The Exodus Saga – 1

All Israel shared the background of the ancestors—all Israel had been slaves in Egypt. Whatever one’s biological ancestry, to be an Israelite meant that one’s ancestors—spiritual or emotive or collective ancestors—had risen from Egypt to conquer Canaan. YHVH(YHWH) liberated the Israelites from Egypt and executed a covenant with them. The covenant stipulated that, in return for their emancipation and for the gift of the land of Canaan, Israel would worship YHVH and obey his law. In Near Eastern culture, a sovereign who saved his subjects from ruin and gave them land merited loyalty. This nexus furnished the myth of the Passover, celebrated every spring as the green wheat broke ground. This was the story of how Israel came to be, and how it came into possession of Canaan. For without the conquest of Canaan, the Exodus would have been without a point.

The earliest Israelite Passover ritual already incorporated the pretense that the participants were in transition from Egypt to Israel, from bondage to freedom: The unleavened bread they ate was (and is) the “bread of affliction,” the unleavened bread that their ancestors ate on leaving Egypt. And the roasted lamb [1] they ate was the stuff of rugged campfires; it reflected the absence of basic amenities—since in civilized settings, meat was always boiled.  The ritual of the Passover, in sum, always presupposed the threshold location of the celebrant, between bondage and freedom, between Egypt and Canaan, in the realm of the uncivilized.

The difference between the early Israelite celebration and the Jewish festival is this: The Jewish celebrant in the Diaspora expresses hopes for national reintegration; the ancient Israelites knew, from the bleatings of the flocks and from the greening of the landscape all around them, that the festival would leave them in possession of the land of Canaan.

Yet modern scholarship divorces the Exodus from its completion in the conquest. For the relation of the Exodus to Israel’s settlement of Canaan is no longer as clear as it was to the Israelites of the Iron Age[2] . Neither the date of the Exodus nor the duration of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt can now be ascertained with any confidence. Consequently, we cannot accurately gauge the interval between the Exodus and the emergence of Israel in Canaan. More the pity: to the Israelite of the Iron Age, the events were all but simultaneous; this is the reason that the Book of Joshua locates Israel’s entry into Canaan at the time of the Passover (Joshua 4:19, 5:10–11). The historical uncertainty arises from the nature of our sources, and of the events reported. Endless generations of oral recital have made themselves felt in shaping the literature. The accounts—of J, E, P, D[3] , and other sources—differ in detail.[4]  And the story of the Exodus is so central to Israelite identity that changes in that identity almost unconsciously registered in the evolution of the story. Nevertheless, behind the Exodus story events can be discerned that, unlike those of the patriarchal narratives, can be termed historical in scale.

First, to the matter of dates. The Bible basically offers us a choice of various dates for the Exodus. First Kings 6:1 places the building of Solomon’s Temple 480 years after the Exodus, which would put the Exodus around 1450 BCE, smack in the reign of Thutmosis III, the Augustus of the Egyptian empire. The Bible also tells us that the Israelites grew from a clan of 72 males to a mighty “mixed multitude” of around 600,000 adult males during their stay in Egypt— the number is from the P source (Genesis 46:8–27; Exodus 1:5, 12:37; Numbers 1:18, 46–47, 26:4, 51). Other sources recall a stay of four generations (Genesis 15:16 [J or RJE]; Exodus 6:16–27 [P]), over the course of which such a population explosion seems implausible; or of 400 years (Genesis 15:13 [RJEP?]; cf. Exodus 12:40–41 [P]). 

At the end of the sojourn in Egypt, under the pharaoh of the oppression, the Israelites built the store-cities of Ramses and Pithom. Ramses was rebuilt as a capital in the reign of Ramesses II, in the 13th century BCE The pharaoh of the Exodus, who succeeded the pharaoh of the oppression (Exodus 2:23), and who seems to drown during the Exodus (Exodus 14:6–8, 10, 27–30), would then be Merneptah, Ramesses’ son and successor. Unfortunately, according to a hieroglyphic inscription known as the Merneptah Stele, or the Israel Stele, Merneptah already knew of an Israel living in Asia in the fifth year of his reign, around 1230 BCE Even assuming that the pharaoh of the Exodus didn’t drown, Israel cannot have left in the first year of Merneptah and then wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before turning up in Canaan in his fifth year.

So either one must divorce the Exodus from the conquest, as I shall try to do a bit later on, or one must remove the reference to the store-cities. The alternative, lately in vogue, is to claim that the Israelites built not Ramses, but the town of Avaris, the ancient predecessor of Ramses. But any such activity would have to be located at least 150 years before 1450 BCE—in which case, the pharaoh of the Exodus will not have been the immediate successor to the pharaoh of the oppression.

In short, one or another aspect of the biblical account will have to be jettisoned. Now, the question is, how shall we choose which aspects to retain?

The place to start is with the Book of Genesis, which tells us that Israel (Jacob) descended to Egypt in a time of famine and found that his son Joseph, who had been sold into slavery, had risen to be vizier there. Where in Egyptian history does this story belong?

Semitic slaves are attested in Egypt from the beginning of the second millennium on down. The Amarna 1etters clarify the context: Whenever warfare or drought wracked Asia, townsmen in Canaan sold their families to Egypt in exchange for grain.  [5] Sometimes these slaves rose to positions of considerable prominence in Egypt, often to major power.[6]

The universal experience of Canaanites, in other words, was that in times of famine, Canaanites were sent down to Egypt. And when the Canaanites were pastoralists, it was to the land of Goshen they went—the area where the Israelites settled. This is the background against which the myth of Israel’s descent into Egypt must be viewed.

