What does the biblical parting of the Red Sea mean?

@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

most public projects in all egypt seemed to be well run and in the hands of technically saavy groups of specialized work gangs.

Yes but that does not preclude the ancient practice of prisoners of war being enslaved, or foreign tribes and even Egyptian communities being subject to occasional force labor here or there. The Egyptian recorded the transactions of slaves so it was not foreign to their culture.

This being said, I agree that the vision of thousands of slaves building the pyramids is a greek invention.

Quote:

the word "slave" was probably added in Post schism Catholicism to make the story a little more entertaining

That doesn't account for the Jewish versions of Exodus though. Even the CC could not have changed that, and the masoretic text has "enslaved with back-breaking labor".

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

That doesn't account for the Jewish versions of Exodus though. Even the CC could not have changed that, and the masoretic text has "enslaved with back-breaking labor".

. Well, I cannot counter that. Im not facile in any ancient language, I thought ancient Hebrew didnt have verbs.

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@farmerman,

Not a language without verbs — a language without vowels:

Quote:

"It was written from right to left; the words contained no [written] vowels; there were no intervening spaces between words, and no punctuation marks. Even with the introduction of vowel points [dots or marks below the words that indicate vowel sounds] many words in Hebrew, as in English, have more than one meaning. Without these points, as originally written, the number is increased a hundred fold. The five English words, bag, beg, big, bog, and buy, are quite unlike and easily distinguished. Omit the vowels, as the ancient Jews did, and we have five words exactly alike, or rather, one word with five different meanings. The Hebrew language was thus largely composed of words with several meanings. As there were no spaces between words, it was sometimes hard to tell where a word began or where it ended; and as there were no punctuation marks, and no spaces between sentences, paragraphs, or even sections, it was often difficult to determine the meaning of a writer after the words had been deciphered."

source

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@hightor,

oy ts a btch t tlk tht wy

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@farmerman,

The biblical text implies they were asked to contribute taxes and corvée. That they felt they were taxed unfairly.

Not that difficult to imagine. Egypt attracted its fair share of foreign workers, marchants and wanderers. The Nile offered predictable, stable food production to Egypt, less often stricken by droughts than neighbouring areas like Canaan. And semi-stable politics made for economic prosperity at times. Hearders from Canaan would come down to work in Egypt in times of crisis or hard times at home. And it's a well documented fact that the ancient Egyptians, on the whole, loathed orientals.

Ultimately the story goes on to all the male children of an entire generation of "orientals" being killed on the order of pharaoh. Which sounds like impossible to do but offers a nice story of origin to the hero of the Exodus story: Moses.

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Jeeezz! Talk about getting off topic. Anyway, the whole discussion has helped me organize my thoughts. Here's what I have arrived at:
I suppose one could see the splitting of the Red Sea as the dualistic mind presented as the Ultimate Reality, in the patriarchal sense. By dualistic mind I'm simply referring to the process of thought, which breaks everything into seemingly opposing pairs of opposites, which, in reality, are interdependent . The problem occurs when each opposite is assumed to have an independent existence: God versus the devil, light versus dark, etc.

Patriarchal View states that the physical is derived from the mind rather than the mind derived from the physical. Another way of saying this is that the God/son gave birth to the goddess/mother rather than the opposite. This, of course is what historically happened when the matriarchal cultures were destroyed by the patriarchal cultures. It was then assumed that God as mind created a separate and physical universe.

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@coluber2001,

Quote:

I suppose one could see the splitting of the Red Sea as the dualistic mind presented as the Ultimate Reality, in the patriarchal sense.

No offense, but I think you're really reaching here and trying to turn a dramatic convention into a metaphor for dualism. I don't recall anything in the account which suggests a qualitative difference between the two halves of the divided sea. Your interpretation seems more Greek than Hebrew.

