Expert: Tyler Eldred (formally known as DarkBlue) - 12/31/2008

Question
Was the bible account of exodus true? If so why cant we find any archeological proof of this? Could it be that Ahmose was really Moses of the bible?

If the bible account of exodus was a lie, what a tragedy.

Answer
Hi Chris,

   I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. I thank you for taking time to ask me this question. It has been interesting for me, because I don't get enough opportunities to do a historical analysis like this. Unfortunately, that also means that there's a whole lot knowledge and expertise that goes in answering this question that I truly don't have. But this is a very important question to face in this age of science and skepticism, and so I've tried really hard to get you the best answer that I can. I'm going to talk first about what traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs about the Exodus are and how the historical truth of the Exodus bears on our lives, then do a little to explanation about just what sort of evidence historians have available to them, next I will address some criticism of the story of Exodus to include the Ahmose theory, and then finally I have split the Exodus story into six different questions and we will take a look at the evidence that weighs on each of them.

   Obviously an atheist has no motivation for believing that the full story of the Exodus is true, but it is not unanimous amongst believers that everything recorded in the Bible is fully historically accurate. On the other hand, it seems perfectly reasonable that a Christian or a Jew believe that the Old Testament is precisely historically true. Many believe, though, for example, that the story of Sampson is historically untrue, but that it plays an important role to our tradition and spirituality. The Exodus is probably a story that you will find a believer less willing to compromise about. For a Jewish person, the Exodus lies at the heart of their religious beliefs: the origin of their people through the mercy of God, the spiritual and physical reality of the Promised Land, their solemn commemoration of the Passover, and God guidance and use of leadership to bring about victory in a very real and physical way. The Jewish people place trust in their religious tradition of the Passover, because the Exodus story contains the account of the institution of the Passover tradition, and Jews believe that that traditions exists since the time of their Exodus, not since the time Exodus was written. What's more, other sections of the Old Testament, such as Psalms and Proverbs, and also the book of Wisdom, refer to aspects of the Exodus as a point of boasting, not just simply a good story. For the Christian, the concerns about the Exodus are going to be less, though there are still many considerations to be made. Theologically speaking, the Passover corresponds to the Last Supper of Christ, and the crossing of the Red Sea corresponds to our liberation through Baptism. In addition, Jesus refers to the Exodus, mentioning the manna which God fed to their ancestor in the desert in His Bread of Life discourse in John 6. Now for some Christians that will mean that the Exodus must be true, for others that will mean that it isn't necessarily true. I understand it like this: I do not believe that it would be the end of my faith if I discovered that parts of the Exodus story are not true, but according to how I currently understand things, I do believe that it is true. It isn't that I believe the Exodus story isn't true, and it isn't that I believe it doesn't matter whether it is true or not, but it’s just that I believe that the historical facts relating to the Exodus story isn't what subsists my faith in God, and with that in mind, there isn't to many historical facts that ever really scare me.

   Now the answers to this sort of historical question are very difficult to sort out, because the evidence that we have is so sparse and limited, and the question is approaches from a large variety of reference frames. There are basically three different types of evidence with this type of question. One is, obviously, the Bible. There are two camps when it comes to using the Bible as a historical reference. The most historians are Maximalists, who think that the majority of historical information in the Bible is true, thus times and dates, locations, specific details of events are all to be interpreted as concrete facts. Maximalists will be mostly looking for evidence that makes sense of what the Bible says. Minimalists, however, think that most of the specifics in the Bible cannot be trusted. They do not the Bible to reliably narrate information, and therefore take information like times and dates worth a grain of salt. They look to the Bible as more of the guidelines of a general type of story that may have occurred sometime in history. A second source is Egyptian documents. Most of the information that those contain are things like lineages, building projects, and military campaigns. One of the most helpful things the documents can provide is a time period, since the time period for each Pharaoh’s reign and many of the associated artifacts are well known. The situation in complicated by the fact, however, that the Egyptian Pharaohs literally changed or erased their nation's history according to their whim. Anytime Egypt experienced a shameful loss, for example, that information would be hidden from public record. This behavior is well documented an easily verifiable. So with something like the Israelite slaves wrecking plagues upon Egypt, defiantly escaping, and miraculously destroying an Egyptian army, a historian wouldn't be too surprised not to find much detail of this, and must simply do their best from what is said. Thirdly, there are ruins of ancient cities and pottery from ancient civilizations. This helps us to understand the different nations that existed at different times, so we can try to find the Israelites, who were apparently enslaved by the Egyptians, then escaped, and then took over the land of Canaan. This is difficult though, because not every site has been found, and among the sites found, most are barely excavated, and few are excavated thoroughly. The Jewish people themselves have their religious practices and their oral tradition as historical sources, but the attempt to find "the real story" of Moses is precisely an attempt to use information similar yet contrary to this source. (The Jews did, unlike the Egyptians, record their great disgraces as a nation.) So in the context of this information, you have people trying to prove that the Exodus never happened, people trying to prove that the Exodus was a story inspired by a radically different story of a different nation, people trying to prove that the Exodus story contains some truth and did involve the Israelites but that there was not divine intervention involved, and people trying to prove that the Exodus story is true basically exactly as written. Some historians are criticized as wishful thinkers seeing the story where the evidence simply isn't, and others as cynics that disbelieve any story that is overwhelmingly obvious. And all of this basically sits on the question of exactly how do you prove something so miraculous? Some try to find what the story would be if there weren't miracles involved and others are trying their best to find what those miracles might look like. So basically, the answer is controversial and unclear because of the lack of non-Biblical evidence, though there is much speculation and controversy.

