The investigation of this mystery is a time machine. We can look back and see what happened some thirty-three hundred years ago. Then we can move through time and watch the story evolve. And in the end, I think we shall stand in awe at how it still informs us and has willed to us some of our most precious values. The event and the story are thousands of years old, but they can still enrich and preserve us in our precarious times.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MYSTERY OF EGYPT
How Do Two Million People Disappear?
A SMALLER EXODUS?
The principal points that people generally bring up in doubting the exodus are mostly about numbers: We have found no remnant of the two million people in the Sinai region. We have found no widespread material culture of Egypt in early Israel: no Egyptian style pottery or architecture. We have found no records in Egypt of a huge mass of Israelite slaves or of a huge exodus.
True. But none of this is evidence about whether the exodus happened or not. It is evidence only of whether it was big or not. For heaven’s sake, did we need archaeological work to confirm that an exodus of two million people was, shall we say, problematic? It had already been calculated long ago that if the people were marching, say, eight across, then when the first ones got to Mount Sinai, half of the people were still in Egypt. And I think it was Bishop Colenso who calculated around 150 years ago the amount of, let us say delicately, residue that that many people would have deposited in the Sinai over a period of forty years, and he figured that the Sinai wilderness should be fertile! Did we really need archaeologists combing the Sinai and not finding anything to prove what we knew anyway? The absence of exodus and wilderness artifacts questions only whether there was a massive exodus.
Part of being a scholar-detective is learning what questions to ask. If there were two million people, how did they disappear? If the answer is that they could not just disappear, then the question is why and when would somebody make them up? If numbers figure so much in the argument, then the question is not just why would someone make up the exodus, but why would someone make it an exodus of two million persons?
Would it be a wild and crazy idea if we consider the possibility that the exodus happened but that it was not big?
One thing that came out at the San Diego conference and in published articles and books in our field was: we nearly all recognize that there were Western Asiatic people in Egypt.1 Call them Asiatics, Semites, Canaanites, Levantine peoples. But whatever we call them, these aliens were there, for hundreds of years. The literature on this is voluminous. They were everything from lower class and slaves (called variously Shasu, ‘Apiru, Habiru) to a dynasty of Pharaohs (the Hyksos, the Fifteenth Dynasty). And they were coming and going all along, just not in millions at a time.2 We could say: there were many “exoditos.” The idea that our exodus was one of these is well within reason. The archaeologist Avi Faust put that line about the exodus not happening the way the Bible tells it into this context, writing:
While there is a consensus among scholars that the Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible, surprisingly most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt.
Faust cites twenty such scholars.3
Even Finkelstein and Silberman, who had done so much to raise doubts about a massive exodus,4 still wrote:
One thing is certain. The basic situation described in the Exodus saga—the phenomenon of immigrants coming down to Egypt from Canaan and settling in the eastern border regions of the delta—is abundantly verified in the archaeological finds and the historical texts.5
Lee Levine, too, in the passage I quoted above, referred to the possible cultural background for
the Egyptian servitude (of at least some of the people who later became Israelites).6
Wolpe followed the scholars on this as well:
The probability is, given the traditions, that there were some enslaved Israelites who left Egypt and joined up with their brethren in Canaan. This seems the likeliest scenario.7
And James Hoffmeier, in his survey of responses from twenty-five Egyptologists from eleven countries, wrote:
Those who offered additional thoughts indicated that given the regularity of Asiatics, to use the Egyptian term, entering Egypt during the days of famine or drought in the Levant it was likely that the biblical Hebrews were one such group.8
Verified immigrants from Canaan in Egypt, “the regularity of Asiatics . . . entering Egypt,” “some of the . . . settlers,” “at least some of the people,” “some enslaved Israelites,” “one such group.” Alright, then, maybe we are looking for one particular group among the many immigrants from and back to Asia. But who could this “one such group” have been? Back in 1987 in Who Wrote the Bible? I included the possibility that it was just the Levites.9 The Levites were the group who later became the priests of Israel and some of the main authors of the Bible. The Bible identifies them as the group that was connected with Moses and his family. The story says that both his mother and his father were Levites.10 What if it was just the Levites who made the flight from Egypt? I wrote there that this idea about the Levites was “in the realm of hypothesis, and we must be very cautious about it.” That was to convey the caution with which I always urge my readers to examine new hypotheses. But it has now been thirty years (not a biblical number) that we have had to think, research, and consult with colleagues, and there is new evidence to take into account, and so I am vastly more confident of the situation now. My field has come a long way since 1987. It is very exciting. I hope that the evidence, when it is fully assembled here together with the other works that I cite, will tantalize many readers as it has tantalized me. I recall that Professor Baruch Halpern, now my colleague at the University of Georgia, wrote a book on The Emergence of Israel in Canaan in which he said:
Biblical scholarship is no more methodologically equipped to reconstruct the exodus than is America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration technologically equipped to send video probes to the Alpha Centauri system. The period of the judges, like Pluto or Uranus, presents a more realistic, if still elusive, target.11
He thus explained why he chose to focus his work a little later, on the period of the judges (the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE), rather than to go as far back as the exodus. He wrote this in 1983. In 1986 the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus. In 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto. And in 2013 the Hubble telescope sent back photographs of the Alpha Centauri system. I am sure that Halpern would be delighted with these developments. My point is how quickly the rate of new developments has accelerated in recent decades. All of us in this generation have seen it in hundreds of ways, in all areas of knowledge and research. That goes for the Bible and archaeology too. We have new tools, new findings, and new answers.
