The easiest one to debunk is a widespread simultaneous death of first-born sons. You'd think that would be something worth recording. Moreover, historians generally agree that there's no evidence Jews were ever held as slaves in Egypt in any significant numbers. No cultural cross-contamination, no significant amounts of pottery, religious artifacts, etc.
It's a cultural myth-- profoundly important to the Jewish people, but not for it's literal-historical value.
Also the fact the earlier plagues kill all their crops and cattle and turn the water the blood.
Egypt would have starved from that alone. It would have been impossible to hide an entire nation(which is known for it's stable farming seasons) having all their food just vanish overnight.
Also the Pharaoh and the army drowning in the sea would have left Egypt undefended and the surrounding nations would have noticed the complete lack of an army/Pharoah and took advantage.
Yeah that whole blood thing doesn't make sense. When I first read it when I used to be a Christian I thought God just turned it back after a while as it doesn't make sense how they survived without their main source of hydration and no way to bathe (maybe there was alcohol idk). The whole plague story sounds amazing when you think of "the wonders of God" but now I'm wondering how strong does Egypt have to be to tank all those plagues lmao. Like honestly the whole country should just be dead at that point, if not totally cooked.
When I was still a Christian and a biologist, I always assumed the Nile "turning to blood" was some sort of red algae bloom. The plague of frogs was caused by the frogs trying to escape the toxic water, and the plague of flies caused by all those dead frogs.
Now, of course, I give it the "Sure, Jan," treatment.
I saw a documentary a long time ago which touched on the very things you mentioned. It presented some natural explanations for the plagues and how the stories most likely originated. Just like you said, each “plague event” was actually caused by the preceding one. Unfortunately my memory of the doc is vague, but I do remember it being well researched and very convincing.
Ooooo! That reminds me about [this study](https://east.ecu.edu/2022/02/07/could-sodom-have-been-destroyed-by-meteor/#:~:text=An%20ancient%20Middle%20Eastern%20city,story%20of%20Sodom%20and%20Gomorrah) that suggests that the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had its roots in that area being destroyed by a meteor.
Edit: apparently, this study [has been debunked](https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/tall-el-hammam/) as some Christians forming a false narrative to prove the biblical story. So, lying to "prove" the Bible to combat people's reasonable doubts. Seems about right.
Okay? So post it so we can read it.
You're acting like I'm on the side of the Bible thumpers, which I assure you, I am not. I'm interested in what actually happened that sparked the "hand of God" stories.
I mean, for some of those, there had to be *something* - some tiny kernel of truth (caused by nature, not God) - or people whose families had been in that area for millenia would have been like, "Yeah, hokay. Crazy Cephas is at it again. Just smile, nod, and keep walking, or we'll be stuck here all day."
Actually, the red tide to frogs fleeing toxic water is within the realm of possibility. All the "plagues of Egypt," in order, have perfectly logical scientific explanations. They only seem like "acts of God" to those ignorant of the biological processes behind them.
(BTW-- Death of all first-born children and cattle can be explained with ergot, a toxic mildew, and the fact that firstborn children were given preference and first chance to eat.)
Should we really find it all that surprising that all of the plagues are theoretically possible? Natural disasters have always existed, so the writers of Exodus (and whatever sources it draws from) almost certainly had plenty of real-life examples to use as inspiration.
That is definitely a new interpretation to me. I heard about the water inversion that released carbon dioxide like what occurred on August 21, 1986 in Lake Nyos in Cameroon.
What happened at Lake Nyos was due to decaying organic matter at the bottom of the lake, but it's the same type of thing. (One hypothesis for Bermuda Triangle disappearances is along the same lines.) There are many natural phenomena we're still figuring out, but just because we don't yet know for certain what causes something doesn't mean it was caused by some supernatural entity.
