Why is this Passover different from most others? The first day coincides with Tax Day for Americans. Jews remember the bitter hardship and forced labor of slavery in Egypt. Scholars, however, can find no evidence of modern era-style slavery (or of Jews residing in or escaping from in Egypt). As for the pyramids there are records of payments to laborers, typically farmers who had nothing else to do at certain times of year. A “slave” in ancient Egypt may simply have been a person subject to a 20% tax that free Egyptians did not pay.
[To the children at last night’s Seder I pointed out that “the plagues visited upon the Egyptians were so bad that their civilization lasted only about 2000 more years.”]
The only paid 20%? Oy vey. I guess we know who the real slaves are around here…
PBS program Nova had a show called “The Bible’s Buried Secrets”
In which they looked at origin of Jews
according to archeology.
It turned out that Jews were slave of Canaanite.
They had their Empire end because of drought
and the slaves took over the area as middle east
people migrated to Europe (it is in the genes).
Any way the Jews took up a God from Yemen called
Yahoo. Thus the Jewish people were born.
There is no connection to Egypt except that
Egypt was the local Empire that survived while the Assyrians, Canaanists,
Mitannis perished. All these were Aryan Empires.
That is why you find more Aryan artifact in Israel than Jewish ones.
The Transcript of the show is in the pbs website just search for the title.