Debate: Is The Exodus Myth or History?

we are live welcome to myth vision podcast i'm your host derek lambert we're going to be talking about the exodus today the debate is the exodus a myth or is it actual history this is a serious question that scholars still wrestle around today and there's been a recent publication in the evangelical book where there are five views of the exodus and in that book various views from uh cultural memory all the way to an early hexose expulsion all are covered within this text so today i have a couple experts um phds if you will in the field that are going to be debating my good friend jonathan jonathan sheffield and he's an auto died act and jonathan actually pressed this on me said derek we got to have this discussion man and i said you know what let's do it and as my friend i said you know let me see if i can talk to some of these other experts because i have communication with them and see if they'd be happy to join jonathan's been debating a lot of people a lot of phds and i just want to say that up front he is trying to figure things out this is me going to bat for my friend jonathan here even though me and him have different ontologies the end of the day he said derek put me in front of some of these people i would love to share my view and he is trying to learn from others as well with that being said i also would hope and want other phds in the field down the road to join in the discussion whether it's debate or discussion doesn't matter uh we did try to approach dr david falk but of course that that is an issue where he doesn't do debates and i may have stirred up some waters in that case where that may not happen don't know at the end of the day we're going to be seeing a debate here today and i hope you guys join in try and be as open-minded as you can i know it's difficult because we always have a football team that we're rooting for but with that being said let's get our intro started and if you have any questions super chat them and i'll ask them during the q a i'll ask them in the order that i receive them and we're going to have an opening on each side 20 minutes each and then we're going to go into an open discussion then q a don't any of you have the guts to play for blood i'm your huckleberry that's just [Music] so [Music] thank you everybody for joining me today here on the exodus debate whether it happened or not if it did what happened etc i really look forward to hearing each person's perspective and we'll be opening first having jonathan sheffield and cj cox they're going to go first with a 20-minute opening i want everyone to know they have youtube channels be sure to go down in the description and uh join them and subscribe go check them out i don't care if you agree with them at the end of the day you can't deny the cartoons that jonathan produces aren't magical and also if you're a mod for myth vision do me a favor go hunt some of these channels post them brag about them in the comment section i'd love to see that happen for dr joshua bowen his book the atheist handbook to the old testament which part two is coming and i think we're going to be talking more about some of the details that might be talked about today and also we have dr maggie bryson she's an egyptologist so i didn't want to spend too much time but is there anything in the intro that you would like to plug about yourself before we actually have the introduction where you start on the exodus no one's no one everyone wants to be humble everyone wants to be like no let's just do this let's get our let's get our uh as you saw the tombstone scene i'm your huckleberry let's get our weapons drawn and let's start okay um we'll let jonathan and cj go first and then after that we'll have dr josh and dr maggie bryson okay just let me know when uh everything's up on screen good to go and give me one second just to get started okay a racehorse a murderer and a dog that did not bark what do these factors tell us about a particular case and how do they relate to our proposed investigation of the exodus narrative in the 1892 book the memories of sherlock holmes sir arthur conan doyle offers us a short story that ties these pieces together a mystery entitled the silver blaze which documents the disappearance of a famous racehorse the night before the murder of the horse's trainer sherlock holmes solves the mystery in part by focusing his attention to a curious incident he recognized that on the night of the murder none of the people he spoke to in his investigation remarked that they had heard barking from the watchdog this fact that the dog did not bark at the intruder when you would expect it to do so while a horse was being stolen led the detective to the conclusion that the evil doer was not a stranger to the dog instead they were someone the dog recognized and thus the dog did not bark the significance of holmes investigation is he was able to draw a conclusion from a negative fact that is the barking that did not occur to assist in solving the case therefore we learn from this story that the absence of expected facts can have immense meaning in building our case for a historic exodus the principles of sir arthur cohen and doyle's short story will become quite applicable to the investigation at hand in truth modern scholarships alternative to the jewish records is a naturalistic explanation reliant on an argument based on silence however the silence does go both ways according to ancient jewish authorities to include philo josephus and the talmud the son of amman ptolemy ii philadelphus commissioned the translation of the pentateuch in the greek tongue from the hebrew around 270 bc on the island of pharos off the coast of alexandria his intention to add the pentateuch to the universal library he was actively establishing in alexandria if the exodus report is truly far-fetched it is odd the egyptian priests and greek officials did not falsify a narrative that would have been viewed as a threat to the egyptian state and religion hence a curious incident of the dog that did not bark the intent is not to draw an absolute conclusion from this silence but instead recognize that the silence of the egyptians and greek officials is nevertheless as significant as the silence for sherlock holmes in the case of the dog that did not bark the publication of the pentateuch at the library of alexandria would have formally made the records available to the egyptian priests and greek officials a reality that would have naturally subjected the pentateuch to criticism among the ruling class and educated elites with this in mind how do we explain the absence of an expected fact from the record regarding such a bold claim by the jews especially from the egyptian priests and greek officials to be clear our argument is not based on a hypothetical assumption but is supported by the following empirical facts of history fact one in the field of egyptian history the egyptian priest manathoe was quite critical of herodotus charging him as a falsifier of facts of several points of egyptian history as a result of his ignorance this initial fact offers two points of reference firstly it supports our case that the egyptians were well aware of what they perceived as errors in their sacred histories resulting from their acquaintance with the greek writings second it provides evidence that when they encountered such errors they responded accordingly oddly enough matatho's silence will respect uh hecatous egyptian history which included material facts that are consistent with the book of exodus hence a prime case of the dog that did not bark fact 2 one area commonly assailed by greek egyptian and latin authors during the hellenistic and roman period is the origin and early history of the jewish nation the literary evidence demonstrates that ancient writers frequently weighed in on this specific issue if the exodus were truly a myth surely ancient independent hostile witnesses would naturally falsify the events account by appealing to its absence in the egyptian records despite the suspected reality the histories of tacitus strabo pompeos tragus theodorus apn celsus and a host of others are consistent with the material facts in the book of exodus yet again we see the dog that did not bark thus the absence of those expected facts supplies positive evidence supporting the validity of the exodus report in the case of the exodus our opposition often posits that the ancient testimonies on this event are late alleging that these reports are not based on reliable data sources and are therefore not used in response let us review the evidence that explains why the ancients were in a better position than current scholars and archaeologists to inspect the source egyptian documentation and construct an empirical history to weigh in on the jewish exodus fact three writing has existed in egypt since around 3250 bc therefore from the period before the supposed time of joseph a jewish exodus and up until the present day there was writing in egypt to that end there would seem to be no known gaps in egyptian history that might impede our investigation fact 4 according to theodorus the egyptian priests had records which were regularly handed down in their sacred books to each successive priest from early times this literary evidence documents the legal chain of custody for the egyptian records via the succession of priests what's more it establishes that copies of the source records were preserved down through the ages we also read in herodotus that he saw the egyptian priests reciting a list of its kings from its records and that egyptians are surpassed by no nation in their strong and ever-present desire to leave upon stone or papyrus permanent records of their history thus supporting theodorus's testimony fact five the rosetta stone proves that the egyptian priests could still read the ancient hieroglyphic writings as late as 196 bc this evident rules out any notion that the egyptians couldn't read the ancient hieroglyphics by that time in fact six during the reign of ptolemy the first it is said he encouraged the egyptian priest to records of their past histories and render them available for use by greek scholars and men of letters who he had invited to live in egypt his goal to better understand how to rule a civilization that has existed for over three thousand years the byproduct of ptolemy's actions is documented in the writings of theodorus who tells us that many greeks visited thebes in the time of ptolemy son of largos and composed histories of egypt from its source records one of which was hecatis this supports the validity of hekatius's writings we can logically infer from these facts that a greek like hecatis at the court of ptolemy in thieves when the egyptian temples were still operational had an unrivaled opportunity in early talmudic times of writing an excellent and accurate history of egypt hecatia's unique advantage to inspect the egyptian sources cannot be replicated by modern scholarship today to that end hecatius's egyptian history is a critical piece of evidence that demonstrates early egyptian records supported the material facts of the book of exodus diodorus who used hectius egyptian history for his earth on the jews further corroborates that point the greek conquest of egypt and surrounding territories was able to leverage the death of these nations information centers thereby pushing the boundaries of our knowledge which it centralized at the library of alexandria resulting in the greatest achievements of the intellect to include systematic histories of the areas the circumstantial evidence even seems to draw the inference that euclid was able to leverage the death of egyptian knowledge in architecture and cartography from years of building to pyramids and control of the nile to compile one of the greatest works in geometry the library essentially operated as a think tank for the better part of six centuries for the ptolemies his scholars and the roman empire i uh and the roman empire iranians spoke of ptolemy's desire to equip his library with the writings of all men as far as they were worth serious attention somewhere between 200 and 700 000 estimated scrolls filled its shelves at the original museum in the royal district of the city and about forty two thousand more works located at the daughter library located in the seraphim the ancient historians had access to this type of information and we do not the documents in those libraries are lost therefore by all estimation modern scholarship is operating with at least 700 000 less documents than the ancient historians and that's just from the library of alexandria all modern scholarship has is what's left from the ancient world not what was available therefore the ancient testimony should have greater standing on this issue and with that i turn my time to um cj and thank you dr bryson and dr josh for allowing me to share my thoughts on this issue 10 minutes left cj thank you um i do want to let everybody know i had an opening statement prepared and my computer decided that it hated me uh either that or god decided he didn't want you to hear my arguments exactly how i wrote them so i'm going to try and my best remember everything that i had here it's not going to be too big a deal but i just want to let you guys know if it sounds a little bit odd that is why and by the way anyone who wants to relinquish the remainder of their time if for whatever reason you don't finish you're more than welcome to do so absolutely thank you um so i want to first get some formalities out of the way thank you doctors uh bryson and boeing for uh having me here today and discussing this with me thank you derek also for the hosting and thank you audience here i know that me and mr sheffield are of course um i guess hostile you might say uh so i appreciate you guys hosting us on your platform i certainly do um enjoy these conversations um i want to go ahead and jump right into some of the arguments that i had here the first point that i wanted to make is something which i like to call academic retreat and that is this nasty habit the secular academics seem to have excuse me uh oh excuse me um did i have that sorry i thought that was me my apologies um so this nasty habit the secular academics tend to have of reaching consensus that such and such historical event from the bible whether it be a person a place or a group of people or a thing or whatever it happens to be didn't actually happen didn't actually exist wasn't a real people group and then when evidence comes up that inevitably shows that this is definitively the case um they just move on reach consensus on a new biblical fact and then pretend like what just happened in the last hundred years of academia didn't actually happen let me give a couple examples of this okay um it was only 200 years ago that academics had consensus that nineveh did not exist it was only 100 years ago that academics had consensus that the hittites did not exist it was less than 30 years ago that academics had consensus that king david did not exist and in each one of these situations the bible was shown to be true through the archaeological evidence and the scholars without skipping a beat reached consensus on new facts and moved on as if nothing had happened at all there will come a time very soon when we will know beyond any shadow of a doubt the exodus did happen and when academics or no are no longer entertaining the idea of exodus mythicism that absolutely will happen i guarantee it'll happen in our lifetime and when it does we're going to see the academics shuffle to a new fact pretend that that fact is not actually based on historical evidence because we don't have the archaeology or so on quite yet and completely miss uh not miss a beat here with the um with the academic retreat as you will um attacking the bible without any sort of uh serious reason to do so i personally would like to break that cycle i think it's a little ridiculous i think it shows a very clear and obvious bias against the bible even if i was an atheist i would be making the same claim to you i don't go to everybody saying hey we shouldn't trust the greek histories because they talk about greek gods that's not how this kind of thing works i would hope that we could understand that that's what that is a little frustrating for those who are christians and maybe even if you're not convinced of why i'm so skeptical of um academics you could at least be a little sympathetic to why i'm so skeptical skeptical excuse me of academics with that being said i got a couple actual evidences because that of course is just a brief notation so the first thing is you guys are going to like this at first but i promise you it's actually a good argument the bible says that it happened now let's be clear this is not the bible says that it happened and the bible is the infallible word of god therefore it must have happened right this is no different than saying herodotus's histories say that thermopylae happened so that's evidence thermopylae may have happened or the sumerian king's list says that gilgamesh was a real king so that's evidence that he may have been a real king it doesn't prove the case but what we have here is a very old document in case of the bible a very old collection of documents that are telling us this historical event took place this is important for a couple of reasons number one this collection of documents is actually multiple independent sources there is no scholar who would disagree with that particular phrase the bible is not one book right the bible is multiple books the book of isaiah is written by isaiah the book of hosea is alleged to be written by hosea there's not going to be agreement in this panel as to who wrote the torah but it wasn't either of those two figures is the point this is actually multiple independent sources from different areas in time uh and even from different areas of the land of canaan some of them may be even writing from outside of the land of canaan the second thing that makes this important is the jewish bible actually functions as the history of the hebrew people this is not just a religious text in other words um if we were to go to the sumerian kings list we would see that it starts off by saying and the kingship descended from heaven therefore making it kind of a religious text in other words it's describing a little bit of the religious traditions of the sumerian people but we also know that this particular document is giving us some historical facts right or at least potentially giving us some historical facts uh some of the kings of the sumerian things this we can verify did actually exist but nonetheless the point just being that uh this is actually um what functions as the historical collection of records uh for the hebrew people right um the other thing that makes this incredibly important is of course that the bible is very old um this isn't a source that comes from 2020 uh excuse me 2021 yeah sorry i was gonna say that right that says uh hey here in 2021 we believe that the exit has happened these are sources that come from 500 bc 800 bc potentially as far back as before 1000 bc saying hey this is actually um what happened in our history so i do think that even like if you just take the uh christian cap off put on your atheist cat for a moment and just simply take things at face value the bible's saying that the um that the excuse me exodus did happen is indeed evidence that the exodus did happen the second thing that we can look at for evidence the exodus did happen is jewish tradition this can be split broadly into two different categories there is jewish tradition which stems directly from the exodus and then there is jewish tradition which stems either from egypt egypt itself excuse me or uh the egyptian culture so examples of the first we have passover we have the status of the levitical priesthood we have where the uh hebrew calendar starts there's of course numerous other things we could go into but this is just a small collection of facts for the sake of time passover is a celebration specifically of the exodus event it's also a somewhat somber holiday it's not incredibly joyous right you eat bitter foods you work in haste you commemorate that time that the death angel didn't kill your child uh it's not exactly like christmas time right uh and we have this holiday going as far back as we can actually take uh israelite history that demonstrates for or excuse me that celebrates uh this alleged event in hebrew history i would argue that just as the fourth of july is evidence that there is indeed an independence day in july 4 1776 you could also say that the passover holiday is evidence that there was actually a exodus and by the way interesting thing about the passover it's not like some other holidays where we could actually associate it with a well-known um holiday motif if you will in other words it's not a um solstice holiday it's not a winter festival it's not a harvest festival um it seems to be a little bit random if we don't have the passover to explain it uh that second example is the status of the levitical priesthood the levitical priesthood is essentially a religious caste right this religious past has complete and total monopoly over the religious traditions of the hebrew people and is not able to get out of the monopoly of the traditions of the jewish people where did they establish their authority from according to the histories moses the lawgiver was a levite aaron the first high priest was a levite and it was the levites who were the loyal tribe if you will during the wandering time and who did moses bidding this is what is considered to be their legitimacy and what actually gives them a you know credit so to speak right uh i would argue if a certain war for example the uh or excuse me of a certain dynasty for example the julio claudian dynasty is evidence that something gave them their