Were the Biblical Patriarchs Real Historical Figures or Myths?

@jongarvey

Your analysis is the very approach that has been consistently applied for more than 100 years… to keep the timeline of the Bible “intact and sacrosanct”, and unavoidably from whatever historical material that relates to an actual Exodus.

Exodus 13:17 says “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt:” < !!! this would be around 1200 BCE to 1130 BCE.

But don’t worry, Jon, it is not my intention to try to introduce the Harris text into the models Joshua is working on. But the Harris text just reinforces in my mind why I can only be a Unitarian Universalist in this world of ours:

  1. If the Bible is portraying a Hyksos expulsion, or some event in the Amarna period, as Exodus, then its historicity is out of whack.

  2. If the Bible is portraying an Exodus event at c. 1250 BCE, that’s still too early. Why? Because the Exodus cannot avoid the Phillistine highway if the Philistines are not yet installed in the Levant yet! But even if I accepted your 1250 BCE timeline, I think you will find it compresses the O.T. narrative to a painful degree:

40 years at Kadesh Barnea

1250 BCE - 40 yrs = 1210 BCE

Just 10 years later, c. 1200 BCE, we read about these events:
"On the right hand side of the Pylon is the “Great Inscription on the Second Pylon”, which includes the following text: The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from
Hatti,
Qode, [< aka Kode, aka Kizzuwadna]
Carchemish,
Arzawa and
Alashiya on, [< island of Cyprus, aka Alasiya, aka Elishah (Ezekiel 27:7)]
being cut off [ie. destroyed] at one time.
A camp was set up in Amurru. [< the pro-Hittite region around Kadesh.]
They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being.
[^The Sea People paused north of the Egyptian frontier to remove any threat from
the rear.]

They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: “Our plans will succeed!”
[65: Translation by John A. Wilson in Pritchard, J.B. (ed.) Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edition, Princeton 1969., p.262. Also found in Breasted, 1906, volume 4, p.37, §64.]

In reliefs on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III, whatever year that might be, there is a climactic battle, perhaps just as crucial as the one at Marathon some 8 centuries later!
[7: Silberman, Neil A. (1998), Seymour Gitin, Amichai Mazar, and Ephraim Stern, eds., “The Sea Peoples, the Victorians, and Us”, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Essays in Honor of Trude Dothan, Israel Exploration Society, (pp. 268–275); p. 269.]


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This battle is almost always confused with the final battle at the Egyptian delta! The historic battle, known as the “Battle of Djahy” [also spelled Zahi], was fought in the future territory of Lebanon!

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As Ramesses III notes in an inscription from his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu: “I equipped my frontier in Zahi (Djahy) prepared before them.”[3: Extracts from Medinet Habu inscription, trans. James H. Breasted 1906, iv.§§ 65-66.] Let’s estimate this time to be around 1178 BCE (according to a couple of different sources.

This is followed up by the Sea People fleet attacking the Delta region, presumably in the same year (1178 BCE).

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Conclusion?: I’m not so sure I have any dramatic conclusion, other than this: If the Sea People had marched a significant land force (with family wagons) from Ugarit to northern Lebanon, and then engaged in a tremendous conflict against Egypt somewhere to the East of Tyre or Sidon … around 1078 BCE … what part of the O.T. would have been around that time?

Numbers?
Joshua? < Mentions Philistines - Lots!
Judges? < Estimated to cover 100 to 125 years?
Samuel? < Mentions Philistines too.

Just something to consider… the timeline below:

I know this will get a lot of pushback from some, and this has a lot less research involved than the other posts, but…

It seems to me that Genesis 1-11 has a “conversant” quality to it, whereby although it is distinctly and beautifully Israelite in its theology, the stories bear too much in common with other myths of the time for me to think they are about concretely historical individuals.

The rest of Genesis seems much more specific to Israelite origins. I don’t think everything described in the following chapters literally “happened,” but neither do I think Abraham is a made-up figure. Certainly the text itself has SOME bearing on historicity. It IS some evidence, and denying that seems silly to me. The joseph story is interesting because some of its details are confirmed as accurate but the overall plot bears similarities with other stories of its time.

