Abstract

Two million Israelites did not cross the Sinai on their way out of Egypt, despite the biblical implication as to this number (Ex 12:37).

Hershel Shanks, Editor, BAR

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 16 May 2002

Christianity Today

The period of the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, or judges as devised by the writers of scriptures… never existed.

Robert Coote, San Francisco Theological Seminary

Most Jews and Christians cannot accept that the exodus, as related in the bible, is not actually historical. Thy have been led to believe that the bible is God’s word, and even those who do not regard it as infallible, consider it is essentially true in all major particulars.

Kevin D Miller writes in a 1998 cover story for Christianity Today magazine of “a new breed of radical scholars who would turn Moses as well as Abraham, Joseph and even King David into legends and myths by the stroke of their pens.” Here is a Christain author lying as usual. He wants to imply that this “new breed” are being arbitrary, perhaps because that is all Christians themselves can be, but these scholars, unlike most biblicists, make use of evidence not merely fancy given special kudos for being called faith. Miller calls these discoveries “far-out” and “pronouncements” and declares them “a matter of no small concern to believing Jews and Christians.”

Yet Miller immediately has to admit that answering the “new breed” is not easy because “not one shred of direct archaeological evidence has been found for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 400-plus years the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt, or their miraculous exodus from slavery.” Inscriptions from ancient Egypt contain no mention of Hebrew slaves, of the plagues that the bible says preceded their release, or of the destruction of the pharaoh’s army during the Israelites’ miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. No physical trace has been found of the Israelites’ 40-year nomadic sojourn in the Sinai wilderness. There is not even any indication, outside of the bible, that Moses existed.

Christianity Today even admits that for half a century Christian Sunday School teachers have been telling lies to their charges because Kathleen Kenyon, the noted archaeologists who excavated Jericho found no evidence for the truth of the stories in Joshua but Sunday School teachers have been teaching the opposite. Is Miller a new breed of honest Christian? No chance!

Miller finds that there are “scholars” with another story. And what story is that? The story in the bible! So, who are these scholars? Er, Christian and Jewish believers! Miller specifies Kenneth Kitchen retired from Liverpool and James Hoffmeier of Wheaton College in Illinois, plus an unspecified “handful” of others. These Christian “scholars” argue that absence of evidence is no reason to think that the exodus did not happen.

Apologists, like Jeffrey L Sheler, in a book, Is the Bible True? exerpted on the web, say things like:

The absence of direct evidence of an Israelite sojourn in Egypt is not as surprising, or as damaging to the bible’s credibility, as it first might seem. What type of material evidence, after all, would one expect to find that could corroborate the biblical story?

The honest historian would answer: “A lot!” Sheler answers with quotations from several biblicist professors. He reports university of Arizona archaeologist, William Dever, as saying:

Slaves, serfs, and nomads leave few traces in the archaeological record.

If this is truely said by Dever, nothing could be more stupid. What is the biggest and likely to be the most permanent monument from the ancient world? From Egypt in fact? The answer is the pyramids, and who built them? They were built by slaves, or more likely by serfs labouring in the quiet times of the agricultural season.

Biblical Criticism and Defence

The critics of the bible are not really a new breed, Miller now tells us. Julius Wellhausen, in the nineteenth century, showed the law was not given to Moses on Mount Sinai in the second millennium BC, but was composed after the Jews had returned from their exile in Babylon only 450 years before Jesus. Miller calls the work of William Foxwell Albright a “moderating influence” when even some of his own students now admit, perhaps not in so many words, he was a Christian crook whose biblical bias led him to grossly misinterpret almost everything he touched—and that was almost everything.

Miller gives us a little of the psychology of his main contender for the biblicists and it does not dispose us to think he would be any different from Albright. James Hoffmeier remembers a lecturer, on a course he took in the early seventies, teaching that the patriarchs were not historical:

I remember the knots in my stomach when he was lecturing.

This confession of his anxiety over a supposedly historical issue should incline anyone to realise that he could never be a reliable witness. Hoffmeier apparently comes from a missionary family, and is far too emotionally involved in biblical belief to treat the evidence fairly. Most of the vocal Christians and some Jews are the same. They pretend otherwise.

Albright was particularly damaging for pretending almost from the start of his career that he was being honest and objective. He claimed himself, Miller tells us, that surmising about the conquest of Canaan was pointless because archaeology would reveal the truth. It can only reveal the truth, however, to those who want to know it. Albright was not one of them. For him a conquest meant destruction and, when he found any signs of destruction, it automatically proved the conquest. Thus, thirteenth-century devastation layers at a site believed to be biblical Bethel were interpreted by Albright’s student G Ernest Wright to be the work of Joshua’s army.

The fact that destruction occurred continually in these parts for thousands of years did not bother Albright or the gawpers who believed everything he said. Even the bible claimed that the people who lived in the Palestinian hills called Israelites fought the Philistines. They also fought the Egyptians. The Assyrians came through several times, and there were occasional incursions by Indo-Europeans like the Scythians. Besides that the city states fought among themselves, sometimes had accidental fires that burnt down whole cities and even set their own cities on fire when they were scourged by plagues or pests.

Even liberal scholars were convinced by the Christian crooks that the bible was supremely historical. In 1981, the biblicist historian of Israel, John Bright could state:

There can really be little doubt that ancestors of Israel had been slaves in Egypt and had escaped in some marvelous way. Almost no one today would question it.

Hoffmeier says Albright convinced scholars that the bible was substantiated from archaeology because everyone was prepared to accept that the bible was innocent of any deception. In short, it was accepted as history and merely needed confirming. In the last two decades, a generation of scholars have not been happy that the bible has been confirmed by archaeology, and stood up and said so. N P Lemche and T L Thompson found from close examination of the evidence for particular parts of the bible “history” that it was no more than mythology or romance set in an abstract first millennium BC setting. They thought only indisputable evidence would prove bible stories to be historical. What had happened was that the scientific attitude had asserted itself at last over the gullible attitude of belief. Historical documents have to be verified as genuine before they are believed as history. Nor will biblical critics readily accept what is in the bible so long as they can find known events in Near Eastern history which could account for them just as well or better.

J Maxwell Miller and John H Hayes quite reasonably maintain, in Israelite and Judean History, that the exodus cannot be treated as history because there is no other support for it except the bible. J M Miller in A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, points out no direct, extra-biblical evidence of the Egyptian stay or of the exodus has ever been found, and the bible often neglects to record details that might provide the exodus with a place in history such as the name of the pharaoh that “knew not Joseph” (Ex 1:8) and any contemporary events. The authors either did not know the contemporary situation, were not concerned about it because it was not theologically relevant or preferred not to include hostages to fortune in their romance. It is hard to believe that known details would have been omitted as irrelevant, and some details that seem irrelevant to theological purpose are included. The rational deduction is that details such as the name of the Pharaoh were unknown to the authors.

Now despite this lack of secure information in the story and external to it that leads critical historians to doubt its authenticity, Christian apologists like to give another impression showing that they are utterly unscientific and incapable of even trying to be objective. They say:

A considerable amount of external evidence exists that lends plausibility to and provides possible time frames for the most basic elements of the exodus and Egyptian stay.

William Dever, a leading authority on what he prefers to call Syro-Palestinian archaeology rather than biblical archaeology, was a student of the Albright school but learnt from experience that his teachers were wrong. He rejected the study called "biblical archaeology" on the grounds that the bible prejudices the archaeologist. Nevertheless, he is utterly offended by scholars who are logical enough to be consistent and demand satisfactory evidence from the ground before anything in the bible—a devotional book not a history book—should be believed as history. In a discussion in BAR (July-August 1997), Dever writes:

Joshua has little to do with any historical events. If you guys think I—or the Israeli archaeologists—am looking for the Israelite conquest archaeologically, you’re wrong. We’ve given that up. We’ve given up the patriarchs.

