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April 1, 2015 at 8:43 am (This post was last modified: April 1, 2015 at 8:45 am by watchamadoodle.)
(April 1, 2015 at 1:15 am)Brometheus Wrote: Coming from where I have, I've got a few questions as I try to sort out my world-view. Google hasn't been any real help, maybe someone here could help me out, or at least point me to resources.
1.) Were the ancient Jewish people actually slaves in Egypt?
2.) Did the ancient Jewish people actually carry out the genocides described in the Bible?
Here is a quote from a magazine article where Elliot Friedman argues that the story of Exodus was based on a real event involving only the Levite tribe. I have read a couple of Elliot Friedman's books, and some of his ideas seem too speculative, but they are interesting to consider.
Quote:At a recent international conference entitled “Out of Egypt” on the question of the Exodus’ historicity, one point of agreement, I believe, among most of the 45 participating scholars was that Semitic peoples, or Western Asiatics, were in fact living in Egypt and were traveling to and from there for centuries. And the evidence indicates that the smaller group among them, who were connected with the Exodus, were Levites. The Levites were members of the group associated with Moses, the Exodus, and the Sinai events depicted in the Bible. In the Torah, Moses is identified as a Levite. Also, out of all of Israel only Levites had Egyptian names: Moses, Phinehas, Hophni, and Hur are all Egyptian names.
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The Levite authors also devote more ink in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to the Tabernacle—the Tent of Meeting which held the ark in the Exodus account—than they do to any other subject. The non-Levite text, J, doesn’t mention it. This is also significant because the architecture of the Tabernacle and its surrounding courtyard matches that of the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II, for which we have archaeological evidence, as was shown by Professor Michael Homan in a brilliant combination of archaeology and text (To Your Tents, O Israel, 2005). Professor Sperling had emphasized in the RJ article that, archaeologically, there are no Egyptian elements in Israel’s material culture. But in the Tabernacle we do have those Egyptian elements. Egyptian culture is present, but, again, only among the Levites, not all of Israel.
Likewise, only the Levite authors emphasize that males have to be circumcised, which was an Egyptian practice. They write of God commanding Abraham to make circumcision the sign of the covenant (Genesis 17), and they include the commandment for all males of Israel to do so (Leviticus 12:3.) Only the non-Levite source, J, does not command it. Again, the connections with Egyptian culture are there—but only among the Levites.
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