Hello.



You have good reason to be worried. Your son is going through a process of immense change (brought about by a collapse of his emotional systems leading to a denial of his reason, the values upon which he was raised, and the secular culture).

See how much your son’s situation (his desire to dive into the world of mysticism) blurs his sense of critique: he hears a lecture by a religious Jew and suddenly his face is glowing as though he found a great treasure. He did not cast any doubt on the subject of the lecture, did not seek to hear the opinion of an expert Egyptologist (about when the text was written and for what reason…).

What is amusing is that those in the process of “returning to religion” (or, more correctly, “functional collapse” — a concept which defines his state well) honestly and truly think that they only “seek the truth.” But if you tell them that, as seekers of truth, they must look at all religions and listen to those who have already been through this wringer (those who have left religion, or, more correctly, those who have freed themselves of the chains of religion), they will answer that there is no need, because they have already checked (they mean that they have checked with their rabbis), that they feel “the truth” in their hearts, and that they have no need to check further.



And now to your question about Papyrus (the lamentations of) Ipuwer.

As is our way, we turned to an Egyptologist, and this is his answer in brief:



The papyrus is not called Papyrus Ipuwer – there is a confusion here between the papyrus and the text written on it. The papyrus itself is called Papyrus Leiden 344, and the text is called The Lamentations of Ipuwer (or the Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All).

The papyrus dates from the Nineteenth Dynasty (ca. 1295-1186 BCE), but the text is a copy of an earlier text. The date of its composition is unknown, and various options have been suggested – general consensus sets it in the late Middle Kingdom (Thirteenth Dynasty; 18th century BCE?) on internal evidence. It belongs to a genre of laments over the sad condition of Egypt which do not necessarily reflect real events.

The major works produced by leading scholars in the field (probably a detailed library search will not add very much to their summaries) are:



R.B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Oxford, 1997, 166-199 or W.K. Simpson, et al., The Literature of Ancient Egypt, New Haven and London, 2003, 188-210. (Here ends the Egyptologist’s answer).



You can read more on Wikipedia, in Letter to Rabbi: Historical impossibility of the Exodus, the Sinai Revelation and conquest of Canaan, and the Hofesh website (where you will find a Hebrew translation of the papyrus text). Note the date of its writing (the 18th century BCE) and that of the Exodus, according to Jewish tradition (1310 BCE) and the debate over whether it represents historical fact or a literary creation (lamentation).

I will add a little; though I am not an expert on ancient Egypt, I am an expert on the vile ways of outreach professionals. They bring half the information, ignoring the important data and grabbing hold of the inconsequential, all in hope of finding succor for their desires — faith in the fictions that they themselves invented or which they inherited from their parents.

I will give you an example, and from that you can learn the rest: They bring a quotation from the papyrus which reads “The river was blood,” and they parallel that with what is written in the Torah, “And the blood was in all the land of Egypt” (Exodus 7:21). See how vile and insolent they are. In the next sentence it is written “yet men drink of it” while in the Torah the opposite is written: “And Egypt could not drink of the waters of the Nile.”

It is also written in the lamentation that the reason for the river becoming blood is dead bodies. “Indeed, many dead are buried in the river; the stream is a sepulcher” and not that it turned for some strange reason (miraculously, as written in the Torah).

Another, opposite example (an event written in the lamentation but not in the Torah): Ipuwer remarks “Indeed, the women are barren and none conceive,” but the Torah does not speak of this “plague.”



Moreover, and this is the most important aspect, the lamentation recorded on the papyrus is a dialogue between Ipuwer and the “Majesty of the Lord of All,” as is written, “Thus spoke Ipuwer in answering the Majesty of the Lord of All.” The papyrus does not mention the main points of the story of the Exodus from Egypt as related in the Torah: a nation of slaves, a nation which believes in a different god, and the exodus of an entire nation. The Torah testifies that one of the purposes of the plagues was to show Egypt the power of the “G-d of Israel”: “And Egypt shall know that I am G-d when I stretch out My Hand over Egypt” (Exodus 7:5). Ipuwer, for some reason, does not mention a new god of whom he learned from a different nation. (Perhaps, we can joke, the believers will claim that G-d hardened the heart of Ipuwer.)

Now see something amazing. Out of the believer’s wish to bring support for his delusions, he ends up bringing contradictions to his faith (because his faith is not based on reason, he does not notice the contradiction in what he does). One who reads Ipuwer’s “lamentation” gets the impression that the events were very serious, but not supernatural in nature (miraculous). The whole power of the Biblical tale — the Exodus told as a description of miracles — is swept away by the papyrus, because it permits a naturalistic explanation of events. If so, this is another example of the fact that Biblical stories are based in the cultural legacy of the ancient Middle East (like the story of the Great Flood). The authors did not “make up” the stories, they just linked lamentations, legends, and legacies and added them into the history they were inventing for the Jewish nation. The lamentation of Ipuwer shows where the author of the Exodus story got his ideas and how he so easily introduced them to the Jewish masses. There is no force greater than that of legend and myth, entrenched within the masses, to bolster a fictional story (as archeologists of our day argue; see the essay Archeological Findings Help Determine the Era in which the Torah Was Written).



We will summarize our findings in such a way that the claims support each other and build an entire thesis.



1. Were the text of the papyrus a lamentation and not necessarily a description of factual events, it would have been enough.

2. And did it include factual descriptions, the lamentation of Ipuwer far from describes the ten plagues. It is enough.

3. And did it describe the ten plagues, it would strengthen the argument that there were serious problems in Egypt (natural, not miraculous) which refutes the main point of the Exodus, the miracles, and contradicts what is written: “Has any god ventured to go and take for himself one nation from the midst of another by prodigious acts, by signs and portents?” (Deuteronomy 4:34). It is enough.



Since this is a lamentation which does not describe the ten plagues and does not describe miracles, how much more so is it clear that we never left Egypt and there never were ten plagues and that we never received the Torah at Sinai.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet