Is the Passover story true? As Wordsworth said, “to be mistaught is worse than to be untaught.”How anyone could believe that a story possessing such obvious mythical properties, so poorly substantiated and so soundly countered by the facts, would be God's choice of medium to convey the most important historical context on earth is beyond me. I never really bought into a large amount of the bunk in the OT, even as a Christian, and now, as an atheist, it seems as clear as a sign on one's forehead -- the scarlet letter "C" for credulity.
Let’s start with the prequel to the Exodus, the story of Joseph and his family. Excavations in the eastern delta of the Nile have revealed a gradual increase in Canaanite pottery, architecture, and tombs, beginning about 1800 B.C. As explained by Donald Redford, professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Toronto, in his book Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, these findings are broadly consistent with the tale of Joseph, the visits of his family to Egypt, and their eventual settlement there. 1 Archaeologists have identified the site of Avaris, the Egyptian city of that period that was the capital of a people known as the Hyskos, a name which translates from the Egyptian as “rulers of foreign land.” Inscriptions and seals bearing the names of Hyskos kings indicate that they were Canaanites. Although the Egyptian historian Manetho, writing in about 300 B.C. from an Egyptian perspective, asserts that Egypt was brutally invaded by the Hyskos, archaeologists believe the takeover was peaceful. However, the forceful expulsion of the Hyskos as described by Manetho is supported by other archaeological and historical sources. The most reliable evidence, according to Redford, suggests that Pharaoh Ahmose and his forces attacked and defeated the Hyskos in Avaris, and chased them out of Egypt into southern Canaan in 1570 B.C. 2
The Roman-Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, citing Manetho, equates the expulsion of the Hyskos from Egypt with the Exodus. As Abba Eban points out, “this is plainly impossible,” 3 in the context of the Biblical chronology. The Book of Exodus states that Hebrew slaves built the city of Pi Ramses (“House of Ramses”). According to Egyptian sources, the city was built during the reign of Ramses II, who ruled 1279-1213 B.C. In other words, the Biblical Exodus would have had to have taken place 300 years after the expulsion of the Hyskos. Of course there is also no evidence that the Hyskos were ever enslaved—or even Hebrews. Again quoting Abba Eban, “few modern scholars would go so far as to assert that the Hebrews and the Hyskos were the same people.” 4 If the Hyskos were not the Hebrews, what then, is the earliest non-Biblical reference to this people?
About a century ago, archaeologists found 350 tablets covered with cuneiform writing in the Akkadian language in the Egyptian village of El Amarna. These tablets, dating to the 14th century B.C., contain numerous references to a people whose name is Habiru (or alternatively Hapiru or Apiru) in the Akkadian language. The obvious phonetic similarity to “Hebrew” suggested to early scholars that the Habiru of the Amarna tablets and the Hebrews were the same people. However, subsequent archaeological findings as described by Niels Lemche, professor of Old Testament studies at the University of Copenhagen, in his book Prelude to Israel’s Past, indicated widespread use of this term throughout the near east over many centuries during the mid-second millennium B.C. The context of this usage makes clear that ‘Habiru’ “should not be understood as an ethnic group, but as some kind of social segment.” There is no reference to the religious beliefs of the Habiru. The totality of ancient documents discovered, reviewed in detail by Lemche, suggests ‘Habiru’ is best translated, depending on the context, as ‘bandit,’ ‘outlaw,’ ‘highwayman,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘fugitive,’ or ‘immigrant,’ without any suggestion of ethnicity. 5 Thus, despite the phonetic similarity, the Habiru of the Amarna tablets are not the Hebrews of ancient Israel.
The earliest known non-Biblical reference to Israel is on the 27th line of inscription on a 7.5 foot high granite slab found in Thebes, Egypt, and dating to 1207 B.C. 6 This commemorative stone monument was commissioned by the son of Ramses II, Pharaoh Merneptah, to commemorate his military victories in Canaan, and is known as the Merneptah Stella. Israel is listed as one of eight “border enemies” vanquished by Egypt. The literal translation of the relevant line of Egyptian hieroglyphics is “Israel is stripped bare, wholly lacking seed.” Although this claim is obviously an exaggeration, it is evidence that a group of people named Israel was living in Canaan during the reigns of Merneptah and presumably his father, Ramses II. What is most important, though, is the point emphasized by Israel Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and his colleague Neal Silberman, in their book The Bible Unearthed: “We have no clue, not even a single word, about early Israelites in Egypt: Neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri.” 7 Similarly, William Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, states in Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?: “no Egyptian text ever found contains a single reference to ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’ in Egypt, much less to an ‘Exodus.’” 8 The ancient Egyptians were such compulsive chroniclers, albeit biased, that it is inconceivable that they would not record any version of an event as momentous as the Biblical Exodus. We should at least expect some self-serving or biased accounts of this extraordinary event, but there is absolutely no reference to any exodus of Hebrew slaves in the voluminous Egyptian writings.
