'13-10-15, 11:28 CharlesChandler	The Pharaoh of the Exodus Hey Folks! I think that I can make a good case for the Exodus to have begun in 1312 BCE, during the reign of Horemheb (1319~1292 BCE). If you're interested, the full version is on my website. The following is the summary of the evidence in support. The full version explores the political, social, and spiritual implications of the Amarna heresy, its continuation through the Exodus and into the Promised Land, and its lasting impact on the Jewish community. I'm interested in getting a critical review of this material, by people who know more about ancient history and archaeology than myself. Regards to all, Charles ================================= First, we have to get an idea of when the Exodus occurred. Many ancient authors associated the Hebrews with the Hyksos, and the Exodus with their expulsion in 1560 BCE. But DNA studies now show that the Hebrews who settled the Levant were a thorough mix of Egyptians, and became racially distinct after the Exodus, due to their enduring unwillingness to intermarry with other ethnic groups. So the Hyksos expulsion was earlier, and unrelated. Manetho (according to Eusebius) wrote in the 3rd century BCE that the Exodus occurred in the reign of Rathotis, who most historians believe to have been Tutankhamun. After Tut's 10 years as pharaoh, Ay ruled for 4 years, and then came Horemheb. Yet if the Exodus occurred during Tut's reign, Moses didn't negotiate with the boy-king, but rather, with Horemheb, who was the commander-in-chief of the army and minister of foreign affairs under Tut. We can draw a loose inference that Moses negotiated with Horemheb from the following passage. Exodus 3:1-3 wrote: Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up." Midian was east of the Sinai Peninsula, while Mt. Horeb is thought by many to be at the southern tip of the Sinai, and by some to be in Sudan near the Red Sea coast. Either way, if the shepherd had ventured that far from Midian, the sheep probably would have complained (especially about having to do all of that swimming, which they don't enjoy). The mismatched geography might be the author's hint that we are to interpret the passage loosely. One possible reading is that Horeb is short for Horemheb, and that the "mountain of God" was the pharaoh, who the Egyptians considered to be a living god. The Seder Olam Rabbah (a chronology of the Hebrews written in the 2nd century CE) states that the Exodus began in 1312 BCE, or 7 years into the reign of Horemheb. Tacitus wrote early in the 2nd century CE (based on Lysimachus) that the Exodus occurred in the reign of Bakenranef, who all authorities agree came much later. But the story mentions Moses, who led people out of Egypt and into a new country, where they expelled all of the inhabitants, and built a temple. So it's the right story. Interestingly, Tacitus also mentions the outbreak of a contagious disease. We now know from archaeology that there was a pandemic during or just after the reign of Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun. And of course the Bible describes plagues just before the Exodus. We can establish the range of years in which the Exodus occurred by looking at the latest and earliest possible dates. So the Exodus began no earlier than... 1405 BCE Late in the reign of Amenhotep III (1415~1352 BCE), Egyptian records mention an incursion into Canaan by "Yashuya the Habiru", which we would recognize as "Joshua the Hebrew". The Bible tells us that Joshua sacked Jericho after the walls fell down. This is archaeological evidence of an earthquake in 1365 BCE that leveled both Ugarit and Jericho, leaving them vulnerable to attack. With three independent lines of evidence in support, it's reasonable to conclude that Joshua sacked Jericho in 1365 BCE, after the earthquake knocked the walls down. If this occurred at the end of the Exodus, and if the Exodus lasted 40 years, the earliest date for the beginning is 1405 BCE. 1359 BCE The Hebrews took over the state of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. Jacob found Egypt to be the land of Ramesses (II). The Bible doesn't tell us exactly when he was there, but to figure conservatively, let's say that Jacob was 60 years old in 1279 BCE, which was the very beginning of the pharaoh's 66 year reign. And