Egyptians could have thrown off the Egyptian yoke and thus been brought out of Egypt in the sense of no longer being an Egyptian colony.
We now get the same false argument that Christians are fond of. That a belief must be true if people were willing to die for it.
When Jews in the Crusades chose to be burned at the stake rather than convert, they were not subscribing to some weak fable.
Were the perpetrators of the 11 September atrocities in New York following a true belief because they willingly martyred themselves for it? Is the same true of the Moslem martyrs blowing themselves up for their cause? Spiro is using double standards here because he obviously cannot accept these. Using double standards is dishonest.
He concludes saying that Jews have faithfully transmitted the exodus story for over 3,000 years. From parent to child, and teacher to student, it is an unbroken chain of transmission. Is it true? He will believe his bible and think it is, but that does not add a scintilla to the lack of evidence for Judaism before Persian times.
Biblicists and Archaeologists
The sure sign of the religious rogue is when they run down their own profession rather than admit that all might not be what it seems in the holy book. An archaeologist trained by Albrightian biblicists can write:
Good scholars, honest scholars, will continue to differ about the interpretations of archaeological remains simply because archaeology is not a science, it is an art. And sometimes it is not even a very good art.William Dever, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Arizona
Since Dever is an archaeologist, he ought to know what he is talking about, but what we learn is something about his own attitude to archaeology, not about archaeology itself. Science varies from subjects that can be prescribed with great detail and precision to subjects that are much looser and involve more personal discrimination, but as long as scholars are being honest their differences can be agreed amicably until better data turn up that will distinguish between different views. That is not the case when religious belief enters the discussion. Belief is not subject to persuasion by evidence, and it is at this point that arguments begin. They are between those who will not accept the evidence and those who do. Those who will not accept it are the dishonest ones, and they are the biblicists who will not allow facts to come between them and their sacred history.
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel—The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel.Ze’ev Herzog, Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Tel Aviv University
Dever calls archaeologists like Ze’ev Herzog biblical minimalists or even nihilists because they see a minimal historical content to the bible. Rabbi David Lichtman, one of the Jewish apologetic school of deceit, criticizes Herzog and Prof Israel Finkelstein for being convinced of their position from their own studies. For Lichtman, studying anything, except the Torah, is valueless, so he cannot be believed by anyone reasonable.
Biblical revisionists dismiss as fictional many parts of the bible because, as Marit Skjeggestad, puts it, “the archaeological record is silent” regarding them. Dever prefers to think that it is some historians who are deaf, presumably because they cannot hear God whispering in their ear. Dever continually bad mouths critical scholars:
In my view, most of the revisionists are no longer honest scholars, weighing all the evidence, attempting to be objective and fair-minded historians, seeking the truth. Determined to unmask the ideology of others, they have become ideologues themselves. The revisionist and the postmoderns are dangerous because they have created a kind of relativism—an anything goes attitude—that makes serious, critical inquiry difficult if not impossible.
This is almost the reverse of the truth. It tars the biblical critics with the brush of biblicism. It is biblicist scholars brought up in the W F Albright tradition, like Dever himself, who have bent and ditorted evidence, muddied waters, despoiled archaeological sites, propagated grossly wrong interpretation, dated artefacts to suit the bible rather than to suit other data, often being wrong by hundreds of years but believed because these falsehoods matched the bible and not external data. Dever seemed to learn from the blatant tendentiousness of his teachers and rejected much of it, but latterly has cracked under the strain of trying to uphold the bible contrary to the evidence and has taken to shooting the messengers.
Prof Adam Zartal, chairman of the Dept of Archaeology at the University of Haifa says this:
After years of research, I believe it is impossible to explore Israel’s origins without the bible. At the same time, the research should be as objective as possible. The bible should be used cautiously and critically. But again and again we have seen the historical value of the bible. Again and again we have seen that an accurate memory has been preserved in its transmuted narratives, waiting to be unearthed and exposed by archaeological fieldwork and critical mind work.
