But these are just interpretations of the evidence, which may or may not be correct. To argue that no evidence has been put forward is nonsense. Others here have provided compound evidence. You may interpret such evidence in one way, that’s fine if it explains all of the evidence and is plausible, but it also supports an influx of Hebrews as an interpretation. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
What, The Flood DIDN’T happen?! Glad to hear it.
See above.
? Sorry. There’s nothing modern about about the way cultures evolve. That’s what they do. The rate of change now is about every 5 years. That’s new.
On the contrary, I defend faith. I admire faith. I miss faith. But I don’t defend, admire, miss any distortion of reality, i.e. of knowledge, through its lens.
And what on Earth, in Heaven’s name, have Jewish myths got to do with Christianity? Apart from being part the 100% human enculturation, the baggage, of Jesus.
A completely unnecessary interpretation. An influx of Hebrew Canaanites from where? Apart from the Canaanite lowlands?
I live in an urban area at least that big. With a population of a quarter of the Exodus. And the 50 odd square miles is generous. It would be half that. For the mythical 2.2 million. As in contemporary refugee camp density.
Yes, the pottery is different, and there’s a notable drop in the use of idols and of pork. Finklestein was one of the authors on such studies.
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What “major cultural change”?
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What “assumed arrival” date? You have previously suggested two very different dates:
- Where were these “archeological findings” published?
This seems to conflict with the article, which seems to imply that pigs would not be expected in the highlands:
The absence of swine in the archaeological record of such settlements in this rugged region [the highlands of the southern Levant] is no surprise. “In the majority of cases,” Price says, “a mobile, pastoral way of life, especially in the Near East, generally does not include raising pigs.”
I would expect that, if pig remains had been found in that area from earlier periods, that this would have been noted.
So again, I must ask where were these “archeological findings” published?
At this stage, we appear to be at a state of hearsay, not evidence.
Lacking verifiable specifics, I am unable to accept this claim.
And more recent genetic studies have demonstrated that such “comparable changes” were often not as simple as wholesale population replacement. The studies I am thinking of were not talking about the Yamnaya specifically, but more about the Celts (and their predecessors) in Western Europe. I saw these results presented in videos on the genetics of Celtic-influenced areas, so cannot cite the original papers. As to the Yamnaya, Wikipedia states here:
However, according to Heyd, et al. (2023), the specific paternal DNA haplogroup that is most commonly found in male Yamnaya specimens cannot be found in modern Western Europeans, or in males from the nearby Corded Ware culture. This makes it unlikely that the Corded Ware culture can be directly descended from the Yamnaya culture, at least along the paternal line.[86]
Which seems to indicate that the Yamnaya-Corded Ware culture relationship was also more complicated than wholesale population replacement.
The answer to that question would depend on the specific “lifestyle and culture” and the specific circumstances (which would depend on the specific timing), which you have failed to provide.
If we are talking about the Bronze Age Collapse, I could suggest a couple of candidates:
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Disruption due to loss of trade and/or protection provided by the Egyptians and/or the Canaanite City States.
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New opportunities due to a wetter climate, making agriculture more appealing than pastoralism.
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I think you have failed to adequately distinguish them. I don’t really see a Hyksos peasant farmer (as opposed to a member of their elite) being particularly “militant”.
The key distinguishing factor would seem to be that the Hyksos are historically attested to, whereas the “herders in Goshen” doesn’t seem to be much more than a biblical story.
How would archaeology distinguish between your “herders in Goshen” from a peasant farmer of the Semite Hyksos general population that remained in the Delta after their elite was expelled?
I could see this strategy working for small, sparse, isolated populations. The question is how would this strategy scale? The larger the population, (i) the greater the risk of contagion, and (ii) the greater the dependence on, and thus the need to remain near, larger water sources. A relatively small trickle could provide sufficient water for a single family group. A hundred people (assuming the 20,000 were divided up into groups of that size), let alone 20,000, would require far more significant sources.
As I suggested to @knor, such logistical issues are well understood, as are the constraints that they provide in an environment with limited resources.
Which raises the questions: (i) what were these “two exodus events”, and (ii) what evidence do we have of them?
Could you provide a citation for this? My understanding was that there was continuity of pottery style.
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Given the lack of a quote, it is not clear what statement of mine you are referring to.
However, I think it is useful at this point to distinguish between “facts” simpliciter and “evidence”.
In this context, evidence is “facts tending to prove or disprove any conclusion”.
This means that the facts need to be relevant to the conclusion to be evidence.
In the above thread, it is not clear that that the facts of pig raising, or the facts of new settlements, is relevant to the conclusion of a “new” population coming in from outside the region.