also to go back as far as possible, let's say that Jacob was 20 years old when the Exodus was completed. That puts the end of the Exodus 40 years earlier than 1279, which would be 1319, and the beginning of the Exodus would be as far back as 1359 BCE. Isaac contacted Philistines, who didn't arrive in Asia until 1350 BCE. If Jacob was born c. 1340 (to be 60 years old when he went to Egypt c. 1280), and if Isaac was 30 years old when he had Jacob, then Isaac was born in 1370, and was 20 years old in 1350 BCE. This doesn't alter the range, but it does confirm that this is the right era for these people. ...and ended no later than... 1241 BCE The Hittite King Khattushil III in his treaty with Egypt mentioned "the land of the Habiru of the Sun" lying between his country and Egypt. 1208 BCE Merneptah boasted that he had crushed the nation of Israel. Then the only question is: was there any sort of cultural upheaval involving monotheistic beliefs in Egypt between 1400 and 1250 BCE? And of course the answer is that the biggest monotheistic upheaval in Egyptian history, known as the Amarna heresy, occurred during the reigns of Akhenaten, Smenkhare, and Tutankhamun, or 1352~1323 BCE (start-to-finish). And were there any plagues in that period? Yes, and they were the only Egyptian plagues big enough to show up in the literary records of other countries, and in the archaeological records. So the present thesis is that Moses' monotheism was the continuation of the Amarna heresy, forced into exile by Horemheb in 1312 BCE. (Note that this means that the fall of Jericho in ~1360 BCE came before the Exodus. This anachronism is addressed in the section on Joshua.) So who was Moses? Exodus 2:12 tells us that he was a poor shepherd who fled Egypt to escape prosecution for killing an Egyptian. Then Exodus 5 tells us that the poor shepherd just back from the Sinai got an audience with the pharaoh to argue the case of the Hebrews. There had to be more to the story than just that. Aside from divine intervention, only an important Egyptian could have stood toe-to-toe with the pharaoh. He might have been exiled, perhaps for killing someone, but he was still influential enough to re-enter Egypt and meet directly with the pharaoh. Sigmund Freud was the first to point out the striking parallels between Moses and a very important Egyptian at the time, namely Ramose, vizier to Amenhotep III and tutor of Akhenaten, later to be his vizier as well. Hence it's possible that the person who talked with God at Horeb (or rather, met with Horemheb) was Ramose, second in charge under Akhenaten. It's interesting to note that Manetho's list of Egyptian kings (according to Africanus) includes Rathose, who ruled for 9 years, and who most historians consider to have been Tutankhamun, based on the length of the reign, and position in the sequence. "Th" is not interchangeable with "m", and thus "Rathose" cannot easily be equated with "Ramose". Nevertheless, Rathose appears in no other literature, and it's possible that this was actually a deliberate obfuscation, accomplished by earlier priests, to mask the fact that Ramose ruled, or at least was co-regent, after Akhenaten, at least until the end of the Amarna period. Perhaps when the capital was moved back to Thebes, and the boy-king changed his name to Tutankhamun, Rathose/Ramose/Moses was displaced, and Horemheb was promoted, who as a later pharaoh completed the eradication of the Amarna heresy, including the expulsion of all those refusing to go back to the old ways, thereby causing the Exodus. Horemheb actually removed the Amarna pharaohs from the record, so in his version, he succeeded Tutankhamun, who succeeded Amenhotep III. The only way Manetho could have known of other pharaohs would have been through scribes, who preserved the names, but perhaps cared not to explicitly say that the architect of the Amarna heresy, and leader of the Exodus, had actually been a pharaoh. Regardless, the idea that will be explored in this paper is simply that Horemheb was the pharaoh of the Exodus, and that Ramose was its leader.
'13-10-15, 11:58 Briton	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus So basically the Exodus was a real historical event because the book of Exodus says so? Fact is there is no good reason to believe that this story is anything but fiction.
