This might surprise you but the bible isn’t 100% accurate.
Jokes aside: scholars think that the Israelites were a group of Canaanites who lived as “outcasts” in the hinterlands and seized the cities after the bronze age collapse.
So Israelites came when the Canaanites collapsed but the causality is different than depicted in the bible. Also they weren’t that foreign in the first place.
I’m not sure why you put “history” into quotation. I was referring to history as in archeology.
The arguments are according to pottery and art in general, linguistics and I think genetics too. The first israelite settlements were in the north and therefore not were you would expect them if they arrived from Egypt. I don’t know if Abraham was a historic figure and it honestly doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, iirc the Isrealite ethnic group was a combination of Canaanites and tribes from near Canaan that invaded during the Bronze Age Collapse. Though the religion is mostly Canaanite-derived, Yahweh and Elohim, the two main titles/names used to describe the Abrahamic God in the Torah are descended from the Canaanite gods Yaweh and El, who were syncretized together into a single god sometime before/during the early 1st temple period.
Edit: Though there’s also loads of Mesopatamian influence, the Noah’s flood myth is directly based on the Mesopatamian flood myth that eventually made it into the Epic of Gilgamesh. Plus lots of ancient Isrealite folklore is derived from Mesopatamia, like Lilith, who is probably derived from a kind of demon in Mesopatamian mythology that fed on newborn children and was in league with Lamashtu, who was basically an Anti-Fertility goddess, considered responsible for infant mortality.
The Bible doesn’t need to be 100% accurate to be useful as a historical document. It certainly appears to contain a lot of historical content if you ignore the supernatural embellishments, and probably more importantly it’s being used as a historical source for claims about who owns Palestine, so it’s the ideal source to refute those particular claims to the audience most likely to believe them.
This might surprise you but the bible isn’t 100% accurate.
Jokes aside: scholars think that the Israelites were a group of Canaanites who lived as “outcasts” in the hinterlands and seized the cities after the bronze age collapse.
So Israelites came when the Canaanites collapsed but the causality is different than depicted in the bible. Also they weren’t that foreign in the first place.
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I’m not sure why you put “history” into quotation. I was referring to history as in archeology.
The arguments are according to pottery and art in general, linguistics and I think genetics too. The first israelite settlements were in the north and therefore not were you would expect them if they arrived from Egypt. I don’t know if Abraham was a historic figure and it honestly doesn’t really matter.
deleted by creator
Yeah, iirc the Isrealite ethnic group was a combination of Canaanites and tribes from near Canaan that invaded during the Bronze Age Collapse. Though the religion is mostly Canaanite-derived, Yahweh and Elohim, the two main titles/names used to describe the Abrahamic God in the Torah are descended from the Canaanite gods Yaweh and El, who were syncretized together into a single god sometime before/during the early 1st temple period.
Edit: Though there’s also loads of Mesopatamian influence, the Noah’s flood myth is directly based on the Mesopatamian flood myth that eventually made it into the Epic of Gilgamesh. Plus lots of ancient Isrealite folklore is derived from Mesopatamia, like Lilith, who is probably derived from a kind of demon in Mesopatamian mythology that fed on newborn children and was in league with Lamashtu, who was basically an Anti-Fertility goddess, considered responsible for infant mortality.
The Bible doesn’t need to be 100% accurate to be useful as a historical document. It certainly appears to contain a lot of historical content if you ignore the supernatural embellishments, and probably more importantly it’s being used as a historical source for claims about who owns Palestine, so it’s the ideal source to refute those particular claims to the audience most likely to believe them.