Noah's Arc
NOAH’S ARK and EXODUS – REVISITED
By Joseph J Kusnell for Boomeryearbook.com
Excerpted from ‘THE ORIGIN OF FAITH – THE DAY THE JEWS INVENTED GOD”
Available at www.boomeryearbook.com now.
Noah: There was a great flood. A man named Noah and his three sons, at God’s command, built a great Ark and on it, they put two pairs of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal on the Earth. How many animals were there? That depends on who’s counting.
According to paleontologists, one million years ago, the planet was covered with dinosaurs and huge, flying reptiles. But according to Genesis, God created animals after he created Adam and Eve and Noah came along even later. So by Noah’s time, there had to be lots of them. So God instructed Noah to build the Ark 480′ long, 80′ wide, and 48′ high. (The dimensions were in cubits, each cubit measured as 19″..) Think of that. A vessel this awesome would be over 20,000 tons and would carry the same cargo as 539 railroad cars, a train that would be over five miles long. That’s immense.
Unfortunately, all Noah had to build with were his three sons and maybe some prehistoric stone tools – primarily cutting stones and bores. With these ancient tools he had to accomplish an enormous task. He had to (1) cut down about 250 or 300 very large trees. He had to (2) rip 2,000 planks from these trees. He had to (3) smooth the cut planks with a stone tool boring thousands of connecting holes with still another stone tool. He had to (5) build the Ark and fasten it with thousands of wood pegs that he also had to make himself and lastly, he had to (6) caulk the entire vessel with hot pitch and get this monstrosity down into the water to see if it floated. Considering the huge size of the Ark and its 20,000+ lbs. that alone would be a tall order for three or seven guys regardless of the problems building it. My guess? God had to help push.)
Even then, Noah’s work wasn’t done. Next he and his sons had to go around the world – on foot – collecting many pairs of all the animals and birds on Earth. Plus they had to gather enough food to last them all six months, a gigantic task in itself.
When that was done, they then had to herd this huge mass of living creatures – animals and birds – along with tons of food – all the way back to where the Ark was waiting. How they could have accomplished any of this is beyond me. I would have figured it would take up to 10,000 men 5-10 years to get it all done back in Noah’s time. But I could be wrong. Faith does move mountains, they say.
Lastly, once they got everybody and every creature and all that food up on the Ark and set out to sea, the seven of them had the unenviable task of handling the waste matter and manure from all these creatures for the next six months. Every day, sometimes many times a day, these folks would have to enter these cages of wild beasts, gather up the tons of waste material they would generate, and find a way to transport that mess to the sides of the arc, and throw it overboard. The trouble with that is the Ark has no sides. It is a closed vessel, so I don’t have the slightest idea of how they would have been able to discard these tons of waste material without flooding the boat. It’s just one more question that is left unanswered in the Bible’s rendition of the story like how did they feed the animals that live off other animals? Think on that for a while. .
So that’s the story of Noah and his Arc. Unbelievable? Of course it is. In fact, it’s so unbelievable you wouldn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Yet, every few years, someone finds the Ark buried in the mountains somewhere. I’m waiting for it to show up in Disney World.
The truth is it never happened, not the way we have been taught. The Bible story is maybe allegorical, maybe apocryphal; but certainly it is fictional. Maybe there was a local flood and maybe a guy built a boat and took his family and his pets with him until the water went down in a few days, but that’s about it.
Consider this from Iraq’s ancient past.
The first known civilization appeared about 3500 BC in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers then known as Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. In the 1800’s, archeologists excavating an ancient Sumerian site uncovered a series of clay tablets covered with a form of wedge-shaped characters now called cuneiform writing. This earliest form of writing was used to depict stories of the culture and events of the early Sumerians. (Later these same people invented the more traditional form of writing that we know today.)
The clay tablets uncovered in this ‘dig’ were packed up and brought back to England were they were promptly stored and just as promptly forgotten. It wasn’t until one hundred years later that someone remembered them and began the tedious task of translating them. They were astounded at what they found.
On a series of tablets was discovered the story of a great flood in the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates – since thought to be the site of the Garden of Eden. The flood was so severe, that much of the surrounding land simply disappeared. The tablets went on to say that an observer on a raft on the river was unable to see land in any direction.
A local merchant, who made a habit of shipping cargo down river to the towns that lay below Sumeria, became apprehensive about his supplies and decided to construct individual rafts to save them from the approaching flood waters. When he was finished, in order to keep his rafts together on the river, he fastened the rafts together. (The Bible makes reference to the Ark having ’sections’.) When everything was ready, the merchant ordered the raft loaded and he, his family, his animals, and his cargo set off down river to safety.
The story put down on the clay tablets is long. It states how the passengers lost all sight of land as the water rose to levels never seen before and the raft drifted down river until finally, it entered the Persian Gulf that bordered Mesopotamia. There the raft continued to drift for about seven days, finally coming to rest on an island. Because the Gulf waters are salted, the passengers had no fresh water to drink so they drank their cargo which was beer, a substance which preserves well and which is full of nutrients. The story ends with drawings of the passengers and animals disembarking from the raft and being greeted by a large crowd of angry people. The people have been since translated as angry creditors demanding some sort of payment from the merchant without which he would be put into slavery as was the custom in those days. .
That is the story of a great flood recorded on ancient Sumerian clay tablets and written in cuneiform, the oldest writing known to man. It is easy to see how this story could have been transformed thousands of years later into the Bible story of Noah and his Ark as we know it today. All the Bible writer had to go on was a word of mouth story handed down over the millennia like an urban legend. Certainly there was a great flood. The tablets support that. Certainly it covered a large area. The tablets support that too.
But the flood was still a regional rather than an international event. And God didn’t appear to the merchant to tell him to save himself and his family; the merchant was simply trying to save his merchandise. Nor were two of every unclean animal and seven of each clean animal in the world taken aboard the Ark which would have been impossible. What was on the Ark were a few pack animals intended to be sold down river along with a few people, some merchandise cargo, and some beer.
So it is written on the tablets.
As to the voyage itself, far from taking seven months which would have been impossible, it took one week, which was very possible. All the unanswerable questions about gathering, feeding and caring for all those wild animals also disappear with the Sumerian version. There aren’t any wild animals to worry about. And the questions of supplying fresh water for so many creatures for so long a period of time also disappear.
It seems clear to me that the Sumerian version of the flood is factual while the Biblical version, complete with God and a series of mythical religious extensions is basically fiction.
Nevertheless, the lesson is real.
Next we have the story of The Exodus, another urban tale rewritten hundreds of years later while greatly embellished by the writer.
THE EXODUS
According to the Bible, 600,000 men along with their wives, children, and “a large number of others” – English version, left Egypt on a journey across the Sinai Desert, a place where temperatures range from 120-degree during the day to a cold 50 degrees at night. Each family took with them an untold number of goats, sheep and cattle representing the wealth of the nation.
There were old people and young people, sick people and well people, children and babies and even newborns. According to the Bible, this lusty throng was bent on reaching Jerusalem across a blistering desert, a place where there would be absolutely nothing but blowing sand and a blazing sun for the next five hundred miles.
The Biblical rendition goes on to say that this huge mass of animals and people lived out there – in that desert – in that horrible, torturous place – all 2,000,000 of them, for the next 40 years!
Now let’s think about that for a moment to determine if it even sounds plausible. First of all, how much LAND do you think so great a throng would cover out in the desert? Let figure it out. A million people would make a good size city, let’s say a city the size of Phoenix, Arizona. So that’s like ten to twelve miles square (say one hundred square miles).
But there were also a million animals. The Bible mentioned goats and sheep and cattle for starters, but this is a desert so there must also have been some camels. In any event, there were a given number of these animals for each family (animals represented their wealth) and when you add them up, that amounts to at least another million creatures in the desert. So for starters, we have two million living creatures in the Sinai Desert for a period of forty years who would certainly need both food and water to survive – lots and lots of water. At any one time, they would also occupy a lot of space extending for miles in every direction.
Allowing ten more square miles for the one million animals which is probably a gross understatement (what did the animals live on out in the desert anyway? They don’t eat bread.) we have a total of twenty miles square or four hundred square miles of creatures spread out across the blistering, blowing sands.
That means just to walk to the back of the crowd in that heat and over those sands would take Moses up to six hours with another six to return to the front. That’s a twelve-hour walk in 120-degree heat Just to communicate with his people bringing up the rear. Did he do this every day? Once a week? Once a month? Or did he just sit down and wait as his people struggled past him until the people in the back caught up?
That’s what the Bible says. Because it is so patently ridiculous some people have tried to alleviate the problem by saying the Bible doesn’t mean exactly what it says. That maybe instead of 600,000 men, their wives and children and “a large number of others”, it just means a few people. Sorry, but that doesn’t wash. It’s true or it’s not true, you can’t have it both ways. The numbers are quite specific.
