Originally posted by DeepThought
My pet theory is that Moses is in fact a garbled version of Rameses the Great. Rameses never personally entered Canaan although his army did, ditto Moses, and they both lived to be 90 which was an extreme age at the time. Rameses = born of Ra. Moses just means born, so if you drop the reference to Ra then they have the same name. After a millennium o ...[text shortened]... s are like that - highly symbolic with the players not necessarily referring to a single person.
Yeah, but when you are still clinging on to the idea that they were ever 'real'
by saying that they were a metaphor for the defeat of an army...
You have already passed the point where you can reasonably claim that they
are not fictional.
When someone asks if Robin Hood really existed, they are not really asking if
there were a bunch of different people who's actions were mixed together with
a bunch of myth, and then distorted by a centuries long game of Chinese whispers.
What they want to know is if there was
A GUY called Robin Hood who's
actions formed the basis of the legends we have today.
If it's the former, then the answer is no and that person is a fiction, even if
bits of the stories have some basis' in reality.