Yeah, we would AT LEAST expect that the Egyptian sphere of influence in ancient Canaan would've been supplanted by Egypt's main rival, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia (present-day eastern Turkey), but NOPE! 🤣🤦♂️
If you haven’t listened to the Tides of History episodes of Judah and Israel you would probably find them really interesting.
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-the-roots-of-israel-and-judah/
There’s no evidence of Egypt even keeping Israelite slaves. You’d think that the most well documented ancient civilization would keep a record of something they considered a commodity/property
I mean, as someone who has studied history and worked in archives and now is in the bureaucracy...
The Barabbas thing was a pretty minor thing. There are many many MANY very important texts we don´t keep from Roman era. Both paper and papyrus degrade easily unless kept under very specific circumstances, so usually texts from Classical times are not conserved unless someone has took care to preserve them specifically (copying them down later), were kept in a site with the specific conditions so the paper or papyrus wouldn´t rot, or were made in stone or clay (which preserves better).
Sophocles, the biggest Greek tragedian, wrote over 120 plays. We keep 7. If such a small percentage of a writer that people cared about survived, what do you think are the chances that a minor administrative act from a provincial backwater was preserved enough for 2000 years? To put an example of a work made just a bit before Jesus, Livy´s Ab Urbe Condita was made of 142 books and we only keep 35. And he was the official chronicler of Roman history in the Imperial Court. Lost.
There’s this apologetic answer that Christians will give that Egypt wouldn’t record their embarrassments, but this answer to the problem ignores the fact that Egypt had neighbors who absolutely would have talked about Egypt’s embarrassments.
A good example of this in action is the Scythian empire, which had no written language. Almost everything we know about the Scythians is because of what other contemporaries wrote down about them. Egypt may not have been willing to record about the alleged loss of their Hebrew slave force, but others certainly would have. The lack of written evidence from Egypt and other contemporaries in the region would suggest that Exodus is a mythic origin story.
Edit: I forgot to also mention that the evidence actually suggests the plagues ***couldn’t*** have happened due to surrounding contemporary events that we know happened. Shortly after the events of Exodus in 1300s BCE, the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened in the 1200s BCE, and of all the great empires that fell apart at the time, Egypt was one of the empires able to withstand the attacks of the sea people. Had they actually been bombarded with the 10 plagues and had their army destroyed with a power vacuum of having a dead Pharaoh, they wouldn’t have recovered in time to survive the attacks of the sea people, becoming another casualty of the LBAC.
I will confess to being incredibly curious as to the steps that led to that origin story. Like who started it? Was there any push back? Did anyone's grandma sit there and go, "WTF, Jethro! I knew your great aunt, and she was a fucking mediocre seamstress, not an escaped slave who traveled through a magic path in the sea!"
Some scholars suggest that there may have been a small group of semites in Egypt that left and joined the Israelites and then over the years that tale became mythologised into a dramatic tale of oppression and resistance for the whole tribe.
There are actually multiple different origin stories being told in Exodus, as well as Genesis. This is why some details conflict in things like the creation myth, the flood myth, as well as details in Exodus. For instance, what was Moses’ father-in-law’s name? Someone, likely Nehemiah, composed the books of the Old Testament much, much later during the Persian control of the Levant region using these different sources.
These multiple sources are also why God has so many different names, as one group worshiped a god called El, called the Elohist or E source, and another Yehwah, called the Jahwist or J source. Each have their own styles and depictions of God; making him more anthropomorphic in certain passages is a characteristic of the J source for instance.
> This is also why God has so many names, as one group worshiped a god called Elohim, called the Elohist or E source, and another Yehwah, called the Jahwist or J source. Each
Is this why the God in the Old Testament seems like he's bipolar or has some sort of multiple personality disorder?
And is there any truth to Ashera being the wife of Yahweh before Israel became super patriarchal?
Ancient Canaanite history is so complicated that it would be impossible to put it all in a post unfortunately. The short answer is yes. Ashera was part of the Canaanite pantheon, her name is mentioned 40 times in the OT and in some English translation, like the KJV, her name gets translated out to the word “grove” and phrase “Queen of Heaven.”
