'13-10-18, 09:55 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Agrippina wrote: Evidence for this please? I'm still looking for the exact reference, but here are a few tidbits that I found in a quick search: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/horemheb.htm Regardless of these efforts, there was apparently several instances of tomb vandalism during the reign of Horemheb. We know that the tomb of Tuthmosis IV was robbed and then restored in Horemheb's eighth year as ruler. Graffiti recording the restoration credits Maya with the work, and he was probably also responsible for the re-closure of Tutankhamun's tomb, which also seems to have suffered the attention of robbers. Once it was re-closed, it obviously wasn't re-opened, or there wouldn't have been much left for Carter to find. So why wasn't it found by scavengers? http://www.crystalinks.com/tut.html Although all the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes were later plundered, the tomb in which Tutankhamen was ultimately buried was hidden by rock chips dumped from cutting the tomb of a later king. I'll let you know when I find the exact reference that I was quoting from memory above. BTW, are you going to produce some archaeological evidence for your Babylonian captivity "theory"?
'13-10-18, 09:58 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus The_Metatron wrote: CharlesChandler wrote: Sounds like you fell in love. This is how you support your argument? I didn't want to leave this thread until I learned how to be a skeptic, engaging in critical reasoning and stuff, like the old-timers here. How am I doing so far?
'13-10-18, 10:13 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler said: BTW, are you going to produce some archaeological evidence for your Babylonian captivity "theory"? Have you read "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman? Look specifically at the section after page 290 for the Babylonian exile. And do you know about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Chronicles? The seventh year: In the month Kislev the king of Akkad mustered his army and marched to Hattu. He encamped against the city of Judah and on the second day of the month Adar he captured the city (and) seized (its) king. A king of his own choice he appointed in the city (and) taking the vast tribute he brought it into Babylon. This is from extra-biblical evidence.
'13-10-18, 11:08 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Agrippina wrote: This is from extra-biblical evidence. I can cite extra-biblical literary "evidence" for the Exodus, and you weren't impressed. In order to float your Babylonian captivity "theory" in this critical environment, you have to provide archaeological evidence. It should be easy to do, since the supposed events were nearly 1000 years later than the ones I'm describing. If you cannot provide such evidence, your "theory" is highly suspect. Do you know what "archaeological evidence" means? If not, please look it up. Or, to put it more tactfully... JVRaines wrote: Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, grin-grin, say no more, say no more. That means you.
'13-10-18, 11:40 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler wrote: Agrippina wrote: This is from extra-biblical evidence. I can cite extra-biblical literary "evidence" for the Exodus, and you weren't impressed. In order to float your Babylonian captivity "theory" in this critical environment, you have to provide archaeological evidence. It should be easy to do, since the supposed events were nearly 1000 years later than the ones I'm describing. If you cannot provide such evidence, your "theory" is highly suspect. Do you know what "archaeological evidence" means? If not, please look it up. Or, to put it more tactfully... JVRaines wrote: Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, grin-grin, say no more, say no more. That means you. Oh for Christ's sake Charles, if you even bothered to read Finkelstein's book, or looked at the quote I gave you, it came from archeological evidence. What the hell did you think it was, an email sent to me from the past? Did you even read the first sentence of the Wikipedia link: The Babylonian Chronicles are many series of tablets recording major events in Babylonian history. They are thus one of the first steps in the development of ancient historiography. The Babylonian Chronicles were written from the reign of Nabonassar up to the Parthian Period, by Babylonian astronomers ("Chaldaeans"), who probably used the Astronomical Diaries as their source. Almost all of the tablets were identified as chronicles once in the collection of the British Museum, having been acquired via antiquities dealers from unknown excavations in the 19th century. All but three of the chronicles are unprovenanced.
