Why We Know The Exodus REALLY Happened! w/ Dr. John Bergsma

I also am interested if you have any if we have any good reason to think that the Exodus happened because often yeah I've heard a lot of defense of the historicity of the New Testament the reliability that we can compare and contrast and see that there's very few discrepancies yeah but what do you say when someone says we've got really good evidence I think the Exodus never occurred it's just it's a nice fairy tale it's a myth of a of a people but it's not something that happened yeah um I I would say uh okay first of all you're not going to get direct evidence of that because the Egyptians were masters of propaganda so they never record any defeats or anything that goes wrong okay so it's kind of like uh you know kind of like our newspapers yeah it's like the New York Times yeah uh just uh it's very uh ideological um so that's that's how Egyptian historiography was so you would not expect that um a story of a massive defeat of one of the Pharaohs say Ramsay's the second or something like that where he lost a major part of his Workforce uh you know and was defeated by a foreign God that's never going to be recorded in Egyptian animals so you can just forget like having direct attestation from the Egyptians um now what you can look for though is is indirect evidence of authenticity and um what what I find really compelling about uh The Exodus accounts is in particular um the account of the building of the Tabernacle uh in the wilderness and what I find so fascinating about that is that when you look at how the Tabernacle is built it uh it strongly resembles the um uh the Egyptian war tent of the Pharaohs like Ramses II and these Pharaohs were gods and when they would go on campaign up into Kanan for example they would reside in these big Courtyards that were ringed around by curtains and they would have like a tent in the middle and this tent would have an outer cord and an inner court and the Pharaoh would sit and thrown on the inner court on a throne with two cherubim on either side now we have pictures of this we having you know uh you know ancient Engravings of what these War tents look like and the Dimensions the layout it all resembles very very similar to the layout of the Tabernacle in in the books of Exodus and and thereafter and what's so interesting about that Matt is that it's been popular ever since you know the middle of the 1800s to suggest that the pentateague was actually written in the time of Ezra you know like a thousand years after the events that it records and it's all fictitious well if it's being written in the time of Ezra how is it that it matches up so well with Egyptian cultural realia of that time of uh you know the the new what we call the New Kingdom Period which is often suggested as we're talking about like the 13th century BC the 1200s BC the time you know around Ramses the second and before and a little bit after within that time period this is often suggested as the time of The Exodus and in fact the like the technology and uh the the cultural forms that are described in The Exodus resemble that time period in Egypt in fact in King Tut's tomb we have something that looks like the Ark of the Covenant we have this big gold box on poles only on top it's got a figure of the god Anubis this uh you know like jack-o-like God or it's like dog god and um but but anybody biblically literally it looks like wow that looks like the Ark of the Covenant with a pagan God on top and so what is going on what I would argue Matt is that when Moses leads the people out of Egypt he uses you know some cultural forms and some cultural technology you know even like the shape of different vessels and chairs and Tents and so on like that that they're familiar with because they built these things for Pharaoh but Moses tells a radically different uh theological message with this material so the Egyptians had this kind of sacred tent of pharaoh their their god king when they went out on war well the Israelites go out into the desert uh and they organize themselves as an army too as we see and say numbers 10 they're on the they're doing waging the battle the the battles of the Lord and uh but they have a tent and in the sacred uh throne room of the Tabernacle you have the two cherubim that are signs of divinity and and of royalty but no Idol no image this is the Unseen God this is the god that cannot be represented by animals or a human form or whatever and so we're using you know and this makes sense to me Matt because you know you would you would want to use Language and Cultural forms that these Egyptian slaves could understand so you want to use something that communicates just like we want to you know we you know we use the form or the podcast whatever you know to communicate to our contemporaries right so you want to use cultural forms that communicate but you want to say something radically different uh then then what was said with them previously and I think that's what we see in in the excess so that kind of indirect evidence again that to me is is very strong that yeah this is being composed this is this is reflecting the historical reality of the time period that it's uh that it's describing so indirect evidence feels more compelling because it's it's accidental evidence it seems as it were yeah yeah yeah right um you know the the big stuff can be faked if there was just some names dropped in the book of Exodus well you know you could say well some fiction writer looked up in a history book and found some names of some pharaohs to drop but but when it's embedded into as it were the culture of the pentateuch that's even stronger and then you then then two we have from this from the Egyptian second temp uh sorry excuse me from the Egyptian New Kingdom Period we also have a whole bunch of treaty documents Covenant documents uh between say the Pharaoh and the king of uh of haughty land or the hittite Empire which we would know as agent minor so these are major Empires that kind of intersected in in what's now Israel they kind of had a border there and so they they made uh treaties back and forth with one another and the fascinating thing about these treaty covenants that we've that we've discovered and we have several of them they're written in Egyptian and there there's a copy and hittite you know and and uh and and also in the international language at that time which was Acadian and you don't want to go on to all that and get down on a rabbit Trail but different languages these these covenants are preserved in and the structure of them looks like the book of Deuteronomy with an introduction and then kind of a historical prologue about the past history of the Covenant parties and then we get into some major like constitutional principles and then we get into a whole bunch of very specific laws and then we end with instructions about how to store the treaty document and how often it should be read publicly and a list of blessings for following the Covenant and curses for breaking the Covenant boom boom boom boom this has been known for uh boy since the 1950s at least this material you know has come out it's like dang the book of Deuteronomy is following this Covenant treaty formula format that we can attest to the time period that many have proposed as the time period of The Exodus and what do we know about Moses well he was raised in the Egyptian Royal Court where they were sending these documents this was like you know political you know International politics with the international political treaties that were passing back and forth in Moses if he was raised in the court of pharaoh would have been trained to read these languages and read these political documents and be familiar with them and how to engage in you know International diplomacy so you know Moses would be a natural person to be able to write such a document not between two great foreign Kings but between the king of creation God himself and his Covenant people hey thank you so much for watching before you go do us a favor leave a comment let us know what you thought of the video like And subscribe

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 983,776

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: PW-VB9HNnzg

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2023