Talk:The Exodus/Archive 19

Adding a new section about the Orthodox position
Hi again everyone. During my absence from this article I have been thinking of how to insert a ==In Orthodox Judaism== section that would convey the views of Rabbinic Judaism as expressed by the beliefs of modern-day mainstream Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism, Hasidic Judaism alive and well and with us in the present-day modern world, that are not mentioned in this article and they are as contemporary with the academic views. I have done some preliminary Google searches and there are some good WP:RS to support their positions, such as: "Evidence for the Exodus" by Prof. Joshua Berman, "The significance of the Exodus" by the Arachim organization , "Faith in Exodus" by Dennis Prager , "When Was te Exodus?" by Brad Aaronson and many others like this. Any objections and positive ideas before I start this section? Thank you, IZAK (talk) 22:53, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * you can add something on orthodox Judaism’s theological views on the exodus, but it sounds like you want to add a section arguing that it happened with the excuse that Orthodox Jews believe that it did. That is against academic consensus, and we have, quoted in the article, a scholar saying that it is a wp:fringe position. We don’t make exceptions for religious texts descriptions of supposedly historical events on that.—Ermenrich (talk) 23:02, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * You contradict yourself. *Theology* by definition means they "believe it" to be true. So how does one get around that? IZAK (talk) 23:22, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * 1) Another question, this time theologically speaking, in order to show the centrality of the Orthodox belief in the Exodus, can we use parts of this Wikipedia text from Kiddush (I assume you know what that is) see Kiddush (see underlined in bold): "...Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments, and hoped for us, and with love and intent invested us with His sacred Sabbath, as a memorial to the deed of Creation. It is the first among the holy festivals,  commemorating the exodus from Egypt . For You chose us, and sanctified us, out of all nations, and with love and intent You invested us with Your Holy Sabbath. Blessed are You, Adonai, Sanctifier of the Sabbath. (Amen)"? See how confusing this becomes when you want to cut off people's beliefs from what people actually believe to be true? How to solve this? IZAK (talk) 23:46, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 2) Furthermore, there are various mentions of the Exodus in various important Jewish prayers, like this, see Emet Veyatziv (see underlined in bold): "1 Emet Veyatziv is the first paragraph. The word emet (truth) is appended onto the Shema, and veyatziv appears as the first word. 2 Al Harishonim is the second paragraph. It focuses on the truth of redemption. 3 Ezrat Avoteinu is the third paragraph, and is an elaboration on the Exodus from Egypt 4 The blessing ends with the paragraph Mi Komokha, ending with the blessing Ga'al Yisrael (Who Redeemed Israel)". So this too is a case of theology held dear as a true belief of historical fact. How does one get around that? IZAK (talk) 00:01, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 3) There is also the Passover Haggadah recited by virtually all religiously observant Jews, that has important sections about events at the time of the Exodus, such as " Haggadah The story of Passover, and the change from slavery to freedom is told. " and Ha Lachma Anya  This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.  All those who are hungry, let them enter and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate the Passover. Now we are here. Next year in the land of Israel. This year we are enslaved. Next year we will be free." So this too is theology, meaning religious practice and observance that accepts the veracity of the events as they happened as central to Orthodox belief and practice. IZAK (talk) 00:13, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 4) This is famous, Matzo: "There are numerous explanations behind the symbolism of matzo. One is historical:  Passover is a commemoration of the exodus from Egypt. The biblical narrative relates that the Israelites left Egypt in such haste they could not wait for their bread dough to rise; the bread, when baked, was matzo.  (Exodus 12:39). The other reason for eating matzo is symbolic: On the one hand, matzo symbolizes redemption and freedom, but it is also lechem oni, "poor man's bread". Thus it serves as a reminder to be humble, and to not forget what life was like in servitude" it speaks for itself, and how to split the theology from the practical observance, faith and belief is incomprehensible for the religiously observant Jew. IZAK (talk) 00:32, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 5) In the second paragraph in Passover: "In the Bible,  Passover marks the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egyptian slavery , when God "passed over" the houses of the Israelites during the last of the ten plagues." How can one "pass over" this, excuse the pun, as it is so important that, some people say that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder meal,or at least a Passover meal, they say and it therefore even impacts Christianity and its theology and practice of Easter. IZAK (talk) 00:39, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 6) Then we have Sukkot as the article states in paragraph four: "As stated in Leviticus,  it is also intended as a reminiscence of the type of fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. " and paragraph one of the Sukkah, see: "The Book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describes it as  a symbolic wilderness shelter, commemorating the time God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness they inhabited after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. " these are further examples of Jewish theology, meaning the Jewish religion, especially as strictly observed by mainstream Orthodoxy that enacts something they hold to be true. Is there another way around this, I doubt it. But it would all fit nicely into an "In Orthodox Judaism" section. IZAK (talk) 00:22, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I assume that you are okay with 1-6 as is, so far, there are more to add, going into the article in an "In Orthodox Judaism" section. They are based on existent WP articles and material, so no need to even reinvent the wheel here. Let me know, IZAK (talk) 00:26, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * —you say "it sounds like you want to add a section arguing that it happened with the excuse that Orthodox Jews believe that it did". How do you concoct such a misreading of what someone said? Bus stop (talk) 00:42, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't know, I guess I read what he wrote and that's what it looked like he was saying. Or how would you interpret linking to an article called "Evidence for the Exodus" which states Here I’d like to offer an academic defense for the plausibility of the exodus event., another at "The Torah.com" say Weighing the historicity of the exodus story entails more than addressing the lack of archaeological evidence. and another stating That most of these archaeologists [arguing that the exodus didn't happen] have the same bias against traditional religious beliefs that most of their academic colleagues have..
 * Anyway, talking about how Judaism commemorates the Exodus does not mean we need to add a section sourced to a bunch of websites that definitely aren't wp:RS for these claims stating that Orthodox Judaism thinks the Exodus happened. As stated before, if wants to add a section about the significance of the Exodus in Judaism or Orthodox Judaism in particular, that's an entirely different matter and would be a welcome addition to the article. I haven't read every quote he wants to add, but provided it's about the symbolism, importance, theology, etc. of the Exodus without staking out a WP:fringe position arguing for the historicity of the Exodus.--Ermenrich (talk) 01:12, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * So I will add the theological sections and let's take a rain check on the history debate. And by the way, there is nothing wrong in having a minority view that happens to coincide with mainstream Orthodox beliefs. IZAK (talk) 01:20, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

IZAK, rather than creating a new section, I think it would be better to integrate this with the existing "cultural significance" section, as a series of expansions. Plus, of course, you need sources (which shouldn't be too difficult).Achar Sva (talk) 03:07, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Achar Sva. The idea of starting with a "theological section" comes from Ermenrich. Your idea of "Cultural significance" is much too broad, since Jewish culture does not equal Judaism and definitely not Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism Hasidic Judaism combined. The idea is for a section to focus on Orthodox, Haredi and Hasidic Judaism and Jews who take the Exodus very seriously, not just as a matter of "culture" but as a strict requirement as part of their spiritual beliefs and religious practices. So far all the material I have quoted comes from other WP articles except the opening paragraph which I wrote. We can add sources sure, but there are sources in the main articles cited. IZAK (talk) 03:35, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , I think your objection to it being "culture" is easily fixed by renaming the cultural significance section to "Religious and cultural significance." I agree with that that's where the material belongs - we also already have some sourced information on the exodus in Judaism there that should be integrated into your text.
 * I haven't looked through everything you've added, but I think that all of the protestations in the first paragraph you wrote are wp:undue. Obviously religious groups are going to believe what they're going to believe no matter what archaeologists have to say on the matter, there's no reason to belabor the point. The most I would say we should say is "The exodus is regarded as a significant historical event in Orthodox Judaism" provided that that statement is sourced to an RS. Additionally, I don't believe the websites you're using are really wp:RS - there must be better sources, try doing a search at Google Scholar for "Exodus Orthodox Judaism" or something like that. We already have an article in the bibliography by Barmash that also covers the exodus's significance in Judaism that's at least partially online.--Ermenrich (talk) 12:12, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Ermenrich, the sources I am using are directly tied to their WP articles, meaning the institutions and personalities are on WP, they are mainstream Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic. You can say the same thing about the lengthy biblical criticism sections, that academic groups are going to view anything the religious groups say as irrelevant. I am sure there are always better sources, but I am pressed for time, this has taken me hours already. Anyhow, I have put the cards on the table, and let's see how to improve the article. IZAK (talk) 12:54, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Another point is that the uniqueness of the Orthodox position is lost in classing it with "Religious and Cultural" since then you have all religions and all cultures that are not as directly and intimately tied in with the Exodus as the Orthodox position is. IZAK (talk) 13:13, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Not sure I follow your logic there on academics and religion- academics are pretty unanimous that Jesus or Judas Maccabee existed, for instance, just like religious groups. The question isn’t whether your sources are “mainstream” it’s whether “the Torah.com” is a good source for claims about an ethno-religious group, and the answer is probably not.—Ermenrich (talk) 13:17, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * The authorities cited are reliable as far as I can see. Did I cite "the Torah.com" anywhere, or did you just make that up? Which statements do you find problematic? Also, it's about Judaism and Jewish observance and not about a group of "ethno-religious" people only. IZAK (talk) 13:23, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * In wiki orthopraxis sources aren't legitimated by being linked to their wiki articles. I've no objections to your suggestion but it must be succinct, and relayed through the standard system of RS. I think you grossly underestimate the huge amount of scholarly work on everything covered here. If you dislike harvesting it, then use the 2nd edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia, which covers everything. Anyone can believe what they like, and we can describe those beliefs. But attempts to argue against the obvious, that the accounts of the Exodus etc., remain ineludibly mythical, written not by historians but as religious re-imaginings of the past, are pointless. We know this. Everyone knows, and I include most orthodox Jews of my acquaintance, that Moses could not have transcribed the tetragrammaton's communications down, on stone, a half a millennium before the Hebrew script was invented, or that, as in the oral torah, Moses was a rabbi more than a millennium before rabbinical institutions arose, or that the biblical subsistance of 2 and a half million people in the Sinai desert for 40 years would have been economically impossible even for a 1000th of that number etc. Judaism does not oblige one to confuse historicity stricto sensu with the narrative lessons of these extraordinary tales. It is the moral thrust of the tale, not their facticity, which counts. Interpreting key religious documents like the Talmud by recourse to  faith-based hermeneutics is not acceptable for a secular encyclopedia, because they invariably paper over or simplify difficulties. It is far a too complex, layered opus with a huge tradition of commentary, traditional/rabbinical and modern scholarly research, to allow that. We should rely on scholars with a thorough mastery of yeshiva hermeneutics, thoroughly at home at the same time with the conventions of scholarly methodology, for this. Already Wikipedia is crammed with imprecisions or simplifications because we use such faith-based sources.Nishidani (talk) 13:30, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Nishidani, always good to hear from you. Who your friends are is neither here nor there. Feel free to recommend other works, but I have stuck to material taken directly from WP itself and outside RS. I am creating a separate section that conveys Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic views, that are no less important than what ancient Greeks opined. You do not speak for Judaism as far as I can tell from your record, but hey, everyone is free to have their penny's worth. IZAK (talk) 13:47, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * We are all guests here, invited to work according to rules that, in many cases, each of us might feel uncomfortable with in their private, off-wiki worlds. A key principle is Wikipedia is not a reliable source. When you state:
 * "I have stuck to material taken directly from WP"
 * you are ignoring that rule, which the rest of us have to abide by. Nishidani (talk) 13:59, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Nishidani, linking (see Manual of Style/Linking) to other articles is not using them as a source, otherwise we would have no links to other articles in any WP article. Linking also saves time and "ink" not having to re-write what has already been written on WP. That's why we have "See also" and things like that. Thus, for example, I can link here in this discussion and in the section in question to Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism, Hasidic Judaism without having to explain from scratch what I am talking about. That much should be obvious. The sources I cited were from outside of WP and added to a WP link about institutions in WP articles. Not so complicated and not so sinister either. IZAK (talk) 15:51, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, one can't trust other articles for content, unless one has gone through the sources and checked if (a) they're adequate (b) report the source correctly (c) and cover the phenomenon. In my experience they rarely do. It's fine linking as you say, but begs that question: is the linked article reliable for what you link to. Nishidani (talk) 17:57, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, I think it is, I read through much of those and I trust those articles and I quote/link to them to the point relating to the importance of the Exodus in Orthodox and Jewish ritual, prayer, worship, practice. I am actually a big fan of WP and use its articles wherever and whenever I can. It would be most productive to go through line by line and see what bothers you, if you are up to it. IZAK (talk) 18:07, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

IZAK, Do you think you speak for Judaism? Remember, there are no wp:Expert editors with special privileges...

