Thursday, May 30, 2024

Historic legends

Unfortunately quite a few 'historic facts' turned out to be urban legends, a cautionary tale or simply a made up story. Take the 'true' story of Lady Godiva. The story about how she helped the locals by riding through town naked in exchange for lower taxes implemented by her husband, was written down some 200 years after the events supposedly took place.

Of course details of the story got mixed up and changed in translation and by passing on the story orally. Everyone who has ever played 'Chinese whispers' knows what I mean.

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Am I drawing parallels with The Bible? Of course. It's not that the old stories don't hold any wisdom and every single detail is made up but we have to remind ourselves they are stories. Just stories. If you follow the Bible/Torah literally, the Israelites started out as a family of 70 people. Just a few generations later there were at least 2 million Israelites.

Apparently Abraham/Ibrahim had a few thousand children with his half sister Sarah. Very potent couple. If you take the stories literal.

Was that some kind of miracle or simply a made up story, an exaggeration? Made up by the people who wrote the stories to give themselves some extra credit, a 'Raison d'ĂȘtre'?

The Exodus is the founding myth of the Israelites.[1][a] The scholarly consensus is that the Exodus, as described in the Torah, is not historical, even though there may be a historical core behind the Biblical narrative.

"Yeah, but there is some archealogical evidence that some of the people and places in the Bible/Torah existed to the stories must be true!"

Sorry to tell you but that's a rather stupid argument. Unless you believe Spiderman is real.


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