This is cited by Lichtman, and whatever more Zartel might have had to add is not given, but Zartel’s sounds a healthier position that has a fairer basis, but still gives the bible pride of place for no good reason except belief. The bible purports to be a long history and even the critics of it accept that there is history in it, but only in the more recent parts of it is unequivocal confirmation of it found. Some names and dates are found to match external records.
What the critics say is that any competent author could put a long romance written for some non-historical purpose, whether entertainment, propaganda or theological, and set it convincingly in time, establishing a few historical characters to add to the authenticity. Propaganda and theological purposes existed, and that means the bulk of the content of the scriptures served those purposes and not the need to record facts accurately. There might be historical facts in the bible, but except where they can be checked from external douments or archaeology, no on knows what is true and what is written for effect.
That is a perfectly reasonable and scholarly position to take. It sounds like the position that Adam Zarkel might be attempting to hold. Unfortunately when he says, “again and again we have seen that an accurate memory has been preserved in its transmuted narratives,” these memories are in the later parts of the history that were not far removed from the times when the books were written. The earlier in the history you get the less and less sound evidence there is for the bible as history and eventually it runs out all together except for vague allusions.
A Late Work
One of the claims of the critics is that the bible can be better explained as having been written much later than the times it describes. It stands to reason, unless the prophets were writing history in advance of it happening—no doubt a position that Rabbis Lichtman and Spiro would gladly accept—that history cannot be written until it has happened. The bible describes the fall of Jerusalem and the “return” from exile. It then describes Ezra and Nehemiah coming with the law in the fifth century. It follows that the bible could not have been written until at least then. This is 1,000 years after the exodus, which, if it were history, has to have been preserved in sources no longer available to us for the whole of that time.
Works that are written later than the time they represent not uncommonly have anachronisms and the bible sure enough has a lot of them. A significant one might be the camel. It certainly once was thought to have been. In Genesis, camels are already domesticated at the time of Abraham, in the 18th century BC. Yet camels were thought not to have been domesticated until nearer the 12th century BC. Lichtman assures us that archaeological finds show that the camel was domesticated by the 18th century BC. He gives us no sources, but few would be prepared to disbelieve him even though he thinks it is a great refutation of the critics.
Neverthless, it poses questions that smuggies would prefer were not asked. For example, if camels were only domesticated at the time of Abraham, and Abraham had camels, then he was not just a wandering Aramaean. If the beast had just been domesticated only great kings could have had them because domesticated camels would have been rare animals. It would be the ancient equivalent of someone today having a private jet or helicopter. Yet the bible treats them in a matter of fact way. The evidence remains that even if it were possible for Abraham to have possessed camels, the stories were written when it was probable that he did—much later in history.
Prof Kenneth Kitchen, formerly an Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool, gleefully says that price of 20 silver pieces for Joseph when he was sold to a caravan of Midianites matches precisely the going price of slaves in the region from Joseph’s time period. 1,000 years later the price for a slave was much higher. This is just one example that demonstrates, according to Kitchen, that “it’s more reasonable to assume that the biblical data reflect reality.”
To reiterate, the minimalists do not deny that there is valid historical data in the bible but no one knows what it is unless it is checked against external sources. On the face of it this is what Kitchen has done, but as ever it poses questions. The Midianites seem to be using money well over 1000 years before it was introduced, according to historians. It is also hard to believe that slaves ever had a fixed price irrespective of the state they were in and the race they belonged to. And it is hard to believe that the price of slaves, whatever it was, inflated continuously at a steady rate across the whole of the ANE for over a thousand years.
