Proto-Semitic and Egyptian.

John Cowan wrote me as follows:

Proto-Semitic and Egyptian is a chapter by John Huehnergard from a forthcoming book Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic, obviously descended from a conference talk. Here’s a money quote:

My frustration in working on Afro-Asiatic was brought into sharp focus one semester, twenty-five or thirty years ago, when my late Harvard colleague Calvert Watkins, the eminent Indo-Europeanist, asked me to present the status quaestionis on AfroAsiatic to his graduate seminar on historical linguistics. At the end of my two- or three-hour presentation, Watkins’s first comment was something like, “So, not really an established family, then.” And I believe he was right, in the sense that there was still a long way to go to elicit significant numbers of plausible cognate sets across the branches and to formulate consistent sound correspondences on the basis of those cognates, the most fundamental goals of the comparative method. And I also believe that is still true today.

What is needed, still, is a reconstruction of the earlier stages of the other branches of Afro-Asiatic besides Egyptian and Semitic. If, for example, the Cushitic languages constitute a family, and if they are related to the Semitic languages, the comparanda must be Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Semitic. It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language; we are dealing with an enormous time depth, and the chance of accidental similarity is simply too great. Likewise, if there is a genetic relationship between Egyptian and Semitic, it must be because they descend, separately, from an ancestor that predates both of them.

Egyptian is patently much more different from any Semitic language than any one of those is to another, even languages as different and as widely separated in time as Old Akkadian and Maltese. Therefore, a proposed common ancestor of Egyptian and Semitic must be older than both the oldest Egyptian attested and the oldest Semitic attested. And what we should compare, as just noted, are not features of individual languages but rather features of the earliest reconstructible ancestors of those languages. In this case, that would ideally mean comparing Proto-Semitic and Proto-Egyptian. Proto-Semitic must, obviously, be older than the earliest attestation of a Semitic language, in the mid-third millennium, though perhaps not much older, possibly as late as the mid-fourth millennium. As for Egyptian, since we do not have evidence for a great deal of dialect diversity in the earliest attested phases of the language, we are unable to reconstruct a Proto-Egyptian that is much different from those early phases.

So what I will present, in this chapter, is a summary of our current understanding of Proto-Semitic, and a comparison of features of Proto-Semitic with their counterparts in Old and Middle Egyptian. Most of those features have already been noted by the long parade of scholars, from before Erman up to today, who have compared Egyptian and Semitic. What I hope will be at least somewhat novel is the comparison to a reconstructed proto-form of the latter. And I should also state explicitly, right up front, that although I am comparing Semitic and Egyptian, I do not mean to suggest that I think they form a subgroup within AfroAsiatic; on the contrary, I do not think they do.

Fascinating stuff; thanks, JC!

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language; we are dealing with an enormous time depth, and the chance of accidental similarity is simply too great

    Preach it, Brother John!
    (Mutatits mutandis, this particular sin is committed constantly in Niger-Congo comparative work. Anathema! Anathema!)

  2. David Eddyshaw says

    Good article, as you’d expect. Among other things, admirably agnostic.

    Interesting point about the surprising (relative) lack of cognate vocabulary between Egyptian and Semitic, compared with the evident similarities in the pronouns and several aspects of the grammar. Apart from being odd in itself, it’s of course a warning against overconfidence in reconstruction of the proto-Afroasiatic lexicon that the two oldest attested branches already agree on so little.

  3. One thing about Afroasiastic and similar enterprises: not always, but often enough, language families have more obvious subfamilies. With a tenuous one like AA, wouldn’t one want to first identify the closest two or more branches and concentrate efforts on reconstructing that particular subfamily? Aren’t Semitic and Berber supposedly especially close to each other?

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    The trouble is, there isn’t even a consensus about subgrouping.
    (IIRC, Lameen thinks that Berber has very evident connexions with Chadic.)
    The problem is a bit chicken-and-egg (as Huehnergard actually points out in this article): the evidence for subgrouping is often itself dependent on your reconstruction of the protolanguage, because you don’t actually know what is a common retention (as opposed to common innovation) until after you have reconstructed the protolanguage.

    In Oti-Volta comparative work, the received opinion* ever since Gabriel Manessy’s pioneering studies in the 1970’s has been that there is an “Eastern Oti-Volta” subgroup, and Coffi Sambiéni has made an impressive in-depth attempt to reconstruct proto-Eastern; but Manessy was wrong, and Sambiéni has consequently reconstructed something that never existed in the first place.

    * Miehe’s excellent compendium of Oti-Volta noun flexion systems, for example, says that the Eastern Oti-Volta languages are all “closely related” to one another, presumably just taking Manessy’s word for it. They aren’t. Allegedly “Eastern” Waama is no closer to the other Eastern languages in vocabulary or grammatical structure than Yom, away over in Benin, is to Dagaare, at the extreme western end of the whole family.

  5. Owlmirror says

    @Y: One of the related papers under the one by Huehnergard is:

    https://www.academia.edu/1195168/Semitic_Berber_Relations ( Vermondo Brugnatelli )

    The classification of Berber as a branch of the Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) linguistic family is now undisputed (Chaker 1995; Galand 2010, 11)

    […]

    Chaker, S.
    1995 La parenté chamito-sémitique du berbère: un faisceau d’indices convergents. In: S. Chaker. Linguistique berbère. Études de syntaxe et de diachronie (Paris–Louvain: Peeters) 219-245.

    Galand, L.
    2010 Regards sur le berbère. Milano: Centro Studi Camito-Semitici

    For whatever that’s worth. I make no pretense of anything other than the ability to copy and paste.

  6. David Eddyshaw says

    There’s no doubt but that Berber is related to Semitic. But you can’t tell just by looking at Berber and Semitic whether they form a subgroup of Afroasiatic: that is logically impossible. You need to look at the rest of Afroasiatic, and, specifically, you need to decide whether the resemblances between Berber and Semitic are common retentions or common innovations. Given the current state of reconstruction of e.g. proto-Chadic, you will, in fact, not be able to do this, and you will just need to accept this awkward fact, rather than leap to the entirely unwarranted conclusion that the (perfectly real) similarities you have detected establish a Berber-Semitic subgroup.

    It’s rather like the situation with “Gur” languages: the supposed Gur languages surely are all related to one another (they are all Volta-Congo languages); but it does not follow that they form a subgroup of Volta-Congo. To establish that, you need to be able to exhibit a common non-trivial innovation that they all share, that cannot be plausibly ascribed to diffusion (and preferably more than one.)

  7. chicken-and-egg (as Huehnergard

    Heh.

    you don’t actually know what is a common retention (as opposed to common innovation)

    Of course. I should say, you can concentrate on reconstructing the common ancestor of the languages (or proto-) which can most easily be compared to each other. In other words, not the languages most closely related, but those most easily relatable.

  8. It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language

    Rather true, but the load-bearing problem here is (the first instance of) the singular indefinite article “a”; it is surely acceptable to compare a sufficiently large collection of forms across Cushitic with something similar in Semitic already before having exact Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Semitic reconstruction in hand. This is how almost every currently known language relationship has been established — comparing just e.g. one Germanic language at a time and Sanskrit would be rather risky, but if we list one Gothic word and understand it to be shorthand for also corresponding words in a few dozen newer Germanic varieties too, then NBD.

    Actually the even worse problem is that “a particular Cushitic language” really means “any Cushitic language”. If we took and fixed one specific Cushitic language, say Beja or Afar, then comparing just that with Semitic could perhaps give some solid result on their relationship too. That just would imply nothing about the rest of Cushitic until we have at least demonstrations that (1) Beja is, in fact, related to the rest of Cushitic and (2) the evidence for this and the relationship-with-Semitic have sufficient overlap (that the data cannot be assumed to comprise one set of native material and another contact-derived).

    I wonder if by Watkins’ criteria, Cushitic might itself count as “not really an established family”, because the usual process of establishing one should already have given a good list of widespread comparanda that you might compare then further with e.g. Semitic. But finding cognates between the components of Cushitic is really almost as hard as finding them in AA as a whole. (I do sometimes think Cushitic indeed might not be a family but rather a language area of independent AA branches — this has been explicitly proposed for Beja but could be maybe proposed for others, too.)

  9. J.W. Brewer says

    I am now wondering if it’s odd that “Egyptian” is (or was) essentially a one-language grouping within some conjectured larger grouping, or if it’s as simple as the fact that the very long-running cultural/political unity (most of the time) of the relevant part of the Nile Valley (plus surrounding desert as an obstacle to gradual geographical diffusion of population) just meant that the historical processes whereby e.g. proto-Germanic (or proto-Cushitic, if there be such a thing) split up into a bunch of daughter languages were never enabled by the circumstances in which Egyptian-speakers lived.

  10. How do we know there weren’t daughter languages that never got recorded? Why would the official scribes who produced what we have of Egyptian have felt the need to memorialize the various local forms of speech they may have encountered in their forays into far-flung districts?

  11. J.W. Brewer says

    Well, lots of different early Semitic languages got recorded by scribes during some of the same time period. I guess it’s difficult to sort out how much of that was greater existing linguistic diversity versus greater diversity of scribal focus/interest. Wikipedia points out that the earlier Egyptian writing systems were not well-suited for capturing dialect diversity whereas by the time the adapted-from-Greek Coptic alphabet was finally introduced it was much better suited for visually evidencing dialect diversity and the surviving corpus of Coptic texts does indeed evidence multiple dialects. But it’s still the case that we don’t have some no-literary-tradition language spoken in recent centuries by a small ethnic group living at some Libyan oasis or down in the Sudan (i.e. out of the geographical range of the “Egyptian” polity with a single/unified scribal class) that’s clearly part of the Egyptian branch/sub-family.

    Are there any oddities of Biblical Hebrew as compared to other “Canaanite” languages that could be made sense of with the Biblical narrative that long long ago the early Hebrew-speakers spent a few centuries living among Egyptian-speakers before returning to the Holy Land? I’m not certain given time-depth etc. that *lack* of such Egyptianisms in Hebrew would be much evidence against the historicity of the Biblical narrative, but their presence would be interesting.

  12. “How do we know there weren’t daughter languages that never got recorded? ”

    @LH, as I keep insisting, language diversity of the Middle East, North Africa and Europe at any point was likely much greater than the attested diversity. Chances of a large language to get recorded can be estimated from available attestations of say African Romance and there were numerous small languages.

    But the fact is, it is weird Egyptian is an isolate within AA! Whatever the reason.

  13. This paper (which I haven’t yet read – only found through googling “early attestation Cushitic”) states that the earliest document of Cushitic we have is a late-1700s version of the Song of Songs in Gafat, a language with little other documentation.
    https://www.academia.edu/4214217/Cushitic

    Other than that, it sounds like there are some singleton words and onomastics. I wonder about how Song of Songs became the passage written down.

    I find myself wondering about the odds for discovery of a pre-modern text in a Cushitic language. Even a brief funerary monument could be pretty significant, if recent/similar enough to allow a convincing exegesis, but old enough that it showed some sound changes.

  14. A little further digging turns up a single ostracon from Saqqara with language believed to be Blemmye, believed to be related closely to modern Beja and believed to be a version of Psalm 30. A lot of conditionals.

    I may plow through the paper on this ostracon. It was published by an English speaker in 2004 in Champaign, Illinois. In Latin.

    My high school Latin is pretty rough anyway. And there are words in it with no other google hits at all. Can I assume that the Latin “bedauyica” is meant to be an adjectival form of Beja? I realized a moment after writing that the homepage also has a link to a related, responsive paper that confirms my guess — “Remarks on Old Bedauye”. Given that it’s in English, maybe I’ll just read that.

  15. I think I once wrote but didn’t sent a comment where I tried to demonstrate that (a) the phrase “A and B are related” is actually confusing (b) what is meant is we can reconstruct something.

  16. “cannot be plausibly ascribed to diffusion” – because 1. the two languages are geographically isolated – in which case inheritance or diffusion predates isolation

    or because of the innovation itself. But are there features that can’t be borrowed? I think
    2. similar languages (two elements of a continuum), or also lanhguages that preserve the structure modified by the innovation in similar form can borrow almost anything.
    3. in case of a very close contact between two different languages also almost anything can be borrowed.

  17. Considering that Coptic dialectal differentiation wasn’t great, and neither is Egyptian Arabic, I would guess that Old Egyptian wasn’t either, especially after the political unification of the Nile valley and delta. Maybe some desert nomads or Red Sea fishermen spoke Para-Egyptian languages.

  18. “and neither is Egyptian Arabic”

    perhaps greater than in any other country – but I’m not sure (I have no first hand experience).
    Take a look at the map here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic#Classification

    It includes Saidi in the south and Hijazi-adjacent Sinai bedouin. Also Egypt is huge.

    Cairenne is not very diverse, but… But it is Cairenne!

  19. JP: In an agreeable-though-of-course-not-perfect world, one would be able to find a relatively conservative member of Cushitic (or whatever), as an adequate proxy for the reconstructed ancestor.

  20. drasvi: WP says that “Speakers of Egyptian Arabic do not always understand more conservative varieties of Ṣaʽīdi Arabic.” So, some dialectal differentiation, but not huge. Maybe comparable to that between Coptic dialects? If Old Egyptian had that kind of dialectal differentiation, the protolanguage reconstructed from them wouldn’t be that different from the attested varieties, and wouldn’t be that much more helpful for studying AA.

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    @drasvi:

    almost anything can be borrowed

    Sure: that’s why I stuck in the plausible-deniability word “plausibly.”

    Two cases in point:

    (1) all the Western Oti-Volta languages except Boulba (widely separated from the rest, away off in Benin) have merged proto-Oti-Volta *c *ɟ into *s *z, a development which is maybe not tremendously far-fetched phonologically but is still unique within Oti-Volta. However, Boulba does not seem particularly aberrant in general, apart from effects which are attributable to it having wandered into the Atakora Sprachbund at an impressionable age: there’s not much else to suggest that it should be regarded as an aunt rather than a sister of the other WOV languages.

    On the other hand, Dagaare, which is also geographically widely separated from the rest of Western Oti-Volta but in the opposite direction, does show the merger, from which it seems to follow, at least, that Dagaare was still physically in contact with the other WOV languages some time after Boulba had departed on its Journey to the East. Unless you subscribe to a very hardcore (and implausible) conception of how languages usually separate historically, whether you call this a common innovation or an example of diffusion is pretty moot, really.

    (2) Western Oti-Volta, Buli/Konni, Yom/Nawdm and Waama have essentially inverted the proto-Oti-Volta tone system, so that the original lowest tone is now the highest. I have a hard time imagining how a feature like that could spread by diffusion. It’s scarcely something that could spread lexical item by lexical item: the whole tonal system has been changed.* (Though, to be honest, I have some difficulty in imagining how it even happened at all: still there are similar examples elsewhere, in Japanese and Scandinavian, for example.)

    * Howsomever, I just recently discovered that Waama shows this inversion in nouns but not verbs. It’s not unusual in Oti-Volta for the tonal systems of nouns and verbs to be rather different from one another, but even so this seems particularly weird. All suggestions gratefully received …

  22. @Y, I think I should at least partly accept your comparison. Because whatever processes encouraged convergence of Arabics could also act upon Egyptian.

    Also note: Berber and Semitic in general. What happened to Semitics in the Middle East after Muslim expansion? Fortunately Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian (ceased to be spoken earlier) are well documented.

    A difficult part is that Arabic can be called relatively young.

  23. David Eddyshaw says

    According to James Allen’s Middle Egyptian. there is a letter from ca. 1200 BC complaining that a correspondent’s language is as incomprehensible as a northern Egyptian trying to converse with a southern Egyptian.

  24. 1-On the uniformity of Egyptian/Coptic: Joseph Greenberg wrote an article on the topic, in 1986, titled “Were there Egyptian koines?” (Not available online, I am afraid!) which covers many of the issues brought up by various hatters upthread: he quoted contemporary statements in Egyptian literature on mutual UNintelligibility between Northern and Southern Egypt at certain periods, and argues that from the vantage point of comparative Afroasiatic earlier Egyptian data is not always better, because the prestige dialect sometimes shifted over time, and a later form of written Egyptian could preserve Afroasiatic features not found in earlier written Egyptian, since the earlier and later forms derived from different dialects of Egyptian, some of which were less faithful to inherited Afroasiatic features than others.

    2-The following statement-

    “Egyptian is patently much more different from any Semitic language than any one of those is to another, even languages as different and as widely separated in time as Old Akkadian and Maltese. Therefore, a proposed common ancestor of Egyptian and Semitic must be older than both the oldest Egyptian attested and the oldest Semitic attested”

    -is, I am afraid, an utter NON SEQUITUR. Languages do not change at a uniform pace: in particular, what if Semitic as a family was simply conservative in preserving Afroasiatic features lost in Egyptian? To give a counter-example from a language family I do know a thing or two about, Modern colloquial French is typologically sharply unlike the Spanish or Italian standards, both of which are far closer to one another typologically than either is to Modern colloquial French: yet we know that despite this typological divide, Spanish and Italian do NOT have a common ancestor distinct from the ancestral form of French.

    Incidentally, Hatters more familiar than I am with Semitic languages might confirm this (or tell me I am writing nonsense), but *within Semitic* I believe that some varieties of neo-Aramaic are MUCH more un-Semitic-like (and thus unlike Old Akkadian) than Maltese is (or indeed ever was): for instance, my understanding is that many (through Kurdish influence) have ergative alignment, and that the entire inherited Semitic perfective/imperfective distinction was lost, with modern verb tenses deriving from older participial forms with nominal inflections for possession turning into verbal inflection. Comparing such neo-Aramaic varieties with Old Akkadian or indeed any older Semitic language might reveal a typological gap comparable to that between Egyptian and older Semitic.

    (I am no Afroasiatic scholar, so do please note that I did write “might” above)

  25. David Eddyshaw says

    Modern Ethiosemitic languages are also usually very unlike the familiar classical Semitic languages typologically.

    Incidentally, Bohairic and Sahidic Coptic have a lot in common despite (supposedly) being respectively northern and southern dialects, and it has been suggested that they were urban-erstwhile-capital dialects, as opposed to back-country dialects, and ended up being similar for that reason. Not all language variation is geographic …

  26. Maltese is not a good example. It even has a decent level of mutual intelligibility with Tunisian.

  27. The article mentioned by Etienne can be found on copticsounds.wordpress.com, which is full of interesting stuff on Coptic phonology.

  28. @DE have essentially inverted the proto-Oti-Volta tone system, so that the original lowest tone is now the highest. … All suggestions gratefully received

    Sorry, no suggestions, I just wanted to echo your “difficulty in imagining”.

    With vowel shifts, we can at least catch transition states where one vowel is getting close in pronunciation to another so ‘bumps’ the point of articulation round the mouth.

    With tone inversions, I can’t see how there could be any transition state that wasn’t utterly confusing to listeners. low -> low-rising -> falling-rising -> falling -> high ??? How many distinct tones are there? Is it the same number pre- and post- the inversion? Or did some tones get merged?

  29. “Therefore, a proposed common ancestor of Egyptian and Semitic must be older than both the oldest Egyptian attested and the oldest Semitic attested”

    -is, I am afraid, an utter NON SEQUITUR. Languages do not change at a uniform pace

    Seems entirely sequitur to me: it’s only saying that (1) Egyptian does not come from Proto-Semitic, and (2) neither does any of Semitic come from Egyptian. How much further long ago Proto-Egypto-Semitic would have been from the earliest attestations is a separate question. To follow your Romance comparison, it’s more like taking German into consideration next and noting that Proto-Romance-German must be older than any of Old French, Old Spanish, Old High German etc.: a rather weak condition. Though yes for this kind of a conclusion you will need to look at actual lexical–affixal material too and not just typology.

  30. David Eddyshaw says

    I can’t see how there could be any transition state that wasn’t utterly confusing to listeners

    It’s not quite as inscrutable as I’ve made it sound (though still fairly inscrutable), because, although the languages are most naturally described with syllables (or even morae) as the tone-bearing units, in every actual Oti-Volta language there are so many restrictions on their cooccurrence that for any given overall segmental word shape there is usually only a very limited set of possible overall tone patterns, quite often as few as three; so in many ways the systems behave rather like the word-level (so-called “pitch-accent”) tonal systems of Japanese or FYLOSC or the Scandinavian languages (though not when it comes to the minutiae of tone sandhi.) It’s therefore possible to imagine this working along the lines of “all tones shift one mora to the left”: there are parallels for that in word-tone languages, even within dialects of the same language.