Dever defended a united monarchy under David and Solomon but says in reply to Thomas L Thompson:

I don’t care in the least whether Solomon ever existed. I’m probably more of a disbeliever than you. I don’t really care about the tradition. I don’t believe any of the myths.

Since then Dever has become more and more shrill in his attacks on those who indeed do not believe the myths, and seek to show that they are myths because they have insufficient historical evidence to back them up.

Hoffmeier and Kitchen hope to lead a fight back using their credentials as learned Egyptologists. They are however also both committed to supernatural beliefs, and for anyone familiar with the effect of beliefs in the past on the honesty of so-called scholars, their pleadings will be looked upon with extreme suspicion. From their position of scholarship they sought to defend some of the bible stories

Kitchen Affirms Genesis

Kitchen highlights the account in Genesis 14 of Abraham defeating a coalition of kings from the east, claiming it fits only the conditions pertaining to the period 1800 to 1600 BC. Before that time, the region of Mesopotamia was closely governed by the dynasties of Ur, and after that time, the empires of Babylon and Assyria controlled the region. Only during the first half of the second millennium could kings of small city-states have roamed the countryside, as did the potentates Abraham encountered, looking to expand their domains.

If this is a serious argument by Kitchen, he has to explain how it is that a bandit king of a small city state like David could have ever built a supposedly large empire in the eleventh century BC. Kitchen’s argument counts David out too. Biblicists like Kitchen will immediately say that David was able to build his empire because Assyria was weak at the time. If that explains David, it also counters Kitchen’s objection. It also shows that these apologists are neither consistent nor honest.

Now Genesis 14 is a quite peculiar chapter that shows every indication of being inserted into the main narrative. It is where Melchizedek appears, and that might be why it was inserted. As a separate unit of tradition, it might have been part of some nation’s mythology and been taken, like other parts of Genesis, to fulfil a need of the author. In other words the whole incident could be mythical, in which case there is no need to find a time when it could have happened, because it did not. Nevertheless, it could easily be a distorted account of one of the several alliances that were built by small states, albeit, not merely single cities, against the Assyrians in the first millennium. Kitchen’s objection, simply does not have enough basis to hold up Abraham.

Kitchen goes on with some sort of palaeocovenantology that he ought to publish to back up his words. He says that treaties and covenants can be dated from their styles quite closely, just as a document can be dated by its style of writing. Kitchen claims:

I have over 90 documents [of ancient treaties and covenants] to compare from 2600 BC down to 600 BC, and so there’s no room for mistake here.

The covenants of the Patriarchs described in the bible only match the time they were supposed to have lived, says Kitchen. He says to Christianity Today that the ones with Abimelech and Laban fit precisely the structure of treaties from the middle of the second millennium—but neither later nor earlier ones. The middle of the second millennium is a vague specification of time. The descendants of Abraham were supposed to have been sojourning in Egypt by then, so Kitchen is again being dishonest.

Moreover, genuine experts in these ancient treaty forms do not make the claims about them that Kitchen does. In fact, they say that the treaty forms were essentially the same for long periods of time and the elements used in them merely varied somewhat according to culture and convenience. Thus the circumstances might condition the curses and blessings, the gods of the participants, whether the vassal was conquered or surrenderd and other factors account for particular changes, but no gradual changes of fashion can be used for dating, as Kitchen claims.

Bearing down on the singularities of names, Kitchen apparently makes a good point in that the names of some of the patriarchs were peculiar to Syrian cultures especially before about the middle of the second millennium BC.

Where did the fiction writers of the middle first millennium BC get these names if they were composing their biblical novellas a thousand or more years after the names had fallen from popular use?

Kitchen does not want to attribute scholarship to anyone other than himself, but no biblical critic is saying that the bible was written by a peasant hoping to write a best seller. They were written by the intellectuals of the time to provide a spurious history for a mixture of people deported into Yehud. Nothing stops the authors from using myths they have at their disposal, and even Kitchen will accept that they did so—myths like the flood. What then is to stop them from using some myths from Syria that perpetuated the names of ancient times because they were the ancient names of heroes and gods?

In Genesis 37:28, Joseph was sold by his brothers to slave traders on their way to Egypt for 20 silver shekels. Kitchen claims that this is the appropriate amount for 1800 BC. Using extrabiblical sources, inflation had driven it up to 30 shekels by the thirteenth century (which corresponds to Ex 21:32), 50 shekels in the eighth century (which corresponds to 2 Kgs 15:20), and to nearly 100 shekels soon after the “exile” in the sixth century. Again, it looks convincing at first glance, but we only have Kitchen’s word for it through Christianity Today.

It all looks too pat. Inflation, for example, is never linear over time, it is not the same in different places, the examples cited are not all for the price of slaves, slaves do not all fetch the same price, irrespective of age, race, health and ability. Professor A H Sayce, in his monograph, Assyria, published by the Religious Tract Society, says that three slaves, one a woman, were sold on 20 Ab 709 BC for three manehs of silver. A maneh is fifty shekels in Syria. So, the price of a slave here is 50 silver shekels. Twenty years later, seven slaves including the two wives of one of them, were sold again for three manehs of silver. Each is therefore only about 21 silver shekels. Then again, about this time, a young girl bought by an Egyptian woman as a bride for her son cost about 14 silver shekels. After the Arabian campaign of Assurbanipal, “a camel was sold for half a shekel of silver and a man was worth a correspondingly small sum,” Sayce says from the Assyrian records.

Considering these possibilities of confusion, and others that the experts might be aware of, it is remarkable that Kitchen’s point seems to stand. The fact about such evidence is that closer inspection has nearly always shown it is spurious or dishonest, and is known to be by the apologists who present it, but they have their own ulterior motive—to preserve their beliefs by hook or by crook.

Semitic Egyptian Viziers

Christianity Today now switches to the plausibility defence. This hopes to show that what is plausible can be considered true. They cite Nahum Sarna, professor emeritus of biblical studies at Brandeis University and author of Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus, as saying that a great deal of what we know about life in Egypt in the second millennium BC is plausible set against the biblical story.

• A papyrus dating from the second millennium BC lists 40 slaves by their Semitic names. One of the names listed is Shiphrah, a name applied to one of the midwives mentioned in the exodus account.
• The Instruction for Merikare, an Egyptian text dated to 2040 BC, suggests that asiatics did indeed inhabit the eastern Delta at certain times, just as the Israelites do before the exodus.
• A tomb painting at Ben Hasan in Egypt dated to 1890 BC depicts traders coming to Egypt by donkeys with both their families and their wares, further supporting the mobility of certain groups of people.
• A painting from the tomb of an Egyptian official known as Rekhmire shows slaves making mud bricks, just as the Israelites do in the biblical accounts. This particular painting is dated to the fifteenth century BC.
• The Louvre Leather Roll, dated to 1274 BC, deals with shortfalls in brick making and mentions Egyptians granting slaves time off for religious holidays.
• Finally, the papyrus Anastasi V from the thirteenth century BC “contains a report from an Egyptian officer on the Eastern frontier who is trying to track down two runaway slaves who have escaped into the wilderness.”

