The Exodus

Departure of the Israelites, by David Roberts, 1829

The Exodus (from Greek ἔξοδος exodos, "going out") is the founding, or etiological, myth of Israel; its message is that the Israelites were delivered from slavery by Yahweh and therefore belong to him through the Mosaic covenant.^{[1][Notes 1]} It tells of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt following the death of Joseph, their departure under the leadership of Moses, the revelations at Sinai (including the Ten Commandments), and their wanderings in the wilderness up to the borders of Canaan.^[2] The exodus story is told in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and their overall intent was to demonstrate God's actions in history, to recall Israel's bondage and salvation, and to demonstrate the fulfillment of Israel's covenant. ^[3]

The historicity of the exodus continues to attract popular attention, but most histories of ancient Israel no longer consider information about it recoverable or even relevant to the story of Israel's emergence.^[4] The archeological evidence does not support the story told in the Book of Exodus^[5] and most archaeologists have therefore abandoned the investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit".^[6] The opinion of the overwhelming majority of modern biblical scholars is that the exodus story was shaped into its final present form in the post-Exilic period,^[7] although the traditions behind it are older and can be traced in the writings of the 8th century BCE prophets.^[8] How far beyond that the tradition might stretch cannot be told: "Presumably an original Exodus story lies hidden somewhere inside all the later revisions and alterations, but centuries of transmission have long obscured its presence, and its substance, accuracy and date are now difficult to determine."^[3]

The Exodus has been central to Judaism: it served to orient Jews towards the celebration of God's actions in history, in contrast to polytheistic celebrations of the gods' actions in nature, and even today it is recounted daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated in the festival of Pesach. In secular history the exodus has served as inspiration and model for many groups, from early Protestant settlers fleeing persecution in Europe to 19th and 20th century African-Americans striving for freedom and civil rights.^[9]

Origins

A Semitic slave. Ancient Egyptian figurine. Hecht Museum

The opinion of the overwhelming majority of modern biblical scholars is that the Torah, or Pentateuch (the series of five books which consist of the Book of Genesis plus the books in which the Exodus story is told) was shaped in the post-exilic period.^[7] There are currently two important hypotheses explaining the background to this: the first is Persian Imperial authorisation, the idea that the post-exilic community needed a legal basis on which to function within the Persian Imperial system; the second relates to the community of citizens organised around the Temple, with the Pentateuch providing the criteria for who would belong to it (the narratives and genealogies in Genesis) and establishing the power structures and relative positions of its various groups.^[10] In either case, the Book of Exodus forms a "charter myth" for Israel: Israel was delivered from slavery by Yahweh and therefore belongs to him through the covenant.^[1]

The final form of the Pentateuch was based on earlier traditions.^[11] These have left traces in over 150 references throughout the Bible.^[12] The earliest are in the prophets Amos (possibly) and Hosea (certainly), both active in 8th century BCE Israel; in contrast Proto-Isaiah and Micah, both active in Judah at much the same time, never do; it thus seems reasonable to conclude the Exodus tradition was important in the northern kingdom in the 8th century BCE, but not in Judah.^[8]

In a recent work, Stephen C. Russell traces the 8th century BCE prophetic tradition to three originally separate variants, in the northern Kingdom of Israel, in Transjordan, and in the southern Kingdom of Judah. Russell proposes different hypothetical historical backgrounds to each tradition: the tradition from Israel, which involves a journey from Egypt to the region of Bethel, he suggests is a memory of herders who could move to and from Egypt in times of crisis; for the Transjordanian tradition, which focuses on deliverance from Egypt without a journey, he suggests a memory of the withdrawal of Egyptian control at the end of the Late Bronze Age; and for Judah, whose tradition is preserved in the Song of the Sea, he suggests the celebration of a military victory over Egypt, although it is impossible to suggest what this victory may have been.^[12]

