The following is a report on recent findings in Egypt by Breaking News correspondent Al Quiet.
Egyptologists recently uncovered a news story which broke shortly after the Exodus. The translation reads…
“On a certain day, God showed up unexpectedly in the court of Pharaoh and through His minister, Moses, made demands on Pharaoh to let His people go. After many rounds of negotiations and following several minor irritant plagues, in which God showed He was more than capable of pulling this thing off, our great leader, Pharaoh, put his back up and God had no choice but to eventually destroy the entire Egyptian army.
The outcome? After many years of enslavement, Moses led Israel to freedom and they took most of the Egyptian Gross National Savings with them as they went. Watching their exit toward the horizon we had to admit that we sort of had it coming. They were basically a peace loving people, non-militaristic, who took care of our undesirable tasks, herding animals, and we unilaterally relegated them to slavery making their lives very hard, at one point even trying to kill their male born children. And the moral of the story? What goes around, comes around.
There are many in Egypt who believe Pharaoh should have backed off from the start and with his demise a more reasonable successor will be sought. His cabinet will be replaced also but this time with counselors who hopefully can be more persuasive than the last group.
It was a bad phase in Egyptian history but we are glad to put it behind us. Admittedly, rebuilding the economy will be a challenge without all the slaves.”
NO, THIS IS NOT TRUE.
But, in recent debates about the veracity of the Exodus story, as recorded in the Bible, it was pointed out that there is no evidence in any ancient Egyptian writings that point to the Exodus or to Israelite slavery in Egypt. I’m not surprised. What would we expect them to do with this event? How would we expect them to report it, if they said anything at all? To call this an international black eye would be an understatement. Not even propaganda would help.
There is no doubt they handled this event the same way all countries handle bad press. They buried it. As much as was possible, anyway. There is some documentary evidence for the Exodus. In fact, a DVD exploring some of the evidence, The Exodus Decoded
Fortunately for the Eyptians, cover-ups were very possible in ancient history. Unfortunately for them, God gave us a detailed record and it is very difficult to erase all evidence.
THINK!AboutIt
You may haven’t intended to do so, but I think you’ve managed to express the state of mind that lots of individuals are in. The sense of wanting to help, but not knowing how or where, is something a lot of us are going through.
Hey, this is your blog. You make the rules, you set the agenda.
If you are of mind, we can leave the external stuff out. I will post next on either the slave issue or the gay issue. Only biblical references will be used.
History and Archeology: Again, if we treat the story as a legend, there is no need to compare it to the historical or archeological record. As I conceded in my initial reaction, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I question whether the scholar you quote is right that only 2% of the archeological sites have been examined, and the basis for that claim; I would suggest that a much higher percentage of the major sites — royal tombs (which include the pyramids), palaces and military structures, and larger settlements — have been explored substantially if not completely. And contrary to your claim, the Egyptians had very efficient and advanced written communications, the likes of which would not be exceeded anywhere on Earth until the Roman and Han Chinese empires and which exceeded that of many medieval European societies. So if you want to believe there are oral traditions of the Exodus, well, I can’t argue with faith. But here as elsewhere, “faith” is best defined as maintaining a belief in the absence of supporting evidence. But again, if the story is a legend and not history, then we don’t need to worry about it.
Modern Egyptian Attitudes: I’ve no doubt there is seething resentment in Modern Egypt of Modern Israel. This proves little because of the effect of modern religious and political tensions. The tensions that likely exist today are the results of events that took place in 1948 and afterwards, not in some indistinct, shadowy past of indeterminate date.
Ancient Government: No society can exist without a government of some kind for forty years. Moses’ leadership of the Israelites after the Exodus is not described as democratic in any sense of the word, nor would democracy have been thought of as a good thing in historical or cultural context. Good government in those days was having a great, glorious, and powerful king. The historical Egyptians claimed that their Pharaoh was literally a god himself (the legendary Egyptians seem to have made no such claim). No one would claim to have a weak, cowardly, or two-faced ruler. Consistent with this notion, Moses is portrayed as a commander, a dictator; his “treason” against Egypt is portrayed as loyalty to the true god — which is consistent with the story being legend rather than history; Exodus is pro-Mosaic propaganda. The Torah is also careful to frequently point out Aaron’s role in the command structure as well, as “proof” of Aaron’s legitimacy to rule in Moses’ absence, and both Aaron and Joshua after him claim a divine mandate. They are for all practical purposes kings, although I’ll concede that the text does not assign them that title.
