Absence of Exodus

The one event from the Bible for which we should be able to find ample evidence in extra-biblical sources is the exodus from Egypt. According to the biblical account, various plagues wracked the nation of Egypt over the course of several months. This was then followed by the exit of 600,000 men and their families (estimated population of over 2 million) from Egypt. When the pharaoh attempted to stop them with a squadron of 600 chariots, they were drowned in the Red Sea. The 2 million people wandered the desert for 40 years before finally settling in the land of Canaan after defeating the indigenous population in a series of battles.

Surely, events on such a scale should have left a record in either Egyptian texts or archaeological strata that would allow us to assign them to an appropriate point in world history.

Getting the Date Right

According to the Bible (1 Kgs 6:1), work on Solomon’s Temple began in the 480th year since the Exodus. Since we know that date with some degree of confidence, a simple calculation would give us 1447 BCE for the date of the exodus. But that places the exodus during the reign of Thutmose III when Egypt was at the height of its powers and Canaan was firmly under his control. Egypt’s power over Canaan only began to weaken in the 13th century BCE.

The Bible also provides a clue that suggests the 15th century is not the right era. Ex 1:11 reports that the enslaved Hebrews were forced to construct the supply cities of “Pithom and Rameses.” Most experts identify the biblical city of “Rameses” as the old Hyksos capital of Avaris (modern-day Tell ed-Dab’a). The city was destroyed in 1530 BCE and long abandoned until it was rebuilt as the royal city of Pi-ramesse during the reign of Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE). The construction referenced in Ex 1:11, therefore, could only have taken place in the 13th century.

We also can’t look at Egypt in isolation, but have to consider what happened in Canaan once the Israelites arrive. All the experts agree that a major break in the archaeological record indicating a shift from an urban “Canaanite” to a rural “Israelite” culture occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, ca. 1250-1150 BCE. If a large number of people suddenly settled in Canaan from elsewhere, it could only have happened in this period.

Therefore, the mid-13th century is the era in which we need to situate the biblical stories of exodus.

Missing Evidence

We can’t quite yet call it a day, though. The big events recounted in the Book of Exodus should have left plenty of evidence in both the written and in the archaeological record, but many have searched and found nothing. There are no Egyptian records of a series of plagues that would surely have destroyed the economy and killed thousands. No records of a mass migration of 2 million former slave workers. No record of a major military defeat in a freak tidal wave.

The typical counter-argument is that Egyptians do not record their defeats. True, Egyptians did put a positive spin on things, but we don’t see that, either. Where are the boasts of a pharaoh who forcefully expelled troublesome aliens from his land or bravely rescued his soldiers from a flood? Sure, there could have been Egyptian texts or inscriptions that did not survive, but we have to make judgments based on the evidence we do have.

And there’s no archaeological evidence of the desert wanderings, either. Two million people could not have passed through the Sinai desert and left behind no evidence behind. It’s certainly not because people weren’t motivated to look or looked in the wrong places. Any discoverers of sunken Egyptian chariots or ruins of ancient Israelite desert encampments would have their names written in the history books, but alas! At some point you have to admit that nothing has been found because there’s nothing there to find.

The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1899) shows many common misconceptions such as the outfits worn by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag.

Where Does That Leave Us?

While many scholars believe the exodus story was invented by the Israelites as their own rags-to-riches tale, there are some biblical clues that some portion of Israel recalled once having lived in Egypt. For example, several of the individuals named in the biblical story of the exodus – Moses, Hophni, Hur, Phinehas – have Egyptian names. The description of the Tabernacle (or Tent of Meeting) has architectural parallels with the war tent of Ramesses II and the Ark of the Covenant has parallels with ritual Egyptian barks. (I hope to go into more detail on this in a future article.) These details could have been invented hundreds of years later to provide Egyptian color to the story, but they could also be relics of memories handed down for hundreds of years.

