Read Rabbi's intro (in blue) and the 4 passages that follow, then answer the questions (bold italic) in the comment section.
As a child, I specifically remember the fantastic images of
Passover. The mean Pharoah battling with Moses, the plagues, the chariots, the
splitting of the sea – all of these components and more thrilled me. But I
suppose it was in my early adolesence when it occurred to me that the whole 10
plagues thing seemed utterly far fetched. It can’t be true I thought.
But it never occurred to me that the whole thing – you know,
Moses and the Israelites and slavery and the Exodus – didn’t happen. That lightning bolt of a proposition
did not even occur to me until I was in rabbinic school and a teacher spilled
the beans. My first response was much like Dennis Prager’s, which is, by the
way, about the only time I’ve ever agreed with anything this staunch right wing
radio host has said. “[The] Jewish people would not have survived, let alone
died for their faith, if they had not believed that the Exodus
really happened. It takes much more than metaphors for a small, dispersed
and horribly persecuted people to survive for thousands of years.” An emotional
argument to be sure, but hardly convincing when there is no shred of evidence
proving that there was a mass transfer of slaves from Egypt to Canaan. Or is
there?
This virtual study session is devoted to pondering this
question: did the Exodus as written in sefer Shemot – the book of Exodus –
actually occur in history? Or is it, instead an origin myth? “Myths are not merely
explanations, but also function to assure, encourage, and inspire. They are
also literary creations: narrative epics, full of drama and romance, of novelty
and imagination, of quest and conflict. But while often having great literary
merit, origin myths should not be thought of as the work of a few creative
geniuses. They are, instead, the product of untold thousands of narrators who,
in telling and retelling a myth, have embellished it here, dropped a character
there, transposed two incidents, amplified a cryptic part, given greater motive
or justification to an action, and so on.”
Here’s a question for you: does it matter to you whether or
not the Exodus is history or myth? That is, does the possibility that trhe
Exodus as you’ve come to learn about it never happened? Does it shake your
faith? Does it make the story harder now to hear? To tell? To celebrate?
Wolpe, the first author, made quite a splash in April of
2001 when he gave a sermon on Passover morning. “Everybody was in shock,"
reported Elazar Muskin, rabbi at the Orthodox congregation Young Israel of
Century City. Muskin, a contributing writer to The Journal,
set aside his prepared sermon and instead addressed the issues Wolpe raised. At
synagogues throughout the area, many had similar reactions. "Everybody was
talking about it," said a congregant at Stephen S. Wise Temple. "Many
people were upset."
Even at progressive shuls on Saturday morning, congregants
were asking, "Did he have to do it during Passover?"
1.
How would you feel if I gave a sermon on
Passover like Wolpe did?
2.
This happened 15 years ago. What do you think
the reaction would be now?
3.
How does the cultural climate affect your sense
of this controversy?
4.
Wolpe writes in his essay, “The Torah is not a
book we turn to for historical accuracy, but rather for truth. The story of the
Exodus lives in us.” What’s your take on this contention?
Sperling puts it right out there. “In short, the traditions
of servitude in Egypt, the tales of the Israelites wandering in the desert, and
the stories of the conquest of the promised land all appear to be fictitious.”
His certainty is compelling. And so is his hypothesis that “the biblical
writers invented the idea that the Israelites lived in Egypt in order to impel
them to maintain their distinctiveness in Canaan. And the story of servitude in
Egypt is an allegory of servitude to Egypt. Our ancestors, among others, did
perform forced labor for Egyptian taskmasters, but they were never slaves in
Egypt.”
1.
Does Sperling’s notion that our early ancestors
created the Exodus story to maintain their distinctiveness convincing to you?
2.
How does Sperling’s theory change your Seder?
3.
Do the first two essays cohabit easily, or do
they create doubt or confusion?
Dennis Prager categorically rejects Rabbi Wolpe’s central
declaration. Prager can’t bring himself to seriously entertain the idea that we
were not slaves in Egypt. He states,
“Logic, however, does strongly argue for the historicity of the Exodus
story.”
1.
What are Prager’s logical conclusions?
2.
Isn't his true motivation his faith and not
logic?
3.
Does Prager’s logic appeal to you more than
Sperling’s historical contentions?
