William Propp - What Was The Exodus?

Thank You Wayne um Tom sent me an email as I was in New Hampshire explaining that he was going to have a conference in May and June 2013 I think I wrote back and said you mean 2014 right there's no way you can organize something like that in five months but it was done it was a logistical triumph unlike the dual adjustable Fiasco I'm going to talk about later I'm going to refer to some of the talks in this conference that just happened and you might feel excluded left out or disappointed but it was mostly confined to the scholars and for a good reason while I was in Dartmouth also a week after I heard from Tom I got an email from a stranger who said I've heard that at UCSD you're going to have a conference giving 40 new proofs that form artifacts that the exodus actually happened and I said what you know so we thought it best to talk among ourselves however a volume will be published knowing Tom in very short order in which you can follow some of the discussions that went on but I'll be referring to them as well right now I want to also thank Sally har gate the Judaic Studies coordinator for various logistical things and for making this poster I am I like it a lot not just for my name but because that thing in the middle the Israelites had nothing to do with the pyramids actually the pyramids are only a joke in the Bible I think when the Israelites say to Moses what there are no tombs in Egypt you brought us out to die in the wilderness that's what they were talking about but they were they were already extremely old but EXO does in Greek as you know as my professors at Harvard used to say as you know in Greek Exodus means the way out the road out so when I look at that I see a pyramid but I see a freeway with a median as well so I think it's entirely fitting so the name of our lecture my lecture tonight is what was the Exodus and cut a long story short I don't know and by the end of our hour neither will you but I will hope you will learn many things along the way now what was the exodus was a convenient title for this talk but really what I'm going to talk about is a more circumscribed question namely is the Exodus historical can a historian show credibly that in the 15th century before the Common Era what archaeologists called a Late Bronze Age the entire Israelite nation migrated AB slavery in Egypt across the Red Sea doing its thing through the desert to enter 40 years later the land of Canaan from the east the land of Canaan being the modern State of Israel Palestinian in territories and in earlier archaeological times Lebanon as well now unlike almost all biblical scholars who operate in departments of religious studies or religion I am a professor of history and while among my historian colleagues I don't really count as a historian among biblical scholars I certainly do and I'm aware of it all the time because you know what in history the evidentiary bar is considerably higher than it is in religion while we don't reach the level of lads laboratory science we do have methods criteria that we'll explore today that determine whether an event is historical or not now just as the word science is used by competing groups who want to claim its cachet whether it's makers of vitamins or creationists or our department of chemistry so to the meaning of history the word history depends upon who uses it and I can't assume we all agree on that although the fifth century BC Greek historian Herodotus owns the copyright so to speak on the word history most historians would agree that the real father of history is a slightly younger contemporary lucida tease and here is how through Sidda tease begins his work vicinities an athenian wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians which to say the spartans and the athenians is the self aggrandize I don't know I put my name on the covers of my works as well he's taking responsibility and this is really very important the Peloponnesian War of the acidities does not have an anonymous omniscient narrator such as one finds in the Bible you might say in Homer as well Homer at least invokes the muse right you can trust Homer because he's an inspired poet vicinities doesn't have amused to guide him his source of knowledge is not inspiration or revelation instead it's a skeptical method of inquiry vicinities begins by summarizing what you would recognize as Greek mythology some of it the Trojan War things like that but in a way that leaves out the gods more or less and well entirely but I mean he except some of the traditions but doesn't accept the causation of fighting deities that we find say in Homer and he says having now given the result of my inquiries into earlier times I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail did the Greeks really believe their myths maybe some of them did the acidities did not that made him superior in his own view the way that most men deal with traditions even traditions of their own country is to receive them all alike as they are delivered without applying any critical test whatever you might agree with acidities you might not in case you didn't he gives a concrete example of an utterly wrong belief prevalent among the Athenians of his day concerning not Agamemnon and Achilles let alone the gods but their own civic leaders it's a technical point but his he says everyone knows this but what everyone knows is wrong and he goes on to illustrate the ignorance of his contemporaries as well there are many other unfounded ideas current among the rest of the hélène's the Greeks even on matters of contemporary history which have not been obscured by time we have no excuse for instance there is the notion that the lack of demony inque Spartan Kings have two votes each the fact being they have only one that there is a company of Bataan a there being simply no such thing so little pains do the vulgar which means common the hurt so little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth accepting readily the first story that comes to hand now he does start his work with the Trojan War but he has certain caveats about that he says on the whole the conclusions I have drawn concerning the heroic age may I believe safely be relied on assuredly they will not be disturbed by the delays meaning the epics of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft or by the composition to the chroniclers that are attractive at truths expense the subjects they treated being out of the reach of evidence and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend sounds rather poetic in English I trust it sounds good in Greek as well but he is um saying that there's a kernel of truth inside of Greek legends about the Trojan War he trusts and assumes and he has feels no compunction about discarding the embellishments that he thinks poets and even chroniclers have introduced to make a story more attractive to us so he has kind of a patronizing attitude towards poetry and mythology even if he can't avoid using them for the events of recent history which in his day meant the Peloponnesian War his technique is very simple research this is what he says I'm not going to read it to you you can read it for yourselves but that what you see is that he didn't trust impressions he didn't trust hearsay he didn't trust a single source whenever possible he sought out eyewitnesses so sought out multiple eyewitnesses he assumed people's memories were imperfect that their narratives were biased but that he was able and obliged as a historian to put things together into a semblance of the truth there's a story I know for much later days from Elizabethan days tell me I assume it's a proc referral I don't know how old it is though and I might even have it garble the version I heard was that Sir Walter Raleigh was in the Tower of London and he saw a street fight occurring from a pie and then when he was released he consulted some of the participants and got their versions of what had happened whereupon he burnt all his history books so this is what the problem facilities is trying to grapple with as well as I said