Holy Moses! PBS documentary suggests Exodus not real

ICBehindtheCurtain

This will be very interesting, I only wish it would make the rounds on the JW emails the same way "knocking" did, FAT CHANCE! We can only hope that PBS and Nova will jump on this bandwagon as well, sooner than later. Holy Moses! PBS documentary suggests Exodus not real http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/orl-exodus2108jul21,0,7755323.story Holy Moses! PBS documentary suggests Exodus not real Hal Boedeker | Sentinel Television Critic July 21, 2008 BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Abraham didn't exist? The Exodus didn't happen? The Bible's Buried Secrets, a new PBS documentary, is likely to cause a furor. "It challenges the Bible's stories if you want to read them literally, and that will disturb many people," says archaeologist William Dever, who specializes in Israel's history. "But it explains how and why these stories ever came to be told in the first place, and how and why they were written down." The Nova program will premiere Nov. 18. PBS presented a clip and a panel discussion at the summer tour of the Television Critics Association. The program says the Bible was written in the sixth century BC and that hundreds of authors contributed. "At least the first five books of the Bible come together during the Babylonian exile," says producer Gary Glassman. The program challenges long-held beliefs. Abraham, Sarah and their offspring probably didn't exist, says Carol Meyers, a religion professor at Duke University. "These stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there's some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later," Meyers says. There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus, either, she says, but "it doesn't mean that there's no kernel of truth to it." Nova series producer Paula Apsell says she found it "extremely shocking" to learn that monotheism was a process that took hundreds of years. "I was always brought up to believe that the minute Abraham and the patriarchs came on the scene, the Israelites accepted one God and there was just always one God and that was it," Apsell says. "I think people are going to really be stunned by that." Another shocker: The program contradicts the biblical view that the Israelites came from somewhere else into the land of Canaan. "The film shows that they were Canaanites," Apsell says. IC

garybuss

Exodus Chapter 12
37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. 38 Many other people went up with them, as well as large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds.

Biggest Mathematical Miracle in the World
Moses and his people were in the desert, but what was he going to do with them? They had to be fed, and fed is what he did, according to the Quartermaster General in the Army.

It is reported that Moses would have to have had 1500 tons of food each day. Do you know that to bring that much food each day, two freight trains, each a mile long, would be required!

Besides you must remember, they were out in the desert, so they would have to have firewood to use in cooking the food. This would take 4000 tons of wood and a few more freight trains, each a mile long just for one day.

And just think, they were forty years in transit.
And oh yes! They would have to have water. If they only had enough to drink and wash a few dishes, it would take 11,000,000 gallons each day, and a freight train with tank cars, 1800 miles long, just to bring water!

And then another thing! They had to get across the Red Sea at night.
Now if they went on a narrow path, double file, the line would be 800 miles long and would require 35 days and nights to get through. So, there had to be a space in the Red Sea, 3 miles wide so that they could walk 5000 abreast to get over in one night.

But then, there is another problem.
Each time they camped at the end of the day, a campground two-thirds the size of the state of Rhode Island was required, or a total of 750 square miles long...think of it! This space just for nightly camping.

Nosferatu

Thank you Gary for posting that! Just another reason for me to believe the bible is horse dumplings.

Hortensia

I hope I remember this in November. It sounds interesting.

Octarine Prince

Hit us up with the reminder. I will be all over this if I know about it.

White Dove

Did you say a double line of people 800 miles long? Umm...The rest sounds reasonable and shocking, too. Thank you, Gary Bus!

Gopher

Thanks for posting this, IC. I have added it as a reminder on my Yahoo calendar, I don't want to miss this.

I look forward to learning more about the "Abraham" account. If the Exodus really happened, and if Abraham was such an influential warrior and patriarch, surely there would have been some archaelogical or historical evidence.

ICBehindtheCurtain

You are welcome Gopher, I accidentally posted this twice, because the formatting was messed up, so there are two topics about this. Anyway, the Abraham thing always intrigued me when I was a witness, years ago while I was still an active JW, I asked my Mom who is a staunch JW regular pioneer, why there was no tomb of Abraham or of any other bible person, she said that Jehoover made sure that there would be no hero worship by keeping their burial places hidden, and my poor brainwashed mind accepted that explanation, although with a little hesitation. I am marked it on my calendar and will post a reminder on that week. IC

CyrusThePersian

Much of the information in this documentary is taken from The Bible Unearthed by Isreal Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. One of the most startling things I learned is that for decades archaeologists have been searching for evidence of the Exodus in the Sinai desert.

Do you know what they found? Nothing, nada, zilch. There should be remains of late Bronze Age campsites, there are none. There should be the bones of more than a million people out in the desert, there are none. (Num. 14:29) There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of a forty year sojourn in he Sinai desert! (Much less the seven plagues on Egypt, which would have left the Egyptian economy in a shambles and left the country open to invasion-an event that is nowhere recorded in the Egyptian, or in any other nation's records)

This documentary will probably posit, like Finkelstein and Silberman, that the Exodus is a Canaanite retelling of the Egyptian story of the Hyksos invasion, as recorded by Manetho.

It should be an interesting documentary!

CyrusThePersian

witnessgirl

I tend to believe that Jews were in bondage to the Egyptians and I tend to believe that Jews later lived in Palestine. I am not an atheist or an agnostic or anything remotely like that. But Cyrus is 100% correct; there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the Exodus, and there really should be given the sheer numbers involved and huge amounts of other archaeological remains in the area.

Holy Moses! PBS documentary suggests Exodus not real

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