Let’s take a break from the matter of the New Testament and shift gears to consider the rampant twaddle presented in the Old Testament.
Take, for example, the Flood of Noah; a worldwide flood, genocide of the entire human species, and a grand pas de deux for all the animals, two by two into an immense barge.
What utter nonsense!
The tale of Noah’s flood has been completely eviscerated by geology, paleontology, endocrinology, zoology, meteorology and archeology. Moreover, although legends of local floods exist in other cultures, no other civilization in the world recounts a world-wide flood that drowned the tallest mountains and killed entire populations of people and animals. China didn’t notice a flood. Rome didn’t notice a flood. Egypt didn’t either. Neither did Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, Ancient Persia, Greece or any other culture, large or small. It seems that one or more of these ancient civilizations would surely have noticed all the drowned bodies and devastation.
For a full evisceration of the Noachian flood myth, check out Aron Ra’s video series debunking the Flood tale using meteorology, geology, paleontology, dendrochronology, zoology anthropology, archeology and mythology. If you want a more concise, less scholarly debunking, reference Bill Nye’s video that deals with the problems of a 500-foot wooden boat.
What must be said is that the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh recounts a Sumerian myth of a great flood, which in the mythological time of Gilgamesh was, even then, termed an ancient story of the Sumerian god, Ea, who, in its anger, flooded the earth and instructed a righteous man, Utnapishtim – the Sumerian version of Noah – to build an enormous boat to ride out the flood. Additionally, the sending out of three birds and the ‘just-so story’ appearance of the rainbow also antedate and ‘pre-echo’ the Biblical account. This is further evidence of the syncretization of Babylonian and Sumerian myths by the Hebrews. (By the way, Ishtar (or Inanna aka; Eoster/Easter) was the goddess who created the rainbow in the Sumerian tale.)
The tale of the Exodus and the enslavement of the Hebrews, while centerpiece of Jewish cultural identity is absolute bunk, devoid of historicity. Worse; the entire elements of mythos of the Hebrew people - the feast of Passover for example - are founded on fictional, unhistorical nonsense. There is no account of the story of the Exodus from the Egyptian side, at all. Meticulous record keepers, the Egyptian scribes never recorded a million-strong population of slaves from Judea, nor the vast Exodus of said slaves, nor the plagues which YHWH sent to punish the hardened heart of ‘Pharaoh’.
Moreover, there is no archeological evidence that the cultures of the Israelites and the Egyptians ever co-existed except in conclaves of the Jewish diaspora in such places as Alexandria. If millions of Hebrews had spent any length of time as slaves in Egypt there would have been the invariable linguist, lexicographic borrowings in the two languages. However, there are none. There would also have been some archeological evidence of Hebrew habitation and slave enclaves but there are none. None!
In addition, the population of male Hebrew slaves (in the Biblical fiction) is estimated at being roughly 2,000,000. The entire population of dynastic Egypt at the time was barely twice that. It would seem that if nearly a third of the population of a nation took a hike, there would have been an historic record made of the event. Moreover, there would most assuredly be record or evidence of the various plagues which preceded the ‘Exodus’ for which no archeological evidence exists.
‘Let my people go.’ Indeed!
Not to pile on the Hebrews, but amid this grand, heroic story of delivery from bondage is the genocide of innocents commemorated by the Passover. One of the ten plagues that YHWH sent to punish the Egyptians was the slaughter of the first-born. God and the Angel of Death apparently couldn’t tell the Jews from the Egyptians so, YHWH instructed the Israelites to daub lamb’s blood on the lintels and side posts of their doorways as a sign that the Angel should pass over their abode and spare the little darlings of YHWH. Why would an ‘all-powerful, omniscient’ god not know who his ‘Chosen People’ were without the gore slathered on doorways?
Just asking…
As written in Exodus 12:23: For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you.
Once more, the jealous, vengeful tribal god of the Hebrews was a homicidal maniac whose go-to mode was genocide. Of course, any intelligent reader of this tale would be beset with questions such as:
WTF? So, did every Jewish family in Egypt each kill a lamb or did they communally use the same lamb for a number of families? Question: How did the Jews have lambs? Weren't they slaves; destitute, miserable, abused, you know…enslaved? Moreover, they had houses with lintels and door posts to slather the blood on? Furthermore, did the Hebrew slaves live among the common Egyptians? Only that might account for the sanguinary markers on doorframes. If that was the case, and the Hebrews lived in common neighborhoods with Egyptians, wouldn’t the Israelites have had the freedom to simply bugger off back to Judea in the night any time they chose?
Again, making sense of utter nonsense is nonsensical, but…
Come right down to it, how is it that an all-powerful entity would or could be stymied by Pharaoh at all? Why did he/it allow the illusory enslavement to begin with? Why bother sending plagues or even dealing with the purported bondage at all. A simple snap of the almighty fingers should have done it, right? Couldn’t YHWH simply have teleported the enslaved Hebrews? (Captain Kirk could!) Was god having a laugh? Taking a piss? After all, YHWH is supposed to be the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, creator of the universe, yet he/it couldn’t deliver ‘his/its’ Chosen People out of Egypt with a wave of a magic, invisible appendage? Christian apologists will surely have writhing, obfuscating answers to these mundane considerations.
I don’t.
To delve further, the Biblical Exodus was a non-trivial event without any record of any kind apart from the narration offered by the Bible. As it’s told in the Bible, YHWH, picks Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage – bondage, it must be stressed, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. The Exodus is, frankly, another major, grisly fairy tale of the Bible that has absolutely no validity at all since there is no Egyptian record of enslavement of the Israelites, the existence of Moses or the destruction of Pharaoh’s army by drowning in the Red Sea. Such a monumental series of events would most assuredly have been recorded by the Egyptian scribes, renown for record-keeping.
No comments:
Post a Comment