Yeah, the exodus never happened either, at least not how it was written anyway. You can tell because there aren't any sites in the Sinai desert of that age. I doubt much of it would survive close scrutiny, except Genesis obviously.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote: Archaeology and religion never seem to agree, and the evidence that the religious conception of the history of Palistine seems to be more and more unlikely. One site that the religious would probably find particularly annoying has the hypothesis that the Persians basically created Judaism. Judaism was created by the Persians in the fifth century. Colonists were deported into Yehud. Their reward was to have control of a temple state which collected taxes for Persia. Only priests of the temple state were Jews - a nation of priests. The history of the Jews was invented from Assyrian records and imagination, to show the native people as apostates who had to obey God diligently to atone for their past failings. Modern archaeologists have dug down to the roots of the bible stories and found them rotten. If David once lived, but not as in the bible, the biblical stories about him are fiction. Critical scholars consider that Genesis-Judges contains no reliable history. Even biblicists accept miraculously early stories were edited 'rather late'. The Jewish bible is a pious fraud, containing a little history hard to discern among the fiction, propagated for theological reasons. Only scripture corroborated by archaeological scholarship should be accepted as history. The Persian period is the earliest admissible context for the biblical romance. Biblicists accuse any critic of the bible as extreme until they accept it as the true account of God’s finger waggling in Jewish history. Most university departments of biblical studies employ committed evangelists not skeptics, so religious history is not history. History is scientific. Religious history is tendentious. It is a rather extensive argument beginning at http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/index.php#How http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/index.php#How