Friedman, the fourth author does not appeal to faith. “There is no archeological evidence against
the historicity of an exodus if it was a smaller group who left Egypt. Indeed,
significantly, the first biblical mention of the Exodus, the Song of Miriam,
which is the oldest text in the Bible, never mentions how many people were
involved in the Exodus, and it never speaks of the whole nation of Israel. It
just refers to a people, an am,
leaving Egypt.” Friedman contends that the Exodus story is real – it just had a
smaller cast. “Western Asiatics, were in fact living in Egypt and were
traveling to and from there for centuries. And the evidence indicates that the
smaller group among them, who were connected with the Exodus, were Levites. The
Levites were members of the group associated with Moses, the Exodus, and the
Sinai events depicted in the Bible.” What he doesn’t say, of course is that
it’s all conjecture. The fact stands that there is no evidence.
1.
Does the Levite story make sense to you? Is it
appewaling?
2.
Does Friedman’s article feel a tad reductionist
to you?
3.
If the Exodus does tell the story of a band of
former Canaanites called Levites, then what about the rest of the story? The
sea, the plagues…?
So if you’ve read through the 4 articles, which one troubles
you?
Which one feels right to you?
Have you developed a new sense of the complexities of the
Exodus story?
Please please please add your thoughts, critiques,
questions. Let’s have a dialogue.
Passage #1
Did the Exodus Really Happen?
Three years ago on Passover, I explained to my congregation that according to archeologists, there was no reliable evidence that the Exodus took place--and that it almost certainly did not take place the way the Bible recounts it. Finally, I emphasized: It didn't matter.
Some argue that there is no evidence to back my assertion. Endlessly reiterated is the mantra "absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence." In other words, the fact that we have never found a single shred of evidence in the Sinai does not mean the Israelites were not there.
This is nominally true. We have found Sinai evidence of other people who predated the Israelites, and while it is improbable that 600,000 men crossed the desert 2,500 years ago without leaving a shard of pottery or a Hebrew carving, it is not impossible. (Together with women and children, that makes a couple of million, who could actually fill the distance between Egypt and Israel by standing in line.) One rabbi quoted to me the mystical tradition that one tribe was deputized to clean up every trace, which at least shows the Jewish tradition's unease with Sinai's preternaturally clean slate.
However, the archeological conclusions are not based primarily on the absence of Sinai evidence. Rather, they are based upon the study of settlement patterns in Israel itself. Surveys of ancient settlements--pottery remains and so forth--make it clear that there simply was no great influx of people around the time of the Exodus (given variously as between 1500-1200 BCE). Therefore, not the wandering, but the arrival alerts us to the fact that the biblical Exodus is not a literal depiction. In Israel at that time, there was no sudden change in the kind or the volume of pottery being made. (If people suddenly arrived after hundreds of years in Egypt, their cups and dishes would look very different from native Canaanites'.) There was no population explosion. Most archeologists conclude that the Israelites lived largely in Canaan over generations, instead of leaving and then immigrating back to Canaan. Some people tendentiously seized on my words and used them to deny that today's Israelis have a right to their land. This is equivalent to saying, "I don't own my house because I have lived in it forever," rather than having moved from the next town. If the Israelites grew up among the ancient Canaanites, they have an unassailable historical claim. They have been there for longer than recorded history. The probability is, given the traditions, that there were some enslaved Israelites who left Egypt and joined up with their brethren in Canaan. This seems the likeliest scenario, a beautiful one that accords with the deeper currents of biblical tradition. The Exodus was a very small-scale event with a large, world-changing trail of consequences.
Some people are surprised, even upset, by these views. Yet they are not new; such views have been a staple of scholarship, even appearing in popular magazines, for many years. Not piety but timidity keeps many rabbis from expressing what they have long understood to be true. As a scholar who took me to task in print told me privately over lunch, "Of course what you say is true, but we should not say it publicly." In other words, tell the truth, but not when too many people will be listening.
There are three primary reasons this is important to talk about:
1. A tradition cannot make an historical claim and then refuse to have it evaluated by history. It is not an historical claim that God created us and cares for us. That a certain number of people walked across a particular desert at a particular time in the past, after being enslaved and liberated, is an historical claim, and one cannot then cry "unfair" when historians evaluate it.
For well over a century linguists, archeologists, historians and Bible scholars have been looking at the Bible in a new way. They understand how much of it is a product of history; how many stories were shared with other cultures whose languages and histories we have just come to understand. We can now appreciate how the vast canvas of the Bible shows different levels of Hebrew language, as would be expected of a work that developed over time. Most people are not aware that there are different manuscripts of the Bible, which show a "transmission history"--that is, constant recopying and variation. Our earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible are only 1000 years old. Even the Talmud (completed some fifteen hundred years ago) sometimes quotes verses differently from the verses as we have them.
