MathGMih wrote:We are told it would have been very difficult for such a multitude wandering around out on the desert to have lived for more than a short time. Yes, and the same could be said about one person out on the desert. They are forgetting God, Who supplied water, meat (quail) and daily bread (Nehemiah 9:20). They believe that encampments of such a multitude would have left some sort of “trash” for them to follow, but they are still trying to figure out which route the children of Israel were on. “Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.” (Nehemiah 9:21) There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow. As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”! Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof! They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents. And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology. See this site with new info on the Exodus = http://www.sinai-horeb.com/

The inability to find something where there would be virtually mountains of evidence. And yes, I read the verses. But this is not a vacuum. You've got reams of other interlocking claims such as a worldwide flood, a Creation myth and scores of other things that don't stand up at all to evidence.

MathGMih wrote:We are told it would have been very difficult for such a multitude wandering around out on the desert to have lived for more than a short time. Yes, and the same could be said about one person out on the desert. They are forgetting God, Who supplied water, meat (quail) and daily bread (Nehemiah 9:20). They believe that encampments of such a multitude would have left some sort of “trash” for them to follow, but they are still trying to figure out which route the children of Israel were on. “Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.” (Nehemiah 9:21) There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow. As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”! Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof! They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents. And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology. See this site with new info on the Exodus = http://www.sinai-horeb.com/

So we know those who built the pyramids were not slaves but skilled artisans, kinda flies in the face of what the Bible said. Also, on the Exodus, you do realize that the numbers quoted in the Bible for population size are about that of the city of Houston. That's a lot of evidence, let alone, at that time, they would have been a regional powerhouse and yet their contemporaries don't speak of themas such, let alone at all.

My argument against the assertions in that particular piece of mythology centre upon one question. Namely, "where is all the garbage?"

Now this might seem like a strange question to ask, until you speak to actual archaeologists and palaeontologists. Who will tell you that a fair amount of their time is spent sifting through the garbage left behind by various organisms in past ages, in order to learn about the activities thereof. Humans are particularly adept at producing garbage, and indeed,our hominid ancestors launched us onto this trajectory with their own propensity for leaving garbage behind them, in the form of various stone tools that were discarded, once better stones allowing better tools to be made turned up. Or, in some cases, stone tools that were simply lost or misplaced, never to be found again by their original owners, silently waiting until people like Richard Leakey alighted upon them several hundred thousand years later. As humans entered the Neolithic Age, they started to leave behind them other things, such as cave paintings and grave goods.

As humans developed such things as the first civilisations, and the first agricultural systems, our ability to generate garbage multiplied, because civilisations and agriculture allowed specialisation and division of labour to arise, along with the products thereof. So, archaeoloigcal digs unearthing relevant sites produce new forms of garbage left behind by the humans of that era - pottery shards, sometimes complete pots, clay tablets with writing upon them. We also start to see the first evidence of abandoned buildings, which means that human-produced garbage started to become substantial blots on the landscape, around the same time that our ancestors started building things such as ziggurats.

Then, our ancestors developed the means to forge and shape metal tools, and weapons, some examples of which were added to the garbage left behind by our ancestors. Coins joined the garbage piles at a fairly early stage in development too. Later on, as our capabilities expanded, so did our garbage. We started leaving ships on sea beds, we started leaving ruins of entire cities, and by the time our ancestors started to develop the first recognisable steps toward modern science, we started leaving behind ever greater quantities of garbage, and ever more exotic forms of garbage. More recently, we've left behind us entire ocean liners, battleships, and our own versions of the abandoned cities of the past, such as Pripyat in the Ukraine, abandoned along with the Chernobyl nuclear power station that forms perhaps one of our most hazardous pieces of garbage to date.

We're even starting to leave our garbage behind us in space. Dead satellites and other pieces of junk orbit Planet Earth, forming a sort of junk "ring system" that spaceflight planners have to take into account when planning new missions, which will eventually be joined by rather more substantial bits of hardware such as the Hubble Space Telescope, an 11 ton collection of metal parts that's almost as long as an articulated lorry. At least two now-dead space probes occupy the surface of Venus, sent there by the former Soviet Union. Mars now plays host to over a dozen dead spacecraft and their assorted ancillary cast-offs, and the recent Curiosity rover misssion will, in time, once its mission is complete and its fuel has run out, become yet another piece of garbage we've left on Mars. We've left a space probe on the surface of Titan, that will in time become more of our junk. We've left several tons of hardware on the Moon, along with human footprints that will still be there a million years or so into the future. The two Voyager spacecraft are now taking our garbage outside the Solar System - once they've shut down for the last time (if they haven't done so already), they too will become pieces of our garbage, now passing through the helioshock into interstellar space proper. And our most exotic form of garbage to date is in the electromagnetic spectrum - television and radio transmissions, whose signals were powerful enough to leave Earth, and radiate out into space, the earliest of which have now dissipated into very weak signals indeed, but which may still be detectable by any suitably equipped civilisation that happens to be residing 70 light years away.

