The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  DEDICATION

  For my wife, Janet, with love

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  HISTORY RECAPTURED

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MYSTERY OF EGYPT

  How Do Two Million People Disappear?

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MYSTERY OF ISRAEL

  What Did They Find When They Came There?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE MYSTERY OF MIDIAN

  From Where Did God Come?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MYSTERIES OF BABYLON

  The Emergence of One God

  The Death of the Gods

  Why God Speaks in the Plural

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MYSTERY OF JUDAH

  Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

  APPENDIX A

  FROM EGYPT TO MIDIAN

  The Oppression in Egypt and the Revelation in Midian

  APPENDIX B

  THE STORY ACCORDING TO EACH OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF THE PENTATEUCH

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Elliott Friedman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In past books I expressed my good fortune to have had teachers and friends who were among the greats. I was touched and taught by more wise and learned souls than a person has a right to have in a lifetime. Now their entire generation has passed, and the first part of my acknowledgments has become an In Memoriam. They are:

  Ernst Pinhas Blumenthal, wise educator

  Frank Moore Cross, biblical scholar

  Mary Douglas, anthropologist

  John Emerton, biblical scholar

  Louis Finkelstein, scholar and Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary

  David Noel Freedman, biblical scholar

  Sir Martin Gilbert, historian

  Nahum Glatzer, philosopher

  Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, philologian

  Moshe Greenberg, biblical scholar

  Menahem Haran, biblical scholar

  Thorkild Jacobsen, Assyriologist

  Mordecai Kaplan, scholar of Judaism

  Jerome and Miriam Katzin, who endowed my chair at the University of California and taught me much about life along the way

  Walter Kohn, physicist, Nobel Laureate

  Abraham Malamat, historian

  Arnaldo Momigliano, historian

  William Moran, Assyriologist

  Yochanan Muffs, biblical scholar

  Frank Nelson, debate teacher and coach

  Jacob Neusner, scholar of Judaism

  Yigal Shiloh, archaeologist

  Melford Spiro, anthropologist

  Hayim Tadmor, historian

  Shemaryahu Talmon, biblical scholar

  Geza Vermes, historian of religion

  Moshe Weinfeld, biblical scholar

  G. Ernest Wright, archaeologist and biblical scholar

  All are gone now, as is my wife Randy Linda Sturman, lawyer, anthropologist, teacher, my basherte, whose influence was the deepest and most pervasive of all.

  The second half of my acknowledgments is to the living. What a strange feeling it is that I share with some of my colleagues, that we are the old guys now. I wish them: to 120. And I am grateful to:

  Ike Williams, of Kneerim and Williams, my new literary agent whose skills amaze me.

  Mickey Maudlin, my superb editor at HarperOne, and the smart, professional team at HarperOne.

  The University of Georgia, my students, and my welcoming colleagues in the Department of Religion, who gave me a new home and a new energy for teaching and research for ten years after my retiring from the University of California.

  Ann and Jay Davis, who endowed my professorship at the University of Georgia.

  Baruch Halpern, still the unsurpassed historian in our field.

  Ronald Hendel, who read and commented on the entire manuscript.

  Thomas Lambdin, a teacher from my days as a graduate student whose generosity, wisdom, and wit stay with me.

  Paul Wolpe, who amiably and collegially set me on the trail of the genetic evidence concerning the Levites.

  Alice Hoffman, on whose novel the Dovekeepers I had the pleasure of consulting.

  John Buffalo Mailer, my professional partner and invigorating friend in television and books.

  My blessed children Jesse and Alexa, and Jesse’s loving husband Nick.

  My partner in life, my wife Janet. We came together after we each had a terrible loss of a beloved spouse, and she has brought me comfort, partnership, love, and a tremendous new community of family and friends.

  I had the opportunity to test and refine these ideas in lectures at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California, San Diego, Wright State University, Southern Methodist University, Mercer University, the University of Haifa, the University of Georgia, at Limmud conferences at the University of Warwick, England, and at Ramah Darom in Georgia, at the Biblical Archaeology Society, at the Society of Biblical Literature, and at the Rabbinical Assembly at their annual convention. I am grateful to these institutions for their kind hospitality.

  INTRODUCTION

  History’s a thing not easily captured

  And once deceased not easily exhumed.

  —R. E. Friedman’s misquotation of Dan Fogelberg

  Three questions: Is the exodus from Egypt a story—or history? How did monotheism, the idea of there being only one God, come about? What person or events gave us the idea that we should love others as ourselves? Three mysteries. Or one.

  It is 1956, I am ten years old, and I am standing in line to see the opening of the movie The Ten Commandments. My passion with the exodus must have kicked in even before that day because I already knew the story by the time I saw the film, and that passion has not ended. As for the film, it was a wonder to the ten-year-old. I was short and had big eyes and was overwhelmed like everyone else looking up at the scene of the Red Sea splitting. About forty years later (a biblical number), when I had become a biblical scholar, I was a consultant on another movie about the exodus, The Prince of Egypt. Jeffrey Katzenberg at Dreamworks graciously allowed me to bring my daughter to one of the sessions at the studio. She was about the age that I had been when I had seen The Ten Commandments, so I met the story again through a child’s eyes.