So if the Bible is to be believed, this immense mob traveled out into the desert on a journey that was to take forty years. They couldn’t travel at night because at night the desert is very cold so they would need to seek shelter for themselves and their children. So they huddled at night and moved during the blazing hot daylight hours. Either way, it’s a tough, formidable journey – a journey that would require a lot of food and even more water to accomplish. Where would that come from out there in the desert?
The Bible says the food came from God in the form of Manna, the water from the few existing springs along the way. I think manna is like unleavened bread. Now, if you can accept that they ate nothing but this bread, three meals a day, seven days a week, for the next forty years, we will let it go at that. But I find that hard to believe both psychologically and physically. This type diet would cause serious problems among the adults. I can’t imagine the effect on children. And the animals as I said earlier don’t eat bread. As to the water, that is another matter altogether.
The Sinai desert isn’t littered with wells. If it were, it wouldn’t be a desert at all. That’s what makes a desert – the lack of water. So even if a few wells are there, and they are, they are few and far apart.
Now could this immense throng of people and animals get through a day, walking in the blazing hot desert, without a continual supply of water? No they couldn’t. If they walked an hour in that sun without drinking water, they’d all be dead at the end of that day. You have to have water with you all the time. So, I guess they would have carried water bags – goatskin water bags. (Where they could have found a million goatskin water bags, I have no idea. And if you say they killed their goats and made them, it would take maybe a hundred thousand goats to make a million water bags and that’s a whole lot of goats. But to continue.)
Day 1: 8:00 AM.
The people have been walking for an hour. The sun is high, and the temperature hovers around 110 degrees. The hot sands are blowing, children are whining and everyone is hungry and thirsty – but mostly thirsty. They need water. They ALL need water. The children and animals most of all. There is an oasis up the desert a short ways. It contains four small water wells. Our people that stretch backward for over twenty miles need to fill their million water bags from those small wells. (Figure a water bag must hold at least a quart of water – probably more. A million quarts of water would be 250,000 gallons. A quarter of a million gallons of water from these four wells? I’d think those wells would be dry in an hour.)
So, how long do you think it will take us to fill all our water bags? Well let’s figure it out. Do you know how you draw water from a well into a water bag? It isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. You have to lower the bag, let it fill up, then bring it up and start the process over again. It has to take fifteen – maybe twenty seconds per bag at the quickest. So, if you have a million PEOPLE and you have to fill a million water bags, how long would it take? We have decided on fifteen seconds per bag. Now fifteen seconds may not sound like much but you have a million people so that’s a million water bags. That would mean they’d need fifteen million seconds to fill them all up. That converts to 250,000 minutes, 4,166 hours, and about 175 days. That’s six months. And the animals still have to be watered somehow.
Of course, if there were four wells (probably a typical oasis), it would only take maybe six weeks for the people to all get to the well. But it wouldn’t matter because in six weeks, they’d all be dead. You can’t go two hours in the desert without water let alone six weeks.
So the folks in the front get their water and move on. But this takes time and even as they do, people in the back are keeling over, dying of thirst from the scorching heat. And during all this, what happens to the babies and the animals? They too would begin dying by the thousands. It would never work. It could never work. Everyone would be dead of heat stroke or dehydration before they got 20 miles from Egypt. Life is really tough in the desert.
Something is wrong here and I’ll tell you what it is. The story is patently ridiculous. It is impossible five different ways. It never happened. Maybe a dozen people could make such a trip, maybe a couple of dozen Bedouins could, but that’s it. Not the million reported in the Bible story and certainly no animals other than maybe a few camels. The truth is the Sinai would have been a deathtrap for the fleeing Jews and their animals and they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at all.
Water and food are not even the only problems. This is a huge crowd of people. People of all types, males and females, young and old, angry and impatient. Such a huge and diverse throng of people is bound to have problems – all kinds of problems. How is this huge throng to be disciplined and controlled out in the desert?
For example, what did these people do all day and night, every day of the week, seven days a week, for forty years? That’s a lifetime. What did they do just to pass the time? Did they have disagreements, fights and arguments caused by the heat or by someone coveting his neighbor’s wife or daughter? Who policed them? Who was there to respond to emergencies? Who was in control of such a mass of humanity?
Hell, the guys in the back were twenty miles away from the leaders so who was in charge way back there? Come on now, let’s get serious. These weren’t a bunch of pussycats. They were ancient Jews, a tough, robust, lustful group of people (as the Bible tells us). Remember when Moses came down from the mount? What did he find? The people were engaging in a drunken ORGY! And now, they are out in that stinking, hot, sweaty desert with nothing in view but more and more hot days and nights. They want relief. They want to forget. They want a PARTY!
And who was there to deal with all the pent up frustration these people would have had to feel? Who would see that fights did not break out? That people didn’t start killing each other? After all, tempers had to be short in that terrible heat with never enough water and boredom had to be a continuing problem. So who would be in charge. The Bible doesn’t address any of these problems. And the reason is that none of this ever happened. It would have been physically impossible to move such a large number of animals and people across the Sinai Desert in this manner. No matter how many years you tried. If you started out with a million, you’d be lucky to reach your destination with a couple of hundred. That might even be optimistic because it is very likely that none of you would ever get where you were going – not with that crowd.
And remember this: there had to be births along the way over forty years. Babies – lots of them. After all there were a million people and Jewish families had a lot of children in those days. They were a lustful group. So how did they tend their babies in the blowing sands and in the awful heat of the desert? How were they able to raise their young (and the young animals that also must have been born.) How did they get milk for the infants, or water or food? After all, it is said the people existed on Manna from God but babies don’t eat manna. Neither do animals. And if the adult women were living on manna, how much mother’s milk could they have produced?
The whole thing is utter nonsense. It never happened. It never COULD have happened. Not the way it’s written. A writer heard an old story from the ancient past and embellished it just as fiction writers do today. We call it poetic license. The biblical author used poetic license to tell his version of an “urban legend” that had become near and dear to his people.
Anyway, if God wanted the Jews to cross the desert, there were easier ways for Him to accomplish that. After all, he is God. He could have simply transported them from where they were to where he wanted them to be. That would have been much easier. Why kill half of them if he loved them so much? No, this story is not real, it is largely allegorical but based on something. What that something might be we will discuss in a moment.
(Did you wonder where I got the 1,000,000 animals from? Well the Bible says that there were “600,000 men accompanied by their wives and children and some hangers-on (English version) together with many sheep, goats, and cattle”. You can make up your own numbers but I used 150,000 families represented by the 600,000 men, each of whom had some number of animals. Figure for yourself how many they might have had per family? A dozen sheep, half dozen goats, a donkey or two, a camel or two, a dog or other household pet, some pigs, some chickens? Pick a number per family. I used an average of 7 per family, which I really think is conservative. And that’s where I got the 1,000,000 animals.)
Anyway, none of this happened because none of it COULD have happened. It’s just not possible. MAYBE a few dozen people MIGHT have been able to do something like this, but this wasn’t a few dozen, this was a million or more. The Bible is very exact about that.
In closing, let me make a few observations. As the Bible recites the tale, the Egyptian King let his slaves go but then changed his mind. So he sent out 600 chariots to catch them and bring them back. He also sent some soldiers.
First, chariots are horse-drawn and horses can gallop easily at 15-18 miles per hour. Soldiers force walks about 3-4 miles per hour. After the first hour, the chariots will be 14 miles ahead of the soldiers. It will take the soldiers four hours to catch up. After three hours, the horses will be 54 miles down the road and the soldiers just 16 so they will now be at least 9 hours behind. And so forth. So the soldiers are pointless in the chase. Also, chariots normally carry one or two men standing side by side. If it’s two men, and 600 chariots, that’s a total of a maximum of 1,200 men.
Twelve hundred men to capture and bring back over 1,000,000 hot and tired people – people that are spread out over 400 square miles of desert with 1,000,000 animals in tow? You got to be kidding. The Jews were a tough group of ex-slaves. If they decided to resist just a little, the charioteers would have no chance. With twelve hundred against one million, the soldiers would have been overwhelmed in a heartbeat.
PLUS and most importantly, GOD was on the side of the Jews. The King knew this because, according to the Bible, he had just been beat up for the past seven years until in defeat, he had to let his slaves go. Yet before they are out of sight, he changes his mind and dares God to strike him and his people dead by going after them. Now this is indeed a man with a hard head.
Anyway, how come as they galloped across the desert sands, the Bible doesn’t mention the bodies of Jews lying in the burning sand where they dropped from heat exhaustion and thirst which most certainly would have been the case. The desert should have been, and still must be, littered with their bones by the thousands.
But it isn’t and that’s because this never happened. Neither did the crossing of the Red Sea (actually the Sea of Reeds). That is one myth (The Crossing) born of another (The Exodus).
THE CROSSING OF THE SEA OF REEDS
The reference to the Red Sea in the Bible is an error of translation. The Bible does not say the people of the Exodus crossed “the Red Sea”, it says they crossed the “Sea of Reeds”. The Sea of Reeds refers to a small number of lakes also known as the Bitter Lakes that in many places is simply marshland.