Quite simply, archaeologists have known for some time that our garbage tells so much about what we got up to in the past. Indeed, archaeology is perhaps best described as the fine art of learning about what we did from our trash, and archaeologists have become singularly adept at discovering our past deeds in this manner. Of course, there's more to it than this, but I suspect that most archaeologists won't complain too bitterly about my summing up their profession in this manner, because it takes cconsiderable skill and expertise to learn from past garbage, and a whole battery of scientific tools are indispensible in this process.

So, when a claim is made, that humans got up to various forms of mischief in large numbers somewhere in the past, the first question is, "where is the garbage they left behind?" Because humans are a garbage producing species, and a fairly florid garbage producing species at that. If we got up to something in the past, almost certainly, we left behind garbage testifying thereto. Consequently, one would reasonably expect that if three million or so people spent 40 years piddling about in the Sinai Desert, they would have left behind them a fair amount of trash. Trouble is, there is none. At least, I ccan't recall any peer reviewed papers noting a large amount of relevant, precisely dateable trash in that part of the world. The absence of large amounts of garbage from the relevant period alone says there's something a bit iffy about the whole Exodus myth. That's before you delve into a range of other problems and evidential inconsistencies that have been covered by others in this thread.

As a consequence ...

MathGMih wrote:We are told it would have been very difficult for such a multitude wandering around out on the desert to have lived for more than a short time.

Please do tell us all how three million people could survive for 40 years in an arid desert incapable of sustaining even the relatively modest agriculture of the era. And before you start, "my magic man somehow made it happen" isn't good enough.

MathGMih wrote: Yes, and the same could be said about one person out on the desert.

Actually, a small number of people possessing desert survival skills aren't the issue here. We have some of these alive today, such as the Kalahari Bushmen. Three million such people concentrated in one relatively small area, on the other hand, would exhaust the available resources long before 40 years was up.

MathGMih wrote:They are forgetting God, Who supplied water, meat (quail) and daily bread (Nehemiah 9:20).

Blind assertion and nothing more. First of all, we're still waiting for supernaturalists to provide evidence that this god entity is something other than the figment of the imagination of Middle Eastern nomads. Until that question is addressed in a substantive manner, all assertions about this entity, such as the above, constitute mere speculation and fantasy. Plus, we have zero evidence for magic conjuring tricks of the sort asserted above.

MathGMih wrote:They believe that encampments of such a multitude would have left some sort of “trash” for them to follow

This isn't a matter of "belief", it's a matter of evidence. See above for the evidence that humans produce garbage wherever they go. The absence of any garbage with respect to this asserted multitude of people is a big red flag with respect to the veracity of the story.

MathGMih wrote:but they are still trying to figure out which route the children of Israel were on.

The fact that no readily detectable garbage trail exists, is a big sign that the story was made up. If the Sumerians were capable of leaving behind entire buildings as their trash legacy 3,000 years before the asserted events in this story, along with such artefacts as a 7 foot tall basalt stele bearing the first major written code of laws in human history, the absence of any litter left by the purported multitudes asserted to have trampled the desert is highly suspicious. Or are you going to tell us that your invisible magic man cleaned up after them?

MathGMih wrote:“Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.” (Nehemiah 9:21)

Again, nothing more than mythological blind assertion, without any factual support.

MathGMih wrote:There was no thrown away, worn-out clothing, no piles of leftover manna as it melted (Exodus 16:21), and they left no “soda bottles or gum wrappers” for them to follow.

Once again, an assertion that looks laughably untenable, alongside the evidence of the behaviour of our species (and the ancestors thereof) over a 4 million year period. Why doesn't your magic man solve our trash problems today in the same fashion?

MathGMih wrote:As others have brought out, the Israelites the critics are looking for never existed, because they do not believe God provided for them, but the truth is Israel “lacked nothing”!

Blind assertion. Once again, please provide us with something a little more substantial than blind assertions to the effect "my magic man did it because he's my magic man".

MathGMih wrote:Their inability to find something is what they offer as proof!

Inability to provide evidence for a given assertion, is usually a good sign that said assertion is made up shit. Please learn this elementary concept sometime.

