hello to jeffro above the original and first reference that i put in was thomas cahill and his book the gifts of the jews how a tribe of desert nomads changed the way everyone thinks and feels and i originally put that ref alone the wilson ref came later on from a search and at the request of jeppiz but cahill alone i felt was overall sufficient at that point and that cahill book had literally zero to do with anything with jehovah s witnesses or any jw books or journals or sermons that wasn t even on my mind in that sense nor did i look at any watchtower publications regarding this article or this specific matter cahill had nothing to do with that and even jeppiz admitted a number of times that it was a reliable source and ok but the wilson source i provided here later on and then soon on the article itself was only at the demand of jeppiz for another source he kept insisting to find something else etc so i did a search and the wilson thing was even more pointed in a way and it s in a pro jw website strictly genteel which transcribed the noted wt book is the bible really the word of god and the link can be found here also to dougweller hello i m still not sure why you say that i got the name of the book wrong that s what s stated as the source j a wilson and the world history of the jewish people at least that s he main part of the name of the book and i believe wilson was a co author of that or something but to jeffro you seem to think incorrectly that i probably had the wilson ref as paramount when in actuality that was just a side thing and accident because of subsequent demands and circumstances on this talk page cahill was actually my guy on this specific matter on the exodus matter not wilson necessarily nearly as much the exact in context quote from cahill s book says this when we examine the considerable extant literatures of mesopotamia and egypt we find no obvious mention of the israelites if as the majority of scholars have provisionally concluded israel escaped from egypt in the reign of rameses ii about midway through the thirteenth century b c why is there no record of this marvellous defeat in any egyptian text or inscription of course the defeat may have been so embarrassing to egypt that like many great powers it could not allow itself to record honestly what happened alternatively the story of the drowning of pharaoh s army may have been inflated over time by hebrew oral tradition and what had been a minor skirmish in egyptian eyes we know for instance that ramses ii died not in a watery grave but in his bed was eventually puffed up beyond all recognition most radically the exodus may never have taken place but may be just a story concocted like gilgamesh by nomadic herdsmen in need of an evening s entertainment this last hypothesis though temptingly unambiguous can be maintained only by ignoring undeniable aspects of the actual text of the bible there are real differences literary differences differences of tone and taste but far more important differences of substance and approach to material between gilgamesh and exodus and even between gilgamesh and genesis cahill continues the anonymous authors of gilgamesh tell their story in the manner of a myth there is no attempt to convince us that anything in the story ever took place in historical time at every point rather we are reminded that the action is taking place once upon a time in other words in that pristine golden time outside of meaningless earthly time the story of gilgamesh like the gods themselves belong to the realm of the stars it is meant as a model for the hearers who believed in any case that everything important everything archeteypal happened had happened was happening it is impossible to fix this occurrence clearly in one tense since it occurs outside of time beyond the earthly realm of unimportant instances for all the ancients except the israelites the people who would become the jews time as we think of it was unreal the real was what was heavenly and archetypal for us the heirs of the jewish perception the exact opposite is true earthly time is real time eternity if we think of it at all is the end of time or simply an illusion the text of the bible is full of clues that the authors are attempting to write history of some sort but there is in these tales a kind of specificity a concreteness of detail a concern to get things right that convinces us that the writer has no doubt that each of the main events he chronicles happened he makes it pretty clear that even though not saying it dogmatically he does