No Exodus, And Maybe Moses

Mummy!

Passover starts today. According to the Torah[1] the holiday is the annual commemoration of the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt. It’s a great story, but the problem is that it’s almost certainly a story. It doesn’t hold together, and that’s even without getting into the magical elements, but the whole thing is more mythic account than clear reporting. It’s a story.

The first little hint is that we now know that the Egyptians used contract labor to build their pyramids.[2] No slaves. The phrase “for we were contract laborers in Egypt” just lacks something. There’s no indication that the contract laborers were some sort of foreign presence either. But someone could argue that the records of all this were lost.[3] Not gonna wash.

The bigger problem comes at the other end, where all the archeological evidence of Bronze-Age Israel indicates a standard slow rise of populations (with the occasional falls due to the usual, followed by slow rise). No big jumps in population because a major group suddenly came in, or city suddenly being established that didn’t start out as much smaller communities.[4] As you add up the evidence, it seems clear that there was no Exodus.

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Esperanto and Cycling

Herzl's bicycle

When I visited Vienna last year, I took in two (among many others) two sights: the Esperanto Museum (which is is fairly small) and the Jewish Museum (which is fairly large). I was surprised to see a bicycle hanging from the ceiling. This turned out to be the bicycle one owned by Theodore Herzl, the journalist who started the Zionist movement, a search to regain the homeland of the Jewish people. Another surprise was to see a book on Esperanto, though perhaps Esperanto shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, since it was created by a Polish (not Viennese) Jew, Ludovik Zamenhof. Zamenhof was even involved in the Zionist movement, though he later concluded that withdrawal was not the right thing for the Jewish people (he also had his doubts specifically about the settlement of Palestine). The book on Esperanto (in German) was not one by Zamenhof, but rather by the Austrian peace advocate (and Nobel laureate), Alfred H. Fried. In this museum, I walked from bicycling to Esperanto.

Both were seen as something of a fad in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. They didn’t come together only in the Vienna Jewish Museum, but instead as many European cyclists were exploring nearby countries, there seemed a need for a common language. The Touring Club of France was an early proponent of making Esperanto the international language of bicycling, and according to this article, the Cyclists’ Touring Club in the UK, was thinking of doing the same. (Zamenhof was a proponent of making Esperanto the language of a new Jewish homeland, one that wouldn’t be in the Middle East. No word from him on bicycling.)

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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