That God's hand is in the Bible is a pillar of belief for many, myself included. That human hands are in there as well does not detract from its sanctity, but reminds us that God and human beings are partners in this world in ways that we did not, when we first learned our Bible lessons, even imagine.
2. Truth should not frighten one whose faith is firm. As the Israeli Orthodox rabbi and scholar Mordecai Breuer writes: "Unable to withstand the contradiction (between faith and modern biblical scholarship) most men of faith consciously avoid biblical scholarship in order to safeguard their traditional belief." Those who hold that people should never explore such questions have very circumscribed notions of why God gave us brains. The Talmud ringingly declares: "God's seal is truth" (Shabbat 55a).
3. Knowing the Exodus is not a literal historical accounting does not ultimately change our connection to each other or to God. Faith should not rest on splitting seas. At the Passover Seder we declare: "In each generation, each individual should see himself as if he (or she) went forth from Egypt." The message does not depend upon whether 3 or 3 million individuals left.
In a book explaining how orthodox scholarship views the Torah, Rabbi Shlomo Carmy writes that he was always troubled by the omission of the exodus from Egypt in the book of Chronicles. Why does the concluding book of the Hebrew Bible elide this central story? His answer is in a prophecy by Jeremiah (16:14-15) that one day the liberation from Babylonian captivity will be more important than the liberation from Egypt. History will give way to messianism. In the future the very story of the exodus is omitted, for it is not the specifics of history, but the theme of liberation and of God's providential care that is the theological center.
The Torah is not a book we turn to for historical accuracy, but rather for truth. The story of the Exodus lives in us. Standing at the Passover Seder, I see in my mind's eye the Israelites marching out of Egypt, the miracles at the sea, and the pillar of fire leading them through the fearful night. I feel an enormous gratitude to God. For although we cannot know exactly how God has saved our people, we have been saved. Despite unimaginable odds and opposition, the Jewish people have seen nation after nation buried under the debris of history while our nation lives. Here is where archeology, history, scholarship and scripture meet: Am Yisrael Chai, the nation of Israel remains alive.
Passage #2
Were the Jews Slaves in Egypt?
The Torah devotes more than four books to the proposition that the Israelites came to Canaan after having been subjugated in Egypt for generations, and yet there is no archaeological evidence to support that they were ever in Egypt.A prolonged Egyptian stay should have left Egyptian elements in the material culture, such as the pottery found in the early Israelite settlements in Canaan, but there are none.
In short, the traditions of servitude in Egypt, the tales of the Israelites wandering in the desert, and the stories of the conquest of the promised land all appear to be fictitious.
This means that the biblical traditions are allegories invented deliberately to obscure the fact that the Israelites were native to Canaan. But why should Israelite writers have invented traditions of foreignness when these would seem to undercut their claims to the land in which they lived? When were such traditions invented, and by whom?
Whereas foreignness traditions appear in the text of the eighth-century prophet Micah—“For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam” (Micah 6:4)—and the prophet Amos—“Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7)—there is no mention of it in one of the earliest extant biblical texts—a long, pre monarchic poem preserved in Deuteronomy 33 and set in the southern region of Israel in the period of the nation’s origins. Nor is it highlighted in the account of the eighth-century Judahite prophet Isaiah.
Biblical historian Robert Carroll has explained the discrepancy by pointing to a “northern tradition of the Exodus,” which was virtually unknown in the south. Between 920 and 720 B.C.E., the land of Israel was divided into two separate kingdoms, Judah in the south with its capital at Jerusalem, and Israel in the north with its capital at Samaria. With the fall of Samaria to the Assyrian rulers of Northern Iraq in 720 B.C.E., many northern Israelites found refuge in Judah, bringing with them their native literature and traditions, among them the traditions of the Exodus, which depicted the Israelite people as foreigners invading from Egypt.
Why, then, did this tradition of foreignness arise in the north? Why does the Torah tell us that the priesthood, the sacrificial cult, the tabernacle, the festivals, most of the covenant traditions to serve Yahweh exclusively, and the laws governing most of life’s activities originated outside the promised land? What explains this recounting in Leviticus 18:1–5: “Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: I am Yahweh your god. You shall not emulate the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelled, nor shall you emulate the practices of the land of Canaan where I am taking you. Not their statutes shall you follow but my norms you shall observe and you shall take care to follow my statutes. I am Yahweh, your god?”
The reason, I believe, was to enable the Israelites to assert their distinctiveness.
