I quoted the distinguished archaeologist William Dever above, where he wrote that there is “overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel.” Israel was indigenous. They did not come from Egypt or anywhere else. They were just there as far back as we can trace them. Dever meant this as evidence against the exodus. But, as I have been saying, it is evidence only against an exodus of all of Israel. The Israelite tribes had “largely indigenous origins.” Most of them were in Israel all along. That fits fine with the evidence that just the Levites came from Egypt. Then the Levites united with those Israelite tribes. Why? Either because (1) they felt kinship with each other, or (2) these Levites had originally come from Israel (probably called Canaan at that point) themselves, so their uniting was actually a re-uniting with their old brethren, or (3) those Israelite tribes had defeated the Canaanites (as the Song of Deborah reports), so the Levites naturally allied with them as the new strong force in the land. Maybe it was a mixture of all three. We do not doubt that this union of Levites and the Israelite tribes took place, though, because the Levites have been counted among the people of Israel from biblical times until the present day.
But what about the God of this united confederation? Were they going to worship El or Yahweh? Israel had choices. They could have chosen to worship only El. They could have chosen to worship only Yahweh. They could have chosen to worship both. They could have said that El is Yahweh’s father, or his son. But they chose none of these. They said: El is Yahweh. He was always Yahweh, but the Israelites in the land had not known this name because He did not reveal it until the time that these Levites were to come from Egypt to Israel.46 He revealed it to His greatest prophet, their leader, Moses. The Levites’ sources E and P retained this story as a crucial development in the people’s history.47 But the author of the J source, living in this same period, long after the acceptance of Yahweh as the proper name of God, and who was not a Levite priest, could not have cared less about when it started, and so he or she just told the story without including that transition.48 And that would explain how we came to have the crucial name of God distinction that helped us to separate the Bible’s sources to this day. That story is important itself, but it reflects something vastly more important. Yahweh and El are one. Scott Noegel of the University of Washington wrote:
The Late Bronze Age . . . was a formative and flexible period in the history of Israelite religion as it also saw the gradual fusion of the Canaanite god El with Yahweh.49
Frank Cross wrote of how biblical Israel made no distinction between El and Yahweh:
’El is rarely if ever used in the Bible as the proper name of a non-Israelite Canaanite deity in the full consciousness of a distinction between ’El and Yahweh, god of Israel. This is a most extraordinary datum.50
And Professor Mark Smith of Princeton University explained this datum thus:
At an early point, Israelite tradition identified El with Yahweh or presupposed this equation. It is for this reason that the Hebrew Bible so rarely distinguishes between El and Yahweh.51
We shall definitely return to this fusion of El and Yahweh because its implications are potentially tremendous. For now, our concern is that it is one more piece that fits with the picture of the Levite exodus from Egypt and subsequent union with Israel.52
The premium of this body of evidence from the sources behind the Bible is that it explains so much. It harmonizes with the other evidence about the Levites and the exodus. It provides the reason for the accounts of the revelation of God’s name in the Bible. That was, as I said at the beginning, the first and most famous clue in the investigation into who wrote the Bible, but the reason behind this clue always eluded us. Now we have a reason, and it connects the hypothesis about the Bible’s authors to a real-life historical course of events in ancient Israel, a course of events that other evidence supports. In the early days of modern Bible scholarship, people would attribute a passage in the Bible to one source or another, to J or E or P, because it used a particular word or told a story a particular way. But now, as we uncover logical connections between the source texts and the historical events that produced each of them, this tapestry of connections in turn gives the hypothesis more strength, more appeal, than ever. In scientific terms, it is a more elegant theory. In everyday terms, it is more likely that the theory is correct. This is not circular reasoning. It is convergence of evidence in mutual support. I said that there is currently a plethora of models competing for consensus. No other model known to me coincides so consistently with what we know of history and archaeology. Indeed, we commonly find books, lectures, and courses that introduce the subject with a discussion of “the names of God” without even raising the question of why this prominent thing exists. And the trail of archaeology and history continues through all the evidence below.
4. The Tabernacle and the Battle Tent of Rameses
What about the claims that we have found no widespread material culture of Egypt in early Israel? Those claims, like the ones about not finding two million people, are true only if we are still thinking of all of Israel making the exodus from Egypt. The whole country of Israel does not have such cultural connections back to Egypt. But the Levites, and only the Levites, do have the cultural connections. We have already seen that they have Egyptian names. And there is much more. The Levite priests’ description of their Tabernacle, the sacred Tent of Meeting, is long and detailed. It obviously was extremely important to them. There is in fact more about the Tabernacle than about anything else in the Five Books of Moses. Now, my former student, Professor Michael Homan of Xavier University of Louisiana, in a wonderful combination of Bible and archaeology, showed that the Tabernacle has architectural parallels with the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II.53 Its size, shape, proportions, surrounding courtyard, golden winged accoutrements, Eastern orientation, and arrangement of outer and inner rooms are a match. My own calculations of the Tabernacle’s construction differ in some ways from Homan’s, but still I acknowledge enough of a match that the connection is visible.54 The Levite sources of the Torah mention the Tabernacle, or Tent of Meeting, over two hundred times. And how many times does the non-Levite source J refer to it? Zero.