None of these small lakes is very large individually and crossing one of them might be easy enough for a small number of people (particularly when the lake is at its low ebb, which happens regularly). But, to talk about a million people and a million animals crossing these lakes, is another matter altogether.
(Not to mention 600 Egyptian Chariots with accompanying foot soldiers that all fitted nicely within the banks of one of those small lakes at the same time so they could be conveniently drowned – another wild stretch of the imagination.)
Look, let’s try an exercise. Let’s compute how long this Egyptian column chasing the Jews would actually be. The column consisted of 600 galloping chariots and some number of trailing foot soldiers as described in the Bible. Figure to fit conveniently into the river channel to drown, the chariots would be limited to two abreast, with sufficient room between the first and second sets so they will not run up each other’s heels. The horse and chariot are 20’ long front to back. With spacing between the sets, I made it 30’ total. Multiply that by 300 sets of two chariots each and you get a column that is 9,000 feet long (almost two miles) and that doesn’t count the column of foot soldiers coming behind them. So that’s a column at least two miles long that would have to fit nicely into the bed of the first of the ‘lakes’, so they could be conveniently drowned together.
(As a matter of fact, I doubt any of the lakes are actually wide enough to have contained all the Egyptians soldiers and chariots at one time so they could drown together as the Bible states they did. Remember the Bible says there were no survivors so they all had to be inside the waterbed at the same time. If some were too far behind they would have seen what happened and escaped. If some had been too far up front, they would have been out of the riverbed before the waters rushed over them. For everyone to drown, they all had to be within the banks of that marsh lake at the exact same time which alone seems impossible.)
But that doesn’t matter anyway because trying to get 1,000,000 people and 1,000,000 animals through this narrow channel as God held up the waters would have taken the better part of a month. Big crowds in the hot desert move very, very slowly and this was more than a big crowd, it was a huge crowd. (God would have been much better served just building them a bridge.)
(Note: Biblical ‘scholars’ – those people who study the Bible more to reinforce it than to seek out the truth – find all kinds of excuses when Bible stories turn up to be inaccurate or flat. When you ask them about the million people and the million animals specifically referenced in the Bible story, they tend to brush it off by saying it wasn’t meant to be a literal number. Well to me, it’s true or it’s not – when they say 600,000 men I assume they mean 600,000 men or what’s the use of saying it?)
The Hebrews of the Exodus were a HUGE throng of men, women, and children, all moving at a snail’s pace across a very difficult landscape. They have another million animals with them, So we have two million living creatures moving across a very difficult desert landscape in intense heat. Earlier we calculated about 400 square miles of them.
Now for two million of ANYTHING to make its way past a given point ANYWHERE, would take days – maybe even weeks – to complete. And in that excessive heat, and over that difficult terrain, it very well would have taken longer. So for them to make their way across the bed of even the first lake of the Bitter Lakes, the waters would have to be held back a long time (even by Hollywood standards). For me, I like the idea of a bridge much better.
(Keep in mind, the width of this ‘channel’ through the water that God created would be limited to feet or at most yards. Therefore, the throng that we estimated to be 20 miles wide and 20 miles deep would had to be reorganized to get through that narrow channel. Let’s say they were reorganized into a column 12 abreast. How long would the new column then be? My guess would be 60 miles long. So the Jews would be passing through that channel, between those high walls of “mighty water”, for at least a month. Talk about being scared!
But they weren’t scared because it never happened. And the story isn’t new either. Check this out. It’s from ancient Egyptian writings.
Note: A woman accompanying the pharaoh on a rowing excursion drops “a fish shaped charm of new turquoise” into the lake. Then the chief lector Djadjaemonkh, placed one side of the water of the lake upon the other, and lying down upon a postsherd, he found the fish-shaped charm. Then he brought it back and gave it to its owner. Now as for the water, it was twelve cubits deep, and it amounted to twenty-four cubits after it was folded back. Again he said his magic sayings and the waters of the lake returned to their rightful position. This marvelous thing occurred in the Reign of King Snefru”.
So you see, it had all been done before. This little Egyptian story is thousands of years old and yet, is very much the same as the story of the Red Sea crossing of the Bible written much later. Would you believe this fanciful tale any more than the equally fanciful tale of the “Exodus”? You shouldn’t. Both are equally unfounded.
Over the years, people have tried very hard to make the Exodus work. But they haven’t had much luck. Today, they are trying very hard to dispute the Bitter Lakes as the place of the Israeli crossing, preferring it to be the Red Sea, the “mighty waters” of the Biblical passage. But the literal translation of the Hebrew text is not Red Sea, it is Bitter Lakes, an extended group of marshes.
The story of the “Red Sea” crossing is a fable just as is the story of the Exodus. Neither ever happened. Consider this fact: Bible scholars estimate the size of the Exodus being anywhere from one to two million PEOPLE plus the animals. (I have used a total of 2,000,000 to include both.) That’s fine, but if there HAD been such a huge throng living in the desert for forty years, where is the physical evidence they would have had to leave behind? The desert is an inhospitable place. If a large group of living creatures spent forty years out there, many, many would have died and their bones would be buried in the sands for eons. But they are not. Despite continuing efforts on the part of geologists for centuries, no physical evidence of any kind has ever been found in the Sinai to support the thought that a huge throng of living creatures ever lived out there.
The following is from the Sea of Reeds Web Site in Egypt and speaks to this very question:
TRADITIONAL MOUNT SINAI: “Having visited Mount Sinai in the southern Sinai Peninsula, I have seen first hand the only place the Israelites could possibly have camped in the desert. It is a small, flat valley area adjacent to Mount Sinai. Yet even this place would allow for only about one square yard per person and how could so many have lived cramped into so small a place for any length of time? Furthermore, despite extensive archeological investigation throughout the region, nothing has ever been found that can conclusively be tied to the Exodus – to so large a population ever having occupied this area.”
(Note: Animal bones including human would be preserved forever in the desert sands. If many people or animals had died there, their bones would still be there, but they aren’t. The reason is simple: it never happened. Keep in mind; this particular Egyptian article deals with one valley in which the Israelites are said to have camped for a couple of nights. But these people were moving across the Sinai for forty years so they had to find valleys to camp in like this one, every night. The problem is, they don’t exist anywhere in the Sinai. I guess the anonymous writer didn’t know this when he wrote his story.)
Here’s another amazing claim. The Bible says the Egyptian charioteers left shortly after the Jews. But the Jews couldn’t have managed any more than a couple of miles a day in that heat and over hot sands, while the charioteers could gallop as much as 18 miles AN HOUR. It wouldn’t have taken an hour for them to catch up to the Jews many of whom would have been lying dead in the sand anyway.
It couldn’t have happened as described. The dynamics just don’t work. The story goes that the chariots rushed full speed ahead, two by two, into the small channel between those two great walls of water being held up by an unseen force. You would think it would have been a shocking and amazing sight – enough to frighten almost everyone! But it didn’t frighten the Egyptian commander. His courage never faltered. He plunged right ahead at full speed, right down into the riverbed, right where he had to be so that he and his men, and his horses, and his trailing soldiers, could all come together and conveniently drown at the same time. Nice touch.
Think about that. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. If you saw a body of water divided into two towering walls being held up on either side by a mysterious unseen force, would you plunge ahead down into the dry river bed feeling secure that the water would stay up there until you got safely across?
Not me, I admit I’d be scared to death by such a sight. After all, waters being held back by some mystifying, unknown force, high above me and my men, are not an
everyday sight. Not for Egyptians, nor for Jews. Not even in those amazing Biblical days. I would have taken a pass. “You go ahead,” I would have said, “ I’ll come later.”
But not so the Egyptians. Their charioteers plunged down into the ravine without the least trepidation. And their foot soldiers did the same. (The soldiers must have been fleet-of-foot since they were able to catch up to the galloping charioteers and get into the ravine before the charioteers had gotten through, so they could all die together. Another lucky break for the Chosen People. )
Finally consider this question for a moment: if the Jews didn’t know God was going to part the “Red Sea’ for them, and if they were being chased by Egyptian charioteers, why in the world were they where they were in the first place?
(Think carefully about this.)
There apparently weren’t any roads or bridges across the Sea or the Jews would have used them and there would be no problem. That makes sense. So assuming there weren’t, how in the world did Moses expect to get across the Lakes? And if he didn’t know how, then what was he doing there? Was he lost? Didn’t he know another way across or around the Lakes? He apparently knew where he was going because he was on a 500-mile trip. So, why would he lead this huge group of people up to the edge of a Lake that he couldn’t cross? Who in the world planned that trip anyway? Certainly not ‘Triple AAA’!
The whole story simply falls apart if you simply think for yourself. If you are indoctrinated, then your answer will be “God did it” to everything. That’s what indoctrination is all about. But if you think for yourself, you can easily see how poorly thought-out it is. It collapses of its own stupidity once you stop sucking in the party line.
