Ship of Fools: Dating the exodus

Thread: Dating the exodus Board: Kerygmania / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

Last night I ran across the documentary Patterns of Evidence on Netflix.

It focuses on the arguments in favour of the New Chronology by David Rohl.

Basically this claims to find archeological evidence for Israel's settlement in Egypt, the devastation caused by the plagues, their sudden departure, and the initial conquest of the Promised Land, notably Jericho, by dint of putting the date of the Exodus earlier than conventionally thought and, more controversially, by calling into question conventional Egyptian dating.

In one of the more compelling sequences of the documentary, allusion is made to a house claimed to be that of Joseph, complete with 12 pillars, 12 graves, one tomb larger than the others with a large statue of a non-Egyptian wearing a multi-coloured coat - and without a coffin.

As might be expected, all this is hotly contested by, well, just about everyone except some conservative Christians (Rohl himself is purportedly an agnostic). The most substantial (but by no means unbiased or indeed robust) cricitisms of the documentary I could find at first glance were here.

I'm torn.

On the one hand, the documentary makes me want to believe, but it seems to be largely a case of a narrative searching for evidence rather than the other way around, and the presentation of evidence struck me as possibly selective even before reading the criticisms.

Against that, I can quite believe that when academic reputations are on the line, it is quite possible for received wisdom, even received academic wisdom, to be wrong, and ideological presuppositions to cloud rational analysis.

Any resident experts care to comment?

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

The "New Chronology" isn't all that new, of course. I remember watching the "Pharoahs and Kings" documentary series more than 20 years ago which was based on Rohl's Test of Time. Likewise, I'm not an expert but found the documentary and book providing enough evidence that it seemed churlish to dismiss it out of hand just because it was different.

On the other hand, I find it disturbing that Rohl failed to complete his PhD and have his ideas refined through academic review, prefering to spend his time writing popular accounts of his ideas first. Popular accounts of science are essential, but not at the expense of the rigourous scientific process. It kind of puts him in the position of potential crank, rather than unorthodox academic.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

So God the Killer IS for real?! I used to believe this BEFORE Rohl. Way before. The Exodus was 1443 BCE entirely based on internal Biblical chronology and the Pharaoh was Amenhotep III (I know, I know ...).

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :

A friend of mine wrote a novel in which Moses is actually Akenaten, gafiated and then returned home with a refined concept of monotheism. She had to kick the calendar around hard to make it fly, but the concept was just too yum not to write.

Posted by Net Spinster (# 16058) on :

I suspect that Rohl may be so fringe that most scholars just don't deal with him. There are academic debates about the chronology but his isn't mentioned.

Other sites that take him down include
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2007/05/David-Rohls-Revised-Egyptian-Chronology-A-View-From-Palestine.aspx

The supposed Joseph house is at Tell el-Daba where there is evidence of Canaanites living there and it was also generally considered the site of Avaris. An apologetic site http://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a027.html
states that the conclusion was drawn because "the floor plan is identical to the Israelite “four-room house” of the later Iron Age in Palestine". I note that "later" in this case is several hundred years and that "identical" comes with several buts. A footnote states "Str. d/2 at Tell el-Daba". Note also some arguing with Rohl in the footnotes. A site devoted just to the Tell el-Daba site is at http://www.auaris.at/

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Net Spinster:
Other sites that take him down include
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2007/05/David-Rohls-Revised-Egyptian-Chronology-A-View-From-Palestine.aspx

This article is much less vehement than the other one but repeatedly refers to "the Biblical date of the Conquest".

Surely the whole point is that the "Biblical date" of anything is disputed? By "Biblical" the author appears to mean "the one I favour".

(Also, the second of the two comments on the article alerted me to the "fact" that Jesus was definitely born on the early evening of September 11, 3BC, which led me down this rabbit-hole... [Paranoid]

)

It strikes me a lot of these academics/archeologists are as eccentric and biased as each other. And again, the whole method of having a narrative first and then looking for supporting evidence seems suspect.

Posted by David Goode (# 9224) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
A friend of mine wrote a novel in which Moses is actually Akenaten, gafiated and then returned home with a refined concept of monotheism. She had to kick the calendar around hard to make it fly, but the concept was just too yum not to write.

Your friend would enjoy (if she doesn't already), the works of Ahmed Osman, whom I knew slightly about twenty years ago through a mutual acquaintance.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
It strikes me a lot of these academics/archeologists are as eccentric and biased as each other. And again, the whole method of having a narrative first and then looking for supporting evidence seems suspect.

You don't have to be mad to be an academic, but it helps.

Archaeologists have a particularly difficult task. They have highly fragmentary physical evidence of the past, and everyone wants them to produce a narrative of what happened. In Egypt there is a wealth of evidence - monuments, inscriptions, tombs, as well as the more common trash pits. But, even so preservation of evidence isn't complete - much has been destroyed (sometimes deliberately by subsequent rulers seeking to obliterate evidence of previous rulers, sometimes by tomb-robbers, often just by time), what does exist in monumental architecture is effectively propaganda, and there is a very long history of antiquarian and archaeological investigation - much of the early examples of which were barely better than tomb-raiders often destroying what we think of as vital evidence as they sought the artifacts that look good in museums and private collections.