Arguments like this “plausibility” argument offered by people who believe the story told in the same book that the earth was flooded to a depth of 5000 meters in a worldwide flood do not persuade the critical reader that they are being serious. For them, a vast volume of water is plausible when it is not to anyone else, so why are they so fussy about fine details like these? Well, the more sensible ones are happy, if not glad, to drop the Flood story as a myth, but they are unable to accept as mythology the story of the exodus because the origin of God’s chosen land and people is in it.

Joseph’s high ranking is plausible for several reasons. Joseph therefore is history! Hoffmeier again feels he has to prove what no one doubts but can hardly be considered evidence for the patriarchs, although that is the impression he wants to leave. He is talking to the Christian gallery, not to anyone who understands evidence. Christians believe anyway, so any evidence is unnecessary, but it comforts them nevertheless.

Kevin Miller asks:

Is it realistic to think that a Semitic-speaking foreigner like Joseph, and later Moses, could have risen to the highest levels of Egyptian government?

It is not a question that a biblical critic would asks, since they are aware of the Hyksos who ruled Egypt in the seventeenth century BC, and know that by the time this story was rewritten there were many Jews living in Egypt under the Ptolemies. It is, therefore, a question set up as a straw man, one of the most popular Christian apologetic tricks. Hoffmeier answers it, seeming to refute a point that was only put by the Christian himself to seem to be able to answer it affirmatively. An Egyptian tomb discovered in Sakkara, Egypt, in the late 1980s had the coffin of a Semite named Aper-el along with the coffins of his wife and children. His titles include “vizier,” “mayor of the city,” “judge,” “father of god,” “child of the nursery.”

K Miller tells us:

A study on foreign children reared in the pharaoh’s nurseries during the eighteenth dynasty shows that some of these children became court officials, and that a few eventually attained high government posts.

The similarities to the stories of Joseph and Moses (and Aper-el) are obvious. He wants us to conclude that the biblical stories are therefore true. An Egyptian Queen was called Cleopatra and two Roman generals were called Antony and Caesar. Are the plays about these people by a man called Shakespeare therefore true? They seem plausible enough. Hoffmeier extends his biblical beliefs into his day job, according to Miller who says, in a report to the Institute for Biblical Research Hoffmeier explained: “He believed…” That is the pathetic level of “biblical” research. It is whatever you believe. At least this is consistent for a Christian. Usually they are not.

Hoffmeier’s real point is to show that Moses and Joseph might yet be lying in undiscovered tombs because Aper-el’s name was the first of a high-ranking, Semitic official to be found there, even though Sakkara has been excavated and explored for more than a century. For this reason, “it is wrong to demand, as some have, that direct archaeological evidence for Joseph should be available, if he were in fact a historical figure.”

Perhaps some have felt that such prominent men in Egypt as Joseph and Moses should have left tombs, but most will not expect it. What is meant is that there should be mention of these people in the extensive records that Egyptians habitually wrote and that Kitchen and Hoffmeier make a living out of deciphering. Had they been found, these believers would have been whooping and gloating that their critics had been proven quite wrong. Their frustration is that they have to depend on analogies, and analogies are too often wrong. Hoffmeier immediately feels he has to apologise for this too: “Joseph lived during a period when surviving Egyptian documents of any kind are sparse and Joseph operated in the Nile Delta, an area that remains ‘underexcavated’ to this day.” Why is God so mean with His evidence?

Semites in Egypt

J Maxwell Miller and John H Hayes, note that “the authenticity of the Egyptian background of the narratives is thought to support the claim that the stories do reflect an historical presence of Israel in Egypt” sometime in the second millennium. As sensible historians, they do not see this confirming the biblical story. Names like Moses, Hophni, Phinehas, Merari, Pithom and Ramesses are authentic Egyptian names, but they too do not confirm the story. Pithom and Raamses were cities that existed for centuries in Egypt.

Egypt was a great culture through good times and bad for 3000 years BC. Mainly the times were reasonably good becasue Egypt had the regular inundations from the mighty Nile river that kept the crops growing even when no rains came. As a consequence, in any regional drought, the nearby people in Canaan would seek sustenance in Egypt, and the Egyptians usually gave it, by allowing the starving Semites to stay until the drought alleviated. Papyrus Anastasi VI records that an entire Edomite tribe gained permission to enter Egypt to avoid starvation. Not only that, but for long periods, Canaan was ruled from Egypt as a colony, so there was traffic in people between these countries. Hoffmeier wants to tell his Christian thumb-suckers that this shows that the bible is plausible and therefore true. It is plausible all right because it relates nothing that was not common knowledge when these romances were written.

J M Miller and Hayes point out that a knowledge of Egypt could not have been uncommon for a literate Canaanite to possess, given Egypt´s long time occupation of the region. The authors of Exodus might easily have been familiar with Egyptian conditions, and certainly would have been if the book had been written in Egypt. The earliest external knowledge we have of the Jewish scriptures is their translation into Greek for the library of Alexandria by the Ptolemies in the third century BC. This might have been when the exodus was elaborated from an earlier mention merely that Jews had been slaves of the Egyptians—meaning they had been enslaved because Canaan was an Egyptian colony for centuries.

In respect of Moses and the exodus, Kevin Miller says Hoffmeier agrees with his critics: such a momentous event would not have transpired without being recorded. But, he says:

I don’t know of any surviving papyrus documents from Egypt’s Delta. It’s too wet. And papyrus is where most of the records were kept. The inscriptions that we see on statues and temple façades tend to be propagandistic, what-we-want-you-to-know messages. And where papyrus records have survived, they tend to be from the desert areas. So we have very few of the day-to-day court records of 3,000 years of Egyptian history.

Well, he is the Egyptologist, but it sounds desperately like special pleading. Did the Egyptians not realise, even though they lived there, that the delta was wet and not a suitable place to keep papyrus records? The Pharaohs of Egypt were kings of upper and lower Egypt, except when the system broke down as it did on a few occasions and then there were multiple kings. The Eighteenth Dynasty, when, the biblicists tell us, the Israelites were building Pi-Ramses, was a powerful dynasty, the last really strong one in Egyptian history. Yet these kings did not have the gumption to take their papyrus records up the river where it was dryer so that they would keep. Despite them being utterly stupid, by some good fortune large numbers of papyri have survived, and Kitchen and Hoffmeier must be glad they did, but it was purely accidental, they claim.

No one need be an Egyptologist to consider the literary character of the exodus story. All you have to be is free of Christian and Jewish indoctrination, and even many Christians and Jews are free of it enough to make up their own minds in these cases. The ten plagues, a two million slaves running away into a desert, death dealing angels, pillars of fire, manna from heaven, the sea dividing, miracle upon miracle—all bellow out that the story is fabulous. It is a myth. None of this is plausible in the least, and yet the evidence for it is… “whatever seems plausible.” Christianity Today admits that direct evidence for the exodus is missing, but tries to convince us that all these wonders were real history by coming up with circumstantial evidence!

Hebrew

All of this provides the Exodus accounts with some degree of “plausibility” but it really offers no confirmation of it in the least. Apologists still like to maintain the discarded idea that the Hyksos were the Israelites, but mostly will not use it directly. Instead, they bring forward the evidence that there were people with Semitic names in Egypt in the second millennium, implying that all Semites are Jews and therefore these people were the Israelites.

Semites had a large part to play in the history of the eastern Nile Delta, referred to as Goshen in the Exodus traditions. John Bright, whose paraphrase, with additional commentary, of the bible has been read by devout Christians as if it were some independent confirmation of it, argues:

Semitic shepherds were frequently allowed to enter Egypt during times of famine, like the twelfth-century Shasu from Edom… and that Israel’s historical entry into Egypt might well have occurred in this manner.

