RE: Was the Exodus natural or supernatural, fact or fiction?
February 6, 2013 at 4:07 pm
(This post was last modified: February 6, 2013 at 4:12 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 6, 2013 at 3:23 pm)Confused Ape Wrote:(February 6, 2013 at 3:11 pm)John V Wrote: That and the other plagues that came after it says that god hardened pharaoh's heart.
Looking at it from the ancient Israelites' point of view. They had stories about all the devastation caused by the Santorini eruption and these got mixed up with stories about the Hyksos leaving Egypt. They would have wondered why the Pharoah didn't let the Israelites in their Exodus story go when the first plague struck so the only explanation they could come up with was that God must have hardened the Pharoah's heart. It's would be a case of putting two and two together and making five.
From Israelite's point view, it must appear necessary to concoct a suitably grandiose origin myth to mitigate the sense of unworthiness resulting from the manifestly superior grandeur, culture and majesty of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. So they stitch together rudely perceived elements of widely disparate stories and anecdotes, to which they add a generous amount of custom manufactured bullshit, in an effort to bastardize an already crude regional history and insinuate themselves into a historic narrative in which they otherwise would have had neither a significant, nor a praise worthy, part.
