Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?

Conversation
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@OneGod @John_Harshman

@John_Harshman I never used a ChatGPT before. Maybe it’ll help me or will it not. As I understand about Moses leaving Indus Valley.

  • It appears that chatGPT seems confused with my asking about the word comprehension

  • I promise if I ever use chatGPT that I’ll explain like you did this is what chatGPT wrote.

  • Here it seems your chat GPT john was confused about comprehension, how come?

  • Example today there’s people who comprehend Abraham and even teaches about Abraham

  • How did they comprehend?

  • This makes sense to me the word comprehend, how come GPTchat was confused, as you shown @John_Harshman what GPTchat said, was confused about the word comprehend

  • So I was asking about Moses and Moses comprehension and due to Moses left Indus Valley and travel to Yisrael yes there’s a Y - there I wrote Indus Valley what would GPTchat say about Indus valley, I never used GPTchat so I don’t know.

  • I learn that too., Yisrael it’s Yisrael not Israel, what does Israel even mean, actually it was Canaan, then Yisrael

  • so moses comprehension of abraham and people now comprehension of abraham has it changed or same

oh @Tim you asked, about yadav and yadavas is it same word, I learn in an email as I asked, yes same word, I learn the letter A can be at the end or taken off and it’s the same word

  • This is what I learn in an email

  • my response in an email as I was asking same question as @Tim as I was seeking about this.

this response: yes all of me wrote this.

Wow, now I understand why “Rama Ram” and “Yadava Yadav” are the same word. It’s because the letter “a” can be at the end of the word or not, and both are the same word. Thank you for explaining. Yes, I can see why knowing Hindi is so important, so I understand. You wrote, “The Hindi word ending with the sound a is translated both ways, for example, ram and rama.”

this is in the email where I learn about the letter A

The hindi ending with the sound a is translated both ways, for example, ram and rama.

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Please get real. The opposite is apparent.

What motivates all this nonsense? Do you even care about history, archaeology, or haplogroups, or is all this to somehow have Krishna somehow be extended to include the wellspring of Judaeo-Christian-Muslim religions or some such fancy?

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I think your limited fluency in English is not adequate to this discussion. And I believe the rest of us don’t understand you any more than ChatGPT did.

I don’t believe a paper was attached.

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No I did not.

The issue was whether they are the same population – NOT whether they were given the same (or very similar) name.

History is rife with unrelated populations being given the same name, e.g.:

  • both Native Americans and natives of India have been called “Indians”

  • the original “Prussians” of the Baltic coast in pre-Christian times and the “Prussians” of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire.

What you need to do is demonstrate that the modern Yadavs (a label that only goes back a couple of centuries) is the same population as the Yadavas of ancient legend.

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[My emphasis]

I will note that you said “is widespread in India” NOT “was in India” – the paper is about modern populations not ancient – and my question is about ancient populations.

[Addendum: on closer examination, that paper does not even cover the Indus Valley, which is in modern-day Pakistan, and the paper only covers states within modern-day India – making it even more irrelevant!]

Given that populations move, and genes spread, over the millennia, it is the genetic makeup of the ancient Indus that matters, not modern India.

As we have no evidence that R-M124 is basal in the ancient Israelite population, and a whole heap of evidence (which you have failed to address) that it isn’t, R-M124 would appear to be completely irrelevant!

As I said before:

[Addendum:

But I have in fact found an answer to your irrelevant question:

The question remains of how distinctive is the history of L1 relative to some or all of R1a1 and R2 representatives. This uncertainty neutralizes previous conclusions that the intrusion of HGs R1a1 and R2 from the northwest in Dravidian-speaking southern tribes is attributable to a single recent event. Rather, these HGs contain considerable demographic complexity, as implied by their high haplotype diversity. Specifically, they could have actually arrived in southern India from a southwestern Asian source region multiple times, with some episodes considerably earlier than others. [1]

So it seems that R-M124 came to India from southwest Asia.]

Easy:

The Kassites and the Phoenicians met the Late Harappans in Bahrain.

There’s an explanation in that very paper.