'13-10-15, 13:06 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus No, I don't consider the Bible to be proof of the Bible. Rather, I consider the emergence of a sophisticated, abstract theology, and the most detailed set of personal laws in the ancient world, to be quite anomalous if coming from Bedouin chieftains in Canaan, but a lot easier to understand if they were drafted by Egyptian royalty. The fusion of cults that resulted in the worship of Amun-Ra had already occurred in Egypt, and constituted a sort of pseudo-monotheism, in that Amun-Ra was so much more powerful than the other deities that there wasn't much of a contest. (In Greek mythology, the equivalent would be Zeus as the master of the lesser gods.) But that wasn't monotheism in the true sense, since there was no difference in kind between the old Amun, the old Ra, and the new Amun-Ra — it was just a matter of degree. Pagan gods were bigger than life, but nevertheless conceived as people, with all of the character flaws of normal folks, but who just happened to be a lot more powerful. In other words, gods were just one step above kings. But in Akhenaten's Atenism, we see a whole new concept, where God is not a powerful local ruler, or really powerful national ruler, or a really really powerful global ruler, but rather, a set of principles. The social significance is staggering. Local lords can do anything they want. National rulers can do anything they want. Same with pagan gods. But a canonized set of principles can form the foundation for morality that can guide people's lives. It's a heckuva step, for kings to surrender their prerogatives to a set of principles. Needless to say, kings fought such ideas with a vengeance, perhaps for that very reason. But the people refused to let go of their principles. Next we see the ancient Greeks inventing all kinds of principles, and of course, the rest is history. The turning point was in going from might-makes-right to truth-makes-right. This fully matured in the Amarna heresy, and of course, it appears in a mature form in Canaan just shortly thereafter. The Amarna heresy was suppressed, and Egypt went back to its pantheon of cults, while the Canaanites became monotheistic, and stayed that way. The Phoenicians then spread the ideas all over the Mediterranean. I don't see that as any sort of coincidence — I see it as straight cause and effect. Then, to study how this transformation took place, in its proper historical context, is enlightening.
'13-10-15, 13:26 Calilasseia	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus So, in short, your hypothesis is that the Egyptians invented a single god, and the Jews took that idea and ran with it when the Egyptians dropped it? Didn't Sigmund Freud peddle a version of this hypothesis years ago?
'13-10-15, 13:58 Scot Dutchy	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus I would like to know where is the evidence that Moses did exist?
'13-10-15, 14:42 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Calilasseia wrote: So, in short, your hypothesis is that the Egyptians invented a single god, and the Jews took that idea and ran with it when the Egyptians dropped it? Exactly. Calilasseia wrote: Didn't Sigmund Freud peddle a version of this hypothesis years ago? Yes. (Freud, S., 1939: Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. Amsterdam: Verlag Albert de Lange) But we've learned a lot since 1939, from new archaeological finds, and from ongoing studies of literary sources. My uncle, Tertius Chandler (author of "4000 Years of Urban Growth"), covered the topic in "Godly Kings and Early Ethics" (first published in 1976), which filled in a lot of the factual blanks, and which I'm using as my primary source. But we've learned a lot since 1976, and Tertius is no longer with us, so I figured it was time somebody updated the thesis. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but the only person that I've found so far who is furthering the idea is Ahmed Osman, but he's a bit of a quack. (He believes that Jesus was Tutankhamun, neglecting Tacitus' nearly contemporary account 1300 years later. ) But I find the evidence to be far more compelling than for any of the other theories, so I think that it's worth pursuing. Scot Dutchy wrote: I would like to know where is the evidence that Moses did exist? What would you consider to be evidence? If you mean a clearly-labeled sarcophagus, complete with a well-preserved body inside, no, we don't have any evidence. But if that's the criterion, then Adolf Hitler cannot be proved to have existed, since his body was never recovered. If the "evidence" is the effects of somebody willing to trek through the desert with a bunch of exiles, working out the details of Mosaic Law, then somebody existed.
'13-10-15, 15:40 Onyx8	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus What we haven't found since 1939 is any shred of physical evidence that this exodus (trek through the desert) actually happened.