    Comparisons within Oti-Volta lead to a basic three-tone system (high/mid/low) for the protolanguage, but the very limited data available from comparisons between proto-Oti-Volta and proto-Bantu suggest that the low tone is of two different origins. Conceivably these two low tones might have been distinct before the tonally innovative groups separated off, and fallen together later in the tonally conservative branches, but at present I can’t see that that helps any. I’m handicapped by only having very patchy and inconsistent data on tone in Waama, which being (apparently) innovating in noun tone but not verb tone might turn out to be the key to the whole mystery.

  31. Modern colloquial French is typologically sharply unlike the Spanish or Italian standards, both of which are far closer to one another typologically than either is to Modern colloquial French

    this makes no sense to me. comparing a colloquial lect to two different standardized forms is not a useful comparison, and especially useless for assessing similarities or relationships among the three clusters of lects. and that seems especially true for this particular triplet, where each standardized version is a pretty artificial construction* created with a linguistic-ideological eye to Nos Ancêtres les Romains and a deep aversion to the colloquial. i daresay you could rearrange those language-names in any permutation without changing the accuracy of the sentence.

    .
    * i hasten to footnote: artificial doesn’t mean fictional, or lacking speakers, as any esperantist can attest. my own lect of yiddish is just such an artificial dakh-shprakh.

  32. John Cowan says

    Are there any oddities of Biblical Hebrew as compared to other “Canaanite” languages that could be made sense of with the Biblical narrative that long long ago the early Hebrew-speakers spent a few centuries living among Egyptian-speakers before returning to the Holy Land?

    There are indeed, as this paper by Benjamin J. Noonan shows. There are almost 80 Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, and they are especially thick on the ground in the “exodus and wilderness narratives”, as he calls them. The corpora of the other ancient Semitic languages have 0-4 Egyptian loanwords each, with the exception of Imperial Aramaic. However, much of the surviving IA corpus was in fact written in Egypt, where we would expect many Egyptian loanwords; only two of these are shared with Old Aramaic.

    What is more, 8 of the Biblical borrowings are feminine Egyptian nouns in -t, showing that they were borrowed from Old (second-millennium) Egyptian, as this Afroasiatic ending was lost in later Egyptian (and to some degree in Semitic). A first-millennium Hebrew author might sprinkle his text with Egyptian words to give artistic verisimilitude to his otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, but he would hardly have been able to provide these words in their ancient forms. To write that sort of historical fiction requires historical research of a kind quite impossible then. Per contra, the IA borrowings are in a form contemporary with the IA texts themselves.

    Note that Noonan’s affiliation, Columbia International University, is a small Christian college in Columbia, S.C., unrelated to the Columbia University in New York. Noonan is a professor of (anarthrous) Old Testament. But that does not mean there is anything wrong with his derivations, his logic, or his statistics.

    Though yes for this kind of a conclusion you will need to look at actual lexical–affixal material too and not just typology.

    Just so. And it is the lexical material that shows that Egyptian cannot be part of Semitic-as-we-know-it: it is just too different, and in ways that do not permit reconstruction of a common proto-language. (This is why the two AA dictionaries we have agree in approximately nothing.) The evidence for the unity of AA is of the form “it is inconceivable that it could be otherwise” rather than “we can definitively show it is so”.

  33. It’s not clear to me if Egyptian borrowings came into Hebrew through a population living in Egypt, as in Exodus, or through the Egyptian rule of Palestine (which is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible).

    The paper is very interesting, but the Hebrew typesetting is really messed up.

    Noonan’s 2019 book Non-Semitic loanwords in the Hebrew Bible is now pretty much the most complete and authoritaive source on the title subject (though I disagree with him on one etymology.)

  34. “Therefore, a proposed common ancestor of Egyptian and Semitic must be older than both the oldest Egyptian attested and the oldest Semitic attested”

    The only odd thing about this sentence is the ‘therefore’. A proposed common ancestor of two language groups must, by definition rather than circumstance, be older than the languages it is ancestral to. Otherwise what’s being proposed wouldn’t be a common ancestor, obviously. It’s a very strange sentence to write. I guess he just means that Semitic obviously forms one group, Egyptian another, and he’s looking at a higher node on the tree, but he’s put it in a very weird way. Even if Egyptian were nested as a branch within the Semitic family, the common ancestor of these languages would still have to be older than all the actually attested languages.

    Or should I be much more worried about the possibility of time machines and temporal loops complicating historical linguistics than I have been?

  35. What is needed, still, is a reconstruction of the earlier stages of the other branches of Afro-Asiatic besides Egyptian and Semitic. If, for example, the Cushitic languages constitute a family, and if they are related to the Semitic languages, the comparanda must be Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Semitic. It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language; we are dealing with an enormous time depth, and the chance of accidental similarity is simply too great.

    I can follow the line of reasoning here, but I couldn’t help but be struck by how opposite this is to Piotr Gąsiorowski’s argument that reconstructed proto-forms cannot be used as inputs for further comparison:

    In the previous post I pointed out that biologists do not use hypothetical taxa and their inferred features as data. But wait, linguistics is a different discipline. Perhaps in linguistics it’s perfectly legal to use asterisked reconstructions (like, say, Proto-Germanic *wulfaz ‘wolf’) as data on which higher-order reconstructions can be based? The structure of language families is hierarchical. We traditionally group uncontroversially related languages into “branches”, and for the members of each branch a respective ancestral protolanguage is reconstructed by applying the comparative method, right? Then we compare the “proto-branch” languages to reconstruct the most recent common ancestor of the whole family, don’t we?

    No, we don’t. Proto-Indo-European was not reconstructed by comparing Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Slavic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Anatolian, etc., with one another. It has always been reconstructed by comparing data extracted from a multitude of documented languages such as Vedic, Avestan, Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Albanian, Classical Greek, Biblical Gothic, Old Norse, Old High German, Hittite, Luwian, and so forth. Proto-branch languages are reconstructed first and foremost for the sake of quality control. The nodes of the family tree are where the most conservative features of the whole branch roughly coalesce, and where it is convenient to check the consistency of the reconstruction. Proto-Germanic is not reconstructed just by comparing English with German, Dutch, Icelandic, Gothic, etc. The reconstruction is informed by the rest of the family tree as well. There is considerable feedback from reconstructed PIE to reconstructed PGmc. To give a historically important example (one among many), for more than fifty years in the 19th century a large set of exceptions to Grimm’s Law remained unexplained, until it occurred to Karl Verner to look for evidence in outgroup languages such as Classical Greek and Vedic. The conditioning environment of the Proto-Germanic process now known as Verner’s Law was obliterated in Germanic itself, but preserved elsewhere.

    The use of *protoforms in datasets is not justifiable in any way if the reconstructions are highly conjectural, if they might be biassed (“improved” to make a point without sufficient evidence), or if they represent preliminary, speculative research whose quality remains controversial.

    http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/05/mind-asterisk.html

  36. PlasticPaddy says

    @jim t
    Maybe someone like Piotr or Étienne should explain the apparent inconsistency but for me it seems that the difference with AA is the time depth, resulting in huge drift in the modern languages, making the signal to noise ratio much smaller and the probability that proposed resemblances are due to chance, contact or independent development much larger than would be the case for PIE and its modern daughter languages. I would suppose the same issue would apply to any Nostratic correspondences derived using modern Semitic and PIE daughter languages.

  37. I think Piotr is getting at a different (but also important) issue. Basically, both these things are true:

    1) Simply comparing late forms in an ad hoc way from across a large family is a poor approach, and reconstruction should take careful note of features that are likely to be secondary innovations within a family. This doesn’t actually entail using an intermediate proto-language as the basis of reconstruction, which is where Huehnergard goes a bit wrong, but the idea that a comparativist shouldn’t (say) rely too much even on something archaic like Gothic alone to represent Germanic as a whole is a fair one.

    2) Relying on proto-forms as the primary basis for reconstruction has two problems. (A) For ‘intermediate’ nodes (like Germanic within IE, or Semitic within AA), you miss out on all the potential data from the wider family that could improve your reconstructions. (B) Proto-forms don’t typically encode uncertainty very well, so the uncareful researcher can easily take something as ‘data’ that is actually a ‘best guess’ synthesis of more complicated data.

    Actually I think both points boil down to the same thing: that a holistic view that accounts for as much real data as possible is the best way to go.

    I guess the difference lies less in the principle of the thing, and more in how to attack datasets in practical terms, when they’re usually far too large to handle in their entirety, at least from the get-go. Semitic and Egyptian don’t seem particularly bad in this regard, since even Semitic only has a fairly small number of early languages. Surely most Semiticists don’t actually struggle with the concept of drawing first on the oldest data and using the wider family as a control? (I’m thinking here of how Germanicists will rely most heavily on Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, and Old High German, and use later/smaller languages to fill in details and provide a check on the conclusions based on the ‘main’ representatives.) It’s the rest of AA that seems like a bit of a nightmare in terms of getting a practical handle on the data.

  38. Owlmirror says

    Note that Noonan’s affiliation, Columbia International University, is a small Christian college in Columbia, S.C., unrelated to the Columbia University in New York. Noonan is a professor of (anarthrous) Old Testament. But that does not mean there is anything wrong with his derivations, his logic, or his statistics.

    Well, his linguistic logic, perhaps. But his “logic” that Egyptian loanwords somehow support the exodus/wilderness narratives, when archaeology has long contradicted those narratives, can only be deliberately disingenuous.

    I don’t see how he can possibly be honestly ignorant that Egypt had complete control of the region, including military garrisons at least as far north and east as Beth She’an. Indeed, Beth She’an was an administrative center for Egyptian rule for about 300 years, which is plenty of time for Egyptian loanwords to pass into Canaanite, and thence into Hebrew.

    It’s not clear to me if Egyptian borrowings came into Hebrew through a population living in Egypt

    I suppose it’s not completely impossible that the Hyksos dynasty, after fleeing Egypt, may have influenced the Canaanite language with Egyptian loans, and therefore Hebrew, but that seems more complicated than the Egyptians directly ruling Canaan directly influencing the language.

    or through the Egyptian rule of Palestine (which is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible).

    The bible isn’t an accurate or honest history of events of the region.

  39. I agree. I was being polite.
    There is his point about more Egyptian loans in the Exodus narrative, though I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Even a biblical literalist would think that the Exodus narrative was written long after the supposed return to Canaan.

  40. Well, Biblical literalists by definition would believe the Exodus narrative was written down at the time of the event, by its protagonist, Moses. To give Noonan a charitable interpretation, I doubt he’s such a literalist. I expect that he is interested in whether and how the Exodus narrative, written down at some later date, may have been constrained by oral traditions, which may have included some ancient bits of language, not unlike the Homeric traditions. He does try to show that the loanwords themselves are ancient, with morphological analysis that I can follow but don’t know nearly enough to critique.

    Certainly, parts of the bible or torah are reasonably accurate if polemical historical accounts. Is there anything historical about the Exodus narrative? It’s at least an interesting question to me. Owlmirror, you’re positing that the Egyptian loanwords come not from a Semitic population that dwelled in Egypt and fled to Canaan, but from the period of Egyptian rule of Canaan in the late Bronze and early Iron Age. That seems reasonable to me. (You leave out other possibilities though, like the influence of Semitic populations that we know settled and remained in the eastern delta.)

    But for me, the thesis of imperial-era loanwords still seems to imply that these ancient words must have come down as part of an oral tradition that had its roots in the Bronze Age. Otherwise, you would expect these words to be more thoroughly integrated into the Hebrew of the later era when these works were written. As Noonan writes, the resources that might allow a latter-day Hebrew scribe to recognize them as antique loanwords and pepper his historical fiction with them to provide authenticity just didn’t exist.

    So even if you’re right, you’re left with a bit of a quandary — that Noonan’s verbal analysis provides some evidence of an ancient tradition that influenced the Exodus story, and not other Iron Age stories. The most likely reason is that the Exodus story is a reshaping of that tradition itself, meaning the idea of a migration from Egypt, whether rooted in some actual event or mostly or entirely fictional, was not a fiction invented in the Iron Age for political purposes. At minimum, it’s a much older story.

    That seems interesting, even if it’s not clear what we should do with it.

  41. There is another explanation, put forth by Richard Eliott Friedman, based in part on textual analysis: That an exodus occurred, but only of the Levites/priestly caste. So the archaeological record of Israel arising from settlements in the highlands is correct, but it is complicated by this additional group.

    https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-historical-exodus

    One might respond that the second explanation is enough; it still doesn’t connect the Levites with Egypt or an exodus. But, then, some Levites have Egyptian names: Hophni, Hur, Merari, Mushi, two named Phinehas, and of course Moses. […] Levites have the connection with Egypt, evidenced by their Egyptian names. The other tribes don’t. So Deborah, set in Israel, doesn’t mention the Levites; and the Song of Miriam, set in Egypt, doesn’t mention all of Israel. It just mentions a group who leave Egypt and end up at the miqedash.

    I seem to recall reading a much shorter and less rigorous version of this idea, where Friedman suggests that the priests might have been those fled after the death of Akhenaten and the overthrow of the monotheistic cult of Aten by the resurgent (and vindictive) cult of Amun. Or something like that.

  42. John Cowan says

    I don’t see how he can possibly be honestly ignorant that Egypt had complete control of the region, including military garrisons at least as far north and east as Beth She’an. Indeed, Beth She’an was an administrative center for Egyptian rule for about 300 years, which is plenty of time for Egyptian loanwords to pass into Canaanite, and thence into Hebrew.

    All very well, but that doesn’t explain why Egyptian loanwords are so very sparse in Phoenician (by a factor of ten compared to Hebrew.) Egyptians controlled their cities in the -14C as much as the rest of Palestine. Granted, the absence on Ammonite, Edomite, and Moabite might be an artefact of preservation.

  43. @John Cowan: A potentially interesting question would be whether there are more Egyptian loanwords in the J narrative than in E. The J source has a more Judaean orientation, and was likely authored there, whereas E was probably codified in the northern kingdom. Before the Bronze Age collapse, Egyptian control stretched a long way up through the Levant, but there may have been more hegemonic Egyptian traders and settlers toward the south and toward the Mediterranean coast. It is thus plausible that Judaean Hebrew may have been more influenced by Egyptian than ancient Israeli Hebrew, which in turn may have been more Egyptianized than northern Phoenician or eastern, inland Moabite and Ammonite. The variations between J and E could witness that, but it may be difficult to disentangle from other differences, such as J probably being somewhat older than E.

  44. ” That an exodus occurred, but only of the Levites/priestly caste. ”

    Yes. Exodus, of course, is based on some tradition, like everything. And it is possible that some group (not necessary representing all ancestors of Hebrew writers) actually came from Egypt and preserved a tale about their exodus.

    Also I would not be so sure that they could not recognise Egyptian loans.

  45. [content advisory: 50% argument about language, 50% rant, by weight.
    tl;dr: not norman french in england, paris french in post-napoleonic poland.]

    i’ll be the one to say it: the exodus story has nothing historical in it. it is a mythic narrative which no evidence has appeared to support despite obsessive attempts by entire professions over many centuries*.

    and it doesn’t require any such attempts to explain why biblical hebrew would have a disproportionate number of egyptian loanwords – it just takes the existence of the exodus myth! which is, after all, a story that constructs a connection between the hereditary ruling class of an insignificant hill-fort polity (and its tutelary deity) and a major regional power. which is a transparent political-cultural text if i’ve ever seen one (and especially in a time/place where kinship was deeply political and more affiliative than genetic, in ways that that kind of narrative is made to support**).

    which just on its own means there’s abundant cultural reason for there to be a bunch of specifically egyptian vocabulary in the texts made and compiled by a rising social group in that polity’s descendent states, whose political project is all about establishing (on remarkably shallow ground, even according to their own narratives) their legitimacy as the rightful heirs of that hereditary ruling class. it’s not norman french in england, it’s paris french in post-napoleonic poland.

    and that’s not even taking into consideration that the judean ruling class (if we choose to believe its own PR) was “returnees” from persian mesopotamia – an empire that IIRC had a very specific habit of moving subject populations around and supplying them with bespoke “return to ancestral homeland” narratives to fit their deployment, under exactly the rulers who get praised for resettling putative judean-descendents in the texts written (we are told) by putative leaders*** of these putative returnees.

    .
    * i don’t count the well-documented existence of labor unrest, which is universal where there is forced labor.

    ** and is hardly an unusual move in the period, from Megiles Esther to the Aeneid.

    *** i say putative because, these texts tell us****, they had radically different cultural practices from the people they “returned” to, who they then proceeded to force into line with their own preferences (a task eased, as the texts do not tell us, by their status as grateful proxies for the empire which had sent them there).

    **** one of the stronger points in favor of these texts’ usefulness as historical documents, in fact, is that the narrative promoted by people who considered themselves heirs to ezra and nehemiah fits so well with what we know about persian imperial practice. which is an equally strong point against the historicity of any aspect of the exodus story.

  46. My take on it is much like rozele’s.

  47. Rozele or Hat,

    What do you make of the linguistic argument that feminine loan words ending in -t suggest a much older loan, Bronze Age loan? It seems like the options are:
    a) Iron Age borrowings that attracted the Hebrew / Semitic feminine -t suffix
    b) Iron Age borrowings that offer evidence that Egyptian retained the feminine ending in -t at least in some archaizing contexts much longer than Noonan tells us.
    c) Bronze Age loans that survived in some Canaanite (or Delta) dialect, and held onto their soupcon of Egypt (making them attractive to an Iron Age scribe writing historical fiction about an Egyptian sojourn), even though they were lost to the wider culture that produced the rest of the Hebrew Bible, where they are not used.
    d) words that were part of a specific, late Bronze Age tradition that was still living in the Iron Age (as with the Iliad), that provided material for a scribe trying to salt his narrative. (Not that it’s ancientness need suggest anything about the historicity of that tradition.)

    Or e) that Exodus itself is a Bronze Age tradition (which might still be utterly fictional), maybe even first written down in the Bronze Age.

    Noonan seems to believe a strong form of e) – Exodus is a Bronze Age tradition based on actual Bronze Age events.

    John Cowan seems attracted to options d or e, I think, though maybe not in the strong form.

  48. David Marjanović says

    I’ve encountered the idea before that the Exodus narrative is based on the experience of a small group of people that got generalized to the entire nation, much like the importance of Thanksgiving and the Mayflower in the US. This may have been a version of Friedman’s idea about the Levites. However, the archeological record of the Sinai makes clear that any such group must have been really small.

    I’ve also encountered the idea that monotheism is imported from Egypt. The problems there of course are that 1) monotheism doesn’t suddenly appear even within the Bible, but develops peu à peu from henotheism, monolatrism and all that; 2) good old Tetragrammaton is a good old Semitic mountain-and-thunderstorm god who personally shakes the cedars of the Lebanon, not at all a sun god – even though other known Semitic religions (unlike IE ones) had readily available sun gods that could easily have been equated with Aten as far as I understand.

    whose political project is all about establishing (on remarkably shallow ground, even according to their own narratives) their legitimacy as the rightful heirs of that hereditary ruling class

    A bit like the Mafia claiming descent from Spanish knights.

  49. Well, if those knights were driven from Spain at the point of a spear and then wandered North Africa, and not even the populated coast, poverty-stricken and ragtag, for decades, with nary an adventure, only a talking cloud to relieve the tedium, till a single shrub that caught fire during a drought stood out as the highlight, after literally four decades.

    Those who say the politics are so transparent that it’s clearly invented need to explain the “remarkably shallow ground” part. Because it’s hard for me to understand why someone with a free hand wouldn’t invent a better story. It looks to be constrained by some sort of tradition to me.

  50. Well, no one “needs” to tell me anything. That sounded sharp in a way that I didnt mean. Just pointing to something I’m curious about.— the idea that this is transparently political, yet doesn’t serve it’s political purpose well.

  51. Owlmirror says

    @DMć:

    This may have been a version of Friedman’s idea about the Levites. However, the archeological record of the Sinai makes clear that any such group must have been really small.

    The thing that I mentioned remembering in my prior post included Friedman saying something like “Of course this group of priests traveled by the coast road, not through the desert”. I wish I could find that again.

    @DMć:

    I’ve also encountered the idea that monotheism is imported from Egypt. The problems there of course are that 1) monotheism doesn’t suddenly appear even within the Bible, but develops peu à peu from henotheism, monolatrism and all that

    Looking (admittedly briefly) at the description of Atenism, it looks more monolatrist than monotheistic.

    WikiP sez:

    Others see Akhenaten as a practitioner of an Aten monolatry,[34] as he did not actively deny the existence of other gods; he simply refrained from worshipping any but the Aten. Other scholars call the religion henotheistic.[26]

    @DMć:

    2) good old Tetragrammaton is a good old Semitic mountain-and-thunderstorm god who personally shakes the cedars of the Lebanon, not at all a sun god

    An admitted speculation that I thought of is that it might be that Atenists, feeling betrayed because Aten did not help them, converted to Yahvism, perhaps after being helped by Yahvists.

