I have searched and
researched, but I cannot find any positive evidence for the correctness of our
beliefs. History, natural science, and every other field of human activity
involved in discovering factual reality (in searching for the truth in its most
essential form) yields a great deal of evidence that seems to make the main
points of our tradition implausible -- and yet virtually no evidence exists
which could serve as support for our tradition.
4. The Written Torah
Discrepancies between
the Torah and reality
There is a very popular approach claiming the
very existence of our tradition is sufficient evidence of its veracity -- yet
that is highly problematic, as I will show below. Unfortunately, it seems that
the text of the Torah itself contains major discrepancies with factual reality.
It tells us about the Creation of the world only thousands of years ago -- yet
from scientific research we know for certain that the world has existed for
billions of years and that in 4000 BCE there were already well-developed human
civilizations in Sumer and Egypt (see Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sumer and Egypt,
history of).
The Torah tells us about a global flood 1656
years after Creation (2104 BCE, according to our tradition) which only Noah,
his family, and the animals on his ark survived, but archeological research
reveals no traces of a global flood during the last 10,000 years. We have a
well-documented history of Egyptian civilization from the late 4th millennium
BCE to the Greek conquest of Egypt in the 4th century BCE -- a summary of which
may be found in any encyclopedia -- and no flood other than local overflows of
the Nile is mentioned there, let alone anything resembling the complete
destruction and rebirth of the Egyptian civilization. Geologists have actually
discovered patterns of a flood in the Black Sea area circa 7500 BCE (see K. A.
Svitil, "Forty Days and Forty Nights, More or Less," Discover,
January 1999), but it was very far from covering "all the high hills that
were under the whole heaven," as the Torah tells us (Genesis 7:19), and it
happened 3800 years before we are taught the world was created.
According to the Torah, different languages
appeared after the Tower of Babel incident, that is, some time about 2100 BCE,
yet we definitely know that centuries before then the Egyptians spoke Egyptian
(historians even mention a shift from Old Egyptian to Middle Egyptian circa
2200 BCE), the Semites of Mesopotamia spoke Akkadian, and the Sumerians spoke
Sumerian (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Egyptian
language ibid., Akkadian
language and Sumerian
languageibid.). These languages were totally different, each with
its own writing system, and we have documents written in each of them dated
before the traditional date of the Flood.
Moreover, we know that by 2100 BCE people inhabited most of the planet Earth, and any language-confounding incident in Mesopotamia could not influence the development of languages in such distant corners of the world as America, China, Australia, or Scandinavia. The Torah, however, tells us that it was only at the time of the Tower of Babel that all the people with their different languages were "scattered... abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth." This, too, is highly problematic: we know that human beings had already spread as far as Australia about 40,000 years ago (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Australia, history of, Prehistory).
In Genesis 11:31 we are told that Abraham, his
wife, his father, and the rest of his relatives "went out from Ur of the
Chaldeans [Ur Kasdim]." According to our tradition, Abraham was born in
1813 BCE and died in 1638 BCE, but the Chaldean tribes reached southern
Mesopotamia (where the city of Ur is situated) only about 1000 BCE, and the
first historic reference to them appears only in Assyrian documents of the 9th
century BCE (Encyclopedia Hebraica, Kasdim, v. 20, p. 1076), and the city of
Ur was turned into a major religious center of the Neo-Babylonian (Chaldean)
kingdom only in the 6th century BCE (Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher
Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 313). So Abraham could not have left
"Ur of the Chaldeans," and the account of Genesis 11:31 seems to be
an anachronism committed by a writer who mistook the geopolitical situation of
his time for that of hundreds of years earlier.
Likewise, in Genesis 21:34 we are told that
"Abraham sojourned in the land of the Philistines many days," and
Genesis 26:1 tells us "Isaac went to Abimelech king of the Philistines to
Gerar." The region of Gerar was located, according to the Torah, in the
Land of Israel; in the subsequent verses of Genesis 26 G-d even warns Isaac not
to leave the Land. But the Philistines only appeared in the Land of Israel (on
its southern coast) in the 12th century BCE (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Philistine).
Should one doubt whether the Philistines of
which the Encyclopaedia Britannica speaks are those written about in
the Torah, the Scripture itself answers: "Woe to the inhabitants of the
sea coast, the nation of the Cherethites! The word of the Lord is against you,
O Canaan, the land of the Philistines" (Zephaniah 2:5). In Hebrew
"the nation of the Cherethites" is goy Kretim, the people of
Crete, also called Kaftor in the Scriptures (e.g. in Amos 9:7). Only
once during the 2nd millennium BCE did people from the Aegean islands invade the
eastern and the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean -- in the 13th-12th
centuries BCE; in the history books this is called the Sea People invasion.
Some of those Sea People were indeed from Crete; they are the Scriptural
Philistines (Pelishtim), and the Egyptian sources call them prst orplst (the
later is usually vowelized Peleset). By the 13th-12th centuries BCE,
according to any possible Scriptural chronology (the Judaic tradition
included), both Abraham and Isaac had already been dead for centuries. Stories
of the visits they made to "the land of the Philistines" and their
meetings with Philistine kings also seem to be the work of later authors. How,
then, can we believe in the Torah's historical accuracy?
Not only are the Torah stories about the events
of the remote past problematic, the very narrative of the Exodus from Egypt,
the Sinai Revelation and the conquest of the Land of Israel -- the continuum of
events we consider the basis of our faith -- is by no means rooted in reality. Even if we dismiss our
tradition (which dates the Exodus and the Sinai Revelation to 1313 BCE), the
Scripture itself defines the chronological framework for this narrative as
somewhere between the 15th and the 12th centuries BCE. Egyptian history of that
time, as well as of the whole 2nd millennium BCE, is well documented and we
have a clear picture of what happened there. Besides the Egyptians, other
civilizations flourished in the Near East of that time: the Babylonians, the
Hittites, and towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE the Assyrians. Each
left plenty of historical documents, and from them we can reconstruct a clear
historical picture of what happened in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium
BCE. Moreover, events which were significant for the whole region were
mentioned and described in documents of different civilizations, and this gives
us a brilliant opportunity to cross-check information, to crystallize the
facts, and to separate fiction from the facts of the ancient Near East. Modern
archeological studies add to the picture, and thus we obtain quite a detailed
and reliable chronology of the Near East in the 2nd millennium BCE.
