No Stealing, Unless from Egyptians

Sorry, but this just struck me as an interesting couplet.

Precisely!

quote:

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The event is suppose to take place in Egypt, yet Egyptian sources know it not. On the morrow of the Exodus Israel numbered approximately 2.5 million (extrapolated from Num. 1:46); yet the entire population of Egypt at that time was only 3 to 4.5 million! The effct on Egypt must have been cataclysmic -- loss of a servile population, pillaging of gold and silver (Exod. 3:21-22, 12:31-36), destruction of an army -- yet at no point in the history of the country during the New Kingdom is there the slightest hint of the traumatic impact such an event would have on economics or society.

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[and later ...]

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... we can now genuinely speak of unanimity of the evidence. Whoever supplied the geographic information that now adorns the story had no information earlier than the Saite period (seventh to sixth centuries B.C.). The eastern Delta and Sinai he describes are those of the 26th Dynasty kings and the early Persian overloards: his toponyms reflect the renewed interest in the eastern frontier evidence for this period by fort building and canalization. He knows of "Goshen" of the Qedarite Arabs, and a legendary "Land of Ramessses." He cannot locate the Egyptian court to anything but the largest and most famous city in his own day in the northeastern Delta, namely Tanis, the royal residence from about 1075 to 725 B.C., ...

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-- Egypt, Cannan, and Israel in Ancient Times by Donald B. Redford

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Nor is the problem limited to the Exodus narrative. Studies of settlement patterns provide abundant and growing evidence repudiating the conquest model of Israelite origins, so much so that this model is no longer taken seriously by any of the leading voices in Syro-Palestinian archaeology.