Thursday, April 15, 2021

An Agnostic Egyptologist Argues for the Validity of the Biblical Account of the Exodus

Oh this is fun. Just heard most of an interview done by my greatnephew Christian Cox, who also goes by "CJ" and sometimes by "Jay," and "The Cynicogue" whatever that is, I'll look it up someimte. Anyway this is a three-hour interview with British Egyptologist David Rohl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
This is heavy duty scholarship so you'll have to be willing to think through the facts and arguments. I looked up David Rohl and found there is a movie on the subject. It is rentable at Amazon and I'm about to watch it. "Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus." It starts out with the usual "scientific" debunkery of the Bible. You know, the Exodous didn't happen because archaeology hasn't found it. I hope the rest of the film does a nice clear job of showing them wrong but wait and see.

I don't have any problem rejecting "science" in such cases because I know the Bible is truth, but it is frustrating that this avenue to faith is cut off by "science" as if it were god. This argument comes up frequently in the creationism-evolution debate: you really cannot do true science on historical events. You need to be able to replicate your findings and that is not possible with events in the past. everything you think you know is always merely an hypothesis for that reason and subject to all kinds of errors you may never be able to discover because the usual avenues of correction aren't available. This is the problem with evolution and it's the problem with the "scientific" investigatiobns into Biblical accounts.

Rohl's argument is that the archaeologists have misunderstood the timing of events because they misunderstand the languages of the relevant time period, involving the names of pharoahs among other thihngs.

UPDATE. Finished the film. I'd say it proved the point. Various lines of evidence point to an earlier date for events in Egypt discovered byh archaeology than the currently accepted date. The currently accepted dating is nevertheless defended with an iron grip by many Egyptologists although there are some who argue for the earlier dating. Both sides are well represented in the film. Nevertheless the filmmaker doesn't take sides in the end although the main thrust of the film is to the earlier dating.

Interesting that it's the dating discrepancy between the science and the Bible that is used to discredit the Bible. Same situation as with Evolution and Old Earth Geology. The evidence in the film is that there are many archaeologically established events that do fit the Biblical accounts, it's only the dating that says they don't support the Bible. The only real evidence for the Old Earth and Evolution is also the dating methods, the actualities fit the Biblical account just fine, genetics/ biology, and geology.