Cultural significance

The exodus is remembered daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated each year at the feast of Passover.^[13] The Hebrew name for this festival, Pesach, refers to God's instruction to the Israelites to prepare unleavened bread as they would be leaving Egypt in haste, and to mark their doors with the blood of slaughtered sheep so that the "Angel of Death" or "the destroyer" tasked with killing the first-born of Egypt would "pass over" them. Despite the Exodus story, a majority of scholars do not believe that the Passover festival originated as described in the biblical story.^[14]

Jewish tradition has preserved national and personal reminders of this pivotal narrative in daily life. Examples include the wearing of tefillin (phylacteries) on the arm and forehead, the wearing of tzitzit (knotted ritual fringes attached to the four corners of the prayer shawl), the eating of matzot (unleavened bread) during the Pesach, the fasting of the firstborn a day before Pesach, and the redemption of firstborn children and animals.

Historicity

Possible Exodus routes. The traditional Exodus route is in black; other possible routes are in blue and green.

Summary

The archaeological data do not accord with what could be expected from the Bible's exodus story: there is no evidence that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula shows almost no sign of any occupation at all for the entire 2nd millennium BCE, and even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy.^[15]

Scholars generally agree that while the exodus narrative contains late 2nd millennium elements, it has not been demonstrated that these elements could not belong to any other period and they are consistent with "knowledge that a 1st millennium BCE writer trying to set an old story in Egypt could have known."^[16] A few scholars, notably Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeier, continue to discuss the historicity, or at least plausibility, of the story, although historians of ancient Israel rarely respond.^[17] They advance a range of arguments to explain the lack of evidence: possibly the Egyptian records of the presence of the Israelites and their escape have been lost or suppressed; possibly (or probably) the fleeing Israelites left no archaeological trace in the desert; possibly the huge numbers reported in the story are mistranslated.^[18]

Numbers and logistics

According to Exodus 12:37–38, the Israelites numbered "about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children," plus many non-Israelites and livestock.^[19] Numbers 1:46 gives a more precise total of 603,550 men aged 20 and up.^[20] It is difficult to reconcile the idea of 600,000 Israelite fighting men with the information that the Israelites were afraid of the Philistines and Egyptians.^[21] The 600,000, plus wives, children, the elderly, and the "mixed multitude" of non-Israelites would have numbered some 2 million people.^[22] Marching ten abreast, and without accounting for livestock, they would have formed a line 150 miles long.^[23] The entire Egyptian population in 1250 BCE is estimated to have been around 3 to 3.5 million,^[24][22] and no evidence has been found that Egypt ever suffered the demographic and economic catastrophe such a loss of population would represent, nor that the Sinai desert ever hosted (or could have hosted) these millions of people and their herds.^[25]

Some have rationalised the numbers into smaller figures, for example reading the Hebrew as "600 families" rather than 600,000 men, but all such solutions have their own set of problems.^[26] The most probable explanation is that 600,000 symbolises the total destruction of the generation of Israel which left Egypt, none of whom lived to see the Promised Land,^[27] while the 603,550 is a gematria (a code in which numbers represent letters or words) for bnei yisra'el kol rosh, "the children of Israel, every individual".^[28]

Archaeology

A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness,^[29] and archaeologists generally agree that the Israelites had Canaanite origins.^[30] The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains are in the Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite.^[31] Almost the sole marker distinguishing the "Israelite" villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether even this is an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute.^[31]

Anachronisms

Despite the Bible's internal dating of the Exodus to the 2nd millennium BCE, details point to a 1st millennium date for the composition of the Book of Exodus: Ezion-Geber, (one of the Stations of the Exodus), for example, dates to a period between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE with possible further occupation into the 4th century BCE,^[32] and those place-names on the Exodus route which have been identified – Goshen, Pithom, Succoth, Ramesses and Kadesh Barnea – point to the geography of the 1st millennium rather than the 2nd.^[33]

Similarly, the Pharaoh's fear that the Israelites might ally themselves with foreign invaders seems unlikely in the context of the late 2nd millennium, when Canaan was part of an Egyptian empire and Egypt faced no enemies in that direction, but does make sense in a 1st millennium context, when Egypt was considerably weaker and faced invasion first from the Achaemenid Empire and later from the Seleucid Empire.^[34]