'13-10-18, 12:20 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Tablets are literary references, no better or worse than papyrus manuscripts. I'm talking about physical evidence of the physical presence of real people, not just taking somebody's word for it. And might I remind you that you're talking about supposed events that are over 700 years later than the ones I'm talking about. It's a bit easier to understand why we can't find physical evidence (i.e., non-literary) of a small number of people leaving Egypt c. 1312 BCE. But it's a lot harder to understand why there wouldn't be physical evidence of the destruction of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, and the supposed "captivity" thereafter. I haven't read "The Bible Unearthed", but if they're claiming that they have physical evidence, not much of the rest of the archaeological community has been informed, because that's not what I'm reading anywhere else. And as others have commented on what I'm saying, the trail from Jerusalem to Babylon should be littered with the proof — campfires, misplaced trinkets, bloody rags, etc. If I'm going to engage in your style of shoddy logic, I get to call absence of evidence tantamount to evidence against, and I have a much stronger point than you, because your event is 700 years later than mine. If you weren't so arrogant, you'd see how arrogant you really are.
'13-10-18, 14:27 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus I'm watching the YouTube version of "The Bible Unearthed". One of the reasons for thinking that the Biblical story begins in the 7th century BCE is that camels weren't domesticated until the 1st millennium BCE. But here's what the Wikipedia article on camels had to say: Dromedaries [i.e., one-humped camel, the most common type] may have first been domesticated by humans in Somalia and southern Arabia, around 3,000 BC, the Bactrian in central Asia around 2,500 BC. Does the book elaborate on this?
'13-10-18, 15:03 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus You know what? Read the damn thing. Look at particularly page 37, I'm not going to type it out for you.
'13-10-18, 15:06 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler wrote: Tablets are literary references, no better or worse than papyrus manuscripts. I'm talking about physical evidence of the physical presence of real people, not just taking somebody's word for it. And might I remind you that you're talking about supposed events that are over 700 years later than the ones I'm talking about. It's a bit easier to understand why we can't find physical evidence (i.e., non-literary) of a small number of people leaving Egypt c. 1312 BCE. But it's a lot harder to understand why there wouldn't be physical evidence of the destruction of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, and the supposed "captivity" thereafter. I haven't read "The Bible Unearthed", but if they're claiming that they have physical evidence, not much of the rest of the archaeological community has been informed, because that's not what I'm reading anywhere else. And as others have commented on what I'm saying, the trail from Jerusalem to Babylon should be littered with the proof — campfires, misplaced trinkets, bloody rags, etc. If I'm going to engage in your style of shoddy logic, I get to call absence of evidence tantamount to evidence against, and I have a much stronger point than you, because your event is 700 years later than mine. If you weren't so arrogant, you'd see how arrogant you really are. Ooooh arrogant. I've been called worse. I don't recall the Bible claiming that it took them 40 years to wander from Jerusalem to Babylon. Also I don't understand why you are refuting stone tablets as evidence, it's a lot more than "hmmm I think the exodus story might be true because I can assume this and presume that."
'13-10-18, 15:20 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Here's another book you can read: http://www.amazon.com/Jerusalem-Besieged-Ancient-Canaan-Modern/dp/0472031201
'13-10-18, 21:57 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus OK, I'm on the second "The Bible Unearthed" video now (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDDs8HgOZ4o). At 19:40, in talking about the Merneptah stele, it says: We know the date at which the stele was erected: 1207 BCE. At that time, Israel was already in Canaan. So the Exodus could not have occurred before this date. Ummm, how is it that the Exodus could not have occurred before the first nation of Israel was established?
