What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread.
A joyous Easter to those who celebrate today and a happy Passover to those who observe. Last year I posted lots of Easter and Passover-related links here. I’ll just add a couple more: 2014 is one of those years when Eastern Orthodox Christians and those of other denominations celebrate Easter on the same day. Most of the time those holidays fall on different weekends because the churches use different calendars.
Reform Judaism magazine published a fascinating interview with Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman. He argues that the Exodus story is not fiction, but reflects a departure from Egypt by the Levite tribe, and that most of the Hebrews never lived in Egypt. I’ve posted excerpts after the jump, but I encourage you to click through and read the whole interview. Friedman is “a leading proponent of the Documentary Hypothesis, which maintains that the the biblical texts traditionally known as the Five Books of Moses are actually the synthesis of many different sources from different time periods.” Click that link to learn more about what he views as “the editorial team behind the Bible.”
Religious or secular, I think all Iowans appreciate spring’s arrival. This weekend’s weather is almost perfect. Just within the past few days, the first ruby-throated hummingbird sightings were reported on the edges of Iowa. We don’t typically see any in Windsor Heights until early May. The latest central Iowa butterfly forecast is here. Our bloodroot only just started blooming this week, nearly a month behind schedule. We can see leaves or buds on a few other spring wildflowers, so I’m just about ready to relaunch Iowa wildflower Wednesday.
From The Exodus Is Not Fiction, an interview in Reform Judaism magazine:
At a recent international conference entitled “Out of Egypt” on the question of the Exodus’ historicity, one point of agreement, I believe, among most of the 45 participating scholars was that Semitic peoples, or Western Asiatics, were in fact living in Egypt and were traveling to and from there for centuries. And the evidence indicates that the smaller group among them, who were connected with the Exodus, were Levites. The Levites were members of the group associated with Moses, the Exodus, and the Sinai events depicted in the Bible. In the Torah, Moses is identified as a Levite. Also, out of all of Israel only Levites had Egyptian names: Moses, Phinehas, Hophni, and Hur are all Egyptian names. We in the United States and Canada, lands of immigrants, are especially aware of how much names reveal about people’s backgrounds. The names Friedman, Martinez, and Shaughnessy each reveal something different about where they came from. Levites have names that come from Egypt. Other Israelites don’t.
Present scholarship on the question of who wrote the Bible bolsters this picture that the Levites were the group who departed Egypt. The Five Books of Moses were not written by Moses but by authors of four main texts, known as J, E, P, and D. Three of the four texts-E, P, and D-are traced to authors who were Levite priests, and these three are the only ones telling the story of Moses, Pharaoh, and the plagues. The fourth main source, called J, the one that shows no signs of having been written by a Levite priest, makes no mention of the plagues. It just jumps from Moses’ saying “Let my people go” to the story of the event at the sea.
The Levite authors also devote more ink in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to the Tabernacle-the Tent of Meeting which held the ark in the Exodus account-than they do to any other subject. The non-Levite text, J, doesn’t mention it. This is also significant because the architecture of the Tabernacle and its surrounding courtyard matches that of the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II, for which we have archaeological evidence, as was shown by Professor Michael Homan in a brilliant combination of archaeology and text (To Your Tents, O Israel, 2005). Professor Sperling had emphasized in the RJ article that, archaeologically, there are no Egyptian elements in Israel’s material culture. But in the Tabernacle we do have those Egyptian elements. Egyptian culture is present, but, again, only among the Levites, not all of Israel.
Likewise, only the Levite authors emphasize that males have to be circumcised, which was an Egyptian practice. They write of God commanding Abraham to make circumcision the sign of the covenant (Genesis 17), and they include the commandment for all males of Israel to do so (Leviticus 12:3.) Only the non-Levite source, J, does not command it. Again, the connections with Egyptian culture are there-but only among the Levites.