The problem is, there is no room for the
Exodus--Sinai--Land-of-Israel narrative in this picture. To begin with, in
order to leave Egypt, the Israelites had obviously to arrive there in the first
place. The Torah tells that the number of the Israelites who came down to Egypt
was seventy (Exodus 1:1-5). In Exodus 12:37 we are told that 600,000 adult
males left Egypt in the Exodus, which, taking into consideration women and
children, is about 2.5 million Israelites leaving Egypt. According to our
tradition, the Israelites stayed in Egypt for 210 years. Such a rate of
population growth -- by more than 35,000 times in two centuries -- seems quite
unnatural. To
add fuel
to the fire, the Judaic tradition tells that most of the Israelite population
did not leave Egypt: "Those who went out [of Egypt] were one out of five,
and some say one out of fifty, and some say one out of five hundred... And when
did those [who did not come out of Egypt] perish? During the plague of
darkness." (Mechilta deRabbi Ishmael, Beshalach, Petichta; Mechilta
deRabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Exodus 13:18). This gives us an Israelite
population growth from 70 to 12,500,000, 125,000,000 and 1,250,000,000 persons
correspondingly. These extraordinary numbers have a fanciful, almost playful
quality to them. But the situation is even worse: historical and archeological
research tells us that the whole population of Egypt was only 2-3 million
people towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE (see Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Egypt, History, Introduction to ancient Egyptian
civilization). So, when the Israelites left, according to the Torah,
Egypt would have been devastated. Yet this devastation did not happen in fact.
Moreover, no large population decrease occurred in ancient Egypt from the 4th
millennium to the 4th century BCE. How, in light of the above, am I to
understand the Rabbinic notion of the Exodus? Are the Rabbis simply tellers of
tall tales? What purpose is thereby served?
If the Israelites coming to Egypt numbered only
70, it would be quite meaningless to try to look in Egyptian annals for mention
of them -- surely not every Semitic clan coming into the country was documented
in detail (there are many general mentions of such clans arriving in Egypt).
However, the Torah states that one of the Israelites coming (or actually,
brought) to Egypt -- Joseph -- was appointed viceroy of Egypt. In Genesis 41
and 47 we are also told of very significant reforms Joseph introduced in Egypt:
1. Gathering of all the surplus food from the
seven plenteous years into Pharaoh's storehouses.
2. Selling food to other countries during the
famine.
3. Centralizing money and all the cattle in the
hands of Pharaoh.
4. Purchasing of all the land in Pharaoh's name
and taxing each year's harvest: 20% of the grain would go to the royal barns;
the only exemption from this law was the Egyptian priests and their lands and
crops.
5. Enslaving the whole Egyptian population and
moving them all over the country; the priests seem to have been exempted from
this policy as well.
Yet there is no mention of such a reform in any
Egyptian source. As I wrote above, the history of the Egypt in the mid-second
millennium BCE (when Joseph's adventure must have taken place, according to the
Scripture and to our tradition) is well documented; many literary sources and
monuments from that time are available, and we can trace the historical and
social picture of ancient Egypt at a highly precise level. A major reform like
the one reported in the book of Genesis would surely leave many traces in
contemporary written sources -- and the fact that not a single document speaks
of the events as described in the Torah, or even of anything close to those
reforms, leads to most unsettling conclusions.
Moreover, Genesis 41:57 says: "All
countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn, for the famine was sore in all
lands." Were things really so, this would surely leave traces in the
historical documents of the countries which came to Egypt to buy corn --
"all countries," according to the Torah -- and yet there is nothing.
Babylon, at that time a highly developed civilization where literature
flourished, left many historical sources, but none of them mentions a massive
pilgrimage of Babylonians to Egypt to buy food and a total dependence of the
Babylonian population on Egyptian food supplies. Texts from the great Hittite
empire of Asia Minor reveal nothing of this kind about the Hittite people. Are
we therefore to understand the Biblical phrase "in all lands," as
legend?
This has all been about the Israelites' arrival
in Egypt, but the picture is simply disheartening about their exodus from
there. No historical source mentions a large Israelite slave population in
Egypt, nor any distinct ethnical group subjected to slavery there in the second
half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The city of Ramses, which, according to Exodus
1:11, the Israelites built in Egyptian captivity, appears in fact to be built
during the reign of Ramesses II in the 13th century BCE (The Bible
Unearthed, p. 59) -- decades after the date of Exodus according to our
tradition. No historical source tells us of the ten great and awesome plagues
reported in the Torah. Much less significant events are thoroughly described,
yet these major catastrophes rate not a single mention, not only in Egyptian
sources (maybe the Egyptians were traumatized enough to want to forget the
plagues), but also in all the historical sources of the ancient Near East. And
though some very optimistic people suggest that the ancient Egyptian Papyrus
Ipuwer is a description of the Exodus from the Egyptian point of view, this
view seems implausible. The papyrus (which can be found in English translation
in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: a Book of Readings, v.
1, pp. 149-163) is in fact the admonition of an Egyptian sage, describing
certain natural and social calamities. Some Egyptologists hold that the papyrus
is written in an allegorical manner and has no relation to any historical
events whatsoever.
