You mean like besides the presence of Semites in Egypt, in the area the Bible names, in large numbers?
It’s hidden by the idiotic insistence that the Exodus must have occurred when Ramses was pharaoh.
I would suggest that further information on the degree of overlap between these “Semites” and the Israelites (who were only one of a number of groups of Levintine Semites) and of the overlap between their eventual exit from Egypt (assuming that they did leave, rather than being simply assimilated over time) and a ‘mass exodus of slaves’, before the relevance of this fact (and thus the extent to which it counts as “evidence”) can be assessed.
That which is consilient, consensual, warranted and justified.
How?
When I idiotically KNEW that the Exodus was true, that it happened in 1446 BCE, from Biblical chronology, we finally knew that ThutMOSE III was Pharoah. We’d favoured AmenHOTEP(JOSEPH!!!) II or III prior to that.
Now I post-idiotically know that there is no rational warrant, no justification, for the literal truth of the Bronze Age, pre-collapse, Exodus fantasy.
Canaanites in Egypt - and never, by any archaeological evidence whatsoever, by the millions for 40 years, in Sinai - over 200 years before then, demonstrate what? Especially with regard to a story written by their remote kin 1,000 - that’s one thousand - years later. The Holy Ghost preserved the truth obviously despite that!
If you’re including “scientifically accurate” then you’re making a category error by imposing a modern worldview onto ancient literature – they had no such concept.
Not an obstacle in a culture where strict retelling of important tales is regarded essentially as holy.
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Sorry? I don’t impose any anachronism into ancient literature.
What culture? There was no culture capable of doing that for a thousand years. None existed for a thousand years and nothing holy lasted anywhere near that long beyond cultures. Let alone through the Bronze Age collapse. The only tales we know were written in much briefer, much later cultural cycles. Including the C5th BCE tale of the C15th BCE set Exodus foundation myth. An event for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
re the Exodus, I am not sure what evidence, archaeological or otherwise, you expect to find thousands of years later. It was a nomadic tribe, probably of about 20,000 people - there is good textual evidence this is the case rather than 2 million or more - wandering around a desert region for 40 years. Any structures, for example, would by definition have been temporary by nature. And of course only a small percentage of that geographical area has been excavated for research.
People should be careful claiming such and such an event or person definitely didnt happen or exist when we know from other examples similar claims were made only to be negated when evidence was found at a later date.
Coproliths.
I don’t know about @Apistos, but the first thing I’d be looking for is evidence that the empire they had been fleeing from (Egypt) was not controlling the desert in question (presumably the Sinai) at the time.
Beyond that, as I would suspect that even 20,000 is well beyond the carrying capacity of the desert in question (without supernatural intervention), I would expect that even a “nomadic tribe” would leave some traces through a decades-long occupation.
Finally, I would expect evidence of the two events that ‘bookend’ the Exodus – the Captivity in Egypt, and the Conquest of Canaan. On the former, I would be looking for something beyond the mere presence of Semites (who most probably weren’t a slave population, and may or may not have been related to the later Israelites) in the Delta region.
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The words “without supernatural intervention” are crucial words. According to the story, the people ate manna, not what the desert normally produced. About the equipment, Deuteronomy 9:5 tells:
“Yet the Lord says, “During the forty years that I led you through the wilderness, your clothes did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet.” (NIV)
With that amount of “supernatural invention”, it is not evident what kind of ‘proof’ we could find of the Exodus people. The desert has been visited for thousands of years and the visitors probably left signs of their visits. How could we separate the Exodus remains from the remains of the other visitors?
The ‘bookends’ would be potential points for findings. The problem with these is that there is very little written documents from those periods, excluding the biblical scriptures. There is something about the claimed victories of the rulers as hieroglyphs on the monuments etc, but it is not likely that these propaganda writings would tell about the embarrassing success of slaves turned to enemies, or ‘foreign’ gods being stronger than the gods of the rulers.
What is left is archeological findings and those may be difficult to interpret, especially when there is no consensus about the years when the Exodus happened. Showing differences in the culture or habits of the local inhabitants before vs. after is quite good support for something crucial happening between the time points. What happened is a matter of interpretation and opinion.