The Red Sea (Sea of Reeds) didn’t open up. The million or so Jews and animals didn’t exist and they didn’t cross the desert and God didn’t hold the waters back for them. None of it happened. As for the Egyptians chasing them, they didn’t happen either. The 600 chariots and their accompanying horses and soldiers didn’t all fit comfortably and stupidly into the Red Sea between two high walls of water so they could be conveniently drowned. No one would be that stupid, certainly not combat veterans, and certainly not the seasoned commander of an Egyptian unit of trained charioteers. None of it ever happened and, come to think of it, neither did the Exodus. That story is filled with holes from beginning to end. What amazes me is that these stories have hung around so long. But remember what I said earlier: the stories in the Old Testament are all about Jews. And in every story, the Jews prevail, thanks to this God who loves them so much because they are so wonderful and because Jews wrote all the scripts.
But did something happen? Sure. And we will get to that in a moment. But the second part of the Exodus is Passover, the holy day that preceded it. We need to take a look at that story.
You remember Passover? That’s where God killed thousands of innocent Egyptian children in order to punish the King of Egypt. Like what the King did was the children’s fault. Here’s how that story goes.
PASSOVER
The Egyptian King refused to free his Jewish slaves as God requested. (Here comes God again to save his Jewish kids from the rest of us.) So, God decides to punish the King. He sends an angel to tell the Jews He is coming to kill all the Egyptian first-born babies. Since God didn’t know where the Jews lived, and in order to keep them safe from his avenging angels, he tells the Jews to put lamb’s blood on their front door. That way, His Angels would know which homes to let alone – which homes to “pass over” – and which ones to ‘visit’.
(Know what I would have done if I were an Egyptian in those days? I would have immediately got some lamb’s blood and put it on MY front door to confuse those dumb Angels – and they would have skipped me thinking I was Jewish. Make sense? Of course it makes sense. Not only that, but I might have gone into business selling lamb’s blood to other Egyptians to put on their front doors, to save their children from being murdered. Without the houses being marked, the Angels were apparently helpless.)
And what about this one: the story of Joseph. This is one more wonderful success stories about a Jewish kid that makes good in a foreign land. Joseph is a slave who becomes the Pharaoh’s dream interpreter and top assistant and eventually Governor of all of Egypt. That’s not a bad job for a Jewish slave but we have to keep in mind who it was that wrote this story. Somehow Jews always seem to come out ahead in Bible stories. (I wonder why.)
(Note: As we read on, keep in mind the one thing that is integral to belief in all these stories: the suspension of common sense.)
Some Bible documentaries seem to suggest that Moses was the son of a Jewish mistress and the Pharaoh, Rameses II. That in fear for his life, his mother spirited him away. Somehow, Moses ended up living for some years in a small town in the desert. Then one day, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. (Suspension #1.)
God tells Moses to go back to Egypt and order the Pharaoh (Rameses II) to release the Jews. God apparently can’t accomplish this by Himself, but needs Moses to carry this message to Rameses. (Suspension #2.)
So Moses goes back and gets an audience with the Pharaoh, Rameses II. No one bothers to explain how this unknown man out of the desert can get such an audience (Suspension #3), but he appears before the Pharaoh and tells him God has sent him (Moses) to demand that he (Rameses II) set the Jews free.
Rameses declines. To prove the power of his God, Moses then throws his shaft to the floor where upon it turns into a deadly snake. (Suspension #4.)
(Remember this is not supposed to be a fairytale. It is not supposed to be science fiction. It is supposed to be true. Do you believe this happened? Do you believe this COULD happen, a walking stick turn itself into a living deadly snake? I don’t.)
Rameses, seeing the snake on the floor before him, and becoming frightened, motions to two of his high priests that are standing in the room. Responding to their Pharaoh’s concern, the two priests throw their own shafts onto the floor whereupon BOTH OF THEM also turn into snakes. (Suspension #5.)
(So now we have three snakes on the floor in the room.) At what point does this become silly? But wait, there’s more!)
As the snakes tangle, Moses’ snake suddenly turns on the other two and devours both of them! That’s right. The good snake eats the two bad snakes. (Suspension #6.) The Pharaoh is suitably impressed and I don’t know where the story goes from there but who cares. It is all such silly nonsense.
Bible stories are like that. The are predicated on the assumption that you will suspend your thinking processes and buy into what is pure nonsense. And for thousands of years, the “faithful” have done just that. That’s why these stories persist. The willingness of the faithful to be manipulated.
So what is the truth behind these stories? Here’s my guess.
A small group of Jewish slaves, perhaps a few thousand, did escape slavery in Egypt. When they were found to be missing, the Pharaoh sends his charioteers – 600 of them – with a small number of soldiers under the command of his eldest son to bring them hack.
Altogether about 1,200 soldiers were dispatched to bring back a few thousand Jewish runaways. However, when the soldiers caught up to the fleeing Jews, there was an intense battle and the Pharaoh’s son was killed (hence the first born story) permitting the Jews to escape. Getting two thousand hardy Jews across the desert might have been possible and that might be the genesis of the story of Passover and the Exodus.
The original “urban legends” had a small grain of truth to them and that was the basis for the Bible stories
But:
(1) All the Egyptian first born were not slain by God.
(2) There was no fly-over by the Angels of Death (what’s an Angel of Death?).
(3) Passover is the celebration of something that truly never happened – thank God.
(4) The journey over the desert by a handful of robust slaves may have taken a few months walking mainly at night but never forty years.
These stories can be found, among others, in my Essay titled; “The Origin of Faith – The Day The Jews Invented God”.
Before exploring the Essay, let ms say this: I have no desire to hurt religion or the people who deeply believe in it. I think of Christianity as a bulwark to communism and as a means to a political affiliation among people that can be – and has been – used to transcend national borders.
For example, in Europe over the centuries, people in Spain hated people in Germany, people in Ireland all but detested people in England, the Germans and the Fresh hated one another as do the English with the people in France and Germany etc.
What allowed them all to come to America and build a new nation among themselves was the common thread created by Christianity. That thread bonded them more strongly than their differences alienated them. They all accepted Jesus and the existence of a hereafter.
Therefore it strikes me that Christianity is a political force which acts for the good of the world as much as it is a religious force which acts for the good of its followers. And I don’t think believers have to accept that any more than I have to except the inherent religiosity of the various churches, just as long as we all live their message.
When religious individuals get down on religion because of the sex scandals that crop up in all religions or because of the Tele-evangelists that in my opinion are very destructive of religion, that doesn’t do any good for them or their country. They are, to coin a phrase, throwing out the baby with the bath water when what we be far better for them and America would be to work to correct what wrong in their churches.
There is little as comforting when dealing with life’s serious problems than simply going to church or appealing to a higher authority for the strength to cope. Many people truly need that. .
When I write that the Old Testament may not be what most of us were taught, or that the Old Testament stories may be more allegorical than factual, I worry that I am hurting the very cause that I wish to champion: religion.
You might say I want the physical organization to succeed but the ‘faith’ to be more in the order of a prayer: there for those who need it but not necessary for those who do not – but always within the fabric of the church.
Let me add that no matter what is truth and what is fancy, if the fancy helps you to get through this life and deal with its many crises and problems, then the church’s attitude and mine should be and is, “more (of God’s) power to you.” After all, there are many roads to Damascus with Damascus being the end of life and the paths being the churches and institutions that help us to get there.
So that’s my reasoning yet I hasten to add that I find it almost self-evident that Genesis is a collection of stories fabricated loosely on true cataclysmic events of ancient times. The tales of these events handed down verbally over many generations while they maintained much of their central character, in passing took on a new dimension as, “Acts of God”. And for very understandable reasons.
The contemporaries of the day had little understanding of the forces that beset them; hence, they stood in awe of much that to us today would be passed off as nature’s phenomena. That wasn’t true to them and so they immortalized those events in ballad stories and songs that took on a life of their own and in that manner were they passed from generation to generation for centuries. Eventually the stories, or what was left of them, reached the ears of men that could write and so, each interpreting the stories with his own life experiences – they were written down for posterity transmuted in the process from acts of nature to Acts of God. .
Over the next millennia, hundreds of these written “texts” were found throughout Israel and translated from Hebrew to Greek by the Emperor Alexander. But in time, the money ran out and a great number of untranslated texts were added to the back of the newly bound volume known as the Old Testament,. These texts have since been lost and are now known by the name: “The Lost Texts Of Israel”.
That is a very perfunctory history of how, where and when the Old Testament stories got written which explains why there are so many inaccuracies in them. How could there not be? And that prompted my Essay. Therefore, the question: am I doing more harm than good writing it? I hope the later but I fear the former. The Essay does explore a lot of things in a way that might upset a lot of people.
Which wasn’t my intent. I actually believe religion can not only survive but be stronger than ever if it alters not its message so much but its fundamental structure and philosophy.
If not, it will become increasingly irrelevant, at least in America.
