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The Exodus is simply the single biggest event that should have clear evidence.
It supposedly happened around 1450 BCE, about 3,500 years ago. The population
of Egypt was less than 5 million people.
It supposedly involved two million people across forty years and occured less than 3,500 years ago and there is simply no evidence. Ignoring the complete lack of evidence of the Exodus, any Jew or Christian must believe in the Exodus. To not believe in the Exodus is to
According to the Book of Exodus, God commanded Moses to tell the Israelites to mark a lamb's blood above their doors so that the Angel of Death would pass over them: they would not be touched by the tenth Plague of Egypt, the death of the firstborn. No one analyzes the communication paths back then. How does one tell two million people to hurry home, paint your house and then get ready for a forty year trip. How long would it take to communicate the information. No internet, TV, radio. Smoke signals, perhaps? Where is the evidence of slavery in Egyptian history? Does the bible even mention the Pyramids or the Sphinx? Where are historical records in Egypt concerning the escape/departure of 600,000+ slaves and their families? Where is the evidence of the exodus out? The book of Numbers shows 600,000 men and their families wandering out in the desert of the Sinai peninsula for forty years, hauling around their children, water, wood, food and animals. Yet, they left no artifacts like graves, broken pottery, carcasses of dead animals, etc. Sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people of all ages plus accompanying animals down steep cliffs and corral dropoffs that typify the Gulf of Aqaba, and up the other side is clearly unfeasible. One question that arises is how approximately two million people along with their flocks and herds could ever have been sustained in a barren waterless wasteland. Given the carrying capacity of the barren landscape and the lack of archaeological evidence suggests a massive exodus never happened.
Why did the Egyptians never mention the powerful Hebrew wizard raised by their Queen who turned the goddamn Nile into blood and killed half our population with meteors, plagues, pest invasion and a god of death ?" One tries to imagine two million people walking for forty years in circles, perhaps 10 abreast (along with their herd) with a 20 foot space between the lines.
600,000 men, 2,000,000 people in all
Someone calculated long ago that if that number of people were marching, say, eight across, then when the first ones arrived at Sinai, half of the people would still be in Egypt! Using Google Maps, I measured the Sinai peninsula to be roughly about 150 by 250 miles. The total area of the Sinai peninsula is 23,166 square miles.
Just try to imagine the issue of defacation.
Now, let's talk about graves left behind during this expedition. If the average life span back then was a generous 40 years, then we take 2,000,000 people / 40 = 50,000 equals the number of people who died each year and presumably had to be buried. In 40 years of wandering around, they would have left 40 * 50,000 = 2,000,000 graves. Where? Supposedly, Moses received the Oral Torah on Mt. Sinai way back in 1312 BCE (according to believers). Imagine Moses remembering the details some thirty years later, when he could finally find a scribe to dictate to. I cannot imagine Moses being able to make parchment. All that was available was perhaps clay tablets. Religious fanatics tell us that without God, one has no moral compass that is encompassed in Mosaic law and the Ten Commandments. Of course, Mosaic law and the Ten Commandments were unknown before the Mt. Sinai encounter between Moses and God. By religious logic, these two million people had no morals. The Torah makes for a large number of clay tablets. I have to presume that upon arrival in the promised land, there were a few carts containing the tablets. Did you ever notice that all the great prophets couldn't read or write. Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and Joseph Smith. God is very choosy with his prophets. After 200 years of digging around the Sinai, no trace of any significant migration have been found. No pottery, broken wheels, two million graves, etc. If the jews are slaves for untold years in Egypt, parts of their language and culture would be found within Egyptian language and culture. Historians have found no trace of Hebrew culture within Egyptian culture. Does the bible even mention the Pyramids or the Sphinx? We can safely conclude that the story of Moses is just that, a nice fictional story. The implications are the Torah was all made up from start to finish. Believing in the Exodus implies you believe that
The obvious implications of the Exodus not happening is that the Ten Commandments story on Mt. Sinai never occured. So where did this mythical Mr. Moses come from? Two million people, 603,550 males and their families, as the Torah describes - should have left some remnants that we would find. But few of us ever thought that this number was historical anyway. |
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Using Exodus to expose the monstrous nature of the Old Testament God never fails.