  52. J.W. Brewer says

    It does seem that once one starts entertaining the idea that the various OT historical narratives were retconned fabrications intended to justify some “present-day” (for the nth century BCE, with disagreements about the value of n) political agenda, it is hard to avoid noticing how incompetent and inconsistent the presumed retconned fantasy/mythology is. It makes one recall the quote attr. Hilaire Belloc re how “for unbelievers a proof of [the Church’s*] divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”

    *Belloc, stuck in his own various misjudgments and heresies, did not subjectively mean to refer to the True Church, but the point would not have lost its plausibility if he had.

  53. The fact is that it is now impossible to know how and why these ancient texts were written; of course those of a religious persuasion will be persuaded they know the answer, but for the rest of us, it makes sense to adopt a firm stance of ignorance.

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    Ah hat, but those of an irreligious/debunking/demythologizing mindset seem to be equally persuaded that they actually know the answer, rather than heeding your prudent counsel and retreating to a safe position of uncertainty.

  55. Alas, too true. We humans are addicted to false knowledge.

  56. Owlmirror says

    Belloc may well paraphrase Tertullian, but why should anyone be persuaded that the argument is meaningful? Surely there must have been some “knavish imbecility” that had lasted longer than a fortnight that even he would have disagreed was proof of any divinity involved.

  57. Owlmirror says

    Ah hat, but those of an irreligious/debunking/demythologizing mindset seem to be equally persuaded that they actually know the answer, rather than heeding your prudent counsel and retreating to a safe position of uncertainty.

    If we throw up our hands in epistemic despair, we’ll never find out anything about anything at all, ever. To the extent that investigation and hypothesis generation is possible, it is reasonable to investigate and hypothesize.

    And besides, isn’t despair a sin?

  58. J.W. Brewer says

    Belloc was: (a) at some level just being rhetorically clever and figuring out how to make lemonade out of lemons (i.e. turn the many unedifying anecdotes about the wickedness and corruption of those humans who have historically been in charge of what he took to be the True Church to a rhetorical advantage rather than disadvantage); and (b) was hyberbolically contrasting a “fortnight” with an implicit “almost nineteen centuries and counting” of actual apparent institutional survival rather than try to delineate some more plausible intermediate period of time between those two extremes after which the non-supernatural explanations of the survival of an institution would become unpersuasive.

  59. J.W. Brewer says

    Re “it is reasonable,” let me shift from Belloc to the more secularized Steve Anderson: “The original nineteenth-century constitution of the Societe linguistique de Paris is famous for explicitly prohibiting the discussion of matters concerning the origin of language at the society’s meetings. This was no mere quirk of the founders: they introduced this limitation for precisely the reason that there could apparently be no real science that bore on the topic. Since the late 1990s, interest among linguists and others has reawakened, and conferences are now regularly devoted to the subject. To my mind, this revival is not based on additional data, but rather on the mistaken impression that if we can pose an important question, we ought in principle to be able to find an answer.”

    Put another way, it ain’t epistemic despair, it’s epistemic humility, based on a reasonable degree of understanding regarding what sorts of empirical evidence (currently) are and aren’t accessible to our investigating-and-hypothesizing faculties.

  60. @Ryan: my “remarkably shallow ground” was about the succession/supercession relationship between the emerging rabbinate and the hereditary priesthood. my understanding is mainly drawn from shaye j. d. cohen and daniel boyarin’s work, both of whom deal in various places with the yavne myth and other aspects of the centuries-long parallel development of the synagogue as an institution, the rabbinnic textual corpus, and the rabbi as textual/ritual professional.

    though given the absurd amounts of effort over many centuries that have gone into searching for the slightest shred of corroborating evidence for the exodus story, without finding any such thing, i’d say the same description applies. i can’t think of another investigation of comparable scale, duration, and obsessive thoroughness that still provokes such indignant denial of its results – but the denial is based, explicitly or not, on faith, so cannot be dented by any accumulation of mere facts. but when it comes to evidence, we might as well use the Book of Mormon as a source on the precolumbian americas.

    i haven’t got the chops to assess the -t question. but none of those possibilities require taking any part of the exodus story as historical evidence, given the ample contact between egypt and the levant and the complex and changing regional political and cultural relationships that could lead to egyptian loanwords arriving in hebrew texts.

    i don’t claim to know any answers here. but i do believe in evidence. and a text telling us that it is true because it was written under divine inspiration is not evidence of anything but what the writer believed. sure, the contents of traditional narratives are often found accurate – but we can say that because there is other, independent evidence to confirm them. occam’s razor isn’t universally applicable, but it’s a good start on all of the bible-as-history epicycles.

  61. it ain’t epistemic despair, it’s epistemic humility

    Exactly right.

  62. I’ve encountered the idea before that the Exodus narrative is based on the experience of a small group of people that got generalized to the entire nation

    It immediately follows when either “historicity” or “existence” (before a certain date) of an account is questioned. The story says that some group moved from Egypt.

    If this happened, and if this group’s story was the basis of Exodus, then the event is historical.
    If some group’s story (involving migration) existed long before writing Exodus, then it existed.

    Idenifying this group with “Jews” is a next step and I don’t understand how you can make it if you don’t accept historicity of Torah. How there can be any obvious group in the 1st millenium that you can identify with Jews?
    And who were Russians?

    However, the archeological record of the Sinai makes clear that any such group must have been really small.

    How much in Exodus must be true so we could agree that it has some historical basis? I don’t think archaeology can confirm that no group of people ever crossed Sinai during the first millenium:/

  63. And who were Russians?

    I mean, how do you identify a “nation” A now with a group of people a millenium before? Sometimes it is territory (but borders move). Sometimes it is “the main contributors” in either genes or culture or religion of A (but there is not always a “main contributor”).

    Sometimes it is “they recognise as their [genetical, political, religious] heirs people who recognise as their heirs people who recognise as their heirs…… A”. But again, there can be more than one such a group.
    Sometimes it is “A recognise as their [genetical, political, religious] ancestors people who recognise as their ancestors people who recognise as their ancestors this group”.

    If you require all of this at once (except the territory), and also the conquest of Canaan after 40 years in desert, then maybe you just accept historicity of Torah…

  64. @JWB Ah hat, but those of an irreligious/debunking/demythologizing mindset seem to be equally persuaded that they actually know the answer, …

    You can be of an irreligious mindset without feeling any need to debunk myths. It’s only when those (believers in) myths lead to precipitate action there’s a need to intervene.

    @Owlmirror If we throw up our hands in epistemic despair, we’ll never find out anything about anything at all, ever. …

    Whether there were a bunch of troublesome Rabbis/Levites in Egypt, and whether they left, and whether some Pharaoh tried to chase them, etc, is just not worth finding out about (except per above).

    It’s not ‘epistemic despair’, it’s epistemic indifference. (I don’t care enough about it even to call it ‘humility’.) Pontificating about Biblical accuracy seems to be a way for some believers to avoid “finding out anything” about the evils some churches continue to perpetrate in the right here and now.

  65. “Not possible to find out” at least has some chance of being objectively true. “Not worth finding out”, on the other hand, simply elevates one’s own lack of interest to a universal rule. Most people would classify pretty much any question a linguist might be interested in as “not worth finding out”; personally, I’d rather live in a world where some people are willing to put energy into answering questions it would never have occurred to me even to wonder about.

  66. Obviously there are people interested in proof of a Bronze Age migration because it would support their belief that Moses parted the Red Sea (or Yom Suf) as described in the Living Word of God.

    But what is the faith-based motive to find historical aspects and underpinnings in a story that distorts them? Maybe this would help strengthen the faith of a believer in a sophist god, handing down His Word in the form of a book of sleights of hand?

    My interest is in the fact that a few hundred years before Herodotus, people were writing things that read very differently from what is found (to my limited knowledge) in Egyptian or cuneiform archives. Many Biblical passages read like history. And history of a particularly pedantic and uninspiring type. I could see inventing Solomon, but inventing the 12 stewards of different regions of Solomon’s kingdom, which don’t correspond to my kingdom or land I realistically aspire to rule? And not bother to list Jerusalem among the cities mentioned? Giving those stewards arcane names that don’t support the theology of my regime? Maybe, but why? We don’t learn the names of the Dukes and Earls of later kings of Israel and Judah. What was the Iron Age polemical value of spending time naming Solomon’s stewards Son of Hero, Hero Son of Fiery and Brother of Liberality? When they wrote all this in the name of “legitimacy, was there no Iron Age James Carville reminding them “None of that shit matters. It’s the economy, stupid”?

    I’m skeptical of the claim embedded in the idea that Exodus is (almost?) entirely fiction, that the genre of writing that reads like history but is actually fiction would have been invented before the genre of history itself. It’s not a matter of proving a negative either. It’s a claim that is falsifiable. If they made things up for the polemic value, the polemic value should be transparent, or at least recognizable. Yet frequently, it’s not.

    The story of Balaam is weirder in its way and much more “transparently political” than Exodus. It’s also more compact, without the extraneous details. Balaam’s is a story I could easily believe was a whole-cloth invention. Yet we now have archaeological evidence of a dude making prophecies in Moab, named Balaam son of Beor.

  67. To the extent that investigation and hypothesis generation is possible, it is reasonable to investigate and hypothesize.

    Well said. The comparison to the origin of language is partly disingenuous (we can talk about biblical texts with a vastly more philological specificity, and the archaeological contexts, though only made relevant with difficulty, are rather more detailed), and partly just wrong (there is of course more potentially relevant data that has become available in recent decades, in the form of a much better understanding of human evolution both in the fossil record and genetically, than was around in the 19th century).

    This (obviously) doesn’t necessarily mean that either issue is fully ‘answerable’, but of course there’s a broad spectrum of relative plausibilities between that and ‘can’t know anything’. That spectrum is often worth exploring in detail, despite the protestations of many ‘agnostic’ scholars who usually seem to think that the existence of multiple ‘possibles’ automatically means the existence of multiple ‘equally plausibles’. With the bible, there are all sorts of things one might reasonably say about relative chronologies in linguistic (and presumably also historical, political, and archaeological) terms, which will meaningfully constrain the plausibility of different composition hypotheses.

    But I think B. Elan Dresher says all this much better than I can: https://dresher.artsci.utoronto.ca/papers/02Dresher.pdf

  68. support their belief that Moses parted the Red Sea (or Yom Suf) as described in the Living Word of God.

    But it never was the Red Sea — that’s just bad translation in the Septuagint. So no legitimate Word of God. And despite wikipedia being abundantly clear on that point (with copious citations), I’m not expecting many Christians to disabuse themselves of the Charlton Heston version.

    That’s why it’s not worth the faithless finding out either. If evidence can be identified, that’s not belief. And if contrary evidence can be identified, believers are going to believe against the evidence, because that _is_ belief. There is no “faith-based motive”. There is even less counter-faith motive.

    Non-believers can just take the whole myth as fairy-stories/the truth of it doesn’t matter — except for the anthropological interest of stories handed down. Stories so anthropologically valued that Christ also was shuttled to Egypt and back, with even less historical likelihood, and a back story that’s even more poppycock.

  69. “That’s why it’s not worth the faithless finding out either.”

    So the worthwhileness of scholarly inquiry is inversely correlated with religious dogma? We shouldn’t try to answer questions if there will be people who ignore the answers?

    “Non-believers can just take the whole myth as fairy-stories/the truth of it doesn’t matter”

    But surely Ryan’s whole question is not what non-believers can do, but what we should do. A good theory should explain everything holistically, and if part of that theory involves the elaboration of a tradition out of whole cloth, then there need to be plausible outlines for how that elaboration might have worked. I think in this case there are (and more than the overly vague and kind of hand-wavy appeals to political legitimacy that have been brought up in this thread so far), but it’s that that would be an actual objection to the ‘historical kernel’ view of Exodus.

  70. There is a possibility of finding out something else in a discussion of a question that is difficult to answer with certainty. (I’m not sure there are historical questions that can’t be answered at least probabilistically. When you have 2 bits of information you have 2 bits of information and you can’t make a choice in 5 different ways based on your 2 bits. But you always have the physical world as your given).

    A well known argument (from WP): Democritus’s argument for the existence of atoms hinged on the idea that it is impossible to keep dividing matter infinitely – and that matter must therefore be made up of extremely tiny particles.

    I find this wonderful.
    Moreover, I think many elements of modern physics can be derived from naked eye observations, most certaily wave theory of light can.
    now you’re saying that the Greeks were idiots.

    Surely I do find some discussions rather idiotic but it’s because I personally think certain guys are unlikely to come up with anything. Discouraging discussion of a topic is extremism, not humility.

  71. This (obviously) doesn’t necessarily mean that either issue is fully ‘answerable’, but of course there’s a broad spectrum of relative plausibilities between that and ‘can’t know anything’. That spectrum is often worth exploring in detail, despite the protestations of many ‘agnostic’ scholars who usually seem to think that the existence of multiple ‘possibles’ automatically means the existence of multiple ‘equally plausibles’.

    Yes, but there are essentially an infinite number of historical issues and possibilities that we can turn our attention to and explore with varying degrees of success. I think — to channel what I take to be AntC’s main point while omitting the atheist bile — it is hard to dispute that the only reason such a huge percentage of scholarly and pseudo- or para-scholarly effort has been devoted to what are from the perspective of world history extraordinarily minor issues of who exactly was where in a tiny area of the Middle East several thousand years is because those issues are of extraordinary importance to a few religions that have managed to become wildly popular worldwide. For those of us who do not subscribe to those religions, it has all been largely wasted effort that could more profitably have gone elsewhere. Look at the huge strides made recently in the understanding of prehistory brought about by concentrating on the uplands that surround the “Fertile Crescent” and the Black Sea and Caspian regions to the north, regions of little or no interest to Biblical scholars! If someone wants to spend their life puzzling over a few potsherds and possible allusions that may or may not increase the likelihood that some aspect of Mosaic tradition represents historical reality, more power to them, but I personally think it’s pretty much on the level of stamp collecting.

  72. David Marjanović says

    Surely there must have been some “knavish imbecility” that had lasted longer than a fortnight that even he would have disagreed was proof of any divinity involved.

    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints isn’t going anywhere…

    “The original nineteenth-century constitution of the Societe linguistique de Paris is famous for explicitly prohibiting the discussion of matters concerning the origin of language at the society’s meetings. This was no mere quirk of the founders: they introduced this limitation for precisely the reason that there could apparently be no real science that bore on the topic. Since the late 1990s, interest among linguists and others has reawakened, and conferences are now regularly devoted to the subject. To my mind, this revival is not based on additional data, but rather on the mistaken impression that if we can pose an important question, we ought in principle to be able to find an answer.”

    Well, they introduced the limitation because many of the society’s meetings had unraveled into pointless bickering about this question, and there was no evidence that could have shut the bickering down… “Since the late 1990s” we haven’t been in a position to answer the question either, but we have learned enough to at least rule out many of the hypotheses that were seriously entertained in the 19th century, and indeed the bickering hasn’t come back.

    Let people speculate, then. With some luck, some of them will come up with another testable hypothesis.

    The story of Balaam is weirder in its way and much more “transparently political” than Exodus. It’s also more compact, without the extraneous details. Balaam’s is a story I could easily believe was a whole-cloth invention. Yet we now have archaeological evidence of a dude making prophecies in Moab, named Balaam son of Beor.

    Not all that many stories are invented out of whole cloth, generally speaking. Historical people of some renown get confused with each other, accrete existing stories, and a thousand years later you have a whole anthology of fairytales featuring Eskandar or an epic about King Gesar. And after barely two hundred years you get people insisting that the representative of Uri at the Rütlischwur, assuming that ever happened in the first place, cannot possibly have been some otherwise undocumented Walter Fürst, but must of course have been none other than Wilhelm Tell.

  73. Potsherds probably aren’t relevant at this point, since we’re talking about the philological (linguistic and literary-historical) evaluation of specific texts. We already know the archaeological contexts for a large-scale exodus are poor, and the discussions here haven’t really been of the kind that further archaeological research will likely shed much light on.

    We’re really just talking about how to compare multiple different, already well-developed hypotheses about this text’s history. Not something anyone is obliged to be interested in, though some here have already weighed in with strong votes for the ‘political propaganda’ school of thought (a strange thing to do if the topic really is so undeserving of further attention). I agree with Ryan that this is an inadequate explanation on its own, though I expect it’s part of the story. I certainly have no complaints about people who know the textual and linguistic evidence better than I do continuing to think this one through a bit further.

  74. The story of Balaam is weirder in its way and much more “transparently political” than Exodus. It’s also more compact, without the extraneous details. Balaam’s is a story I could easily believe was a whole-cloth invention. Yet we now have archaeological evidence of a dude making prophecies in Moab, named Balaam son of Beor.

    I once had someone tell me about a brilliant physicist named Stephen Hawking, who, among other things, invented the internet.

  75. Not all that many stories are invented out of whole cloth, generally speaking

    i would say that the entire history of literature, back to enheduanna and beyond, contradicts this, except in the sense that there’s no such thing as “whole cloth” when stories are told and invented in a society (which is kinda hard to avoid).

    [(against) the idea] that the genre of writing that reads like history but is actually fiction would have been invented before the genre of history itself

    the issue isn’t about the relative antiquity of factual versus fictional narratives about the past: the Tanakh narratives aren’t The Oldest Stories Ever Told, much less the Greatest. it’s about these particular texts. and we’ve got older ones that don’t appear to have connections to otherwise documented events, and ones that do. and also, if memory serves, we’ve got older “historical” inscriptions that as far as we can tell are commissioned by rulers to set in stone revisionist accounts of the then-recent past – accounts that contradict what are considered reasonably certain facts based on other evidence.

    and, importantly, we generally have very little to work with that lets us tell whether the texts we have that do relate to otherwise documented events are more like what we’d call ‘history’, ‘historical fiction’, ‘historical romance’, ’alternate history’, ‘satire/parody’, ‘epic fantasy’ or any other current genre (which would be a matter of resemblance, not of identity, in any case). generally isn’t always: Megiles Esther is a great example of a narrative from the Tanakh where there is a fair amount to work with – and the evidence directly contradicts the canonized text in almost every particular, making it pretty clear that Esther is somewhere between ‘historical romance’, ‘satire’, and ‘epic fantasy’.

    possibly more to the point, though, it’s a huge and dubious assumption that these texts, or their antecedents, are meant as “histories” in any sense that maps closely onto that genre as we know it (or even as herodotus conceived it). yosef hayim yerushalmi, in his classic Zakhor, argues, specifically against that kind of genre-projection, that even early modern jewish texts about the past should not be understood as “histories” in that sense.

    and from the culturally-christian side of the academy, thomas thompson*, in his The Mythic Past, makes an interesting (and to me pretty compelling) argument that even the most facts-y parts of the Tanakh’s narratives about the past should not be read through the genre-lens of history (either to be confirmed or debunked), but through the lenses that they themselves put forward, which very loosely map onto genres that we could loosely call ‘literary’ or maybe strain a bit for ’theological’.

    i’m very much with the two of them, in thinking that there’s a ton we can learn, historically, from these texts – about the time(s) of their recension, about the literary traditions they drew on, &c – and no reason to consider them as more credible accounts of historical events than hesiod’s Theogony or the gilgamesh epic.

    I certainly have no complaints about people who know the textual and linguistic evidence better than I do continuing to think this one through a bit further.

    same! but starting with a presumption of the narratives in these texts as historical evidence isn’t that – especially when it comes to the parts of them, like the exodus story, that have been investigated for impressive lengths of time by daunting numbers of scholars in a wide range of fields with no supporting evidence coming to light.

    .
    * who bears the (probably far from unique) distinction of having his dissertation rejected for theological reasons by joe ratzinger.

  76. What rozele said. Whatever kernels of “historical fact” may be embedded in these ancient tales are largely irretrievable at this late date, and scrabbling for them is largely a waste of time (as well as being beside the point as far as the tales themselves are concerned).

  77. “same! but starting with a presumption of the narratives in these texts as historical evidence isn’t that – especially when it comes to the parts of them, like the exodus story, that have been investigated for impressive lengths of time by daunting numbers of scholars in a wide range of fields with no supporting evidence coming to light.”

    This still seems to frame the issue in a frankly uninteresting binary of ‘historical’ or ‘not historical’. The interesting questions of diachrony in the tradition have little to do with that framing, and the specific issue of possible old narrative links with Egypt shouldn’t be confused with the strawman issue of a biblically literal narrative.

  78. >like the exodus story, that have been investigated for impressive lengths of time by daunting numbers of scholars in a wide range of fields with no supporting evidence coming to light.

    Evidence and proof are different things. This discussion began with John Cowan offering evidence from a scholar in support of the Exodus story.