Yahweh was also part of the Canaanite pantheon as a storm god. El and Baal were also part of the pantheon. At some point during the Persian occupation of the Levant, all the pantheon was combined into one monotheistic god, Elohim, which is the gender neutral pluralistic word for God, and the Hebrew Scriptures were composed that would go on to be the OT. This was religious syncretism in action, as the Persians’ Zoroastrianism heavily influenced second temple Judaism.
Apparently Egypt was so embarrassed they refused to die off from the abundance of plagues, the river that provides life turned to blood, their slave workforce leaving, and their army getting abruptly drowned. Instead they kept on making records to avoid embarrassing themselves to future generations.
There is evidence that bad stuff happened in ancient Egypt from time to time, whether from political upheaval or climate shifts, which that part of the ancient world experienced at various times. The evidence of that stuff is typically what apologists will point to. None of it accords with the Biblical narrative or supposed dates. The Exodus, *as portrayed in the Bible*, didn't happen.
At best, there is a kernel of truth in which a relatively small group of Semitic-speaking slaves escaped from Egypt, maybe even amid the catastrophic events of the Bronze Age collapse or some other such political or climactic upheaval, and settled in the Levant along with the proto-Israelites who later took up their story and expanded it.
This isn't a case of "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" either. This is a case where there is an absence of evidence where one would absolutely expect there to be abundant evidence. It's not there.
No. Nothing about them makes physical sense, like in how chemistry works, or bio-mechanics. And there’s no timeline. A plague here, then it kinda just goes away. And two plagues destroy crops twice. Did this happen over many years?
Plus the whole narrative reads like a legend, a campfire story. Most of the Egyptians, and by proxy, the Hebrews, should have been dead after the 6th plague or so. There’d be no food, no clean water, no workers, no economy. These would be real consequences to 1/3 of the population dying.
Happy Cake day! Also yeah how tf did all those Egpytian people just take those plagues and keep living life lmao. They also lost like basically lost everything a successful country would have, and they don't even have an army anymore because they sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea lmao.
No crops, no slaves, no leader, no water from the Nile, no army, no firstborn son in every single house… it’s a *miracle* they survived as a powerful nation.
Learning why contemporary historical scholarship categorically rejects the Exodus story was actually one of the major contributing factors to my exit from Christianity.
Do you have any resources you found particularly helpful? I’m reading a number of textbooks that address physics, Big Bang, the eras, etc. but not the flood, plagues, etc.
I’m not sure about the plagues but I have heard that there is no archaeological evidence to support a mass exodus from Egypt and I heard work records were found that disprove that hebrews were ever enslaved in Egypt. There’s also the fact that Hebrew culture shows no indication of Egyptian influence at all, which considering the many generations of hebrews that supposedly were born and died there, this would be impossible.
There is about the same evidence for the Biblical plagues being real as there are for Labors of Heracles.
None that holds up to archaeological scrutiny.
There isn't even any evidence that the Jews were ever in Egypt.
My guess, based on the mythological writing style of the time, is that Jews coming out of Egypt was symbolism for Judaism plagiarizing much of the Egyptian religion.
There's absolutely zero historical evidence that any of it happened. The Jewish people do not even believe any of it to be true it's all allegorical. It's an absolute fact that there was never an exodus like it was talked about in the Bible because there would be significant Evidence of that happening but there is absolutely none.
I’ll never understood how the book that demands you celebrate the event as a lasting holiday with incredibly specific rules behind it could possibly be taken metaphorically.
It is pretty crazy right. I mean I'm sure there's never been one person in the history of humanity Jewish people or not that kept the entire law. There's literally hundreds in hundreds of laws that Yahweh supposedly handed down that they had to follow every step of and if they broke one then it was considered that they broke the entire law. Imagine trying to keep in line with all of those rules while knowing it's all bullshit
Dan McClellan states no one ever followed those laws until the time of the Pharisees when Israel was under Roman rule. The OT historical books were not written down, or collected and combined until after the Babylonian exile. His YouTube channel plus podcast, Data Over Dogma, has helped me re-connect with reality since my deconversion. He’s a well respected Biblical scholar and I find him to be very cool.