The facts of pig raising, at least as the have been presented by the Archaeology Magazine article (which is our only solid source to date) fit this conclusion very poorly.
The facts of new settlements require context. Are they explicable in the context of known endogenous forces, like political and economic changes (e.g. those of the Bronze Age Collapse) and local climate changes? Or do they require an exogenous force like an invasion of a “new” population from outside the region?
Only after such matters are considered can the relevance of the new settlements be determined, and whether they are evidence of a “new” population from outside the region.
Addendum:
By way of an example on the second set of facts.
You are in the Australian Alps, and you come across hoof prints. Do you automatically see these as evidence of zebras, an exogenous explanation. Or do you first attempt to rule out ‘brumbies’, Australian feral horses, an endogenous explanation?
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Don’t be deliberately obtuse – it makes you look like an idiot, especially when you quote something and ignore what you quoted.
“Jewish myths”? They do two things: first, they set up the conditions for the Incarnation; second, they explain what the point was going to be, though not directly and rather dimly.
It’s evident that you only select archaeology that fits your position. The presence of herders in Goshen has been known for decades.
I forget what papers I read that presented the evidence. One actually argued for three exoduses (exodi?), which was interesting but seemed stretching the data.
No Roymond, what is “evident” is that an initial search turned up very little information on the subject. This may be at least partially due to the fact that “Goshen” appears to be a purely biblical designation – so not really that helpful for tracking down information.
Known to whom, and how? How were they distinguishable from peasant farmers of the Semite Hyksos general population that remained in the Delta after their elite was expelled?
Citations please!
Addendum:
Lacking any substantive information available through either Google search, or Google Scholar, I turned to ChatGPT (an unreliable source I know, but better than nothing).
When I asked it if it is “possible to distinguish evidence of the biblical “herders of Goshan” from evidence of other known Asiatic populations in the Delta, e.g. remnants of the Hyksos?” It responded in the negative. The response included this statement:
Mainstream Egyptological view
Asiatic pastoralist populations were present intermittently from the Middle Kingdom through the Ramesside period. Their material culture forms a continuum; no uniquely Israelite group is archaeologically discernible.
I would note that “the Middle Kingdom through the Ramesside period” covers around a thousand years – too diffuse a period to nail down to a single biblical group.
This comes close to my original:
I would note that the Egyptian corvée system (i) is clearly distinguishable from outright slavery, and (ii) is remarkably similar to the system Solomon imposed. If they didn’t consider themselves to be “slaves” under Solomon (although there was resentment) it seem anomalous that they would consider themselves to have been thus in Egypt.
Another distinguishing factor is that participants of the corvée system would seem likely be free to emigrate – they would not need to “escape captivity”.
Then I am left with absolutely no information on which to assess the credibility of this hypothesis.
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A citation from an article about the subject (Late Bronze Age Settlement Patterns in Ancient Israel):
"The first such marker is the absence of pig bones from the Late Bronze age right up to the Iron Age. Prior to the Late Bronze Age, pig bones were ubiquitous throughout Palestine, especially in the rural areas. Dever (2001:113) notes that pork was a common food in Bronze Age sites because pigs were well-adapted to different areas. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, pig bones largely disappear from the rural areas and are restricted to a few urban centres, with the largest concentration of pig bones to the southwest in areas controlled by the Philistines. This indicates the presence of two distinct people groups: One that consumes pigs and one that does not (Hess, Klingbeil and Ray 2008:100). "
The second marker in the article is ceramics:
" Another important piece of archaeological data that is relevant here concerns the gradual change in ceramics towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, from highly decorated Canaanite ware to much simpler, undecorated pottery, with the highly decorated ware becoming limited to Philistine territories. Various scholars, such as Younker (cited in Hess, Klingbeil and Ray 2008:100) have suggested that this is “a marker for ethnicity,”"
The article is perhaps a bit too apologetic for your taste but uses citations to academic articles to back up the claims.
Despite your criticism, pig bones and ceramics have been interpreted as markers of two distinct groups.
The markers suggest a cultural change between the early-to-mid bronze age (c.2400-1500 BCE) vs. late bronze age. This indicates that a novel culture emerged somewhere between 1500-1200 BCE (I used earlier years 2000-1200 BCE because the main comparisons between the excavation sites were between the early vs. late bronze age).
In theory, the emergence of the new group could have originated in situ, without movements of people.
In practice, such a change is not very likely without the arrival of people with a superior strength or culture.
What happened to the earlier inhabitants is not known. They could have died, emigrated or merged into the new group.