It's probably inevitable that the archaeologists who are successful at producing a narrative that the rest of us can follow do so by filling in the substantial gaps between what is fairly certain with the products of their own imagination.

Posted by Net Spinster (# 16058) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Eutychus:
[It strikes me a lot of these academics/archeologists are as eccentric and biased as each other. And again, the whole method of having a narrative first and then looking for supporting evidence seems suspect.

I'm don't really trust any of the sources talking about Joseph's supposed house to be academic. The academic sources don't talk about it and I haven't figured out what the apologists are looking at in the academic work. They do skip over that a fair number of the tombs at that site (according to the academic sources, admittedly it is a large site) have sacrificed donkeys buried with them (and in a few cases what appear to be slaves [who oddly enough died at the right time to be buried with the important figure]).

Posted by Mudfrog (# 8116) on :

Might this be linked to the idea that Mt Sinai is actually in Saudi Arabia

[ 22. February 2017, 12:07: Message edited by: Mudfrog ]

Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :

This is what frustrates me about discussions of the historicity of the Bible. Most scholars who aren't fundamentalist would accept that the completed Bible we have today, records not only the events they depict but also subsequent interpretation layered on top of them.

I'm a liberal, in that while I accept that in all probability, a group of former slaves thousands of years ago, fled Egypt and wandered into Caanan. Whether it happened under such and such a Pharaoh, I honestly see little point in that question. The Exodus story thus has been embellished and crafted for theological purposes, and its merit lies in this theology, not in its historicity.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Although I am no fundamentalist, accept that "mythological" accounts may not be accurate "historical" ones, and believe that all telling of history inevitably comes with an interpretative sheen, yet I still have problems with lightly dismissing accounts which claim to be "true" history.

Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
I still have problems with lightly dismissing accounts which claim to be "true" history.

How do the "" marks qualify "true" in your use?

I think that people may claim a history to be a true history.
I don't think the Exodus account includes a statement by the author/redactor that it is true.

In what way can a theologically interpreted history be true? Is it just that the events happened and it is accompanied by a faith interpretation?

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Stripped down to basics, the answer to your last question is probably "yes". Of course, it's not quite as simple as that, for the writers/redactors of history are choosing the specific facts they wish to interpret and deciding upon the matrix with which they will interpret them - but every historian (or even news editor) does that, whether they realise it or not.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
In what way can a theologically interpreted history be true? Is it just that the events happened and it is accompanied by a faith interpretation?

All history is interpreted. What makes a history a history and more than a list of things that happened is the interpretation. The King dissolved Parliament and then there were battles and then the King's head was cut off is a list of events; The King dissolved Parliament and so Parliament launched a civil war to defend their rights, and they won and executed the King is a history with interpretation.
Though even then 'the King's head was cut off' can be reduced to events (movements of solid objects) plus interpretation.

Of the wide related semantic field ('accurate', 'insightful', 'valid', 'illuminating', 'true') we tend not to use 'true' to describe the ways in which some interpretations are better than others once we've reduced an account into facts and interpretation. Nevertheless some interpretations are better: more illuminating, more true.

Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :

I think that a theological interpretation has elements that are not necessary for secular subjective interpretations that any history has.

Posted by Callan (# 525) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
A friend of mine wrote a novel in which Moses is actually Akenaten, gafiated and then returned home with a refined concept of monotheism. She had to kick the calendar around hard to make it fly, but the concept was just too yum not to write.

It's not just the dates though - the politics of Atenism were the sort of absolutism that would make Louis XIV blush, the politics of Exodus, on the other hand, clearly aren't. Linking Moses and Akenaten is really a kind of lazy elision - Moses was a monotheist and Akenaten was a monotheist so they were broadly on the same wave length. It's a bit like claiming that Bossuet was an immortal who took on a second identity as Thomas Paine. They were both monotheists but the politics of the first must have shifted out of all recognition for him to embrace the identity of the second.

(I realise, of course, that authors of fiction are not under oath - no-one sensible objects to I, Claudius because the narrator is a republican and the actual Claudius clearly wasn't. So it might work perfectly well as the basis for a novel. I suspect that the historical Moses, if there was one, might have spent a lot of time explaining to people that El was emphatically not the same God as the Aten.)

Posted by Flubb (# 918) on :

I've spent a good portion of the last five years on Exodus and assorted historicity issues and I'm running out of academic books and articles which I haven't read on Exodus. Rohl's arguments were 'tested' at his own journal JACF and you'll see Bimson was a contributor there. The New Chronology destroys the rest of the chronological base for the rest of the ANE and circum-Mediterranean simply to fix an Israelite issue (the same goes for Finkelstein's Low Chronology to a lesser degree apropos of nothing), and this why the majority of Egyptologists, believers or otherwise refuse to countenance the theory.

I detest Avalos for a number of reasons, but his review is correct - Rohl weasels different parts of the evidence out when it's convenient for him but ignores the rest of it which implies a narrative continuity that just isn't there. There are much better (Christian) scholars out there who would jump at the chance of proving the Exodus (Hoffmeier for one) but are much more circumspect in analysing the evidence and the conclusions which can be drawn from them.

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