You shall provide him from your flock and from your threshing floor and from your wine press; as Yahweh, your God, has blessed you, you shall give to him.
(Deuteronomy 15:12–14)
And why must one do this?
And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh, your God, redeemed you. On account of this, I command you this thing.
(Deuteronomy 15:15)
While these laws about treating slaves, which are explicitly traced to having been slaves themselves in Egypt, come up so much in the three Levite sources, there are no laws about slaves at all in the non-Levite source J. Now one might say that this is simply because the J source does not include law codes at all except for the Ten Commandments. That is true, but even there in the J version of the Ten Commandments, its law of Sabbath rest does not include slaves. The other two occurrences of the Ten Commandments refer to slaves both in their very first verse (“I brought you out of the land of Egypt from a house of slaves”)79 and in their Sabbath commandment, which requires that one’s slaves are not to be made to work on the Sabbath.80 But the J Decalogue does not give slaves the day off or show any interest in slaves at all.81
In fact the non-Levite J source does not even have the word “slave” any time after Genesis. It is unclear in what way the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites in J. It must be some kind of forced labor because the text refers to “taskmasters,” but that is the closest it comes. It has Pharaoh trying to diminish their numbers by killing male babies, and it has Pharaoh refusing to let them leave. But it has no specific reference to slavery. That which is a primary focus of the Levite sources is not mentioned by name in the non-Levite source.
10. Be Kind to Aliens
Over and over—fifty-two times!—all three Levite sources command that one must never mistreat an alien. The first occurrence of the word “torah” in the Torah is the command:
There shall be one torah for the citizen and for the alien who lives among you.
(Exodus 12:49)
Why should an Israelite not mistreat an alien? What is the reason for this Israelite obsession with not oppressing a foreigner who is in their country? All three Levite sources answer word-for-word the same:
Because you were aliens in Egypt.82
Indeed, biblical law forbids an Israelite to disdain an Egyptian. Why?
You shall not abhor an Egyptian,
because you were an alien in his land.
This law, too, comes in a Levite source (Deuteronomy 23:8).
Only the non-Levite source, J—by now it should come as no surprise—never mentions this. Indeed, William Propp makes a strong case on the etymology of the very word levi, that its most probable meaning is an “attached” or “joined” person, in the sense of a resident alien.83 This might apply to the Levites as resident aliens during their stay in Egypt, or it may apply to them as attached resident aliens among the Israelite population, where they were not one of the original union of tribes. Either way it fits with the concentration on aliens in every Levite source of the Torah—and never in a non-Levite source. This Levite concern for aliens is unique: unique in the Bible, and actually unparalleled in the laws of all the lands of the ancient Near East. As the Canadian scholar Glen A. Taylor put it:
In ancient Near Eastern laws, while there is usually protection and provision given to the marginalized (i.e., widows and orphans), there is typically no mention of provision for the sojourner, or foreigner, as Deuteronomy provides. This is an emphasis unique to the Hebrew law codes.84
An emphasis unique to the Hebrew law codes. And unique to the Levite sections of those Hebrew law codes! Only the Levites preserve the memory of having been outsiders in Egypt, and only the Levites are moved to show fairness to outsiders ever after. This last of the ten bodies of evidence that we have seen may well be the most significant of all. We shall return to it in the final chapter of this book.
In Sum:
So let’s do the math:
Eight out of eight Israelites with Egyptian names are Levites.
Two out of two accounts of the revelation of God’s name make it to the Levite Moses and are told in Levite sources.
The massive treatment of the Tabernacle, which parallels the Egyptian tent of Rameses II, appears in the Levite Priests’ sources.
The ark, which is entrusted to the Levites, parallels the Egyptian barks.
Seven out of seven items of Egyptian lore that come up in the biblical story occur in Levite sources.
Eleven out of eleven references to circumcision in legal context, literal or metaphorical, occur in Levitical sources in the Torah and the prophets. And the two references to it in stories involve the Levite Moses or Levi himself.
Three out of three sources that tell the story of the plagues and exodus are Levite sources.
All texts treating slavery during and after the Egyptian stay are Levite sources.
Fifty-two out of fifty-two references to aliens occur in Levite sources.
Fifty-two references to the sanctuary (miqdash) in the Bible, which is where the people in the Song of the Sea go, identify it as the Temple or Tabernacle, the shrines to which only the Levites are allowed access.
The non-Levite source(s) lack all of this.
It took a variety of scholars, each contributing a piece of the puzzle, to arrive at this picture. Homan saw the connection between the Tabernacle and Rameses’ tent. Noegel saw the connection between the ark and the Egyptian barks. Rendsburg saw the connection between the Exodus stories and the stories that we know from Egyptian culture. Freedman saw the connection between the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah. Propp saw the connection of the word levi and the role of aliens. And a host of scholars saw the significance of the presence of Semites, Asiatics, Shasu, ‘Apiru (Habiru), Hyksos—Levantine people in Egypt in those centuries. And we can now unite all of this in the context of what we know about the Bible’s sources: the texts and the people who wrote them.
