You wrote:

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.

We actually do.

There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves.

Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.

No, they don't. But they do claim lineage to Alfred the Great, whose lineage is traced by legendary sources to Woden/Odin, and from there to Noah and Adam. In some versions, Beowulf is also part of that lineage.

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found.

The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the original claims.

Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago black sea connected to the Mediterranean and probably was not entirely unpeaceful.

I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.

> The biblical flood was mythical yet couple of thousand years ago

Pretty much every ancient religion/group has a "biblical" flood story. Even those from different continents. Haven't you seen Ancient Aliens?

even if black sea deluge happened sufficiently rapidly, you're several thousands years off. Current theories date it to about 8 thousand years ago.

If there had been a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people, and even more so hundreds of thousands of slaves, from late bronze age Egypt (a powerful, old, highly literate kingdom), we would expect to find significant evidence of this (inscriptions, local stories, migration sites, etc). The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.

We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, and there is no evidence of any such mass migration in the archeological record, nor any non-Biblical references to such an event taking place.

It may be the case that the Exodus tale is a recontexualization of various historical memories of nomadic resettlement combined with political narrative, but the actual story as described in the actual Bible didn't happen.

The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”

Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.

It's the result of politics, and that's not always pretty.

> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).

While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.

After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.

Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.

So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.

But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.

The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…