   If someone is trying to disprove the story of the Exodus, there are basically two ways to do it. One is to go by negative information and say "the evidence that would be there for this story to be true isn't there, so it isn't true," and the other is to say "the evidence for what the story describes fits better with a slightly different story, so this other story is probably true instead." As you can see, it is much harder to do than to simply find evidence for a particular story.  
The first one is most commonly employed with the Exodus story. This is particularly tempting to do because the information is so sparse and because the story is so incredible. The following things there does not exist direct evidence for: that a large group of Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians, that an adopted son of the Pharaoh lead an slave insurrection in Egypt, or that an small nation's worth of people existed in the deserts outside of the Egyptian empire for about 40 years. The second one would most likely not be recorded by the Egyptians, and the third one is not very compelling since there is an entire desert to search, and according to the Exodus story, their food was incorporeal, their clothes did not tear, and their shelters were temporary fixtures. The first one I think is most interesting. One usually supposes that the Egyptians enslaved a whole nation's worth of Israelites during some military raid or occupation, but this seems to at the very least challenge the idea. Some other interpretation include that a only a small number of Jews were captured, that the people of the Exodus came from a variety of religious or ethnic background and during the Exodus unified under one nationality and religion, or that the name Israel was not used yet and for that reason was never mentioned. To this we might also add that the Israelite identity may have been extremely limited before because they did not become "God's chosen people" until they began their wandering in the desert, and also that out of shame the Egyptians may have chosen not to mention them altogether.
   An example of the second method of disproving a story, using evidence for a similar story, is that Ahmose theory. There are two sources that I have discovered so far that espouse that theory, one was a History Channel special called "The Exodus Decoded," which has been fiercely attacked here: http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2006/09/Debunking-The-Exodus-Decoded.aspx . The other is a book by Ralph Ellis called Tempest & Exodus: The Biblical Exodus Inscribed on an Ancient Egyptian Stele. That book doesn't suppose that Ahmose and Moses are the same people per se, but at the very least that Moses was a powerful leader who closely worked with Ahmose. The basic premise of both of these is that the Hyksos, a nation who was warring with Egypt and was driven out during the reign of Ahmose are the same people as the Israelites, a nation who was enslaved and then escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. In addition to the similarity that both groups of people were leaving Egypt, I believe the geographical location is roughly the same. There are two chief difficulties with supposing that Ahmose and Moses are the same person. One is chronology. Ahmose lived in the 16th Century BC, the Bible sets the Exodus story at around the 15th Century BC, and some scholars have proposed that the Exodus story is a late as 13th Century BC. The other difficulty is that Ahmose was a Pharaoh and a military leader who stayed in Egypt his whole life to later be succeed by another Pharaoh, while Moses was a not a Pharaoh and fled the nation of Egypt, not to return until after the Pharaoh of the time was dead. In my opinion, the Hyksos and the Israelites cannot be the same people without radically changing the story of either the Hyksos or the Israelites. Now I will go on to the six questions.

When was the Exodus?
   I brought this up to show you that even this fact is unknown, which is problem that first must be solved before good evidence for the story can be found. A really good analysis of the dating for the Exodus story can be found here: http://www.cresourcei.org/exodusdate.html . As I said before, the two most common time periods suggested for the Exodus are 15th Century BC and 13th Century BC. According to the article, there is a verse in Kings which said that Solomon began working on the temple 480 years after the Exodus, I time which we know as about 1000 BC, making the Exodus 15th Century. One main argument for the 13th Century date is that the Bible describes settled people in an area that there is no evidence of occupation for until around the 13th century. This evidence can be easily reconciled with the Bible's account if you consider that 40 years was often used to denote the length of one generation, and that 480 divided by 40 is 12. Then, using 25 years for the actual length of a generation, the literal number you get is 300, accounting for the 200 year discrepancy.

