Posted: Apr 14, 2016 12:16 pm
Hobbes Choice wrote:Agrippina wrote:
Exodus speaks about "Raamses".
Exodus 1:11 They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses
Between 1307 and 1070, there were nine kings named Ramses, so you tell me, which one?Pi-Ramesses (/pɪər.ɑːmɛs/); (Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu, meaning "House of Ramesses, Great in Victory")[1] was the new capital built by the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt Pharaoh Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great, reigned 1279–1213 BC) at Qantir, near the old site of Avaris. The city had previously served as a summer palace under Seti I (c. 1290–1279 BC), and may have been originally founded by Ramesses I (c. 1292–1290 BC) while he served under Horemheb.
From the Wikipedia page on Pi-Ramesses.
So if they actually were there, and actually lived there, then, given the name of the city, it would have had to have been between 1307 and 1070.
What is a problem is that none of the kings ruled for long enough for Joseph or Moses to have had a continuing relationship with them.
Also that the Egyptians have no records whatsoever of the Jews running their country or building their edifices.
So it does not bother you that the Jews were not in "Palestine" before this time, when exodus was supposed to have happened?
But a word learned by the people of Judea from their current knowledge of Egypt, anachronistic.
OK. The Jews were in Palestine, except they didn't identify as a cohesive people. The area of Canaan has been occupied since the end of the last great Ice Age. There is evidence of settlements from as far back as 6000 BCE. So to say that the "Jews were not in Palestine" is incorrect. The Children of Israel was a name invented to identify post-flood people as being directly descended from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. The claim being that after the flood, ALL people were descended from Noah, but the children of Jacob were selected by God to be his "chosen people". This is the mythology of the Jews. It's not real history.
And why did the Egyptian, the people who wrote down just about everything, know knowing about Jews?
They did know about Canaanites. For some reason, possibly there was a famine in the early second millennium BCE, people arrived in Egypt from Canaan. They were not one family, descended from one parent, with 11 other families, but a group of discrete families who settled there, and they participated in the building operations that happened there.
There is lots of mention of Canaanites in Egyptian history, just no mention of Israelites, or the Children of Israel, or Joseph, or Moses, or that they were slaves, or that they brought plagues down on the Egyptians.
It's also possible that when the Hyksos arrived in the 2nd Intermediate period, the Canaanites went back to their own land taking stories of the lives in Egypt, and that this evolved into their fable of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They invented a religion at some time in the late second millennium BCE, one made up from the stories of their neighbours, and adopting the gods of their close neighbours, decided to make one powerful, monotheistic god, who forbade the worship of other gods.
The simple fact is that the Jewish religion was new by the Iron Age, and everything up till then is a post hoc justification of their invented religion. circa 800bce.
Yes, but I would put the invention of the religion earlier, before David.
One thing is for sure, if a group of slaves left Egypt, they were not, at that time, religiously Jewish since no such religion existed.
Exactly. The religion was invented at the time when they were settling down to a cohesive society under the rule of a king, but it was a small society, nothing as big as the Bible claims, and certainly not the conquerors the Bible claims.
Read: The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. It's a very good explanation of Jewish archaeological history.