Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 17 November 2003

It is hard to identify authentic elements in the Exodus story.

B S J Isserlin, The Israelites

Execration!

Some character has on the web a site he pompously calls the “Institute of Biblical and Scientific Studies”. The scientific part of it seems to mean archaeology, and one page is called “Biblical Archaeology: Evidence of the Exodus from Egypt”. You have to admit that this is a challenging page, since honest archaeologists cannot find any evidence for an exodus from Egypt like that described in the Jewish scriptures that could stand up in a kangaroo court, let alone a rigorous scientific one. So what is this evidence?

First, he picks on the Merneptah stele which mentions a landless people called by a word which seems to be Israel. The stele is dated to 1210 BC, and so seems to tell us that there were people identified as Israel, but with no land in Canaan in 1210 when the Pharaoh Merneptah devasted the whole of Canaan and declared that Israel was laid waste and his seed were no more. Our biblical professor concludes:

Before the discovery of the Merneptah stele scholars placed the date of the exodus and entry into Canaan much later. They are now forced to admit that Israel was already in Canaan at the time of Merneptah. Israel was big and strong enough to challenge Egypt in battle. This stele puts a latest date of 1210 BC for the exodus.

Of these four sentences, two are wrong, and the last one assumes what the professor purports to be showing. It is plain enough that at some stage in history, the people who occupied the hills of Palestine came to be called Israelites, and this monument says they had that name in 1210, if the date is sound. It does not mean they left Egypt in an exodus or came into Canaan from elsewhere. The evidence our guru presents simply means that the rural people of Canaan were called Israel, just as Romans called their rural people Pagans. They could have been bandits, since even rural people were usually associated and under the protection of some nearby city.

No theory of the exodus ever put the exodus later than Merneptah, let alone “much later”. The preferred date was in the reign of Rameses II (1279-1212). It would have been quite impossible for the bible to have been true and the supposed exodus to have been later than about 1250 BC. There could not have been time enough for the period of the Judges to have been fitted in. Israel was far from being big and strong. It was wiped out, Merneptah wrote, along with several fortified cities. Our biblical guru seems to think that this meant Israel was strong enough to challenge Egypt in battle. So, in only a few sentences, this supposedly scientific man shows that he is anything but scientific. His science is a fraud intended to fool his readers. He is a biblical bigot. Much of the evidence dishonest bigots like this present is of the most tenuous kind.

The professor now turns to the Egyptian execration texts. The Egyptians had a superstious habit of ritually destroying pottery inscribed with the name of an enemy. Breaking it broke the power of the name. Many of these broken pots have been found. Our expert observes that one transliterated word sounds like the biblical Anakim, a race of giants that lived in Canaan before Israel! Any name that is found in the bible has a peculiar significance to this gullible man who does not pause to think whether the name was correct, or common. It does not seem surprising that several well known cities are indeed mentioned in these execration sherds. He himself mentions Shechem, Hazor, Ashkelon, Laish, Tyre, and Byblos. Perhaps for him, somehow, these names mentioned in Egyptian rubble of about 1700 BC, are evidence of the exodus, but he does not say how. A ruler of “Shutu” is named Job. Our professor hopefully declares that Shutu is probably Sheth (Num 24:17). You cannot get more tenuous or hopeful than that! Almost as hopeful is that the ruler of Shamkhuna is Abu-reheni—Abraham. Iysipi is Joseph. The ’Apiru-Anu are mentioned, and presumably are to be taken to be the Hebrews. A place that sounds like Jerusalem is named, but in the later Amarna correspondence, it sounds more like a garrison than a town. Israel is not mentioned as early as this. We seem to be meant to conclude that these sherds therefore give the date before which the exodus can be assumed not to have happened.

Another stele from the time of Senwosret III mentions a town called Sekmem, thought by some to be Shechem. Undoubtedly Shechem, for most of its history, was a far more important place than Jerusalem, but the guru seems to want to mention it as confirmation of the conquest, although Shechem was a place that was apparently not conquered even in the Joshua myth. Apart from that, the biblical professor just wants to show again that Israel is not mentioned so early. So too, he mentions the romance of Sinuhe, set in about 2000 BC which also mentions nothing of Israel, although the hero leaves Egypt and travels through Palestine to Byblos. The professor notes without comment that the story has elements of the story of Moses in it, and even has a dual like that between David and Goliath, points that suggest that these ancient biblical tales are themselves compilations of old stories and events.