I would note that @knor omitted …
Yes, and they were placed there as preemptive acknowledgement.
Yet I cannot help but note two important omissions from this statement.
@Apistos has already alluded to one form of evidence:
Where are all the latrines Kai?
Even 20,000 people would produce an enormous amount of excreta which, if left unburied, would be a significant health hazard. I have no real problem assuming, for the sake of argument, miracles explicitly mentioned in the Bible, when assessing the historicity of the the Bible account – but am considerably less sanguine in assuming extra-biblical ones. Like a divine Waste Management System.
The other issue is where are all the wells? 20,000 people would consume an enormous amount of water.
Both of these would be expected to leave significant physical evidence.
It seems unlikely that the Egyptians could have, or would have bothered, erasing all documentary evidence of the centuries-long “captivity”. And even a ‘cover up’ of the escape would have left indirect evidence – scapegoats taking the blame, indirect mention of disruption, etc, etc.
Instead, we have silence. It is as if the Egyptians never even noticed that the Israelites came and went. In the same way that earlier dynasties appear to have been unaware that a putative global flood came and went. This is of course, in and of itself, not evidence that the Exodus didn’t happened. But each individual silence adds up, until it is eventually deafening.
At this stage, I think some form of consensus when the Exodus could have happened (see my unanswered first point), would be a good place to start.
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The 36 square mile camp moved 42 times in 40 years. 1500 square mile dumping grounds. Out of 23,000.
32 billion ‘deposits’. Up to 95% at Kadesh-Barnea. Average over 1500 sq. mi. that’s 7 per square yard.
Over Kadesh-Barnea, 300. Per square yard. 100 x less people would still leave 3.
AFAIK, there were no common latrines. People would go outside of the camps and dig a small hole to the excreta and then cover it with sand or other soils.
I watched once a program talking about bones and coprolites in Near East desert areas. One point that I remember was that when the soils are eroded or the sand moves, the remains rise to the surface and are quickly eroded by the sand particles moving with the winds. There were shots from areas where there was small bone remains on the surface, with a comment that these would soon disappear. Pieces of pottery last somewhat longer but also these erode with time on the surface.
Water is definitely a challence in the desert. There are sites where the water comes to or close to surface, and there are wells, but even the story tells about moments when the people were thirsty and complained that they did not have enough of water. There were also promises to pay for the water that the locals would give to those travelling through their land.
How many watering places are available depends on where you move and what is the state of the local climate (it has varied a lot in that region). I do not know the exact route of the Exodus or the state of the local climate during the trip, so no idea how many watering places were available. I do not either know what was the number of people moving as a group.
You seem to think through the modern worldview. Quite little was written during that era because most people could not read or write, and much of what was written has disappeared. Papyrus or other soft materials usually do not last thousands of years.
What is preserved is mostly stuff that was related to what the ruler had achieved (propaganda) or what was crucial for the religious system, like the yearly floods of the Nile or the status of the rulers in relation to gods. The stability of the society depended much on the claims that the rulers were representatives of (or set by) the gods and proper worship ensured the current and eternal success of the.people. Any writings against the stability would be seen as a serious danger.
I am not an expert of the Egypt writings so those that know something can correct me.
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20,000 people wouldn’t walk hundreds of yards to do that. It would take fanatical discipline. 2.2 million couldn’t possibly, walk miles, even with fanatical discipline. They don’t in Gaza. But let’s assume 20,000 at Kadesh Barnea for 38 years. There would be a very fertile, elevated ring around the Hyde Park sized camp.
No Kai. With 20,000 people you have two choices. You have latrines, or you have cholera, dysentery and the like. Do you know how many tonnes of feces and how many cubic metres of urine 20,000 people produce in a day? ChatGPT estimated it at 2.6 tonnes and 30 cubic metres respectively. Even if they moved each and every day (unlikely logistically), this would still be a massive health hazard, unless handled in a coordinated manner.
One person relieving themselves in the desert wouldn’t leave much evidence after centuries. 20,000 people doing so sure as heck would.
