The Exodus is seen as the most important event in the Bible by ancient Hebrew writers themselves—no other event is mentioned as frequently. The book of Exodus itself commands the Israelites to remember and reenact it, and they followed this command.
As the political theorist Michael Walzer writes,
We can think of the Exodus as an example of what is today called “national liberation.” The people as a whole are enslaved, and then the people as a whole are delivered. At the same time, however, the uses of the story in Israel’s own history—first in legislation and then in prophecy suggest that the Egyptian model reaches to every sort of oppression and to every sort of liberation. Perhaps the crucial point is the linking of oppression and state power: “the oppression in Egypt,” as Croatto says, “is of a political order … [it is] exercised from the seat of political power.” Hence the escape from bondage is also the defeat of a tyrant—and the escape is only possible because of the defeat…
Hence Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for the inscription on the Great Seal of the United States: “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”
But just because something is frequently repeated does not make it a statement of fact, let alone an eyewitness account. Start with the most obvious example: in prayer, millions of people every day repeat an account of the Exodus that they obviously never saw. For example, part of the traditional Jewish morning prayer goes: “we remember His miracles and wonders when He took us out of Egypt.”The point is not that the person saying the prayer personally remembers this event happening to them. They are not saying that they themselves were an eyewitness 3,500 years ago who recalls the Exodus from personal experience, but that that they deliberately call these traditions to mind.
Historically, what can we know about the events that the Bible wishes us to call to mind? Here the Bible seems to disagree even with itself about exactly how this liberation from Egyptian oppression happened. Was the Red sea divided into two towering walls, as in the C.B. DeMille epic The Ten Commandments, with the walls crashing back down on the Egyptian army as it pursued the fleeing Israelites?
Or did the wind blow all night to simply dry up the sea, with God actively picking up the Egyptian forces and hurling them into the water?
The Bible’s Retellings of the Red Sea Story
In one prose version, which scholars recognize as Priestly, God first ‘stiffens the heart’ of the Pharoah, so that everything is part of his plan. He then rescues the Israelites by dividing the waters into two parts so they can be safe just as God divided the waters at the beginning in Genesis 1, and then destroys their enemies by releasing the waters just as he destroyed the world by releasing them to cause the flood in Genesis 6. This fits the special patterns of creation and de-creation we have seen in the Priestly source. And according to the Priestly account of events, since God has revealed his personal name Yahweh (“the Lord,”), that name is now used regularly for the divine being.
Ex 14:8 The LORD stiffened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he gave chase to the Israelites. As the Israelites were departing defiantly, 9 all the chariot horses of Pharaoh, his horsemen, and his warriors overtook them encamped by the sea, near Pi-hahiroth, before Baal-zephon. 10b And the Israelites cried out to the LORD. 15 But the LORD said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward, 16 And you lift up your rod and hold out your arm over the sea and split it, so that the Israelites may march into the sea on dry ground. 17 And I will stiffen the hearts of the Egyptians so that they go in after them; and I will gain glory through Pharaoh and all his warriors, his chariots and his horsemen.
18 Let the Egyptians know that I am LORD, when I gain glory through Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen.”
21aThen Moses held out his arm over the sea and the waters were divided.
22The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued, and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers.
26Then the LORD said to Moses, “Hold out your arm over the sea, that the waters may come back upon the Egyptians and upon their chariots and upon their horsemen.”
27aMoses held out his arm over the sea, 28b and the waters turned back and covered the chariots and the horsemen — Pharaoh’s entire army that followed them into the sea; 29 But the Israelites had marched through the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.
Here again in the Exodus, just as in creation and the flood, the Priestly version is woven together with an alternative version (the one scholars call J or Yahwist). In this one the Pharoah is not predestined by God to do it, but his aggressive behavior in pursuing the Israelites is just because he changes his mind about letting them go. Here the Israelites do not just cry out for help but yell at Moses because they think they are doomed—it is only after the divine rescue that their confidence in the Lord is restored. But the most dramatic difference is that here the Lord does not part the sea, but gradually blows the water away with a wind over the course of the night. Since the water only gradually comes back, the Egyptians almost escape but the Lord simply grabs them and throws them into the sea.
Ex 14:5 When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, Pharaoh and his courtiers had a change of heart about the people and said, “What is this we have done, releasing Israel from our service?” 6 He ordered his chariot and took his men with him; 7 he took six hundred of his picked chariots, and the rest of the chariots of Egypt, with officers in all of them.