'13-10-19, 00:16 CharlesChandler	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus After watching the first two videos of "The Bible Unearthed", my opinion is that Finkelstein and Silberman are making a good case for the whole thing coming together in the 7th Century BCE into the version of the OT that survived, and which we have therefore inherited. I'll easily concede that "slaves in Egypt" could have actually been "Israelites under Assyrian domination", and that many other threads in the OT were similarly fresh in their minds from recent events. But I'm still not convinced that all of those threads run no further back than a few generations before Josiah. To think that the priests and scribes manufactured the whole thing from scratch, using only epiphanies that occurred to them during that period, is ignorant of the way faiths actually worked, in ancient and modern times. To accomplish the unification of Israel and Judea, they had to claim that the gods of Israel and Judea were both the same god. But if they had just made something up, it would have lacked the authenticity of the ancient gods, which would have made it a tough sell. So it was a fusion, not a fabrication. What does this do to my thesis? I'm starting to see why you folks have been insisting that the "Exodus" was a literary formulation in the 7th Century BCE, not an "historical fact", from the period I'm focusing on, or any other. So a thread entitled "the Pharaoh of the Exodus" that talks about Akhenaten dings your BS meters, and you started attacking the premises of the Exodus-actually-happened mentality. Almost all of them were straw-man attacks. You defeated me for things I didn't say. But not having prior familiarity with your position, I didn't realize how I totally failed to distinguish my thesis from what you can demonstrate is false. So I'll accept half of the blame for the straw man attacks. I didn't realize that wearing a straw hat would bring me such wrath!!! The net result here is a separation of the chaff from the grain of what I'm actually saying. Here's a longer excerpt from what I said in post #20, with new bolding: CharlesChandler wrote: 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. The mistake here was in me hitching my wagon to the Exodus story, which you've got hitched to a different set of circumstances, and thus the ideological clash. For me to remove my straw hat, so that I am not mistaken for the straw man that you're attacking, I have to reformulate my thesis, to say that some of the ideas in the OT trace straight back to Ramose and Akhenaten, and can only be fully understood in the Egyptian context. The Exodus, as told in the Bible, didn't happen. The difference between your position and mine is that I thought that I could get away with just downsizing the number of people involved, leaving the story centered on the period that interests me, but you've got the story re-attributed to a different period. But the clash was unnecessary, because my thesis never relied on slaves, nor on a major migration of people. I'm actually focusing mainly on the cultural implications of the emergence of monotheistic ideas at a time when there was a pandemic of influenza and/or bubonic plague. This explains the isolationism of the Semites in the early Iron Age (1200~1000 BCE), which can be proved with archaeology and with modern DNA studies. My thesis is that the Israelites had a great set of ideas, which were non-superstitious and humanistic, courtesy of Ramose and Akhenaten. But through no fault of their own, a pandemic occurred, with two enduring effects. First, they learned to live a healthier life, eating right, bathing regularly, not partaking in promiscuity, etc. Second, they learned not to intermingle with others who did not abide by their strict codes. These two effects, taken together, created a powerful dynamic. Because their philosophy was practical and less superstitious, the success of the framework was guaranteed. But with a contagious disease going around, there was a lot of cultural mistrust, and isolationism. This created a self-distilling culture, that would ultimately emerge as the champions of practical, healthy, non-superstitious monotheism, which we see in the literature from the 7th Century BCE that persisted. Thus I actually had no need to hitch my wagon to the Exodus — I just didn't realize that coming into this. Now, does my wagon still need to be hitched to Ramose and Akhenaten? If my thesis is about the emergence of a more rational mentality, with a single, abstract deity, and with a large volume of practical codes for living a healthy life, is there reason to believe that this could have only germinated in the Amarna heresy, and in the context of a pandemic afflicting everybody else who does not abide by the same codes? Could similar circumstances, with similar effects, have occurred during a different period? Is it necessary for there to have been a pandemic, to supply the motivation for the healthy lifestyle, and for the isolationism? I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever know. But I'll separate the chaff from the grain in what I'm presenting on my website, to eliminate future confusion concerning what I'm actually saying. And I'll keep studying. I'm actually currently considering the possibility that the pandemic in question might have contributed significantly to the Bronze Age Collapse, with more far-reaching effects than I had originally considered. My initial foray in this direction hasn't turned up any evidence of disease being the cause of the Collapse, but then again, I'm not seeing the Collapse being attributed convincingly to anything else either. In short, what I'm reading is basically saying that nobody really knows why everything just fell apart, but it did, and then out of the rubble emerged the Iron Age. OK. So could influenza and/or bubonic plague, spreading among a population that had no concept of sanitation, have done that? The implications would be staggering. If I had to guess, I'm not going to find a smoking gun here. Still, it's interesting to consider possibilities. Things happen for reasons, you know? BTW, the one thing that I like the most about Finkelstein and Silberman's work is that they treat the Bible as just one more artifact, which is evidence of something, but is not to be taken at face value. Judging by the straw man attacks, I failed to make my position on this issue clear, but that's definitely how I'm thinking.
