A similar question has been asked regarding the sight of Jesus ascending to heaven by hundreds of people. This claim can be easy to question since supposedly it was only seen by a small percentage of the population.
The revelation at Mt. Sinai, however, is believed to have been witnessed by ALL 3 million Jews (600,000 adult men with wives) who followed Moses in the desert. ALL attained prophecy. There is no tradition counter to this where an entire (large) nation claims to witness such a miraculous event.
Posted: July 1st 2008
bitbutter www
Hoax is probably the wrong word for it. But I think it’s extremely likely that this story is the product of legend.
Without getting into the specifics of this example, in cases like this, it’s important to realise that claims about the number of witnesses to a special event can also be part of the legend.
So how could such a legend get going if the claim is false? We know enough about human psychology that even when we have a situation in which a claim is conclusively falsified, we can expect denial, and belief in the claim to continue in some cases. Studies of the members of young cults is particularly interesting here.
Even if we have a hard time imagining how an audacious claim could establish itself in the face of easy rebuttal, we should remember that this kind of thing happens with regularity.
This all means that we’re not obliged to take what looks like a legend any more seriously when it contains within itself a claim about the number of witnesses to an amazing event.
Posted: April 25th 2009
Eric_PK
A few thoughts.
First of all, there are well-documented cases of mass delusions where large groups of people see (or experience) things that aren’t true.
But in this case, I think you are confused about the evidence. You seem to think that there are millions of witnesses to an event.
But really you only have a book that says that there were millions of witnesses to an event.
That’s one account, not millions of accounts.
Posted: July 16th 2008
Reed Braden www
If you are referring to Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets, I have no reason to doubt that this was portrayed accurately in whatever testimonies exist, but it is only evidence that Moses carved a bunch of words onto tablets, not that God exists.
Any supernatural elements of the story are extremely suspect. Even if writings exist that say millions of Jews saw God himself (which is not in Exodus—only Moses saw God and he was only allowed to see his butt), those writings are thousands of years old and were passed down orally for at least 1000 years before anyone wrote them down, and then they went through hundreds of translations and interpretations, so the evidence you speak of is highly unreliable.
Also, this is from Wikipedia:
It may not be possible to fabricate a public event during one or two generations, however, when time is distant it is perfectly possible to create a myth regarding the ancestors: “...Greek mythology has it that Prometheus gave fire to the first humans, and afterwards the Greek gods gave Pandora’s box of diseases to humanity. Those gifts, for good or bad, were given to the first humans, which are supposedly the ancestors of us all, of the humanity of all the world. “Your ancestors were witnesses to the fact that Prometheus gave them fire”, it could be so phrased. Would Rabbi Gottlieb find it strange? It is no more strange than his own saying, “your ancestors were witnesses to the fact that God gave them the Torah”. There is as much justification in believing the Prometheus myth, but an Orthodox Jew has already taken it for granted that Greek mythology must be false.”
Posted: July 14th 2008