This post is in response to an exchange between Paulk and myself in the 'Bible Unearthed' thread. Paulk rightly pointed out that the mention of The Estate of Rameses in Exodus 1.11 could be an anachronism as there are other clear anachronisms in the Bible. But, my argument here is that the Rameses reference was taken as true and accurate because the archaeological data can support a mid 13th century BCE Exodus better than it can support a mid 15th centiry BCE Exodus. My opinion is that neither of the two dates can be suported with any great certainty but that the 13th century BCE date is the more likely.
Despite more than a century and a half of archaeological excavations in the Near East and Palestine in particular, archaeologists have failed to find a single shred of evidence to support the Exodus or the Military Conquest of Palestine.
This has prompted the Syro-Palestinian (his term) archaeologist and biblical scholar William Dever to state that the Exodus is a
‘Dead Issue’. (Dever
‘Qom, Khirbet El’ in
The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Archaeology in the Near East, Eric M. Meyers (Editor), American Schools of Oriental Research vol IV (1997) pp 391-2.).
The fact is, it is no longer possible to harmonise the Hebrew Bible with the archaeological data in regard to Exodus event.
Scholars use literary and archaeological sources in an attempt to determine whether the Exodus was a real historical event.
The first thing to establish in investigating the historicity of the Exodus event is to determine when it was said to have happened. The dating of the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible is given in 1 Kings 6:1:
‘In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the temple of the LORD.’
The date of Solomon’s reign is worked out by synchronising the characters mentioned in the Bible that are known from external texts, and working from the genealogies in the Bible, we get the 4th year of Solomon’s reign pinned down to 967 BCE, this obviously puts the Bible’s date of the Exodus at 1447 BCE. It should also be noted here that the Bible is the only place that King Solomon is mentioned, he is not mentioned in any texts anywhere outside the Bible and there hasn’t been a single stone of his ‘Temple’ found anywhere either.
The enslavement, Exodus, and the Military Conquest of Palestine as portrayed in the Bible are described as huge events involving millions of people and many different nations. Scholars now have at their fingertips an abundant amount of literary sources from the very time that the Bible claims that the Exodus, the desert wanderings, and the Conquest of Palestine happened.
Regarding the Literary sources, the Hebrew Bible is the only text that mentions the Enslavement in Egypt, the Israelite Exodus, and the Military Conquest of Palestine. However, the Hebrew Bible is not the sole source we have for reconstructing the background of Syria-Palestine in the early 2nd millennium BCE onwards.
The earliest important texts are the Egyptian Execration texts from c. 1800 BCE, these were written on potsherds and described many different enemies of Egypt, including Palestine and Phoenicia. In these texts we learn all sorts of names of princes and places, and the way the rulers names are formed provides clues about their ethnic origins and the ethnic structure of the population. (M. Noth,
The History of Israel, SCM Press, London 1958 p 113) If the Bible’s dating is correct, then 1800 BCE is not much later than the time that Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat rose from humble beginnings to a highly prominent position in pharaoh’s court.
Then there are the Mari Texts, these are dated to approximately the same time as the Execration Texts or slightly later and consist of an extensive archive of the Kings of Mari. They contain legal economic and political correspondence between Kings of Mari and give a good amount of information about contemporaneous Syria.
Next we have the Amarna Letters that date from the 14th century BCE. The political situation in the Near East during the Late Bronze II period (1400-1200 BCE) has been extremely well described by this collection of tablets. These tablets, written mostly in Akkadian, were found in the ruins of a site built by Akhenaton (Amenophis IV) sometime during the first half of the 14th century BCE. No one knows for sure how many tablets were actually found since it has been suggested that some were subsequently lost or destroyed. Today some 382 tablets are housed in museums, of these known tablets, 350 are letters of correspondence between various kings and vassals to the pharaoh. Although some of these letters are from Near Eastern powers independent of Egypt (Babylonia, Mittani, Alasia (probably Cyprus), Assyria, Arzawa and Hatti (the Hittites), most are from vassal chiefs or rulers living in Syria-Palestine. Some 150 of the letters come from Palestine proper. A small minority of the letters originated in Egypt. (John C. H. Laughlin,
Archaeology and the Bible, Routledge, London, 2000, pp84-86)
By Bible chronology, these letters were written just after the Exodus from Egypt and the Military Conquest of Palestine by Joshua and co. But, the Amarna letters are silent regarding anything that the Hebrew Bible claims happened in this era.
