We all know of the Exodus where, according to legend, a large group of Hebrew slaves escaped from Egypt, after God intervened by killing a large portion of the Egyptian population. The Jewish holiday 'Passover' is still based on this legend, as during his killingspree God passed over the houses of the Hebrews and only killed the Egyptians.
The story explains how the Hebrews set off on a long journey through the Sinaï dessert for 40 years, after God's killingspree where he killed all the firstborn of Egypt including the animals.
It's a fantastic story. But that is all that it is. None of it is true. I can say this with great confidence. The reason for this is quite simple. Not only does the story speak of unnatural events, there is also no evidence to support any of it happening. The story has many issues, reducing it from a historical recollection, to a mere allegory from which a moral is to be taken.
Asking the important questions
The story mentions several things about which you can ask questions. All can be boiled down to... "where's the evidence?". Let's take Passover for example. Here's we'll skip over the obvious question "If God is allknowing, then why did he need the Hebrews to signal to him that they are Hebrews, so that he wouldn't mistakenly kill them allong with all the Egyptians?".
Instead we should look at something that can be proven through evidence. At the time Egypt may have had a population between 2 and 5 million people. As God killed all the firstborn, this would include everyone from newborns to old people, who were the first born of their parents. This could easily have been a quarter of the population. This would mean that there would have been between 500,000 and 1,250,000 people dead.
Where are their graves? Where is the mention of this, in Egypts history? The Egyptians documented their history very well, so why is there no recollection of this?
Besides this. The bible speaks of 600.000 Hebrew men, besides their wives and children fleeing Egypt. But as the Egyptian population had just been decimated and with it, their military had also been dealt a devastating blow, the Hebrews would have been able to overthrow the Egyptian rulers and their army. Instead they, a population of between 1,200.000 and 2,400,000 people, wandered through the dessert for 40 years.
Where are the remnants of the journey through the dessert?
Now, here again, I'll skip over the question "Why did a journey that would take about 2 weeks, take them 40 years?". Instead its more interesting to ask... "Where's the evidence for this journey?" Let's say that, at minimum, the total population was 1,200,000 people. This would be the 600,000 men as mentioned in the bible, 300,000 women and 300,000 children. A population this large would, ofcourse travel slowly. But besides that, there are more problems to counter.
These people all need food, water and shelter. Desserts can be rather cold at night. Food needs to be prepared and with all this, garbage is created. So, the important questions here are: "Where did they get food, water, building materials and firewood?" and "How did they provide for themselves, for 40 years in the dessert?". "Did they grow crops and breed animals? How did they do that? Did they use their own excrements to fertilize the land to grow crops and feed their animals?"
There's an abundance of questions you can ask here. Questions of which the answers may lead to more questions. Providing food and shelter, will produce waste. And with a population of over a million people, there would have been a lot of waste. What happend to it? Where are the ruins of a massive city in the dessert that housed over 1 million people and possibly even more than 2 million people?
No evidence of this has ever been found. The most logical answer for the lack of this evidence is, that the exodus, as it is described never happend. There may have been some Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but not millions of them. And these slaves didn't wander through the dessert for 40 years.
But there is evidence!
People may believe that the Exodus did happen and that there is evidence to support this. But is there? No. The best known "evidence" are the "chariotwheels" on the bottom of the Red Sea, of which people claim they ended up there, when the Egyptian soldiers who followed the Hebrews throught the passage Moses had created, closed up again.
It however is unknown that these items on the bottom of the sea are actually chariots or chariot wheels. But even if they were, that doesn't mean they ended up there, in the way that the story depicts. The Egyptians had boats. Chariots and chariotwheels could have been lost overboard at any time. No divine act would have been needed there. So, in no way are these objects evidence for the Exodus.
Therefor we are left with a lack of evidence. And as the story is not supported by any evidence, why should we believe any of it is true?
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