Abstract

Two million Israelites did not cross the Sinai on their way out of Egypt, despite the biblical implication as to this number (Ex 12:37).

Hershel Shanks, Editor, BAR

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 16 May 2002

Joshua

The Book of Joshua is of no historical value as far as the process of settlement is concerned.

Volkmar Fritz, director, German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, Jerusalem

Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated Jericho for six years in the 1950s believed the site was uninhabited from 1500 BC to about 800 BC, the very time of the exodus and the Israelite crossing of the Jordan River into Canaan. Hoffmeier argues:

A careful reading of Joshua shows there are only three cities that Joshua was specifically said to have burnt with fire—Jericho, Ai, and Hazor.

Other cities will not necessarily show any signs of destruction:

To besiege a city does not necessarily mean to destroy a city. To capture a city may not involve destroying it in such a way that you’d find that destruction in the archaeological record.

This is rather hilarious in a context that began with Hoffmeier’s role model, W F Albright, finding signs of the conquest of Canaan from destruction layers in cities all over the landscape. It is yet another pathetic ploy used by these sad people that want to be thought of as scholars. They accuse their critics of the very crimes that their own predecessors in biblicism have done, and would still be doing, if no one had noticed. It is the smug hypocrisy of these people that should give anyone interested in truth knots in their stomach. Since this disregard for truth has been the domain of Christianity for millennia, it makes you realise the extent of the damage Christians have done.

When the bible plainly tells lies, it is merely “rhetorical hyperbole.” Joshua 10:20 boasts that Joshua’s men had “wiped out” their enemy, but in the next phrase begins speaking of the survivors. Hyperbole it plainly is, but why then should we believe anything the bible says. The point that the biblical critics are making is that it is all hyperbole!

Kevin Miller says that Hazor was inhabited and destroyed during the “time of Joshua,” immediately begging the question, a habit that these Christians cannot get out of but proves a lack of objectivity that should disqualify them from their jobs when they are supposed to be scholars. It seems that in part of a substantial building the heads of decapitated statues of Canaanite deities and an Egyptian sphinx with the name of the pharaoh hacked out are found scattered across the floor. Hoffmeier says:

The palace was destroyed in such an inferno that many of the mud bricks actually turned to glass. No Canaanites would destroy their own deities, and no Egyptians would deface their monuments.

Ergo, Joshua did it because of the account in Joshua 11:11 of the Israelites burning Hazor with fire. If this is not the shade of Albright, it is his successor, indeed. The destruction could have been by more likely hands than Joshua’s, but no such possibility will be considered. It could even been done by Merneptah himself. Because he brags of destroying Gezer does not mean that he did not destroy Hazor too. The sheer tendentious dishonesty of it evades these protectors of God. When it comes to Ai, Hoffmeier has to admit that the excavations show it was not inhabited during the time of Joshua and so could not have been destroyed by fire. Hoffmeier’s answer to this is that Ai is not actually Ai, but no one then knows where Ai is. What better answer could there be?

Jericho poses problems for the biblicists but they take comfort that there is archaeological agreement on three important points that correspond directly with the biblical record:

1. Jericho was destroyed violently sometime in the second millennium BC;
2. it was occupied briefly and partially during the period of the Judges (a small palace from that period has been identified);
3. and it was rebuilt completely in the days of King Ahab in the ninth century.

Note the biblical scholar begging the question, yet again, in respect of the “period of the Judges.” Kenyon dated Jericho’s destruction to 1570 BC, when the Egyptians kicked the Hyksos out of their land and pursued them north to Jericho and beyond.

Christianity Today now turns to the blatantly biblicist work of one Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research, whose very organizarion cries out, Liar! Liar! The Association for Biblical Research is not for biblical research but to confirm the bible, as it freely admits. No one therefore who works for it, let alone its director can be believed in anything they say. Wood claims he discovered evidence in Kenyon’s findings that contradicts her own conclusions. Anyone with any sense would prefer to stick with Kenyon’s conclusions, because she made some effort to be objective even though she was a Christian. Wood will make no such effort because his self-confessed purpose is to uphold the bible not to criticise it.

Wood’s evidence turns out to be sherds of pottery from a later period and some Egyptian seals also later. These show that someone lived on the site of Jericho after it had been destroyed, but Kenyon plainly did not regard them as citizens. There was no city.

Wood finds it credible that by walking round the city for seven days the walls would fall down. He thinks all that marching triggered off an earthquake! The dryshod crossing of the Jordan was also caused by an earthquake. All of this is the usual apologetic delusion that what is plausible actually happened. And perhaps it did! If examples can be found, as Wood does of the Jordan being temporarily dammed by an avalanche, then anyone hwo has observed the pheomenon could use it as the basis of a tale. It could, indeed, have been a legendary tale that formed the basis of the miracles in the Joshua story. Any of these explanations are more sensible to anyone of a rational mind, but the Christian is not in this category.