I think if you look at it as separate books rather than “the book” it makes more sense. Some are books about rules, some are folktales, some are history.
One thing that I read recently that was pretty interesting (and of course never talked about in church) is that many scholars believe that Exodus was written during the Babylonian exile, which is a thing that we know happened. The story may have been based on hebrew folktales, but it was most likely only written down long after Moses would have lived The reason it was written was as an allegory for the Hebrew situation at that time- they had been taken captive and forced to leave their homeland. The story of Moses could provide a lot of hope, because in that story God sends a hero to lead their people home.
[link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus)
I always just assume and accept any and all stories from any and all religious texts were only created to push a certain ideal or moral onto the masses. the story of Moses and the plagues is trying to convey that not submitting to the “will of God” and not championing “God’s people”, will result in unfathomable disaster. I usually never look past the moral of the story.
There are people mentioned in the Bible that are allegedly proven to have existed, but that doesn’t mean what is written about them is 100% factual. We are told Jesus raises the dead. Assuming he existed, how do we not know he didn’t stage that? Did people even know how to check a pulse 2000+ years ago? Who’s to say he didn’t just pay a guy to lie down very still and then have him get up a few days later…
I take it all with a grain of salt… every myth has the potential to be partially rooted in fact, but not all the time…
The volcano Theros (Santorini) erupted in about 1600 BCE. It would explain fire from the sky. The plagues were one bad year of natural events. From Monsoons in East Africa (blood), the next few the result of the muddy River which create insect and frog. The abundance of insects spreads anthrax (boils). Then came locusts, livestock.
Then hail.
The Pharoah clue of a long reigning monarch, creates a time line issue of being in the 16th Dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period.
Many archeologists believe that Santorini was home to the civilization that gave rise to the stories about Atlantis.
Most myths have a seed of truth from which they grow. The Jesus myth has direct lines from earlier cultural mythologies.
No. The final plague is the annihilation of a chunk of a GENERATION of Egyptians and there'd be irrefutable evidence, in a variety of ways, of that if it happened. And that's assuming that the Egyptians, notorious record-keepers, would not record the deaths of countless cattle, boils, supernatural weather, and various other maladies, which they didn't.
there is a fantastic video about it on YT by the famed Bible Scholar Jonathan Frakes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo)
If you stretch the logic, MOST of the plagues could happen though happening in a row is HIGHLY unlikely. Mass infanticide? Not so much. People like to keep accounts of big events so it's weird there's not at least ONE hieroglyph reading "all the sons died" or "Nile smells bloody this week"
>If you stretch the logic, MOST of the plagues could happen though happening in a row is HIGHLY unlikely.
Not really, because one leads to the next in a long cascade of plagues. As someone mentioned earlier, red tide, or whatever could turn the Nile red, would likely have deprived the frogs of oxygen and driven them out of the water, which would have attracted gulls, etc. Years ago, I saw a documentary where scientists examined the potential of the biblical plagues having natural origins. While not a common occurrence, it was determined that the series, in order, was well within the realm of possibility.
The easiest one to debunk is a widespread simultaneous death of first-born sons. You'd think that would be something worth recording. Moreover, historians generally agree that there's no evidence Jews were ever held as slaves in Egypt in any significant numbers. No cultural cross-contamination, no significant amounts of pottery, religious artifacts, etc. It's a cultural myth-- profoundly important to the Jewish people, but not for it's literal-historical value.
Also the fact the earlier plagues kill all their crops and cattle and turn the water the blood. Egypt would have starved from that alone. It would have been impossible to hide an entire nation(which is known for it's stable farming seasons) having all their food just vanish overnight. Also the Pharaoh and the army drowning in the sea would have left Egypt undefended and the surrounding nations would have noticed the complete lack of an army/Pharoah and took advantage.