Seriously, I've never once encountered a Christian who has ever been able to explain/justify the Biblical God's monstrous cruelty shown in Exodus with any degree of competence. I've had more than one Christian confess to being deeply disturbed when they are confronted with the logical reality of what the supposedly all-loving, merciful and perfect God they worship did, according to the scripture they think is infallible and literally true. They cannot explain it satisfactorily. Of course, I'm referring chiefly to the massacre of the innocent first-born children of the Egyptians. Now there are a LOT of Yahweh-delivered horrors in Exodus, but his savage murder of innocent children who'd done nothing wrong and weren't in any way responsible for any evil is probably the most brutal of them. Most Christians I've talked with about it had convinced themselves that while tragic, the deaths of these children were entirely Pharoah's fault. Yes, these folks who claim to believe in a merciful god who loves everyone and is perfectly just have taken on the singularly twisted viewpoint that there actually exists a context wherein the mass killing of innocent kids is perfectly acceptable. They believe that Pharoah is responsible for their deaths, as he was warned and given numerous opportunities to heed Yahweh's wishes and let the Hebrews leave Egypt, but he stubbornly refused. So, in these apologists' minds, Yahweh just had to murder all the kids to make his point and free his people! The problem with this is that they get the context wrong: Pharoah didn't refuse to let the Hebrews go, it was Yahweh who intervened and altered Pharoah's very mind and made him refuse to let them go! That's right, the Exodus account is irrefutably clear on this: God deprived Pharoah of Free Will and used mind control to force him to refuse to let the Hebrews go, thus engineering the most heartless, immoral massacre imaginable. According to Exodus, on numerous occasions during the plagues that Yahweh was visiting upon Egypt as punishment for enslaving the Hebrews, Pharaoh had decided to let Moses and his people leave Egypt, with all of their livestock and possessions. But for some reason, this wasn't good enough for Yahweh. He decides to harden Pharaoh's heart, robbing him of Free Will and forcing him to continue to enslave the Hebrews. And this is done just so Yahweh can visit more terrors upon Egypt and demonstrate his powers. Exodus 10: 1Then the Lord said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord." Yahweh outright admits he's forcing Pharaoh and all of his officials to be dicks, mind controlling them just so he can show off what a bigger dick he can be. Thus we get to the final plague, and it's the same story: Pharaoh had previously acknowledged the awesome power of the Hebrew's god and been cowed. He'd said he'd let Moses and his people go. But Yahweh again intervenes. Exodus 11: 1Now the Lord had said to Moses, "I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely. 2 Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold." 3 (The Lord made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and Moses himself was highly regarded in Egypt by Pharaoh's officials and by the people.) 4 So Moses said, "This is what the Lord says: 'About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. 5 Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. 6 There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt - worse than there has ever been or ever will be again. 7 But among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any person or animal.' Then you will know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. 8 All these officials of yours will come to me, bowing down before me and saying, 'Go, you and all the people who follow you!' After that I will leave." Then Moses, hot with anger, left Pharaoh. 9 The Lord had said to Moses, "Pharaoh will refuse to listen to you - so that my wonders may be multiplied in Egypt." 10 Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his country. (Notice that the LORD also mind-controls all the Egyptians into "giving" their precious belongings to the Hebrews) So then Yahweh does as he promised and kills every first-born child of the Egyptians. He kills "from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well." That's right, the all-loving God not only kills the kids of lowly peasants who had no power at all, he kills defenseless animals. What the fuck? Again, there's no other reason for Yahweh to do this except to show off to the Hebrews. He literally massacres thousands of innocent kids and animals that he doesn't have to kill to free the Hebrews just so he can demonstrate how big and bad he is. And to prove it, he lays out the tradition of Passover celebrations before he actually murders the kids. Yup, he tells Moses that from then on, his people will have a ritual celebration of the day Yahweh mind-controlled Pharaoh into being a dick just so he could show off my slaughtering thousands of innocent children. Later in Exodus 13, Moses outright lies to his people and says with acute political spin that Pharaoh had stubbornly refused to obey Yahweh and thus gotten the kids killed... but Yahweh had previously told Moses he was hardening Pharoah's heart. Oh, and Moses tell the Hebrews that from now one they have to sacrifice the first-born offspring of all their livestock. Nice on. And the whole bit with Pharaoh and his army chasing the Hebrews and then getting drowned by the closing of the parted sea? Also due to Yahweh's mind control. He again "hardens Pharoah's heart" and forces him to pursue the Hebrews that he actually wanted to let go. And thus all-loving Yahweh gets to slaughter a lot more people, mostly innocent soldiers simply obeying their king's orders, just so he can again show off how great he is. TL;DR: Exodus clearly says God deprived Pharaoh of Free Will and forced him to keep the Hebrews enslaved, just so he could show off his powers by ultimately murdering thousands of innocent children and others. Had he not mind-controlled Pharaoh, the Hebrews would have been allowed to leave Egypt without anyone dying. Like I said, I've never encountered a Christian who can reconcile the Exodus account with their notions of a loving, merciful god. If one believes the Old Testament is literally true and thus the Exodus account is also such, then there's just no way to square those notions.
The simple reason is that the ancient Hebrew peoples were never in Egypt in any significant numbers, and certainly were not held as a slave race. There is zero archeological evidence for the Exodus story, none. It is a foundational myth, and as such contains story elements that drive the narrative, but in no way should it be thought of as an accurate historical portrayal of events or conditions in Egypt at the time the pyramids were constructed. Accordingly, the original mythologists would have had no reason to conjure anything like the pyramids in their stories. Instead, their intention was to create a coherent story of persecution and redemption, in order to create a political and cultural entity unified around certain core principles. |
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