Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Exodus in the Bible, the Qur’an, and History (Part 3): Evidence for the Historical Exodus

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.


[1] Kitchen, 245.
[2] Kitchen, 256; Hoffmeier, 117-119.
[3] Hoffmeier, 118.
[4] Kitchen, 259.
[5] Greenstein, Edward L. “Exodus.” HarperCollins Study Bible: Old Testament.  Ed. Attridge, Harold.  iBooks.

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