vicinities avoids attributing to divine causation apical events such as migrations Wars even plagues in contrast of Homer Herodotus and the playwrights of his time now I increasingly to inject some novelty into a 30-year old career have been playing with counterfactual expositions of ideas just to entertain myself a little bit so some of my recent writings ask questions like if he were brought back to life and invited to give a TED talk how would the prophet Ezekiel explain particle physics or what would it be like if Dan Brown wrote a novel whose protagonist as a colleague and friend unfortunately deceased in mine in the anthropology department described his exploits what if Moses son went in a time machine and were transported to early 20th century Vienna and was a patient of Sigmund Freud these are all serious articles but I find more interest in going about it that way so the obvious question and this won't actually be funny but it's the question I'm leading to is what with lucidity --zz have made of the Torah and it's story of the Exodus which by coincidence probably reached its current formed about his time say around 400 BCE as with Homer he would no doubt have found a historical core to the traditions but as with Homer his attitude towards Homer he would have been frustrated by the fanciful aspects the prominent role of the supernatural and the lack of authentication and his inability to consult eyewitnesses now facilities would not be the least chagrined that the torah contradicts itself we've already seen his method takes that into account he would also expect the Torah to be biased of course it's pro Israelite and doesn't like Pharaoh again that's a given for him he would suspect that like Homer the Torah just tells too good a story that the truth is blander than fiction and I can attest to that okay I've just said a lot in praise of Thucydides have I been able to make it through his Peloponnesian War I've tried a couple of times I devoured Herodotus much less reliable but much more entertaining he would probably would assume the Citadis would that the dialogue surely was fabricated I always wondered about that I don't know how far bibarel literalists go do they really think that at the revelation of Sinai all millions of Israelites said with one voice all that the Lord has said we will obey and heed you know in coral speaking probably not lucid ities who was a wannabe playwright kind of like Plato who wrote his dialogues I'm sure they were envious of Sophocles Euripides sofu sinner tease fabricated the speeches and dialogues in his Peloponnesian War but you know what he admits it he tells you so that to this day we don't know if Pericles wonderful funeral oration is by Pericles probably not it's probably by Thucydides imagining what Pericles would have said based upon reports of what he had said the cities would be frustrated as are we by the lack of names and dates especially Pharaoh yes all the pharaohs went by the name Pharaoh like I go by professor but what they also had real names that wouldn't be nice to know which pharaohs were talking about and he would be most troubled by the anonymity of the testimony there's no historian I'm taking responsibility we take this for granted there's an omniscient narrator in the Torah and when it comes to Scripture when people say omniscient narrator they mean omniscient narrator right but if you think about it says who the text just says trust me and some do and some don't the Torah doesn't even cite amuse it just tells you what happens here there in God's mind everywhere the synergies would feel much more at home in the books of Samuel and kings during the account of David's reign there's a lot of political chicanery virtually no supernatural causation for the first and second book of Kings while there is more supernatural causation there's also a lot of international and domestic political intrigue there's a detailed chronological framework that is not precisely consistent which in a way lends to our sense of rasa tea no one has tried to make the truth smoother than it really is I have to digress to say that the most profound comment I ever heard about the Bible was actually by the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine I came across it in a biography of him in its quotation from one of his letters and I don't have it in German I'm not going to say it right in English either but what he's saying is more or less the duplications and the contradictions in the Bible are the best evidence it was put together in good faith bad faith is always scrupulous concerning the details so 1st and 2nd Kings had these minor inconsistencies but there is a detailed chronological framework there are multiple perspectives and what we know today what the soudanese wouldn't have known is that we can decipher Egyptian and Mesopotamian chronicles can confirm an impressive amount of what it says there are I think 9 biblical Kings mentioned Assyrian records and several Assyrian and Egyptian rulers are mentioned in the Bible whom we have found this is not like the Torah Torah is quite different moreover even though the books of Samuel and kings have no I facilities or I anybody taking responsibility for what you're reading the author does cite sources he says if you want more information look it up in the kings of the chronicles of the kings of Israel or the Chronicles of the kings of Judah we have no reason to doubt these were literary sources now unfortunately lost from which he worked that explains why he got so much right now if this is your first time attending a Bible lecture at UCSD you might be asking well isn't the Torah an eyewitness account of the exodus written by Moses it's called the five books of Moses it says so on the cover you know that of course is an article of faith for Jews for Christians of trilogy traditional religious band and to some extent less centrally for Muslims as well but since the Renaissance scholars no longer take traditional claims about authorship on trust I know seth has talked about this too but we all parade out the same hero Lorenzo valla was a Renaissance he was a priest actually which I hadn't realized and he took a document called the donation of Constantine whereby supposedly the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine gave authority over the Western Empire to the Bishop of Rome whom we called the Pope the baton was very happy to waive this document around to assert its authority but valla just said wait a second and he noticed that there were terms and expressions that were impossible for a 4th century Roman Emperor to have used there from a later time and had perspective as that of later time he said this is a fraud at this point the church had one of two roads it could have gone down it could have said praise God a miracle how is it that Constantine knew what we would be talking about centuries after his time but they did not have the foot spa to go that way instead the church quietly said let's much forget about that and it's not really been talked about since and again especially Kabbalah and other critics of this document he wasn't the first word churchmen themselves and the church you've heard of the devil's advocate the church has always had a commendable degree of skepticism about its own claims so this was just the beginning of an avalanche I don't know if vallah would have been so happy that didn't learn that his methods would someday be turned upon the Bible itself not the donation of Constantine but you can't always put the tiger back in the cage you know so who applied this to the Bible the first was the Jewish medical philosopher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza in the 17th century who argued at length what it appears certain medieval Jewish commentators had suspected namely that the Torah could not really have been written in the form we have it by Moses that when you apply the vallah test to the Torah it fails miserably it fails miserably but unlike the donation of Constantine it's not a forgery a deliberate forgery someone wrote the donation of Constantine