Joseph and Jacob

Our prof now brings us to the biblical story of Joseph, always, contrary to science but in line with his religious preconceptions, taking the bible as the authority that external findings must match. The biblical Joseph rose to power in the time of the Hyksos, he says, ignoring that the biblical tale makes no mention of Hyksos and has no hint that the Pharaohs of the time were Semitic or Asiatic, and indeed maintains that they were Egyptians. For biblicists, this early date for the exodus has always been one of the positions that they could take in regard of it, but latterly, it was placed in the time of Rameses II. The original idea was that the Israelites were the Hyksos expelled from the thrones of Egypt about 1570 BC. We read:

It also seems most likely that the Exodus from Egypt should be equated with the expulsion of the Hyksos. Not all the Hyksos were Israelites. It says in Exodus that a great mixed multitude came out of Egypt with Moses.

Exodus 12:38

So, the expulsion of the Hyksos was of many more people than the Israelites but yet the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt was the same as the expulsion of the Hyksos. The bible does indeed say “a mixed multitude went up also with them, and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle”, but the mixedness of the multitude seems to be that of the flocks and herds that accompanied them. There is no suggestion otherwise that people other than Israelites left Egypt. If they did, the mixed peoples that left were called, as a whole, the Israelites so they were not the purebred descendants of Abraham. Now, our guru tells us that the Hyksos capital was called Avaris, and another of their cities was called Tell el-Yahudiyeh, seeming to offer conclusive proof that the Hyksos were Jews, when the name offered is a much later name of this hill. This is pure dishonesty, or ignorance at best.

Our teacher turns to the “store” cities of Pithom and Raameses mentioned in Exodus 1:11. His point is to show that they were not associated with Rameses II and so the exodus did not have to be either. He is pressing for a return to the older exodus at the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos. One of the Hylsos kings was called Yaqob-her which our expert says is the same as Jacobel, and…

In 1969 a scarab of Jacob-El was found in the MBII tomb at Shiqmona, a suburb of Haifa, that was from a mid-eighteenth century deposit 100-80 years before the Hyksos. The Jacob-El of Shiqmona must have been a local Palestinian ruler, possibly the same Jacob of the Bible.

This is science? Jacob was a common Aramaean name, yet this expert wants to suggest that the biblical Jacob has been found outside the bible! This is sheer crookery, not science. Everything that these biblical gurus write is inevitably copiously punctuated with “may bes”, “probablys”, “possiblys” and other weasel words meant to imply something that has negligible likelihood of being true. Or we get tricks like this:

…a tomb containing a statue of an Asiatic with a mushroom hairstyle that some scholars think might be Joseph. Much more evidence is needed to claim for certain that this is Joseph’s tomb.

Gullible Christians, our guru knows, will ignore the caution, but it would be a miracle if evidence is found that proves what this biblicist suggests. Then we get this:

Barbara Bell, on the records of the Nile’s water levels… concluded that in the middle of the 12th Dynasty there were erratic Nile water levels that caused crop failure. Could this be Joseph’s famine?

The question is not meant in a spirit of inquiry but to suggest to the credulous readers of this fraudulent expert that Joseph’s biblical famine has been found by archaeology. Even if the biblical plagues of Egypt were real, finding which of many disasters that must have happened in 3000 years of Egyptian history they represent is scarcely possible. On the other hand, if they are fictional, then any of the plagues and famines the Egyptians remembered long enough could have been the biblical model. Our guru gets close to the truth when he mentions, in passing:

There is “The Tradition of Seven Lean Years in Egypt” written during the Ptolemaic period about the reign of Djoser that states: “To let thee know. I was in distress on the Great Throne, and those who are in the palace were in heart’s affliction from a very great evil, since the Nile had not come in my time for a space of seven years. Grain was scant, fruits were dried up, and everything which they eat was short. Every man robbed his companion”.