The Bronze age collapse is another topic because it happened after the initial cultural changes had already happened. I read from Wikipedia something about the collapse and it seems that the early hypotheses about the causes of the collapse (such as collapse of the trade) were not supported by evidence. It seems there was a period of famine, which hints that more favourable weathers could not explain the collapse.
Pigs were not the animals that would have been among the most vulnerable to a climate change, and changes in weather cannot explain the changes in the local ceramics.
So far, you have been extremely critical towards everything I have presented. Yet, you have not yourself presented evidence for your alternative hypothesis. You linked one article but omitted that part of the citation that seemed to speak against your hypothesis.
Just being critical towards the information others are presenting is not enough if you cannot present positive evidence supporting your interpretation. I would say that now is your turn to present evidence supporting your hypothesis.
OK matey, The Flood would have been the greatest unnatural disaster since the divine intervention of Chicxulub the Dinosaur Killer 63 million years ago.
And you put the cart before the horse with your magical thinking. The horse is the culture that pulled the cart of Jesus’ story of himself. That didn’t loop back in time. Nature does not work that weirding way. There is no anachronism in the story. No metaphoric or tangible fossil that cannot be there, yet is. Jesus’ remarkable Messianic mother, in an extended Messianic family, in a Messianic culture of many (Satanic counterfeits!), given a shot in the arm over half a millennium before, moved inexorably forward, only, to its emergence in, as Jesus and Christiano-Judaism in the Church.
That’s entirely knowledge based belief.
[The Flood was worse than Chicxlub, or any other event since Snowball Earth 720 mya, it killed all land organisms.]
I could not find this article in Google Scholar, so I presume it is unpublished. I eventually tracked it down on Google search to the author’s personal “Christian Theology and Apologetics” site. The author states that his …
… interests revolve primarily around topics that pertain to Christian theology, apologetics, and comparative religions.
So he would not seem to have a strong background in zooarchaeological matters.
Yes, and more importantly, insufficiently expert. The one citation I did look up had me pondering whether he was being sufficiently careful in accurately representing it.
Add to this, his bent towards apologetics would influence which articles he cites, potentially giving a biased result.
I would note that ‘Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah: New Insights Regarding the Origin of the" Taboo"’, L Sapir-Hen, G Bar-Oz, Y Gadot, I Finkelstein, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (1953-), 2013•JSTOR suggests that things become more complex as you dig deeper into newer data:
The absence of pig bones at Iron Age I sites in the highlands and their exceptional abundance at contemporaneous Philistian sites had an enormous impact and scholars assumed that all early Israelites did not consume pork throughout the Iron Age 4. FINKELSTEIN argued that the absence / presence of pigs may be the only way to shed light on ethnic boundaries in the Iron Age I. However, the accumulation of new data in the 20 years following these influential articles has revealed new and intriguing patterns regarding pig husbandry in the Iron Age, placing the older assumptions regarding pig consumption in the Iron Age in ques- tion.
By reviewing the new data, we wish to question the notion that pork consumption is a way to distinguish Israelites /Canaanites from Philistines. In this essay, we demonstrate that pigs do not appear (or appear in small number) in Iron Age I Canaanite centers in the lowlands as well as in non-urban settlements within the presumed territory of the Philistine city-states. Yet, the data collected demonstrate that dichotomy in pig consumption did occur – between sites located in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the Iron Age IIB. The data, presented here for the first time, call for a reevaluation of the origin of the biblical taboo on the consumption of pork.
This article also notes that:
… the smaller, rural sites within the territory of the Philistine city-states, which did not reveal large number of pig bones either: only 0.4% at Aphek, and 1.2% at Tell Qası¯le 31 in northern Philistia, and no pigs in Qubu¯r el-Wale¯yide in southern Philistia, near Gaza 32.
This suggests that the situation is very complex.
I am not stating otherwise. I am however questioning whether such ‘interpretations’ are well founded.
And here we get to a point where Dizon appears out of his depth, in that he is citing a reference that he has not himself read. What Hess, Klingbeil and Ray 2008:100 states is:
Fritz (2002: 29) has denied the possibility of distinguishing Israelites from Canaanites on the basis of pottery, but Younker (2003b: 372) observes that, whereas the ceramic wares in the highlands were Canaanite in origin, Israelite pottery is distinguishable in that it avoided the external painting common to Canaanite tradition.
This would seem to support the very narrow point of can we distinguish them at all? But it would appear to be silent on the question of whether the difference is due to a difference in underlying culture, or simply to a difference in level of sophistication within the same culture? Was the difference simply due to the greater wealth and cosmopolitan influences, and professional craftsmanship on the part of the Canaanite City States, and more utilitarian home-made wares in the Israelite highlands?