to prove a point and they knew what they were doing they wrote what they imagined Constantine would have written had he thought about it you know but they had to know there was some deceit in contrast the Torah never claims to be by Moses it stands is consistently retrospective what happened in the past not just that it's told in the past tense but it says things like in those days there were there were Canaanites as though in the author's day there were no longer Canaanites and Moses day of course there were Canaanites it says that it refers to the kings of Edom who hadn't yet come to reign when Moses supposedly lived it talks about nobody knows location of Moses tomb to this day it calls um Transjordan what we call the nation of Jordan the other side of the Jordan why would Moses have called where he was standing the other side of the Jordan River there is when you read the Torah and say well how do I know it's written by Moses you can only find one piece of evidence internal to it and the book of Deuteronomy Moses it says frequently and Moses commanded this Torah of QED Moses wrote the Torah but Torah is just a Hebrew word for law that was only later applied to the whole five books of Moses with all their stories and genealogies and laws in the book of Deuteronomy is talking about the laws of Deuteronomy not about something and a chronicity that would become to be called the Torah which is to say for the historian the Torah is a secondary source when it comes to the Exodus or anything else well not for it's a primary source for the era in which it was compiled but that's another issue we'll get to later what would be a second what would be a primary source on the Exodus say you found papyrus say it was by an Egyptian named Musa complaining that boy I'm trying to negotiate with Pharaoh in this labor dispute but he keeps changing his mind that would be a primary source the Torah is a secondary source it's a secondary source that cites no primary sources no documentary evidence as I said it just says to you trust me our best estimate for its compilation as I said is around 400 BC around the time of acidities but a millennium later than Jewish tradition dates the Exodus now here I come to some good news and some bad news 200 years of Phil illogical research has revealed the sources hidden in the Torah that what we call the je DNP sources and many of you have read my former colleague Richard Friedman's who wrote the Bible which lays out the evidence ok this takes us closer to the events these documents are old or that in that 400 BC date I gave for the compilation that's the good news the bad news these two are weak these two sources are a reconstructed we're not know their parameters exactly and B they too are secondary moreover they're not independent the DNP sources are based on the je sources and none of these come from the Late Bronze Age their language and contents suggest some time during the kingdoms of Israel and Judah I would guess perhaps in the 8th century BC and many scholars my colleagues would date them even later however and this is or large however inside of the Torah exists a body of poems periodically the blessing of Jacob the son of Moses the blessing of Moses one interesting book compared to the showstopper numbers of Broadway musicals and it's not just a facile joke he makes a good point about how it affects the action in the plot and some of these poems are linguistically older appearing than the prose the most famous of these and linguistically the oldest is Exodus chapter 15 the song of the sea' this by the way is my first public PowerPoint lecture I thought hear in Caly - I should take the plunge you can thank me what clap when it's over clap when it's over this is the familiar text I thought I'd use the new King James translation to give it kind of an archaic old timey feel not all scholars agree this is a very old poem the oldest thing in the Torah the problem is linguistically it surely is the question is could they fake it and there's some reason to think they could fake it so we remain up in the air about this it's our best hope for a contemporary documentary source William Fox o Albright who pioneered the linguistic dating of Hebrew poetry I think he put this in the 13th century BC and as which you'll see that's when many scholars also thought a and Exodus was and he thought this was an eyewitness account potentially my teacher Frank cross did - he had kind of an odd theory that what it describes I never pressed him on this is Egyptian chariots and horses falling off of barges I don't really see that when I read it but you can read it and come to your own conclusions but it does describe Pharaoh's chariots sinking into a sea or perhaps a papyrus papyrus marsh it's the question of how you translate read sea and drowning the cities would still say yeah but you know poets but but still I will make another comment about it - well this is a huge topic I won't digress too far into the Hebrew Bible has no narrative poetry in it no epic poetry Homer is epic poetry it tells a long story in poetic form the Bible only has lyric poetry and this is a good example if you read this you have no idea really what's going on it assumes you understand a story background and it's highlighting certain features of it you could say well we have in the Torah tell us what's going on there coming out of Egypt the c.split that came across is that what really is behind the poem if the poem is older than the prose not necessarily so these are all some of the improbabilities and confusions we deal with okay now if our documents don't go back to Egyptian times whenever they were you might say well there must have been some kind of oral tradition right an oral tradition can be astonishingly reliable true but it's astonishing when it is reliable have you ever played telephone more often it is unreliable now how could we tell whether this is which kind of oral tradition that is we could look for details in the text how they made bricks how they made textile city name something that would only be known in a certain period of time right that would be the right method alternatively we could look at the overall sweep of what they're describing in this case and enslaved people of Asiatics in Egypt pressed leaving crossing the desert something like that if everything's true these two methods will lead to exactly the same conclusion and corroborate one another but I'm not a fan of the detail-oriented method for the simple reason that it's too easy and it has been done people pick details that are right and say AHA it's true and others say look what they got wrong aha it's fake so I'm not surprised those theories wouldn't be surprised the details slipped over time through oral and written transmission I'm much more comfortable with the biggest sweep approach now at this point we have to ask what time period we're talking about in addition to not naming the Pharaohs the Torah doesn't tell you when these things happened or rather it tells you exactly when they happened provided you accept that the world is six thousand years old everything in the Torah is dated to creation now here at Cal I t2 we doubt that so have we another way of doubting the tradition well in first Kings chapter 6 verse 1 it gives a date of King Solomon relative to the Exodus a four hundred and eighty year gap we can if there was a Solomon we can date him I guess I put it that way to the 10th century BC and that puts the Exodus in the mid 15th century BC which is an a richly documented period of Egyptian history again praise I'll use a lot that's good and bad news we have lots of evidence but it's also the heyday of the Egyptian Empire so do we look for our Exodus there or do we say okay among the details that might have slipped over time the chronology might have slipped as well all ancient numbers are suspect you read Genesis people are living almost a thousand years we know they don't do that then you look to Sumerian texts people are living tens of thousands of years Bibles all of a sudden very modest they only claim no one even reached a