Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Stump a Christian (or a Jew) #5

Who was pharaoh when Moses freed the Hebrews?

10 comments:

  1. Supposedly the whole shebang is just myth.

    Your take?

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    1. My take would require a whole post. The short of it is that there was a sect of monotheists in Egypt who may have fled after the death of Akhenaten, who would have had stone-working experience enough to facilitate the sudden city-building traits of the previously nomadic Semitic people they found past the Sinai Peninsula.

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    2. Actually the story of Exodus may be an embellishment of a battle between the Hibaru tribe who lived in a semi-autonomous region of the Egyptian Empire and the Egyptian military.The "40 years of wandering" in the desert is thought to have been a guerilla war of attrition against the Egyptian army. If you leave out all the supernatural crap and you retranslate in the context of a military campaign, it starts to make a lot of sense. There was a Battles BC episode about this on the History Channel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phrvxAcugiM

      It's an interesting theory, take it or leave it.

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  2. Nobody. Moses didn't free the Hebrews. It's fiction.

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  3. The pharoh was Pharoh. Least that was what I thought as a kid. Wasn't that his name then?

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    1. Are you suggesting that's how Martin Luther King Jr. got his surname?

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    2. Ah well now, that depends. I just assumed that Martin was just another scion of the seeming enormous Junior family. An awful lot of that family seem to have emigrated to the states! :-) Serously though, if I have a point it is just that looking back at my school RE lessons I find it embarassing just how many times I misunderstood stuff. For example in the hymn "There is a green hill far away, Without a city wall" it was years before I had a satisfactory answer to the puzzle of why they felt it necessary in the hymn to state that there was no wall around the hill that the crucifixation took place on! Either I was a bit thick or my education was a bit lacking. Or both. You talk a lot on your blog about how little many atheists know about the religions they criticise. As an ex-christian I think that observation may well extend to many christians as well. My ex-wife came from a different denomination from me and we endlessly had to backtrack and clear up misunderstandings about the nature of the others rituals as they were quite different! For example I was in my 40s before I twigged that some xian deniminations distinguish between baptisms and chrisanings, which I always though were the same thing and used interchangably.

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    3. I just assumed that Martin was just another scion of the seeming enormous Junior family

      LOL

      I misunderstood so many things about Christianity while growing up as well, but that's par for the course for Catholics. I knew when to stand up, when to sit down, when to kneel, and what "transubstantiation" was. Otherwise, I didn't know God had a name until years after I became an atheist.

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  4. There isn't any evidence of anything that happened in the Bible before the Jewish exile. They've got infrared cameras that have found trading routes used by dozens of people at a time in the desert around the time period...but they can't find anything that the children of Israel would have used. That said, the area was controlled by Egypt for quite some time.

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