ANET (1969) 31

This is notable in several important respects. The first is that the tradition written about Djoser was a tradition 2500 years old when it was being written in Ptolemaic times! If it was based on some original record then the “seven lean years” happened a thousand years before even this biblical guru thinks Moses lived. We therefore had an ancient Egyptian legend that was incorporated into the exodus myth much later. And when could that have been? The professor of biblical science tells us that this tradition was written in Ptolemaic times, so it seems beyond coincidence that what proper expertise there is, based on seriously interpreted evidence, suggests that the romance of Moses was composed in none other than the Ptolemaic period, roughly 300 BC! There simply is no evidence of Moses and the exodus before then, but lots afterwards.

Genesis has another story sourced in Egypt, that of Joseph, which is an adaptation of the well-known Egyptian tale going back to 1200 BC called The Two Brothers. This tale is nothing to do with Israelites, but our guru contrives at this point to list several Asiatic names from Egyptian households of the twelfth dynasty including Issachar (Sekratu), Asher and Jacob (Aqaba). He lastly cites Manetho, another well-known Egyptian writer of the Ptolemaic period as confirming the Joseph story, apparenly unaware that Manetho or a colleague might have written it, in its present form, in the first place.

[Aphophis] was at first called Pharaoh, and that in the fourth year of his kingship Joseph came as a slave into Egypt. He appointed Joseph lord of Egypt and all his kingdom in the seventeenth year of his rule, having learned from him the interpretation of the dreams and having thus proved his divine wisdom.

Egyptologists have assigned the years 1610 to 1569 BC to Pharaoh Auserre Apopi, the fifth of the fifteenth dynasty, Hyksos, kings of Egypt, but this is based on what Manetho said anyway. Now the guru cites The Admonitions of Ipuwer, an Egyptian papyrus from the nineteenth or twentieth dynasty, but apparently describing something in the time of the Hyksos.

Foreigners have become people everywhere… the Nile is in flood… poor men have become the possessors of treasures… many dead are buried in the river… let us banish many from us… the River is blood.

This impresses our professor greatly and he observes that it sounds similar to the event of the first plague against Egypt (Ex 7:14-24) when the river Nile turns to blood. The Biblical scientist tells us “the river is not actually blood, but looks blood red because the Nile is flooding. Some speculate that the rest of the plagues are a result of the Nile flooding”. In that case Egypt ought to have been plagued annually, as the Nile floods annually, but do not let sense enter into these biblical discussions.

The whole tone of The Admonitions of Ipuwer is frankly one of admonition, and in the context cited, there seems no reason not to believe that the author is not being metaphorical. There had been some sort of uprising or invasion of foreigners, and the Nile was full of dead bodies. The metaphor, “the river is blood”, suits that description. Perhaps the author is urging the violent expulsion of the foreigners, but either way, the metaphor is appropriate.

The Expulsion of the Hyksos

It seems the Hyksos capital at Avaris was besieged but was never taken, and so, by some arrangement, they were apparently allowed to leave for Palestine, as Josephus claims. No doubt our professor wants this to be an exodus, but, if it is, it is not the biblical exodus. That was an exodus of slaves badly treated, but this was an exodus of the ruling class of lower Egypt, who had enjoyed power there for 100 years. In some ways, the exodus of a ruling elite would suit the biblical account better, because the supposed slaves were evidently highly skilled and well off. They could hardly simply have been making bricks. It was much more the practice of rulers in those times to deport conquered rulers rather than their slaves or serfs. The rulers were the dangerous ones. If, then, these were the Israelites, then the bible is wrong about them being slaves.

The Egyptian archives had the story of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the priests of Ptolemy had used it to construct a romance. In the second intermediate period and the time of the Hyksos, Egypt had been in disarray, and had spent 200 years in chaos. Kamose and Ahmose restored order, founding the brilliant eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, which Ramesses II followed with a final spurt of brilliance. If the Asiatics that constituted the Hyksos had been expelled only to Palestine, then they were quickly enslaved in their new land by the newly expansive Egypt. So, technically, it might even be possible to claim that they had been slaves too, although that was later, when Israel was an Egyptian colony. And the bible makes no mention of the Pharaohs returning to colonise Israel after the exodus.

If the Asiatics had been expelled from Avaris and sent to Palestine in about 1550 BC, then there ought to be clear cultural signs of resettlement. The trouble is that the new imperialism of the eighteenth dynasty would have led to cultural changes in Palestine anyway, so how could colonisation have been distinguished from migration? The truth is that colonisation usually was migration in the ancient near east. Imperial powers habitually deported people from one place to another where they would be less trouble struggling to keep themselves in power in a stange place. This might have been what Ahmose did to the Hyksos ruling class. Our guru concludes:

The story of the Exodus is most likely based on the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, for there is no other record of any mass exit from Egypt.

