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April 03, 2007
Egyptian Propaganda and the Exodus
The parting of the Red Sea was probably a myth, Egypt's chief archaeologist tells the New York Times today. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, said that he can find no archaeological evidence for the kind of cataclysmic event represented by the Exodus account of God's deliverance of the Israelite slaves from Egyptian slavery.
Speaking of Jewish and Christian believers in the historicity of the event, Hawass said: “If they get upset, I don’t care. This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”
First of all, it is amazing how the New York Times still finds it newsworthy when a scientist announces a biblical event didn't happen, right before a major Jewish or Christian holy day. It is also noteworthy that such reports rarely recount all the other biblical claims to historical reality previously "debunked" by the experts: the existence of the Hittites or of King David, for example.
The Times did, however, include an opposing theory, that offered by another archaeologist, Mohamed Abdel-Maqsou, based on his knowledge of contemporary Egypt.
“A pharaoh drowned and a whole army was killed,” he told the newspaper. “This is a crisis for Egypt, and Egyptians do not document their crises."
Posted by Russell D. Moore at 05:41 PM | Permalink
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Theory #2 seems real original...is this the best they really can come up with?
Posted by: Carl Holmes | Apr 3, 2007 8:35:07 PM
“Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,” Dr. Hawass said
Where is this "restraint" when biologists are talking about macro-evolution?
Posted by: Yaknyeti | Apr 3, 2007 10:43:27 PM
Would someone remind the good scientist and the NY Times that the crossing was perhaps through the Sea of Reeds and not the Red Sea. It is my understanding that Red Sea is a mistranslation of the Hebrew. The Sea of Reeds is near the Mediterranean coast and subject to the effects of a tidal wave that could have been caused by the Santorini earthquake and volcanic eruption. That is one theory anyway. It is interesting that the Times now sees fit to attack Jewish beliefs (and by extension Christian as well) before such an important holiday as Passover. I do not know Dr. Hawass' religion but it is likely Muslim. And many Muslims deny the historicity of Jewish claims, including the existence of the Jerusalem temple and maybe, the Exodus too.
Posted by: Arnold | Apr 4, 2007 12:29:33 AM
I can't help it. This discussion always reminds me of the old joke about a young man (or a boy) reading. He's excited, saying "praise the Lord!" and "Hallelujah!" An older "wiser" man comes by and asks what he's so excited about.
"Oh, I just found out how God parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could cross over it!"
The older man gently corrects him. "That wasn't really the Red Sea. That was the Reed Sea, and it's only about half a foot deep. The Israelites didn't need a miracle to cross it."
The young man, subdued, goes back to his reading. The older man goes on, satisfied that he's nipped religious fanaticism in the bud. A few minutes later, he returns the same way, and there's the young man, excited again, saying "praise the Lord!" and "Hallelujah!"
"What are you so excited about now?" he asks.
"God just drowned the whole Egyptian army in six inches of water!"
Posted by: Beth | Apr 4, 2007 6:29:48 AM
And my mom told me this one last night:
God and a scientist are arguing, and the scientist says, "I can take dirt and create a person, too, you know."
God says, "Okay, let's see you do it."
So the scientist bends down and scoops up a handful of dirt.
"Oh, no!" God says. "You use your own dirt!"
(Okay, so it's a little off topic, but it's a similar principle . . . )
Posted by: Beth | Apr 4, 2007 6:32:22 AM
You know, when a Muslim can't find evidence of something, it's wise to establish the terms of further discussion by asking whether he thinks there's convincing evidence of the Holocaust of the 1940's...
Posted by: Joe Long | Apr 4, 2007 9:00:41 AM
It always worries me when Christians try to come up with natural explanations for miracles. Not that we shouldn't question, but if you don't believe in miracles *at all* what's really the point in being Christian?
Posted by: Nick | Apr 4, 2007 12:58:52 PM
“Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,” Dr. Hawass said.
The classic historian's fallacy of depending entirely on the argument ex silentio to reach a conclusion. All the absence of evidence tells us is that there's an absence of evidence today. Why no evidence survives to the present cannot be determined merely by its absence. Evidence may once have existed but has been lost; evidence may never have existed but the event did occur, leaving no evidence; or the event may never have occurred. Filling the absence with any one of these three has nothing to do with history or science but with one's belief-system. This archeologist would flunk an undergraduate Philosophy and Methods of History course.
The NYTimes has already flunked every imaginable elementary test of character, whether of decency, honor, veracity, justice, or patriotism, not to mention plain old common sense. But that we knew long before this silly article appeared.
Posted by: Dennis Martin | Apr 4, 2007 3:31:44 PM
Bravo to Dennis Martin for an admirably succinct and pointed post. Would that there was such a thing as a real "undergraduate Philosophy and Methods of History course" -- or at least one not poisoned at the well of postmodernism.
Posted by: James A. Altena | Apr 4, 2007 3:47:24 PM
I must lament that we did not discuss the historian's fallacy at all in my own undergraduate Principles of Historical Inquiry class, though we did make an awfully nice display case exhibit.
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Apr 4, 2007 4:11:24 PM
Some way has got to be found to confront the media about this constant looking for and promoting stories to attack Christianity (and Judaism) at Christmas, Easter, and Passover time. The obvious blatant bigotry of it all makes it even more repulsive. Why do Christians allow their businesses or corporations to advertise in media outlets that clearly follow this anti-religious policy? There are certainly plenty of advertising alternatives out there. Hasn't it reached the point that one could consider advertising in the NY TIMES a mortal sin???
Posted by: deacon john m. bresnahan | Apr 4, 2007 5:22:57 PM
My view is that God could use natural phenomena to effect His purpose if He wished. The miracle could be the result of extraordinary natural events happening just in time and in synch.
Posted by: Arnold | Apr 4, 2007 11:37:15 PM
"My view is that God could use natural phenomena to effect His purpose if He wished. The miracle could be the result of extraordinary natural events happening just in time and in synch."
True -- but the question is whether that is actually what occured in the case of the Exodus.
Posted by: James A. Altena | Apr 5, 2007 7:38:36 AM
Arnold, even if what you suggest were the case, who created the "natural" phenomena?! Your wording suggests (may not be what you mean) that natural phenomena somehow exist outside of God's creation and He just uses them for His convenience. But He created nature and its laws. So whether He "breaks" His own laws or "uses" them in some unique way, it's stll He who is doing it all. So I guess I don't see the point in wanting to explain miracles by some strict adherence to "natural" phenomena . . . Why not just recognize that God does what He wills, whether within or beyond what He has already created?
(I think, myself, that we tend to call too many things "miracles" and have made the word nearly useless for distinguishing between, say, the resurrection of Lazarus and the birth of a child. The latter use, for something that is wonderful but obviously within the bounds of God's "natural" law, makes us forget that He does the truly impossible -- for us, and according to that law that He created -- at times.)
Posted by: Beth | Apr 5, 2007 7:46:33 AM
Amen to Nick's comment. What's the point of trying to 'naturalize' every single miracle in the Scriptures? The Resurrection remains the great stumbling block, and if you can't find a plausible 'naturalistic' explanation of that, why bother trying to debunk the others?
And haven't we witnessed the sorry consequences for the faith life of those Christians who have tried over the past hundred or so years to transform the Resurrection from a literal event to a 'spiritual' experience?
Posted by: kate | Apr 5, 2007 8:41:41 AM
Yam Suph really does mean Sea of Reeds. But the water there was probably over people's heads, and that doesn't count the mud.
A tsunami from Santorini would have pulled the water away for only minutes at most. If that. An inland salt slough where now is the Suez Canal might not have been affected. But the Bible says that a strong wind came up and blew for quite some time, and all Israel passed through, and the wagons didn't get bogged down in the mud, then the water came back so quickly that it drowned the Egyptian army, and thus caused a dynastic change, as the eldest son of Pharaoh had already been killed in the plagues.
Dating the Exhodus results in several viable dates with a handful of possible Pharaoh's over a few hundred years. We probably shouldn't tie ourselves down to the Thera detonation unless the other evidence point to that time.We should also be looking for two dynastic changes over a period of no more than 500 years.
The Egyptians apparently doubled their history to make their chronology twice as deep in time, and as archaeologist Dr. Edwin Yamauchi told us in seminary, the Egyptians never recorded their disasters. You have to look for gaps and missing information to deduce them.
Posted by: Labrialumn | Apr 5, 2007 1:21:36 PM
Yes - the dear old New York Times couldn't find evidence of Stalin's genocide-by-starvation, either, despite sending a reporter to the Soviet Union who in fact got a Pulitzer Prize, apparently for not finding it. (As it took a lot of work to miss, that prize was at least an "A for Effort".) No wonder they're excited that an archaeologist can't find something the Egyptian regime may have hidden much more diligently - and much longer ago. The NYT fields a champion "Hide, And Don't Seek!" team. (The world "Hide and Don't Seek" championships this year will probably come down to another close contest between NYT reporters and UN weapons inspectors. The NYT won last year but needs a new trophy - the old one is lost in plain sight somewhere!)
Posted by: Joe Long | Apr 6, 2007 8:11:04 AM
Five alarm alert, folks -- friend Stuart Koehl is back, and promises a major post to this blog (already distributed privately) that will be sure to stir up much debate!
Friends GL and Gene (who else am I forgetting?), hope also to hear from you soon!
Posted by: James A. Altena | Apr 9, 2007 7:04:12 AM
The following is a series of e-mails sent out to various people concerning the Exodus thread and how one can look at the books of the Bible with an historical eye and find one's faith deepened as a result. The exchange began in response to a post on this thread:
_____________________________
I came to Christianity late in life because, over a period of years, I had come to see that it was true. Not metaphorically true, but historically true. Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Son of God, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried and arose on the third day. Once you buy into that, the rest comes easily. As an historian I looked at all of the evidence with a critical eye, and concluded that the Gospels were authentic histories of the life and death of Jesus. I read them as history, and I evaluate them as history. As an historian, this is what I am trained to do.
Looking at the books of the Old Testament, I see some that are obviously historical, some that are poetical, some that are prophetic and some that are sapiental. Then there are the Five Books of Moses. These I would class as "mythical", which is to say that they recount events that actually occurred in the dim past of the Hebrew people and have been told in a manner that provides meaning within the narrative history of that people. Not ever event in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutoronomy (and let's throw in Joshua, while we are at it) is "true" in an absolute, factual manner. People did not keep records, nor did they think in those terms. Attempts to do so are anachronistic. On the other hand, all the events embedded in the stories have a basis in fact. Inconsequential details indicate that they reflect accurately life in the 14th-13th centuries BC, and thus encapsulate a memory that goes back to those times.
Reading Exodus as history, an historian immediately recognizes certain historiographical characteristics which are shared by many ancient histories. First, there is a general disregard for numbers and chronology, with canonical or mystologically significant numbers substituted--forty days and forty nights, forty years, recurrences of seven and eight, different colloquialisms that mean "a long time" or "a great many". This applies to numbers of people. Numbers for people, whether the size of a tribe or the size of an army, or the number of killed and captured in battle, are quite inexact, and deliberately so. Historians mentally discount them without a second thought, as do I with regard to the size of the Exodus and the number of men drowned at the crossing of the Red (or actually, "Reed") Sea.
That the Exodus occurred cannot be denied any more than it is possible to deny that the Trojan War occurred (and about the same time, too!). But, in recounting the great events of their past, the Hebrews were bards and poets, not historians and accountants. The tale got elaborated over the centuries, and retrospectively the hand of divine providence was seen in all the events. Thus, as is fully in keeping with Hebrew historiography, God is the author of all things, and the triumphs and tribulations of His People are laid directly at his door.
