Chapter 29. Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest: The Biblical Story and the Archaeological Record

The books of Genesis to Joshua tell Israel’s founding story. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob receive the promise of the land. Seventy souls go down to Egypt. After 430 years of sojourn and bondage, Moses leads some 600,000 men on foot, besides women and children, out through the sea to Sinai. A conquest under Joshua follows. For believing Jews and Christians this narrative is sacred history. For modern archaeology it is a set of claims to test against the ground. For a third group of writers in the library (Freud’s successors, polemicists and Mehran Keshe) it is either a coded Egyptian memory or a fabrication. This chapter sets the three positions side by side, attributing each claim to its source.

The Biblical Outline and Its Numbers

The narrative’s own figures shape every later debate. Seventy people of Jacob’s household enter Egypt. Israel dwells there 430 years (Exod 12:40). At the Exodus about 600,000 men leave (Exod 12:37). Armstrong notes that when the Israelites looked back to their own golden age they saw the patriarchs “living on familiar terms with their god”, who guided their wanderings and spoke to them in dreams. The covenant with Yahweh at Sinai came only with Moses [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999, ch.1]. The Priestly source makes the same break explicit: God “appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them” (Exod 6:2-3) [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch.1 §2].

Mehran Keshe takes the numbers literally as a demographic claim. In Knowledge Seekers Workshop 520 he argues: “we know how many children can be reproduced. And … if you say, equal men and women, and they’re all (sexually) active, and all the children survive, scientifically, data tells us they cannot be more than 10,000. How did the Jews became 3 million in 400 years from 70? All lies.” Elsewhere in the same session he puts the ceiling at 15,000 (“even if like rabbits we do … even put it at twins”). He adds a military objection: if there were 600,000 men of fighting age, “this six hundred thousand (army) couldn’t (with) stand the pharaohs, that they had to escape from him?” He also cites “one of the historical books” for the claim that 600,000 soldiers marching four abreast would form a column 600 kilometres long [Keshe, KSW 520, #378232, (2:08-2:12), (2:24)].

What Archaeology Reports: Mazar and Smith

Amihai Mazar’s Archaeology of the Land of the Bible frames the debate as a spectrum. At one end is “the fundamentalist approach-which strictly adheres to the biblical text regarding the patriarchal traditions, the enslavement in Egypt, the Exodus, and the conquest of Canaan”; at the other is a position “which entirely negates any historicity in the biblical tradition, regarding it as fiction”. He confines himself to what archaeology can contribute, and warns that excavated data “can lead to different interpretations; such interpretations are often subjective and slanted toward a particular historical view” [Mazar, #68234, “The Material Culture of the Israelite Tribes in the Period of the Judges”].

He then goes through the conquest sites one by one. At Kadesh-Barnea, “thorough archaeological research … did not reveal even one sherd from the Late Bronze Age or Iron Age I”. The Arad Valley shows “no evidence of any Canaanite settlement of the Late Bronze Age”. Mazar thinks it most likely that the Arad stories “were formulated as a literary tradition of no historical value”. In Transjordan, “there is no archaeological testimony of an ‘Amorite’ state … which could have been conquered” [Mazar, #68234, “The Israelite Conquest of Canaan in the Light of Archaeological Evidence”]. At ‘Ai there was a long gap after the Early Bronze city, and the “lack of any Late Bronze Canaanite city at the site or in the vicinity contradicts the narrative in Joshua 8 and shows that it was not based on historical reality”; the story “can only be explained as being of etiological nature”. Jericho, by contrast, “cannot serve as decisive evidence to deny a historical nucleus”, and at Hazor, Lachish and Bethel archaeology “does not contradict” the stories. His overall verdict: “the conquest tradition must be understood as a telescoped reflection of a complex historical process in which some of the Canaanite city-states, weak and poor after three hundred years of Egyptian domination, were replaced during Iron Age I by a new national entity, Israel” [Mazar, #68234].

The positive evidence is the settlement wave. “Intensive archaeological surface surveys revealed an entirely new settlement pattern in Iron Age I. Hundreds of new small sites were inhabited” in Galilee, the hills of Samaria and Ephraim, Benjamin, the northern Negev and parts of Transjordan. There were about a hundred sites in Manasseh and about a hundred in Ephraim. Finkelstein estimated the population at about 60,000 [Mazar, #68234, “The Israelite Settlement”]. Mazar sees “a simultaneous, independent settlement of various regions by loosely related population groups … partly … indigenous and partly … from the periphery of the country”. He notes, however, that the Canaanite traditions in their material culture “do not necessarily point to the origin of the Israelites in Canaanite society”. He records the hypothesis linking early Israel to the Shasu, in whose land one Egyptian document names “Yahu” [Mazar, #68234, notes 55].