The prophet Amos wrote in the 8th century BCE, “Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?” (Amos 9:7) Caphtor is the area of Cypress and Crete and historians agree that the Philistines did arrive in Canaan from there in the 12th century BCE. If Amos knew where Philistines originated 400 years previously, why would we not expect him to know the origins of his own people?

It is not inconceivable that a relatively small group of Semite immigrants left Egypt during the time of Ramesses and settled in the hill country of Canaan, bringing with them tales of having once lived as strangers in an alien land. We would not expect Egyptians to record the departure of a small group nor would we find traces of them in the desert unless we knew exactly where to look. No plagues, no miracle of the sea, just one of many quiet migrations in and out of Egypt.

But if this theory is true, then only a fraction of the people who became Israel would be able to trace their story back to Egypt. How did the entire nation of Israel come to see themselves as having been brought up from the land of Egypt?

Americans can look to Thanksgiving as an example. While very few Americans can trace their ancestry back to one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, we teach our children the story of Pilgrims sharing food with Native Americans every Thanksgiving as though it were our story. The Pilgrims’ desire to flee religious persecution in Europe became a central theme in American history and culture.

And what happened once the Egyptian pilgrims arrived in their promised land? We’ll look at the stories of the conquest of Canaan in my next article.

Navel Gazing

Did Adam and Eve have navels? They didn’t need navels because they did not form in a womb, but there is a theory called the Omphalos hypothesis that claims the world was created with an apparent age: Adam and Eve with navels, trees with rings in the Garden of Eden, light from distant galaxies created en route. The Omphalos hypothesis is sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for creationists, because any evidence a skeptic presents proving the age of the earth or universe can be shot down with the assertion that God simply created it to look antique, like a rustic distressed coffee table from Pottery Barn.

But the situation changes when you get to the Noachian deluge. Here we are no longer dealing with the story of creation where “apparent age” can be used as a trump card. In the flood story, we find claims that can be scientifically verified or discredited. If a worldwide flood happened, there should be some trace of it left behind, whether geological, ecological or zoological. Or, historical traces since, according to biblical literalists, the flood was supposed to have occurred between 2300 and 2350 BCE, well within the confines of recorded history.

Skeptics have presented dozens of challenges to the veracity of Noah’s flood and creationists have found “creative” ways of answering most of those questions…to their satisfaction anyway. For example, a skeptic may question whether a large wooden structure like the ark would be seaworthy. Beyond a certain size, wooden ships bend and leak. But a creationist can argue that the ark was made of “gopher wood” and this wood, which no longer exists today, may have been as hard as steel for all we know. Or Noah was a master craftsman or God gave him special knowledge to construct the ark. 

Pretty sure it didn't look like this. ("Noah's Ark - The Homecoming" by Steve Crisp)

In the creationist literature, many appeals are made along the lines of “we don’t know what conditions were like on the pre-Flood earth.” Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? Maybe the pre-Flood earth didn’t have very high mountains or the oceans weren’t as deep. The tremendous weight of the water forced the oceans to become deeper and pushed the mountains up, so the water drained away from the land naturally. But geological shifts of this magnitude would have destroyed any trace of human civilization before the flood. Recall the flood is dated to approximately 2350 BCE and the Great Pyramid of Giza dates to 2560 BCE, 200 years prior to the flood. Yet the pyramid is still there when, according to creationists it should have been destroyed in the flood cataclysm. According to Gen 10:6, the founder of Egypt was Noah’s grandson, so the entire history of Egypt should post-date the flood, but Egyptian history is well-documented back to 3100 BCE and shows no discontinuity.

Either the dating of the flood is wrong, a theory creationists are loathe to admit because that puts the reliability of the Bible’s dates into question, or the generally accepted dates – not only for Egyptian history, but also for other ancient civilizations – must be wrong. But that poses another problem because the Bible dates to Exodus to around 1450 BCE, 900 years after the flood. Events over 1500 years of recorded Egyptian history would have to be crammed into 900 years. Far less than 900 years actually, because rebooting the post-Flood world with only 8 people would require many generations before there was enough of a population to form distinct cultures and societies.