  79. I have stated before that I think the story of (some of) the plagues, the inundation (although not of Pharaoh’s army), and the pillar of smoke and fire probably come from a real tradition that was passed down from the time of a massive volcanic eruption in the Bronze Age (so most likely the Minoan eruption in the seventeenth century B. C. E.). Whether some Semites were convinced by this colossal demonstration of divine anger to return to the Levant (or whether the story was originally even set in Egypt at all) is, to me, honestly less interesting than seeing how the story accrued further mythical elements in the thousand or more years between the events in question and when they were written down in something resembling a final form.

    Similarly, there are a few bits from the Book of Esther that are probably the original core of the legend. The name of the Purim holiday comes from a mention near the end of the story of the casting of lots having something to do with who would be killed:

    Haman the son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had devised against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast pur, that is, the lot, to discomfit them, and to destroy them.

    In the megillah, this mention of the pur seems like an almost total non sequitur, but it was deemed so important that it provided the name for the entire observance. It therefore seems possible that the original story, before it was elaborated by post-Exilic writers to extol Orthodox observance, had something to do with the casting of lots, perhaps deciding the fate of a number of Jews. Whether this story had any basis in actual events that befell the Judean exiles in Mesopotamia is unknown, but the element of the lots seems to be the oldest stratum of the narrative, on top of which many patently absurd further layers were added to eventually form the Book of Esther.

  80. How large must be an exodus for us to expect to find its evidence in (a) Egypt (b) Sinai with 50% certainty? 90% certainty?

    I don’t understand these arguments about a “small” group.

    I partly understand LH’s perplexion with biblical archaeology: I am a believer, but I’m not terribly interested. On the other hand, if a large group of people finds some book Very Important, it is natural.

  81. I mean, if a group of 10 000 people left Egypt and crossed Sinai, do we expect to find mentions of the fact in Egyptian inscriptions in 50% of cases? And can this group be described as really small?
    And what are probabilities for 50 000? 100 000?

  82. Going back to something David M said, why suppose that the actual size of the (irrecoverable) historical Exodus was much bigger than the passenger list of the Mayflower? (as someone who went to American elementary schools, the analogy to the Mayflower foundation myth had occurred to me before.)

  83. Just ran across this quote from Ronald Syme, “Tigranocerta: A Problem Misconceived”:

    Erudite controversies can go on for a long time. Repetition or fatigue is no bar. Of some, notably in sacred history, there never was a solution.

  84. evidence from a scholar in support of the Exodus story

    my original point was that the presence of egyptian loanwords (of any age) in biblical hebrew – even the presence of more of them than in other regional languages – is not that, unless you’re starting from the axiom that the Tanakh narratives are True History (or Historical At The Core, which amounts to the same thing) and scrambling over poor bill of ockham’s corpse to try to back up the presumption. there are plenty of other explanations, at least some with actual independent evidence to support them, which the exodus story lacks.* again: the density of french loanwords in polish is a great analogous case, from a time-period where we can actually track the process.

    .
    * i’m not disagreeing with Brett’s point here, that there are elements of the exodus myth (and of the megile) that are likely rooted in specific past occurences. the narrative those elements have been hung on, however, has nothing whatsoever to support it – neither evidence nor l’havdl proof.

  85. When we say that some account of migration is “true” we don’t mean that a known group of people (representing ancestors of Jews) actually migrated. We have a very vague idea who were “ancestors of Jews”, but likely it was a multiethnic and multilingual crowd.

    We mean at least that a story of migration of some group was the basis of this account, and we also want this “some group” to recognise Jews as their ancestors, and hopefully to be connected to them in religious practice.
    And a priori existence of such a group is not unlikely. “Very well might be true”. Possibility of other explanations does not change the fact.

    Now there are other elements that a priori seem suspicious.

  86. When we say that some account of migration is “true” we don’t mean that a known group of people (representing ancestors of Jews) actually migrated.

    I don’t know what you mean by “we,” but when most people say it, that’s exactly what they mean. Unless you’re channeling Radio Erevan. (“Yes, except that instead of Jews it was Armenians…”)

  87. @LH, no. There is a known group of “Jews” if you accept historicity of the account.
    If you do not, you have no idea what people lived in the region back then and who of them can be considered ancestral to Jews (and you assume that historical Jews may have quite diverse ancestry).

    What were “Algerians” 1000 years ago? Not “what people lived in Algeria”, but what were Modern Algerians, just 1000 years ago?

    P.S. Between the time of [hypothetical] exodus and historical times there was a rather dark period.

  88. If what you mean is “people who accept historicity of the account”, here I do not disagree.

    But most people here seem not to be ready to do discuss the matter based on this assumption, even if they believe in the account. And I mean them by “us”.
    —-
    A believer’s mindset and an atheist [Buddhist, Hindu…] sceintist’s mindset got mixed up here. Everything is clear for a believer, but for a historian…

    All right, let’s hypothesise there was a group that was ancestral to Jews in religious practice [in some way which we have not formulated but which we expect to be intuitive]. The chosen people. Here we have a believer’s mindset applied to religious continuity.
    Now what they looked like, what was their cultrue and what was their language? We have no idea.

  89. ktschwarz says

    we also want this “some group” to recognise Jews as their ancestors

    Sentences involving the word “ancestor” are especially likely to come out backwards — so likely that in 2019, the OED added a sense “irregular. A descendant.” (In this case, the fix is to change “recognize” to “be recognized by”.)

  90. What were “Algerians” 1000 years ago? Not “what people lived in Algeria”, but what were Modern Algerians, just 1000 years ago?

    Who were you before you were conceived? Should be a koan, if it isn’t already.

  91. @ktschwarz, true*, but here the source of the error is different:) Or the same, but the confusion occured not as much in my head as on paper in the course of typing…

    *(my usual problem is that for some reason I always remember “ancestors” but it either takes some time to remember “descendants” OR it feels wrong, not in the same relation to ancestors as Russian potómki to prédki (potom “after”, Russian pered, Slavonic pred “before” – but the actual problem here is the semantics of descendants), and I spend a second trying to remember if there are other words. (when I can’t remember it at first, I don’t spend this extra second, just grab the wrong-sounding word happily:))

  92. David Eddyshaw says

    Sentences involving the word “ancestor” are especially likely to come out backwards — so likely that in 2019, the OED added a sense “irregular. A descendant.”

    Same root (though not same word) for both in Oti-Volta, e.g. Kusaal yaab “grandparent, ancestor”, yaaŋ “grandchild, descendant” (formally parallel to the relationship between ansib “mother’s brother” and ansiŋ “sister’s child”; the Moba cognate yìɛ̀ actually means both “mother’s brother” and “sister’s child.”)

    (Waama even has a verb yabi “be a grandparent.” Very handy …)

  93. David Marjanović says

    I mean, if a group of 10 000 people left Egypt and crossed Sinai, do we expect to find mentions of the fact in Egyptian inscriptions in 50% of cases?

    No idea, but we would expect to find lots of archeological traces. And that hasn’t happened.

  94. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    FWIW, Danish has forfædre (no gender neutral version as yet) and efterkommere in the most general sense. So a bit like Russian.

    (Formødre does exist, but has an exclusively female denotation [and a gender political subtext]—unlike forfædre which is inclusive faute de mieux [but does feel a bit antiquated in its world view]. We also have forgængere (‘predecessors’) which would be nicely parallel with efterkommere, but can’t be used of family relations. Strangely enough, the conventional inverse of forgænger is usually arvtager (‘inheritor’) which is not familial by default [unlike arving {‘heir’}]). Hell is in the details.

  95. PlasticPaddy says

    @lars
    I have the feeling that German Vorgänger, like English predecessor, refers more typically to a previous occupant of an office or post than to an ancestor. For ancestors German has Ahnen/Vorfahren.

  96. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    @PP, the same in Danish, that was what I was trying to indicate. But from the viewpoint of logic, ‘go before’ and ‘come after’ would be nicely parallel.

    Actually Vorfahren is more or less ‘before-goers,’ I assume. And Danish could have forfarere in the ‘ancestors’ sense if it wanted, but it doesn’t. If you want logic, make a conlang.

  97. Dmitry Pruss says

    In Russian, праотцы, ~pre-fathers / forefathers, exists too, but it’s probably vestigial Slavonic / possibly a Biblical calque. And it’s mostly limited to one expression, “to send someone to the forefathers”

  98. No idea, but we would expect to find lots of archeological traces. And that hasn’t happened.

    @DM, I suspect what you expect to find is evidence of 40 years of wandering (or even of a permanent settlement) rather than merely crossing it. Note that this is described elsewhere in the Bible.

    But it is hardly true that there is no evidence (1) of anything (2) in any time period (3) in the whole peninsula.

    We must be speaking about a particular sort of evidence (distinct from just evidence of human presence) in a specific time range, and in specific locations (because we don’t know everything about the whole peninsula).

  99. WP:
    “the Sinai Peninsula shows almost no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE (even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the early 12th century BCE). [9]

    The first part is untrue (12th century is already “the second millenium”), but apparently for most of the second millenium the peninsula was arid (now it is arid as well). The second part can be true but are we discussing here existence of a particular fortress before 12th century?
    Perhaps they have in mind : “no trace of people in the oasis before 12th century”? If the spring was active and there was an oasis I would expect some people to live there, and I’d look for pollen.

    Anyway, their reference [9] (Finkelstein, Israel (2015). “The Wilderness Narrative and Itineraries and the Evolution of the Exodus Tradition”. In Levy, Thomas E.; Schneider, Thomas; Propp, William H. C. (eds.). Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer. p 41 https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04768-3) has nothing to do with “the Sinai peninsula” and the oasis, it is about the fortress. And it says nothing about habitation before 12th century (but if you follow links from there you will find such a claim).

  100. Finkelstein and Silberman’s popular account:

    According to the biblical account, the children of Israel wandered in the desert and mountains of the Sinai peninsula, moving around and camping in different places, for a full forty years (Figure 8). Even if the number of fleeing Israelites (given in the text as six hundred thousand) is wildly exaggerated or can be interpreted as representing smaller units of people, the text describes the survival of a great number of people under the most challenging conditions. Some archaeological traces of their generation-long wandering in the Sinai should be apparent. However, except for the Egyptian forts along the northern coast, not a single campsite or sign of occupation from the time of Ramesses II and his immediate predecessors and successors has ever been identified in Sinai. And it has not been for lack of trying. Repeated archaeological surveys in all regions of the peninsula, including the mountainous area around the traditional site of Mount Sinai, near Saint Catherine’s Monastery (see Appendix B), have yielded only negative evidence: not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment. One may argue that a relatively small band of wandering Israelites cannot be expected to leave material remains behind. But modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral activity in such eras as the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century BCE.

    It says that the whole peninsula was uninhabited for a hundred years or two surrounding Ramesses’s reign!

    This conclusion is … interesting. If this is true, I really want to know what the local conditions were like. Today Sinai is arid, but there are bedouins

  101. It was from The Bible Unearthed. All right, if they want to claim that the peninsula was empty (not even “relatively small bands” of nomads) then, and presumably for a large part of the second millenium – I would love to see a discussion of this. Not just “archaeologists found nothing, ‘no Jews’ included in nothing” (which resembles the argument about why humans could not have descended from apes).

    It continues:

    The conclusion—that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible—seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (Numbers 33) and where some archaeological indication—if present—would almost certainly be found.

    If you are confident there were no “small bands” in the whole Sinai, why Kadesh (“It has been identified by archaeologists with the large and well-watered oasis of Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, on the border between modern Israel and Egypt“)? But all right, let’s look at the large and well-watered oasis. Was it well-watered or dry? Did anyone live in that oasis?

    It seems,
    – I was wrong about “particular sort of evidence”. It’s evidence of human presence, not evidence of “Jews”.
    – I was right about specific time range (~ time of Ramses II).
    – I was right about specific places.

  102. Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience.

    p 470: “the consensus today is that all previous suggestions have some truth regarding the origins of the ancient Israelites”

  103. That’s why it’s not worth the faithless finding out either. If evidence can be identified, that’s not belief. And if contrary evidence can be identified, believers are going to believe against the evidence, because that _is_ belief. There is no “faith-based motive”
    Of course there is. Most Christians are neither fundies nor biblical literalists; many are quite happy to see evidence, besides the bible and their priests and preachers telling them so, that the events they are supposed to believe in actually happened. In my middle years at school, in the town of Papenburg in the Catholic Emsland, the whole school was marched to watch a film titled … und die Bibel hat doch recht “… and yet the bible is right”, showing how supposedly archaeological findings support the narratives of the bible (I can’t find an English-language description of that film; it was based on a best-selling book with the same title.) If there were no Christians desiring confirmation by outside sources, such films wouldn’t be necessary.

  104. Thanks @Hans, but your very message seems to be providing evidence against you:

    was marched — so wasn’t invited to watch voluntarily? Why did the priests feel the need to ram messages into impressionable minds? The “confirmation” seems to be as in an ideological echo-chamber [**] (as we’d put it these days); I see no “desiring” cool assessment and archaeological verification.

    doch recht what? every jot and tittle in the Bible? And every version/translation? Upthread, we’ve noted the ‘Red Sea’ claim is a poor translation in the Septuagint, not faithful to the Hebrew. How is/was the episode presented in German bibles/schools in the 1970’s? In British Sunday Schools (Baptist in my case — and I should know: top-of-class 96% in the Scripture exam) it was definitely the Red Sea (pointed out on a map) with the waves parting then closing again. Not a ‘Reed Sea’ where plausibly those on foot could paddle across but chariot wheels would sink into the swamp.

    There is no archaeological evidence to support Israelites in Egypt, nor large numbers returning across Sinai — are the claims upthread. So what ‘evidence’ did the movie present?

    Is the Virgin Birth claim doch recht? What archaeological findings supported that? (Even my R.I. teacher at school, faced with close enquiries from hormone-loaded prurient teenagers, had to concede it was nonsense.) There is just no independent evidence bearing on whether Christ existed, let alone all the details in the Gospels.

    Is this movie more of a Fox News-type exercise? (As in: taking the form of presenting facts, but doing so merely as assertions, with no cutaway to independent authorities pointing to evidence.)

    You haven’t demonstrated such a film is “necessary”. Or was thought to be “necessary”. What explanations did the priests give for marching you to watch it?

    [**] I’m going by the ‘Kritiken’ at that wiki link. Yes I don’t think the movie got to the English-language world.

  105. Werner Keller’s book …und die Bibel hat doch recht was translated into English as “The Bible as History”, which I read in school in England in the 80’s. I don’t know if the film got foreign distribution.

  106. There is a lot of fallacious equivocation in Biblical archeology (as well as archeological and anthropological studies relevant to other religious traditions). Above, drasvi quotes The Bible Unearthed saying: “The conclusion—that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible….” However, when people talk about the Exodus occurring “in the manner described,” there is a ton of variation in what they mean. Does any archeologist expect to find evidence that the people subsisted on food* that fell from the sky six times a week? Are they looking the ruins of the homes built by the giant Anakim whose presence balked the Israelites from crossing over the Jordan? Or are we just talking about possible evidence of a group numbering in the thousands traveling through the Sinai and Negev Deserts for forty years? I cannot imagine any honest archeologist going looking for evidence of the Exodus story as it is actually described, full of magic and miraculous occurrences. Indeed, for a non-literalist, what would it mean for the Exodus story to be disproven? Which elements of the story are essential to the account, and which can be dismissed as extraneous mythologizing? It seems like the most important element to many people is the story of a group of Semites, descended from Jacob the patriarch, returning to Canaan. If that is all people are talking about studying, does it matter whether there were six thousand of those ancestral Hebrews or more like sixty?

    Of course, if there were any hard evidence of Semitic (back)-migration to the Levant in the late Bronze Age, Jewish and Christian fundamentalists would take it as confirmation of the whole story—with the burning bush, sticks turning into snakes, and the tablets of law given from on high. In fact, they would take it to confirm other extra-Biblical traditions* that have been added to the story since its written form was standardized. While the fundamentalists are, not surprisingly, the most liable to this kind of conflation, it also comes from the other side. Some atheists claim that since there are no records of the living dead invading Jerusalem in 33 or 34 C. E., as recorded in the New Testament, Jesus must be an entirely mythical figure, his ministry having no historical basis whatsoever.** Moreover, as I noted above, these evidential equivocations are not limited to discussions of the Bible. There are fringe claims that since there are no surviving written records of him from his own lifetime, and because he is described as performing miracles, Muhammed is mythical too.*** More consequentially, the Hindu nationalists who destroyed the Babri Masjid mosque (the beginning of riots in which thousands died) argued that archeological evidence that there had been preexisting structures on the same site demonstrated that the builders of the mosque had torn down a previous Hindu shrine marking the birthplace of Rama.

    * The Torah has relatively little to say about the Hebrew wanderers’ sources of water. This led to the Rabbinical innovation that there had been a well (the Well of Miriam) which followed Moses’s sister around, providing a continual supply of fresh water. When we were reminded of this tradition at the Passover seder a couple weeks ago, my elder son and I found it hilarious, since one of the major antagonists in a previous fantasy RPG campaign had been an evil well that started following our characters on their journey. It apparently arose by accident. The Dungeon Master rolled up random encounters and kept getting a roadside well, so he just decided to run with it and make it an evil entity, into which we would have to descend to defeat is Juiblex-like core.

    ** If you think that is too absurd a syllogism for any actual atheist to make, then I admire your belief in human rationality. However, you are unfortunately mistaken.

    *** In a recent online discussion, somebody evaluated the claim that Jesus was not a historical individual as plausible, although to prove such a complete negative would be exceedingly challenging; however, the claim that Muhammed was fictional was simply “bananapants.”

  107. @AntC: I don’t think you got my point. It is that there are a lot of Christians who actually are interested in finding out whether the biblical tales have an actual foundation, otherwise there would be no public for such films. That specific film picked findings that confirmed bible stories, and IIRC there was a bit of an insinuation that as story X was confirmed, then maybe story Y was true, too. But my experience with Christian friends is that they’re just as interested in finding out what cannot be confirmed. So it’s worth engaging them. Either you’re not much in contact with Christians at all or they all seem to be the fundie literalist kind – from my experience, although they sure are quite loud on the internet, they’re actually a minority.

    was marched — so wasn’t invited to watch voluntarily? Why did the priests feel the need to ram messages into impressionable minds
    No priests involved. This was a state school, and the film was seen as educational. There was as little choice about participating as with any other official school activity. It was actually the only time in my 9 years at school that the entire school went to watch a movie (at one other point we went to see a screening of “West Side Story,” but that was only for the senior English classes). It sure helped that the message of the film was probably approved by the majority of teachers and parents in that very Catholic area.

  108. PlasticPaddy says

    What I found most jarring about this sort of film was that the effort made in imposing a style in dress, setting and other properties did not extend to the dialogue and movement. In “Exodus”, I remember a scene where a modestly dressed elderly woman spoke the line “Look, it’s Joshua!”, probably accompanied by finger pointing, in a way one might exclaim “Look, it’s uncle Steve!” when on some family outing where uncle Steve was not expected, or is going in to his tightrope act. In the film “Napoleon”, there is a scene where the general climbs an observation tower and meditates on the scenes of carnage below. On descent he delivers a line like “I leave the battle for five minutes and look at what happens!” in a tone and with accompanying gestures of middle manager or middle school sports coach pathos.

  109. @Brett Some atheists claim that since there are no records …, Jesus must be an entirely mythical figure, his ministry having no historical basis whatsoever.**

    ** If you think that is too absurd a syllogism for any actual atheist to make, …

    Let’s note atheists form a broad church. Some are the “fundie [anti-]literalist kind”, I dare say. Since there are no records, we can’t claim there is or there isn’t a historical basis. The lack of facts leaves the question wide open — would be my syllogism.

    @Hans … you’re not much in contact with Christians at all …

    To the contrary, I seem to be something of a magnet for Christians with doubts — particularly lapsing Catholics. Whereas most folk who don’t go to church and might count themselves as non-believers when pushed, actually haven’t considered the matter much and are just embarrassed to talk about it, I’m happy to voice and listen to the concrete doubts that lapsers are thinking through for themselves.

    In a sense, ‘once a Catholic, always a Catholic’ in that such lapsers feel they must have a definite opinion/belief, not some wishy-washy ducking of the question.

    [Dan Dennett] has been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings …
    [from wp on Dennett]

    Similarly, teachers in state-funded but Catholic-run schools (of which there are many in NZ) have to tread a fine line. And when they can finally retire, there is a lot of bottled-up anger they need to release, historic abuse they’ve observed, etc.
    .

  110. my 9 years at school
    That was meant to be “my 9 years at that school”, Gymnasium Papenburg. There were four years of elementary school before that.

