(November 18, 2021 at 10:37 am)T.J. Wrote: It's always been a popular belief that Moses wrote, if I remember correctly, the first five books of the bible. But a documentary I watched at Larned said that the Jews didn't even begin writing the bible until after their exile by Babylon, so how could Moses have written the first five books if the bible didn't even start until years later when Babylon fucked their shit up? Or did they mean that was when the books, already written, were included in a single structure called the bible?
Indeed.
The Jews calculate the Exodus as happening during the reign of Ramses The Great (1303-1213 bce) The Torah known today was actually written during the Babylonian exile, ca 539 bce.
Minor points; Egypt was not a slave-dependent society although it had slaves. Many were prisoners of war and were eventually release.
The Torah says half a million men left Egypt to begin the Exodus. Add women and children and that comes to about 2 million.
At that time, the world population was about 40 million. The total population of Egypt was perhaps 2 million.
It took Moses 40 years to lead his people to Canaan, where they exterminated the inhabitants. At that time Canaan was a client state of Egypt. Taking the longest route, Canaan is around 8000km from Egypt. 40 years?
Recent archaeology has established that the Exodus almost certainly did not happen. Moses probably never existed..
My reference :
"The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book published in 2001, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist, historian and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine."
The Bible Unearthed - Wikipedia
