Easter Questions

[denuseri]

Hebrew: or if you will: עברים or עברייםʿor Iḇrîm, ʿIḇriyyîm or ʿIvrim, ʿIvriyyim or ʕibrim, ʕibriyim is an ethnonym used in the Jewish Bible to describe the Jews.

It is only one word of many used by the Jewish people and others for them throughout the ages.

It isn't until the establishment of their monarchy that they actually wrote anything down themselves. Until then only oral records were kept. Hence the earliest written account of what came later to be referred too as the Bible wasn't until the times of David and Solomon.

Before then they were often considered Habiru (which is a lawless type of bandit or nomadic invader) especially by the Philistines who wrote too both the Hittites and the Egyptians asking for help against them at various times.

Where the ancient Egyptians referred to them as Habiru themselves on occassion (at least during times of strife with them as in the case of the "Exodus" ) it was more common to refer to them more directly as Shasu (a type of nomadic herder); more specifically Sashu of Yhw. Which btw is a well documented hieroglyphic rendering that corresponds very precisely to the well documented Hebrew tetragrammaton for YHWH.

Often times people get confused when studying Jewish history when it comes to sorting through the myths presented in the Bible and the archeological evidence.

It is very helpful however to understand that even though the Bible may sound to layman as if the Jews were all one contiguous group of people who traveled around together in a single ethnic and cultural gathering that they were in actuality often separated (sometimes for decades even centuries) into smaller groupings as were all such nomadic peoples of those times.

Biblical history reaserchers have shown bia a cross disiplinary approach that the Bible shows cultural bias of two distinctive groups...IE the old testament is a blending of two seperate and distinctive cultures oral histories into one set of "books".

How can both groups be Jews then you may ask?

At the time of the Exodus story there were in fact two settled and distinct groups of Hebrews who were out there with markedly different customs. Though both originally in so far as we know could have came from one commonly accepted point of origin many centuries before this epoch (The city of Ur): One group split from the other to settle in Egypt during a time of drought...and the other stayed in the vicinity of Canaan and were later driven into the hill country by the arrival of the Philistines.

Then years later they decided to start writing things down.

[Thorne]

Then years later they decided to start writing things down.

Which means that everything that came before was little more than a monstrous game of Telephone. And it was more like centuries later, not just years.

Nice post, denuseri. Pretty much agrees that what's written in the Bible cannot necessarily be taken literally. Even in the US, right now, despite all of the written and archeological evidence, groups in power are trying to rewrite history to suit their political and/or religious agendas. How much easier would that have been when all of your history was oral, and saying anything against the rulers was a death wish?