Bright, in so arguing, also refers to Semitic loan-words in the Egyptian language as a further demonstration of the depth of Semitic influence in Egypt. In addition, he also refers to the Apiru in Egypt, to Egyptianized Canaanite deities, and to the use of Semitic slaves in the Ninteenth and Twentieth Dynasties.

For most of its pre-Roman history, southern Levant was an Egyptian colony and buffer against the Asiatics. The Amarna letters show that the “kings” of the Canaanite cities were considered to be local officials, called mayors by the Egyptians, and were abjectly fawning and submissive. These Canaanites were the Israelite slaves. They were slaves of the Egyptians but most of them were not slaves in Egypt, unless the colony of Palestine was considered itself to have been annexed into Egypt itself. That is possibly true and would make the Israelites truly Egyptian slaves. They were still, however, not slaves in the delta and had no need to escape because they were already at home!

In one of those miraculously surviving papyri, called Leiden Papyrus 348, orders are given to “distribute grain rations to the soldiers and to the Apiru who transport stones to the great pylon of Rameses.” K Miller compares it with Exodus 1:11, where the Hebrews “built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh.” Biblicists “believe” the Apiru are identically the same as the biblical Hebrews, the Ibrim—Israelites, in other words, and therefore Jews. In cuneiform sources the word appears as “Habiru” or “Hapiru.” If the word “Apiru” does mean “Hebrew,” then Hebrews might have been among the Egyptian slaves who built Rameses’ capital in the thirteenth century BC, just as the bible says. K Miller thinks that all that is needed to settle the question is a firm link between Apiru and Hebrew or Ibrim.

Yet, the very name Hebrew opens another whole can of biblical worms, because the Hebrews are assumed to have been the Jews or Israelites when the bible itself distinguishes Israelites and Hebrews. The Jewish scriptures are written in a language called Hebrew which is otherwise western Semitic, a language spoken widely across the litoral of the Levant and not just by Jews or Israelites. These AW! pages take the Hebrews to be the various nations of the Persian province called Abarnahara, the “Abar” part of it being the same root as Ibrim meaning “beyond” or “across”—“eber.” The province was across the river Euphrates, and evidently all of the people there were called Hebrews—Beyonders! The situation is even more complicated because the people who became the “Beyonders” also called the people on the other side of the river “Beyonders” too! Then it might mean captured Assyrians, or even Indo-Europeans. More generally, in the Egyptian texts, Apiru means foreigners, social outsiders, and renegades.

The point of all this is that no one can satisfactorily identify Hebrews with Israelites, unless one of the lucky papyri preserved actually identify them directly. To show that Apiru meant “Beyonders” still does not explain who the “Beyonders” were. They finished up being identified with the Jews simply because it was the Jews who survived with their sacred history written in a language called Hebrew that they solely inherited. The Apiru, theorized as being the Hebrews, may have no direct connexion with the nation of Israel.

The Semitic loan-words entered into the Egyptian language long before any specific, likely time period for the exodus from the circumstances just mentioned, and from the earlier Asiatic invaders no doubt. The Middle Kingdom text, the Admonitions of Ipuwer, suggests that Semites were already part of Egyptian culture before the Hyksos rule. There is nothing to show that these Semitic references in second millenium Egypt were to a coherent group or ethnos of Semites rather than a lot of individuals like the large numbet of individual French people who work in the UK and the British who similarly work in France. They are not herded into a ghetto and treated as second class citizens or a nation of slaves.

In the Second Intermediate Period, Egypt was split into bits. The SIP lasted from 1786 to 1570 BC, and in this time of little more than 200 years there were almost as many kings. Many were ruling simultaneously so Egypt had broken up. Upper Egypt was separate for much of the time and Lower Egypt seemed to be split into at least two kingdoms ruled by the Asiatic princes.

Asiatics had been settling in Lower Egypt and eventually their numbers were great enough for them to control the region. These Asiatics seem to have come mainly from Canaan, and Peter A Clayton says their homeland was Phoenicia. Their rulers called themselves the Heka Khaswt or in Greek, the Hyksos, meaning Rulers of Foreign Lands. They were Egypt’s fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties dating from 1675 to 1552 BC. The apologists determine that these Hyksos were the Israelites and we can read:

Under these foreign rulers, the ascent of a non-Egyptian, for instance the patriarch known as Joseph, to power seems very plausible.

Indeed it does, but Joseph was a Semitic slave who rose to power as an administrator under an Egyptian king, not a foreign prince who took control because the Egyptian kings had become weak and Egypt disorganized. These significant difference are always ignored by dishonest shyster apologists.

Eventually the kings of Upper Egypt in league with the Nubians threw out the Hyksos. The Hyksos show that some Semites from Canaan went to Egypt, and that Egyptians forcibly expelled them—the plot of the biblical accounts of the exodus. Since Manetho the source of our basic knowledge of the Pharaohs of Egypt knew this, the authors of Exodus might well have done, since the likely time and place of its composition was Ptolemaic Egypt.

A monument known as the 400-Year Stele may have been the inspiration for Genesis 15:13 which foretells that the family of Abraham will be “strangers in a land not theirs and they shall be enslaved and oppressed 400 years.” Nahum Sarna notes that “the biblical author linked the 400th anniversary of Hyksos domination commemorated on the stele—that is, the 400 years between the rise of the Hyksos and the rule of Rameses II, who erected the stele—to the 400 year enslavement of the Israelites.”

Knowledge of the Hyksos might have given the authors of Exodus the basis of their plot. One can say that the authors of Exodus had an idea of some Egyptian history, and this is the tenuous link between the biblical exodus accounts and external history. By no means does it confirm that the Hyksos were the Israelites, but it does suggest that Ptolemaic Egypt was the place where these facts were known.

The Date of the Exodus

The biblical chronology of the exodus does little to support the historicity of the exodus as it often contradicts itself and seems to be largely symbolic in nature. The length of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt is listed as 400 years in Genesis 15:13, four generations in Genesis 15:16, and 430 years in Exodus 12:40-41. Josephus makes it 215 years, and a still later rabbinic source gives 210 years.

The dating of the exodus also has long been controversial. 1 Kings 6:1 gives a clear historical marker for the end of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt:

In the 480th year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord.

Biblicists agree that Solomon, the son and successor of David, and noted in the bible as the builder of Israel’s first temple, came to the throne in about 960 BC. If so, then the exodus would have occurred in about 1440 BC.

Biblical scholars are reluctant to say that this is the time when the exodus most likely occurred. Doubt is cast over this time period for three reasons. First of all, as Maxwell Miller states:

Forty and multiples of forty are in evidence throughout Genesis–2 Kings. There were forty years of wandering in the wilderness following the exodus, for example. The interval from the exodus to Solomon’s building of the Temple is recorded as 480 years (1 Kg 6:1). From that point to the return of the exiles from Babylon turns out to be another 480 years.

Nahum Sarna is also amongst those who say that the 480 years cited in 1 Kings should not be taken literally. The skeptical reader will notice that the bible can be wrong in specific details but cannot be wrong in the big picture. Sheler assures us Sarna is amongst the many “scholars,” who say the 480 years is merely a conventional “long time,” being twelve generations of 40 years each, 40 being the conventional time span of a biblical generation.

The chronology in the bible is schematic, like the chronologies of other ancient races, and is usually exaggerrated. The mention of the cities in Pithom and Rameses in the exodus account would place the exodus around the thirteenth century. The pharaohs in power in the fifteenth century, Thutmosis III (1479-1425 BC) and Amenhotep II (1425-1410 BC), were strong kings and were unlikely to have put up with a rebellion of slaves that easily.