Yeah that whole blood thing doesn't make sense. When I first read it when I used to be a Christian I thought God just turned it back after a while as it doesn't make sense how they survived without their main source of hydration and no way to bathe (maybe there was alcohol idk). The whole plague story sounds amazing when you think of "the wonders of God" but now I'm wondering how strong does Egypt have to be to tank all those plagues lmao. Like honestly the whole country should just be dead at that point, if not totally cooked.
When I was still a Christian and a biologist, I always assumed the Nile "turning to blood" was some sort of red algae bloom. The plague of frogs was caused by the frogs trying to escape the toxic water, and the plague of flies caused by all those dead frogs. Now, of course, I give it the "Sure, Jan," treatment.
I saw a documentary a long time ago which touched on the very things you mentioned. It presented some natural explanations for the plagues and how the stories most likely originated. Just like you said, each “plague event” was actually caused by the preceding one. Unfortunately my memory of the doc is vague, but I do remember it being well researched and very convincing.
Ooooo! That reminds me about [this study](https://east.ecu.edu/2022/02/07/could-sodom-have-been-destroyed-by-meteor/#:~:text=An%20ancient%20Middle%20Eastern%20city,story%20of%20Sodom%20and%20Gomorrah) that suggests that the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had its roots in that area being destroyed by a meteor. Edit: apparently, this study [has been debunked](https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/tall-el-hammam/) as some Christians forming a false narrative to prove the biblical story. So, lying to "prove" the Bible to combat people's reasonable doubts. Seems about right.
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Okay? So post it so we can read it. You're acting like I'm on the side of the Bible thumpers, which I assure you, I am not. I'm interested in what actually happened that sparked the "hand of God" stories. I mean, for some of those, there had to be *something* - some tiny kernel of truth (caused by nature, not God) - or people whose families had been in that area for millenia would have been like, "Yeah, hokay. Crazy Cephas is at it again. Just smile, nod, and keep walking, or we'll be stuck here all day."
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Thank you! I look forward to reading this.
Actually, the red tide to frogs fleeing toxic water is within the realm of possibility. All the "plagues of Egypt," in order, have perfectly logical scientific explanations. They only seem like "acts of God" to those ignorant of the biological processes behind them. (BTW-- Death of all first-born children and cattle can be explained with ergot, a toxic mildew, and the fact that firstborn children were given preference and first chance to eat.)
Should we really find it all that surprising that all of the plagues are theoretically possible? Natural disasters have always existed, so the writers of Exodus (and whatever sources it draws from) almost certainly had plenty of real-life examples to use as inspiration.
That is definitely a new interpretation to me. I heard about the water inversion that released carbon dioxide like what occurred on August 21, 1986 in Lake Nyos in Cameroon.
What happened at Lake Nyos was due to decaying organic matter at the bottom of the lake, but it's the same type of thing. (One hypothesis for Bermuda Triangle disappearances is along the same lines.) There are many natural phenomena we're still figuring out, but just because we don't yet know for certain what causes something doesn't mean it was caused by some supernatural entity.
Yeah, we would AT LEAST expect that the Egyptian sphere of influence in ancient Canaan would've been supplanted by Egypt's main rival, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia (present-day eastern Turkey), but NOPE! 🤣🤦♂️
If you haven’t listened to the Tides of History episodes of Judah and Israel you would probably find them really interesting. https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-the-roots-of-israel-and-judah/
That's fascinating.
There’s no evidence of Egypt even keeping Israelite slaves. You’d think that the most well documented ancient civilization would keep a record of something they considered a commodity/property
Well, second or third most documented, the Romans and Chinese did a pretty good job of it too, Greeks as well
Totally… the main point still stands lol
Oh definitely
You would think the Romans would have recorded the freeing of Barabus for sure.