THE LEVITES AND THE EXODUS
Archaeological findings alone did not do it. What is it that we biblical scholars bring to enrich what we have found through archaeology? Answer: the text. What evidence can we derive from the text about who were the ones who made the exodus from Egypt? I mean real textual evidence, not just reading the Bible and taking its word for it that sticks became snakes and seas split. And how does this textual evidence connect with the archaeological evidence? And I mean real archaeological evidence—findings, artifacts, material culture, stuff—not just surveys that did not turn up anything. What evidence shows that the group that left Egypt over three thousand years ago were the Levites?
1. What’s in a Name?
Only Levites have Egyptian names. Hophni, Hur, two men named Phinehas, Merari, Mushi, Pashhur, and, above all, Moses are Egyptian names.12 But all of these biblical persons are Levites, and not one person from any of the rest of Israel has an Egyptian name. We in North America, lands of immigrants, especially are aware of the significance of what names tell about a person’s background. Friedman: probably a Jewish American whose family came from the Austro
-Hungarian empire. Shaughnessy: probably not a Jewish American from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Now there are exceptions in North American names. Not every Friedman is Jewish, and not every Shaughnessy is Irish. But we have no exceptions in biblical Israel. Moses, Phinehas, and the rest of the eight persons with Egyptian names are all from the Levite/priestly group. And no one else, from all the names mentioned in the Bible from all of Israel’s tribes, has an Egyptian name.13
Now we must ask if perhaps the Bible’s authors invented these Egyptian names precisely to help make the story of Egypt and the exodus look believable. But (a) this still begs the question of why all the named figures are Levites; no one invented a single Egyptian name for anybody else in the story. (b) The Egyptian names appear in texts from at least twenty different authors and editors, spread out over five hundred years.14 These authors and editors did not all work together to invent this. People say that the Bible is the only book ever successfully written by a committee, but we also note that this is probably because the committee never held a meeting. And we cannot attribute all the Egyptian names to an editor (usually referred to as a redactor) who threw them in when he assembled the text. We know this because no single person edited all of these texts. The Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy), the Deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings), the Psalms, the prophets, and the Chronicler’s history (1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah) were all edited at different times by different people. (c) We can know for a fact that it cannot be that the authors deliberately gave characters Egyptian names in order to fool us. How? Because we can see where the authors themselves did not know that the names were Egyptian. This is apparent in one of the most famous stories in the Bible: the baby in the basket.
It is the story of Moses’ birth. The Pharaoh has decreed the death of the slaves’ newborn males. A Levite woman places her baby son in an ark of bulrushes sealed with bitumen.
And she put the boy in it and put it in the reeds by the bank of the Nile. And his sister stood still at a distance to know what would be done to him. And the Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile, and her girls were going alongside the Nile, and she saw the ark among the reeds and sent her maid, and she took it. And she opened it and saw him, the child: and here was a boy crying, and she had compassion on him, and she said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”
And his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nursing woman from the Hebrews for you, and she’ll nurse the child for you?”
And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.”
And the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I’ll give your pay.” And the woman took the boy and nursed him. And the boy grew older, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses, and she said, “Because I drew him from the water.”
(Exodus 2:3b–10)
Now that is very logical. She called his name Moses—Hebrew mosheh—because she drew—Hebrew root mashah—him from the water. I have always told my students that the translation of his name in English should be Drew. So it would be that she says, “I’ll call his name Drew, because I drew him from the water.” Puns do not usually translate. But this is a really good exception.
But the point is that the author of this story is treating the name Moses as Hebrew. The author is manifestly not trying to give the hero an Egyptian name. The author rather gives the princess a flair for language. She knows Hebrew exquisitely enough to make Hebrew etymologies when naming a boy. The author either did not know that the name was Egyptian, not Hebrew; or else deliberately was hiding the fact that it was Egyptian, not Hebrew. Either way, we cannot read this story and think that the authors were falsely making up Egyptian names. The Egyptian names are real, native to the text, and they belong only to Levites.
