The Oxford History of the Biblical World (16 page)

The historicity of the Exodus narrative is thus a complex issue. Clearly, significant portions are not and were never intended to be historiographic. Yet the overall intent of the narrative was historical, despite nonhistorical elements in its compilation. In this context it is important to remember that the biblical writers’ conception of history, particularly within what was primarily a theological document, differed from our own. The dominant historical concern of the Exodus account is to demonstrate that God acts in history: that Israelite bondage and salvation took place in history; that God’s covenant with Moses and the Israelites was made in history; and that the fulfillment of that covenant also took place in history. All other historical concerns are secondary, but this underlying, elemental historicity suffices to make the account historical, and this dominating concern made it permissible to shift historical particulars in order to make the Exodus chronicle more accessible to successive generations. A similar process can be seen at work in European Renaissance art, where biblical figures are anachronistically dressed in contemporary clothing and biblical locations transformed into contemporary surroundings so that the material might speak more directly to its intended audience. Mythic events, too, were incorporated into the Exodus epic to enhance, rather than detract from, the basic historical foundation of the account. It was the enduring reality—expressed in the core historicity of the central events of the Exodus—not transient specific historical detail, which was important and eternal. Ultimately it is this compelling historical grounding of the narrative that sustains most scholars’ belief in an actual historical origin for the Exodus events.

The biblical Exodus account was never intended to function or to be understood as history in the present-day sense of the word. Traditional history, with its stress on objectivity and verifiable, detailed facts as the building blocks of historical understanding, is a modern obsession. Not that the ancients were incapable of bald, factual rendering if they deemed it appropriate—they, too, had accurate tax records. But for most occasions, and especially for documents that expressed deeper truths and fundamental values, facts as such were not always valued, consistency was not always a virtue, and specific historical particulars were often irrelevant and therefore variable.
In the end, it was necessary that the theologically informed events of the Exodus epic relate to history, in the sense that a true historical heart to the narrative exist, but not that these events be bound by history. Particular, individual historical details were superfluous.

Thus, there is an inherent tension between an ancient and a modern understanding of the historicity of the Exodus. Mythical and historical categories of thought were not mutually exclusive in antiquity; on the contrary, the very miracles that make modern readers uncomfortable intensified the drama and significance of the historical base for the ancient. We do the Exodus narrative a profound disservice by uncritically seeking natural interpretations for the clearly miraculous, and it is misguided to supply scientific explanations for such nonhistorical events as the ten plagues of Egypt, the burning bush that spoke to Moses, or the pillars of cloud and fire that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness.

In the end, the Exodus saga is neither pure history nor pure literature, but an inseparable amalgam of both, closest in form to what we would call a docudrama. For the Israelites, the Exodus events were anchored in history, but at the same time rose above it. The Exodus saga incorporated and reflected an original historical reality, and this reflection was all that was necessary to make the account historical in ancient eyes. The Egyptian captivity and deliverance were seen through a lens of communal faith, in which history provided the skeletal framework for structuring the actions of God. This skeleton was fleshed out by a variety of predominantly literary and religious forms.

Attempts to anchor the Exodus events in broader historical currents typically begin with the biblical account, taking the text of the Bible at least initially as a primary source document. Superficially, the Bible does appear to provide historical data that might locate the Exodus account in history. As we have seen, however, serious problems arise when the biblical text is used for modern historical interpretations, and critical historiography casts doubt on the usefulness of the biblical narrative as a historical source for the Exodus. Potential factual information contained in the account falls into three categories: events within the borders of Egypt; the geography of the Exodus; and biblical reckonings—the figures given for establishing the date of the Exodus and for the number of participants in the flight from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings.