thousand years you say and no the word year doesn't mean anything other than a year we can discuss that later if you're really interested so many people have said let's be agnostic about the date and see if that helps us place the Exodus in history now in fact there are numerous known historical events from the ancient Near East I'm about to tell you about that rather resemble the Bible's account of the Exodus and I'm going to make frequent allusions to the conference that just took place but these you can also find discussed in my Exodus commentary volume 2 Appendix B on sale for $80 but $70 for tonight only and for easy Stallman payments okay in chronological order from the 18th through the 12th century whenever I give centuries there BC unless I say otherwise that's why time goes backwards from the 18th of the 12th century there was an unruly or unruly groups called the abbey roooar at Peru we're not sure how to pronounce it throughout the ancient Near East but focused in Levant Syria Palestine some of them have semitic names other them have Korean names an unrelated language this indicates they are not an ethnic group but a social class and their name connotes or means something like freebooter some of them were migrant farm workers some of them were mercenaries some more and organized threat now I said it's not a national or ethnic name but a kind of lifestyle name not everyone agrees with that some people say what could have been an ethnic name sometimes ethnic names pejoratively get applied as into chip someone to Jew someone Indian giver that's dozens of examples the products of xenophobia so maybe this people call the AH Peru they called anybody they didn't like anna peru most scholars think that's not the case it's not an ethnic term but it might be the word hebrew even so because in the bible the israelites use this term hebrew when describing themselves to others as though its name that others have for them not their own name so it could be a pejorative term they have internalized i believe the word eskimo has some explanation like that and more than you think that comes on the Bushmen that there are other cases where people where the philosophies of ethiopia where pejorative terms have become kind of routinized in our discussion okay that's the eighteen through twelfth centuries this group whose name might be the same as hebrew and they're kind of rootless in the seven tenths three bc as we heard a lot in the conference there was a huge volcanic explosion in the mediterranean island of santorini or fira why is that important well you saw the exhibit could have made it tsunami could have made an ash cloud darkness couldn't have rained frogs but it could have done a lot okay also in the seventeenth century Asiatics came to rule over egypt these are the famous Hyksos you'll see all these names up later in a chart i'm going to give you from their center of avarice excavated by manfred manfred betta who was here later anti Hyksos propaganda from Egypt says nasty things about them that you wouldn't trust but I still have to mention it says they ruled without the Sun God and they worshipped only the storm God now most people think this is the exuberantly polytheistic Egyptians saying look at these terrible people they worshipped only one God you may know or may not know that the word atheist was coined by the Romans to describe Jews and Christians who worshipped almost no gods if you see what I mean so but so you could argue there was some hint of monotheism of these Asiatic Hyksos who ruled Egypt the foundation of their capital of Evora certain is's even mentioned in the bible numbers 13 22 of the israelites knew something about that and one of their rulers was named Yaakov har we're not sure about the second element whether it's hard but if its heart means now but Yaakov is the name of Jacob there are other yacht coves in the documentary record it's not unique to these two men but isn't it funny that the father of the Viceroy of Egypt in the Bible bears a name that we know was the name of a hexose ruler of Egypt okay in the 16th century the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt we have these Asiatic peoples among whom is a name like Yaakov and other names that sound somewhat like Hebrew being kicked out of Egypt and some sources to show that this was such an important as favorable vent from God describe meteorological phenomena not in great detail but there was unusual rainstorms or something like that now I always wondered how they could really cleanse the Hyksos so thoroughly and in fact professor be.talk said that we can show that and others say this too that when the expulsion of the Hyksos were the expulsion of the ruling class of the Hyksos out of egypt but that plenty of Asiatics like nexus remained in egypt in all sorts of social capacities okay in the 16th through 15th centuries again this will all be in our chart most the large cities in Canaan were destroyed by whom by the 18th dynasty pharaoh is the dynasty that kicked out the Hyksos kept moving and built the mightiest Empire Egypt ever had down to Nubia but also into Syria Palestine the 16th through 11th centuries many Asiatics as I just said remained in Egypt some were slaves some were hostage princes raised in Pharaoh's Palace in fact Ron Handel talked about some of these Asiatics some of them have Egyptian names some keep their native Semitic names in the 14th century BCE East to be our OVA we have reference to the Bedouins the no matter the sha tsui of and then it says Yahweh in the hieroglyphics yahwah is the proper name of God of Israel you can call me professor or you can call me William my middle initial supposed to be a mystery Tom but alright William Henry Kovich II prop you can call me professor which is my job title or by my name okay so Elohim or God is the job description of the protagonist of the Bible but his real name is pronounced Otto died by Jews today but they pronounced it Yahweh if you know Hebrew you're confused because there's no W sound now but there was then so what are the sha tsui of Yahweh these Bedouins of Yahweh who live in the deserts southeast of modern Israel Egyptian writing which is not picture writing by the way you're not pictographic has a way of indicating whether something is the name of God and doesn't do that it doesn't indicate any knowledge of what Yahweh is some people think it's Al and I have a personal favorite theory which is that it was the name of their Sheikh an old man with a white beard who by coincidence became the god of three monotheistic religions but that's just my theory so this is happening in the 14th century there are sha tsui veterans of yahwah in the deserts southeast of israel which is among the candidates for where sinai desert mount sinai would be also in the 14th century BC Pharaoh Akhenaten says there is no god but the sunlight and I am is earthly its earthly representation the God which sunlight has no gender so it is father and mother of all and I am father and mother of all which is one theory of why his statuary looks so strangely androgynous now because Akhenaten is the image of the God Tottenham sunlight you may make no graven images so there is no god but God and thou shalt make no graven images the first two commandments of the Ten Commandments are very much paralleled in Egypt in the 14th century BC also in the 14th century BC these appear ooh who might be the Hebrews are making trouble in the land of Canaan in the Egyptian has an Egypt have an empire in the land of Canaan with city-state vassals that respond to them we have hundreds of letters to the Pharaoh and some of them complain about these opera bands that are roaming around making trouble their names aren't Hebrew but still 13th century BCE ramasees the second bills the cities of Pithom and Rameses mentioned as Tom said in Exodus chapter one as built by the Israelites also in the 13th century BC we have the end of the Late Bronze Age in the fall of an international order of Empire and kingdoms the Hittites are gone the Assyrians retract the Egyptians retract who Garrett is gone if