The papyrus does not provide even the slightest
hint about most of the Ten Plagues (including the final and the crucial one --
the plague of the firstborns), nor is there any mention of Hebrews, Israelites,
Moses, Aaron, mass exodus from Egypt or anything of that kind. The only
resemblance it bears to the book of Exodus is the phrase "Lo, the river is
blood" (Ipuwer 2:10). A few lines earlier the papyrus explains also the
source of this blood, "There's blood everywhere, no shortage of dead...
Lo, many dead are buried in the river" (Ipuwer 2:5) -- so it speaks not of
a plague of blood, but of many bleeding dead bodies thrown into the river. The
papyrus is dated by Egyptologists to the time of the 10th-12th dynasties of
Egypt (2133-1786 BCE) -- hundreds of years before the Exodus is reported to
have taken place. Of course, our knowledge of ancient Egyptian chronology is
not perfect, and imprecision of a few decades is quite possible, but a
discrepancy of several centuries is too much -- in short, Papyrus Ipuwer may be
related to almost anything but the Exodus from Egypt, and in searching for historical
corroboration of the Exodus narrative this papyrus offers no real help.
There no mention in any of the Near Eastern
sources of a total rout of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea waters, which is
particularly problematic since the Torah tells us that this event made a great
impression on the other nations: "The peoples have heard, they tremble;
anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia. Then the chiefs of Edom were
dismayed; the leaders of Moab, trembling grips them; all the inhabitants of Canaan
have melted away" (Exodus 15:14-15).
Moreover, were the Egyptian army indeed
crushed, the not-so-peaceful neighbors of Egypt -- the Babylonians and the
Hittites -- would have immediately invaded the powerless empire. At the end of
the 14th-beginning of the 13th centuries BCE Egypt and the Hittite empire were
at a state of constant war; the ten plagues and the Exodus would have quickly
led to a Hittite invasion and conquest of the ruined Egypt, especially since
according to the Torah the Egyptian army wasn't able to recover for at least 40
years (see Deuteronomy 11:4 and Nachmanides's commentary on it). But no such
invasion ever happened, and after almost four decades of indecisive war a peace
treaty and a mutual defense pact were signed between Egypt and the Hittite
empire (see Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hittite).
Egyptian borders in that period were well
guarded and watched. Papyri Anastasi (from the end of the 13th century BCE)
show that neither Egyptians nor foreigners could enter Egypt without special
permission of the authorities, and each border crossing is well documented.
Papyrus Anastasi V goes so far as telling in minute detail about two slaves
from the royal residence of Pi-Ramesses who managed to flee from Egypt, about
their path, the point they crossed the border, and the measures taken to pursue
them and to return them to their masters (see A. Malamat, "Let My People
Go and Go and Go and Go," Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February
1998, p. 65). Were 2.5 million ex-slaves to leave Egypt, it would most
certainly be documented, and yet there is not a single mention in all the
Egyptian documents of such a massive exodus. (Of course, only a fraction of the
documents describing fleeing of slaves from Egypt came down to us, and
therefore minor exoduses, of which we have no evidence nowadays, could really
have happened, but that an escape of 2.5 million people -- almost the whole
country's population -- would leave no evidence which would make it down to our
time seems quite improbable.)
According to the Torah, after they left Egypt,
the Israelites (some 2.5 million of them) wandered for 40 years in the Sinai
desert. Such major nomadic activity in an area not so large usually leaves many
traces easily discoverable by archaeologists, especially since "modern
archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager
remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the
archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral
activity in such eras as the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and
Byzantine periods [when the population of Sinai was tiny compared to the
wandering Israelites of the Torah]" (The Bible Unearthed, p. 63). Yet,
"repeated archaeological surveys in all regions of the peninsula,
including the mountainous area around the traditional site of Mount Sinai...
have yielded only negative evidence: not a single sherd, no structure, not a
single house, no trace of ancient encampment" (The Bible Unearthed, pp.
62-63).
Furthermore, among the places in which
Israelites encamped on their journey through Sinai, the Torah mentions Kadesh
Barnea (Deuteronomy 1:2) and Etzion Geber (Numbers 33:35). The former was
identified by archaeologists with the large and well-watered oasis of Ein
el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai (a water spring near that oasis is called to this
day Ein Qadis), and the latter is mentioned in the Scripture (e. g. in I Kings
9:26 and 22:49) as a port town on the north-eastern tip of the Red Sea -- which
led to its identification by archaeologists with a mound located between the
modern towns of Eilat and Aqaba. However, numerous excavations and surveys
throughout these areas have not provided even the slightest evidence of any
settlement or encampment there at the alleged time of the Israelites' wandering
through Sinai (The Bible Unearthed, p. 63).
In Numbers 20:14-22 the Torah tells how Moses
sent emissaries to the king of Edom to ask permission to pass through his
territory on the way to Canaan -- permission which the king of Edom refused to
grant, thus making Israelites bypass his land. The Torah implies that in the
last year of the Israelites' wandering through Sinai there was already a
kingdom in Edom. However, "archaeological investigations indicate that
Edom reached statehood only under Assyrian auspices in the seventh century BCE.
Before that period it was a sparsely settled fringe area inhabited mainly by
pastoral nomads" (The Bible Unearthed, p. 68).
There is also quite a lot of archeological
evidence about what happened in the Land of Israel at the alleged time of the
Israelite conquest. This evidence shows no trace of any massive conquest by a
people coming from the east bank of the Jordan (where the Israelites are
reported to have attacked from). The first historical document to mention the
name "Israel" is the stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, who
reigned 1213-1204 BCE (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Merneptah),
but the theme of that stele is quite far from matching the Biblical account:
"Plundered is the Canaan with every evil; carried off is Ashkelon; seized
upon is Gezer; Yanoam is made as that which does not exist; Israel is laid
waste, his seed is not... All lands together, they are pacified" (cited
from Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. by J.