legitimacy legitimacy namely the augustinian wars right so we could say something gave these levites their legitimacy and the hebrews told us it was their very important role in an exodus we have to give them something that gave their legitimacy legitimacy excuse me there's some reason the rest of the hebrew tribes submitted to the smallest and weakest of the tribes and gave them complete and total monopoly over religious matters history says that it is the or at least jewish tradition excuse me says that it is the exodus and their role in it that gives them this lofty status another example of this is the beginning of the jewish calendar a lot of people will actually say rosh hashanah is the beginning of the jewish calendar modern tradition uh if you read the bible itself it says that the first month in the son or eve depending on what you want to call it is act or excuse me the month of uh aviva in the sun not the first month it's the same thing right this is actually the first month of the jewish calendar why is this the first month of the jewish calendar well because this is the month at least according to the tradition this is the month when they left egypt when they go and start to be their own independent people group right um this is the month of the passover this could potentially depending on how quickly they actually got to mount sinai uh this could be the month that they actually had first arrived on mount sinai though a lot of people think that might have actually been the third month the point being why does the jewish calendar start at this time the um uh gregorian calendar starts because the julian calendar started on uh january 1st and the julian calendar started on january 1st because that's when roman consulship started in other words it's not random there is a reason the calendar starts at that time why does this uh calendar start when it starts we do have uh historical evidence that tells us it's because of the exodus tradition numerous other jewish traditions there but of course we can uh move on for sake of time some of these traditions that is don't find themselves say again that's time my friend all right for sure um see that's why i would have been better if i had it written out but nonetheless i'll go ahead and say other stuff later yeah yeah we have open after we get done with the uh the opponent if i could use the term uh the other side's opening we'll be able to have open conversation so now it's turned over to you dr josh and dr maggie bryson all right thank you very much i apologize uh i think it's nora in the background screaming so it's hard to tell all right there's quite a bit of information that scholars discuss when dealing with the topic of the exodus from egypt both that is both as it is presented in the narrative of the hebrew bible and as it can be understood from historical and archaeological sources there are several interpretations that scholars hold with respect to this evidence the more traditional position the exodus was a historical event that took place in the 15th century much as it is described in the hebrew bible is held by only a small number of scholars those that believe that there is likely at least a historical kernel that lies behind the events appear to make up the majority view with a small percentage of these arguing for the general historicity of the events as described in the exodus those that conclude that there is some historical event or events that stand behind the story generally conclude that they would have taken place in the 13th century bce finally there are other theories that consider the exodus to be either not historical or to have become a cultural memory that was passed on and reworked to suit the needs of those transmitting the story let's begin with the data that scholars have to work with the first references to the exodus tradition or traditions comes come from the text of the hebrew bible itself perhaps the earliest can be found in exodus 15 the so-called song of the sea dating at the earliest to the end of the second millennium bce these 18 verses present some aspects of the story as it appears in the book of exodus but clearly does not contain many of its key features in addition the oracles of balaam found in numbers 23 and 24 may date to the 9th or 8th centuries again this text appears to show that an exodus tradition in some form was known to the writer but it is not the complete story as we have it in the book of exodus two of the early prophets hosea and amos contain passages in their books that speak of the exodus from egypt as with the song of the sea and the oracles of balaam while the prophetic writings date relatively early late century they do not appear to contain a full or closely parallel version of the exodus traditions seen in the other texts finally the mernepta stila the earliest known reference to a people group known as israel was while not an example of the exodus tradition per se shows that by 1207 bce there existed a group of israelites that were significant enough to be combated and documented by the egyptian pharaoh there is also some evidence from egypt itself that bears on the exodus discussion beginning with the textual data there is an incredibly important and sometimes overlooked group of texts that was found at tel alamarna dating to the 14th century because these texts describe interactions between the pharaoh and his vassals in the land of canaan they are extremely valuable in determining the state of affairs that existed in canaan during this period among other things we learned that kanan was firmly under the control of egypt during most of the second half of the second millennium this is very problematic for the exodus story as it would require the israelites to leave a land controlled by egypt and escape to another land controlled by egypt while the amarna letters do not present supporting evidence for the exodus story as told in the hebrew bible there are several egyptian papyri that established to greater or lesser degrees the various similitude of the background of the exodus story we learned from these papyri that they were canaanite slaves that escaped from egypt and that their route out of egypt was in some ways similar to that which was taken by the israelites in the story we also see that shepherds would bring their flocks into egypt to water them and this was documented at the border in addition to the textual evidence there is also archaeological data that need to be considered perhaps the most difficult problem for a historical reading of the exodus story as presented in the hebrew bible is the number of israelites purported to have left egypt we read that six hundred thousand fighting men were said to have exited the land leading to an estimated two to three million people participating in the exodus in total while several attempts have been made to reinterpret this figure it seems that the text is presenting this number as it has always been interpreted indeed other aspects of the story appear to rely on the fact that the israelites were a massive horde that exited egypt and were making their way through the desert to the land of canaan other archaeological and historical data suggests that there was titan security at the at the egyptian border both in and out following the expulsion of the exos this would have made the departure of a group of israelite slaves incredibly difficult to miss finally there are several toponyms that were mentioned as part of the route that the israelites took out of egypt including the cities of pithom and ramses while several of these toponyms could reflect circumstances as they were in the 13th century they quite often also fit well sometimes much better in a later period hundreds of years after the exodus was supposed to have taken place it is also incredibly important to this discussion to examine the claims of the old testament with respect to the israelite conquest of canaan according to the biblical text this conquest would have taken place during the late bronze age either around 1407 the conservative view or sometime in the mid to late 13th century the more mainstream view in order to determine the historical validity of these accounts from an archaeological perspective we need to ask two questions of the data first do we see occupation of the city said to have been destroyed in the narrative during the late bronze age and second if there was occupation during this period was that occupation destroyed at the required time put more simply if the bible says that the israelites destroyed these cities were there people in them and does the archaeology show that these cities were destroyed we begin with three cities that are purported to have been destroyed before the israelites crossed the jordan arad in the negev and heshbon and dibon in the transjordan at a rod following occupation in the third millennium bce the site was abandoned until after the late bronze age thus there was no city in existence for the israelites to destroy a similar picture is painted by the archaeology of heshbon which shows no occupation earlier than 1200 bce finally at dibon we see early bronze age levels followed by a break in occupation which is only re-established in the iron age in all three sites there appear to be no late bronze age remains of cities that the israelites could have destroyed the situation does not improve much as we cross over into canaan beginning with jericho despite some debate over the dating of some of the features especially a wall from the early bronze age at most there was a small unwalled village at jericho at the time when the israelites are said to have destroyed it this of course is completely at odds with the biblical account when we move to the city of i the situation is much like a rod and debone before there was occupation at the site in the third millennium but the city was abandoned during the late bronze age when the site was reoccupied around 1200 it showed no fortifications with jericho and i standing firmly at odds with the stories of the book of joshua we turn to lachish there was occupation at the site during the late bronze age with a destruction occurring around twelve hundred however the archaeology shows that lahish was immediately rebuilt rebuilt as a canaanite city which poses problems for the biblical story finally when we examine the archaeology of hatsura which is the one city that may fit at least in part with the old testament narrative we see that the city was destroyed in the mid to late 13th century this is incredibly problematic for a traditional date and could still be problematic depending on which when in the 13th century was destroyed nevertheless it may fit well with the biblical narrative and although the site was abandoned for approximately two centuries after its destruction it does appear to have been ultimately occupied by the israelites several different models have been advanced over the last century including both outsider israelites coming from outside canaan and insider models israelites being indigenous to canaan it appears that scholars have concluded that both outsider models both conquest and peaceful infiltration as well as the insider model known as the peasants revolt are no longer tenable given the archaeological data now known instead nearly everyone appears to agree that the israelites were in fact canaanites who settled down in the hill country the debated issue is who these canaanites were for example pastoralists or disenfranchised city dwellers the bottom line is this the story of the israelite conquest as told in the old testament appears untenable in light of the archaeological evidence no single mass of outside conquerors entered into canaan and destroyed multiple canaanite strongholds this picture simply does not match the archaeological record with all of this in mind what can we say about the story of the exodus as we read it in the old testament first the exodus as described is not historically reliable not only do we lack evidence for the events described in the book of exodus but the historical situation that we know of in late bronze age in egypt and canaan is incongruent with the events described in the text as prop observes archaeologists and textual historians agree that the biblical narrative is not contemporary with purported events has a complex literary pre-history and does not fit comfortably with known ancient near eastern history in order to overcome seemingly impossible details like two to three million people leaving egypt at one time significant reinterpretations are required that appear to be quite problematic second the story does have verisimilitude the background to the narrative has many aspects that generally fit with the circumstances of the second millennium it would be unwise to conclude that none of the concepts or themes in the exodus narrative can be found in the world of ancient egypt and canaan there were canaanite slaves in egypt egypt did enslave and control the canaanite population in canaan itself there were slaves that escaped from egypt in fact it is quite likely that this familiar and reasonable backdrop made it easier for the story to remain in popular usage however and this is very important just because some or even many of the toponyms or general backdrop might fit well in the second millennium we must remember two things first they do not fit in a specific moment in time many of these events took place spread out over the second millennium second just because the story contains some genuine elements or even memories we cannot simply conclude that the story as a whole is therefore true as we often say no one would conclude that spider-man is a true story simply because it took place in new york city in the end what matters most about the story is it that a literal 2 to 3 million people were miraculously delivered from captivity following 10 supernatural plagues being inflicted upon wicked egyptians no i don't think so what matters most in my opinion is how the story has been used by believers just to sustain them through periods of great difficulty indeed stories can be incredibly powerful william prop has brilliantly described the development of the miraculous story of the battle of mons during world war one the british soldiers under a fighting retreat came to believe that they had been delivered by angelic beings who fought for them against the germans this was not an isolated story but became an international account of deliverance even making its way into some sources as purported history what are we to make of such a story and how can it help us understand the exodus prop writes quote we know that the battle of mon's occurred we know its precise dates we know its exact location we know the historical context we can date matron's story to the day we can supply oral and written testimony from literally thousands probably tens of thousands of diverse sources to gain a stereoscopic image of the of the times in other words we have precise reference points to support the historical analysis yet for all this historical information surrounding the events in question there is universal consensus that angels did not miraculously defeat the german army at the battle of mars but did that really matter at the time in a very real sense it did not right or wrong such a story not only bolstered the confidence of the soldiers who believe they have been divinely delivered out of harm's way but also unified many of them around a common miraculous event of which they believe they were apart in the same way the story of the miraculous deliverance of yahweh against the evil egyptian pharaoh may have served to bolster confidence and unify the fledgling group known as israel forming in the highlands of canaan setting them apart from the surrounding people groups at a minimum the exodus ultimately served as a powerful origin story that continues to keep those who identify with it as a unified people even thousands of years later and positive just letting maggie know you have 5 minutes and 30 seconds uh to finish up thank you for all the super chats i will be taking those during q a when we get to q a you will go in the order of the super chats and address those so thank you all for the super chats i just want to add i think josh did a really good job of summarizing the issues at stake um for me i think it's important to be respectful of people of faith when we discuss this issue i i don't actually know a lot of scholars who don't think that it's interesting to look at what history might underlie uh the exodus narratives and i um you know i think that for something as central to the identity as a p of a people you know the jewish people as the exodus um it's it's really worth looking at and giving a serious critical thought to but i think it does an injustice to the hebrew bible not to try and understand what the text is really about what it's really saying what value these stories could have beyond sort of trying to find archaeological evidence that doesn't exist for a literal uh interpretation or literal understanding of this narrative you know i think you know as an egyptologist i'm mainly here today just to kind of fill in any gaps that i can you know if anybody has questions or or sort of wants the aegyptological perspective here i'm here to give it um but i can tell you from the perspective of an egyptologist i have a lot of colleagues who are very interested in this story who are very interested in the history behind it and respectful of people's fascination for it for the importance that it holds in the lives of so many um so thanks for the opportunity to join this conversation um i enjoyed hearing jonathan and cj's perspective and i'm looking forward to seeing what questions come up thank you so much that left four minutes left i appreciate you relinquishing that time we'll go ahead and go to opening uh like an open conversation slash if i could call it cross examination the goal will be to be respectful of each other try not to allow this to get too emotional um i will only interject if i feel like it's becoming hogged or there there's some disrespect in terms of communication here so with that being said i i think since you guys just finished your opening let's allow jonathan and cj to start and then we'll go back and forth i'd like to make this uh for the next 60 minutes if you guys um run out of things to talk about we'll relinquish that time get straight to q a super chat your questions and i will take them during q a thank you once again okay yeah so dr josh please don't yell at me um but no i'm just kidding um no uh and and this is for either dr josh or dr bryson um well you've laid out a good case uh on the absence of evidence in what you're looking at in the early uh data from the egyptian records uh that you wouldn't feel is consistent with the case what positive uh data are you making for your case so where is the positive uh data to support that this did not happen and i'll let either one of you respond go ahead josh i was just going to say that um jonathan i think that we are all in agreement that logically right it's a famous logical proposition that you can't prove a negative there is no logical way to prove a negative right the absence of evidence doesn't necessarily mean that something didn't happen um and there isn't right there's no amount of non-evidence that you could ever marshal to prove that something absolutely didn't happen it's just not possible but if something didn't happen then no it wouldn't leave evidence right you're left in kind of a quandary there and it's one of the fundamental problems of ancient history in particular where we have problems of preservation to contend with and things like that for me the positive evidence lies in what we can say about people of canaanite origin living in egypt not only in the the late bronze age but before and after and in the sort of facts of egyptian history as we know them that offer alternative explanations or um that at least give us an indication that if something of on the scale of the exodus as it's described in the hebrew bible had happened we would have some indication either from egyptian or from other near eastern sources so that's where i come from i'll let josh take over there yeah and i mean just sort of from a from a methodological standpoint i think the the problem that i have with the question is that it's not really how historiography is done right we don't start with a we don't start with a source and then say okay well we're going to assume that this is accurate in its details until we can prove all the the things that it says incorrect right um it's it's far more complicated than that like nobody picks up um the many inscriptions that we have from the 24th century about naram sin right and and this series of nine battles that he fought in one year and then became deified because the people of of the city of agade requested of the gods that he be deified we don't pick up that text and say all right now how can we prove this wrong that's not really the approach right it's taking into account uh and to be clear like i'm a philologist right so i'm not a professional historiographer or something but the the approach is to to take the data and to generate a model right so um relying on things like well it's possible that x is the case while absolutely plays a role at certain points it's sort of a last resort role and what we don't do um is is begin with the conclusion that x ancient text as it stands is true and now we have to to figure out a way to make that work um if that makes sense yeah the the one uh follow-up question i would have on that just from an archaeological uh perspective uh so when we're trying to construct an empirical uh uh history don't we begin with the artifact so if we have a site uh so our empirical basis is the site and those artifacts and then from there we're we're building that uh and i'll uh i'll i'll