Mark S. Smith pushes the cultural argument further. Iron I pottery, scripts, the four-room house and the collared-rim jar are no longer thought to be distinctively Israelite. “It is at present impossible to establish, on the basis of archaeological information, distinctions between Israelites and Canaanites in the Iron I period”. His conclusion is direct: “In sum, Iron I Israel was largely Canaanite in character” [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch.1 §1]. For a judgement on the competing archaeological syntheses he points readers to W.G. Dever’s What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel, and to “the somewhat one-sided work of I. Finkelstein and N. [Silberman]” [Smith, #67245, notes to ch.1]. The Merneptah stele (c. 1208 BCE) is the anchor of the debate. It reads “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not”. Its scribe used the determinative for a people for Israel and the one for a land for Canaan, so that, in Smith’s words, “Israel was differentiated as early as 1200 from its Canaanite forebears” [Smith, #67245, ch.1]. Smith still counts “Israel’s early tradition of the Exodus from Egypt (Exod. 15:4)” and Yahweh’s southern sanctuary (Sinai, Paran, Teiman) among the features that are not Canaanite [Smith, #67245, ch.1]. The reference shelf summarises the current consensus: the Exodus “as described in the Torah, is not historical, even though there is a historical core behind the Biblical narrative” [Wikipedia: Sources and parallels of the Exodus].

The Traditional and Evangelical Position

The library’s conservative works keep Mosaic authorship and a historical Exodus. Norman Geisler’s survey dates the events precisely: “The events of Exodus cover the period between 1445 and 1405 B.C.” He argues that Moses wrote the book: “No other known person from that period had the time, interest, and ability to compose such a record” [Geisler, A Popular Survey of the Old Testament, #62050, on Exodus]. John Walton and Brent Sandy take a subtler view informed by ancient literary culture. “The book of Deuteronomy explicitly claims to preserve oral traditions originating with Moses as well as documents that he generated. There is no reason to doubt that Moses generated such documents or that they were preserved.” The archive “could have been expanded and revised over centuries”. The scribes who shaped the Pentateuch might have worked “as early as the judges period, but more likely later on in the monarchy (even if it were as late as the postexilic period it would not matter)”. Biblical authority, they argue, rests on Moses as the authority behind the words, not on Moses as the writer of a book in the modern sense [Walton & Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture, #65622, Part 1].

The Egyptian Theories: Freud, Osman, Greenberg

A long line of authors has argued that the Exodus remembers real events in Egypt but the Bible has misread them. Gary Greenberg sums up the founding thesis: “Sigmund Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, argued that Moses was an Egyptian noble who followed the Atenist beliefs of the heretic pharaoh, and he even identified Aten with Adonai” [Greenberg, The Moses Mystery, #81927, Introduction]. Ahmed Osman gives the details of Freud’s 1939 book. Freud held that the name Moses derives from the Egyptian mos, “child”, and that the birth story copies other hero myths. He proposed that a high official “probably named Tutmes”, a follower of the Aten religion, chose after the king’s death “the tribe of the Hebrews, who already lived in the land of Goshen in the Eastern Delta, to be his chosen people” and led them out in the Exodus [Osman, Moise, Faraonul Egiptului, #9487, introduction; Romanian edition, rendered here].

Osman goes further than Freud. “As Freud almost succeeded in demonstrating, Akhenaten and Moses were one and the same person.” The identification commits him to showing that the two had the same parents, birth date and place, and similar monotheisms. On his chronology, Akhenaten “was removed from power and fled to Sinai in 1361 BC, at the age of 34 or 35”. If he was Moses, “he was about 60 when he returned to Egypt and led the Exodus during the reign of Ramesses I” [Osman, #9487]. Greenberg proposes a variant: “Moses was the chief priest of the Aten cult and that at the time of Akhenaten’s death Moses fled from Egypt to avoid execution”. He dates the Exodus to 1315 BCE, with Moses born in 1395 BCE [Greenberg, #81927, ch.15]. His subtitle, The African Origins of the Jewish People, states the wider claim: Egyptian texts preserve a version of the Exodus that “reverse[s] the roles of Moses and the pharaoh, making Moses the cruel ruler”, and the patriarchal genealogies encode Egyptian dynastic and mythological history [Greenberg, #81927, ch.10]. Hopkins and Wallace-Murphy adopt the Osman line (“the arrival of Moses/Akenhaten’s people following the Exodus”). They note that David Rohl places the Exodus instead under the 13th-dynasty pharaoh Dudimose [Hopkins & Wallace-Murphy, Custodians of Truth, #70623, chs 2-3].