I’m sure there was SOME type of exodus from Egypt. Certainly what we now have is a theological INTERPRETETION of its significance and not a wholly accurate (and never intended to be) description of what took place. I like the idea I’ve seen from some scholars of multiple exoduses from Egypt being combined into one grand narrative. Moses is an Egyptian name, so I see no reason to doubt his existence. Moreover, some of the experiences described in Exodus are so strange (“I am” for instance) that they don’t seem like they could be wholly made-up stories.

I see no problem with seeing the books of Job, Daniel, Jonah and Esther as mostly fictional/quasi historical fictional stories, though I’m sure Daniel and Jonah were real people as well.

I feel like John Goldingay, Christopher M. Hays, Tremper Longman, and perhaps Lawrence Boadt are good people to turn to on these issues.

As good as J.J. Collins is as a scholar, he offers NO faith perspective at all and seems to get very excited at the thought of rehabilitating Albert Schweitzer’s failed apocalyptic prophet Jesus. Haha

@deuteroKJ,
@AllenWitmerMiller, especially @AllenWitmerMiller, I feel we agree on quite a bit regarding HBC. Thoughts?

@Patrick,

I think you discount the text itself as evidence too much. Why does the biblical text, from a secular historical perspective, have NO value? Certainly, it has SOME. I think you paint with too broad a brush.

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I would say that the OT has some value - mostly on what not to do. The ethics, morals, and values for a modern secular, evidenced based society can use the Old Testament stories to realize how far humanity has come by throwing away old tyrant Gods, and unjust laws created to appease those Gods while humanity learned to more cooperative, tolerant, and just ways.

Are you referring to the ethics of Jesus? :wink:

You should read David Bentley Hart’s “Atheist Delusions.” He dispells a lot of the myths that the values that you love could exist apart from Christianity. The first abolitionist was the fifth century bishop Gregory of Nyssa after all, and he grounded his theory of rights exclusively in Christianity.

Also, the notion of progress is meaningless unless you presuppose an objective good we are progressing towards. That means either platonism or theism, or a combination thereof.

My first thought is that DeuteroKJ is much more qualified to address your questions. And some others on this forum are probably more qualified as well, especially in OT topics. (My focus was largely New Testament, although I have a very strong interest in Genesis because of my extensive engagement with origins issues over the years.)

That said, Mark, I have an appointment in a few minutes but didn’t want to forget to reply to your post. So this will be a quick summary for now:

Yes, whatever one’s positions on the literary genre of these Genesis pericopes, comparisons with the contemporary stories from the surrounding cultures simply can’t be ignored. They matter.

Yes. And the entire book of Genesis must always (obviously) be regarded as the introduction to the Torah, the five books (the Pentateuch), and always regardsed as the early history of how Israel came to be YHWH’s covenant nation. And as John Sailhamer emphasized, even Genesis 1 and 2 is about the ERETZ, the land, long before it became the land of Abraham’s descendants and the Promised Land following the exodus from Egypt.

Our cultural predispositions naturally encourage us to assume that a text must be historical, chronological, and “literal” to have value. Yet that is a modern and western bias, one not necessarily shared by the original audience, the Semitic culture for which these texts were intended. Indeed, this is an incendiary concept for so many of my evangelical friends but it is hard to ignore. Even comparisons of the English language versus the Hebrew language remind us that chronology matters much more to us than to them. (e.g., The Hebrew language of the Old Testament differs in so many ways, such as Hebrew verbs having no tense inflections.)

Where do we draw the line between the historical aspects and the truth-telling literary genre which is not obsessed with objective historical details? That’s a huge topic I will not even attempt to dissect in a brief post. Suffice it to say, many react in total fear at anything but a total “literalism” in our interpretations—largely because the false dichotomies and the Logical Fallacy of the Slippery Slope has tightened its death grip on so many of my evangelical brethren. (Ken Ham et al constantly warn that if one questions whether Methuselah lived 969 years or whether the Noahic Flood was global, “then why can’t the resurrection of Jesus Christ be merely a parable?” I would ask Ham if my insistence that Jesus was not a literal “door” negates Jesus’ claim of being the way to salvation.)

