As I've been continuing to watcdh the film about dating the Exodus and related Biblical history by the archaeology of Egypt, a wave of disgust for "science" has been engulfing me. I'm supposed to respect this "science?" One after another of these highly regarded scholars and archaeologists flatly give their educated opinion that this or that archeologically determined event that so nicely matches this or that part of the Biblical account simply has nothing to do with the Biblical account. They may try to rationalize the opinion in other ways as the interview proceeds but in tghe end the filmmaker gets them all to admit that their opinion comes down to the one reason, that it is the established conventionally accepted chronology that makes it impossible. There is no evidence of any of the Biblical narrative at the time convenationally established for those events, therefore they did not happen, the Bible is a piece of fiction and the fact that so much of it IS demonstrated by archaeological and documentary evidence from a time a few centuries earlier is just thrown out. Didn't happen when they expect it to happen, therefore even though so much of it DID happen exactly as described in the Bible at a different time it cannot be those Biblical events.
I'm trying to be forgiving, trying to be understanding. This is a fallen world after all, and nevertheless surely these are great investigators, great scientists who are honest as well as expert. I accept that, of course they are honest as well as careful scientists, their findings for the most part are highly trustworthy as far as I can tell. But when one after another flatly denies what the film has shown to be such a dramatic correspondence between the Biblical accounts and the evidence the scientists themselves have brought to light, I am overcome with disgust. A cavalier overthrowing of the Bible which had been known to be historical fact for millennia deserves that disgust. It is the Bible that should be the standard, not the cogitations of fallen humanity. They should be ruled by the fear of God. If their dates don't line up with the Bible they should be exerting all effort to figure out why and reconcile them, not just accept their own antibiblical conclusion so easily. "There is no fear of God before their eyes."
This is how we got all the Bible debunkery that's been laid on us over the last century This is how we got Darwinism. This is how we got Marx and Freud, historical Geology. This is how we got Liberal Theology and the fake Greek manuscripts Sinaiticus and vaticanus. All it seems to take is a plausible sounding "scholarly" theory and out goes the Bible. "There is no fear of God beforfe their eyes." If it overturns the Bible it makes some people happy, it makes other people unhappy but they are seduced by the reputations of "great men" nevertheless and go about trying to fit the Bible to the work of heathen. Gosh, but isn't radiometric dating just so incontrovertible you can't reject it? No, not if you know the word of God is the word of God. Anything that contradicts it is wrong, and your job is to find out how, not accept anything that contradicts it. The logic is only plausible, when you prayerfully think it through it starts to come apart. You'll start to see its flaws, you'll find facts you hadn't seen before. They stop too soon.
If you set your mind in that direction instead of capitulating to the pagan powers you will find many ways the established bodies of knowledge have failed to recognize the actual facts. The worldwide strata with their fossil contents in factg could not have formed on the interpretation of their representing time periods of millions of years. The whole intellectual edifice is impossible in the real world. It's ludicrous. I've argued this over and over and I'm not going to do it again here, just say that it's one of the many ways modern thinking deserves profound disgust.
I may buy the movie and see if I can master the facts in it. The Bible is historically true, I know that anyway, I'm just horrified to the core by how easily the devil has seduced humanity into discrediting it and creating unnecessary hurdles for people who would otherwise believe it as they should. The debunkers should be the ones on the defensive, not the Bible believers.
Saturday, April 17, 2021
The Evidence Presented in the Film "Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus" Demonstrating the Presence of the Israelites in Egypt Earlier Than the Accepted Timing
Since I'm into this I might as well give as much of the evidence as I can of the archaeological validation of the Biblical Exodus, against the accepted date for which there is no actual evidence.
The dating discrepancy starts with a verse in the Bible, Exodus 1:11, that says the Israelites made bricks for the Egyptian cities of Pithom and Rameses. Rameses was pharoah around 1200 BC so that date has been accepted as the time period of the Exodus although there is no actual physical evidence from that period that fits the Biblical narrative of the Exodus, nor does that date fit with the Biblical timing itself.
This reference to Rameses seems like a pretty solid clue, so it is easy to understand why it is so adamantly held as a time marker before which the Exodus could not have occurred. Unfortunately it makes a liar of the Bible since there is no evidence from archaeology to support it.