The Outright Rejections: Hitchens and Keshe

Christopher Hitchens states the sceptical case without qualification: “It goes without saying that none of the gruesome, disordered events described in Exodus ever took place.” He credits the archaeologists. “Israeli archaeologists are among the most professional in the world, even if their scholarship has sometimes been inflected with a wish to prove that the ‘covenant’ between god and Moses was founded on something” [Hitchens, God Is Not Great, #65383; Romanian ed. Dumnezeu nu este mare, #77051]. His moral charge rests on Exodus 32. After the golden calf, “the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men”. Hitchens calls this “a small number when compared to the Egyptian infants already massacred by god in order for things to have proceeded even this far”, and says it “helps to make the case for ‘antitheism'” [Hitchens, #65383, ch. on the Old Testament].

Keshe’s rejection, in KSW 520, rests on the absence of external records. “If you had a pharaoh disappearing under the ocean … why don’t we read it in Greek mythology, in Greek history, in other histories, the Persian Empire, in the Romans … There is no indication of such a thing.” “Where is the Babylonians who had all these papers and stones …? There is no name of any tribe existing in that time and a pharaoh disappearing in the (Red) Sea, with all his soldiers. It’s all fabrication.” He extends the claim to the plagues and the forty years of hunger: “Why it is never recorded anywhere?” [Keshe, KSW 520, #378232, (2:10-2:18)]. He holds that the Ten Commandments were “copied from another Babylonian king. It’s not theirs. And it was there 2,000 years before Christ”. He also holds that the Moses birth story reproduces that of an earlier king whose mother set him adrift in a basket and who “ruled for 48 years” [#378232, (2:18-2:22)]. He reads the spoiling of the Egyptians (Exod 12:35-36) as an instruction to deceive. In his paraphrase the last instruction was “Teach your men and women … how to deceive the Egyptians, to get their silver and gold before you leave town tomorrow”. He asks, “Why do you need silver and gold when you’re going to the desert?” [#378232, (1:28), (2:26)]. In the earlier Workshop 204 (28 December 2017) he gives a different account of Sinai. “All the knowledge had been given to Moses but he changed them and only brought down 12”. He says he was releasing “all the 24 Commandments”, and wishes Moses had kept only one: “‘thy shall believe in One Creator for all men,’ then things would have been different” [Keshe, KSW 204, #377847, summary and teaching].

Three Positions Compared

Key points

• Mazar finds “an outright conflict” between archaeology and the conquest stories in “southern Transjordan, Arad, ‘Ai, Yarmuth, and Hebron”, and no contradiction at Hazor, Lachish and Bethel. He reads Joshua as a “telescoped reflection” of a long process [Mazar, #68234].
• The material trace of early Israel is the Iron I highland settlement wave: hundreds of small villages, about 60,000 people on Finkelstein’s estimate. The Merneptah stele (c. 1208 BCE) gives the first mention of “Israel” [Mazar, #68234; Smith, #67245].
• Smith concludes that “Iron I Israel was largely Canaanite in character”, while keeping the Exodus tradition and Yahweh’s southern origin as distinctive features [Smith, #67245].
• Conservative authors keep Mosaic authority and date the Exodus to 1445-1405 BCE (Geisler). Walton and Sandy see “no reason to doubt that Moses generated such documents”, allowing for centuries of revision [#62050; #65622].
• Freud placed Moses among Akhenaten’s Atenists. Osman identifies Moses with Akhenaten himself. Greenberg makes Moses Aten’s chief priest, fleeing in 1315 BCE [#81927; #9487].
• Hitchens declares that none of the Exodus events “ever took place” and uses the Levites’ killing of 3,000 (Exod 32) as a moral charge [#65383; #77051].
• Keshe rejects the Exodus on the absence of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek or Persian records and on demographic grounds. He claims the Decalogue was copied from a Babylonian king and that Moses withheld 12 of 24 commandments, including “One Creator for all men” [#378232; #377847].