'13-10-19, 06:00 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus I'm pleased about a few things you've said here: 1 You've admitted your error 2 You've admitted that you've learnt something 3 You took the trouble to examine the information I gave you. I would recommend that you buy the book, and read the parts you're questioning in context. Also I recommend another book, a little older than this one, that you might find to be an interesting read. It's also available as an audio book: Jews, God and History by Max I Dimont What is particularly interesting about this book is that it was written 50 years ago, and that he isn't pushing a religious agenda with it, merely placing the history of the Jewish people in place. There's another one, a fictional history of Israel, and a long read, but fascinating, and very well-researched with accurate history, as are all his books: The Source, by James Michener. I take it you have read Herodotus's History? Have you also read the other classic that's given to Ancient History students: Thuycidides's History of the Peloponnesian War. Why I recommend these two is because it gives some perspective to the insignificance of the Jewish people, because neither of these ancient historians make a big deal of the people of the Bible, who claim, throughout the Bible that they were a force to be reckoned with. Imagine a people who claim to be as great, if not greater than any of the other people of the region, having no other written history, than that which they wrote themselves? While there is ample ex-biblical history for every other people of the time, yet by comparison, practically nothing about the Jews. It says a lot about how important they really were to the overall history of the Near East.
'13-10-19, 06:23 Thomas Eshuis	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus To lazy to read the entire thread. What claim is CharlesChandler trying to assert?
'13-10-19, 06:24 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Thomas Eshuis wrote: To lazy to read the entire thread. What claim is CharlesChandler trying to assert? That the Exodus might be true.
'13-10-19, 06:30 Thomas Eshuis	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Agrippina wrote: Thomas Eshuis wrote: To lazy to read the entire thread. What claim is CharlesChandler trying to assert? That the Exodus might be true. Ah and he's been pointed out that there's no evidence for it? And quite a bit against certain details of the biblical story?
'13-10-19, 06:34 Thomas Eshuis	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler wrote: After watching the first two videos of "The Bible Unearthed", my opinion is that Finkelstein and Silberman are making a good case for the whole thing coming together in the 7th Century BCE into the version of the OT that survived, and which we have therefore inherited. I'll easily concede that "slaves in Egypt" could have actually been "Israelites under Assyrian domination", and that many other threads in the OT were similarly fresh in their minds from recent events. But I'm still not convinced that all of those threads run no further back than a few generations before Josiah. To think that the priests and scribes manufactured the whole thing from scratch, using only epiphanies that occurred to them during that period, is ignorant of the way faiths actually worked, in ancient and modern times. To accomplish the unification of Israel and Judea, they had to claim that the gods of Israel and Judea were both the same god. But if they had just made something up, it would have lacked the authenticity of the ancient gods, which would have made it a tough sell. So it was a fusion, not a fabrication. What does this do to my thesis? I'm starting to see why you folks have been insisting that the "Exodus" was a literary formulation in the 7th Century BCE, not an "historical fact", from the period I'm focusing on, or any other. So a thread entitled "the Pharaoh of the Exodus" that talks about Akhenaten dings your BS meters, and you started attacking the premises of the Exodus-actually-happened mentality. Almost all of them were straw-man attacks. You defeated me for things I didn't say. But not having prior familiarity with your position, I didn't realize how I totally failed to distinguish my thesis from what you can demonstrate is false. So I'll accept half of the blame for the straw man attacks. I didn't realize that wearing a straw hat would bring me such wrath!!! The net result here is a separation of the chaff from the grain of what I'm actually saying. Here's a longer excerpt from what I said in post #20, with new bolding: CharlesChandler wrote: 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. The mistake here was in me hitching my wagon to the Exodus story, which you've got hitched to a different set of circumstances, and thus the ideological clash. For me to remove my straw hat, so that I am not mistaken for the straw man that you're attacking, I have to reformulate my