there was among the various destructions and Wars at Troy that sound like what Homer might be talking about the 12th century late 13th century level is the one that people point to there are in the 13th century and 12th century new burgeoning populations in the highlands of Canaan that must be the proto Israelites and the judge from their artifacts however they are indigenous there's no evidence that came from outside the land we could argue about the meaning how meaningful that is also in the 13th century pharaoh Merneptah claims to have eradicated an ethnic group named israel so first proof that Israel exists is a statement that they no longer exist in the 12th century BC the Philistines who are mentioned in the context of the Exodus in the Bible as the reason why they have to go around the land the other way we can show that the Philistines have arrived from Egyptian sources and we have a Philistine expert visiting I mean an expert on the Philistines visiting UCSD I can't see if he's here but Professor Aaron Mayer and anthropology gave a lecture last week on the Philistines in the 12th century the Egyptians end their rule over Canaan the natives are free they're no longer being shipped as slaves to Egypt or being conscripted in the land of Canaan Pharaoh and his armies have left crossed the canals back to Egypt does this sound like good news for the historian that there's so much evidence in fact it's really bad news what's relevant and what's not here do you notice do you notice it starts at the 18th century and it runs through what things I've talked about the 11th and 10th centuries BC how can a historical event be smeared across 800 years and still be called an historical event or is the exodus not really an event but memories of various events and experiences or is one of these the Exodus and all the others are fakes this is our problem moreover beneath the gray zone the gray band you see I've given tentative dates for the sources I've given the oldest reasonable dates for the sources most scholars would put them later the song of the sea' 10th century well as a 12th century J source esource 10th century that's really pushing them way back P source later the Torah even later look at how many centuries thirteen centuries are covered by this chart separating the oldest hypothetically relevant events that we know happened and our sources to complicate matters further one of the most solid discoveries of 20th century in really late 19th century biblical scholarship and it was discussed by Bernard Bato at our conference is that the Israelites knew an old myth of the amorite the ancient northwest semitic peoples who became the Babylonians and the Assyrians of a certain that's I'm oversimplifying something there and the Arameans and the Phoenicians and the Israelites and the AH Peru and the hexose they're all amirite s-- an old amirite myth whereby at the beginning of time the storm God liberated the dry land from the depredations of the god of the sea by killing the sea and or the seas serpentine ally allies monsters or a monster that lived in the sea referred to as the great dragon or the serpent or Rahab or Leviathan and named appears in the Ugaritic tablet to the 14th century BCE and is found in the Bible as well this myth was recovered for the past 150 years from Mesopotamian and Canaanite sources and and Syrian sources - it's alluded to dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible all in poetry because the myth and epic is hidden in the poetry not in the prose and in fact survives into later Jewish apocalyptic speculations now several of the passages that quote allude to this ancient myth of the combat of the storm God on the sea make an explicit explicit connection to the Exodus here's one the arm of God and days gone by cut Rahab in pieces Pierce the monster dried up the sea who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed might cross over this is a creation myth until the last words and then it refers to the Exodus I hate by the way the New International Version this is lest it appear - I appear to be plugging it it was just the simplest thing to click on it's a misleading translation in general but here this is a good translation or here's some 77 I consider your works and miracles of long ago your ways are great you redeemed your people the descendants of Jacob and Joseph then it personifies the waters as seeing God and being convulsed and there's clouds and a thunderstorm lightning the earth trembled and the end up dropping for trampling through the sea which other passages is part of the defeat of the sea monster by the storm god but here again it's contextualized as the exodus from Egypt other passages will equate the king of Egypt Pharaoh with Leviathan and they're probably thinking of a crocodile - but also the cosmic monster oh I don't have to look up here it's on my screen terrific so you can see Pharaoh is compared to the great Surt the great cosmic serpent troubling the waters in other words the tradition that yahuwah created his people and established his kingship by fighting a battle by a sea or drying or splitting it the israelites themselves connected this with a pre Israelite creation myth what conclusion do we draw from this some people will say what I just said they made an association if so when later in time my teacher Frank cross if I understood his rather cryptic utterances seem to think that when they watched the Egyptians fall off the barges something happened that made and think oh this is just like the creation myth that never made any sense to me but some people think what the eyewitnesses must have been impressed by some event involving water and a storm that reminded them of the Smith other scholars make a claim that will sound far-fetched but again giving the given the long time spans it isn't that far-fetched that it's all a myth it's a myth turned into history when the Israelites abandoned the genre of epic poetry that we know the Canaanites had and started writing historical prose and started telling stories not in which yahweh defeated egypt but which Moses and Aaron defeated the king of Egypt Pharaoh when the actors became people sort of anchored in time the basic plot stayed the same and a myth was turned into history it's it's a respectable academic theory even if though I don't know if it's the majority now let me leave the riddle of the Exodus as myth and history in fact what it is as mythic history whether or not it's true right and explore a contrast with a miraculous Redemption much more amenable to historical analysis over the five thousand years of recorded human history there are hundreds probably thousands of supernatural salvations during military crises that are recorded from all sorts of cultures I'm going to tell you about one we know a great deal about from 1914 to 1918 ad much of the globe was convulsed in a conflict that altered the international order with consequences still palpable throughout the world namely world or one now if our recent conference was a logistical triumph the entry of Britain to the war was a logistical nightmare on August 22nd 23rd 1914 happened the first engagement of the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders at a place called moles it's my first laser point adventure as well which Newland the light waves are coherent this is amazing two people know about this this is that's that's the city of moles in Flanders right there now the British were coming to aid the French these black and white boxes are the German lines as they're pushing towards France through Belgium okay here the hastily convened forces of England in red to oppose them what you see over here are the French forces retreating leaving the British they say as I understand some of you might be better experts than I the French said thank you for riving cover our retreat we'll meet you in a few days and that's what happened the the British at first repulsed in a good sense from the British I mean the Germans I pushed them back as what I'm saying the Germans had had no respect for these British sources of British