'13-10-15, 15:47 Wheelspawn	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Did Joshua exist? Did he knock down the walls of Jericho or were they destroyed thousands of years before the events described in the Bible? If Moses and his buddies trekked through the desert for eighty years, surely there are some artifacts they left behind? CharlesChandler wrote: What would you consider to be evidence? If you mean a clearly-labeled sarcophagus, complete with a well-preserved body inside, no, we don't have any evidence. But if that's the criterion, then Adolf Hitler cannot be proved to have existed, since his body was never recovered. If the "evidence" is the effects of somebody willing to trek through the desert with a bunch of exiles, working out the details of Mosaic Law, then somebody existed. Hitler left behind millions of people dead and hundreds of letters and public addresses. His enemies as well as his allies acknowledged his existence. There are drawings, films and photographs of him. Surely he left birth and marriage records behind. The criterion for determining someone's existence does not lie solely on the remains of their body. Corroboration like this represents the best evidence for someone's existence. Did Moses leave behind a visible legacy, write letters and public addresses and get acknowledged by external sources including those left by his enemies?
'13-10-15, 16:40 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Wheelspawn wrote: Did Moses leave behind a visible legacy, write letters and public addresses and get acknowledged by external sources including those left by his enemies? Do you consider Mosaic Law to be a visible legacy? Do you consider Manetho and Tacitus to be external sources? For that matter, do you believe that Jesus existed, or was he just a myth? The first written account was by Tacitus, who wasn't even born until several years after Jesus' (supposed) death. How about Socrates, who never wrote anything down either, and is only known through Plato and Aristophanes, who could have just made him up? (I'm just trying to figure out what you consider to be proof.) But Ramose certainly left behind a decent paper trail, right up to the time when Akhenaten made it illegal to write the names of any of the lesser gods, including Ra. (This included defacing his own father's cartouches, since Amenhotep meant "Amun is satisfied".) We don't have any Egyptian records of Ramose's new name, since Horemheb obliterated as much evidence of the Amarna heresy as possible. The most conservative change would have been to simply drop the "Ra", leaving Mose (or Moshe in Hebrew, or Moses in Greek). But we don't have any legal documents certifying that this is what he did.
'13-10-15, 17:01 THWOTH	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus
'13-10-15, 21:08 Moses de la Montagne	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Interesting OP, Charles. I tried, a couple years ago, to put forward a theory not dissimilar to yours in making an Akhenaten thread, but it garnered all boo's and no yay's. Good luck; you're far better-acquainted with your material. Good name, too. Jimi Hendrix's manager was "Chas Chandler."
'13-10-15, 22:46 Wheelspawn	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler wrote: Do you consider Mosaic Law to be a visible legacy? Do you consider Manetho and Tacitus to be external sources? For that matter, do you believe that Jesus existed, or was he just a myth? The first written account was by Tacitus, who wasn't even born until several years after Jesus' (supposed) death. How about Socrates, who never wrote anything down either, and is only known through Plato and Aristophanes, who could have just made him up? (I'm just trying to figure out what you consider to be proof.) Again, was Mosaic Law actually written by Moses? What did Manetho say on the subject? Tacitus is a reliable source of information on the Christianity of his time. Since he was not an eyewitness to Jesus and wrote long after he was dead, Tacitus is not a good source of information regarding whether Jesus actually existed. Socrates could have been a literary device invented by Plato and Aristophanes. I don't know if this is true which is why I am agnostic on the issue. If there were compelling evidence for or against his existence, I would make a conclusion on the basis of that evidence. What I would find compelling is if historical methods used to establish the existence of figures such as Adolf Hitler, Julius Caesar and Hammurabi also established the existence of figures such as Jesus and Moses. Because the eyewitness evidence for Jesus is so bad, I am forced to come to the same conclusion I did with Socrates. CharlesChandler wrote: But Ramose certainly left behind a decent paper trail, right up to the time when Akhenaten made it illegal to write the names of any of the lesser gods, including Ra. (This included defacing his own father's cartouches, since Amenhotep meant "Amun is satisfied".) We don't have any Egyptian records of Ramose's new name, since Horemheb obliterated as much evidence of the Amarna heresy as possible. The most conservative change would have been to simply drop the "Ra", leaving Mose (or Moshe in Hebrew, or Moses in Greek). But we don't have any legal documents certifying that this is what he did. I'm curious. Can we see these records?