So looking back as an historian, I can reconstruct a realistic scenario for the entire Exodus, but only by recognizing the mythical elements added onto the story and amending them to fit historical probability. We can start with the size of the Hebrew tribes, which did not number 600,000 or more (another canonical number), but more likely something on the order of 6000-20,000--still a significant number. When one considers that battles were fought between the Egyptians and the Hittites in which more than 20,000 soldiers fought on each side, the escape of 6000 slaves, including women and children, doesn't rate a stele in some big city. Simularly, Pharoah himself is unlikely to have engaged in the pursuit of some rag-tag band of runaway slaves. A bureaucratic state like Egypt had an institutional military, with regiments and generals, precisely so that the King did not have to lead every expedition himself. In this case, a minor police action would be handled by the commander of the local garrison or military district, who would have pursued the Hebrews with a few hundred chariots and a couple of thousand foot soldiers--more than enough to do the job. To the un-military Hebrew slaves trudging along the desert tracks with their flocks and all their good, the pursuit would have been terrifying.
Now, at the time of the Exodus, the Egyptians had a chain of forts and garrisons along the Mediterranean coast, so escape by that root was impossible. To go far south before turning east leads to the Red Sea proper, too vast to be crossed under any conditions. But where the northern end of the Red Sea joins Egypt and the Sinai, there were no such border posts. Moreover, the coastal way provided water and fodder. It is a marshy area, and at times of strong northerly winds, the waters can back up into the marshes, causing them to flood. Conversely, southerly winds can cause the waters to recede, making for firm going. This provides the most logical explanation of the "parting of the Red Sea"--closely followed by the Egyptian army, the Hebrews fled into the marshlands and crossed over into Sinai over land normally too wet to traverse. When the Egyptians tried to follow, the winds reversed and the water flooded. I seriously doubt that many Egyptians, let alone the Pharoah, actually drowned, but undoubtedly a number of chariots and horses were lost. If you parse the account of Exodus with the eye of a military historian, you find a classic example of how to steal a march: The Hebrews had been using a smoke signal to mark their line of advance by day (the pillar of smoke), and torches at night (the pillar of fire). Normally, the pillars were at the head of the column, but that evening, the pillar of fire was between the Hebrews and the Egyptians. Moses, it would seem, used one of the oldest tricks in the book: he built up his campfires and had a small group keep them burning, while the main body silently decamped. Because the flames were between the Egyptians and the Hebrews, the former could not see what the latter were doing. In the morning, they were mightily ticked off, and followed the Hebrews headlong into the marsh, but were trapped when the tide came in.
To the Hebrews, given their mindset, this was a wonderful, miraculous deliverance, the hand of Yahweh overshadowing and protecting them. The song of Miriam, which culminates the story in Exodus, is one of the oldest passages in the Bible, and may in fact represent a very early and authentic stratum of the oral tradition, which metaphorically conveys the gratitude of the Hebrews to Yahweh for the victory.
The point of this long digression is history is not the enemy of theology. Rather, history is the handmaiden of theology. The former gives meaning to the latter; the latter validates the former. The problem, I think, comes from the use of the term "miracle", which is a faulty translation of the Greek term "paradoxia", the most literal meaning of which is "mighty deeds" (Josephus uses the same word as the Gospel to describe the works of Jesus but also of other, non-religious figures). Understood thus, the "paradoxia" of the Bible may or may not have "supernatural" or "natural" causes (I am reminded here of Arthur Clarke's maxim that any technology, if sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic). Either way, they are manifestations of God's majesty and providence, whether He bends the natural laws to make it happen or relies upon his human instruments.
From an apologetic point of view, I don't particularly care if its the supernatural or the natural explanation that works for you. From my own perspective, a good dose of Occam's Razor must be applied: which explanation requires the least number of hypotheses. And no, saying "God did it" is not the simplest explanation in all cases, because it requires one to either address or beg the question of God. In some cases, I can find no reason to dismiss an incident (usually because it's either superfluous, or because it's embarrassing), but also cannot find any "natural" explanation for it. Therefore, only a supernatural explanation will do.
Again, speaking for myself, in my pilgrimage of faith, it was the general improbability of history that led me to believe in God, because no other answer would work. When the deck is so heavily stacked in one direction, yet the cards fall in another one, and this happens with amazing regularity, the existence of a divine providence putting its thumb on the scales is a perfectly reasonable explanation. And yet, if we just look at the events in question with a dispassionate and "objective" mind, we see nothing "supernatural". But, if I was living three or four thousand years ago, and something like that happened, I know that I would have to find a supernatural explanation. And, if I was a poet commemorating the event in verse, I know I would certainly employ divine metaphors to do so. And would my version be any less true than the "objective" one? Not at all--and since it reveals a deeper underlying truth, the "mythical" version is in fact "more true".
_________________
The problem is not that historians use the "argument from silence" to deny the historical reality of various episodes of the Bible, but rather that they ignore all evidence that points to the actuality of the events. The record is not silent, and every year archaeological and paleographical studies confirm more and more of the Bible as an authentic record of times past. But, not being inclined to cut believers any slack, most mainstream historians, as the Egyptian cited in the original article, profess a naive literalism when it comes to the Bible's claims.
This brings us back to the subject of my last letter. In the original article, the Egyptian historian pointed to the lack of evidence for a massive exodus of Hebrews into Sinai. Well, maybe the Exodus wasn't very massive, in which case its footprint would be very small. Maybe Moses wasn't chased by the King of Egypt with a massive chariot army, and maybe the King and all his soldiers and all their horses weren't drowned in the Red Sea. In which case, if you go looking for evidence of events on the scale suggested in the Bible, you aren't going to find them. On the other hand, if you look for more subtle signs within the text of Exodus, as well as within Egyptian texts, Syrian texts and the archaeological record, you find there is ample evidence for Hebrews being in Egypt, for their being conscripted into forced labor (not literal "slavery" as we think of it, but more along the lines of the corvee), and of eventually leaving and returning to Canaan.
The use of biblical literalism on both sides sets up straw men galore and false dichotomies that muddy the waters and only sow doubts that bloom in the form of a host of bizarre theories from both extremes that cannot be sustained.
Take, for instance, the whole issue of the Hebrew Conquest as outlined in Joshua. The maximalists take Joshua at face value, ignoring all evidence to the contrary and making claims that cannot be sustained by the historical and archaeological record. The minimalists also take Joshua at face value, point out that the evidence isn't there, and advance a diametrically opposed theory that denies the reality of the Exodus and points to an internal transformation of Canaan by indigenous Canaanites.
The reality must have been much more complex and involved a variety of modalities. I personally believe that there was an Exodus, but that it was nowhere near as massive as the Bible says. I believe that the Hebrews went into Egypt, but that many more never left Canaan. I believe that somewhere along the line Moses (very probably an historical person and not a mere legend) had a revelation about a deity named Yahweh already being worshipped in parts of Sinai and Arabia, and brought that cult to the Hebrews in Egypt, who also equated Yahweh with the Canaanite god El Shaddai. Going back into Canaan, these Hebrews made contact with their kinsmen already in Canaan, made common cause with them, and in turn converted them to the cult of Yahweh. In the normal course of such events, some of the other local tribes or cities were conquered, others surrendered, and yet others joined voluntarily. Thus, both sides are right--there was a conquest, and there was internal conversion. They aren't mutually exclusive. We have evidence for this in the documentary and the archaeological record. We know, for instance, that the Tribe of Dan did not come out of Egypt, but joined later. We have strong evidence that they weren't even Canaanites but were originally part of the Sea Peoples of the 12th-11th centuries BC with probable Aegean origins (Danite = Danaioi = Danaans); we know that they were originally settled on the coast but were moved later to lands in the north of Canaan.
Joshua, of course, doesn't reflect any of this. And why should it? It is the Hebrew foundational epic, intended to show how God delivered the land of Canaan unto his chosen people, and to glorify the deeds of the Hebrew people accomplished in God's name. So, like all good epics, it puts narrative flow ahead of historical verisimilitude. Events are compressed, some are exaggerated, others rearranged, all with the purpose of furthering the story's objective of showing God's providential guidance of the People of Israel.
You seem to think that holding this position denies the divine inspiration of Scripture, but Judeo-Christian Scripture is not like the Qu'ran or Book of Mormon: God did not dictate the text to the author or authors of the Books, but rather allowed the Holy Spirit to fill the authors with a vision of divine truth, which they chose to convey in different ways and in different forms. These are real, living, breathing human beings filled with divine grace, working out the story of God's relationship with his people in a manner comprehensible to them and their audience. They are not mere stenographers (as Mohammed and Joseph Smith claimed to be). That is why we have exegesis in the first place, and what makes the Bible universal in its scope and applicability.
_____________
The question was put to me:
Do you mean that the people who went to Egypt were not worshippers of Yahweh? Do you think the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph was invented and the people just happened to go to Egypt? You seem to be saying that Moses had a vision about a god who was just one among many gods worshipped by some of the desert people, and imposed his vision on his people. Where is God in all this? My head is spinning.
I responded:
Abraham had a revelation from God, but God did not reveal his name. In Canaan, the God of Israel was most often addressed as El or El Shaddai, which name was probably appropriated from one of the indigenous Canaanite gods (remembering that Abram/Abraham was of northern Mesopotamian origin). The difference between the Israelite and Canaanite conceptions of El Shaddai was that the latter saw El as one of many gods, where as Abraham and his descendants saw El as the One True God (though, admittedly, from the language used in Scripture, it seems clear that the Israelites--a term I am using for the descendants of Abraham before the Bondage in Egypt--seem to have conceded the existence of other gods, with El Shaddai the preeminent one; only later--much later--does He go from being biggest god on the block to the one and only God of the entire universe accept no cheap imitations).
So, prior to wandering off into Egypt, Jacob and his sons were a tribe (or tribes) within Canaan who were monotheist in outlook, worshipping a God they call El Shaddai. It's interesting that in the Pentateuch there are distinct threads which in which God is El and others in which God is Yahweh; scholars call these the "E" and "J" texts. Very often, the same story is recounted twice, once from E and once from J--as in the creation story in Genesis. And from the language and other clues, it's pretty clear that the E texts originated in northern Canaan, while the J texts came from the area around Jerusalem. In any case, here were these montheist pastoral herdsmen, who went down to Egypt to avoid a drought. But not all of them went--some stayed in Canaan, and continued worshipping El, as they had done for generations. After a century or so in Egypt, the others Israelites come back to Canaan, led by a guy named Moses. Moses (an Egyptian name) went out into Sinai after killing that nasty foreman, and while wandering around, he picked up a wife and met God, who told him His name was Yahweh. Yahweh just happened to be the name of the storm god worshipped by the nomads in that part of Arabia, but to Moses, He was the One True God. Moses somehow organized a group of Hebrews (I'm of the school that says the word is derived from the Egyptian 'apiru, meaning "Asiatics") and takes them out of Egypt. Probably he brought his Yahwist theology to them in Egypt, and this made them distinct from the other 'apiru. They wandered out into the desert, where Moses codified the Law for them (a necessity for a tribal people attempting to maintain a distinct identity amidst a hostile population). When they get into Canaan, they run into the Israelites who never left. These guys are worshipping one God, whom they call El. Moses' Hebrews are worshipping one God, whom they call Yahweh.
