"Hoist with his own petard" Source is ironic because it wasn’t uncommon for a bomb-maker to be blown up by his own explosive device. Grenades had the same development glitches, until WW2.

Cool!

I can answer some more with this video and this one. But where does the count of 8 patriarchs come from? Or any specific resemblance between Solomon and Amenhotep? Insisting on plagiarism seems a bit cherry picked and self fulfilling.

restrains self from discussing the holy hand grenade

For a live action example, see Swiss Family Robinson.

Noah is a cheap copy of the far older Akkadian Altrahas. The 8 patriarchs correspond to the 8 ancient Sumerian kings. Moses' birth story is a variation of the far older Sargon of Akkad's birth. Moses commandments are a lesser copy of the far older Hammurabi's code. Solomon is a copy of Amenhotep III. After David it might be an actual record, a very loose one with lots of embellishments and some editing of prophecies, Egyptian style. But millions of clay tablets and monument inscriptions very clearly show that Israel was a tiny political entity with little significance to the events of the wider world.

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>Yes, and the Hyksos were overthrown by the Ramesside dynasty and they did their damndest to erase them from Egyptian history, hence why Exodus says a Pharaoh arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph (who would have been a Vizier under the Hyksos) and then the Hebrews became slaves.

Good try sport, you only missed it by a few centuries and an entire dynasty. It was Ahmose I that overthrew the Hyksos. His dynasty, with pharaohs like Thutmose I and Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun, came before the Ramesside. I do appreciate your wishful thinking about your bible myths though.

>The previous theory was that the Hebrews split off from the Canaanites, which is laughably false. Israelite material culture is clearly distinguishable from all other Canaanite material culture and it just appears suddenly during the early Iron Age.

I am afraid the archeology doesn't support that. The archeology of the Hyksos areas in Egypt shows that they were similar to Canaanites, and Canaanites in the Levant worshiped Yahweh and El among their gods, and Hebrew is a Canaanite language. The consensus among scholars is that Hebrews are a branch of Canaanites, and the Hebrew religion is an offshoot of Canaanite religion. I am sure it is painful to learn this for people who are emotionally invested, but that has no bearing on the evidence.

>You missed the part where I pointed out that the percentage of loan words is much higher than literally everybody else living in the Levant, even in correspondence sent TO the Egyptians. Some languages have 0 Egyptian loan words and even later books of the OT have less than the Pentateuch.

What other languages are you talking about here? Aramaic? Greek? Arabic? I didn't consider it before because it's something that doesn't mean anything without context, which you have not provided.

>Ok, so you have no clue what you're talking about. There was never an Egyptian empire.

There can be a debate about the meaning of Empire, but in general it is a position above king, a king of kings, as the Persians would say. The first pharaoh was Narmer, who united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt. Over the millennium the land of Egypt would fragment into smaller kingdoms and then be united again. Various pharaohs would extract tribute from and station troops in the Nubia and the Levant and Libya. If you don't understand that to be an Empire, then fine, pick a different word, but Egypt still had a massive presence in what later became, for very short periods of time, an independent Israel.

I could go on but there is a lot of reading you need to do before you can catch up. Good luck buddy. Maybe don't get your information from "Biblical Archeology", because those folks start out with the answers and try to find evidence they can force to support.

18th Century grenades used cast iron, not ceramic. They were fairly heavy. Interestingly musket slings were developed for grenadiers allowing them to sling the musket over their back while hurling grenades and holding the long fuse. Also the use of mitre caps and bearskins were worn to allow slinging of the musket instead of a tricorn cap which would catch up in the sling.

Haven't come across anything myself, but you may want to try this week's thread which'll get posted this morning!

What's it about?

Me too, I really appreciate each and every comment!

Ah that's what you mean. I raise you the absence-of-evidence thing again, copying is a poor explanation for a picture better fit by a common cultural context. Huge differences abound in any example you can pick, so the best assumption is that the variations are derived from older versions of the stories with different cultures remembering what they found relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SZZzuweVEs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp3HpDOOWS8

Who invented ZERO? I’m no mathematician, so please explain this to me like I’m a dummy. To my understanding, the Babylonians flirted with the theory of zero in numeric systems, those from India were the first to actually use zero in numeric systems, and the Mayans were the first overall to use zero, but this was done so in their calendar systems. Please correct me if misunderstood :)

If you read the bible, and then read the historical documents from other kingdoms and cultures who lived in the middle east, it becomes very clear that the bible is a combination of copied Mesopotamian myths and a fictionalized history of Iron Age Hebrews. Anyone in who reads it in the modern era can figure out its not bad, it's just like any other myth.

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I have zero interest in biblical history, but you simply can't say that the people who became Hebrews were not slaves in Egypt. Not sure what your agenda is here.

Is this where the idea of the Cartoon-style, little black ball bomb with fuse came from?

