Exodus Contradiction was it 66 70 or 75 who went to Egypt

Faith & Science Conversation
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Oh, if only literature were so simple!

Not even English literature always provides an introduction to something symbolic. For an offbeat illustration Ayn Rand stated that there was symbolic language in the novel [u]Atlas Shrugged[/] – and that she felt no obligation to point out what was symbolic because she assumed her readers possess basic intelligence. Indeed it isn’t all that uncommon for writers to deliberately not provide any indication at all that they’re shifting to symbolic language because the nature of the story requires that the reader figure it out for himself/herself! It’s also not uncommon to write in a way that could be read literally or symbolically – and sometimes is meant to be taken both ways – and each works for the story. That gets done in poetry, too; as a high school freshman I won in a national poetry contest with a poem that my teacher thought could be read three different ways, one literal, one with metaphors, and one totally symbolically, and I’m far from a good enough poet to do that regularly, but real poets do it all the time.
Heck, one of the most common debate topics in my college literature courses was whether a piece of writing was meant literally or symbolically, or mixed, or both!

From the New Testament canon we have a superb example of symbolic language with no “introductory language”, yet the readers knew right off that it was symbolism all the way through – and that brings me to the critical point here: people in a given culture don’t need to be told that something is symbolic most of the time because they recognize the genre of the literature; that’s why John didn’t have to say, “Okay, I’m using symbolism now”, his audience would recognize the literary genre and just know that.

Ancient Hebrew writers did all those same things I’ve described, expecting the audience to recognize when something was symbolic. How did the audience know? Because they recognized the genre of the story.
But we don’t have that advantage; we have to do our homework to even know what genres they had. For a long time it was common to read the first Creation account literally because no one knew what genre it actually was, so they read it as being in a genre they knew. But God has privileged us to learn enough that we can try, as Dr. Michael Heiser puts it, to “have an ancient Israelite living in your head”, and even if we are very good at that we come much closer to the richness of the message of the scriptures than if we didn’t even try.

And if we don’t try, that shows we have no respect for the original audience, nor for the writer, nor for the Holy Spirit who inspired that writer.

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You are making the unwarranted assumption that the genre here is to be forced on the scriptures. I’ve pointed out repeatedly that by your method of “normal language” then you have to conclude that the novels by Tom Clancy and John Grisham are meant to be history, because that’s how they read. Thus taking something as what it looks like to you is not a valid method.

Your argument only works if you impose the modern scientific, materialistic worldview onto what Jesus said. That regards Jesus as foolish, because nothing in the culture of the time and place was either scientific or materialistic.

“As it was with Harry Potter in the flying car” fits the literary structure in the passage above, which demonstrates that the first clause does not have to refer to actual history to work, it only has to refer to something commonly understood.
Thus again you are claiming for the text something that the text itself does not support.

No, it isn’t – it’s only obvious that He expected His audience to understand His reference. That the referent has to be actual history is an idea from scientific materialism that goes well beyond how literature actually functions.

No, it isn’t, it is only necessary that his audience understand His reference.
Something you’re missing here is that Christ had to use material that His audience would know, and in a situation where the one common element in literary terms was the Old Testament writings that was the available source. Few even in Jerusalem would have even known enough about Greek literature to have gotten a reference to something in it, and a large portion of Jesus’ audience would likely not have even known there was such a thing as Greek literature (though as Peter demonstrates by his use of “Tartarus” that was not a blanket truth).

Nope – they had that intimate knowledge because the Tanakh was the only reading material available to more than nine out of ten Jews at the time.

It is perhaps the toughest lesson for understanding the scriptures to not add to the text more than it actually says, but it is an absolutely essential one.

At least one of the rabbis I knew didn’t think it was important whether or not Abraham was real; it didn’t make any difference to him because the authority of the text comes from HaShem, it doesn’t come from being historically accurate in all details.

As for Moses, he held that “of course Moshe actually lived” since in a very real way Moses was the very first Jew, and a great example of one: he was stubborn, he argued with God, he was impulsive, he was sometimes a coward and sometimes brave, and he got “foreign education but turned out okay”. That Israel ever existed shows that someone at least led and was followed, because (paraphrasing) any time you get ten rabbis together you get twelve opinions, so if it had been a committee the Jews would all still live in Egypt because the committee would still be arguing!

I don’t know where he stood on the historicity of Joseph.

It would have made no difference if the whole thing was invented, not to an ancient Israelite: to them authority derived from the source, so if Yahweh had given them novels it would be just as authoritative because it was from Yahweh.

You continue to apply standards from scientific materialism to the scriptures; you would do better to do some actual study about the book you rely on.

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I thought there were two possibilities; I listened to a set of lectures recently where I learned that there are at least five different candidates! And the most popular candidate started from nothing but guesswork by early Christian monks.

It had to be just for one reason: travel times. In Exodus we read of Moses going back and forth between Pharaoh and the elders of Israel, and nothing indicates there was any significant journey involved. It also makes sense that it would have been near the capital at the time; had the capital been farther south the Hebrews probably wouldn’t have even gotten noticed. We also read that Moses in the basket was found by Pharaoh’s daughter, which means the Hebrews were living close enough to the capital for it to share a watercourse.

