My Detoxing Thread

[Brakeman]

Wasn't there this awkward scene not too long ago where an israeli official was going on about how his people built the pyramids, and the egyptian's reaction was like, erm, no you didn't?!

Couldn't have someone from an inferior race build something like the pyramids could we? It would need to be "god's special people" ™.

[Brian37]

Jews were never slaves in Egypt.

Does not matter if they committed genocide or not.

Genocide even as a mere story is a sick motif no matter what holy book it is in. It is a literary device to scare the reader into conformity. Back then the mortality rate was much higher and it was extremely important that the individual tow the tribal line.

The god of Abraham is dictator god. So no matter which of the three religions you are talking about he still amounts as a CHARACTER only. The downside is that this fictional being has fans, and they all fight over who this fictional being loves best.

But it still would not make an invisible sky hero by any name real.

[watchamadoodle]

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.

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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.
...
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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http://www.reformjudaism.org/exodus-not-fiction

[Vox Populi]

I'm pretty sure it's no and no. I don't have any sources though, just based on what I have learned here and talking to others in real life.

[Aractus]

No and no. The most detailed records we have frim bronze-early iron is the Egyptians, and no where do they record any sort of en masse enslavement,  and they don't mention a Jewish culture till the time of around the 8th-7th century.  Also the archeological evidence does not support a genocide in the region of Isreal at that time and nor does it support the notion of mass migrating people from that time.
What it does suggest is that Jewish culture descended from cultures around it, not becoming truly monotheistic until after the BabylonIan exile.

Actually archaeology does show genocides in the Canaan region, but they occurred centuries or even a millennia earlier than the "first Jews" (8th cent. BC). Going by the Biblical timeline some of them are possible, however at the times they occurred there were no Jewish people. Antisemitism, however, was alive and well under the Roman empire and continued well into the 20th century. It's only following Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that it's become less popular.

[Mudhammam]

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?

1) While there is reference to conquests in Palestine during the New Kingdom of Egypt, the earliest and only reference to the Hebrews occurs in the "Hymn of Victory of Mer-ne-Ptah," otherwise known as the "Israel Stela," which includes in its inscription of subjugated nations, "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not." This dates to about 1206 B.C.E. One commentator writes, "Much has been made of the fact that the word Israel is the only one of the names in this context which is written with the determinative of people rather than land. Thus we should seem to have the children of Israel in or near Palestine, but not yet as a settled people. This would have important bearing on the date of the Conquest. This is a valid argument. Determinatives should have meaning, and a contrast between determinatives in the same context should be significant. This stela does give the country determinatives to settled peoples like the Rebu, Temh, Hatti, Askelon, etc., and the determinative of people to unlocated groups like the Madjoi, Nau, and Tekten. The argument is good, but not conclusive, because of the notorious carelessness of Late-Eygptian scribes and several blunders of writing in this stela." What's more likely is that if this refers to the Israelites, then some of the Hebrew people would have been taken captive, and the rest would have been made to pay regular tribute to the Egyptians, which may have been viewed as a form of slavery. That important figures in Hebrew history contain Egyptian names and certain stories are derived from Egyptian folklore (such as Moses and the story of Joseph and Potiphar) suggests an earlier connection.
2) Many Egyptian sources reference a group of Semitic people who lived as marauders from about 1,800-1,100 B.C.E. known as the "Habiru," and some have related them to the Hebrews, but there's not really any conclusive evidence on the matter. More likely, the Hebrews accumulated their land by waging war on their neighbors, and the biblical history represents a reconstruction with the common exaggerations and embellishments.