Did Egyptians ever have Israeli slaves?
   The Egyptian empire did keep slaves, and it is known that they did keep foreign slaves in the 15th Century. Archaeological evidence does show that some Hebrews were enslaved at one time, but there is not much to account for all or many of the Israelites being enslaved. The lack of mention of the Israelite captivity is pretty striking, but this is something that I already discussed above.

Were there ever any plagues like those described in the Bible?
   Explanations for the plagues have included famines, terrible storms, bacteria, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Some of the plagues, like locusts, were not uncommon. Ash from a volcano has been used to describe the hail or explain the darkness, and the darkness has also been explained by a terrible storm. Bacteria in the Nile can apparently cause red coloration that may have been associated with the turning of the Nile into blood. I don't know which if any correspond to the actual plagues, or whether or not God used some of these phenomena during the plagues, but it seem like there is a possible but not definite scientific explanation for each of the plagues. Aside from the discussion of whether or not these occurrences were divine in nature, these explanation are the closest we could ever come to proof of the plagues. There is a piece of Egyptian writing saying that "blood is everywhere," "the river is blood," and that "the land is not light," but it dates back to the 19th century BC, and it is unclear whether or not his meaning is figurative or not since, he was writing at the time of the end of what is called the "Old Kingdom" of Egypt.

Was there ever a mass escape from Egypt using the Red Sea?
   As I said before, such a thing would not have been recorded in Egyptian history. I have heard that they have discovered Egyptian troops in the Red Sea, but I couldn't find a good source for that information so that is simply hearsay for the moment. It has been suggested that it perhaps was not the Red Sea Moses crossed, but a different body of water, such as the Gulf of Suez or Lake Subonis, since the Suez is subject to variable tide and Lake Subonis contains a narrow isthmus occasionally subject to flooding.

Was there ever a period of 40 years of wandering for the Hebrews?
   No archaeological evidence exists for Israelites wandering the desert. This is sometimes used as an argument ender for skeptics of the Exodus, but as I talked about before, it seem difficult to see exactly what evidence they would be looking for, and a sufficient lack in evidence would be difficult to find. In addition, only 40 years and constantly moving isn't really good conditions for a whole lot of artifacts anyways. Recently there has been satellite photo analysis of the area and according to George Stephen there is a route from the Nile Delta to the Sinai Peninsula that seem to indicate "a massive number of people," to include locations along the way that could be huge campsites. I don't have the knowledge to know how reliable this satellite information is, but a skeptic might explain such tracks by saying that that would be a popular route to Egypt from the East or that it is alternatively possible that those track were instead caused by a large army.

Were cities like Canaan and Jericho ever concurred by the Israelites?
   They found evidence of destruction for the site of Jericho, but erosion and shifting deposits of sand have made it impossible to accurately determine when this destruction took place. Hazor, a city in Canaan, has evidence of being destroyed and rebuilt that corresponds with its history with Israel, but the majority of the destruction was dated to be 13th Century BC, and only a small amount of destruction was dated for 15th Century. There is burn marks at the sites of Lachish, Debir, and Bethel, all cities concurred by the Israelites, but the Bible doesn't mention that these cities were burnt and the dates corresponding to late 13th Century. It is difficult to understand just who the Canaanites were at the time of the Exodus. It seems that the original inhabitants of Canaan were destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age, though the Exodus would not occur until the Iron Age, and archaeological evidence does not indicate that people had inhabited between those two dates These original Canaanites wrote Hebrew poetry, and it is wondered whether the Canaanites were heavily influences by the Israelites or if the Israeli people who were enslaved by the Egyptians had Canaan roots. At the time of the Exodus there were invaders from the North who may have fought the Jews or settles into Canaan or both.

   So that was my analysis of the Exodus situation as it historically appears. It seems that the inconclusiveness of the question at hand allows you the choice of what to believe. As far as the evidence is concerned, it could be that the Exodus story is an loose adaptation of a different story, such as that of the Hyksos, that Exodus story is mostly correct but containing some small discrepancies such as the date of the Exodus and the size and origin of the Israeli people, or that the Exodus story is fully is correct and that the truth of the matter simply remains to be uncovered. I hope that I have done a good service to you in trying to provide for you the information and advice that will help you to understand what is going on with this very important historical issue. Once again, I thank you for your question and I ask that God may bless you along your way.