Some try to reconcile the Bible with this melancholy absence of evidence by claiming the Biblical narrative doesn't have to be factual in order to be "true" and other such tiresome sophistries. Supposedly it is enough that it has "meaning." This is a pretty anemic way to defend what has always been known as a history until "science" did its dirty work on it. "Let God be true but every man a liar" says Romans 3:4. I'm going with that. And true does not mean meaningful, it means factually true.
The point of the movie is that there does seem to be plenty of evidence from archaeology and other sources such as documents from ancient Egypt of the factual reality of the Biblical account of the Exodus, quite a bit of it, though not from the time of Rameses, rather from a few hundred years earlier.
In this earlier time period are found:
1. EVIDENCE OF A SEMITIC SHEEPHERDING PEOPLE IN GOSHEN PRIOR TO THE TIME OF RAMESES: A city called Avaris beneath the city of Rameses, the area where the Bible locates the Israelites, which had been populated by Semites or Canaanites. The excavator says they seem to be there by permission of the Egyptian crown, which exactly fits the Biblical narrative of the family of the patriarch Jacob, Joseph's father. The family was given the land by the pharoah of the time. There is also evidence of an abundance of sheep and goats with them. Egyptians were not allowed to be sheepherders but Jacob's family were, so this fact also fits very well. Yet the Austrian excavator, Manfred Bietak, denies that they could have been the Israelites described in the Bible, because, of course, the timing is wrong. He believes the accepted later timing of the period of Rameses. All this apparent evidence of exactly what the Bible describes is therefore tossed out because of the clinging to that date. (Starts about 13:19 into the film.)
2. EVUDENCE OF JOSEPH'S FAMILY IN GOSHEN: About 28:30 into the film, David Rohl offers as evidence that the city of Avaris is indeed where the family of Joseph settled, in the land of Goshen, the style of house built there. It is like those found in Syria, where Abraham originally came from. It's not an Egyptian style of architecture. He says it is the sort of house you'd expect Jacob to have built. Built on top of it was an Egyptian style palace Rohl suggests must have been for a very high dignitary who was being honored for his service to the nation. Its occupant was a Semite or Canaanite. There were also twelve tombs in the garden around it, and twelve pillars in its portico, all suggesting that the honored dignitary must have been Joseph, who was one of twelve brothers
3. EVIDENCE OF JOSEPH'S HIGH RANK IN EGYPT: At 30 into the film Rohl goes on to point out that one of the tombs is special in that it is a pyramid, a shape usually reserved for kings and queens though in this case it was for a Semitic official. There is a very large statue inside the chapel of the tomb that has the hair style and the skin color (pale yellow) by which Egyptians depicted northern people. It also had the remains of painted stripes of many colors which is awfully reminiscent of Joseph's signature "coat of many colors" given to him by his father. The statue has been reconstructed with such a multicolored striped robe covering it. The filmmaker consults another Egyptologist, a Dr. Charles Ailing, who agrees with Rohl that it must depict either Joseph or someone who had a career remarkably similar to Joseph's. Both scholars confirm that this tomb and its statue are unique in Egypt.
I think that is pretty impressive evidence myself that despite the dating problem the Biblical narrative of Joseph's life in Egypt is confirmed by archaeology, and this is only a quarter of the way into the film. It goes on to include a canal attached to the Nile that is named for a "Joseph" and the fact that the pharoah in this time period are depicted with worried features unlike the usual depictions of pharoahs. One important piece of evidence is that the pyramid tomb was completely cleaned out of its artifacts and bones when discovered, which fits with the biblical fact that Joseph had asked for his bones to be buried in the promised land. After that the film goes on to much evidence of other parts of the Biblical account, such as the seven years of famine, the enslavement of the Hebrew descendants of Jacob, then on to the time of Moses when God brought plagues on the land, the death of the firstborn on the night of Passover, the Exodus itself and then evidence from the later time of Rameses that the Israelites were now a nation in the land of Canaan. It's all very compelling but I'm going to stop here for now.
The dating discrepancy starts with a verse in the Bible, Exodus 1:11, that says the Israelites made bricks for the Egyptian cities of Pithom and Rameses. Rameses was pharoah around 1200 BC so that date has been accepted as the time period of the Exodus although there is no actual physical evidence from that period that fits the Biblical narrative of the Exodus, nor does that date fit with the Biblical timing itself.