lay either dr maggie bryson and dr josh yeah if i go ahead meg if you want if you've got something i just wanted to jump in as as an historian and say that jonathan and cj you're both right that historians academics often have prejudices you know josh what josh is describing is is the way that we all want to work we all want to look at texts as objectively as we can nobody wants to come to a text with a pre-conceived idea and then try to prove it right or wrong but i think most people who study history probably do so because they have some investment in it emotionally intellectually spiritually at some point in their lives it's on some level you know and i don't want to speak for everyone i'm sure there are people who really do just have a certain amount of intellectual curiosity and get into it that way right but you guys are right that if you look into the backgrounds of a lot of mainstream historians you'll find that they are bringing perspectives from their own personal or religious uh experiences and i think we all do that regardless of which side of the debate today you might fall on and i think it's very fair of you guys to point that out and i think that it's our responsibility as scholars to acknowledge that fact and to try to compensate for it in our work i think most people do you know i think most legitimate scholars would would describe what they're doing as trying to get out of truth that it's sometimes difficult to access because we do have these perspectives and we do lack positive evidence in many cases we're doing our best um with i believe um sorry i didn't mean to try and cut you off there um i wanted to just kind of build off that a little bit because you know i totally agree that i'm also coming at this with with a particular bias as well right and if i had a phd six or ten or however long it took me years from now it wouldn't be any different i'm still a very much you know a christian fundamentalist that said though i feel like i can take my fundamentalist cap off and make a lot of the same arguments that i would make for an exodus and i really want to talk specifically about two things dr josh mentioned you mentioned the battle of mons and naram sin which i think perfectly illustrate uh the position that i'm coming at here today i don't i'm willing to grant for sake of argument that moses never worked a miracle that prophethood is not real that there is no god and that the numbers are exaggerated i think all of that can be granted for sake of argument because none of it actually disproves the central claim which is is there evidence of the people who became the israelites actually leaving um from slavery in egypt at a point in time right did that event the historical exodus take place then just to give a really good example right um we have the battle of thermopylae right which has tons and tons of false facts surrounding it right uh false facts regarding certain deities false facts regarding way exaggerated numbers uh false facts regarding you know i mean how does anybody know what leonidas did in his last seconds if everybody was killed right that doesn't make any sense but we know that thermopylae happened and we know that leonidas existed and we know that the 300 spartans did die there and even though it wasn't a million persians it was a really really large army of persians and so on and so forth right my point just kind of being that even if we grant a lot of the points that you guys made let's say the numbers are exaggerated let's say it's 10 000 or or even lower right the is that actually disprove the central claim here which is that an event uh the the proto excuse me the proto-hebrew people left um egypt at a point in time were led from slavery at a point in the time there and then came into kanan via conquest and i don't think i think naram sin and the battle of bonds proved very clearly that i don't think it does um if the miracle claims aren't true if the numbers are exaggerated again all that other kind of stuff i'm just treating myself but it doesn't actually do anything other than tell us some of the details might be wrong but the actual historical claim is what i'm personally trying to defend and so with some of those things i'm just willing to grant them for sake of argument sure so go ahead make your case because hang on that was sort of rhetorical um because if if what you're going to marshal is the hebrew bible it's just not that simple right you can't you can't marshal the hebrew bible and say that uh well we just we have to start with this is a historical document because that is the debate right so uh well not not exactly the debate is the claim right because there's there's multiple documents and multiple documents have evidence of the claim right but the debate is the claim itself because you and i actually agree that the document is historically reliable at least in certain instances right so for example you would obviously say that when in the book of chronicles right when we're talking about the kings that's probably fairly accurate history of the hebrew kings right not the chronicles as much as maybe kings but okay well king king's works for certain either way one of the books right um the point just kind of being we actually do agree that this is at least somewhat historically reliable both of us right so all i'm saying is that it's historical historically reliable in uh this past event right even if certain details could be wrong and again we know uh from you know other examples like normson like the battle of mons like these sumerian kings list all these other kinds of things um there is evidence where we discount an awful lot of it but still recognize that it is evidence of a certain claim right we recognize that gilgamesh should have surely been a king yeah if i if i could so what there's a fundamental difference i think between the claim of the hebrew bible about the exodus and something like naram sin and that is the contemporarity contempora the contemporaneous nature of the source material right so when we think about something like naram sin if if we only had copies of stories or of that story from 700 years later uh it would be a lot harder it'd be a lot harder to and if that were all that we had it'd be a lot harder to say yeah we actually think there was probably some battles right that naram fought and even with even with um you know these these multiple accounts that we have of normson's battles from the period and the fact that you know we have administrative documents that show naram sin's name changing from you know without the divine determinative to with the you know having the divine determinative uh and something like you know having the victory steely of naram sin where he's wearing the horned headdress like even with all of those contemporaneous pieces of archaeological data and textual data we still don't go well what you know what what this like joan westenholtz you know like when she writes or says she doesn't just oh well this obviously happened right it's it's much more nuanced than that and i think that's the big thing that um you know i think we need to drive home with this is that there obviously are scholars that would say very minimalist scholars uh that would say no it's a complete fabrication from the persian period or something but most scholars that that you'll encounter uh we'll say with the consensus yeah i mean there very well may have been um you know a uh some some real historical background to this some cultural memory or actual events right but the problem is that that that that's not the question the question is do we turn to the hebrew bible and say all right this description as given in the you know the book of exodus or in numbers like this this is actually how it was connected to get to jonathan's point about positive evidence too cj you mentioned the conquest josh am i correct in understanding that the conquest is one situation where we do have positive evidence in other words that it didn't happen yeah lays out a specific itinerary for the conquest by the israelites and we can look at those sites archaeologically and know that we've been there i think that is um i do want i don't want to go too deep in that just because i personally think that there is a good deal of evidence in the conquest and i think that could take us away a little bit from the conversation um but i will say like for example you just some of the places you mentioned you know jericho i location hot sore um if anybody is interested in looking at you know the some of the stuff that the archaeology that's what it institutes for bible archaeology or something like that um they personally argue and all of them are phd egyptologists and history historians and stuff like that right um and they all argue that um these there's actually very solid evidence for uh those four towns in particular have now granted their eye i think is different than your eye i think there's a disagreement as to what town actually is high so that is something that does need to be noted uh can we pause can we pause there cj paul's there for just a second because i think you you've hit upon a a really good point why is it a different eye yeah well so certainly so and there is an eye that um that was originally believed to be the eye and now there's this dispute right and this is why but sorry i i really want to camp on this i really want to i really want to camp on this why is it now disputed right no and that's what i was saying so this particular eye the first one is said to have been abandoned from sometime like 2000 to 1000 bc um which is a very large period of time and obviously would include both possible dates of an exodus um there is obviously some arguments that maintain a biblical exodus as well as the traditional eye uh the one that i think is most popular although i don't know if anybody actually buys it anymore is richard gabriel used to say that the bethelites uh used i as sort of like a base um but nonetheless the point just kind of being i fully recognize your your point there that um let's not let's not move past it because i i think it's important because it kind of goes back to what you something you said earlier in your opening when you said that academic retreat right that that when scholars find that oh you know this this this consensus that we held no longer holds uh what's good for the goose right um and like somebody like bryant wood from university of toronto right where he got his phd um you know he's digging it in mucketeer and making you know this this argument that oh well it's not it's not i well there's a reason that he's doing that right and it's not because he went over to this other tell for no reason right it's because i is such a huge problem and it's the agreed-upon site has been for uh and and and this is also the case with jericho right and and let me i want to say one more thing about this from a biblical his uh biblical archaeology standpoint a whole chapter on this uh in my in my first book um like biblical archaeology was the opposite of what you're describing in in in the sense that this is this was a very uh in many ways uh uh enterprise dedicated to proving the validity of the biblical texts right so when people came to these sites i mean they were coming to these sites organizations saying the defense of the bible right well and i know it's true a lot like bryant wood for example is he would take the same position that i do as far as admittedly calling himself fundamentalist right so totally grant some of that and i think the original german excavation of of uh of jericho was also that way well like garstang for example um john garsting i don't know that john garsting was even a christian um let alone actually he's definitely going to he was definitely going to defend the biblical text that's why he was taking it right but that's a different thing right like that for example there the guy who originally discovered troy the reason the whole reason that he was there in the first place is because he really genuinely believed now he didn't believe in zeus or aries or anything like that but he really genuinely believed that that story was accurate and he was set out to prove it right and so that's a different thing than saying this person may have had a religious motivation or something right but it's it's it's six one half dozen the other in this case right because it's arguing for the biblical the validity of the biblical text yeah but you gotta understand and you would understand this greater than anybody right all of the ancient texts are going to have that problem so sorry and i will stop here because i've been hogging the conversation but you know for example this sumerian king's list like i already said it starts off saying that the the kingdomship descended from heaven right like all the ancient texts incorporate their religion into their history it's just like second nature to them almost so for us to say well we kind of kind of discount that because it has the supernatural religious nature i think nobody's making that argument nobody's making nobody's making that argument yeah and and just uh um i think i know we're getting a lot of really good discussion uh i i think uh i do want to kind of circle back to some of the points that i made in my opening uh i know uh you know maggie alluded or talked about this uh earlier in terms of you know viruses or perceptions uh which go back to the ancient historians and while i i understand there's a an academic view today one of the things that i think you know we gotta look at is uh the view uh by some of the uh most credible authori uh historians over a period of you know some of the greatest acquisition of knowledge and learning uh we're able to look at the data and they come to an opposite conclusion uh i know tacitus refers most authors agree you know that this was the uh origin of the jews we have strabo uh you know we even have vapian and if you think about it he was an egyptian peace uh he had very clear intentions to discredit the jewish account and largely what we get from him is positive for the jewish exodus so what i would like to say is or at least understand how do you reconcile uh modern uh consensus or the world view of today with historians in a position as i opened up in my argument with better access to information that we just do not have today jonathan i i'm not sure are you directing this mirror josh just to be called either either one dr josh or dr bryson let me give you my perspective which is that i'm not sure i understand your question entirely because there isn't one modern perspective and there wasn't one ancient perspective either right josephus and apn were at odds they had access to the same material nominally but they were at odds about how to interpret it josephus had to write for starters i would just see excuse me though because we're talking about epitomes of these texts anyway right we don't have all we don't have apiens works at all we don't have all of minitho we have the bits of menitho that josephus and other authors thought were important because they addressed this or had the potential to address the issue of israelite history in egypt so monito right talks about the hixos he talks about canaanites who lived in egypt who came to rule it and the fact that they were driven out of egypt by the egyptians josephus turned to that and said ah this must be the exodus right josephus thought that minitho's account of the hixos described the exodus um but again i don't think that that's what we're you know a modern right scholar looking for the historical exodus would necessarily turn to right because if i understand correctly right we're talking in terms of the middle of the 15th century to the around 1400 bc right and the episode takes place a little before that again this is if we can get that kind of chronological resolution which isn't certain yeah no i'm not sure i understand your premise and that neither modern historians nor ancient historians were really in agreement on how the egyptian sources spoke to the exodus tradition well i i think if we look at the statement so what i'm trying to say is the consistent or the material facts of an exorcist of uh exodus you know so when tacitus refers that there was a great plague well that's consistent with an element in the book of exodus when they talk about an expulsion from egypt because the gods were upset uh we have that element we also have the element that you know of character of moses he was the leader of this group they went to uh judea um and then you know that we see elements of that in apian uh strabo and while there are differences when we look at uh benito we look at these elements of the uh exodus that is consistent with the book is in their histories and so what i'm saying is they uh hecatius he was he was at thieves uh ptolemy's opened up all this access to egyptian uh records theodorus confirms that these records were there so why are we in a better position today to inspect the egyptian documentation than these scholars who make pretty clear case of the uh jewish exodus so the the material facts they basically agree on there's some differences which show that they're independent so i i'm not suggesting that we're in a better position to inspect the ancient egyptian sources but what i am stating pretty categorically is that i don't think that the ancient authors um were authoritative in saying that the exodus of israel from egypt happened as it's described in the hebrew bible the status of jews in egypt was as was the status of a lot of people in egypt and the ptolemaic period a subject of contention and so they were interested in the history for you know some of the same reasons we are right what does it mean to be jewish what what should the position of a jewish community in a given state be right or any religious minority um and so they looked to the ancient egyptian sources the same way we might and they sure they probably did have better access to them but even with that better access they still weren't able to come up with definitive and undisputed conclusions about what the exodus even would have been if it had happened much less that it actually did and i don't think anyone you know like you know and obviously right things like the idea that there was a plague in the late bronze age a pandemic disease that that affected egypt that affected canaan that affected the hittite empire is clear from plenty of other sources of evidence we don't have to turn to tacitus to know that there was a plague in the 14th century bc right the temple of alman hodgep iii right is full of these statues of the plague goddess there are spells on papyrus from a bit later but admittedly still there that talk about the canaanite illness right the talk about a plague of black boils right the bonnet plague in fact produces um symptoms like that so if it was if it was present in the ancient near east then yeah sure there might have been a plague of black boils but the sources that we have for that right so the plague in the reign of ahmed hotep iii then this these spells against canaanite illness right they date to a range that over they they span a range of time they don't land at 1450 or 1400 bc or whatever it is that you want to call it as if there had been a singular instance of plague that could have been wrought upon egypt by a god right there's a plague of the plague of hail right there is a tempest stella right there is a an egyptian stella you know composed at the behest of an egyptian king that describes a massive storm a bad weather event that that caused a lot of trouble in egypt that dates to maybe around 1550 bc right a date that no one posits for a historical exodus right there there is plenty of egyptian uh evidence that speaks to events like this right and of course there were canaanites people cannot origin west semitic speakers living in egypt there may have been yahweh worshippers living in egypt in the bronze age but the idea that all of that evidence coalesces around a singular point in time as we would expect worthy exodus historial historical excuse me is not supportable would you would you agree that from the histories of tacitus theodorus hecateus strabo that they all blamed uh the jewish people or the foreigners a large majority of them being the jews that moved on were expelled for that reason which would be another really consistent element with the exodus case from their perspective so the hellenistic historians had both an axe to grind and the benefit of historical perspective right they had a current his current political problem that they wanted to marshal historical evidence to help them solve in their own interests and they could then go back through egyptian history and cherry-pick the sources for information that supported them in the same way that a modern historian might you know it's not right josh you can speak to this with you know you've done a lot of research on the daniel problem right the issue of prophecy in ancient near east when you come to these when you see these later sources making use of earlier material right you know the fact that they agree isn't coincidental right they're drawing on the same body of of evidence and they're referring to each other right they're they're epitomizing each other right they're constantly citing and referring to one another they aren't telling the same story but it's not because that story is necessarily true they're telling the same story because they got there the same way and because they're reading each other so that would be my perspective i don't think the daniel part will help here because i think jonathan and i are also going to disagree on that uh but yeah no i i i agree with you completely uh we had a debate about this several months ago uh it was the same jonathan now we're having the same discussion that you and e are having uh because like you know when when meg as you're pointing