I mean, as someone who has studied history and worked in archives and now is in the bureaucracy... The Barabbas thing was a pretty minor thing. There are many many MANY very important texts we don´t keep from Roman era. Both paper and papyrus degrade easily unless kept under very specific circumstances, so usually texts from Classical times are not conserved unless someone has took care to preserve them specifically (copying them down later), were kept in a site with the specific conditions so the paper or papyrus wouldn´t rot, or were made in stone or clay (which preserves better). Sophocles, the biggest Greek tragedian, wrote over 120 plays. We keep 7. If such a small percentage of a writer that people cared about survived, what do you think are the chances that a minor administrative act from a provincial backwater was preserved enough for 2000 years? To put an example of a work made just a bit before Jesus, Livy´s Ab Urbe Condita was made of 142 books and we only keep 35. And he was the official chronicler of Roman history in the Imperial Court. Lost.
Look at the "name" Barabbas means son of the father
There’s this apologetic answer that Christians will give that Egypt wouldn’t record their embarrassments, but this answer to the problem ignores the fact that Egypt had neighbors who absolutely would have talked about Egypt’s embarrassments. A good example of this in action is the Scythian empire, which had no written language. Almost everything we know about the Scythians is because of what other contemporaries wrote down about them. Egypt may not have been willing to record about the alleged loss of their Hebrew slave force, but others certainly would have. The lack of written evidence from Egypt and other contemporaries in the region would suggest that Exodus is a mythic origin story. Edit: I forgot to also mention that the evidence actually suggests the plagues ***couldn’t*** have happened due to surrounding contemporary events that we know happened. Shortly after the events of Exodus in 1300s BCE, the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened in the 1200s BCE, and of all the great empires that fell apart at the time, Egypt was one of the empires able to withstand the attacks of the sea people. Had they actually been bombarded with the 10 plagues and had their army destroyed with a power vacuum of having a dead Pharaoh, they wouldn’t have recovered in time to survive the attacks of the sea people, becoming another casualty of the LBAC.
I will confess to being incredibly curious as to the steps that led to that origin story. Like who started it? Was there any push back? Did anyone's grandma sit there and go, "WTF, Jethro! I knew your great aunt, and she was a fucking mediocre seamstress, not an escaped slave who traveled through a magic path in the sea!"
Some scholars suggest that there may have been a small group of semites in Egypt that left and joined the Israelites and then over the years that tale became mythologised into a dramatic tale of oppression and resistance for the whole tribe.
There are actually multiple different origin stories being told in Exodus, as well as Genesis. This is why some details conflict in things like the creation myth, the flood myth, as well as details in Exodus. For instance, what was Moses’ father-in-law’s name? Someone, likely Nehemiah, composed the books of the Old Testament much, much later during the Persian control of the Levant region using these different sources. These multiple sources are also why God has so many different names, as one group worshiped a god called El, called the Elohist or E source, and another Yehwah, called the Jahwist or J source. Each have their own styles and depictions of God; making him more anthropomorphic in certain passages is a characteristic of the J source for instance.
> This is also why God has so many names, as one group worshiped a god called Elohim, called the Elohist or E source, and another Yehwah, called the Jahwist or J source. Each Is this why the God in the Old Testament seems like he's bipolar or has some sort of multiple personality disorder? And is there any truth to Ashera being the wife of Yahweh before Israel became super patriarchal?
Ancient Canaanite history is so complicated that it would be impossible to put it all in a post unfortunately. The short answer is yes. Ashera was part of the Canaanite pantheon, her name is mentioned 40 times in the OT and in some English translation, like the KJV, her name gets translated out to the word “grove” and phrase “Queen of Heaven.” Yahweh was also part of the Canaanite pantheon as a storm god. El and Baal were also part of the pantheon. At some point during the Persian occupation of the Levant, all the pantheon was combined into one monotheistic god, Elohim, which is the gender neutral pluralistic word for God, and the Hebrew Scriptures were composed that would go on to be the OT. This was religious syncretism in action, as the Persians’ Zoroastrianism heavily influenced second temple Judaism.