David

The David of the Bible, David the king, is not a historical figure.

Niels Peter Lemche, University of Copenhagen

Christianity Today assures us that Hoffmeier and Kitchen are confident the future will side with those who take the bible’s history seriously. They take more comfort from the “House of David” inscriptions, even though they are disputed in several respects. Seals of some of the kings of Judah and Israel and surrounding Canaanite nations are being found, but these do not necessarily refute the Minimalists who accept that Israel existed by about 850 BC, whatever happened before. Other evidence produced by K Miller is a twelfth-century BC bronze bull and a sixteenth-century silver Canaanite calf, supposedly “illustrating why the Israelites were constantly warned against idol worship,” but actually showing that the Canaanites—whom the Israelites were, at least culturally—did indeed worship idols, as all their neighbours did.

In 1979 a silver scroll from the seventh-century BC was found in a cave near Jerusalem. Containing the words in Numbers 6:24-26 (“May Yehouah bless and keep you; May Yehouah cause his face to shine upon you and grant you peace”), K Miller says it forced revisionists to explain how their sixth-century BC composition date (or even later) for Numbers squared with a portion of that book appearing a century earlier. It is not a hard question to answer. Why do excerpts from the bible turn up in modern writings? Here was a simple blessing from Yehouah. Is there any good reason why such a blessing, innocuous as it is, should not be remembered by people who have a god called Yehouah. Such points are merely to pander to their Christian readership, because beyond it, they are quite ridiculous as any sort of evidence or polemic.

Hoffmeier goes into some misunderstanding from 30 years ago that is not accepted now, even if it ever was. It shows how desperate these people are for some basis for argument. Hoffmeier failed the course that knotted his stomach apparently out of the tutor’s spite, but later on the tutor admitted that Hoffmeier had been right about some point he had about tents. For all that, Hoffmeier says “some of these experts are close-minded people. They’re not willing to wrestle with different views.” Now there is a real case of someone with a beam in his eye trying to correct motes in his critics’ eyes!

Hoffmeier and Kitchen urge patience. The affirmative evidence will be dug up in the next spadeful, or soon, anyway. You can be certain if it is, it will be dug up by a Christian or a Jew. They are the people with something to defend, not the critics.

The Reality

Apologists have yet another argument. Nahum Sarna says the exodus story, tracing, as it does, a nation’s origins to slavery and oppression, “cannot possibly be fictional. No nation would be likely to invent for itself… an inglorious and inconvenient tradition of this nature,” unless it had an authentic core. Sarna’s scholarship does not extend to thinking who then could have written this “history” if the Jews did not. He cannot think laterally enough to imagine anyone other than Jews writing it. Richard Elliott Friedman, professor at the University of California, San Diego, adds, “If you’re making up history, it’s that you were descended from gods or kings, not from slaves.” Quite so. It suggests strongly that the Jews did not write their own mythology.

Prominent Jewish authors, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed, assert that the biblical texts dealing with the Egyptian captivity and the exodus are not contemporary accounts but were a product of the much later time when they were written. The authors were not primarily recording history. The exodus narratives are “a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change,” a blending of the writer’s knowledge of the past and present.

The “much later time” when the present account was composed, Finkelstein considers to be the time of King Josiah, but he thinks it was based on an exodus tradition. Finkelstein argues that there was no political entity known as Israel until the late 11th century, and even at this time the state of Israel was merely a loose cohesion of diverse nomadic groups. What is certain is that, when Samaria fell in 722 BC, Israel ceased to exist as a political entity. In essence, the political history of Israel came to an end with the end of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Martin Noth theorized that the Sinai narratives came from cultic legends that had their original meaning in a festival of covenant renewal. The truth is that they were traditions invented based on Persian originals to personify Moses, previously known only in the phrase the “law of Moses,” really the law of Mazas, or Ahuramazda.

Minimalist scholars draw upon a post-exilic dating for the composition and theology of the biblical literature. Philip Davies, in his controversial work In Search of “Ancient Israel” argues that the theological ideas in biblical literature were formed in post-exilic times as an ideological construct of the Persian-imposed society of Yehud. According to the Minimalist view, Judean history, as one reads about it in the biblical text, is an idealogical construct of political and religious leaders centuries later. It is a political construct, and that has huge theological implications.