Joey
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NOAH’S ARK and EXODUS – REVISITED
Noah's Arc
NOAH’S ARK and EXODUS – REVISITED
By Joseph J Kusnell for Boomeryearbook.com
Excerpted from ‘THE ORIGIN OF FAITH – THE DAY THE JEWS INVENTED GOD”
Available at www.boomeryearbook.com now.
Noah: There was a great flood. A man named Noah and his three sons, at God’s command, built a great Ark and on it, they put two pairs of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal on the Earth. How many animals were there? That depends on who’s counting.
According to paleontologists, one million years ago, the planet was covered with dinosaurs and huge, flying reptiles. But according to Genesis, God created animals after he created Adam and Eve and Noah came along even later. So by Noah’s time, there had to be lots of them. So God instructed Noah to build the Ark 480′ long, 80′ wide, and 48′ high. (The dimensions were in cubits, each cubit measured as 19″..) Think of that. A vessel this awesome would be over 20,000 tons and would carry the same cargo as 539 railroad cars, a train that would be over five miles long. That’s immense.
Unfortunately, all Noah had to build with were his three sons and maybe some prehistoric stone tools – primarily cutting stones and bores. With these ancient tools he had to accomplish an enormous task. He had to (1) cut down about 250 or 300 very large trees. He had to (2) rip 2,000 planks from these trees. He had to (3) smooth the cut planks with a stone tool boring thousands of connecting holes with still another stone tool. He had to (5) build the Ark and fasten it with thousands of wood pegs that he also had to make himself and lastly, he had to (6) caulk the entire vessel with hot pitch and get this monstrosity down into the water to see if it floated. Considering the huge size of the Ark and its 20,000+ lbs. that alone would be a tall order for three or seven guys regardless of the problems building it. My guess? God had to help push.)
Even then, Noah’s work wasn’t done. Next he and his sons had to go around the world – on foot – collecting many pairs of all the animals and birds on Earth. Plus they had to gather enough food to last them all six months, a gigantic task in itself.
When that was done, they then had to herd this huge mass of living creatures – animals and birds – along with tons of food – all the way back to where the Ark was waiting. How they could have accomplished any of this is beyond me. I would have figured it would take up to 10,000 men 5-10 years to get it all done back in Noah’s time. But I could be wrong. Faith does move mountains, they say.
Lastly, once they got everybody and every creature and all that food up on the Ark and set out to sea, the seven of them had the unenviable task of handling the waste matter and manure from all these creatures for the next six months. Every day, sometimes many times a day, these folks would have to enter these cages of wild beasts, gather up the tons of waste material they would generate, and find a way to transport that mess to the sides of the arc, and throw it overboard. The trouble with that is the Ark has no sides. It is a closed vessel, so I don’t have the slightest idea of how they would have been able to discard these tons of waste material without flooding the boat. It’s just one more question that is left unanswered in the Bible’s rendition of the story like how did they feed the animals that live off other animals? Think on that for a while. .
So that’s the story of Noah and his Arc. Unbelievable? Of course it is. In fact, it’s so unbelievable you wouldn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Yet, every few years, someone finds the Ark buried in the mountains somewhere. I’m waiting for it to show up in Disney World.
The truth is it never happened, not the way we have been taught. The Bible story is maybe allegorical, maybe apocryphal; but certainly it is fictional. Maybe there was a local flood and maybe a guy built a boat and took his family and his pets with him until the water went down in a few days, but that’s about it.
Consider this from Iraq’s ancient past.
The first known civilization appeared about 3500 BC in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers then known as Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. In the 1800’s, archeologists excavating an ancient Sumerian site uncovered a series of clay tablets covered with a form of wedge-shaped characters now called cuneiform writing. This earliest form of writing was used to depict stories of the culture and events of the early Sumerians. (Later these same people invented the more traditional form of writing that we know today.)
The clay tablets uncovered in this ‘dig’ were packed up and brought back to England were they were promptly stored and just as promptly forgotten. It wasn’t until one hundred years later that someone remembered them and began the tedious task of translating them. They were astounded at what they found.
On a series of tablets was discovered the story of a great flood in the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates – since thought to be the site of the Garden of Eden. The flood was so severe, that much of the surrounding land simply disappeared. The tablets went on to say that an observer on a raft on the river was unable to see land in any direction.
A local merchant, who made a habit of shipping cargo down river to the towns that lay below Sumeria, became apprehensive about his supplies and decided to construct individual rafts to save them from the approaching flood waters. When he was finished, in order to keep his rafts together on the river, he fastened the rafts together. (The Bible makes reference to the Ark having ’sections’.) When everything was ready, the merchant ordered the raft loaded and he, his family, his animals, and his cargo set off down river to safety.
The story put down on the clay tablets is long. It states how the passengers lost all sight of land as the water rose to levels never seen before and the raft drifted down river until finally, it entered the Persian Gulf that bordered Mesopotamia. There the raft continued to drift for about seven days, finally coming to rest on an island. Because the Gulf waters are salted, the passengers had no fresh water to drink so they drank their cargo which was beer, a substance which preserves well and which is full of nutrients. The story ends with drawings of the passengers and animals disembarking from the raft and being greeted by a large crowd of angry people. The people have been since translated as angry creditors demanding some sort of payment from the merchant without which he would be put into slavery as was the custom in those days. .
That is the story of a great flood recorded on ancient Sumerian clay tablets and written in cuneiform, the oldest writing known to man. It is easy to see how this story could have been transformed thousands of years later into the Bible story of Noah and his Ark as we know it today. All the Bible writer had to go on was a word of mouth story handed down over the millennia like an urban legend. Certainly there was a great flood. The tablets support that. Certainly it covered a large area. The tablets support that too.
But the flood was still a regional rather than an international event. And God didn’t appear to the merchant to tell him to save himself and his family; the merchant was simply trying to save his merchandise. Nor were two of every unclean animal and seven of each clean animal in the world taken aboard the Ark which would have been impossible. What was on the Ark were a few pack animals intended to be sold down river along with a few people, some merchandise cargo, and some beer.
So it is written on the tablets.
As to the voyage itself, far from taking seven months which would have been impossible, it took one week, which was very possible. All the unanswerable questions about gathering, feeding and caring for all those wild animals also disappear with the Sumerian version. There aren’t any wild animals to worry about. And the questions of supplying fresh water for so many creatures for so long a period of time also disappear.
It seems clear to me that the Sumerian version of the flood is factual while the Biblical version, complete with God and a series of mythical religious extensions is basically fiction.
Nevertheless, the lesson is real.
Next we have the story of The Exodus, another urban tale rewritten hundreds of years later while greatly embellished by the writer.
THE EXODUS
According to the Bible, 600,000 men along with their wives, children, and “a large number of others” – English version, left Egypt on a journey across the Sinai Desert, a place where temperatures range from 120-degree during the day to a cold 50 degrees at night. Each family took with them an untold number of goats, sheep and cattle representing the wealth of the nation.
There were old people and young people, sick people and well people, children and babies and even newborns. According to the Bible, this lusty throng was bent on reaching Jerusalem across a blistering desert, a place where there would be absolutely nothing but blowing sand and a blazing sun for the next five hundred miles.
The Biblical rendition goes on to say that this huge mass of animals and people lived out there – in that desert – in that horrible, torturous place – all 2,000,000 of them, for the next 40 years!
Now let’s think about that for a moment to determine if it even sounds plausible. First of all, how much LAND do you think so great a throng would cover out in the desert? Let figure it out. A million people would make a good size city, let’s say a city the size of Phoenix, Arizona. So that’s like ten to twelve miles square (say one hundred square miles).
But there were also a million animals. The Bible mentioned goats and sheep and cattle for starters, but this is a desert so there must also have been some camels. In any event, there were a given number of these animals for each family (animals represented their wealth) and when you add them up, that amounts to at least another million creatures in the desert. So for starters, we have two million living creatures in the Sinai Desert for a period of forty years who would certainly need both food and water to survive – lots and lots of water. At any one time, they would also occupy a lot of space extending for miles in every direction.
Allowing ten more square miles for the one million animals which is probably a gross understatement (what did the animals live on out in the desert anyway? They don’t eat bread.) we have a total of twenty miles square or four hundred square miles of creatures spread out across the blistering, blowing sands.
That means just to walk to the back of the crowd in that heat and over those sands would take Moses up to six hours with another six to return to the front. That’s a twelve-hour walk in 120-degree heat Just to communicate with his people bringing up the rear. Did he do this every day? Once a week? Once a month? Or did he just sit down and wait as his people struggled past him until the people in the back caught up?
That’s what the Bible says. Because it is so patently ridiculous some people have tried to alleviate the problem by saying the Bible doesn’t mean exactly what it says. That maybe instead of 600,000 men, their wives and children and “a large number of others”, it just means a few people. Sorry, but that doesn’t wash. It’s true or it’s not true, you can’t have it both ways. The numbers are quite specific.