And no, I did not "make up" the Torah.com, see, which contains this link. If you removed it from your post subsequent to my first mentioning/reading it, that's not really my problem. As I said, I haven't read your addition closely, but the same objection can be brought to the other websites your citing, the Torah.com just happens to have a name that marks it as egregiously non-RS. It may not be any less reliable than arichimusa.org, aish.com, "Orthodox Union" ou.org, or the Jewish Journal, but that's the point: websites are not good sources for what a religion (the definition of an ethno-religious group) believes, especially if the point is to argue for the historicity of something on religious grounds. We leave the question of historicity to the historians/archaeologists here. No one is stopping you or religious believers from believing the exodus happened, it's just not supported by modern scholarship and that is who we defer to on the question of how we present it as a historical (not a religious!) event.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:56, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Ermenrich, all the voluminous words you expand both here and in the article can really be boiled down to two simple phrases: "The Exodus never happened. The Israelites didn't exist"! I get that point. It is not rocket science and you don't need a gazillion sources to say the same thing over, and over, and over again, and again, and again. While Judaism, the religion that originated the Exodus in the first place says "The Exodus happened. The Israelites existed"! We just keep going around in circles and it's time we stopped this silly dance that gets us nowhere. Right now I see that has made some very important and useful edits  to improve the section. Let's keep going in that spirit. IZAK (talk) 15:38, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Also remember please that you suggested and agreed to insert a section about Jewish "theology" = Judaism, and I am focusing on the definable Orthodox Judaism. Feel free to add a section about what other faiths or sects say about the Exodus. IZAK (talk) 15:42, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * IZAK, most of the paragraphs recently added to the article have no cited sources. Are you planning to add citations eventually, or do you leave this task to others? I am particularly concerned about exact chronological dates given without a source. It sounds as another attempt at a Biblical literalist chronology, only without citing supporting material. Dimadick (talk) 16:34, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your input. In Judaism they use the Jewish calendar or Hebrew calendar with corresponding dates to the secular calendar. I have to look at the segment as it has been re-edited since I wrote it, and there are other citations to add. There is no way around it that all branches of Orthodox Judaism, and many other Jewish groups, counts time from the beginning of Creation and not from the time Jesus was born for obvious reasons as does the Gregorian calendar. And yes, I would appreciate some help from editors who are knowledgeable as I did my best so far to put the basic section together. It is less than 24 hours that I am working on this, so let's give this time and WP:DONOTDEMOLISH. Thanks again, IZAK (talk) 17:28, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , if you'd like to stop going around in circles, it would be best to abandon the question of historicity. Wikipedia is not the place for apologetics. Fundamentalists, Jewish or otherwise, believe the Bible literally happened exactly as described, this is not a revelation to anyone and is not something we need to discuss really. If academics or neutral third party sources have discussed the phenomenon of Orthodox Jewish reaction to modern scholarship on the exodus, that is one thing, but simply having a section saying that a fundamentalist group says the Bible is right is not wp:due.
 * I also echo the concerns about sources by Dimadick and Nishidani.--Ermenrich (talk) 16:41, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Ermenrich, it is insulting and uncivil to call the entirety of Orthodox Judaism a "fundamentalist group" when there are dozens of Orthodox-content articles to which I link in the section that clearly describe and explain their beliefs and practices. It is all clearly demarcated and separated in the section. The article is not just about the historicity straight-jacket you wish to shove it into. It quotes the Bible at length, and how beliefs and practices evolved. And Orthodox Judaism is a legitimate stream that is amply defined in the section. This is a subject of concern to a wide range of fields, history and religion included. IZAK (talk) 17:18, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Being fundamentalist does not imply not being a mainstream group, just ask evangelical Christians. How is Orthodox Judaism not an example of fundamentalism?
 * If we’re going to discuss the evolution of practices, we need to use sources by actual historians published in scholarly journals or books, not found on some website.—Ermenrich (talk) 18:07, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It would be nice, but linking to online articles is also acceptable, maybe not the ideal, but WP allows for citing reliable websites. By the same token, historians are not theologians and it is Jewish/Orthodox theology we are focused on, and that happens to be part of the religious domain. I don't have access to Harvard's library right now. IZAK (talk) 18:13, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * If you have taken the information from theology books, you can cite them. Better than no source at all. Dimadick (talk) 18:41, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Dear IZAK. I don't know where you got the idea that there are people here who deny the existence of the Israelites. If they did, they would be ignoring everything that secular scholarship has confirmed. One cannot 'quote the bible' to illustrate something about Judaism except through a secondary source, for very obvious reasons. From line 1 of Genesis, rabbinical commentaries have been intense on virtually every word and line, and Judaism has had a great diversity of views, even about the creation of the world,- what Genesis 1 states is a proposition that, as Judaism's tradition shows, requires interpretation as you certainly know from your intimacy with Rashi and Maimonides (both of whom allowed for the possibility that it might not be saying what it seems to be on on the literal face of it stating). No one's getting at your religion. They are simply saying that, to represent it on Wikipedia, scholarly sources are required, not sources grounded in institutional modern religious bodies. Many of the people who write this scholarship are deeply religious and orthodox. They don't fear the scholarship we are talking about: to the contrary, they write a lot of it. Nishidani (talk) 18:49, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks Nishidani. To each his own. Is anyone disputing the following for example, as I started on this subject above, so let's get down to nitty-gritty, your responses are most welcome: 1 Theologically speaking, in order to show the centrality of the Orthodox belief in the Exodus, can we use parts of this Wikipedia text from Kiddush (I assume you know what that is) see Kiddush (see underlined in bold): "...Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments, and hoped for us, and with love and intent invested us with His sacred Sabbath, as a memorial to the deed of Creation. It is the first among the holy festivals,  commemorating the exodus from Egypt . For You chose us, and sanctified us, out of all nations, and with love and intent You invested us with Your Holy Sabbath. Blessed are You, Adonai, Sanctifier of the Sabbath. (Amen)"? 2 There are various mentions of the Exodus in various important Jewish prayers, like this, see Emet Veyatziv (see underlined in bold): "1 Emet Veyatziv is the first paragraph. The word emet (truth) is appended onto the Shema, and veyatziv appears as the first word. 2 Al Harishonim is the second paragraph. It focuses on the truth of redemption. 3 Ezrat Avoteinu is the third paragraph, and is an elaboration on the Exodus from Egypt 4 The blessing ends with the paragraph Mi Komokha, ending with the blessing Ga'al Yisrael (Who Redeemed Israel)". So this too is a case of theology held dear as a true belief of historical fact. How does one get around that? 3 There is also the Passover Haggadah recited by virtually all religiously observant Jews, that has important sections about events at the time of the Exodus, such as " Haggadah The story of Passover, and the change from slavery to freedom is told. " and Ha Lachma Anya  This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.  All those who are hungry, let them enter and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate the Passover. Now we are here. Next year in the land of Israel. This year we are enslaved. Next year we will be free." So this too is theology, meaning religious practice and observance that accepts the veracity of the events as they happened as central to Orthodox belief and practice. 4 This is famous, Matzo: "There are numerous explanations behind the symbolism of matzo. One is historical:  Passover is a commemoration of the exodus from Egypt. The biblical narrative relates that the Israelites left Egypt in such haste they could not wait for their bread dough to rise; the bread, when baked, was matzo.  (Exodus 12:39). The other reason for eating matzo is symbolic: On the one hand, matzo symbolizes redemption and freedom, but it is also lechem oni, "poor man's bread". Thus it serves as a reminder to be humble, and to not forget what life was like in servitude" it speaks for itself, and how to split the theology from the practical observance, faith and belief is incomprehensible for the religiously observant Jew. 5 In the second paragraph in Passover: "In the Bible,  Passover marks the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egyptian slavery , when God "passed over" the houses of the Israelites during the last of the ten plagues." How can one "pass over" this, excuse the pun, as it is so important that, some people say that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder meal,or at least a Passover meal, they say and it therefore even impacts Christianity and its theology and practice of Easter. 6 Then we have Sukkot as the article states in paragraph four: "As stated in Leviticus,  it is also intended as a reminiscence of the type of fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. " and paragraph one of the Sukkah, see: "The Book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describes it as  a symbolic wilderness shelter, commemorating the time God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness they inhabited after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. " these are further examples of Jewish theology, meaning the Jewish religion, especially as strictly observed by mainstream Orthodoxy that enacts something they hold to be true. Is there another way around this, I doubt it. But it would all fit nicely into an "In Orthodox Judaism" section. IZAK (talk) 19:11, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment. Consider creating a page The Exodus in Jewish Prayer, where all of that can go. At the most, on this page which people visit for an overview of the Exodus, it looks WP:Undue. Compare Mary, mother of Jesus (or Miriam, wife of Pandera, as in Jewish traditions), where we are linkied to, without details, Ave Maria, Alma Redemptoris Mater, Sub tuum praesidium, Ave maris stella, Regina caeli, Ave Regina caelorum and the Magnificat, and for those interested specifically in prayer, there is a link to a page appropriate to the topic, namely Hymns to Mary. In other words, there is precedent for naming the prayers, but not for exasperating the main page with details, which in any case are repetitive. No one doubts the obvious, that the myth of the Exodus is central to the religious identity of the orthodox and is a constant refrain in prayer. Nishidani (talk) 19:30, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * So I gather you agree the links are good and relevant and usable. I disagree about creating a new article because then (a) we skin good material off of the "In Orthodox Judaism" segment in this article, and (b) I am afraid of running afoul and being accused of creating a needless WP:POVFORK which is all that it would be, as discussed above with the POV fork Christian view of the Exodus. (c) The wording of the blessings and prayers speak volumes, akin to a picture is worth a thousand words since in a nutshell they convey the Jewish religious and theological attitude to, and usage of, the Exodus. IZAK (talk) 20:37, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * NO. Your inference is incorrect. I think this page is important and of general interest. While important for a community, the details of prayer shouldn't take up too much space in an article that lacks a huge amount of scholarly commentary. The whole exodus story is a commingling of priestly and deuteronomist recensions. Tickling out which layers belong to one or another gives one compelling insights into how the overall narrative emerged. of this we have almost nothing. So promoting the religious content while leaving the article bare of what we actually know of how each theme was woven into the texture of the story is, to me at least, utterly boring. This ia partly an intellectualist bias - I'm interested in history and scholarship, and partly temperamental: I couldn't help reciting Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa as 'me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican comboy'. Once you memorize prayers, that's it: scholarship, on the other hand, comes up with new insights month in month out which illuminate what is not immediately obvious in our customary life. I think encyclopedias should tell us what is thought, and not be vehicles for orthopraxis, which you can mug up in a few weeks in any school, madrassa, or yeshiva. Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * While I am not particularly interested in specific prayers, covering modern commemorations of the Exodus story in the Jewish liturgical calendar is neither off-topic nor lacking in intellectual merit. The average Wikipedia reader does not have to attend a religious school to get some basic facts on liturgical practices. Dimadick (talk) 17:20, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Collecting RS for Jewish practices/theology on the Exodus
Since there seems to be general agreement that websites like Chabad are not suitable RS for this article, I thought the most productive thing to do would be to gather RS on the topic here now. Our section on Judaism currently has three cites:
 * 1) Tigay, Jeffrey H. (2004). "Exodus". In Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi (eds.). The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195297515.
 * 2) Nelson, W. David (2015). "Discontinuity and Dissonance: Torah, Textuality, and Early Rabbinic Hermeneutics of Exodus". In Barmash, Pamela; Nelson, W. David (eds.). Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations. Lexington Books. pp. 23–51. ISBN 9781498502931.
 * 3) Sarason, Richard S. (2015). "The Past as Paradigm:Enactments of the Exodus Motif in Jewish Liturgy". In Barmash, Pamela; Nelson, W. David (eds.). Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations. Lexington. ISBN 9781498502931.

Two of these are actually from the same book, which is available in preview online:. That book/those two articles could be used to greatly expand the section and probably source some of IZAK's statements, as could the Jewish Study Bible (There's currently a certain amount of reduplication of things the article already said and that IZAK also said without a source that will also have to be sorted out).

Though not currently cited in this section, the book by Baden actually has chapters on "Exodus as Ritual (pp. 61-87)" and "Social Formation and Communal Identity (pp. 127-155) ":
 * 1) Baden, Joel S. (2019). The Book of Exodus: A Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16954-5.

It is also available in preview online, though obviously having access to the relevant chapters would be better.

Might these books also be useful (don't have free access on JSTOR myself, but I think I could get it)?:
 * 1) The Pentateuch: Fortress Commentary on the Bible Study Edition, Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Matthew J. M. Coomber. Copyright Date: 2016. Published by: Augsburg Fortress, Publishers. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1b3t6qt https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1b3t6qt
 * 2) The Pentateuch: Introducing the Torah. Thomas B. Dozeman. Series: Introducing Israel's Scriptures. Copyright Date: 2017. Published by: Augsburg Fortress, Publishers. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1ggjhj2 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ggjhj2
 * 3) A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Third Edition. JOHN J. COLLINS. Copyright Date: 2018. Edition: 3. Published by: Augsburg Fortress, Publishers. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1w6tb3r https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1w6tb3r
 * 4) Exodus and Deuteronomy: Texts @ Contexts series. Athalya Brenner. Gale A. Yee. Copyright Date: 2012 Published by: Augsburg Fortress, Publishers DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt22nm70p Pages: 384 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nm70p

I do have access to these:
 * 1) Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. BENJAMIN D. SOMMER Series: The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library Copyright Date: 2015 Published by: Yale University Press DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvggx3zd Pages: 256 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvggx3zd
 * 2) The Heart of Torah, Volume 1: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Genesis and Exodus. RABBI SHAI HELD. Foreword by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg Copyright Date: 2017 Published by: University of Nebraska Press, Jewish Publication Society DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1tg5nz2 Pages: 408 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tg5nz2
 * 3) Rhythms of Religious Ritual: The Yearly Cycles of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Kathy Black Bishop Kyrillos Jonathan L. Friedmann Tamar Frankiel Hamid Mavani Jihad Turk. Volume: 1 Copyright Date: 2018 Published by: Claremont Press DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvwrm4gj Pages: 165 OPEN ACCESS https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvwrm4gj (article on the Jewish year here https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvwrm4gj.6 )

Please add anything else you might know of.--Ermenrich (talk) 12:51, 17 July 2020 (UTC)




 * I have this one and need to dig through it. A. Parrot (talk) 14:24, 17 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your initiative Ermenrich. Though some of the content may be more relevant on the Book of Exodus rather than the Exodus as a narrative. That article's bibliography also includes relevant publications. Dimadick (talk) 16:40, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Chabad as a reliable source for Jewish history?!
I am putting this short comment on a new section because User:Ermenrich is obviosly right that the discussion about the Chabad sources for Jewish history is just a bait and switch, and this discussion would have to be carried out properly in the Reliable Sources noticeboard, not here. But I will fire an opening shot in such an eventual discussion.

Following Ermenrich's comments, I am referring here to secular, non-religious history as a discourse and analysis of historical evidence, of the historical record in general, and of past events and chronologies. In this scholarly and academic sense, any Chabad material is basically completely biased and therefore utterly unreliable from a Wikipedia perspective as a secular, non-religious encyclopedia. Thank you, warshy (¥¥) 18:53, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Chabad is offering a literal interpretation of Biblical chronology, not actual historical research. I thought we were using them as sources on religious beliefs, not historical data. Dimadick (talk) 19:21, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Someone should probably take it to the reliable sources noticeboard, though our experience(s) here and before on this issue lead me to believe that's likely to be an unpleasant shitshow, so I have no desire to do it myself.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:45, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Me neither. :) But let me put some initial thoughts on these "religious sources" out here in the open: For religious fundamentalists of the type who opened this whole distraction/discussion here there is actually no line of separation whatsoever between religious belief and historical "research." Historical discourse, when it is presented, is just serving the needs to reinforce religious belief. For this type of fundamentalist religious belief there is not even a "chronology," so to speak. It is all just God, whatever that is, directly acting in and dictating the course of "history." For them Wikipedia is actually unaware of this basic "fact" of life and/or the world, and all this argumentation about the lack of a proper religious perspective on the Exodus, is just a means of constantly bringing this "divine," transcendent, metaphysical awareness to the reader. Chabad religious material in English for the "lay" reader is all crafted to begin with only to serve this specific purpose. And, one of the reasons they are so "powerful," as another editor has alluded to in passing, is that they are rather effective at their craft. warshy (¥¥) 20:08, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't it be an instance of demagoguery,, to say "that they are rather effective at their craft"? Bus stop (talk) 21:24, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Demagoguery?! How would it be "demagoguery" for me to acknowledge/recognize their effectiveness at their craft, as much as I would prefer they weren't as effective? I am not a politician, and I am not dealing with politics here in any way, shape, or form. Others, including you, on the other hand, may be doing just that in some disguised form. warshy (¥¥) 21:37, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Bar Ilan University has the reputation of being a conservative university (conservative, not fringe). Why not use its publications? A first step was made with a blog post by Joshua Berman. But Berman had glossed over the many impossibilities of the Exodus story, when taken at face value. Or course, an Exodus of 600 families, if we translate "family" instead "thousand", would be a more plausible story. In the end it is not excluded that some groups of slaves ran from Egypt to Ancient Israel, and if those groups were tiny, archaeologists can neither confirm nor deny it. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:39, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , we already have that in the article under historicity, see this quote by Baden: He writes that while "[a] onetime mass exodus of all Israelites from Egypt cannot be maintained, a relatively steady trickle of Semitic slaves making their way through the Sinai to the northeast seems eminently reasonable." Anyway, if we were going to add more scholarship that is pro-some sort of Exodus, wouldn't it be better to use Kitchen and Hoffmeier? They're the only, or at least the most prominent, mainstream scholars I know of who argue for it. There's also an article by Manfred Bietak available at academia.edu that mentions some signs of historical traditions in the exodus.
 * The chief issue is actually not what sources we should use for the historicity of the Exodus, but what sources we should use to discuss modern and historical Jewish commemoration of the Exodus.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:52, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I meant that Berman is at least a scholar, so technically he writes WP:RS. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:01, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * That a source is a reliable source is of course essential, but it's not sufficient: whatever the source says needs also to represent the scholarly consensus, or majority view, or a significant minority view. Chabad, by the way, is not a reliable source in Wikipedia terms.Achar Sva (talk) 06:12, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm reluctant to dive into this argument, sorry, discussion, but there is a point which doesn't seem to have been made. Quite a lot of Orthodox Jews would not like to be represented here by Chabad, even on issues for which they agree. The attitude of Orthodoxy towards Chabad ranges from admiration to contempt. I'm sure Izak and Bus Stop are well aware of this. Zerotalk 02:46, 17 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi —thank you for mentioning me. Perhaps you can tell us—why would "The attitude of Orthodoxy towards Chabad" range from "admiration to contempt" and why would "Quite a lot of Orthodox Jews...not like to be represented here by Chabad"? Bus stop (talk) 05:38, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * There's no need to argue that. It is more than well known in any Jewish community, esp. in the US, and obvious. Read Roberta Kwall's The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition, which came out some years ago. In particular chapter 4. Nishidani (talk) 06:15, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Chabad is not RS by WIkipedia definition - it's a website, we need books or articles by academic experts. Nothing Izak has added is actually terribly controversial, but he needs better sources. (He also needs to write better paragraphs, but that's another matter).Achar Sva (talk) 06:55, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Bus Stop, these "why would" questions are not for me to answer. The relevant questions are whether my statements are true, and I believe they are. I know it from personal conversations, but there is a fair literature on it; see this as a random beginning. The worst attacks are on the messianic aspects of Chabad, but not only that. Another source of friction, from the Haredi side, derives from the attitude to the State of Israel. Zerotalk 07:26, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * —Jews are not a monolith. They are a diverse group of people. All you are doing is raising questions. You are not fleshing out ideas. For instance you say "Another source of friction, from the Haredi side, derives from the attitude to the State of Israel". What is your point? Bus stop (talk) 13:39, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "Chabad is not RS by WIkipedia definition - it's a website" Verifiability does not entirely exclude self-published sources such as Websites. "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications." I am not certain whether Chabad publishes opinions by such experts. Dimadick (talk) 07:57, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Websites are fine for some subjects, such as popular culture, but for academic subjects such as this we need academic sources.Achar Sva (talk) 09:11, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * To be on the safe side, I opened a discussion on the Website in Reliable sources/Noticeboard. It has not attracted much attention yet. Dimadick (talk) 16:08, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , oh, just you wait, the shitshow is coming...--Ermenrich (talk) 16:12, 17 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, of course Jews are not a monolith. No widespread religion is. But that's not the point. The point is that Chabad has been chosen to represent Orthodox Judaism on this page when they are not representative. The whole idea of using religious websites rather than academic sources is contrary to Wikipedia philosophy to start with; using unrepresentative religious websites just compounds the error. Zerotalk 13:49, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Chabad has not been chosen to "represent" Orthodox Judaism. It has been chosen as a source to support the religious version of the exodus. The religious version of the exodus has been supported by publishers for centuries and newer versions of such publications can be found in every religious Jewish home and every beth midrash. Chabad is online and therefore convenient. Furthermore we are not seeking only academic sources, because WP:CONTEXTMATTERS. This is an article saying in the lede "The Biblical Exodus is central in Judaism, with it being recounted daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated in festivals such as Passover." This calls for authenticity in at least one paragraph of the article. By authenticity I mean the non-watered-down, non-secularized version of the exodus. The reader benefits from being apprised of this version of the event, at least in one paragraph. It doesn't matter if the archeological record reveals a different story. That is for a different paragraph. Bus stop (talk) 14:43, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * What are you talking about? If you want the the non-watered-down, non-secularized version of the exodus (whatever that is - what's the "watered-down secularized version"???) then we have it at The Exodus - as has been pointed out above already.--Ermenrich (talk) 14:49, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "The religious version of the exodus has been supported by publishers for centuries" Yes, prior to the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, the Bible was seen as authoritative history. That does not mean such publications are reliable. Dimadick (talk) 16:26, 17 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the best source for the Orthodox or even traditional Jewish view would be the Jewish sacred texts themselves. Chabad like all other contemporary Jewish movements is inherently subjective and often has a bais of some sort. The best way to neutrally explain the traditional Jewish perspective would be to source Mishnaim, Germaras, Geonic responsum and even Rishonic works that relate to the topic at hand. These are generally much more unifying believed in, and mostly representative of historical and modern Jewish thought. Of course, this would require several WP: EXPERTS who are well versed in rabbinic literature. Generally, I have found Sefaria to be the best and most transparent medium for referencing a piece of rabbinic literature. Ibn Daud (talk) 16:55, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Per WP:RSPSCRIPTURE the sacred texts would not be good sources for that. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:16, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I think there is a consensus above by most editors involved that (a) Primary texts are unacceptable except through secondary sources (b) which ideally should be peer-reviewed academic works. I.e., the 'experts' you name. At this point, as I tried to show by my recent edit today, it is just a matter of rewriting what is cogently germinal in IZAK's contribution in those terms. Rather than talk on or around this, if each of us just did some homework and added one or two reformulations, showing the ritual-religious functions and their Talmudic bases which are all covered by scholarship, this problem would be solved, a gift of course to IZAK when he returns, showing that there is no need to worry about 'secular' scholarship, since it can cover what Chabad or any other group essentially wants to say. Nishidani (talk) 17:37, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Discussion of interest at talk:The Book of Exodus
There is a discussion of interest at Talk:The Book of Exodus. It’s related to edits that have also been conducted at Hyksos and Sources and parallels of the Exodus regarding the inclusion in Wikipedia’s voice that Israel definitely included a group from Egypt.—Ermenrich (talk) 00:43, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Re the following
"'which was never intended to function primarily as a historical document.'"

