Scholars say Bible's version of Exodus probably isn't true

http://detnews.com/2001/religion/010...ion-212248.htm


- By Teresa Watanabe / Los Angeles Times


It's one of the greatest stories ever told: A baby is found in a basket adrift in the Egyptian Nile and is adopted into the Pharaoh's household. He grows up as Moses, rediscovers his roots, and leads his enslaved Israelite brethren to freedom after God sends down 10 plagues against Egypt and parts the Red Sea to allow them to escape. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and, under the leadership of Joshua, conquer the land of Canaan to enter their promised land.
For centuries, the biblical account of the Exodus has been revered as the founding story of the Jewish people, sacred scripture for three world religions and a universal symbol of freedom that has inspired liberation movements around the globe.
But did the Exodus ever actually occur?
On Passover Sunday this week, Rabbi David Wolpe raised that provocative question before 2,200 faithful at Sinai Temple on the west side of Los Angeles. He minced no words.
"The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all," Wolpe told his congregants.
Wolpe's startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understandings of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided.
After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua's leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua's fabled military campaigns never occurred -- archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.
Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan -- modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel -- whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites who took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt -- explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors over water rights and the like, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges.
"Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we've broken the news very gently," said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America's pre-eminent archeologists.
The modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the general public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze'ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua's conquests ever occurred. In the hottest controversy today, Herzog also argued that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described as grand and glorious in the Bible, was at best a small tribal kingdom.
In a new book this year, "The Bible Unearthed," Israeli archeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University and archeological journalist Neil Asher Silberman raised similar doubts and offered a new theory about the roots of the Exodus story. The authors argue that the story was written during the time of King Josia of Judah in the seventh century B.C. -- 600 years after the Exodus supposedly occurred in 1250 B.C. -- as a political manifesto to unite Israelites against the rival Egyptian empire as both states sought to expand their territory. The young Israeli king's growing conflict with the newly crowned Pharaoh Necho, the book argues, was metaphorically portrayed through the momentous and probably mythical struggle between Moses and the pharaoh.
Dever argued that the Exodus story was produced for theological reasons: to give an origin and history to a people and distinguish them from others by claiming a divine destiny.
Some scholars, of course, still maintain that the Exodus story is basically factual. Bryant Wood, director of The Associates for Biblical Research in Maryland, argued that the evidence falls into place if the story is dated back to 1450 B.C. He said that indications of destruction around that time at Hazor, Jericho and a site he is excavating that he believes is the biblical city of Ai support accounts of Joshua's conquests. He also cited the documented presence of "Asiatic" slaves in Egypt who could have been Israelites and said they wouldn't have left evidence of their wanderings since they were nomads with no material culture. But Wood said he can't get his research published in serious archeological journals.
"There's a definite anti-Bible bias," Wood said.
The revisionist view, however, is not necessarily publicly popular. Herzog, Finklestein and others have been attacked for everything from faulty logic to pro-Palestinian political agendas that undermine Israel's land claims. Dever -- a former Protestant minister who converted to Judaism 12 years ago -- says he gets "hissed and booed" when he speaks about the lack of evidence for the Exodus, and regularly receives letters and calls offering prayers or telling him he's headed for hell.
Many of Wolpe's congregants said the story of the Exodus has been personally true for them even if the details are not factual: when they fled the Nazis during World War II, for instance, or, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Daniel Navid Rastein, a Los Angeles medical professional, said he has always regarded the story as a metaphor for a greater truth: "We all have our own Egypts -- we are prisoners of something, either alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, overeating. We have to use (the story) as a way to free ourselves from difficulty and make ourselves a better person."
Judaism has also traditionally been more open to non-literal interpretations of the text than, say, some conservative Christian traditions.
"Among Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, there is a much greater willingness to see the Torah as an extended metaphor in which truth comes through story and law," said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That's when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University's archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank.
The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua's conquests in the 13th century B.C. and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers.
If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys' final results were published three years ago.
The settlement research marked the "turning point" in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed Egypt's voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 B.C. inscription did mention them in Canaan. Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries B.C.
Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three different texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of pharoah's charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sunk to the bottom of the sea.
And some of the story's features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of California, Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a "formulaic genre of catastrophe" found in other Near Eastern texts. One ancient treaty between an Assyrian and Aramaic king, for instance, noted that violations would be punished by gods sending down locusts and hail.
Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. "People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections," she said. "That wasn't considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across."
Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would amount to a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, fortified with fortresses along the way.
Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said "you'd have to be a bit crazy" to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a blitzkrieg military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan. But Schiffman, chairman of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, still maintains that a significant number of Israelite slaves fled Egypt for Canaan.
Wood argued that the 600,000 figure was mistranslated and the real number amounted to a more plausible 20,000. He also said the early Israelite settlements and their similarity to Canaanite culture could be explained by pastoralists with no material culture moving into a settled farming life and absorbing their neighbors' pottery styles and other cultural forms.


Reference: http://detnews.com/2001/religion/010...ion-212248.htm

Toto

This story and a related book review were dealt with in these two prior threads:

http://www.infidels.org/electronic/f...ML/000397.html

http://www.infidels.org/electronic/f...ML/000428.html

There's an article about the similarities between the stories in the Bible, the NT, the Qur'an and the Mahabharata, here:

http://www.geocities.com/freethoughtmecca/intolmes.html

Read especially at the bottom of the page.

d
Thanks for the info and sorry for the recycle.

Toto

No problem. Here's another article. There seems to be pitched academic warfare going on between Dever and Finkelstein. I doubt if we've heard the last of it.

http://www.latimes.com/living/20010510/t000039549.html