Moses and Exodus. It ain't necessarily so!

What if many of the narratives in the Bible and Koran are not true? What if they are the equivalent of modern fiction?


There is no archaeological or historical evidence, for example, for Moses and the Exodus. Archaeological research has not uncovered evidence in Sinai, Palestine or Egypt, and the search has been going on for a considerable length of time. Those cities, such as Jericho and Ai, where great victories were apparently acheived did not exist during the 13th and 12th centuries BCE. In fact, they had thrived almost 700 years prior to the Exodus narrative. During the 13th and 12th centuries the conquest-area, as described in Exodus, consisted of small villages without large urban sites.

Archaeologists suggest, given available evidence, that the Isrealites were an indiginous Canaanite group, highly likely as Hebrew appears to have been a Canaanite dialect, supplimented by outcast groups from Ugarit and Egypt. William D. Dever (Archaeology: A Biblical Interpretation) suggests that the roots of the  Exodus' narrative, if anything of the kind occurred,  are similar to that of the Pilgrim Fathers, a small group who came to ideologically represent many other immigration or settled groups. If Moses did not exist as the Moses of Exodus, perhaps others too did not exist. Mohammed is not mentioned until 200 years after he was said to have lived, and may too have been largely an ideological construct created for narrative purposes.