This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #425, on the subject of Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
6. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?
7. For the seventh objection, we addressed the issue of anachronisms, and particularly those related to place names, in #422:  Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?
8. The absurdity of the eighth objection is displayed in #423:  What Kind of Infrastructure Did the Wandering Israelites Need?
9. We looked at the penultimate objection in #424:  Did the Earth Really Stop Turning?

The final objection raised by the article is that there are parallels to earlier known writings, and specifically that the story of the birth and early life of Moses has similarities to the earlier story of the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great of perhaps a millennium before.  Based on this, the article decides that Moses was a fictional character invented when King Cyrus permitted the Israelites deported by Nebuchadnezzar to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple.

It is certainly true that there are events reported in the Bible that parallel accounts from other countries.  There are several plausible explanations for these.  Liberal scholars (we discussed in the first article of this series) always assert that they demonstrate that the biblical accounts are later derivative versions, but that’s presumptive.  There are many reasons to believe that the Biblical accounts, usually simpler, are the originals from which the others are elaborations, or that both are developed from the same tradition independently.

It also appears that God has mirrored the real historic events of the Bible in the myths of other peoples.  The virgin birth is the reality of the many myths about gods having children through human women.  The resurrection of Jesus is the realization of the imagery of the corn king deities found in many cultures.  It is not impossible that God prefigured some of the early events of the life of Moses in the myth of Sargon, as a sort of prophetic revelation to a people who were not from Israel, pointing to Himself.

At the same time, similarities between Moses and other ancient heroes do not falsify the accounts.  It might be that Moses’ mother got the idea of hiding her son in the rushes from her knowledge of that earlier myth; it might simply be coincidence, that she had that idea which someone else had had earlier.  I’m sure that many of my original ideas have been original ideas previously elsewhere.  There are many differences between the accounts (for example, the inclusion of Moses’ sister Miriam watching him in the rushes), which would mean that if the events as reported about Moses are fictional, they are of a quality of realistic fiction unknown for millennia thereafter.

Further, if you assume that Moses was a fictional character invented as late as Babylon, you have to explain too much about everything else.  To what Law were the psalms referring in so many instances?  At what point do the historic books become actual history, and how did Israel come to exist before that time if not through the events recorded in the earlier books?  The pre-exilic prophets, such as Isaiah and Amos, don’t seem likely to have existed if there was no Torah, or at least something remarkably like it.  And when Ezra and Nehemiah returned from exile to “rebuild” the temple, exactly what were they rebuilding?  Without Moses we have no tabernacle; without the tabernacle we have no original design for the temple.  Pre-exilic Israel simply does not exist in any discoverable form without those documents, and those documents do not exist without Moses.  Or do we want to claim that the entire Old Testament was invented after the last events it records, and foisted on the nation as if it had always existed?  That seems far less likely than the alternative that they are actual historic records.

And if, as is claimed, the events of Exodus were written centuries later to give cohesion to a people leaving from Babylon, why does the story so effectively attack the gods of Egypt rather than the gods of Babylon?

In their last words, the authors of the article reveal that they have an agenda.  They assert that the entire Bible is fiction written for political purposes, and that therefore the Jewish people should abandon any claim they think it gives them to the land it says was given to Abraham.  They are in essence blaming Judaism, and perhaps Christianity, for the conflict in the Middle East, and saying that we should stop thinking that anything in our religions is true so that we can get along with people who disagree with us–as if agreeing with people was either a necessary or a sufficient condition to getting along with them.

I’m sorry.  I’m not a terribly patriotic person, but I do believe that it is true that those we Americans call the Founding Fathers risked and sometimes lost their lives to establish this nation on some Deist/Enlightenment principles about the rights of humans, and that several wars have been fought to preserve the nation they created and protect those rights.  Some things are “true facts”.  Pretending that they are false because you would like history to be different is lying about the past.  Certainly we don’t know everything about the events of the Exodus account, but there’s no absolute reason to disbelieve them in their entirety, or in any particular point raised by the objectors.

And the ultimate problem that liberal scholars have failed ever to answer adquately is, if the Israelites did not escape from slavery in Egypt, travel across the wilderness, and conquer the land then known as Canaan, whence did they come and how did they become a nation?  The most cogent and coherent explanation for their existence is their own carefully recorded and preserved history, and that they did not much matter to the self-important “big” nations surrounding them does not negate that.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #424, on the subject of Did the Earth Really Stop Turning?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
6. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?
7. For the seventh objection, we addressed the issue of anachronisms, and particularly those related to place names, in #422:  Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?
8. The absurdity of the eighth objection is displayed in #423:  What Kind of Infrastructure Did the Wandering Israelites Need?