There is nothing to argue with in this, but an exodus “based on” some historical event is not the same as the historical event itself. It is an admission that the exodus is fiction. The oppressed people in the true story were the Egyptians, held in servitude by a foreign ruling class, which was subsequently defeated in power and thrown out of the country rather than prolonging the war with even more bloodshed. The foreign people had to gather up their goods and leave in defeat, whereas the Israelites supposedly were themselves saved from slavery and fled with wealth stolen from Egyptians, under the guidance of the loving and just God.

There is nothing unique about the movement of the Israelites, even if it were true. Indeed, the whole of European history is determined by successive waves of migrations from the east. As part of the same migrations, people from the east repeatedly moved against the settled populations of the near east, usually setting themselves up as a ruling elite which becomes acculturated to the local culture. The first civilisation in the ancient near east were Sumerians, a people with an unknown origin, but who were not Semites or Aryans. Semites moved in from the Arabian peninsula, then successive waves of Aryans from the Eurasian steppes. The biblical authors have taken this theme to create a bogus history for the Israelites. It is, as our guru says, “based on” historical events, but no one in particular. The eviction of the Hyksos from Avaris might come closest, but if it really were that event, why are there so many significant differences? The story is a romance of national origin, not real history.

The Events of Sinai

The biblical master almost confirms it when he comes next to consider the crossing of Sinai. The archaeologists have found that Sinai was only sparsely occupied in the LB period, and our guru immediately concludes it was because of the Israelites fleeing before Ahmose, but he notes:

Von Rad and Noth argued, “The Exodus and Sinai traditions and the events behind them were originally unrelated to one another”.

We find here the typical scholarship of the bible. One group of people argue one thing, another another and so on. They come up with many explanations, but all are equally tenuous, because the biblicists are restricted in the conclusions they are allowed to reach, and retain their professorships. The conclusions they reach are therefore always, at best, partial ones. The real answers to the questions go beyond the limits of Christian or Jewish belief. Since the real answers are forbidden, any number of approximations with varying dgrees of credibility can be proposed, and held by different authorites.

In 1954, Mendenhall put forth the idea that the Sinai covenant is similar to Hittite suzerainty treaties, and one might add, since these became the form of subsequent treaties among nations, all later treaties before the conquest of Alexander. This is undoubtedly the correct hypothesis because it is supported by the bible itself, but it was immediately pooh-poohed, and remains mainly unknown by the ever faithful flocks of the churches. Instead, the biblicists prefer to hold on to the miraculous, immediately proving that the word “scientific” in this context is fraudulent.

The events on Sinai included what seems to be a volcanic eruption, but there were no volcanoes in Sinai. That is pretty miraculous. Well, it was instead, for some, a volcano in Arabia, but there is no suggestion that Moses travelled through Arabia with his horde of Israelites. For others it was the eruption of the volcano on Thera, the Greek island. No one suggests that Moses and his mobile nation took to ships and travelled to Thera, so the excuse becomes just that they could see the eruption over the horizon, as a column of smoke by day and a column of fire by night. The Egyptian army, in this notion was overtaken by the massive wave that the volcanic explosion caused. Never mind the problems of timing that all of this introduces. It makes for highly publicised but bad television, but good religious propaganda.

Meanwhile, Moses was obviously not ascending Thera to get his epiphany and tablets of stone, and so there must have been a more local volcano involved too. No one considers the possibility that the whole thing was a show put on to impress the people, and possibly even repeated annually. Who could have initiated this? The Persians, when they sent colonists into Yehud.

Our guru quotes us Deuteronomy 33:2, which describes the Jewish God as the rising sun:

And he said, Yehouah came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them. He shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with myriads of holy ones. From his right hand went a fiery law for them.

Fiery law is interesting because it involves an unusual word for law—“dath”. It means a royal decree, and is likely to be Persian. It confirms that the covenant and its accompanying law was issued as a royal decree, just as a vassalage treaty was. But apart from this interesting nugget of information, the view here of the sun is from Egypt looking east across what is now called Sinai towards the Arab city of Petra (Seir). It suggests that this was a passage rendered afresh by the Ptolemaic priests.

