Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 9/17/05, Read, James C wrote:
> 
> This is not true. It is easily demonstrable when the bible claims that Moses
> lived. We are given an unbroken timeline from Adam to Joseph in the torah
> itself. Working backwards we can see the timeline from the babylonian exile
> through all the kings up to Joshua. This leaves a grey area between Joseph
> and Moses. 

If we can reconstruct all the way back to Joshua, we can figure out when
Moses lived.  Why do we need the gray area?

> How many years? How many generations? For those who accept that
> the Christian Greek scriptures can give valuable insight on Jewish history
> it is easy to calculate this grey period by the reference to the
> '400 years of affliction' of God's people. 

For those who accept the Jewish Hebrew scriptures give sufficient insight
into Jewish history and that the Christian Greek scriptures generally simply
quote them, they can look up Gen 15:13.

> This makes the 10th century an
> absolute 'no-no' and the 'scholarly' assumption that Rameses was the pharoah
> of the time of the exodus is way out.

If you think Ramesses was Pharaoh in the 10th century, how are we supposed
to believe you when you say elsewhere "you risked failing by showing that you 
had studied the sources and been capable of formulating your own opinion."  
If 
you mean you risked failing by studying only the Bible and sources you deemed 
appropriate and refused to read other sources that were assigned (in this 
case,
for example, an historical overview of Egypt), then it's not an issue
of formulating
your opinion but of your filtering out sources that are assigned. 
This is not just
a singular issue here because you just simply constantly misrepresent the
position of scholarship on a whole variety of issues, and it's hard to form a
discussion when every once in a while you write something about what
"scholarship" says that at best misrepresents what it says and at worst is 
flat
out wrong.  If you are going to attack what scholarship says about Ramesses II
being the Pharaoh, first know when he lived and why scholarship (in the past)
attributed the Exodus to his time.  Today, though, that would misrepresent
scholarship since my understanding is that today most scholars are generally 
wary of assigning any specific historical period with any kind of certainty,
even if they accept that the Exodus is historically true.

Yitzhak Sapir