History tells us that the Philistines aren’t in place until 1130 BCE.
The Bible tells us that Judges and David and Solomon took centuries to unfold their stories. But there aren’t centuries available.
What’s the solution? If I were you, I would conclude that the Exodus is a lyric expansion of legends the Hebrew heard about the Hyksos… combined with legends about their deity Yahweh.
And inspired scribes combined them together into a beautiful story. This is the way millions of American Christians already interpret the Bible … and share their mind between Lord Yahweh, and the facts of Evolutionary progress.
If you insist on making everything literally true … when there is no way to do so, I think you are going to lose generations of followers.
Well, I was afraid that was where you were going. I was hoping i had misunderstood. There is plenty of time with the revised chronology. I think you are mistaken about one of your misconceptions; hegemony by Egypt of the Levant during the time I discussed before and I cite the Tell-El-Amana Letters which are the 12 communications that clearly lay out a military situation contrary to your assertions. And we know why Pharaoh Akhenaten may have been preoccupied. His religious internal battle is well known.
What amazes me is that the Biblical assertion lays out clearly and precisely the time frame (from the building of the Temple to Moses). Use that and all else makes sense. I do like the video available on Netflix; Patterns of Evidence, the Exodus.
My good sir, I have taken great pains with my readings to get this part of Egyptian history correctly construed. Below is a map showing Egyptian hegemony in the 1300s… From the viewpoint of Egypt, the map is not seriously different from the earlier Amarna period - - circa 1400’s.
And here is some extensive discussion about just what was going on during the Amarna period:
“Evidence suggests that the troubles on the northern frontier led to difficulties in Canaan, particularly in a struggle for power between Labaya of Shechem and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, which required the pharaoh to intervene in the area by dispatching Medjay troops northwards.”
“Akhenaten pointedly refused to save his vassal Rib-Hadda of Byblos — whose kingdom was being besieged by the expanding state of Amurru under Abdi-Ashirta and later Aziru, son of Abdi-Ashirta — despite Rib-Hadda’s numerous pleas for help from the pharaoh. Rib-Hadda wrote a total of 60 letters to Akhenaten pleading for aid from the pharaoh. Akhenaten wearied of Rib-Hadda’s constant correspondences and once told Rib-Hadda: “You are the one that writes to me more than all the (other) mayors” or Egyptian vassals in EA 124.”
“What Rib-Hadda did not comprehend was that the Egyptian king would not organize and dispatch an entire army north just to preserve the political status quo of several minor city states on the fringes of Egypt’s Asiatic Empire. Rib-Hadda would pay the ultimate price; his exile from Byblos due to a coup led by his brother Ilirabih is mentioned in one letter. When Rib-Hadda appealed in vain for aid from Akhenaten and then turned to Aziru, his sworn enemy, to place him back on the throne of his city, Aziru promptly had him dispatched to the king of Sidon, where Rib-Hadda was almost certainly executed.”
William L. Moran notes that the Amarna corpus of 380+ letters counters the conventional view that Akhenaten neglected Egypt’s foreign territories in favour of his internal reforms. Several letters from Egyptian vassals notify the pharaoh that they have followed his instructions…
When the loyal but unfortunate Rib-Hadda was killed at the instigation of Aziru, Akhenaten sent an angry letter to Aziru containing a barely veiled accusation of outright treachery on the latter’s part…"
Amarna correspondence “. . . . shows that Akhenaten paid close attention to the affairs of his vassals in Canaan and Syria. Akhenaten commanded Aziru to come to Egypt and proceeded to detain him there for at least one year.”
[^^^ This could only be possible if Aziru understood Egyptian power engulfed Aziru’s tiny domain, as it was part of Egypt’s Syrian frontier. It was only an external power that had the ability to significantly influence Egypt. See below …]
Here is a map that depicts Amurru - - part of present day Lebanon.
“In the end, Akhenaten was forced to release Aziru back to his homeland when the Hittites advanced southwards into Amki, thereby threatening Egypt’s series of Asiatic vassal states, including Amurru.”
"Sometime after his return to Amurru, Aziru defected to the Hittite side with his kingdom. While it is known from an Amarna letter by Rib-Hadda that the Hittites ‘seized all the countries that were vassals of the king of Mitanni’, Akhenaten managed to preserve Egypt’s control over the core of her Near Eastern Empire (which consisted of present-day Israel … [<<<<< !!!]
. . . as well as the Phoenician coast) while avoiding conflict with the increasingly powerful Hittite Empire of Suppiluliuma I."
“Only the Egyptian border province of Amurru in Syria around the Orontes river was permanently lost to the Hittites when its ruler Aziru defected to the Hittites.”
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I think the coincidence you should consider is that many Bible historians point to the 1450’s as the time of Exodus.
“The Hyksos continued to play a role in Egyptian literature as a synonym for “Asiatic” down to Hellenistic times.”
“The term was frequently [invoked] against such groups as the Semites settled in Aswan or the delta, and this may have led the Egyptian priest and historian Manetho to identify the coming of the Hyksos with the sojourn in Egypt of Joseph and his brothers, and led to some authors identifying the expulsion of the Hyksos with the Exodus.”
“With the chaos at the end of the 19th Dynasty, the first pharaohs of the 20th Dynasty in the Elephantine Stele and the Harris Papyrus reinvigorated an anti-Hyksos stance to strengthen their nativist reaction towards the Asiatic settlers of the north, who may again have been expelled from the country.”
“Setnakht, the founder of the 20th Dynasty, records in a Year 2 stela from Elephantine that he defeated and expelled a large force of Asiatics who had invaded Egypt during the chaos between the end of Twosret’s reign and the beginning of the 20th Dynasty and captured much of their stolen gold and silver booty.”