out like when um you know references made to alexander the great coming uh to the jewish high priest and being shown you know that uh you know here you are right in the book of daniel um that that's not like there aren't historians that will look at that and say well we can you know there's a peg that we can you know nail that we can drive into the wall and uh because there's definitely as you as you put it you know uh there's motivation there's commitment uh there's a reason that he's utilizing uh that and that it's part of it is utilizing the text right but um yeah i don't think jonathan's jonathan i think you'll you'll agree on that and i think it just comes down to uh these greeks did have biases and you know uh the purpose of picking you know tacitus uh stravo theodores is uh they were very anti-jewish in their writings uh so they did not have incentive uh to go ahead and establish a positive uh history that would have uh posed a threat to the egyptian religion especially since you know money was very important so um you know they didn't have any uh incentive uh to propagate a claim that would only be positive for the jews their religion um so you know when i bring up the dog that did embark that is a huge um that's a huge flight it doesn't say it draws an absolute conclusion but it uh it does make us think why they wouldn't have responded and they did to this specific issue um i'm sorry jonathan apologist um uh uh go ahead and finish your thought uh because i was gonna ask you something else but well it is a powerful rhetorical strategy to concede part of your opponent's argument and then use it against them and i think that any uh self-respecting apologist would know that so if you are an apologist for the ancient egyptian pagan religion right to concede the point that your opponents are making and then to turn that to your own advantage right or if you are a jewish apologist um in um a bad position in egypt either way right agreeing on the terms of debate and then trying to take whatever supposed facts and cast them to your advantage would have been a valid rhetorical strategy for either side so i don't know that i agree with you that that particular piece of that particular argument is is helpful here um but again even if we all agree right that the ancient historians could see the same thing we're seeing which is that there were a lot of different things that happened over the course of the bronze age that could have played into the exodus tradition right i mean they i don't see necessarily how um how that speaks to the idea that the exodus was a big one-time event the way it's portrayed in the text but anyway i'm turn it back over yeah and i think it i know dr josh and i've had these discussions i've talked with cj about that it you know uh from your perspective an aegis apologist uh what would it mean in the ancient world or for egypt uh for a large group uh we don't have to get to a six hundred thousand but i mean even if i just stick with the historian's task today straw booster there was a large number that was expelled what would have had to happen for the egyptians to allow its workforce um its economy basically uh to just leave like that and if the jewish account that says a mixed multitude went in that what would have had to happen for a nation like egypt as powerful was to allow all the slaves to just leave um well let's be clear egypt from my perspective did not allow hundreds of thousands of slaves to walk out no i and and i would agree with you from the standpoint that they wouldn't allow it to happen they didn't i mean in point because right the exodus narrative says that whether the egyptians wanted it or not hundreds of thousands of people left egypt at the same time if that had happened it would have caused an unprecedented crisis for the egyptian state that's pretty you know the that's a big chunk of the actual population of egypt as a whole at that time i mean it would have been you know again the population estimates for the ancient world are subject to debate but we're not we're talking about single-digit millions at the very most for the entire population of egypt if the israelites in the numbers that the exodus text specifies had left egypt at once it would have wreaked havoc on the political economy of the entire ancient near east right and if i just i want to make sure we're all like on the same page here um so you know if you go to exodus 12 uh you know where this comes from is you know 1237 talks about 600 000 fighting men right men on foot uh so you know when you factor in women and children you know the the the general estimate that people scholars are coming up to is between two and a half three million people somewhere around there and that's a little conservative well you know dr bryson can speak to it but i mean there's what two and a half to three million people in all of new kingdom egypt right so in in in the entirety of it so um now whether whether one wants to make an argument that the word the hebrew word lf there doesn't mean thousand that it means like a military unit um you know or like first of all there's a reason that we're now making that argument and if you're talking about academic uh retreat there's another example of it right because everybody has translated lf just as it's i think it's supposed to be translated and that is thousand straight for the record i actually agree with that oh i know i know you do i know you do uh but so not not you um and i think actually the biblical narrative in a lot of ways at least in its canonical form requires this massive horde right i mean you think about the oracles of balaam and you think about that story even though they're there licking up the ground right opposite jericho um you know moses making the comment like how if we slaughter all the animals and get every fish out all the fish of the sea how will we feed you know these people and then of course you have the censuses in the book of numbers that are 603 550 people i think that's the right number and then it's a little less than that you know what 38 years later anyway the point is that those are the numbers that you know that we're dealing with and so if that's the case um you know like dr bryson is spot on here like havoc i mean it's it's and and the other thing to remember here is depending on when you want this to happen you're either doing this in either case you're doing it in a period where egypt has firm control on kanan i mean i don't think we should overlook that you know these israelites are escaping to another part of egypt for all intents and purposes right well sort of though right because many many historians have pointed out that the egyptian control over the judean highlands which is everything they would have before the united monarchy is weak at best because there wasn't anybody up there well that's the claim right but there is certainly evidence that there was people up there for example jericho is the oldest inhabited city in world history and that's in the judean highlands right so there is certainly evidence that some people were there jerusalem also we have the amarna tablets talking about urusalim right which a lot of people say is probably um jerusalem in fact it sounds very much like the hebrew pronunciation of yerushalayim sure but these are canaanite cities the point that i'm just trying to make though is that we do have right so there's i know there's a lot of disputing claims in other words that like me and you would disagree on a lot of the uh the conclusions here but the point is just that when we talk about egyptian control over the judean highlands that's not really very firmly in fact thutmose iii is going up there to megiddo precisely because of that right uh at least if we are uh if we have a understanding of his conquest there at least um yeah and so the point there just kind of being that you know when we talk about egyptian domination in this area i think that's kind of overblown um we know that this was a border area we know that it was not as it wasn't a border area cj it was a well it was a province right i mean that that it's it's made up of of of three different uh areas right uh umuru what upu and and canaan right i mean it's it's not like it's a it's a area out there that's sort of on the you know like something that that the assyrians would have had you know maybe tentative control over i mean it's go ahead i'm sorry josh i just you know again i feel like i really should jump in here because even if we concede and there and it's possible that there was an egyptian revengement in canaan overall not just in the highlands right but in the lowland area of coastal area as well around 1400 bc right in the rainbow and hotel the second right thereabouts right through the amarna period is that you know we concede right that that a conceit is not the right word we believe that that likely happened the egyptians were not necessarily as soundly in control throughout the entirety of the bronze age okay and josh you know that as well as i do um but in point of fact right for starters the the if i'm josh am i right that the exodus narrative includes coastal cities it's not just the conquest excuse me includes coastal cities it's not confined to the highlands entirely i mean it's it's it's mostly central than southern than northern but okay but again so it this is something that does kind of you know reach to all of those geographic regions and second right again we're talking about you know a third of the population of egypt as a whole that many people on the move is something we expect to leave a mark well i would i i would uh yeah let me just uh i'm so sorry oh i have to go change a diaper i'll be right back oh yeah anything interesting without me no no problem um the one thing dr josh i think it just comes back you know to you know what would have taken um and you know we do see in the historical council or at least in uh the hellenistic and roman histories this great plague this uh expulsion the jews were blamed for it so they're looking at it from their perspective but at that point that we do have that empirical data uh regardless of what we may think of what their sources or what their motivations for saying it um when do we begin to engage the black swan that hey uh what uh the jewish narrative is saying and and i mean as uh you know as serious i mean i i do tie this event back to you know what happens outside of jerusalem you know when the largest syrian army we have you know an observable black swan here uh and are we willing to engage it uh outside our naturalistic framework when it calls for it and yeah and that's all i'm asking is when do we start to engage that question instead of i want i want to try to fit it into my natural not saying that you are but sure when do we start breaking out of that mold and start saying this is what it would have meant for that let me let me come at it from the other direction to answer the question because what you're describing is the last you know 200 years right when you think about biblical archaeology the history of biblical archaeology is this pursuit of assuming the validity the historical validity of the biblical text and the stories that are in it and then going to substantiate it right where do we dig i mean you know i've said it before and certainly it's certainly not my saying uh digging with the bible in one hand and the spade in the other can i kind of push back on that a little bit though because i i know there is some truth to that i certainly understand like henry rolison for example is considered the first to seriously he had a a very serious conviction that the bible was at least historically accurate right and i get a lot of that but it is also true i mean you would certainly concede that before 1906 it was universally attested the hittites did not exist the bible is a fairy tale uh before 1842 universally attested nineveh does not exist the bible is a fairy tale uh before the i can't remember the exact date it was dug up but before we got the tell dan stella the house of david didn't exist the bible's you know what i mean so while it is true in one end that certain people were there trying to prove the narrative it's also true that the academic consensus has always had a vendetta well i strongly disagree um so i mean isolating certain aspects so for example any fundamentalist evangelical would say that william you know albright was a liberal right but i mean he argued for the basic historical validity of the text right um and so this isn't a question of theological commitments i think that's a separate issue um what i'm what i'm describing and i mean often very often there were theological commitments that that that came in right but on the whole what i'm saying is that uh what jonathan is saying is that like starting with this idea um like at what point do we say all right we're gonna if i heard you correctly jonathan at what point am i gonna say let's take it as it stands and engage with it in that way that's what go ahead yeah and and i would just say and you're right i would say when it warrants i i i'm not it's a naturalistic model in most cases this is what we're gonna expect to find but i i would equate what happened in the exodus for as dr bryson was saying you know yeah they wouldn't have allowed that to happen but you know we do have a lot of reports that it did so what best explains that expulsion if it's not consistent with where it makes us step outside our naturalistic framework and start to say there may be some validity in this because for that to have happened because it would have destroyed their economy they wouldn't have left their workforce go like that and then you know i am trying to grab the empirical data whether you know it's from the hellenistic periods to roman periods they did identify core elements which then makes me ask what would allow the egyptians to do that yeah and i think this is why i say how did we get where we are right in this in this debate like how did it get here um so james hoffmeyer for example i think this is a really good example of this brilliant egyptologist um and i think it's in his 2005 publication but he's talking about this number of you know 600 000 and he makes the argument that it means a military unit that lf there means a military unit but when he when he opens up about why uh he says well like we know now archaeologically and i'm paraphrasing but that we know archaeologically and historically that 600 000 fighting men doesn't work so we have to look for another explanation see for me uh what you're describing is where we've come from right people people coming at this and other biblical stories from that perspective and the reason that we're where we are today is because people excavated at jericho people excavated it hashbone people excavated a de-bone people excavated a rod and they went uh okay well this doesn't fit right and and so now the interpretive model has to shift this is why i think this is why we are where we are so i don't think it's a question of what we wanted to fit naturalistic means or something like that it's what model best accounts for the data and if you have later data and i'm in no way an expert on greek and roman historians i'm the last person you should ask about that but when you have later data like that and you compare it to the archaeological data as it stands oh my god that's adorable um i'm just not going to look at your screen right now i guess because i'm just kidding i'm kidding you know now you have to you have to come up with this adjusted model it's the reason that we're in a mainstream position of the 13th century if there's historical reliability if there's historical you know background at all to the exodus it's got to be a 13th century thing right that's why that's the mainstream position it's because the 15th century became untenable so see and i just want to point out there's a large deal of agreement that i have with what you just said because like for example the aleph thing i mean is it possible yes but that's definitely not what it means you know what i mean yeah uh and so i i hear a lot of what you're saying where i'm coming from though again and it's don't get me wrong i know this is a little different than the line of questioning that that uh mr truth was just asking so i'm not gonna pretend you weren't answering me or anything um because you know there's a different line of questioning but where i'm personally coming from here is like i feel like if i were an atheist i could make the exact same arguments i'm making right now right because i we do this with so many other sources um all the time right like did like the amelia man army and herodotus histories is nobody believes that i don't know a single historian on the planet who would say a million persians showed up at thermopylae and attacked but also a lot of what herodotus says is definitely taken to be true um because he was at least a semi-decent historian right and he has the ability to know what he's talking about at least so we assume i guess we wouldn't say so evidence suggests right um and my only point i guess in saying that is if we do go that far right if we do grant let's say moses is not miraculous at all um let's say that the numbers are very clearly exaggerated and let's say if there was natural disaster it was natural at best if it existed at all um do we is it still true for us to say there is good reason to believe that a large number large meeting in the thousands not hundreds of thousands right um that a large number of semitic slaves who we might consider to be proto-hebrew left egypt uh around the 15th to 13th century i personally take the 15th century date uh and i think there definitely is right we do know they were there uh we have large numbers of semites in the goshen region uh and then we do know that they left at some point we don't really know why or how but there's conflicting theories at least partially we know that the hypos were driven out but that's not all the semites it's just some of them right um but we don't exactly know how we know that they were there we know that they left we know a lot of them were slaves like we have slave lists that include hebrew names like ashura and yakuba and dawid and stuff like that right um so do we have reason to believe that that minimalist version of an exodus occurred i think we definitely do and i think the the ways i'm concluding that are no different than the ways i would conclude thermopylae happened gilgamesh was a king the trojan war really happened right even though i don't grant that the kingship desire uh descended from heaven or there's a million persians who showed up uh or that um achilles actually was dipped into the river sticks or anything like that you know what i mean so go ahead yeah yeah so let's take the gilgamesh example because we're that's something that i can comment on right um without feeling like i'm leaving my area of expertise uh just not something i want to do um if we if we use that analogy it's absolutely true uh that i think that gilgamesh was a real king of o'rourke uh you know in the mid-thir millennium but i think the analogy would then extend at least in this debate it would then extend all right how much of the epic of gilgamesh can we prove to be true and i just don't i don't think it follows right i don't think it follows that if he was an actual king that then we have to look for the like historical kernels of something like the epic of gilgamesh or the sumerian you know individual stories that built up around him let me just explain because i think you're definitely right in the sense that um and just to give an example that everyone knows of right george washington did not cut down a cherry tree it's a myth it didn't happen right so i certainly hear you there um i i think the kernel of truth might be um gilgamesh was a was a ruler who was legendary in nature who did something potentially something in a natural disaster um given the epic gilgamesh has to do with the deluge that caused him to be remembered in such a way that people were writing legends about him even if that's as far as you go that's still a decent amount of evidence right that's still it like it gives us an idea maybe we can expect a flood to be around his time or some other kind of natural disaster we can expect potentially if we get more evidence to see uh maybe other legends about him because it appears that he very much left an impression on the sumerian people you know what i mean and so there is still a lot of evidence we could deduce from that and if i were to just keep my skeptic cap on i can grant that it doesn't follow the exodus may have happened therefore or even moses may have existed or anything like that therefore we have to take the torah whole hawk i'll totally grant that and i'd even say that's a different argument right um we could come here and have a different debate on the subject you know are the numbers of the exodus accurate or was moses a prophet of god or something along those lines right um but as far as just the bare minimalist claim um you know you you said that you do think there's probably good evidence to believe gilgamesh was a real king of order and i would say as i that's all as far as i'm going in this debate is that i think there is good evidence that semitic slaves left in a semi decent large number large for the time right uh and went into exodus and that's it went to israel excuse me and that's what we could define as the historical uh exodus so let me let me say let me say this so i think we've got to be careful about um distinguishing between what varisimilitude in the story suggests and i'm really sorry that's my three-year-old um and how far we can how far we can push that into the story and what i mean by that is like you know dr bryson can speak to this uh you you know we have um anastasia papyri that from the new kingdom right that that