At this point our expert gives us a table of population density in regions of Sinai, one of which listed for the Iron I period contains the entry, “Israelite forts and colonies”. Here our scientific guru is, as usual, begging the question. Nothing in the forts tells the archaeologists that they are Israelite forts, so he is assuming it. This is the puerile circularity of biblicist thinking, a fault that they seem not to notice, but shows their claims to be scientific to be utterly bogus. Seir was a land of the Shasu, we are told from Egyptian topographical lists. Shasu seem therefore to have been Arabs. The expert adds:

One place is called “land of the Shasu Yhw”.

We are invited to think that the Shasu are the Israelites or one of their tribes, presumably Asher, and Yhw is the Jewish God, Yehouah. Yehouah was a popular Canaanite god for a long time in history, so this does not seem unlikely, but the guru adds in passing:

Astour places this city north of Israel in Lebanon.

Lebanon is Phœnicia, and the Phœnicians’ name for themselves was Canaanites. Yehouah was a Canaanite god, so this is not at all a controversial fact. It is the chain of false implications that is dishonest. It is certain that Canaanites had a god called Yehouah long before any supposed Moses met him on some untraceable volcano somewhere between Egypt and Arabia.

Conquest

Our biblical professor now starts to set Moses and his Israelites against the rest of the Hyksos! This it was that accounts for the destruction of the LB period—unless it was Ahmose and Thutmose on their own! Then again, from a survey of the central hill country, Finkelstein finds nothing to connect the Egyptian conquest with the end of the MBA.

There is no solid archaeological evidence that many sites across the country were destroyed simultaneously, and such campaigns would fail to explain the wholesale abandonment of hundreds of small rural settlements in the remote parts of the land.

More persuasive is a deterioration in climate. Kenyon found that Jericho was destroyed at the end of the MBA. Our guru tells us Kenyon thought it was because of the expulsion of the Hyksos. There seems no reason to disbelieve this, but it contradicts the apparent consideration of the Egyptians in letting the population of Avaris escape. Still, monarchs do not have to be consistent, and perhaps, Ahmose decided the Hyksos were not moving fast enough for him. The archaeology shows destruction of about the right time in Jericho, and it could have been associated with Ahmose pursuing the foreigners. Or not! And, it is still an unproven hypothesis that these Hyksos were the Israelites.

The city of Ai was destroyed at the end of the EBA, and was abandoned until the beginning of the Iron Age, yet Joshua destroyed it in God’s Holy Word. We now get the usual thrashing about to explain away a discrepancy in the bible. The site of Ai has been mislocated. The biblical story is an aetiological romance that explain ancient ruins on the site—Ai means “heap of ruins”. The ruins were used as a fortress only when attacked. Our guru opts for a mixture of the last two! Yet, only the first can really save the bible, and is perhaps the least likely. The others admit the bible is wrong. Genesis 12:8 says Ai existed when Abraham was first looking around Canaan still called Abram. So, it was ruined even then. Yet when Joshua crossed the Jordan, it was described as the second city that he destroyed, attacking it first with 3000 men and losing the battle! It can hardly have been a ruined city or a heap of rubble, if 3000 men could not take it.

Another famous city of its age was Hazor, finally destroyed in the thirteenth century, by Joshua, say the biblicists with no evidence other than that it fits a thirteenth century date for the exodus. It does not fit the date preferred by our guru, though. He is unfazed because the bible, in one of its many inconsistencies revives Hazor for the period of the Judges which says Deborah and Barak fought Jabin, the king of Hazor, and his commander Sisera. This allows for the final destruction of Hazor to have been by Deborah and her army. One trouble is that both kings are called Jabin—in Joshua 11 and Judges 4. That too is no problem for the biblicists. Jabin was a dynastic name! This too from the famous excuser of biblical errors, Kenneth “Dodd the Diddy Man” Kitchen, once of Liverpool University. A clay tablet has been found at Hazor with the name, Ibni, on it. That turns out to be Jabin! So, Joshua must have destroyed Hazor at the earlier MBA date of about 1500 BC, when destruction was commonplace.