That may have some source behind it, but it is an inference based on a very large assumption. As it stands, it means that modern scholarship has ascertained what the intention of the original authors of Exodus was. In classical scholarship one can speculate about authorial intentions only tentatively, when they are not explicit, on an evidential basis taken from construing traces and hints in any work (Herodotus/Thucydides etc) under scrutiny. The nature of this text, as a divine composition, rules out the presence of any information about the intentions of its real authors in Babylon or the post-exilic period.

The distinctions between 'history' and 'general narratives' about the past was not available at that time. We do know that the authors recast a hodgepodge of legends, historical records, etc., according to a theological understanding of what the past ought to mean and signal. That doesn't translate into a witting sense that they perceived its purpose as 'primarily' theological. Since they ascribed its authorship to the contemporary leader of the putative exodus transcribing God's word, that itself would indicate a desire to authenticate the narrative as 'divine', and therefore not subject to any challenge, historical, doctrinal or otherwise. In short the statement is a modern conjecture, that many or some might underwrite, but it is not appropriate to state this in Wikipedia's voice as though it were a fact, especially since it assumes a priestly class worked within a framework of awareness that there is a distinction between theology and history. We know, to the contrary, that such distinctions did not operate in that milieu.Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Cool :) Wdford (talk) 20:27, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Addition of unsourced info
, I finally had a more thorough look at what you've added. It is almost completely unsourced or sourced to poor quality sources, e.g. Chabad.org. Do you expect us (as in other editors) to add citations for you? If this is not rectified, the entire addition should be removed. It is unreasonable to add unsourced information to an article (all of which besides this new section has good sourcing), particularly in this enormous amount. And surely you can find something better than Chabad.org? Try Google Scholar, do a search at Academia.edu, Google Books preview, anything. There is tons of freely available scholarship out there for one who searches.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:43, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you give some examples of what needs sourcing and why? It is very elementary stuff linked to other WP articles. Do you want sources for Jewish prayers and blessings or sources for holidays all of which have the Exodus as a central motif? Like Judaism 101. IZAK (talk) 02:32, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I just tried doing a Google Scholar search for "passover exodus" and all it came up with is tons of Christian and critical scholarship that you already have in the article. Jewish points of view are going to come from Jewish sources. Do you see the problem. In my house I have more Jewish religious literature about Passover and the Exodus in one bookcase than the whole of Google scholar can offer it seems. How are you ever going to meet that need using your criteria? IZAK (talk) 02:40, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * FYI, I will be on the road the next few days so I may not be able to communicate. IZAK (talk) 02:53, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * 'Jewish points of view are going to come from Jewish sources.' There is no such thing as a 'Jewish point of view', anymore than there is a German, Italian, Chinese, Turkish etc.,etc. 'point of view'. Such points of view are either stereotypes by outsiders, or generalizations by interested groups within a certain ethnic world. One can speak at the most of a 'Jewish Orthodox' or 'Catholic' or 'Lutheran' point of view, when it is clear that a specific body, institution etc. is articulating its official line. To represent an ethnicity is extremely parlous, when not offensive, in that it arrogates control over how all members of a group are to be perceived, investing that authority in just one sector or interest group of that particular constituency, a form of interpretative hegemony. This is a banal truism for all modern scholarship.  I thought that this was one of the fundamental lessons of WW2.Nishidani (talk) 08:18, 15 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Looking at your last edit, you’ve restored information that was, rightly in my opinion, flagged as unacceptable by, justly removed by , and also removed a CN Tag I had added without providing a source. As to what needs sourcing: any statement of Jewish belief or practice needs a source. That’s pretty much everything you added.
 * I also have to agree with Nishidani. If you have sources, please use them. They are in any case preferable to websites. It does not strike me you've taken my points on the wp:dueness of having 6 different orthodox rabbis (or commentators) saying that archaeologists are a bunch of idiots.—Ermenrich (talk) 12:36, 15 July 2020 (UTC)


 * —you can't prevent Wikipedia from writing about religion. We write about art. Both art and religion are cultural. We don't present disclaimers when we wax eloquent about art and we need not present disclaimers when we write about religion. Orthodox, Haredi, and Hasidic commentary on The Exodus constitutes entirely acceptable and non-objectionable material for inclusion on Wikipedia. No one believes assertions that cross thresholds in realms known for taking liberties with verifiable truth. You are creating an issue where none exists. Please stop obstructing the building out of an area of the encyclopedia in which it is deficient. IZAK should not have to run a gauntlet of picayune objections to presenting religious commentary. No reader is likely to be harmed by the presentation of authentic and verifiable Jewish commentary. This is not watered-down, secularized commentary that is trying to present for the reader. Your personal sensitivities should not prevent this material from being included in this article. As you know, Wikipedia is not censored. Bus stop (talk) 15:41, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Trying to suggest that the objections here are grounded in opposition to religion is improper. The essence of the critique concerns what WP:RS advise about sourcing quality. I don't like, and never have, the emic/etic distinction but, to use those common terms, IZAK's approach is to say he is representing the emic version of Jewish Exodus accounts, whereas other editors are insisting that (a) modern scholarship covers both etic and emic dimensions;(b) IZAK's version of an 'emic' worldview is skewed to his own programmatic takes on issues, informed by attachment to orthodox doctrine and (b) his sourcing is way below par, in that it uses primary sources that reflect that orthodoxy's interests; so that (d) he is wholly insouciant to the critical secondary literature written by scholars, orthodox, Jewish or otherwise published in peer-reviewed books and articles. So it is an issue of wiki method. There is absolutely no problem in sourcing these matters to the works that meet RS in (d). The analogy with art is wrong-footed. If we write about Renaissance painting, Vasari is fine, but everything he has to say about figures from Michelangelo to Margaritone d'Arezzo ought to be, in wiki best practice, titrated through any number of modern monographs, of which there are a vast number,  that mention them all. Nishidani (talk) 16:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The accusation that I'm somehow trying to prevent Wikipedia from writing about religion is nonsense. I have no problem with religious content here on Wikipedia, the issue is 1) the utter lack of sourcing/the poor sourcing for IZAK's addition; and 2) an wp:undue inclusion of a bunch of websites where rabbis/religious commentators take potshots at modern scholarship. We don't make exceptions for wp:fringe just because of religious belief. If you or IZAK or I want to believe the Exodus is a historical event, that's entirely our own issue. But if we want to present arguments that it happened, we have to ground them in modern archaeological and historical scholarship: the issue of whether the Exodus happened is a historical question, not a "religious" one. It's the same thing with, for instance, the historicity of the book of Mormon. You might think that it's historical, but Wikipedia does not take the position of any religion, it takes the position presented by modern scholarship--much of which is written by practicing/believing religious people, but working within the confines of the scientific method and critical inquiry.
 * Anyway, IZAK claims to have tons of books on the Jewish theology surrounding the Exodus - he should cite them.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:08, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

And that's only part of the problem, e.g. Berman says archaeology is unable to find the Exodus because they were nomads, but ignores the impossibility of 2.5 million people for 38 years at Tell el-Qudeirat. So, if his cards were on the table, Berman would have to agree that he postulates an Exodus not like that described in the Bible. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:16, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it should be underlined that there is absolutely nothing troubling to Jewish/religious readers about the unhistoricity of these things. It is accepted generally as obvious, so that, if for example, one consults the Jewish Encyclopedia 2nd edition entry, you find the following:
 * "'Current scholarly consensus based on archaeology holds the enslavement and exodus traditions to be unhistorical. Indeed, the Book of Exodus itself underlines its unhistoricity by its abundance of miracle tales and by not bothering to name either the Pharaoh of the enslavement or of the exodus.' Rabbi Moshe Greenberg David Sperling, Exodus, EJ vol.6 2007 pp.613-623 p.622.Nishidani (talk) 20:04, 15 July 2020 (UTC)"
 * When I said "art" I didn't have in mind "Renaissance painting", . I had in mind twentieth century and contemporary art. Sorry for not being clear. Bus stop (talk) 19:28, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Well then, the analogy fails nonetheless. One cannot compare the oeuvre of Andy Warhol, - the doyen in the inimitable words of the late lamented Robert Hughes, of artistic entrepreneurs in the 'age of supply-side aesthetics,' or David Hockney, or Brett Whiteley, or Banksy, esp. the latter's mastery of the ephemeral, to a prayer tradition, and commentary on them that goes back millennia. Even were the analogy correct, the same would apply: all modern and contemporary art, (well there are exceptions,- a deceased friend of mine who never pushed the masterpieces he painted) is well documented, galleries themselves see to that, and art coverage is massive.Nishidani (talk) 20:15, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I wasn't comparing art to a "prayer tradition". Nor is IZAK presenting a "prayer tradition". IZAK is presenting The Exodus as it is presented in an Orthodox Jewish setting. Interpretations of art abound. You don't go to articles on art and argue that an understanding of a work of art is unfounded. Yet you come to an article on "The Exodus" and argue that the Orthodox presentation is somehow unpresentable. Some of you argue that an Orthodox presentation conflicts with archeology. Irrelevant. Everybody knows that which is cultural is quintessentially open to a wide range of interpretations. And you seem to be pointing out that even Jews disagree over versions of "The Exodus". This is also irrelevant. As long as IZAK's version is adequately sourced, it is a presentation worthy of conveyance to our readers. There is no correct version of Wikipedia. This is especially true of Wikipedia's coverage of "cultural" subjects. Bus stop (talk) 20:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Except that it isn't properly sourced. Have you looked at the addition? The extremely few sources there are are all various websites.

