Zachary Cawley Bastnagel ENGL 14 December 2017 Was the Exodus a Historical Event? What use is a political debate or quarrel when one’s eternal soul, which lasts for much longer than any temporal nation’s sovereignty, is on the line? In the long term, it is comparatively impractical. Part and parcel for establishing a need to come to God inevitably boils down to whether or not the Bible is truthful in what it says. The first thing to establish is whether the Exodus, the event where the Hebrews left Ancient Egypt under Moses as described in the Bible, occurred. Many people would deny the exodus ever happened on account of a relative lack of archaeological evidence, but there are in fact reasons from the ancient culture, linguistics, and literature surrounding Israel, coupled with Egyptian history and the science behind an easterly wind in shallow waters as accounted for by geography and meteorology, to believe the Exodus was in fact a historical event. Relatively recently, some archaeologists came to doubt the Hebrews ever came out of Egypt. Israel Finkelstein, for instance, denies it on account of the conclusion that “there is no archaeological evidence of the story itself” (Tel Aviv University). The thing is, archaeology is not the only way to prove an event to have happened, although it is a starting point. In addition, another set of people, the Scythians, were under rather similar conditions in the Black Sea regions that the Hebrews were in the Middle East on their way to Canaan. A key difference is brought to light when Karen Rubinson, in a 1975 article from Expedition Magazine, notes that the artifacts which act as evidence regarding Herodotus’ mention of these same people within the Black sea region “come principally from burials of the rich leaders of the Scythians and other tribes, and date to the 7th through the 4th century B.C.” (17). Moshe and Aaron, as powerful as they were as religious and political leaders, did not have this luxury upon their deaths, nor did any of the tribal leaders of Israel. Any precious metals and valuable resources Cawley 2 Nomadic Israel had were used for religious ceremonies and the Ark of the Covenant. Another key difference was their likely purpose of travel. At least in the Dneiper region, the Scythians simply moved around during the summer so to tend to flocks (Rubinson 17-18). The Hebrews’ ultimate destination, meanwhile, was Canaan, hence it is unlikely they would have been inclined to leave any sort of lasting trace of their presence. Why would a recently-freed people that devotes the more valuable items to their deity even have leaders buried with the sorts of riches the Scythian rulers were found in the ground with? Naturally, other people will still reject the Exodus on the grounds of how extraordinary it may sound. Reputable Syro-Palestinian scholar William G. Dever is quoted in one of his books as saying that narratives like it are “overlaid with legendary and fantastic materials that the modern reader may enjoy as “story,” but which can scarcely be taken seriously as history” (98). Imagine where the theory of the atom would be if, using that same assumption, we employed the Greek philosophers’ thinking towards the words of Democritus. That being said, it is not necessary for this paper to prove the “supernatural” to be real (which, frankly, would require another paper entirely), only that the Hebrews were there and left Egypt. These same naysayers, regarding the topic of the Hebrews and their journey to Canaan from Egypt, often have a clear bias against applying the Bible to research on the history of Israel as a people. Minimalist Niels Peter Lemche, for example, makes a point of saying that the Bible “has to do with religion and most scholars have been and still are religious people”, hence biased in that direction. Biases are something everyone has, and societal pressure of any kind did not stop what Christians would call “heresies” from sprouting, such as the same Arianism -the belief that Jesus is not God, but a created being- Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. It is not just today that such biases are prominent. There are religious biases in a number of ancient documents that include, but are not limited to, “interpretations in the omen traditions which are tied to political themes” (Soden 46). This obviously includes Egyptian texts, and the Egyptian treatment of Pharaohs as gods meant that anything Cawley 3 humiliating would be in the rulers’ best interest to omit for fear of being shamed and ousted, in steep contrast to the Bible’s habit of including moments that would embarrass Hebrew leaders immensely, as is the case with Moses striking a rock twice for water instead of doing as instructed by God and speaking out to the rock. The cultural concept of honor and shame, in fact, provided the perfect battleground to destroy the Exodus narrative before it could even be written. The cultural concept of Honor is where your value within society and your in-groups is determined by what people think of you, warranting a frequent contest to gain honor by way of public competitions with your peers (Plevnik 106-107). A single shred of proof that shattered the narrative would have been an incredible loss of honor for the authors, generating an incentive to be honest, especially since none of the biblical writers nor any likely patrons claimed divinity. If we were to discard anything on account of a bias, there would be no established history, at all, let alone a way to determine the truth or falsity of the Exodus narrative. If we are to treat at least some of the Bible as history and determine the truthfulness of the Exodus narrative, how was it compiled? There is no clear answer agreed upon regarding that, although there is a prominent theory where there are four main sources of the Pentateuch/Torah (where we find the Book of Exodus), called the Documentary Hypothesis, which speaks of them with the labels J, E, P, and D, each having a distinct set of vocabulary and content which sets them apart in some way (Brettler 