Canaanite relief in basalt depicting a lion and a lioness at play, 14th century BC, from Beit She’an, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
In their book, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts, Tel Aviv University archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman conclude from the archaeological evidence that the history of the Jews in the Old Testament, including that in Exodus, is almost entirely invented; the Jews arose in situ from indigenous Canaanites, carving out the states of Israel and Judah on land peripheral to the Bronze Age Canaanite city states as these faded during the Early Iron Age.
The invented history simply reflects the rivalry between these closely related populations and, as with all invented histories, shows those writing them to be the superior group, having stunning victory after stunning victory over their rivals, whom they always totally vanquished and annihilated and enslaved, and having the superior tribal god(s). The stories were invented to give retrospective justification for genocide and land-theft and invariably exaggerated them, as we can see from the fact that there are descendants today of these supposedly totally annihilated tribes.
And naturally, they had the wisest, bravest kings who were also the richest in the region. They also made up tales about their rivals in order to minimise them. For example, the curious tale of a supposedly 'righteous man', Lot, getting drunk and having incestuous sex with his daughters in a cave. The tale of Lot and his daughters was probably invented to discredit their neighbours, in Moab and Ammon who are represented as the descendants of the daughters' sons by Lot, Moab and Ben-ammi.
This conclusion was supported by DNA analysis by geneticists working at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, in a paper published in Cell in May 2020 - the subject of this article in Bible History Daily - which showed that modern populations in the southern Levant are descendant of these ancient Canaanites and that most modern Jews and Arabic-speaking groups from the region owe at least half their ancestry to those ancient Canaanites. In other words, the Jews and the Palestinians are both descended from the same indigenous ancient population, rather than the Jews being a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age conquering population from outside the area, who drove out and occupied the land of the different Canaanite tribes.
Nor is there any genetic evidence of an ancestry in Mesopotamia via a period spent in captivity in Egypt. What African ancestry there is, is sub-Saharan, not North African. It is inconceivable that after many generations of slavery in Egypt there would not have been a substantial ingression of Egyptian DNA.
From the team's May 2020 paper:
Graphical Abstract
HighlightsSo, we now have a second substantial strand of evidence - genetic evidence - to add to Finkelstein's and Silberman's archaeological evidence that there never was an Exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt and that most of the 'history' in the Old Testament was invented by later scribes, possibly on the orders of kings of the small, indigenous Canaanite states of Israel and Judah (Judea). 'Histories' that reflect the rivalry between the two Judaic states and between them and the neighbouring tribes whom they dispossessed of their land, or at least needed to stake a claim to.
- Analysis of genome-wide data for nine sites from the Bronze Age Southern Levant
- Contemporaneous samples from multiple sites are genetically similar
- Migration from the Zagros and/or Caucasus to the Levant between 2500–1000 BCE
- People related to these individuals contributed to all present-day Levantine populations
Summary
We report genome-wide DNA data for 73 individuals from five archaeological sites across the Bronze and Iron Ages Southern Levant. These individuals, who share the “Canaanite” material culture, can be modeled as descending from two sources: (1) earlier local Neolithic populations and (2) populations related to the Chalcolithic Zagros or the Bronze Age Caucasus. The non-local contribution increased over time, as evinced by three outliers who can be modeled as descendants of recent migrants. We show evidence that different “Canaanite” groups genetically resemble each other more than other populations. We find that Levant-related modern populations typically have substantial ancestry coming from populations related to the Chalcolithic Zagros and the Bronze Age Southern Levant. These groups also harbor ancestry from sources we cannot fully model with the available data, highlighting the critical role of post-Bronze-Age migrations into the region over the past 3,000 years.
Significantly, it seems that every attempt by Israeli scientists to prove the stories in the Old Testament are true, results in them being proved false - no Exodus, no wandering around in Sinai for a generation, no walls round Jericho to tumble down, no vast empire under Solomon's rule, etc, etc.
Far from being the inspired word of an omniscient, omnipotent god, the Old Testament is a collection of invented 'histories', folk tales and legends, heavily embroidered to give the Hudaic petty-states a spurious credence and glorious past in order to set them apart from their fellow Canaanite tribes and city states. In all probability, they were never intended by the scribes who produced them to order to be collected together and bound up in a single book, presented as a consistent narrative and true history of the Jews.
This is why we can say with complete confidence:
I keep on working on the principle that the writers made it up as they went along
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