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Archive for June 10, 2009, 11:14 am

Creationism is Based on the Fallacious Word of God

The finding of Moses, by Edwin LongImage via Wikipedia

In making an introduction to the Book of Exodus I want to make two things completely clear: the error in the Word of God as to how long they stayed as slaves and when the exodus actually happened.  So many points exist that refute the concept of 430 years in Egypt that I will use as many as I can in this post.  The timing of the Exodus is a hotly debated subject, but we do have enough information to be certain that Biblical scholars are wrong.  It did not happen in the 18th dynasty of Egypt (1446 BCE).  I will point out in this post why how long the Israelites were in Egypt.  In my next post I will debate the timing of the Exodus.

To determine the time the Israelites spent in Egypt let me start with these verses:

Exodus 12:40-41 Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years.  At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the Lord’s divisions left Egypt.

Now let me compare to more verses:

Gen 15:13 Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years.

Gen 15:16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. 

So in two different places the Word of God tells us that the Israelites would be in Egypt for four centuries.  Yet in a different verse it tells us that in the fourth generation they will leave Egypt.  Now here comes the question: was a generation 100 years?  No, they were not; we know that because four generations did actually live in Egypt and each of these generations did not live for more than 137 years!  We know that Jacob was close to 81 years old when Levi was born.  Jacob was 147 years old when he died and only lived in Egypt for 17 years (Gen 47:28) meaning that Jacob entered Egypt when he was 130 years old.  That would mean that Levi was 49 years old when he went to Egypt.  We also know that Levi died when he was 137 years old (Exodus 6:16).  This leads us to understand that Levi lived in Egypt for 88 years.  We also know the lineage of Moses: Levi, Kohath, Amram, and then Moses himself.  So Gen 15:16 is correct!  From the Dead Sea Scrolls we know that Kohath died when he was 136 years old and that the Israelites had been in Egypt for 152 years by the time of his death.  Two generation and we are already at 152 years into the exile.  The lynch pin to the whole 430 year exile in Egypt is how long did Amram live!  We know that Moses was 80 years old when he led the people out of Egypt (Exodus 7:7).  Combining what we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls (152 years) and what we know from Moses age (80 years) that adds up to 232 years.  So Moses was born when Amram was 200 years old, right?  Not so, Amram died when he was 137 years (Exodus 6:20).  So you see we are running into a problem here, it could not have been 4 generations and 430 years, the Word of God is wrong!  But by how much is it wrong, how old was Amram when Moses was born?  Moses was born 2377 years after the creation of the world.  With a lot of finagling we find that Amram was 72 years old when Moses was born.  This means that the Israelites spent only 304 years in Egypt.  To make things even worse we know that while Joseph was alive, the Israelites were favored by the Egyptian Pharaoh (Exodus 1:8).  So now comes a new question: how many years were the Israelites slaves?  Joseph died at the age of 110 (Gen 50:26).  He spent an additional 68 years in Egypt after Jacob died.  Levi lived an additional twenty years after Jacob. So for 88 years out of the 304 years the Israelites lived in peace with the Egyptians.  To make things even worse the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate in the Tractate Visions of Amram that the Israelites were free to travel from place to place.  In the time of Amram they were not slaves!

So as it turns out the Israelites definitely did not spend 430 years in Egypt making two of my opening sets of verses lies.  The Word of God is correct about the number of generation, but is completely false about the number of years spent in exile.  Using different dates of births and deaths the Israelites spent between 215 years and 304 years in Egypt of which 88 years were totally peaceful.  So the Word of God is fallible in both the number of years spent in Egypt and in the slavery of the Israelites!  As an Atheist I continue to find that the Bible is a complete work of fiction that should not be taken literally.  Creationism (taking the Word of God literally) is complete bullshit and as a result should not and cannot be taught as an alternative to science.  The two are not compatible, one is based on facts (science) the other is based on an extensively fallacious Book of Words.


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