5). Different accounts serve to authenticate the occurrence rather than destroy it, seeing as it shows there was not some corroborated effort to invent a narrative by having every account of it say exactly the same thing. In all likelihood, a bout of paraphrasing was responsible for variations in narrative due to different people remembering events like the Exodus distinctly from each other, especially when accounting for oral tradition: “To prevent a crisis from destroying the state, storytellers searched past traditions for wisdom which had been forgotten or ignored, and retold the stories of the people looking for new directions in past experiences (McCarter 1990: 291)” (Matthews and Benjamin 240). In such a social environment, nobody could get away so easily with making things up out of the blue, especially Cawley 4 when others with access to traditional tales were willing to capitalize on an opportunity to gain prestige by publicly shaming the perpetrator. Thus, it is logical to assume there is at least some truth to the story of the Exodus; we simply need to find it. It would be undutiful to avoid establishing the ideal candidate for the time period to find the patriarch Joseph, followed by the rest of Israel’s ancestors, within Egypt, for the purpose of dating and then proving true the Exodus, which we must do by pinpointing the correct circumstances and when they take place. Within the Bible is mention from God to Abraham that his descendants that would become Israel would be subjugated before reaching Canaan and “be afflicted for four hundred years” (Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Gen. 15.15-16). It should be noted that an agricultural and shepherding society, like the Israelites, had no use nor capacity for an exact counting of time, and instead would count time by the seasons that dictated farm and shepherding life. It especially holds true when mentioning how the breaking up of ground in the early summer after each spring harvest was followed by a flood from the rivers and a harvest in the fall (Soden 99). A literal understanding of the 400 years is even more hard-pressed to prove in light of the fact the average life expectancy was generally lower than ours today. The other clue is that it would be the fourth generation that ultimately inhabits Canaan (Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Gen. 15.15-16). A generation lasts as long as the oldest person of it, which you cannot precisely predict the death of. On the other hand, it would not have been above certain people to live beyond the age of 60, Moshe/Moses being a case in point, thus there is plenty of leeway in dating the events related to the Hebrews’ sojourn from Egypt. It is a safe bet to date Joseph’s lifetime exactly at the time of the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period/Middle Bronze Age and use that knowledge to find the Pharaoh mentioned in the Exodus narrative in order to pinpoint historical accuracy. For one, the ethnically-Canaanite Hyksos largely conquered and controlled the rival lands of Upper and Lower Egypt during this time (Hoerth and McRay 77). A group of fellow Levantine people like the Hyksos would have welcomed the Hebrews due to the fact they came from the same region, allowing for a stay in the land until a pharaoh Cawley 5 hostile to the Hebrews came about, prompting a journey out of Egypt. Among the sites is one in the Eastern Nile Delta dubbed Tell el-Kebir, where we find tombs, plus the presence of Levantine materials from this same period and region at the Wadi Tumilat (Hoffmeier 65-68). This indicates a foreign presence that included people from Canaan, where the House of Israel was written as journeying from during a famine to Goshen, an ideal spot in the Nile Delta to go to as an escape from starvation due to its (still) lush environment until the Exodus. The slave price paid for Joseph was twenty shekels of silver, narrowing down the time period to the first half of the second millennium BC (Hoffmeier 8384). Dating Joseph’s lifetime to the second millennium BC makes sense in light of the decline of Ancient Egypt as an empire later on, making the second half of the same millennium the ideal candidate for the Exodus. Latter generations of Israel would have stayed roughly five centuries, at most, before another dynasty oppressed them. Our scope of candidates for Pharaohs mentioned in the Exodus narrative zeroes in on the New Kingdom. From near the close of the Second Intermediate Period to the start of the 18th Dynasty, Ahmose I drives back the Hyksos and begins to assert imperial dominance over the Levant, a precedent Egyptian rulers followed in an additional dynasty. (Mumford 74-76). Just a portion of this span of time is more than enough for any knowledge of Joseph to be forgotten by the Egyptian Pharaohs, as described concerning one of them. Obviously, it only takes one dynasty for there to be multiple generations before two or more Pharaohs during this time period make the move towards afflicting Israel. With this in mind, who was the one from during the Exodus? It is reasonable to say that the Pharaoh Moses spoke to before the Exodus was Ramesses II. Archaeologist Ann E. Killebrew confirms that there is a widespread consensus that the “sheer volume and suddenness of the appearance of significant quantities of Aegean-style pottery herald the arrival” of what are known as the Philistines in settlements that include Gaza (598). The Phillistines’ arrival preceded a decline in Egyptian influence over Canaan, the Hebrews’ destination as they left Egypt. Trude Dothan’s findings at Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip confirm there was an Egyptian outpost there Cawley 6 during the reign of Ramesses II to avoid due to the fact the troops “would have been prepared to recapture” them, as God warned them about (Price 136). Even if the phrase “way of the Phillistines” was a later term, a recently freed people is more likely to avoid a direct confrontation in a military location like the “Way of Horus”. At this point, all