talk about uh whether they're school texts and how much you know that that pulls from their validity or uh you know uh speaks to their validity or not from uh i think it probably if it's anything like what we see in you know sumerian texts that it probably does reflect some sort of maybe some sort of practice uh but at any rate if you have something like you know papyrus anastasia what five or six i always mix them up uh where it talks about two slaves that probably canaanite slaves [Music] are escaping from egypt and on their way out they're taking a path that's very similar it seems on its face to maybe what the israelites did and they're being chased and they're being tracked and there's border crossing and like for two right uh that sort of thing is it's like it's it's evidence that we want to use to say this gives some varisimilitude that slaves did escape it would seem seems very likely that they did but then we also have to factor in that there's only two of them and they're being pretty pretty clearly tracked right because following the hick sauce and again egyptian history is not my thing uh but it seems like there's a lot of you know um control on the border and so those are the things that i have to i think we have to factor in if we're thinking about this and i'll stop but if you were thinking about this from like a criminal investigation standpoint which you know i think is one way to come at this we want to think in terms of like means motive and opportunity so when i think about things like the exodus if we have two of the three but they don't have an opportunity or we you know that they're supposed to be at kadesh barnea for 38 years and there's no there's nothing maybe some 12th century shirts maybe but there's nothing there no no architecture at all before what the 10th century it's like um those are problematic things for a massive group of people and once you start saying well how far down can we scale it well that's fine i mean i'm okay with that but now what we're doing is we're walking away from the narrative of the biblical text and you know that well but to be fair i think the reason that i have to do that is because it's you know it's we first have to agree that the exodus happened before we can just debut excuse me dispute i said debut it doesn't make any sense um before we can dispute some of the uh details of it right uh another and did you just give a perfect example that let's say i wanted to make the case that achilles existed um which just to be fair i think it's likely he probably was a military general from the maestinian empire but regardless right um if i wanted to make that case i think it'd be probably it would behoove me to prove that the mycenaeans existed first or that the trojan war happened first you know what i mean um and then and when i'm doing that i may want to grant certain details like i'm not saying achilles the achilles excuse me uh existed per se i'm just simply saying that you know this particular historical event took place and so i'm not you know walking away from the biblical narrative in the sense that i don't believe it i'm simply saying that i feel like there's no use in us disputing some of the details like did six hundred thousand leave versus ten thousand if we don't even agree with a large group left ever you know what i mean uh yeah so oh go ahead i'm sorry i just wanted to to jump in here because i think it i think cj you've made an important point which is that we have to define an exodus what we you know if we don't agree on what we mean by the exodus right then it's going to be very hard for us to have a conversation about whether it happened you know it's it's very likely that a number of very small exodus of canaanite slaves happened right the egyptians were were very concerned about border control throughout their history really throughout the bronze age on their northeastern frontier it was something that they they had you know they had dedicated border police forces in various periods because people were always coming and going from egypt right the patriarchal narratives about you know abraham coming down in times of famine right people from canaan came to egypt all the time and they left a lot of times they were enslaved in egypt and they escaped they got loose um so the idea that you know this sort of thing happened repeatedly is i think very terrible but if we want to talk about exodus as a singular event then that's the terms we need to debate under to talk about well and that's why i would say i would say oh sorry uh and and that's what i'm saying we are talking about um you know and uh you know part of the case tonight and i see derek coming on just give me one last minute derek uh but you know what we're advocating for for an exodus is a a single event in history uh we are advocating uh you know from the narrative that for some reason the egyptians were spooked uh they felt it was coming from the gods and they believed these foreigners a majority that made up uh the um the state of israel would be the state of israel are to blame for it and because something spooked them to that magnitude not only do we have uh a large number of jewish people leaving under the command of a historical figure moses but it also spooked a number of egyptians to follow in their lead so we are talking about a major event that would have necessitated that big f uh exit we're not talking about little numbers uh we are talking about the big event um and that's what we were trying to at least establish we do want to define uh but we're not talking about little excesses or people running away we're talking something that would make such a big impact it we we can see why the ancients in their histories would talk about it and how something like that could be embarrassing so with that i will be quiet and turn it over to derek my buddy and we can begin q a thank you thank you a wonderful job everybody even through the children i could hear oliver uh maggie's changing diapers while debating i mean can you imagine what a mother right so uh thank you all for being cordial and respectful and insightful in the way that you guys were interacting with one another i really appreciate that we're going to go to the q a session i really appreciate all the super chats they really go a long way in helping us do what we do and i'm going to start at the top work my way down as super chats come in i won't be uh saying thank you for the super chat and chatting because i'm reading them and i'm scrolling down from the top working down to the bottom and our first super chat is from arum guard and i don't know this might be addressed to certain people and not everybody so uh you know we'll try and tackle these there's many to come to so thoughts on exodus 15 is a rework of the ball cycle yahweh defeats egypt with the sea yam and underworld mot and has a temple built in his honor don't know that might be a dr josh question and i have noticed just to make one quick uh jab i wanted to say cj seems to be the fox kind of guy like me where we just explore different things so he's a christian who sees things like this that most the time you don't hear other christians say but anyway if you have a comment feel free of course but i think dr josh might be one for this thank you you're me yeah if you don't mind yeah i mean that type of intertextuality uh you know it's it's a whole it's a whole sub-discipline right trying to to piece those things together uh i haven't looked at the secondary literature on the song of the sea specifically to look at the connections there but that's something that would take looking back through the uric text uh and then looking back specifically at the the hebrew there and seeing if there are echoes or illusions and there's it's makes absolutely true that chaos conf uh this idea that you know you have uh chaos being fought back and often in these types of um you know oh boy that's putting me big up on the screen um you know these types of mythological uh aspects coming in there's absolutely true that in exodus 15 you have this um this sort of mythological battle that's taking place but you know as far as what sort of specific connections i i'd have to do a lot of reading to to to make that sort of argument uh whether it's a reworking like i might i tend to think no just off the cuff uh because reworking to me has a very specific meaning to it uh but could it be pulling from you know that the general chaos conf um you know theme yes i think that's absolutely the case thank you thank you did anyone else want to make a comment on that one i'd just like to very briefly say um i i i don't believe this but if i were to make an argument that there was a reworking of the bail cycle i don't think i would use exodus 15. i think i'd probably go either to job with the leviathan um or maybe daniel 7. um but i don't i don't think exodus 15 would be reworking in the bail cycle although it does have the mo and there is a common motif right of ancient near eastern gods fighting with the uh the ocean right or the sea um so in a very general sense i guess you could say there's the motif there but um that would be being very generous i think to the position even still dr bryson were you going to make a comment i was just going to say that um they're the story stories about yom the god and fights with yam were known and written down in egypt in the late bronze age right there's the famous story of the goddess astarte and the sea and yam but there are actually a lot of really interesting literary interconnections between egyptian religious and mythical and literary traditions in the exodus story specifically the plagues it's really funny you can almost track sort of one-to-one ideas and themes from egyptian literature that would have been present in those stories so i'd be happy to talk more about that too at some point if anyone's interested thank you thank you so much uh jump into the next super chat my friend caleb jackson he says is monito cited by josephus a credible egyptian source for an exodus-like event so and i'll jump in first so you know once again i i think it does go to opportunity uh what he had available to at the time now uh josephus who is uh making his case and remember a lot of the greeks you know asked for you know a history on the jews romans are trying to better understand them and you know obviously josephus strategy uh you know is to defend you know what he feels like has been attacking the sacred tradition of the jews so you know josephus does do a good job with his quotations of uh manito in the sense that he said okay well here's my source i would uh obviously i i can't read the egyptian sources but i do have a native-born uh egyptian who was very uh fluent in the greek uh learning uh he says in manitoba's work that he translated from the native records and if we tie that back to uh the the potomac uh area he was living in you know this is the greek conquest uh the ptolemies are opened up all this data the egyptian priests were still there the temples were still there a lot more that we didn't have uh there's the library of alexandria all this learning coming in all these scholars coming in uh so uh i would say he is credible he he is an egyptian he is gonna give it from his standpoint um so i to discredit him you know there was an opportunity he was well quoted in there uh so the question i i have to ask is you know why wasn't he attacked more josephus felt that he supported uh the elements uh material facts in the exodus narrative to justify their antiquity he says he had the native records and uh unless there's some disagreement that period opened up a wealth of the egyptian archives to not only the greek uh scholars coming into the area but as an egyptian priest uh he would have that information as well and i uh i don't know dr bryson if you want to comment on that uh since monito may be in your area of expertise well i can certainly um speak to the way that egyptologists regard moneta which is to say that um you know again it's a real pity that we don't have minito's original work the egyptians in all periods were conscious of their own history they looked to earlier records um as a source of religious inspiration or authority um and they looked to earlier records as a source of um sort of knowledge about the the way the world should work as a source of credibility various kings right might refer to to the works of earlier kings as a way to kind of cement their own authority associate themselves with earlier rulers you know that there was a one of the sons of ramses ii is always called the first stage apologist because you know he actually sort of sponsored digs at either he excavated he had excavations at giza and um you know put his name on her old kingdom statues that he had dug up because he was curious about the past the egyptians believed that the world was created in a moment called the first moment right the first instance and they wanted to know what things were like then so they were always trying the same way we are to get back to ever deeper history um so monito as an egyptian priest would likely have been again right what we mean by accurate is is i don't want to just sort of you know throw in with minito entirely because in terms of things like his chronology right so the number of years he attributes to various kings there's a lot of corruption a lot of problems with that text but if josephus is faithfully exerting beneath though then we can be fairly confident that there is a kernel that there is historical uh meat to those stories and in fact there are archaeological um and sort of you know our historical and historical indications that a lot of the stories that monito is reported by josephus to have told um or to have written were were fairly faithful accounts of egyptian history again i think the key thing caleb about your question is that you say exodus like event right and josephus is doing the same thing we are doing he's mining egyptian sources for anything that could be relevant to the jewish tradition and so yes absolutely there are things that happened in ancient egypt that could have that historical kernel that the people who were compiling the exodus narrative brew on okay so real quick i just want everyone to know we have many many super chats i'll try to work through them as as best we can to get the topics addressed from you so um i don't want to push us because we have to you know address them but i wanted to let you know we have many in mind so if we can get right to whatever the answer might be that'd be good for both sides um just let's just keep the move uh keep moving because there's so many of them uh rn thank you so much for the super chat the battles of megiddo kadesh karshemus uh were in 1457 1274 and 605 bce egyptian part no mention in judges egypt remained active uh h.o to fingers crossed with exodus i i'm not really sure but like how to reconcile with the exodus i think probably is the idea okay yeah i mean like there was a recent uh lecture series interview that israel finkelstein did um [Music] down at the uh albright institute i think that's where he's at but um yeah i mean he brings this up quite a bit when he talks about it is like you know the biblical texts don't seem to know that egypt was in charge of canaan right it's uh it seems sort of foreign to the text like there's no there's no memory of egypt being so firmly in charge of canaan so uh yeah i mean these i think these are problematic things yeah i would say it is interesting certainly that it's not mentioned especially since by my reckoning of the chronology i i think the battle of megiddo should have happened actually megiddo and kadesh i think should probably have happened during the period of the judges and i'll admit that's rather strange um there are two things that i would say uh well i guess megiddo might be a little bit before the period of the judges but kadesh definitely would be in the period of the judges i have to look back at the exact date of megiddo is because i'm not really remembering perhaps somebody can remind me of that um at any rate i know it was almost the third at any rate um what i would say about that is number one i don't think that the um i don't think it would necessarily be a problem if the israelites were not necessarily in conflict with egypt in other words if egypt is not going there to fight israel it could be just an army passing through to go take on some of the rebellious canaanite tribes that have nothing to do with the hebrews um i think the area has evidence enough that it was disunified that that such a thing could be the case even the hebrews themselves were disunified so they could be attacking ones and not attacking others and because of that a certain history if it's told from the perspective of a certain group of people just may not find the event relevant because it's not relevant to their history in particular um another thing that i think would be interesting to note is we don't have um really i guess complete evidence of the um egyptian chronology right and i want to be very careful here because i'm not by any means an expert on this but i just know that you know there is the there's a low chronology a high chronology and a new chronology as well as other different chronologies right and my only point in even bringing that up is just to say that each of those is going to give you a different pharaoh and a different historical context for what's actually happening at these particular times even if only by a slightly slight amount of time uh evan hotep or thutmose or um i forget dudamos right are three different pharaohs of the exodus based off of the three chronologies that i just mentioned right my only point in saying that is just simply to say it could be that megiddo and kadesh are actually in such a period that it works um with the biblical chronology and we just don't we simply don't know enough to reconcile those things yet i i fully recognize that speculation but i do think that it's possible thank you thank you um everybody commented on that one all right moving on topic discussed my friend gary thank you for the super sticker really appreciate the help gary uh go subscribe to his channel too he has a whole another channel talking about all sorts of topics so there's my plug for you man thank you so much once again for the support i appreciate it kirk keys i hope i'm saying your name correctly there thank you for the super chat uh do the sea peoples fit into the exodus story in any way well so they wouldn't one way right which is that the philistine question um are the philistines actually there when the exodus happens um but other than that i don't know how i'm sure that dr bryson you could probably give more on that than i definitely could i can jump in here um and say that there are a couple of ways in which they do first if cj mentions right the the question of when the philistines actually were present in canaan israel right the philistines come from the palace that is the idea right one of these groups of people that settled on the canaanite coast after spending some time at sea's marauders um but the way that the sea peoples usually come into the debate is when we talk about when the exit has happened right there are sort of two points in time where the exodus might have happened one is around 1400 bc 1450 bc and one is around 1200 bc well that question of the conquest right of israel invading canaan and and laying waste to these canaanite cities archaeologists look for destruction levels to support that story they look for evidence that an army attacked a canaanite city if we date the conquest of israel or conquest of canaan by the israelites to around 1200 bc we would expect to find destruction levels in canaanite cities that date to around 1200 bc we do in some cases but that's also the moment when the sea peoples were attacking coastal cities throughout the mediterranean so if you find a destruction level at a city in 1200 around 1200 bc there's chances are it's almost certain right that this is a sea people's attack not an israelite attack right i guess it's sort of the the archaeological perspective josh correct me yeah i mean this is this is what makes this so complicated right because when you eric klein has written very recently an updated edition of his book 1177. there's so much going on in the decline of the levant uh and you know the the rest of the mediterranean um and it's it's certainly not my area of expertise but uh you know so so looking at these sorts of things becomes incredibly complex which is why when you look at a site like hatsur there's a reason they kind of have to go through the different steps okay who could have done this could this have been the sea peoples could this have been you know another canaanite city could this have been something done by themselves could have been the egyptians right and uh i think that the the sea peoples the reason that uh this but bentor is i can't remember if it was a marijuana but um said that no he didn't think it was the sea people because too far inland for that to be interesting to them it's like is it though but um but that's the reason that you have to contend with that is because there's there's it's so much more complex and this is why historiography this period is very difficult because we we don't have for the israelites we have so so little right got the meredith stila um so it's difficult really well with josh derek you're on you good reminder uh i i muted just in case uh so that way you don't hear any background noise a little siren was coming by uh moving to the next super chat topic discussed gary again thank you for the super chat he says dr josh cleans up quite well thank you man of the year right thank you so much uh let's continue on queen of the heathen says uh and thank you for the super chat why are dr josh and dr bryson so good looking this is very important for my