Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli
I tend to believe the archaeologists who state that Egypt went into sudden miliary decline about 1600 BCE. Their hieroglyphs and those of the Minoans suggest that.
The "Linear A" script of the Minoans is still hard to decipher because of our ignorance of their Eteo-Cretan language, but from the "Linear B" script adapted from it by the Myceneans (in an archaic Greek language), we understand the nature of the documents: warehouse inventories, tax receipts, temple offerings, etc. filled with numbers and pictograms giving quantities and valuations of various goods, with names explaining where they came from and went to. A typical text is: "the ru.ma.ta. of the ru.ma. of ku.do.ni.", that is, the governor(?) of the province(? the root is evidently related to the Etruscan word found in the name "Rome") of Cydonia (for sure! we know where that was) sends "[picture of a wheat sheaf] IIII [picture of a jug] IIIIII", that is, 4 bushels (or whatever measure) of grain and 6 hogsheads (or whatever) of wine; and a bunch of amounts from other ru.ma.ta., followed by the ku.lo. ("total", borrowed from Semitic qol "all") numbers. We get no texts that are historic or literary: all bureaucratic stuff.
The Egyptians had pulled their army out of Palestine/Canaan possibly due to Hyksos or Sea Peoples.
That's like saying "it was either due to Richard the Lionheart's knights, or to Erwin Rommel's tanks." Yes, from thousands of years later all ancient events seem to be close together in time, but the Hyksos were many centuries before the Thera eruption, and the Sea Peoples were many centuries after. The Thera eruption was c. 1500 BC, after which the Greeks increasingly dominated not only the mainland, but started to move on Crete and the other islands, and then there was the Trojan war sometime in the 1200's BC, after which a lot of the Aegean peoples decided to pick up stakes; after rolling over the Hittite Empire, they tried to move down the coast and take Egypt, and were repulsed sometime after 1200 BC, by Rameses III and his successor, ending in Philistia (Gaza and environs).
This left the Canaanite Cities undefended. Canaanites were peaceful traders and not skilled soldiers. They didn't need soldier skills with the Egyptian defending them.
Now they were very weak in defending against hard and vicious desert nomadic raider. Deuteronomy tells the biased side of the story as city after city was taken with brutality, mass murder of men, women, children, and babies. Israelites claim God said they could take the virgin girls for themselves. It was like a Nunnery with praying nuns defending themselves when Hell's Angels moved next door.
This is the kind of romanticized nonsense that makes me want to tear out my hair. There was no such thing as "peaceful traders" in ancient, or even medieval times; EVERYBODY was "hard and vicious" back then, there was no choice in the matter. The Canaanites in fact had superior military technology to the Hebrews, as a passage in Judges acknowledges when it talks about certain parts of Canaan remaining unconquered because they had iron weapons and chariots, while the Hebrews still had Bronze Age weaponry.
1. Archaeologists two years ago unearthed under the Nile Delta mud the remains of the partially built City of Rameses on which the Hebrews were reported to be working.
Built by Rameses II, in the decades before 1200 BC.
2. They debate on the exact year, 1500-1800 BC, but that is the time of the one of the most massive volcanic eruption since the Super-eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra 70,000 years ago that almost wiped out humanity. The Exodus volcano is thought to be Thera on the Island of Santorini. The Ash deposited across Asia and Northeast Africa from the Aegean Sea. The dust flume could be seen as far away as Babylonia/Assyria and the Kingdom of Van. This fits with what Moses was seeing. He saw a dark cloud to his left curving toward the Middle East with the prevailing winds. At night the hot magma bursts glowed in the sky. This is associated with the destruction of Atlantis the Minoan Civilisation. Moses and the Hebrews likely followed that Pillar cloud and fire to the East toward Palestine.
A 300-year uncertainty could hardly be called a debate over the "exact" year (again, this is sort of like "it was around the time of Elizabeth I, or Elizabeth II, not quite sure which"). 1800 BC would be before Abraham. 1500 BC might be a reasonable date for the Hebrews *going IN to Egypt*. 1200 BC is more like when they left.
But Egyptian records mention a terrible disaster after which Egypt was defenceless for several years. Neighbours attacked from Nubia, Cush, and Libya. It was chaos from the sudden loss of the Brilliant General and Pharaoh and the best army of the region if not the world at the time. The pharaoh of the Exodus was Amenhotep II, brilliant general of the 18th Dynasty.
Egyptian records mention several disastrous periods in their very long history. But the years after Amenhotep II were just about the MOST PROSPEROUS TIMES they ever knew! And of course, he was a very long time before Rameses II built the city of Rameses, and you do appear to accept that the Hebrews were still there then.
6. An archaeologist in Cairo, emailed me (after I contacted him) and he says divers have found broken remnants of chariots, chariot wheels and green sword blades (oxidised bronze).
Yes, and this appears to have happened more than once. A "tsunami" is not, however, necessary to explain it (nor would a tsunami from an earthquake in the Aegean reach the Red Sea; we do not find these drowned chariot sites on the *Mediterranean* coast of Egypt, but on the other side). The term "tidal wave", which has been inaccurately applied to tsunamis, originally refers to a phenomenon of extreme, sudden tidal motions. Three factors influence how extreme the tides get: first is the shape of the coast; a "funnel" shape exaggerates the tides, as at the Bay of Fundy in the Canadian Maritimes, where the records for tidal surges, exceeding 40 feet, have been recorded, and at the Severn Estuary between south Wales and the base of the Cornwall peninsula, where the "tidal wave" famously makes the Severn river runs backwards on frequent occasions. Both the Sea of Reeds (on the west side of the Sinai peninsula, up to the south end of the Suez Canal) and the Gulf of Aqaba (on the east side, up to the Jordanian port of Aqaba and Israeli port of Eilat) have this funneling effect (and we find some drowned chariots in both places!). Secondly, tides are most extreme when the sun and moon are directly conjoined (new moon) or opposed (full moon), and the story specifically tells us this happened at full moon. Thirdly, there is the effect of winds and currents, and the story also tells us that a hard wind blew the water, and then turned around and blew it back in. So while this was very fortuitous for the Hebrews, it was not a "supernatural" event, or even a unique one.