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@fresco,

Hahaha! i'm sorry, fresco, sometimes i'm kind of a drunken idiot. Seriously, i'm sorry for for being a dick, in this instance. i'm sure that i'll find a more substantive reason to be rude to you in the future! kisses!

that being said:
quote="fresco"]
I doubt whether the composers of the OT had any philosophical or poetic prowess. Like most early theistic narrative I suggest this is nothing more than a picturesque expression of 'trust in the omnipotent being and all will be resolved''. [/quote]

that statement is just, historically speaking, lazy.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Nice to know I'm not the only British guy you have a problem with, at least your xenophobia is consistent.

You're just pissed off because Fresco is a lot smarter than you.

Xenophobia? Not at all. There are many indictments that you could make against my persona on these forums, but i don't think that xenophobia is one of them. And, honestly i didn't know that you were British until this post...

Regarding your second "point", do i think that fresco is smarter than i am?

Yes, i think that he probably is...but, despite that, i'll still disagree with him when i think that his judgement is lacking or that he oversteps his epistemological boundaries. And i'm more than happy to confront him when he's just being a rhetorical blow-hard.

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@Razzleg,

Like hell you didn't know I was British.

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@coluber2001,

coluber2001 wrote:

Okay. Thank you for your views. Do you have any ideas about the Virgin birth?

Yes. Jesus was a bastard and his mother had to find an explanation...

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@coluber2001,

yes.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Yes. Jesus was a bastard and his mother had to find an explanation...

A reasonable hypothesis. Let's extend it.

Jonah comes home after days and nights away. "Where the hell have you been?", he's asked. "And why is it that you stink like fish?" "Well, darling, I know this sounds a tad unbelievable but I was swallowed by a whale and have only just now escaped. It was horrid, absolutely horrid. And to be kept away from you was the worst part of it all!"

Ira Gershwin, in the lyric for It Ain't Necessarily So remarked on another instance.
Moses was found on a stream
Moses was found on a stream
He floated on water 'til old Pharaoh's daughter
She fished him she says from that stream

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@coluber2001,

maybe its just that these folks, shy of scientiic sophistication, didnt know of global tectonics in the least, and had no idea about the RED SEA/AFAR Triple point where diveregent AND convergent plates meet. Could it be that somebody cam up with a neat little tale about a qeird seismic event that often precedes a tsunami (that being a disappearance of the embayment)

Today we see these things severl times in a century. The last major on was around 2004 in Phukett.
Ya know, gunga snak believes that dinosaurs lived with the Ojibwa Indians in Minnesota , all becauae of one pictogrph.

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@farmerman,

That's not much different from what I said about Santorini, namely that there could have been a real life event that inspired the legend of Moses parting the Red Sea.

That is a far cry from saying the Santorini explosion occurred just as Moses parted the Red Sea.

Btw, I appreciate you pointing out Gunga's nonsense so the rest of us don't have to.

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@blatham,

Freud hypothetised in the 30's that Moses was an Egyptian priest. It would make a lot of sense. In ancient Egyptian, "mss" means "born of", as in Ramses (born of Re) or Tutmosis (born of Tut).

According to Exodus, the name "Moses" would come from a Hebrew verb meaning "to pull out/draw out of" (water, the nile), as in your song. That's strikingly similar to the putative Egyptian ethymology.

It's purely speculative but maybe the guy was called Tutmosis or Ptahmoses or Matmoses, and later dropped the Egyptian god's reference from his name. E.g. a name like Hapmoses (“born of the river/god of Nile) would have made a nice princely Egyptian name.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

coluber2001 wrote:

Okay. Thank you for your views. Do you have any ideas about the Virgin birth?

Yes. Jesus was a bastard and his mother had to find an explanation...

That's the kind of talk that started a pogrom in Czarist Russia.

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@Foofie,

That's what the Talmud says, and it seems logical to me. It would explain a lot.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

That's what the Talmud says, and it seems logical to me. It would explain a lot.

Shhh. There might be Cossacks over the next hill.

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@Foofie,

Foofie wrote:

Shhh. There might be Cossacks over the next hill.

You live in the past.

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What does the biblical parting of the Red Sea mean?

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