The mention of the dromedary in Exodus 9:3 also suggests a later date of composition – the widespread domestication of the camel as a herd animal is thought not to have taken place before the late 2nd millennium, after the Israelites had already emerged in Canaan,^[35] and they did not become widespread in Egypt until c.200–100 BCE.^[36]

Chronology

The chronology of the Exodus story likewise underlines its essentially religious rather than historical nature. The number seven was sacred to God in Judaism, and so the Israelites arrive at the Sinai Peninsula, where they will meet God, at the beginning of the seventh week after their departure from Egypt,^[37] while the erection of the Tabernacle, God's dwelling-place among his people, occurs in the year 2666 after God creates the world, two-thirds of the way through a four thousand year era which culminates in or around the re-dedication of the Second Temple in 164 BCE.^{[38][39][Notes 2]}

Route

The Torah lists the places where the Israelites rested. A few of the names at the start of the itinerary, including Ra'amses, Pithom and Succoth, are reasonably well identified with archaeological sites on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta,^[33] as is Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites spend 38 years after turning back from Canaan, but other than that very little is certain. The crossing of the Red Sea has been variously placed at the Pelusic branch of the Nile, anywhere along the network of Bitter Lakes and smaller canals that formed a barrier toward eastward escape, the Gulf of Suez (SSE of Succoth) and the Gulf of Aqaba (S of Ezion-Geber), or even on a lagoon on the Mediterranean coast. The Biblical Mount Sinai is identified in Christian tradition with Jebel Musa in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, but this association dates only from the 3rd century CE and no evidence of the Exodus has been found there.^[40]

Date

Attempts to date the Exodus to a specific century have been inconclusive.^[41] 1 Kings 6:1 places the event 480 years before the construction of Solomon's Temple, implying an Exodus at c.1446 BCE, but it is widely recognised that the number in 1 Kings merely represents twelve generations of forty years each.^[42][43][44] There are major archaeological obstacles to an earlier date: Canaan was part of the Egyptian empire, so that the Israelites would in effect be escaping from Egypt to Egypt, and its cities were unwalled and do not show destruction layers consistent with the Bible's account of the occupation of the land (e.g., Jericho was "small and poor, almost insignificant, and unfortified (and) [t]here was also no sign of a destruction". (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002).^[45] William F. Albright, the leading biblical archaeologist of the mid-20th century, proposed a date of around 1250–1200 BCE, but his so-called "Israelite" evidence (house-type, the collar-rimmed jars, etc) are continuations of Canaanite culture.^[46] The lack of evidence has led scholars to conclude that it is difficult or even impossible to link the exodus story to any specific point in history.^[47]

Possible sources and parallels

Ipuwer Papyrus

Ipuwer

The "Ipuwer Papyrus" is thought to have been written in the Thirteenth dynasty of Egypt (18th century BCE), and certainly no earlier than the 12th Dynasty.^[48][49] Written in the form of a dialogue, the sage Ipuwer accuses both the creator-god Ra and the king of having neglected their roles, as a result of which the social order is overturned and disasters fill the land.^[50] Ipuwer has been put forward in popular literature as an Egyptian confirmation of the exodus account, most notably because of its statement that "the river is blood" and its frequent references to servants running away, but these arguments ignore the many points on which Ipuwer contradicts Exodus, such as the fact that Ipuwer's Asiatics are arriving in Egypt rather than leaving, and the likelihood that that the "river is blood" phrase refers to the red sediment colouring the Nile during disastrous floods.^[51] Scholars have identified this and similar works (Ipuwer being the most ambitious) as examples of a common Egyptian literary genre, with little or no basis in historical events.^[52]

The Hyksos

The Hyksos ruled over the Nile Delta in the 2nd millennium BCE until expelled by the Egyptians.^[53] While they had nothing to do with the Jews, it is possible that a vague memory of these events may have formed the basis for the Israelite exodus tradition.^[54][55]

