Quote
However, if you want to discuss judeo christian myths, Modern Biblical Scholars agree The Exodus belongs at the top of the list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#The_Exodus_as_myth

There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as myth;[38] more specifically, it is a "charter" (or foundation) myth, a story told to explain a society's origins and to provide the ideological foundation for its culture and institutions.[1] While some continue to discuss the potential historicity or plausibility of the Exodus story, the overwhelming majority have abandoned it as "a fruitless pursuit" (Dever, 2001).[39][40] There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula shows 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 establishment of the Israelite monarchy).[41] In contrast to the absence of evidence for the Egyptian captivity and wilderness wanderings, there are ample signs of Israel's evolution within Canaan from native Canaanite roots.[42][43]. The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is a mythical figure,[44] and while, as William G. Dever writes, "a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.", archaeology cannot confirm his existence. [39]


When I read things like this I wonder about the level of scholarship employed.[/quote]

The Proto-Sinaitic script was the first alphabetic writing system and developed sometime between about 1900 and 1700 BC. People speaking a Semitic language and living in Egypt and Sinai adapted the Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic scripts to write their language using the acrophonic principle. This invovled choosing about 30 glyphs, translating their Egyptian names into the Semitic language, and using the initial sounds of those names to represent the sounds of their language.

For example, the Egyptian nt (water) became mem in Semitic and represents the sound /m/, and eventually developed into the Latin letter M.

Inscriptions in Proto-Sinaitic have been found at Serabit el-Khadim (سرابيت الخادم) a mountain in Sinai and at a temple for the Egyptian goddess Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr) that is located there. The script was partially deciphered by Alan Gardiner in 1916. Inscriptions very similar to those found at Serabit el-Khadim have been found at Wadi el-Hol (وادي الهول).


https://www.omniglot.com/writing/protosinaitc.htm

When we have very specific archaeological evidence which proves the presence of Semitic people in Eqypt and that this proto Sinaitc script was the basis of the Hebrew alphabet, it leads me to conclude that liberal scholarship is based largely on prejudice. While the level of scholarship in the Wikipedia can be good at times, its always best to check it against other sources. I guess we need to ask how the Semites in Eqypt got to Canaan and spread their language around without ever making an exodus.

Last edited by Thunderstick; 07/09/19.