It doesn't take much for them to conclude that both are the same God. Since Moses' Yahwists are the better organized and by far the more militant, they come out on top and start driving the chariot. They begin conquering or assimilating other tribes, subduing various cities (some are destroyed, others surrender and are brought into the fold). Some of the people they bring in aren't even Canaanites or Semited: the Tribe of Dan, for instance, probably originated as one of the "Sea Peoples" who ravaged the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age. Egyptian texts speak of an Aegean people called the Danaans, which is a cognate for Homer's Danaioi (one of his terms for the Greeks) who are probably the Danites. It's interesting that the Danites are originally found on the coast, but are later moved north and inland (the Philistines (Pelasti), by the way, were another group of Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt, were defeated by Ramases III, and settled on the coastal plain that bears their name).
It is also significant that in the time of the monarchy, the army was the backbone of Yahwism under David and Solomon both. Yahwism was a warrior religion and a lot less tolerant of syncretism than in the more laid-back El-worshippers of the North, who retained a kind of dual belief in which El remained more or less the chief god, with many of the indigenous Canaanite fertility cults remaining intact. Part of centralizing the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem had to do with controlling and eventually eliminating the vestiges of Canaanite cults from the kingdom. In the end, it worked.
So where is God in all this?
My understanding of God is that as sovereign Lord of the Universe, He can do whatever He wants in whatever manner He chooses. My understanding of God as the loving Father of mankind, who desires us to be his loving children and not his obedient slaves, causes me to think God prefers to act through human agency whenever possible. The prayers of the Liturgy bear this out:
"By your just judgement, O God, you expelled him [man] from paradise into this world and returned him to the earth from which he had been taken, and devised for him the salvation of regeneration which is in your Christ. And yet, O gracious Lord, you did not turn away from your creation, nor did you forget the work of your hands: you visited man in various ways because of your merciful lovingkindness; you sent prophets and and wrought mighty deeds through the saints who in every generation have been pleasing to you; you spoke through your servants the prophets who foretold the salvation which was to come; you gave the law as an aid, and appointed angels as our guardians. When the fullnes of time had come, you spoke to us through your Son Himself, through whom you created the temporal world". [Anaphora of St. Basil the Great]
In other words, whenever possible, God works through human beings inspired by the Holy Spirit. Human beings, being finite and limited in their senses and intellect, have, when dealing with the transcendent divinity, to fall back on imperfect words and concepts to explain something which defied human comprehension in the first place. So, Moses, inspired by the Holy Spirit, comes upon the Burning Bush and has a theophany: God reveals himself to Moses, and moreover, tells Moses his sacred Name. Moses needs to put this into terms people can understand, so he uses the name Yahweh to express the inexpressible reality he encountered on the mountain. Since God does not impose himself on us, but rather reveals himself in a manner we can apprehend, it should not be surprising that man's conception of God evolved with each new revelation, or that it took some centuries for the vision of Moses to come to fruition in the Davidic kingdom.
That Scripture takes this very complicated organic process, compresses it and in effect, "tidies up" the story doesn't mean the story is false. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that the story is probably a lot more complex and messy than Scripture tells us make it it untrue. I personally see the hand of divine providence working in history all the time, even if God does not normally engage in flashy parlor tricks. God worked through Moses, who was inspired by the Holy Spirit. He worked through Joshua and the Judges, and the prophets, and through David and Solomon and the other kings of Israel and Judah. Looked at from the outside, one can find a host of reasons for their actions, but from the inside, with eyes of faith, one can perceive the unfolding of a consistent plan of salvation. Certainly that is how the historians who wrote much of the Old Testament saw it. They were not merely interested in recounting events, but with instilling those events with transcendent meaning. It's through the interpretation of the events that the hand of God is revealed.
________________
On the matter of Egyptians recording their disasters:
Actually, they did, but only if they happened under the previous dynasty. However, even assuming that they did cover up this episode, the loss of a King and a major army would have caused a power vacuum in the region and a succession struggle at home. We don't see any of this reflected in written sources, whether Egyptian or non-Egyptian. The reasonable assumption, then, is not that it didn't happen (the Song of Miriam is assessed as being a contemporaneous composition of the Hebrew victory over the Egyptians--and we're going to sing it tomorrow). Rather, one must conclude that the incident wasn't as big a deal as the Book of Exodus implies. Or, to be more precise, it was a big deal to the Hebrews, and small beer to the Egyptians.
First of all, there probably were only a few thousand Hebrews running away--between 6,000 and 10,000, including women and children, as well as all their goods and livestock. There would be perhaps 2000 men of military age, probably badly armed. Against a small group of runaway slaves, the King of Egypt would not go in person, nor would he dispatch his main army, but probably send one of this provincial military commanders with the local garrison. Since at a major battle like Kadesh or Meggido Egypt could deploy more than 6000 chariots (12,000 men) plus about 24,000 foot soldiers, a few hundred chariots and a couple of thousand infantry are more likely the pursuit force. When they got caught by the incoming tide, it is unlikely that more than a handful drowned, though most of the chariots and horses would be lost. This is not the sort of thing you put on a public monument in any case, nor is it of sufficient magnitude to impress the neighbors enough for them to write about it.
To the Hebrews, however, this is a defining moment in their foundational epic, so they're going to milk it for all its worth. The ancient sources were never very good about numbers, especially in battles. Always play down the size of your own force, and play up the size of the enemy, so that victory is more glorious, and defeat more explicable. Herodotus, a punctilious historian in other regards, puts the size of Xerxes army at more than a million men, which is a logistical impossibility (he might have been able to mobilize that many, but he could never move them from Persia to Greece because of the need for food, water and fodder). Moreover, in the ancient mind, the agent is more than the representative of the one who sent him; to some extent he shares the identity of the sender. Thus, Pharaoh's general is identified as Pharaoh, because the King sent him. And it makes a better story, too. We do the same thing when we say, e.g., that Roosevelt defeated Hitler, when in fact FDR's generals fought Adolph's generals.
So, a naturalistic explanation of the victory of Hebrews over Egyptians doesn't strain credulity, nor does it in any way make the victory less miraculous. As a military historian, I have studied dozens of miraculous victories that don't involve supernatural events, just uncanny or improbable ones. It was the amazing regularity of such improbabilities that led me to believe in divine providence and put me on the road to becoming Christian.
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Apparently this line of reasoning stucks some people as verging on herretical, as witness the following:
While I can agree generally with the principles stated in your first four paragraphs (and some specifics -- e.g. the use of symbolic numerology), I simply cannot agree with much of the rationalistic reconstruction that follows. E.g., when the Scriptures say that Pharaoh was involved, that should be taken at face value. And there are other perfectly good explanations for why the flight of the Israelites
didn't "rate a stele" -- e.g. the fact that the ancient Egyptians are well known for NOT documenting their defeats in such a manner, and also for erecting stele that whitewashed the truth and turned e.g. military stalemates against the Hittites into "victories."
The problem, it seems to me, lies in your presumptions that the account was humanly "elaborated by bards and poets" rather than providentially guided by God, and that our understanding of OT Scriptural history must be conformed to "logic" in the sense of everyday ordinary human expectations.
As you may have seen, in a recent post on MC under the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" thread, Mr. Scott Pennington opined that my use of the word "trajectory" to describe the unfolding of a pattern of Christian discernment of the import of Scripture over time could not be distinguished from e.g. the interpretive methodology of the Jesus Seminar. I can only wonder what he would make of your argument here. It would probably make his head explode.
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I responded with the following:
The reason I do not take certain statements at face value is the way in which certain terms or concepts were understood. For instance, in the ancient Near East, an agent is considered not a subordinate of the one who sent him, but as the manifestation of the one who sent him. Therefore, if Exodus says Pharoah led the expedition against the escaping Hebrews, then we must ask the logical question of whether to take this literally or symbolically. As an historian, I know a lot about the Egyptian kingdoms, about how they organized their government, and (given my interests) especially how they organized their army. Therefore, I have to determine, in the circumstances described in the Book of Exodus, and in the written and archaeological records of Egypt, the probability (a) that the King of Egypt (Pharoah is in itself an anachronistic term in the Exodus period) actually led such a military expedition; and (b) whether it was as great a catastrophe to Egyptian arms as the story claims. And I have to answer both those questions in the negative. The evidence doesn't support it. We also have a pretty complete line of kings for the period in question, and if one died prematurely, it would be recorded somewhere. Even kings who died in battle or by misadventure had their ends recorded for geneological purposes. It is the presumptive death of the king that is a telling detail. Who was this guy, and why don't we have any record of him? We have records of other kings killed in military defeats (which, if the king is dead, tended to be recorded pretty accurately, so as to make the glorious victory of his successor even more illustrious). Also, given the likely numbers of Hebrews, the idea that King of Egypt would mount a large scale expedition (there were 6000 Egyptian chariots at Kadesh, even more at Meggido) is absurd. We talking about a small-scale operation here, led by an Egyptian provincial commander. I don't need the C.B. de Mille treatment for the escape of the Hebrews to be a miracle. And small scale operations have changed the course of history.
Look at our own history, at the critical battles of Trenton and Princeton, which in Europe would hardly rate as skirmishes. Consider if, instead of living in a written culture, Washington had lived in an oral culture. How would the Battle of Trenton have been immortalized? As it partly was, in song and story. But suppose there were no written records to go with the songs and stories, no "control" over the accuracy of the content? Suppose all you knew of another American hero, Andrew Jackson, was contained only in popular ballads like "The Battle of New Orleans" and "The Hunters of Kentucky"? At the end of the day, the only historically accurate things you would know would be the name of the American commander, the nationality of the army he was fighting, and the rough outcome of the battle. Nothing about the size of the forces, the number of casualties, the tactics employed, or the significance of the battle. What we get from the ballads is what we get from Exodus, except that Exodus was infinitely better written and in its own way is a lot more accurate.
Does that mean the story isn't true? Not at all. That it is recounted in mythical terms merely punctuates the theological significance of it. But the fact is, the events in Exodus are true--just not in the way in which we 21st century Western European-Americans have been conditioned to view truth. There was no CNN, there wasn't even Herotodus. There was the Hebrew equivalent of a Homer, though. And just as I believe that the events underlying the Iliad are true, without necessarily believing that they occurred exactly as Homer composed them, so I believe that Exodus is true, even though the events did not happen precisely as they were finally written on parchment. That also does not make Exodus the inspired word of God--only that God worked through human agents wrote the story in a way that transmitted what they considered to be the most important aspects. Or do you think that the Holy Spirit does not operate through the hands of the bards and poets? After all, they were free agents themselves. They could have recorded the story any number of ways, but they chose one particular way. Is that not in itself evidence of God's providential guidance?
I think we have rather different approaches to Scripture, which in turn reflect our own personal experiences as well as the Traditions of the communities of which we are members. As an Anglican, you of course have a conception of the primacy of Scripture as fons et origens of faith, which I as an Eastern Christian don't have in precisely the same way. In fact, the kind of historical exegesis I use has a long history in the Eastern Churches, going back to Papius, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Epiphanius and Photios the Great. They looked at Scripture and Church history with a critical eye, and did not see any contradiction between noting that there are elements of Scripture which are not, strictly speaking, historically accurate. They knew that while the Books were divinely inspired, they were written with a different set of objectives and criteria in mind.