So if the Bible is to be believed, this immense mob traveled out into the desert on a journey that was to take forty years. They couldn’t travel at night because at night the desert is very cold so they would need to seek shelter for themselves and their children. So they huddled at night and moved during the blazing hot daylight hours. Either way, it’s a tough, formidable journey – a journey that would require a lot of food and even more water to accomplish. Where would that come from out there in the desert?
The Bible says the food came from God in the form of Manna, the water from the few existing springs along the way. I think manna is like unleavened bread. Now, if you can accept that they ate nothing but this bread, three meals a day, seven days a week, for the next forty years, we will let it go at that. But I find that hard to believe both psychologically and physically. This type diet would cause serious problems among the adults. I can’t imagine the effect on children. And the animals as I said earlier don’t eat bread. As to the water, that is another matter altogether.
The Sinai desert isn’t littered with wells. If it were, it wouldn’t be a desert at all. That’s what makes a desert – the lack of water. So even if a few wells are there, and they are, they are few and far apart.
Now could this immense throng of people and animals get through a day, walking in the blazing hot desert, without a continual supply of water? No they couldn’t. If they walked an hour in that sun without drinking water, they’d all be dead at the end of that day. You have to have water with you all the time. So, I guess they would have carried water bags – goatskin water bags. (Where they could have found a million goatskin water bags, I have no idea. And if you say they killed their goats and made them, it would take maybe a hundred thousand goats to make a million water bags and that’s a whole lot of goats. But to continue.)
Day 1: 8:00 AM.
The people have been walking for an hour. The sun is high, and the temperature hovers around 110 degrees. The hot sands are blowing, children are whining and everyone is hungry and thirsty – but mostly thirsty. They need water. They ALL need water. The children and animals most of all. There is an oasis up the desert a short ways. It contains four small water wells. Our people that stretch backward for over twenty miles need to fill their million water bags from those small wells. (Figure a water bag must hold at least a quart of water – probably more. A million quarts of water would be 250,000 gallons. A quarter of a million gallons of water from these four wells? I’d think those wells would be dry in an hour.)
So, how long do you think it will take us to fill all our water bags? Well let’s figure it out. Do you know how you draw water from a well into a water bag? It isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. You have to lower the bag, let it fill up, then bring it up and start the process over again. It has to take fifteen – maybe twenty seconds per bag at the quickest. So, if you have a million PEOPLE and you have to fill a million water bags, how long would it take? We have decided on fifteen seconds per bag. Now fifteen seconds may not sound like much but you have a million people so that’s a million water bags. That would mean they’d need fifteen million seconds to fill them all up. That converts to 250,000 minutes, 4,166 hours, and about 175 days. That’s six months. And the animals still have to be watered somehow.
Of course, if there were four wells (probably a typical oasis), it would only take maybe six weeks for the people to all get to the well. But it wouldn’t matter because in six weeks, they’d all be dead. You can’t go two hours in the desert without water let alone six weeks.
So the folks in the front get their water and move on. But this takes time and even as they do, people in the back are keeling over, dying of thirst from the scorching heat. And during all this, what happens to the babies and the animals? They too would begin dying by the thousands. It would never work. It could never work. Everyone would be dead of heat stroke or dehydration before they got 20 miles from Egypt. Life is really tough in the desert.
Something is wrong here and I’ll tell you what it is. The story is patently ridiculous. It is impossible five different ways. It never happened. Maybe a dozen people could make such a trip, maybe a couple of dozen Bedouins could, but that’s it. Not the million reported in the Bible story and certainly no animals other than maybe a few camels. The truth is the Sinai would have been a deathtrap for the fleeing Jews and their animals and they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at all.
Water and food are not even the only problems. This is a huge crowd of people. People of all types, males and females, young and old, angry and impatient. Such a huge and diverse throng of people is bound to have problems – all kinds of problems. How is this huge throng to be disciplined and controlled out in the desert?
For example, what did these people do all day and night, every day of the week, seven days a week, for forty years? That’s a lifetime. What did they do just to pass the time? Did they have disagreements, fights and arguments caused by the heat or by someone coveting his neighbor’s wife or daughter? Who policed them? Who was there to respond to emergencies? Who was in control of such a mass of humanity?
Hell, the guys in the back were twenty miles away from the leaders so who was in charge way back there? Come on now, let’s get serious. These weren’t a bunch of pussycats. They were ancient Jews, a tough, robust, lustful group of people (as the Bible tells us). Remember when Moses came down from the mount? What did he find? The people were engaging in a drunken ORGY! And now, they are out in that stinking, hot, sweaty desert with nothing in view but more and more hot days and nights. They want relief. They want to forget. They want a PARTY!
And who was there to deal with all the pent up frustration these people would have had to feel? Who would see that fights did not break out? That people didn’t start killing each other? After all, tempers had to be short in that terrible heat with never enough water and boredom had to be a continuing problem. So who would be in charge. The Bible doesn’t address any of these problems. And the reason is that none of this ever happened. It would have been physically impossible to move such a large number of animals and people across the Sinai Desert in this manner. No matter how many years you tried. If you started out with a million, you’d be lucky to reach your destination with a couple of hundred. That might even be optimistic because it is very likely that none of you would ever get where you were going – not with that crowd.
And remember this: there had to be births along the way over forty years. Babies – lots of them. After all there were a million people and Jewish families had a lot of children in those days. They were a lustful group. So how did they tend their babies in the blowing sands and in the awful heat of the desert? How were they able to raise their young (and the young animals that also must have been born.) How did they get milk for the infants, or water or food? After all, it is said the people existed on Manna from God but babies don’t eat manna. Neither do animals. And if the adult women were living on manna, how much mother’s milk could they have produced?
The whole thing is utter nonsense. It never happened. It never COULD have happened. Not the way it’s written. A writer heard an old story from the ancient past and embellished it just as fiction writers do today. We call it poetic license. The biblical author used poetic license to tell his version of an “urban legend” that had become near and dear to his people.
Anyway, if God wanted the Jews to cross the desert, there were easier ways for Him to accomplish that. After all, he is God. He could have simply transported them from where they were to where he wanted them to be. That would have been much easier. Why kill half of them if he loved them so much? No, this story is not real, it is largely allegorical but based on something. What that something might be we will discuss in a moment.
(Did you wonder where I got the 1,000,000 animals from? Well the Bible says that there were “600,000 men accompanied by their wives and children and some hangers-on (English version) together with many sheep, goats, and cattle”. You can make up your own numbers but I used 150,000 families represented by the 600,000 men, each of whom had some number of animals. Figure for yourself how many they might have had per family? A dozen sheep, half dozen goats, a donkey or two, a camel or two, a dog or other household pet, some pigs, some chickens? Pick a number per family. I used an average of 7 per family, which I really think is conservative. And that’s where I got the 1,000,000 animals.)
Anyway, none of this happened because none of it COULD have happened. It’s just not possible. MAYBE a few dozen people MIGHT have been able to do something like this, but this wasn’t a few dozen, this was a million or more. The Bible is very exact about that.
In closing, let me make a few observations. As the Bible recites the tale, the Egyptian King let his slaves go but then changed his mind. So he sent out 600 chariots to catch them and bring them back. He also sent some soldiers.
First, chariots are horse-drawn and horses can gallop easily at 15-18 miles per hour. Soldiers force walks about 3-4 miles per hour. After the first hour, the chariots will be 14 miles ahead of the soldiers. It will take the soldiers four hours to catch up. After three hours, the horses will be 54 miles down the road and the soldiers just 16 so they will now be at least 9 hours behind. And so forth. So the soldiers are pointless in the chase. Also, chariots normally carry one or two men standing side by side. If it’s two men, and 600 chariots, that’s a total of a maximum of 1,200 men.
Twelve hundred men to capture and bring back over 1,000,000 hot and tired people – people that are spread out over 400 square miles of desert with 1,000,000 animals in tow? You got to be kidding. The Jews were a tough group of ex-slaves. If they decided to resist just a little, the charioteers would have no chance. With twelve hundred against one million, the soldiers would have been overwhelmed in a heartbeat.
PLUS and most importantly, GOD was on the side of the Jews. The King knew this because, according to the Bible, he had just been beat up for the past seven years until in defeat, he had to let his slaves go. Yet before they are out of sight, he changes his mind and dares God to strike him and his people dead by going after them. Now this is indeed a man with a hard head.
Anyway, how come as they galloped across the desert sands, the Bible doesn’t mention the bodies of Jews lying in the burning sand where they dropped from heat exhaustion and thirst which most certainly would have been the case. The desert should have been, and still must be, littered with their bones by the thousands.
But it isn’t and that’s because this never happened. Neither did the crossing of the Red Sea (actually the Sea of Reeds). That is one myth (The Crossing) born of another (The Exodus).
THE CROSSING OF THE SEA OF REEDS
The reference to the Red Sea in the Bible is an error of translation. The Bible does not say the people of the Exodus crossed “the Red Sea”, it says they crossed the “Sea of Reeds”. The Sea of Reeds refers to a small number of lakes also known as the Bitter Lakes that in many places is simply marshland.
