Some Thoughts on the Real-ish History Behind Exodus

I wrote this after being part of a debate about the historical grounding of the story of Exodus. Reading the comments and jumping to quick Google searches, this is what I gleaned. I thought I’d share. If I got anything seriously wrong, I'm open to corrections.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I realize that since I'll be jumping back and forth across millennia, so I need to give you a partial chronology first, just so you can keep that which follows straight in your heard. The dates that follow are working backwards in time:

597 BCE through 539 BCE approximate date of the Babylonian captivity, during this time was the actual writing of most of the Old Testament including the Book of Exodus.

650 BCE approximate date of first contemporary record of a clearly identified Jew in Egyptian records, this was long after the events of Exodus.

925 BCE approximate date of the writing of the Gezer Calendar, the oldest existing Hebrew writing

1050 BCE approximate date of the founding Israel under King Saul

1200 to 1300 BCE assumed period of the Jews arrival in the land of Canaan (the era described in the Book of Judges that took place on the real estate of the future Israel)

1208 BCE the approximate date of the Egyptian Merneptah Stele which may place the Jewish people in Canaan (the future Israel) at the time of its writing.

1213 - 1292 BCE approximate dates of reigns of Pharaoh’s Ramses I & Ramses II

1549–1524 BCE approximate dates of the reign of the oldest Pharaoh mentioned in the story below, Ahmose I

1550 BCE approximate date of the writing of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

2560 BCE, the date of the laying of the capstone of the Great Pyramid

Most rational faithful assume that the Exodus story, after one stripped of its supernatural elements, has a core of truth: the enslavement of the Jews, the mass exodus, and then the settlement of Israel many years later.

Despite the Egyptian records being the most detailed of any contemporaneous civilization in the region, establishing the basic facts of this story has proved impossible. Many of the problems seem not only related to extracting answers out fragmented, millennia-old evidence, but that long histories have shifted the understanding of identity, so in some ways we don’t even know what the right questions to ask are anymore.

Start with the Jewish slaves building the pyramids. This is demonstrably false, as worker’s records have been recovered, and the pyramids weren’t built by slaves at all. The pyramid builders were recruited from poor communities and worked shifts of three months, often farmers who worked during the months when the Nile flooded their farms. They were well paid and fed, and we know some very intimate details of their lives (there are records of on-the-job and domestic disputes that had to be arbitrated). The capstone of the great Pyramid was laid in 2560 BCE, almost 2000 years before the first contemporary recording of any Jewish people in Egypt (these were not the Jews from Exodus) and also before any Jewish writing that still survives.

Because of popular culture I had to mention that first, but it is in fact the least important point -- if you review you Bible, it doesn’t claim the Jews did that particular work. Following up on that detail, most say the story of the Jews and the pyramids comes from Herodotus, “the father of history.”

Ooops! It turns out Herodotus does not mention either Jews or slaves in connection to the pyramids. In fact, no one really knows where the idea of Jewish slaves building the pyramids came from.

As for the Pharaohs in the story, they remain unnamed, and the Book of Exodus was probably not written until the era of the Babylonian exile in 6th c. BCE, so dating him (and everything else) is all but impossible. Various scholars have identified six candidates, the most popular in pop-culture, Ramesses I & Ramesses II are, in fact, the least likely suspects among them. All told, these Pharaohs cover a space of years from 1549 BCE through 1213 BCE, or a moving target of more than 300 years, which is also between 1,000 and 700 hundred years before the story was actually recorded. The oldest of these Pharaohs, Ahmose I, is just-less-than 1,000 years after the laying of the capstone of the Great Pyramid, and about 1,000 years before the first contemporary recording of a Jewish people in Egypt.

Various historians have tried to find similar events in Egyptian history that may be the same as those in the Exodus story just described differently (examples: calling the Exodus an "expulsion," the Egyptians giving the Jews a different name (the mysterious Hykos people were once a popular candidate for being the Jews) or nailing down records of at least a couple similar plagues even if not all of them) but each historian who tries this comes up with a different chronology.