Also, "the Orthodox presentation" cannot be a backdoor to argue for the historicity of the Exodus. This shouldn't be a difficult concept. Every time a religious belief contradicts science we don't add a section explaining that in this or that religion things are seen differently. If IZAK wants to add information about the importance of the Exodus in Judaism, the ways in which it is commemorated, the many theological implications of the Exodus in Judaism, all that is fine, if it is sourced to reliable sources, which it currently is not. But the guise of "belief" should not and cannot be used to argue that scholarship should be disregarded. That is against Wikipedia policy.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:07, 15 July 2020 (UTC)


 * What is the guise of belief, ? Bus stop (talk) 21:30, 15 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Fundamentalists of all sorts will say that the Exodus did happen as described. But WP:RNPOV says we don't give them the right to state facts in the voice of Wikipedia. For the same reason as we don't consider the existence of Lamanites as objective historical fact. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:45, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Bus stop This is scattershot rambling. You ignored every point made above. Whar you are saying about the art analogy is silly. Prayer is not an interpretation, hence the analogy with art fails. Prayer alludes to elements of belief. The story of Exodus is told in detail here. Prayers refer to it. Prayers in every religion tend to do that, What you say is irrelevant. What IZAK asserts is badly sourced. I guess I'll have to write an article on a Jewish prayer to show how this is done, academically, without pushing anyone's POV, but simply showing how scholarship works, since this appears not be understood by one or two editors here.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps that was phrased badly, : we cannot, under the guise of belief, i.e. claiming that it is justified by religious belief, argue that scholarship should be disregarded. That the Exodus occurred is not a theological, but a historical question. It's not like how many gods there are or how many persons God has or whether angels exist, etc. It is a supposed historical event, and we have to defer to historians on whether or not it happened. The fact that Orthodox Judaism (and many other Judeo-Christian-derived religions!) believes the Exodus happened does not mean that they get to argue that it happened in a special section of this encyclopedia.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:47, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "Guise" means "pretext", . An example Webster's gives is "swindles people under the guise of friendship". Bus stop (talk) 23:06, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm perfectly aware of what it means. You asked me what I meant and I gave you an answer. Now is there a reason you keep making subtle digs at me or do you have something constructive to add?--Ermenrich (talk) 23:15, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It's not quite apropos for this page, but the discussion prompted me to write on my page a reflection nonetheless on the tension here between whether a narrative must be truthful or not to be believed. Ignore by all means.Nishidani (talk) 06:44, 16 July 2020 (UTC)


 * There is no "guise". Nobody is trying to swindle anyone. Nor is there any "subtle dig", . I am refuting what you are saying about "the guise of belief". Countless centuries of Judaism would support the version of the exodus that IZAK is presenting in the article. In a separate paragraph you can present the archeological version. But you are running interference for the science-based version. You can't do that, any more than you can go to an article on contemporary art and say "that's not true" and remove the material that is not supported by objective reality. Every religious Jewish home contains on its bookshelf the version IZAK is providing in the article. Every Jewish beth midrash contains bookshelves detailing the version of the exodus IZAK is putting in the article. This is exceedingly well-sourced. It is ridiculous that you are saying it is poorly sourced. And the reader should be apprised of the Orthodox Jewish version of the exodus. This does not conflict with science because the cultural is not necessarily in conflict with that which is scientific. That is for the obvious reason that they occupy different realms. Wikipedia is not precluded from documenting the Orthodox Jewish version of the exodus in an article on The Exodus. Bus stop (talk) 15:18, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * There is very much a "guise" here: it's the claim that because "Jews" or "Orthodox Jews" believe it, we have to make a historical claim about it. It's the guise of "completeness" or something like that. It's a completely false argument that's being used to justify completely unjustified additions of religious figures railing against "secular" scholars because they don't confirm their religious text. History is not a question of religious belief, it is a question of evidence. I can believe with all my might that the Founding Fathers created an explicitly Christian nation, but that doesn't make it so. I can believe, because of "thousands of years of tradition", that a Native American people were created in the spot where they were when White Europeans came to North America, but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia states that they were always there. It may state their own traditions, but this article already states the biblical version of what happened in the exodus. The article says what the exodus narrative is, there is an entire section on it The Exodus, it's the first section. That is enough for Jewish or Christian belief in it. We don't need a separate paragraph to say that Jews or Orthodox Jews or Evangelical Christians believe in the narrative. The rest of what he added was exceedingly poorly sourced, to websites, rather than to scholarly books or articles discussing Jewish belief, or is not sourced at all. Let's look at what's left of his addition:
 * The Exodus exactly one source, "What Is Shavuot (Shavuos)?" from Chabad.org . Note that the section discussed two other festivals besides Shavuot, so even if we were to assume everything about Shavuot in the section could be sourced to this article, the information on the other two festivals would still have no sourcing.
 * The Exodus zero sources
 * The Exodus exactly one source... a quotation from "The Exodus: An Experience of the Present As Well As the Past" also at Chabad.org . None of the actual content is sourced.
 * Now in what way is this "exceedingly well-sourced"?--Ermenrich (talk) 15:43, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Now in what way is this "exceedingly well-sourced"? Wouldn't Chabad.org be a reliable source? Bus stop (talk) 16:00, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

I don’t think you’re looking at what I—or IZAK—wrote. Very little in it is sourced to Chabad, and Chabad is not an ideal source anyway as an advocating group, not some neural organization. It's like if we sourced our information on Christianity to Campus Crusade for Christ, they have an "FAQ: What do Christian believe" after all. We don't do that because there are much better sources out there. Most of the addition is completely unsourced.—Ermenrich (talk) 16:29, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:CONTEXTMATTERS, meaning that Chabad should be an appropriate source for supporting material pertaining to Orthodox Judaism. You say Chabad is an "advocating group". I would say they are apolitical. What do they "advocate" for? They inform Jews as well as non-Jews about Jewish observance. Bus stop (talk) 16:52, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "the Orthodox Jewish version of the exodus"
 * Do you know what you are talking about? The Jewish, orthodox or otherwise, version of the Exodus is in the Torah section of the Tanakh. It is shared by Christians, with the difference that later there were midrashic elaborations in the Talmud, and responsa concerning those midrashim, which did not feed into the Christian 'version'. If you are an orthodox Jew and a geneticist you are under no obligation to follow what Chabad says about 'Jewish genes', since, despite their fantasies, such genes don't exist. After the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, what came to distinguish the emerging rabbinical tradition from the emerging Judeo-Christian/Christian tradition was that the former successfully in good part allowed dissent within the interpretative ranks, whereas the later grew intolerant. Jewish tradition had the edge over Christians in its toleration of differing opinions within the fold, and does to this day. So just one institution, authoritative and powerful as Chabad may be, does not have a monopoly on orthodoxy. Such a thing would contradict the victory over sectarianism which was a core element in the Yavne succession. To take a concrete case, Chabad can rule differently than the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards on say, genetically modified foods. Each group, reform, conservative, Hasidic has its interpretations and they often differ while subscribing to the same halakha, because these always require, in emerging new contexts, interpretation.
 * No, therefore. And it has yet to be shown that what IZAK or others write here is not readily available in peer-reviewed scholarship.Nishidani (talk) 17:43, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Chabad is obviously not an ideal source, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that most of the added information has no source. Bus stop does not seem to want to acknowledge that fact, and his focus on Chabad as "an Orthodox Jewish source" appears to be a bait and switch to get us to ignore it. Or can Bus Stop show how every sentence in the three sections that IZAK has added is sourced in the two articles on Chabad IZAK cited?--Ermenrich (talk) 18:20, 16 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I think part of Nishidani's reasoning deserves some response:
 * "IZAK's approach is to say he is representing the emic version of Jewish Exodus accounts, whereas other editors are insisting that (a) modern scholarship covers both etic and emic dimensions;"
 * IZAK argued that an emic view of the Exodus was missing from the article. He/she was not wrong, since the focus of the article so far was the narrative's historicity and its origins. Not on its religious significance to modern Jews or its influence on their modern life. If there is proper scholarship on the topic, this was not reflected in the article at all.
 * No, he didn't argue that. Those concepts are alien to his approach. An emic approach, properly considered, would be the survey of all perspectives in various schools of Judaism, and in self-identifying orthodox Jews regarding the matter he mentions, not just Chabad. He argued the Orthodox view he subscribes to was missing: the scholarly literature covers both the etic and the emic perspective (emic here for example as scholarly analyses of what the Talmud sages say regarding the Exodus). Scholarship constantly cites what the sages say.Nishidani (talk) 20:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "(b) IZAK's version of an 'emic' worldview is skewed to his own programmatic takes on issues, informed by attachment to orthodox doctrine"
 * He/she is quite open concerning their own bias. But I would argue that his/her efforts to improve the article were in good faith and that we didn't end up with polemic-style additions. Ideally we could improve the section with adding sources from other perspectives, rather than deleting it in its entirety.
 * No one disputes he is in good faith. Many say that if you want to contribute to Wikipedia fruitfully, you should learn to take on board its core criteria and sourcing ambitions.Nishidani (talk) 20:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "(b) his sourcing is way below par, in that it uses primary sources that reflect that orthodoxy's interests";
 * I will admit that I am unfamiliar with the sources IZAK used or whether they are reliable for Wikipedia. Perhaps you should open a topic on Reliable sources/Noticeboard.
 * That is up to IZAK, not others.Nishidani (talk) 20:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "(d) he is wholly insouciant to the critical secondary literature written by scholars, orthodox, Jewish or otherwise published in peer-reviewed books and articles."
 * It is unclear whether such sources are available to IZAK. Dimadick (talk) 19:03, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * He can google. Wiki resource wizards can get you virtually anything, if you ask. He probably won't, because there are some deep reservations in the movement he identifies with about secular scholarship.Nishidani (talk) 20:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I would also prefer that the three remaining sections that IZAK added (minus what I've removed as wp:undue wp:FALSEBALANCE, and wp:PROFRINGE ) be improved rather than deleted, but adding essentially unsourced sections is an imposition on the rest of us to find sources for them. Surely IZAK has access to some sources? Searching "Exodus theology" works wonders. We don't just take other editors word on what they know about things, after all.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:41, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Unless someone can provide some RS for the rest of IZAK's addition (there must be some, we've already found a few things), I intend to remove them by the end of the week.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:58, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Importance of Judaic content about the Exodus
====The Exodus in Jewish prayers and blessings====

The Song of the Sea (שירת הים, Shirat HaYam, also known as Az Yashir Moshe and Song of Moses, or Mi Chamocha) is a poem that appears in the Book of Exodus of the Hebrew Bible, at. It is followed in verses 20 and 21 by a much shorter song sung by Miriam and the other women. The Song of the Sea was reputedly sung by the Israelites after their crossing the Red Sea in safety, and celebrates the destruction of the Egyptian army during the crossing, and looks forward to the future conquest of Canaan. The poem is included in Jewish prayer books (in all Orthodox siddurim and machzorim), and recited daily in the morning shacharit services.

There are various mentions of the Exodus in various important Jewish prayers, see Emet Veyatziv: Structure: "1 Emet Veyatziv is the first paragraph. The word emet (truth) is appended onto the Shema Yisrael, and veyatziv appears as the first word. 2 Al Harishonim is the second paragraph. It focuses on the truth of redemption. 3 Ezrat Avoteinu is the third paragraph, and is an elaboration on the Exodus from Egypt. 4 The blessing ends with the paragraph Mi Komokha, ending with the blessing Ga'al Yisrael (Who Redeemed Israel)".

Jewish prayers and blessings often show the centrality of belief in the Exodus. For example in the Friday night (Shabbat) Kiddush (see also List of Jewish prayers and blessings: Shabbat) the one making the blessing loudly declares: "...Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments, and hoped for us, and with love and intent invested us with His sacred Sabbath, as a memorial to the deed of Creation. It is the first among the holy festivals, commemorating the exodus from Egypt. For You chose us, and sanctified us, out of all nations, and with love and intent You invested us with Your Holy Sabbath. Blessed are You, Adonai, Sanctifier of the Sabbath."

====The Exodus in Rabbinical writings====

See the following for in-depth descriptions, citations and discussions of the Exodus in classical Rabbinic literature studied and accepted by most Orthodox Jewish scholars:


 * 1 Va'eira: In classical rabbinic interpretation; 2 Bo: In classical rabbinic interpretation; 3 Beshalach: In classical rabbinic interpretation.
 * 1 Va'eira: In medieval Jewish interpretation; 2 Bo: In medieval Jewish interpretation; 3 Beshalach: In medieval Jewish interpretation
 * 1 Va'eira: In the liturgy; 2 Bo: In the liturgy; 3 Beshalach: In the liturgy

Modern day Orthodox scholars and rabbis have in turn followed in the pathways of classical Rabbinic literature and have taught about how the Exodus applies in contemporary times, such as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) the last Rebbe of Chabad Hasidism:

"...Though we may never have been in Egypt, nor experienced actual slavery, redemption can be real for us, for, as chassidic thought explains, Egypt is not only a geographical location but also a state of mind. In fact the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is almost identical to the word meitzarim, which means straits or limitations...The continued significance of the Exodus from Egypt can be viewed from another perspective. The Torah says of the Jewish people, “They are My servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.” The redemption from Egypt and the subsequent experience of receiving the Torah established the identity of the Jewish people as “servants of G‑d” and not “servants of servants.” After leaving Egypt, they could never again be subject to the same kind of servitude. The Maharal of Prague explains that the freedom achieved through the Exodus transformed the essential nature of our people. Through the Exodus, we acquired the nature of free men. Despite subsequent conquests and subjugation by other nations, the fundamental nature of the Jewish people has not changed. Our freedom is maintained only because, in a spiritual sense, G‑d is constantly taking us out of Egypt. The miracle of the redemption is thus not an event of the past, but a constant occurrence in our daily lives..."

- Menachem Mendel Schneerson

The above was in the article for a while awaiting referencing, but removed it. Firstly, the direct quote by Rabbi Schneerson does not need extra referencing. Secondly, when I wrote up this I was careful to base it on existing Wikipedia articles. So in fact this is a summary of much longer material, some of which is referenced in their original Wikipedia articles. Thirdly, the "prayers and blessings" section can be found in any standard Jewish prayer book, which we can reference if need be. It is a shame that this important updated information that is practiced in Judaism, the source religion of the Exodus, should be excluded from this article. IZAK (talk) 19:53, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia articles aren't sources, which you know. If you have sources, then why don't you add them? There were also questions of wp:DUEness to listing every Jewish prayer that mentions the Exodus. The gist of the Schneerson quote is already covered in the current section, mainly: In the Hagaddah of the Seder it is written that every generation is obliged to remind and identify itself in terms of the Exodus. Thus the following words from the Pesaḥim (10:5)  are recited:

"”In every generation a person is duty-bound to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt”."
 * Is there anything specific you object to the current section The Exodus?--Ermenrich (talk) 20:07, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


 * The section you mention is actually excellent, some of it originally written by me and then improved by Nishidani. There is only one sentence that is problematic: "The festivals now associated with the Exodus (Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot) began as agricultural and seasonal feasts but became completely subsumed into the Exodus narrative of Israel's deliverance from oppression at the hands of God." and that is because it is two non-Jewish scholars, Tigay in 2004 and Nelson in 2015, who say that, it is not a Jewish view which is that the festivals have equal parallel agricultural and historic importance. Nishidani added in that quote that encapsulates the Rabbi Schneerson's longer quote which explains more, note WP:NOTPAPER. The "prayers and blessings"' and "In Rabbinic writings" is key to how Judaism views and memorializes the Exodus and should be included. IZAK (talk) 20:35, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


 * But now why do you say that this represents a "fringe" POV?: "Belief and observance of and in the Biblical Exodus are central to Rabbinic Judaism as expressed by the beliefs and practices of modern-day mainstream Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Torah Judaism. Many orthodox Jews view the Exodus as a key historical event in the development of Judaism and in Jewish history. In recent years, several orthodox scholars have attempted to prove the Exodus using a historical framework while juxtaposing traditional Jewish thought such as Dr. Joshua Berman, who writes about the "Evidence for the Exodus." and Dennis Prager writes about his "Faith in Exodus." According to most Orthodox Jewish sources, the Exodus happened on the 15th day of Nissan in the Hebrew year 2448 (1313 BCE), and lasted 210 years, with the Hebrew being enslaved for 116 years." IZAK (talk) 20:35, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Not wanting to steal Nashidani's thunder, but I wrote a bit of that too . And of course some was actually already there. As I've tried to tell you, I think expanding on the religious and cultural importance of the exodus (not only for Jews) would be a great thing. It's just we need sources.
 * There might be a question about whether we need to include the historical origins of the three pilgrimage festivals here, but as the WP:RS/AC is that they were not originally connected with the Exodus, we shouldn't remove it simply because it disagrees with their origins as stated in the bible per wp:NOTCENSORED. Note that the section is about the exodus in Judaism, it is not the Jewish perspective on the exodus.
 * As to why adding a bunch of sources arguing (from whatever point of view) that the exodus happened is fringe, I don't really enjoy having to explain this to you over and over, but we have sources that call that position fringe and/or fundamentalist. It's right about where you quoted, in fact. That covers everything you want to add. As it is fringe/fundamentalist, we cannot give it the appearance of having more support or validity than it has. I know that you find that frustrating, but no one is making you believe what archaeologists and scholars have to say about the exodus if you don't want to. Our readers don't have to either. Wikipedia is bound to follow their lead per wp:FRINGE and wp:RS/AC, however. This is not related to what percentage of the population holds a belief. Many, perhaps majorities of people believe things that science tells us to be false (e.g. that colds are caused by cold air). We report them as science/scholarship tells us.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:08, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Ermenrich: You are making one big terrible mistake by equating History with Science!! History is a sub-division of the Humanities, not even a part of Social science. Science, means things like, see article Science: "Modern science is commonly divided into three major branches: natural science, social science, and formal science." As for Archaeology, see the article it says "Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In Europe it is often viewed as either a discipline in its own right or a sub-field of other disciplines, while in North America archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology. " Now along comes the Hebrew Bible which is a written document, according to its secular critics it was written about 2,500 years ago and by the way, in Judaism they teach that that was when the Tanach (Hebrew Bible) was actually redacted (not "written") by the Men of the Great Assembly (אַנְשֵׁי כְּנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה), but the origins of the Hebrew Bible goes back to earlier times, such as to Moses who received the Torah (aka Pentateuch) at Mount Sinai following the Exodus, as it states in the Oral Torah, Pirkei Avot (פִּרְקֵי אָבוֹת) aka Chapters of the Fathers: "Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets gave it over to the Men of the Great Assembly..." (משה קיבל תורה מסיניי, ומסרה ליהושוע, ויהושוע לזקנים, וזקנים לנביאים, ונביאים מסרוה לאנשי כנסת הגדולה). As far as pure history is concerned, and I am speaking as a historian, yes I have a MA in history: See History: "Historians place the past in context using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, ecological markers, and material objects including art and artifacts. " that includes Primary sources: "In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions can be used in library science, and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions. In journalism, a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document written by such a person. " So somewhere Wikipedia goes against this and screwed up by overly stressing secondary sources mainly. 2,500 years of the Hebrew Bible make it into a pretty good primary source even for historians. But we have been overcome with the need to deny the Bible's authenticity by secular Biblical criticism, which brings us to the problems me and you are having here recently. It is not just religion that I favor as you seem to think, but I also favor the correct study of history. IZAK (talk) 22:05, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Your remarks about "the correct study of history" strike me as pretty strange, given that I'm studying a subject (decline of ancient Egyptian religion, dealing with a period for which we have far more abundant evidence) in which the majority of scholars savagely criticize one of their number for taking ancient texts at face value, not taking the agendas of the authors into account, and failing to check such texts against the archaeological evidence. That is what the study of history does, and while I think biblical critics often get too wrapped up in their detailed reconstructions of how the Bible took its current form and what really happened, their broadest conclusions are entirely in keeping with historical methodology. In the case of the Book of Exodus, there are very good reasons to be skeptical that it was "created at the time under study". Namely: Israel coalesced as a nation in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse, in which the people of the region lost their literacy, so there was no way to transmit a written account of the hypothetical Exodus from the period in which it takes place; and the claim that hundreds of thousands of Israelites migrated out of Egypt is simply not compatible with the physical evidence.