What we call the book of Exodus is propaganda supporting the rule of these de facto kings, who claimed a mandate to rule tracing back to these figures of myth for the same reason that the early kings of Rome (and indeed most of Rome’s noble houses during the Republican era and the Julio-Claudian dynasty in the early Principate) traced their lineage back to Romulus and Remus. And it may be some of the most effective propaganda in human history — although it is devoid of any resemblance to actual, documentable historical events and instead packed to the gills with laughable claims of greatness attributed to a warlord, people today continue to insist that it is literally the truth.
Viewed as a legend, though, its moral lesson is actually quite simple: obedience to the priestly leaders of Mosaic tradition is morally good; disobedience will be punished both in this world and the next.
Three critiques. First, I do not understand you to be a Biblical literalist. You seem to be a thoughtful Christian interested in extracting moral guidance from the Bible. Therefore, I do not understand you feel the need to defend the historical veracity of the Exodus legend. A myth does not need to be literally true in order to provide value. Good fiction often provides a better lens with which to view human nature than does factual history. To concede that a legend is exactly that, a legend, does not diminish its value as a legend, its cultural power, or its claim to moral authority.
Second, your report is far too sympathetic to the Israelites. The Egyptians would never have admitted that they “kind of had it coming.” From their perspective, the slaves were their property, which would have made those who led the slaves out of Egypt were thieves.
Also from their perspective, Moses would have been the representative of a different god than the ones worshipped by the polytheistic Egyptian state clergy — perhaps a god who, in the legend, had just demonstrated his superior power, but a different and alien god nonetheless. There would have been calls to switch to worship of this god had people in power actually believed they’d been overpowered by a foreign god; easy acceptance of new forms of worship is a hallmark of ancient polytheism.
And let’s not forget that Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s house, as a son, and was once a great vizier of Pharaoh himself, which would have made Moses an apostate and a traitor as well as a thief.
Third, I can buy the idea that the Egyptians authorities might try to purge out evidence of an event like the Exodus from their history. At least two real events — the monotheistic heresy of the Pharaoh Ahkenaten and the reign of the female king Hatsheptsut — were the subject of exactly such an effort. In both cases, the censors did not do their work completely and a historical record remains — including Hatsheptsut’s body, the ruins of Tell Amarna, the enduring fascination with Ahkenaten’s son Tutanktamen, and chronological gaps in the written records elsewhere.
Now, according to the legend, the Exodus itself was preceded by tremendous and terrifying events, such as the water of the Nile turning foul, famine, plagues, and it culminated in an act of massive death (I’ll shrink from calling it murder here). Such events would have touched every man, woman, and child from the mouths of the Nile to the First Cataract.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to imagine that, in a very literate culture, there would be absolutely no written record of events like these — regardless of the perspective. It’s much more likely, given that such things took place, that nearly everyone who could write would have written about it. Imagine how difficult it would be for the Russian government to expurgate evidence of the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan.
These are the kinds of events that give rise to great national and ethnic vendettas between peoples, blood feuds which persist to this day in many parts of the world.
So even if the censors had done their job with perfect efficiency, there would still be a corresponding oral tradition among the Egyptians. But there is none and there is no evidence that there ever was one. Foreigners visiting Egypt (the Pyramids were a tourist attraction 3,000 years ago) remark about how the Egyptians made ice, how they dressed, and when they harvested dates, but said nothing about the simmering hatred and desire for revenge the Egyptians harbored against the Hebrews.