2. Our Earliest Evidence: The Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah
Which did humans compose first: poetry or prose? I think that most people would be surprised, maybe even incredulous, to learn that we wrote poetry and songs for thousands of years before we wrote any long works of prose (at least any that have survived). That may possibly be because poetry and songs are easier to remember, and this mattered in an age when writing was more difficult and literacy was perhaps less common (though not as uncommon as people sometimes claim). I think I can sing all the words of the Beatles’ songbook and maybe a thousand other songs from memory, but I could never learn to recite The Brothers Karamazov, which is probably about as long, from memory. Poems, and especially songs, are easier to retain.
And that goes for the Bible as well. Two of the many eminent students whom Albright produced at Johns Hopkins University were Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman. Cross became the Hancock Professor of Hebrew at Harvard. Freedman had chairs at both the University of Michigan and the University of California and became the General Editor of the Anchor Bible, the most successful series of commentaries on the Bible (over three million volumes sold). Cross produced over a hundred PhD students. Freedman produced (wrote or edited) over three hundred books. Now when Frank and Noel were still students at Hopkins, Albright put them together to write two joint PhD dissertations instead of one each. Both dissertations became classics, but one is particularly relevant for our present probe. It was titled Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry.15 Cross and Freedman argued (this was back in the 1940s) that the oldest parts of the Bible were a group of songs. They based this early dating on spelling (orthography), contents, setting, language, and new knowledge from inscriptions that had been discovered (epigraphy). Meanwhile, as they were writing in 1947–1948, a goat made the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Evidence from the scrolls further convinced Cross and Freedman of their conclusions. I have been listening to challenges to those conclusions since my very first session at my first international conference thirty-five years ago, but Cross and Freedman and others have defended their work, and I think that it has held up.16 David Noel Freedman wrote in 1997:
I am as firmly convinced today as I was forty-five years ago that early poems really are early. While it is true that many, perhaps most, serious scholars date this poetry across the whole spectrum of Israelite history, from premonarchic to postexilic, I believe that the whole corpus belongs to the earliest period of Israel’s national existence, and that the poems were composed between the twelfth and tenth–ninth centuries BCE. I have encountered neither compelling evidence nor convincing argument to the contrary, or to make me think otherwise.17
I do not mean to redo the entire history of this scholarship here. But its relevance to our present questions will be visible and will show that their work on the early poetry and the work on the evidence for the exodus are mutually supporting. Two of the group of old songs are the Song of the Sea (also known as the Song of Miriam) and the Song of Deborah. Noel identified them as the two oldest things in the Bible. They were composed close to the time of the events that they portray. They are written in an early form of Hebrew, and other datable texts use them as sources.18 Though I mean to make another point, I also cannot help but note that the two earliest texts in the Bible are both associated with women: Miriam and Deborah. Even in our age of interest in matters of gender, this fact continues to go insufficiently appreciated.19
What do the songs say? The first, the Song of Miriam, or Song of the Sea, is the earliest reaction we have by an ancient writer to the culmination of the exodus story: the Red Sea calamity. If Cross and Freedman and their successors are right, people sang it within maybe a hundred years, maybe a year, of the event. (Or the alleged event. We have not yet determined whether it was historical.) Here is my translation, as literal as possible while still trying to capture the poetry.
Let me sing to Yahweh, for He triumphed!
Horse and its rider He cast in the sea.
My strength and song are Yah,
and He b
ecame a salvation for me.
This is my God, and I’ll praise Him,
my father’s God, and I’ll hail Him.
Yahweh is a warrior.
Yahweh is His name.
Pharaoh’s chariots and his army He plunged in the sea
and the choice of his troops drowned in the Red Sea.
The deeps covered them.
They sank in the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, Yahweh, awesome in power,
your right hand, Yahweh, crushed the foe.
And in your triumph’s greatness you threw down your adversaries.
You let go your fury: it consumed them like straw.
And by wind from your nostrils water was massed,
surf piled up like a heap,
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
The enemy said, “I’ll pursue!
I’ll catch up!
I’ll divide spoil!
My soul will be sated!
I’ll unsheathe my sword!
My hand will deprive them!”
You blew with your wind. Sea covered them.
They sank like lead in the awesome water.
Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh!
Who is like you:
awesome in holiness!
fearsome with splendors!
making miracles!
You reached your right hand: earth swallowed them.
You led, in your kindness, the people you saved;
you ushered, in your strength, to your holy abode.
Peoples heard—they shuddered.
Shaking seized Philistia’s residents.
Then Edom’s chiefs were terrified.
Moab’s chieftains: trembling seized them.
The Exodus Page 3