So, biblical dating does not fit with other biblical texts or with what is known of ancient Egyptian history. But, never deterred, the Christian tells us “the flaw is far from fatal.” The used car dealers that God employs as His apologists can always come up with something. They say the 1 Kings chronology is a theological statement not history in the modern sense, and the exodus can be placed in the thirteenth century, in the days of Ramses II, where other biblical clues place it.

Here is the usual double standard. A minor adjustment to dating can be a theological statement, but the whole of the story of the exodus is not merely a theological statement. It must be true history despite the missing external evidence. A Minimalist does more conscientiously what these used car dealers do. What does not find corroboration elsewhere is discarded! That is the whole story of Moses and the flight from Egypt.

So, the thirteenth century BC is most commonly cited as the time of the exodus. The bible’s mention of the cities called Ramses, referred to as Pi-Rameses in Egyptian texts, and Pithom as the locations of Israelite labour most assuredly links Rameses II with the exodus. Rameses II moved the capital of Egypt to the North East Delta and named the new city after himself sometime during his reign from 1279 to 1213 BC. Rameses II was known for his ambitious building projects and for forcing large numbers of civilians to participate in this construction. The name Pithom also surfaces “in several Egyptian texts dated from the Ramesside to the Christian Period, and is mentioned in connection with the city of Tkw, biblical Succoth (Ex 12:37), a city which also existed in the Ramesside period.”

The apologetic scheme to account for the exodus notes that, with the death of Rameses II, Egypt was severely weakened, and with the collapse of the nineteenth Dynasty in 1200 BC, the “enslaved nomads” could escape. Note that these “enslaved nomads” were either “slaves” or “nomads” but could hardly have been both. if they were originally nomads then, after 400 years of slavery, they could have known nothing of the nomadic existence. Whether they were slaves or not, if they were living settled lives in the Nile Delta, then they were not nomads. Such nonsense is propagated by apologists to explain the fact that these supposed slaves were able successfully to live as nomads for 40 years.

Apologists also think the thirteenth century is the most likely time for the exodus because Israel is first mentioned on the Merneptah Stele of about 1200 BC. If Israel was mentioned in a monument at that time, the Israelites must have been already settled there, and so they must have left Egypt about 1250 BC, on the biblical evidence. This is when Rameses was at his height! The appearance of highland villages in Canaan is attributed to the Israelite settlers. In fact, settlers from Egypt would show a great deal of Egyptian culture in their archaeological remains, but the culture of the highland villages is uniform with preceding Canaanite culture, making it unlikely, if not impossible, that the Israelites were indeed immigrants and not native Canaanites.

The conclusion, from this largely negative evidence, that biblicists come to is that “the basic events of the exodus, miracles aside, are plausible and fit well into the thirteenth century BC.” More rationally, the exodus is a late romance based on the expulsion of the Hyksos but set at the time the Rameses 400 year stele was erected.

Exodus

Recent discoveries of military outposts on a road leading from Egypt into Canaan, built by Pharaoh Seti I and earlier kings in the thirteenth century BC, shed new light on why a northern route for the exodus would have meant war for the Israelites. Exodus 13:17 states:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer, for God thought, If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.

If that is what God thought, why did he not think he would destroy the Philistines while preserving His people? He had no compunction in sending a murderous angel just at this time to kill the Egyptian first born. What suddenly made him so moral about the Philistines? Perhaps the practical answer is that it would leave a hostage to fortune. The authors knew that there were no records or even legends of the Philistines ever having to fight a mass of escaping slaves. What is more, the Egyptians would also have preserved records of major battles on the chief route out of Egypt to Asia, and indeed, the Egyptians would have had to get involved. The practical problems of writing a sacred history that is not demonstrably false dictates that the miracle has to extend to the people escaping by a deserted and depopulated route.

God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness.

Christianity Today continues with a plain denial of their earlier excuse that the papyri about Delta matters were all sodden and rotten. Anastasi III is a letter to guards at a “border crossing” between Egypt and the Sinai, which shows that in the thirteenth century the Egyptians had tight control of the border, allowing no one to pass without a permit. The letter describes two slaves who, K Miller writes “in a striking parallel to the Israelite escape” flee from the city of Rameses at night, are pursued by soldiers, but disappear into the Sinai wilderness. An official writes to the border guard:

When my letter reaches you, write to me about all that has happened. Who found their tracks? Which watch found their tracks? Write to me about all that has happened to them and how many people you send out after them.

So, the Egyptians were able to preserve a papyrus about delta matters despite the wet. It tells a tale about only two slaves escaping and treats it as an important matter, but two million is too unimportant to record. The concern of the official over an apparently minor matter proves that the Egyptians could hardly have regarded the somewhat more major incident with equanimity.

No level of dishonesty passes these people by. If defending the bible gets too tough, then they just change it. It is all right for defenders of the faith to change it to suit themselves, then. What they do not like is critics to change it. It is not consistency but it is typical. K Miller reports Hoffmeier as saying:

If it seems incredible to believe that 600,000 men plus women and children could have survived as a people in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years, we may be misinterpreting the number.

This is Hoffmeier again, supposedly not a biblical critic!

The Hebrew word eleph can be translated “thousand,” but it is also rendered in the Bible as “clans” and “military units.” When I look at the question as an Egyptologist, I know that there are thought to have been 20,000 in the entire Egyptian army at the height of Egypt’s empire. And at the battle of Ai in Joshua 7, there was a severe military setback when 36 troops were killed. If you have an army of 600,000, that’s not a big setback.

The head count was a lot less than Exodus 12:37 says. It was not 600 thousands but 600 military units. Hundreds? Tens? 36 in 6000 troops still does not seem a serious loss. Perhaps the military units were individual male slaves! 36 in 600 is getting serious, but it is looking even more miraculous that 600 slaves should have conquered 15 fortified cities and a whole country. Suddenly, the numbers in the bible becomes open to interpretation. Why then not interpret the whole story by treating it as allegory? That is the Minimalist line.

Merneptah

Christianity Today now turns to the Merneptah Stele, a seven-foot high, black granite inscribed stone, as evidence that Israel existed in 1208 BC. The Pharaoh proclaims:

Canaan is plundered with every hardship.
Ashkelon is taken, Gezer is captured,
Yano’am reduced to nothing.
Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more.

Biblicists consider this stone to be proof of the exodus. Israel was already in Palestine in 1208 BC. Yet, any proper reading of the inscription tells a story that the biblicists do not want to read. Israel is identified with Canaan. Ashkelon and Gezer are cities of the coastal plain, bracketed by the descriptions of the people as Canaan and Israel. Jerusalem is not mentioned! Merneptah thinks Israel is what the bible calls Philistia!

Biblical critics have not sought to deny what is inscribed on the stele, although K Miller says they “downplay its significance.” The name of Israel must have started sometime in history, and this stele shows it was at this point, if it is correctly dated. The Stele does say, though, that Israel is laid waste, which is the precise opposite of what the bible says. History does not find any Israel again for hundreds of years, suggesting that Merneptah was more correct than the bible was.

Joshua

The Book of Joshua is of no historical value as far as the process of settlement is concerned.

Volkmar Fritz, director, German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, Jerusalem

Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated Jericho for six years in the 1950s believed the site was uninhabited from 1500 BC to about 800 BC, the very time of the exodus and the Israelite crossing of the Jordan River into Canaan. Hoffmeier argues:

A careful reading of Joshua shows there are only three cities that Joshua was specifically said to have burnt with fire—Jericho, Ai, and Hazor.

