Tanach Thoughts

Yesterday, Shabbat of Chol Hamo'ed Pesach 5784, I said a Dvar Torah by my grandparents' שיחיו house. The DT was about the subject of the Israelites having "borrowed" wealth from the Egyptians. It was essentially a combination of what Dr. Aton M. Holzer wrote here and my answer here  on Mi Yodeya. The gist is that while different answers have been given over the millennia as to why it was okay for the Israelites to take the Egyptian wealth, apparently only Dr. Holzer has provided a reasonable explanation for why they claimed they were merely "borrowing". He suggested that the borrowing was based on a Hittite ritual similar to the Israelite scapegoat ritual (more on that, see here , pp. 16-17) where the Hittites adorned two slaves, a bull and an ewe with gold and colorful wool and sent them away to take away a plague caused by an angry enemy deity. The Israelites told the Egyptians they would take the 10 plagues from Egypt but they had to do it properly: adorn...

On this blog I've discussed a couple of times the Exodus and archeology (see here and here ). Recently, I have been thinking to myself that perhaps the lack of hard evidence means something. True, there's a loose collection of findings (such as the Ipuwer Papyrus or the Book of Gates (see here )) that many Bible-believers hold to be evidence of the Exodus, but since they have all been dismissed by academic scholars in a manner that has lulled the world into a belief that there is zero evidence for the Exodus, it is difficult to consider them hard evidence. Not impossible, just difficult. Which led me to think that perhaps there's a reason for us not having found hard evidence for the Exodus, i.e., something that will completely knock the socks off of academia, and that is that the Exodus stands as a challenge to our generation: Will you believe or will you deny? Look at it this way: Although we have not yet found evidence for portions of the Tanach, it is no longer (compa...