    @rozele: Is there somewhere a nice summary of what has been looked for on Sinai wrt the Exodus myth? I somehow doubt that every square meter of Sinai has been combed through by archaeologists, but there are probably places where it makes more sense to look than in others, e.g., based on evidence for the presence of water sources in that time period. And how does the absence of evidence look compared to the evidence for movements we know happened, like the Persian or Alexander’s invasions of Egypt – did they leave any archaeological traces on Sinai?
    Lastly, even big events may not show up in the archaeological record until they do – the location of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest wasn’t found by archaeologists despite people looking for over a century, until the finds at Kalkriese 1987/88 (and debates are still ongoing whether the battlefield found is actually where that battle took place or whether it’s the scene of some other, later battle between Romans and Germanic tribes.)

  111. Hans,

    This is Finkelstein’s summary of the archaeology.

    One thing I’d note is that on a couple of the sites, you find references to what is underneath fortresses, like this — “Scanty remains (Stratum 6) uncovered under the gate of the main fortress (below) were interpreted as belong-ing to an early fortress from the tenth century BCE.”

    That an “early fortress” only shows up as “scanty remains” makes me skeptical that an encampment of nomads in tents burning camel dung in scattered hearths would leave enough material to be identified. A mighty host tarrying at Kadesh-Barnea for 38 years would leave traces, of course.

  112. @Ryan, you mean, a mighty host greatly exceeding the population this oasis can sustain (which can be the size of its previous population).
    I wonder who is feeding this host.

  113. My point is just that the biblical narrative taken literally is clearly ridiculous. If Kadesh-Barnea hosted 600,000 people with all their animals for 38 years, there would be more than traces. But clearly K-B couldn’t sustain 600,000 people for 38 years. I’m not positive that late Bronze Age economies sustained populations that size anywhere, but definitely not at a small, remote desert oasis with a handful of springs.

  114. Honestly I am confused.

    I expected to find a reference to a serious discussion of depopulated Sinai, but all I find is references to The Bible Unearthed. Even in serious publications. E.g. “The lack of finds in Sinai, for example, led some scholars to doubt the historicity of the event altogether (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 61–63). ” (Avraham Faust, The Emergence of Iron Age Israel: On Origins and Habitus)

    Finkelsttein’s Living on The Fringe looked promicing but I don’t see it online. So I tried to read what proponents of the Exodus say, and started from Hoffmeier (Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authencity of the Wilderness Tradition), and I am confused much more:

    In fact there has been a rather energetic debate about this matter in recent years.[5] Of special interest to the current study is the question of whether nomads are discernible in the archaeological record. Finkelstein and Perevolotsky, who were engaged in considerable survey work in the Negev and Sinai, argue for only negligible evidence, if any, which is true not only of ancient desert dwellers but even of nineteenth-century Bedouin, whose traces are ‘‘difficult to identify.’’[6] They further observe that ‘‘nomadic societies do not establish permanent houses, and the constant migration permits them to move only minimal belongings. Moreover, their limited resources do not facilitate the creation of a flourishing material culture that could leave rich archaeological finds.’’[7] They acknowledge, however, that nomadic people do leave such evidence of their presence as cemeteries, desert kites (for hunting), cult places, and rock drawings.[8] But for the most part, they speak of the ‘‘nomadic lifestyle’’ as ‘‘archaeologically ‘invisible,’ ’’ one that does not leave an ‘‘archaeological footprint.’’[9] Their study is not primarily aimed at tracing ancient nomadic peoples in the archaeological record, but at explaining what happened at different periods in the Early Bronze Age when certain urban centers in southern Canaan were abandoned. They rightly want to explain how sites vanish and then reappear. They offer a model of nomadization followed by sedentarization, caused by shifting economic factors. [10]

    Subsequently, Steven Rosen offered a critique of the nomadization-sedentarization theory, based primarily upon his ability to point to some (albeit scant) evidence for nomads.[11] He is especially critical of Finkelstein and Perevolotsky’s nomadization-sedentarization theory, preferring not to see populations that shift between these two modes of existence. Finkelstein responded forcefully to Rosen with a more detailed study in a monograph, reiterating and expanding upon his earlier arguments.[12] He argues that the scanty evidence Rosen points to does not account for the disappearance of the large urban centers and thus rejects the notion that the absence of archaeological evidence means that the Negev and Sinai were devoid of people. Curiously, when it comes to the Israelites in Sinai, Finkelstein is quite adamant that ‘‘some archaeological traces of their generation-long wandering in the Sinai should be apparent.’’[13] Apparently Finkelstein applies a different set of criteria when the question of nomadism applies to the early Israelites.

    5. Roger Cribb, Nomads in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Kay Prag, ‘‘Ancient and Modern Pastoral Migration in the Levant,’’ Levant 17 (1985): 81–88; Israel Finkelstein and Avi Perevolotsky, ‘‘Processes of Sedentarization and Nomadization in the History of Sinai and the Negev,’’ BASOR 279 (1990): 67–88; Israel Finkelstein, Living on the Fringe, Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995); Steven Rosen, ‘‘Nomads in Archaeology: A Response to Finkelstein and Perevolotsky,’’ BASOR 287 (1992): 75–85.
    6. Finkelstein and Perevolotsky, ‘‘Processes of Sedentarization and Nomadization,’’ 67.
    7. Ibid., 68.
    8. Ibid., 68–70.
    9. Ibid., 75, 78.
    10. Ibid., 72ff.
    11. Rosen, ‘‘Nomads in Archaeology,’’ 75–85.
    12. Finkelstein, Living on the Fringe, chapters 1–3.
    13. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 62.

  115. @Ryan, I all the time was having somethign else in mind: just a claim that Jews once lived in Egypt. A subquestion here is whether they ever crossed Sinai (they still could have taken a different route), and DM says archaeology excludes this possibility and I’m perplexed (I don’t think it is easy to exclude).

    Yes, 600,000 in one oasis sounds crazy.

    But I think I’m inclined to just replace 600,000 with “some amount”. Then maybe there was the closest thing to their “main base”…

  116. Actually I am more intrigued by the question of visibility of ancient peoples and the population of Sinai than with the Exodus. This is why so much attention to DM’s words specifically.

    But my conclusion (not very confident though) is that Finkelstein and Silberman do not mean or think that even “small bands” can’t remain invisible for “modern archaeology”. They just were… emotional.

    And exaggerated. (I would use stronger words if they were having me – an ignorant reader – in mind, but they could be thinking – hopefully – of a more informed person who knows the actual situation).

    And then this emotional passage was cited by WP and everyone and we obtained depopulated Sinai.
    —-
    The argument is not invalid. When you a priori expect to find in you sample (archaeologists only deal with some sample of easy-to-notice sites) evidence of someone’s presence with the probablity 50% – in reality it is not 50%, it is 0 to 100, a function from the size of population and their way of life – and do NOT find it, it of course changes you a posteriori probabilities that you assign to this or competing hypotheses.

    And they wanted not as much to exclude the Exodus as to make their own idea more attractive.

  117. And I think DM is wrong: no way we can exclude presence of relatively small number of Jews (where relatively small is not really small, just comparable to normal local tribes) in Sinai in any time.

    We also can’t exclude crossing of Sinai by a very large crowd.

    Glassner, 1974, The Bedouin of Southern Sinai under Israeli Administration:

    No proper census has ever been taken in all of Sinai, and even the best census has never been able to count the Bedouin accurately, but a reasonable estimate of the present Bedouin population in the region is about 33,ooo. Of these, about three-quarters live in northern Sinai and nearly all of the remainder in southern Sinai.[1]

    [1] David H. K. Amiran (Nomadic and Beduin Population in the Census Returns of Mandatory Palestine, Israel Exploration Journ., Vol. 13, 1963, pp. 247-253) argues for the enumeration of nomads on the basis of social identity rather than on degree of sedentarization, since many Bedouin continue to identify themselves as such long after they have settled in towns. The estimate of 33,000 comes from Emanuel Marx (Bedouin of the Negev [Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1967], p. 5), who estimates the Bedouin of northern Sinai at 26,ooo. Checked against both earlier and more recent estimates, his figures seem fairly accurate (see Hugh John Beadnell: The Wilderness of Sinai: A Record of Two Years’ Recent Exploration [London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1927]; and C. S. Jarvis: Yesterday and Today in Sinai [rev. edit.; William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., Edinburgh and London, 194 1 ]). An Israeli census in the fall of 1967 found 33,441
    persons in northern Sinai, of whom 30,000 were in El Arish, and estimated “only a few thousands” in the rest of Sinai (Efraim Orni and Elisha Efrat: Geography of Israel [3rd rev. edit.; Israel Universities Press, Jerusalem, 1971], p. 381). Mohamed Awad cites estimates for the 1940’s of 12,ooo Bedouin in the north and 2,000 to 4,000 in the south (Settlement of Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribal Groups in the Middle East, Internatl. Labour Rev., Vol. 79, 1959, pp. 25-56; reference on p. 43). Awad’s figures seem too low.

    But these are Bedouins.

  118. drasvi, on the one hand, I’m sympathetic and kind of agree. The 40 years is also clearly symbolic, but what time period is long enough that someone would express it as 40 years? I don’t have the faintest acquaintance with the desert archaeology of nomadic populations, so I don’t know how large a group would need to visit how frequently, or for what duration, before we’d expect to find evidence. As I said, finding only faint traces of a previous fort makes me think that the fainter footprint of a tent encampment might disappear.

    But, another part of me looks at that mental exercise the way I look at election skeptics who retreat to new complaints as each previous complaint is proven invalid.

    The only thing I see is an interesting linguistic paper that seems to offer proof of the ancientness of Exodus *as a story.* I think that’s pretty interesting. It doesn’t seem to be consensus. If you accept the ancientness of the story as myth, I think it leads to some interesting hypotheses that don’t hinge on trying to find that some one group of whatever size ever experienced the various incidents of this narrative.

    I’m drawn to the Mayflower example above, but I look at it rather differently than David M and Rodger seem to–it doesn’t present a reason to diminish the Exodus story as evidence of history. The Mayflower didn’t become a foundation myth because of any phenomenal institutional power of King, governors or churches imposed the story of a small group as foundation myth for millions.

    Instead, the Mayflower resonated with the descendants of tens of thousands of groups and individuals who arrived in part inspired by religious oppression and dissent in a day when religion was an important organizer of everyday life, and who found a measure of congregational and political self-rule in the colonies. It symbolically matched the lived experience of millions. Had that not been true, you would not have had school children singing “Land of the Pilgrim’s Pride” in the 20th century. And indeed, far fewer do today, as the resonance fades for a variety of reasons.

    In a setting like Late Bronze Canaan, a foundation myth, in particular one about opposition to empire and established governmental power, had to have deep popular resonance to survive. Knowing that, we should be able to formulate some hypotheses about Canaanites, some of which might not otherwise be obvious. I wouldn’t frame any of this as being about “Jews” nor even Judeans and people from the northern kingdom, Israel. (Other Biblical stories suggest to me that such identities were not strong, if they existed at all, until the time of those monarchies.)

    At the most banal level, imperial oppression was deeply felt.

    But other hypotheses suggested by the lasting resonance of Exodus are more interesting, I think. Was Canaanite population flow to and from the Delta significant and ongoing, continuing producing new groups that felt an affinity for the story? Did Canaanites define themselves in opposition to an other which was imperial but also culturally Egyptian? Was Canaanite participation at high levels of the imperial service plausible? Was the abandonment of homes by settled groups choosing to roam nomadically in flight from governmental power a familiar part of life, and a living option? Did power frequently change hands among Canaanites between individuals and powerful relatives rather than by patrilineal inheritance? Did Egyptian monarchs respond erratically to natural disasters? Did Canaanite populations look at flood and famine as signs of God’s anger?

    Certainly, some counterhypotheses are negated if we accept Exodus as an ancient and lasting tradition. It’s hard to believe there wasn’t a large Canaanite population not subject to inherited royal power, for a myth like this to survive. The comparison of the 10 Commandments on their stone tablets (“Thou shalt not kill.”) with, say, Hammurabi’s Code on its basalt stele (“If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and the trading agent incurs a loss on his journeys…”) tells us a lot about Canaanite development, while equally suggesting that the norms of empires were powerful among Canaanites (the law written in stone.)

    None of these really depend on the size of the group or how long it tarried in Sinai nor whether any of it really happened. But they are supported by the idea that this particular Bronze Age tradition survived long enough to be written down by Iron Age scribes who accepted it, even if they adapted it, as an important foundation myth, and one that they felt constrained to accept despite the fact that in some ways it cuts against the interest of a monarchy trying to establish the legitimacy of monarchy. I do think that’s interesting.

  119. elections scepticts” – I think “is there historical truth behind this tale?” (no matter what talу) is a meaningful question. It does not imply a literal reading of the tale (especially if there are numerous miracles in the tale), rather a “core” and its minimal/maximal versions, all chosen subjectively based on what element of the tale is the most interesting (for you).
    Perhaps an even more meaningful question is “what is true and what is not” (that is: let’s speak about elements, not the whole) or more precisely and holistically “in what relation with the reality does it stand”.

    No need to approach the tale with jealousy, trying to “prove” or “disprove” it as a sacred history.

  120. Put it this way. Forget 600,000 people for 40 years. Is it even credible that Kadesh-Barnea could have supported 2,000 people for a year? It doesn’t seem to have in days since. As you reduce your aspirations, it becomes banal. Did 200 people who spoke a Semitic language ever leave Egypt as a group by way of Sinai? Probably. What are we trying to do in assessing “historicity” at that level? And is Exodus evidence of such, or are we simply deciding on the basis of probability, in order to deem Exodus real or not?

    To me, pending some evidence of a more thoroughgoing narrative truth in the story, it’s more interesting to analyze it as a myth that endured for reasons and to think about what those reasons might be.

  121. Ryan, I agree.

  122. I don’t think that the reality is not interesting (it’s a part of a tale’s history) but what you are speaking about is definitely extremely interesting.

  123. at a bit of a skew to this, but it seems relevant: i went to this fascinating talk today by laurie pearce, on the evidence for judeans in 5thC BC* babylonia from cuneiform texts. i quite recommend it; the Katz Center puts its events on YouTube, so it should be watchable there soon

    what was striking was the way that the axiomatic Historical Truth of the Tanakh texts was used to make evidence that easily admits of multiple interpretations appear to have only one possible message. a few examples:

    – there are a set of theophoric names in the cuneiform record with -yama suffixes, that are understood as referring to yhvh. a number of these names also appear in the Tanakh, in the lists of “returnees” in Ezra or Nehemiah, which are understood to have been written quite a bit later than the cuneiform tablets. on that evidence, the bearers of these names are being described as “judean exiles”. that’s certainly a plausible interpretation. but without evidence* of those names appearing in the archaeological record in judea, or in a period before the babylonian tablets – or, really, both – there’s no reason to favor it over one that says they’re yhvhistic names from mesopotamia that were later incorporated into the Tanakh narrative (perhaps precisely because they were distinctively mesopotamian, to back up a “retvrn” narrative).

    – a reconstructed family tree contains one yhvistic name. it also contains distinctively babylonian names with religious connections, including a “marduk”. on the basis of the presence of that one yhvhistic name, it is identified as a “judean exile” family. the other names, and their implications, are ignored. again, sure! that is indeed a possible interpretation. but so are any number of others. this stuff isn’t exotic, or even unusual***! a u.s. family having a kid named “naima” or “aisha” doesn’t automatically make them muslim (they could just be coltrane fans), and knowing that there are other folks in the immediate family named “theodore”, “timothy”, and “geoffrey” (or “akiva”, “basya”, and “nehemiah”) would make an important difference in trying to decide whether they were or not.

    – there was apparently a settlement in the general vicinity of nippur and babylon called yāhūdu. this is, sensibly afaik, interpreted as “judean-town” or “little jerusalem”. but there the inquiry stops: it axiomatically must be ‘a town of judean exiles’, because bible. other possibilities aren’t even floated to be refuted: a town founded by judean traders; a town of non-deportee immigrants from judea; etc. other settlements in mesopotamia are apparently named for places in palestine as well (ashkelon and gaza were mentioned) – but no comparative anything was brought in about or from those sites, which seems like an obvious place to find evidence of why places are named for other places in that particular time and geography.

    even if all these conclusions are in fact right (which is entirely possible!), this is methodological garbage. and it is that way because the field is based on thinly-papered-over assumptions that in every case “die Bibel hat doch recht”, and defines its task as figuring out precisely how to back up that axiomatic truth. it can be true literally or loosely, in whole or in part. that flexibility, and the accompanying readiness to move back and forth between different modes, is a necessary and integral part of the apologetic mission – there’s not a coherent theory of the relationship between text and history; everything must be historically true somehow, but each element can be true in an entirely different way that has no particular relation to how any other element is true. it passeth all understanding, after all.

    .
    * if we’re marking the era with the mythic date of the christian messiah’s birth, there’s no point euphemizing BC/AD.

    ** i asked if there was any; didn’t get an answer. in the presentation, the biblical citation was presented as sufficient in itself.

    *** i can speak to this personally: i have a cousin named “kiva”. she was born very near reservation land, her parents lived for many years in a tipi, and she is, in fact, named for the indigenous subterranean ritual spaces of the southwest (and not for the talmudic rabbi, like the kivas on the other side of my family). but none of that makes her indigenous, much less puebloan or hopi – it just means she has hippie parents.

  124. David Marjanović says

    Strikingly, the title The Bible as History fits the contents of the book (which I read once or maybe twice when I was little) much better than the original “…and the Bible is right after all”: the book is basically euhemerist. It tries to explain a lot of miracles as natural, if rare and/or exaggerated, events.

  125. There’s a pretty good defense of Pearce’s point of view on Yahvistic names in Babylonia here in <a href=
    https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Judeans-in-Babylonia-Alstola/b45dd153c689c4a65408c07894d4b421fde1103e<Judeans in Babylonia, a book by Tero Alstola published in 2020.

    “Pretty good” means well written and seemingly careful against over-interpretation — well worth considering for anyone interested, but there may be holes I’m not aware of.

    He points out that the primary evidence confirming the Babylonian exile is that the exiled Judean king is named in ration lists from the Babylonian archives of the relevant time, along with two sons of a king of Ashkelon among others. He also states that Yahvistic names start showing up in serious numbers at the right time, and devotes some discussion to dispelling the idea that people of other ethnic backgrounds adopted such names.

    Naturally, after what I wrote above, I find this paragraph compelling.:
    >According to the Hebrew Bible, Judeans in Judah and Babylonia remained in touch with each other after the deportations.470 Jeremiah 29 describes how letters were sent from Judah to Babylonia and back, and, later in Chapter 51, Jeremiah writes prophecies against Babylon on a scroll that would be sent with a Judean royal official to Babylon. Ezekiel 33:21–22 refers to a Judean refugee who brings the news about the destruction of Jerusalem to the exiles. Whatever the historicity of these accounts, it is interesting that their ancient authors took the possibility of communicating between Judah and Babylonia for granted.

  126. Some numbers from Hoffmeier:

    600k men means 3 million people if there is one woman and three chidren per a man.

    3.5 million population of Egypt [1]
    20 000 the size of Egyptian army [2]

    53 000 troops 3 940 cavalry 2 900 chariots – the army that eleven kings gathered against Shalmaneser in the battle of Qarqar (the first mention of Arabs) in the Iron Age [Shalmaneser III, -852, the Kurkh monoliths, mon.2]

    140 000 population of Canaan in Middle Bronze age II [3]
    750 000-900 000 population of both kingdoms in Iron II [4]
    460 000 population of both kingdoms in Iron II [5]

  127. Hoffmeier:
    [1] Cf. Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt, Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 76–77. Butzer’s figure is based on two different unpublished studies that he reviewed, by Klaus Baer and Fekri Hassan.

    [2] Alan R. Schulman, Military Rank, Title and Organization in the Egyptian New Kingdom, Münchner Ägyptologische Studien 6 (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1964). See also Andrea Gnirs, ‘‘Military,’’ in Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt 2, ed. Donald Redford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 404. The figure of 20,000 is determined by the fact that during the Ramesside era, the army was made up of four divisions, named after the gods Re, Amun, Seth, and Ptah. There were 5,000 soldiers in a division. In a conversation with the late Alan Schulman many years ago, I pressed him on his estimate for the maximum size of the army during the New Kingdom. He thought that the Egyptian army was at its greatest size during the reigns of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, and 25,000 was the highest figure with which he was comfortable.

    [3] Magen Broshi and Ram Gophna, ‘‘Middle Bronze Age II Palestine: Its Settlements and Population,’’ BASOR 261 (1986): 89
    [4] Yigal Shiloh, ‘‘The Population of Iron Age Palestine in the Light of a Sample Analysis of Urban Plans, Areas, and Population Density,’’ BASOR 239 (1980): 32.
    [5] Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, ‘‘The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II,’’ BASOR 287 (1992): 47–60.