Having analysed 3000 surviving price records on clay tablets for the period between 464 and 72 BC, Peter Temin, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Explorations in Economic History, 39, (2002), says ancient Babylonian trading markets were as volatile as our own, prices fluctuating a lot. The tablets also record astronomical observations, allowing researchers to ascribe precise dates to the deals. Babylon’s main temple was also a bank and it employed scribes to record the city’s business. They noted on clay tablets how much barley, dates, mustard, cardamom, sesame and wool one shekel of silver would buy. Temin found prices to be random just as they are in modern markets.
Alexander the Great conquered Babylon in 331 BC, and his empire stretched from his native Macedonia to India, but economic upheaval followed after his death and before 300 BC. The price of agricultural commodities rose sharply, while two of his generals—Seleucus and Antigonus the One-Eyed—fought to fill the power gap. The destruction of crops and the need to feed troops would have driven prices up, but Temin suggests that the generals used Alexander’s treasure to fund armies causing inflation.
These markets remained volatile for about 20 years, until Seleucus was firmly established in charge. Prices then remained stable until around 141 BC, when the Parthians attacked from Persia, initiating a prolonged period of conflict and steadily rising prices. Babylon, once the biggest city in the world, declined over the next few centuries, eventually collapsing into abandonment and ruin.
Now, slaves were a commodity and their price was governed by the supply. In hard times people would be sold into slavery like Joseph, but the price would be poor because a lot of people would be doing it and there would be fewer buyers. In times of conquest there might be more slaves from captives and the price might fall. Kitchen might be able to answer these questions, but the way the evidence is presented, it sounds far too simplistic. If the standard price for a healthy male slave in prosperous times in the fifth century BC, for example, were 100 pieces of silver, a romance writer could make the price 20 to show that the times were hard. Then Kitchen’s explanation is spurious.
Slaves in Egypt
What about evidence of Jewish slavery? Lichtman quotes Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner who wrote:
It must never be forgotten that we are dealing with a civilization thousands of years old and one of which only tiny remnants have survived. What is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and tatters.
The irony of this assessment of Egyptian history is that Egypt has one of the best recorded histories of any ancient country, partly because it reached an advanced level early on and partly because the Egytians were incessant recorders of things that their climate kindly preserved for us. Lichtman calls the Egyptian archaeological record “sketchy,” an utter joke in comparative terms. What point Gardiner was making is missing from the quotation, but it can hardly be that the Egyptian record is relatively poor. Compared with the original culture all archaeology is tatters, but Egypt has a lot more tatter left than contemporary civilizations.
Lichtman wants an excuse for there to be nothing in the Egyptian records about Israel, so that when something turns up that biblicists can say is relevant, they can claim it is a miracle. He nominates the Brooklyn Papyrus, because it has Israelite names from the bible as the names of domestic slaves: Asher, Yissachar, and Shifra. It shows that Israelites were slaves in Egypt, but that is something that is not denied. So were Nubians and Libyans. Canaan was an Egyptian colony for centuries. What is denied is that the slaves outmultiplied the Egyptians and they all left in a rush one night leaving the Egyptians with no wealth because they stole it all and simultaneosuly murdered all of the Egyptian first born sons.
The document also uses the word “hapiru” which biblicist scholars want to identify with the word “Hebrew,” the biblical word “ibrim.” It is not certain that the words should be identified, but more important is that no one knows what the word means. Nor do they know what “Hebrew” itself means. The Jews have three apparently equivalent names. Why? The evidence there is, including that in the bible suggests that “Hebrew” is from “eber” meaning “across” or “beyond.” The reference is to the Euphrates river because barbarian invasions came from the east, across the river.
Habiru and Hebrew seem originally therefore to have meant people coming across the Euphrates from the east, and being a trouble to the settled people in Syria and Palestine, and sometimes a threat to Egypt. The biblical word however is the word used by the Persians to describe the people who lived in their colony Abarnahara, meaning “across the river.” These people were Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites, Arabs and Syrians, not just Jews.
