About the ten plagues in Egypt

by runForever 45 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  jehovahsheep

  It's interesting that there is NO historical evidence anywhere to prove there was Hebrew slaves in Egypt never mind the plagues or the mass exodus.
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  marmot

  Not according to mister Cold Steel! No indeed, there is oodles of the "best" evidence available on the History Channel made by none other than acclaimed archaeologist and peer-reviewed scientist James Cameron. In fact there's 90 minutes worth of evidence with flashy CGI and clips from Indiana Jones, too! CGI means it HAS to be true.

  Sooooo much more reliable and trustworthy than those elitist dusty academic journals. They're just the mouthpiece of Satan anyway.
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  LV101

  Question: The History Channel does not show any 'reliable and trustworthy' academia? Don't want to waste my time finding out at this point if it's just one sided evidence.
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  AndDontCallMeShirley

  First, I don't care what the biblical scholars believe or not. The best evidence was done in James Cameron's documentary entitled, Exodus Decoded, with Simcha Jacobovici.

  I don't believe James Cameron's documentary because of Mel Brooks' "Holy Moses" and Monty Python's "Life of Brian" movies.

  .

  From, The Atheist's Book of Bible Stories:

  "The Camp of Israel As I mentioned earlier, approximately 600,000 Israelite warriors left Egypt during the exodus. If we assume one warrior for every three persons, that brings the population of the exodus to at least 1.8 million. For round figures, let’s assume there were two million of them. Some persons have estimated this ratio considerably higher, but as always, I give the Bible the benefit of the doubt.

  This group lived in a temporary camp that wandered throughout the wilderness for forty years. Needless to say, a population, or should I say poopulation (a pun you will understand later) of two million, living in tents, creates tremendous logistical difficulties.

  Let’s focus in on the logistical difficulties encountered in just one of the necessities of human life.

  Now, let’s calculate. If each person relieved himself only twice a day (an obviously low estimate), and each deposit used one square foot of land surface (also a pretty low estimate), that means that every day, the Israelites turned 93 acres of land into a sewage lagoon. If they stayed in the same spot for a month, around 4 ½ square miles would be consumed – a veritable poop farm. During their 40 years in the wilderness, 2,160 square miles would have been used (that’s 1,357,800 acres). No wonder it was wilderness.

  When you consider that there were two million people living in tents, and every one of them had to leave the camp to go to the bathroom – a bathroom that moved farther away every day, they must have spent half their life walking.

  If we assume that the camp had a population density equal to modern Hong Kong (which is totally ridiculous, but we’ll give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, again), it would have occupied at least 44 square miles. That means that if you lived in the center of the camp, you would need to walk 3.7 miles, each way, every time you went to the bathroom. You would need to plan your bathroom breaks hours in advance. And, by the time you returned, you would need to go again. You’d think that God could have come up with a better system.

  The camp of Israel was approximately the same population as the greater Vancouver or Cincinatti area. Just imagine yourself living in one of those two cities. Now, imagine that every time you had to go to the bathroom, you had to walk outside the metropolitan area, find an unused spot, dig a hole with a stick, do your business, cover it up, and then walk home. This is the best system that the Almighty of the Universe could think of.

  Not only that, if we assume that each of these persons spent only two minutes digging their hole and doing their business, that means that at any one time, there would be an average of 5,500 persons simultaneously squatting on their holes. It must have looked like a pooping convention.

  The total population of Egypt prior to the exodus was actually less than the number of Israelites who left it. That doesn’t make any sense.

  [...]

  In other words, there weren’t nearly as many Israelites in the camp as the Bible claims. In fact, a more reasonable estimate for the number is around 7,000, not two million. That is, assuming that the exodus even happened. Once again, the Bible exaggerates, this time overstating the number by at least 300 times. And, don’t forget that I have given the Bible the benefit of every doubt by underestimating the ratio of warriors to population, ignoring the presence of their animals, assuming impossibly high population densities, and attributing almost legendary bladder capacity to the Hebrews.
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  runForever

  ADCMS: Surely you're correct 2 million people could not live in the wilderness. But there wasn't. At one time there could have been 500k Israelites in Egypt total and that is when Pharoah started killing the firstborns. The registry included dead ancestors. Abraham was gathered to his peoples after he was dead. It is possible that this is translated poorly by someone who thought they knew what the bible was saying. So it was probably alot less around 100k. In numbers Moses took a census of LIVING firstborns and only had 22k so there you go. Numbers 3:40-43.
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  AndDontCallMeShirley

  Except there's no record of any it outside the Bible.

  So there you go.