  128. What it gives us is that to be formidable Jews need some 6 000 warriors (almost 1/3 of the Egyptian army) and some 40k people.

    And… they don’t even have to be “formidable”.
    —-
    Hoffmeier believes 600 000 results form misinterpretation of the text, particularly אֶלֶף rather than from any exaggeration on the part of the text itself. I have no idea if this argument makes sense.

  129. Judeans in Babylonia

    Ryan’s link above doesn’t work (for me, at least). But the pdf of Tero Alstola’s book is available in open access at the Brill website here.

  130. thanks for the links, Ryan & Xerîb! looking forward to reading!

    but i gotta say that it’s rather bizarre to me that anyone would find it surprising that communication between judea and mesopotamia could be relied on in a period where they were part of the same centrally-ruled empire (hardly an workable enterprise without regular, reliable communication) – and even weirder to find it remarkable that people living under that empire had noticed.

    and just to keep on keeping on in the meantime:

    (1) a captured king isn’t a mass deportation. am i right remembering that rome quite liked the first and very rarely did the second? if not, there are plenty of other examples of that pattern, right down to the recent past. and again, where’s the comparative look at the ashkeloneans? same captured king situation, so if we’re to believe in a judean mass deportation, there oughta be one from ashkelon right alongside it.

    (2) of course more judean names would appear in the capital and core of the empire right after it incorporated judea! that in itself gives us nothing to support any particular account of how and why they’re there; it’s a trivial result of a documented conquest. and the resulting name lists look the same whether they come from mass deportation, newly reliable trading routes, sycophants or fanatics deciding to follow a hostage king, indentured laborers, paid laborers, settled soldiers recruited from a new province, fads for new “exotic” names*, cultural workers heading where the money is, or any number of patterns we know from other empires.

    again: the only reason these specific narratives are being cherrypicked from the many at-least-equally plausible ones is the axiomatic reliance on the bible as a reliable historical source. and that’s true whether the conclusions are correct or not, and just as much of a problem either way.

    .
    * which seems likely to be at least a part of the picture, given the documented family with the classically babylonian names and one judean name. which reminds me of the dutch/scottish/english side of my own family, where there are suddenly some spanish names in the generation following the one that includes at least one veteran of the mexican-american war.

  131. rozele, people use written texts as a starting point for historical investigation all the time, in every proto-historical context there is. I personally think that’s a good thing. Texts should be read critically, and with careful attention to changing cultural and historical contexts, but ignoring them completely sets aside a possible source of evidence. It should be possible to navigate between the extremes of epistemologically righteous ‘doubting antiquity’ and naive textual credulism (I take it as read that we can dismiss actual literalism, miracles and all, out of hand).

  132. rozele, people use written texts as a starting point for historical investigation all the time

    But rozele wasn’t talking about using written texts in general, but “these specific narratives” (bolding in original).

  133. Yes, but I don’t know whether an approach of “it’s in the bible, so I doubt it on principle” is much better than “it’s in the bible, so it must be true”.

  134. The point is not whether it’s true or not, the point is that the fixation on stories that are in the Bible focuses attention away from other things that are of greater potential importance to those not Biblically oriented. Who really cares whether a ragtag group of proto-Jews spent time in the Sinai at a certain point several thousand years ago, if the Bible and its tales aren’t of personal importance to you?

  135. J.W. Brewer says

    Take a non-Biblical instance from early Roman history instead. Did Horatius really single-handedly defend the bridge? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatius_Cocles No suspension of the commonly-understood laws of nature is necessary for the account (or at least most details of most versions) to be accurate, but the alleged incident obviously lends itself to mythologization in service of the political agendas of subsequent generations and the sources we all have were first written several centuries after the alleged date of the alleged incident (and are probably available to us only in manuscripts that are many centuries younger than the alleged date of writing of the various accounts). It is difficult to imagine archeological evidence that would either prove or disprove the claim. Radical forms of disproof (no evidence that proto-Romans lived anywhere near the area at the time, the Tiber was not bridgeable anywhere near the location of the anecdote by any technology known to have existed in the area at the time …) may not be available, but that’s hardly affirmative evidence for truth. So you’re left with a bunch of skeptical moderns trying to assess the accuracy of the text without any real basis for doing so other than their own prejudices and biases about how things probably did or didn’t happen.

    Of course, as one historiographer has pointed out, there’s at least one generally-considered-to-be-historically-accurate incident from the early history of the U.S. (Adams and Jefferson both dying on the very same day and that day being the highly symbolic July 4, 1826) that we hubristic moderns would dismiss out of hand as an obvious fabrication if we found the equivalent in an ancient or medieval chronicle.

  136. All true, of course, and my reaction is simply not to worry my head about the degree of potential accuracy of ancient texts when there is little likelihood of proof or disproof. The Horatius-at-the-bridge story is a good one whether it happened or not, and (not being an ancient Roman) I have no skin in the game.

  137. “importance”
    But importance is somewhat subjective. I would even say it is “interest”.

  138. ə de vivre says

    I think there’s a basic methodological consideration at play here: if you have an unreliable Source 1 that says “A” and a reliable Source 2 that could be interpreted as saying “A”, “B”, or “C”, you can’t use Source 2 as evidence that Source 1 is reliable. You need some independent reason to believe that “A” is the correct interpretation of Source 2, otherwise the argumentation is circular: “We know that the claim in Source 1 is reliable because it agrees with Source 2, and we know that interpretation A of Source 2 is the correct one because it agrees with Source 1.”

  139. John Cowan says

    Piotr Gąsiorowski’s argument that reconstructed proto-forms cannot be used as inputs for further comparison:

    […]

    The use of *protoforms in datasets is not justifiable in any way if the reconstructions are highly conjectural, if they might be biassed (“improved” to make a point without sufficient evidence), or if they represent preliminary, speculative research whose quality remains controversial.

    The question is whether any of these caveats is true of Huehnergard’s reconstruction of Proto-Semitic. He does add one consonant to the standard 29, but that strikes me as a minor change.

    d) words that were part of a specific, late Bronze Age tradition that was still living in the Iron Age (as with the Iliad), that provided material for a scribe trying to salt his narrative. (Not that it’s ancientness need suggest anything about the historicity of that tradition.)

    Or e) that Exodus itself is a Bronze Age tradition (which might still be utterly fictional), maybe even first written down in the Bronze Age.

    Noonan seems to believe a strong form of e) – Exodus is a Bronze Age tradition based on actual Bronze Age events.

    John Cowan seems attracted to options d or e, I think, though maybe not in the strong form.

    Just so. You don’t have to believe in Igor’s campaign or Beowulf’s monster-mashing to find the arguments for the antiquity of the respective texts convincing.

  140. “I think there’s a basic methodological consideration at play here: if you have an unreliable Source 1 that says “A” and a reliable Source 2 that could be interpreted as saying “A”, “B”, or “C”, you can’t use Source 2 as evidence that Source 1 is reliable. ”

    Not necessarily. It does not demonstrate that S1 is “reliable”, but it does increace its credibility.

  141. ‘But rozele wasn’t talking about using written texts in general, but “these specific narratives” (bolding in original).’

    My point was simply that this case is no different from any other circumstance or text. The source shouldn’t be treated as specially problematic because it’s the bible. This is just as bad as treating it as specially privileged just because it’s the bible.

    (The bolded point is rather different, though, no? Surely rozele was talking about ‘narratives’ as ‘theories or accounts of history in this context’, not ‘the bible as opposed to Shang history, or Beowulf, or whatever.)

  142. David Eddyshaw says

    There is considerable feedback from reconstructed PIE to reconstructed PGmc

    I think this thought is the key. Just as a reconstruction, though created by comparison of daughter languages, is of no particular value unless, in turn, it sheds light on the daughter languages (e.g. by explaining how irregularities arose), so too reconstructions at a deeper level are an empty exercise unless they shed light on the reconstructed proto-branch languages. The grammars of modern languages are themselves exercises in abstraction away from the data, and these various abstract models at their various levels shed light on one another mutually.

    In Oti-Volta work I’ve seen quite a few outright errors in grammatical analysis that would have been avoided in the writer had had even a passing acquaintance with some of the related languages.

    I actually just a few days ago came across an example of proto-Oti-Volta reconstruction shedding light on the Western Oti-Volta languages as an entire group (as opposed to shedding light on just one particular language) and vice versa.

    Nearly all Oti-Volta languages have a “reversive” verb-deriving suffix, which everywhere except Western-Oti-Volta and Buli/Konni turns up as an alveolar, usually d or r e.g. Moba den “lean”, dend “stop leaning.” (Moba has dozens of pairs like this.) Buli/Konni has no such derivative, but Western Oti-Volta has (or seems to have) -g, e.g. Kusaa “put on clothes”, yɛɛg “take off clothes”, pil “cover”, pilig “uncover.”

    This is weird from a comparative standpoint, because there is no phonological parallel for a velar-alveolar correspondence of this kind, so it’s hard to see how the suffixes involved could actually be cognate, and it seems a bit of a stretch that WOV could have just switched suffixes for some reason, or independently developed a reversive off its own bat.

    It turns out these suffixes are indeed not cognate, and yet there still is an inherited derivational pattern going on. The proto-Oti-Volta form of the reversive suffix was *rɪ, and many other comparative series show that the expected outcome of this in proto-Western Oti-Volta would be *yɪ, with subsequent loss of the *y. As there are no contrasts among non-root vowels within Western Oti-Volta words stems (they all just behave like epenthetic vowels), you’d expect the suffix basically to have become obsolete in Western Oti-Volta and for the reversive derivative to have been abandoned (which is exactly what has actually happened in Buli/Konni.)

    So why does Western Oti-Volta seem to have a reversive g suffix?

    What explains this is the fact that WOV g is very frequent as a singulative suffix, often alongside plurative forms in s, e.g. Farefare fiige “break” (once), fiise “break” (several times), but also in pairs where the plurative is just a root-stem, e.g. Farefare yelge “winnow” (once), yeele “winnow” (several times.)

    And, lo and behold, you get pairs like this for reversives, too: Farefare pire “put shoes on”, pirge “take shoes off” (once), pirse “take shoes off” (several times.)

    At this point you could try to rescue the hypothesis of a reversive g by proposing some sort of internal sandhi change of *gs -> s, but that won’t work, because there are also sets like Mooré pili “cover”, pilgi “uncover” (once), piili “uncover” (several times.)

    What’s going on here is that, for pragmatic reasons, reversives are very likely to be singulative, and it is that which has produced the impression that (one meaning of) the Western Oti-Volta g suffix is reversive. The actual inherited reversive suffix has indeed disappeared in WOV, but it leads a ghostly afterlife, because the consequences of making a verb reversive were that further singulative and plurative suffixes were usually added after it, and these haven’t disappeared at all. The only direct effect of the reversive suffix itself is the compensatory stem vowel lengthening in forms like piili “uncover.”

    Nicole’s grammar of the non-Western Oti-Volta language Nawdm actually claims that the Nawdm reversive suffix d only forms singulative verbs, in the combination dg (he’s actually wrong about that, but in Nawdm too, reversives are naturally much more likely to be singulative than plurative.)

    All this makes sense of why g seems to be “the” reversive suffix in WOV, and yet is completely missing from some forms which surely must be morphologically derived reversives; so the comparative work sheds light on the real modern languages. But to get there, you need not only the proto-Oti-Volta form *rɪ of the reversive suffix, but you also need the reconstruction of proto-Western Oti-Volta *yɪ and all the other evidence for the distinctively WOV phonological developments. And in turn, this absence of a direct reflex of the POV reversive suffix in (all of) WOV is evidence that the POV suffix was, specifically, *rɪ and not *dɪ or *tɪ, which would have resulted in proto-WOV *dɪ.

  143. >these specific narratives

    Does it make sense to lump together Exodus (supposedly happened long before writing in Canaan, or rather, after a long break in the record of royal archival material and known history of writing in the region) and Kings (written by a culture known to be literate and matching the known history in many respects) as “these narratives.” I’m intrigued by what Exodus might offer as a myth, but am very sympathetic to those who aren’t, and find it reasonable even for someone like Hat who is obviously intrigued by classical history to simply ignore and even scoff at it.

    But I find it absolutely bizarre not to consider Kings a source. Rozele offered specific criticisms, but frankly, they’re answered in the book I referenced. The author, Alstola, spells out his own source criticism, dismissing some books of the Hebrew Bible, while making a case for Kings.

    Rozele in particular asked at length and seemingly with exasperation “where is the comparison” between Jududaya and Ashkelon? (And asked it *after* I posted the link.) I don’t want to go back, but my banal answer to a question which was posed rhetorically as evidence of the weakness of the argument is “somewhere around p. 50”.

    The argument is pretty sophisticated, with 6 interlocking bits of evidence —
    – there are a series of towns that seem to have West Semitic names – Yahudu/Yahudaya, Ashkelon, Gaza, Hamath and Neirab
    – the evidence that Neirab is a “twin town” with people from the one populating the other is quite strong – cuneiforms tablets found at a burial in Syrian Neirab that reference Babylonian Neirab.
    – these villages appear in the documentary record just after the Babylonian conquest of West Semitic lands.
    – they are clustered in rural areas around Nippur
    – there is evidence of parallels between them that relate to the conquest, such as the documentation of royal captives from both Ashkelon and Judah.
    – there is documentation of intentional Neo Assyrian resettlement of captives in similar “marginal” rural contexts in their “heartland” offering a parallel and precedent for such a Babylonian policy.

    By ignoring 4 of the 6 points, someone posting online can make it seem like a weak argument really only supported by the Biblical narrative. And one can make up just-so stories to explain this coincidence away. But none of them are as strong as simply following the story of a reasonable secondary source, which would seem to offer explanation of all known details. One can posit that the Babylonian towns of Gath and Ekron were near Babel, but just don’t show up in the record. One can posit that these 5 towns existed before the Babylonian conquest. That West Semitic traders were more apt to form their own rural villages rather than living in cities. That the parallels between the royal captives from Ashkelon and the King of Judah are coincidental. But really, that all seems a stretch when we have a narrative that suits the facts and the known patterns of Imperial behavior in the mid-first millennium BC(E). El Señor Guillermo de Ockham is not smiling on Rozele’s alternate hypothesis.

    The other just-so story being posited against finding evidence for the veracity of Kings is that Babylonians were in the habit of giving their children exotic names from the areas they conquered. The evidence from Babylonia is that there are Judean families, identified by more than one -yama/yahu name, in a town that seems to be named for Judea, who also have kids with Babylonian names. And even a case of a guy who changed his name back and forward from a -yama/-yahu name to a Babylonian one. Rozele suggests that a family that had only one such Judah-sounding name was Babylonian, but just liked Judean names. No one has brought forward a demonstrable case of a such a practice. But Rozele is willing to advance a turn-of-the-twentieth-century case in his own family as “evidence” of this theory, which (singular) they somehow believe is “at-least-equally plausible”.

    I don’t actually believe the example is relevant at all. But if 20th century American naming practices are relevant, then I think Rozele needs to admit they push the other way, since it’s “at-least” 1000 to 1 more common to find a John with a Mexican-American background than to find a non-Hispanic Miguel or Juan. The number of immigrant families with a mixed set of ancestral and Anglo names must number in the millions. The only setting I can think of where something like what Rozele posits has happened is with African Americans who choose Muslim or African names to identify with an aspect of their history that is in many cases discontinuous with the more immediate culture of recent generations of their family (and may not have any relevance.) But that is a very special case with a clear explanation that seems unlikely to apply in mid-millennium rural Babylonia.

  144. “a reconstruction, though created by comparison of daughter languages, is of no particular value unless, in turn, it sheds light on the daughter languages (e.g. by explaining how irregularities arose), so too reconstructions at a deeper level are an empty exercise unless they shed light on the reconstructed proto-branch languages.”

    While I do agree that this is the main value and point of reconstruction (and the relevant one here), it’s certainly not the only value. Things like evaluating proposed loanwords between prehistoric languages can be done much more rigorously if reasonably sound reconstructions are available.

  145. Stu Clayton says

    The discussion here shows the notion of reconstruction in the process of being constructed. Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.

    # This short essay by Heinrich von Kleist advises a burgeoning early-nineteenth-century public to speak to others with “the sensible intention of instructing yourself” – in short, to talk not just about what you already understand, but to dive into conversation with zest and curiosity, with a thirst to learn more and question openly – to relish the pleasures of intellectual discourse, unsure of where it’s headed. # [p98a]

    Le bourgeonnement des bourgeois. Let a hundred wallflowers bloom !

  146. David Eddyshaw says

    @Nelson Goering:

    Yes, you’re right. I was overstating the case.

    What I should have said was, not so much thst shedding light on the daughter languages is the sole point of comparative reconstruction, but that unless your reconstruction sheds some new light on the daughter languages, you probably haven’t done it right. Reconstruction needs to explain something to be more than a sort of pattern-making exercise.

    (Though I think that “evaluating proposed loanwords between prehistoric languages” could actually be subsumed under “shedding light on the daughter languages”, at that, without doing undue violence to the meaning of the terms.)

  147. Stu Clayton says

    Reconstruction needs to explain something to be more than a sort of pattern-making exercise.

    Now all that needs a bit more explication is the notion of “explanation”. I too think of explanation as being a kind of pattern-making exercise, where one attempts to fit concepts (words) together with other concepts (words) to create and modify patterns.

    Is the idea here that an “explanation” has been reached when you (temporarily) run out of new patterns ? That’s where my bets are. You spread your explanatory wares, and wait for takers and scoffers to stroll by.

  148. The point is not whether it’s true or not, the point is that the fixation on stories that are in the Bible focuses attention away from other things that are of greater potential importance to those not Biblically oriented. Who really cares whether a ragtag group of proto-Jews spent time in the Sinai at a certain point several thousand years ago, if the Bible and its tales aren’t of personal importance to you?
    Well, I can accept that you’re not interested, or that you think other topics should get more attention, but I wouldn’t fault people coming from societies where millions believe the bible to be literally true and where its stories make up a part of the shared culture even for those who don’t believe in it, for being interested in how much in these stories actually has factual underpinnings.
    And after all, we’re all in the glass house here; I guess there are a lot of people who would look at us debating languages and (sometimes) hats and tell us to stop waisting our time while instead we could do something about hunger, war, climate change, or cancer…

  149. Stu Clayton says

    I guess there are a lot of people who would look at us debating languages and (sometimes) hats and tell us to stop waisting our time while instead we could do something about hunger, war, climate change, or cancer…

    Well, while people comment here they are at least not exacerbating hunger, war etc. They might well make things worse in the time they otherwise spend commenting. “Doing something” can have good, bad or indifferent outcomes. Just like commenting here.

    Perhaps you are assuming that “doing something about hunger etc” should be a full-time occupation, like being a nun ? I make mute, inglorious contributions to doing something about all of those issues – except for cancer, where I have to admit incompetence.

  150. “unless your reconstruction sheds some new light on the daughter languages, you probably haven’t done it right”

    That’s a good way of putting it.

  151. I wouldn’t fault people coming from societies where millions believe the bible to be literally true and where its stories make up a part of the shared culture even for those who don’t believe in it, for being interested in how much in these stories actually has factual underpinnings.

    Good heavens, I don’t fault them either! As you say, we all have our specialized interests. The difference is that I don’t claim my interest in hats or the NY Mets is of world-historical importance, and those interests don’t monopolize a huge chunk of the collective brainpower of mankind. Of course people who believe the Bible to be literally true are fascinated by all things Bible-related, including relevant history; I merely regret that the result of biblical religions spreading over so much of the world is that such history gets a disproportionate amount of attention.

  152. @LH, you don’t recognise subjectivity of “importance”.

  153. Of course there’s a subjective element, but only solipsists equate what’s important to them with absolute importance. Surely you can see the difference between an interest in a sports team or stamp collection and an interest in world history.

  154. @LH, no, the idea is that “importance” simply does not exist other than subjectively (or outside of humans who decide what’s important for them).

    Actually, one reason why I can’t agree with you is that I do not understand Biblical scholars. I am much more interested in who lived in Sinai between -1600 and -1200 that in whether Jews crossed it. When I don’t understand a person, I can’t be sure if she’s doing the right thing or what.

  155. or outside of humans who decide what’s important for them

    Well, of course it doesn’t exist “outside of humans who decide what’s important for them” — it’s a human category, like morality or beauty. How else could it exist? And within such categories, the only criterion that makes sense is the judgment of humans.

    I am much more interested in who lived in Sinai between -1600 and -1200 that in whether Jews crossed it.

    Well, that’s you. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to admit it’s a minority interest.