Lichtman tells us that Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak has succeeded in positively identifying the city of Pi-Ramses, one of the two slave cities, with Pitom, explicitly mentioned in the bible. Pharaoh Rameses II built Pi-Ramses as a new capital on the eastern Nile delta, supposedly near Goshen, where the bible places the Israelites. Lichtman says it dates exactly to “the period of the sojourn in Egypt,” and even contains many Canaanite remains where the slaves lived. Here the biblicist is at work again dishonestly arguing in circles. He does not know when the sojourn in Egypt was. The bible does not place it in the time of Rameses, according to its own dating. So what do the biblicists do? They ignore the bible’s dating in favour of dating from the names of the cities. So, they are not averse to being revisionists themselves when it suits them, but they will not admit it.
The Leiden Papyrus mentions an Egyptian official of Rameses II ordered to “distribute grain rations to the soldiers and to the Apiru who transport stones to the great pylon of Rameses”. Again the biblicists assume that these Apiru are biblical Hebrews without any basis whatsoever. Professor Abraham Malamat of Hebrew University more honestly says:
This evidence is circumstantial at best, but it’s as much as a historian can argue.
The reader should appreciate from this that it actually means nothing much until the meaning of Apiru can be determined more precisely.
Most of the cities along the alleged route that the Israelites traveled immediately before reaching the Jordan River—Iyyim, Divon, Almon-divlatayim, Nevo, and Avel Shittim (Num 33:45-50)—have not been located, and those that have been found did not exist at the time the bible reports. Yet Charles Krahmalkov notes what are apparently the same names on the walls of Egyptian temples like Karnak. These routes are recorded in the same order as the bible, and “dated to the exact period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan.” Lichtman simply cannot stop begging the question because there is no question for him. Archaeologists find no conquest of Canaan so how could it have had a period. What is more, if the places are marked on the temple walls in precisely the same order, and are so obviously places on the way from Egypt to Canaan, then that could have been the source of them used by the much later author.
Lichtman also tells us that Balaam of Beor, the prophet who rode the “athon ”or she-ass has is verified by an 8th century BC inscription housed in the Amman Museum. It was found in the Jordanian village of Deir Alla, which was Moabite territory in the first millennium BC. This inscription tells of a person by the name of Balaam ben Beor, known to the locals as a prophet who would receive his prophecies at night. These features match the Balaam described in the bible (Num 21)—his full name, occupation, night time prophecies, and Balaam was a Moabite. The minor details that Lichtman forgets is the 700 year difference between the Balaam in Numbers and the Balaam in the Ammon inscription, and that the biblical Balaam lived in Mesopotamia, not locally. Most scholars would be slightly troubled by a difference of 700 years but not biblicists. Balaam might have been famous locally or perhaps even a god (“Lord of the People”) and was incorporated into the Hebrew bible because Moabites were Hebrews under the Persians too.
Utter desperation finally outs itself when Lichtman obliges us to accept that God intervened continuously during the exodus to keep the two million slaves alive. That is why the desert which ought to have killed them actually provided for them. God did it! Now, apparently God would not let the Israelites go by the direct northern route to Canaan because they would have had to fight the Philistines who lived en route, and biblicists tell us they would have had to hazard a lot of Egyptian fortresses too.
Quite why that should have concerned such a bloodthirsty god is hard to imagine. He has just swamped and drowned a large Egyptian army and later was to kill 185,000 Assyrians, and urge the genocide of people living in Canaan only a few years later. He had already destroyed Sodom with fire, so why not just carry out a few of these tricks via the direct route? Well, He did not, and instead the Israelites spent 40 years in a barren desert fed on manna, a supernatural food, and leaving no trace at all, or at least only supernatural ones! God must have cleaned up after them too.
There is no signs of mass encampments from that time, even at the place where they camped for nearly 40 years, the bible says. We have to believe the bible that the Israelites’ food, clothing, and protection was provided directly by God. This man is such a biblicist that we are obliged to accept all of its miracles instead of finding rational explanations. The reason is that the most rational explanation is that it was all mythology and anyone who encourages others to believe myths as true history rather than moral tales is a rogue.