B. Pritchard, p. 378). To be sure, the phrase "Israel is laid waste, his
seed is not" is but a common boast of power by rulers of that period and
need not be taken at face value, but much more important is the fact that the
whole book of Judges (which, according to our tradition, describes the events
of that period) makes no mention of an Egyptian campaign in Canaan, nor even of
any Egyptian presence there -- something which cannot be expected from an
author familiar with the history of Canaan in the 13th-12th centuries BCE, when
that land was firmly under Egyptian rule. (Merneptah's military exploit was not
a conquest, but a punitive campaign intended to crush rebels and to
"pacify" the land under the control of the Egyptian throne.)
Moreover, the nature of the group called
"Israel" on the stele of Merneptah remains unknown. The first
references which allow us to speak of Israel as a cultural and geopolitical
entity do not occur before the early 1st millennium BCE, centuries after
Merneptah's time. There is no evidence of any link -- ethnic, cultural, or
political -- between the defeated "Israel" of Merneptah and the
conquering Israelites of the Scripture.
According to the Scripture, the number of the
Israelites invading the land of Canaan was about 2.5 million, and it is simply
impossible for such a vast population to have survived in that area at that
time. In fact, even the earlier archeologists estimated the Israelite
population immediately after the supposed time of the conquest as much smaller:
W. F. Albright thought it to be about 250,000 (see C. C. McCown, "The
Density of Population in Ancient Palestine," Journal of Biblical
Literature, v. 66, p. 435), and M. Avi-Yonah approximated it to be 1,000,000
("Uchlusiyah",Encyclopedia Mikrait, v. 1, p. 146). However, the
further excavations and research progressed, the more skeptical archeologists
became about the magnitude of the Israelite population at the time of the
supposed conquest. Israel Finkelstein speaks of about 20,000 sedentary
Israelites living in Canaan in the 12th century BCE, while towards the end of
the 11th century BCE their number increased to about 50,000 (I. Finkelstein, The
Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, p. 334).
Prof Ze'ev Herzog of Tel-Aviv University wrote
about archeological research into the period of the alleged Israelite conquest
of Canaan:
"The most serious difficulties were
discovered in the attempts to locate archeological evidence for the Scriptural
stories about the conquest of the land by the Israelites. Repeated excavations
conducted by different teams in Jericho and the Ai -- the two cities whose
conquests were told in the greatest detail in the book of Joshua -- greatly
disappointed. Despite attempts by excavators, it became clear that at the end
of the 13th century, the end of the late Bronze period, in the age agreed upon
as the time of the conquest, there were no cities at either tell and
certainly not walls which could be brought down... As excavated sites
multiplied... it became clear that the settlements were destroyed or abandoned
at differing times, the conclusion that there is no factual basis for the
Scriptural story about the conquest of the Land of Israel by the Israelite
tribes in a military campaign led by Joshua was strengthened.
The Canaanite Cities: The Scripture magnifies the strength and the fortifications of the Canaanite cities that were conquered by the Israelites: 'great cities with walls sky-high' (Deuteronomy 9:1). In reality, all the sites uncovered remains of unfortified settlements, which in most cases consisted of only a few structures or the ruler's palace rather than a genuine city. The urban culture of the Land of Israel in the Late Bronze Age disintegrated in a process that lasted hundreds of years and did not stem from military conquest. Moreover, the Scriptural account is inconsistent with geopolitical reality in the Land of Israel. The Land of Israel was under Egyptian rule until the middle of the 12th century BCE. The Egyptians' administrative centers were located in Gaza, Jaffa and Beit She'an. Egyptian findings have also been discovered in many locations on both sides of the Jordan River. This striking presence is not mentioned in the Scriptural account... The archaeological findings blatantly contradict the Scriptural picture: the Canaanite cities were not 'great,' were not fortified, and did not have 'walls sky-high.'"
(Z. Herzog, "HaTanach -- Ein Mimtzaim
BaShetach," Haaretz, October 29th, 1999)
We see that modern historical and archeological
research has already shown the Scripture, up to the period of the Judges, is
difficult to reconcile with the historical record. The point now in dispute
amongst researchers is the existence of a United Monarchy of David and Solomon
(see H. Shanks (ed.), "Face to Face," Biblical Archaeology
Review, July/August 1997). Many researchers think that no united monarchy ever
did exist, much less one resembling Solomon's huge empire as described in the
Scripture: "Now Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the River [to]
the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt; they brought tribute
and served Solomon all the days of his life... For he had dominion over everything
across the River, from Tifsakh even to Gaza, over all the kings across the
River; and he had peace on all sides around about him" (I Kings 5:1-4).
Moreover, were 2.5 million people to enter the
Land of Israel, they would have to eat and drink something. Assuming a very
modest diet of 0.5 liters water and one pound of bread a day per capita, they
would need 1.25 million liters or 1,250 tons of water and 1,134 tons of bread a
day. From where did this food come? The manna? It stopped falling from the sky as
soon as they entered the Land of Israel: "And the manna ceased on the
morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the
children of Israel manna any more; but they ate of the fruit of the land of
Canaan that year" (Joshua 5:12).
But to eat "of the fruit of the land of
Canaan," one first has to take control of the land, and that took the
Israelites a lot of time: "Joshua made war a long time with all those
kings" (of Canaan) to conquer their land (Joshua 11:18). Judaic tradition
(Seder Olam Rabbah, Milikowski edition, chapter 11) states the conquest
took Joshua as long as seven years. What did the Israelites eat all that time?
Food stored by the defeated local residents for their own use, in accordance
with Deuteronomy 6:10-11? This was not possible, since the population of the
whole Land of Israel, from Upper Galilee to Negev, was at that time less than
200,000 people (see M. Broshi, I. Finkelstein, "Minyan Uchlusey
Eretz-Yisra'el Bi-Shnat 734 Lifney HaSefirah," Katedra, v. 58 (1991),
pp. 22-23). Surely the food stored for their own use would not suffice for
nearly 12 times as many conquering Israelites for a single year, let alone
seven.