  156. @LH, yes.

    I mean, I could argue that someone wastes her efforts on something not very interesting if I understand this person and we have a common ground. But I simply don’t share this interest to Biblical archaeology and Moses – for me it is as interesting as any other archaeology.
    Sinai is interesting, but just as interesting as any region.

    In 1980s (likely earlier, but I don’t remember earlier times) and for some time later there was a phrase польза для народного хозяйства. Intelligentsia joked about польза of this or that scientific observation.
    The implied reference is to an image of a bureaucrate who asks a scientist (who presented some highly abstract theory about, say, elementary particles and requests support for further research) how people’s economy can benefit from this.

  157. I’m against establishing an hierarchy of importance (based on external criteria or on the consensus among some “majority”).

    It easily can lead to the situation where instead of explaining each other why Lobachevsky’s geometry is cool we explain to Lobachevsky that he’s wasting his time on nonsense.

    So what I am saying is that my interests are maybe more similar to yours. I don’t mean that I have a special interest in Sinai, I just mean, I start reading about Jews and then ask “what was the climate in the Sinai back then” and it captures my imagination more than sacred history. And then I learn that the whole Egyptian army was just 20 000 – and realise that I was imagining very different numbers.
    Am I not in the position of a lover of ballet who does not understand painters?

    Yes, I agree, physics (for example) is interesting. It has captured my imagination already. But I am afraid if I establish an hierarchy, this hierarchy will devour it instead. Besides, relying on a majority consensus means putting all eggs in oe basket.

  158. @Hans April 18 Most Christians are neither fundies nor biblical literalists;

    yesterday people coming from societies where millions believe the bible to be literally true and where its stories make up a part of the shared culture

    “millions”? literally “literally true”? “societies” plural? How prominent is the Exodus story specifically amongst the shared cultures?

    actually has factual underpinnings

    Then some factual underpinnings for your claims, please.

    Continuing to asseverate here has gotten well beyond buttering all possible parsnips.

    I do hope you’re not labouring under a delusion that finding historical parallels for one particular O.T. narrative thereby somehow strengthens the believability of other narratives; and especially that it strengthens believability of the N.T. — which is merely parasitic on those older myths/histories.

  159. drasvi: I’m beginning to get the feeling we agree.

  160. yep.

  161. @AntC: My assertions are not outlandish or about obscure matters. I don’t have exact numbers about biblical relativism worldwide, but in a Gallup survey of 2011 quoted at Wikpedia, “Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s”. The number if American Christians nearest in time I could find is for 2009 (178 million according to Pew. That gives us about 50 million literalists in the U.S. alone. As there are also literalists in the rest of the world, I could even have said “tens of millions”. And there are many distinct societies in the world in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania that are historically Christian or have a strong and growing Christian presence. So I don’t see where I said anything contentious.
    How prominent is the Exodus story specifically amongst the shared cultures?
    I didn’t say anything about the Exodus story being prominent. I just said that people from societies where the bible is part of the cultural heritage are interested in what is fact and what is fiction in the bible. I don’t have poll figures for that, but I follow news sources in several languages and there seems to be more attention to finds of biblical archaeology and theses about biblical history than to comparable issues in other fields of ancient history (something LH took issue with).

    I do hope you’re not labouring under a delusion that finding historical parallels for one particular O.T. narrative thereby somehow strengthens the believability of other narratives; and especially that it strengthens believability of the N.T. — which is merely parasitic on those older myths/histories
    Short answer: No, I don’t. I may not advertise it as much as you do, but I actually don’t believe in god, neither the Christian one or any other.

  162. David Eddyshaw says

    Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God

    There’s an enormous non sequitur in this, though it’s not clear whether the logic failure is on the part of the aforesaid three in ten Americans or Gallup for asking the question in a form more or less guaranteed to produce problematic answers.

    It’s perfectly possible to believe that the BIble is the “actual word of God” without assuming that it (all) has to be taken literally. In fact, the very question at issue among Christians is how far the former actually does imply the latter, and no self-described Christian would answer either “not at all” (on the one hand) or “in every single detail: there are no metaphors of any kind in the Bible.”

    It seems to me to be a curious notion of God that entails that they can’t communicate in any form more conceptually sophisticated than a cooking recipe or a police report.

  163. Unfortunately, there seems to be an alarming number of Christian political activists in the US today who interpret the Bible mainly as a police report, or as instructions for cooking up a legal system to their liking.

    ETA: Admittedly, those who claim that arming oneself with an AR-15 is a God-given right are making creative use of the penumbrae of biblical lore, as Scalia might have put it.

  164. David Eddyshaw says

    Unfortunately, there seems to be an alarming number of Christian political activists in the US today who interpret the Bible mainly as a police report, or as instructions for cooking up a legal system to their liking

    True, alas. Though this is done to a great extent by skipping all the bits of the recipe that they find inconvenient; for example, where the Man himself tells them (with great literalness) that when they reject impoverished strangers they are in fact rejecting God. I suppose shipping the impoverished strangers to Martha’s Vineyard to embarrass your political opponents is OK, though. Sharing the blessing with those godless Democrats, perhaps? Why, it’s practically a form of evangelism!

  165. @DE: Yes, the wording of the question is problematic and whether all of those who answered with yes really think that every single word in the bible is literally true or wether they have more nuanced opinions is hard to say. But what I found with a quick search were always phrasings like that, and I wasn’t planning to spend hours on digging up more exact figures; with that figure of 50 million Americans who believe that the bible is the actual word of god and from what I see and read in the media and in the interwebs, I’m quite confident that one can find millions of people who subscribe to the “police report veracity” version of biblical literalism.

  166. “Which of the following statements comes closest to describing your views about the Bible — READ 1-3: 1) The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word, 2) the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, 3) The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man?”

  167. David Eddyshaw says

    If that’s the actual question they asked, it does indeed incorporate the logical error I mentioned.

  168. @DE, you reminded me about an argument between me and my friend. He criticised Lukashenko (the refugees story). I remember seeing the story in news, but I don’t know any details. So I asked him, he does not know much, just that L. let them enter Belarus and cross to Poland. I still don’t know details, but I was perplexed by his version (why a human rights activist is attacking L. for letting refugees cross to Poland?).

    it does indeed incorporate the logical error

    Yes.

  169. I wonder why they formulate questions in the form “which of the the following comes closest to…” and not in the form “A) … B) … C) … D) other”

  170. David Eddyshaw says

    I would imagine that pretty much everyone who picked (2) also thinks (3); if they really wanted to make people choose between three distinct options, they should have said “the Bible is only an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.” In fact, (3) as it stands is quite compatible with (1), let alone (2).

    The central point is that the exact way in which the Bible is the “Word of God” (if it is) is a quite separate issue from whether it ought to be read “literally.” I have never met anybody who actually believed (1) as it stands, with its “literally, word for word”, and I have met some pretty hardcore American missionaries, who made me feel like Honest-to-God Robinson (not bad thing to feel, on the whole.) But none of them had gouged their eyes out, for example. In fact, I don’t think any of them had given away all their goods to the poor, either, unerringly identifying all such injunctions in the Bible as being metaphorical.

    I think the questionnaire is probably simply intended to get people to self-identify with one particular Christian sectule or another; this is why it includes shibboleth-buzzwords like “inspired”, which yer average bigot-in-the-pew has been encouraged to think is actually tantamount to not believing that the Bible is the Word of God at all. (Believe it or not.) The results might well be interesting (or alarming) in themselves, but they probably don’t tell you anything much about what Americans actually believe about the Bible. Not even the ones who ticked (1).

  171. “has been encouraged to think is actually tantamount to not believing”

    @DE, I am surprised, because the word is taken from Timothy…

  172. David Eddyshaw says

    You’re right to be surprised. It’s daft (as we advanced theologians say.)

    But the words have been taken hostage by particular groups in such a way that you can’t always decipher what they imply in context without knowing about the sometimes quite bitter background conflicts.

    As a matter of fact, I would think that even most (1)-tickers in reality subscribe to a more complicated notion of Biblical authorship than God simply dictating the text to the people who wrote it (though that was in fact a pretty usual view in the early church.)

    I think that the issue the Gallup questionnaire is inexpertly driving at is whether people believe that the Bible is inspired (by whatever means) word by individual word, or whether God as it were suggested a general theme and the inspiree then worked it up under their own steam, treating it as seemed best to them at the time and constrained by their own human ignorance etc etc. But for anybody who thinks about it at all from a Christian standpoint, this is a false dichotomy anyway.

    A lot of ink has been spilt on these issues:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inspiration

  173. @ ə: yes, that has been pretty much my entire point this whole time, which various people seem insistent on missing.

    @Nelson: i mean “narratives” in the most boring way possible: accounts of specific events in past time. and i wouldn’t be saying any of this if i had observed much of any critical relationship to the texts of the christian canon (including in this case the Tanakh, since that canonization is why it’s treated so uncritically) in the historiography of the eastern mediterranean.

    @ Ryan: you seem surprised that i hadn’t yet read something i began by saying i was looking forward to reading; not much i can do about that. as i still haven’t had the time, i appreciate the page reference! i’m glad to see the parallel case is in there, since it’s methodologically important.

    and to respond directly to some of the more ad theminam bits: i’m not arguing for a specific alternate narrative – that’d be way above my archaeological paygrade. and also would involve, um, presenting a single account, rather than suggesting a range of hypotheses that seem like they should at least be actively ruled out before adopting the socially-(and arguably disciplinarily)-dominant default to Biblical Truth.

    which is to say, again: all i have been doing is pointing out the wide variety of narratives that are a priori excluded from supposedly historical work that takes that stories in the Tanakh as axiomatically *somehow* factual, and aims itself at seeking to figure out a workable “somehow” for whatever the particular case at hand is. i remain, as i said, interested to see (among other things) how alstola deals with Kings. i hope it’ll be outside the usual pattern that ə summarized so well.

    (and do you seriously think that ‘foreign’ names have never been exciting to parents in any time prior to our own? or that the mexican-american war was at the turn of the 20th century?)

  174. “But for anybody who thinks about it at all from a Christian standpoint, this is a false dichotomy anyway.”

    I don’t understand what you mean here, so apparently not for anyone:) But I must admit, I haven’t spent much time thinking of the nature of the Bible.

    Despite the very different (explicitly) status of the Quran, there was an argument about its createdness.

  175. I usually hear the Russian (or rather Slavonic (or rather calqued Greek – a distinctive bookish layer in Russian vocabulary is compounds with Slavonic roots)) word боговдохновенный (God-connective vowel-inspired) in the context of canonicity of books.

    A natural question is then what other books and pieces of art could be inspired by God…

  176. that has been pretty much my entire point this whole time, which various people seem insistent on missing.

    It can be a perfectly valid point when Source 2 is uninformative (perhaps in our case). E.g. when S1 says “I’m a woman” and S2 says “S1 is either a woman or a man or a child or third gender or whatever”.

    When Source 2 narrows down your list of options (S1: “I’m a were-cucumber”, you “what a nonsense, you’re a human”, reliable S2: “S1 is either a were-cucumber or were-orange”, you “oops”) it can affect your estimate of S1’s ceredibility. In this case you are generally inclined to believe S1, but then S1 says something a priori implausible, but then you cease to see it as implausible and revert back to your inclination.

    (An abstract objection to a similarly abstract claim. I do not mean to contribute anyhow in the discussion of the Bible).

  177. “suggesting a range of hypotheses that seem like they should at least be actively ruled out before adopting the socially-(and arguably disciplinarily)-dominant default to Biblical Truth.”

    Rather than hoping for reconstructions that holistically account for all available textual and archaeological evidence, we seem to be stuck with two choices: 1) the texts are specially likely to be highly accurate, or 2) the texts are specially likely to be completely useless or irrelevant. It seems to me that both approaches are letting irrelevancies get in the way of treating the biblical texts like any other proto-historical source. Maybe that’s only to be expected, the same way that militant atheism tends to mirror a lot of the same problems as militant Christianity. (I’m an atheist myself, but I hope not the militant kind.)

  178. Update 2022: A record-low 20% of Americans now say the Bible is the literal word of God, down from 24% the last time the question was asked in 2017, There’s a chart showing a steady decline in that figure; and at that link you can download more breakdown.

    What I can’t find is who (if anybody) commissioned the surveys, and whether they stipulated the questions. As all have noted, the questions make this an utterly useless exercise, even by the usual standards of Gallup’s junk research.

    Never the less, a small proportion in each survey couldn’t choose any of the three responses — although I suspect Gallup may be cooking those numbers: “The largest percentage, 49%, choose the middle alternative, roughly in line with where it has been in previous years.” I don’t see answer two as somehow a middle between two extremes. It’s quite consistent to say all three responses apply — each to different parts.

    Does “the Bible” mean specifically the Christian Bible? All of it? In which language? How is a Jew or a Moslem to answer?

    Does “God” mean specifically the Christian God? Which one? How is a Hindu or a Buddhist (or an atheist) to answer?

    To @Hans claims, the survey didn’t ask, irrespective of which of the three responses, if anybody gives tuppence for the veracity of the Exodus story.

  179. David Eddyshaw says

    I don’t understand what you mean here

    Yeah, it was a bit Delphic. By saying it’s a false dichotomy (from a Christian standpoint) I don’t mean that there is no difference at all between Luke (say) writing Acts at the literal dictation of God and Luke doing his human best to create an edifying account of the earliest days of the church because he believed that that was what God meant him to do; I mean that, as God was responsible also for Luke being exactly what he was along with his (Luke’s) biases and limitations, God is (from this point of view) also potentially involved in the details of the text being the way they are, so that one is talking about a continuum, not a neat either/or thing.

    Even a literal-dictation-pusher would surely have to accept that (say) the style of John’s Gospel is very different from Luke’s, thus attributing formidable powers of ventriloquism to God. I would have thought that they would need to come up with some theory as to why God would do that, too. No doubt someone has.

    As I say, though, neither view of inspiration in itself tells you whether you are supposed to read the Bible “literally” (itself a highly slippery term.) Gallup’s questions weld together two quite distinct issues, which perhaps wouldn’t matter if the answers likely to be given by self-described Christians were highly correlated: but they aren’t, not at all.

    I think the question they would have liked to ask, but were too mealy-mouthed to actually use, was “Do you think (1) that the Bible’s accounts of events which are implausible or impossible from a modern scientific viewpoint should still be accepted as straightforwardly factual, or (2) that they have a deep spiritual significance for us even if they never actually happened or (3) who cares?”

  180. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    The only way I can rephrase this so that it’s amenable to logical analysis (Venn diagrams and all that) is to ask two questions:

    1) Do you think that the Bible’s accounts of events which are implausible or impossible from a modern scientific viewpoint should still be accepted as straightforwardly factual? Yes/No

    2) Do you think that the Bible’s accounts of events has a deep spiritual significance for us? Yes/No

    There is no logically necessary implication either way, as I see it, and thus there are four possible outcomes. I would find it interesting to see the statistics. But it’s very possible that I’m in a minority in thinking the questions are unrelated.

    (I also find it difficult to imagine a world view where it makes sense to answer Yes to 1) and No to 2), and disallowing that option would make it possible to simplify the questions, but that would be begging the question).

  181. J.W. Brewer says

    I am fascinated, by the way, by the notion that a “police report” is some sort of gold standard of verifiable facticity and historicity, as opposed to a genre of document typically prepared in service of some agenda or to justify some conclusion, or potentially a lack of conclusion (such as “we aren’t ready to arrest anyone yet because we’re not actually sure that a crime was committed and/or, if so, who did it”). Which is not to say that such documents are untrue, only that they may assemble a narrative out of a selection of true facts while neglecting to mention other true facts, and that other equally-not-untrue narratives can sometimes be constructed from the same raw materials.

  182. ə de vivre says

    ACABL: All cops are Biblical literalists.

  183. To @Hans claims, the survey didn’t ask, irrespective of which of the three responses, if anybody gives tuppence for the veracity of the Exodus story
    And where did I say they do?

  184. David Eddyshaw says

    By “police report” I did not mean to imply “historically accurate” (I am a member of the Labour Party, after all.) I was alluding to a certain stylistic unimaginativeness. The imputation may be unjust …

    @Lars:

    I think that there are individual miracles recounted in the Bible where any deep spiritual significance is beyond my powers of discernment (in the Elijah/Elisha cycle, for example.) And although in the New Testament, John (in particular) seems to be committed to the view that individual miracles have specific intended moral meanings, I must say that the meanings adduced by modern commentators often seem a bit awkwardly retrofitted to me (e.g the various views about the “significance” of turning water into wine.)

    I suppose you could take a step back, though, and say, the existence of any miracles at all is the issue, rather than the significance or otherwise of any particular miracle. I’m not sure that that is really consistent with the position of most of the actual writers, though, who seem to regard it as perfectly possible for people to miss the point of miracles both individually and en masse (and quite often attribute what we, if not they, would call “miracles” to bad guys.) So I think many of the actual Bible writers could be described as (potentially) having the unimaginable world-view you mention.

    The idea that a belief in miracles implies an assent to any particular moral teachings is probably yet another false assumption underlying the Gallup pollsters’ confusions. Most people at most times and in most places would have been completely baffled by such an assumption.

  185. @DE, thanks. Your explanations is quite agreable.

    I would have thought that they would need to come up with some theory as to why God would do that, too. No doubt someone has.

    I still think, a message is said by someone to someone (although ChatGPT poses a problem here…). The Bible does not look like a text sent by God to humanity that depends solely on the whole history of humanity and not any specific context within it.

    If God (assuming his authorship) adapted the message to Luke’s langauge (like Russian, Yiddish, LISP…) why would not he adapt it to Luke’s language?

    Saying that a language (Russian, Yiddish) is just a language and a message is a message and they are two very different things (not merely for human translators solving practical problems but from every perspective that potentially matters to God) is seriously trivialising the question of what is “language”.

  186. David Eddyshaw says

    the Bible does not look like a text sent by God to humanity that depends solely on the whole history of humanity and not any specific context within it

    What would such a text look like?

    I think this is a paradox that affects anybody purporting to have communication with the kind of God figuring in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim outlook: how is it possible for a human being to have any meaningful communication at all with an entity which is completely unlimited in space and time?

    In Christianity this paradox is unavoidably at the very centre of the whole religion, but even Muslims, whose religion is frankly a lot less paradox-ridden in general, have to do some very inventive thinking with regard to the status of the Qur’an: how can the Word of God not be eternal and uncreated? And if it is eternal and uncreated, how do we avoid shirk in thinking about it?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranic_createdness

  187. Yes, I wonder what Muslim theologians think about this (e.g. connectedness of the Quran to the circumstances of its revelation). But I think I recently posted this very same link:))))

  188. Over the weekend, I remembered another historical explanation for the Exodus story that I heard about thirty years ago. It came up in a casual discussion, so I don’t know the original source for this theory, but the idea was that the Hebrew returnees were actually the Hyksos of the Fifteenth Dynasty, who were eventually driven out of Egypt by the indigenous Seventeenth/Eighteenth Dynasty. The precise makeup of the Hyksos—including whether they were a single uniform ethnic group, and how numerous they were—remains unclear. However, various Egyptian references from the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period appear to indicate that the Egyptians thought of the prototypical Hyksos as pastoralists from the Levant. Some of the Hyksos rulers are known by Egyptian names (although, given the standard use of multiple names for Pharaohs, it seems likely to me that they all had both Egyptian and Semitic names), but the Kamose, ruler of the native Theban Seventeenth Dynasty during they period when Hyksos control was weakening (the Theban state had been a tributary of the Hyksos kings who ruled Lower Egypt directly, but Kamose worked to break free, and his brother Ahmose I eventually reconquered most of the Nile Delta) referred to the rival Hyksos king Apepi as a chieftain of Retjenu—Retjenu being the Egyptian name for a region (of somewhat variable extent) along the western coast of the Levant.

  189. David Eddyshaw says

    Late Egyptian contains a good many Semitic loanwords, both Akkadian (unsurprisingly) and Canaanite; the latter notably including the word which subsequently turns up in Coptic as ⲉⲓⲟⲙ “sea.”

  190. I wonder what were the semantic boundaries of the word יָם / ⲉⲓⲟⲙ. Was the Mediterranean a ⲉⲓⲟⲙ? There were Canaanites living for millennia in the Delta. What about fresh- or saltwater lagoons in the Delta? One might also imagine a loan from Phoenicians in the coastal carrying trade

    Substituting West Semitic speakers for any ethnic terms is probably more appropriate. A biography of Cleopatra I read referred to an extraordinary population of Jews in Alexandria. Since there is evidence of West Semitic speakers in the Delta before my sense of the formation of Jewish identity, I’ve wondered whether this may have been an easy reference for outsiders to a diverse population of West Semitic speakers, and to what extent Judaism might have been an adopted identity, for instance for Phoenician/Punic people whose identity may have been fraught after the Punic Wars. In short, how continuous was West Semitic settlement in the Delta from pre-Hyksos to classical and even post-Classical days?