Settlement

Turning to the topographical lists of Thutmose, our expert, drawing upon such “objective” opinion as that of Hoffmeier, a man who feels physically sick when the bible is contradicted, finds Josephel and Jacobel among the places named. Well, Josephel is really “Yspir”, but that is close enough. These apparently prove that the Israelites were in the hills of Palestine by 1481 BC. Never mind that these are only Israelite names because they are in the Word of God. Where did He get them from?

A list of Amenhotep II’s prisoners (1453-1419 BC) is:

550 maryannu, 240 of their wives, 640 Canaanites, 232 royal sons, 323 royal daughters and 270 concubines… 127 rulers of Retenu, 179 brothers of the rulers, 3600 ’Apiru, 15,200 living Shasu, 36,300 Huru, 15,070 living Neges, and 30,652 families thereof…

Of the people living in Palestine, from these figures, 66 percent are Horites, 27 percent Shasu and 7 percent ’Apiru. Of course, the Hebrews are the ’Apiru for this clever man, and the Shasu are the Israelites. Who then are the other two thirds of the population called Horites? Bible bashers will tell us they are some sort of troglodites or cave dwellers who lived with the Edomites, but the logical connexion with history is with the Hurrians who once occupied the whole of Syria. We are to believe that all of these people were expelled from Palestine leaving only the Israelites or Hebrews. Perhaps they did! Or not.

In the temple of Amun in Soleb (Nubia) is a topographical list from the time of Amenhotep III (1386-1349 BC) in which is written “Yahweh of the land of the Shasu”, according to our biblical guide. This is the earliest mention of Yehouah in history. The Egyptians used “Shasu” to describe nomads east of the Delta, and would add to the description an explanatory phrase. Since the Israelites who wandered in the desert for forty years were supposed to be nomads, the biblicists hopefully identify them as Shasu in Egyptian eyes. No matter that it is pure nonsense to pretend that people drifting around aimlessly with nowhere to live are nomads. Proper nomads have a seasonal cycle of wanderings set in time by centuries of habit, and broken only by dire circumstances such as drought. The same nonsense is applied to Abraham, who, far from being a nomad, deliberately uproots himself at God’s behest to go wandering about.

Also in the temple inscription of Soleb is the word “Iswr”, taken by the biblicists to mean Asher, even though it is mentioned next to Carchemesh, about 350 miles to the north of any place that Asher could be. The sensible assumption in the absence of any other data is that the place meant is the city of Assur in Assyria. This illustrates another aspect of the crazy world of the biblicists. They always love authority, when, that is, it agrees with them. They can be certain of something if only there is a suitable biblical quotation. Similarly, when a biblicist, often with vast ingenuity, finds a biblical excuse or identification, then others will cite the author gleefully. No matter to them that the cunning ploy found to explain something to their satisfaction does not satisfy anyone else. It will be endlessly cited until it is universally believed among Christians.

Our teacher of biblical science now mentions Seti I (1291-1279 BC), whose father, Rameses I (1293-1292 BC), founded the nineteenth dynasty. Seti campaigned against the Shasu who were assembled in Kharu. The Karnak inscriptions report:

The foe belonging to the Shasu are plotting rebellion. Their tribal chiefs are gathered in one place, waiting on the mountain ranges of Kharu. They have taken to clamoring and quarreling, one of them killing his fellow. They have no regard for the laws of the palace.

“Kharu” is the same word as that elsewhere given as Horite, plainly identifying the land as that of the Horites, but these Shasu are now undoubtedly Israelites, for our master, even though they seem to be no longer nomading about but living among the Horites. They are quarreling and have only chiefs not kings because this is the time of the Judges in the Jewish scriptures. Then again, perhaps they are just what the Egyptians always mean by Shasu—they are Bedouins, and Bedouins have chiefs not kings. In hope, the scientific biblicist writes that, “They have no regard for the laws of the palace” because they had the laws of Moses. Or then again, perhaps they had no such regard because they were lawless people on the fringes of society. If this is so, then the Shasu and the ’Apiru begin to sound similar because the ’Apiru seem mainly to have been bandits. Breasted concluded that these Shasu are the same as the ’Apiru of the El Amarna letters. Again the biblical clue gatherers think they see the name Asher, in the form “Isr”.

