In the previous article, I briefly dissected the common arguments
against the basic historicity of the Exodus tradition. In this article I
will present some of the evidence in its favor, though I will leave many
specific details for the succeeding articles in this series.
1. The Unlikelihood of Invention
One reason many, if not most, scholars hold that the Exodus story
has a historical core is that it is otherwise difficult to explain why the
Israelites would have invented a story that portrays their national origins as
lowly slaves laboring on Egyptian building projects. As Kitchen frames it, “If there never
was an escape from Egyptian servitude by any of Israel’s ancestors, why on
earth invent such a tale about such humiliating origins?...That question has
been posed enough, and the sheer mass and variety of postevent references gives
it sharp point.”[1]
By “postevent references,” Kitchen is referring to the fact that
references to the Exodus occur throughout the different biblical sources
including even the earliest Hebrew texts: J, E, P, and D (the different sources
of the Torah, according to the Documentary Hypothesis long held by biblical
scholars), the Psalms, the different prophets, and so on. This suggests that the slavery in Egypt was
widely accepted by the Israelites as their historical national origin, and not
merely a myth invented by a few writers or a single party.
2. Semitic Slave Labor
The opening chapter of Exodus describes the slave labor the
Israelites were forced into:
Therefore they
set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply
cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. (Exod. 1:11)
The Egyptians
became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives
bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.
(Exod. 1:13-14)
The use of Semitic people for slave labor is a well-known
phenomenon of ancient Egypt beginning in the New Kingdom period, i.e. after
around 1540 BCE. This means
that the notion that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt forced to labor in
construction projects has a credible historical backdrop.
The Book of Exodus even gives specific details about the nature of
this slave labor:
Thus says
Pharaoh, “I will not give you straw. Go and get straw yourselves, wherever you
can find it; but your work will not be lessened in the least.” ’ So the people
scattered throughout the land of Egypt, to gather stubble for straw. The
taskmasters were urgent, saying, ‘Complete your work, the same daily assignment
as when you were given straw.’ And the supervisors of the Israelites, whom
Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, and were asked, ‘Why did
you not finish the required quantity of bricks yesterday and today, as you did
before?’ (Exod. 5:1-14)
Remarkably, all of the details of this description are confirmed
by the a relief on a wall of the Tomb Chapel of the vizier Rekhmire (c.
1450). The painting shows
Semites and Nubians building the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Thebes, gathering
straw and measuring the building materials to meet a specified daily quota:
3. City Names and Descriptions
The Book of Exodus names specific cities where it locates the
Israelites:
“Therefore
they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built
supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh.” (Exod. 1:11)
“Pithom” is now identified as Per-Atum in the modern Tell
el-Mashkuta. “Rameses” is
identified as Pi-Ramesses, built into a large city by Ramesses II (r. c.
1279-1213 BCE) to be his capital in the East Nile Delta. (This is one of the
evidences, as we will see, for Ramesses II being the pharaoh of the
Exodus.) Pi-Ramesses was
indeed a “supply city” as the above quote from Exodus states. It had workshops and storage magazines
for palaces and temples. As Kitchen[2]
and Hoffmeier[3]
point out, because the city was abandoned in the 1130s BCE, it could not have
been known to the authors of the Book of Exodus if they were writing a made-up
story many centuries later. They could
only have received it as an authentic detail preserved in the memory of an
actual historical Exodus from Egypt.
Additionally, the biblical text
states that the Hebrews required
two days to travel from Rameses to Succoth to Etham (Exod. 12:37; 13:20; Num.
33:5-8). The Papyrus
Anastasi V also gives the same time frame with reference to two escaped slaves
who took the same route.[4]
4. Israelite People Names
Another reason for believing that the Exodus story has a
historical core is that many Israelite names appear to be of Egyptian origin:
a relatively
large number of Egyptian personal names are found within the tribe of Levi
(e.g., Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Merari, Putiel, Phinehas, Hophni). There is
therefore a basis to surmise that ancestors of some Israelites, and
particularly those associated with the priestly tribe, came out of Egypt.[5]
This is, of course, unlikely on the assumption that the Israelites
emerged completely indigenously in Canaan.
5. Environmental Descriptions of the Sinai
The descriptions of the Israelites’ sojourn in the Sinai Peninsula
found in the books of Exodus and Numbers are strikingly consonant with its
actual natural conditions. This
includes the mention of the quails and their flight patterns, the miracle of
the water from the rocks, salt-tolerant reed marshes, and even geographical
descriptions, such as the description of the route the Israelites took down the
southern coast of the peninsula (see point 1 in the previous article). We will mention these in a later
article.
We see from this that the details found in the biblical
descriptions of the Exodus and Wandering could not have reasonably been
produced by scribes writing in Palestine or Babylon many centuries after the
alleged events. The details
are accurate and could only have been passed down from actual experiences in
Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, particularly towards the end of the New Kingdom
period.
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