Other cities will not necessarily show any signs of destruction:

To besiege a city does not necessarily mean to destroy a city. To capture a city may not involve destroying it in such a way that you’d find that destruction in the archaeological record.

This is rather hilarious in a context that began with Hoffmeier’s role model, W F Albright, finding signs of the conquest of Canaan from destruction layers in cities all over the landscape. It is yet another pathetic ploy used by these sad people that want to be thought of as scholars. They accuse their critics of the very crimes that their own predecessors in biblicism have done, and would still be doing, if no one had noticed. It is the smug hypocrisy of these people that should give anyone interested in truth knots in their stomach. Since this disregard for truth has been the domain of Christianity for millennia, it makes you realise the extent of the damage Christians have done.

When the bible plainly tells lies, it is merely “rhetorical hyperbole.” Joshua 10:20 boasts that Joshua’s men had “wiped out” their enemy, but in the next phrase begins speaking of the survivors. Hyperbole it plainly is, but why then should we believe anything the bible says. The point that the biblical critics are making is that it is all hyperbole!

Kevin Miller says that Hazor was inhabited and destroyed during the “time of Joshua,” immediately begging the question, a habit that these Christians cannot get out of but proves a lack of objectivity that should disqualify them from their jobs when they are supposed to be scholars. It seems that in part of a substantial building the heads of decapitated statues of Canaanite deities and an Egyptian sphinx with the name of the pharaoh hacked out are found scattered across the floor. Hoffmeier says:

The palace was destroyed in such an inferno that many of the mud bricks actually turned to glass. No Canaanites would destroy their own deities, and no Egyptians would deface their monuments.

Ergo, Joshua did it because of the account in Joshua 11:11 of the Israelites burning Hazor with fire. If this is not the shade of Albright, it is his successor, indeed. The destruction could have been by more likely hands than Joshua’s, but no such possibility will be considered. It could even been done by Merneptah himself. Because he brags of destroying Gezer does not mean that he did not destroy Hazor too. The sheer tendentious dishonesty of it evades these protectors of God. When it comes to Ai, Hoffmeier has to admit that the excavations show it was not inhabited during the time of Joshua and so could not have been destroyed by fire. Hoffmeier’s answer to this is that Ai is not actually Ai, but no one then knows where Ai is. What better answer could there be?

Jericho poses problems for the biblicists but they take comfort that there is archaeological agreement on three important points that correspond directly with the biblical record:

1. Jericho was destroyed violently sometime in the second millennium BC;
2. it was occupied briefly and partially during the period of the Judges (a small palace from that period has been identified);
3. and it was rebuilt completely in the days of King Ahab in the ninth century.

Note the biblical scholar begging the question, yet again, in respect of the “period of the Judges.” Kenyon dated Jericho’s destruction to 1570 BC, when the Egyptians kicked the Hyksos out of their land and pursued them north to Jericho and beyond.

Christianity Today now turns to the blatantly biblicist work of one Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research, whose very organizarion cries out, Liar! Liar! The Association for Biblical Research is not for biblical research but to confirm the bible, as it freely admits. No one therefore who works for it, let alone its director can be believed in anything they say. Wood claims he discovered evidence in Kenyon’s findings that contradicts her own conclusions. Anyone with any sense would prefer to stick with Kenyon’s conclusions, because she made some effort to be objective even though she was a Christian. Wood will make no such effort because his self-confessed purpose is to uphold the bible not to criticise it.

Wood’s evidence turns out to be sherds of pottery from a later period and some Egyptian seals also later. These show that someone lived on the site of Jericho after it had been destroyed, but Kenyon plainly did not regard them as citizens. There was no city.

Wood finds it credible that by walking round the city for seven days the walls would fall down. He thinks all that marching triggered off an earthquake! The dryshod crossing of the Jordan was also caused by an earthquake. All of this is the usual apologetic delusion that what is plausible actually happened. And perhaps it did! If examples can be found, as Wood does of the Jordan being temporarily dammed by an avalanche, then anyone hwo has observed the pheomenon could use it as the basis of a tale. It could, indeed, have been a legendary tale that formed the basis of the miracles in the Joshua story. Any of these explanations are more sensible to anyone of a rational mind, but the Christian is not in this category.

David

The David of the Bible, David the king, is not a historical figure.

Niels Peter Lemche, University of Copenhagen

Christianity Today assures us that Hoffmeier and Kitchen are confident the future will side with those who take the bible’s history seriously. They take more comfort from the “House of David” inscriptions, even though they are disputed in several respects. Seals of some of the kings of Judah and Israel and surrounding Canaanite nations are being found, but these do not necessarily refute the Minimalists who accept that Israel existed by about 850 BC, whatever happened before. Other evidence produced by K Miller is a twelfth-century BC bronze bull and a sixteenth-century silver Canaanite calf, supposedly “illustrating why the Israelites were constantly warned against idol worship,” but actually showing that the Canaanites—whom the Israelites were, at least culturally—did indeed worship idols, as all their neighbours did.

In 1979 a silver scroll from the seventh-century BC was found in a cave near Jerusalem. Containing the words in Numbers 6:24-26 (“May Yehouah bless and keep you; May Yehouah cause his face to shine upon you and grant you peace”), K Miller says it forced revisionists to explain how their sixth-century BC composition date (or even later) for Numbers squared with a portion of that book appearing a century earlier. It is not a hard question to answer. Why do excerpts from the bible turn up in modern writings? Here was a simple blessing from Yehouah. Is there any good reason why such a blessing, innocuous as it is, should not be remembered by people who have a god called Yehouah. Such points are merely to pander to their Christian readership, because beyond it, they are quite ridiculous as any sort of evidence or polemic.

Hoffmeier goes into some misunderstanding from 30 years ago that is not accepted now, even if it ever was. It shows how desperate these people are for some basis for argument. Hoffmeier failed the course that knotted his stomach apparently out of the tutor’s spite, but later on the tutor admitted that Hoffmeier had been right about some point he had about tents. For all that, Hoffmeier says “some of these experts are close-minded people. They’re not willing to wrestle with different views.” Now there is a real case of someone with a beam in his eye trying to correct motes in his critics’ eyes!

Hoffmeier and Kitchen urge patience. The affirmative evidence will be dug up in the next spadeful, or soon, anyway. You can be certain if it is, it will be dug up by a Christian or a Jew. They are the people with something to defend, not the critics.

The Reality

Apologists have yet another argument. Nahum Sarna says the exodus story, tracing, as it does, a nation’s origins to slavery and oppression, “cannot possibly be fictional. No nation would be likely to invent for itself… an inglorious and inconvenient tradition of this nature,” unless it had an authentic core. Sarna’s scholarship does not extend to thinking who then could have written this “history” if the Jews did not. He cannot think laterally enough to imagine anyone other than Jews writing it. Richard Elliott Friedman, professor at the University of California, San Diego, adds, “If you’re making up history, it’s that you were descended from gods or kings, not from slaves.” Quite so. It suggests strongly that the Jews did not write their own mythology.

Prominent Jewish authors, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed, assert that the biblical texts dealing with the Egyptian captivity and the exodus are not contemporary accounts but were a product of the much later time when they were written. The authors were not primarily recording history. The exodus narratives are “a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change,” a blending of the writer’s knowledge of the past and present.