I should add that the enormous numbers in the Hebrew text which quantify the Exodus—much like many other numbers in the Tanakh—have textual issues. Many evangelicals fear that giving any ground on the accuracy of numbers in the Bible would be a fatal blow to the modern day notions of inerrancy. Yet if they would only carefully read their own doctrinal statements of faith, they would notice that that strict inerrancy applies only to the original autographs, none of which exist. So doesn’t that allow that imperfect humans may indeed have introduced small scribal errors into the recording of those numbers? Accordingly, if the Exodus led by Moses involved far fewer people than most evangelicals assume, isn’t it possible that archaeological evidence would be much less likely to be found? (Meanwhile, I’m not smugly and casually dismissing any discussion of other, much deeper questioning of the book of Exodus, but this seems to be a good place to start. I’m not afraid to engage the hard questions. Why should any Christ-follower be afraid of asking hard questions? Isn’t our faith stronger than that?)

That brings to mind two of my biggest beefs with the amateurish complaints against the Bible constantly promoted by various popular anti-theists and anti-Bible websites:

(1) “The Bible must be ignored as an historical document because it is obviously biased.” I chuckle at that one because I’d like to know what percentage of all documentation from the ancient world would have to be thrown out if fear of bias was the key consideration! (Seriously?)

(2) “Jesus most likely never existed because there is not significant contemporaneous witness from unbiased sources.” LOL again. Consider:

(a) If historians had to depend on contemporaneous witnesses recording historical persons and events, we would lose a massive volume of knowledge about the ancient world. How many ancient figures—which those same anti-Bible anti-theists take for granted without a peep of questioning—aren’t mentioned by any ancient historian until centuries later? And how many of those ancient historians were truly “neutral” (i.e., unbiased) concerning those persons?

(b) To state the obvious: Not all ancient texts have survived to our day. Obviously! Only a tiny percentage had any chance of preservation, especially outside of arid Egypt, where only many cycles of recopying the perishable organic materials had any chance of perpetuating their written content. (How the relatively few texts survived is a fascinating study in itself. Many of my students have been shocked to learn that the biggest preserved corpus of texts from the ancient world came from the Roman physician, Gallen. Medical knowledge was valued, so many copyists were willing to labor over them.) So when I hear Bible critics complain that “Roman historians and government records make no mention of Jesus performing miracles, being crucified, and rising from the dead.”, I marvel at the naivete of such arguments and the gullibility of those who fall for such handwaving. Why would two millennia of scribes have any incentive to preserve mountains of Roman bureaucratic records, even if they had access to any surviving documents? (Organic materials don’t store well in the long term!) The ignorance and naivete of such critics is incredible.

Those critics really ought to check with some trained and respected historians once in a while. (Perhaps @Patrick could pass along that advice for me!)

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Hi @Mark, @jongarvey, @Guy_Coe, @gbrooks9, @deuteroKJ, @AllenWitmerMiller and @Patrick:

Speaking of the Patriarchs, here are a couple of brief excerpts from the Wikipedia article on Abraham:

In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as William F. Albright and biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the “patriarchal age”, the 2nd millennium BCE. But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel’s past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in Thomas L. Thompson’s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van SetersAbraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations.[7] By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.[8]

The Abraham story cannot be definitively related to any specific time, and it is widely agreed that the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the judges, is a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history.[4] A common hypothesis among scholars is that it was composed in the early Persian period (late 6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their “father Abraham”, and the returning exiles who based their counter-claim on Moses and the Exodus tradition.[5]

Regarding the Exodus, I’ve been discussing the arguments for and against its historicity, over on my thread on Jesus, Moses and Elijah, so let me just say this. If you’re going to accept an historical Exodus, then the version propounded by Richard Elliott Friedman is your best bet. For a good summary of his argument, see this review here. Friedman thinks only ONE tribe came from Egypt: the Levites. The other tribes already lived in Israel, and were well-established there: as Friedman points out in his book, the archaeological evidence for their continuous presence there is overwhelming. Friedman “agrees with the scholarly consensus that the biblical story as we have it was composed in the first millennium, but he argues persuasively that this story contains historical memories that go back much further.” Thoughts?