research thank you i appreciate it once again gary's back with another super chat this is dr josh and dr maggie professional articulate intelligent respectful and looking smoking hot i think that's what they mean to say i i told you we were gonna lose the uh uh the attraction contest uh well cj is wearing a a tie so like he is competing in some sense so yeah i tried to at least put on a my wife said i can't look crazy when i come on these things so i thank you so much for those super chats i appreciate the compliment of course to the guest converse contender thank you for the super chat he says dr j and dr b can you explain why scholarship is important when discussing biblical issues asking for a friend laugh out loud also glad to see all cordial thank you so much yeah i think this was probably uh more more at me um yes so one of the reasons that you'll hear uh scholars when they when they academics when they talk about a topic if they haven't written their like their dissertation or they haven't done an independent project or something on it one of the reasons that we start off with things like look the majority of scholars that are in this field argue x people like to jump down scholars throats for saying stuff like that who cares what the consensus says well you should um and the reason that you should is not that it's necessarily right or that it's infallible or something but there's a [ __ ] good reason that they're saying it sorry but i mean i feel like that deserves an expletive there there's a reason that all these scholars are getting together and saying this is what we think about this um so i'll take something that's not on the table today like when i talk about slavery in the hebrew bible that the reason that you the reason that you talk about what scholars say about this is because it's it's everybody that's saying it it's not just you know liberal scholars or fundamentalist scholars or conservative scholars or whatever scholars this is what the consensus position is so does that mean that it's right no what it means though is if you're going to go against it if you're going to buck against it there's a reason that phd students write dissertations that often go against the consensus when they do it they have to spend damn near five years after their coursework studying that very specific topic and reading what everybody says about it because if you're going to buck against it you damn well but if you're going to come at the doctors you better not miss right and that's that's that's sort of the down and dirty way to say it so that's why if i don't have an expertise on the exodus i don't have an expertise on egyptian history i don't have an expertise on any like most of the stuff that i write down i don't write my dissertation on it so we talk about consensus scholarship because look here's what the secondary literature is here's what scholars say about this here are their arguments this is why they hold to it this is what you have to contend with i'll jump in here too and say that when josh says expertise he's using that word loosely right expertise in an academic sense is very different right josh is extremely well informed with respect you guys have figured that out right with respect to the exodus and with respect to egyptian history right when he says it's not his area of expertise he means that he is not one of the handful of people in the world who can speak with the most authority to that subject right he can be well informed right in a level much beyond that of your average sort of you know casual person of casual interest in a topic right and still you know not consider himself an expert because there's a very high bar that you have to hold yourself to call yourself an expert as an academic i think in fairness to josh uh he's pretty smart dude but to me at least um i think scholarship is important when discussing biblical issues mostly because it keeps us humble to be perfectly honest right i mean i'm christian i'm i'm alien it's not terribly important to me from the perspective of my own faith and this isn't true for all christians obviously but for me it isn't terribly important from the perspective of my faith whether or not the exodus happened literally as it's described in the bible but the fact that this conversation happens right the fact that we have to have that that there is this disconnect between the evidence that i see as a scholar and the the book that i read as a person of faith makes me have to really think about what it is that i believe why i believe it what it means to me what does the exodus mean to me as a christian right given what else i know um you know and again what i take from it is not what everyone else takes from it necessarily but i think the scholarship really helps inform me um of how big the world is and how big god is right god is bigger than any of this to me and so you know i think the scholarship keeps me humble as much as anything thank you did you guys want to comment on this question yeah like uh that's just a brief uh i guess dissenting opinion but not quite because here's the thing i often get a lot of people say and in fact i have a feeling the asking for a friend comment was directed at me because me and converse know each other quite well um i i have somewhat of a reputation of being anti-academic and it's not true i don't think that people shouldn't actually like take any stock from experts so that experts don't know what they're talking about or anything like that that is that's a major misrepresentation of my point my only thing though is we have a i mean i don't know how to describe it other than idolatry of phds in this world such that they can get away with almost everything i'll give a perfect example uh don dershowitz what he says about leviticus is hilarious like it's just i don't think you understand his argument cj i've heard your videos in his argument sorry it's utterly absurd uh and the fact that anybody takes him seriously is utterly absurd on its face you don't understand what leviticus says uh you don't understand his argument just to be fair when i've pressed you on that issue dr josh you even said no i'm not saying that what dr dershowitz is true uh even though in your videos you seem to imply that it is and i don't want to get into the argument necessarily about whether or not you should the point is that like um that like that is something where it's like people are people are going to take this leviticus 18 is actually implicitly accepting homosexuality things seriously jesus christ you don't understand his argument cj use a different example you don't understand his argument use a different example i do understand this example though and we can give plenty of other examples we can give plenty of other examples right i've already given the history we should move on and so on and so forth richard carrier is another example i mean mythicists i love richard carrier by the way i think he's a cool dude uh mythicists are not typically taken seriously in academic circles but everybody sees that he has a phd and now mythicism is like a mainstream position if you ask somebody in the atheist sphere on youtube and like that bothers you that's just not true it totally is though like i talk to these people all the time gentlemen gentlemen let's let jonathan get his peek in here and we'll move on yeah so i now when i had my debate with uh dr bart airman and you know once again we were discussing um the text of the new testament the reliability you know what is the the basis that we should be uh establishing our textual criticism on now one of the questions he asked me because i recognize that the scholarship of today doesn't support my hypothesis at all now he did mention now i know this is the consensus position and this is not exodus or this is not evidence for it but jonathan i i do need you to help uh explain to me you know why is that that this is the consensus now uh i i do recognize the scholarship uh in a lot of different subjects may not agree with this and my answer to a dr airman is while i recognize it is there are things to help explain why those positions came to be now for me you know i i kind of brought up the uh the philosophical shift in thinking the kind of break with the empirical method you know i i quoted uh you know stephen hicks who's done that kind of showed the kind of break with the empiricism with kant and the the movement of post-modernism but while i recognize you know from a christian perspective you know if i am gonna challenge going back to dr josh you know obviously there's a lot i have to explain and research but for my example with dr airman it was specifically you know to really address his concerns because you do have a legitimate concern if hey you're going up against you know what a lot of experts have said but how do you best explain around that uh and for me it was really just trying to show the philosophical shift or the history of these ideas and how they have influenced our particular worldviews and we can move on from there i just i just want to say that as far as idolatry and academics goes i accept offerings in the form of cash and or but you know i mean you know best to look at the evidence right thank you thank you so much next super chat hot black desi auto thank you says can dr josh comment on the fact that pharaoh's real name is never used in the hebrew text isn't pharaoh a title yeah i mean again this is this is something that comes up quite a bit and like i think it says source dr bryson be able to speak to this much more but i mean like the writers of the hebrew bible know how to name egyptian pharaohs right then how to do that um so i think it i don't think it's the strongest piece of evidence um [Music] and i don't think that scholars think it's the strongest piece of evidence like israel finkelstein mentioned it i'm just thinking back to that lecture that i heard a couple days ago uh but it but again he said it's it's a you know it's it's something that's noteworthy but not the strongest piece of evidence it is strange it's it's as if they're trying to make it vague sorry good doctor i was just going to say and just to clear up pharaoh is a it's not exactly a title it's kind of like saying the white house said when you talk about the president pera means the great house to the palace and the egyptians used it as well as a an expression to refer to the king either you know sometimes when they were speaking of a specific ruler and sometimes in a literary context when this josh said they wanted the opportunity for it to be kind of vague thank you thank you appreciate that briefly i've never had this verified but i have heard that that could potentially be evidence of exodus being old because they didn't used to and i don't know maybe you could even you could comment on this but i've heard um people say that in the like 15th 14th century and before it was customary to refer to pharaoh simply as pharaoh rather than as pharaoh such and such um i've never taken the time to verify that but i've heard that to be the case it's something that comes becomes more and more common as time goes on it's something that's you know first really becomes typical in the new kingdom so um but it's not an argument i don't i mean for or against the historicity of the exodus narrative thank you so much next super chat doc pleroma not thank you so much for that super chat in exodus 1 5 the clan of jacob consisted of 70. how could the great grandchildren of the 12 sons number over 2 million all of egypt was 2 to 4 million so i think this is a population question and an issue on a large exodus i suspect and also how could they have become that large of a number i don't know anyone wanna i'm not personally here to defend the population numbers today um i could do that in another debate i don't have a problem with them i just think that it isn't necessarily relevant to this specific issue just because i think that i like i said earlier i think like coming at like a almost like a minimalist position as far as did the minimal facts of a historical exodus event take place i think that should be the first thing we argue about and then at that point once we agreed that the event took place then we can agree or start to uh dispute rather the details of the event like is it 600 000 or is it something smaller than that that's still very large well not you know i'll go ahead and defend uh the number real quick uh for doc pleroma uh hopefully i'm pronouncing that right well first we're talking about a period of time um you know so we're talking a large expansive time and when we talk about the the number the 600 000 uh which would equate to x amount of uh 2.4 million remember there's a mixed multitude uh that went with them so you know and that's operating on the assumption that uh obviously they saw something there uh they either spooked them uh or came to the belief uh they recognized what the jewish people did and they left so we're talking about a mixed multitude went with the jews uh to come up with that large number so we obviously have a time period of growth um and then we do have a mixed multitude going with those people to be clear though it's 600 000 fighting men these are all israel in the narrative these are all israelites right so that that's the that's the basis for that what i think is probably conservative number of two to three million but anyway all right thank you so much appreciate that moving on to ethan styles i hope i'm saying your name right ethan i've been seeing you around for a while thank you so much question for dr bryson can you describe the relationship between egypt and kanan i've heard that kanan had to pay tribute to egypt for a time in the late bronze age which is the period we're discussing here when the exodus story is set um most of the cities of canaan were vassals of the egyptian kings so the egyptians controlled canaan um as far as sort of um securely as far as modern-day lebanon and then um as far as the euphrates river at various points in the new kingdom um there was always sort of back and forth among the empires of the region so matani and then the hittites after about 1350 bc for the allegiance of most of those city-states but canaan southern canaan in particular um but up through the sort of central part of the canaanite coast was um filled most with egyptian vassals of varying degrees of loyalty the egyptian army would regularly march up through canaan to kind of cement their um authority their presence in that that area and of course being a vassal meant paying tribute and also supplying troops should there be conflict in the region on behalf of the egyptians things like that thank you i appreciate it next super chat gnostic informant for the tip jar thank you nasa conformant uh go subscribe to my friend nostalgic informant neil i appreciate that super chat uh next super chat jay schroeder hope i'm saying your name correctly great content always interesting subjects so thank you for just uh adding to the tip jar as well i appreciate that next question topic discussed my friend gary's back dr josh and dr maggie how does one go about checking in their checking their own biases the same question to the evangelical fundamentalist on the panel yeah i mean i can go and go first um it's tough right i mean being able to recognize what it is that you're coming to the data with is it's first of all you have to be aware you have to be looking for it um so i i like i'll give an example um that's not a good example anyway yeah i mean i think being aware of it enough to try to consider your current life situation your academic situation your upbringing all of those things um but again i don't know that you get free of bias i don't think that you do it's just trying to be uh as aware of it as possible and try to not let it to the greatest extent uh affect your model gentlemen yeah i'll say i mean i don't know how well any of this works but i'll just mention some of the things i try to do um one thing i like to consider is could i make this argument if i were um on the opposite you know side as well as would i make this argument if i was on the opposite side because those are of course different questions right just because i could make an argument doesn't mean i necessarily would if i had different presuppositions or something like that um i also do kind of like to um come out of position of you know everybody is just presenting um they're not i don't want to say their best guess because people obviously are doing very serious work here but they're um how would i say this uh i guess incomplete model right we don't have all the pieces yet and so everybody's trying to figure it out and so when i read them and you know don't necessarily take them as uh you know gospel and be able to compare them and that of course would apply to myself more so than them right because i'm not even an archaeologist or anything like that um and i i guess another position is just trying to listen as much as possible i think that's the most difficult one just simply because especially in the debate you're literally coming at it from the perspective of the people against you or wrong because otherwise you wouldn't be here right um but you know trying to uh listen is is certainly good i think and hopefully i do a good job i don't know that i necessarily do but hopefully yeah to piggyback on what cj was saying i think manners go a long way you know the ability to listen is really absolutely key right and you know we do our best i mean it's hard for for me you know i'm not to jump in and try to talk over people and you know raise my voice and get all indignant when i hear something that doesn't accord with what i think is correct but um just remembering what mom said right just you know just stay quiet listen let the other person talk if you don't have something nice don't say nothing at all that goes a long way because you'll hear things right and in point of fact there is evidence that speaks to these issues you know people bring it up you miss stuff and if you're not listening you're not going to catch it jonathan do you want to finalize that when we move on yeah you know for me um you know i i enjoy these engagements with dr josh uh dr bryson because i am honestly looking for are there holes in my narrative is there a way that dr josh or uh dr bryson can give me information to help me falsify it because there may be things i'm not seeing it so uh part of these interactions are really to help me also understand i i don't know everything there are things that are missing dr josh is an excellent academic whether this is his field of expertise or not as dr bryson says he's very well informed he's done a lot of great research in his education so for me this kind of helps me determine i get to test my hypothesis against someone like dr josh who does have good information to share that may falsify uh these accounts so the fact that dr josh and dr bryson is doing it uh helped me uh you know really test these ideas that i have thank you so much next up scott duke thank you for the super chat scott i am enjoying this debate immensely i think megan may have dressed dr josh this morning i don't think scott's wrong i think it's possible it's possible very especially the tie i mean she had to maybe line it up a little i don't know uh arum guard i hope i'm saying your name correctly thoughts on the possible egyptian origins of moses name i believe there are some other levites as well so yeah and actually so i wanted to get to this my opening but unfortunately with everything being deleted i didn't get you know the ability to get my thoughts all concise but that's one of i think the really good evidences of uh a historical exodus is you know you can see the name moses or at least what appears to be a uh cognate in many of the pharaoh's names right like that most say ahmos say uh the even ramesses if you say it in its uh original tongue which i could not do i think it's like ramashisha or something like that uh it sounds a lot like moses and there uh the egyptologists i think say that the um the word there means son of if i get if i i'm understanding that correctly well the hebrew word uh means drawn out of and while those aren't the same thing you can certainly see how the etymology could you know go from one word to either of the two words or even from one to the other if one came first um you know the first thing i was suggesting is maybe they have a common ancestor uh but the point there just kind of being that i i think that that is a pretty solid evidence for a potential um history behind the exodus and some of the other names include like phineas for example uh i believe pua which is one of the egyptian uh midwives excuse me the hebrew midwives in the exodus i believe that is uh has egyptian origin um and i think aaron even as well is said to have some egyptian um history behind it so um yeah i i would say that that is a very solid point to bring up and i wish i would have brought it up earlier actually any other comments before we move on i think the egyptologist probably should answer this one yeah moses um is perfectly plausible as an egyptian name mesu right means to be born or to to beget or to bear so the child of or one born of is a way of translating um mosa in egyptian and as cj said a lot of pharaoh's names included that element right so that moses is the one borno ever begotten by thoth or amin moses is from amumu right um so it's a perfectly plausible egyptian name but it's a nickname right it's not his whole name moses would be part of an egyptian name and there are other um cj as you point out egyptian names in the exodus story um and in the patriarchal story there's the famous one right is pop potiphar which comes from the egyptian padi prey right so the one whom the god pray has given and the fact that there are egyptian names in the text is another one of these examples that