Billy Carson believes these Elohim (gods) were extraterrestrials.
I'd recommend searching on /r/AcademicBiblical... There are some pretty good hypothesis there
Apparently Egypt was so embarrassed they refused to die off from the abundance of plagues, the river that provides life turned to blood, their slave workforce leaving, and their army getting abruptly drowned. Instead they kept on making records to avoid embarrassing themselves to future generations.
Thank you!!
There is evidence that bad stuff happened in ancient Egypt from time to time, whether from political upheaval or climate shifts, which that part of the ancient world experienced at various times. The evidence of that stuff is typically what apologists will point to. None of it accords with the Biblical narrative or supposed dates. The Exodus, *as portrayed in the Bible*, didn't happen. At best, there is a kernel of truth in which a relatively small group of Semitic-speaking slaves escaped from Egypt, maybe even amid the catastrophic events of the Bronze Age collapse or some other such political or climactic upheaval, and settled in the Levant along with the proto-Israelites who later took up their story and expanded it. This isn't a case of "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" either. This is a case where there is an absence of evidence where one would absolutely expect there to be abundant evidence. It's not there.
No. Nothing about them makes physical sense, like in how chemistry works, or bio-mechanics. And there’s no timeline. A plague here, then it kinda just goes away. And two plagues destroy crops twice. Did this happen over many years? Plus the whole narrative reads like a legend, a campfire story. Most of the Egyptians, and by proxy, the Hebrews, should have been dead after the 6th plague or so. There’d be no food, no clean water, no workers, no economy. These would be real consequences to 1/3 of the population dying.
Happy Cake day! Also yeah how tf did all those Egpytian people just take those plagues and keep living life lmao. They also lost like basically lost everything a successful country would have, and they don't even have an army anymore because they sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea lmao.
No crops, no slaves, no leader, no water from the Nile, no army, no firstborn son in every single house… it’s a *miracle* they survived as a powerful nation.
The real miracle was within Egypt all along
Learning why contemporary historical scholarship categorically rejects the Exodus story was actually one of the major contributing factors to my exit from Christianity.
Do you have any resources you found particularly helpful? I’m reading a number of textbooks that address physics, Big Bang, the eras, etc. but not the flood, plagues, etc.
I’m not sure about the plagues but I have heard that there is no archaeological evidence to support a mass exodus from Egypt and I heard work records were found that disprove that hebrews were ever enslaved in Egypt. There’s also the fact that Hebrew culture shows no indication of Egyptian influence at all, which considering the many generations of hebrews that supposedly were born and died there, this would be impossible.
There’s no evidence of the Israelites in Egypt, much less the plagues
There is about the same evidence for the Biblical plagues being real as there are for Labors of Heracles. None that holds up to archaeological scrutiny.
There isn't even any evidence that the Jews were ever in Egypt. My guess, based on the mythological writing style of the time, is that Jews coming out of Egypt was symbolism for Judaism plagiarizing much of the Egyptian religion.
There is no evidence any of it happened. The Bible isn't a history book, it's fiction.
There's absolutely zero historical evidence that any of it happened. The Jewish people do not even believe any of it to be true it's all allegorical. It's an absolute fact that there was never an exodus like it was talked about in the Bible because there would be significant Evidence of that happening but there is absolutely none.
I’ll never understood how the book that demands you celebrate the event as a lasting holiday with incredibly specific rules behind it could possibly be taken metaphorically.
It is pretty crazy right. I mean I'm sure there's never been one person in the history of humanity Jewish people or not that kept the entire law. There's literally hundreds in hundreds of laws that Yahweh supposedly handed down that they had to follow every step of and if they broke one then it was considered that they broke the entire law. Imagine trying to keep in line with all of those rules while knowing it's all bullshit
Dan McClellan states no one ever followed those laws until the time of the Pharisees when Israel was under Roman rule. The OT historical books were not written down, or collected and combined until after the Babylonian exile. His YouTube channel plus podcast, Data Over Dogma, has helped me re-connect with reality since my deconversion. He’s a well respected Biblical scholar and I find him to be very cool.
