Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
As a matter of fact, the whole story about Moses seems to be fiction! There's no independent evidence that he ever existed, no evidence that there were ever Jews enslaved in Egypt, at least not in the vast numbers portrayed in the Bible, no evidence of a Hebrew Exodus, no evidence of millions of people spending 40 years in Sinai. Last I heard, even some Jewish scholars now doubt that Moses, even if he existed, ever wrote the first five books of the Bible, as has been traditionally believed. It's all myths and story telling, teaching tools for uneducated people. Aside from some of the more arcane dietary and clothing laws of the Bible, there is nothing in there that wasn't common in most of the earlier cultures around the world at the time. The Hebrews/Jews just adopted those that worked for them, changed those that needed to be changed to agree with their own beliefs, then wrote it up as if they invented it.
What I have a real problem with is the way in which science so often seems to be the victim of fads of one kind and another. Decades back, there were all these findings that this or that from the bible was now proven, or partly proven, or explained - by both Christian and non-Christian archelogists. This decade the fad seems to be that it is all just smoke and mirrors. I am extremely sceptical about these all-or-nothing waves.

Hold on to your hat Thorne - I believe in the bible! What I mean is, I do not believe that things written down there were taken completely out of the thin air. The archeologists now want us to believe that nothing happened, Moses did not excist, the jews were never in Egypt, nobody emigrated, it is all just a methaphor or allergory about freedom. I note that when archeologists are at loose ends, the word allegory thends to pop up a lot, because they know darn well that things are written down for a reason and they feel they have to come up with some sort of explanation.

Now, I believe that when something is written down, it is because something happened. It may be embellished, exaggerated, given a specific meaning, get garbled over the years, be partiallly inspired by myth (themselves distant account of who knows what) but they did not just get pulled out of thin air.

The latest is that no traces can be found of people wandering about in the dessert for 40 years - well, maybe that would be extremely difficult with tribes that had few things that would survive, and in a big dessert too. Maybe be they did not take 40 years to cross - why should they have? They say millions cannot survive in these areas with sheep and what not - well, maybe it wasn't millions - maybe it was thousands.

Some say thousands of jews were taken to Egypt as POWs in wars - there are always wars going on in these areas. Some say thousands more emigrated from Canaan to Egypt because there was a famine and Egypt was fertile. Maybe thousands left centuries later because of whatever natural disasters or plagues wreacked havoc in the country, and maybe Moses lead number of them out by way of a new, mono theistic religion and various promises of a better place.

Or maybe something different happened. But obviously (to me) something did.