Is the Joseph story set before that time, in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom [7] , when Semitic immigration into Egypt produced records of Semitic slaves and even Semitic officials in the Delta? At that time, the pharaohs based themselves in Thebes, some 350 miles south of the Nile Delta, so this creates a problem.

Does the Joseph story belong in the Hyksos  [8] era, when Semites rose to be nomarchs (kings of districts) and even pharaohs? These were the rulers of the XVth Dynasty; the Egyptian priest, Manetho , interprets the term Hyksos to mean “shepherd kings.” These Semitic “invaders” of Egypt—the invasion itself may have taken the form of a longstanding immigration into the Delta—expanded from their base in the Delta—at Avaris (Tell ed-Dab‘a on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile)—to control Egypt as a whole for about a century. Ahmose, the founder of the XVIIIth Dynasty, expelled the Hyksos , and relocated the capital again at Thebes. [9]  Does the Joseph story belong to the period after that expulsion, the period of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, when Egypt held sway not only over Canaan but over Asia as far as the Euphrates?.

NOTES:

[1]  See Ronald S. Hendel, “Sacrifice as a Cultural System: The Ritual Symbolism of Exodus 24:3–8, ” Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 101 (1989), pp. 366–390.
[2]  Iron I is the period of Israel’s emergence in Canaan, biblically the period of the Judges—1200–1000 BCE Iron II is the period of the Israelite monarchy, both the United Monarchy and the Divided Monarchy, and ends with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE
[3]  J, E, P and D are the names scholars give to the four principal textual strands that comprise the Pentateuch—J for Yahwist (Jahwist in German), E for Elohist, P for priestly code and D for Deuteronomist. JE, used below, designates an early combination of the two. R designates the redactor, or editor, who combined strands.
[4]  JE, for example has only eight plagues (Exodus 7:14–18, 20b–21a [blood]; 7:25, 8:1–11a [frogs]; 8:16–28 [flies]; 9:1–7 [pestilence among the livestock]; 9:13–29 [hail]; 10:1–19 [locusts]; 10:21–26 [darkness]; and 11:1–9, 12:21–27, 29–36 [death of first born]). J alone would have had fewer plagues still, as pestilence (dbr) and hail (brd) form a doublet, the latter affecting cattle supposedly killed by the former. The number grew to ten in the present text.
[5]  The principle that in times of famine one sold one’s children into slavery, and found grain in Egypt, is a telling one: Egyptian agriculture, after all, depended on the Nile flood rather than on the rainfall of western Asia. In one case of disastrous famine, related to the fall of the Hittite state in Anatolia and the collapse of urban Canaanite civilization at the end of the Late Bronze Age, Egypt alone was able to offer relief; see G. A. Wainwright, “Merneptah’s Aid to the Hittites,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 46 (1960), pp. 24ff.; M. C. Astour, “New Evidence on the Last Days of Ugarit,” American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965), pp. 253–258, on King Ammurapi of Ugarit forwarding Egyptian grain to Hatti.
A bit later, there is also evidence of shepherds entering Egypt in the vicinity of Goshen in order to graze their flocks. Under Seti II (1222–1216 BCE, high chronology), a frontier official related his readiness to admit the “nomadic tribes of Edom to the water holes of Per-Atum [biblical Pithom] of Merneptah Hotep-har-Maat of Tjeku, to sustain them and their [small?] cattle.”—Papyrus Anastasi 6.51–61, late 13th century; see “Egyptian Historical Texts,” transl. John A. Wilson, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), 3rd ed., ed. James Pritchard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 259; James H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (ARE), 7 vols. (1906; reprinted) 3.368. (An earlier case, indicating that the practice was typical, is found in Breasted, ARE 3.10–12.) The continuation of this text shows that the commerce was a regular feature of the Bronze Age.
[6]  For the present purposes, anachronisms are unimportant, merely a sign that the narratives were codified far later than the initial recollection of the relevant events—for example, the fact that the Egyptian king is referred to as the pharaoh (“big house,” a term first attested midway through the XVIIIth Dynasty), the alleged reliance of the patriarchs on camels, first domesticated outside Arabia in the 13th or 12th century, and the like, including toponyms. For Semites in power in Ramesside times, see S. Sauneron and J. Yoyotte, “Traces d’etablissements asiatiques en Moyenne Egypte sous Ramsés II,” Revue d’Egyptologie 7 (1951), pp. 67–70; A. Rowe, “Stelae of the Semite Ben-Azen” Annales du Service des Antiquitiés de l’Egypt 40 (1940), pp. 45–46. Note J. Vergote, Joseph en Egypte (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1959), pp. 203ff, for a Ramesside background to the Joseph story; Roland de Vaux, Early History of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), pp. 300ff. At the end of the XIXth Dynasty, Ramesses III reports (Wilson, “Egyptian Historical Texts,” ANET, p. 260) there was also a Canaanite (Horite) usurper on the throne.
[7]  The dating of the Middle Kingdom is disputed, but ran from the late third millennium to about 1700–1650 BCE
[8]   rulers of foreign lands
[9]  The war against the Hyksos was first successfully prosecuted by the pharaoh Kamose, who recovered the territory from Thebes up to the Faiyum. See Wilson, “Egyptian Historical Texts,” ANET, for the Carnarvon tablet and Karnak stele, p. 232f; for the new stele, probably a continuation of the former, p. 554f. For further texts, see Donald B. Redford, History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 36.