And we have no one dying during this 430 years?
Sure, but with famines, natural disasters, wars, etc, the aggregate population always increases in a society. Like I said in my figure, every 13 seconds an American dies. But every 7 seconds one is born. The mean average is always increasing.
Since you live in Scotland, you may not have heard it before. But an economic question asked is if you had the choice to take a million dollars in one lump sum, or take a penny a day and have it double every following day, which would you rather choose? 1 cent is a 100th of a dollar. It's nothing. But compounding it will make a millionaire multiple times. It is therefore more lucrative to take the penny than the lump sum. A similar principle applies here.
Remember the time and place though NJ, even the Bible talks about disease and famine being rife, how many famines does the Bible record? It was the reason why the clan of 70 went to Egypt to settle.
Which is all fine and good. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the Exodus took place, because I honestly don't know. All I am saying is that it is not physically impossible.
But we can think of this in another way. If you are going to criticize aspects of the Bible that lends it credence, why not dismiss everything, including famine and disease? By not doing so it would appear as if you are biased towards it.
A doubling of less than 2000 years, yet the Hebrews, according to your idea, doubled in one year, almost 2000 times faster than every other nation!
Doubled in a year? I said nothing of the sort. I gave a 430 year span.
The population of the Earth has went throught the roof since the industrial revolution, and with advances in medicine, sanitation, and urbanisation. This is a completely different situation to 4000-3500 years ago.
Perhaps it has as far as the time in which it takes. But population always increases. That trend has never been broken.
You are staring with a massively different amount of people though NJ. Starting with nearly 90 million people is a lot different than starting with 70.
I had to go with the earliest census I could find. Unfortunately Americans were very bad at censuses, because of how many unaccounted for people started moving to the untamed western states.
It was the Sinai desert NJ, which is not that large a desert.
Yes, I misspoke. Be that as it may, there is nothing small about 60,000 kilometers. That is only inclusive of the Sinai desert, and not also the Negev desert which some archaelogists have included. That is plenty of habitation for a population that size. People in India, Japan, and China live in far more cramped spaces. Jacob's clan could have migrated that expanse.
Archaeologists have found only two sites from the Exodus itinerary that can be identified with any confidence, Kadesh-Barnea and Ezion-Geber, so you think we would find some evidence at these sites, especially at Kadesh-Barnea since the Israelites camped there for 38 years!
I agree that the evidence is scant, but there is
evidence that lends it credulity.
But how many things do we need to discover about an historical account before we have to conclude that it didn't happen as written?
I don't know. That is one of those things that keep some people searching for Shangri-La, Atlantis, or El Dorado. With the Exodus, they aren't looking for a place so much as they are looking for artifacts scattered throughout the desert. With the ever-shifting sands, I'm sure it is like finding a needle in a haystack.
How plausible is it to you that only 1 in 15 Hebrew women got pregnant and had an average of 50 children consistently for 430 years?
50 children? How have you deduced this figure?
Does this really sound historically possible?
No, but the 2-3 million is a speculative figure to begin with.
Remember as well that some Bibles give the time as being 215 years, which is even more difficult to swallow.
I've never come across a Bible that gave that figure. Which one are you referring to?
Four generations spanning 430 years can we really take this at face value?
But you are not accounting for the reputation of living upwards of 140 years, and that it does not account for daughters. Four generations back then was not the same as four generations now.
Taking these numbers at face value makes the Bible look silly, and none of us want that.
Again, I'm not here to put the story on trial. It may be totally ludicrous, and it may be completely factual. The most reasonable answer is that the story is probably true, but with embellishment. Even its strongest critics would concede that the Bible is generally trustworthy when it comes to its historicity. And when there is looming doubt, something ends up corroborating it.
For instance, it was believed for many, many years that the Hittite civilization was a complete fabrication. They deduced this because there was no evidence for it. That, of course, is a reasonable assumption, especially given how the Bible described the Hittite civilization as a dominating world power back then. That is, until their capital and records were discovered in Bogazkoy, Turkey.
Other things like the Deluge seems to be a mixture of truth interlaced with embellishment. From what I have seen, there is no evidence to assume that the entire world was flooded. I don't completely discount it, but as of late, there is no evidence to suggest that it is as pervasive as most creationists would have us believe. However, the area known as the "whole world" during the time when Moses wrote Genesis, is highly suspected to have suffered a large inundation. Though it was not entirely of "Biblical proportions," it certainly would have killed nearly every inhabitant from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea.
“I know where I am and who I am. I'm on the brink of disillusionment, on the eve of bitter sweet. I'm perpetually one step away from either collapse or rebirth. I am exactly where I need to be. Either way I go towards rebirth, for a total collapse often brings a rebirth." -Andrew Jaramillo
take everything the Bible says as absolutely true. Then you have the super critics who pretty much dismiss almost everything as being a fantasy. The truth, as they say, tends to be usually somewhere in the middle.
™ Version 4.2