What is immediately striking about the earlier portions of the Exodus saga is the lack of distinctively Egyptian content and flavor, despite the Egyptian setting. The only description that contributes a slight Egyptian cast to the locale is that of Exodus 7.19 (echoed in 8.5), which refers to “the waters of Egypt… its rivers, its canals, and its ponds, and all its pools of water.” None of the Egyptian pharaohs in the entire narrative—not those who presumably dealt with Joseph, Jacob, or the “sons of Israel,” nor the pharaoh who did not know Joseph, and certainly not the pharaoh of the ten plagues and the Exodus who sent his army after Moses—are identified by name. Nor is there a hint of individual or historical idiosyncracy by which to distinguish one pharaoh from another. There is, moreover, no characteristically Egyptian phraseology, no allusion, brief or otherwise, to distinctively Egyptian literary or historical
material, and no invocation of local color (apart from the description cited above) that would help authenticate an Egyptian location or suggest an Egyptian origin for any part of the account. Instead, except for a few references and an occasional name (for example, Pharaoh, Nile, Moses, Rameses, Pithom), the purportedly Egyptian setting is so generic that the action could have taken place almost anywhere.

Given this curious absence of Egypt from the Exodus narrative, scholars have focused on the few clearly Egyptian terms that do occur, but with disappointing results. The supply cities of Pithom and Rameses bear indisputably Egyptian names, but neither can be situated with certainty. Pithom is derived from Egyptian
Pr-’Itm
(Per Atum), the temple domain or estate of the god Atum, a relatively common designation beginning with the mid-second millennium
BCE
. In Egyptian usage,
Pr-’Itm
would not stand alone but would be followed by a specific location designator, identifying the Per Atum of a specific place. In effect, the biblical rendering of Pithom strips the reference of its specificity and thus identifiability, and transforms it into a collective allusion equivalent to the generic references to “Pharaoh.” Biblical Pithom’s most plausible association to date is with Tell Retabah in the Wadi Tumilat, although it has also been identified with Heliopolis. The supply city of Rameses is most often equated with Per-Rameses, the delta capital founded by Rameses II (ca. 1279–1213; Dynasty 19) and occupied throughout the Ramesside period (Dynasties 19 and 20, ca. 1295–1069). This city is now identified with Qantir, an eastern delta site currently under excavation by a German archaeological team. At least one prominent Egyptologist, however, challenges the equation of Rameses and Per-Rameses. Moreover, in typically Egyptian fashion, the memory and name of Rameses II continued to live on and function in Egypt long after the king’s death, and the name
Rameses
was used in a variety of place-names down to Greco-Roman times. Thus the name
Rameses
functions only as a
terminus post quern;
that is, any appearance of the name must date no earlier than the time the name first occurs. The place-name
Rameses
may even have been inserted into the biblical narrative at a later date, and some scholars have suggested that the reference to Rameses (and also to Pithom) is an anachronism reflecting the geography of a much later period, from somewhere within the sixth to the fourth centuries
BCE
.

The land of Goshen, identified as the area inhabited by the Israelites in Egypt (Exod. 8.22; 9.26), has never been localized with certainty. Most scholars assume that Goshen lay in the eastern Nile Delta, but the word
Goshen
does not occur in any Egyptian texts, and efforts to derive it from the Egyptian language are unconvincing.

The name
Moses
is most likely Egyptian, although other etymologies have been proposed. If so, the name comes from the Egyptian verbal root
msy,
meaning “born.” In Egyptian usage this is generally linked with the name of a god. Thus
Ramose
means “the god Re is born,”
Ptahmose
means “the god Ptah is born,” and so forth. Such compounds are particularly common in the New Kingdom and later. In the biblical narrative, however, the divine element is missing, producing the abbreviated name
Moses,
a shortened form not common in Egyptian. The lack of the divine element in the biblical name is not surprising, however; if it existed, it could have been removed to avoid an affiliation between a central figure in the development of Israelite religion and a foreign god. Moreover, Aaron and his son Phinehas also have names of Egyptian origin.