> Avaris was the Hyksos capitol, and as the Hyksos were from the Levant it is likely that they were semitic people,

Yes, and the Hyksos were overthrown by the Ramesside dynasty and they did their damndest to erase them from Egyptian history, hence why Exodus says a Pharaoh arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph (who would have been a Vizier under the Hyksos) and then the Hebrews became slaves.

> but there is no evidence that the Hebrew ethnicity had split off from the other Canaanites at the time of the Hyksos.

Cool, and I never said they had. Obviously they would have been as Egyptian as the Hyksos were until the Thebans took power. The previous theory was that the Hebrews split off from the Canaanites, which is laughably false. Israelite material culture is clearly distinguishable from all other Canaanite material culture and it just appears suddenly during the early Iron Age. A complete coincidence, I'm sure. It was probably just placed there by a later redactor, isn't that the typical minimalist response? When in doubt, make up another redactor.

> Egyptian loan words makes a lot of sense, because Egyptians controlled and dominated the Levant for the vast majority of the Bronze Age, and never once noticed the Hebrew people or religion until after the Bronze Age Collapses.

You missed the part where I pointed out that the percentage of loan words is much higher than literally everybody else living in the Levant, even in correspondence sent TO the Egyptians. Some languages have 0 Egyptian loan words and even later books of the OT have less than the Pentateuch. And then you get the absolutely laughable conjectures of the Documentary Hypothesis with omniscient redactors who know 19th dynasty Egyptian place names and customs that fell out of use 400 years prior but who also can't see blatant "contradictions" in the text.

Of course they wouldn't have recognized them until after the Bronze Age Collapse, since Israel didn't exist yet and Yahwehism was largely unknown prior to the Israelite adoption of it.

> The people who would eventually become Hebrews likely picked up the language and customs from the empire that ruled over them and that they paid tribute to.

Ok, so you have no clue what you're talking about. There was never an Egyptian empire. The only direct control of the Levant Egypt exercised was a few small garrison towns. That is why so many kings went on campaign to bring back tribute to Egypt and is also why Ramses II lack of campaigns after the proposed Exodus is consistent with the Exodus narrative. Even by the time of his reign Egypt was unable to oppose the incursion of the sea people, but Ramses still went on campaign. After his 25th year however, he stopped. Obviously something happened, and the loss of his chariot core could be a reason why he lacked the military strength.

> There is nothing at all that indicates Rameses lost his chariots or that they have anything to do with his campaigns or why he went on them.

Except for the Exodus account and that such a blow is an explanation for why Ramses stopped going on military expeditions as opposed to "we don't know lol, but it definitely wasn't the Exodus". Like I said in my other comment "except for the evidence, there is no evidence".

I also like how you ignored my refutation of "extensive record keeping". If they kept such extensive records, then where are they? All of our sources for the 19th dynasty are inscriptions. Those records would have been kept at Pi-Ramses and Avaris which are close to the Nile in an extremely wet environment, not in sealed jars in a cave out by the Dead Sea. There's no reason to expect that they would have survived until today, if they even existed.

What's really wishful thinking is the lengths skeptics go to to invent imaginary sources so they can cling to the dying dregs of crap 19th century German higher criticism.

> The Mernephtah Stele does not mention the defeat of Isreal, it mentions the defeat of nomadic foreign people called Isiriar, among others.

Just completely glossing over the fact that the majority of scholars agree it mentions Israel. Yeah, people didn't think it was Israel back in the 1960s.

> The oldest seals for Hebrew kings use Egyptian symbolism, indicating they were still beholden to the Egyptians even into the Iron Age around 700 BCE.

Yes, which is consistent with my position and not yours, since nobody else in the Levant did that as you go on to point out. Did you even read my comment where I said that the Israelites have much more in common with the Egyptians than anybody else living in the Levant does, even though they were all supposedly beholden to the mighty Egyptian Empire which never existed?

Do some basic reading before commenting on this again. Like I said, people spouting off this nonsense are completely ignorant of the last 50 years of Scholarship.

I don't think this is the evidence to biblical history that you think it is. Don't get me wrong, Proto-Sinaitic script has been extremely fascinating to read about, but it's importance isn't that it's the precursor to Hebrew; it's that it is a common ancestor for a lot of the European, East Asian, North African alphabets and connects them directly to Egyptian.

Basically Proto-Sinaitic when it comes to writing is an even broader term than Semitic is when it comes to language.

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What’s ridiculous about it?

Grenades in the US Civil War were up to 5 lbs

Interesting theory but it doesn't follow the theorem, evidence of absence is evidence of absence. Going by language Hebrew is West Semitic, putting the ancestral culture of both Hebrews and Arabs solidly in Eurasia when they lost mutual intelligibility.

If you're talking genetics nothing is debatable, I agree that a prehistoric Inuit man once journeyed back out of Alaska and is an ancestor to everyone alive by virtue of his genes having so long to spread around the earth.