The “much later time” when the present account was composed, Finkelstein considers to be the time of King Josiah, but he thinks it was based on an exodus tradition. Finkelstein argues that there was no political entity known as Israel until the late 11th century, and even at this time the state of Israel was merely a loose cohesion of diverse nomadic groups. What is certain is that, when Samaria fell in 722 BC, Israel ceased to exist as a political entity. In essence, the political history of Israel came to an end with the end of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Martin Noth theorized that the Sinai narratives came from cultic legends that had their original meaning in a festival of covenant renewal. The truth is that they were traditions invented based on Persian originals to personify Moses, previously known only in the phrase the “law of Moses,” really the law of Mazas, or Ahuramazda.

Minimalist scholars draw upon a post-exilic dating for the composition and theology of the biblical literature. Philip Davies, in his controversial work In Search of “Ancient Israel” argues that the theological ideas in biblical literature were formed in post-exilic times as an ideological construct of the Persian-imposed society of Yehud. According to the Minimalist view, Judean history, as one reads about it in the biblical text, is an idealogical construct of political and religious leaders centuries later. It is a political construct, and that has huge theological implications.

Post-exilic Yehud, specifically that of Jerusalem, was a dimorphic society, as even the biblical literature itself shows. J Blenkinsopp argues for the existence of this dimorphic society on the premise of what he calls the Burger-Tempel-Gemeinde social model. Those sent as colonists by the Persians were thrust into conflict with the “people of the land,” the native Canaanites who had not been sent into exile. The Persians designated the colonists as governors and leaders in the community, and legitimized it by declaring that they were merely returning to their rightful home.

The biblical literature is a creation of this society, as the immigrant leaders of Yehud attempt to legitimate their right to political, and that meant religious, authority. The purpose of this group, as Davies states, was to create an “Ancient Israel that explained their own post-exilic society and the rights and privileges of the elite within it.” The ethnic collectives, the exclusive exile society, and the provision of a new central sanctuary and law form the backbone of a new society, a society with a purpose for the compiling of the Jewish scriptures.

Part of the Persian propaganda was that the Egyptians were the enemy of the Canaanites because they had held them captives for centuries by ruling Canaan from Egypt. The propaganda was telling, but it is unlikely that it included any exodus story. The law was presented at the same time by Ezra as the Law of Moses, and later Jews ruled by the Egyptian Greeks had to explain the law and the anti-Egyptian propaganda. The Ptolemies favoured the Jerusalem temple state and had the Jewish law translated into Greek. It is at this point that the exodus will have been invented—explaining the anti-Egyptian feeling with a pseudo-history but simultaneously making the Jews into escaped Egyptians. The Greek rulers of Egypt would not have been distressed that earlier anonymous Egyptian pharaohs were depicted in a bad light.

The story was an allegory of the colonists taking over their promised land—promised by the Persians, not by God, and also explained the reason why the law was called “of Moses.” It invented Moses as an archetypal Jewish hero to dispense with the Persian “Mazda.” This perspective sees an original Israel that was brought out of bondage and led into the promised land from the outside, with a hero and a law, and an Israel that distinguished itself, radically and polemically different from the indigenous population.

The exodus is a metaphor for the Persians setting up a new society, but de-Persianized because the new rulers of Israel were the Egyptian Greeks. The exodus narrative is an ideological construct created by this post-exilic society in an attempt to define their unique identity as Yehouah’s chosen people. They are delivered into this Judean promised land by God’s deliverance and love, with a covenant that proved it in the precise form of a vassalage treaty, and it is upon this identity created in the biblical literature, that the Israelite society draws is legitimacy.

Further Reading

• More on Exodus, and on more, and more on Moses, and more still, and on the Sinai theophany.
• More on Canaanite religion, and more.
• More on Persian religion and Judaism, and more Zoroastrianism.
• More on Ezra, and more, and more still on Ezra.

From Daniel

Mike, I have the following comments on: AW! Exodus: Christian Apologetic - God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion? AskWhy! Publications.

Why would the bible not count as evidence (a positive finding) for past history and a lack of it being recorded in ancient egyptian writings (a negative finding) count as evidence the recordings of the bible is false. The bible has been proven itself to be historically accurate in the New Testament and in other books, yet now magically a lack of support for the past means its false? I suppose however evolution gets your approval despite most of the evidence for it ever having occurred for 1 or two billion years is TOTALLY lacking. Talk about biased.

Is this a serious question? I have about 4 MB of criticism of Judaism and 11 MB of criticism of Christianity, much of it direct criticism of the historicity of the bible, and you ask why it should be considered as false. You then say it has been proven historically accurate, but only in the New Testament, apparently proof, if it is a true statement itself, that Moses wrote detailed diaries while leaving Egypt with 2 million people pursued by an army of charioteers, 1500 years before that, even adding an account of his own death and disappearance! You end up saying evidence for evolution is totally lacking. I suggest that it is you who are totally lacking something, and among your deficiencies are a total inability to understand what evidence is. Christians, of course, do not need evidence, and so it is plain enough they do not need to understand it. That is what bias really is.

From JB

Having dipped briefly into your commentary on the Exodus, and having also recently attended a lecture on Late Bronze Age archaeology in the Levant/Egypt, I put forward the following points for your interest:

• As to the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus, we seem to have a similar situation with the Battle of Khadesh, mentioned in both Egyptian and Hittite records, but no evidence of it found on the ground. What does that tell us? I would suggest that current knowledge is too limited to permit categorical statements either way.
• You mention the Merneptah stele as having the first reference to Israel. However the earlier Armana letters make reference to the Habiru—and although the Egyptians describe them almost as bandits, reading between the lines and from other texts (inscription on statue etc), it would seem that disaffected Canaanites were already opting out of society and establishing themselves in the hill country. These were not bandits but intellectuals for most of the examples we have of the early Canaanite alphabet (precursor of the Phoenician and all western alphabets) comes from this people in the hill country. This is probably not news to you, but it does suggest that written records may have been kept from early times (I think earliest example of this script comes from about 1800 BC).
• Leiden papyrus 348 records Habiru labourers dragging stones for one of Rameses second’s temple pylons.
• As to Albright, though he has received much criticism for his focus in archaeology, he was apparently a meticulous archaeologist who dug and recorded his sites extremely well—and much of the dating of Levant archaeology (eg beginning of Late Bronze Age) is fairly fluid and subject to reinterpretation (apparently some of Albright’s dating, once rejected, is now looking likely again).
• Likewise as you know, Egyptian dating has proved very problematic too.
• After the minimalism of much of the 90s, it appears that scholars are now putting some of the history back into the old Old Testament (ie the Pentateuch).

I think the main point that I am trying to make is that the state of our knowledge at the moment does not enable us to make categorical statements—there is a lot of hypothesis out there that is liable to change, and also a lot of politics. I think people on both sides of the argument approach it with strong presuppositions which often lead to a lack of balance in assessing the evidence. I found some of your writing intemperate and emotional, and that leads me to question the validity of your views. But thank you for an interesting read.

From Mike

Thanks for your contribution. You say you dipped briefly into this one article, an article which is one of four on the index page of the AW! “truth” directory and three more on the index page of the AW! “judaism” directory, all on Moses and the exodus. It is wisest to read up fully on a subject before criticising because you might have missed some important points otherwise.