resources but they had been trained in the Boer Wars and were disciplined and they pushed back the Germans at first but eventually once the French retreated the British forces also decided to pull back for 200 miles they they fought their way backwards into France until the Battle of the Martin and had a near escape from annihilation the Germans didn't push their advantage apparently because they didn't realize how few the British forces were the British forces just as we were very good marksman in the American Revolution the British were very good marksman in World War one and that might have created an impression of more soldiers than there really were we don't know why that's part of my story we don't know why the Germans didn't really press their advantage at first this whole escapade should call that this first engagement was concealed by the military censors but on August 30th 1940 14 1914 August 30 it was reported by the press the Battle of Mons and was converted by propaganda into a qualified victory on the one hand and a call to enlistment on the other it was also steam literally as a miracle on the 24th of August 1915 this is this is a good deal later but not that much later and magazine called the spiritualist published records of visions of a supernatural force that intervened to help the British and there were many corroboree reports people talking to soldiers and nurses but mostly soldiers who said they had seen or Norton or two nurses who had treated soldiers who said they'd seen a luminous cloud or more often medieval archers carrying long bows led by st. George himself others reported simply heroic angelic warriors warrior soldiers who intervened between them and the Germans and covered their retreat just as they were covering the afrien retreat by May and thereafter there were sermons throughout churches in England proving that God was on their side by citing this miracle and the tale was soon circulating internationally dying men swore they had been at the battle and seen it is that proof professor mayor gave I told the funny story about a friend of his who had written a bus and he had he say said it's a mild-mannered guy but he was talking to I think a tourist a woman and she asked him Oh were you if you were this many years ago were you on in the rated Entebbe and he said well no I was not and she said that's amazing you're the first Israeli soldier I've met who wasn't in the rated Entebbe so now French soldiers once once the retreating British joined up with the French then they were doing something together and the angels were still there French soldiers saw something different they saw st. Michael and Joan of Arc who apparently had made her peace with the English and that was defending English and the French from the Hun now there were cynics right from the start it pointed out that soldiers were and are notoriously superstitious that these are men who haven't eaten or slept - under extreme stress high on adrenaline and intensely doctrine ated can you believe anything they say as stories of divine interventions on the battlefield are as old as homer as old as the Bible as old as eager to Mesopotamia and older than any of these things further investigation by skeptics proved that all these accounts were secondhand hearsay some from soldiers who weren't even Atmos again the Entebbe analogy the Society for psychical research which is rather famous and people like Arthur Conan Doyle were loyal members which as its name suggests were would like to have believed in Hsu paranormal phenomena they conducted investigation and concluded there was no credible eyewitness testimony or any evidence at all the atmosphere of this incident was conditioned by new self-conscious methods of information control censorship and propaganda for true believers in the miracle the deniers were participating in a cover-up because there was heavy censorship and there always are cover-ups right for the skeptics the war machine was using the story of the miracle as propaganda to prove that God is an Englishman there were many other rumors circulating in England than all the nations of Europe during the First World War none of which attracted this much attention but people thought the tens of thousands were Russians of Russian soldiers were billeted in England who were going to intervene on the side of the Allies at some period they thought that was a German blimp invasion contemplated and they'd been seen all lots and lots of legends that don't have to do with angels at all but here is another factor to consider on the 29th of September 1914 by coincidence probably maybe not the feast of st. Michael and all angels one month almost to the day after the first Press reports of the Battle of malls the welsh english author and journalist Arthur Mackin who both throat factual journalistic accounts of the war but it's more famous today as a seminal author of fantasy and horror literature and he was inclined to neo medieval mystical forms of Christianity Celtic Christianity himself he published a short story called the bowmen in the London newspaper The Evening News this story was inspired by the accounts he had read of the fighting published a month before and probably also his own familiarity with medieval traditions of angelic hosts and Saint George back through the Middle Ages especially the Crusades in the Hundred Years War also he might have known stories of angels intervening in the English Civil War in the 17th century he probably also knew that Mol's was a center albeit in flanders of the veneration of st. george it was where i don't know if it's the only place but it was one of the places maybe the place where it was thought that st. George had slain the dragon all these things parently came together in his mind and he wrote a short story in a first-person somewhat matter-of-fact verisimilitude anus which means truthiness full in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe fantasy story about and it begins it was during the retreat of the 80,000 and the authority of the sensor is sufficient cause for not being more explicit hinting that what he's about to tell you the truth was even more fantastic than what he's going to show in the story it doesn't say where it's happening but it's clear to the reader this is the Battle of moles a beleaguered soldier calls upon Saint George where upon phantom bowmen from the 1415 Battle of Agincourt where England triumphed over France they appear and they destroy a German force the story was not labeled a fiction and was published alongside other things that were labeled as fictions as if to say this is really news and it was kind of like the War of the Worlds except I think doesn't the War of the Worlds really begin with a disclaimer this is a story I'm not sure I've never actually listened to it this it it was meant to be self-evidently a bit of fiction but it was taken for fact many readers wrote in to ask mocking sources and need to ruefully confess he'd made the whole thing up with no intention to hoax anybody however he did permit the story to be reprinted because it became very popular and sold over 150,000 copies we all should be so lucky so here's a reprint him you can see how Arthur Meccans name looks he made very little money from this his publishers made all the money and although he conscientiously reminded the editors and readers he had made it all up and the preface tells you that at least one priest who wrote to him outraged said whatever you say now I'm not quoting my paraphrasing the story was certainly true and you must be mistaken in your impression that you made this up others were less generati can degenerate in erotic others were less generous and accused Macan of being anti-christian and of course unpatriotic this is what he wrote later you can see his chagrin at the thing he set in motion that he could no longer control the more he protested the more people didn't believe him was he part of the cover-up who knows some piled wonder top miracle one theory by a psychical group was that while mockin sincerely may have believed he wrote the