Post-exilic Yehud, specifically that of Jerusalem, was a dimorphic society, as even the biblical literature itself shows. J Blenkinsopp argues for the existence of this dimorphic society on the premise of what he calls the Burger-Tempel-Gemeinde social model. Those sent as colonists by the Persians were thrust into conflict with the “people of the land,” the native Canaanites who had not been sent into exile. The Persians designated the colonists as governors and leaders in the community, and legitimized it by declaring that they were merely returning to their rightful home.

The biblical literature is a creation of this society, as the immigrant leaders of Yehud attempt to legitimate their right to political, and that meant religious, authority. The purpose of this group, as Davies states, was to create an “Ancient Israel that explained their own post-exilic society and the rights and privileges of the elite within it.” The ethnic collectives, the exclusive exile society, and the provision of a new central sanctuary and law form the backbone of a new society, a society with a purpose for the compiling of the Jewish scriptures.

Part of the Persian propaganda was that the Egyptians were the enemy of the Canaanites because they had held them captives for centuries by ruling Canaan from Egypt. The propaganda was telling, but it is unlikely that it included any exodus story. The law was presented at the same time by Ezra as the Law of Moses, and later Jews ruled by the Egyptian Greeks had to explain the law and the anti-Egyptian propaganda. The Ptolemies favoured the Jerusalem temple state and had the Jewish law translated into Greek. It is at this point that the exodus will have been invented—explaining the anti-Egyptian feeling with a pseudo-history but simultaneously making the Jews into escaped Egyptians. The Greek rulers of Egypt would not have been distressed that earlier anonymous Egyptian pharaohs were depicted in a bad light.

The story was an allegory of the colonists taking over their promised land—promised by the Persians, not by God, and also explained the reason why the law was called “of Moses.” It invented Moses as an archetypal Jewish hero to dispense with the Persian “Mazda.” This perspective sees an original Israel that was brought out of bondage and led into the promised land from the outside, with a hero and a law, and an Israel that distinguished itself, radically and polemically different from the indigenous population.

The exodus is a metaphor for the Persians setting up a new society, but de-Persianized because the new rulers of Israel were the Egyptian Greeks. The exodus narrative is an ideological construct created by this post-exilic society in an attempt to define their unique identity as Yehouah’s chosen people. They are delivered into this Judean promised land by God’s deliverance and love, with a covenant that proved it in the precise form of a vassalage treaty, and it is upon this identity created in the biblical literature, that the Israelite society draws is legitimacy.

From Daniel

Mike, I have the following comments on: AW! Exodus: Christian Apologetic - God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion? AskWhy! Publications.

Why would the bible not count as evidence (a positive finding) for past history and a lack of it being recorded in ancient egyptian writings (a negative finding) count as evidence the recordings of the bible is false. The bible has been proven itself to be historically accurate in the New Testament and in other books, yet now magically a lack of support for the past means its false? I suppose however evolution gets your approval despite most of the evidence for it ever having occurred for 1 or two billion years is TOTALLY lacking. Talk about biased.

Is this a serious question? I have about 4 MB of criticism of Judaism and 11 MB of criticism of Christianity, much of it direct criticism of the historicity of the bible, and you ask why it should be considered as false. You then say it has been proven historically accurate, but only in the New Testament, apparently proof, if it is a true statement itself, that Moses wrote detailed diaries while leaving Egypt with 2 million people pursued by an army of charioteers, 1500 years before that, even adding an account of his own death and disappearance! You end up saying evidence for evolution is totally lacking. I suggest that it is you who are totally lacking something, and among your deficiencies are a total inability to understand what evidence is. Christians, of course, do not need evidence, and so it is plain enough they do not need to understand it. That is what bias really is.

From JB

Having dipped briefly into your commentary on the Exodus, and having also recently attended a lecture on Late Bronze Age archaeology in the Levant/Egypt, I put forward the following points for your interest:

• As to the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus, we seem to have a similar situation with the Battle of Khadesh, mentioned in both Egyptian and Hittite records, but no evidence of it found on the ground. What does that tell us? I would suggest that current knowledge is too limited to permit categorical statements either way.
• You mention the Merneptah stele as having the first reference to Israel. However the earlier Armana letters make reference to the Habiru—and although the Egyptians describe them almost as bandits, reading between the lines and from other texts (inscription on statue etc), it would seem that disaffected Canaanites were already opting out of society and establishing themselves in the hill country. These were not bandits but intellectuals for most of the examples we have of the early Canaanite alphabet (precursor of the Phoenician and all western alphabets) comes from this people in the hill country. This is probably not news to you, but it does suggest that written records may have been kept from early times (I think earliest example of this script comes from about 1800 BC).
• Leiden papyrus 348 records Habiru labourers dragging stones for one of Rameses second’s temple pylons.
• As to Albright, though he has received much criticism for his focus in archaeology, he was apparently a meticulous archaeologist who dug and recorded his sites extremely well—and much of the dating of Levant archaeology (eg beginning of Late Bronze Age) is fairly fluid and subject to reinterpretation (apparently some of Albright’s dating, once rejected, is now looking likely again).
• Likewise as you know, Egyptian dating has proved very problematic too.
• After the minimalism of much of the 90s, it appears that scholars are now putting some of the history back into the old Old Testament (ie the Pentateuch).