you can point to either as an indication that the text is historical or has the as evidence that it's not in that like using mosa which is a perfectly legitimate egyptian name but a nickname is kind of like saying pharaoh right it's kind of like if you name a guy jack in a story it could be anybody um also potiphar right padi pray that that form padi which means the one whom whoever has given is very common in the iron age so after 1200 1100 bc that name because that name form becomes very very common using different gods the earliest attestation that we know of of that form of name based on the reign of seti the first so in that sort of you know a little after 1300 bc range you know it's it's highly inconsistent with the mid 15th century date for the for the the story the patriarchal stories the joseph story right um right or earlier before the mid 15th century bc um but it would have been very a very plausible egyptian name to a reader in the iron age so the egyptian names in the bible can go either way from my perspective and and again from my perspective it suggests very much that the narrative is um is historicizing but not historical thank you thank you i appreciate that uh next super chat the empty cross any evidence that people knew about moses before the septuagint some scholars think that exodus was fabricated just before its translation to greek i don't know i don't think anyone on the panel thinks that though do you no i it and i think you know what we have from you know philo of alexandria from josephus uh the uh you know that they had already known about it uh so this information was already out there obviously uh they know about moses before the septuagint um you know a lot of ancient historians cite him uh obviously hekatius's egyptian history includes a moses element uh which places that before the septuagint uh and i think as josephus writes it in his opening you know from the standpoint that you know the ptolemies came into power they're uh ruling the civilization that's been around for a while uh the ptolemies did have jurisdiction over judea as well uh so they really wanted to understand the constitution of the jewish people uh to better rule them and you know josephus does go into his account explaining that they already have this information um and they want to learn more about it hence that was the uh that was the key to begin this work at the library of alexander to get it at alexandria to get that so this information was known at least on the basis of those in empirical records that they had already known about it they just wanted more information since they're specifically dealing with them in alexandria that you had a large jewish community over there so they wanted to understand who these people were and hence you know get their records do a translation of the law uh because you know it's one of the things that they were trying to understand about the jews you know uh the uh you know they kind of thought they were strange they worshiped their gods differently than us how do we understand their uh their laws and uh everything that they're doing that was kind of so this was already known they're their neighbors uh so it makes sense why they want to try to better understand them and they would have already known about moses thank you so much uh getting to the next one genesis and exodus are at odds i think writing duration of stay in egypt so it's a short super chat i know it's difficult to get what you want to say in there but uh is that do you see something here dr john or cj well if you want to answer first you can definitely i mean these are just this is just a question of source material right so looking at how many generations or is it 400 years or 430 years it's a complicated question um i don't know that it it doesn't really have tons of bearing necessarily here scholars would be in general agreement here that you have two different origin stories right for the nation of israel one's a patriarchal one and one's an exodus origin story and bringing them together what yeah and i certainly would you know obviously would um disagree with that but to be fair i don't know if it's necessarily where i would want to go with this answer only because i think that it i would want to explain the reconciliation just because i could do so very quickly uh and of course young people can accept it or not accept it but uh the bible seems to be very consistent in interpreting 430 years as 430 years separating the abrahamic covenant from the mosaic covenant um and therefore the four hundred years of sajorn would be considered uh both in egypt and in canaan now it is interesting to note that the septuagint translation of the bible actually says uh the sajorn in egypt and kanan whereas the modern king james bible does not add hand cannon whether or not one is original and the other isn't i don't think is necessarily relevant because what it uh indicates there is that the people at the time thought that this was implied right i thought that it was uh us adjoining in both canaan and egypt and the rest of the bible seems to demonstrate that if you count the generations if you look at what separates the abrahamic covenant from the mosaic covenant and other different references that you tend to have there um so i i don't know that they are actually in contradiction i guess that's where i'm gonna end thank you thank you appreciate it we have a bunch of super chats i'm trying to push through i know a couple of you have appointments around two so please uh forgive me for trying to get us through these doc pleroma thank you again for the super chat in exodus 13 17 how could there be a philistine or philistine to circumvent at this time philistines did not appear in the area until 1200 bc in my opinion i think that the our understanding of the origin of philistines is probably flawed um my reason for saying that is because the uh i mean the bible seems to think that they were there forget the exodus they were there in abraham's time right um which is an even bigger problem if you want to start talking about what does that jive with our current understanding of when the philistines arrive um i would say that um i think it's very likely that there was a proto-philistine group in the region beforehand uh in fact it might be it could be the case and others have suggested as well before me this isn't a unique idea to me but it could be the case that the reason the pellet set were going to the gaza region in the first place is because it was already a kind of colony or an area where there was a large number of um greek migrants because the pellets that do appear to be from the aegean area um and again there are there are numerous people who have suggested that before me um i think the is actually kind of a shame the only one that's actually coming to the top of my head is um david roll but doug petrovich is another example there you go uh and a lot of the guys actually at abr bryant wood and so on and so forth um they would be much better to ask the question than me but that would be sort of my short quick answer all right anyone else brief brief uh answer to this as we move on all right next super chat queen queen of the heathens uh thank you for the super chat do jonathan and cj have any credentials number two cj stated that getting a phd wouldn't change his position doesn't this mean by default he's doing the exact retreat he was referencing earlier and uh let's try to keep it as brief as possible gentlemen but uh yeah how do you respond um i i know in terms of credentials uh in this particular field that's why i call myself an anglican auto didact so i'm research myself but uh i do have my mba uh so i do have my master's degree i do have my undergraduate obviously it's in business and statistics and computer programming i do a lot of data science so that's where my educational credentials are in um unfortunately you know dr josh and i are not debating data science or statistical models or forecasting uh or regression so um obviously i'm not going to showcase any of my uh educational credentials but yes i do have my master it's not in this field uh so i don't think it would be relevant except i had to do papers and sit down and and get my degree by showing up uh and doing some work so in that regard but i don't advertise it because of the fact that i'm self-educated in this particular field yeah and i'll just be very quick so answer number one no i do not have any credentials uh answer number two um the it wasn't a position of uh like assuming my position per se or saying like the evidence couldn't convince me otherwise uh rather what i was trying to communicate and saying that was my look at these documents whether it be the iliad or the sumerian king's list or the bible is not actually based in my religious faith um it's based in my understanding of how we should understand these ancient texts which is very likely based on historical truth even if not entirely historically accurate i i tend to be on the side that legends are more likely to be based in truth than not based in truth um to give an example of how that would apply it seems to me pure face value i don't know much about this but it seems to me more likely that there was a historical heracles on which the legends are based then that he is a purely fictional character and people made up legends about him right um that doesn't obviously mean he cut off the head of a hydra and who grew back right and maybe it's not even possible for us to deduce what is myth and what is not but it just seems to me at face value to be more likely um and there are plenty of of scholars who do take that kind of a position as well although they would be very much more nuanced than i would and that probably would change if i did have a phd i probably did a lot better at articulating what i mean and all that kind of stuff um it might also be a little bit less fundamentalist because you know if i wasn't a christian um so that could potentially change as well but my only point was just to communicate uh my idea of looking at legends and ancient texts all right thank you so much next uh super chat topic discussed thank you question for cj you stated the egyptians would never let them go because it would be so destructive to the egyptian economy and you said they did leave what evidence exists that the egyptian economy was devastated at that time well i think that's a mix of of two different things i think mr sheffield said that they wouldn't let them go and then i was uh talking about um you know like the uh population variances and stuff like that um so as far as the like evidence of the destruction of the economy this is very circumstantial and i don't necessarily want to get too much into it only because if depending on what chronology you take you're going to have different approaches of this and and i don't mean anything as drastic even as new chronology versus conventional um even low chronology versus high chronology is going to give you a very different understanding because you have a different pharaoh you have a different economic situation going on uh you even have slightly different situation going on in canaan so this is just a very long way of saying i don't really know and i don't want to be committal to it because i don't think that um i don't think i can be really jonathan did you want to make a brief remark um you know once again this this can only be speculating because you know um you know anything between the old and the the new kingdom as far as the dark ages that existed i'm not saying that's positive for our case um of that that then references back to the excess of you know you had this large group of people that uh left you know you would uh we would have the expectation that it would have a big impact on their economy that's why they wouldn't let them to leave and if we um and i i'm not holding to this firm but we do see the sort of dark ages uh between the old and the new kingdom uh does that give any and and dr uh bryson you can definitely chime on on this because uh maybe you'll have more expertise on this but you know in terms of any uh evidence from the standpoint i would say positive but uh it's it's definitely another curious incident uh that we do have this uh dark age uh between the old and new kingdoms which uh circumstantial as it may be could tie back to the uh or be consistent with the exodus that impact on their economy so i'm not sure what dark age you're talking about between the old and new kingdoms there was 200 there were two intermediate periods and a metal kingdom in between the old and new kingdoms um but both um positive dates for the exodus occur during a very well documented period in the history of the ancient near east just to be you know perfectly clear about the the egyptology there oh thank you so much i appreciate your answers festering boils and thank you for that super chat gary thank you for this super chat festering boyles uh sounds like he was there during the plagues with that name if jonathan could prove that the numbers in exodus were unexaggerated would he admit that he'd use that argument as evidence of the story being true you must be muted yeah let me say if john could prove the number were unexaggerated would he admit that he used that argument um well no i when you're putting or you're trying to construct an empirical history you're trying to um look at many elements of it i mean uh apian for instance you know his attack on the account uh had 110 or 120 000 uh egyptians now still a very high number it's not 5 000 uh it's not 35 000. you know an egyptian himself you know at the court you know said it was 120 that was and that was his uh polemical attack to saw a discredit or inverse the amount so in terms of setting that baseline um you know and you know it's difficult sometimes to look at numbers uh from the ancient sources and give um you know how close were they uh but you know um not i wouldn't use it uh to be true per se it's not just the numbers it's all these other elements you know i uh that that for me i have to resolve um because we're getting all these reports that something did happen uh of that magnitude so um hopefully that answers uh festering boyle's uh question thank you thank you um gnostic conformer thank you for the super chat is it possible that the exodus is an allegory for egypt losing strongholds in kanan let's start with uh dr josh and maggie real quick just briefly if you don't mind and then uh briefly have you comment if you want uh yeah i mean allegory it certainly could be a memory of that right i mean it could factor in um i think nahman made an argument about that recently but i mean it's certainly nothing new uh uh but yeah i mean it certainly could factor in uh because again it's when you have that sort of firm control and then you know egypt following the decline in the mediterranean loses control of the region it's like freedom from that oppression all right all right um let me move on gentlemen and uh ladies if you don't mind here mr monster thank you for the super chat did canaanites and egypt worship yahweh el or baal or el elyon ball can we even know for sure empirically could they have mashed gods into one so this is definitely a really interesting question because l is it appears to be a canaanite deity but it's also a generic word meaning god um and bail it has the same problem it appears to be a deity but it's also a generic word meaning lord as well as a generic word meaning husband and sometimes it can refer to more than one deity like for example baal haddad is the lord haddad um you know he's not actually the end i think actually if i remember correctly i do believe in the bible there is at least one usage of baal to refer to yahuwah um so it can be kind of an interesting and complicated question there it gets more complicated by the fact that there is clear syncretism i think in the region right um for example we have well first the bible just says so right so we know that even from the bible's own perspective there was mixing of the israelite religion with the canaanite religion right uh but if we just you know look at the archaeological record as well we'll see like um archaeological evidence of jehovah and his asherah right which is like a wife named asherah um what's the indication there well that there was some syncretism going on here that the the worshippers of yahuwah were also synchronizing with the canaanite religion um as far as in origin um jehovah does appear to be unique to the israelites there is record of him potentially elsewhere like for example some will say that uh he's referenced as i give about the shasu but first off it's not actually the same spelling it's actually you'd have not you'd have hey and secondly it's probably a toponym and not actually the name of a deity um so as far as worship in origin of yehovah that appears to be unique to the hebrews and originate from them and we can't really go much farther than what we have biblically speaking because there's just no extra biblical evidence to go farther uh the other names there very much a different story dr josh did you want to make a brief comment or are we moving on or uh it's just such a complicated question uh it would take 10 minutes to say anything about it thank you i appreciate it uh next super chat jason i don't want to butcher your last name thank you there an eruption in 1613 bce i personally don't think it had anything to do with it if people are interested in that the entire center section of the 2015 publication um exodus from a transdisciplinary approach that was the publication of a 2013 conference where essentially all the experts in the exodus came together to discuss the topic um they discuss it from that you know sort of naturalistic approach trying to see these as the stories still being describing actual events but you know from a from a naturalistic perspective and they talk quite a bit about that eruption so all right and jason comes back with house of ramesses or name in 1613 bc um so i i think this is actually probably a later redaction um this is just my personal opinion but um my view on the torah is that it was probably originally written by moses and has redacted uh redactions later on more than likely done during the 1000s bc which is when they would have been using terms like land of ramses and house of or not house excuse me um city of ramses um the interesting thing about it is when we see these names it does uh appear to be anachronistic to apply like for example the name of avaris would not be a varus and it would be p ramses the city in the general region at least because they're not actually the exact same city um and so it seems anachronistic to have a figure like moses calling this place ramses at the same time though it's equally anachronistic to have somebody in the 600s bc calling the place ramses because they hadn't called it that for 300 years at that point um so it appears that there's a redaction of an original torus sometime around the um 1000 era bc and interestingly enough there is jewish tradition that supports that actually um there is jewish tradition which suggests that uh samuel and joshua both samuel being around that 1000 bc period um did actually have minor redactions to the torah um so it's not just something that is uh you know pulled out of a hat per se it actually does have historical precedent so dr maggie i know that you have an expertise in this direct field would you comment on that oh you're muted you're muted i'm sorry can you tell me what the specific question was again real quick um yeah um i think uh cj kind of rabbit rolled into just the names that are being used anachronistically and things like that but this oh i got it house of ram sees her name in 1613 bc um i'm not sure what what the 1613 date means in 1613 you know so the volcano eruption i think it is gotcha the thera eruption so there's a series of of cities in the eastern delta so avaris right which was the hixos capital it's a middle kingdom settlement that becomes the capital of the hixos dynasty um uh that then this you know in the at the beginning of the ramsey period so under hormhab um and later um this new site called contier um becomes important so they start sort of establishing an urban settlement there and under ramses ii that becomes the capital city of egypt effectively and it's named p ramesse which means or para ramsay which means the house of ramses and a lot of people have tried to make arguments regarding an exodus or the date of a possible exodus on the basis of those settlements there's not really any particular reason why in the iron age and people wouldn't have known that piramise was you know the bronze age name of that site um monuments of ramses ii we're still standing there they are still standing in the area um and it's true that if right the the later text is referring to an event that happened in that area they might have chosen the name pyramids because these cities right and later of course tennis are all very close together you know they it sort of almost seems like sort of evolution of settlement in that area um thank you yeah thank you so much i appreciate it ronald angel thank you for the super chat egyptian historiography did not permit records of what was considered embarrassing and ignomin ignominious defeats of the pharaoh true or false that's definitely you uh dr bryce i'll take that question it depends on the context the ancient egyptians were very willing and capable of making fun of um and undermining their kings official documents rarely recorded defeats explicitly the egyptians did not like to admit that anything had gone wrong that is correct and given that it's really fascinating how many instances there are where we can really tell in spite of the reluctance of the egyptians to record a defeat or a problem as a defeat or a problem we could infer from a lot of other kinds of evidence