Do either Fritz or Younker weigh in on these issues? We don’t know, and more importantly neither does Dizon.
On this basis, I am accepting neither “marker” as evidence of a deeper difference in cultural origin.
They are not strong evidence, just indirect markers, but anyhow something that points towards cultural differences between the groups. That is more support than what you have presented so far for your pet hypothesis.
What these groups were is another question, bones and ceramics do not seem to answer to that question. We need a wider perspective to answer to that question.
Those who think that some kind of Exodus happened, can use the markers of cultural differences as indirect support for their explanation.
The same is true for those who think that one of those groups is Israelites, independent of the origin of that group.
If you do not support either explanation, then you have to explain the origin and future success of Israelites with some other hypothesis & try to explain what these two groups were, using some other general interpretation model.
By the way, selective use of academic literature (citations) is unfortunately very common in the academic circles. The strive towards concise and selling articles guides the writing towards selective use of literature, especially when the author tries to sell his/her opinion to readers that may support a competing hypothesis. Review articles and general books may be an exception because space is not as tight limit in these.
Because of this, there is a need to read all the literature with a somewhat critical eye. Critical in a constructive way, meaning to be ready to accept what seems to be true but filtering out what does not stand closer scrutiny. The problem with this may be that it demands some background knowledge to separate the strong and weak arguments from a professional text.
In addition, an academic perspective to the word ‘constructive’ (criticism) it that you should not just shoot down a poorly justified hypothesis, you need to present another explanation that has better justification to replace the hypothesis you want to shoot down.
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This is a Chelsea FC Uniform:
This is a Saville Row suit:
The two are blatantly distinguishable. Would anybody in their right mind consider them to be even remotely evidence of being from two different cultures (especially as they are only 4 miles apart).
Context matters.
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Yes, I certainly agree with that.
Context is one of the most important guides when we interpret old texts like the biblical scriptures. It is also an important guide when we consider how to interpret archeological findings.
Understanding the context is not always easy when we are dealing with a culture that has a very different worldview than our modern western understanding. It is great that the accumulating data is helping in this task. We may not understand enough today but i expect that we will learn much more in the near future.
Your analogy isnt helpful. It is unlikely zebras would survive in the cold weather of the alps, not to mention the higher altitudes. Zebras are used to warm weather at low altitudes. Plus you would have to provide an explanation as to how zebras got there in the first place. The same could hardly be said of the Hebrews arriving in a new area in Canaan.
I would suggest using your logic if human footprints were found near the coast of Cuba, you would presume they were of the indigenous people. But it turns out they are from 1492 and are of European settlers. Your presumptions were wrong and biased your thinking against the reality. Context and timing are everything.
The ethnicity of the wearers may indicate 2 different cultures!
It was meant to be (i) somewhat fanciful, and (ii) a reference to the medical diagnosis saying:
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
And of course no analogy is perfect.
Except that the Australian Alps are not particularly high or particularly cold, particularly in comparison to Europe’s Alps and New Zealand’s Southern Alps. I would not expect a zebra to survive there indefinitely, but would not be surprised if it could survive several months, particularly in summer.
But my point wasn’t about zebra ecology, but to look for endogenous explanations before seeking exogenous ones. This would appear to be closely related to the thinking behind Occam’s Razor.
Indeed. 
I’m failing to see the disanalogy here.
The zebra could have escaped from Canberra Zoo. There, you have an explanation.
I can and I do say it. The biblical explanation would appear to be problematical, at best.
And I would suggest that the ‘presumption’ is yours. I would not “presume” any such thing!
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The example you give is the complete opposite of mine, in that I explicitly stated that brumbies are “feral” – i.e. they are not indigenous.
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I was well aware that the indigenous Caribbean populations had largely been wiped out and replaced during the colonial era – and that there is a huge body of evidence unambiguously supporting this fact. Therefore an endogenous explanation would need to include this replacement.
Addendum:
I think part of the problem is that you may be conflating “endogenous” with “indigenous”. That is not what I mean.
In this context, by endogenous, I mean ‘within the firmly established facts already known.’
Such facts would include:
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That a population of brumbies exists in the Australian Alps.
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That the indigenous inhabitants of Cuba, and the rest of the Caribbean, were largely wiped out and replaced by colonial (including slave) populations.
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The Bronze Age Collapse and contemporaneous climate shifts in Canaan.
If an explanation is available invoking only such firmly established facts already known, then it is unnecessary to propose explanations outside those facts (i.e. “exogenous” ones), and Occam’s Razor would suggest that we should not do so.
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