What if they were already providing the mud and the straw, which comes from the harvest, was being provided by somebody else? We aren’t told one way or the other so of course I prefer my choice, just like you prefer yours.
that is simply untrue. The Nile river is a massive source of clay and has been for millennia. Id suggest you have not adequately researched Egyptian Pottery in your stumbling through the pages of Indian history (perhaps that’s because one doesn’t normally travel to India to find clay for Egyptian pottery and also because the bush telegraph of a few millennia B.C might have had unreliable connection issues such that Alibaba, Amazon and Ebay decided to hold off for a few thousand years?)
Nile clay is the result of eroded material in the Ethiopian mountains, which was transported into Egypt by the Nile. This clay was deposited on the banks of the Nile in Egypt since the Late Pleistocene by the cyclic Nile floods. As a result, deposits can be found far from the modern floodplain as well as within the level covered by the flood in modern times.
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it would have been sticks or stone. Abrams journey was quite a distance from his home before intending to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice. I very much doubt he carried a “Pizza oven” with him inside which one could make fire bricks!
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this map is ridiculous.
It has been proven historically that mt Sinai is nowhere near the location you have indicated on this map. The 4 likely locations of mt Sinai are thousands of km away. There is simply no way to reconcile any possibility of that location for Mt Sinai in order to support India’s culture or history.
Next, the distance you are trying to compute for the travels of the Israelites there is absolutely huge. It is very clear from the biblical account that the distance from Egypt to Sinai was actually quite short by comparison to your model…its just weeks to Sinai and a handful of months to the promised land of Canaan. To illustrate, Pharoah’s army managed the journey from Egypt to the Red Sea in about one week…its a journey of roughly 400km.
People in this day and age are so used to jumping in cars and traveling hundreds of km, making phone calls in the blink of an eye obtaining photographs of people traveling vast distances in a day…we think that Pharoah must have had a moment by moment update on where the Israelites were in the first few days after they left Goshan. This is simply ridiculous. PHaroahs updates on the location of the Israelites would have been at best weeks behind their actual observed location. A lot of his location finding even for a large caravan of this size would have still been days behind their real location…a lot of guesswork went into finding them. I think the main reason he caught up with them so easily was that they were camped by the Red Sea at the time. The biblical story clearly tells us that the cloud moved between the camp of the Israelites and the Egyptian army. The army simply wasn’t able to get closer due to the dense cloud…it formed a barrier preventing the army from moving forward…thus forcing the army to camp as well. This would have greatly frustrated the pharaoh such that when the cloud lifted and he saw the Israelites on the other side of the open Red Sea, he wasn’t thinking at all about the stupidity of attempting to march down into the sea to cross it. They would have rushed down at full pace filled with impatience and anger.
What you are trying to compute would take an enormous amount of time for a caravan of over 1 million people to travel…it could not be done in a matter of weeks months or even a handful of years! Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the land of Canaan was a 40-year journey in the bible narrative. That is absolutely not the correct reading of the text.
You want 1 million people [Israelites] to travel, in the space of a few months, thousands of km across deserts all the way to Israel from India?
To use a phrase from the Aussie movie The Castle…“tell him he’s dreaming”
The logistics of your attempt to reconcile this story in the manner you are attempting to do is simply logistically impossible. Its about as realistic as the claim the earth is flat!
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make the journey from India to Israel. I’m asking how well that fits with Exodus. Taftan Volcano (Khash) to Jerusalem according to Google maps is 3,307km by a more direct route than shown in your map, so let’s say 3500km. Shortly after leaving Mt Sinai Moses sent spies into Canaan. So those spies had to make a round trip of 7000km for that mission, in about “40 days” *. Let’s say 60 days total with 10 days for exploring Canaan. So 7000km in 50 days is 140km/day. A caravan in those days would have been happy with an average of 15km/day.
- Numbers 13:25 At the end of forty days they returned from exploring the land. “40 days” is an idiom for an indefinite time period of several weeks.
We do know from archeology that unfired mud bricks were extensively used in construction in Egypt form that period. Although the Bible does not explicitly say fired or unfired it is reasonable to infer that the bricks referred to were unfired/unbaked.
Straw ratio. It makes a big difference if you are using ratio by weight or by volume. From what I read the ratio by volume is about 1 straw : 5 mud. That probably is close to 1 straw : 100 mud by weight (1%). (bear in mind that there would be considerable variation).
Although the amount of straw might be small by weight it is significant by volume and that has consequences. If you omit the straw;
- The selection of mud becomes more critical to maintain brick quality, or there is a higher reject rate.
- It will require about 16% more mud to replace the straw. (1% straw by weight will displace about 16% mud by volume)
- Drying time increases so production is affected
- Brick weight will increase by about 15%
So if they are no longer being given straw the labour to produce unbaked mud bricks goes up significantly.
There is no need to hypothesize baked bricks to explain why Pharaoh imposed this penalty or why the Hebrews were upset about the extra burden it produced. For Pharaoh it was easy since he simply stopped supplying straw already in storehouses, while demanding production be maintained.
See above. For unfired mud bricks it is mud rather than clay. While brick mud includes a significant proportion of clay it can have a lot more “other material” than potters clay. It is likely that good quality potters clay would be reserved for pottery, tiles, etc., rather than used for mud bricks. Remember archeology has confirmed that unfired mud bricks were extensively used for construction in ancient Egypt.
From other places we know that altars were commonly built of stone. Joshua was specifically instructed to construct an altar of uncut stone.
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I think you completely missed the evidence I provided to you. I will repeat it again more specifically so you fully understand…
Pharoahs army (in chariots) managed to travel 400km, in hast chasing down the Israelites, in 1 week. Thats about 56km per day at high speed. You are claiming Joshua and the spies travelled a round trip of 7000km in 1 month and 10 days?