that something did go wrong so like the battle of kadesh is the famous example right the egyptians recorded as a victory of ramses ii when in fact it was at best to draw probably a defeat we have hittite records that clarified that the hittites thought that they had won and if you read the i said narrative carefully right if you read ramses and seconds accounts carefully you can kind of see that they got out by the skin of their teeth um you know the whole story right is that the egyptians almost losing and ramsay's through his own strength right even his army sort of fell apart holding things together long enough for help to get there and the egyptians to get out alive um i guess the question i have to probe just to ask boldly bluntly based on this amazing super chat is can we imagine a mass exodus of that large scale of people if we assume the numbers there and they don't document it because they're embarrassed does that actually even work in that kind of question the egyptians tended when there was a problem to try to come up with a counter story or often seem to have tried to come up with counter stories so like in in cases where someone usurped the throne um that person we often sort of see a flurry when somebody came to the throne in unusual circumstances we see a flurry of writing and art that make the claim very loudly that they didn't exact it didn't actually usurp the throne that the lady doth protest too much is kind of a thing that we see happen in egyptian history and literature so like um hatshepsut right she's this female pharaoh um and you know her coming to the throne was irregular it was unusual and there were other claimants to the throne so you know she had you know her court had these narratives composed where you know her father appointed her his heir when she was a child all this retroactively right these narratives are all over the walls right there you know seeing the artistic sort of representations of her divine birth as the child of almond things like that right accounts of oracles proclaiming her king so we see these flurries of activity sort of saying you might have heard that i'm a usurper but in fact i am not and let me tell you about that in great detail so something like the exodus we might have expected the egyptians to try to come up with a good story about um there are you know like plagues right this this great plague um of the 14th century bc the egyptians don't nobody's you know we don't have a thing where somebody sat down and wrote about its precise effects on egyptian society but you know we have this flurry of statue making of the goddess right the protective goddess against illness we have magical spells against illness um so yeah the egyptians officially go ahead sorry i just wanted to say it now that i'm more than certain there would be a little bit of issue taken simply because i don't know that i don't know that dr josh and dr bone would take as much stock from somebody like moneta or what we have from him but what i would say is i think there is what monetary demonstrates is that it is definitely very possible that we don't have records which actually show exactly that right namely the the um the egyptians sort of weaving the story in such a way that it's better for them oh well these were actually leprous people of a rebellious priest and so we expelled them kind of thing right now um is that true is it not i to a certain extent it's it's not an argument from silence because we do have record of moneto actually presenting a polemic but monetto is fairly late in the record i think he's in the 300s or 400s um so it would be nice to get something farther back from him my reasoning for bringing him up would just be to say um that i think it's likely we could actually discover some records which show moneta was maybe uh drawing upon an earlier historical source which did try to paint the exodus in such a way that it wasn't embarrassing um you know there's still a lot to be found uh and i think it's important for us to always kind of remember that thank you thank you so much everybody i appreciate that crash the party i appreciate you my friend super chatting and uh is this question for dr josh when you decided on a suit today were you deciding to also not get into a street fight is it the boomer in me that's not getting that somebody help me out yeah it's it's he's just uh josh can fight missing if he fights yeah oh i see yeah no i see i i think you got it all wrong dr josh is actually secretly like james bond and he's gonna go do something good one cj thank you so much uh everybody for the super chats i appreciate it history of the goddess showing love thank you so much may the goddess bless you uh let's see keeping on keeping on there now we're getting down to the bottom of the barrel here i'm just trying to make sure i cover everybody and don't miss anything my good friend john gear thank you so much for the super chat according to the bible moses lived to be 120 years old do cj and jonathan believe that to be true um it has no bearing on the debate today but yes yes i do all right jonathan yeah no i agree it to be true and i might as well for the other side uh because maggie is a christian right so but do you believe that moses lived to be 120 years old to be honest i just don't think about it okay and josh i'm not a hundred percent sure that moses twitter did not exist so interesting certainly if he certainly if he did i'd love to be i like that i'm i would say the same thing both suggested i see no reason why not all right thank you so much stop scamming man thank you for the super chat mernetta mentions crushing israelites but only in passing on second to last line on an eight-foot tablet wouldn't he make a bigger deal if the exodus happened i don't necessarily think so um if the if you take the 15th century date as most traditionalists or fundamentalists would um the merniftastelle is some 200 250 years separated so it may not necessarily be uh important for them it'd be kind of like us having a war with britain um today or even a couple decades from no no would be today actually uh having a war with britain today and then kind of referencing the the revolutionary war if they crushed us or something you know it may be a little bit um outside of of their purview maybe um but that being said what the merneptus delay i think does demonstrate is by the 13th century bc there is a singular group of people who are one cohesive culture who can be called israelite uh and i think that's very important because a lot of people for a long you know israel finkelstein used to say that they developed in like the 9th or 10th century i don't think anybody would make that position anymore uh in fact dr david falk has has said a very recently that um a lot of those kinds of positions are kind of being done away with and i don't know how right or wrong that is but that you know that's at least one expert in the field who seems to be demon who seems to be arguing that that is the case um so let's be let's be let's be clear there's a difference between a group known as israel uh being in the highlands of canaan in 1207 and the full full-fledged what we would consider to be israel uh that existed in the iron age right oh totally agree totally agree um but i would note if if my interpretation of chronology is true that's actually expected because the 1200s would be the judges period when they're actually a tribal confederation right so um to see the emergence of a kingdom 200 years later uh or a nation so to speak um would actually be perfectly consistent with the traditionalist model i mean i'll disagree i think it's strange that through the amarna period uh and of course maggie feel free to comment uh if you have a massive group of people having taken over egyptian territory in canaan that they don't show up at all uh in the amarna period texts um [Music] that's incredibly problematic i agree if it were a coordinated campaign if a an army even even not an army thousands strong right the america talk all the time about a peru right these sort of stateless people who you know harassed or harried the local rulers of canaan right so the canaanite rulers will write to the egyptians saying hey we've got problems with the imperial send us some troops you know the egyptians were well aware of what was going on in canaan at the time and were there a a people called israel who called themselves israel you know making trouble in canaan at the time chances are that they would have showed up under that name unless you know i mean you want to think of this a piroue phenomenon yeah and again there's good reason right right josh um kyle mccarter talking about david as an imperial uh ruler back in the day you know there there are people who have argued that that the superior phenomenon may have contributed to the origin of the israelite state but you know we would have expected them to show up yeah and i mean when you know when these local rulers are writing to the to the pharah and the amarna letters you know it's not like send thousands and thousands of troops to deliver us you know it's send 50 right send 50 soldiers and i'll take care of it so yeah these are all things that make this an incredibly complex discussion but sort of coming at this i think holding one text and saying let's see if we can make this text you know continue to work i think that's problematic you're muted hi derek i think you're on mute again i think i did that because i had to give my wife a smooch and i didn't want you all hearing so uh stop scamming man is back he says why doesn't the bible mention egypt seizing the near east in 1458 bc and holding it for centuries uh well the seizing is just probably before the exodus actually happened if it's 1458 bc i think people usually date the exodus to about 1446 if they're doing a late date now you know are we committed necessarily to a specific date well when you have chronologies that are up in the air i guess it's not a good idea right um so maybe not uh but it is entirely possible that this just happened before the exodus occurred and that it seems to be likely if you just take a straightforward interpretation of the chronologies uh now as far as egypt being in control of the region um i think many have argued before me like abr david roll and others uh dr david falk then you know and so on and so forth uh they would argue that egyptian power again has it really is very dominant in the lower region like sinai and the negev and the coastal regions but not so much in the judean highlands it's not that they don't have control there it's just that it's not quite as defined as it would be elsewhere um and the hittites sometimes take control the assyrians sometimes take control sometimes they're even kind of independent uh for a small period of time um and so i think that would be probably a main reason for it although you know there is kind of reference to it in a sense which is that um you know solomon kind of appears to be a vassal of egypt if we read um the bible straightforward i mean he has a wife who's a pharaoh i don't think a pharaoh is just passing out wives to people um but you know it mary's the pharaoh's daughter i think that might indicate he would be some kind of a um vassal or some uh or something like that and so there's little indications there potentially um but yeah that's all i'd say all right are we moving on or all right thank you so much for that appreciate it topic discussed my boy gary thank you for the super chat dr maggie is there evidence that the egypt that egypt experienced an economic destruction due to the loss of a large number of slaves during the time of exodus no that's an easy one though awesome and i just say i think it it for our position it certainly depends on who you ask um like for example i think inspiring philosophy would say no we don't have that evidence yet i think a lot of people at abr would say yes we do have evidence like that uh i am certainly not qualified to give you anything there so i won't i won't contend for it personally and if you wanted to point to any of the specific you know items of evidence that that they would bring up i'd be happy to address them you know but from my perspective the answer there is no all right thank you so much danny phil if i if i could sorry just real quick and dr bryson what what is your as far as a chronological period of egyptian history what is your focus uh the new kingdom period into the third intermediate period so the end of the bronze age in the beginning of the iron age i just wanted to point that out to everybody thank you so much i appreciate your comments everybody in these super chats danny did you want to comment again on that maggie no i just wanted to say right there are instances right of of turmoil of economic downturn um that occur right throughout the period but um to attribute any of them to a mass exodus of slaves is i think well beyond what the evidence can support thank you so much appreciate it appreciate it danny at phil talk go subscribe to phil talk if you want to talk philosophy thank you for the super chat my friend can dr josh account for the transcendental necess guy guy hijacking this uh q a you're funny uh dr josh account for the transcendental necessity of thought given the predict the preconditions of the platonic state of his own universal existence listen his kantian metaphysics don't uh supply the intelligibility necessary uh to substantiate the ultimate grounding of all being uh in three-dimensional existence of this plane so you know that says josh for prime mover [Laughter] thank you danny appreciate the little bit of humor here in the middle of all of this considering uh is it philebus i hope i'm saying that right hi the old testament knew about the hittites who lived circa 1700 to 1500 bce i suspect isn't it possible it also preserved the other historical information from such antiquity yeah so i would uh encourage considering plebus to go pick up um i don't know i just just go to david friedman's it's just because it's accessible um anchor bible dictionary just look up the hittites and read through it and see uh what the article says about when you get to the usage of the term hittite or amorite or canaanite how is it used in the biblical text and does it refer to the hittites that we're referring to um well ladies and gentlemen thank you for being patient with me getting through all the q a i think we're we're wrapped up on all the questions super chatted questions and um any final statements don't don't be too long because everybody's got things to do today but if you don't mind wrapping this up with a final statement from each of you and ladies first that's that's yeah i enjoyed talking with you all and hearing the questions uh from your audience derek um i think it's i do think it's an important thing to keep discussing and i'm glad that we can have these conversations regardless of anyone's credentials or background or perspectives it's it's important to a lot of people and so i'm always happy to talk about it and share whatever it is that i can contribute so thanks for this opportunity and i wish your audience well happy holidays you too uh dr josh yeah i i agree um i don't think that this is a topic that uh any i mean i'm sure there are some but i don't think most scholars would hold that this is some sort of an elitist thing that only they should be talking about uh and i'm actually really happy uh to see that you know people are are doing the research and trying to engage with this as you know utilizing what sources that they have um again as i always say in these types of conversations at the end of the day uh check your conclusions right i know i talk a lot about consensus scholarship but the reason that i do that is because they're people that dedicate their lives to these to these topics and it's incredibly valuable what they say about it so whatever position you you end up holding make sure that it you know that that it accounts for um and respects the models that first of all the data that they're using and the models that they're then utilizing to you know account for those data so all right cj or jonathan yeah i'll just say a couple brief things first off i definitely want to thank uh doctors bone and bryson for um taking time out of their day because i you know the the while i certainly appreciate the graciousness you guys give i am a youtuber who just struck 700 today with no credentials whatsoever who has very clear fundamentalist bias and you could have just nope you know what i mean so i very much appreciate having this conversation um and i absolutely um adore the opportunities right uh i also just want to say briefly because i do at the end of every debate uh proverbs 27 says let someone else praise you and not your own mouth and outsider and not your own lips it also says later as iron sharpens iron so one person sharpens another the reason i bring that up is just simply to say if i did a great job here today if you thought jonathan did a great job here today if you thought that we presented good evidence then say so yourselves it doesn't do us any good for us to say that we did anything good and if you think that the opposite is true also say so yourselves because we're never going to get any closer to the truth if we're surrounded by yes men uh and of course that goes for everybody right so um i think regardless of our um of our theological presuppositions or anything like that that's definitely some good words of wisdom and i would just like to uh pass it on to everybody thank you jonathan uh yeah once again uh thank you again dr josh i know we were talking on a number of issues in the past but uh once again it's always a pleasure you're always a class act obviously you always dress and look better than me so i'm probably a little upset about that but uh no i i i do say this out to the audience anyone who takes the time uh to speak with dr josh outside of these conversations or even jarring he's a class act um definitely uh such a warm and friendly person uh and is always there to really help and understand your different ideas so um and same thing uh dr bryson uh thanks for your input uh you have a wealth of knowledge uh that you were able to add to this conversation and you know i think it's important to understand the other side that we should not be uh operating in an echo chamber this is an opportunity to share ideas and thought and you know what dr josh says it's important to understand why um you know the academies do reach conclusions and we should definitely do the due diligence and really understanding that so uh thank you dr josh uh dr bryson for giving me the opportunity to at least share my views on this thank you and i want to say thank you oh go ahead sorry i just my apologies i just want to say really briefly i i do have an open mic after show today if anybody wants to join um there is i have pretty strict rules um but everybody is invited if you guys want to continue the conversation and that includes the audience all right and i want to thank uh first of all both of our phds for giving the opportunity to do this uh they didn't have to uh jonathan approached me and i want everyone who's going well why are there non two pa there's people who aren't phds talking to phds this is unfair i've been hearing that a lot lately and i want to go ahead and address the elephant in the room and say first of all jonathan's my friend and uh more important than our ontological positions and he approached me saying would you see if they'd be interested in having something like this he would love to have that i misvision derek here will be happy to have more phds come um like dr falk and others but dr faulk doesn't do debates but others that are experts in the field that are interested in the topics to have these debates maybe with dr josh and dr bryson so it's not that i'm closed off it's i haven't been head hunting so to speak to try and make this happen jonathan did the work and came to me and said can we do this on your platform so i said absolutely i'd be happy to do that so uh i want to thank every one of you cj it's really good to meet you and um let's do this again sometime yeah definitely awesome ladies and gentlemen if you like what you heard like the video thanks for all the super chats those help support us and doing what we're doing and let's have another one of these in the future maybe some follow-ups i got to get bryson back on dr bryson you're just too much fun so we have to have you back for sure and the babies won the day by the way all the kids that showed up in this i wish that girl [Laughter] real quick let's see that baby hey [Music] oh lovely baby look she's she's famous she's famous she won the debate she won she won all the little babies won so thank you so much dr roma said dr josh papas or cj's for crab cakes i don't understand it but thank you for the super chat i don't know do you guys understand this not at all thank god it's not just me but i'll take uh crab cakes uh if anyone's uh willing to contribute to myths vision and he'll order it for us so yeah thank you so much for this time ladies and gentlemen we're to leave with our little outro from tombstone i hope you feel where i'm coming from like the video share this with someone who might want to know about the exodus and join the patreon if you want hundreds of videos early access you can kind of steer the direction of questions i interview experts in person asking your questions and then there you have a specific video with a phd and and your name being mentioned in it so thank you so much and have a wonderful saturday family don't any of you have that gus to play for blood i'm your huckleberry that's just my game [Music] you

Channel: MythVision Podcast

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Id: Sp2nshpCdAw

Length: 189min 39sec (11379 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021