Yes, there is historical evidence for the Exodus from Egypt

Ronald Hendel writes

Archaeologists and Egyptologists tell us that there is no evidence for the Exodus. This presents different problems for various types of biblical scholars. How do we make sense of the central narrative in the Bible if there is no evidence for it? If the Exodus didn’t happen, where did the story come from? Why would the ancient Israelites accept this as the story of their origins? I think it unlikely that such a central story would come from nothing. I will argue that the Exodus is a cultural memory of a historical era that really happened and for which there is (literally) tons of evidence.

Freedom from the Egyptian Empire: Exodus as cultural memory of the demise of Egypt’s 400-year rule over Canaan. Prof. Ronald Hendel

Benjamin Sommer writes

Friedman poses a straightforward historical question: Did the exodus from Egypt really happen? He notes that many scholars regard scripture’s narrative concerning Moses, Pharaoh, and the Israelites as a fiction concocted by authors who lived in the first millennium B.C.E., long after the events were supposed to have happened. After all, no archaeological evidence of the presence of Israelite slaves in Egypt has ever been found, much less evidence of their sudden liberation one early spring night in the Late Bronze Age.

This line of reasoning doesn’t impress Friedman. To be sure, some details of the exodus story cannot be historically accurate. For instance, the book of Numbers tells us that the liberated slaves included 603,550 adult males. If we extrapolate conservatively from this number, we would conclude that at least two million Israelites left Egypt, which would be a lot of missing slaves to go unnoticed by ancient Egyptian historians.

But ancient historians did not use numbers the way we do, so getting bogged down over what were probably intended as typological figures is hardly necessary. (Furthermore, some parts of the Bible suggest that the number of escaped slaves was far smaller.) The absence of specific references to Israelite slaves in Egypt is hardly surprising, since Egyptian texts do not indicate the precise ethnicity of slaves. Israelites would simply have been considered “Asiatic,” and references to Asiatic slaves abound in the relevant time period.

But Friedman goes beyond doubting the doubters. He brings together several converging lines of evidence that point toward a smaller exodus in the latter part of the second millennium…

Consequently, Friedman believes that there really was an exodus, but only of the Levites. In fact, he proposes, it is possible that the Levites were not originally part of the nation Israel; alternatively, they were separated from their Israelite brethren precisely by the fact of their sojourn in Egypt, a sojourn that the other tribes never experienced.

Friedman notes that the oldest parts of the Bible depicting Israelites in the Land of Canaan, such as the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, don’t include Levites in their list of Israelite tribes. Conversely, another very old poem, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, talks about the exodus but doesn’t specify that Israelites left Egypt. That poem’s closing verses identify arrival at a temple (“the sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands established”) as the ultimate goal of the exodus; thus, this poem reflects specifically priestly, Levitical concerns. All this leads Friedman to conclude that the Levites united—or perhaps reunited—with the Israelites only after they had left Egypt.

Exodus and Consciousness, Benjamin D. Sommer, Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2018

The Historical Exodus

Perhaps the Exodus was real but it involved mostly the Levites – see the fascinating idea here: The evidence for the Levites leaving Egypt and the introduction of YHWH into Israel. Prof. Richard Elliott Friedman.

See his book The Exodus.

How big was the historical Exodus from Egypt?

Michael S . Bar-Ron, November 23, 2017, writes

What is needed is a new understanding of the term אלף-eleph, as none of the above issues make any sense when אלף-eleph means a thousand. Yet all these verses and demographics recorded in TaNaKh make sense if the term אלף-eleph meant “clan chief” or “clan brigade” when human beings are being counted.

It will be seen below why the author sides with “chief” or “troop commander”. It is not only the same conclusion that academia have long arrived at, but one that can be explained well from a faithful Torah viewpoint as well, with full respect for the real addition being done in the tallies of the tribal censuses

The Good Torah Sense of the “Alpha-Eleph”

Also – Ben-Zion Katz writes

Many passages in the Bible characterize the Israelites as having a small population. Exodus 23:29-30, for example, states that one of the reasons God will not drive out the Canaanites from the Promised land all at once is “lest the land become desolate” because the Israelites will need time to “increase…and possess the land.”[6] Deuteronomy 7:7 states that the Israelites were “the fewest of all people.”[7] Finally, troop numbers mustered in later periods are lower than expected if 600,000 males of military age lived in the period of the wilderness. For example, Deborah is only able to raise 40,000 troops from six tribes (Judges 5:8).[8]

Many modern Bible commentators—Baruch Levine, for instance [11]—treat the number “600,000” as exaggerated. The number, they claim, is meant to express the great numbers of Israelites in the wilderness. The reason the number is “six hundred thousand” and not, say, a million or five hundred thousand is based on the fact that the Torah works with a sexigesimal (base 60) system (as was common in ancient Mesopotamia).

Alternative Approach: אלף means a Contingent: Another modern suggestion—first suggested by Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), is that אלף, usually translated “thousand,” should be translated like אלוף (troop or contingent.)[13]

Examples of this use of אלוף include Exodus 15:15, “clans of Edom (אלופי אדום),” and Gen. 36:15-30 (also in regard to Edom).[14] It is this possibility that I plan to explore here.

Aside from the fact that אלוף means contingent, in several instances in the Bible, the word אלף itself may not literally mean “thousand”:

…The above explains the counting for the individual tribes. When it comes to explaining the totals, I believe the best answer is to assume that a later scribe or editor misunderstood the earlier notation.