I think the main point that I am trying to make is that the state of our knowledge at the moment does not enable us to make categorical statements—there is a lot of hypothesis out there that is liable to change, and also a lot of politics. I think people on both sides of the argument approach it with strong presuppositions which often lead to a lack of balance in assessing the evidence. I found some of your writing intemperate and emotional, and that leads me to question the validity of your views. But thank you for an interesting read.

From Mike

Thanks for your contribution. You say you dipped briefly into this one article, an article which is one of four on the index page of the AW! “truth” directory and three more on the index page of the AW! “judaism” directory, all on Moses and the exodus. It is wisest to read up fully on a subject before criticising because you might have missed some important points otherwise.

With respect to your specific points, first you are coy about saying who organised the seminar to which you refer. I expect you must realise that Christians and Jews have a non-scholarly agenda, since you mention “politics”. If I am intemperate in my language, and I concede that sometimes I am, it is because these people deliberately ignore or distort scientific norms. So when you say there are a lot of hypotheses out there, you have to realise that some of them are there for no other reason that Jews and Christians find them necessary. They are, in short, poor hypotheses taken objectively, and if it were not for the religious necessity of sad people to have to hold on to them they would be quickly discarded. I suspect therefore that some of the arguments presented to you in this seminar were specious and tendentious, and you must learn how to recognize and ignore them. It is always useful to know who is behind a lecture, and why it has been organised. If it is organised by Christian or Jewish sources, then the arguments presented have to be carefully examined. I think precisely the same about scientists who offer proof of the benefits of smoking or growing GM foods. Who says it and why? Everyone has a price. For some it is money, and for some it is to be assured they will live forever even after they are dead!

Comparing two million people camped in one spot for nearly forty years with a one off battle lasting less than a day is hardly good science. Many battlefields have been lost especially after such a long intervening time, but the refuse and disturbance of the Israelites leaving Egypt in such numbers and camping for a long time at Kadesh Barnea cannot have left no trace. You will find this on the Moses pages, if you care to look.

Your next two points are about the Habiru, not about Israel. You assume that the Habiru are the Hebrews or proto-Hebrews, but it is a bad assumption with no evidence supporting it. It is the first I have ever heard that the Israelites were disaffected intellectuals called Habiru, yet were dragging stones for Egyptian temple pylons. As for the date of the Canaanite script, it is getting on for a millennium older than I have ever heard of. If it came from your lecture, then I am getting an impression that they were tendentious and frankly false facts being offered. The Merneptah stele is the first unequivocal mention of Israel, and to date it at 1200 BC, we have to assume that the Egyptologists have their dates right. Since they are dated from the bible, they are probably wrong.

You say that Albright is being rehabilitated, but when someone has misdated so many sites so conspicuously wrongly, and evidently out of pure bias, it takes a lot of gullibility to be persuaded that he was ever right. If he sometimes was, we have the same problem the minimalists have with the bible. How do we know which is wrong and which is right? All of them have to be re-assessed, preferably by someone who is properly scientifically skeptical.

You end by saying that the Pentateuch is also being rehabilitated by “scholars”, and again I want to know which “scholars” and on what basis. The trouble with biblicists is that they treat scholarship as being only opinion. They do not want anything as objective as science that has the danger of exposing the falseness of their opinions.

