101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Heroes 197
Reducing God’s prophecy to Abraham to its essential components, we have the
following scenario:
1. Abraham sojourned in Egypt.
2. Canaanites (i.e., Hyksos) afflicted Egypt.
3. The prophecy said that the strange land (i.e., Canaan) would afflict the seed of
Abraham. The Canaanite Hyksos dominated Egypt and Canaan.
4. The prophecy said that in the fourth generation there would be a return from
the strange land, i.e., from Canaan, when the power of the Amorites (i.e., Hyksos)
had ended.
5. Joseph, in the fourth generation from Abraham, returned to Egypt.
6. God’s prophecy said that Abraham’s seed (Isaac and his descendants) would
come out of a country after four hundred years.
7. Moses led an Exodus out of Egypt and into Canaan.
What we have here are two separate stories that have become entangled due to
confusion by the biblical redactors.
The first story described an affliction by Canaanites in Egypt for four generations.
The second described a departure from Egypt after four hundred years. Both stories
included a period of affliction, one by Canaanites over Egypt and one by Egyptians
over the Israelites.
The biblical redactors, who no longer remembered that the Israelite ancestors of
the patriarchal age had lived in Egypt, only knew of Israelites as a Canaanite people
who had been afflicted in Egypt. They read these two stories from a Canaanite rather
than Egyptian perspective. From that point of view, persecution in a land of strangers
meant persecution in Egypt rather than Canaan. They integrated the first story with
the second story to reflect a single affliction. For this reason, they assumed that the
time spans of four hundred years and four generations were one and the same when
in fact they actually measured two different durations. Consequently, the biblical
redactors erroneously created a period of four hundred years of slavery in Egypt.
Because we have no actual direct evidence for Israelite slavery in Egypt, it is difficult
to determine when (or if ) Israel ever suffered under bondage in Egypt. In my previous
book, The Bible Myth, I present an extensive argument that the Israelites