Originally posted by RatX
So it's good... Until you back up that fiction claim, we'll keep it at "good", if not downright spectacular!
Some say that absence of evidence doesn't imply evidence of absence, but I think if you are honest enough to do some digging into the archaeology literature that has investigated the claim of at least 600,000 Israelites (certainly far more as this was only a count of the fighting men) plus all their livestock marching from egypt (despite fairly detailed egyptian records through out that time perioid, there is no mention of israelite slaves or their exodus) and hanging out in the patch of desert mentioned in the OT for over 40 years, you'll find that there's not a single trace of their passage. Experts can uncover small settlements of fewer than 300 people. 40+ years of at least 600,000 and more realistically 3 million people eating, pissing, building, herding, and otherwise living, would show up.
But it's not there. Even the two-bit apologists like Lee Strobel, who if the evidence were there, would be on it like a fly on dung, are silent. The OT gets history of the area pretty well around the 7th century BCE, (certainly because that was when it was written), but when it tries to give accounts of the history and geography before that, it has blatant errors.
The whole story of Moses leading the israelites out of Egypt and Joshua conquering the land of Caanan was a Hebrew folklore made up well after the events were said to occur. All it takes is a bit of courage to investigate what mainstream archaeologists who study that area have to say on the subject. Well and you could do some mathematics to realize that the population growth rates are pretty silly too, especially when one considers what average populations were at the time the story supposedly occured.
10 Oct '05 01:39
Top 10 works of religious fiction
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