None of these small lakes is very large individually and crossing one of them might be easy enough for a small number of people (particularly when the lake is at its low ebb, which happens regularly). But, to talk about a million people and a million animals crossing these lakes, is another matter altogether.
(Not to mention 600 Egyptian Chariots with accompanying foot soldiers that all fitted nicely within the banks of one of those small lakes at the same time so they could be conveniently drowned – another wild stretch of the imagination.)
Look, let’s try an exercise. Let’s compute how long this Egyptian column chasing the Jews would actually be. The column consisted of 600 galloping chariots and some number of trailing foot soldiers as described in the Bible. Figure to fit conveniently into the river channel to drown, the chariots would be limited to two abreast, with sufficient room between the first and second sets so they will not run up each other’s heels. The horse and chariot are 20’ long front to back. With spacing between the sets, I made it 30’ total. Multiply that by 300 sets of two chariots each and you get a column that is 9,000 feet long (almost two miles) and that doesn’t count the column of foot soldiers coming behind them. So that’s a column at least two miles long that would have to fit nicely into the bed of the first of the ‘lakes’, so they could be conveniently drowned together.
(As a matter of fact, I doubt any of the lakes are actually wide enough to have contained all the Egyptians soldiers and chariots at one time so they could drown together as the Bible states they did. Remember the Bible says there were no survivors so they all had to be inside the waterbed at the same time. If some were too far behind they would have seen what happened and escaped. If some had been too far up front, they would have been out of the riverbed before the waters rushed over them. For everyone to drown, they all had to be within the banks of that marsh lake at the exact same time which alone seems impossible.)
But that doesn’t matter anyway because trying to get 1,000,000 people and 1,000,000 animals through this narrow channel as God held up the waters would have taken the better part of a month. Big crowds in the hot desert move very, very slowly and this was more than a big crowd, it was a huge crowd. (God would have been much better served just building them a bridge.)
(Note: Biblical ‘scholars’ – those people who study the Bible more to reinforce it than to seek out the truth – find all kinds of excuses when Bible stories turn up to be inaccurate or flat. When you ask them about the million people and the million animals specifically referenced in the Bible story, they tend to brush it off by saying it wasn’t meant to be a literal number. Well to me, it’s true or it’s not – when they say 600,000 men I assume they mean 600,000 men or what’s the use of saying it?)
The Hebrews of the Exodus were a HUGE throng of men, women, and children, all moving at a snail’s pace across a very difficult landscape. They have another million animals with them, So we have two million living creatures moving across a very difficult desert landscape in intense heat. Earlier we calculated about 400 square miles of them.
Now for two million of ANYTHING to make its way past a given point ANYWHERE, would take days – maybe even weeks – to complete. And in that excessive heat, and over that difficult terrain, it very well would have taken longer. So for them to make their way across the bed of even the first lake of the Bitter Lakes, the waters would have to be held back a long time (even by Hollywood standards). For me, I like the idea of a bridge much better.
(Keep in mind, the width of this ‘channel’ through the water that God created would be limited to feet or at most yards. Therefore, the throng that we estimated to be 20 miles wide and 20 miles deep would had to be reorganized to get through that narrow channel. Let’s say they were reorganized into a column 12 abreast. How long would the new column then be? My guess would be 60 miles long. So the Jews would be passing through that channel, between those high walls of “mighty water”, for at least a month. Talk about being scared!
But they weren’t scared because it never happened. And the story isn’t new either. Check this out. It’s from ancient Egyptian writings.
Note: A woman accompanying the pharaoh on a rowing excursion drops “a fish shaped charm of new turquoise” into the lake. Then the chief lector Djadjaemonkh, placed one side of the water of the lake upon the other, and lying down upon a postsherd, he found the fish-shaped charm. Then he brought it back and gave it to its owner. Now as for the water, it was twelve cubits deep, and it amounted to twenty-four cubits after it was folded back. Again he said his magic sayings and the waters of the lake returned to their rightful position. This marvelous thing occurred in the Reign of King Snefru”.
So you see, it had all been done before. This little Egyptian story is thousands of years old and yet, is very much the same as the story of the Red Sea crossing of the Bible written much later. Would you believe this fanciful tale any more than the equally fanciful tale of the “Exodus”? You shouldn’t. Both are equally unfounded.
Over the years, people have tried very hard to make the Exodus work. But they haven’t had much luck. Today, they are trying very hard to dispute the Bitter Lakes as the place of the Israeli crossing, preferring it to be the Red Sea, the “mighty waters” of the Biblical passage. But the literal translation of the Hebrew text is not Red Sea, it is Bitter Lakes, an extended group of marshes.
The story of the “Red Sea” crossing is a fable just as is the story of the Exodus. Neither ever happened. Consider this fact: Bible scholars estimate the size of the Exodus being anywhere from one to two million PEOPLE plus the animals. (I have used a total of 2,000,000 to include both.) That’s fine, but if there HAD been such a huge throng living in the desert for forty years, where is the physical evidence they would have had to leave behind? The desert is an inhospitable place. If a large group of living creatures spent forty years out there, many, many would have died and their bones would be buried in the sands for eons. But they are not. Despite continuing efforts on the part of geologists for centuries, no physical evidence of any kind has ever been found in the Sinai to support the thought that a huge throng of living creatures ever lived out there.
The following is from the Sea of Reeds Web Site in Egypt and speaks to this very question:
TRADITIONAL MOUNT SINAI: “Having visited Mount Sinai in the southern Sinai Peninsula, I have seen first hand the only place the Israelites could possibly have camped in the desert. It is a small, flat valley area adjacent to Mount Sinai. Yet even this place would allow for only about one square yard per person and how could so many have lived cramped into so small a place for any length of time? Furthermore, despite extensive archeological investigation throughout the region, nothing has ever been found that can conclusively be tied to the Exodus – to so large a population ever having occupied this area.”
(Note: Animal bones including human would be preserved forever in the desert sands. If many people or animals had died there, their bones would still be there, but they aren’t. The reason is simple: it never happened. Keep in mind; this particular Egyptian article deals with one valley in which the Israelites are said to have camped for a couple of nights. But these people were moving across the Sinai for forty years so they had to find valleys to camp in like this one, every night. The problem is, they don’t exist anywhere in the Sinai. I guess the anonymous writer didn’t know this when he wrote his story.)
Here’s another amazing claim. The Bible says the Egyptian charioteers left shortly after the Jews. But the Jews couldn’t have managed any more than a couple of miles a day in that heat and over hot sands, while the charioteers could gallop as much as 18 miles AN HOUR. It wouldn’t have taken an hour for them to catch up to the Jews many of whom would have been lying dead in the sand anyway.
It couldn’t have happened as described. The dynamics just don’t work. The story goes that the chariots rushed full speed ahead, two by two, into the small channel between those two great walls of water being held up by an unseen force. You would think it would have been a shocking and amazing sight – enough to frighten almost everyone! But it didn’t frighten the Egyptian commander. His courage never faltered. He plunged right ahead at full speed, right down into the riverbed, right where he had to be so that he and his men, and his horses, and his trailing soldiers, could all come together and conveniently drown at the same time. Nice touch.
Think about that. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. If you saw a body of water divided into two towering walls being held up on either side by a mysterious unseen force, would you plunge ahead down into the dry river bed feeling secure that the water would stay up there until you got safely across?
Not me, I admit I’d be scared to death by such a sight. After all, waters being held back by some mystifying, unknown force, high above me and my men, are not an
everyday sight. Not for Egyptians, nor for Jews. Not even in those amazing Biblical days. I would have taken a pass. “You go ahead,” I would have said, “ I’ll come later.”
But not so the Egyptians. Their charioteers plunged down into the ravine without the least trepidation. And their foot soldiers did the same. (The soldiers must have been fleet-of-foot since they were able to catch up to the galloping charioteers and get into the ravine before the charioteers had gotten through, so they could all die together. Another lucky break for the Chosen People. )
Finally consider this question for a moment: if the Jews didn’t know God was going to part the “Red Sea’ for them, and if they were being chased by Egyptian charioteers, why in the world were they where they were in the first place?
(Think carefully about this.)
There apparently weren’t any roads or bridges across the Sea or the Jews would have used them and there would be no problem. That makes sense. So assuming there weren’t, how in the world did Moses expect to get across the Lakes? And if he didn’t know how, then what was he doing there? Was he lost? Didn’t he know another way across or around the Lakes? He apparently knew where he was going because he was on a 500-mile trip. So, why would he lead this huge group of people up to the edge of a Lake that he couldn’t cross? Who in the world planned that trip anyway? Certainly not ‘Triple AAA’!
The whole story simply falls apart if you simply think for yourself. If you are indoctrinated, then your answer will be “God did it” to everything. That’s what indoctrination is all about. But if you think for yourself, you can easily see how poorly thought-out it is. It collapses of its own stupidity once you stop sucking in the party line.