Still, you say, “God keeps detailed records.” Where are these? What form do they take? We have a legend of a collection of ignorant and superstitious bronze age shepherds that eventually got written down. And that’s it. There is no physical evidence whatsoever. There is likely no place in the world that has been more thoroughly combed over by archeologists than Egypt. And literally tens of thousands of scientists examining the area for hundreds of years have found no pottery shards, no bones or mummified bodies, no altars, no arrow heads or spear points, no kind of archeological evidence that suggests the kind of massive emigration from Egypt EVER took place in the four millennia between the beginning of recorded history (which is a stone document called the Narmer Palette, which you can still see on display in Cairo) and the Roman conquest of Egypt. Indeed, for this entire time, ALL of the available evidence suggests that for this entire time, people were constantly trying to get in to Egypt — the richest and most fertile land in the known world — and not out of it.
And given that Egypt would have just suffered a decimation of its population focused on the men who had military training and were of military age, were Exodus to be believed as a record of a historical event, it is a record of an extraordinary blunder by Moses. Having just defeated Egypt and rendered it without a leader and without an army to defend itself, Moses could have turned his army around and invaded it — probably successfully. But instead of taking the world’s richest, most powerful, most fertile, and most militarily-defensible piece of land, he chose instead to allow his people to wander aimlessly through the desert for forty years. (And he was an exceptionally poor navigator at that — he somehow found a route that took his people forty years to traverse a distance of less than 300 miles as the crow flies.)
I realize that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. So I have to rely on Occam’s razor here. One theory explaining the total and complete absence of any documentary or physical evidence to corroborate the Exodus legend is either the result of the only instance in all of human history of a successful purge from history of each and every record of an embarrassing event, right on down to sending out squads of men to pick up all the broken chariot wheels, arrowheads, animal bones, and other evidence of a failed military expedition to the east. The other theory is that is never happened at all, and that theory is much to be preferred for its economy of satisfactory explanation of the available evidence.
Sorry I didn’t answer this sooner but Sundays are hectic.
I really didn’t intend to get into the veracity of the text. I admit up front that I lean toward the side of acceptance but the intention is to explore evidence within the text not the evidence for the text. But, in a discussion of this nature there will always be a tendency to stray beyond the text in looking for something to argue for or against some detail within it. I agree that there is a lot to be gained from the study even if it is fictional.
You’re correct. I am certain the event would not have been represented the way I wrote it but that was the point. It was irony. If they reported the event what would they really say. They were not free to say what they really thought so whatever they may or may not have said guarantees little and this story, presented in any fashion, could not be written with a positive twist. This was beyond propaganda.
Yes, Moses believed in a different God but not a foreign God. Before Moses, Joseph outspokenly gave testimony to faith in his God, in prison and publicly, in the court of Pharaoh. Moses’ family demonstrated a faith in the Hebrew God and I doubt that was uncommon for Israelites. In defying Pharaoh’s command to destroy male born sons, the midwives demonstrated a very strong sensitivity to Israel’s God. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think religious ideas bled from and to both sides (Israel did construct a golden calf at Mt. Sinai) so Egypt clearly knew about Israel’s God.
Moses was a traitor but not in the cowardly sense of the word and I doubt it surprised Pharaoh. As you mentioned, he was raised in Pharaoh’s house and tradition indicates he was a great military leader. We can’t verify the tradition but even though the Exodus Pharaoh is not the one he deserted I’m sure he would have known something about him at least distantly. Moses was not the only “alien” trained in Pharaoh’s court. The Egyptians took in trainees from other cultures as a matter of course so Moses wasn’t alone.
Additionally, his dereliction on the one hand, was an act of faith on the other. I am sure that wasn’t lost on either Pharaoh. The God issue was a prevalent difference between Israelites and Egyptians. I think Pharaoh was surprised when Moses chose the Hebrew God over Egyptian prominence but he wasn’t unaware of the possibility. There is evidence in the story itself that Egyptians did cross over to the Hebrew side and Pharaoh’s counselors did recommend he acquiesce. So, was Moses really a traitor or did he make the unpopular but right choice?
Your comments do prompt an interesting thought about Pharaoh’s perspective. For him to agree with Moses on any level was tantamount to not only acknowledging Moses’ God but admitting His supremacy. Since ancient kings justified their right to rule by suggesting God ordained it or, more extremely, suggesting they were God in person, Moses’ demand was really an “in your face” sort of thing.