'13-10-15, 23:40 Ironclad	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Calilasseia wrote: So, in short, your hypothesis is that the Egyptians invented a single god, and the Jews took that idea and ran with it when the Egyptians dropped it? Didn't Sigmund Freud peddle a version of this hypothesis years ago? There is a school of thought that sits between you both, iirc.. chatter of the birth of monotheism and Tuthmoses iv (or was it Akenhaten) and his epilepsy. Has there even been a ratskep thread on this topic, it is the most interesting one going, regarding the origin of monotheism. Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk [url='http://tapatalk.com/m?id=10']now Free[/url]
'13-10-15, 23:51 Nicko	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus It is fairly well established that there was no Exodus from Egypt to Palestine. Rather, the consensus is that migration of Semitic peoples to that area happened piecemeal over a long period as per how it happened just about everywhere else. The archaeologists who have established this are overwhelmingly Israeli. Given the compelling interest of these scholars in establishing the reverse - any Israeli scholar who could demonstrate that Exodus was remotely accurate would be a national fucking hero - I am inclined to trust their objectivity. Also, you seem not to be aware there is also a strong consensus that the Israelites were not monotheistic and that Yahweh was one of a pantheon of pagan deities worshipped in that area.
'13-10-16, 00:05 james1v	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Me "dot" fingers itching.
'13-10-16, 01:14 Onyx8	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Just listened to a piece on the CBC where a guy was talking about the Egyptian god "Bez" (sp?) Anyway this was a bear-faced god, ugly of demeanour, but well liked and worshipped by the down-trodden of society. As it happens in the recently discovered and excavated towns that were where the builders of some of the more prominent structures from Akenaten's time ( he of the 'there is only one god' idea) lived, there were a great many statuettes of this Bez. So apparently the top-down demand that people get on board with monotheism in Egypt was at least problematic. It's really hard to tell other people what they believe just ask some of the theists around here. Anyway, vaguely off-topic, but they also haven't found any statuettes of bez that fell out of peoples pockets while wandering around a desert for fourty years. Or indeed anything else.
'13-10-16, 02:01 Moses de la Montagne	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Nicko wrote: It is fairly well established that there was no Exodus from Egypt to Palestine. Rather, the consensus is that migration of Semitic peoples to that area happened piecemeal over a long period as per how it happened just about everywhere else. The archaeologists who have established this are overwhelmingly Israeli. Given the compelling interest of these scholars in establishing the reverse - any Israeli scholar who could demonstrate that Exodus was remotely accurate would be a national fucking hero - I am inclined to trust their objectivity. Also, you seem not to be aware there is also a strong consensus that the Israelites were not monotheistic and that Yahweh was one of a pantheon of pagan deities worshipped in that area. But I don't know if this theory requires the actual Exodus as it occurs in the bible. That story would naturally be a highly redacted & heavily mythologized version of what were originally a set of oral stories told about the Egyptian Moses, who refined the polytheism of the Hebrews and raised Yahweh to a privileged position. Charles, if I'm reading him right, concedes that the Canaanites had a pantheon. But something shifted the Hebrews away from that polytheism, and into monolatry and monotheism.
'13-10-16, 02:15 Moses de la Montagne	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Onyx8 wrote: Just listened to a piece on the CBC where a guy was talking about the Egyptian god "Bez" (sp?) Anyway this was a bear-faced god, ugly of demeanour, but well liked and worshipped by the down-trodden of society. As it happens in the recently discovered and excavated towns that were where the builders of some of the more prominent structures from Akenaten's time ( he of the 'there is only one god' idea) lived, there were a great many statuettes of this Bez. So apparently the top-down demand that people get on board with monotheism in Egypt was at least problematic. It's really hard to tell other people what they believe just ask some of the theists around here. That's true, but different circumstances can change up the game. There's no doubt Akhenaten's program was an unpopular bust in Egypt. He had to decamp from Thebes and build up a new city & a new temple for the few people who were willing to interest themselves in his monotheism (and many of them were probably only going along of out sycophancy). The religious needs of the Thebans, however, probably differed greatly from those of the Hebrews. A scrappy sect of desert nomads may've been more receptive to the idea of a single loyal preferential god above the multifarious deities of their neighbors. After all, the same thing was true for nascent Christianity: its monotheism appealed primarily to the underclasses (slaves and women), while it was rejected by the more cultured and cosmopolitan.