The great Pharaoh, Rameses II, now came to the throne of Egypt and set up a stele at Beth Shan that mentioned Per Rameses. Our guru tells us it is mentioned in Exodus 1:11, quite forgetting that he has already said that the biblical Raameses could not have been Per Rameses. Well, the bible is never consistent so why should its believers be? Biblicists pored over the texts and thought they found Edom and Moab, Dor and Jericho, and once again Jacobel. Plainly Jacobel was an important Canaanite city at this time. “Qazardi, the Chief of Isr” (Asher) was also found.

’Apiru

The Tel El-Amarna letters from the reign of Akhenaten (1350-1334 BC) speak of the inroads being made into Palestine by the ’Apiru, thought to have been a general term for migrants with no means of support other than banditry. The word seems to be associated with the word “eber”, meaning “beyond”, and referring to migrants coming from the east, beyond the Euphrates and then penetrating into Canaan. These would have been Aryan tribes, or more probably, the people displaced by successive waves of Aryan invasion, as well as economic migrants. These people had to take to a life of banditry, and the earlier career of king David in the bible might be an attempt to depict it, and give it a noble turn.

The biblical professor gives us a citation from EA letter 288:

The strong arm of the king seizes the land of Nahrima and the land of Cush, but now the Hapiru are seizing the cities of the King! There is not a single governor to the king. All are lost. Behold, [when] Turbasu was slain at the gate of Zilu, the king kept silent. Behold Zimredda, the [sons of] Lachish smote him, slaves who have become Hapiru.

Note first that the writer here does not mean Ethiopia when he writes Cush, but the land of the Kassites. Nahrima is the headwaters of the Euphrates river. A Pharaoh had obviously conquered these cities in Syria but the ’Apiru were coming across the river and taking them from the Egyptian governors. Lastly, the local slaves were taking the chance of freedom by joining the bandits coming from beyond the river. Other letters plead for help against the ’Apiru who were penetrating deep into Palestine, but Akhenaten had no desire for war or to defend Egyptian borders. He was another religious nut. The guru writes:

The Hapiru of these Amarna letters seem to clearly be identified with the Hebrews of the Old Testament during the time of the judges before the monarchy.

But not all Hapiru were Hebrews! Those that had theophoric names in Yeho were Isaelites because these simple folk think only Israelites worshipped Yehouah. It is typical pseudo-science. It cannot be disproved. The biblicist clue-finders squabble like fish-wives over the meaning of the personal names in the Amarna letters, but the truth is that few of them can be identified with biblical characters, even at a stretch. Some place names can be identified, but not the characters. No matter! It means the conquest by Joshua preceded the letters and the letters pertain to the time of the Judges. The results of biblical scholarship are always infinitely malleable. Thus, cities which ought to have appeared in this correspondence but do not, like Gibeon, Jericho, Hebron and Bethel must have been destroyed by the Israelites coming into the land. Some appear again later, though. Oh, they were eventually rebuilt! This is science?

It seems:

About 40% of EA 252 is written in pure Canaanite or Hebrew.

Here is an admission that Hebrew does not differ from Canaanite, which is, in more usual terms, Phœnician. So-called Hebrew is just a Phœnician dialect, which fell out of use as Aramaean came in, and was revived by the second temple priesthood in the third century BC as a religious language, using sixth century Phœnician glyphs. Almost pathetic is the claim that a proverb in the letters is repeated in the bible, proving that the ’Apiru were Hebrews! True! The old biblicist rogue, W F Albright, thought the biblical Proverbs 6:6 and 30:25 appeared in the EA letters, which say:

If the ants are smitten, they do not accept quietly, but they bite the hand of the man who smites them.

A moment’s enquiry shows that the only thing the two biblical proverbs and the EA one have in common is the ants. God’s Truth!

Ugarit

The biblical scientist turns now to Ugarit, an ancient city to the north of Phœnicia. The clay tablets found at Ras Shamra were in a language “very similar” to Hebrew. Quite so! It is Phœnician, otherwise known as Canaanite. It is declared that the personal name “Ysril” appears, and means, of course, Israel. We find too that the god, Yam, the Sea, identified with Nahar, the river, had the personal name Yw (Yehou). The high God, El, wanted to rename Yam as his “darling” (doubtless, “beloved”, Dwd or Hadad), but first he had to drive off Baal. This ought to be too close for comfort for biblicists because the rivalry of Baal and Yehouah in the bible is precisely that described in these cuneiform texts from 1300 BC. Any implications are, however, lost on these poor simple folk.

