By ‘us’ I’m assuming you mean the Jewish people, and specifically those living in Israel today.
You can’t cherry-pick God’s promises. Even if you accept those verses at face value, the promise is contingent upon the nation remaining faithful to God’s commandments. In the Book of Deuteronomy (chap. 28), God warns Moses:
Continue readingActually, no. The Book of Deuteronomy is very explicit on the issue, with the expression avor et-hayarden el-ha’aretz asher Adonai eloheinu noten (‘pass the [River] Jordan to the land which the Lord our God has given’) repeated (in various permutations) a dozen times (2:29 / 3:27 / 4:21, 23, 26 / 9:1 / 11:31 / 12:10 / 27:2,4, 12 / 30:18).
Continue readingNo.
For starters, there is no historical evidence for the existence of Moses as a historical figure—i.e., a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian prince who flees into exile then returns to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt.
Secondly, the Exodus story is most likely an embellishment of the forced exodus of a quarter of a million Canaanites from northern Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom period in 1550 BCE, which marks the beginning of the New Kingdom period. Even if they had a charismatic leader who might serve as the basis for Moses, casual but clearly assured graffiti inscriptions in a well-defined Canaanite/Old Hebrew script on statues in the western Sinai at that time support the evidence of Canaanites indicate that by this time, even ordinary folk (probably teenage boys, or young men) were literate in that script—which indicates that the script was invented a considerable time before that.
Oh, yes. Here are a few examples, just from the first few books of the Hebrew Bible:
The most obvious instance of a checkpoint was the one set up by the Gileadites to catch retreating Ephraimite soldiers, after the Ephraimites’ defeat in battle. Since Ephraimites were known to have a particular kind of lisp—pronouncing /sh/ as /s/—the Gileadites put a simple test to every man they caught:
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. [Judges 12:6]
[A2A] Because He was putting on a show, to demonstrate to the Hebrews* and other nations that He is the greatest—nay, the only—God.
This was, if you like, God’s comeback performance (His first since the Flood), so he was intent on making a big impression. And what greater impression could there be than to beat up and humiliate the most powerful kingdom in the known world at that time?
ומשה לא ידע כי קרן עור פניו | and Moses did not know that his face’s skin shone
This is the result of a misunderstanding (and therefore mistranslation) of the Hebrew (Exodus 34:29):
ויהי ברדת משה מהר סיני ושני לחת העדת ביד משה ברדתו מן ההר ומשה לא ידע כי קרן עור פניו בדברו אתו
The bolded text in Hebrew above, transliterated, says: uMoshé lo yada ki qaran or-panav bedabro itto—meaning ‘and Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone as he spoke with him.’
The word qaran is a verb form of qeren, which can mean either ‘ray’ (of light), or ‘horn’.
Some Latin translations chose—either deliberately, or out of ignorance—to interpret it as ‘horn’, when in fact, what is meant in the original is that his face glowed (presumably as a result of exposure to something during his meeting with God on Mt. Sinai).
Ooh boy—that’s a great question. Here are a few, to titillate the palate:
Post-Exodus:
Notes by Autumn Light 