The story is preserved in two fragments written by the 3rd century BCE Egyptian priest Manetho, and preserved by the 1st century CE Jewish historian Josephus. In the first, Manetho describes the lowly origins of the Hyksos in Asia, their dominion over and expulsion from Egypt, and their subsequent foundation of the city of Jerusalem and its temple.^[56] It is Josephus, not Manetho, who identifies the Hyksos with the Jews, and it seems that Manetho found no mention of either Jews or Moses in the Egyptian temple archives.^[57]

In the second fragment Manetho tells how King Amenophis was told by the gods to purge Egypt of lepers. The lepers, imprisoned in the abandoned city of Avaris and led by an Egyptian priest named Osarseph, joined forces with the "shepherd people" now living in Jerusalem to invade Egypt and wreak havoc until eventually Amenophis and his son Ramses chased them out to Syria, where Osarseph gave them a law-code and changed his name to Moses.^[58] Almost all scholars believe that the identification of Osarseph with Moses is a later addition to the text.^[59]

See also

• Invented tradition
• Va'eira, Bo, and Beshalach: Torah portions telling the Exodus story

Notes

1. "Charter (i.e., foundation) myths tell the story of a society's origins, and, in doing so, provide the ideological foundations for the culture and its institutions." (Sparks (2010), p.73
2. See Thompson, The Mythic Past (1999), pages 73 and following, for an overview of the place of the exodus in the biblical chronology.

References

Citations

1. Sparks 2010, p. 73.
2. Redmount 2001, p. 59.
3. Redmount 1998, p. 63.
4. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 81.
5. Meyers 2005, p. 5-6.
6. Dever 2001, p. 99.
7. Enns 2012, p. 26.
8. Lemche 1985, p. 327.
9. Tigay 2004, p. 107.
10. Ska 2006, p. 217, 227–228.
11. Carr & Conway 2010, p. 193.
12. Russell 2009, p. 1.
13. Tigay 2005, p. 106–107.
14. Prosic 2004, p. 31.
15. Redmount 2001, p. 77.
16. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 90.
17. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 88-89.
18. Berman 2015, p. passim.
19. Exodus 12 Archived December 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.
20. Numbers 1 Archived September 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.
21. Miller 2009, p. 256.
22. Kantor 2005, p. 70.
23. Cline 2007, p. 74.
24. Butzer 1999, p. 297.
25. Dever 2003, p. 19.
26. Grisanti 2011, p. 240ff.
27. Guillaume 1980, p. 8, 15.
28. Beitzel 1980, p. 6–7.
29. Meyers 2005, p. 5.
30. Shaw 2002, p. 313.
31. Killebrew 2005, p. 176.
32. Practico 1985, p. 1–32.
33. Van Seters 1997, p. 255ff.
34. Soggin 1998, p. 128–129.
35. Finkelstein & Silberman 2002, p. 334.
36. Faye 2002, p. 3.
37. Meyers 2005, p. 143.
38. Hayes & Miller 1986, p. 59.
39. Davies 1998, p. 180.
40. Hoffmeier 2005, p. 115ff.
41. Killebrew 2005, p. 151.
42. Shea 2003, p. 238–239.
43. Moore & Kelle 2005, p. 81.
44. Thompson 1999, p. 74.
45. Finkelstein & Silberman 2002, p. 77–79, 82.
46. Killebrew 2005, p. 175–177.
47. Killebrew 2005, p. 152.
48. Willems 2010, p. 83.
49. Grabbe 2014, p. 68.
50. Perdue 2008, p. 22.
51. Enmarch 2011, p. 173-175.
52. Lichtheim 1975, p. 134-135.
53. Finkelstein & Silberman 2002, p. 69.
54. Oblath 2004, p. 21.
55. Droge 1996, p. 134.
56. Droge 1996, p. 121–122.
57. Droge 1996, p. 122 fn 14.
58. Droge 1996, p. 134–135.
59. Droge 1996, p. 135.

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