In fact, the Hebrews more or less invented history long before Herodotus, though their conception of it changes subtly over time. For the patriarchical era, the Judges and the monarchy through David, we are in fact dealing with an oral society working in the same epic tradition as Homer (and the parallels between, e.g., the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or of Saul and David, and the Greek epic cycle show that both arose in the same Eastern Mediterranean late Bronze Age culture). Later, under Solomon, we get a more bureaucratic annalistic treatment of history, but under the divided monarchy and in the post-exilic redaction of Kings and Chronicles, we get something altogether new and remarkable--an eschatological understanding of history, reflecting the Hebraic conception of God as sovereign Lord of Creation, not just "a" God, but the God. This his history with a distinct perspective and a purpose very different from the kind of panagyrical history found throughout the Near East. What is being told is the story of Israel's relationship with Yahweh, and Yahweh's plan for mankind, something unique in all of antiquity. If that's not providential, what is? In any event, the writers of Kings and Chronicles were self-consciously historians, working in an historical genre and referring to other works as contemporaneous sources for their stories. And guess what? In almost every case where we can find it, the archaeological evidence bears out their fundamental accuracy. That is to say, they get their facts right. How they interpret their facts is conditioned by their covenantal relationship with God--a Phillistine, Syrian, or Egyptian historian recording the same facts would have a very different interpretation. Which one is right? As a follower of the New Covenant, I of course share the same eschatological understanding of history as the Hebrews, because we are inheritors of the entire patrimony of the Old Convenant. Which is why it is important to know when the events described in Scripture are "literally" true (happened as written), when they are "essentially true" (happened roughly as written, with some exaggerations or anachronisms), and when they are "mythical" (reflect memories of events that did happen, if not actually as written, yet still convey a transcendent truth).
It's also important to try to view Scripture through the eyes of the people who wrote it, and the audience for whom they wrote it, if we do not wish to superimpose our own preconceptions upon the text. Isn't that precisely the error of the "Jesus Seminar"--that they bend the text to fit their own modernist mindset, rather than reading it with the mind of the Evangelists and the early Christian Church? Which answers your question about the difference between "trajectories" of Christian interpretation and the Jesus Seminar: a trajectory is determined by its initial conditions. Once launched from a given point, a projectile with a ballistic trajectory will follow a predetermined path to its final impact. The Christian interpretation of Scripture was launched in the Apostolic era, and still follows a preset trajectory. The Jesus Seminar lies outside the ephemerus of that trajectory, so either it was launched from different coordinates, and will have a different impact point; or it represents an attempt to alter the trajectory of traditional Christian interpretation.
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Another person objected:
I'm sure you'll not be surprised to hear that I, as an evangelical, take a
different view of the Pentateuch than does Stuart. I share your concerns.
I too wonder if Stuart's view is indeed closer to the methodology of the
Jesus Seminar than to more classical understandings of Scripture. For my
part, I sincerely doubt that the Lord Jesus, when judging the simple faith
in the truth of Scripture held by an ordinary Christian, gives a "wink,
wink, nudge, nudge" to the other members of the Holy Trinity, as if to say,
"Look, another Biblical simpleton!" The older I get, the less I care about
whether the world agrees with me. I'm more concerned about whether I agree
with the Bible. I strive to make this my faith. I'm pretty sure the Lord
won't judge me on whether I'm up on the latest Biblical scholarship. God
will not despise the little ones who protest, "Lord, I took You at Your
Word!"
This needn't be anti-intellectualism. I do admire believing Christian
scholars. But I firmly believe that scholarship must be the servant of the
church. The Scriptures must judge scholarship and not vice versa.
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I responded as follows:
Thing is, our faith is based on truth, for Christ is the Truth and the Way. Truth is self-affirming--it is true, regardless of who endorses it or believes it. We cannot make it un-true. Therefore, our faith has nothing to fear from historical or scientific inquiry, since our faith is true, and truth will out.
When one starts from the proposition that Scripture must judge scholarship, one is right on one level, and very wrong on another. One is right in that, ultimately, the truth of Scripture will be affirmed. He is wrong because he has a very narrow conception of how Scripture is true. But his attitude is actually not that of the Church of the Fathers. They were quite open to this type of inquiry, because they wanted to know what really happened, and because they were close enough in cultural space to the Scriptures to understand what the authors were trying to say. [The author] views Scripture through 500 years of Protestant exegesis and polemic, and above all, he views Scripture in light of the ongoing battle with secular skeptics. This is how he can say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between what I do and what the Jesus Seminar does. Because he rejects the pseudoscholarship of the Seminar, he feels obliged to uphold a form of biblical literalism as a bulwark against the erosion of the authority of Scripture. The Jesus Seminar pushes in one direction, he pushes back in the opposite direction. [Another commentator] is, I think, of the same mind but more subtle (I remember a discussion we had about Pharisees, in which, in effect, he said that even if scholarship proved my understanding of the Pharisee movement, he would still uphold the commonly understood portrayal of the Gospels as correct). He does this, I think, as a reaction against the rampant heresy of the Episcopal Church, which is founded on a loosey-goosey reading of Scripture (this says something about exclusive reliance on Scripture as the source of authority, but that's another issue). I dislike reflexive reactionism (it is one of my beefs with the Council of Trent: if the Protestants say A, we must affirm NOT A, even if A is correct), because it tosses out the baby with the bathwater. {The author's] approach is not going to win any arguments against the Jesus Seminar; it is, as Bill himself affirms, preaching to the choir. On the other hand, objective scholarly inquiry, unfettered from preconditions (all preconditions, not just Christian ones), can affirm the authenticity and truth of Scripture in a manner that cannot be disputed.
I also fear that some people need a God who indulges in special effects, rather than working quietly behind the scenes. The Greeks had the deus ex machina come down from the ceiling to save the day; some Christians want God to act like a cheap theater trick. But they are like those who chided Jesus on the Cross, "If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross". He could have done so, but to do that would have negated the much greater miracle that was to come. Jesus did not perform his "mighty deeds" as a way of demonstrating his power ("Hey, everyone! Look at me! Messiah at work!"). Rather, he healed the lepers, cured the lame, made the blind see and expelled demons "in fulfillment of Scripture", so that people would see the signs foretold that the Kingdom of God was at hand. A subtle, but very important difference, which is what distinguishes Jesus from other contemporary miracle men like Honi the Circle Drawer.
_________________
Finally, there was this friendly exchange first me, then an interlocutor:
ME:
As I told some other people, it isn't that there's no evidence, it's merely that most archaeologists perversely take Exodus at face value, instead of interpreting the text as they would if it were something secular, e.g., the Illiad. Let's not forget that until the last decade or so, the consensus among scholars was Homer made it up out of whole cloth. Now, the consensus is moving towards saying Homer captured an authentic memory of an actual historical event, albeit retold in the epic format with typical epic exaggerations and poetic license. If you look at Exodus (and its extension Joshua) as being the Hebrew foundational epic (and both Homer and the Books of Exodus and Joshua arose out of a common Eastern Mediterranean late Bronze Age cultural milieu), there is no reason to believe that the it is any less authentic than Homer. And, just as Homer can be used as a key to Mycenaean civilization, so Exodus can be used to crack open late Bronze Age Canaan. In fact, the more we uncover archaeologically about the Bronze Age Near East, the more it appears that the Bible got it right in the essentials. The problem arises from Christians who are excessively literal in their approach to the Bible, who thus play into the hands of secularists (or, in the context of archaeology, the "Biblical minimalists" by taking exorbitant numbers and "miraculous" events as being literally rather than metaphorically true. I tend to downplay "miracles" (the actual Greek word paradoxia is better translated as "mighty (or puzzling) deeds") unless no other explanation will fit. There is, for example, no suitable explanation for the Resurrection other than that Jesus did rise from the dead. On the other hand, there are lots of explanations for plagues or crossing the Red (Reed) Sea, and these are to be preferred as a kind of Occam's Razor.
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Interlocutor:
I see exactly where you're coming from. I can imagine at some point in the future the stories of, say, Davy Crockett, inspiring similar debate - and upon the re-finding of an actual Alamo, of excited speculation about the assorted "Tall Tales".
And yet - the Occam's Razor application I refrain from, in the case of the miraculous elements of the Exodus narrative. Perhaps there is some exaggeration or misunderstanding of Providential weather patterns; if so, it's just a less dramatic sort of miracle being reported as a more dramatic one - and I have to think that as important as Passover would be to God's people down the generations, He would take some care that the Exodus story be correct in its essentials. What with the New Testament referring back to the Old as if it were literally true, soon you're doing all sorts of gyrations...and you have to pick a point where you do start believing the miraculous stories; were there miracles in Elijah's career, for instance? Or was God's first overt miracle the birth of a Messiah among a people who fervently but wrongly believed in God's miraculous intervention in their past?
If I learned tomorrow that "Moses' books" (plus Joshua) were only on the Illiad's level of truth, it wouldn't destroy my faith, and I am certainly willing to tackle them as books of history. However, as a Christian I accept the reality of the miraculous; given that, to me Occam's razor would suggest miraculous intervention in the Exodus - it's a deal simpler than a more complex explanation which allows so many generations of Jews and Christians to have deceived themselves about the events and in so doing, to ironically have laid hold of greater truths and prefigured (or better understood in retrospect) the Messiah's deliverance.
Of course you would at least solve the problem of Israel's continual backsliding despite the miracles they all witnessed, if they hadn't seen any. And personally I'll go with you all the way on the assorted obviously-goofy numbers (this all started when I tried to reconcile "The Thirty" and "The Three" in the King James account of David's "mighty men", at about age 12). The literalist can unnecessarily place his very faith at risk on minutia, or more often commit himself to intense rationalization and denial; I don't want to be in that position. Still to accept Christianity is to accept God's miraculous intervention in history - so with Biblical accounts, I think the "devil's advocate" role is unnecessary.
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In all, this was a very cordial and fruitful exchange of views. I don't know if any minds were changed, but I hope we understand each other better. In a subsequent post, I will try to sum up my philosophy of history and its relation to divine revelation.
It is good to be back.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 12:36:22 PM
For those who are interested, there is an article in the current edition of Biblical Archaeology Review, which makes many of the same points that I made regarding the manner in which archaeology is confirming the broad outlines of the story of Exodus and Joshua.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 12:52:24 PM
Thank you for the long and revealing post, Stuart. While I find much of what you say concerning the method of interpreting the Pentateuch quite reasonable, I do fid myself agreeig with your interlocutor in the final exchange. Why should we necessarily doubt the recounting of the "mighty deeds" recorded in Exodus? We do, after all, believe in a God who is clearly capable of such things, and who has done things like them in the past.
I agree that it is important to recognize that Biblical literalism is a product of modern interpretive controversies. Yet so too is the tendency to prefer natural explanations to supernatural ones, supposing that nothing is inexplicable to a scientific approach. I know that you do not take the extreme totalizing form of this position (as those who deny the Resurrection do), but why allow such a tendency to affect how we interpret miraculous accounts from the Pentateuch? Only, it seems to me, when we have firm physical evidence for events having really happened differently than the Biblical record should we conclude that scripture speaks figuratively.
What is the difference between the plague against the Egyptian firstborn and the slaying of Senaccherib's army? Yet one is found in the "mythical" books and one is found in the eschatological history books. Is context everything in whether we choose to accept or deny each as literal occurances?
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Apr 9, 2007 1:56:18 PM
>>>Why should we necessarily doubt the recounting of the "mighty deeds" recorded in Exodus? We do, after all, believe in a God who is clearly capable of such things, and who has done things like them in the past.<<<
I think it is important to note that our faith is founded on the truth, because God is Truth. Ours is a God who acts in history, which makes him pretty unique among the various deities that have been worshipped by man in the course of time. A large part of Scripture is written in an overtly historical manner, precisely because those who wrote it understood that God was working through history with a purpose, that history is not merely endless (and ultimately meaningless) cycles (like being stuck in Wagner's Ring Cycle for all eternity).
Once it is understood that God works through history, it is not only possible, it is incumbent on us to further explore that history, in order to understand more fully what God has doing, and is doing, but also how He does it and why He does it.