Interestingly, the Torah says to the
Israelites: "The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you
because you are more in number than any nation; for you are the fewest of all
the nations" (Deuteronomy 7:7). Given the fact that the whole population
of the Egyptian Empire at that time was 2-3 million people, were the number of
Israelites really as stated in the Torah they would actually be "more in
number than [almost] any nation" of that time. What am I to suppose about
the Torah author's knowledge of historical realities? If the historical
narrative of the Torah and the subsequent books of the Scripture is wrong, then
the account of the Sinai Revelation and the Giving of the Torah is obviously
also unhistorical, how can one speak of the Torah's divinity?
Although you start off with mentioning evolution (and Noah’s
flood), I will leave answering that question for the time being, not because I
am not able to respond to it, but rather, I feel that it is such a significant
subject on its own, that it deserves a separate discussion.
On the Exodus and other events in Jewish history, however, I
wish to mention something very interesting: it’s all there, just earlier than
the time frame we expect. I’ll lay out the case for that just below, and will
suggest some possible reasons for the confusion, but I will first focus on the
general picture, and only afterwards address the specific points you mention
above.
Looking through the events recorded in Egyptian history, I
first noticed that many of the events seemed familiar, and could be understood
as reflected the events described in the Torah. After a while, it seemed that a
pattern was emerging: that the time difference between two events as recorded
by the Egyptians was roughly double the time difference given by the Torah. Based
on that realization, and choosing the date 430 BCE for the cut-off date for when
things were counted double beforehand, for reasons I will explain below, I
discovered the following:
(I will provide a table listing all of the events, together
with their times, later on, to make it easier to keep track of the
calculations.)
The Exodus
Looking throughout Egyptian history for a period that would
be the best candidate for the Exodus, the most obvious choice would be the
Sixth Dynasty, the end of the Old Kingdom, for a number of reasons, including: the
Egyptian kingdom falls into chaos and disarray directly afterwards; the Ipuwer
papyrus, which has many parallels to the ten plagues, is usually dated to that
time; and King Pepi II reigned for 94 years, which is the amount of years
attributed to him by the Midrash Sefer Hayashar.
Since the fall of the Old Kingdom is conventionally dated to
about 2180 BCE, I will use that as the date of the Exodus to calculate the
events that occurred before and after it. I will note that between 430 BCE and
1312 BCE, the date give by Jewish tradition for the Exodus, there is 882 years.
If I am assuming that Egyptian history is inadvertently being counted at double
the correct time, then double 882 is 1764. 1764 years before 430 BCE is 2194
BCE.
Joseph
Working backwards from that time, we come across the figure
of Imhotep in the Third Dynasty. There are a number of parallels between
Imhotep and Joseph, including: the Famine Stela, which dates to 330 BCE, describes
a legend of a famine that lasted seven years during the Third Dynasty, in which
Imhotep was instrumental in stopping, although admittedly, in a rather
different fashion than described by the Torah; the translation of ‘Imhotep’ is
‘he who comes in peace’, strikingly similar the first words that Joseph told
Pharaoh, ‘G-d will give an answer [that will bring] peace to Pharaoh’ (Genesis
41:16); and the Third
Dynasty is a period where Egypt enjoyed great wealth and begun building
monumental projects, consistent with the Midrashic literature describing that
period.
According to Jewish tradition, Joseph first met Pharaoh at
the age of 30, and continued to reign for the next 80 years, until his passing
at 110. Since the Jewish people sojourned in Egypt for 210 years, and Joseph first
met Pharaoh 9 years before that period started, Joseph’s meeting was 219 years
before the Exodus. When we go back double 219 years, i.e. 438 years, before
2194, we arrive at 2632 BCE. The Third Dynasty corresponds to this time, as it
is conventionally dated between 2650 – 2575 BCE.
Nimrod’s
death, Abraham’s visit and the Tower of Babel
The Midrash recounts that on the day of Abraham’s passing,
Esau, at the age of 13, met Nimrod, a ruler of Ancient Sumer, killing him and
taking the unique clothes he was wearing. Other Midrashim add that after
Nimrod’s death, the kingdom of Sumer fell apart. This is consistent with
historical records, where we find that the whole region was afflicted with wars
that would last centuries, and the area became divided into different, rival
kingdoms.
One hundred years before that episode, Abraham visited Egypt
as is recounted in Genesis 12:10 – 20. Sefer Hayashar details that just before
Abraham’s visit, a new form of governance arose in Egypt. This may possibly
correspond with the establishment of the First Dynasty.
Just a few decades earlier, was the saga of the Tower of
Babel, which according to the Torah, produced the 70 different languages. We
find that just before the start of the First Dynasty, the first instances of
writing appears, in Sumerian script, Egyptian hieroglyphics and other languages.
These three incidents also fit, well enough, when comparing
the dates. According to the Midrash, Jacob and Esau turned 13 on the day of
Abraham’s passing, at the age of 175. As Jacob was 121 when Joseph became
viceroy of Egypt, there are 108 years between then and when he turned 13.
Double 108, i.e. 216 years, before 2632 BCE is 2848 BCE, which is close to the
date give for the Ancient Sumer’s downfall, at around 2900 BCE.
Abraham was 75 years old when he visited Egypt, 100 years
before his passing. Double 100 years is 200, which when added to 2848 BCE,
gives us 3048 BCE. This date is close to the date given for the beginning of
the First Dynasty, estimated at 3100 BCE.
The Tower of Babel is usually dated by Jewish tradition to 27
years before that, when Abraham was 48 years old. Double 27 gives us 54, which
when added to 3048 BCE, provides us with the date 3102 BCE for the beginning of
written language. This is, again, quite
close to the conventional date for this event, at 3200 BCE.
