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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Joseph: Israel - Hyksos - Egypt

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • Cc: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Joseph: Israel - Hyksos - Egypt
  • Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 11:31:34 +0000

On 15/11/2005 01:45, Yigal Levin wrote:

Not only Exodus. The entire Bible, in all its versions (not just the MT), is primarily a book about God's relationship with Israel. Some parts of it use "historiography" as a tool to get that message across. Others use poetry. Others use wisdom. Whatever the authors thought was irrelevant to their objective - they left out. Their objective was NOT to teach us what WE think of as history. We should always keep that in mind.


You and Jack can assert such things as many times as you like, but unless you provide evidence you are not going to convince people like Karl, or even myself who is already in partial agreement.

Anyway, what do "WE think of as history"? If by this you mean an exhaustive record of all events, of course the Bible is not that, but nor are modern history books. If a modern author were to write a history of the people of Israel from earliest times, even if they had far better data than are actually available, that history would pass over the time in Israel, between Joseph and Moses, very briefly, as does the Genesis-Exodus narrative - for the focus of the book is on Israel, not Egypt. The modern author would probably want to relate this to specific Egyptian dynasties and dates, but then those are modern concerns, not the concerns of ancient Israelite historians. For historians they were, although like modern historians not without their specific purposes and biases. Why can't people accept this? Is it because someone once declared that Herodotus was the first historian and so no one earlier can be called a historian?

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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