  There has been a surge of interest in the exodus lately: live movies, animated movies, books, cover stories in magazines, archaeological surveys and excavations, conferences, lectures, sermons, debates, documentaries, online videos. And the quantity of interest means a quantity of different treatments at a quantity of different levels. You can find everything from nutty “theories” to serious, respectable scholarship. People blow small items out of proportion. People focus on items of evidence without taking into account other evidence that challenges or outweighs those points. People deny that it happened. People insist that it happened. People say that it happened but not the way the Bible tells it.

  The exodus is the story of the birth of a nation—and the birth of some cornerstone ideas. Practically everything that follows it in the Bible flows from it: the greatest concentration of miracles in the Bible, the first statement of the Ten Commandments (“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt”), the introduction of Moses as well as Aaron and Miriam, the early great prophets, and the first priests. William Propp, possibly the preeminent scholar of the biblical book of Exodus, says it simply in his two-volume commentary: “The story of Israel’s flight from Egypt is t
he most important in the Hebrew Bible.”1 Scholars have written thousands of articles and books about it. Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, literary scholars, geologists, anthropologists: people from practically every background have been drawn to it. Millions of people tell it and retell it and celebrate it and teach it to their children. And we do not even know if it really happened.

  This is truly frustrating. Until very recently we had the same situation with the Bible’s King David. David is, after all, the only figure in the Hebrew Bible who compares to Moses, both in the sheer amount of the texts about him and in the degree of development of his life and character. Some said that there was no such person, no such kingdom, no royal house of David. But then we found two references to kings of the House of David in ancient texts,2 and also our work in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of Jerusalem—in which my students and I joined the virtuoso archaeologist Yigal Shiloh—along with subsequent excavations, uncovered monumental architecture from David’s period.3 So now there have been a host of books about David, so many that one can hardly choose which to read.4 Archaeology and skilled historical detective work have accomplished a great deal toward solving the David problem. But the exodus problem has remained.

  The Bible’s story of the exodus was always on the menu in my introductory courses on the Hebrew Bible, and I wrote in detail about that story in my Commentary on the Torah: the meaning, the artistry, the character of Moses, the connection with other parts of the Bible. But I had little to say as a scholar about the exodus itself, the real exodus, the historical event, whatever that was, behind the Bible’s story. I knew that many of my colleagues in Bible studies and most of my colleagues in archaeology doubt, or even deny, that it happened. That never felt right to me.

  The event figures centrally in the very earliest texts of prose, poetry, and law in the Bible. And those texts seem to refer to something with which their audiences are already familiar. And beyond this, a scholar, like a detective, has to rely to some extent on his or her instincts. My great teacher, Frank Moore Cross, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew at Harvard, was a model for his students of an intuitive scholar. Sometimes while he was still working on a problem he could make the leap to a solution. As he went on to test the solution, in some cases his intuition proved to be right. In some cases it turned out to be wrong. In some cases he left it to his students to work out the evidence that would prove it right or wrong. But we learned to respect and admire his intuitive scholarship, and we learned how much or how little each of us was able to trust our own intuition as we worked on our own challenges.

  My intuition was always that there was something historical behind the exodus story. Probably this intuition came partly from that kid in line back in 1956, who renewed his attraction to the exodus through his own kid’s eyes decades later. And it came partly from a sense that there was something in all the different bodies of facts that would eventually come together. That kid still thinks that something really happened in Egypt around thirty-three hundred years ago. Together with some superb fellow detectives, scholars from many countries, in different fields, it took forty years of studies (still a biblical number) to work it out sufficiently to formulate it in writing. Studies of literature and history, archaeology, art, architecture, genetics, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and, not to leave out the obvious, religion—all of these separate kinds of evidence came together in just the last few years for us all to see.

  Let me ask you a question. Before you set out on this sea of evidence, what is your intuition? If you are a person of faith, this is not a question about what your faith tells you. If you are a person of facts and reason, this is not a question about what your intellect tells you. This is not a question about opinion. This is a question about what your gut tells you. What does your intuition say: that something happened in Egypt, or that nothing happened? And if your answer was “Why should I care?” then the objective of this book has to be to show you what probably happened and also to show you why it matters.

  This book is a work of detective nonfiction. But I am going to give away where it is headed. I believe we can get at what probably took place in Egypt over three millennia ago. That would be a lot. But we have much more. We have evidence that without the historical anchor of the exodus, we would not have had the rise of the idea of monotheism. And without the experience of that returning group from Egypt, we might not have had the ethic of caring for the stranger. Monotheism and loving others as ourselves—two radical developments, major developments, in human consciousness became embodied in the heart of Western religion.