As I said elsewhere, the authors of Scripture were not God's stenographers. The Angel Moroni or the Angel Gabriel did not hand some guy a quill and a papyrus and say, "Write down what I tell you, and don't leave out anything". Rather, different men, in different places and different times, were prompted to recount the story of God's relationship with his people Israel based on what they knew and what they had seen. Being inspired by the Holy Spirit, what they wrote reflected the Truth of God's Word has best they could conceive and express it. If Scripture is not a continual, ever-expanding revelation, then the manner in which God is conceived at the beginning should be identical to the way He is conceived at the end, much as Allah is the same in the first Sura as in the last. Because of how our Scripture was composed, because of how the Spirit worked within the authors of Scripture, we have interpretation and exegesis, whereas Muslims have jurisconsultation. That's a very significant difference.
As to why one should prefer natural explanations, I believe that one should not needlessly proliferate miracles, lest one be unable to recognize the real thing when it happens. If one reads a lot of ancient history, to say nothing of ancient epic poetry, one quickly realizes that the supernatural permeated the mind of ancient man, for the very simple reason that he was surrounded by forces beyond his comprehension. Thus, not only was he prone to attribute strange events to supernatural causes, but he was also likely to explain even mundane events in supernatural-charged languages. Man had a theocentric mindset, in which all that happened was caused by the gods (or, in our case, by God). Since God is the cause of all things, when something good happens, it is attributed to Him; when something bad happens, it is because we have incurred his displeasure.
Colin Duriez, the Tolkien Scholar, has just written a new and very entertaining book called "AD 33: The Year That Changed the World". In it, he serendipitously captures this way of looking at the world, in relation to the story of the raising of Lazarus:
"Even to restrict the account to human agency is not as simple as it sounds. An historian who is a materialist will have to reduce human actions to natural causes. For a materialist, an historical cause would be identical with a natural cause. The interest of history, however, is in its dealing with historical causes as transcending natural causation, in its dealing with culture as well as with nature, in its concern with the subtlties motives of human beings, which can be interpreted but never easily explained. For the theistic historian (such as the writers of the scriptural narratives), human agency and its cause point to an even higher causation--the hand of God in history. A polytheistic historian (like Tacitus of Suetonius) would have a similar orientation. Tacitus finds it natural to include the arrival of the fabled phoenix in his account of the Caesars. The working out of historical causes is parallel to the complex relationship between human freedom and the intricate causalities that shape it--those of nature, society, thought and belief. To try to understand the world of AD 33, it is necessary to step inside a Zeitgeist in which events are shaped not only by free human agency as well as natural causes, but also by causes that are supernatural, spiritual, angelic and divine. . . " (p.89)
Duriez is writing of one point in time--the year of Christ's death and Resurrection, but what he writes can apply in all times and all places. I consider myself very much a "theistic historian", in that I believe God is an active participant in the life of mankind. God works in mysterious ways, and uses whatever tools come to his hand, but I believe Scripture shows that, whenever possible, He prefers to use freely willing human agents to do his bidding. God never compels obedience, for He made us in his image, and God is unconstrained and free.
To the extent that God suspends the laws by which He governs the material universe, it would only be as a last resort, in those situations in which human agency would not suffice. Hence, don't proliferate supernatural explanations if you can find a natural cause. Nor should one turn up his nose at a "merely" natural explanation, or at human agency.
Consider the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, as I was doing on Saturday evening at Vespers of the Resurrection, where the first Old Testament reading is none other than the parting of the Red Sea (Moses delivers the Israelites out of bondage to Egypt; Christ delivers out of bondage to sin and death). As I stood listening to the chanting of this very long account, I was struck by how eminently plausible the entire story is to one who is accustomed to the epic genre. We're dealing with poetry here, not with dust-dry annalistic accounting of facts. Everything rings true, from the selection of the campground, to the organization of the Hebrew's order of march (found, right down to the use of smoke signals by day and torches by night to keep everyone on track), to the headlong pursuit of the Egyptians, to the kvetching of the Hebrews at Moses (everyone from a Jewish family can recognize that part), to the ruse of war by which Moses breaks contact with the Egyptians to flee across the (temporarily dry) seabed. And when the Egyptians follow, they are first disrupted by the Israelite's smokescreen, then find their chariots mired in the mud, then find themselves enveloped by the incoming tide (anyone who lives in areas with large tidal surges knows how terrifying that can be; I remember standing along the shore at Aberystwych in Wales and watching close to half a mile of tidal flat get innundated in less than half an hour).
Undoubtedly, a modern, academically trained reporter or historian would write a very dry account of the incident. But we aren't dealing with that kind of person here. We are instead dealing with an oral people whose stock in trade is epic poetry and myth, and they will recount the events in those idioms. The people for whom they sang the songs knew how to interpret the metaphors and symbolism.
In any case, far more important than the events is the manner in which the Israelites understood the meaning of what had happened to them. They were miraculously delivered from death, or at very least, from a return to bondage in Egypt. Thus, the episode concludes with the Canticle of Miram, sung as a responsive hymn:
Sing praise to the Lord, for He is gloriously triumphant! (Refrain)
Horse and chariot he has cast into the sea.
Sing praise to the Lord, for He is gloriously triumphant!
My strength and courage is the Lord,
And He has been my savior
He is my God and I praise him,
The God of my fathers, and I extol him!
Sing praise to the Lord, for He is gloriously triumphant!
The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name!
Sing praise to the Lord, for He is gloriously triumphant!
Sing praise to the Lord, for He is gloriously triumphant!
(continues to the end, Ex. 15:1-18)
This is the meaning of the story: Yahweh is author of Israel's victory: her deliverance is God's will, working through his human agents. This theme recurs throughout the Old Testament, even when no supernatural imagery is used. This is the elaboration of the Hebrew philosophy of history, which has God at its center.
I wholeheatedly believe in what people commonly call "miracles"; a God who is sovereign over all creation can abrogate the laws that He made, when it suits his purpose. But this is not his preferred modus operandi; an omnicient God foresees events and can work within his own laws, using his own human agents, MOST of the time. He saves the supernaturally miraculous for the important things that cannot be done any other way.
I can explain the crossing of the Red Sea without recourse to the supernatural. I can explain Joshua making the sun stand still (you find a combat veteran and ask him if the sun doesn't stand still in the middle of a firefight--in fact, there is a quote from a veteran of the Battle of Antietam who said he finally understood Joshua during the battle, "for that sun would NOT go down").
But I cannot explain the raising of Lazarus from the dead, nor can I explain the greatest of all mysteries, that a man can be crucified, be certifiably dead, and yet rise from a sealed, guarded tomb, walk through walls and locked doors, and ultimately, ascend into heaven. That's a miracle. It is, in fact, the only miracle that really matters. I am as surprised at people whose faith rests on the literal truth of every last miracle in the Bible as I am at those people who have no faith in the Bible because it contains miracles.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 3:14:59 PM
>>>Only, it seems to me, when we have firm physical evidence for events having really happened differently than the Biblical record should we conclude that scripture speaks figuratively.<<<
This seems to me to be wanting to have it both ways--rely on historical or physical evidence when it supports the traditional position, deny its validity when it does not. Since the Bible is True in a deeply metaphysical sense, we have nothing at all to fear from historical or scientific investigation. We do, however, have much to fear from sloppy or false scholarship, which is most of what we see these days.
>>>What is the difference between the plague against the Egyptian firstborn and the slaying of Senaccherib's army? Yet one is found in the "mythical" books and one is found in the eschatological history books. Is context everything in whether we choose to accept or deny each as literal occurances?<<<
Well, for starters, we don't have any records of the plague on the firstborn (although I have heard a number of theories that make a lot of sense--notably that the Hebrews alone of the peoples of that time had foresworn human sacrifice.
On the other hand, we do have Assyrian records of Senaccherib's expedition against Judah, which is slightly at odds with the account in 2 Kings:
Because Hezekiah, king of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against him, and by force of arms and by the might of my power I took 46 of his strong fenced cities; and of the smaller towns which were scattered about, I took and plundered a countless number. From these places I took and carried off 200,156 persons, old and young, male and female, together with horses and mules, asses and camels, oxen and sheep, a countless multitude; and Hezekiah himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his capital city, like a bird in a cage, building towers round the city to hem him in, and raising banks of earth against the gates, so as to prevent escape... Then upon Hezekiah there fell the fear of the power of my arms, and he sent out to me the chiefs and the elders of Jerusalem with 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, and divers treasures, a rich and immense booty... All these things were brought to me at Nineveh, the seat of my government.
No doubt both accounts are biased and omit things that do not suit the author's purpose. Which one is true? I would say both are, within their limits. It is clear that Senaccherib did not accomplish his objective of taking Jerusalem--the seige was a failure. Likewise, it is probably true that Hezakiah paid tribute of 30 talents of gold (probably from the Temple treasury). But Assyrian seiges did not often fail, even against the most sophisticated fortifications. So why did the Assyrians pack up and leave? I believe that the account of the plague in the Assyrian camp makes a lot of sense. Armies that stayed in one place for any time were prone to disease, since in the pre-hygenic era, water quickly became fouled and caused water- and insect-borne disease (something for which that area of the world is known). We know that before the seige, Hezakiah had a tunnel built to the Siloam springs, to bring water to the city. When the Assyrians appeared, he probably clogged or fouled all the wells in the immediate vicinity. Bad water = plague. But Hezakiah needed the Assyrians to leave Judah, not merely Jerusalem, so he bought them off with gold. Now, that's not something the Yahwist editor of 2 Kings wants to advertise, so he omits it. Senaccherib doesn't want his prestige diminished by saying he had to lift the seige of Jerusalem, so he omits it, too.
From my perspective as a believer, I don't find any problem with this. By all rights, the Assyrians should have taken Jerusalem, and if they had, Judah would have gone the way of Israel, its people dispersed, its cult obliterated. The extra years of life given to the South Kingdom saw the supplanting of Assyria by Babylon, and when Jerusalem finally did fall, in fulfillment of Scripture, it did not mean the end of God's people or of man's knowledge of the true God. It was, in other words, a miraculous and providential deliverance, even if it was caused by microbes--for are they not part of God's creation, and do they not have their part to play in the economy of salvation? "How great are your works, O Lord, in wisdom you have made them all" (Psalm 103).
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 3:31:27 PM
This is one of those areas where I have to disagree with Stuart. I join with Ethan, we may not fully understand the account but it is not any less true. I'm troubled by phrases like, "milk it for all its worth," followed by a claim that the story is mythically true. If my child told me he was "just milking it for all its worth," I'd promptly send her to her room to rethink that matter.
I also disagree that this is a "protestant" hermeneutic. Roman and Eastern sources both take the Bible at face value as often as not with Eusebius and Josephus (easterner if there ever was one even if not Christian) taking pains to explain difficulties in the narrative.
If there's one thing I'm likely to agree with you about it is that Pharaoh, the person, likely did not die. There is more than adequate evidence in the period that a mouth piece of the state would be awarded the same dignity in a history as the king. Even a fairly minor regional governor could become "Pharaoh". For those counting:
1.) I believe a large number of Israelites escaped
2.) That a significant portion of the Egyptian army faced destruction
3.) That God descended in a pillar of fire and smoke (to claim that this was just the march leader is stretching the "mythic" narrative way to far in my opinion).
4.) Moses and all the patriarchs were historical.
I believe these things because Jesus taught them and He should know. I also believe because the various Christian bodies have repeated these teachings until about 90-100 years ago.