Thus, originally the text at the end of Numbers 1 may have read “598 אל(ו)פים (contingents) totaling 5 אלף (thousand) 550 [men].” Mistakenly assuming the term אלופים (or even אלפים) to have the same meaning as אלף in this context—when in reality the first meant “contingent” and the second “thousand”—a later scribe may have combined the two “numbers” yielding “603 אלפים ,” which was interpreted as 603,550.

The fact that this theory posits a later editor who misunderstood the distinction between אלופים and אלף and combined the terms, while not traditional, is not completely at variance with some of the later literary activity that is postulated to have occurred in the text of the Torah by a minority of traditional Bible commentators.[23]

From Recounting the Census: A Military Force of 5,500 (not 603,550) Men, Ben-Zion Katz, The Torah.com

View of Lawrence Schiffman

… The job of historians is to reconstruct as closely as possible from all available evidence what was happening in ancient times. Archaeologists who, based on their data alone, seek to conclude that there was no Exodus and there was no conquest have fallen into the same trap of the earlier archaeologists: that of proving or disproving the Bible.

Rather, our job is to take archaeological evidence and textual evidence, from Jewish and non-Jewish sources, and to put forward as historians what we think most likely occurred. Such an approach yields a very different picture. By accepting that there may indeed be Egyptian traditions of the Exodus independent of those passed down in the Bible, and by realizing that archaeological evidence favors the picture of the conquest presented in Judges, the most likely (but not proven) conclusion is that there indeed was an Exodus followed by a gradual conquest.

Is the Bible’s story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt accurate?, Lawrence Schiffman, The Jerusalem Post, 3/10/2022

Was There an Exodus? Joshua Berman, Mosaic Magazine, 3/2/2015

Many are sure that one of Judaism’s central events never happened. Evidence, some published here for the first time, suggests otherwise.

Despite the Bible’s apparent declaration that Israelite men numbered 600,000 when they left Egypt, a wealth of material in the Torah points to a number dramatically and perhaps even exponentially lower.

For one thing, the book of Exodus (23:29-30) claims that the Israelites were so few in number as to be incapable of populating the land they were destined to enter; similarly, in referring to them as the smallest nation on the face of the earth, the book of Deuteronomy (7:7) says they were badly outnumbered by the inhabitants of the land. The book of Numbers (3:43) records the number of first-born Israelite males of all ages as 22,273; to have so few first-born males in a population totaling in excess of two million would have required a fertility rate of many dozens of children per woman—a phenomenon unmentioned by the Torah and not evidenced in any family lineages from that period in other ancient Near Eastern sources.

…In Exodus 15:27, moreover, the Israelites are reported camping at a particular desert oasis that boasted 70 date palms—which, for a population of two million, would have to have fed and sheltered 30,000 people per tree!

… In biblical Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, the word for thousand—eleph—can also mean “clan,” or “troop,” and it is clear from individual occurrences of the word that such groups do not comprise anywhere near a thousand individuals. In the military context, the term may simply function as a hyperbolic figure of speech—as in “Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands” (1 Samuel 18:8)—or serve some typological or symbolic purpose, as do the numerals 7, 12, 40, and so on.

Was There An Exodus? Joshua Berman, Mosaic Magazine, 3/2015

Books

To This Very Day: Fundamental Questions in Bible Study, Rav Amnon Bazak. Maggid Books, 2020

The author shows that the Torah and Nakh (other books of the Tanakh, after the Torah) are far more historically accurate than skeptics once believed. And the sources of the Torah themselves are not “modern-ish,” post Babylonian exile inventions, but in fact really do come the period of Abraham and Sarah, and of Moses and the Exodus.

The Exodus: How it happened and why it matters. Richard Elliott Friedman, Harper One, 2017

Like a detective on an intricate case no one has yet solved, pioneering Bible scholar and bestselling author of Who Wrote the Bible? Richard Elliott Friedman cuts through the noise — the serious studies and the wild theories — merging new findings with new insight. From a spectrum of disciplines, state-of-the-art archeological breakthroughs, and fresh discoveries within scripture, he brings real evidence of a historical basis for the exodus — the history behind the story. The biblical account of millions fleeing Egypt may be an exaggeration, but the exodus itself is not a myth.

Friedman does not stop there. Known for his ability to make Bible scholarship accessible to readers, Friedman proceeds to reveal how much is at stake when we explore the historicity of the exodus. The implications, he writes, are monumental. We learn that it became the starting-point of the formation of monotheism, the defining concept of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Moreover, we learn that it precipitated the foundational ethic of loving one’s neighbors — including strangers — as oneself. He concludes, the actual exodus was the cradle of global values of compassion and equal rights today.

Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition
by James K. Hoffmeier, Oxford University Press, 1999

Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, Ernest S. Frerichs, Leonard H. Lesko, Brown University, 1997

This book – a collection of six papers given at a conference at Brown University – looks at new evidence of the Exodus: the Egyptian evidence.
The contributors include leading historians, archaeologists, Egyptologists and literary scholars. Join them as they discuss, among many other topics, whether the Exodus was a specific historical event or a wider phenomenon spread over time, whether wall reliefs at Karnak depict a battle between the Egyptians and the Israelites, and whether the Israelites emerged from within ancient Canaanite society.

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