thesis, to say that some of the ideas in the OT trace straight back to Ramose and Akhenaten, and can only be fully understood in the Egyptian context. The Exodus, as told in the Bible, didn't happen. The difference between your position and mine is that I thought that I could get away with just downsizing the number of people involved, leaving the story centered on the period that interests me, but you've got the story re-attributed to a different period. But the clash was unnecessary, because my thesis never relied on slaves, nor on a major migration of people. I'm actually focusing mainly on the cultural implications of the emergence of monotheistic ideas at a time when there was a pandemic of influenza and/or bubonic plague. This explains the isolationism of the Semites in the early Iron Age (1200~1000 BCE), which can be proved with archaeology and with modern DNA studies. My thesis is that the Israelites had a great set of ideas, which were non-superstitious and humanistic, courtesy of Ramose and Akhenaten. But through no fault of their own, a pandemic occurred, with two enduring effects. First, they learned to live a healthier life, eating right, bathing regularly, not partaking in promiscuity, etc. Second, they learned not to intermingle with others who did not abide by their strict codes. These two effects, taken together, created a powerful dynamic. Because their philosophy was practical and less superstitious, the success of the framework was guaranteed. But with a contagious disease going around, there was a lot of cultural mistrust, and isolationism. This created a self-distilling culture, that would ultimately emerge as the champions of practical, healthy, non-superstitious monotheism, which we see in the literature from the 7th Century BCE that persisted. Thus I actually had no need to hitch my wagon to the Exodus — I just didn't realize that coming into this. Now, does my wagon still need to be hitched to Ramose and Akhenaten? If my thesis is about the emergence of a more rational mentality, with a single, abstract deity, and with a large volume of practical codes for living a healthy life, is there reason to believe that this could have only germinated in the Amarna heresy, and in the context of a pandemic afflicting everybody else who does not abide by the same codes? Could similar circumstances, with similar effects, have occurred during a different period? Is it necessary for there to have been a pandemic, to supply the motivation for the healthy lifestyle, and for the isolationism? I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever know. But I'll separate the chaff from the grain in what I'm presenting on my website, to eliminate future confusion concerning what I'm actually saying. And I'll keep studying. I'm actually currently considering the possibility that the pandemic in question might have contributed significantly to the Bronze Age Collapse, with more far-reaching effects than I had originally considered. My initial foray in this direction hasn't turned up any evidence of disease being the cause of the Collapse, but then again, I'm not seeing the Collapse being attributed convincingly to anything else either. In short, what I'm reading is basically saying that nobody really knows why everything just fell apart, but it did, and then out of the rubble emerged the Iron Age. OK. So could influenza and/or bubonic plague, spreading among a population that had no concept of sanitation, have done that? The implications would be staggering. If I had to guess, I'm not going to find a smoking gun here. Still, it's interesting to consider possibilities. Things happen for reasons, you know? BTW, the one thing that I like the most about Finkelstein and Silberman's work is that they treat the Bible as just one more artifact, which is evidence of something, but is not to be taken at face value. Judging by the straw man attacks, I failed to make my position on this issue clear, but that's definitely how I'm thinking. CharlesChandler, 2 things: 1. Semites =/= Isrealites/Jews 2. Can you please formulate in one or two sentences, what the point of your thesis is? Please state clearly what claim you are seeking to defend/
'13-10-19, 06:44 Agrippina	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Thomas Eshuis wrote: Agrippina wrote: Thomas Eshuis wrote: To lazy to read the entire thread. What claim is CharlesChandler trying to assert? That the Exodus might be true. Ah and he's been pointed out that there's no evidence for it? And quite a bit against certain details of the biblical story? Yes, but he insists that he's identified the "pharaoh" and "Moses." The discussion became a little heated until he actually looked at some of the current archeological evidence that refutes the claim, albeit the video and not the actual book, but thankfully, he's not blindly denying the evidence, he's going to research it. I'm quite pleased to have come across someone who is prepared to admit that they might be mistaken.
