Looking for answers…and not from Ken Ham

There are a few problems on

1: the number of surviving textual records from Egypt at that date that discuss other nations that are not “I [Pharaoh] smashed their army and raided their lands, etc., etc.” or “here is the tribute they sent us” is exactly zero, because the former categories are what they put on monumental buildings, and all papyrus records from lower Egypt prior to 300 BC are gone.

2: Shoshenk raiding extensively in Palestine (and his son Osorkon IV using huge amounts of precious metals on building projects) suggests there was something valuable to be grabbed from the area, and that would fit nicely with the record of Shishak hauling off much of Solomon’s wealth.

  1. Both Egypt and Mesopotamian kingdoms were weak, and not fighting people in Palestine from c. 1400-c. 950 BC, thus the lack of records is uninformative.

We can observe a massive influx of people (~30,000 people adding to the ~20,000 that already lived in Palestine) into the highlands of Israel c. 1200 BC. These new people had a distinctly different pottery and ate essentially no pork, whereas that was a staple meat of the former inhabitants. There is an Egyptian record of a people in the right area called (a phonetic equivalent to) Israel in 1209 BC.

The origins of Genesis are much harder to discern than the later historical books, though.

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