'13-10-16, 03:09 Onyx8	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Youse gots a point. A good point, better than mine. Still requires the OP to respond.
'13-10-16, 03:19 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Moses de la Montagne wrote: I tried, a couple years ago, to put forward a theory not dissimilar to yours in making an Akhenaten thread, but it garnered all boo's and no yay's. Cool — I'll look it over. As concerns your comment in the OP there about "an interesting-looking androgynous fellow", if we hadn't already been told that this statue is of a male pharaoh, we'd certainly conclude that it was of a Sudanese matron. Hey wait, would that mean that Nefertiti, the most beautiful woman of all time, was a lez? Wheelspawn wrote: What I would find compelling is if historical methods used to establish the existence of figures such as Adolf Hitler, Julius Caesar and Hammurabi also established the existence of figures such as Jesus and Moses. Because the eyewitness evidence for Jesus is so bad, I am forced to come to the same conclusion I did with Socrates. I have no problem with your not being convinced of the existence of Moses, Socrates, and Jesus. No legitimate study of anything can ever be made if you start out with assumptions that never get challenged, and one of the possibilities in the absence of definitive proof is that something (or someone) actually did not exist, where all supposed effects of said person or thing have been mis-attributed. But locking down on the position that someone or something definitely did not exist, due to a lack of evidence, is actually an hypothesis in its own right, and is in no sense glorified to the status of fact by the absence of evidence. In other words, agnosticism is fine. It means you still have an open mind, and perhaps are willing to consider hypotheses. (If you're not, I don't know why you would bother participating in a discussion of hypotheses.) Just bear in mind that no definitive proof of anything was ever collected without a pre-existing hypothesis of some sort. So the hypothesis comes first. Then comes the detective work to find the proof. If it is found, then the hypothesis is proved, and thus becomes a theory. Sometimes I wish people would take a course in geometry, and think about the implications for logical discourses. In geometry, you start out with axioms. Then you develop postulates. Then you work through the postulates to the proofs. Somebody can always be ornery and refuse to help work through a postulate, and might even pretend to be an intellectual by saying that it isn't worth considering, because it hasn't already been proved. But all that does is prove that said "intellectual" doesn't understand the process of developing proofs. Of course it hasn't already been proved — that's why we call it a postulate! Similarly, in disciplines outside of geometry, one has to start out with the facts, and then develop conjecture based on them, and then search for the evidence that hasn't already been collected. That's just how it works. Even if all of the facts were already known, the development of any theory would still require a pre-existing hypothesis of some sort, since sifting through all of the facts in the Universe would take a long time, and during that time, the hypothesis guides the search. Otherwise, it would be just a Universe full of facts, but with no theories to explain any of it, since no hypotheses could be formed, since they hadn't already been proved. It is certainly true that we must be careful of the way in which our hypotheses guide our searches, because invariably, we miss clues because they didn't fit the hypothesis that we were trying to prove at the time. But that doesn't mean that we must not utilize hypotheses, because then we have no way of building theories. It just means that we have to understand the whole process. Observe, hypothesize, test, conclude, and repeat until all is understood. People who reject postulates because they're not theorems are not logicians — they're elitists who have locked down on the status quo, and are attempting to glorify it by making it sound logical. So I'm taking the facts available, and developing conjecture based on them, and I'm requesting a critical review of the facts that I've used, or failed to use, hopefully by people better versed in ancient history than myself, and of the conjecture based on said facts. Have I left out a detail? Does the conjecture follow from the facts? I know that this has not already been proved. Otherwise, there'd be no sense in discussing it. Nicko wrote: Also, you seem not to be aware there is also a strong consensus that the Israelites