'13-10-19, 19:45 Oldskeptic	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus CharlesChandler wrote: After watching the first two videos of "The Bible Unearthed", my opinion is that Finkelstein and Silberman are making a good case for the whole thing coming together in the 7th Century BCE into the version of the OT that survived, and which we have therefore inherited. I'll easily concede that "slaves in Egypt" could have actually been "Israelites under Assyrian domination", and that many other threads in the OT were similarly fresh in their minds from recent events. But I'm still not convinced that all of those threads run no further back than a few generations before Josiah. To think that the priests and scribes manufactured the whole thing from scratch, using only epiphanies that occurred to them during that period, is ignorant of the way faiths actually worked, in ancient and modern times. To accomplish the unification of Israel and Judea, they had to claim that the gods of Israel and Judea were both the same god. But if they had just made something up, it would have lacked the authenticity of the ancient gods, which would have made it a tough sell. So it was a fusion, not a fabrication. What does this do to my thesis? I'm starting to see why you folks have been insisting that the "Exodus" was a literary formulation in the 7th Century BCE, not an "historical fact", from the period I'm focusing on, or any other. So a thread entitled "the Pharaoh of the Exodus" that talks about Akhenaten dings your BS meters, and you started attacking the premises of the Exodus-actually-happened mentality. Almost all of them were straw-man attacks. You defeated me for things I didn't say. But not having prior familiarity with your position, I didn't realize how I totally failed to distinguish my thesis from what you can demonstrate is false. So I'll accept half of the blame for the straw man attacks. I didn't realize that wearing a straw hat would bring me such wrath!!! The net result here is a separation of the chaff from the grain of what I'm actually saying. Here's a longer excerpt from what I said in post #20, with new bolding: CharlesChandler wrote: 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. There is a lot of back peddling going on here. You certainly did claim and have tried to support an exodus as portrayed in the Old Testament, both in your original post and on your website. It was only after it was pointed out to you that it is everything but certain that that exodus never happened that you changed your story to "a relatively small number of people involved". First you want Ramose leading the Hebrews to Canaan and taking 40 years to do it, but then it is just some "missionaries" bringing the word to Canaan. No one was attacking a strawman they were refuting one of your key premises, before you changed your story. Your website: 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 archeological 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. The mistake here was in me hitching my wagon to the Exodus story, which you've got hitched to a different set of circumstances, and thus the ideological clash. There was no ideological clash, you were wrong and rather than admit it you now say, "That's not what I said," when you clearly did. For me to remove my straw hat, so that I am not mistaken for the straw man that you're attacking, I have to reformulate my thesis, to say that some of the ideas in the OT trace straight back to Ramose and Akhenaten, and can only be fully understood in the Egyptian context. Or you could just drop it. There are better explanations for the Israelite development of monotheism in the seventh to second century BCE than a twenty year run of a monotheistic sun god worship 600 years earlier. The Exodus, as told in the Bible, didn't happen. The difference between your position and mine is that I thought that I could get away with just downsizing the number of people involved, leaving the story centered on the period that interests me, but you've got the story re-attributed to a different period. But the clash was unnecessary, because my thesis never relied on slaves, nor on a major migration of people. Why are you telling falsehoods? I'm actually focusing mainly on the cultural implications of the emergence of monotheistic ideas at a time when there was a pandemic of influenza and/or bubonic plague. This explains the isolationism of the Semites Israelites in the early Iron Age (1200~1000 BCE), which can be proved with archaeology and with modern DNA studies. My thesis is that the Israelites had a great set of ideas, which were non-superstitious and humanistic, courtesy of Ramose and Akhenaten. There is no evidence, in fact there is evidence against the idea that the Israelites were anything