Though I’m not sure that this is even relevant, given that the evidence seems to be that the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet derives from the Phoenician alphabet which in turn derives from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, which are all native to the area.

But I would note that writing systems are far more portable than language. We speak a Germanic language, yet use Romano-Greek script and Arabic-derived numerals. A number of countries have changed writing system even in the last century.

This quibble still does not address my original point:

Please explain why you have not addressed my explanation WHY “Indus is completely awful!”

Given that the oldest *proto-*Hebrew writings date back only to the 11th-10th Centuries BCE, this is a ludicrously silly request. The Bible itself isn’t that old.

Because “Mizraim” is a Hebrew word, not an Egyptian word!

Please reread this:

  1. Please demonstrate how what word Arabic used for Egypt “< 1300 BCE” is relevant.

  2. I rather doubt we have any surviving Arabic writings this old.

Hell no!

  1. Your claim was “No character parallel to Moses in Egyptian literature” NOT “No character parallel to Moses in Egyptian literature before 1500 BCE” – you are attempting to move the goalposts here.

  2. There is no evidence that Moses himself existed in Hebrew literature that far back.

So this issue, as with nearly every other issue you have raised, is utterly irrelevant!

I’ll do so after you explain all the parallels between all the gods and heroes in all the world’s myths and legends. :smiley:

Trying to cherry-pick a single set of parallels out of that vast number, and declaring that only they are meaningful and worthy of explanation is a a fallacious Special Pleading.

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Did The Yadavas Have A Conflict Over Straw In The Indus Valley?

Krishna abandoned Dwarka after ill-omens appeared there; and led the Yadavas to Prabhasa. Here the Yadavas indulged in a quarrel and killed each other. Arjuna came to know of this soon and came to Dwarka. At this time Vasudeva told Arjuna…. “Your friend [Krishna] spoke to me as follows after sons, grandsons, brothers and friends were killed by each other: ‘I will live… in some pure place and following the rules will wait for my end.’ Krishna has left towards an unknown direction after leaving me with the children” (Mahabharata , Mausala Parva 6:17, 24-25.). This “unknown direction” could be that of Yisrael. We make this suggestion because the Bible says that Moses led the Yahudis from Mistrayim to Yisrael during the Exodus. This narrative could be recorded in the Hindu texts in Krishna going away in an unknown direction.

Moses lived in Egypt?

The Biblical scholars, however, believe that Mistrayim was located in Egypt and Moses led the Exodus from there. The Hebrews wanted to go to the desert for 3 days to worship the Lord. The King refused to let them go. Instead he increased their work load. He told his supervisors: “You must no longer give straw to the people for making bricks as before. Let them go and collect straw for themselves. But you must require of them the same quota of bricks that they were making before” (Bible, Exodus 5). This conflict led to the Exodus. It is clear from this that straw was an important ingredient of making the bricks at Mitsrayim. We can use this information to ascertain whether Mitsrayim was located in Egypt or the Indus Valley.

Stone and mud brick construction in Egypt:

The main construction material used in ancient Egypt was stone. Picture of a stone block used in the construction of a pyramid. Indeed, mud bricks were used to construct the living quarters. Even here, the amount of straw used in making of the mud bricks was very small: The Biblical Archaeology Society Staff says that only half pound of straw is added to one cubic foot mud to make mud bricks. This works out to be merely 0.6 per cent straw by weight in making mud bricks.

Baked bricks in the Indus Valley:

In comparison, baked bricks were the main construction material in the Indus Valley. The important buildings such as citadel where the elite lived was made with baked bricks. The excavations at Chanhu Daro are shown at Picture 4. One can see profuse use of baked bricks. A brick kiln owner in Rajasthan said that straw used as fuel for baking constitutes of about 50 percent of the cost of production.

The Biblical story matches more with the Indus Valley than with Egypt because of two reasons. One, the construction material for the important buildings in the Indus Valley was baked bricks while it was stone in Egypt. Two, because large quantity of straw is required to make baked bricks. Thus, the conflict over the collection of straw is more plausible if it took place in the Indus Valley.

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Bingo.