Although these three last dates are somewhat off from the
conventional dates, I feel comfortable linking them together nonetheless, as it
is widely acknowledged that the dates given for these events which happened so
long ago, can be off by up to a century.
Now, after going back to the beginning of recorded history, I
will move on to the events that occurred after the Exodus.
Shishak
The next reference we have in Tanach pertaining Egypt, is
with Shishak, the father-in-law of King Solomon. It is normally assumed that
Shishak corresponds to the Egyptian Pharaoh Shoshenq I, mainly because of the
similarities between the names, as well as the records found that detail
Shoshenq’s campaign against the Land of Israel. However, one of the glaring
problems with that approach is the fact that Jerusalem is missing from
Shoshenq’s records of conquered cities, even though it should clearly be there.
I will suggest that Shishak was actually the famous Ramesses
II, for a number of reasons:
· In the reliefs detailing his campaign in the Land of Israel, it
clearly mentions the attack on Jerusalem.
·
David Rohl points out that the nickname of Ramesses II
(the first line to the right) would have been spelt almost identically to
Shishak (the second line), using the symbols commonly used in that time.
·
The Israel Stela, which is the first known Egyptian
record to use the term ‘Israel’, and describes its defeat, is dated to directly
after his time.
·
The Midrash (Esther Rabbah 1:12), when describing the
different kings that captured King Solomon’s throne, explains that first
Shishak took it when he fought against Jerusalem, then the Kushite King Zorach,
took it from the Egyptians, after which the Jewish King Asa recaptured it from
Zorach.
This sequence would only make sense
if Shishak corresponds to Ramesses II. The Kingdom of Kush fought twice against
Egypt in that period of history – the first time was shortly after Ramesses’
death, at the fall of the New Kingdom, and the second time was some centuries
later. If Shishak was Ramesses II, then it would be possible for Zorach, who
came after him, to live during the time of Asa. But if Shishak was Shoshenq I,
the invasion of the Kushites that was after his rule is so late, that the
Kushite kings were almost contemporaries of Hezekiah and Sennacherib (who lived
around 200 years after Asa).
Using the methodology mentioned before to reconcile the
dates, Ramesses II is also a much better candidate for Shishak, than Shoshenq
I. Shishak ransacked Jerusalem in the fifth year of Rehoboam, which according
to Jewish tradition, was 521 years after the Exodus. When we subtract double
521, i.e. 1042 years, from 2194 BCE, we reach 1152 BCE. This is closer to the
date attributed to Ramesses II, 1220 BCE, than the date accorded to Shoshenq I,
at 925 BCE. Admittedly, the dating doesn’t pair that well, but I must confess
that I haven’t even begun to explore to see if they can be reconciled better.
Shoshenq
I, Taharqa and Necho II
If Shishak corresponds to Ramesses II, then I believe that
the reference in Tanach to Shoshenq I, whose reliefs record his own campaign
against the Land of Israel, is in Chronicles II 21:16, which describes the war
of ‘the Philistines, and the Arabs that are next to Kush,’ i.e., the Egyptians.
Later on we find Taharqa, who is called Tarheka in Tanach,
who came to the aid of Hezekiah.
Finally, we find Necho II, who is called similarly in Tanach,
who lived at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, as is recorded in
the books of Kings, Chronicles and Jeremiah.
Other events
If the above is true, it would help solve some
historical puzzles that are otherwise difficult to understand. I will give just
a few examples:
1. In the history of Manetho, an Egyptian historian from the
third century B.C.E., there is a very cryptic entry for the description of
Seventh Dynasty: “The Seventh Dynasty consisted
of seventy kings of Memphis, who reigned for 70 days.” As that seems quite
incredulous, it is usually understood as being an exaggeration.
But if the Exodus occurred at the end of the Sixth Dynasty,
as suggested above, Manetho’s description of the following dynasty can be
understood quite literally; the scene in Egypt at that time, was that chaotic.
2. The identification of the Apiru (Abiru). There appears in
the correspondence between the inhabitants of the Land of Israel and Egypt, as
well as in the writings of surrounding nations, the term ‘Abiru’ – or more
precisely ‘Abirayu’. I will suggest that this term refers to the Jews living
there, as those consonants correspond directly to the Hebrew letters of ‘עברי’.
The view that the Abiru in historical findings reflects the
generation of the Jewish people entering Land of Israel, is generally rejected
for two reasons. Firstly, they appear in the historical record much too early,
with the earliest instances dating to the 18th Century BCE.
Secondly, the descriptions we do find about them, do not mesh with the details
recorded in the Book of Joshua.
If, however, one takes into account the dates suggested
above, those objections fall away. Firstly, the time frame within which one can
expect to find references to the Abiru, stretches from 2112 BCE to 1234 BCE
(and perhaps even later). Secondly, many of the Abiru references (Amarna
Letters), mirror closely the descriptions given in the Book of Samuel about the
campaign-styles of Kings Saul and David – maybe the Abiru in those letters are
a reference to them.
3. This, in turn, provides the explanation for the Israel
Stela you referenced to above. Part of the text reads:
Now that Tehenu (Libya) has come to ruin,
Hatti is pacified;
The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:
Ashkelon has been overcome;
Gezer has been captured;
Yano'am is made non-existent.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.
Hatti is pacified;
The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:
Ashkelon has been overcome;
Gezer has been captured;
Yano'am is made non-existent.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.
Since this find is dated to about 1210 BCE,
its reference to Israel’s destruction is quite mystifying – in Scripture, we
find no corresponding account of an Egyptian offensive in this time frame. As
such, the stela’s claims are usually understood to be somewhat figurative, as
you also suggest.
