• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Debunking the Exodus Code

This is the same guy (Jacobovici) that found Jesus' tomb. Look him up - a healthy dose of skepticism is needed whenever this guy is around.
 
Last edited:
icantlogoff said:
ON 'Egyptian papyrus' was written IN Egyptian, about the 12 plagues, AND the guy who warned the Pharo about their coming. The Pharo calls him the "Prince of the Desert", while he referred to the Israelis as "The Evil Ones".

Could someone point me i the direction of where this is confirmed, that such a comment exists. ( i don't mean for that to come over rude).

I have been under the impression that there was no direct evidence of moses and the Israelites in Egypt other then in the OT.
Click to expand...

It isn't confirmed. In fact, we find the opposite. The paprus in question is The Admonition of Ipuwer. It does not mention Moses. It does not mention anyone turning the Nile into blood. It does mention people being extremely thirsty, going down to the Nile to drink and crocodiles eating them -- hence blood. It mentions none of the other plagues. It does mention a storm, but it does not mention the fire and ice that the documentarian says is in the text. It doesn't even mention a prince of the desert. It mentions a great chief of the plain and prince of the hill. Both are actually references to gods, not men.

The "evil ones" mentioned in that papyrus were invaders, not slaves escaping from Egypt.

This guy has a serious problem making the Hebrews be the Hyksos if he wants to hang onto most of Israelite history. The Hyksos were kings not slaves. They were never slaves. They did not escape from Egypt. They were forcibly expelled. The documentary is bunk. Not complete and absolute bunk, since the best lies have some truth underneath them to make them seem plausible, but it's bunk nonetheless.
 
icantlogoff said:
I have been under the impression that there was no direct evidence of moses and the Israelites in Egypt other then in the OT.
Click to expand...

And you're by no means alone in that, I'd even venture to describe it as the consensus view.

I wouldn't be surprised by evidence of an Egyptian list of plagues, since the whole thing smacks of being a fairy-story invented, and varied-upon, in Egypt. Kids and simple folk love stories that have lists.

IMO, Exodus is plagiarism bent to a political end.
 
CapelDodger said:
Why are you piping this stuff here without even the pretence of filtration? Hello :rolleyes: ? Sceptics' Forum?
Click to expand...
Maybe for sommeone else's opinion? (The thread title is debunking the exodus code)
 
Wait... doesn't he first have to show that wacky story about Moses growing up a prince of Egypt was true?

I think the early Jews had serious inferiority complexes.
 
DangerousBeliefs said:
Wait... doesn't he first have to show that wacky story about Moses growing up a prince of Egypt was true?

I think the early Jews had serious inferiority complexes.
Click to expand...

He has a really stupid argument based on mangled transliterations of Egyptian into Hebrew into English and back into Egyptian for that. He says that Ahmose means brother of Moses. It doesn't. The whole thing is a house of cards. The link I gave above does a very thorough job of debunking his claims point by point by point.
 
Darth Rotor said:
If you live long enough to get my mileage, we can talk on that point of life, and world view. Until then, I don't see this conversation going much further.

Do you?

DR
Click to expand...

Since you think being older is enough to justify your silly beliefs, I agree, there won't be much point to that conversation. You believe in a god and there is no evidence of that god. How old you are doesn't change that at all. King isn't angry at your god either, he's simply pointing out how silly the beliefs are.
 
I did not see this show, mostly because I've seen many other shows and read about this topic in the past. In my opinion, the Satorini eruption is the likely event that is behind "The Exodus". Back in those days, natural disasters would have been seen as coming from God(insert prefered God). It seems likely that some of the survivers fleeing from some of the badly hit areas saw this event as an act of God and later turned it into a religious story. The background of widespread suffering and fleeing was probably true, the rest of the story was fiction.
 
DangerousBeliefs said:
Wait... doesn't he first have to show that wacky story about Moses growing up a prince of Egypt was true?

I think the early Jews had serious inferiority complexes.
Click to expand...

Egypt features a lot back in mythic Jewish history. Right from Abraham and Sarah. It even crops up when Jesus is taken there to escape Herod.

This is hardly surprising, of course, given the colossal disparity in cultural weight between Egypt and the pastoralists to their north-east. Loved or loathed, they couldn't be ignored. Just like the US in the 20thCE :) .

I'm of the opinion that the plague-form (so to speak) of story developed in Egypt for various purposes. From fairy-stories to pseudo-history. Remarkable natural events - some very remarkable (such as Santorini) others not so much (such as algal blooms or really bad years for flies) - will naturally be inorporated over time. Only much later was the story-form bent to the particular politico-religious purpose served by Exodus. Whatever that was.

Whether my take on the matter is the right one or not, it does show that an Egyptian-sourced plague-list would provide no support at all for the historicity of Exodus. If anything it would undermine it.
 