From the referenced site commonprophet.com

The Abrahamic and Hindu Religions have common
heritage in the Indus Valley. Adam, Noah, Abraham
and Moses lived here and Moses led the Exodus from
the Indus Valley to Yisrael. The Hindus know these same
persons by the names of Swayambhu Manu, Indra,
Vaivaswat Manu, Rama and Krishna.

Maybe all the references to Krishna are redacted. That is how @OneGod dismisses the association of Pharaoh with Egypt throughout the Old Testament.

Charlton Heston has as much credible claim to being Moses as Krishna.

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Given that we have no evidence that the ancient Yadavas even existed outside legend, do we really care?

[Addendum:

I will note that none of this even establishes that any of this occurred in the Indus valley, even in legend. Both Dwarka and Prabhasa are in Saurashtra in Gujarat, whereas the Indus valley is in Sindh.]

Balderdash.

  1. Biblical scholars do not “believe that Mistrayim was located in Egypt”, they know that “Mizraim” is the Hebrew word for Egypt.

  2. They do not “believe that … Moses led the Exodus from there” – the scholarly consensus is that the Exodus is ahistorical – i.e. it did not happen.

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Here are some other perspectives on the Indus Valley in this forum.

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@riversea:

You must remember that Alice Linsley was writing from the viewpoint of Theological Anthropology, which Wikipedia describes under the label of Christian anthropology, a sub-field of Theology, not of the social science of Anthropology. Under that viewpoint, yes, the “Table of Nations” is a real thing, they did all really speak the same language before Babel, Noah and Nimrod were real people, etc, etc.

However, within that viewpoint, the Bible really did mean “Egypt”, “Pharaoh”, the “Sinai”, the “Nile”, etc when it wrote, in Hebrew, “Mizraim”, etc.

Of course if you venture beyond this viewpoint, things may look very different, as @John_Harshman said:

Looking outside this viewpoint, we find opinions that the Harappans spoke Dravidian, a non-Afro-Asiatic, and in fact non-Indo-European, language unrelated to Hebrew and other Semitic languages.

You also find that you have to find non-Biblical evidence to support Bibilical claims about the existence of volcanoes, orders-about-straw-in-bricks, etc, etc in the Exodus narrative – because stepping outside this viewpoint puts all purely-Biblical claims into question.

So neither accepting the Theological Anthropology viewpoint, nor rejecting it, helps the Israelites-from-Indus argument. To support that argument you need to pick and choose claims from within that viewpoint and from rejecting that viewpoint – which leaves you with a Special Pleading fallacy – as your claims are neither fully consistent with accepting that viewpoint nor with rejecting it.

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That opinion is based on very thin speculation. In reality we have no real idea what language is represented in Harappan cylinder seals (which is where most of the signs come from). Some Dravidian language is a reasonable guess, but that’s all it is.

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Yes, but is there any significant evidence-based, as opposed to Bible-based, opinion that they spoke a language “in the Afro-Asiatic group”, as Alice Linsley suggested?

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I don’t recall Alice Linsley ever saying anything I found credible.

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  • So Alice describes Africa, while Bharat describes the Indus Valley, where the Hebrews left. Am I understanding correctly, @OneGod What differentiates Alice’s thinking from Bharat’s?

  • About languages: Bharat told me about Pieo and how languages spread. German spread westward, while Sanskrit spread eastward. However, who wrote the Pentateuch while languages were evolving?

bharatwrote
bharatwrote1800×1200 443 KB

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Davidian isn’t Afroasiatic. Please consult an actual reference on language families.

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  • I found Charlton Heston movie clip on YouTube, and how did they change a sceptre into a serpent? Have you ever turned a sceptre into a serpent before? I never have.

  • CLIP DESCRIPTION: Moses (Charlton Heston) goes to the court of the Pharaoh (Yul Brynner) demanding he let his people go. Moses turns his sceptre into a serpent, which swallows the serpents of the Pharaoh.

To see it clearly one has to watch it on youtube.
after you click on video I think on the lower right click on youtube and then you’ll see it clearly

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I found out pretty quickly that those ideas (which I was just summarizing for a new participant) are idiosyncratic.

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@swamidass Can you direct me to this summary you’ve written? I appreciate this.

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