This reference to Rameses seems like a pretty solid clue, so it is easy to understand why it is so adamantly held as a time marker before which the Exodus could not have occurred. Unfortunately it makes a liar of the Bible since there is no evidence from archaeology to support it.
Some try to reconcile the Bible with this melancholy absence of evidence by claiming the Biblical narrative doesn't have to be factual in order to be "true" and other such tiresome sophistries. Supposedly it is enough that it has "meaning." This is a pretty anemic way to defend what has always been known as a history until "science" did its dirty work on it. "Let God be true but every man a liar" says Romans 3:4. I'm going with that. And true does not mean meaningful, it means factually true.
The point of the movie is that there does seem to be plenty of evidence from archaeology and other sources such as documents from ancient Egypt of the factual reality of the Biblical account of the Exodus, quite a bit of it, though not from the time of Rameses, rather from a few hundred years earlier.
In this earlier time period are found:
1. EVIDENCE OF A SEMITIC SHEEPHERDING PEOPLE IN GOSHEN PRIOR TO THE TIME OF RAMESES: A city called Avaris beneath the city of Rameses, the area where the Bible locates the Israelites, which had been populated by Semites or Canaanites. The excavator says they seem to be there by permission of the Egyptian crown, which exactly fits the Biblical narrative of the family of the patriarch Jacob, Joseph's father. The family was given the land by the pharoah of the time. There is also evidence of an abundance of sheep and goats with them. Egyptians were not allowed to be sheepherders but Jacob's family were, so this fact also fits very well. Yet the Austrian excavator, Manfred Bietak, denies that they could have been the Israelites described in the Bible, because, of course, the timing is wrong. He believes the accepted later timing of the period of Rameses. All this apparent evidence of exactly what the Bible describes is therefore tossed out because of the clinging to that date. (Starts about 13:19 into the film.)
2. EVUDENCE OF JOSEPH'S FAMILY IN GOSHEN: About 28:30 into the film, David Rohl offers as evidence that the city of Avaris is indeed where the family of Joseph settled, in the land of Goshen, the style of house built there. It is like those found in Syria, where Abraham originally came from. It's not an Egyptian style of architecture. He says it is the sort of house you'd expect Jacob to have built. Built on top of it was an Egyptian style palace Rohl suggests must have been for a very high dignitary who was being honored for his service to the nation. Its occupant was a Semite or Canaanite. There were also twelve tombs in the garden around it, and twelve pillars in its portico, all suggesting that the honored dignitary must have been Joseph, who was one of twelve brothers
3. EVIDENCE OF JOSEPH'S HIGH RANK IN EGYPT: At 30 into the film Rohl goes on to point out that one of the tombs is special in that it is a pyramid, a shape usually reserved for kings and queens though in this case it was for a Semitic official. There is a very large statue inside the chapel of the tomb that has the hair style and the skin color (pale yellow) by which Egyptians depicted northern people. It also had the remains of painted stripes of many colors which is awfully reminiscent of Joseph's signature "coat of many colors" given to him by his father. The statue has been reconstructed with such a multicolored striped robe covering it. The filmmaker consults another Egyptologist, a Dr. Charles Ailing, who agrees with Rohl that it must depict either Joseph or someone who had a career remarkably similar to Joseph's. Both scholars confirm that this tomb and its statue are unique in Egypt.
I think that is pretty impressive evidence myself that despite the dating problem the Biblical narrative of Joseph's life in Egypt is confirmed by archaeology, and this is only a quarter of the way into the film. It goes on to include a canal attached to the Nile that is named for a "Joseph" and the fact that the pharoah in this time period are depicted with worried features unlike the usual depictions of pharoahs. One important piece of evidence is that the pyramid tomb was completely cleaned out of its artifacts and bones when discovered, which fits with the biblical fact that Joseph had asked for his bones to be buried in the promised land. After that the film goes on to much evidence of other parts of the Biblical account, such as the seven years of famine, the enslavement of the Hebrew descendants of Jacob, then on to the time of Moses when God brought plagues on the land, the death of the firstborn on the night of Passover, the Exodus itself and then evidence from the later time of Rameses that the Israelites were now a nation in the land of Canaan. It's all very compelling but I'm going to stop here for now.
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