 * But most importantly, writing from secondary sources is the way Wikipedia works, and it's disturbing that you don't understand that, or at least don't accept it, after having edited here for nearly 18 years. A. Parrot (talk) 23:20, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi A. Parrot. No self-respecting Orthodox Jewish scholar will deprecate the value of the Hebrew Bible as the primary source about Judaism and Jewish history. It's in fact the way classical Jewish scholarship functions. Maybe this will help to explain List of Talmudic principles and it is fully encyclopedic to make note of that too. That should not be a surprise. IZAK (talk) 19:21, 10 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Yup, it's disturbing because we are neither Conservapedia, nor New World Encyclopedia, nor OrthodoxWiki. And because Wikipedia editors should not "play scholar", i.e. WP:NOR. And because of WP:RSPSCRIPTURE: the Bible/Torah never was a WP:RS for Wikipedia and never will be. In the past 18 years Wikipedia chose for more professional or if you want more highbrow sources. IZAK's solution is replace mainstream Bible scholarship and mainstream archaeology with fideist original research and fundamentalist propaganda, i.e. in the sense of "biblical archaeologist" which implies derision from mainstream archaeologists. If Wikipedia does not kowtow to just WP:CHOPSY, then it surely kowtows to top 100 hundred universities from the world, according to https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2020/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats . And forget a moment about primary and secondary sources, Wikipedia always kowtows to the consensus of mainstream experts. IZAK is not allowed to undermine the consensus of mainstream experts with primary/secondary sources. Nobody is allowed that around here. We are a fair encyclopedia in the sense that such rule applies to each and every editor. Wikipedia already chose its side: it sides with the academic elite, it renders the knowledge according to this elite. It's a matter of who does Wikipedia wants to associate with, to which league does it owe allegiance. This isn't anti-Judaism. Shaye J. D. Cohen is part of the academic elite and at the same time a believing Jew (it's true that he isn't a naive Jewish believer, he is a Bible scholar). Tgeorgescu (talk) 02:09, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Tgeorgescu, in fact Wikipedia is far greater and far wider than even CHOPSY. Because number one, CHOPSY is not the WP equivalent of Papal infallibility, and number two, not everything is CHOPSYeable, such as belly dancing and comic book Superheros which are not taught or studied at most universities yet they do get ample treatment on WP. In other words, you are narrowing down WP to suit your own personal POV while WP is ever-widening and WELCOMING to include all forms of information, especially reliable ancient religious information. IZAK (talk) 19:21, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, that's why CHOPSY only applies to scholarly claims. It does not apply to true belief or Justin Bieber. Tgeorgescu (talk) 09:29, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps we should have an article called The Exodus in Judaism, or something similar, to address specifically this issue, although it is already addressed in depth across a variety of existing articles? We would still need to include a sentence which says "The historicity of the Exodus is rejected by modern archaeology", to preserve WP:NPOV etc. Wdford (talk) 11:26, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If IZAK wants to write it without any sources that’s not going to solve the problem. I would also question giving a page for a religious group to argue that their sacred texts contain historical fact when that isn’t the consensus of scholars. If we do that we’re opening a can of worms.—Ermenrich (talk) 11:33, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Obviously it would need to be properly sourced, to Wikipedia standards, and obviously it would need to include the caveat that the consensus of scholars is firmly against the historicity of the religious myths. There is no harm in having a page dedicated to what their texts say - we do the same for other religions - provided the lack of historicity is plainly reported as well. Wdford (talk) 13:13, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Again, I think the danger is that IZAK will use that to add paragraphs stating that "According to Orthodox Judaism the exodus is a true and real thing that happened, and rabbi X says that it happened and rabbi Y says that it happened and fundamentalist scholar Z criticizes mainstream scholars for blah blah blah" (compare what he tried to add before). Which sort of misses the point of what such a page should be about. I have no problem adding some additional sourced information about Jewish prayer and rabbinical tradition here, provided it is properly sourced, however. The section can easily be expanded (without subdividing as was done before). I honestly think that we could cover both of those sections in two sentences without any real loss.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:30, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your suggestion to write up an an article about the Exodus in Judaism, not a bad idea but too big a job for me at the present. It would still be open to lots of disputes as  points out. However Ermenrich is adamant that the current article take as a given that the Exodus is not a historical event as the Hebrew Bible presents it. Anything else is a "fundamentalist fringe" view. But for a start I do wish that Ermenrich would allow me to insert the following brief section as I have tried: "Belief and observance of and in the Biblical Exodus are central to Rabbinic Judaism as expressed by the beliefs and practices of modern-day mainstream Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Torah Judaism. Many orthodox Jews view the Exodus as a key historical event in the development of Judaism and in Jewish history. In recent years, several orthodox scholars have attempted to prove the Exodus using a historical framework while juxtaposing traditional Jewish thought such as Dr. Joshua Berman, who writes about the "Evidence for the Exodus." and Dennis Prager writes about his "Faith in Exodus." " I don't see why it should be a problem as it pretty much summarizes the position of classical Judaism. In addition, there is already a lot about the Exodus in Judaism to be found in the sections I have cited above (see below) already existing on Wikipedia in great detail, but a way needs to found to summarize the multiple citations in these carefully chosen sections:

" ====The Exodus in Rabbinical writings====

See the following for in-depth descriptions, citations and discussions of the Exodus in classical Rabbinic literature studied and accepted by most Orthodox Jewish scholars:


 * 1 Va'eira: In classical rabbinic interpretation; 2 Bo: In classical rabbinic interpretation; 3 Beshalach: In classical rabbinic interpretation.
 * 1 Va'eira: In medieval Jewish interpretation; 2 Bo: In medieval Jewish interpretation; 3 Beshalach: In medieval Jewish interpretation
 * 1 Va'eira: In the liturgy; 2 Bo: In the liturgy; 3 Beshalach: In the liturgy

Modern day Orthodox scholars and rabbis have in turn followed in the pathways of classical Rabbinic literature and have taught about how the Exodus applies in contemporary times"

Thanks again for your open-mindedness. IZAK (talk) 20:21, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Well, I agree the article should say which varieties of Judaism, or Jewish groups, insist on a historical Exodus and which don't. A. Parrot (talk) 21:48, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , do we have any sources for that? I can't imagine you'd want it added with IZAK's proposed wording. If we do that, don't we also need to state which Christian and Muslim groups insist on a historical exodus?--Ermenrich (talk) 21:51, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * A quick google search turned up this Torah is Not History] at reformjudaism.org, but I'm not sure we can say the whole denomination holds these views, as there's also this on the same website (albeit this version of the exodus is a smaller version as favored by a number of scholars): The Exodus is not Fiction. I've found a few similar things, e.g. . But none of these claim to speak for all Reform Judaism. I also found this NY times story :
 * "Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation. Such startling propositions -- the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years -- have gained wide acceptance among non-Orthodox rabbis. But there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss them with the laity -- until now. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, has just issued a new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60 years. Called Etz Hayim (Tree of Life in Hebrew), it offers an interpretation that incorporates the latest findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures. To the editors who worked on the book, it represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document."
 * That last claim might actually be something we could discuss adding, if we're going to add anything on Orthodox rabbis insisting on literal belief. But also see here: :
 * "Dennis Prager, a radio personality who teaches at the University of Judaism, was outraged by Wolpe’s remarks, writing in an article that, “If the Exodus did not occur, there is no Judaism.” Though few Conservative leaders took this extreme approach, many–including Joel Meyers, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, and Jerome Epstein, the executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism–professed their belief in the historicity of the Exodus."
 * So it's at the least very messy.

--Ermenrich (talk) 22:13, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * No, I don't have the sources, nor do I agree with IZAK's wording. I only meant to agree with the general idea of saying which groups insist on a literal Exodus and which don't. And that should absolutely extend to Christians and Muslims (with sourcing, obviously). A. Parrot (talk) 22:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Ermenrich, just because it is confusing to you does not mean it cannot be done. We can work from the known to the unknown. It is actually not so complicated and can be summed up in one sentence: In America, most of Orthodox Judaism pretty much believes in the literalness of the Hebrew Bible, while most of Reform Judaism does not, with Conservative Judaism being somewhere in the middle but tending to the Reform view, and hence the same applies to belief in the Exodus as described in the Hebrew Bible. That should not be too difficult to state and substantiate with WP:RS. IZAK (talk) 23:29, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * EDIT: I misread what you said, mea culpa. Pretty much you've said what I say below now. According to the NYTimes, it's only most Orthodox rabbis who believe in that the exodus must have happened, to quote the above again Such startling propositions -- the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years -- have gained wide acceptance among non-Orthodox rabbis. The article is discussing the positions taken by the (then new) Conservative Torah commentary. But it's obviously more complicated than that: non-fundamentalist denominations simply have a far greater tolerance for different beliefs about the Bible than fundamentalists ones do.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:43, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Proposal: Splitting this article into two
Proposal: Basically, just as there there is a separate article for Historicity of the Bible (versus regular articles for the Bible and Hebrew Bible) we could solve a lot of problems by splitting this article into two, meaning create a new article called Historicity of the Exodus (currently a REDIRECT to Sources and parallels of the Exodus) and the regular article left standing for Biblical and Judaic, or Christian content. Thus Historicity of the Exodus would include Sources and parallels of the Exodus and the detailed sections of The Exodus, The Exodus, The Exodus, so that then the The Exodus article would consist of the logical The Exodus, The Exodus, The Exodus, and the sections The Exodus, The Exodus can be expanded with more information. End of problem. IZAK (talk) 22:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Support IZAK (talk) 22:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This is an obvious POV fork, particularly given that the whole article is less than 5,000 words, far too small to justify splitting based on size. You can't shunt evidence aside just because you don't like it. A. Parrot (talk) 22:45, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi A.Parrot, are you accusing the Bible of having a "POV"? Sounds odd to accuse the Bible of saying what it says as POV! Besides, there is a huge amount currently on WP denying the Exodus than actually trying to understand what the Bible's Exodus itself means. Basically as things stand there are not one, but two articles denying the historicity of the Exodus, and constant opposition to affirming or inserting any POV of the historicity of the Exodus. Where is the balance here and can you show how this is not WP:UNDUE, with a subject this WP:N to have two articles belabor the point of "it did not happen"? IZAK (talk) 22:56, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Another point that I want to ask is why in the entire The Exodus article does it not cite this important verse: "And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, beside children" (וַיִּסְעוּ בְנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל מֵרַעְמְסֵס, סֻכֹּתָה, כְּשֵׁשׁ-מֵאוֹת אֶלֶף רַגְלִי הַגְּבָרִים, לְבַד מִטָּף) plus  "And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle." ( וְגַם-עֵרֶב רַב, עָלָה אִתָּם, וְצֹאן וּבָקָר, מִקְנֶה כָּבֵד מְאֹד.)? This key bit of information, it's not a "POV", is missing and needs to be elaborated upon, not just attacked in absentia. IZAK (talk) 23:04, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * To steal from my own past comments on this page: Many ancient texts describe events that happened centuries before they were written, which incorporate memories of genuine events along with legends. For instance, there really was some kind of attack on Troy in the 12th century BC, but people don't generally go looking for a historical Achilles. Scholars use the same criteria for analyzing the Bible that they use for these other ancient texts. To do otherwise would introduce bias by privileging the Bible above other ancient texts. Personally, I think anyone defending the accuracy of the early biblical books should read the Nibelungenlied and the Arthurian sections of Historia Regum Britanniae and compare them with what actually happened in northern Europe during the fifth century AD. Like those texts, the early biblical books represent a centuries-later understanding of a period of disorder and societal breakdown: the fall of the West Roman Empire in one case and the Bronze Age Collapse in the other.


 * And the work of checking the text against the outside evidence has been done, very extensively. To shunt that material—volumes and volumes of research by RSes—into an article with less traffic would be doing a disservice to the reader. And it's obvious why you want to do it. You haven't been able to muddy the waters of the historicity section with the work of pro-historicity religious scholars who aren't qualified to check the text against the evidence, so you choose to push the treatment of historicity aside entirely. A. Parrot (talk) 23:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * A. Parrot, this is not just some dusty mundane text we are speaking about. It's the Bible, the core document of Judaism and Christianity. It's about the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews who are more than capable of knowing about their own origins as well as for Christians. I have a question: Just whose Exodus is it? To a motley bunch of professors at universities (and to their upholders on WP with methods of ruthless WP:OWN) or to people of faith? I know this point is not given the respect it deserves, but for example take a look at the Christianity article: "It is the world's largest religion, with about 2.4 billion followers. ...the four largest branches of Christianity are the Catholic Church (1.3 billion/50.1%), Protestantism (920 million/36.7%), the Eastern Orthodox Church (230 million) and Oriental Orthodoxy (62 million/Orthodoxy combined at 11.9%), amid various efforts toward unity (ecumenism). Despite a decline in adherence in the West, Christianity remains the dominant religion in the region, with about 70% of the population identifying as Christian. Christianity is growing in Africa and Asia, the world's most populous continents. Christians remain persecuted in some regions the world, especially in the Middle-East, North Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. " do they not deserve a voice as much as Bible critics? And then you have Judaism, there are only about 14 million Jews in the world today, but they are the holders and originators of the Hebrew Bible. Do they not deserve to be presnted in proportion to their influence on human civilization? IZAK (talk) 23:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * "It's about the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews who are more than capable of knowing about their own origins as well as for Christians."
 * An 'ethnos' does not have any intrinsic right to write its own history and affirm this 'national' version as on a par with, if not superior to, what 'outsiders' write. That infantile malady, as Einstein called it, is excluded on principle from Wikipedia. How any ethnos may tend to view its past comes from education, slanted to indoctrinate a sense of common identity among heterogeneous subjects, and is written by nationalists almost always with an airy insouciance to the facts, or historical method. History is the domain of qualified historians, whose status is determined not by their ethnicity or faith, but by their mastery of the relevant scholarship. I've met very few Christians who know much about the historical side of their religion. Most Japanese never had heard of the sun-goddess a hundred and fifty years ago: decades of indoctrination had millions ready to die for her and her putative lineal descendant. Nishidani (talk) 08:40, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You're pushing for alternative history (read: alternative facts). Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:47, 11 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose. This is an obvious attempt to avoid dealing with the fact that reliable scholarship has determined that the Pentateuch is not an accurate representation of history. Note that this article is about the Exodus as an event. It would be a great disservice to our readers not to say what historians think about whether this event happened/how it happened. A. Parrot is right, you're trying to shunt off unwanted info into a less read article, just as you tried to remove it from the lead before.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:46, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This article is the "historicity" article already. We also already have Book of Exodus which focuses on what the Bible texts say about the Exodus - even though those texts are not historical. Wdford (talk) 17:56, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose. I'm not taking sides on the legitimacy of either argument, but it is pretty clear that the split request is in response to the above argument. In addition, Wdford is correct - why would we create a 2nd page that deals with just the actual text of the book.Ckruschke (talk) 18:44, 12 August 2020 (UTC)Ckruschke
 * Oppose Splitting the article just to hide inconvenient information is not an idea based on Wikipedia's policies. Dimadick (talk) 09:02, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Founding myth or Passover narrative?
I made changes to the introductory paragraphs, harmonizing it with sister pages in French and German, and making some of the sentences more specific.