5. The Ark and the Bark
While Professor Homan focused on the Tabernacle, Professor Noegel, in another combination of Bible and archaeology, showed parallels between the Levite priests’ description of their Ark of the Covenant and Egyptian barks. Though barks are boats, these barks were rarely set in water. They were rather carried in processions. They were sacred ritual objects. Like the ark that the Levites carry in Israel, the barks were sometimes gold-plated, many were decorated with winged cherubs or birds, they were carried on poles by priests, and they served as a throne and footstool. Noegel concluded that “the bark served as a model, which the Israelites adapted for their own needs.”55
6. Circumcision
Also, it is the texts written by Levites that give the requirement to practice circumcision. Circumcision was a known practice in Egypt. The biblical texts required circumcision in the Levite Priestly covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis and in the Levite Priestly law in Leviticus.56 Levite authors, and only Levite authors, used the metaphor of circumcision of the heart, which is found both in Leviticus (26:41) and in Deuteronomy (10:16; 30:6). This metaphor of circumcision of one’s heart also appears in two prophets: Jeremiah (4:4; 9:25) and Ezekiel (44:7, 9), and it happens that both of these two famous prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, were Levite priests.57 The Levite Priestly writer in Exodus also uses the metaphor of Moses’ uncircumcised lips (6:12, 20); and Jeremiah adds the metaphor of uncircumcised ears (6:10). All eleven of these references to circumcision appear only in these Levite sources.
The non-Levite source J, meanwhile, tells nothing about circumcision except in stories, not in instruction or legal contexts. In J, circumcision is not a law and not a requirement of the covenant. It comes up in two episodes. The first is the strange J story of Moses�
� Midianite wife Zipporah, who does something to somebody for some reason at a lodging place when they are on the way to Egypt. It is a brief story, only three verses, so here it is:
And Moses took his wife and his son and rode them on an ass, and he went back to the land of Egypt. And he was on the way, at a lodging place, and Yahweh met him, and he asked to kill him. And Zipporah took a flint and cut her son’s foreskin and touched his feet, and she said, “Because you’re a bridegroom of blood to me.” And he held back from him. Then she said, “A bridegroom of blood for circumcisions.”
(Exodus 4:24–26)
If you found that confusing, don’t worry. Nobody understands it. Propp and I have suggested utterly different readings of it, and there are plenty more.58 My goal here is not to solve it but, if anything, to emphasize how enigmatic it is. The story gives no hint of circumcision being a cultural norm, and it derives from a Midianite woman, not from Israel or from the deity.
In the other story, circumcision is claimed to be an ethnic norm but turns out to be used as a strategy to disable and destroy someone who has committed an offense against Israel’s ancestors. It is the story of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34). Dinah is Jacob’s and Leah’s daughter. Shechem is the prince of the city that is also called Shechem. He has sex with Dinah. The episode is sometimes referred to as “the rape of Dinah,” but the Hebrew text is unclear about whether it is a rape, a seduction, or even consensual sex.59 Still, that does not matter to Dinah’s brothers, who are “pained and furious, for he had done a foolhardy thing among Israel, to lie with Jacob’s daughter, and such a thing is not done.” Shechem and his father, the king of Shechem, come to propose peace and intermarriage between their city and Jacob’s clan. Dinah’s brothers’ strategy: they tell Shechem and his father that they would not give their sister to a man who has a foreskin “because that’s a disgrace to us,” so all the men of Shechem must be circumcised. The Shechemites agree. Three days later, when the men of Shechem are hurting, apparently handicapped from the surgery, two of Dinah’s brothers massacre the city and take back their sister.
This story, like the story of Moses and Zipporah, makes no mention of law or covenant. The brothers just state that they are circumcised and demand the same of the Shechemites “with deception.” And one more thing: even in this source, it is just two out of Dinah’s twelve brothers who use the circumcision strategy, and one of the two is Levi. And the other J circumcision story that we saw concerns Moses, the most famous Levite of them all, and his son Gershom. And Gershom turns out to be the ancestor of an important Levite clan.60 Neither of these J stories includes a commandment that all Israelite males must practice circumcision. They simply treat it as a known practice. Circumcision as a commandment for Israel comes only from the Levites.61
In fairness we must acknowledge that other ancient Near Eastern cultures had circumcision as well,62 but still this is worth reckoning as part of the series of connections of culture between the biblical text and Egypt, and the fact remains that it is still only in the Levite sources that circumcision remains as a command and a continuing concern.
So for those who argue that there are no Egyptian elements in early Israel’s material culture, that argument, too, has substance only if we are still stuck at the two million number and all of Israel participating in the exodus. Egyptian cultural influences are present, but only among the Levites.
7. Parallels with Egyptian Traditions
And the list of these connections goes on. The Bible scholar Professor Gary Rendsburg at Rutgers collected a series of known items of Egyptian lore that appear in the story of the exodus. He noted that the story in Exodus 1–15 “repeatedly shows familiarity with Egyptian traditions: the biblical motifs of the hidden divine name, turning an inanimate object into a reptile, the conversion of water to blood, a spell of three days of darkness, the death of the firstborn, the parting of waters, and death by drowning are all paralleled in Egyptian texts, and, for the most part, nowhere else.”