The article’s penultimate objection is “Can the earth ever stop spinning?”  This, of course, references the account of the battle in which we are told that as long as Moses held his hands up, “the sun stood still in the midst of the heavens”.  It is, of course, impossible, which is the point the article makes.

The first objection is that there is no record of such an event anywhere else in the world.  After all, if the earth had stopped turning (the author never considers whether the miracle could have been accomplished some other way) the length of the day would have been increased everywhere, and other cultures would have noticed this.  Yet outside the Bible ancient history is silent on this point.

That’s not exactly true.  In fact, the Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs, and possibly the Egyptians all have mention of an unusually long day in their ancient writings.  The real issue is whether any of these correspond to the date of the biblical battle (or indeed, to each other), which is difficult given our lack of knowledge about placing events on these ancient calendars.  It is certainly peculiar that the Babylonians don’t mention it, but then, they were mostly interested in the night skies, and this reportedly happened during the day in the Middle East.

So maybe there are other records, and maybe not, but records of the past are spotty at best, and we again have the problem of the argument from silence.

From there, the article argues that were the earth abruptly to stop spinning, everything on its surface would have been hurled into the air.  Certainly there is merit to this objection–the rotational velocity of the surface of the earth at the equator is almost a thousand miles per hour.  This, though, is something of a foolish objection.  Let us suppose that indeed God momentarily cancelled all the momentum in the mass of the earth.  What would cause everything to be thrown?  Why, the fact that it, too, has momentum–and if God actually did cancel the momentum of the earth itself, it would have been a terrible oversight for him to have failed to do so for all of those other objects.  Either it was a miracle or it wasn’t, and if it was, it doesn’t need to be limited.

On the other hand, the text does not say that the earth stopped.  It says that the sun stood still–that is, that it appeared to stop moving across the sky–and there are many ways that might happen.

Immanuel Velikovski, early twentieth century scholar, doesn’t get much respect for his theories, but among his interesting proposals is the notion that a near-collision of the earth with another massive object could have pulled us out of our orbit slightly and returned us to it.  Remember, what matters is the visible angle of the sun relative to the ground over the Middle East.  That angle is a function not only of the rotation of the earth but of its revolution around the sun, and the gravitic affect of a significant enough mass at the right angle could have pulled the earth in such a manner that it continued rotating, or possibly slowed slightly, but was drawn away from its orbit such that the angle to the sun was not altered, or was altered more slowly.  Then as the object passed out of range it could have pulled the earth back into orbit and onto its normal course.  It is an incredibly difficult outcome to achieve, but it would be a miracle that does not violate any of the laws of physics as we understand them.

Is that how God did it?  I don’t know.  I only know that it’s a plausible answer.  God being God, it is possible that He froze time for everywhere else in the universe for a few hours so that the battle could be completed in a sort of temporal bubble–we see them all the time in fantasy and science fiction, but certainly the inventor of time could tamper with it if He had reason.  The idea that God “doesn’t break His own rules” has merit, but we don’t know what the rules are or what would constitute “breaking” them, and tampering with the laws of how the universe works–well, it would be like snatching the cue ball off the pool table.  It breaks the rules of the game, but not the rules of reality, and in this case, the rules of reality are outside our knowledge.

So given what we know about God, it is certainly possible that one way or another the sun appeared to hold its position in the sky for an extended period, as the account suggests.  That we don’t know how it was done does not mean it never happened; that we can imagine how it might have been done means that it is not irrational to believe it.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #423, on the subject of What Kind of Infrastructure Did the Wandering Israelites Need?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
6. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?
7. For the seventh objection, we addressed the issue of anachronisms, and particularly those related to place names, in #422:  Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?

The article’s eighth objection is “What would it take infrastructure wise for a community of 2,500,000 to function?”.

I don’t want to say that the article is being silly at this point, but–well, I’m going to address a few of their points, not in sequence.

The article states, “Factories and mining facilities were needed as they all had spades, tools, and weapons.”

“Factories” are an invention of the industrial revolution.  The word itself was created in the mid sixteenth century.  Prior to that, objects were made by the people who needed them, or by skilled craftsmen.  The best guess dating for the Exodus (between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries before Christ) puts it in the late bronze age, so metal tools and weapons could be forged in simple fires, as indeed the Native Americans were doing with copper before the arrival of Europeans–if they used metal at all.  Just because they had shovels did not mean they had metal shovels.  Wooden shovels would have been adequate to the job, and I suspect if put to it even I could make a wooden shovel.  They might even have used stone tools for some tasks.