MathGMih wrote:They only recently found (2002) the “workers’ village” for the pyramids of the Giza Plateau. It is estimated this town housed 20,000 people and was built out of bricks, whereas the children of Israel lived in tents.

So what? This doesn't support the myths in question at all. Red herring.

MathGMih wrote:And this discovery only came after they had searched every inch of the Giza Plateau for the last two hundred years of archaeology.

Once again, red herring.

MathGMih wrote:See this site with new info on the Exodus = http://www.sinai-horeb.com/

Oh no, not another apologetics website. Yawn.

Finally, even though he's been banned, I can't help but respond to this:

Lion IRC wrote:

Varangian wrote:

Lion IRC wrote:We are talking about an area which lies within a couple of days walk of the Kings Highway which has been a trade route for over 5000 years. (...) Why is there this astonishment about nomadic wanderings for 40 years.

Well, if there was an old, established trade route through Sinai, why did it take Gawd's Chosen People 40 years to find their way? ...

They were not rushing to get somewhere. And Cosmic Teapot is mistaken to think Christianity hinges upon archeological evidence.

If archeology stumbles across bible evidence the only thing I would say is..."yeah thats what we have been saying all along"

If archeology finds no evidence it makes no difference to my religion which is based on The Word not The Artifact.

If archeology finds evidence claimed to contradict The Word I say - "show me"

Lion (IRC)

In short, "My mythology is always right, and it's up to you to prove it wrong, even when it manifestly is".

So let's see. 3 million seems a fair estimate, that's the 600 000 "warriors" claimed in the bible plus their wives and children plus the old and infirm plus all their slaves and associated hangers on. Marching 10 abreast and 2m apart the column would be 600 km long. Yet still they take 40 years to cross an area about 200km wide which most people could walk across in an easy month. Yet they manage to leave behind not a trace of their passing? How much shit would 3 million produce in 40 years?

The killer to the story isn't just in the complete lack of trace they left in their passing though but in the complete lack of anyone in Egypt noticing a large part of the population missing, and most particularly in the complete lack of impact on the Canaanites that their arrival appears to have generated.

There is no evidence that the population of Canaan increased at this time and no evidence of cultural change. The last point is interesting. Egypt had distinct pottery, in makeup and design, from that in use in Canaan, yet there is no evidence of pottery of Egyptian design occurring in those settlements. There were many other cultural differences, yet none of them appear to have become established in Canaan at that time.

Almost like they were ghosts?

Fenrir wrote:So let's see. 3 million seems a fair estimate, that's the 600 000 "warriors" claimed in the bible plus their wives and children plus the old and infirm plus all their slaves and associated hangers on. Marching 10 abreast and 2m apart the column would be 600 km long. Yet still they take 40 years to cross an area about 200km wide which most people could walk across in an easy month. Yet they manage to leave behind not a trace of their passing? How much shit would 3 million produce in 40 years?

I did some similar calculations some years back, yielding among other things the fact that if they were moving in one direction the column of people could span the distance from Cairo to Jerusalem. Also with so many people there would be no way to get enough access to the tiny wells in the district to provide water for so many people and all their animals. And just think of the waste disposal issues. It was a veritable miracle they survived.

spin wrote:

Fenrir wrote:So let's see. 3 million seems a fair estimate, that's the 600 000 "warriors" claimed in the bible plus their wives and children plus the old and infirm plus all their slaves and associated hangers on. Marching 10 abreast and 2m apart the column would be 600 km long. Yet still they take 40 years to cross an area about 200km wide which most people could walk across in an easy month. Yet they manage to leave behind not a trace of their passing? How much shit would 3 million produce in 40 years?

I did some similar calculations some years back, yielding among other things the fact that if they were moving in one direction the column of people could span the distance from Cairo to Jerusalem. Also with so many people there would be no way to get enough access to the tiny wells in the district to provide water for so many people and all their animals. And just think of the waste disposal issues. It was a veritable miracle they survived.

Trouble is, the people who want desperately for their mythology to be right, will fall back upon blind assertions about "miracles" to prop said mythology and its assertions up. It's standard supernaturalist practice, of course, to invoke entirely arbitrary appeals to magic on the part of their magic man to get the job done. That there's no evidence either for magic or their magic man doesn't bring this approach crashing to the halt that it should do. We've just had one person resurrect this thread trying that exact approach, namely, appeal to blind assertions from his mythology, those assertions claiming that Magic Man waved his magic todger about and magicked into existence all the necessities to keep these people going. That there isn't a shred of evidence for any of these assertions doesn't have any effect, because adherents of doctrine all adopt the position that the assertions of their pet doctrines somehow dictate to reality, whether or not reality agrees with this.

