― Israel Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts
“biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.”
― Israel Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts
–Dr. Steven DiMattei
PhD New Testament studies
"Despite its provocative and even misleading title, “Contradictions in the Bible” is a website devoted to bringing biblical scholarship to the public, what experts in the field now know about the Bible’s various textual traditions, the historical and literary contexts that produced these texts, how they came to be assembled together, and even the competing aims and agendas of their diverse authors. Thus, this website’s primary aim is to reclaim the topic of Bible Contradictions for its proper field of study—biblical scholarship. In other words, biblical scholars have known and written about the Bible’s Contradictions for centuries now—what has traditionally been labeled as source-critical scholarship, that is the study of the Bible’s numerous, and often competing, textual traditions! "
"In its present form, the book of Exodus is a composite of the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly sources. These biblical traditions, which record the story of the Israelites’ enslavement in and exodus from Egypt, maintain that the Israelites were oppressed by an unnamed Pharaoh, used as forced laborers in the Pharaoh’s building projects, and were subsequently liberated by Moses, under Yahweh’s guidance, with signs and wonders.
Yet despite these traditions, historical specifics are never described, and neither are there any extent extra-biblical sources nor archaeological data to corroborate these narratives:
No Egyptian records of a large number of, nor any, Israelites in Egypt during the alleged time periods proposed by our biblical sources
No literary nor archaeological records of a mass flight of 600,000 males (Ex 12:37) accompanied by women, children, servants, and livestock in what would have been a heavily fortified Egyptian presence from Egypt to Canaan
..
No archeological record of settlements in the Sinai peninsula in and around the time of Rameses II, or the whole New Kingdom period (15th-11th c. BC) for that matter—especially true of Kadesh-barnea where this one million plus troop allegedly encamped for 38 of the 40 years spent in the peninsula!
No trace of Egyptian influence on Hebrew material culture and language as the result of four centuries of direct Egyptian contact."
...At the other end of the spectrum, there is significant archaeological data confirming the re-importance of the city of Rameses as well as the foundation of Pithom (Ex 1:11) in the 7th century BC. In fact, all the major places in the wilderness narratives have settlement layers in the archaeological record for the 7thcentury BC, especially Kadesh-barnea where the Israelites allegedly remained 38 of their 40 years in the peninsula—at least according to one tradition. In other words, the authors who sculpted the Exodus narrative were familiar with the geopolitical world of the Egyptian delta and the Sinai peninsula as it stood in the
7th century BC!"
Additionally, such stories need to be assessed from within their own historical and literary culture, and not from modern reader’s agendas, presuppositions, or whims. For example, the biblical plague narrative itself was influenced by older ancient Near Eastern literary—and not historical—traditions. There are a number of Sumerian tales that narrate how the goddess Inanna brought forth three plagues upon the land, the last of which was turning all the water of the land to blood. Various plagues and skin diseases, such as boils, are prominent curses among numerous different covenantal treaty documents in the literature of the ancient Near East. Hail is visibly one of the plagues sent by Inanna as well, and swarms of plant eating locusts are a popular divine punishment in Assyrian vassal treaties and other texts from Mesopotamia. Moreover, in the ancient Near Eastern world one of the most significant ways a scribe could argue for the supremacy of his national deity over and against another nation’s god was to present his god, in the present case Yahweh, as ultimate sovereign over the forces of fertility, life, and death—and this is exactly what the whole plague narrative accomplishes. These stories must be understand and read as products of their own literary and historical contexts.
Thus, far from being a work of historical fact or the recollection of an historical event, the Exodus traditions were most likely the product of centuries of accumulated and shared cultural memories of past events in the long history between Egypt and the land of Canaan: the expulsion of the Semitic Hyksos; the fact that the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom regularly used Semites in their building projects; and the underlying political reality that the Canaanites did in fact liberate themselves from Egyptian control in the 12th century BC, but it was the Egyptians who were expelled from the land of Canaan, not the Israelites from Egypt! As some scholars have suggested, the shared cultural memory of the liberation of Semites in Egypt might have been a powerful enough narrative to have been the catalyst for creating a shared ethnic identity and past which took the form of the Exodus narrative."
Continue...
