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.

We are Family

Chapter 10 of Genesis has been called the “Table of Nations,” consists of almost nothing but a list of 70 names (some of them repeated), and is a strong contender for one of the most boring parts of the Bible. The purpose of Gen 10 is to list the descendants of Noah’s three sons – Shem, Ham and Japheth – to show how the tribes, nations and peoples surrounding Israel derive from them. It is a mixture of a monotonous enumeration of names from the Priestly (P) source along with more names and scraps of narration from the Yahwist (J) source.

While scholars cannot identify every single name mentioned in Gen 10, they have been able to identify enough to get a rough idea of the lay of the land. As you can see in the accompanying map, the descendants of Japheth are the peoples to the north of Israel in Europe and Asia Minor. Ham’s descendants populate the northern-most parts of Africa and the area immediately surrounding the land of Canaan. The peoples descending from Shem occupy the lands of Mesopotamia and Arabia. These far-flung areas encompassed the known world in Solomon’s day (10th century BCE) but, for the modern reader, fail to take into account the Indian subcontinent, China and other Far Eastern nations, and the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas. The great flood is dated by biblical literalists to 2350 BCE, so all of these migrations and racial diversity would have had to take place since that time.

A rough approximation of where the various peoples mentioned in Gen 11 would have been located in the ancient world.

The literary genre may be that of a genealogy, but the names are not really individuals; they are the names of tribes and regions. In some instances, the writer doesn’t even pretend to provide the name of an individual. In v. 15, J states that Canaan is the father of Sidon (one of the ancient cities of Phoenicia) and Heth (representing the Hittites), as well as the father of several Canaanite tribes (Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, and Hivites). And, as if that wasn’t enough, Canaan was also the ancestor of the inhabitants of five Phoenician cities (Arkites, Sinites, etc.).

As mentioned above, there is some duplication of names due to different traditions in the two sources. According to P Lud (assumed to be a reference to inhabitants of Lydia in Asia Minor) are descended from Shem (v. 22), but according to J the Ludites are descended from Ham (v. 13). According to P Havilah and Sheba are descended from Ham (v 7), but J has them descended from Shem (vv. 28-29). It’s all quite confusing.

Presented graphically, the mind-numbing list of names is a little easier to digest.

The backbone of the Table of Nations is provided by P. He lists the sons of Noah in reverse order, from youngest to oldest. P announces the sons of Japheth, Ham or Shem and then selectively names some grandsons. The passage citing the sons of Japheth (10:2-5) is pure P. P ends each genealogical list with a formulaic conclusion: “These are the descendants of Japheth/Ham/Seth in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.” A similar formula concludes the chapter.

The list of Ham’s sons (vv. 6-20) is longer because it includes a lengthy addition (vv. 8-19) from the J source. This insertion breaks the monotony by providing us with a few lines (vv. 8-12) describing Nimrod, a mighty warrior and hunter and also the founder of the kingdom of Babel in Shinar (Babylonia) which expanded into Assyria and led to the building of Nineveh. Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the figure of Nimrod can be identified with either a mythological god or hero (like Gilgamesh) or some historical figure. Perhaps he just stands as the representative of the Babylonian nation. It is a bit odd, though, that Nimrod is included in the Hamite list but is said to have established a kingdom in Babylonia which is a Sethite region.

Two brief verses (13-14) relate the origins of the Philistines and the rest of the first J insertion (vv. 15-19) lists various tribes in the land of Canaan and its vicinity. While the division of peoples and nations appears to be along ethnic lines, there are curiosities. The Philistines were of Aegean origins, so they should be listed with Japheth’s descendants, not Ham’s. And the Canaanites were ethnically Semitic, so by all rights they should be counted among the descendants of Shem. Scholars believe that because the Canaanites were under the political control Egypt, the P source listed them as sons of Ham.

Shem is introduced at the ancestor of Eber (v. 21), who we will later see in Gen 11 is the ancestor of Abraham. Without the link to Eber provided by J, we would not know from reading P’s genealogy where to place Israel among Noah’s sons. In a J insertion (v. 26) we further learn that Eber is the father of Peleg during whose lifetime “the earth was divided” (Hebrew palag). This would have been about a hundred years after the flood event and seems to be a reference to the confusion of languages and scattering of peoples across the earth in the following episode of the Tower of Babel (11:1-9). That the descendants of Shem are to be found in Mesopotamia is consistent with the Bible’s claim that Abraham’s home town is Haran (or Ur, depending on the source).

The purpose of the Table of Nations seems to be rather straightforward. The biblical authors are demonstrating that all the known tribes, nations and ethnicities derive from the family of Noah. Therefore, all people are part of an extended family. But the rest of the OT stands diametrically opposed to this notion. Canaanites are not considered “cousins” of Israel, but abominations that needed to be driven out of the Promised Land or exterminated. Perhaps the writer is recalling an older tradition that acknowledged the ties between Canaanite and Israelite civilizations. In fact, archeologists cannot distinguish between Canaanite and Israelite culture; the two blend seamlessly from one into the other. 

Either that or the writer is speaking to his audience, an audience that is returning from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land, much as Abraham made that journey. When Abraham arrived in Canaan, he peacefully co-existed with the tribes there. The returning exiles would also arrive to find the land occupied by descendants of the Canaanites. Perhaps the writer wanted to remind his audience that they, too, could peacefully co-exist with the inhabitants if they remembered that they are all descendants of Noah.