OTHER ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE EXODUS
I said above that the study of the Bible’s sources and their authors has been a central part of Bible studies for about two centuries. It is remarkable that we have not applied it sufficiently before to the question of the exodus. Perhaps we needed to acquire a certain quantity of archaeological information to go along with it first. For a while we relied on this growing archaeological information in a bubble. We did not see the intersection between it and what we knew of the texts, and that led us astray. But now this combination of textual and archaeological information has proved to be revealing. These ten (a biblical number) points of evidence all support the hypothesis that, while most of Israel was back in the land all along, just the Levites made the exodus from Egypt. How do we relate this to the other evidence and arguments about the exodus?
In the first place there is the dating game. If it was just the Levites, then classic arguments over dates are transformed. One of the turning points in many arguments about the exodus has been the Merneptah stele. Pharaoh Merneptah was the son of Rameses II. He reigned late in the thirteenth century BCE. He erected an inscribed stone, which the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie discovered in 1896 at Thebes. It is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It contains the earliest known occurrence of the name Israel, so it has sometimes even been called “The Israel Stele.”85 Scholars date it to circa 1205 BCE or a little earlier.86 So, people commonly said, if Israel was a settled people by 1205, then the exodus had to be before that. Also, some pointed out that the Egyptian military controlled the Sinai Peninsula at that time, so a huge mass of escaped slaves slipping by there would have been impossible then. But the flaw in this picture is that it still presumes that all of Israel made the exodus and then arrived in Canaan. If it was just the Levites who made the exodus, while the rest of Israel was back in their land, then this whole argument disappears. If it was just the Levites, then their exodus could have been before or after Pharaoh Merneptah. I am therefore completely in agreement with the histor
ian Abraham Malamat, who said, “This stele has little or nothing to do with the Exodus.”87
Second, people who challenge the historicity of the exodus frequently point to the absence of any references to it in ancient Egyptian sources. This argument too is dependent on the assumption of a big exodus of a mass of Israelites. There is no reason to be surprised that there is no mention of Israelites in Egypt when, after all, there is no mention of Israelites in the Song of the Sea either! A group of Levites, of unknown size, leaving at an unknown time, under unknown circumstances, did not require a headline in the Egyptian Daily News. So when Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman say, “We have not even a single word about early Israelites in Egypt” in inscriptions or papyri, it means they are looking for a reference to a specific nation, Israel.88 But no entity named Israel was there. And the group that was there would not necessarily be called “levites” in Egyptian sources either because that might not have been the name by which they were known there. Indeed, if levi was in fact a Hebrew word for an attached person, the levite group in Egypt probably was not known to Egyptians by that term. We do not have any idea what they would be called there.
A third old argument figures both ways in this. Some argue that a people would not make up a story that their ancestors were slaves. If they were going to make up a history for themselves, they would say they were descended from kings or gods, not slaves. Why invent a lowly past?89 I used to use this argument as well. But later I thought that it is really not a very strong argument, and people are right to challenge it. A rags-to-riches story can in fact have appeal. Still, Professor Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University pointed out that rags-to-riches stories are one thing, but “no people, so far as we are aware, has ever suggested that its origins were as slaves” (emphasis mine). I would add that the obvious exception is Liberia, a country that does see its origins as slaves, but among Liberia’s founders were slaves, liberated from North America. They did not invent it. So that is just the exception that makes the point.
In any case, an essential question for all historians is whether someone would make this up. It still applies here, and it argues in favor of the exodus, because there are other parts of the story that seem even less likely to be made up than slave ancestors. Why make up that Moses was married to a Midianite? Why make up that his father-in-law was a Midianite priest? Why make up that Israel’s priesthood was not indigenous? There are some other parts of the story that I, too, would acknowledge were made up. But these basics—some Egyptian experience, the Midianite connection—appear to me to be shoes, not magic pumpkins.