In the first sentence, German wiki uses the word Erzählung (story; narration); French récit biblique (Biblical account, narrative), Spanish la historia (story or history); Italian racconto (story, account), Russian says предание (legend, tradition). So "narrative" or "Biblical tradition" brings English wikipedia into line with its siblings. The "narrow range" of chapters 1-15 is mentioned in the German article; someone should check the range actually referred to in Haggadah.

The phrase "founding myth" is problematic because: (1) the "founding myth" link redirects to Origin myth, and as an "origin", the Book of Genesis preempts Exodus; (2) "founding myth" is only used by one scholar, whereas there are thousands of scholars who have published on the Exodus, many of whom are notable enough to have wikipedia articles about them; and (3) "founding myth" is an oversimplification of a complex situation (for example, if the Tribe of Judah had Genesis as the starting point, and Ten Northern Tribes has Exodus as the starting point, then Exodus cannot be the founding myth) for certain periods of Biblical history.

It would seem that "charter myth" is a useful concept (an origin myth that involves a covenant), but is Exodus the only charter myth in history? To claim that a single instance can be better understood by a general concept when the general concept is a single instance -- we might call this "historical-critical obscurantism".

Definitions should begin with the narrow definition first: the account surrounding the festival of Passover (matter-of-fact). In the history of religion, ritual often comes first, the oral narrative later, the written narrative last. Vagabond nanoda (talk) 08:49, 22 August 2020 (UTC)


 * You changed:


 * the consensus to most;
 * composition to redaction.


 * I don't know if that's verifiable. First gain WP:CONSENSUS for your edits.


 * Further, Judaism as monotheism appeared late on the scene of history and Jews became overwhelmingly monotheists much later (in the Maccabean period). So yeah, in the periods before that they did not have Exodus as the charter myth, but they weren't Judaist Jews. If by Jews we mean monotheists, then Jesus was born in a very young nation. Tgeorgescu (talk) 09:16, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll also point out that there is no reason to harmonise this with other language Wikipedias. Most of them do not have the same policies and guidelines as ours for a start. Sure, if you've got an article about a French subject you might want to use fr.wiki as a guide, but this isn't a French subject. Exodus is the origin myth for Judaism, Genesis the origin myth for the universe. Doug Weller  talk 10:25, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
 * From my own experience - I often check sister articles in those languages - the English  wiki tends to be, not always invariably, but very often far more advanced towards encyclopedic coverage, and more alert to contemporary scholarship, than the others, if only because far more editors work on this wiki. If one does check, at a glance it is worthwhile looking at the parallel notes to see the quantity difference 8and quality). The other problem is that editors of those articles (less frequently in Russian) tend to create their pages translating a much earlier  version from the English wiki. For those reasons alone, and those mentioned by Doug above, that particular argument does not stand.Nishidani (talk) 10:57, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
 * This is the first time that I see other language versions of Wikipedia elevated to a level of almost equality with the English Wikipedia. I also like, for the sake of curiosity, in many cases to see and compare what other language Wikipedias are saying about a specific subject, but I've never thought or never seen their text being elevated to this level of reliability. I also agree with the arguments against doing this brought up by the previous responders. warshy (¥¥) 17:06, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

It is arrogant of the English WP to WP:OWN any topic or article because the very notion of Wikipedia as an open international global encyclopedia is bigger than just one language or culture or group of scholars. It seems that some sanity prevails on the Spanish, French, German, Russian Wikipedias as far as the appropriate wording for The Exodus article is concerned. Bravo to for his insertion of some sanity, and finally a reality check for all those in denial relying on misinformed and anti-Biblical secular scholarship. IZAK (talk) 05:15, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Oh, man, you are your own worst enemy. You're doing yourself a disservice by putting things that way. Tgeorgescu (talk) 06:21, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * wp:Battlefield much, IZAK? What you’ve said is also directly counter to Wikipedia’s policies on sourcing, scholarship, and religion—-but you know that already and don’t seem to care. Also, the other versions still say that the Exodus is a myth or legend, regardless of whether they call it a "story" in the first sentence. Check for yourself.—-Ermenrich (talk) 12:30, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


 * —you say "the other versions still say that the Exodus is a myth or legend". Are you saying that the other versions matter? Should we be looking to Wikipedias in other languages to see how they treat this subject matter? Bus stop (talk) 15:26, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


 * That’s what IZAK was saying, I just pointed out that the idea that the article saying the exodus is a myth is unique to English Wikipedia is bogus.—Ermenrich (talk) 16:28, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Ludicrously, Vagabond nanoda makes an edit, and it gets immediately reverted. Bus stop (talk) 16:53, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * He/she removed any references to myth and disguised its disputed historicity as a sign of modernism. The reversion was appropriate. Dimadick (talk) 17:06, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * When somebody tries to water down the academic consensus, experienced editors react. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:43, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

The Gospels
In the timewasting obsession with this orthodox stuff, no one seems to think it worth the trouble to add a section on what is a glaring absence here. The exodus theme in the Gospels, esp. Mark. The exodus schema it has long been argued formed a template for the Christian gospels, as we would expect, given that the Gospels started out as a branch of Jewish religious literature.Nishidani (talk) 21:43, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Nishidani, we already have The Exodus and a whole article Sources and parallels of the Exodus, feel free to add to those. IZAK (talk) 22:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks IZAK. Forgetfulness after a long hot day, if not indeed dementia, acquiring a good memory for forgetting things, as it has been defined. Nishidani (talk) 09:15, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I added a bit more material on the gospels today. There's a lot more obviously, and if we could get more on post-NT uses of the Exodus in Christianity it would also be good. As well as anything on Islam.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:55, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Add that the exodus was the template for Matthew's story of the Flight into Egypt? (Matthew had to get Jesus into Egypt before he could bring him out again). Also the name Joseph is apparently taken from the Joseph in Genesis, with the same exodus connection.Achar Sva (talk) 00:26, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Should not this be adressed first in the Flight into Egypt article? Its historicity section is only three-lines long and only hints at parallels between Jesus and Moses. Dimadick (talk) 09:08, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * No reason for one or the other to go first, it's just a matter of getting the sources. But I'll have a look at Flight into Egypt.Achar Sva (talk) 09:16, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it would be fine here. There is a voluminous amount of work on the impact of the Exodus narrative and the way it framed Jewish-Christian accounts of their own sect's foundation. It is a tacit narrative template that conditions the Gospels in numerous places. To break these up into pieces and allocate them bit by bit to disparate articles would be to miss a key design element in the New Testament. To those Christians, being overwhelmingly Jewish, the Exodus was seminal, just as one would expect. Religion is very echoic mythically.Nishidani (talk) 09:22, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

We are now getting into murky territory. Has anyone here read Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill: "which argues that the New Testament Gospels were written as wartime propaganda by scholars connected to the Roman imperial court of the Flavian emperors: Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. According to Atwill, their primary purpose in creating the religion was to control the spread of Judaism and moderate its political virulence. The Jewish nationalist Zealots had been defeated in the First Jewish–Roman War of 70 AD, but Judaism remained an influential movement throughout the Mediterranean region. Atwill argues that the biblical character Jesus Christ is a typological representation of the Roman Emperor Titus." And not just of Moses! IZAK (talk) 23:28, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If you are seriously interested in that idea, IZAK, I would suggest you read as a corrective, a very important, seriously historical work out now in Hebrew and recently reviewed by Israel Yuval in Haaretz. See Israel Jacob Yuval, 'We Curse Christianity Three Times a Day': Can Jews and Christians Truly Reconcile? Haaretz 14 August 2020. Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll sleep on that one, dear IZAK, probably much as the author did in writing it. Admittedly I haven't read the book, but it is obvious trash to judge from the summaries. Apparently his boyhood profound studies at St.Mary's in Japan didn't get him far enough into Greek to grasp that it would require a genius of Shakespeare's stature in imperial Rome to forget all of the rules of classical Greek and write in four different hands a form of that language which all accomplished scholars of that period would have thought of as a barbaric souk mangling of Attic.Nishidani (talk) 23:43, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * See Christ myth theory and Historicity of Jesus. Atwill is arguing for a fringe theory.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:51, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The article on the book itself contains a rejection of its theory from other mythicists. And two negative comment by mainstream scholar Bart D. Ehrman. On the book itself "I know sophomores in college who could rip this ... to shreds" and on Atwill: "no training in any relevant field." Dimadick (talk) 11:31, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * See Bible conspiracy theory. Tgeorgescu (talk) 12:33, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm rubbing my eyes in disbelief to watch all those who want to send Moses and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible into the dustbin of mythological beliefs all of a sudden turn around and defend Jesus and the New Testament from being treated to its own mythological waste basket! Personally I loved watching this very informative video: CAESAR'S MESSIAH: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus - OFFICIAL VERSIONIZAK (talk) 22:04, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You're comparing wildly different things. The Exodus story is set in a murky period when there was no writing system in which to record events, and the kingdoms that claimed the Exodus as their own origin story didn't emerge in the archaeological record until a few centuries later. This is exactly the kind of situation in which ethnic groups develop myths about their own origins. The stories about Jesus date to a vastly better recorded time period, and while historians decidedly do not assume the gospel narratives are true except in the broad outlines, we have enough evidence from people only a few degrees of separation away from Jesus (Paul of Tarsus and Josephus) to believe he existed. A. Parrot (talk) 23:10, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi A. Parrot. Obviously the chances that something that happened about 2,000 years ago would have more written records is greater than something that happened 3,300 years ago. But you are overlooking one important thing that it is the same record keepers, the Jews, that tell about both Moses and Jesus, as a "Yeshu" = Jesus is recorded in the Talmud as the worst Jew who ever lived! I am not making this up. And by the same token Moses is held up as the greatest Jew who ever lived. Now there is a lot of murkiness and outright lies that surrounds the rise of early and later Christianity. At first it is assumed the Yeshu = Jesus led a "Jewish Messianic" aka Jewish Christian cult that was rejected by mainstream Judaism, the so-called Pharisees. Yeshu = Jesus lived and died an observant Jew and said that to become a disciple of his one must adhere to the 613 Commandments of the Torah (I believe it is so stated in the book of Mathew) that was later rejected by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. How the later Gospels emerged and the New Testament was created is also shrouded in much myth and mystery and they are not really connected to the real Yeshu = Jesus who lived and died in Judea. But now to the subject at hand. You are wrong when you claim that there was no writing system at the time of the Exodus because the ancient Phoenician language existed and it is a sister language to the Ancient Hebrew alphabet (that REDIRECTS to Phoenician alphabet, see also Ancient Hebrew language: "Ancient Hebrew (ISO 639-3 code hbo is a blanket term for pre-modern varieties of the Hebrew language: Paleo-Hebrew (such as the Siloam inscription), a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Biblical Hebrew (including the use of Tiberian vocalization). Mishnaic Hebrew, a form of the Hebrew language that is found in the Talmud") and according to the accepted rabbinic tradition the original Ten Commandments and Torah were written in ancient Hebrew. Later in the time of Ezra the Torah's Hebrew alphabet was re-written in Assyrian script aka Ktav Ashuri leading to the error common among modern secular bible critics that the Torah was written then by Ezra but it was not. It was written by Moses and handed down through the ages to our day. So while the story of the Exodus may be puzzling to outsiders to the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews it is an unconfused and unconfusing document. While the New Testament is riddled with holes and inaccuracies. IZAK (talk) 00:29, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * While I would love to point out all the inaccuracies in your post (*cough* Phoenician Alphabet postdates the time of any Exodus, *cough*),, might I remind you that this is wp:NOTAFORUM? None of this is relevant to the article.--Ermenrich (talk) 00:51, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Ermenrich, I was responding to A. Parrot. This section is about IF we can extrapolate Christianity's Gospels from the Exodus, and I pointed out that there is a big problem with that as there are schools of thought that argue for the fact that Jesus is a created myth, much like YOU argue the Exodus and Moses are myths. On the subject of the Hebrew alphabet as used by the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, according to classical Judaism the Ancient Hebrew, the language of the Hebrew Bible, predates the Phoenician Alphabet. While WP says that Paleo-Hebrew REDIRECTS to Phoenician alphabet: "The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear script (in a Semitic context, not connected to Minoan writing systems), because it is an early development of the pictographic Proto- or Old Canaanite script, into a linear, alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script. Its immediate predecessor, the Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite or early West Semitic alphabet, used in the final stages of the Late Bronze Age first in Canaan and then in the Syro-Hittite kingdoms, is the oldest fully matured alphabet, ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, or alternatively, as shown with phylogenetic algorithms, from Minoan writing system. ". You already said to look at Historicity of Jesus (something YOU evidently believe in) as a way to back up the Gospels as expressing Exodus themes. IZAK (talk) 22:22, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The original subject of this section was the way episodes in the gospels were shaped to echo the Exodus story. You keep dragging us back to the historicity of the Exodus, which has no direct bearing on the use of the Exodus story, in its familiar biblical form, to shape the gospel narratives. Jewish traditions are not reliable sources, the sources that are reliable do not treat the Exodus as historical, and you're not going to convince everyone else on this page otherwise. Drop the stick. A. Parrot (talk) 23:01, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Yup, our task isn't to re-litigate the academic consensus, our task is to simply render it. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:07, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Strange redirects. We have an article on the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet that was mostly in use between the 10th and 5th centuries BCE. The main article on the Phoenician alphabet does not cover the texts written in this variant. Dimadick (talk) 10:32, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * "The original subject of this section was the way episodes in the gospels were shaped to echo the Exodus story." Which would attest to their authors' familiarity with the Exodus narrative which they emulated, and probably the familiarity of their intended audience with the Exodus. The Gospel of Mark is thought to have been written for a gentile audience, but the Gospel of Matthew was written for a Jewish Christian audience. Dimadick (talk) 10:50, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * None of which means we need to have yet another argument about the historicity of the exodus or now, apparently, of Jesus. Neither is relevant to this discussion, and the latter not even to this article.—-Ermenrich (talk) 11:23, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

"Jesus lived and died an observant Jew and said that to become a his disciple one must adhere to the 613 Commandments of the Torah (I believe it is so stated in the book of Mathew)" Really IZAK, you are extending Chukot Akum to the very process of thinking in implicitly pitting something you appear to assume to be gentile scholarship against what you mistakenly believe to be 'Jewish' scholarship repeatedly above, and the result is predictably farcical, since you have no idea of what the former is. The author of the Gospel of Matthew lived one and a half centuries before Simlai determined that the mitzvot were 613 ( Tractate Makkot 23b) so he can hardly have composed chapter 5:17-48  with such praeternatural prescience as to anticipate what would be recorded for the first time in the Bavli centuries later. As several editors have noted, this is not a forum, and you should really desist, it's embarrassing.Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 19 August 2020 (UTC)