    In a parallel that may be less relevant to Egypt, I find it interesting that Punic regions of Hispania held many late Classical Jewish communities. It’s possible that Punics all became good Romans. Or left for the Levant. Or died out. Or there was never more than a handful of traders in cities populated by indigenous Iberians. But it does make one wonder.

  191. J.W. Brewer says

    The idea that the Bible primarily represents God trying to send a message to humanity in much the same fashion as certain humans tried to send a message to unspecified non-humans in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaques seems an odd one to me. But maybe it makes sense to (certain) Muslims and (certain) Protestants?

  192. Stu Clayton says

    I’ve often wondered what non-humans might make of the detail that the female figure isn’t standing straight in that plaque. In fact I myself don’t know why younger women talking to each other often stand like that mostly on one leg, sometimes with the other leg wrapped across it.

    Does it have something to do with leg muscles being affected by high heels, or pelvic structure ? Or is it just that men don’t relax when talking to each other ?

    I have noticed swishy men standing like that when talking to women. Maybe it’s all gendering conventions, or lissome-signalling. In any case, how are aliens going to figure that all out ? If the medium is the message, what is the message ?

  193. The aliens are just going to have to spend time in bars until they get it all figured out.

  194. Stu Clayton says

    Ah, the plaque is a teaser trailer for Shuman’s Red, White and Brew Lounge !

    # Short in length, teaser trailers contain little material from the advertised content to be released.[1]

    Frequently, they contain hinted, cryptic, curiosity-inducing messages. Methods of this nature are designed to pique audience interest and anticipation, as well as increase the hype of the advertised content before release of its trailer. #

  195. “stand like that mostly on one leg”

    There was a time every second person I met greeted me with “wow, you can stand like Jethro Tull!!!!”. Not a single idiot who would say “you know, Jethro Tull can do drasvi’s stance!”.

  196. Stu Clayton says

    That is Ian Anderson, the deranged flamingo of Jethro Tull.

  197. @JWB, then Jesus or Indian avatars must be these man and woman on the plaque.

  198. David Eddyshaw says

    Avatars of Ian Anderson?

  199. David Marjanović says

    The aliens are just going to have to spend time in bars until they get it all figured out.

    Wretched hives of scum and villainy!

  200. January First-of-May says

    but even Muslims, whose religion is frankly a lot less paradox-ridden in general, have to do some very inventive thinking with regard to the status of the Qur’an: how can the Word of God not be eternal and uncreated?

    There’s an extra mythological paradox – which I think I might have actually seen on LH first, but maybe somewhere else, not sure – in that it’s said that the jinn (of the good variety) were Muslim all along (and consequently didn’t have to be converted), but they would have been around since long before Muhammad, so how could they have been Muslim before the Qur’an was created?

    I forgot how this was resolved. I do recall it involving some interesting contortions of logic.

  201. @January First-of-May: The orthodox Muslim view is also that Abraham was also a perfect Muslim, and the monotheistic religions were only corrupted by his descendants. What sophistry is invoked to justify this statement I don’t know.

  202. @J1M, Brett,

    The orthodox Muslim view is also that Abraham was also a perfect Muslim, and the monotheistic religions were only corrupted by his descendants.

    I think in the Quran it is more along the lines fo “perfectly muslim” than “a perfect Muslim”. Hopefully Lameen will correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought it describes a certain quiality of Abraham that can be translated.

    (I don’t know if Jews or Christians can too be muslim in this sense)

    Which does not change the fact that the Muslim view is that prophets were right and that the message was corrupted.

  203. John Cowan says

    I mean that, as God was responsible also for Luke being exactly what he was along with his (Luke’s) biases and limitations, God is (from this point of view) also potentially involved in the details of the text being the way they are, so that one is talking about a continuum, not a neat either/or thing.

    Quite so. When Tolkien tells us that Pengolodh wrote the Lammas ‘Account of Tongues’, it would be absurd to say that Pengolodh was solely responsible for its content and that Tolkien himself had nothing to do with it. “We [humans] make still by the law in which we’re made”, and when Tolkien referred to the Author of the Story (the L.R.) he adds parenthetically “by which I do not mean myself”.

    Another case is Raymond Smullyan’s dialogue “Is God a Taoist?”, wherein the characters are labeled “God” and “Mortal”. The commentary by Hofstadter & Dennett (included at the end of the page) says inter alia:

    There are undoubtedly many religious people who would consider this dialogue to be the utmost in blasphemy, just as some religious people think it is blasphemy to walk around in a church with his hands in his pockets. We think, on the other hand, that this dialogue is pious — a powerful religious statement about God, free will, and the laws of nature, blasphemous only on the most superficial reading. Along the way, Smullyan gets in (through God) many sideswipes at shallow or fuzzy thinking, preconceived categories, pat answers, pompous theories, and moralistic rigidities. Actually we should – according to God’s claim in the dialogue – attribute its message not to Smullyan, but to God. It is God speaking through the character of Smullyan, in turn speaking through the character of God, whose message is being given to us.

    (There are a lot of really grotty typos in this version: sorry about that.)

    Even a literal-dictation-pusher would surely have to accept that (say) the style of John’s Gospel is very different from Luke’s, thus attributing formidable powers of ventriloquism to God.

    Surely if one believes in omnipotence, then one believes a fortiori in omni-stylistico-potence. Though a better example would be John’s Gospel and Revelation. A being who could write both such elegant Greek and such downright illiterate and Semitistic Greek in the same breath, as it were, would be omnipotent indeed.

    Some of the Hyksos rulers are known by Egyptian names (although, given the standard use of multiple names for Pharaohs, it seems likely to me that they all had both Egyptian and Semitic names)

    Consider by the same token the Biblical Hittites, who all have Semitic names, by which some people assume that they had nothing to do with the Hittites of Hattiland. But I don’t find that convincing, any more than the existence of American Jews with names like Natalie persuade me that American Jews have nothing to do with the Jews of Judaea.

    The aliens are just going to have to spend time in bars

    Or behind them.

  204. I think in the Quran it is more along the lines fo “perfectly muslim” than “a perfect Muslim”. Hopefully Lameen will correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought it describes a certain quiality of Abraham that can be translated.

    Yes, in that it describes a quality (“submitting to God”) which applies axiomatically to all true prophets throughout history, and which all believers should strive to achieve. But at the same time this quality is placed in opposition to the later innovations of being “Jewish” or “Christian”, suggesting its interpretation as a specific religion. 3:67: “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was ḥanīf, muslim – nor was he of the polytheists.”

    how can the Word of God not be eternal and uncreated? And if it is eternal and uncreated, how do we avoid shirk in thinking about it?

    It’s always puzzled me that theologians should make such a big deal of a question on which the Qur’an expresses no position at all, and I can make very little sense of their arguments on the subject. I have, however, seen the linguistically interesting suggestion made in this connection that words in general aren’t “created” – the term creation (or, I guess, xalq) only applies to things (including, of course, all possible users of words besides God).

  205. For some reason that moment I forgot “neither a Jew nor a Christian” part entirely (normally I remember it).
    I guess because I read it differently.

    There is something paradoxal about a religion in the sense of “the true religion” vs. in the sense “mosque, not church”.

  206. David Marjanović says

    I have, however, seen the linguistically interesting suggestion made in this connection that words in general aren’t “created” –

    I’ve encountered this as part of an argument that the nearest Christian equivalent to the Qur’an isn’t the Bible, it’s Jesus: for example, as Jesus is “begotten, not created”, so the Qur’an is “spoken, not created”.

  207. There is something paradoxal about a religion in the sense of “the true religion” vs. in the sense “mosque, not church”.

    How so?

  208. as Jesus is “begotten, not created”, so the Qur’an is “spoken, not created”.

    That might help explain the salience of this question in the Abbasid period, now you mention it. From an Islamic perspective the parallel kind of works in the opposite direction: Jesus is specifically described as God’s word.

  209. J.W. Brewer says

    The more typical English rendering of the Creed is “begotten not made.” But on further reflection I recall that the more detailed (and perhaps not entirely orthodox) Western confection known as the Quicunque Vult (or “Athanasian Creed,” although at best composed by a pseudo-Athanasius) specifies “The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten.” (“Filius a Patre solo est: non factus, nec creatus, sed genitus.”) By contrast, the Father is “made of none; neither created, nor begotten” while the Holy Ghost is “neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.” I don’t know how significant any made/created (factus/creatus) distinction was to Latin theologians of former centuries, but someone thought it important to cover both bases to avoid any risk of ambiguity.

  210. Cf. al-Maʾmūn to Isḥaq b. Ibrāhīm in al-Ṭabarī:

    [They hold this erroneous view about the uncreatedness of the Qur’ān] even though the Qur’ān itself speaks about God’s creating power, sets forth its proof and decisively confutes all difference of opinion about it. [These people] talk just like the Christians when they claim that Jesus son of Mary was not created, because he was the Word of God. But God says, “Indeed, We have made it an Arabic Qur’an,” meaning, “We have created it,” ….

    https://archive.org/details/tabarivolume32/page/n225/mode/2up

  211. Here’s a relevant Philologos column: How Many Egyptian Words Made It into Biblical Hebrew? Conclusion:

    This, too, however, is far from conclusive. We have words in American English—think of jungle, tundra, savannah—that refer to terrain that does not exist in America; why could not speakers of biblical Hebrew living in Canaan have had similar words? It is true that, when considered together with the many personal and place names in the Exodus story that also have Egyptian roots (Moses, Pharaoh, Rameses, etc.), such words suggest a real familiarity with their subject. We are unlikely, though, ever to know exactly where this came from. One can’t even rule out the possibility, as far-fetched as it may seem, that a biblical author tasked with writing about the Exodus traveled to Egypt, or interviewed Egyptians, to research his narrative. Nor can one do more than speculate, as does Mr. Wiener, about what language Israelite slaves in Egypt might have spoken. Rabbinic tradition, for what it’s worth, held it to be pure Hebrew.

    Thanks, David!

  212. David Eddyshaw says

    We have words in American English—think of jungle, tundra, savannah—that refer to terrain that does not exist in America

    You mean Savannah, Georgia is an imposter? This is disturbing …

    (Also, is Alaska not in America any more? I haven’t been following the news as closely as I should …)

  213. J.W. Brewer says

    The writer must have been using “America” in an undisclosed narrow-scope sense equivalent to what Alaskans call the “lower 48” and what is more technically called the “contiguous” or “conterminous” United States (“CONUS” in military/bureaucratic jargon, although there can be some ambiguity there).

    “Jungle” is a pretty ambiguous term, but there are certainly “rainforests” of the “tropical” sort in both Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

    But it would have been simpler and safer to say “words in English … that refer to terrain that does not exist in England.”

  214. ktschwarz says

    The word tundra (< Russian < Sami) did enter English before the purchase of Alaska by the US, and long before statehood. So in the early to mid 19th century, it was true that Americans had the word and not the thing.

  215. The OED (entry from 1915) takes it back only to 1841, but of course that’s easily antedated; from The Athenaeum of July 21, 1838 (review of M. Baer, Expedition to Novaia Zemlia and Lapland, p. 506):

    Plains of this kind are called by the Finns Tuntur, or Tundra, a word borrowed by the Russians, and carried by them into Siberia. But by the word Tundra the Russians mean in general a plain without trees, and covered, not with grass, but with cryptogamic plants, either lichens or mosses. Thus, there are two kinds of tundras, the wet and the dry.

  216. Savanna(h) is a technical term used all the time in Midwestern ecology, for a scattered-oak grassland between prairie and woodland. Wiki says “characterized by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close.”

  217. There’s plenty of subtropical savannah along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the Deep South, and likewise with the chaparral terrain of California. The Everglades are a “flooded” savannah, if one allows for such a thing.

    Moreover, the historical definitions of the word savannah included a significantly broader range of grassy terrains, beyond what is covered by the modern technical definition Ryan mentions. The word could even refer to pure prairie landscapes that are almost wholly free of woody vegetation. However, I do suspect that the prototypical savannah was always tropical or subtropical (unlikely all but perhaps the southernmost reaches of the American Great Plains.)

  218. David Eddyshaw says

    @Ryan:

    Covers the West African sort pretty well, too, apart from the specific tree species involved.

    If WP is to be believed, the term “savanna” is entirely broad enough to be applicable to both.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna

    Seems the writer was wrong about savanna not being American, too. Unaware of the geographical riches of their own country. Very sad.

    I am reassured as to the bona fides of Savannah, GA; though the name does in fact seem to be a coincidence, apparently coming from the name of the river, which in turn seems to be a variant of “Shawnee.” Neither rivers nor people really fall under the strict sense of “savanna”, though I suppose that they could be so widely spaced that the canopy does not close, at any rate.

  219. DE: a nitpick, but I hope you’ll appreciate it: two-letter state abbreviations take a period, unless in all caps, so “Ga.”, though “GA”.

  220. David Eddyshaw says

    Hah! Way ahead of you, Y!

  221. J.W. Brewer says

    @Y: You can’t trust foreigners on punctuation. Why, Dr. Eddyshaw’s own neighbors may well refer to him as “Dr Eddyshaw.”

  222. David Eddyshaw says

    I am Mr Eddyshaw, thank you very much. (The nerve of these colonials …)

  223. Doesn’t explain why a donkey is osël when in Russia and išak when in Turkic lands.

  224. David Eddyshaw says

    You’re right. It doesn’t. (These are deep waters.)

  225. Or the great variety of names under which the same simple dish may appear depending on the restaurant.

  226. John Cowan says

    I am Mr Eddyshaw, thank you very much. (The nerve of these colonials …)

    This colonial made that point (with reference to the title rather than its punctuation) in 2019 already. I had attributed your failure to correct one Mr. Brewer in this comment to inverted pride, but perhaps not. I await an explication.

  227. David Eddyshaw says

    I thought I had explained it somewhere, but maybe not.

    The convention in the UK is that Fellows of surgical colleges (which includes the opththalmologists) are called “mister” rather than “doctor.” However, virtually nobody except other UK doctors understands this (and probably not all of them, either.) All but the most irredeemable amongst us have long since given up trying to explain it unless specifically asked to do so.

    It is indeed supposed to have originated as a piece of inverted snobbery, dating from the days when UK surgeons generally weren’t medically qualified at all.

    My own Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was set up in 1505 when the Guild of Barber Surgeons got a Royal Charter from James IV (himself apparently an enthusiastic practitioner; I imagine it somewhat overlapped with kingly interests like torturing suspects to get confessions.)

  228. The convention in the UK is that Fellows of surgical colleges (which includes the opththalmologists) are called “mister” rather than “doctor.” However, virtually nobody except other UK doctors understands this …

    Oh, I think plenty of people (non-medics) understand it ok. Some of us might have been married to a non-doctor medic, for example, or have family members in allied trades.

    a piece of inverted snobbery

    Exactly: to which us in the cheap seats won’t subscribe.

    (BTW what’s the convention for female ‘surgical Fellows’? Especially those who are already fighting sexism by refusing to distinguish ‘Miss’ vs ‘Mrs”?)

    There’s a contrary problem: those with PhDs insisting on being called ‘Doctor’/Dr. and then spouting off on medical issues — of which they have no better understanding than (also) those in the cheap seats.

    And then there’s a guy on Youtube who ” My PhD focused on the development of open learning resources for nurses nationally and internationally. ” styles himself ‘Doctor’ and knows plenty about medications (presumably from nursing in A&E), and has decided Covid is a scam by Big Pharma. I’ve watched him evolve into a vaccine denier — apparently having erased all memory of the very real deaths through the first year of the pandemic. In a posting last week he’s decided an extract from cannabis (cannabidiol, not the psychotropic component) is more effective than vaccines against a whole host of diseases — including some hepatitis viruses. But Big Pharma are going to suppress the research (just you watch!) because they can’t make money out of it.

    Of course he by now has an army of followers (who were never going to take no vaccine anyway), and scream ‘Doctor!’ at me whenever I point out the parts of academic papers he conveniently ignores.

  229. I thought I had explained it somewhere, but maybe not.

    You did indeed; probably more than once, but here you are in 2019 (further related info in later comments).

  230. David Eddyshaw says

    what’s the convention for female ‘surgical Fellows’

    Miss/Mrs/Ms, as specified by the Fellow in question.

    I have known some old-school female married surgeons who went by “Miss.” You didn’t get cheeky with them if you had any sense.

    Relatively few UK medics are in fact “doctors” at all in the academic sense: MD in the UK is a higher research degree, like a PhD. “Doctor” is purely a courtesy title for most UK medics (and wasn’t regularly used for medics in the nineteenth century.)

    This may complicate your project of opposing inverted snobbery. I should perhaps also point out that even if the custom of calling surgeons “mister” originated in inverted snobbery (personally I suspect that this is a myth) it can hardly be so characterised now.* Saussure has warned us about confusing the diachronic with the synchronic.

    * I have yet to meet any Fellow of a UK college of Physicians who showed any symptoms of feeling inferior to surgeons. Or to anybody, really,

  231. J.W. Brewer says

    In the U.S. we recurrently have various credentialism-controversies in which various people with The Wrong Sort of Doctorate get prickly about not being addressed or referred to in the media as Dr. SURNAME. But I don’t think any of them were barbers, who while typically a licensed profession seem pretty relaxed about credentialism. The oldest (by their own account at least) medical school in the U.S. is Columbia’s “College of Physicians and Surgeons,” whose name presupposes two separate-but-related professions. Like the barrister/solicitor distinction in the English legal profession, this apparent distinction seems baffling and mysterious to us simple frontiersmen.

    But this is an unfortunate distraction, since the real difference is between those who refer to Mr./Dr. Eddyshaw, having laid up a sufficient inventory in advance of the appropriate punctuation, and those unpunctuated slackers who refer to him as Mr/Dr ditto.

  232. David Eddyshaw says

    True. We have lost sight of the central issue here. À nos moutons!

  233. Dr. Ditto (also a Dr. John*).

    * The real Dr. John, if you’re interested, got him credentials from studying under Professor Longhair.

  234. I thought the history is very clear. Doctors (of medicine) come from the lineage of Galenian quacks so lovingly portrayed in Le Malade imaginaire. While surgeons were a workmanlike profession (like barbers) which saw your bones without much knowledge of humors. Because, despite what bien paysans think, doctor is (historically) a university degree, doctors are doctors and surgeons (like barristers) are misters. Next time, we need to take on Punch and Judy professors. And figure out what MPs are doing in their offices during surgeries.

    Are there any humors in the eye, Mr. Eddyshaw?

  235. J.W. Brewer says

    This British pseudo*-folk song does reflect a jaundiced view of the physician as not merely a quack but a predator and exploiter of hapless damsels. No doubt a surgeon would be more hono(u)rable.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBQTBWz0gxk

    *By “pseudo” I merely mean that while reflecting a traditional style and themes the lyrics appear not to have been handed down since time immemorial from Anon. but to have been newly devised by some combination of Messrs. Swarbrick and Thompson circa 1970.

  236. David Eddyshaw says

    Are there any humors in the eye

    As a matter of fact, yes there are: aqueous humour and vitreous humour.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueous_humour

  237. David Marjanović says

    But Big Pharma are going to suppress the research (just you watch!) because they can’t make money out of it.

    Never mind, of course, that cannabidiol is already pretty big business, perhaps especially in places where tetrahydrocannabinol remains illegal so you can’t just consume some hemp for the CBD (if you don’t know the right people).

  238. And the fact that Ely Lilly has a monopoly on Atomoxetine, which should have expired seven years ago.

  239. David Marjanović says

    Relatively few UK medics are in fact “doctors” at all in the academic sense: MD in the UK is a higher research degree, like a PhD. “Doctor” is purely a courtesy title for most UK medics (and wasn’t regularly used for medics in the nineteenth century.)

    The Austrian Solution® to this is that a master degree in medicine is officially called a doctorate. You write a master thesis and you’re titled Dr.

    There’s no time to do science while studying medicine anyway. The sheer volume of stuff you have to learn…

  240. David Eddyshaw says

    Brit medics normally have two bachelor’s degrees (medicine and surgery), both of them pass degrees. You can get honours, but that is only for a small proportion of whizz kids (most of whom seem subsequently to sink without trace.) Honours degrees are so unusual that they are not even subclassified into firsts, seconds etc.

    I am much the most underqualified in academic terms in my entire family (apart from my parents, neither of whom went to university at all.)

  241. @V: FDA approves first generic Strattera for the treatment of ADHD (May 30, 2017)

    Or did something else happen subsequently?

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