Dear Moshe,



G-d, as a human illusion, is naught but an empty solution for the multitudes who follow that which is unclear and foggy, who love contradiction and run from reason. That is the case, too, for the World to Come, heaven, and hell.

You asked how the universe was formed. This is a question which is not subject to discussion and inquiry. Man cannot grasp creation, ex nihilo or infinite. The universe is something one must merely see and accept, along the lines of “He saw this and sanctified it,” or “I created nature and you are not permitted to inquire about it.” You must accept it without understanding or the potential to understand it. All man can do is look into the evolution of nature and the physical “laws” in light of reason.

Clarification of the story of the exodus from Egypt is something which must be left to scholars who use tools of reason. Their conclusions can be found in the essay Archeological Findings Help Determine the Era in which the Torah Was Written. You can read more about the topic of morality, which does not exist at all in religious Judaism, in our essay Morality in Halacha.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet

Dear Sir/Madam,



You ask a very general question, and for a similarly general answer we would recommend you to look at the review of Kitchen’s book by Charles David Isbell, at http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Doctwo/kitchen.htm

If you have a question on some specific issue mentioned in Kitchen’s book, we will be glad to discuss it with you.

As for the historicity of the Exodus (which we assume to be one of the issues interesting you, because of the title of your message), see the article by David Goldstein, “Of Pharaohs and Dates: Critical remarks on the dating and the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt” (http://www.talkreason.org/articles/exodus1.cfm)



Daat Emet

Dear Sir/Madam,



First of all, please take into account that what Isbell wrote is a book review, not a book. Book reviews are usually rather short, and their authors cannot afford to argue in detail with each and every point made in the book under review. Still, a good book review mentions the strong and the weak sides of the book it reviews, with a few examples, and Isbell does that for Kitchen’s book. Perhaps the most important point of Isbell’s review is that Kitchen too often treats his unverified and unverifiable assumptions about the ancient world and the history of the biblical literature as though they were facts, while accusing at the same time other scholars that they are being too much hypothetical (cf. Kitchen’s view of Moses as a graduate of the foreign ministry in the Egyptian capital of Pi-Ramesse).

Also, Kitchen’s use of the term “minimalism” is misleading. In recent scholarship on the history of ancient Israel and of the biblical literature, this term refers to the views held by a group of scholars (P. R. Davies, T. L. Thompson, etc.) who claim that almost all of the texts included in the Hebrew Bible were written not earlier than the period of Persian rule over the Near East (539-332 BCE) and that very little of what is told in these texts reflects the actual history of the Iron Age (c. 1200-586 BCE), let alone earlier periods. Of course, their view is hotly debated in the larger scholarly world, and it appears that most scholars do not accept it. Finkelstein and Silberman do not accept it either, since they date the bulk of the materials included in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets to the 7th century BCE (in our mind, their theory is somewhat oversimplified, meaning that it disregards the complexity of the process by which the biblical literature must have emerged, but that is not the issue now). Of course, Finkelstein has made much publicity for himself with his essential denial of historicity of the biblical narrative of the united monarchy of David and Solomon, but accepting as he does the basic historicity of the biblical narrative of the divided monarchy (from the immediate successors of Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE), he is certainly not a minimalist by today’s standards. For a good summary of the recent scholarly debate about the historicity of different parts of the Hebrew Bible, see the article by Ziony Zevit, “Three Debates about Bible and Archaeology”

(http://www.bsw.org/?l=71831&a=Comm01.html).

For Kitchen, however, a “minimalist” is anyone who denies the basic historicity of almost anything told in the Hebrew Bible (except perhaps the stories of the Creation and the Flood). And since there are few academic scholars who do not fall into this category, there is little wonder that Kitchen’s position is much more exceptional in the scholarly world than that of the true minimalists. What is disturbing that some people have the correct impression that the minimalist positions fall outside the scholarly consensus regarding the history of ancient Israel and the origins of the biblical literature, but then apply the “minimalist” label in Kitchen’s way, i.e., apply it to the views which form the very heart of the scholarly consensus – e.g., the view that the book of Deuteronomy was written in the 7th century BCE (the evidence and considerations supporting this view are too numerous and complicated to leave them for a separate discussion, if you are interested; or better, we recommend you to turn to any academic introductory textbook on biblical studies).

Now to your specific questions.

1. As we said above, it is an oversimplification to claim that the entire Pentateuch was composed in the 7th century BCE. The Pentateuch includes, in all likelihood, sources that were composed both earlier and later than this date. However, the 7th century BCE is widely accepted by scholars as the date of the composition of the book of Deuteronomy, and we suggest you to begin the discussion of the dates of the Pentateuchal sources with the date of Deuteronomy, if you are interested. In any event, we do not understand what you mean by saying that the Pentateuch “resemble[s] in both style and content the text of the late second millennium.”

