(July 18, 2011 at 11:31 am)thebigfudge Wrote: The Ipuwer is a poem.
This is an extract from Wikipedia.
Parallels with The Book of Exodus
Some have interpreted the document as an Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt and the Exodus in the Old Testament of the Bible, and it is often cited as proof for the Biblical account by various religious organisations.[23]
The association of the Ipuwer Papyrus with the Exodus as describing the same event is generally rejected by Egyptologists.[24] Roland Enmarch, author a new translation of the papyrus, notes: "The broadest modern reception of Ipuwer amongst non-Egyptological readers has probably been as a result of the use of the poem as evidence supporting the Biblical account of the Exodus."[25] While Dr. Enmarch himself rejects synchronizing the texts of the Ipuwer Papyrus and The Book of Exodus on grounds of historicity, in The reception of a Middle Egyptian poem: The Dialogue of Ipuwer.. he acknowledges that there are some textual parallels "particularly the striking statement that ‘the river is blood and one drinks from it’ (Ipuwer 2.10), and the frequent references to servants abandoning their subordinate status (e.g. Ipuwer 3.14–4.1; 6.7–8; 10.2–3). On a literal reading, these are similar to aspects of the Exodus account."[26] Commenting on such attempts to draw parallels, he writes that "all these approaches read Ipuwer hyper-literally and selectively" and points out that there are also conflicts between Ipuwer and the biblical account. He suggests that "it is more likely that Ipuwer is not a piece of historical reportage and that historicising interpretations of it fail to account for the ahistorical, schematic literary nature of some of the poem’s laments," but other Egyptologists disagree (see Genre section above). Examining what Enmarch calls "the most extensively posited parallel", the river becoming blood, he notes that it should not be taken "absolutely literally" as a description of an event but that both Ipuwer and Exodus might be metaphorically describing what happens at times of catastrophic Nile floods when the river is carrying large quantities of red earth, mentioning that Kitchen has also discussed this phenomenon.
So no its not scientific method. Its cherry picking certain lines from a poem and ignoring the ones that do not tie in with the bibles view.
I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but did you follow that link? If you look at the references to the Papyrus, you will see it references just about every other line. That is not cherry picking. If someone said that they cherry-picked lines from Exodus, they would be wrong; Exodus doesn't solely describe the ten plagues. Therefore, you cannot quote every other line in an argument.