Do you not recall what those spies also brought back with them from the “land of Canaan”? one of the things they returned with was a huge bunch of grapes that required two guys to carry it. How on earth could something like that have survived a 3,000km journey? Clearly when the bible says the were camped near the Jordan river prior to sending out the spies…that’s exactly where they were.
I cannot for the life of me understand how it is that a person can read a very specific statement and decide “oh nah, that’s not what really happened” given there are no other historical sources that illustrate what has been written is false. You have an entire civilisation/culture (the nation of Israel) who also have this written and oral history…are you really trying to claim the nation of Israel don’t know their own history? That is completely ridiculous!
Im a former Design and Technology High School Teacher. My degree major/minor is Industrial Technology and Design. I seriously have a bit of an issue with the term “mud” in the way in which it appears to be defined by some here.
My hope is that most do realise that without any kind of binding agent, mud will not form brick.
Straw is not a binding agent as such…it basically provides reinforcing…it is not glue.
Another example…steel reinforcing in concrete plays absolutely no part in the gluing of the various elements of concrete together. That glue in the concrete is a combination of clay and cement (fired lime) Steel is simply a substitute for straw…one that has far better tensile strength.
The “mud”, must contain a binding agent such as clay to glue the grains of sand together around the straw. Without this binding agent, it will simply crumble as soon as the sand dries out…even whilst its wet it wont bind adequately enough to build a brick structure like a wall.
perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions, however, just want to make sure that point is front and center because there seemed to be a lot of focus on making sand castles! These work on the beach only for a very very short period of time and that is because they don’t have any real binding agent. They have almost no capacity to hold weight (when compared with a properly made brick), and once hit by water or they dry out…the erosion is extremely rapid.
You must have missed the discussion of clay and the references to mud brick construction in Egypt.
I recall the original part of the mud brick discussion in Egypt. One of the posters made the statement that egypt was desert how could they make clay bricks. I refuted that with a post illustrating that the Nile gets enormous quantities of clay via the flooding of the river carrying it down from Ethiopia.
The point is, it appeared to me that the feeling was that straw is a binding agent/glue. It most definitely does not serve that function. These kinds of uninformed contributions lend themselves very easily to non Christians forming the opinion that here we have another bible story that is a falsehood because of the misinformed statement “there is no clay in the desert sands of Egypt” completely ignoring the fact that the nile river itself has huge quantities of clay right near civilisation and structures they are building that need it.
That’s very weak beer either way,
Egypt build with stone
In Egypt build with stone
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No one is disputing this. The question is why would there be conflict on straw–a minor raw material; and not clay-mud–the major raw material. Straw was as easiliy available, I think, in any fertile area of India or Egypt.
Please do tell me of these locations and evidence for the same.
Please give the time calculation from Egypt to Sinai to Paran (from where Moses sent the spies on horses to Israel) to Edom to Israel by your calculation. (Please give verse numbers).
Where is that stated in the Bible, please?
Perhaps not. I’ll respond after you clarify above.
Sure. But we are discussing the input of straw vs mud-clay.
Not shortly after, maybe much after. The distance from the point of sending spies to Israel would be about 1500-2000 km. @100km / day on horses.
I like the “trippy” version better. More readable…but still based on some unnecessary speculation.
The point of my comment, the one you highlighted, is that the Indus Valley is in a country that is on another continent entirely. The Exodus in the biblical account occurs on a separate continent. His map is interesting in its “trippy” state, but still not descriptive of the event that is described/mentioned in the Bible.
What is his point? To suggest that Hinduism fathered Judaism?
The point of the biblical text was, to the point of the exodus, the preservation of a larger story of one very imperfect --totally dysfunctional — family which nonetheless broke away from polytheism (imperfectly) and was selected by God to carry that message and,.,…much further down the road …to be the vehicle by which God’s Messiah (Jesus, not Krishna) would enter our world to be with us and ultimately to die on a cross, taking the punishment for OUR sins and rising physically from the dead …so that you and I can, if we ask for forgiveness, have friendship with God once again.
So where does this leave the Indus Valley? Canaan, in those long-ago days was a dilapidated country and sparsely inhabited, from what I have heard. It had barley and wheat. But so did the Indus Valley. So why go there for that? .
An ancient abecedary tablet done in the early Semitic alphabet was discovered a few years ago along the banks of…oh what was that river called?..wait! let me think of it!..The tablet provided evidence not only of early literacy (since dated 1450 BCE) but also of Semitic habitation of …oh wait, what was the name of that country?..In ancient times other peoples utilized the sites noted in the chapters of the Book of Exodus. They used them to make escapes…for military reasons…etc. Read Van Seters, who cites Herodotus, …or Five Views of the Exodus which notes, among other things, that Exodus 12:51 describes a route that was used, not only by escaping Hebrews, but by escaped slaves in Papyrus Anastasias V,…There are lots of proposed routes …but nothing in Bh’s direction.
Oh…don’t mean to be too silly… The river by which the tablet with Semetic writing was found iin Luxor, along the banks of the Nile
Have a good one.
It appears we agree.
I said “While brick mud includes a significant proportion of clay it can have a lot more “other material” than potters clay.”
You said “The “mud”, must contain a binding agent such as clay to glue the grains of sand together around the straw.”
Straw was an essential material for brick making and it was not as easily accessible as earth. It was part of the harvest which happens at only certain times of the year and there was competition for its use as fodder or animal bedding or making straw mats or baskets. Not to mention farmers wanting to use it to make mud bricks to repair or extend their own buildings.
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I think you missed my point. It is possible to travel overland from India to Israel, but it is inconsistent with the Exodus account, and that is why I reject it. It is quite clear that the exodus left from Egypt.
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