story he was actually channelling the experience of a dying soldier at most and so both things could be true simultaneously now the question of date is crucial who knew what when there is a single pre Macan reference to the miracle at most which would seem to be lie what I'm just what I'm implying here that he made it up in 1931 Brigadier General John Charteris published a memoir called at GHQ General Headquarters according to which the story of the angel of Mol's was a popular rumor among the troops as of September 5th 1914 nineteen days before the appearance of Makin's story by the way I should have explained it way up front this incident is sometimes called the angel of moles and sometimes the Angels of moles depending upon whether people saw mainly st. George or a bunch of angelic armies you'll find it both ways mm however so so it's not true that Macan made the story up that he's the first report however there is ample evidence in this published diary member it was published in 1931 the entry for 1914 talks about a story like this but in his preference Charteris admits quote I have not I had not kept a formal diary where records were incomplete I have amplified them by my recollections and some according to researchers of Charteris his own documents and letters personal archive survives from this time letters back home guess what they don't mention the Angels this is probably a deliberate or an unconscious fraud on his part now incidentally and hilariously to my mind to the extent that I've been able to research this which is not my field I read a couple of books you know no one ever asked any Germans who are at the battlefield what they thought they saw you do find contemporary accounts where English sources say is in the Britain and the German prisoners of war also say they saw a mysterious army of Englishmen clad all in white coming out of the sky and they didn't know what it was that's not the same thing as an interview with a survivor right which until recently you could have found however in 1930 a former member of the Imperial German intelligence service Colonel Friedrich Harrison Verte claimed that the Germans what happened was that the Germans had been projecting images onto white cloud banks in an effort to scare the English and the plan backfired even though no such technology existed in 1914 the battle took place during the day and the German military records when consulted could not confirm that there as a colonel friedrich hertz invert in their armies during World War one this is not the only example of this there's another though in 1915 there was a story called in the trenches by Reverend WH lead them in which a wounded soldier is nursed by a mysterious comrade and white who proves to be Christ he shows the wounded soldier his own wounds guess what happened thereupon soldiers began seeing or telling stories about a comforter in white and this made its own rounds is kind of a codicil to the legend of the Angels of moles and once again the author who was a clergyman had to say it's not a miracle I made it up I'm really sorry anybody believed it it was just supposed to be an inspiring story ok approaching the end what are the morals for us well the skeptic would say just as the Torah is later than tradition claims and even Exodus 15 the song of the sea' is a questionable date so our only could possibly contemporary reference to a real miracle at most Chartres sirs diary is very likely written much later than it appears than you would think they would say the skeptic would say just as mockin took immemorial Christian miracle stories and turn them into a factual sounding report which then entered British popular consciousness as stone-cold fact despite or rather because of the supernatural content if you see what I mean it was an appealing tale so the ancient myth of the primordial combat between the storm God and the sea and the creation of the storm God's kingdom and rule over the earth grew out of a literary tradition now the other side the credulous believers approach would say look believe what you want about miracles there was a battle of moles there was a British retreat and an unlikely escape there was a real war maybe there was a meteorological phenomenon a fog maybe there was an accidental hoax miracle report certainly our product of hope fear and the will to believe but still the historical content of the legend of the angels most is rather large that's probably what through synergies remember him with with the great deal of cautions and apologies would say well we have to excuse the poets the Mystics but sure there's a solid historical core now our conference here had several papers about Nemo history the history of memories they hit the ear espect of the truth just the history of the memories especially professor Mayer the Philistine archaeologist gave a wonderful paper in which he delved into Neurology neuroscience which really dovetails beautifully into my paper there's lots of research on what we perceive what we don't perceive that's right in front of our eyes how we remember how we create false memories how others can implant false memories in us this all these are relevant to both the Exodus and the angels of most so some conclusions the store of the exodus is still alive it's why we're all here I have to say although I have the sinking impression that most of my students know the story more from the DreamWorks Phil the Prince of Egypt maybe then from reading the Bible but the story is still alive whereas the angels of most is fading fast except for the occasional you know History Channel documentary my scientific survey of three Brits over the past week discovered that the one who appeared over 50 had heard of the story and the two under 50 had not this suggests that the angels may not be along with us so why this difference obviously the story of the exodus is older much than the angels of most and has had more time to diffuse for most of history if you were to doubt the story of the exodus if you were lucky you'd be socially ostracized like Spinoza if you were unlucky right in the 20th century the legend could spread like wildfire because it arose in an age of technology print and literacy and met an intentionally felt need but it incurred doubt for exactly the same reason the need passed and we live in an age of technology literacy and education where people are inclined to doubt miracle stories whereas the story of the exodus whatever it's true origins arose there an age when skepticism was even weaker than the early 20th century apropos false memory and pulse memories filling and intensely felt need here's a recent example do an experiment on you maybe it won't work maybe it will raise your hand if you know and don't try to psych me out just raise your hand if you knew before you came in here that the King of Denmark during the Holocaust when all the Jews of Denmark were commanded by the Nazis to wear badges the King of Denmark said well if that's the rule I'm wearing one too and he put one on and if you know that you know what that is from a novel that's from a novel by Leon URIs European gentle thumbs finest hour and it never happened that don't you viscerally want to reject what I've just told you that I'm surely mistaken that was my response when the Holocaust historian I forget if Sir Martin Gilbert who visited here told me this early or I read in his book or both but I guarantee you this is what he says and he would know it's from a novel by Leon URIs and he told me or I read that every year the Danish royal family issues a disclaimer saying thank you it's a flattering legend we're sure how had he thought of it the king would have put on a star but it never happened but I want you to think about how it makes you feel to be told by me an authority that's not true you don't really believe me I don't really believe me so you and I are not above being duped today bottom line we know that the Battle of Mons occurred we know it's dates we know the exact location we know the historical context we can also date Macan story to the day we can date sermons articles