The article acknowledges “Since their food was rained down for them as manna, we can skip that necessity,” but fails to mention (Deuteronomy 29:5) that their clothes and sandals did not wear out.  The author seems to believe that clothes for the children had to be manufactured, but it was the ordinary practice of the time that people made their own clothes.  It speaks of needing hospitals, which were actually invented by Christians millennia later; schools, for a people who raised and taught their own children; medicines, which were herbal; first aid stations–the author exhibits no understanding of pre-modern societies, and less of nomadic ones.

The only question he raises that has any force at all is the need to find water; and the force it has is largely based on the statement that they were wandering in the “desert”.  That word has a very specific meaning in the modern vocabulary, based on the annual level of rainfall.  The ancient word, though, was better understood as “lonesome place”, the place where no one lived, the wilderness.  These people had a heritage of being shepherds.  They were accustomed to moving with the grass and the watering holes.

Was there enough water to hydrate that many people and their animals?  It does sound like it would take a miracle–but we already know that they were being fed by a miracle, the manna that they collected fresh every day.  We don’t have any of it to examine; we can’t guess the moisture content (and many desert creatures get all their hydration from the plants they eat).  Also, although we say they were “wandering” in the desert, they weren’t really–they were following the pillar of fire, the presence of God that told them when and where to move.  Undoubtedly part of that would have been to bring them to fresh water supplies when needed.

And the text addresses the issue of water.  On two occaisions Moses miraculously caused water to spring out of the rocks.  What is more important than that he did this is that God had him do it specifically to communicate to the people that they were not to worry about water.  He guaranteed they would have it.  They did not need plumbing (another terribly modern concept) to receive it.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #422, on the subject of Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

0. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
1. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
2. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
3. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
4. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
5. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
6. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?

The article’s seventh objection is “There are many anachronisms”.

As I mentioned in the introductory article, I am not an Old Testament scholar; I am a New Testament scholar and teacher.  I can’t actually say to what degree there are anachronisms in the Torah–but I can give some principles that might help.

The article specifically targets the phrase “before any kings ruled over the sons of Israel”, claiming that it proves that the books were not written until a time after there were kings.  There are several points to make in response to this, but one is that Moses specifically predicted that Israel would have kings (see Deuteronomy 17:14ff and 28:36), and once that prediction has been made it is not unreasonable for the writer to say that these certain things happened before there were kings.

Further, in this connection and in connection with the statement that there are place names used that did not exist for centuries after the Exodus, two things must be asserted.

First, among those of us who hold to some form of inerrancy, the rule is generally that the Bible was completely correct in its original text.  I know a fair amount about New Testament textual criticism, the effort to establish the original text of those books; I also know that there are problems with applying these techniques to the Old Testament.  Chief among these is that the accepted text in the Jewish community, the Masoretic Text, was preserved over the centuries in a very unusual way.  Each copy was reverently and meticulously made from an older copy, looking at the next letter, writing that letter, checking that letter, then moving to the next, and ultimately when the new copy had been completed the old was reverently destroyed.  Of course, we have versions of the Hebrew text that are outside that tradition, plus early translations to other ancient languages, but the older the document in question the more difficult it is to establish the original text.  It may be that changes have crept into the Torah which we cannot correct.

The second point, though, is that it is not at all improbable that there were changes made in the early centuries.  Particularly with place names, if the original document recorded a city or a mountain or some other landmark by the name it had at the time the document was written, and then over time the name changed, it is not at all unlikely that copyists preserving the text for the next generation would have replaced the original name with that name which would be known by the intended audience.  It is similarly not at all implausible that the comment about events occurring before there were kings in Israel was a later accretion added so as to avert reader confusion.  We see this in the New Testament at times, that there is a short text in most of the earliest copies, and then a clarifying comment appears in a margin, and then copyists mistakenly insert that comment into the text believing it to be an editorial correction.  After all, these accounts were intended in large part to provide for the people an understanding of their past, and the fewer place names they recognized the more the story seems to become a fantasy.  Thus a copyist might well say, oh, that’s not called that anymore, now it’s called this, so we’ll update it.

Of course, the copyist could be wrong, and that would mean that an error crept into the text.  Most of us don’t have a problem with the possibility that the text we have is not absolutely accurately the one produced by Moses; the changes are undoubtedly going to be minor and not significant to our understanding of that which they report.

So ultimately the kinds of anachronisms that are claimed to be in the Torah are not a sort that would invalidate the assertion that the original documents date from the events they claim to report and over centuries minor accretions and corrections have adhered to the text without impacting the integrity of the core events reported.