2. The mere existence of “camel figurines, paintings and remains” proves nothing about the domestication of the camel. For comparison, in the palaces of Crete dating to the mid-2nd millennium BCE (the so-called Minoan period) there are splendid wall paintings depicting swimming dolphins, and nobody has ever claimed that the people of the Minoan Crete had domesticated dolphins. People depicted the animals which they see around them, and hunted some of these animals also (which is a possible explanation for some camel remains found in excavations), but that does not equal domestication. On the other hand, there is some evidence for domestication of camels in the 2nd millennium BCE (which Kitchen lists), but these are very few pieces of evidence, and the evidence for the domestication and the use of camels for transport in the 1st millennium BCE is much more extensive. Given these data, the most reasonable conclusion is that although camels were occasionally domesticated in the 2nd millennium BCE, their regular use for transport (such as trading caravans, or military units of camel riders) did not occur before the 1st millennium BCE. And of course, it is the regular use of camels for transport that forms the background of the patriarchal stories in Genesis (Gen. 12:16; almost 20 occurrences in Gen. 24; Gen. 31:17, 34; 37:25; etc.).

3. As early as 1985, Finkelstein has explained the wave of new rural settlements in the central mountains of Canaan in Iron Age IA (c. 1200-1000 BCE) as resulting from settlement of nomads whose ancestors had roamed the same areas in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550-1200 BCE) and who were forced into permanent settlement by the demise of the Late Bronze Age cities: these cities had functioned as the source of agricultural products for the nomads (grain, oil, wine, etc.), but with the beginning of Iron Age these sources were lost, so that the nomads had to grow themselves the agricultural produce that they required – and this demanded permanent settlement. Of course, this is only one possible explanation for the origin of the Iron Age IA settlements. But in any event, the material culture of these settlements is clearly connected to the material culture of the Late Bronze Age Canaan and lacks any clear connection to the material culture of Egypt during the relevant period, so judging by the archaeological findings, the inhabitants of the central mountains of Canaan in Iron Age IA did not come from Egypt (as the Exodus-Conquest narrative has it).

4. Before speaking about evidence of the Israelites’ presence in ancient Egypt or Sinai, one should first define what human collective he means by the Israelites. It would be fair to say that one of the requirements which a population has to fulfill in order to be identified as Israelites is to have spoken a Northwest Semitic language of the Canaanite branch (to which the Hebrew language belongs). Another requirement for the population involved is to have worshipped a deity whose name can be identified with the name of the Bible’s deity YHWH. Well, there is ample evidence that populations speaking Northwest Semitic languages were present in Egypt in the Late Bronze Age, but absolutely no evidence for a deity called YHWH (or something significantly similar). The last point is important, since the inhabitants of the ancient Near East gave their children, or adopted for themselves, names which expressed their religious sentiments. Such names were usually sentences or phrases which included the name of the deity whom the name-giver revered (a random example: the Hebrew name of Joshua, the disciple of Moses, is Yehoshua‘, which means “YHW(H) is affluent”; for shoa‘ = “noble, affluent” cf. Isa. 32:5, Job 34:19). Now, the extant Egyptian sources of the Late Bronze Age mention hundreds of names which can be identified as belonging to Northwest Semitic languages, but none of them includes the divine name YW or YHW(H). And needless to say, the name Israel occurs in Egyptian sources only once, in reference to a population dwelling in Canaan and not in Egypt or in Sinai (the Merneptah stele, 1208 BCE).

Then, of course, one has to have an idea of the magnitude of the Israelite population, for whose presence in Egypt or Sinai one looks. The Pentateuch’s number of over 600,000 adult males, which makes for c. 2,000,000 total population, is simply absurd – see David Goldstein, “A Nation, Great, Mighty, and Populous?”

(http://www.talkreason.org/articles/exodus.cfm). On the other hand, the smaller the number of the Israelites that might have participated in the Exodus, the lesser the chance to find any trace of them in archaeological explorations of Sinai or of the northeastern Nile delta (where the Israelites are told to have dwelt in Egypt). Still, it is noteworthy that, to quote Finkelstein and Silberman (The Bible Unearthed, p. 63), “modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral activity in such areas in the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century BCE” (the Rabbinic tradition places the Exodus in 1312 BCE, but that does not matter much in this regard).

So, while in general absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, in our case the absence of extra-biblical evidence for the Israelites’ presence in Egypt and in Sinai shows at least that the Pentateuchal narrative of the Exodus is greatly exaggerated. That is, even if some population identifying itself as Israelites had left Egypt sometime during the Late Bronze Age, it must have been rather small and must have proceeded more or less straightly to Canaan instead of wandering 40 years around Sinai, in order to escape leaving any trace of its existence in textual sources and in the archaeological record. And of course, the biblical chronology of the Exodus simply does not fit within the history of Egypt and Canaan in the Late Bronze Age – see David Goldstein, “Of Pharaohs and Dates” (http://www.talkreason.org/articles/exodus1.cfm)



Daat Emet