Posted by: Nick | Apr 9, 2007 3:46:58 PM
>>>This is one of those areas where I have to disagree with Stuart. I join with Ethan, we may not fully understand the account but it is not any less true. I'm troubled by phrases like, "milk it for all its worth," followed by a claim that the story is mythically true. If my child told me he was "just milking it for all its worth," I'd promptly send her to her room to rethink that matter.<<<
I would recommend then, that you review the conversion of C.S. Lewis, which occured precisely because he came to understand that "Christianity is a myth that is true". In fact, all "myths" by their very nature are "true"--it is just that they convey truth by a different epistemology. Myths are eternally true, and as such transcend facts. It's all in Tolkien's essay "On Fairey Stories", which is essential reading in any case. On this issue, once you understand what I mean by myth, we are in agreement.
>>> I believe a large number of Israelites escaped<<<
Large by what standard? Large by our reckoning? Large by the standards of the late Bronze Age? By that of a major state? By that of a tribal confederacy? It is important to understand numbers in the ancient context--they were not precise (many peoples did not go much beyond one, two, several, many) and were intended only to convey magnitude in the subjective opinion of the teller.
Herodotus tells us that Xerxes crossed the Hellespont with a million men. OK, I'll bite. Given the road net, and marching eight abreast, how long would it take them to pass a given point along the way? How many animals would have to go with them to provide food and carry supplies? How much food do a million men need?(Answer; about 2 million pounds per day) How much water do they need? (Answer: about a million gallons a day just for drinking). What about the animals? A horse requires 20 pounds of fodder a day (more, if all you have is hay), and about 10 gallons of water. So, how do you supply that million-man army? Answer: You don't. So how many men did Xerxes have? "Inherent military probability" (i.e., what is realistic given logistic and tactical realities) is about 250,000, or one eighth the number given by the Father of History. Does that diminish the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the victory of Plataea? Not at all. Does it mean those battles never happened? That would be silly.
So, why not apply the same standard to the Bible? We know a lot about Egypt in the 13th century--the Egyptians loved to put things down in stone. We know how big the armies Egypt deployed to its wars with the Hittites and Libyans were, we know the size of their garrisons on the Way of the Sea. We know the ration standard for both soldiers and laborers, and for animals as well. We know pretty well how many people can forage off the land per square mile--and when we consider all those factors, we don't get an answer anywhere near 600,000--never mind what a ridiculously large percentage of the Egyptian population that would have been. Applying the same depreciation factor used on the Persian Army (moving through more fertile land with a better logistic support train), we get a number around 75,000, which is probably too big by a factor of three. For a nomadic people traveling with flocks, relying exclusively on forage, 25,000 is an upper end approximation.
>>> That a significant portion of the Egyptian army faced destruction<<<
Again, what is "significant"? At full stretch, the Egyptian Army could field 6000+ chariots and at least 30,000 foot soldiers. This was the army they sent against the Hittites, the other superpower of the age. How many men do you send against 25,000 or so herdsmen (assuming that there were even that many)? Maybe a hundred chariots and a couple of thousand foot solders. Remember that the chariot was the tank of its age. As a platform for archers it could kill men by the score from over a hundred yards away. As a shock platform, it could ride down dispersed infantry, killing them with both arrows and spears. Infantry were for mopping up, providing a base of maneuver for the chariots, and guarding the camp by night. All this we know from Egyptian, Hittite and Canaanite tablets. So, the Egyptians pursued the Hebrews, got stuck in the mud, were overwhelmed by the tide. Few of the infantry would drown, most of the charioteers would get away. Pity about the horses and the chariots, though. Understand this: in the ancient world, every victory over every enemy is an anihilating victory--even if we know, by reading the account of the other side, that most of the army got away. It is a rhetorical feature of the times.
>>>hat God descended in a pillar of fire and smoke (to claim that this was just the march leader is stretching the "mythic" narrative way to far in my opinion).<<<
As Gandalf says to Bilbo at the end of "The Hobbit": "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophesies just because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?"
>>>Moses and all the patriarchs were historical.<<<
Most probably. The Patriarchical narratives contain so many features specific to the 15th and 14th centuries BC that they could not have been composed "retrospectively" in the Babylonian Captivity, as the minimalists assert. By the same token, the Illiad contains so many elements specific to the Mycenaean period that Homer could not have made them up himself.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 4:41:21 PM
Preach it, Stuart, preach it.
Posted by: Bobby Winters | Apr 9, 2007 7:01:19 PM
I'll get around to responding to Stuart more fully later. I'm in the final preperations for a new child arriving so between that and trying to fit in some overtime funds I'm a bit stretched.
Based on Stuart's answers though I have to wonder if you play historical mini's? If so...hot dang I'll have to take you on one of these days (I'm a cheapskate and play with paper cutouts of the bases).
Posted by: Nick | Apr 9, 2007 7:53:18 PM
>Most probably.
So when Christ said that Abraham saw his day and was glad Christ was "probably" right?
Posted by: David Gray | Apr 9, 2007 8:25:25 PM
>>>Based on Stuart's answers though I have to wonder if you play historical mini's? <<<
Of course. I have about 300 or so 25mm Napoleonic and Seven Years War Minifigs. Wrote my own rules (that way, I have nobody to blame but myself).
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 8:27:36 PM
>>>So when Christ said that Abraham saw his day and was glad Christ was "probably" right?<<<
Depends on a lot of factors.
First, what were the effects of Christ's kenosis?
Second, was he speaking of Abraham as an actual human being, or as a symbol of Israel's covenant with God?
Third, assuming for the moment that Abraham was not an actual historical figure (though I tend to give ancestral memories the benefit of the doubt, because the skeptical experts have been proven wrong time and again), would not Jesus have used Abraham's name in any case, in the interests of making his message clear to his hearers?
Now, there is no reason to deny that Abraham was a real person; all of these foundational myths have their roots in truth. The contractual forms found in Genesis have been found to match similar contracts found on clay tablets from Mesopotamia to Syria. and date them precisely to the patriarchal period. Moreover, those same documents show nomadic pastoralists living in wealthy, extended clans, just as Genesis describes. The marriage and inheritance customs, the kinds of stories and puns, all of them place Genesis firmly in the 15th-13th century culture of Mesopotamia and Syria. There is no way that a person living even in the time of David and Solomon some 300-400 years later would have known these things had they not been passed down. Now, whether specific details of all the stories are all factually accurate, that's another question, but on the whole, the stories of the patriarchs reflect real cultural memories, hence there is no reason to doubt the existence of some tribal ancestor names Abraham, who had son named Isaac, who had a son named Jacob, and so on. In these nomadic societies, dates and birthdays are always rather sketchy and abstract, but geneology is highly reliable. Even in the 20th century, an illiterate Bedouin might not know how old he is, but he will be able to recite from memory his entire family tree going back six or seven generations. He might not be able to read, but he would know by heart a range of songs and poems describing the mighty deeds of those ancestors several hundred years earlier. And if the story improved with the telling, that doesn't make the stories any the less true in the mythical sense. Myth is the way man communicates truths that are too vast to be transmitted as a dry recitation of facts.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 9, 2007 8:38:10 PM
Stuart -
I am quite sympathetic to much of what you are saying, but I disagree with a couple of your points. So, naturally, that's what I'll focus on.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had over at my own blog a week ago. I was in the middle of wrestling with the passage where Moses orders the wholesale slaughter of Midianite women and baby boys, and a commenter and I quickly got into a debate over whether the story of the Exodus and following should be read as mythology or history. I acknowledged the mythological elements, but this was my response:
Well, let's make sure we define our terms. I see mythology (at its best) as a way of invoking God's guidance of the imagination in telling stories. The myth maker weaves fantastic stories which guide the people into realities higher and richer than they ever would, while peeling back the curtain of the multi-dimensional world we live in. Its a way of seeing the significance of what seem to be mundane things. Most myths are rooted in real events, but the myth maker sees things that someone standing there at the time would not have seen (and so, he would argue, he sees more clearly what "really" happened).
So, sure, there is some of this reflection throughout the Old Testament. But equally strong is the gravity of testimony. Deuteronomy, which I'm coming to now, harps on this really strongly: Do you remember what you saw with your own eyes? What you, and no one else, were privileged to witness? Do not let this be forgotten! Tell it to your children, and have them tell it to their children. You have a testimony to keep alive.
This is not primarily the vision of a myth maker closing his eyes while God shows him the story from the divine perspective. It is the vision of a witness testifying under oath, on pain of death, what he has seen with eyes wide open.
And I would make the same point here. I have no doubt that the numbers may have been a good deal smaller than 600,000 or whatever, but scripture presents the Exodus as God stepping himself onto center-stage. The questions afterwards - "has any other nation had the chance to actually see their gods do stuff like this?" - seems like a way of saying that this is meant to be seen as testimony to something absolutely spectacular. Or, to put it this way, I'm not particular about the pillar of fire and cloud at the sea, but the fire on the mountain and the booming voice has to stay.
I do cringe a little at the notion of God having to suspend the laws by which he governs the universe to act. I don't find this supernatural/natural distinction helpful. Take Elijah and the axe head floating. You might say that God suspended the normal properties of water and metal - bending the rules for a special case. But why not simply say that God exerted a force on the axe head? A cup normally sits on the table due to the laws of gravity, but I do not break the law of gravity by picking it up. I simply assert my agency in the world.
God works in many ways - subtly speaking thoughts into our minds, orchestrating the most minuscule of details into a web of providence, choosing how to create the world to begin with, and, yes, doing wonders with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. And of course most clearly through the agency of the man Jesus Christ - his only begotten son our Lord. And I argue that none of this ought to be seen as "breaking laws".
Anyway, you are clearly more educated and experienced than myself, so I expect you will have no trouble shooting down in flames most of my arguments. Try to bolster them up before you do though - perhaps there is something worth taking on board.
Posted by: Wonders for Oyarsa | Apr 9, 2007 11:49:18 PM
> On this issue, once you understand what I mean by myth, we are in agreement.
I have no doubt that we are largely in agreement. You're not trying to undo the Pentateuch after all, just abridge it :)
> Large by what standard? Large by our reckoning? Large by the standards of the late Bronze Age? By that of a major state? By that of a tribal confederacy?
Large by the numbers given in the text. While the number may be an estimate (it is awfully round in places) or it may include odd methods of counting that we aren’t culturally familiar with, absence evidence or especially revelation to the contrary I’ll use the numbers given.
> Herodotus tells us that Xerxes crossed the Hellespont with a million men. OK, I'll bite.
I will note that some estamites by competent historians range as high as 750,000 which makes a million (especially if you include uncrossed support personnel), unreliable counts from enemy sources, and eye witness accounts more than reasonable
> We know pretty well how many people can forage off the land per square mile--and when we consider all those factors, we don't get an answer anywhere near 600,000
But that number is arrived at without divine intervention. The story is pretty clear that divine intervention *is* required to move that many people. Without Yahweh guiding them I admit they’d be toast. But that’s kind of the whole point.
> As Gandalf says to Bilbo at the end of "The Hobbit": "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophesies just because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?"
And Gandalf hurled tree branches, lit them on fire, and took out platoon sized groups of mounted orcs single handedly while growing as large as tree. Not to mention he was Middle-Earth’s version of an angel. He counts as divine intervention in my book.
The pillar of fire and cloud was also the source of a theophany….which doesn’t sit well with it being torch bearers…
Too bad you do your own rules...I'd love a recommendation from you for a Napoleonics set...only play Armati and DBA right now...
Posted by: Nick | Apr 10, 2007 12:05:00 AM
Stuart,
First of all, welcome back! We’ve missed you and your posts. MC hasn’t been the same since you took your blogging fast.
Second, it would be interesting to combine the posts here with those in the concurrent thread, “Little Lies for God.” I find myself for once in sympathy with Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” Alas, I thought I knew!