He concluded:
In sum, the narrative that encompasses Exodus 1–15 evokes the Egyptian setting at every turn.63
Rendsburg is right, and I would add one more thing. What makes these points even more revealing is that every one of them is from the Levite sources E and P. None is from the non-Levite source J.64 So even if we regard these as just stories and not necessarily as historical, they indicate Egyptian literary connections as well as the Egyptian cultural connections. The exodus story did not come out of nowhere. Its authors knew Egyptian culture, traditions, and literature—but not all of its authors, only its Levite authors.
Similarly, many Bible scholars, archaeologists, and Egyptologists have examined the element of the Exodus story that identifies (apparently correctly) two cities by name, cities that the Israelite slaves are said to have built: Pithom and Rameses.65 Other elements of the story, too, match with known situations in Egypt in the right centuries. The Israelites are said to have been forced to make bricks.66 They complain about not being given straw to use in making the bricks.67 Quotas of brick production are imposed on them.68 Baruch Halpern wrote:
The brickmaking, too, described as part of the Oppression, reflects close knowledge of conditions in Egypt. A 15th-century tomb painting depicts Canaanite and Nubian captives making mudbricks at Thebes. One text even complains about a dearth of straw for brickmaking—a situation encountered by Israel in Egypt. In Canaan, by contrast, straw was not uniformly an ingredient of mudbrick. Almost every detail in the tradition mirrors conditions under [Egypt’s] 19th Dynasty.69
I want to emphasize that Halpern was not raising these elements of the story as proof that the exodus was historical. Nor do I take them as evidence of historicity. We should say more cautiously that they show that the biblical authors who told the story had familiarity with conditions in Egypt in the period with which the exodus is associated, the Bronze Age. But again I add the same observation as with Professor Rendsburg’s collection of parallels in the biblical and Egyptian sources. In my (and some other scholars’) identification of the Bible’s sources, every one of these elements is from the Levite sources E and P.70 None is mentioned in a non-Levite source.
So these other parallels serve only to indicate plausibility; that is, that the biblical writers got many things right about the story’s setting. They still do not necessarily constitute proof of what happened. James Hoffmeier made a similarly positive but cautious point, saying that
while there is no direct evidence to prove the exodus, the Egyptian linguistic and cultural background details in the Exodus narratives suggest a historical origin for Israel in Egypt that is most plausible.71
I would restate this that these literary points about the narratives are helpful in showing that the exodus is plausible, yes; but we have also seen tangible evidence that suggests a historical origin not for all of Israel in Egypt, but just of the Levites.
8. The Story of the Plagues and Exodus
The literary connection of the story to the Levite authors goes still deeper. It is the sources that come from the Levites—E, P, and also D—that tell the whole story of the plagues on Egypt, leading to the people’s exodus. J, the version that was not written by a Levite, does not tell it at all.72 If you read the Levite sources E, P, and D, you learn of ten plagues on Egypt: rivers turning to blood, frog infestation, lice, an insect swarm, a livestock epidemic, boils, hail, locusts, a three-day darkness, and finally death of firstborn humans and animals. In these sources you read of the competition with the Egyptian sorcerers who attempt, and ultimately fail, to reproduce the plagues. In these sources you read of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, which keeps the plagues coming. And then you read of Egypt’s capitulation and the people’s departure: the exodus. You get all this and more in the Levite sources E, P, and D. It goes on for nine chapters. But if you read J, you find none of this. It jumps from Moses’ saying “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1f.) to the people’s already having departed Egypt (13:21). The Pharaoh answers the
first demand with “I won’t let Israel leave” (5:2), and he is not mentioned again until “He heard that the people had fled” (14:5). Who knows what story, if any, came between. The plagues and exodus story comes entirely from the Levite sources.73 Interestingly, J has a story of plagues in Egypt, but it is set in the time of Abraham (Genesis 12), not in the time of the exodus. So on top of everything else that ties the Levites to the exodus, we now find that the story itself comes from them.74
9. Be Kind to Slaves
I am among the many readers who love detective fiction. I especially relish when all the different parts of the mystery come together and finally make sense. Similarly here: we have looked at poetry, prose, material culture, traditional lore, and names. And now still another category of evidence comes together with them: law. Only Levite sources (E, P, and D) have laws of how to treat slaves. The Bible does not abolish slavery. It limits it. It gives slaves rights, sometimes (not always75) the same rights as free people. It limits the situations in which one can acquire slaves, and it puts certain limits on how long one may keep them. It forbids one from mistreating a slave. If you knock out your slave’s eye, or even a single tooth, the slave goes free.76 If you hit your slave, there is no penalty, but if you strike him or her so hard with an implement that he or she dies, then the slave is to be avenged.77 If you capture a female in war, you must marry her or set her free, but you may not enslave her.78 If one acquires a fellow Israelite as a slave, one must let the slave go free after six years, and one must also give the freed slave provisions:
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