However, if Ramesses II was in fact the
Biblical Shishak, then this stela can be much better understood, as it refers
to Shishak’s victorious campaign against the Land of Israel and the great
destruction that he caused there. It would also explain why this is the first
reference we have to the name ‘Israel’ – previously, the Jewish tribes were
referred to as ‘Abiru’ or ‘עברי’. Now, after the
establishment of the Jewish monarchy of Kings David and Solomon, the
surrounding nations began to reference to them as the People of Israel.
To sum up, I am providing a table below, listing the
above-mentioned events together with their dates:
Event
|
Jewish
Date
|
Jewish
Date in BCE
|
Years
Before
430
BCE
|
Double
That
|
Calculated Date BCE
|
Conventional
Date BCE
|
The Tower of Babel
|
1996
|
1764
|
1334
|
2668
|
3102
|
3200*
|
Abraham’s Visit
|
2023
|
1737
|
1307
|
2614
|
3048
|
3100*
|
Fall of Sumer
(Nimrod’s death)
|
2121
|
1639
|
1209
|
2418
|
2848
|
2900*
|
Joseph’s first meeting with Pharaoh
|
2229
|
1531
|
1101
|
2202
|
2632
|
2650 –
2575*
|
The Exodus
|
2448
|
1312
|
882
|
1764
|
2194
|
2180
|
Abiru
|
2489 –
2928
|
1271 –
832
|
841 –
402
|
1682 -
804
|
2112 -
1234
|
1800 –
1300
|
Amarna Letters
(King David)
|
2885
|
875
|
445
|
890
|
1320
|
1330
|
Shishak / Ramesses II
|
2969
|
791
|
361
|
722
|
1152
|
1220**
|
Shoshenq I
|
3052
|
708
|
278
|
556
|
986
|
925**
|
Taharqa
|
3213
|
547
|
117
|
234
|
664
|
670
|
Necho II
|
3320
|
440
|
10
|
10
|
440
|
600***
|
* According to the
conventional method of dating, it is not uncommon for these estimates to be off
by more than a century, due to their great distance from our present time.
** These two are the most
problematic. I must confess that I haven’t even begun researching if there is a
way to reconcile these dates better.
*** This number is due to the
different amount of years that is generally accepted for the later kings of
Persia. Jewish tradition gives the Persian Kingdom a total of 52 years, while
conventional history gives them 220 years, which we will discuss later on.
The elegance in such a theory,
is in that it seems obvious that the whole misunderstanding stems from a simple
wrong assumption, maybe made by current historians, or even perhaps, a wrong
assumption made by ancient historians, on whose writings we rely upon.
For example, it could be that
ancient kings had multiple names, and the historians compiling their lists
understood the different names to represent different and separate kings. Or
another possibility is that we/they misunderstood the term ‘king’; in later societies,
there was only one king at a time and the second-in-command had a different
title. It could be that in ancient Egypt, both the Ruler and his
second-in-command were referred to, and recorded, as ‘King’. In which case, the
‘kings’ didn’t rule consecutively, but rather co-currently – which would again,
divide the given times by half.
The last thing I need to do is
to explain why I chose 430 BCE as the cut-off date for my calculations.
The first reason is rather simple – the number that the dates
themselves seemed to point to, lies in the range of 400 – 450 BCE, so I chose
something near the middle.
The second reason is a bit more complex. A significant work
detailing the different dynasties, and their lengths, is the history of
Manetho. As he lived around 250 BCE, it would seem only reasonable to
assume that he would correctly know the dates for the dynasties that ruled
Egypt for a couple of hundreds of years before his time. Accordingly, the
rulers that he lists as reigning within that time period, can be understood as
governing consecutively, as that was the style of governance in Manetho’s time.
However, when we go earlier than that, especially from before
the reign of Necho II, I feel comfortable suggesting that the rulers should be
viewed as reigning co-currently, as we know that to be exactly the case. Manetho
starts the list of the kings of the 26th Dynasty with Ammeris the
Ethiopian, 12 (or 18) years, Stephinates, 7 years, Nechepsos, 6
years, Necho I, 8 years, Psamtik I, 54 years, Necho II, 6
years… But we now know, from other sources, that the 26th Dynasty
only started from Psamtik I; all of the names before him must have been princes
or governors.
So rather than viewing Egyptian
records as opposing the history of the Torah, the question I am left with is:
what am I to make of this coincidence, that when one takes the conventionally
accepted dates and divides them in half, one finds the story of the Tanach
spread out before him?
After elaborating on the general framework, I will now address
the specific questions you raise, point by point:
Q. How can Genesis describe the city Abaraham
departs from, as "Ur of the Chaladeans", if the Chaladeans only
reached Ur at about 1000 BCE?
A. It would seem to me that the city referred to in Genesis,
is the Sumerian city of Ur, which had already been established by Abraham’s
time. The reason why Scripture calls it “Ur of the Chaladeans (אור כשדים)” is
either after the descendants of Kesed (כשד),
a great-grandson of Noah (Jubilees 11:3, and Sefer Hayashar), or as other
opinions explain, as a reference to future times, when this area would fall
under the control of the Chaladeans that lived during the First Temple era.
However, it is acknowledged that the Chaladeans that fought
against Jerusalem were not around during Abraham’s times. In fact, this is the
interpretation that some commentators give to Isaiah 23:13: “Behold the land of
the Chaldees, this people has never been; Assyria established it for fleets;
they erected its towers, destroyed its palaces, made it for a ruin” – meaning
that the Chaladeans later conquered their territory from its founder, Ashur,
and his descendants.
Q. Why are we told that Abraham lived in the
land of the Philistines, if they only arrived in the Land of Israel in the 12th
century BCE? Especially as the Scriptural Philistines originated from Crete,
hence, seemingly, the 'Sea People'?