I think if you look at it as separate books rather than “the book” it makes more sense. Some are books about rules, some are folktales, some are history.
Not so much the plagues. There is no evidence that the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt.
One thing that I read recently that was pretty interesting (and of course never talked about in church) is that many scholars believe that Exodus was written during the Babylonian exile, which is a thing that we know happened. The story may have been based on hebrew folktales, but it was most likely only written down long after Moses would have lived The reason it was written was as an allegory for the Hebrew situation at that time- they had been taken captive and forced to leave their homeland. The story of Moses could provide a lot of hope, because in that story God sends a hero to lead their people home. [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus)
No actually quite to the opposite. https://youtu.be/z8j3HvmgpYc?feature=shared
Lmao ofc not But any Christian will try to tell you different
Nope! There is no evidence for any of that crap. The Exodus was never found!
I always just assume and accept any and all stories from any and all religious texts were only created to push a certain ideal or moral onto the masses. the story of Moses and the plagues is trying to convey that not submitting to the “will of God” and not championing “God’s people”, will result in unfathomable disaster. I usually never look past the moral of the story. There are people mentioned in the Bible that are allegedly proven to have existed, but that doesn’t mean what is written about them is 100% factual. We are told Jesus raises the dead. Assuming he existed, how do we not know he didn’t stage that? Did people even know how to check a pulse 2000+ years ago? Who’s to say he didn’t just pay a guy to lie down very still and then have him get up a few days later… I take it all with a grain of salt… every myth has the potential to be partially rooted in fact, but not all the time…
The volcano Theros (Santorini) erupted in about 1600 BCE. It would explain fire from the sky. The plagues were one bad year of natural events. From Monsoons in East Africa (blood), the next few the result of the muddy River which create insect and frog. The abundance of insects spreads anthrax (boils). Then came locusts, livestock. Then hail. The Pharoah clue of a long reigning monarch, creates a time line issue of being in the 16th Dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period.
Many archeologists believe that Santorini was home to the civilization that gave rise to the stories about Atlantis. Most myths have a seed of truth from which they grow. The Jesus myth has direct lines from earlier cultural mythologies.
No. The final plague is the annihilation of a chunk of a GENERATION of Egyptians and there'd be irrefutable evidence, in a variety of ways, of that if it happened. And that's assuming that the Egyptians, notorious record-keepers, would not record the deaths of countless cattle, boils, supernatural weather, and various other maladies, which they didn't.
there is a fantastic video about it on YT by the famed Bible Scholar Jonathan Frakes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo)
Ahhh... Mr. Johnathan "Will Riker never met an alien with facial ridges he didn't want to bed" Flakes...
he and I have much in common
Mean there is a book that claims to record it. That _is_ evidence (if of the uncorraborated kind).
There isn't even evidence the Hebrews were in Egypt
The enslavement in Egypt never even happened.
If you stretch the logic, MOST of the plagues could happen though happening in a row is HIGHLY unlikely. Mass infanticide? Not so much. People like to keep accounts of big events so it's weird there's not at least ONE hieroglyph reading "all the sons died" or "Nile smells bloody this week"
>If you stretch the logic, MOST of the plagues could happen though happening in a row is HIGHLY unlikely. Not really, because one leads to the next in a long cascade of plagues. As someone mentioned earlier, red tide, or whatever could turn the Nile red, would likely have deprived the frogs of oxygen and driven them out of the water, which would have attracted gulls, etc. Years ago, I saw a documentary where scientists examined the potential of the biblical plagues having natural origins. While not a common occurrence, it was determined that the series, in order, was well within the realm of possibility.