The Red Sea (Sea of Reeds) didn’t open up. The million or so Jews and animals didn’t exist and they didn’t cross the desert and God didn’t hold the waters back for them. None of it happened. As for the Egyptians chasing them, they didn’t happen either. The 600 chariots and their accompanying horses and soldiers didn’t all fit comfortably and stupidly into the Red Sea between two high walls of water so they could be conveniently drowned. No one would be that stupid, certainly not combat veterans, and certainly not the seasoned commander of an Egyptian unit of trained charioteers. None of it ever happened and, come to think of it, neither did the Exodus. That story is filled with holes from beginning to end. What amazes me is that these stories have hung around so long. But remember what I said earlier: the stories in the Old Testament are all about Jews. And in every story, the Jews prevail, thanks to this God who loves them so much because they are so wonderful and because Jews wrote all the scripts.
But did something happen? Sure. And we will get to that in a moment. But the second part of the Exodus is Passover, the holy day that preceded it. We need to take a look at that story.
You remember Passover? That’s where God killed thousands of innocent Egyptian children in order to punish the King of Egypt. Like what the King did was the children’s fault. Here’s how that story goes.
PASSOVER
The Egyptian King refused to free his Jewish slaves as God requested. (Here comes God again to save his Jewish kids from the rest of us.) So, God decides to punish the King. He sends an angel to tell the Jews He is coming to kill all the Egyptian first-born babies. Since God didn’t know where the Jews lived, and in order to keep them safe from his avenging angels, he tells the Jews to put lamb’s blood on their front door. That way, His Angels would know which homes to let alone – which homes to “pass over” – and which ones to ‘visit’.
(Know what I would have done if I were an Egyptian in those days? I would have immediately got some lamb’s blood and put it on MY front door to confuse those dumb Angels – and they would have skipped me thinking I was Jewish. Make sense? Of course it makes sense. Not only that, but I might have gone into business selling lamb’s blood to other Egyptians to put on their front doors, to save their children from being murdered. Without the houses being marked, the Angels were apparently helpless.)
And what about this one: the story of Joseph. This is one more wonderful success stories about a Jewish kid that makes good in a foreign land. Joseph is a slave who becomes the Pharaoh’s dream interpreter and top assistant and eventually Governor of all of Egypt. That’s not a bad job for a Jewish slave but we have to keep in mind who it was that wrote this story. Somehow Jews always seem to come out ahead in Bible stories. (I wonder why.)
(Note: As we read on, keep in mind the one thing that is integral to belief in all these stories: the suspension of common sense.)
Some Bible documentaries seem to suggest that Moses was the son of a Jewish mistress and the Pharaoh, Rameses II. That in fear for his life, his mother spirited him away. Somehow, Moses ended up living for some years in a small town in the desert. Then one day, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. (Suspension #1.)
God tells Moses to go back to Egypt and order the Pharaoh (Rameses II) to release the Jews. God apparently can’t accomplish this by Himself, but needs Moses to carry this message to Rameses. (Suspension #2.)
So Moses goes back and gets an audience with the Pharaoh, Rameses II. No one bothers to explain how this unknown man out of the desert can get such an audience (Suspension #3), but he appears before the Pharaoh and tells him God has sent him (Moses) to demand that he (Rameses II) set the Jews free.
Rameses declines. To prove the power of his God, Moses then throws his shaft to the floor where upon it turns into a deadly snake. (Suspension #4.)
(Remember this is not supposed to be a fairytale. It is not supposed to be science fiction. It is supposed to be true. Do you believe this happened? Do you believe this COULD happen, a walking stick turn itself into a living deadly snake? I don’t.)
Rameses, seeing the snake on the floor before him, and becoming frightened, motions to two of his high priests that are standing in the room. Responding to their Pharaoh’s concern, the two priests throw their own shafts onto the floor whereupon BOTH OF THEM also turn into snakes. (Suspension #5.)
(So now we have three snakes on the floor in the room.) At what point does this become silly? But wait, there’s more!)
As the snakes tangle, Moses’ snake suddenly turns on the other two and devours both of them! That’s right. The good snake eats the two bad snakes. (Suspension #6.) The Pharaoh is suitably impressed and I don’t know where the story goes from there but who cares. It is all such silly nonsense.
Bible stories are like that. The are predicated on the assumption that you will suspend your thinking processes and buy into what is pure nonsense. And for thousands of years, the “faithful” have done just that. That’s why these stories persist. The willingness of the faithful to be manipulated.
So what is the truth behind these stories? Here’s my guess.
A small group of Jewish slaves, perhaps a few thousand, did escape slavery in Egypt. When they were found to be missing, the Pharaoh sends his charioteers – 600 of them – with a small number of soldiers under the command of his eldest son to bring them hack.
Altogether about 1,200 soldiers were dispatched to bring back a few thousand Jewish runaways. However, when the soldiers caught up to the fleeing Jews, there was an intense battle and the Pharaoh’s son was killed (hence the first born story) permitting the Jews to escape. Getting two thousand hardy Jews across the desert might have been possible and that might be the genesis of the story of Passover and the Exodus.
The original “urban legends” had a small grain of truth to them and that was the basis for the Bible stories
But:
(1) All the Egyptian first born were not slain by God.
(2) There was no fly-over by the Angels of Death (what’s an Angel of Death?).
(3) Passover is the celebration of something that truly never happened – thank God.
(4) The journey over the desert by a handful of robust slaves may have taken a few months walking mainly at night but never forty years.
These stories can be found, among others, in my Essay titled; “The Origin of Faith – The Day The Jews Invented God”.
Before exploring the Essay, let ms say this: I have no desire to hurt religion or the people who deeply believe in it. I think of Christianity as a bulwark to communism and as a means to a political affiliation among people that can be – and has been – used to transcend national borders.
For example, in Europe over the centuries, people in Spain hated people in Germany, people in Ireland all but detested people in England, the Germans and the Fresh hated one another as do the English with the people in France and Germany etc.
What allowed them all to come to America and build a new nation among themselves was the common thread created by Christianity. That thread bonded them more strongly than their differences alienated them. They all accepted Jesus and the existence of a hereafter.
Therefore it strikes me that Christianity is a political force which acts for the good of the world as much as it is a religious force which acts for the good of its followers. And I don’t think believers have to accept that any more than I have to except the inherent religiosity of the various churches, just as long as we all live their message.
When religious individuals get down on religion because of the sex scandals that crop up in all religions or because of the Tele-evangelists that in my opinion are very destructive of religion, that doesn’t do any good for them or their country. They are, to coin a phrase, throwing out the baby with the bath water when what we be far better for them and America would be to work to correct what wrong in their churches.
There is little as comforting when dealing with life’s serious problems than simply going to church or appealing to a higher authority for the strength to cope. Many people truly need that. .
When I write that the Old Testament may not be what most of us were taught, or that the Old Testament stories may be more allegorical than factual, I worry that I am hurting the very cause that I wish to champion: religion.
You might say I want the physical organization to succeed but the ‘faith’ to be more in the order of a prayer: there for those who need it but not necessary for those who do not – but always within the fabric of the church.
Let me add that no matter what is truth and what is fancy, if the fancy helps you to get through this life and deal with its many crises and problems, then the church’s attitude and mine should be and is, “more (of God’s) power to you.” After all, there are many roads to Damascus with Damascus being the end of life and the paths being the churches and institutions that help us to get there.
So that’s my reasoning yet I hasten to add that I find it almost self-evident that Genesis is a collection of stories fabricated loosely on true cataclysmic events of ancient times. The tales of these events handed down verbally over many generations while they maintained much of their central character, in passing took on a new dimension as, “Acts of God”. And for very understandable reasons.
The contemporaries of the day had little understanding of the forces that beset them; hence, they stood in awe of much that to us today would be passed off as nature’s phenomena. That wasn’t true to them and so they immortalized those events in ballad stories and songs that took on a life of their own and in that manner were they passed from generation to generation for centuries. Eventually the stories, or what was left of them, reached the ears of men that could write and so, each interpreting the stories with his own life experiences – they were written down for posterity transmuted in the process from acts of nature to Acts of God. .
Over the next millennia, hundreds of these written “texts” were found throughout Israel and translated from Hebrew to Greek by the Emperor Alexander. But in time, the money ran out and a great number of untranslated texts were added to the back of the newly bound volume known as the Old Testament,. These texts have since been lost and are now known by the name: “The Lost Texts Of Israel”.
That is a very perfunctory history of how, where and when the Old Testament stories got written which explains why there are so many inaccuracies in them. How could there not be? And that prompted my Essay. Therefore, the question: am I doing more harm than good writing it? I hope the later but I fear the former. The Essay does explore a lot of things in a way that might upset a lot of people.
Which wasn’t my intent. I actually believe religion can not only survive but be stronger than ever if it alters not its message so much but its fundamental structure and philosophy.
If not, it will become increasingly irrelevant, at least in America.
Joey
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