But, on further reflection, even latrines, on their own, wouldn’t be sufficient. That much waste would quickly leech into the groundwater and so into wells. They would need to very carefully locate their latrines to avoid such leakage. I would strongly suspect that such sequestered locations would increase the probability of evidence of them surviving.
My point was not so much about what specific evidence a centuries-long captivity and mass-exodus would lead to, as the shear improbability of such a large sequence of events being completely invisible to the official record – even with the official position being pretending that the exodus never happened.
I would note you are continuing to carefully ignore the issue of when could the Exodus have occurred, without the Israelites running into Egyptian garrisons in the Sinai? The viable answers seem to be few and far between – and more than a little inconvenient for working them into the wider biblical timeline.
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So? We know that oral cultures were capable of transmitting important stories for generations without change.
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Apart from the Bible itself, the Babylonian Chronicle is the first historical source we have from the ancient Near East that doesn’t strictly glamorize the current ruler. Egyptian records only mention foreigners as something to defeat or have treaties or trade with. “Oops, a bunch of slaves got away and we lost a chariot division” is not going to be recorded by them, nor would a similar admission appear in Assyrian records. Egypt had significant fortresses along the coastal area (making the short route for reaching Canaan impractical). But out in the Sinai wilderness, there’s limited reason for the Egyptians to bother. The experience of the Exodus might plausibly make the Egyptians hesitant to harass the Hebrews, also. Given the limited sanitation facilities of the time, the need for a strategy to deal with waste would have been highly familiar to anyone, as would appropriate strategies for the landscape.
Any records and memories have disruption over time, but the Bronze Age was not a total blank for those in the early Iron Age. The Iliad preserves records of an actual campaign, for example, though likely undergoing some changes to reflect later Mycenean politics. The sparse data on Noah would be quite plausible for his being rather distant in time.
Understanding numbers in the Old Testament, and even in the New, is challenging. There was much more symbolism and less math than we as moderns think. Joseph dying at 110 is, in ancient Egyptian culture, a ripe old age rather than a calendar statement.
Hatsehput claimed the role of Pharoah and kept Thutmose III under her thumb. No other explanation is needed for why he would deface all her monuments as soon as he took over after her death.
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FWIW, the slavery spoken of may have taken a fairly common form, one month out of the year in required service.
Or a population density change.
“Control” is not what we would envision. For ancient empires, it meant a population would pay tribute or get their heads bashed, not something like Rome with garrisons except in important places. Egypt would have paid little to no attention to nomads so long as they weren’t troublesome.
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And we know that how?
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I do not know what the waste system was during the Exodus because the details of the Exodus are still debated (how many participants, when, what route and how long stops, was there one concentrated group or one main group + smaller separate groups, etc.). Having a small spade and digging a small hole would be the way how people in small groups could obey the purity rules of the society.
I can accept what the research can show but at the moment, there is too little known to make strong conclusions, except that somehow there came a considerable amount of new people to the area that became later Israel. The new people seemed to have different habits than the earlier ones, like they did not seem to consume swines. The old inhabitants either disappeared or merged into the new culture.
My comments aimed to show that what is known does not exclude some kind of Exodus, assuming that we allow supernatural influences as the story tells.
About the date of the Exodus: there are two main hypotheses about the date + some alternate ones.
The hypothesis of an early date suggests the year c. 1446 BCE (the start or the end of the Exodus)
The hypothesis of a late date suggests the years c. 1290-1250 BCE.
One alternative theory is that the people did not come as one united group but as several smaller groups during a long time period.
The story of Exodus could have been based on the journey of the largest group, or could be a collective tribal/national story that tells an exaggerated version of the history.
There are some details that speak against an invented story, like the origin of being slaves. That is not a glorious start for a nation, not something to be proud of. Also the stories of rebellions and disbelief against the God of Israel were not glorious parts that would give a good impression of the nation.
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I understand coproliths are a pretty rare finding so I think it odd it is the key one for you. Particularly as they tend to be preserved in damp environments, the exact opposite of a desert. Can you point to other such findings for a nomadic people in very dry conditions?
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