At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.
Locusts were certainly a common problem.
Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle … the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile’s flooding seasons.
A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.
… But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.
…
Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.
At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.
Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant… untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God… and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.
Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.
When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured… Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba’al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.
El and his son Ba’al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon… this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.
…
The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.
The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were… and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia… all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.
2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.
There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.
What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites … well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict… Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.
There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews… ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.
At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.
Locusts were certainly a common problem.
Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle … the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile’s flooding seasons.
A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.
… But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.
…
Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.
At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.
Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant… untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God… and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.
Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.
When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured… Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba’al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.
El and his son Ba’al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon… this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.
…
The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.
The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were… and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia… all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.
2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.
There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.
What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites … well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict… Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.
There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews… ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.