 * —would you find it valid if User:IZAK invoked arguments in this Talk page discussion that were derived from Judaism or the bible or ancient history or lore? You should use plain English. You are saying "IZAK, you are extending Chukot Akum to the very process of thinking". Why would anyone be invoking a Jewish concept found in Leviticus 20:23? Is this according to WP:Leviticus? Or would this be in keeping with WP:Chuck E. Cheese? Bus stop (talk) 15:16, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't understand the above. IZAK, in his wild caricatures, made an egregious blunder. I corrected it, and made an analogy he would certainly understand for reflection. This happens all the time on talk pages.Nishidani (talk) 15:26, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm being a little bit flippant. That's why you may not understand it. But really, invoking Chukot Akum is a little bit convoluted, isn't it? Bus stop (talk) 15:31, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Not really. In the variety of fundamentalism we have here, there is a rabbinical tradition that strongly advises keeping at arm's length any mingling of Israel's wisdom with that of the world's nations. (Sifre Deuteronomy 34) The idea that sefarim hitsonim or books external to the sacred canon should not inflect the Torah has some halakhic basis. Maimonides himself took this latter expression to refer to works of history. I may be wrong, but I read what IZAK argues within this framework.Nishidani (talk) 15:53, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You are larding the discussion with irrelevancies. Talk page discussions are unconcerned with "rabbinical traditions" or what has "some halakhic basis". Bus stop (talk) 16:41, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * What's your game? IZAK 'larded' the talk page with an impressive number of non-sequiturs and opinions. I corrected him on one, and gently reminded him not to confuse two orders of thought. The nudge disconcerted you. You question me flippantly, I give a clarification, and, lo and behoid' I'm the one who gets off the track 'larding' the page, not IZAK's free wheeling fundamentalist divagations. Really. Nishidani (talk) 16:50, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Convoluted reasoning is irrelevant. Here you go saying you are giving "clarification". Wikipedia is not concerned with "rabbinical traditions", that which has "some halakhic basis", any more than Wikipedia operates according to principles of Chukot Akum. Stick to Policies and guidelines, not ancient biblical texts. Bus stop (talk) 17:05, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If you have problems reading a thread, then reread it, even several times, until you grasp the arguments. It worked for St Thomas Aquinas. If I say IZAK's methodological bifurcation reminds me of Chukot Akum, and is inappropriate for Wikipedia, and you ineptly deduce I am arguing that Wikipedia operates in terms of Chukot Akum, then I suggest you might refresh yourself with syllogistic logic. You won't even find propositional warrant for that in the Imaginary Logic of  Nicolai A. Vasiliev.Nishidani (talk) 20:03, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

minimalist maximalist references
The origin and historicity section says: ...the school of Biblical minimalism And ...“Bibilical maximalism” in quotes There is no school of biblical minimalism. As far as minimalists and maxmimalists, these have never been actual academic terms, they were just old derogatory terms that scholars used to denigrate theories and eventually to imply the false argument that a middle ground must be true. There is a wikipedia page on the concept, but these derogatory terms don’t belong in this article. I can't check if the source even says "often associated with the school of Biblical minimalism" because the link has no preview, but regardless I explained why it doesn't belong in this article. As this article states: There is an increasing trend among scholars to see the biblical exodus traditions as the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis The academic consensus is that The Exodus story is historically false. The only question is what random historical event can it be tied to (“historical basis”). The Canaanites - who did not live in Egypt, were not slaves, and were not Jewish The Hyskos - who were not Jewish, and were dictators over Egypt Or as the article states - despite the lack of any evidence, there “may have been” some Egyptians (note-doesnt even say slaves or Jews) that went to Israel

Further, the last sentence of the entire historicity section is another condemnation of “minimalist” scholars. It being the last sentence of that paragraph falsely implies that the scholars mentioned in the paragraph are “minimalists”. The sentence also falsely implies without source that there is textual evidence fro the exodus and that it is contrary to archaeologists consensus. Also, its just generally not a good closing statement to the paragraph as it contradicts the paragraph, and it is a bad close for the historicity section as a whole for the above reasons. I suggest that the minimalists and maximalists references, including the last sentence, be removed. I think this would be a good summary as a last sentence to the last paragraph. It is a quote from William Dever: "The implications of the new picture of indigenous Late Bronze Age Canaanite origins for the majority of the early Israelite population is clear. Not only is there no archaeological evidence for an exodus, there is no need to posit such an event. We can account for Israelite origins, historically and archaeologically, without presuming any Egyptian background. As a Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, I regard the historicity of the Exodus as a dead issue." It is a good summary of the last paragraph and the academic consensus that the Exodus is historically false. Word2001 (talk) 17:15, 13 September 2020 (UTC) Word2001 (talk) 05:17, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello User:Fajkfnjsak, returning to your old bugbear I see, Talk:The_Exodus/Archive_18. Or did you not think that this being your first and only post on this specific topic was obvious enough to figure out it was you? wp:DUCK.--Ermenrich (talk) 14:36, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Anyway the minimalism-maximalism dispute was a dispute from the 1990s. Now the question is moot. Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:29, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, hence why we say the maximalist position on the exodus is defunct.—Ermenrich (talk) 18:52, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed, theyre just outdated derogatory terms, not academic positions. To characterize them as such is incorrect.  Further reason why they don't belong in this article.  Otherwise, wed have to go to all articles on the Bible and use these outdated derogatory terms that mischaracterize the scholars and their theories, fasly imply that the middle ground must be true (contrary to the academic consensus in this case), and mislead the readers.  And as I stated the article doesn't even use "minimalism and maximalism" it uses the made up school of biblical minimalism and "biblical maximalism" in quotes, exemplifying the bias and derogatory use of these terms. This old non-academic dispute has its own wiki page where the terms and a proper explanation of the dispute belong. We should not be adding non-academic derogatory terms to every page on the Bible. Word2001 (talk) 19:54, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * You aren't going to bother denying that you're a sock of Fajkfnjsak? We use the wording we find in academic sources, you can check Davies yourself, he's online.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:30, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * so are you okay with the 2 changes to this article that I suggested in my original comment? Removing the 2 terms: school of biblical minimalism and "biblical maximalism" from the 1st paragraph.  And removing the last sentence of the last paragraph in the historicity section?  Thanks Word2001 (talk) 20:49, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The Exodus is from the Pentateuch, the minimalism-maximalism dispute wasn't about the Pentateuch. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:04, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed, even further reason it does not belong in this article. and thanks for the quick response.Word2001 (talk) 21:10, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Pentateuch minimalism/maximalism should not be conflated with Biblical minimalism/maximalism. Minimalism and maximalism have meanings which are independent of the dispute from the 1990s. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:17, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * can you clarify if you are okay with my 2 changes? Word2001 (talk) 21:21, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I would let others chime in. However, minimalism does not necessarily means Biblical minimalism (specific to the dispute from the 1990s). Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:24, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, I was plannign on waiting to see more support, I just thought I would ask to see if you suppported it because it sounds like you do but I wanted to be sure. But okay well see what others think Word2001 (talk) 21:26, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Bad language - both events can't be true
This language in the article is a misrepresenation

Yahweh commands Moses to send twelve spies ahead to Canaan to scout the land. The spies discover that the Canaanites are strong, and, believing that the Israelites cannot defeat them, the spies falsely report to the Israelites that Canaan is full of giants so that the Israelites will not invade (Numbers 13:31-33).

The Israelites come to the oasis of Kadesh Barnea, where Miriam dies and the Israelites remain for forty years.[20] The people are without water, so Yahweh commands Moses to get water from a rock by speaking to it, but Moses strikes the rock with his staff instead, for which Yahweh forbids him from entering the promised land.

Both of the above cannot be true. An act of MOSES was NOT the reason the Israelites had to stay in the wiilderness for 40 years. The Lying faithless spies were the reason.

MOSES sends the spies after a vission/message from God. The spies, except Caleb, report to Moses that the locals are strong but then MOSES abuses them, calling them liars and faithless. Because they are faithless they do not deserve to live in the promissed land and then forbids the current generations of Israelites from entering the Promissed Land. Thus living in the desert for 40 years while the current generation dies off.

Caleb who did not lie, was allowed to enter after the 40 years had passed as he was not faithless.

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

The lying spies were the straw that broke the camels back, not an act of Moses. 71.174.128.144 (talk) 04:50, 14 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Ignore the above - one is the reason why the Israelites can't go and the other why Moses can't go.71.174.128.144 (talk) 05:03, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Moses in historicity section
The historicity section says this: No modern attempt to identify a historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, The academic consensus as stated in the source 1 is this: The overwhelming scholarly consensus today is that Moses is a mythical figure. I suggest that we replace the current wording with the latter since it is the academic consensus on the historicity of Moses. Word2001 (talk) 21:06, 13 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Israel Finkelstein told in a film that while he is not denying the historicity of Abraham and Moses, they are irretrievably lost to historical investigation. So, yeah, there are scholars who maintain that maybe there was a real person behind Moses, but, unfortunately, we cannot know anything about him. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:10, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * On that basis you could have a real person behind Lord Voldemort.Achar Sva (talk) 22:52, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thats a good point. That basis, which applies equally to all mythical figures that lack any historical evidence, should not prevent us from stating the academic consensus that Moses is a mythical figure. Word2001 (talk) 23:01, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thats a fair point. Although, in addition to the lack of evidence for Moses, the source I linked above says that Yahwism is highly syncrestic.  I've read the same about Moses, that he is a mashup of previous myths from other religions and cultures of "the classic hero who returns to his people to save them after being sent in a basket down a river".  Apparently it was a common mythology of the time period.   And I see the Moses wiki page does say - "...while retaining the possibility that a Moses-like figure existed".  So we could replace the current wording with this:
 * The overwhelming scholarly consensus today is that Moses is a mythical figure, while retaining the possibility that a Moses-like figure existed. Word2001 (talk) 21:18, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

you shouldn’t encourage the sock puppet, there’s a reason he was banned. He shouldn’t be encouraged in his socking behavior, and his goal is to have the word myth appear every other sentence out of some strange belief that the exodus is offensive to ancient Egyptians.—Ermenrich (talk) 23:06, 13 September 2020 (UTC)


 * The SECULAR accedemic consensus is the Moses was a fantasy figure. Millions of Jews and Billions of Christians disagree. The Secularists seem to be outnumbered.71.174.128.144 (talk) 04:17, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Irrelevant, since Argumentum ad populum is not a method Wikipedia uses for sourcing its articles. Dimadick (talk) 11:13, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
 * There are tens of millions of Jewish people and billions of Christian people, however that does not mean they believe any given idea. In fact many religious people are largely or entirely secular (ex: most Jewish people), many just consider religion to be a part of their culture and community +/- some vague openness or belief in some supernatural being,afterlife,etc.  I would even bet most Jewish people and Christian people dont believe in their respective religion's mythologies, the flood myth, the exodus myth, creationism myth, etc etc.  Your stating of the number of people that identify by those labels does not support the conclusion that they believe the historically false mythologies from that religion.  Also, its the academic consensus that the exodus myth is historically false, not the "secular" academic consensus.  Word2001 (talk) 00:56, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

2 word changes to avoid making the Exodus sound like a historical account
The lead says It tells of their departure... And the historicity section says ...explaining their origins These very clearly make the Exodus sound like a historical account, which it is not. I suggest that we remove these 2 phrases. The second should just be removed, while the first could be replaced with: It tells the myth of their enslavement and departure from Egypt...

Another change suggestion The historicity section says A majority of scholars nevertheless still believes that the Exodus has some historical basis... This is misleading because it sounds like the historical basis is in spite of the evidence, when that is not the case. The state of the evidence is what leads scholars to think the Exodus is just a myth. The only question is what unrelated historical event its connected to ("historical basis"): The Canaanites - who did not live in Egypt, were not slaves, and were not Jewish The Hyskos - who were not Jewish, and were dictators over Egypt Or as the article states - despite the lack of any evidence, there “may have been” some Egyptians (note-doesnt even say slaves or Jews) that went to Israel The evidence and the "historical basis" are not in conflict as the current wording suggests. The evidence shows that the Exodus story is just mythology. And the story could be tied to some unrelated event from the list above. So I suggest that we reword that sentence in the historicity section to: Scholars think that the Exodus has some historical basis but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Bible. This accurately represents the academic consensus. And its already in the article so it should not be a controversial change. Word2001 (talk) 22:44, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The exodus story is not about the enslavement in Egypt.Achar Sva (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Doesnt the Exodus story talk about the enslavement in Egypt? If not, then okay.  Do you have thoughts on the other suggestions for changes? Word2001 (talk) 23:18, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The sentence is sourced from Redmount, who says "departure" from Egypt; the next sentence in the lead mentions the slavery from which they were departing. I think that's enough. Are you really a banned sock? Achar Sva (talk) 23:33, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * My suggested replacement also says "departure". The problem is the article currently says "It tells of their departure" which makes it sound like a historical account.  Thats why I suggest we replace with "It tells the myth of their enslavement and departure from Egypt..." or "It tells the myth of their departure from Egypt...".  Do you have thoughts on that replacement sentence or my other 2 suggestions - removing "explaining their origins" and rewording that other sentence?
 * With regards to your recent edit, it includes "the Bible was never intended as a historical document". That is not true and there is no academic consensus that says that.  As the historicity section says:
 * "The Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the..."
 * Additionally, how could you know the intent of the authors of the Bible? And what is the difference from "never intended to be historical" and "is historically false". Also, many took and take the Bibel as a historically accurate account of the world. I dont think we can accurately speak to the intent of the authors.
 * Lastly you removed an important part of the quote: "... but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Bible" That is an important qualifier on the statement "Most modern scholars believe that the story of the Exodus has some historical basis, "
 * together they make sense and represent the academic consensus. If you delete the second half of the sentence it is misleading and not accurate.  It should stay as:  "Most modern scholars believe that the story of the Exodus has some historical basis, but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Bible."
 * If you want to add your part: "[the Bible] contains little that is accurate or reliable " I would support that as that is generally true.Word2001 (talk) 00:00, 14 September 2020 (UTC)


 * seems that evidence for Joseph and his coat of many colors exists - Joseph was the one that gave the correct interpretation of the 7 fat years and 7 lean years - ending up as the second in command after Pharaoh!

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1281783/egypt-bible-discovery-joseph-coat-jacob-jesus-christ-tomb-goshen-nile-god-proof-spt

'Matches the Bible!' Why multicoloured coat discovered in Egypt tomb 'could be Joseph's'

https://www.levitt.com/essays/joseph

One last stunning piece of evidence for Joseph exists, and that brings us back to his burial in Goshen, and his bones that were removed by Moses at the time of the Exodus. In this same area in Goshen, where a large contingent of Semites lived, a great palace has been discovered, with a garden and a tomb, curious in its combination of Egyptian and Semitic styles.

But there is more. In the tomb complex, there are ruins of an ancient statue, also unusual in its design and subject matter. It has been violently smashed almost beyond recognition, but enough of it has been found to piece together a possible identification. The statue is of a man who had obvious stature in the Egyptian power structure, with the symbol of Pharaoh’s authority, the throw-stick, on his chest. Yet he also has an unusual Semitic hairdo, with flaming red hair, and wears a coat with variegated colors. The statue has been deliberately smashed and defaced, with an obvious attempt to destroy the head and face.