pamphlets books that are relevant we can supply oral and written testimony from diverse sources to obtain a stereoscopic picture of the times what historians want contradictions notwithstanding contradictions are good that's what gives us the depth of field we have precise reference points here is the history of the angels of most battle of most followed by first reports published Charteris is dubious diary in grayscale Machens story the bowman republished and the legend spreading like wildfire an intend you ated form existing still today now I read the book by Clarke on the angel de moles and they've almost laughed out loud and it read in his preface I was separated from the events by almost a century my quest for the proof that the truth the truth behind the angels of maules was lacking any of the clear or established signposts traditionally used by historians for navigation mixing his metaphors a little nonetheless and I said poor guy poor guy he's separated by a century from the events he discovered and the eyewitnesses or you know mostly dead recently and he only has 10,000 documents to examine for my perspective then the exodus is not historical by definition because it is simply not susceptible to the historical method which has its own rigor comparable to the scientific message there is possibly one but at most only one eyewitness account Exodus 15 there is otherwise no paper trail of evidence what literary sources remain are of uncertain date the story itself lacks a clear anchor in time and then there's the problem of the supernatural which forces you to ask do you believe in miracles or in the human disposition to believe in miracles or admittedly there's a third possibility both so when asked did the Exodus happen I have a pet answer I often say inspired by Bill Clinton it depends what mean by Exodus and it depends what you mean by happen now the Philosopher's response the Buddha's response the only sane response in my mind is to cultivate apathy we shouldn't care whether there was an exodus by great personal discipline and training I really don't care we shouldn't care whether there was an exodus because wanting what we do not and cannot have which is to say in this case evidence will simply make us unhappy so the exodus irrespective of history questions is a myth it functions as a myth we don't know where its anchor is in fantasy or in real events so we want to ask well what kind of myth is it I want to use terms that will be perfectly clear to our hosts at Cal I t2 and cheese 3 and the x3 exhibit coordinators and my colleagues in the social sciences and the Natural Sciences am I happy to see here is the Exodus only a mythic memory or is the Exodus a manufactured mythic memory thank you very much ok we have time for questions please yeah Vincent Deever yeah right yeah you the simple answer is yes that many people suspect that all the things I told you about irrelevant and that people of Israel are of diverse historical background and their stories coalesced you could cut the evidence in many ways if you really wanted to get more precise than that you know that the Hyksos were driven out and they became the sha tsui and they became the AH Peru and some stayed behind it became the slaves and they met Akhenaten and you know but again it becomes a matter more of fantasy for the historian DNA you mean mmm-hmm people are talking about that if they can get some good DNA we're not all the way there yet Tom would know more about that than I but we're working on it I other questions yes sir right can you hear the question or should I repeat it oh there's an Egyptian narrative about two slaves escaping from Egypt sort of in the way in roughly this time period in the way that the Israelites - a pair of slaves so and you're asking does this have to do with us oh I would well if I were an Egyptian slave I would escape - we assume that slaves were trying to escape all the time the thing about the exodus is could an entire people march together you know we have reason to believe there was lots of going back and forth across the borders between soldiers mercenary slaves merchants all sorts of people someone in the back had a yes well I'll take that as a rhetorical question but I do warn my students before they take my class that there are different temperaments there are people who are all or nothing thinkers and people who are flexible thinkers and the flexible thinkers their lives will not be overturned by what they're going to learn in my class but that I know that I've been responsible for students lives being turned upside down marriages falling apart being kicked out of the church colleagues of mine have told me other stories when I was a graduate student in Israel I met a Christian pilgrim I told him what I was doing and he told me that his brother hadn't gone to Bible College as he was supposed to but had gone to liberal arts college to the course on the Bible lost his faith lost his mind that had been institutionalized the rest of his life then he looked me in the eye and said never destroy a young person's faith and I know that I have I often tell that story to my students the beginning of a class because know thyself so what you said is true of most people but not of everybody sure I would say however that if we're talking about sight on a level of supernatural events then you have to be equal opportunity you can't say believe the supernatural stories of the Israelites but not of some other people you can but then I say personally I find them all equally convincing way in the back I was at Deborah yes yeah like Bad Santa there's a bad Elijah yes well I won't talk about the Seder in detail but I will say that's I should have thought of that as another distinction with the angel of Moss which was preached in Sunday sermons but it didn't become a real Christian ritual that might have helped the story survive in the way the Eucharist perpetuated the story of Jesus but she said that president Hertz is my colleague in German Jewish history said that there's a book biosafety to shalini called suhoor which is Hebrew for remember that's about the remote role of memory perpetuation through ritual I guess what you're talking about now in Judaism and it is true that the story of the exodus in book of Exodus is tied in Exodus 12 and 13 to the commandment for a ritual reenactment that in time evolved into the Passover Seder it wasn't the Passover Seder if it were you'd have to smear your doorway with blood and if you invited a Gentile guest to partake you'd have to circumcise them first so things have evolved over time but yes ritual as a way of creating perpetuating these memories I'm not a biochemist but I'll answer your first question because I am a linguist Canaanite as far as we can tell what the Israelites called their language Phoenician was also Canaanite and Phoenician and Hebrew are probably closer than Scots English and my English so whether they were inside ethnic group or outside ethnic group their language was the same as the Canaanites it wasn't mutually comprehensible with Aramaic we know that because there's a story that tells us that but Canaanite Hebrew the same language let's thank professor problem yeah so if you want to ask him more questions he'll be around here I'd like to invite everybody to go and visit the exhibition and partake in the refreshments thank you

Channel: The Qualcomm Institute

Views: 89,835

Rating: 4.5263724 out of 5

Keywords: UCSD, Exodus, Conference, QI, Calit2, Qualcomm Institute

Id: x6TsppQ5UNY

Length: 76min 0sec (4560 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/matt2001]

I mention this because of the Mormon belief in Moses and the Exodus. He dismisses the historical account and gives some interesting examples of how history can be manipulated and distorted.

[u/mcguirerod]

There's not any evidence in the real world of the existence of Moses, or the Exodus, and there should be a ton of it.

Never happened.

[u/Tindale]

OK I love history and will watch this but only if you guys can assure me he isn't a pretend archeologist from the Mormon church.