Then there’s the outside data. I forget who discovered it first, but we now know that the eastern part of the Nile delta was considered to be foreign territory even though the official border was farther east (both of them; there was actually a dual border, one along the lakes and canals that connected to the Reed Sea, and one farther east along the “river of Egypt” which is almost certainty Wadi el-Arish). It was where foreigners often settled when there was famine farther east, and was regarded as undesirable (and thus foreign) because so many who lived there were herders, and to the Egyptians shepherds were seen as abomination (in the same sense that the Torah uses).

That one’s easy: the Ptolemies, the Greeks who ruled Egypt starting after Alexander of Macedon died, made Greek the language of the upper classes. Greek was the trade language of the east as well, since the rulers of everything all the way to India were Greeks from the moment Alexander’s empire got divided.
Then there’s the fact that Egyptian writing is really fairly clumsy; a system using an alphabet was far easier to learn and thus also to use, so Greek became not just the language of government and trade but also of the temples, so the use of Egyptian hieroglyphs became a sort of secret among the priesthood – and that came to an end starting with Christian Rome and finished with the rise of Islam.

Yep – that corresponds to when the Roman Empire became officially Christian. All the temples where hieroglyphs were used got closed by Roman officials starting with Theodosius made Christianity the state religion concurrent with the calling of the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Any remaining traces got wiped out by Islam’s barbaric approach to other religions: convert or die.

I forget what book I read last year about this (and another the year before), but other than Finklestein and a few others the question isn’t whether the Exodus happened, it’s just what kind of Exodus there was. It plainly wasn’t a couple of million people, but of course that is related to textual problems, not just archaeology. What got me was that one scholar argued for three distinct Exoduses (Exodi?), one pre-Moses when the Hyksos invaded – essentially refugees; one that was just Levites (with Moses), and one somewhat later when the Hebrews remaining in Egypt heard that there was land to be had in the Promised Land. I wish I knew enough of the current knowledge to say more than that it fit with the evidence he cited, I just don’t know what evidence he may have left out.

But that’s not the way to read any literature because it imposes an alien framework. If I’d done what you say in my English lit classes in college I would have gotten straight F grades because by reading it from a modern perspective I wouldn’t have actually been engaging with the text but rather using it as a springboard to make my own thoughts.

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Does the Bible unambiguously claim this? No. If the “thousands” are read as “groups”, which are legitimate translations of the same Hebrew word, and the sums adjusted accordingly, the total number comes to more like 20,000.

Does the Bible explicitly say that Pharaoh was with the army? No. Does it employ hyperbole about how much of Pharoah’s potential army came after them? Yes.

Should we expect there to be evidence that unambiguously supports that? No.

Should we expect there to be evidence that unambiguously supports that? No. Do the first nine correspond pretty well to entirely naturally plausible phenomena in Egypt? Yes.

See above.

Can God? Yes.

How many similar groups have had extensive records survive? Very few.

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Yes. We would expect to see those things and I don’t see any scholars in general arguing for other interpretations than what I presented here.

Also, I’ve muted this convo on my end and do hopefully i won’t see any more comments related to this. I just don’t see the point in answering same questions multiple times.

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Reminds me of when I first read Life of Pi and realized the symbolism only at the end.

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The number of papers written on this is substantial and the disagreements energetic. They reach into Hittite and Akkadian usage and the points can seem quite obscure sometimes.

One of those rabbis I knew said of course it was exaggerated; Moses was like a good Jewish boy expounding in his feats to his mother.
The humor with which all the rabbis I knew at grad school when dealing with scripture always amazed me. As my roommate noted at one point, they acted like God was a buddy they’d drop by the pub with for drinks and bragging.

In a science fiction story I read one of the characters scoffed at objectors to this event: he had developed a device that could analyze two objects and swap them and the air immediately around them, and done deftly it would appear that one object had transformed into the other.
I have no trouble at all believing God could do it that way!

How many groups have survived in a solid line of history long enough to keep writings preserved for centuries?

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Dickens drops in symbolism without warning and does it well enough that someone reading it literally wouldn’t know they’d missed anything, and those who do notice often do so several chapters later in an “Aha!” moment that suddenly enriches the story.

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Well…we started off with one sort of question and then morphed into others. All of it is interesting, for sure…But I was interested (at least) in the challenge of these numbers, as mentioned originally by Adam or by his source…

It does seem to boil down to a difference in numbers used in the Vulgate versus that used in the LXX…And follow this up with the counting and sorting out of names by various commentators.

Acts 7:14 says “Jacob and his whole family, seventy-five in all” (NIV)

Exodus 1:5 --TOTC says "70 may be used as a round number, or as a sacred figure—and then they show how the number can be obtained precisely by excluding Dinah. …“The small number who entered Egypt versus the large numbers who left”… [by which they do not mean millions]…It says the Greek text of Genesis 46 adds the five children of Ephraim and Manasseh to make the number used in Acts 7:14.

Ambrose said the 75 in Acts is “the mystical sense of forgiveness”.

Alter looks at Genesis 46:27 and says the number 70 illustrates “the biblical use of numbers as symbolic approximations”.

NICOT spends way too much time looking at Genesis 46:27, offering lists of the information that goes into Genesis 46:27 compared to Job 44:12-33…looks at this passage in Gen 46 and says that the number in verse 26 refers to “those who migrated to Egypt with Jacob”, excluding Er and Onan who were already dead, and those who were already in Egypt. , And the total in the next verse is due to the addition of Jacob, Joseph, and Joseph’s two children." They offer a theory about the LXX’s number.

Evidently, it is all in the counting! Whether you want to call this an “exodus contradiction” or just a moment for pondering how numbers might have been used in ancient texts — is another matter.

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