were not monotheistic and that Yahweh was one of a pantheon of pagan deities worshiped in that area. No, I'm well aware of that. Even the Old Testament clearly states that the Hebrews were slow to part with their pagan deities. The archaeological evidence of continued worship of Ba'al and other Canaanite gods, well after the first nation of Israel was established, confirms it. But I'm not the one who is saying that all of the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, until Moses convinced the pharaoh to let them go, at which time they all moved to Canaan and established a purely monotheistic state. I explore this in more detail on my site, but to briefly summarize, I'm contending that the "Exodus" might have been just Ramose and a few courtesans who were forced into exile when Horemheb reinstated the Amun cult. There is no archaeological evidence of this "Exodus", in the Sinai or in Canaan, because it might have been a relatively small number of people involved, and the trail would be indistinguishable from a migrating Bedouin tribe. The thesis in question is rather just that the ideas that popped up in Canaan in a mature form, and that, over a period of hundreds of years, came to dominate, trace straight back to what was going on in Egypt at the time, and can only be fully understood in the Egyptian context. To look at it the other way around, if you were to say that Judaism germinated entirely in Canaan, I'll play the skeptic and ask you which Bedouin chieftain had the education, experience, and time to produce the huge volume of mandates known as Mosaic Law? And if it wasn't just one, but a collaboration among many, I'll remind you that we're talking about small Bronze Age settlements in loose confederations, without the social structure to produce such literature. They lived in mud-brick houses or in tents. Saying that Canaanite lords and priests wrote Mosaic Law from scratch would more or less by like saying that the US Constitution was written by a couple of Cherokee Indians with too much spare time on their hands. Indeed, the American Indians didn't jump straight out of a neolithic lifestyle and right onto the cutting edge of modern political science, skipping all of the interim stages of evolution, nor IMO did the Canaanites jump straight into a sophisticated, abstract belief system directly from their pre-historic idolatry. Rather, Canaanites were infused with ideas from Egypt, already in a mature form because Egypt was almost there already, and the architects of Atenism were Egyptian nobility. Onyx8 wrote: So apparently the top-down demand that people get on board with monotheism in Egypt was at least problematic. Exactly. And I'm contending that when the Atenists took the show on the road over to Canaan, the same thing happened — the people were willing to listen, and eventually the ideas took root, but the people held onto their little figurines of tribal gods, just in case anything went wrong. It's also likely that the Canaanites did not buy into Judaism for strictly theological reasons. Typically in the ancient world (and on into modern times), people adopt religious positions because of the implied political alliances. So the Atenists show up, and this new set of ideas looks like it might be able to forge an alliance among the Canaanite lords, with the tangible value of providing mutual defense. Tribal deities could never have accomplished that. Similarly, Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire. While the Romans were arguing over which god in the pantheon was the best, none of them would emerge as the clear winner. But the abstract and all-encompassing conception of God that had captivated the minds of the people in Judea had the ability to cut through all of that, especially after Jesus reformulated it in a kinder, gentler way, and without the associated national pride that made Romans hate Jews and vice versa. One more thing: no, there wouldn't be any Bez figurines dropped on the road from Egypt to Canaan, nor would they have appeared in Canaan after the Exodus. Only the Atenists would have left Egypt, and Atenism forbade idolatry. Moses de la Montagne wrote: But I don't know if this theory requires the actual Exodus as it occurs in the bible. That story would naturally be a highly redacted & heavily mythologized version of what were originally a set of oral stories told about the Egyptian Moses, who refined the polytheism of the Hebrews and raised Yahweh to a privileged position. Charles, if I'm reading him right, concedes that the Canaanites had a pantheon. But something shifted the Hebrews away from that polytheism, and into monolatry and monotheism. Exactly.