Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

What do you mean argument from silence? It is quite clearly testified that:

1) His older brother died before his dad did and that was the only reason he
came to the throne. No other Pharaoh fits this identifying bill.
2) 8 spoke wheels only come from 18th dynasty. This is physical evidence.
3) We have testimony in Amarna letters to Akhenaten complaining about
Nomadic skirmishes from a still Canaanite controlled Canaan i.e. we know for
sure that Isreal did not yet exist as a nation

And so let me play the minimalist here and agree that we cannot prove he
learned about monotheism from monotheistic nomads and that we cannot prove
nomadic descendants of Jacob ever resided in or had direct contact with
Egypt much less that Jacob ever existed. But what we can say for sure is:

1) Isreal did not yet exist in his day
2) Canaanites were having problems from nomadic skirmishes invading their
towns and there are complaints that the Egyptian King doesn't seem to be
willing to do anything about it
3) that there was an Egyptian King who only came to power because his a) his
big brother died and b) he died during the lifetime of his father and so
never even came to power
4) we have oceanographic evidence of an elevated land bridge beneath the
waters from Nuweiba across the red sea
5) 8 spoke Egyptian chariot wheels have been found by diving expeditions in
this stretch and 8 spoke wheels are characterisitic of the 18th dynasty (a
failed experiment never to be repeated)
6) Finally, most shockingly using conventional Egyptian chronology with
Amenophis III starting his rule in the late 15th century we actually get
chronology which fits the chronology presented working backwards from the
Babylonian exile to the Torah's account to work out when its author claimed
the exodus to have happened.

Minimalistically speaking the very least we could say is that the historical
Amenophis III is a strong candidate as the Pharaoh that the authors of the
Torah were hoping to base their story on based on his son dying before he
died, some kind of defeat that led to his chariots ending up in the water
near and the embarrassment of his son becoming monotheistic. Further, the
very least we could say is that Isreal clearly did not exist as a nation in
Akhenaten's time and that the complaints that Pharaoh wasn't doing anything
about the skirmishes in Canaan were strong enough for complainers to be
worried about them, to believe that Pharaoh should be doing something about
them and that Pharaoh astonishingly wasn't willing to get involved (very
strange behaviour). And so minimalistically speaking post Akhenaten is a
very strong candidate for the beginning of Isreal (for whatever reason) and
at least an upper boundary that is testified to in writing from that era
which has survived to this day.

I won't force you into a dating of the Exodus. But at the very least it
would nice if you could acknowledge that Akhenaten is a well attested
boundary showing that Isreal must have come about some time after the
letters to him complaining that he wasn't willing to help the Canaanites out
with skirmishing nomads.

James Christian


2010/2/12 George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>

> James, I wasn't seeking to enter into a discussion on dating the Exodus, so
> I won't take the bait. I was, rather, making a statement of principle and
> method. We, some three and a half millennia after Akhenaton, have very
> little information on which we can evaluate the psychology and circumstances
> that lead one ancient Egyptian of royal stock to create a monotheistic
> religion worshipping the Sun (not Yahweh), in breach of previous Egyptian
> religious traditions. Maybe he had a dream? Maybe he had some other kind of
> personal religious experience/revelation like Muhammad? Maybe he just hated
> the old religious traditions and felt suffocated by them? Maybe he was a
> megalomaniac? Maybe he just had funny chemistry in the brain? There are just
> so many possibilities here and so little detailed knowledge of his context
> that it's virtually impossible from our standpoint to be specific.
>
> Most of what you said is an argument from silence. It's all possible, yes,
> but it can never be tested and confirmed. Therefore, there's little that we
> can actually do with it, and we must acknowledge that it is only
> speculation. It's fun to speculate, but speculation and historical
> construction are two very different things.
>
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au
>
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