King of the Americas said:
So, I saw this History Channel special last night featuring scientific explainations for ALL of the events that occured in the Bible's Exodus....
Click to expand...

This sounds similar to an old BBC documentary fronted by an epidemiologist, who explained the 'ten plagues' using the techniques of his profession.



King of the Americas said:
I found all of the explainations 'plausible', but was left feeling pissed at God.

The story teller went through great efforts to note how there was nothing supernatural about the events that occured, but rather 'God' simply manipulated nature to arrive at a favorable outcome.

My question for God is why? I mean, why didn't he show up with helping hands for last's year's tsunami victums, or those who died after Katrina hit, or how about during the Holocost???
Click to expand...

I know that you don't want to hear this bit, but....

The 'God' of the Bible is nothing more than a human concept/social construct - there's no point in trying to complain to 'Him', as 'He' doesn't exist in any real sense.



King of the Americas said:
In any case, I thought the program was very well researched. They managed to find the Exodus story, as told in the Bible, written in Egyptian papyrus, and engraved on some stone something or other in yet another language.

The conclusion was the the story of the Exodus was based on FACTS, that can be proven and even recreated, although not easily.

Any other thoughts?
Click to expand...

Many of the stories in the Bible are re-tellings of commonplace stories that exist in Middle-Eastern literature that pre-dates the Torah.
E.g. the story of Moses being found as a baby in a basket of reeds - the earliest version of this story of which I am aware concerns a guy called Sargon of Agade/Akkad.
It was told to legitimise his usurpation of the throne after he went on to carve out a (by the standards of the day) huge empire.

Another one is the Biblical story of the Flood - again this is based on a pre-existing Sumerian myth, whose hero is called Ut-Napishtim (rather than Noah).

Floods were very common in ancient Mesopotamia, with the whole 'contry' being nothing more than a silted-up river delta - kinda like NOLA, but on a national scale - so they are the perfect story device to convey devastating disaster, as everyone in the society would have been only too familiar with the effects of localised flooding.

Such tropes become culturally-valuable myths, and are frequently adopted/assimilated by neighbouring cultures.

Myths are generally based on fact, because the inclusion of widely-remembered episodes lends the myth a gloss of authenticity, and they encode valuable lessons relevant to the society that creates them.

Stories/legends/myths are the safest and most reliable way of passing on information in pre-literate societies, as the 'story' format is one that the human brain finds it easy to remember - but they should never be taken to be the 'literal truth'.

The reason for this is that the 'mythological' method of passing on information contains a fatal inherent flaw - the fact that our languages constantly evolve.
(To see the truth of this, one need only look at the plethora of cultural and linguistic divisions that have arisen between the UK and the USA in only a couple of hundred years of separate development.)

As this happens, the useful truths that were initially encoded in any culture's myths gradually become impossible for later generations of that same culture to retrieve correctly, as the expressions used to encode them gradually become 'culturally closed'.
E.g. how many meanings does the word 'bad' have nowadays - and does the antonymic meaning used by Michael Jackson for an album title as recently as the 1980's still persist?

This is the dreadful danger inherent in mythological systems, and the reason why societies based on dogmatic belief almost invariably descend into dystopian Police States with rampant corruption.

Sucks, doesn't it?

This is why I place my 'faith' in the Scientific Method - the need for independently-verifiable proofs, the constant revision of 'the State of the Art' in light of new evidence, and the use of reasoned debate backed up by evidence is the best way to decide how to do anything - but particularly when deciding how to run a society.

Rational scientific methodology is the safest and most reliable method of passing on information in literate societies - its inherent danger is that, should the society suffer catastrophic collapse and widespread literacy be lost, then all the encoded knowledge becomes inaccessible because no-one can read it any more.

As we live in a literate, urbanised culture, rather than a pre-literate agrarian one, I favor the use of the Scientific Method over the mythologically-encoded systems of our ancient agrarian ancestors: my fear of a repetition of the (historically-common) descent of a mythologically-founded culture into dogmatic dystopia far outweighs my (baseless) fear that our culture's literacy might evaporate any time soon.

Slainte,
WT.
 
Last edited:
JEsus Tomb Guy Full of S

Ipuwer predates the exodus, and anything from the ptolemy period postdates it.

Also nothing would mention Israelites before the Exodus. This is simply because their were no Israelites, not any concrete group. As Mendenhall has indicated anyone who left Egypt would have been of many different cultural groups, Hittite, Canaanite, Assyrian, maybe some north Africans, Babylonian, heck maybe even some others, living in Egypt as it was at the time of the exodus an extremely important power. These people were likely not slaves but educated and important individuals (see The Tenth Generation). They were likely familiar with legal principles such as law codes, as seen in development of the holiness code.