Lichtman ends by asking, “Would one expect the remains of large encampments after 3,000 years when bedouin camps have disappeared in about 300?” He hopes you have forgotten that this is not a large Bedouin camp but a mass of two million humans! The answer is certainly that so many people dwelling in a place for 40 years will leave a lot of debris—enough for archaeologists to find traces of 3000 years later.
Conquest
In defending the seige of Jericho, Lichtman turns to Bryant Wood, a notorious biblicist who actually makes a living by taking fee-paying believers to dig holes in the holy land. Woods suddenly found that better and more honest archaeologists had been mistaken all along. Everything he found fitted the Joshua story when previous excavators, and some subsequent ones find nothing of the sort.
He supposedly found a 3-foot layer of ash covering the entire excavated area, something you can hardly imagine anyone could have missed, but whether they did or not, Woods said it was clear evidence of deliberate destruction by fire. What he does not know is when it happened and why. Cities were sometimes burnt by the citizens because of plague. He also discovered large caches of wheat from the spring harvest that had barely been used suggesting a short siege—or none at all! The wheat was from the spring harvest confirming a spring conquest in line with the bible, but what other wheat harvest other than the annual one was there and how does Woods distinguish between them?
If what he reports is true there is a lot of material that could be C-14 dated, but preferably by an expert in sampling, not by a confidence trickster like Woods. Prof Lawrence Stager, of Harvard University, another biblicist, was more cautious but would not condemn Woods:
On the whole the archaeological assessment is not unreasonable. There is evidence of destruction and the date isn’t too far wrong.
It is faint praise, and if the date is wrong at all, it is not right! Adam Zartal says he found the altar built on Mt Ebal in Joshua 8:30-35, the fulfillment of Moses’s command (Dt 27). Animal bones are consistent with the animal sacrifices. Zartal says even the style of the altar is right because it agrees with the Talmud! Biblicists seriously think this is such strong evidence that one might suppose it has Joshua and Moses inscribed on every stone. It is evidence that there was a bamah at Ebal and why should the authors of the passage in Joshua not have known it? Yet Zartal laments that the archaeological world has not been wildly impressed. Stager however was impressed:
If a sacrificial altar stood on Mount Ebal, its impact on our research is revolutionary. All of us have to go back to kindergarten.
Or read the Talmud more closely. The Talmud was written almost 1500 years after this altar was built and the Talmudic author certainly can have known nothing about its design. If his details are correct then he had a source but it would not have been from the time of Joshua but from the fifth century when these bamahs were probably last in use before the Jerusalem temple took over their functions.
Lichtman says that minimalists are dismissive about the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscribed stone dated about 1210 BC which mentions an Israel in the land of Canaan as a “people that had to be reckoned with.” In fact the stele says:
Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more.
Concerning the Merneptah Stele, Dever says the revisionists:
…denigrate it as our only known reference. But one unimpeachable witness in the court of history is sufficient. There does exist in Canaan a people calling themselves Israel, who are thus called Israel by the Egyptians—who after all are hardly biblically biased, and who cannot have invented such a specific and unique people for their own propaganda purposes.
The alert reader might have had a thought at this point. If Merneptah, the Egyptian Pharaoh and a son of Rameses invaded what was described as the land of a people called Israel, then how can Bryant G Woods be certain that the destruction he claims to find at contemporary Jericho is not the destruction of Merneptah. Woods says he has found fire and seed, so perhaps Merneptah actually set out to destroy seedcorn. Admittedly the better sense is that the race has been wiped out, but some biblicists feel they have to explain that it was not, and so say the seed meant seedcorn. Anyway, the point is that biblicists take all their cues from the bible even though there are better ones in the sense that they are vouched for in real history. If we accept the truth of the Merneptah Stele, we ought to accept that any destruction of cities areound this time must have been Merneptah’s and not legendary Israelites.