Calilasseia wrote:

spin wrote:

Fenrir wrote:So let's see. 3 million seems a fair estimate, that's the 600 000 "warriors" claimed in the bible plus their wives and children plus the old and infirm plus all their slaves and associated hangers on. Marching 10 abreast and 2m apart the column would be 600 km long. Yet still they take 40 years to cross an area about 200km wide which most people could walk across in an easy month. Yet they manage to leave behind not a trace of their passing? How much shit would 3 million produce in 40 years?

I did some similar calculations some years back, yielding among other things the fact that if they were moving in one direction the column of people could span the distance from Cairo to Jerusalem. Also with so many people there would be no way to get enough access to the tiny wells in the district to provide water for so many people and all their animals. And just think of the waste disposal issues. It was a veritable miracle they survived.

Trouble is, the people who want desperately for their mythology to be right, will fall back upon blind assertions about "miracles" to prop said mythology and its assertions up. It's standard supernaturalist practice, of course, to invoke entirely arbitrary appeals to magic on the part of their magic man to get the job done. That there's no evidence either for magic or their magic man doesn't bring this approach crashing to the halt that it should do. We've just had one person resurrect this thread trying that exact approach, namely, appeal to blind assertions from his mythology, those assertions claiming that Magic Man waved his magic todger about and magicked into existence all the necessities to keep these people going. That there isn't a shred of evidence for any of these assertions doesn't have any effect, because adherents of doctrine all adopt the position that the assertions of their pet doctrines somehow dictate to reality, whether or not reality agrees with this.

There are limits to sensibility. When the gun enthusiast gets that gleam in the eye and has his finger on the trigger, he knows nobody can do him no harm because happiness is a warm gun. The god enthusiast is the same. When he gets his finger on that trigger he knows no logic can do him no harm. You need to be content with having communicated to the best of your ability while knowing that when that god juice is flowing through the veins he feels he can jump off that building and nothing you can say will prevent it.

Well, the cliche that 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' is the great get-out-of-jail-free card that makes skeptics look rather silly, isn't it?

The unicorn in my garden agrees with this kind of thinking.

Calilasseia wrote:

spin wrote:

Fenrir wrote:So let's see. 3 million seems a fair estimate, that's the 600 000 "warriors" claimed in the bible plus their wives and children plus the old and infirm plus all their slaves and associated hangers on. Marching 10 abreast and 2m apart the column would be 600 km long. Yet still they take 40 years to cross an area about 200km wide which most people could walk across in an easy month. Yet they manage to leave behind not a trace of their passing? How much shit would 3 million produce in 40 years?

I did some similar calculations some years back, yielding among other things the fact that if they were moving in one direction the column of people could span the distance from Cairo to Jerusalem. Also with so many people there would be no way to get enough access to the tiny wells in the district to provide water for so many people and all their animals. And just think of the waste disposal issues. It was a veritable miracle they survived.

Trouble is, the people who want desperately for their mythology to be right, will fall back upon blind assertions about "miracles" to prop said mythology and its assertions up. It's standard supernaturalist practice, of course, to invoke entirely arbitrary appeals to magic on the part of their magic man to get the job done. That there's no evidence either for magic or their magic man doesn't bring this approach crashing to the halt that it should do. We've just had one person resurrect this thread trying that exact approach, namely, appeal to blind assertions from his mythology, those assertions claiming that Magic Man waved his magic todger about and magicked into existence all the necessities to keep these people going. That there isn't a shred of evidence for any of these assertions doesn't have any effect, because adherents of doctrine all adopt the position that the assertions of their pet doctrines somehow dictate to reality, whether or not reality agrees with this.

Yes. They take the attitude that, "Well, it theoretically could have happened, so I'm just going to assume it did, 'cause there's no reason why anybody would lie about that." It's a variation on Pascal's Wager. Their entire world is hypotheticals and theoreticals. Whatever it takes to keep the ventilator on for Sky Daddy.