14:10a As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites caught sight of the Egyptians advancing upon them. Greatly frightened11 And they said to Moses, “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? 12 Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness’?” 13 But Moses said to the people, “Have no fear! Stand by, and witness the deliverance which the LORD will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again. 14 The LORD will battle for you; you hold your peace!”
Ex. 14:19 The angel of God, who had been going ahead of the Israelite army, now moved and followed behind them; and the pillar of cloud shifted from in front of them and took up a place behind them, 20 and it came between the army of the Egyptians and the army of Israel. Thus there was the cloud with the darkness, and it cast a spelld upon the night, so that the one could not come near the other all through the night.
Ex. 14:21b Then the LORD drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground
24 At the morning watch, the LORD looked down upon the Egyptian army from a pillar of fire and cloud, and threw the Egyptian army into panic. 25 He lockede the wheels of their chariots so that they moved forward with difficulty. And the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the LORD is fighting for them against Egypt.”
27Then at daybreak the sea returned to its normal state, and the Egyptians fled at its approach. But the LORD hurled the Egyptians into the sea. 28 so not one of them remained. 29
Ex. 14:30 Thus the LORD delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. 31 And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the LORD had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD; they had faith in the LORD and His servant Moses.
Finally, there are not one but two poetic versions, the first sung by Moses and the second, presented in an abbreviated form, sung by his sister Miriam and the women of Israel (Ex 15:20-21). In the first and most detailed poem, the divine being is imagined as a war-god and called both Lord and God. There is emphasis on his destructive power in battle, visualized as his mighty right hand. There is also an ending that we do not see in the prose versions, where Israel is brought to God’s sanctuary, described as his holy mountain, to dwell in safety.
Ex. 15:1 Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD. They said:
I will sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea.
2 The LORD is my strength and might;
He is become my deliverance.
This is my God and I will enshrinec Him;
The God of my father, and I will exalt Him.
3 The LORD, the Warrior—
LORD is His name!
4 Pharaoh’s chariots and his army
He has cast into the sea;
And the pick of his officers
Are drowned in the Sea of Reeds.
5 The deeps covered them;
They went down into the depths like a stone.
6 Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power,
Your right hand, O LORD, shatters the foe!
7 In Your great triumph You break Your opponents;
You send forth Your fury, it consumes them like straw.
8 At the blast of Your nostrils the waters piled up,
The floods stood straight like a wall;
The deeps froze in the heart of the sea…
10 You made Your wind blow, the sea covered them;
They sank like lead in the majestic waters.
11 Who is like You, O LORD, among divine beings;
Who is like You, majestic in holiness,
Awesome in splendor, working wonders!
12 You put out Your right hand,
The earth swallowed them.
13 In Your love You lead the people You redeemed;
In Your strength You guide them to Your holy abode.
14 The peoples hear, they tremble;
Agony grips the dwellers in Philistia.
15 Now are the clans of Edom dismayed;
The tribes of Moab—trembling grips them;
All the dwellers in Canaan are aghast.
16 Terror and dread descend upon them;
Through the might of Your arm they are still as stone—
Till Your people cross over, O LORD,
Till Your people cross whom You have redeemed.
17 You will bring them and plant them in Your own mountain,
The place You made to dwell in, O LORD,
The sanctuary, O LORD, which Your hands established.
18 The LORD will reign for ever and ever!
There is a shared tradition here with a single very basic plot. Regardless of the conflicting details, the book of Exodus certainly presents a mass migration of Israelites out of Egypt through the sea, and the total defeat of the Egyptian army. But from a literary point of view we have a story told in several quite different ways, while the most broad general outlines are shared.
And for the historian the real problem is that there is no Egyptian or other outside record of such an event—a mass migration of Israelites and a miraculous massacre of Egyptian troops—during the period when it was supposed to have happened. If you add up the dates in the Bible the event is supposed to have happened sometime during the Late Bronze Age. The Israelites are said to have crossed at the Sinai border. Yet during this period this border was anxiously guarded due to political tensions with the powerful Hittite empire in the north, as the prizewinning Israeli historian Nadav Na’aman carefully documents.
How the Exodus may have happened in pieces
While there is no clear evidence of a mass migration, and such an event would have been very unlikely given the heavily guarded border, some specific individual elements of the Exodus narrative do have ancient Egyptian connections. First, is the basic fact of West Semitic speakers migrating to and working in Egypt. Already the very first alphabetic inscriptions in the world were written by speakers of a language ancestral to Hebrew as well as Aramaic and Arabic who were working as miners and soldiers in Egypt. And there are Egyptian records of smaller groups of West Semitic speaking nomads leaving Egypt and migrating away without any official permission. Finally, while there is no Egyptian account that really resembles the miraculous plagues, some ideas and imagery were likely to have been shared, such as the mythic image of a river turning to blood in the literary fiction of the Ipuwer papyrus.