The dating of the Merneptah Stele is also bound up in doubts that some scholars have about Egyptian dating being based essentially on Manetho who was simply inexact. The various Dark Ages in ancient history might be explained by false dating which would lead to about 300 years dropping out of Egyptian history around this time. Merneptah’s Stele would then be dated close to the time of the biblical Omri and Assyrian Khumri, apparently the historic founder of the Israelite state. Even so, Minimalism does not require it and Merneptah’s Stele, if correctly dated simply is the first reference to a people known as Israel. Since Israel seems to be a word cognate with the word Syria, it might have meant no more than that. Otherwise, it was just the Sons (or seed!) of El—the people whose god was El—but these people had no land of their own. The same stele says they lived in the land of the Hurrians.
Lichtman continues with the tricks he has, knowing them to be tricks, we must assume since he is a rabbi. The bible reports the Philistines as expert metal workers, and to have come from Crete. These facts were true but Lichtman seems amazed that the bible should have known it. He lies outrageously, however, to strengthen his point spuriously by claiming the Philistines “were off the political map by the 9th century BC,” hoping to suggest that a later writer could have known nothing about them. They were on the political map until the time of Nebuchadrezzer at least, and probably were only absorbed fully in Persian times. They were certainly on the political map long enough to give their name to the country they lived in—Palestine!
Lichtman again tells us facts that simply cannot be accepted without the original sources because of his biblicist false assumptions. He says that the “pim” of 1 Samuel 13:19-21 when the Israelites go to the metal smiths of the Philistines to have their tools sharpened was an ancient coin weight used “exclusively” during the “Israelite settlement period.” Since there was no conquest and therefore no Israelite settlement period Lichtman is again talking bible and not scholarship. Nevertheless Dever asks whether a writer in the 2nd century BC could have known of the existence of these pim weights which would have disappeared for 5 centuries before his time, and answers, “No.”
Here are a whole load of confusions. Five centuries before the second century is the seventh century not the twelfth century, which is supposedly the settlement period. So were these pims in use for five centuries then went out of use in the seventh century? If they were in use for so long how do they know they went out of use in the seventh century? Could they have lasted until the fifth century before they went out of use. If so then they could easily have been remembered in the second century when these books were re-written by the Maccabees because they were re-written and the pim was in the original version written in the fifth century when Deuteronomy was presented to the Israelites.
Lichtman says that Dever maintains with relative certainty that early Israelites settled the land because approximately 300 small agricultural villages have been found, built between the 13-11th centuries BC, the time period of the “Israelite conquest of the land.” Lichtman insists on reminding his readers of this conquest although Dever himself speaks of a “settlement”—not necessarily the same thing. Dever considers this to have been a large increase in population at the time, and from a non-native people. Their houses matched descriptions in Judges and Samuel, it seems. The settlements lacked any pig remnants amongst animal bones left in the area. Lichtman says only Jews had a pigless diet. This might be when the tradition of not eating pig arose in Israel, but it is not any confirmation that the people there were Jews, but merely that the Jews continued a local tradition. Futhermore, the absence of pig bones means nothing unless it is related to previous middens and others in the region.
Monarchy
The bible relates how king Solomon renovated three cities—Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer—to serve as garrisons for his cavalry. Archaeologists have discovered gates that match this description to these cities that “date to the time of Solomon.” Lichtman is using his perpetual trick. There is no time of Solomon until the existence of Solomon is proven. Lichtman cites Amihai Mazar as saying that these gates were “attributable to Solomon on archaeological grounds as well as on the basis of the biblical reference.” Quite what he means is a puzzle because there is nothing in the archaeology that identifies the gates with Solomon at all. The identification is purely biblical, and the bible could refer to them if the gates were known in more recent times. The only thing he could mean is that the gates were substantial befitting a grand king, but nothing else suggested a wealthy kingdom at all.