The same can be said for the other texts we have, such as the Nuzi tablets and the Ugarit texts. Essentially, the Israelites are unknown to the cultures that have left tens of thousands of records from the very place and time that the Hebrew Bible says all sorts of wonderful epic events happened. None of these texts mention anything at all about Israel, we have no mention of any of the Bible characters, and not one single event in the Bible receives any mention in any extant Near Eastern texts. Therefore, the conclusion is that contemporary literary sources for a mid 15th century BCE Exodus do not support the Hebrew Bible’s dating for the Exodus from Egypt.
The next logical step would be to look for the earliest mention of ‘Israel’ outside of the Bible, and this can be found in the victory stele of pharaoh Merneptah dated to 1207 BCE. But, whether this ‘Israel’ is the Israel of the Hebrew Bible is another matter. The stele includes a list of enemies conquered in Merneptah’s campaign in c.1212 BCE in Palestine, the mention of ‘Israel’ is the only name that is preceded by the Egyptian determinative that represents a people and not a land. The other names on the list were all acknowledge lands, this suggests that the ‘Israel’ mentioned on the stele had not yet entirely settled in Palestine.
If we look solely at the stele then there is absolutely nothing her to suggest that the ‘Israel’ mentioned was ever in Egypt, in fact, attempts by scholars such as F.J. Yurko and Roland de Vaux, have absolutely failed to make the link. Problematic for the Bible guys is that the battle with Merneptah is not mentioned in the Bible.
An honest conclusion is that all that can be said for certain about the Israel in the Merneptah stele is that at the end of the 13th century BCE an Egyptian scribe listed a group of people living in Canaan that were collectively known as ‘Israel’. (J Maxwell Millar and John J Hayes,
A History of Ancient Israel and Judah SCM Press, London 1986, p68)
Also, it is reasonable to say that there is no way to link the ‘Israel’ in the stele to any form of religious worship or even if this ‘Israel’ is related to the ‘Israel’ that emerged under David and Solomon some 200 years later (Niels Peter Lemche Hebrew, in
The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1992 vol 3 p95).
If the Merneptah Stele refers to our biblical Israel, it suggests that they were a relatively new group on the Palestinian scene, as they had not yet become a settled nation. If the Exodus had took place in the mid 15th century BCE then surely Israel would have been happily settled in Palestine 250 years or so later, and would certainly have been mentioned in many more external texts.
So, this is really all there is to say about the literary sources. We have a huge amount of texts to illustrate the political and social background of the ancient Near East, yet the Israel of the Bible and the events associated with her entry onto the world stage are totally ignored by recorded history.
So what about the archaeological evidence for a mid 15th century BCE Exodus? Remember that the ‘Conquest’ cannot be separated from the Exodus; it is, apparently, the last of a three part redemptive action by God, Exodus-Wanderings-Conquest (Raymond Dillard & Tremper Longman,
An Introduction to the Old Testament, Zondervan, Michigan, 1978). So we have a Military Conquest occurring forty years after the Exodus from Egypt, which should mean that there would be evidence of two things at the end of the 15th century BCE:
First, there should be evidence of widespread conflict and destruction in the cities mentioned in the Bible that were supposedly conquered by Joshua and his armies.
Second, there should be signs of a new population entering the land, signs such as new settlements, new material culture, and a sudden cessation of previous material culture conquered peoples.
There is nothing at all to support any of these two claims at the end of the 15th century BCE, which is where we would expect to find a conquest if the Exodus was in 1447 BCE. Also, there is no archaeological evidence to support any Hebrews being in Egypt in the mid 15th century BCE, no evidence to support the wandering in the desert for forty years and no evidence to support a military conquest of Palestine at that time either.
If there is no evidence of a mid 15th century Exodus, is there any evidence to suggest that the Exodus happened but not when the Bible said it did? Well there is a clue in the Bible that suggests another date for the Exodus. In Exodus 1:11 the mention of the store cities of Pithom and Rameses suggests that the Exodus must have happened some time after the commencement of work on the construction of these cities.