Biblical historians put little faith in the historicity of the book of Exodus (faith in histor begins somewhere around David, but even this is suspect, the best trusted books really aren't around until the exile or so). Few scholars think the ten plagues as they were in the bible actually happened or that the exodus included the parting of the sea etc. More likely a group of disatisfied residents left Egypt, voting with their feet. Many were likely educated and important individuals. These people then wandered as hebrews (a term developed from others meaning someone without a home who did not belong to a country). They then likely arrived at the Levant and were able to find others who were also disatisfied and eventually become an important group within cities (theories as to how this was done are varied, but one prominant one was that people were willing to join the group under the idea that YHWH was king and no earthly ruler was needed, so no taxes, just donations to the god, this is reflected in the book of Judges and 1 and 2 samuel). The Exodus narrative as it is today would have served as the basis for a system of eponimous ancestors which would help to link a culturally diverse group of people while they crossed the Sianai and then when they entered the Levant it would have helped create an important historical background, but the plagues etc were not litteral occurance, perhaps exagerations of some events that were linked after the fact, but more than that is stretching it.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Since you think being older is enough to justify your silly beliefs, I agree, there won't be much point to that conversation. You believe in a god and there is no evidence of that god. How old you are doesn't change that at all. King isn't angry at your god either, he's simply pointing out how silly the beliefs are.
Click to expand...
Experience tells me that you didn't bother to grasp what was being expressed in his post. Enjoy your tunnel vision.

DR
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
About the death of the first born, I thought that was an ingeneous explanation, but the thought occurred to me....where did the mammas and pappas sleep? Is it true that every class of Egyptian had everyone but the firstborn sleep on the roof? I don't know enough about early Egyptian social life to be sure one way or another, but that seems a bit odd to me. I also have a hard time believing that anyone but the aristocracy had such beds. All the peasants shared this custom?
Click to expand...


I always thought the death of the first born was a cultural reflection of the hebrai law about giving that which is first out of the matrix to god. Not a reality.
 
ReligionStudent said:
Ipuwer predates the exodus, and anything from the ptolemy period postdates it.

Also nothing would mention Israelites before the Exodus. This is simply because their were no Israelites, not any concrete group. As Mendenhall has indicated anyone who left Egypt would have been of many different cultural groups, Hittite, Canaanite, Assyrian, maybe some north Africans, Babylonian, heck maybe even some others, living in Egypt as it was at the time of the exodus an extremely important power. These people were likely not slaves but educated and important individuals (see The Tenth Generation). They were likely familiar with legal principles such as law codes, as seen in development of the holiness code.

Biblical historians put little faith in the historicity of the book of Exodus (faith in histor begins somewhere around David, but even this is suspect, the best trusted books really aren't around until the exile or so). Few scholars think the ten plagues as they were in the bible actually happened or that the exodus included the parting of the sea etc. More likely a group of disatisfied residents left Egypt, voting with their feet. Many were likely educated and important individuals. These people then wandered as hebrews (a term developed from others meaning someone without a home who did not belong to a country). They then likely arrived at the Levant and were able to find others who were also disatisfied and eventually become an important group within cities (theories as to how this was done are varied, but one prominant one was that people were willing to join the group under the idea that YHWH was king and no earthly ruler was needed, so no taxes, just donations to the god, this is reflected in the book of Judges and 1 and 2 samuel). The Exodus narrative as it is today would have served as the basis for a system of eponimous ancestors which would help to link a culturally diverse group of people while they crossed the Sianai and then when they entered the Levant it would have helped create an important historical background, but the plagues etc were not litteral occurance, perhaps exagerations of some events that were linked after the fact, but more than that is stretching it.
Click to expand...


Interesting, wouldn't it be more parsimounious to think the hebrai were nomads and the other ca'ananites were sedentary.

I always thought the oral tradition of the exedous became codified during the babylonian exile.

The pyramids were built by local farmers in egypt.
 
Dancing David said:
I always thought the death of the first born was a cultural reflection of the hebrai law about giving that which is first out of the matrix to god. Not a reality.
Click to expand...

It probably is. I was responding to what the documantarian claimed as the explanation. He thinks the story is true and the firstborn were killed by CO2 asphixiation while everyone else in Egypt slept on roofs. He neglected the livestock, though. I suppose it could have just been awfully crowded with livestock (except the first born of all the cattle, goat, sheep, etc. which I assume shared some priveleged place in the Egyptian world and stayed on the ground at night) on the roofs with all the rest of the population.:D
 
Darth Rotor said:
Experience tells me that you didn't bother to grasp what was being expressed in his post. Enjoy your tunnel vision.

DR
Click to expand...

Really? I didn't grasp that he would be angry at a god that would do all of these wonderful feats in Exodus but does nothing of the kind today? Hmm. Part of that "anger" is simply at how silly the belief is, the other part is a fictional anger directed towards a fictional god. It's like being angry at a movie character for doing something stupid.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom