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Comment by kilolima | Hacker News Reader

There's no Egyptian record of Moses, Passover, or the Exodus. Religious fabrications are hardly relevant for a discussion of ancient mathematics.

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There are no detailed architectural diagrams documenting how the pyramids were built either. There were some papyrus scrolls discovered in 2013 which provide log information but still to this day, no details are known to exist.

A citation is needed to disprove the information that you refer to as "religious fabrication". Lack of information in Egyptian records is not a citation.

Yeah but a source which is itself derived from an earlier source (Torah) but the earlier source lacks the relevant details is a shut and dry case of fabrication.

It is only controversial to say this because it is a religious document.

(Lest you think I’m taking sides, the Jewish account of exodus doesn’t line up with archeological evidence either.)

Probably the histrorians were looking at the wrong place and perhaps the original Mount Sinai is not the one that's widely accepted. Any knowledge be it science, history, etc need to be revised and aligned to the newly discovery with more robust evidences.

Please check this documentary on the new evidences regarding the Exodus [1].

[1]The Real Mount Sinai - Shocking Exodus Evidence in Saudi Arabia:

https://youtu.be/LZDfGiXJjjI

Do you have some specific archaeological evidence in mind (that disproves the [Biblical/Torah?] accounts)?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481...

Nothing is stated is fact in the article. It is centered around theory. The last half of the article is emotion and conjecture.

There's a lot stated in the article. There is absolutely no evidence for a Hebrew peoples invasion of Canaan. The cities mentioned in the Bible were excavated, but there is no record of any sieges. The transition from Canaanite to Israelite settlers is gradual over hundreds of years, and likely represents a transformation of the same culture and not an actual displacement of people. None of the places mentioned in Sinai that have been identified show any evidence of any people whatsoever having visited until hundreds of years after the absolute latest possible dates. "The conclusion – that Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable [...] repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence." (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002).

On the Egyptian side, basically no excavations or inscriptions anywhere match up with the biblical story. There were semitic-speaking slaves in Egypt, yes, but not chattel slavery as commonly depicted, but rather something more akin to domestic servants and feudal peasants. And they were never expelled, as there are ongoing references long after into the Ptolemaic kingdom. The only exodus on record of semitic peoples is the Hyksos, who weren't slaves but rather conquerors and the fifteenth dynasty of Egypt. When the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they were expelled and driven out as far as Syria. Maybe that was the origin of The Exodus? But if the story changed from a slave rebellion ("let my people go!") to a dynastic struggle by the ruling class, are we still talking about the same story?

Finally there's the question of when the story was written down in the first place. It is interesting to note that the first few prophets of Israel make no mention of the Exodus whatsoever. It is not part of the shared zeitgeist of early Israel. It is only a few hundred years later that the references to an Egyptian origin are made by some of the northern prophets, and then the story spreads to the south. The Exodus itself isn't written down until Babylonian captivity much, much later, at which point a liberation story starts sounding quite a bit like Mary Sue fan-fiction.

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the current state of research as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Reliability_of_the_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses#Historicity

I know it is not satisfying, but essentially all of modern biblical scholarship no longer consider these (among others) are factual. This is held by believers and non-believers in the field alike. There is not a single paper to cite, its the result of decades of research with the field slowly settling on this as the result of hundreds of papers, studies, and books. In particular, you won't find a paper entitled "Modern Biblical Criticism rejects X", as it is not original research and worthy of publication. A book like Thomas Romer's "The Invention of God" goes through a bunch of the pro/con evidence and various theories and proposals put forth. And here is a paper by Romer that just summarily states that modern research has abandoned the documentary hypothesis, but doesn't really offer support for that as it is a well known point within the field that doesn't require re-litigation: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03820791/document

Do you realized that most of ancient mathematics revolved around religions and one of the very first books on algebra was written by Al-Khwarizmi to accurately calculate inheritance for Islamic jurisprudence? [1]

Anyway I was directly replying to my parent poster not to the article mentioning that if anyone especially kings that can sort of reliably predict the future they can claim divinity.

[1]Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwariz...

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