In addition, archaeological excavations do not support the Biblical Exodus story. Modern archaeological techniques are able to detect evidence of not only permanent settlements, but also of habitations of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world as far back as the third millennium B.C. However, there are no finds of a unique religious community living in a distinct area of the eastern delta of the Nile River (“Land of Goshen”) as described in Genesis. In addition, repeated excavations of areas corresponding to Kadesh-Barnea, where the Biblical Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty-eight years of wanderings, have revealed no evidence of any encampments. Finkelstein and Silberman point out that, although the sites mentioned in the Exodus story are real, archaeological excavations indicate that they were unoccupied when the Biblical Exodus would have taken place. For example, the Bible refers to messengers sent by Moses from Kadesh-Barnea to the king of Edom asking him to allow the Hebrews to pass through his land. However, the nation of Edom did not come into existence until the 7th century B.C. 9 Melvin Konner, anthropologist and teacher of Jewish studies at Emory University, sums it up this way in his recent book Unsettled, An Anthropology of the Jews: “Except for the Torah text, there is no decisive proof that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that they rebelled and walked away from the place, or that a leader such as Moses arose and took that people into the desert.” 10 Futhermore, what evidence we do have, as discussed above, contradicts the Biblical account. How, then, did this fable come to be written?
Finkelstein and Silberman present the plausible thesis that the Deuteronomistic version of the Exodus, which brings together and embellishes the chronicles in the first four books of the Torah, was written during the 7th century B.C. The intent of the story was to rally the inhabitants of Judah against Egypt, which had become its most powerful enemy as Assyrian hegemony waned. Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the evil pharaoh in the Exodus story was actually modeled after the domineering Psamethicus I, who reigned from 664 to 610 B.C., approximately during the time that the Deuteronomistic version was written. This account was “powerful propaganda” that created “an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams” in order “to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.” In fact, the Egypt described in the Deuteronomistic account is “uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psamethicus.” 11
According to Redford, the memories of the Canaanite Hyskos ruling Egypt and subsequently being driven out (though not enslaved and not Hebrew) most likely formed the basis for the Exodus story. 12 The sequence of plagues in the Exodus may be related to the ancient Egyptian belief that the inability to worship multiple gods causes illness. The Amarna tablets indicate that Akhnaten imposed monotheism on polytheistic Egypt during his reign between 1372 and 1354 B.C., allegedly causing the populace to suffer a variety of maladies, which abated with the restoration of polytheism by Akhnaten’s successor. 13 14 Jonathan Kirsh notes that the basket-in-the-bullrushes infant-Moses story is clearly a “cut-and-paste” plagiarism copied almost verbatim from a Mesopotamian text. 15 In the words of Daniel Lazare, the stories of infant Moses, the plagues, and final exodus are “unconnected folktales,” linked together “like pearls on a string.” 16 What we have, according to David Denby, is a “self-confirming, self-glorifying myth of origins,” with Moses as “the hero of the greatest campfire story ever told.” 17
Let this eccentric Passover Haggadah be your exodus from ignorance. Emancipate yourself from the enslavement of illusory beliefs. Our parents and grandparents didn’t know the Passover fable they passed on to us was totally contrived. We do. We can still celebrate our peoplehood, but we need to change the script. To quote a line from historian Isaac Deutscher’s essay, The Non-Jewish Jew, “the Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry, belongs to a Jewish tradition.” 18
References & Notes
- Redford, D.B. 1992. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 412.
- Ibid, 129.
- Eban, A. 1984. Heritage: Civilization and the Jews. New York: Summit Books, 20.
- Ibid, 20.
- Lemche, N.P. 1998. Prelude to Israel’s Past. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 139-141.
- Shanks, H. 2001. “A Centrist the Center of Controversy,” Biblical Archaeology Review, December, 41.
- Finkelstein, I. and Silberman, N.A. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. New York: Simon and Schuster, 60.
- Dever, W.G. 2003. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 12-13.
- Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001, 68.
- Konner, M. 2003.Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. New York: Viking Penguin, 3.
- Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001, 283.
- Redford, 1992, 412-413.
- Kirsch, J. 1998. Moses, A Life. New York: Ballantine, 179.
- Denby, D. 1998. “No Exodus.” The New Yorker, December 7 & 14, 185.
- Kirsch, 1998, 47.
- Lazare, D. 2002. “False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible’s Claim to History,” Harper’s, March, 41.
- Denby, 1998, 186.
- Quoted by Konner, 2003, 197. 3/3/04
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