The encampment of Kibroth-hattaavah “graves of lust,” where the “fire” of God burned to death (cremated) multitudes who were there (Numbers 11:1, Psalm 78:20-21). This is the only time during Israel's 40 years of wandering that the Bible tells us of a mass burial. The Egyptians, Arabs and Jews did not cremate; the Romans and Greeks who at one time ruled Egypt and sometimes cremated, had no known towns within 60 miles of these catacombs. The Bedouins call this site Wadi El Khawaja, "Valley of the Foreigner".
The remains from cremation are considerably smaller than the bodies they come from, allowing for a number of cremated remains to have been deposited in each vase. Multiply this by the tens of thousands of vases* and it would have required a city of foreigners (Greeks or Romans) larger than ever existed at any place in the Eastern Desert! (*From the 30 catacombs found to date, the vases would have been made at location.) Greeks and Romans did not always cremate, and at no other location in the Eastern Desert have cremated remains been found, even at sites known to have been home to Greeks and Romans! I received a letter (e-mail, Jan 12, 2011) from an archaeologist at the British Museum who said, “However, cremation in the Eastern Desert seems to be unknown to archaeologists who work in that region. At present, it seems, the site remains to be explained.”
Monastery of Paul, the site of the "Pool of Miriam" where tradition says the sister of Moses washed at the time of the Exodus. This site is located less than seven miles from the catacombs (Kibroth-hattaavah), and the Bible has Israel’s next encampment after the Graves of Lust at Hazeroth (Numbers 33:17), where Miriam was struck with leprosy. It is of interest that this tradition from the Monastery of St. Paul (also from ancient Arab writers) makes no mention of anyone else in the camp of Israel doing this, not even Moses or Joshua or Aaron, but only Miriam, the one person who was struck with leprosy at Hazeroth (Numbers 12:15), which was the next encampment after the Graves of Lust. And according to the Bible (Leviticus 14:9), she would have been required to wash both her clothes and herself (“Pool of Miriam”) before re-entering the camp. [url]http://www.sinai-horeb.com/

bookmarking

Well, three million seems a bit of a 'Camp Fire' elaboration. A more likely scenario would be about three hundred. This would make it easier to travel and evade any persuing army. When they reached the desert they headed for the nearest oasis - they must have had some desert knowledge - they were, after all, people of their time - and set up camp. A reasonably large oasis might support this number.
So, during the next '40 years' they must have explored the locale, er, wandered around a lot (and perhaps found other oases) and also increased their population (it beggars belief that these 'three million' in the Bible weren't doing any fucking - or they practised infanticide).

So when the 'three hundred' got unwieldly (after '40 years') they had to 'move on' and find pastures new. All this 'wandering' we hear about is just a euphemism for exploring the environs to satisfy an increasing population.

One day, (about '40 years' later) one of the 'wanderers' came across a 'land of milk and honey' and rushed back to tell the rest. A call was sent out to the, by now, dispersed decendants to gather and make their way to this new land. End of story.

Oh, and they wouldn't have left as much garbage as 'three million'.

Exodus clearly says that they left with only the clothes they were wearing, their livestock and their children, and the jewellery they "borrowed" from the Egyptians. So while they were travelling, their clothes miraculously remained intact, and they ate manna and drank dew, also they carefully dug cesspits away from their camps, so that explains why there was no debris.

Once again, the idea that 3 million people spent 40 years wandering about in Sinai is a non starter. Zero archaeological evidence. You'd think that a group of people so large that they would have been visible from space (see, for example, this refugee camp in Darfur, eastern Sudan, which currently houses 30,000 refugees from the civil war in Sudan - 3 million people would occupy 100 times this land area) would have left behind them something, wouldn't you? We're talking here about a number of people almost as large as the population of metropolitan Sydney in Australia, who would have needed 9 million litres of water and 6,000 tons of food per day to keep going. Any idea that this is something other than a myth flies in the face of basic facts about human physiology apart from anything else.

Exactly.

Hey I'm kind of new to the forums, I found this an interesting read. I always wanted to know about this, so there indeed seems to be no evidence for an actual historical exodus. It's very vague in the scriptures even about the actual name of the Pharaoh, they just keep referring to him as 'The Pharaoh'. Well I always wondered historically till where is the old testament actually attested? surely not from Solomon because I tried and found nothing for it.

Err Agrippina seems a little old.

AlmightyOne wrote:
Err Agrippina seems a little old.

Barely a sapling in sequoia terms.

Us young'uns do envy her.

Yeah, she's sharp as a tack. An old tack, but still...

AlmightyOne wrote:Hey I'm kind of new to the forums, I found this an interesting read. I always wanted to know about this, so there indeed seems to be no evidence for an actual historical exodus. It's very vague in the scriptures even about the actual name of the Pharaoh, they just keep referring to him as 'The Pharaoh'. Well I always wondered historically till where is the old testament actually attested? surely not from Solomon because I tried and found nothing for it.

Err Agrippina seems a little old.

Hello AlmightyOne.

Don't let my age worry you. Just enjoy the fun.