Fourth, some have raised another argument to suggest that the story is made up. Specifically: unnamed pharaohs. I wrote in my commentary on the Torah that there are five pharaohs in the Torah: a pharaoh who thought that Sarah was Abraham’s sister, the pharaoh who knew Joseph, the pharaoh who did not know Joseph and oppressed the Israelites, the pharaoh who sought to kill Moses (who may or may not be the same pharaoh who did not know Joseph), and the pharaoh of the exodus. Why are not any of their names given? Names of pharaohs do appear in later books (Shishak, Necho).90 Their absence in the Torah gives the narrative a nonhistorical quality, which is contrary to the manifest aim of the authors to present history. So some argue that this is evidence that the stories are not true, that they were invented by writers who could not name these kings because they had no idea of the names of ancient pharaohs.91 In the case of the two pharaohs in Genesis we have hardly any evidence to argue for or against this. But in the case of the exodus pharaohs, we have seen sufficient likelihood that the oppression and exodus are historical so that we must at least consider whether there could be other reasons why the pharaohs are not named. My friend Jonathan Saville suggests that perhaps the reason, consciously or not, was to downgrade the pharaoh, as when people sometimes avoid saying the name of someone to whom they feel hostile. I also keep in mind a lesson I learned from my teacher Professor Cross, who used to say: the most banal explanation is usually the right one. Perhaps the names of the pharaohs simply were no longer preserved in memory or written tradition by the time the stories came to be written. The authors no longer had any sources that recorded (or cared about) the pharaohs’ names. They cared about preserving names that mattered much more to them: Levi, Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Zipporah, even the midwives Shiphrah and Puah. These are the names of the story’s heroes. But did the authors care whether it was Pharaoh Rameses II or Rameses III? Or Merneptah? Apparently not. An absence of pharaohs’ names does not mean an absence of an exodus.92 Indeed, there may not have been any single pharaoh’s name to remember. What we have seen is the likelihood that there were Levites, “attached” outsiders, living in Egypt through centuries, who then left. We do not know if any one pharaoh stood out as their prime oppressor.
Fifth, some have argued that the biblical accounts were written a long time—many centuries—after the time of the exodus, so we cannot rely on them for facts. And that brings us back to the question of sources. If some or all of the biblical authors did not see the exodus themselves, how did they know what happened? Some scholars have argued that the Bible’s story of the exodus comes from very late writers. Probably most prominent among these scholars are the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and the Egyptologist Donald Redford. Redford says that geographic details in the story reflect locations in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, which is at least five or six hundred years after the suggested time of the exodus.93 Finkelstein cites all of Redford’s evidence and concludes, “All these indications suggest that the Exodus narrative reached its final form during the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, in the second half of the seventh and the first half of the sixth century BCE.”94
In the first place, “reached its final form” covers a lot of sins. At most it means that some names of persons and places that fit that period were changed or added to the text at that period. I respect Finkelstein as an archaeologist, and I respect Redford as an Egyptologist. But they are not expert in biblical source criticism. When they date the composition of the texts about the exodus to the seventh or even sixth century BCE because they say that some geographic details in the story reflect that century,95 and when others date it even later, they have to feel compelled at least to try to explain how those places and details found their way into texts that show so many signs of having been composed during the time when both Israel and Judah existed as two countries side by side. That was centuries earlier: between the tenth and eighth centuries BCE.96 These scholars have made no attempt to account for this. Our main sources—the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, J, E, P, and most of D (the law code called Dtn in Deuteronomy 12–26; and the songs in Deuteronomy 32 and 33)—all come from before the end of the eighth century BCE, and some come from as early as the twelfth century BCE. Finkelstein and Redford just do not address source criticism of the Bible. They likewise do not come to terms with the linguistic evidence that confirms that these sources were written in a Hebrew that comes long before the time that they imagine.97 Redford wrote back in 1992, “Any scholar who exempts any part of his sources from critical evaluation runs the risk of invalidating some or all of his conclusions,” but that is exactly what he has done. Our various biblical sources referring to the exodus range all the way from the twelfth century to the fifth. So ancient authors were writing about the exodus all through the biblical period.
And there is an even larger point of method here. At the San Diego conference, Professor Rendsburg questioned the archaeologists. He noted that the Bible says, “Didn’t I bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?”98 The archaeologists agreed that the Bible was right about this: the Philistines did in fact come to the region of Canaan/Israel from across the Mediterranean Sea (Caphtor, which is possibly Cyprus or the Greek Islands). So, Rendsburg asked, if the Israelites could remember the history of the Philistines four hundred years back, why should we think that they could not remember their own history that far back?! Rendsburg addressed the
question to two of the leading archaeologists of the United States and Israel, and neither one of them gave him an adequate answer. Late sources do not necessarily mean wrong sources. (Rendsburg, being an honorable scholar, later wrote to me that he had learned that the biblical scholar and archaeologist James Hoffmeier had also made this point in print. Hoffmeier wrote, “It would be inexplicable for the prophet (and his audience) to know the origins of the Philistines and Arameans but be wrong about Israel’s origin!” It is reassuring when two scholars independently make the same observation.)99
The likelihood that the Levites were the ones who experienced the exodus forces us to reexamine many of the classic arguments. Either these arguments involve a mass exodus, which need not be the case, or they do not come to terms with connecting the archaeology with the texts and their authors.
DON’T MESS WITH THE LEVITES
So, in this scenario, what happens when these Levites leave Egypt and arrive in Israel? The ten tribes of Israel (and two more—Judah and Simeon—to the south) have their territories, and none is about to give its territory to these newcomers. The tribe of Ephraim tells Issachar, “Give them some of yours.” Issachar says, “You give them some of yours.” The tribe of Dan says, “Manasseh has more than we do. Let them give some.” Manasseh says, “In your dreams!” Nobody wants to part with land to give to these immigrants from Egypt.
The Exodus Page 6