Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion, art, science, food, and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. We are going to start today by looking at Egypt in Biblical Archaeology.
Since Egypt is mentioned in some Biblical stories, some people feel that there should be archaeological evidence in Egypt to support the veracity of the Bible. Egyptologist Ian Shaw, in his book Ancient Egypt: A Very Short History, reports:
“There can be no doubting the presence of Greeks and Romans in Egypt, but attempts to correlate biblical narratives with the Egyptian textual and archaeological record have always been distinctly problematic.”
Shaw goes on to say:
“Since most of the events described in the Bible occurred several hundred years before the time that they were written down, it is extremely difficult to know when they are factual historical accounts and when they are purely allegorical or rhetorical in nature.”
In his book The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Toby Wilkinson writes:
“Although Egypt is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, attempts to corroborate these accounts through the study of ancient Egyptian texts or through archaeology have proved extremely difficult, inconclusive and controversial.”
Toby Wilkinson also reports:
“Stylistic connections between Egyptian and biblical texts indicate a common literary tradition across large parts of the ancient Near East, but little more.”
The Exodus account, for example, appears to be a mishmash of stories that probably originated in the expulsion of the Hyksos (the Asiatic kings who ruled Lower Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period). Many archaeologists have concluded that the Exodus story was simply a convenient use of folk tales to allow the Israelites to define themselves as a distinct nation. The story is mythical rather than historical. Ian Shaw reports:
“It is an irony of biblical archaeology that the more we investigate the texts and archaeological remains that link Egypt with the Bible, the less substantial and less convincing these kinds of connections appear to be.”
Associated with the Exodus story is the idea of Egyptian slavery and particularly the misconception that the pyramids were constructed with slave labor. Toby Wilkinson writes:
“Despite the popular (though entirely incorrect) notion that the pyramids were built by gangs of slaves, slavery was very rare in ancient Egypt before the Ptolemaic period.”
This is an open thread