other than a subset of the Canaanites during the period you mentioned. Worshiping the same set of gods and having the same superstitions. But through no fault of their own, a pandemic occurred, with two enduring effects. First, they learned to live a healthier life, eating right, bathing regularly, not partaking in promiscuity, etc. Where is there any evidence that a plague taught them any of these things? Hand washing and and bathing were religious rituals to be preformed so not to offend their god. And no one really knows when it started in the middle east or who out of all the people of the middle east followed it. Second, they learned not to intermingle with others who did not abide by their strict codes. Or others had similar codes, and the Israelites were a network of interrelated tribes/families with a mistrust of outsiders. These two effects, taken together, created a powerful dynamic. Because their philosophy was practical and less superstitious, the success of the framework was guaranteed. How can you say/know that within the time frame you're talking about that Israelites were more practical or less superstitious than the other Canaanites? But with a contagious disease going around, there was a lot of cultural mistrust, and isolationism. This created a self-distilling culture, that would ultimately emerge as the champions of practical, healthy, non-superstitious monotheism, I fail to see how monotheism would be needed to promote a practical, healthy lifestyle. which we see in the literature from the 7th Century BCE that persisted. Thus I actually had no need to hitch my wagon to the Exodus — I just didn't realize that coming into this. What you need to realize is that attaching bathing, practicality and healthy lifestyles to monotheism as any sort of cause or promoter is fairly irrational. There are many accounts of polytheistic people upon first encountering Europeans being repulsed by the stinking, unclean, unethical Christians; Including the Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans. Now, does my wagon still need to be hitched to Ramose and Akhenaten? If my thesis is about the emergence of a more rational mentality, with a single, abstract deity, and with a large volume of practical codes for living a healthy life, is there reason to believe that this could have only germinated in the Amarna heresy, and in the context of a pandemic afflicting everybody else who does not abide by the same codes? Could similar circumstances, with similar effects, have occurred during a different period? Is it necessary for there to have been a pandemic, to supply the motivation for the healthy lifestyle, and for the isolationism? No. I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever know. But I'll separate the chaff from the grain in what I'm presenting on my website, to eliminate future confusion concerning what I'm actually saying. And I'll keep studying. You do that. I'm actually currently considering the possibility that the pandemic in question might have contributed significantly to the Bronze Age Collapse, with more far-reaching effects than I had originally considered. My initial foray in this direction hasn't turned up any evidence of disease being the cause of the Collapse, but then again, I'm not seeing the Collapse being attributed convincingly to anything else either. In short, what I'm reading is basically saying that nobody really knows why everything just fell apart, but it did, and then out of the rubble emerged the Iron Age. OK. So could influenza and/or bubonic plague, spreading among a population that had no concept of sanitation, have done that? The implications would be staggering. If I had to guess, I'm not going to find a smoking gun here. Still, it's interesting to consider possibilities. Things happen for reasons, you know? Well, considering that cities weren't abandoned and left standing, that they actually were destroyed. I'd go for war between the nations and city states. Nations and city states going after one another continuously until hardly any are left standing from Egypt to Greece. BTW, the one thing that I like the most about Finkelstein and Silberman's work is that they treat the Bible as just one more artifact, which is evidence of something, but is not to be taken at face value. Judging by the straw man attacks, I failed to make my position on this issue clear, but that's definitely how I'm thinking. There were no strawman attacks, get over it. Your position was perfectly clear in your original post. You were trying to promote the idea that Ramose was Moses and led the biblical exodus.
'13-10-19, 19:58 The_Metatron	Re: The Pharaoh of the Exodus Good call, old man. I, too, wasn't buying this whole "Did I say exodus? I didn't mean to say exodus." There was no straw man.