I acknowledge that I am the author of the comment you quote and which began: “I'm sure you'll not be surprised to hear that I, as an evangelical, take a different view of the Pentateuch than does Stuart.” Especially as you later identify the author as “Bill”! I will say, however, that I’d not be terribly concerned if all that you described is in fact correct. What you say wouldn’t affect my faith. God being sovereign, He may well choose to act as you describe. Yet while you may be correct, I remain skeptical. I don’t claim to be an historian; I’m just a lawyer. So I’m not able to offer facts contrary to yours, but I can address your arguments.
I believe the place to begin is that is the argument begun by David Gray: what does the Lord Jesus teach us? For here we begin with an era not far removed from our own in its understanding of “truth.” Indeed Pilate was obviously of this era. If the Lord teaches us that something is “true,” what are we to make of it? Can you really hide, as good liberals do, behind “Jesus’ kenosis”? If so, I believe you depart not only from the understanding of evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics, but also from that of the Fathers. Can you point me to any Father who believed that the Lord’s “kenosis” deprived Him of knowing whether statements He affirmed were true were in fact so? And do you not have to face the excruciating dilemma of an inability to know whether anything the Lord asserted about our salvation and the reason for His death were true? What, indeed, is truth?
“[The author] views Scripture through 500 years of Protestant exegesis and polemic, and above all, he views Scripture in light of the ongoing battle with secular skeptics. This is how he can say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between what I do and what the Jesus Seminar does. Because he rejects the pseudoscholarship of the Seminar, he feels obliged to uphold a form of biblical literalism as a bulwark against the erosion of the authority of Scripture. The Jesus Seminar pushes in one direction, he pushes back in the opposite direction.”
Well, not quite so. My battle is with unbelievers of all stripes, and not just with secularists. And I don’t say there is no difference between your position and that of the Jesus Seminar, but only that your argument tends in the same direction. But in the end the truth you defend is not that asserted by the Scriptures but is the result of modern (and largely secular) scholarship. I too will accept truth from any source, but what is truth for you, Stuart? You criticize my position (and that of James and Ethan), but yours too is a literalism—but the literalism of modern historical research. In fact I understand that even some of the most “literal” elements of Scripture involve a judicious application of metaphor and hyperbole. But here I draw the line: where an historical/critical exegesis of what the Lord says indicates that He meant what he said literally, I so accept it. When Jesus did not know something due to His kenosis, he at least knew what the limits of His earthly knowledge were (e.g., the time of His Second Coming). But He did not speak falsely due to His kenosis of matters that we, as moderns, know for a fact to be true. This, I believe, is the Fathers’ understanding of the Lord’s kenosis.
Posted by: Bill R | Apr 10, 2007 12:45:42 AM
>>>I have no doubt that we are largely in agreement. You're not trying to undo the Pentateuch after all, just abridge it :)<<<
No, I am not trying to abridge it, I am trying to understand it and validate it as a true record of the history of God's relationship with his people.
>>>Large by the numbers given in the text. While the number may be an estimate (it is awfully round in places) or it may include odd methods of counting that we aren’t culturally familiar with, absence evidence or especially revelation to the contrary I’ll use the numbers given.<<<
If you're going to draw a line in the sand concerning the literal accuracy of Exodus, the numbers are the last place you should start, since they are the easiest to investigate and cross check against other sources. In other words, we really do know an awful lot about population size and density, the ability of the land to support people, and so forth. If there is an area where scholars across the board can reach consensus, it is that the numbers given are wildly exaggerated in a way common throughout ancient writings of all sorts.
>>>I will note that some estamites by competent historians range as high as 750,000 which makes a million (especially if you include uncrossed support personnel), unreliable counts from enemy sources, and eye witness accounts more than reasonable<<<
Not any that I have seen by people capable of doing logistics.
>>>And Gandalf hurled tree branches, lit them on fire, and took out platoon sized groups of mounted orcs single handedly while growing as large as tree. Not to mention he was Middle-Earth’s version of an angel. He counts as divine intervention in my book.<<<
You'll also note that the Istari were strictly enjoined from using their powers directly against Sauron; their mandate was to counsel, encourage and comfort, not to rule or direct. Only on his return from death did Gandalf confront the enemy directly, and then only in very limited instances. Like God, the Valar believed in working more subtly through the agency of the free peoples of Middle Earth. That's why they sent the Istari, as "paracletes", just as God spoke to us through the prophets and set angels as our guardians (as it says in Basil's Anaphora).
>>>The pillar of fire and cloud was also the source of a theophany….which doesn’t sit well with it being torch bearers…<<<
Theophanies come in all shapes and forms.
>>>Too bad you do your own rules...I'd love a recommendation from you for a Napoleonics set...only play Armati and DBA right now...<<<
The main problem is I never found a rule set that got the command and control, as well as the dynamics of shock action quite right. I'm not saying my rules do so, either, but they come closer to what I think they ought to be.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 5:40:05 AM
>The main problem is I never found a rule set that got the command and control, as well as the dynamics of shock action quite right.
Ever try Piquet?
Posted by: David Gray | Apr 10, 2007 5:49:25 AM
>>>I acknowledge that I am the author of the comment you quote and which began: “I'm sure you'll not be surprised to hear that I, as an evangelical, take a different view of the Pentateuch than does Stuart.” Especially as you later identify the author as “Bill”! <<<
Sorry, I tried to scrub all the personal references. I missed one, and I apologize. I didn't want this to be personal.
>>> Can you really hide, as good liberals do, behind “Jesus’ kenosis”? <<<
It's not merely liberals who "hide" behiind kenosis--a good many of the Fathers did, too, though I dislike the later tendency of ascribing Jesus' apparent omniscience to his divine nature, and his apparent ignorance to his human nature. Still, Scripture attests that Jesus did not know everything, did not have a clear view of the future, and was, in fact, fully human in every way but sin. We can't get around the fact that as a human being, his ability to express himself was as fully limited by speech and comprehension as any of us. Otherwise, he wouldn't have to keep explaining himself to the Twelve.
>>>Can you point me to any Father who believed that the Lord’s “kenosis” deprived Him of knowing whether statements He affirmed were true were in fact so? <<<
Again, true in what way?
>>> And do you not have to face the excruciating dilemma of an inability to know whether anything the Lord asserted about our salvation and the reason for His death were true? What, indeed, is truth?<<<
Why should I have to doubt that, given the testimony of his death and Resurrection?
>>>And I don’t say there is no difference between your position and that of the Jesus Seminar, but only that your argument tends in the same direction.<<<
Not at all. For one, I don't begin with a set of a priori assumptions, as does the Seminar. I seek after the truth behind the words, and let the chips fall where they may. If that means we have a truly supernatural event, then we have a truly supernatural event. The Seminar began with the assumption that there are no supernatural events, which of course, dictates in advance where they would come out. In addition, the Seminar makes no real effort to understand the first century Jewish-Hellenistic culture in which Jesus lived, but superimposes its own 20th century attitudes and beliefs over the text. They do so in one way, scriptural literalists do so in another. Both have a common epistemological approach to the notion of truth, which is not the first century notion by a long shot.
>>>You criticize my position (and that of James and Ethan), but yours too is a literalism—but the literalism of modern historical research.<<<
If that were indeed the case, I would be a materialist historian, rejecting out of hand anything which could not be explained by natural causation or human agency. But that would also mean I could not accept the Incarnation and the Resurrection. God does not become a finite human being, nor does God die, nor do men rise from the grave. Naturalism and materialism therefore cannot accept them. I, n the other hand, am a theistic historian, and see God as the Lord of history, a God who rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty. And if that means He has to become one of us, so be it. As an historian, I could not find any way to explaiin the success of Christianity other than by accepting that its central Evangelion was true: that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, who came into the world to save sinners, was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. Occam's Razor shaves close, and in this case, all other explanations require such a wholesale proliferation of hypotheses as to lack all credibility.
>>>But here I draw the line: where an historical/critical exegesis of what the Lord says indicates that He meant what he said literally, I so accept it. <<<
But God, of course, said nothing at all about the events in Exodus; they were written down by others who gave their take on events.
And here we come to my ultimate problem with my opponents on both sides--the secular materialists and the biblical literalists alike: both seem to me governed by fear of the truth, of where unfettered investigation and analysis might lead. For the secularists, there is the fear of finding something that they have already rejected. For the biblical literalists, there is the fear that something they have accepted might not be there. I think both positions reflect a weakness of faith. The materialists lack faith in their own materialism, while the literalists equally lack faith in the truth of Scripture, for if they really KNEW that it was true, they would not fear where historical investigation would lead.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 6:48:43 AM
>>>Ever try Piquet?<<<
No, I haven't. Got a link to a site that describes it?
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 6:49:40 AM
Okay, back up here just a sec...
"Remember that the chariot was the tank of its age. As a platform for archers it could kill men by the score from over a hundred yards away..."
That's very impressive. Combat archery with a primitive bow, from a moving or at least unsteady platform, that lethal?
I'd suspect the morale effect of being shot AT from something you can't hope to catch might be a bit more important than the actual kill numbers. Col. David Grossman's "On Killing: The Psychological Cost...etc", suggests that most killing in ancient battles occured in rout situations, for reasons of practicality and psychology (harder to kill a man facing you, in both dimensions); and in the exploitation of a rout the cavalry has always been king (again, for both practical and psychological reasons). But - maybe the Stuka rather than the Panzer of the ancient world? Or was the damage less about accurate aimed fire, and more about literal "arch-"ery into a mass of troops from a distance - making the chariot a self-propelled mortar? (Arrow wastage would be monstrous, I imagine...)
And when will "Touchstone" begin vending your rules, with colorful Egyptian, Davidian, Phillistine and Hittite counters and optional fantasy scenarios like "Chariots in Middle Earth" and "War Elephants versus Secular Materialists: Raid on the Faculty Lounge" (short, but satisfying?)
Been adapting some rules from "juniorgeneral.org" for education program usage at work; instructive stuff, and many great links to a wide variety of "paper soldiers" from different historical periods.
Posted by: Joe Long | Apr 10, 2007 8:01:26 AM
>>>That's very impressive. Combat archery with a primitive bow, from a moving or at least unsteady platform, that lethal?<<<
The Egyptian bow wasn't primitive, judging by the examples uncovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen and other places. The Egyptians had become familiar with the Asiatic composite bow, and were producing them en masse. As for the Egyptian chariot, recovered examples are light and have double-sprung platforms that allow for surprising stability. Test shoots using reconstructed chariots and bows show that an untrained archer could get off about ten shots a minute from a moving chariot and score about 50% hits on a mass target (such as a formation of infantry) at 100 meters. Chariot tactics consisted of "caricole" attacks, in which a column of chariots in succession approach the target, let loose several arrows, countermarched and retired. With several parallel columns approaching the enemy formation simultaneously, a continuous hail of arrows could be maintained until all ammunition had been expended. It worked, if you believe accounts from various well documented battles. Considering the cost of building and maintaining a chariot force, if it didn't work, the chariot would never have been buillt in large numbers.
>>>I'd suspect the morale effect of being shot AT from something you can't hope to catch might be a bit more important than the actual kill numbers.<<<
You are partially correct, here: there is a psychologically debilitating effect from being attacked without the ability to strike back. However, a large part of the effect comes from at least the perceived lethality of the attack. If you are being shot at with no effect, it tends to raise morale, not lower it. On the other hand, if guys start going down to your right and to your left, soon you begin to think that your number is coming up next. At that point, cohesion begins to erode. Also, note that the perception of lethality is often greater than actual lethality: in hard-fought Civil War engagements, men are often described as falling in windrows. But if you look at the actual duration of the engagement and the number of men hit, you realize the actual rate at which men are falling is only about 1-2 per minute on each side. Moreover, when you look at ammunition expenditure, you realize it's taking several hundred rounds to bring down each man.