1975 was a long time ago. 40 yrs ago. I think most scholars today would simply say there’s no positive evidence for the existence of the patriarchs other than scripture itself, and some elements of the Joseph story. Guys?

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Yes, there is positive evidence beyond the text itself. See a sampling here: Theology Network - Biblical Studies - The Factual Reliability of the Old Testament

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That’s a very informative link, @Guy_Coe . I’m saving that one to study in greater depth.

I was glad to see within it the “anachronistic camels” issue. I’ve always found the claim that the patriarchs couldn’t have had camels a silly and poorly attested argument. I would agree with said scholars that camels may not have been downright ubiquitous throughout the region during that era—but there is no reason to rule out wealthy nomads having purchased them from traders during their travels. I get the impression that camels may have been the Cadillacs (or Lincoln Continentals) of the prosperous long before they were bred to sufficiently great numbers that prices dropped and the average Canaanite could own one.

I’ve grown weary of the all too common assumption among skeptics that the Bible is somehow inferior as an historical text in comparison to all other ancient documents. Why the negative bias? The same people often accept without hesitation anything and everything found in even the most obscure ancient texts.

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I found these discussions relevant. Was Socrates a Real Person? and Other Questions – How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

We must be consistent and apply the same standards to all texts. On the one hand, we should not be afraid of what we find if it’s not perfect or inerrant. On the hand, secularists should not be upset if applying the same standards across the board would imply that we should tentatively accept the existence of many biblical figures because we don’t have any evidence to the contrary.

@Patrick, and @vjtorley

I think Enns probably summarizes the “scholarly consensus” much better than Wikipedia.

Thomas McCall gives an analytic philosopher’s reponse to why any “critical consensus” is not the last word. This link, go to p.15.

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Page 15, in the foreword by Woodbridge, seems to be missing from the link. Can you supply the quote?
So few seem to have any appreciation of how the “Tablet theory” approach to the later, compended composition of prior sources by Moses answers so many of the minimalists’ baseless assertions.
Another worthy link: Theology Network - Theology of Everything - Polemic Theology: How to Deal with Those Who Differ from Us and here: Theology Network - Studying Theology+RS - Pentateuchal Studies Today

I was using the pdf numbering! The chpater in question is p33 on book numbering.

@AllenWitmerMiller,

The negative bias comes from the ample evidence of politicization of the writings.

The internal evidence for Exodus places it just after the Pelest settle into the Levantine coast - circa 1130 BCE!

The Egyptian Harris Papyrus puts a matching attempt to plunder Egypt which turns into a rout back into Canaan just 30 years PRIOR to the Sea Peoples’ arrival, say around 1230 BCE!

Any earlier and Exodus becomes impossible.

Yet another attempt foiled…
https://watchjerusalem.co.il/590-camels-proof-that-the-bible-is-false

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The first thought that hit me when I saw the “590 camels” was a chain-smoker’s weekly quota.

In any case, that is one fascinating article! I plan to delve further into some of its citations. Great stuff.

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This excerpt sums up my position when I last studied this topic of camels in the Levant.

Because they did not conclusively find evidence of domesticated camel remains earlier than 930 b.c.e., they concluded that camels were not domesticated any earlier than this for the wide Levantine region. This sweeping, sensational conclusion blows the Aravah Valley findings completely out of proportion. To posit that there could not have been any domesticated camels within Canaan or the Levant—that the Bible is an outright fake, based primarily on findings from limited excavations in a limited area—is absurd. Evidence shows that camels had been domesticated in surrounding regions for up to 2,000 years prior . It is irrational to conclude that over such a long time period, no domesticated camel or camel herd was ever brought into the Levant. Long-distance trade had already been established. The domestication of these animals in other locations would have been well known to people of the Levant. It would only make sense for them to have done the same—if on a smaller scale.