The building of the ‘Estate of Rameses’ cannot have been before 1304 BCE, as no pharaoh before that was ever called Rameses. The date of Rameses II’s reign in the High Chronology is 1304-1238 BCE, Middle 1290-1224 and the Low 1279-1213. (Baruch Halpern
The Rise of Ancient Israel Biblical Archaeology Society, Washington 1992 p.90)
There seems to have been some confusion at this site over that dating and naming of the ‘Estate of Rameses’. There is no doubt that the ‘Estate of Rameses’ was named after Pharaoh Rameses II, the inscriptions found at the site itself are evidence of this. I am preparing to start a thread named ‘there’s more evidence for Rameses II than there is for Jesus’; this will contain detailed chronological evidence.
The site of the city of Rameses was built on the location of the Hyksos capital of Avaris, which was rebuilt and made the capital again by Sethos I and Rameses II, and called by the latter the ‘House of Rameses’. The authenticity of the tradition is confirmed by the fact that the capital was referred to as ‘House of Rameses’ only until the 11th century BCE, after which it was called Tanis. (John Bright,
A History of Israel SCM Press, London 1972 edition p.119)
It has been suggested that the references to Pithom and Rameses in Exodus 1:11 could be anachronistic, well it definitely is anachronistic. Even if the reference to Rameses is accurate then the mention of Pithom is still anachronistic. According to Exodus 1:11, Pithom should be seen as a city comparable to Rameses. This is historically impossible, as Pithom was only used as the name of a city in the Saite period, i.e. the 7th century BCE onwards. Pithom means ‘the house of Atum (the god)’ and although this was known prior to the Saite period as the name of temples and temple estates belonging to this god, the name was never connected with cities (Niels Peter Lemche,
Is It Still Possible to Write a History of Ancient Israel? in V Phillips Long,
Israel’s Past in Present Research Eisenbrauns, Indiana, 1999, p.398).
Besides this, archaeologists working at Tell el-Maskhuta in north-eastern Egypt have found clear evidence that this was the ancient city of Pithom and that it was founded by Pharaoh Necho II between 609-606 BCE, a good survey of this can be found in J.S. Holladay’s
The Wadi Tunrilat Project. The Excavations of Tell el-Maskhuta. Malibu CA 1982.
The archaeological evidence cannot support the two cities in Exodus 1:11 as ever being occupied, or even existing, at the same time. One part of the reference seems to belong to the 2nd millennium BCE and another to the 1st Millenium BCE. (Millar and Hayes, page 69)
This is by no means the only anachronism in the Bible’s Exodus myth IF the mid 15th century BCE is the date that the Bible demands. In the Book of Numbers chapters 20 & 21, the Exodus group wander around Edom and Moab and these two kingdoms were unknown before the 13th century BCE (Bright, p121).
If we at least take the Rameses reference as being a memory of an authentic historical event, then we can make a far better case for there being a 13th century BCE Exodus. We know from the Bible that the Israelites left Egypt and wandered for forty years in the desert before entering Palestine by means of a military conquest. We also know, from the Merneptah Stele, that there was a group of people in Palestine who are known as ‘Israel’ by the end of the 13th century BCE, and we know that archaeology lends some support to the theory of a 13th century BCE Exodus.
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of the sudden appearance of hundreds of new settlements in the central hill country of Palestine at the Late Bronze Age / Early Iron Age transition. However, there is nothing that has been discovered so far that has identified the new settlers by name. But if we take into account the evidence of the Merneptah Stele, which places an ‘Israel’ in Palestine at the end of the 13th century, and also the biblical narratives that associate the Israelite tribes specifically with the central hill country, it is at least plausible that the Israelites were connected in some way with the sudden appearance of these new settlements.
It should be emphasised that scholars only promote a 13th century BCE date for the Exodus NOT because they have good evidence for it, they only promote it because it is more plausible at that time. The Bible is simply too unreliable to be of much use in reconstructing Israel’s origin.