Egyptians were ethnically diverse and though they had enormous numbers of slaves, but did not engage in race-slavery, so their slaves were as diverse as the over-all population; that made the identification of the Jews in this mix additionally problematic. There is indirect evidence of an ancient Jewish presence in Egypt, like the many similarities between the Jewish texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (almost the same Ten Commandments recorded in almost the same order). The Book of the Dead is believed to go back to 1550 BCE, maybe strengthening the connection with Ahmose I because the dates of his reign (which are disputed) are 1549–1524 BCE. But being a book, there’s no telling at what time after its writing did the first Jew read it, so that date, in of itself, is less than informative. Another possible connection to Ahmose is he defeated and expelled the Hykos.

The first contemporary record of a distinctly Jewish population in Egypt was not until about 650 BC, so just before the long-delayed writing down of the Exodus tradition was done by exiles so very far, far, away. They weren’t slaves and weren’t really Egyptian Jews, and barely Jews as we’d recognize them. They were a garrison of soldiers from the Persian Empire. Babylon was part of that Empire at that time, so it's likely they were related to those who actually wrote the Exodus and Old Testament. They were stationed on Elephantine, an island in the Nile, and fought alongside the Pharaoh's soldiers in the Nubian campaign. They are believed to have authored the documents that concern them, but those documents were written in Aramaic, not Hebrew. Their religious beliefs appear to have been a mixture of Judaism -- they observed Shabbat and Passover, so the Exodus tradition was already in place, even without a written Bible -- and pagan polytheism. There are records of interfaith marriages and that these some of these Jews owned Egyptian slaves.

Okay, let’s try to tease out logical narrative based on inferences. Most likely there were some enslaved Jews in Egypt, but not all Jews in Egypt were slaves. Moreover, they were not likely a centralized community, so when the enslaved group, or part of the enslaved group, departed on a date we are unable to establish as it wasn’t as important to the Egyptians as it was for the freed slaves themselves. Moreover, after leaving, they most likely joined other Jewish groups, and a good guess is, those they joined were already in living in Canaan (the future Israel).

Another problem with making the Exodus story historically coherent is the word, “Israelite.” Israel itself did not exist until approximately 1050 BCE, with the rise of King Saul, maybe 600 years before the writing of the Exodus story. Their actual arrival in that land, then called Canaan, was earlier and far more loosely dated (according to tradition, that was between 1300 & 1200 BCE, described in the Book of Judges).

A contemporary Egyptian source, Merneptah Stele from approximately 1208 BCE seems to put a Jewish community in Canaan at that time.

This lines up poorly with most of the Pharaohs likely to have been the characters in the Exodus epic. The Jewish people existed before Israel’s founding, and despite the claims in the Bible, some Jewish groups likely occupied that land before the Exodus. Almost certainly, the Jews emerged right there, splitting off from the Canaanites tribes during the Bronze age, their communities are identifiable to archologists because of their dietary habits being distinct from the Canaanites.

The chronology seems to be weakening the connection between the Exodus and the founding of Israel, and that undermines the very heart of the narrative. Worse still, the Jewishness of the first Israelites is potentially fuzzy – they existed, but the religion of Judaism wasn’t codified until the later, during the Babylonian exile (remember that the Jewish garrison in Egypt was an almost unrecognizable breed of Jew).

Going on the assumption that shared language is shared culture -- even if the sharing doesn’t represent a complete in-group coherence -- there’s the evidence of the Gezer Calendar, found by archeologists during the excavation of the Canaanite city of Gezer, 20 miles west of Jerusalem, and inscribed in limestone about 925 BCE in paleo-Hebrew. The dating of this artifact is in between the founding of Israel and the beginning of the Babylonia exile. As essentially all languages exist orally before the creation of a written form, this constitutes direct evidence of a somewhat coherent Jewish people in the right place at the right time to confirm the 'Jewishness' of the early Israelites, and that, at least, falls nicely in line with the earlier Exodus story.

At least for everybody except those archaeologists who insist it’s written in Phoenician.

It’s so much easier to verify or debunk stories that happened AFTER the internet was created.