[Avodah] Evidence of Yetzias Mitzrayim?

[Micha Berger]

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/MAGAZINE-have-camps-built-by-the-ancient-israelites-migrating-to-canaan-been-fo-1.6432817
or <http://bit.ly/2PrCdar>:

   Is This Where the Israelites Camped on Their Way to Canaan 3,200
   Years Ago?
   By Philippe Bohstrom and Ruth Schuster
   Aug 30, 2018

   Stone structures found in the Jordan Valley wasteland may have been
   erected by the Israelites crossing, very slowly, into Canaan,
   archaeologists postulate

   (C) Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Mosaic Magazine's snippet:

    [A]rchaeologists are excavating strange ruins previously found
    in inhospitable parts of the Jordan Valley, hoping to prove or
    disprove the theory suggested by the late Adam Zertal of Haifa
    University: that the stone structures found there were erected by
    the ancient Israelites as they slowly crossed into Canaan 3,200 years
    ago. Interestingly, if the Israelites did build these structures, they
    may have done so to shelter not themselves but their livestock....

    [A] meticulous survey of 1,000 square miles of the western part of
    the Valley, headed by Zertal and his team from 1978 onward, found the
    remains of hundreds of ancient settlements. (One seems to be shaped
    like a foot, with toes and all.) Of the hundreds, Zertal estimated
    that about 70 had been erected in the early Iron Age. That is,
    about 3,200 years ago, which is when the ancient Israelites were
    said to have been led by the Prophet Joshua from the wilderness to
    fertile Canaan....

    No signs of the builders' identity have been found thus far. The only
    reasons to associate the structures in the bitterly inhospitable
    valley with the ancient Israelites are their location and the
    estimated timing of their erection. [The current excavation] began
    with a large and very strange settlement called Khirbet el-Mastarah
    (loosely translated as "hidden ruins"). While today the only sign
    of life there is the occasional Bedouin shepherd passing by with his
    herd, Mastarah seems to have once housed a large Iron Age village...

    [Oddly], no sign of human habitation was found inside the stone
    structures, with the exception of grain grinding stones that could
    have been placed there later, or kept there. [This could be because]
    the structures were occupied by people for a short time, which
    fits with the theory of a migratory people taking a break for a
    decade or two. [Another] possibility is that stone structures were
    for the animals, while the people themselves, being nomads, lived
    in tents.... Ancient and modern Near Eastern Bedouin... also seem
    to have lived in tents but to have housed their animals in stone
    compounds -- to protect their precious livestock from rustlers.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             There's only one corner of the universe
micha at aishdas.org        you can be certain of improving,
http://www.aishdas.org   and that's your own self.
Fax: (270) 514-1507      	    - Aldous Huxley