No Corroborating Written Evidence For Old Testament

The Truth is …

The central events in the history of the Israelites are not corroborated in documents external to the Bible.  Most historians today agree that at best, the stay in Egypt and the Exodous occurred in a few families and that their private story was expanded and “nationalized” to fit the needs of theological ideology.

The Egyptian records have no mention of anything recorded in Exodus… not the existence of 1.5 million Israelites, not the occurrence of the ten plagues, not the loss of 1/4 of their population (and since the Jews were allegedly slaves, their labor would be missed the most).  Egyptians wrote extensively, in their distinctive hieroglyphs, and practiced detailed art that depicted many scenes of Egyptian life yet none depicts any of the 10 plagues. Because they left such a rich legacy, the Egyptians are more familiar to us than perhaps any other ancient civilization.

Neither have any of the writings from the Greek or Roman Empires mentioned significant activities of the children of Israel or the miracles of Jesus. The Romans acknowledge the pesky Christians but make no notice of Jesus or his alleged miracles.

As it happens, we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea in the first half of the first century AD: Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC-47 AD). Yet Philo says not a word about Jesus or Christianity!

The following is a list of massacres at the hands of God. They are noted because they stand out in the long list of atrocities in the bible because they are so strange that they should have been written about by the aggrieved party .

200,000 Midianites Num 31:17
No mention of this in Midianite literature.

People of Jericho Jos 6:21
No mention of this from the survivors of the Jericho slaughter

Ai 12,000 Jos 8:1-25
No mention of this from the survivors in Ai.

Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Debir, “utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded”.
No mention from any of those towns

Anakim, 5000 Jos 11:20-21

Canaanites and Perizzites Jg 1:8

Moabites, 10,000, Jg 3:28-29

Samgar kills 600 Philistines with an ox goad
How amazing and yet no mention elsewhere that one person, using just an ox goad killed 600 people.

Canaanites, 1000, Jg 4:15-16

Gideon, 120,000, Jg 7:22

Ammonite Massacre 20,000 Jg 11:32-33

Samson Kills 1000 with the jawbone of an ass.
Wouldn’t you think that 1000 people being killed by one guy with the jawbone of an ass would merit some write-up somewhere other than the bible?

Samson Kills 3000 Philistines by breaking two roof-supporting pillars, Jg 16:27-30
Again, one guy kills 3000 without nary a mention other than in the Bible.

Elijah kills 450 religious leaders in a prayer contest 1Kg 18.22-40 in Galiad.

Syrians, 100,000 1Kg 20:28
Perhaps they have no written history.

Syrians again!, 27,000 killed by a wall falling on them.1Kg 20:35

Assyrians, 185,000 2Kg 19:35 (who, when they arose, they were all dead corpses.
185,000 murdered while sleeping, non woke up during the slaughter. Perhaps they have no written history.

Ethiopians, 1,000,000 2Chr 14:9-14
One million Ethiopians killed without a peep! Perhaps they have no written history.

Inhabitants of Mt Seir, 30,000, 2Chr 20:22025

Judah, 120,000 in one day by Pekah; 2Chr 28:5
120,000 lost in one day in battle and no one writes about it anywhere other than in the bible. Perhaps they have no written history.

Bear kills 42 little children.
Surely people would have heard about and written about it somewhere. What they didn’t know is that the children deserved it because they were mocking a bald man about his baldness.

QED

6 comments on “No Corroborating Written Evidence For Old Testament

  1. Todd says:

    So you start with your premise that you don’t believe and then interpret everything with that bias. Seems like you need to be freed from your own unwarranted assumptions. Those who started with the belief that panda bears didn’t exist were able to point to a lack of evidence for a long time–until someone proved that they did exist. Maybe you need to evaluate your own phony approach to Scripture–you’re not doing yourself any favors.

  2. Carlos Turriago says:

    Of the conversations that allegedly took place between Abraham and Moses with the Lord, whereby a piece of land was promised to Abraham’s descendency, the only witnesses were Abraham and Moses themselves. Therefore only they could know the veracity of their claim, which for the rest of us it remains for the time being folk- fantasy or wild conjecture. The notion of “truth” of this oral gift from God travelled down the generations by hearsay until it was written down sometime after the Babylonian captivity. To accept the veracity of all this on such scant “evidence” is unwarranted, not to say irrational. Even granting that it all happened as told in the Scriptures, Ishmail was nevertheless Abraham’s first son and therefore he and his progeny (the Palestinians) belonged to the group that was granted the land together with the Jews. In light of this, how can the foundation of modern Israel, as the Jewish state t we know, be substantiated on Biblical grounds?

  3. Matthew says:

    Just wondering where you cite your evidence to support your claim that no evidence of the said events occurred?

    Not only that.. but you contradict yourself by saying that there is no evidence of the Jericho slaughter, because no survivors of the Jericho slaughter said so…. wtf?

    Not to mention.. Your insistence that the bible must be corroborated by non believing (secular) sources is akin to saying something like…. “I won’t believe Kennedy was assassinated until someone that doesn’t believe he was assassinated shows me evidence that he was”.. This whole page is baseless.

    • Show me evidence that ANY of the above events occurred. But let’s stick with the biggie; Exodus. Where other than the bible is there any evidence it occurred? Even Jewish scholars admit that the story of Moses and Exodus are just literature intended to inspire the faithful and make them believe that they really are God’s chosen people.

      Read some history about ancient civilizations. You will see that none of the bible’s atrocities are mentioned.

      That is my evidence. Absence of evidence, in the case of the bibles claims, is evidence of absence.

      Re: “Not to mention …..”
      Your analogy doesn’t hold water. It makes no sense.
      This whole page is truth, not baseless.

  4. G. Bennett says:

    Congratulations, you have just given 20 examples of where the Old Testament has not yet been documented by secular history (assuming the correctness of your statements). The TRUTH is that about 2000 instances where the Old Testament has been proven by secular history.

    • Yes, there was a Babylon, there were Egyptians, there were Ethiopians, etc. Secular history is sufficient to give us reason to believe that those instances of history are correct. But there is no confirmation of any of the supernatural nonsense of the Old Testament. “and there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host of a thousand thousand, and three hundred chariots; and came unto Mareshah.” A thousand thousand is a million you know. There were not even a million Ethiopians alive at that time.

      The sun standing still? The shadow going backwards? The three year drought? When do you think that will be confirmed by secular science? Who is working on that now?

New Evidence? Comments?