"The story of the Hyksos was known to the Greeks,[FN 52 E.g. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca ,2.1.4. “The Bibliotheca (Ancient Greek: Βιβλιοθήκη Bibliothēkē, “Library”), also known as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, is a compendium of Greek myths and heroic legends, arranged in three books, generally dated to the first or second century AD” ]
who attempted to identify it within their own mythology with the expulsion from Egypt of Belos (Baal?[FN 53: Karl Kerenyi, The Heroes of the Greeks 1959 (1974:30): “Belos, whose name reproduces the Phoenician Ba’al, ‘Lord’”.]) …"
The first five books (Torah) are all history. Oh, unless you’re a Darwinist - in which case, anything that might contradict billions of years of evolution is not history, but “allegory”.
That’s not really how most people around here approach the issue. I agree the first five books of the Torah are history. That doesn’t mean that the ancient Israelites told their histories exactly like we do today though.
That’s a little like saying Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot “is history”. How do I mean that?
That movie portrayed events from the American Revolution. And the glorious finale of that movie was a major battle where the American forces defeated the British.
Is that history? Well, maybe the better question is: Is it reliable history?
That final battle was actually a fusion of two battles that historically occurred:
The Battle of Cowpens and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
What do we call a story that takes real history and combines and compresses events into a fictional timeline?
I call it “Bad History”. But there’s no denying that there was a Revolutionary War.
The Torah describes Abraham meeting the Philstines, without an Egyptian anywhere around.
Then about 700 years later, we have Moses leading the Exodus on a route that intentionally avoids the Philistines.
That part of the Levantine coast did not have any Philistine or Mycenaean or Hittite settlements until around 1200 BCE. And archaeology shows us that by 1130 BCE, the Egyptians had been pushed back beyond the western edge of the Sinai … by the Philistines. For centuries the Egyptians passed, at will, through the very same terrain, all the way up the hill country to Beth Shean, and along the coast, as they manned the northern borders of their empire in northern Syria.
But when the Philistines realized they had the power to bottle up Egypt, this would be the only feasible time for an Exodus party to live for 40 years at Kadesh Barnea - - a location virtually devoid of any natural defensive terrain. Prior to the Philistines, anyone trying to hide from the Egyptians in Barnea would have been quickly slaughtered or captured.
Conclusion?
The Genesis and Exodus narratives take historical context and instead of compressing them into a single point of unrecognizably fused history - - they do the opposite! They take a post-Philistine reality and stretch it out an extra 700 years!
Exodus had to have happened after 1130 BCE, rather than sometime in the 1300’s or 1400’s BCE. And to give more depth to the story, the scribes (unintentionally) write a hilarious plot structure where Abraham is trying to keep his elderly wife from "inciting violent covetousness" amongst the Philistines because of her unfathomable beauty … 700 years before there are even any Philistines settled in that part of the Levant!
Torah may be history - - but it is pretty awful and unreliable history. It would be more appropriate to say Torah is a book of stories.
Jewish scholars have calculated from the information provided in the Old Testament that Adam was created about 5778 years ago (that why many Jewish publications use this date on their front pages). Does this chronology fit the BioLogos paradigm?
Reading the Torah doesn’t give me the impression that its a bunch of "stories’. It’s written in such a way that says - loud and clear - This is real history.
For example, read the incredibly precise chronological details provided in Genesis 7-9 regarding the Flood. Are you seriously suggesting this is just a “story” and not real history?
BioLogos is not a person with beliefs. People who participate in the conversations that BioLogos hosts have a spectrum of beliefs. Why would you assume that they have to be acknowledged as complete, free from any numerical symbolism, and representing an objective factual account to be considered authentic? I think they are authentic, in that I think first century Jews saw them as representative of their history and identity. I don’t think they are false or fabricated, which would be the opposite of authentic.
How can I seriously accept some portions of the Old Testament when they have been shown to deviate so dramatically from the basics of historical investigation?
A. The Flood? We have a seamless record of 100,000 years of Summer-then-Winter from arctic ice cores. There was no flood to be found in any of the cores.
B. Unless you have a really different chronology to propose, The Flood would have wiped out all of Egyptian culture after around the 4th or 5th Dynasty. But what we see, instead, is that the 4th dynasty flows without interruption into the 5th dynasty, and so on.
C. If you had a wife in her 60’s, do you think you would have to pretend to be her brother so that no one would kill you so that they could marry such a beautiful woman?
D. In the entire span of world histoy, we don’t have a single convincing case of multiple sons of one man leading to multiple tribes. In other words, it is virtually impossible for the 12 sons of Jacob to have fathered 12 tribes, keeping their lineages separate for centuries.
This is virtually impossible because any continuous contact with allied tribes or communities inevitably leads to “Pedigree Collapse” - - which is a fancy way of saying it is inevitable for adults to unknowingly meet and marry their own cousins (any time after 3 or 4 generations). In Genesis we are told that not only did it happen with the 12 tribes of Israel, but it happened yet again with the 12 tribes of Ishmael !
Then there is the story of Samson… who has magical hair that gives him strength, but once his hair is cut (and he is blinded), he is (temporarily) powerless. The image of a solar god with rays of light depicted as a magnificent head of hair was very common in the ancient world. Blindness becomes a metaphor for a powerless sun, without brightness… shorn of its head of “solar hair”. Not only is Samson’s hair fictional, but the death of 3000 when he pulled the temple down would rival the number of American deaths on D-Day during WWII. It is inconceivable that there was a structure that large that could be brought down all at once.
I’m tired… I think I’ve written enough on this theme…