  Whether one is a monotheist, a polytheist, an atheist, an agnostic, or an observer from another planet, one can recognize the significance of monotheism as a stage in the human adventure here on earth. And whether one is an ethicist, a politician, a minister, a rabbi, or just any decent human being, one can estimate the value of humans’ arrival at the idea of loving others as ourselves. Without the exodus we might have arrived at these ideas much later, or in a much different form, or not at all. Those are the stakes here: a story, history, and immense consequences.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HISTORY RECAPTURED

  FIRST: THE STORY

  It is a fabulous story, one of the best we have. A kingdom overpowers a community of aliens in their country. The kingdom enslaves the aliens, and they kill their male children. But one baby survives, a princess takes him in as her own, and he grows up in royalty. As an adult, he kills a man who is assaulting one of his people, and when his manslaughter becomes known he flees to another land. There he rescues a priest’s daughters, and he stays in that land, marries one of the daughters, has sons, and lives tending flocks. And then he encounters God.

  Miracles occur. A mountain of God. A miraculous fire. An angel. The man’s staff becomes a snake, then turns back as it was. The man’s hand becomes leprous, then turns back as it was. And during all this, God speaks, telling the man that God will free the enslaved people and that the man must be the one to carry it out. He must go back. And God reveals His name to him: Yahweh.

  He returns. He faces the king. The king declines to let the people leave. The man initiates divinely ordered miracles: signs and wonders, ten plagues on the kingdom, on land and water and even blacking out the sun, suffering for humans and animals and plants, and, finally, death, but only to firstborn humans and animals. The king yields. The freed people leave the kingdom. The king has a change of heart, and he and his army pursue them to the sea. But the sea splits, they pass through it, and it closes on the pursuing army. The people then trust in God and in the man, and they sing.

  More stories will follow. The people will go to the mountain of God and will all encounter God. More miracles. More struggles. Covenant with God. Laws. A journey to their ancestors’ homeland. Then the man will die, and a new man will lead them there. But all of these stories depend on and flow out of what happened with the man, Moses, and the departure, the exodus, from that kingdom, Egypt.

  SECOND: THE HISTORY

  Is any of this true? Is it subject to evidence and reasoning, or is it strictly a matter of each person’s religious conviction? In the last couple of decades an array of scholars, archaeologists, and clergy have seriously questioned whether this happened. This is not a tiny little academic spat. This is about two million people. The text says 603,550 adult male Israelites, plus the women and children, leave Egypt.1 If the Bible has this wrong, how did it get it this wrong? These scholars, clergy, and laypersons were right to question the Bible. Questioning is a healthy thing to do. But were they in fact correct in this case? Was there really no exodus?

  Some will say: It does not matter if it is historical or not. What matters is what it has meant, the exodus’ meaning to religion over the centuries. That is a lovely thought. I used to say it sometimes myself. But nowadays I find myself saying: Whom are we kidding? We want to know if it happened, or if what people have been believing for millen
nia is an illusion, an invention. It matters plenty to people whether it happened or not. There is an anti-historical wind blowing lately. People claim that we cannot really recover what happened in the past: we do not have history. But something happened. We can recover some of it from real evidence and reasoning. There are other parts of it that we cannot exhume. We also happen to have some great stories about it, a fabulous narrative. We have both, and we can study both: history and narrative. They are both great enterprises—as long as you tell people which you are doing at the time. And let us say that we investigate the history, and we find that 20 percent of it is true, or 10 percent of it is true, or that none of it is true. Then how did we get these stories? They are not like Cinderella. They are not merely entertainments. The authors wrote the exodus account as part of their nation’s history, and millions of people have taken it as history for thousands of years. What was happening in their world that made them tell the story this way?

  This is the process of literary-historical method. We can read a story that we think is fiction, or even know to be fiction, and still extract historical information from it. At a meeting on the exodus in San Diego (see below), the American biblical historian Baruch Halpern stirred things up saying that the Bible’s story of the exodus should be read as a fairy tale. My wife’s reaction was precisely to look at a fairy tale: Cinderella. It has mice become horses, a pumpkin become a coach, and a poor oppressed girl become a princess because a glass shoe fits only her. The story is fiction. It is not history. But the element of the shoe at least reflects that shoes were a real thing in the culture that produced that story. Everyone who heard the story understood it. So eliminate much of the biblical story from the category of history if you wish. The ten plagues may be a fairy tale. The staff that becomes a snake may be a fairy tale. But we shall see that the exodus itself is not the fairy tale. It is the shoes.

  And here is the pot of gold at the end of this particular historical rainbow: we do not have to choose between recapturing the history and caring about the values we might derive from the exodus. Once we exhume the history, we shall find, more intensely, more vividly, more really than before, the meanings that people can derive, the fruits that those events bequeathed for all the centuries that followed since then.