With respect to your specific points, first you are coy about saying who organised the seminar to which you refer. I expect you must realise that Christians and Jews have a non-scholarly agenda, since you mention “politics”. If I am intemperate in my language, and I concede that sometimes I am, it is because these people deliberately ignore or distort scientific norms. So when you say there are a lot of hypotheses out there, you have to realise that some of them are there for no other reason that Jews and Christians find them necessary. They are, in short, poor hypotheses taken objectively, and if it were not for the religious necessity of sad people to have to hold on to them they would be quickly discarded. I suspect therefore that some of the arguments presented to you in this seminar were specious and tendentious, and you must learn how to recognize and ignore them. It is always useful to know who is behind a lecture, and why it has been organised. If it is organised by Christian or Jewish sources, then the arguments presented have to be carefully examined. I think precisely the same about scientists who offer proof of the benefits of smoking or growing GM foods. Who says it and why? Everyone has a price. For some it is money, and for some it is to be assured they will live forever even after they are dead!

Comparing two million people camped in one spot for nearly forty years with a one off battle lasting less than a day is hardly good science. Many battlefields have been lost especially after such a long intervening time, but the refuse and disturbance of the Israelites leaving Egypt in such numbers and camping for a long time at Kadesh Barnea cannot have left no trace. You will find this on the Moses pages, if you care to look.

Your next two points are about the Habiru, not about Israel. You assume that the Habiru are the Hebrews or proto-Hebrews, but it is a bad assumption with no evidence supporting it. It is the first I have ever heard that the Israelites were disaffected intellectuals called Habiru, yet were dragging stones for Egyptian temple pylons. As for the date of the Canaanite script, it is getting on for a millennium older than I have ever heard of. If it came from your lecture, then I am getting an impression that they were tendentious and frankly false facts being offered. The Merneptah stele is the first unequivocal mention of Israel, and to date it at 1200 BC, we have to assume that the Egyptologists have their dates right. Since they are dated from the bible, they are probably wrong.

You say that Albright is being rehabilitated, but when someone has misdated so many sites so conspicuously wrongly, and evidently out of pure bias, it takes a lot of gullibility to be persuaded that he was ever right. If he sometimes was, we have the same problem the minimalists have with the bible. How do we know which is wrong and which is right? All of them have to be re-assessed, preferably by someone who is properly scientifically skeptical.

You end by saying that the Pentateuch is also being rehabilitated by “scholars”, and again I want to know which “scholars” and on what basis. The trouble with biblicists is that they treat scholarship as being only opinion. They do not want anything as objective as science that has the danger of exposing the falseness of their opinions.

Your final summary, I have already dealt with. Hypotheses have to be the best hypotheses. It is not good enough scientifically to say that you have a hypothesis if it is manifestly poorer than others. Biblicists will not accept this. They think hypotheses are opinions, and theirs is as good as any other, even if it is impossible. Sorry that my impatient language puts you off, but try to ignore it and read what is there. Intemperate language does not alter facts, but merely expresses my emotions of frustration and anger at a load of fraudulent scholarship spouted in God’s name.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my email in such detail. You asked about the lecture I attended. It was one in a series given at the British Museum by Dr Jonathan Tubb and Dr Rupert Chapman. (I was not being coy—nothing could be more respectable!) This one was by Dr Tubb who is head of the Semitic/Levant collection at the museum (can’t remember his exact title), and doesn’t have a particular axe to grind. While he doesn’t believe that the Exodus occured as recorded in the Bible, he was the one who spoke of scholars putting some history back into the Bible. He definitely sees the Habiru as early Israelites, and he was the one who described them as intellectuals (this is cutting edge theory, I believe). It was he who talked about the early Canaanite script, and the fact that most examples are found among the Habiru. We saw an example of the script in a museum gallery, on the shaft of a weapon if I remember rightly. Other interesting ideas included that a number of different people joined the Habiru in the hill country for different reasons—they seem to have had a less decadent lifestyle than the Egypto-Canaanites, but it was a lifestyle of choice rather than necessity. Also they date the beginning of the LBA to after Megiddo ie about 1480/1470 BC. And other things...wish I’d taken better notes! But what I came away from the lecture with was the conviction that no theories are set in stone, and there is a lot we don’t yet know! Just as Christians and Jews may be guilty of poor science, I think others with equally strong convictions against the truth of the Bible can also be less than unbiased. Food for thought?

Honest people will always have food for thought, I hope, but, as a dig at me, it is misdirected, I think. It is the Christian and Jewish believers who need the dig. They are, of course, fed by manna from heaven, in thought as well as through their stomachs. Let me try to explain once more, since you speak of emerging with the conviction that no theories are set in stone. First note the biblical allusion here, since my point is that believers think precisely that their theories ARE set in stone.

By theories you mean hypotheses. Inasmuch as hypotheses get set in stone in science, it is when they are confirmed enough to be declared theories! But none of them are “set in stone’, you are quite right. There might be several hypotheses that could be invented to explain a given set of facts, and there are scientific rules about how to choose one of them. One you might know of is Occam’s razor. The simplest hypothesis that explains the facts has to be chosen. Some people, mainly Americans, call it the principle of Parsimony. English scientists like to call it elegance, and so on, but it means simplicity. Another is to remember that the same applies when this hypothesis depends on some previous one. That too has to be the simplest. As an example, to postulate the hypothesis of a creator God is not acceptable, because there is no hypothesis that explains how such an incredibly sophisticated entity came to be Himself.

When we say “explains the facts’, we have another criterion. In science, it is often possible to design an experiment that allows one variable to change at a time, and so hypotheses can be carefully tested to explain every aspect of some phenomenon. When we are making natural observations we cannot, of course. We have what we see, and in history, archaeology, palaeontology and so on, we only have some of the facts at our disposal. Our best theories might not explain all the facts that we think are related. Then we have to propose hypotheses that explain most of the facts, and especially the critical ones.

I apologise for going on about this, but my experience is that people often just do not get how science works. They think it is merely opinion, and the worst of them are the Christians and Jews who have their belief already in their heads—the worst being the ones who pretend simultaneously to be scientific. Naturally, they will not admit that any scientific hypothesis can replace their belief, failing to see that their belief is just their own peculiar hypothesis and it is not the best one, or even a good one, though it was placed in their heads usually at an early age.

I promise you, I will finish soon! You dig at me implying I am arrogant about my own opinions, but my very point is that these are not merely opinions, they are a set of hypotheses that tie together to give a reasonably coherent theory that requires nothing supernatural in it. They are not just gash discordant speculations like this “cutting edge” idea of Tubb’s that the Israelites were intellectuals. It is frankly risible to me! Intellectuals becoming voluntary shepherds? There was an advanced Canaanite civilisation a few miles to the north by the seaside where the dissident intellectuals could have found excellent jobs. Or they could have joined the Assyrians who spoke a similar language and were just getting round to empire building. Intellectual shepherds? Intellectual pylon builders? When the Chinese and the Khmer Rouge sent intellectuals into the fields, they died by the thousand. They were meant to! It was meant to be a harsh way of curing their arrogance, but it was foolish and counter productive. Intellectuals are rarely cut out for hard labour, and, as intellectuals, they know it.

I have seen Tubb on TV in some popular religion programme and he sounded more considered than many of the talking heads we see there, but what you say makes him seem to me like the rest. They have to defend the “exodus” and the “conquest” even if in so doing it is no longer an exodus or a conquest, but still allows Israelites to suddenly appear in Canaan at the right time. If there is no exodus and no conquest then this part of the bible is wrong! It is not historical! Tubb’s idea does not put this “history” back in the bible. It shows the bible here is unhistorical. It often is. That is what the minimalists have been saying all along. Even if some bits of it are historical, no one knows which bits they are, unless someone can confirm them from other sources.

OK! The End! Stay sceptical and perpetually criticise. It is what keeps us free!

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History