From: "Jeffrey Fisher"
which, btw, is not to argue that the israelites were in fact conquered into slavery. no evidence of that, either, although i could make that argument pretty easily based on literary-critical analysis of the joseph story (you do remember how he got to egypt in the first place, right? :-). but i imagine most people are bored already. ^^^ CB: Yea, the details of the story are what I'm interested in. According to the story, _Joseph_ was sold into "slavery". However, according to the story, the Israelites went in not as slaves, but as Joseph's relatives after he had worked his way up to "Chief Economist", no ? So, the story doesn't claim that the Israelites as a group were conquered into "slavery" . It claims they went into Egypt willingly as a favor to Joseph from the Pharoah. It was sort of a step up, not a step down, for the Israelites to go and live in the higher cultured Egypt My question in part is concerning the term "slavery". It may have been more like an "apprenticeship" than some-kind of ownership of his person and bondage. What evidence (smile) do you have on the nature of Egyptian "slavery" ? or "drubbing"/"conquests" as in your comment below " named for the pharaoh whose drubbing of "Israel" (among other conquests) is being celebrated. that's about 1230 BCE " What I'm getting at overall in this whole discussion is could Egypt be a technologically advanced civilization without "the family , private property and the state", without exploiting and exploited classes and conquering wars, imperialism ? Could the interpretations of the Pharoah's stela as reporting "drubbing/conquest" be inaccurate, a projection of modern thinking into the ancient society which was different from modern imperialist . Could they be defensive battles ? Defensive with the history of , for example , the Assyrians had attacked Egypt in ???? Is there evidence of Egyptian colonies ? ^^^^ ...the problem is that there's only so much there there in the text we have, and what there is we know is informed by the agendas of the people who wrote it when they wrote it. i can understand looking for more evidence that would give us something to work with. but looking at the same evidence over and over again isn't going to make it any better. ^^^^ CB: On the evidentiary issues, I agree that the agendas and biases of the writers/witnesses are important to consider. Keeping in mind your warning about the overall skimpiness of the evidence ( written and material) , it is the Israelite storytellers themselves who say that the group as a whole went into Egypt not as slaves , but freely as the tribe of Joseph, who had become a favorite of Phaoroah. It's also the Israelite storytellers who say that eventually the Egyptian's complained about their overpopulation , and "enslaved" them for not controlling population growth. In terms of evidentiary reasoning, the Israelite's story has credibility because they are testifying against their own self interest, telling on themselves , so to speak. In general, it is difficult to derive any conclusions concerning the precise nature of social structures from non-written, archaelogical evidence. We are sort of stuck with relying on written evidence, hearsay that it is, to "guess" about social structures. Charles _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