that is left is to deal with some scientific and literary contexts to establish the Exodus’ historicity. It will not work to take a completely literal reading of the Book of Judges to date the Exodus before debating its historicity. Those references, if one takes the time to notice, are initially intervals of forty almost consecutively (Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Judges 3-8). The forty-year intervals, of course, occur too frequently together to be taken literally, and are more likely a reference to a full generation that has passed each. That aside, what about the three hundred years Jephthah mentions between Israel’s first encounter with Ammon and the time he spoke to its current ruler via a message? The motif of three occurs throughout the Bible, including where David, in 1 Samuel 20: 41, bowed to Johnathan three consecutive times. Three, reasonably concluded, is a number representing completeness, which would allow for these 300 years mentioned to be interpreted as a way of stating there was roughly a century of relative peace. With the literary context out of the way, what is there to contend scientifically concerning the Exodus? Not only is the “Red Sea” crossed out of Egypt a different body of water altogether, a natural phenomenon regarding the weather does explain the reference to a parting of water there. The phrase used to describe this body of water is yam suph, which translates to “sea of reeds”, especially when you consider the higher ocean levels at the time and how, even in our time along the Suez Canal that connects the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea proper, “a variety of reeds and rushes grow (fig. 27)” (Hoffmeier 208-9). From a geographical standpoint, it would make more sense to cross one of those lakes out of Egypt than take what would likely be a days-long trek across more than a hundred miles of parted water to escape an army of chariots. Using a hydrodynamic model with a digitally-designed geographical map representing the Nile Delta in roughly 1250 BC, where the winds are projected at 28 Cawley 7 meters per second, a pair of researchers who published their work in a scientific journal run by plos.org were able to see exposed mud flats along parts of Lake Tanis and that would leave “3.9 hours for the company to cross the Kedua Gap” (Drews and Han). The same lake, they make clear, has channels from there to the Mediterranean Sea, and was initially at sea level as per the data for the experiment, thus it would not be a stretch to say this lake would have been considered a “sea of reeds”. Once you consider the volume of people and remove the presupposition against the “supernatural”, the pieces all come into place to make a case for the historical accuracy of the Exodus narrative. It is quite evident from the factoring in of culture, linguistics, geography, history, and meteorology that to deny the Exodus ever happened is a barely defensible position. To deliberately make up something would have invited a massive amount of shame. Not to mention, a strong gust of wind as mentioned in the scientific paper allows for a period of time where shallow waters in the marshes of what is now the Suez Canal to clear the way for the Hebrews to make their way out of danger as the mud makes it extremely difficult for the Egyptian chariots to follow. Obviously, proving the Exodus to be factual is not enough to prove Christianity's validity, but it is a great start. The more portions of the Bible are verified, the more critics are hard pressed to do anything more than presuppose it to be false. Cawley 8 Works Cited Brettler, Marc Z. “Introduction to the Pentateuch: Terminology, Contents, and Traditional Views of Authorship." The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Coogan, Michael D. et all, eds. Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 3-6 Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know it? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001. Drews C, Han W. “Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta.” PLoS ONE5(8) (2010): e12481. 30 August 2010 <http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0012481> Accessed 19 October 2017 Hoerth, Alfred and John McRay. Bible Archaeology: An Exploration of the History and Culture of Early Civilizations. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005. Hoffmeier, James K. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1996 Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Crossway, 2016 Killebrew, Ann E. “Introduction to the Levant during the Transitional Late Bronze Age/Iron Age I and Iron Age I Periods.” The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant c. 8000-332 BCE. Steiner, Margreet and Ann Killebrew, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP 2014. Lemche, Niels “On the Problems of Reconstructing Pre-Hellenistic Israelite (Palestinian) History”. Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. 3 (2000-2001).pp. 237-252 <http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_13.pdf> Accessed December 11, 2017. Matthews, Victor H. and Don C. Benjamin. “The Storyteller.” The Social World of Ancient Israel, 1250-587 587 BCE. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, August 1995. Cawley 9 Mumford, Gregory. “Egypt and the Levant.” The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant c. 8000-332 BCE. Steiner, Margreet and Ann Killebrew, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Plevnik, Joseph. “Honor/Shame." Handbook of Biblical Social Values, edited by John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Malina, Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998, pp. 106-115 Rubinson, Karen. "Herodotus and the Scythians." Expedition Magazine, Penn Museum, July 1975 pp. 12 <https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/herodotus-and-the-scythians/> Accessed 19 October 2017 Soden, Wolfram. The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994 Tel Aviv University. 4 April 2017, <https://english.tau.ac.il/news/exodus_history_and_myth/>