And what of the harsh tasks inflicted on the Israelites during their servitude? Numerous Egyptian texts dating throughout the second millennium
BCE
tell us that “Asiatics”
(’amw,
the most common appellation employed by Egyptians for people coming from the general region of ancient Syria-Palestine), like all prisoners of war or foreigners in service to the Egyptian crown or temples, were forced to perform a variety of tasks, including agricultural labor and heavy construction work. But the oppressive task that the biblical narrative complains about most (Exod. 5.7–19) is brickmaking, not the most common of the responsibilities assigned to Asiatics in Egypt. Clearly, Asiatics were in no position to choose their work assignments, and brickmaking was an ever-present need in Egypt, particularly in the alluvial delta, where stone was at a premium. On the other hand, sun-dried bricks made without straw are found at sites in the delta from a variety of periods, and it is difficult to see how the making of such bricks imposed a significant hardship on the Israelites.

Do any of the Egyptian references in the Exodus narrative provide possibly useful historical clues? The name
Rameses,
as noted above, provides a
terminus post quern
for the Exodus events of Rameses I, the first ruler to bear the name. A similar beginning point is implied by the outfitting of Pharaoh’s army with chariots and horses: both horse and chariot are unknown or rare in Egypt prior to Dynasty 18. The Egyptian term
Pharaoh (pr’3,
meaning “great house”) originally referred to the palace, and not until the reign of Thutmose III (ca. 1479–1425
BCE
) in Dynasty 18 was it also used for the person of the king. In general, the limited linguistic evidence found in the narrative seems to date to the New Kingdom or later. Finally, the prominence in Pharaoh’s entourage of magicians, who initially match Moses miracle for miracle, may reflect a first-millennium
BCE
setting.

The geography of the Exodus offers another potentially promising area for the Bible to function as a primary historical source. The biblical text provides detailed itineraries for the Exodus trek, most completely in Numbers 33.1–49, fragments in Numbers 21.10–20 and Deuteronomy 10.6–7, and further parallels elsewhere. These itineraries list, by name, all of the stopping points or stages on the Exodus journey. Theoretically, it should be possible to reconstruct the route the Israelites took out of Egypt. Unfortunately, it is not.

The wilderness itineraries form a distinct genre within the Pentateuch and belong to a literary form widely attested in the ancient world. The primary function of this genre, which survives mostly in official documents, is to describe routes. Nonbiblical examples confirm that these ancient itineraries customarily provided a complete and reasonably reliable record of the routes described. The geographical itineraries associated with the Exodus saga thus probably preserve details of one or more ancient routes.

As a structured literary genre, however, the itineraries most likely were incorporated into the biblical narrative during the process of literary composition and redaction that resulted in the final biblical text. We cannot date precisely this secondary merging of wilderness itineraries with the Exodus account, except to say that it occurred long after the original events. Moreover, the literary itineraries preserved within the Exodus saga derive from more than one source. As a consequence, some
scholars have challenged the integrity of these geographical lists. On the other hand, the itineraries might reflect geographical sources much earlier than the time of their redaction into the biblical narrative. Recent efforts to relate the Exodus itineraries to Egyptian prototypes found in Ramesside geographical lists are intriguing, although far from decisive, and the large number of Asiatic sites in the Egyptian lists that cannot be identified convincingly is instructive.

Already in ancient times the locations of many of the places in the Exodus itineraries appear to have been lost. Of the approximately three dozen or more localities mentioned, few can be pinpointed on the ground, and none of the places listed in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula can be situated with confidence. Thus, as we have seen, Rameses, the starting point of the Exodus, is customarily identified with the Ramesside delta capital of Per-Rameses. Succoth is taken by some as a Hebraization of Egyptian
Tjeku,
a district designation employed for the Wadi Tumilat that first occurs in the New Kingdom. Kadesh-barnea is now generally placed at Ain el-Qudeirat, the most fertile oasis in northern Sinai, located at the junction of two major routes across the peninsula. Tell el-Qudeirat, the ancient mound associated with the oasis, has recently been renamed Tel Kadesh-barnea by its excavators, despite a tenth-century
BCE
date for the earliest finds from the tell. But beyond these and a very few other tentative identifications, most sites in Egypt and Sinai listed in the Exodus itineraries remain unknown.