And then there’s the problem of the animals and whether the ark was big enough to hold them all. Creationists claim that Noah didn’t have to bring every type of animal aboard the ark, but only land mammals, birds, and reptiles. Insects and amphibians were left to fend on their own and fish like water. And Noah didn’t have to bring a representative of every species, but only every “kind” and they define “kind” at the taxonomic category of “family” or, at worst, “genus.” For example, if Noah was only required to bring a pair from the “cat” family (felidae), that would cover house cats, cheetahs, lions, tigers, leopards, etc. That stretches credulity a bit, so most creationists will accept (for the sake of argument) that Noah would have to bring representatives of each genus. That’s over 4000 genera for mammals, birds and reptiles and there would be at least a pair of each and seven pairs for the clean animals, so it would be more like 10-20,000 animals.

And not just representatives of every living genus, but every genus that ever existed, dinosaurs included. Why? Because creationists use the flood to explain fossils, so all those extinct animals – pterodactyls, T-Rex, mammoths – had to be alive at the time of the flood. And Noah would have to bring their representatives – juveniles, to save space – aboard the ark, even though they apparently didn’t survive conditions in the post-Flood world. (God should have informed Noah not to bother with them.) One creationist estimates 16,000 animals in all, representing living and extinct genera. The number seems on the low side to me, but let’s go with it.

Animals vary in size, but creationists like to use a sheep as an average size. The ark had a volume of 1.5 million cubic feet, which they say is equivalent to 570 railroad stock cars, each of which can carry 240 sheep. That works out to 11 cubic feet per animal, so if you have 16,000 animals, they would need 176,000 cubic feet. It sounds like there would be a lot of room left over on the ark, but Noah had to provision food for one year. A human can eat 8 times his weight in food over a year and an ox or cow twice that, so factoring in 8 times the space required for each animal for food, you arrive at 1.4 million cubic feet. This uses up all the space on the ark, with no space left for corridors, ramps, ventilation, water reservoirs or waste storage. Perhaps God put the animals in suspended hibernation – like astronauts in a science fiction movie – so they would not require food or water. But if God could whip out a miracle to save the day, why put Noah through the trouble of constructing an ark in the first place? Why not transport Noah and the animals to the tallest mountain and have them wait it out?

Once the ark landed and the animals disembarked, you would expect to see population densities in decreasing amounts as you travel further away from the site where the ark settled, but that is not the case. Marsupials managed to travel across oceans to South America and Australia, about as far as you can get from the Middle East, without stopping to settle anywhere along the way. God could certainly have infused a migratory impulse within the kangaroos and koalas to head to Australia and use ice ages to conveniently create land bridges for them to cross oceans, but that’s taking special pleading to ridiculous levels. A more plausible scenario is that humans brought the animals with them, but if that is the case, why did they only bring marsupials and not placental mammals? And how did flightless birds – penguins – get to Antarctica?

This brings us back to the Omphalos hypothesis. What young earth creationists are asking us to believe is that not only did God manage to set up the conditions on a pre-Flood earth that would have made a worldwide flood possible, but God also did an excellent job of eliminating all evidence of a global flood. The flood obliterated any trace of the pre-Flood world while, at the same time, laid down a sedimentary and fossil record that gives the appearance that animals went extinct over a long period of time. Recorded human history begins, not with a few survivors trying to rebuild civilization after the flood, but with well-organized societies of thousands of people building massive structures like the pyramids. Within an incredibly short period of time after the flood, animals and humans spread throughout the globe, crossed vast oceans and rapidly adapted to specific environments.

Is God is setting up a series of logically absurd situations in order to test our faith in the veracity of the Bible? The answer is clearly laid out in this quote from creationist literature: “The principal error of this view is that it starts from supposed scientific anomalies, such as the fossil record, rather than from Scripture.” In other words, Scripture drives the interpretation of science, not the other way around.