As to the external record, there is documentary evidence that extraordinary events took place in Egypt. That should be expected.
Regarding slavery, however, that is another issue. Slavery in the ancient world was very different to slavery in the modern world. It was normal, usual, customary, the smart thing to do, not out of the ordinary. It could be very humane or excessively barbaric but it was very normal. Every society had slaves.
Governments were built and economies sustained on the backs of those who did the menial tasks and they did those tasks primarily because they had no other options. It was forced labor. Nations regularly conquered other nations and proceeded to make them servant states, literally enslaving certain individuals or even groups and this is common knowledge despite the absence of documented evidence for the enslavement of any group. It “goes without saying” so to speak.
In the case of Israel, there were no bragging rights to be mentioned. Israel went to Egypt willingly and made respectable contributions to the economy without being conquered first. Their enslavement was a protective measure.
But slavery as a concept was not so clearly defined. It was a fact of life. Public consciousness had not been raised on the issue. It was the obvious thing to do not a political wart. No one considered it inhumane or a topic worth writing about.
Slave owners weren’t stupid and on occasions made good use of a slaves talents. Joseph became the top manager of Potiphar’s household – a powerful position but he was still a slave. What happened in Joseph’s case is well documented elsewhere in ancient history. Even Moses education and development may be interpreted in the same way. He was a formidable fighter evidenced by the fact that he killed an Egyptian single handedly and drove off an entire gang from the well his future father-in-law used, which may be reason he rose to military prominence. He also never married an Egyptian which in this case would have signaled a sure commitment to Egypt.
The Roman economy was squarely built on the contributions of slaves but also allowed slaves to earn freedom by using their special talents. Luke, in the NT was a medical doctor who earned freedom in this way. That isn’t to suggest they were entirely humane. I’m merely pointing out the difference between their perspective and ours on a particularly sensitive issue.
Here is the point. Writing about the maltreatment of servants was not a respected journalistic pursuit. It was not an issue. The fact that the Bible places any restriction at all on the ownership of slaves represents a break with the trend and a good one at that.
As to archeological discoveries, it is overstating the effort to say “There is likely no place in the world that has been more thoroughly combed over by archeologists than Egypt.” The following quote puts the effort and the findings into perspective:
Archaeologist Edwin Yamauchi points out the limits of this science when he explains: (1) Little of what was made or written in antiquity survives to this day; (2) few of the ancient sites have been surveyed and a number have not even been found; (3) probably fewer than 2 percent of the known sites have been meaningfully excavated; (4) few of these have been more than scratched; and (5) only a fraction of the fraction that have been excavated have been published and data made available to the scholarly world (The Stones and the Scriptures, 1981, chapter 4).
You can find the article in which he was sited here.
Obviously, we don’t expect to find artifacts leaning against odd bits of stone and brush. Their survival over the last 3,000 plus years is due only to burial and by now they might be quite deep, considering the “sands of time” and all.
On top of that, there is also the fact that communication was not very advanced. No pens, paper, typewriters, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, TV’s, telephones or internet. They did have ways of communicating quickly but there was no free speech so any official documents would have been highly censored. I believe there are oral traditions of the Exodus.
We can use archeological findings to cast doubt on a theory but not as conclusive proof for or against the biblical record.
As to Egyptian Israeli relations, maybe the tour guides didn’t mention it, then or now, but there is no question about the seething. Even recently, some have suggested Egypt is tooling up to mount an attack on Israel. Aside from discussing which side is right, the issue of tension between these two states and the history, both modern and ancient, that feeds it, to my knowledge, is not questionable.
As to Moses’ navigational abilities there is no problem with the text. The stated purpose for Israel was to become a great nation and the center for that development was Palestine not Egypt. As a statesman he did remarkably well. They had no real government to speak of but he handled many grievances. They had no infrastructure but became organized quickly. They were far more democratic than the monarchies that surrounded them and instructions in the biblical record indicate God endorsed the approach.