The Bible itself gives good evidence for rejecting it as a reliable historical source. For example, there is the problem of the amount of people said to be in the Exodus group, which, in my opinion, verges on the absurd. If taken literally, the claim is that a group of 70 people (Exodus 1:5) multiplied into a nation of 2-3 million in around 430 years! We know that this is impossible to achieve in 430 years, it is even more absurd to expect this population growth in four generations (Genesis 15:16). John Bright in his
A History of Israel states in a footnote on p.130 that ‘The reader can figure that two and a half million people marching in an old fashioned column of fours would extend for some 350 miles!’ We know that this would stretch all the way across the Sinai Desert and back again, the numbers involved in the Exodus, if the event happened at all, must be smaller. Indeed, the word used for ‘thousand’ (‘elef) can be translated as a tribal subunit, which would drastically reduce the numbers involved (Bright p.130).
A more realistic figure is given by A. Lucas in
Palestinian Archaeology Quarterly 1944, pp 164-166, he estimates on the basis of the then (1944) rate of population growth in Egypt that 70 men would produce 10 363 offspring in 430 years. Population growth has only fairly recently began to grow quickly and only as a result of industrialisation, urbanisation and technological advances.
The Bible cannot even agree on how long the stay in Egypt was. The Bible gives conflicting accounts of how long the Israelite enslavement in Egypt was. We have a stay in Egypt of 430 years (Exodus 12:40, &12:41) then we have a round figure of 400 years in Genesis 15:13b and again we have another conflict in Genesis 15:16 that states they were in Egypt for four generations (M. Noth, The History of Israel, SCM Press, London 1958, p114), 75 people multiply to 2 million in four generations is just a little far fetched.
Archaeology also makes a mockery of a lot of a great deal of the Bible, contrary to what some websites promote. Regarding the military conquest, the late Yigael Yadin excavated Hazor and believed that he had found evidence that the Israelites had destroyed the city, which he believed confirmed Joshua 11:10:11
10 At that time Joshua turned back and captured Hazor and put its king to the sword. (Hazor had been the head of all these kingdoms.) 11 Everyone in it they put to the sword. They totally destroyed them, not sparing anything that breathed, and he burned up Hazor itself.
Most archaeologists today date the destruction of Hazor to 1250 BCE, which appears to be a bit early to have involved Joshua (Dever in Shanks p.31). The reason for this is that at the site of Lachish a destruction level was dated to 1220 BCE, this would fit the Joshua account. But recently, scarabs of the later Ramesside pharaohs have been found which means that this particular destruction level has now been dated to 1150 BCE or later. It is impossible that Joshua could have led both these campaigns, which were over 100 years apart; in fact, neither of these destructions can be linked with any confidence to the Israelites (Dever in Shanks p32).
In my opinion, and what my research is beginning to lean toward, is that we are never going to find any evidence for the Exodus, Wanderings or Military conquest in the archaeological sources. What we may be able to do is to locate these events only in literary sources. It is looking increasingly likely that these events, enslavement, exodus, wanderings and conquest, are pure invention. For example, the Joshua narrative advocates the Israelite’s right to the land at a time when their right to that land was disputed. So, both the myth of the promise of the land (Genesis 12:1) and the conquest were simply made up to support the Israelites claim to the right to live in Palestine.
It is an often-quoted old chestnut from apologetic sites that archaeology confirms time and again the events of the Bible. This is basically untrue. Archaeology cannot explicitly tell us anything about any Bible event it can only imply that things were possible, Binford calls this inference justification, we can justify the inference that these events happened by using archaeological data, but you really have trouble proving anything with certainty. For example, you could find dozens of trumpets beside the walls at Jericho, that doesn’t mean that the trumpets had anything to do with the walls tumbling down. (I don’t remember the name of the author of this example)
Because the Bible is a product of faith, its main aim is not to report and record historical facts, this is why the biblical texts cannot be always be harmonised with archaeological remains.
In conclusion then Paul, this is just a very brief outline of some scholars’ opinions regarding the Exodus and other events. This is a massive area of research, and none of the leading scholars support the Bible as being totally accurate, the best they do is promote the Bible as having ‘kernels’ of history within it. Every single book I have read on this subject has massive problems to overcome as soon as the author attempts to harmonise the Bible accounts with the archaeological data.
I would be happy to expand on any of the topics covered here.
Best Wishes
Brian
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