Henke 2022dc

Still No Evidence for Genesis and Exodus

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I state:

“Concerning my high standards for verifying the existence of a supernatural event or being, Lundahl (2022a) replies:

“Will you ‘lower it’ confronted with the fact that your ‘standard’ is not consistent with how we have historical knowledge?”

Of course not. Others might be willing to lower their standards for studying the past so that Mr. Lundahl can label likely fairy tales as “history”, but I won’t and neither should anyone else that studies past events. I will not lower my standards at all to comply with what he views as being “consistent” with historical knowledge, when he readily mixes angels, demons and other groundless claims with reality to explain both the past and present. Lundahl (2022a-g) is engaging in mythmaking and speculation, and not appropriate historical investigations. I am consistent in my very conservative interpretations of both human and geological history, and I see no evidence whatsoever to inject the supernatural into either of them.

Any literate individual can write and make up anything. This is exactly why Mormon apologists are so desperate to verify the Book of Mormon with archeology. They know very well that Joseph Smith Jr. or others could have made up the Book of Mormon. They recognize that they need external evidence to confirm that the Book of Mormon is history. Well, the same problem exists for Genesis and Exodus. It could have been made up by a “prophet” as I discuss in Section 5.0.”

In reply to the bolded sentences, Lundahl (2022m) makes the following comments without providing a shred of evidence to support them:

“No, it does not. Exodus was accepted as historic by Israelites since it was written soon after the event, partly even while it was yet ongoing.

Genesis was accepted as historic by them, and this means, as corresponding to their memories of earlier days, whether Abraham or before. No one pretended Moses was uncovering hitherto in the immediate past unknown things about Noah, and no one pretended Ezra had discovered Exodus as a hitherto unknown account of history. There was a discovery, but the point is, the news for those reading it were the precise content of the laws, things less easy to recall by popular tradition than a series of events.”

Here, Lundahl (2022m) is just pounding the podium to look authoritative because he has no evidence to support his claims. Over the millennia, millions of people have believed all kinds of lies and superstitions. We don’t know when Genesis and Exodus were written and Lundahl (2022m) does not have a shred of evidence to conclude that Exodus was “was written soon after the event, partly even while it was yet ongoing”. Exodus could easily have been made up a thousand years after the supposed events and pushed off onto gullible ancient Israelites by powerful Israelite priests and kings. This mythmaking continues today. Millions of Americans now falsely accept as history that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election (see Henke 2022cc). Putin and his cronies have convinced the majority of Russians to think that Russia is “liberating” Ukraine from the NAZIs.

As discussed in Finkelstein and Silberman (2001), conservative Christians and Jews don’t even have any evidence that the Exodus ever occurred. The ancient Israelites definitively believed that Genesis, Exodus, and Moses were real. However, like many ancient cultures ranging from Hawaii to China, India, Scandinavia, the Americas and Greece, the ancient Israelites believed in far-fetched stories (myths) and popular traditions that have no evidential support. The ancient Israelites certainly believed that they were the chosen people and that they had an unbroken chain of history going back to Abraham and earlier, but there’s not a shred of archeological or other external evidence to indicate that their views were correct – nothing.

Finkelstein and Silberman (2001) and other archeological sources provide a realistic view of the origin of Israel and there’s no evidence to back up the claims in Genesis and Exodus. The “memories” of the ancient Israelites and their traditions are without merit. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that the ancient Israelites had an unbroken historical chain back to Abraham and even earlier. However, he has nothing to support his claims. There’s no evidence of the Talking Snake, no evidence of the Nephilim being procreated by angels, no evidence of Abraham, no evidence of Moses ever existing, no evidence of the Exodus, and geology has thoroughly refuted a worldwide Flood of about 4,300 years ago; see here and my references. The oldest copies of the Old Testament are in the Dead Sea Scrolls and they are copies of copies of copies… of documents that could have been written as much as 1,000 years earlier. We don’t know who wrote them, when they wrote them and Hypotheses #3 and #4 in Henke (2022b) demonstrate that over time lies and misconceptions can become universally accepted as fact, especially in an ancient culture that was superstitious and believed under threat of force whatever their religious and political leaders told them.

Reference:

Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.