How the Exodus could have been turned inside out
But the overwhelming pattern shared between the bible’s versions of the Exodus and our documented historical and archaeological evidence is political. The Egyptian empire did in fact violently dominate and exploit the ancestors of the Israelites! But it happened in Canaan itself, not Egypt. Starting around 1600 BCE, Egypt sent mercenaries and troops to take over cities and territories of Canaan. Indeed, I helped edit and translate a series of letters from such mercenaries complaining that they weren’t getting enough treasure or concubines. Found at the site of Aphek in Israel, they are written in Babylonian cuneiform but tinged with Canaanite expressions and grammar. The Egyptian empire appointed its own governors for these cities and demanded large amounts of tribute from them. By 1350 BCE many of the Canaanites had had enough and started leaving their own cities, returning to nomadic life or acting as mercenaries themselves. In a remarkable collection of cuneiform diplomatic records, these renegades are termed Habiru, a term that may be related to the root of “Hebrew.”
But worse was yet to come for the Egyptian empire. By 1200 BCE a series of disasters was causing the whole system of empires, from Egyptian to Babylonian to Hittite, to collapse. Eminent archaeologist Eric Cline documents this in his recent bestselling book 1177. It was triggered first by climate change, as this part of the world got drier, and then mass migration as climate refugees moved south from Anatolia and east across the Mediterranean. This was described in Egyptian records as the invasion of the “Sea Peoples,” probably mostly such refugees as they are often depicted pulling carts full of their families—not the typical invading military force. One groups of these Sea Peoples, called Pileshet in Egyptian, became the Philistines who settled on the coast of Israel and Phoenicia and ended up dominating part of the Southern Levant. These are the enemies described in Judges and Samuel!
This mysterious crisis ended the Hebrews’ Egyptian oppression, and it was later retold as an escape from Egypt in the land of Egypt itself, rather than from the power of Egypt in Canaan.
But Why Turn it Inside Out? The Power of a Journey
From the most reliable sources it looks as if the Egyptian empire’s collapse and release of its imperial subject territories was a moment of liberation in Canaan. Contemporary archaeological and written evidence from the Late Bronze Age (particularly 1400-1200) show people there champing at the bit to be free of Egyptian domination. So why isn’t it remembered in the Bible as happening the way it actually did, in Canaan? Why did they need to reverse it?
The most likely answer lies in how people understand, and talk about, change when they aspire to become something new. One of the most powerful images of change is a journey from one place to another. Whether Odysseus or Gilgamesh traveling to the end of the world or pilgrims or immigrants traveling to America, the quest to a new place is a powerful archetype. Indeed, not only did the Romans tell a similar story about themselves–the classical Latin epic the Aeneid is the story of how the Romans are actually Turkish refugees fleeing the defeat of Troy–but so does Abraham. In Genesis 12 God commands him to get up and leave his homeland of Ur, in Mesopotamia, to go to a new place God will show him: the land of Canaan.
And idea of being outsiders, people who had undergone a journey from elsewhere, likely took hold because the tribes that became Israel had started to see themselves as separate from their neighbors. Now, in practical terms they were Canaanite–they spoke the same North-West Semitic Canaanite type of language, ate the same food, and lived in the same kind of houses as their neighbors. And as we have seen, the Israelites of the 9th century BCE still wrote about worshiping Asherah and Baal alongside Yawheh in their own inscriptions. Later the prophet Jeremiah would accuse the people of Judah of being old-school Canaanites whose children “remember
their altars and sacred posts (Hebrew ‘asherehem, literally “Asherahs”) by the luxuriant trees and on high hills.” (Jer 17:2)
At the same time, there really were some Canaanites who had migrated to, and then out of, Egypt. So a combination of historical experience and powerful narrative archetypes meant there was a real basis for the story of liberation from Egypt to take the form of a quest–and a conquest. The quest to a new land was an image of change, and the idea of being foreigners who achieved the violent conquest of the natives was a way of understanding the Israelites as the superior side in local conflicts between Canaanites. This, at least, may be the most likely way that Israel became a nation of immigrants in their own land.
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[…] disregard the story as worthless because of this, there is still much to be gleaned from it. Seth Sanders does just this in a post entitled “The Exodus Inside Out.” For example, he notes that there is power in the story of a journey, and in the case of the […]