Biblical Hebrew Forum

[kdlitwak <kdlitwak AT concentric.net>]

Bill Rea wrote:

> Walter Mattfeld wrote:-
>
> >Exodus tells a story of God feeding his people with quail that fall from 
> >the
> >skies, perhaps this marker can identify the route of the Israelites ? Every
> >year near El Arish quail migrating from Europe fall exhausted from the 
> >skies
> >in their annual migration to Africa. They alight only near El Arish, not 
> >the
> >shores of the Red Sea, and the migration occurs only in the Autumn, not in
> >the Spring, as portrayed in the Exodus narrative (Why did the biblical
> >narrator have quail migrating in the spring and not the autumn ?).
>
> Just a simple note of fact. Migratory birds have to go in both directions,
> perhaps you just mean they take a different route on the return journey.
>
> Bill Rea, Information Technology Services, University of

That is a point worth considering.  What I might add to this is, Why does
naturally-occuring phenomena have any real relevance?  It is, I suggest, a 
misguided
quest to find naturally occurring phenomena as an explanation of otherwise
extraordinary occurrences recorded in Exodus. If you don't want to accept 
supernatural
events, then no amount of stretching the known natural facts (of which there 
is
precious little for any time before the recent past) while accomplish the 
task.  If
you accept supernatural possibilities, none of the events in Exodus is a 
problem.  So
the possible fact that you think migration of quail happens in the wrong time 
of year
and in the wrong place is of little moment for the possible historical 
veracity of the
account.

      I've read lots of stuff on historical figures that most people think 
did exist,
like Napoleon, for example.  One writer stated that Napoleon probably lost 
the battle
of Waterloo because of stomach trouble distracting him.  There is simply no 
way to
verify that Napoleon ever had stomach trouble, even if a close advisor of his 
said
so.  We can't go back in time and test it.  Similarly, we can't go back in 
tie and
test anything in Exodus.  As with virtually all documents which purport to 
provide an
account of what happens in some fashion the issue is not, can we validate all 
these
things in a scientific way (which is impossible for any event in history) 
but, Can we
trust (in a legal sense) this source?  Not many transient events (like quails
descending or seas parting or the like are open to empirical research now.  
Even if
they happens, what would you expect for a trace?  The very best one might 
hope for is
other written corroboration, but since most ANE texts don't ever record 
defeat of
themselves, there is certain to be no Egyptian annal of this.  So there's 
going to be
a problem validating the event through any other source, but that's not a 
problem for
me.  The issue would be, Can I trust the book of Exodus as an historical 
record?  To
this I can only say, I certainly trust it more than modern historical works 
which deny
the Holocaust or Japanese history texts that highlight the bombing of 
Hiroshima but
omit mention of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  History writing in 
every age,
including our own, is a matter of whether a source seems trustworthy in a 
legal sense,
not verifiable in a scientific one, and attempting to ignore this is a dead 
end.  You
can never validate any historical event by artifacts or scientific 
observations
alone.  You always need texts to interpret the facts and those texts, 
Israelite,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Egyptian, are all subject to various human 
factors
which  make them more or less trustworthy, but they are really all we have.  
You cold
never reconstruct Babylonian history without Babylonian texts, even though 
some of
them are clearly political cover-up of the real facts.

Ken Litwak