Prof Israel Finkelstein proposed a dating system that places the construction of the gates 100 years after the “time of Solomon.” William Dever strongly opposes this, saying it “is not supported in print by a single other ranking archaeologist.” Needless to say, the statement is extreme as Dever’s often are, and the reason is the biblicist desire to hang on to what little they have.
Lichtman cites the discovery by Avraham Biran of a victory inscription dated to the 9th century BC at the site in Tel Dan. Lichtman, guided by God rather than good sense as ever pronounces that the phrases, “king of Israel” and “Beit David” (House of David) appear. Not only is there doubt about the interpretation, there is even doubt about the stele itself. Lichtman cites Anson Rainey who like all biblicists resorts to calling the critics names:
As someone who studies ancient inscriptions in the original, I have a responsibility to warn the lay audience that the new fad represented by Philip Davies and his ilk is merely a circle of dilettantes. Their view that nothing in the biblical tradition is earlier than the Persian period, especially their denial of the existence of the united monarchy, is a figment of their vain imagination. The name “House of David” in the Tel Dan and Mesha inscriptions sounds the death knell to their specious conceit. Biblical scholarship and instruction should completely ignore the school. They have nothing to teach us.
Yet this man does not explain to his readers that even if the reading is really “House of David,” it does not necessarily mean that David was a great king as described in the bible. A “house” most often meant a temple, and sometimes meant a people. Israel was called the “House of Khumri” by the Assyrians. The Jewish God Yehouah lived in a house, supposedly the temple of Solomon, which name actually suggests that Solomon was the god, not Yehouah. In other words, as many inscriptions as Rainey might have read, he is being economical with the truth to assert that the inscription is any proof of the bible stories.
Biblicists gloated that Philip Davies had just published a book examining the lack of solid evidence for the so-called United Monarchy. But this inscription is not hard evidence in favour of it as biblicists like Rainey and Dever claim. It would be a good idea if forensic scientists or experts on the microscopic examination of cuts could get a look at the inscription because they will be able to confirm the doubt that exists about its authenticity. Sadly, believers in the past have often been known to resort to forgery to uphold what they have little evidence for in fact. G Garbini is suspicious about the inscription for several good reasons, and an examination of the inscribing would serve to show whether it is genuine or not. There seems little likelihood that any objective scientist will get the chance to look at it, and even less for a mixed team to do so.
Revisionists have also argued against King David’s conquest of Jerusalem and Solomon’s major building in the city, due to the lack of archaeological remains from that time period. Lichtman finds another biblicist to excuse it. Archaeologist Jane Cahill says it was impossible to build in Jerusalem without destroying previous structures. Previous buildings have to be taken down to bedrock to get a firm foundation and start again. Jerusalem was also heavily quarried by the Romans and Byzantines. If all this were true, it would be true that no remains at all would have survived in Jerusalem. The city would only consist of the newest programme of building. Cahill’s excuse is plainly just that. Some biblicists say that Solomon’s Millo has been found. Others disagree as to what it is, but why was it not removed to bedrock if Cahill’s excuse is valid? Like all biblicist excuses, it is one that is valid when they want it to be, and not the rest of the time.
Do not expect anything rational form these religious ostraca. Lichtman immediately tells us that archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron have unearthed the remains of a defensive wall in Jerusalem that “predates King David.” They also found a small number of towers which protected the Gihon spring water supply, dating to the “time of Abraham.” There he goes again with his assumptions, but the real point is why these supposed “pre-Davidic” structures are there if Cahill is correct. Lichtman demolishes the Cahill brand of lie in his next sentence without apparently noticing.
So much for rabbinic apologetic!
Further Reading
- More on Exodus, and more, and more on Moses, and more, and more still, and on the Sinai theophany.
- More on Canaanite religion, and more.
- More on Persian religion and Judaism, and more Zoroastrianism.
- More on Ezra, and more, and more still on Ezra.