>>>Col. David Grossman's "On Killing: The Psychological Cost...etc", suggests that most killing in ancient battles occured in rout situations, for reasons of practicality and psychology (harder to kill a man facing you, in both dimensions); and in the exploitation of a rout the cavalry has always been king (again, for both practical and psychological reasons). But - maybe the Stuka rather than the Panzer of the ancient world?<<<
I'm not a big fan of Grossman's book (I think he misreads a lot of the evidence and ignores a number of studies that contradict his thesis), particularly on his analysis of ancient warfare. The reason most casualties in ancient battles occured during pursuit is quite simple: troops tended to be heavily armored, with helmet, breastplate, greaves and shield. But these all gave maximum protection from the front. In particular, the shield was the main source of protection (look at the Greek hoplon, or the Roman scutum, which covered most of the soldier's body), but gave no protection to a man running away. Also, much of the protection afforded by the shield and armor came from the solidity of the formation. The shield of the man on the right protected the man to the left (which is why the right of the line is the place of honor, and why the Psalm says, "I looked to my right hand; there was no one to take care of my life"). Once the formation broke, each man was vulnerable on his right side. If he turned to flee, his back was exposed. Now, if he discarded his shield, he could easily outrun his fully armored opponent (hence the Spartan wife's injunction to her husband, "With it or on it"), but he couldn't outrun a man on a horse. Hoplite battles tended not to be particularly bloody until light troops and cavalry were added to the mix, precisely because a hoplite without his shield could run away from one who retained his.
There is an exception to the rule--when there is a gross disparity in protection between the two sides. Thus, the heavily armored Spartan and allied troops at Thermopylae killed tens of thousands of Persians who were armored only with padded tunics and wicker shields. They were literally skewered by the Greek hoplites.
The Israelites fleeing from the Egyptians were not soldiers. Their weapons would have consisted mainly of home-made spears, farm implements like sickles, and a smattering of swords and knives. Their armor would have been non-existent. To hold off the Egyptian chariots, they would have had to come together in a tight mass (horses don't impale themselves on sharp things, nor do they charge apparently solid objects like a phalanx). Once they did so, they would be vulnerable to Egyptian arrows. Assume that the arrows are only marginally effective (a big assumption, given that the Hebrews had no armor, and thus were utterly exposed), Simply by swarming around the Israelite formation, the chariots would have pinned it in place, allowing the accompanying foot soldiers time to come up. At that point, the Israelites would have been facing well armed and armored infantry fighting in organized formations. It would have been butchery. However, the Israelites, seeing the infantry coming on, and with their cohesion already weakened by the archery barrage, probably would have broken long before contact, and then been ridden down by the chariots, whose riders would have switched from bows to spears at that point.
>>>And when will "Touchstone" begin vending your rules, with colorful Egyptian, Davidian, Phillistine and Hittite counters and optional fantasy scenarios like "Chariots in Middle Earth" and "War Elephants versus Secular Materialists: Raid on the Faculty Lounge" (short, but satisfying?)<<<
I need to make up a new set of ancient rules, since in the period before gunpowder, melee combat really did occur quite often. People were used to killing face-to-face, by hand. Sword did cross sword, spear crossed shield. Nut in the age of musket and sabre, actual contact during shock combat was the exception not the rule. In a cavalry charge, usually one side or the other would break and run before contact; if contact did occur, the two sides tended to open their ranks and "thread" their way down the files, thus passing through each other, at which point they would turn around and go back whence they came. Casualties in such encounters were usually low. Similarly, in a bayonet charge, at some point in the process, one side or the other would, by unspoken consent of its members, decide NOT to press home, turn around, and run. Thus, the bayonet was really used to gain territory, not to kill people. It explains why so few people were killed or wounded by them, yet generals were convinced of its utility. They understood that battles are not won by how many are killed, but by how many run away. And the bowel-churning sight of grim-visaged men armed with long pointy knives on the end of their muskets will make all but the most resolute men run away. Thus, war can be understood best as a lethal game of chicken.
There were two exceptions to the process I outlined above. First, somtimes in dense terrain or poor visibility, opposing bodies of troops stumbled onto each other at such close range that contact was inevitable. This happened in the Battle of Busaco in the Peninsula War, when a body of French troops hopped over a low wall to find a battalion of British troops coming up on the other side. Second, when troops are defending a fortification, an enclosed yard, or a building, the tendency is to stay and fight for the perceived protection of the defended place, rather than risk exposure in the open. That getting out might be difficult or impossible (because there is only one gate or door) also provides an incentive to stay and fight. In such cases, casualties from bayonets might be in the majority.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 8:41:52 AM
Ah, in classic Touchstone style, one thread has developed two conversations, one knottily theological and the other convivial. How I love this site!
Stuart, I wonder why later gun troops lost the mettle to hold in melee combat. Were they just too used to only engaging at range? If I understand you right, a band of Vikings could have easily taken on a column of Napoleonic troops if the latter had run out of ammunition.
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Apr 10, 2007 8:57:05 AM
While I am somewhat bothered by Stuart's theory about the literalness of the Exodus, I must voice an objection to citing references by Jesus to Old Testament events as proof of their literal historicity. This is an argument which one encounters a lot from literalists, but it is based upon an assumption which cannot be proven, i.e., that because Jesus referred to an Old Testament event, He must have believed it (known it) to be an actual historic event the account of which as recorded in Scripture is literally accurate in all its details.
First, and most obvious, Jesus could just as easily cite an example from fiction as a prototype as He could an example from history. I can, for example, say, "Just has Huck Finn grew while floating down the Mississippi, I have grown through this experience." My citing Huck Finn does not mean that I believe that such a person actually ever lived. One would have to read in context exactly what Jesus said to determine if there is any evidence that He was authenticating as being a literal historical event the event He was citing. In some cases, that appears to be the case; in others, I am not so sure.
Second, that He cited an actual historic event does not foreclose the possibility that details recorded in the Old Testament surrounding that event are what we would today considered embellishments, but which were commonly understood as acceptable hyperbole at the time of the autograph. Again, I can cite Davy Crockett's last stand at the Alamo without adopting as historically accurate all the legends that have come to surround that event. Jesus could have done the same. Again, one would have to read carefully the context in which Jesus spoke and what precisely He said to determine if His citation tells us anything about the literal historicity of the details in the Old Testament account.
Beyond that, I have nothing to add for or against Stuart's position. I must note, however, that Stuart's fingers appear not to have atrophied from disuse during his Lenten fast from blogging; if anything, they have renewed endurance! ;-) Nice see you back.
Posted by: GL | Apr 10, 2007 9:26:06 AM
>No, I haven't. Got a link to a site that describes it?
http://www.piquet.com/news.php
Posted by: David Gray | Apr 10, 2007 9:52:19 AM
GL
How does your argument relate to Christ's statement regarding Abraham?
Posted by: David Gray | Apr 10, 2007 9:53:29 AM
In the context in which He referred to Abraham, Jesus clearly understood Abraham to be an actual historic person.
I do not know of any citations by Him related to the Exodus which would refute Stuart's view. Again, I am bothered by his interpretation, especially as it relates to the crossing of the sea and the pillar of fire, but one must be careful not to call Jesus as a witness to one's own position unless he is sure that the New Testament text actually supports His being such a witness.
Posted by: GL | Apr 10, 2007 9:57:08 AM
In the secondary conversation:
-in the Russo-Japanese War, just after the turn of the 20th century, I think there might have been a bit of a "medieval troops meet modern" dynamic - not in technology but in close-combat mentality. At least in press accounts (one celebrated that "the Japanese have rehabilitated valor"!) Japanese soldiers, less than one generation from the Middle Ages, dominated the larger Russians in close combat with bayonet and sword; in fact a martial art of the bayonet (jukendo) had been developed from spear-fighting. The disparity might be attributed to superior Japanese motivation or to technique but I suspect it was the close-and-kill mentality - the same one that brought the Zulus to triumph at Islandhwana. Also, I like Grossman's characterization of fighting for posture-and-submission (most Western bayonet fighting) versus active killing.
(Actually that difference seems to have formed the Zulu nation in the first place: Shaka, a first-class sociopath with leadership gifts, forsook traditional low-casualty Bantu thrown spear exchanges for the use of a long-bladed hand-to-hand killing spear, and was soon cock-of-the-walk.)
-Great that somebody did those chariot tests!! They were crazier than us 19th Century reenactors - unless they got plenty of grant money - but I'm thankful for them, crazy or not. Thanks for fascinating ancient warfare notes. Can you recommend a good book on the topic?
Posted by: Joe Long | Apr 10, 2007 10:25:45 AM
I hope to post my own response to Stuart, since some portions of his long post were off-line reponses to me, but I may not have time until the weekend. Suffice it for now to say that I am in considerable disagreement with him.
Posted by: James A. Altena | Apr 10, 2007 11:11:43 AM
Stuart -
Did my comment have anything worth responding to?
Posted by: Wonders for Oyarsa | Apr 10, 2007 11:53:37 AM
>>>Well, let's make sure we define our terms. I see mythology (at its best) as a way of invoking God's guidance of the imagination in telling stories. The myth maker weaves fantastic stories which guide the people into realities higher and richer than they ever would, while peeling back the curtain of the multi-dimensional world we live in. Its a way of seeing the significance of what seem to be mundane things. Most myths are rooted in real events, but the myth maker sees things that someone standing there at the time would not have seen (and so, he would argue, he sees more clearly what "really" happened).<<<
This is basically correct. True myths address transcendent truths through the use of story in which actions, persons or events may be exaggerated or take on symbolic importance. However, that does not mean that myths are not useful sources of history. Going back to the Illiad, we now know, thanks to archaeology and the decyphering of both Linear B and Hittite tablets, that Homer provided some really useful nuggets of information. We also know, through the reading of Egyptian, Hittite, Canaanite and Syrian documents, that Genesis gives us a pretty accurate picture of life in the Middle Bronze Age of the Near East.
>>>The questions afterwards - "has any other nation had the chance to actually see their gods do stuff like this?" - seems like a way of saying that this is meant to be seen as testimony to something absolutely spectacular. Or, to put it this way, I'm not particular about the pillar of fire and cloud at the sea, but the fire on the mountain and the booming voice has to stay.<<<
Mountains really do smoke and belch fire; the Sinai Peninsula is a volcanically active area. If you've ever seen a real volcano up close and personal in the midst of an eruption, you know the meaning of "the fear of God". As for the voice booming, the Lord speaks to whom He will, in whatever way He wills. The message was for Moses, and nobody else heard it.
>>>I do cringe a little at the notion of God having to suspend the laws by which he governs the universe to act. I don't find this supernatural/natural distinction helpful. Take Elijah and the axe head floating. You might say that God suspended the normal properties of water and metal - bending the rules for a special case. But why not simply say that God exerted a force on the axe head? A cup normally sits on the table due to the laws of gravity, but I do not break the law of gravity by picking it up. I simply assert my agency in the world.<<<
A much simpler explanation. Though note that God in Scripture most often exerts his agency through actual agents, even if these are his Messengers, the angeli. Who usually take human form, just before scaring the pants off of somebody.
>>>Did my comment have anything worth responding to?<<<
Quite a bit. Sorry I couldn't get to you sooner.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 12:56:20 PM
>>>http://www.piquet.com/news.php<<<
Thanks
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 10, 2007 12:57:11 PM
"Myth maker, myth maker, make me a myth..."
A good rhyme for "myth" and there's a fine parody to be written there. "Glyph" maybe?
Posted by: Joe Long | Apr 10, 2007 1:02:35 PM