As for Biblical prophecy - the most well known one is that the Israelites would be scattered among the nations and then gathered from the nations and their promissed land restored. After over 2,000 years there seems to be a nation called Israel, occupied by some of the descendends of those ancient Israelites smack dab in the middle of the Israelite Promissed Land. I hope that we can agree that this prophecy was both accurate and reliable.71.174.128.144 (talk) 05:42, 14 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Prophecies are never reliable. This could be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy, because resettling Palestine became Zionism's political cause due to its previous religious importance. Gods had nothing to do with it. Dimadick (talk) 11:17, 14 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Every conquered people probably thought that they could restore themselves after being conqured. Very few have manged to do it and only one after a passage of over 2,500 years after the conquest. That would be Israel! 71.174.128.144 (talk) 01:46, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Myth vs. Legend
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call the Exodus a "legend", rather than a "myth"? Most people interpret the word "myth" as something that's entirely fictional. The word "legend", in my opinion, is a more accurate description of the Exodus, as it describes a real event that we mostly know about through mythological stories. Much like the Trojan War, there does seem to be credible evidence to suggest that the Exodus has a historical basis. Most scholars agree that the Biblical narrative has flaws and is not 100% accurate, but there also seems to be a consensus that the story itself is based on real history. I propose we change the first sentence of the article and say that "the Exodus is the founding legend of Israel" instead of the "founding myth of Israel". Jgriffy98 (talk) 02:59, 19 November 2020 (UTC)


 * WP:VER: "founding myth"/"charter myth" are sourced, "founding legend" isn't. Tgeorgescu (talk) 04:28, 19 November 2020 (UTC)


 * The exodus is mythical in the sense that it's a story with a purpose, and also mythical in the sense that it's fictional. I think the article needs to make it clear that this never happened.Achar Sva (talk) 21:40, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * How can we make it any clearer? We can't remove that there's a historical core, that's the scholarly consensus. We already say that the core has little to do with the biblical story as we have it.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:47, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The "historical core" is simply that there was constant movement in and out of Egypt over the centuries. I'm worried by the way Jgriffy98 has interpreted our article to be saying there's more than that.Achar Sva (talk) 03:06, 20 November 2020 (UTC)


 * that’s one but by no means the only interpretation of what historical core. As cited in this article “a majority” of scholars believe in a single exodus event of a few hundred or thousand people, but not of all of Israel.—Ermenrich (talk) 15:05, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Talk:Christian_ethics
If you have an opinion to spare, please share. I'm putting this here since I think this page is watched by a bunch of able editors. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:23, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
 * My opinion is that the article is a mess and should be avoided.Achar Sva (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Minimalism
See also http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy/2015/01/minimalists-versus-maximalists-and-contemporary-scholarship/ and Tgeorgescu (talk) 14:27, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The Grabbe quote contradicts the Achar Sva quote - Grabbe is specifically talking about the Exodus and formation of Israel, not only Samuel and Kings. Note that he also continues to refer to certain scholars being minimalists, Although they do not seem to admit it, the minimalists have triumphed in many ways. This certainly implies that they still exist (otherwise why wouldn't they think they had won?).--Ermenrich (talk) 14:42, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
 * So, let's say that mainstream Bible scholars are each a mixture of 90% minimalist and 10% maximalist. That seems to fit the understanding of a nearly total victory of minimalists. Mainstream scholars still use the Bible as a historical source, while genuine minimalists pleaded for dropping the Bible as source. The older, genuine minimalists still exist. So, yeah, the difference between minimalists and mainstream scholars is the suggestion to drop the Bible completely. For the rest, mainstream scholars are practically speaking minimalists, too. It is a dispute about large parts of the Bible being historically worthless. Mainstream scholars think it is a false dilemma between having historicity and being historically worthless. Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:27, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Achar Sva is merely a Wiki editor, and should be quoted with great discretion if at all :) Achar Sva (talk) 05:55, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Have James Hoffmeier's works on the Exodus traditions been considered? I do not see them even cited (what I could tell) in the minimalist/maximalist debates even though they are published through a reputable publisher (Oxford University Press). Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jhanna82 (talk • contribs) 17:48, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * According to our cited sources, Hoffmeier's works are such a vanishingly small perspective that they don't really warrant explicit mention aside from the fact that few, if any mainstream scholars hold them.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:57, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

So if more can be found beyond Hoffmeirer (I would contend there are), they can be cited? What is the threshold that has to be met? Thank you. Jhanna82 Jhanna82 (talk) 18:02, 2 December 2020 (UTC) Also, in historiography, it is good to have as many available secondary sources (e.g. through repuable publishers) as possible, before coming to any solid historical conclusions. Thank you. Jhanna82 18:42, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * No, because we have a statement of academic consensus (see WP:RS/AC) that these views are vanishingly rare in mainstream scholarship. Besides Hoffmeier and Kitchner, they have basically no following outside of fundamentalist circles.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:04, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate that information. However, what is the threshold that has to be met to be able to cite maximal scholarship through reputable publishers? It is more than just Kitchens and Hoffmeier (but they are included). There has to be some sort of objective criteria that needs to be met before citation can take place to keep subjectivity to a minimum. Thank you. Jhanna82 (talk) 20:47, 2 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Does WP:FALSEBALANCE help? You may find Historicity of the Bible interesting. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:06, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I hardly accept that a more maximal view of the Exodus is analogous to conspiracy theories, flat earth, etc. Coupled with the spirit of the "impartial tone" clause (and the "balance" portion) of Wikipedia Neutral page, citing more maximal scholarship would be more in line with that clause than what is currently represented on the page. But I am glad we are having this discussion here so people that do some digging can see that no objective threshold has been proposed (yet) to just be able to cite maximal scholarship and not necessarily endorse it. Jhanna82 (talk) 21:15, 2 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Well, you can always make suggestions like "I suggest that we add this text in this section cited to these WP:RS", or you can make WP:BOLD edits to that effect. About referencing on WP, see WP:TUTORIAL (people want pagenumbers etc). Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:33, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok, technically you can't edit the article at the time I write this, but WP:AUTOCONFIRM is within reach. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:42, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I think if I did that, even with valid citations, it would probably just be reverted back, wouldn't? Jhanna82 (talk) 21:52, 2 December 2020 (UTC)


 * In theory, and perhaps even in practice, that would depend on what you wrote and cited. However, the content in this article has been well debated, and any new additions are likely to be debated too, whatever they are. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)


 * You might want to read https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-exhibition-chronicles-meeting-of-ancient-israel-and-egypt-1.5412326 . Yup, it's about the Israel Museum admitting there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus. I mean this is neither a secret, nor an antisemitic canard: the most prominent Israeli historians and archaeologists openly admit it and tell it openly to the Israeli public. If anyone finds objective evidence for the Exodus, they will surely will the one million dollars Dan David Prize. And it would mean enduring world fame (like in more famous than Donald Trump). Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:55, 4 December 2020 (UTC)


 * What counts as "objective evidence" is indeed a huge part of this debate. Epistemology is very much apart of this conversation. I am afraid verificationism still creeps into our thinking. Yet, that form of knowledge (e.g. warrant) was largely abandoned. However, my main concern is more of a modest one. Maximalists are hardly cited in this article. In the coming days, if I get time, I will press a case to cite more. Jhanna82 00:40, 6 December 2020 (UTC)


 * "Maximalist" has two meanings: (i) the minimalism-maximalism debate of the 1990s and (ii) a person who grants maximal historical validity to a book of the Bible. In the first meaning, that debate is over, in any meaningful sense; just fundamentalist apologists pretend otherwise. In the second meaning, Kitchen and Hoffmeier claim that the Exodus was plausible. Mind you: plausible, not in any sense proven! See e.g. this paper by Peter Enns, back when he was teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary. Tgeorgescu (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2020 (UTC)


 * I've thought for a while that it would be worth mentioning that Hoffmeier et al. maintain that the narrative is plausible, and, if the sources say this explicitly, pointing out that that's about as much as they've been able to manage. But I don't know the sources well enough to hunt down an explicit statement to that effect. A. Parrot (talk) 02:40, 6 December 2020 (UTC)












 * Quoted by Tgeorgescu. You may argue that DH has been refuted, but for Kitchen it cannot be true because it is too radical, while for the WP:RS/AC it cannot be true because it isn't radical enough. Tgeorgescu (talk) 06:04, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

We could consider adding something based on Moore and Kelle (2011), who say:

However, to describe the current situation accurately, we must mention that a few scholars are keeping alive discussion about the potential historicity, or at least plausibility, of these stories, although their arguments rarely elicit responses from historians of ancient Israel for whom this topic is no longer viable. [paragraph break] The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen is the most prolific supporter of the factuality of the general contours of the biblical story, and his approach could be called a "plausibilist" approach. [...] Similarly, Kitchen and others, notably the Egyptologist James Hoffmeier, also contend that the stories of the escape itself and the subsequent wandering of the Israelites in the desert are reliable historical reports and not the inventions of a later author. (pp. 88-89

Also, though Kitchen and Hoffmeier are Egyptologists, other current Egyptologists have argued that these stories have elements that can, or must, be dated to the first millennium. (p. 90)

These types of scholars, including also Kitchen and Hoffmeier, have been called "maximalists" or "conservative," but we believe "plausibilists" is also an appropriate designation. (p. 95).

This could simply be added as a final sentence to the current statement of academic consensus, mentioning Kitchen and Hoffmeier specifically as maximalist scholars who are largely ignored by historians of Israel and contradicted by other Egyptologists.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:55, 6 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Though Hoffmeier and Kitchen's are not the only (or main) maximalists in the scholarly literature,, more maximal (or plausible) citations, for now, is an acceptable edit.  Jhanna82 (talk) 22:47, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

"For Kitchen, the biblical story (at least from the time of Abraham) is true until proven otherwise. Needless to say, he is not troubled by postmodernism or deconstruction, which he dubs "the crown of all follies." His critiques of Lemche, Thompson and others are not without substance, but his own views are too blatantly apologetic to warrant serious consideration as historiography. More sophisticated, but ultimately equally apologetic, is another volume published in 2003, Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, entitled provocatively, A Biblical History of Israel."

- John J. Collins

"The fact is that we are all minimalists -- at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA, the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land. These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view. In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. ... In fact, though, 'maximalist' has been widely defined as someone who accepts the the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong. If so, very few are willing to operate like this, not even John Bright (1980) whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given."

- Lester L. Grabbe


 * Yup, Grabbe was writing about Provan c.s. as the only 'maximalist' history since Wellhausen. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:54, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * The most I would be willing to consider is mentioning Kitchen and Hoffmeier and that they aren't taken seriously. No other maximalist scholars are noteworthy. I'm not sure what position Tgeorgescu is taking.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:18, 9 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Grabble is talking about their first edition (2003). Provan, Long, and Longman respond in the second edition to some of Grabble's criticisms. But Provan was not the only (or main) maximalist when Grabble wrote his criticisms. He should have dug deeper. Jhanna82 (talk) 23:24, 9 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Grabbe did not speak of Provan as being the only (or main) maximalist, instead he stated In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. (Maximalist history means a book.)


 * And, of course, Grabbe replied at  Unflatteringly compared their book to The Book of Mormon history of Mesoamerica. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:50, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Ermenrich, I agree and understand that the maximalist scholars are not apart of the scholarly consensus. Yet, I am not sure what objective criteria you are using to adjudicate that maximalist scholars are not "taken seriously" within the appropriate scholarly community? If they were not taken seriously, why do reputable publishers take up their work? Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jhanna82 (talk • contribs) 23:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)


 * As explained above, Kitchen and Hoffmeier are credible scholars... of Ancient Egypt rather than Ancient Levant. So, yes, about Exodus maximalism we have the guideline WP:FRINGE. Most scholars would grant the point that the Exodus is vaguely based upon one or more historical events, which have been hugely embellished in the biblical narrative. So they agree that the Exodus is mythologized history. That's the WP:RS/AC. Tgeorgescu (talk) 00:05, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 December 2020
Change “founding myth” to “journey”, from the opening sentence on “The Exodus” page. The Exodus is not a myth. Reliable source: Old Testament.

Sentence in its current format below. “The Exodus (Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi’at Miẓrayim: lit. 'Departure from Egypt') is the founding myth of the Israelites.” Bmflit (talk) 10:46, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
 * See the above "Myth vs. Legend" section – Thjarkur (talk) 11:35, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
 * "Reliable source: Old Testament." The Old Testament is not a reliable source. It does not have "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy", quite the opposite. See: Reliable_sources. Dimadick (talk) 21:52, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 9 February 2021
The Exodus is not a myth. It really happened. You need to read a more recent analysis of the date. Previous datings were erroneous because Israelites dwelt in Egypt for 210 years not 430 years. They were in Canaan previously for 220 years. Exodus took place at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and it was responsible for the collapse of the Old Kingdom. That was why there was no strong military in Egypt to waylay the Israelites. The Hykos took over Egypt after the Exodus. You need to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Dating-Kings-Judges-Pharaoh-Unmasked/dp/1466428090/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aolowe (talk • contribs)


 * The Bible is not WP:RS, never was at Wikipedia, see WP:RSPSCRIPTURE. Also, Wikipedia does not listen to WP:RANDY, it listens to mainstream Bible scholarship, see WP:NOBIGOTS.


 * Oh, yes: Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. That means your own book is WP:SPS and thus not acceptable as WP:RS. See also WP:FRINGE. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:11, 9 February 2021 (UTC)


 * What do Hyksos and Israelites have to do with the Old Kingdom of Egypt? The fall of the Kingdom in the 22nd century BC precedes the Hyksos by 5 centuries, and Merneptah's Israel by 9 centuries. Dimadick (talk) 12:05, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Lede quote, intent of the original authors
I wanted to make a separate section to discuss the intent of the original authors of the Exodus narrative to make it easier to follow each discussion, as I think it is separate from the historicity discussion. Right now the article lede states “but the Exodus narrative was not intended to function as history”

The Redmount source doesn’t quite say this. It says: “The biblical Exodus account was never intended to function or to be understood as history in the present-day sense of the word” This just means it is historically inaccurate at best. Its not considered history by modern standards, which is what our casual readers will be expecting. The assumption by casual readers is that the Wikipedia is written in modern English. Also, not considered historical by todays standards, does not mean its intent was not to be considered historical.

Later in our article, we wrote this (sourced) The Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40-41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1-2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40-41), and including place names such as Goshen (Gen. 46:28), Pithom and Ramesses (Exod. 1:11), as well as stating that 600,000 Israelite men were involved (Exodus 12:37).

Or as Michael David Coogan says: The historicity of the Exodus narrative is thus a complex issue. Clearly, significant portions are not and were never intended to be historiographic. Yet the overall intent of the narrative was historical

Also, no one can know the intent of the original authors. Additionally its certainly not agreed upon by religious people. Many religious people still think the Exodus was a real historical event and that is its intent.

Given the scholars saying the Exodus’s intent was to be historical, we should not state the contrary in the lede. If we are going to include something about intent, it should be that it was to be historical. Ideally though, I dont think we should say what the original authors intent was. Bilto74811 (talk) 23:09, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, see the comments above from users - Warshy and Nishidani about this topic. They do a good job of explaining the problem with the current phrasing. Bilto74811 (talk) 23:19, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Primarily
source 1 says, "the evidence points to an indigenous Canaanite origin for the Israelites, with no suggestion that a group of foreigners from Egypt comprised early Israel". source 2 says "the Israelites must have been emerging as a distinct group within the Canaanite culture....the early Israelites were an oppressed group of Canaanites". both sources say this I propose getting rid of the word "primarily", which is ermenrichs POV, not the scholars who do not say this

Also, I do not appreciate you saying its "disingenuous" just because you misunderstand the arugment and refuse to read the talk page when someone says "per talk". The rude tone and accusation is uncalled for.

Adding in primarily when the quotes above clearly indidcate the opposite is changing the meaning. I explained in detail above why the word basis is the choice we should make. Scholars use "basis" just like scholars use "core". Its then our choice which to use. Im not going to re-write the whole explanation, just read above where we discussed it. Again, the edit warring is not appreciated, just take it to talk like I showed you the courtesy of doing. Bilto74811 (talk) 16:17, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not my POV. Human populations never all come from one place, and your insistence on removing the word primarily is silly.--Ermenrich (talk) 16:18, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * its your choice of adding in words that they dont use. Calling others opinions "silly" is unhelpful and uncalled for.
 * Both sources do not say primarily. If your suggestion is so "not silly" and any opionion otherwise is "absurd" then provide a source for your preference of adding in the word primarily, instead of maligning others suggestions, despite the fact that I quoted 2 sources. Bilto74811 (talk) 16:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I’m fine with the wording you’ve added with the word primarily.—Ermenrich (talk) 16:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)