Drawing from Deuteronomy 2:23, Samuel I 30:14, Jeremiah 47:4,
Ezekiel 25:16, Amos 9:7, Zephaniah 2:5, and their commentaries, it turns out that Judaic tradition
does not posit that the Philistines, as a whole, originated from Crete.
The Talmud, in Chullin 60b, says in the name of Resh Lakish,
that the inhabitants of Kaftor rose up against the Philistines (of Abraham and
Isaac), conquered them, and settled in their place. It was against these
Kaftorites that Joshua and the subsequent generations had to contend with, but
Scripture refers to them as Philistines as well, after the area of land that
they inhabited, which is called Peleshet (see, for example, Exodus 15:14 and
Psalms 87:4). Rav Saadiah Gaon identifies Kaftor as Damita, currently known as
Damietta, a port city on the Nile.
However, it seems that already from the times of King Saul,
there was an important family of Philistines referred to as “Creithi”, possibly
because they originated from Crete. I would assume that their relocation would
have not have necessarily left a great deal of evidence behind, as we are
probably not dealing with a mass migration, but rather, the voyage of just a
few people, perhaps a small group.
Q. How can we reach the number of 600,000
people, or more, in only 210 years?
A. One solution is that when we combine the conclusion of
Sanhedrin 69b, that in those earlier generations people became fathers at the
young age of 8 or 9, together with the Midrash (Shemot Rabbah 1:7) that states
that during the most difficult years under Egyptian bondage, the wives would
give birth to six, or more, children at a time, these two points give ample
room for the population to reach 600,000.
There are other solutions as well.
Q. If the whole population of Egypt was only a
few million, wouldn't such a large number of Israelites leaving cause Egypt to
become devastated?
A. It sure would, hence the fall of the Old Kingdom.
Q. Where are the traces of Joseph's reforms in
historical documents?
A. When we look in the right place, in descriptions of the
Third and Fourth Dynasty, we find evidence that can be understood as the result
of Joseph’s governance.
Q. What about references to the Great Famine,
in the records of surrounding nations?
A. The reason we haven’t found them yet is because we are
looking at the wrong timeframe. I haven’t yet researched the records of the
surrounding nations that date to Joseph’s times.
Q. Wasn't the city of Ramses only built during
the reign of Ramesses II?
A. I would assume that the biblical cities of Ramses and
Ra’amses (see Ibn Ezra on Exodus 1:11) are different ones than the one built by
Ramesses II.
Q. How can it even be suggested that the Papyrus
Ipuwer describes the ten plagues, if the papyrus is dated to the end of the Old
Kingdom?
A. It really isn’t a problem, as the Exodus occurred at that
time.
Q. Where is the record of the splitting of the
Red Sea, in other Near Eastern sources?
A. Again, we are currently looking at the wrong time frame
and I haven’t yet researched the records of other nations at that time.
Q. What about the Hittites?
A. The war with the Hittites occurred around 500 years after
the Exodus, during the time of Shishak, so they really have no bearing on the
Exodus itself.
Q. Why is there no record in Egyptian documents
of the mass Exodus?
A. Since the whole kingdom collapsed so catastrophically,
perhaps nobody had the presence of mind to do so.
Q. Why haven't we discovered evidence in the
Sinai Desert of the Israelites wanderings?
A. When we look at the right timeframe, we do find evidence.
I will note that I am not entirely certain what we should
expect to find, based on the Midrashim. About bodily waste, it says in Yuma 75b
that the manna produced none. Nor can we expect to find discarded clothing, as
Pesikta D’Rav Kahana (Chapter 11 [ויהי בשלח]
Section 21) explains, based on Deuteronomy 8:4, that the people’s clothing
miraculously grew together with them. We can’t even expect to find the coal
that they might have used for fire to warm themselves in the desert, as the
Midrash states that the Pillar of Fire at night provided the people with light
and warmth.
Possibly, though, perhaps the ‘multitude of nations’ that
traveled with them did not benefit from these miracles, so maybe we should find
the evidence that they left behind. Which, as I mentioned above, we do find.
Q. How could have Moses sent messengers to the
king of Edom, if Edom only reached statehood at around the 7th century BCE?
A. As of yet, I do not have an answer to this question, as I
have found it difficult to procure any information about that area of land
during the end of the 3rd millennium BCE.
Q. Why is there no trace of Israelite conquest
at the time?
A. Because, ironically enough, we currently refer to the
ancient Israelites as the Canaanites. At the correct period of time, after the
fall of the Old Kingdom, we do find that people from Egypt moved into the Land
of Israel, and some of the original inhabitants were displaced. For example,
the Amorite people suddenly left the Land of Israel at that time, and went on
to conquer the Akkadian Empire.
Q. Why was there an Egyptian presence in the
Land of Israel, during the 12th century BCE?
A. Because at that time, the Egyptian ruler, Shishak, was the
father-in-law of King Solomon.
Q. What about the cities of Jericho and Ai?
A. Interestingly enough, we do find at the end of the 3rd
millennium BCE evidence of the destruction of the cities Jericho and Ai, in a
manner very similar to the descriptions given in the Talmud.
Q. How could 2.5 million people survive in that
area at that time?
A. One possible answer is to note what Rashi writes with
regard to the Blessings and Curses of Leviticus. On Leviticus 26:5, Rashi
writes: “You will eat your food to satiety – one will eat only a little [food],
but it will become blessed in one’s innards.”
If one already accepts the idea that the Jewish people were
satiated during their wanderings in the desert, by manna from heaven, it would
not seem difficult to suggest that, here too, the people miraculously felt
satiated, even after eating minute portions of food.
Q. How can the Torah call the Israelites
"the fewest of all the nations", if they were larger than most other
nations of the time?
A. I must confess that I am somewhat skeptical of attempts to
estimate population sizes of ancient cultures, as our deductions are based on
questionable assumptions.
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