User:Clester07/sandbox
Summary- The logistics of the Exodus have always been critical to historians and archaeologists, as no clear time frame for dating can be determined and the large numbers from perceived censuses and religious texts give inconsistent ranges in the population of the fleeing Israelites. While the debate over the historicity of Exodus continues, the core principle of the Exodus, the founding Jerusalem in Judea, can be tied to the expulsion of the Hyksos around the 2nd Millennium BCE.
In Exodus 2:2 God had decreed that the start of the Israelite's calendar, and the beginning of their Exodus from Egypt, would come in the spring. He said it would be both the "springtime of nature and now the springtime of Israel as a free people". Separate from the common Egyptian calendar which centered on the changing flow of the Nile and solar patterns, the new calendar of the Israelites would center on the cycles of both the sun and moon. Every new year would begin with a new moon Following this new calendar, the Exodus would have begun with a New Moon, ushering in a spring. If the predilections towards a lunar based cyclical occurrence are true, then following the lunar cycle thousands of years into the past could give an estimate to when a possible "spring" for the Israelites had occurred- granted the numerous amounts of new moons that could have occurred within one given millennium[1]
Dating through Language- archaeologists have several main points against the dating of the Exodus- and one comes from the actual writing of the Pentateuch (or the five books of the Torah) and the emergence of the Hebrew language as a whole which formed the foundation for the Torah (and Exodus). The earliest dawn of the modern Hebrew language does not appear in texts until after 1050 BCE, despite Abrahamic faiths believing that Moses had written of the Exodus before this time in Hebrew. Archaeologists are aware of proto-Canaanite languages that lay foundation for Old Hebrew as a language, and many were recorded in Egypt around 1850 BCE and in Palestine around 1500 BCE; one such includes a proto-Sinaitic language which was discovered at the excavations of Serabit-el-Khadim in the Sinai near Egypt in the 1970s[2]. Likewise,the oldest paleo-Hebrew epigraphs seemed to be recorded around the mid 16th century BCE (circa 1500) in a cuneiform type depiction. To get an accurate dating for an Exodus, it would need to be determined if primary sources were written in a proto-Canaanite language, a paleo-Hebrew language, or the emerging "Old Hebrew" language (which birthed modern Hebrew). [3] While scribes and diplomatic envoys in Egypt around the rule of Amenhotep III (1383-1345) would have written in a Babylonian cuneiform writing, some Canaanite scribes in the region used an old Caananite language related to Old Hebrew for oral tradition; there was no evidence of written paleo-Hebrew languages dating to this time in Canaan, so it is unknown if the archaic form of Hebrew was kept to homeland oral discussion or internal person-to-person writings. At this time, in fact, most paleo-Hebrew languages would have resembled more standardized proto-Canaanite languages instead of uniquely Hebrew ones. The emergence of the Hebrew language is paramount to the writing doctrine of Exodus, as the basis for the origins of the Israelites was supposed to have been written in their mother language.
Numbers- Combined, the historical accounts of both Hyksos and leper Israelite migrations from Egypt (as described by the historian Manetho) would barely account for half of the population described as leaving Egypt in the Exodus story.[4]
However, contradiction arises with Israelite migrations described in Numbers 3:43- it was noted there being 273 first born sons of Israel. In total, this would put the population of 20+ year old male Israelites at around 6,000 men, not 600,000[5]. Moses' own apparent census put the 20+ year male population of first born sons at nearly 600,000- which would lead to a rough population total (with women and children included) at well over 2 million. If the amount of 20+ males was in fact the nearly 600,000 as stated, then the Israeli mothers would have had roughly fifty children per person, which again is highly unlikely. The text from Numbers says that the Israelites were lacking sufficient peoples to fully populate their Promised Land, which would have been contradicted by the large numbers (early 3 million Israelites) that the math equates to. Another contradiction lies in the Hebrew word" 'lp" (pronounced 'elep); the letter has more than one definition- it can either mean "thousand", "leader" or "troop", and "group/clan". All meanings have been used when describing the Exodus, which has led to a translation crisis on the true meaning of the biblical numbers. The translation chronicling 46,500 men could have actually meant forty-six families, consisting of five hundred men, or it could have meant forty six separate leaders or troops among the Israelite clans-- it all depends on the translation of 'lp [6]. If the translation of 'lp as "troop" was used, then the estimate for the 20+ year old Israelites would have been roughly 5,500, putting the average Israeli family at around eight to nine men per family, which could be fairly common for the times for which Exodus is believed to have occurred. It also might be possible to eliminate the meaning 'lp as "thousand" as the correct translation by the reading of Numbers III 46, which states that the number of Levite men was 273 fewer than those of the Israelites. The use of 'lp as thousand would not match the proportions stated in the book of Numbers, which would give more validity to the translations of 'lp as "family" or "warrior" which have closer proportions between Levites and Israelites as written in Numbers[7]. A second census was taken by Moses at the end of the forty years wandering through the Sinai, which again used the terminology of 'lp, this time describing the number of troops (groups of warriors), placing the amount of men per troop at 9.6 average. In total this would have accounted for over 6,000 individual warriors with the amount of 'lps at around 600. Numbers 31:5 then goes on to account for individual members of tribes taking up arms, thus using the term 'lp to refer to a troop of men being used from each tribe (accounting for a total of one thousand men from each tribe used for said fighting).[7] However, where the legitimacy of Numbers can be applied, it should also be criticized and heavily debated.of the Old Testemant, the term 'lp is mixed in definitions- and the Book of Numbers even uses the term 'lp twice with separate definitions in one sentence alone. The Old Testament has over forty recordings of the term, with most being used with separate definitions, and where historians have been able to find consistency, there is further inconsistency in definition.
Manetho's Hyksos-Israelite Amalgam
Once serving as the chief priest at the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis,he was well known for
In the second volume of his History of Egypt, retold by Josephus,he defined the Hyksos as the "king shepherds" whose destructive purpose was driven by the desire to exterminate the "root and branch" of Egypt. Following war with Egypt, a treaty decreed these Shepards to exit Egypt.
- ^ Sarna, Nahum M. (1986). Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 81–85. ISBN 0-8052-3982-0.
- ^ Rainey, Anson F. (1987). Egypt, Israel, Sinai: Archaeological and Historical Relationships in the Biblical Period. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University. pp. 57–61. ISBN 965-224-008-7.
- ^ Gertoux, Gerard (2016). "Moses and the Exodus: What Evidence?". Academia.
- ^ Verbrugghe, Gerald P. (1996). Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. pp. 157–158. ISBN 0472086871.
- ^ Humphreys, Colin J. (April 1998). "The Number of People in the Exodus from Egypt: Decoding Mathematically the Very Large Numbers in Numbers I and XXVI". Vetus Testamentum. 48 (2): 196–213. doi:10.1163/1568533982721550.
- ^ Humphreys, Colin J. (April 1998). "The Number of People in the Exodus from Egypt: Decoding Mathematically the Very Large Numbers in Numbers I and XXVI" (PDF). Vetus Testamentum. 48 (2): 199–201. doi:10.1163/1568533982721550. JSTOR 1585502.
- ^ a b Humphreys, Colin J. (April 1998). "The Number of People in the Exodus from Egypt: Decoding Mathematically the Very Large Numbers in Numbers I and XXVI" (PDF). Vetus Testamentum. 48 (2): 205–209. doi:10.1163/1568533982721550. JSTOR 1585502.