Your final summary, I have already dealt with. Hypotheses have to be the best hypotheses. It is not good enough scientifically to say that you have a hypothesis if it is manifestly poorer than others. Biblicists will not accept this. They think hypotheses are opinions, and theirs is as good as any other, even if it is impossible. Sorry that my impatient language puts you off, but try to ignore it and read what is there. Intemperate language does not alter facts, but merely expresses my emotions of frustration and anger at a load of fraudulent scholarship spouted in God’s name.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my email in such detail. You asked about the lecture I attended. It was one in a series given at the British Museum by Dr Jonathan Tubb and Dr Rupert Chapman. (I was not being coy—nothing could be more respectable!) This one was by Dr Tubb who is head of the Semitic/Levant collection at the museum (can’t remember his exact title), and doesn’t have a particular axe to grind. While he doesn’t believe that the Exodus occured as recorded in the Bible, he was the one who spoke of scholars putting some history back into the Bible. He definitely sees the Habiru as early Israelites, and he was the one who described them as intellectuals (this is cutting edge theory, I believe). It was he who talked about the early Canaanite script, and the fact that most examples are found among the Habiru. We saw an example of the script in a museum gallery, on the shaft of a weapon if I remember rightly. Other interesting ideas included that a number of different people joined the Habiru in the hill country for different reasons—they seem to have had a less decadent lifestyle than the Egypto-Canaanites, but it was a lifestyle of choice rather than necessity. Also they date the beginning of the LBA to after Megiddo ie about 1480/1470 BC. And other things...wish I’d taken better notes! But what I came away from the lecture with was the conviction that no theories are set in stone, and there is a lot we don’t yet know! Just as Christians and Jews may be guilty of poor science, I think others with equally strong convictions against the truth of the Bible can also be less than unbiased. Food for thought?

Honest people will always have food for thought, I hope, but, as a dig at me, it is misdirected, I think. It is the Christian and Jewish believers who need the dig. They are, of course, fed by manna from heaven, in thought as well as through their stomachs. Let me try to explain once more, since you speak of emerging with the conviction that no theories are set in stone. First note the biblical allusion here, since my point is that believers think precisely that their theories ARE set in stone.

By theories you mean hypotheses. Inasmuch as hypotheses get set in stone in science, it is when they are confirmed enough to be declared theories! But none of them are “set in stone’, you are quite right. There might be several hypotheses that could be invented to explain a given set of facts, and there are scientific rules about how to choose one of them. One you might know of is Occam’s razor. The simplest hypothesis that explains the facts has to be chosen. Some people, mainly Americans, call it the principle of Parsimony. English scientists like to call it elegance, and so on, but it means simplicity. Another is to remember that the same applies when this hypothesis depends on some previous one. That too has to be the simplest. As an example, to postulate the hypothesis of a creator God is not acceptable, because there is no hypothesis that explains how such an incredibly sophisticated entity came to be Himself.

When we say “explains the facts’, we have another criterion. In science, it is often possible to design an experiment that allows one variable to change at a time, and so hypotheses can be carefully tested to explain every aspect of some phenomenon. When we are making natural observations we cannot, of course. We have what we see, and in history, archaeology, palaeontology and so on, we only have some of the facts at our disposal. Our best theories might not explain all the facts that we think are related. Then we have to propose hypotheses that explain most of the facts, and especially the critical ones.

I apologise for going on about this, but my experience is that people often just do not get how science works. They think it is merely opinion, and the worst of them are the Christians and Jews who have their belief already in their heads—the worst being the ones who pretend simultaneously to be scientific. Naturally, they will not admit that any scientific hypothesis can replace their belief, failing to see that their belief is just their own peculiar hypothesis and it is not the best one, or even a good one, though it was placed in their heads usually at an early age.

I promise you, I will finish soon! You dig at me implying I am arrogant about my own opinions, but my very point is that these are not merely opinions, they are a set of hypotheses that tie together to give a reasonably coherent theory that requires nothing supernatural in it. They are not just gash discordant speculations like this “cutting edge” idea of Tubb’s that the Israelites were intellectuals. It is frankly risible to me! Intellectuals becoming voluntary shepherds? There was an advanced Canaanite civilisation a few miles to the north by the seaside where the dissident intellectuals could have found excellent jobs. Or they could have joined the Assyrians who spoke a similar language and were just getting round to empire building. Intellectual shepherds? Intellectual pylon builders? When the Chinese and the Khmer Rouge sent intellectuals into the fields, they died by the thousand. They were meant to! It was meant to be a harsh way of curing their arrogance, but it was foolish and counter productive. Intellectuals are rarely cut out for hard labour, and, as intellectuals, they know it.

I have seen Tubb on TV in some popular religion programme and he sounded more considered than many of the talking heads we see there, but what you say makes him seem to me like the rest. They have to defend the “exodus” and the “conquest” even if in so doing it is no longer an exodus or a conquest, but still allows Israelites to suddenly appear in Canaan at the right time. If there is no exodus and no conquest then this part of the bible is wrong! It is not historical! Tubb’s idea does not put this “history” back in the bible. It shows the bible here is unhistorical. It often is. That is what the minimalists have been saying all along. Even if some bits of it are historical, no one knows which bits they are, unless someone can confirm them from other sources.

OK! The End! Stay sceptical and perpetually criticise. It is what keeps us free!

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