A list of Ugaritic words which also appear in the bible follows, proving what? Hebrew is Phœnician and Ugaritic is Phœnician. What then is suprising about finding the same words in the two languages? Indeed, when a biblical word is found, but being used not in the biblical way, it is shrugged off. Protean! In Ugaritic, the place-name, zbl, appears. Hebrew has, Zebulon. The minor difference is that these two zbls are not the same place. The Ugaritic zbl is now Karzbil. Here is a case that utterly belies the biblicist method. The text itself explains what is meant by zbl, and it is not the Hebrew tribe called Zebulon. Without the explanation, we can bet for certain that the biblicists would have been identifying the two.

In fact, the town of Ugarit is much further north than traditional Phœnicia, or Canaan, and it might not be surprising that they seemed not to regard themselves as Canaanites. An administrative tablet says, “y’l kn’ny”, meaning Ya’el the Canaanite. Here then the Ugaritic administrator distinguishes a Canaanite. These cities, though they wrote Phoenician, will have regarded themselves as Hittite places. No matter, our expert declares, “Ya’el may have been a Hebrew”. Then again, he probably was not. Moreover, Udm was apparently certain to have been Edom and from a tale on one of the tablets, it was already a kingdom in 1300. This identification might be a little more secure, but humbler men would not be that sure without more evidence. Biblicists are rarely humble, despite the recommendations of their God.

Conclusions

It is plain from this examination of supposed scientific evidence that it is a mishmash of allusions, often extremely tenuous, and assumptions based upon the bible being true. These believers never let the evidence stand on its own, speaking for itself. It is always squeezed into a biblical mould until it is forced into the desired shape. Much of this evidence actually tells the opposite story of the interpretation imposed upon it. Once it is realised that Yehouah worship was not confined to Israelites or Hebrews, but extended to Canaanites, Aramaeans and Hittites as well as into Syria, and Mesopotamia, then many of the assumptions of the biblicists fall flat. To maintain, for example that an asiatic name like Jacobel is a sure sign of an Israelite is utter stupidity. It praises El for a a start and not Yehouah, just as Israel does. Whatever Israel stood for initially, it was obviously not someone who worshipped Yehouah.

The main purpose of our guru’s endeavours is to show that the fictional exodus is the flight of the Hyksos from Egypt around 1550 BC. There is little doubt that this is the historic event that the exodus was based upon, as all the ancient writers said. The reason is that the Jewish scriptures were re-written by Egyptian priests using their own records as a base, as late as the third century BC, some 1200 years after the expulsion of the Hyksos. Most of the events recorded in the supposed exodus, however, had much more recent models such as the works of Herodotus and the exploits of Alexander the Great. Any true scientist would realize this, but this man is no scientist. He is the exact opposite. No scientist could maintain a hypothesis, no matter how committed he felt towards it, when the overwhelming evidence was against it, and no scientist would try to obfuscate the truth by introducing masses of irrelevant detail, especially when one or a few crucial tests suffice to prove it or otherwise.

What is astonishing, and is the real question to be investigated by psychiatrists is that people will lie themselves blue to maintain ancient myth as dogma. What is it that persuades these people that their God is so stupid that He cannot tell an utterly convincing story, if it needs to be told? If God is almighty and omniscient, what purpose could He have had to send such a garbled message, so unconvincing as soon as it is properly investigated. It looks as if God expected people to be fooled by a false message, but the truth is now emerging. Did God really want to save the human race from sin? Or is He playing a vast game as Job suggests? If God does want to save people from something, then why does He act as if He is inept? Why does He need the lying assistance of mendacious poodles who think they are human beings, and think they are superior ones at that? Why do these people not look at the shameful record of their religion as a whole and consider whether they are pandering to the Devil himself and not to the good God, as they think? The truth is self evident, even to this skeptic. No good God could possibly want His acolytes to lie on His behalf. Lying is the sure sign of evil not good, but these Christians and Jews think God wants them to lie for Him. Either they are fools, or their God is Satan. Since the Hyksos worshipped Seth, perhaps He is.

Further Reading

• More on Exodus, and more, and more on Moses, 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.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History