Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

I tried to word my original comment in a way that allows a broad range of opinions to make a narrow point; I don't think anything you've said here refutes anything I said. I'm not really here to kick off a serious apologetics fight, though if you want me to engage on your thoughts I could.

(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)

View on HN

You wrote:

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.

I personally think that the conquest of Jericho depicts, allegorically, a conquest of the Moon itself. That there is more than one OT story that describes journeys to outer space (the highest heavens, of course). That the Promised Land really was an unfathomable location in outer space that was only reached by the most faithful and holiest of warriors.

But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...

> modern day scholars

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

Absolutely, of course we all have our biases and evidentiary standards.

But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.

Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.

In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).

> for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

There's a lot I could say in response to your comment (most notably, I think we literates underrate the ability of oral cultures to transmit information) but I just want to highlight that merely acknowledging your presupposition as a presupposition removes one of the biggest things that riles me up when I get into discussions like this. It's very much appreciated.

the problem with oral societies isn't that they unable to transmit information (in the Shannon sense) it's that they're really bad at transmitting information through time while separating true facts about history from fables, revisionism, bias, she intermixing with pure fiction.

Not presupposing something is not itself a presupposition

Reply on news.ycombinator.com