Well this is awkward! Update!

One of my main irritations when discussing sensitive moral issues of today is when somebody starts quoting Biblical references at me and simply makes the argument that I cannot argue with them because the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  Essentially at that point there is no way to make my case as they are supremely confident of their "facts" since they believe the book they came from is beyond reproach.

In this way many anti-science Christians have been able to shoehorn Intelligent Design into science classrooms, homophobic ministers have created an atmosphere of hate toward gays, and people have been able to essentially wipe out whole civilizations based on the idea that God created this world for his children.  And ONLY his children.

However the facts are simply not there to back up much of ANYTHING claimed in the pages of the Bible, including this most famous case of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt.

Here is more:

Archeologists have proven that slaves did not build the pyramids and that there is no evidence of any jew in Egypt until about 2000 years after the great pyramid was built. The jews that did settle were a garrison of soldiers from the Persian Empire, stationed on Elephantine, an island in the Nile. The Elephantine garrison assisted Egypt in military campaigns against the nubians and themselves owned Egyptian slaves.

 So was there a mass Exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt? There is no record of any such thing ever happening, and the simple reason is that there is no time in which it could have happened. No Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus; and by the time there were enough Jews living in Egypt to constitute an Exodus, the time of the pyramids was long over. And Pharaoh Ramesses can be let off the hook as well: With apologies to Yul Brynner, no documentary or archaeological evidence links any of the Pharaohs bearing this name with plagues or Jewish slaves or edicts to kill babies. Indeed, the earliest, Ramesses I, wasn't even born until more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramid was completed. His grandson, the great Ramesses II, lived even later. 

The pseudohistory of ancient Egypt is disrespectful to both Jews and Egyptians. It depicts the Jews as helpless slaves whose only contribution was sweat and broken backs, when in fact the earliest Jewish immigrants were respected allies to the Pharaoh and provided Egypt with a valuable service of both trade and defense. The pseudohistory also takes away from the Egyptians their due credit for construction of humanity's greatest architectural achievement, and portrays them as evil, bloodthirsty slavemasters. Pretty much every culture in the world at that period in history included slavery and conflict, and the Egyptians probably weren't any better or worse than most peoples.

I know what you are thinking, "Gryphen why are you bringing all of this up now?"

I'll tell you why.  Yesterday the President made history by endorsing gay marriage.  Immediately following that he was attacked by the Religious Right and the Republicans.

And from where do they get their arsenal to attack the President over his endorsement? From the Bible of course.  Though the Bible does not explicitly mention same sex marriage, many believe it does condemn homosexuality as "an abomination, a detestable sin," and that it also describes marriage as "between a man and a woman."

However if this book is so horribly wrong in its historic references, and may in fact be full of outright lies designed to  create sympathy for its followers, then WHY would we allow anything it says to impact the decisions that we make today?

Look progress is being made and, much like the President, WE are evolving. Let's not allow ourselves to be held back any longer by the constraints of an ancient faith, based on a book of fallacies.

In the year 2012 I just don't think that is too much to ask.

Update: As has been pointed out it is very hard to find evidence to support the fact that the Egyptians did NOT have Hebrew slaves.

Of course that is kind of the point. You don't have to prove something did NOT happen, you have to prove something DID happen. And THAT proof shows up in only one place.

The Old Testament.

Here is more:


In addition, archaeological excavations do not support the Biblical Exodus story. Modern archaeological techniques are able to detect evidence of not only permanent settlements, but also of habitations of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world as far back as the third millennium B.C. However, there are no finds of a unique religious community living in a distinct area of the eastern delta of the Nile River (“Land of Goshen”) as described in Genesis. In addition, repeated excavations of areas corresponding to Kadesh-Barnea, where the Biblical Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty-eight years of wanderings, have revealed no evidence of any encampments. 
Finkelstein and Silberman point out that, although the sites mentioned in the Exodus story are real, archaeological excavations indicate that they were unoccupied when the Biblical Exodus would have taken place. For example, the Bible refers to messengers sent by Moses from Kadesh-Barnea to the king of Edom asking him to allow the Hebrews to pass through his land. However, the nation of Edom did not come into existence until the 7th century B.C. 9 Melvin Konner, anthropologist and teacher of Jewish studies at Emory University, sums it up this way in his recent book Unsettled, An Anthropology of the Jews: “Except for the Torah text, there is no decisive proof that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that they rebelled and walked away from the place, or that a leader such as Moses arose and took that people into the desert.” 10 Futhermore, what evidence we do have, as discussed above, contradicts the Biblical account. How, then, did this fable come to be written? 

Finkelstein and Silberman present the plausible thesis that the Deuteronomistic version of the Exodus, which brings together and embellishes the chronicles in the first four books of the Torah, was written during the 7th century B.C. The intent of the story was to rally the inhabitants of Judah against Egypt, which had become its most powerful enemy as Assyrian hegemony waned. Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the evil pharaoh in the Exodus story was actually modeled after the domineering Psamethicus I, who reigned from 664 to 610 B.C., approximately during the time that the Deuteronomistic version was written. This account was “powerful propaganda” that created “an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams” in order “to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.” In fact, the Egypt described in the Deuteronomistic account is “uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psamethicus.” 11 

According to Redford, the memories of the Canaanite Hyskos ruling Egypt and subsequently being driven out (though not enslaved and not Hebrew) most likely formed the basis for the Exodus story. 12 The sequence of plagues in the Exodus may be related to the ancient Egyptian belief that the inability to worship multiple gods causes illness. The Amarna tablets indicate that Akhnaten imposed monotheism on polytheistic Egypt during his reign between 1372 and 1354 B.C., allegedly causing the populace to suffer a variety of maladies, which abated with the restoration of polytheism by Akhnaten’s successor. 13 14 Jonathan Kirsh notes that the basket-in-the-bullrushes infant-Moses story is clearly a “cut-and-paste” plagiarism copied almost verbatim from a Mesopotamian text. 15 In the words of Daniel Lazare, the stories of infant Moses, the plagues, and final exodus are “unconnected folktales,” linked together “like pearls on a string.” 16 What we have, according to David Denby, is a “self-confirming, self-glorifying myth of origins,” with Moses as “the hero of the greatest campfire story ever told.” 17

Of course my point in writing this post was NOT to destroy anbody's faith, but only to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to formulate your view of the world, and your litmus test for the acceptance of societal changes moving forward, on a book that is clearly based on ancient fables.

I have NO problem with people worshiping however they see fit, but I DO have a problem when their version of reality invades the policy decisions that go into making laws, deciding what to teach our young people, and determining who can, and cannot, get married.