During this period, the Israelites were not unique in believing that a “fear of god” or what we now call “ethics” and “morals” was divinely commanded. The Ugaritians of ancient Syria, part of Canaanite culture, praised the legendary King Daniel for “getting justice for the widow, and adjudicating the case of the fatherless.”
The Israelites were also not alone in linking moral law and ritual law. About the same time that the prophet Amos condemned his people for trampling the heads of the poor into the dust (Amos 2:7) and equally for giving wine to the Nazirites (Amos 2:12), the author of the Babylonian work Shurpu catalogued the Mesopotamian sins, which included cheating on weights and measures, omitting the name of God from an incense offering, disarranging an altar, marking boundaries falsely, and eating the taboo food of a city.
Given so many commonalities, the Torah’s repeated denial of Israel’s Canaanite heritage and its assertion that Israel’s most important religious institutions had originated in the desert—the “no-man’s land” (Jer. 2:6) where Yahweh found the people (Deut 32:10)—strengthens the claim of Israelite distinctiveness.
In other words, the biblical authors were attempting to foster Israelite religious, social, and political solidarity. As long as the Israelites were conscious of their foreignness, they would be able to maintain their alleged religious and moral superiority. As foreigners with no roots in Canaan or Egypt, they would find it easier to heed the admonitions of the authors of the Torah to reject Canaanite and Egyptian practices.
We must then ask: Why does the Bible make reference to the Israelites’ 430 years of servitude in Egypt (Exod 14:30)? The 430-year figure fits remarkably well with the chronology of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. The overthrow of the Hyksos by Ahmose (1570–1546) in about 1560 B.C.E. was followed by extensive Egyptian military campaigning in Syria-Palestine, and Ahmose’s successors continued his policy. After Thutmose III (1504–1450) won a decisive victory at the battle of Megiddo (in the north of present-day Israel), he established an administrative system in Canaan that survived until the end of the Late Bronze Age. Only with the invasions of the sea peoples did the old order begin to break down.
I believe the 430-year figure reflects the duration of Egypt’s empire in Asia from a Canaanite perspective. The group that became first-millennium Israel had indeed been subjugated by the pharaohs, but in their native land, not in Egypt.
We can glean some of the truth from a report (called El Amarna letter 365) written by Biridiya, ruler of the large Canaanite city of Megiddo, to the king of Egypt. It reads in part: “May the king, my lord, be apprised concerning his servant and concerning his city. Now, I alone am cultivating in Shunem and I alone am bringing mas-people [involuntary laborers]. But see! The city rulers who are with me do not do as I. They are not cultivating Shunem, and they are not bringing mas-people.
In other words, the pharaoh required Birdidiya to round up the inhabitants of Canaan to cultivate the fields in shunem. If these people were cultivating royal land, they had good reasons for resentment, because they could not work their own fields, which would have required cultivation at the same time.
This was not the only highly unpopular institution of forced labor that ancient near eastern rulers demanded of the local populace. The royal governor Kibri-Dagan wrote in Syria in the 18th century B.C.E.: “My lord ordered me to assemble male and female minors into the fortress…. When I sent to the towns of the Jaminites, the sheik of Dumeti answered… ‘Let the enemy [that is,”you the governor, or the king himself”] come here and pull us out of our towns!’ At harvest time in the towns of the Jaminites, there is no one to help me.”
Thus, when Exodus 1:11 says, “So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor,” the passage is not describing the subjugation of Israelites in Egypt, but subjugation of the larger populace—Israelites included—to serve the needs of outside rulers.
Why, then was the slave tradition introduced? I believe it served an important theological purpose: If divine action could free the Israelites from slavery, then God was entitled to exclusive worship by them. As written in Exodus 20:2: “I the Eternal am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from that slave barracks. You shall have no other God besides me” (my translation).
In short, the biblical writers invented the idea that the Israelites lived in Egypt in order to impel them to maintain their distinctiveness in Canaan. And the story of servitude in Egypt is an allegory of servitude to Egypt. Our ancestors, among others, did perform forced labor for Egyptian taskmasters, but they were never slaves in Egypt.
Passage #3
Did the Exodus happen?
With Passover here, it is a propitious time to address the central issue of the holiday: the Exodus. Specifically, did the Exodus happen?
My friend Rabbi David Wolpe announced some years ago that it didn’t matter whether the Exodus occurred. In his words, writing three years later: “Three years ago on Passover, I explained to my congregation that according to archeologists, there was no reliable evidence that the Exodus took place — and that it almost certainly did not take place the way the Bible recounts it. Finally, I emphasized: It didn’t matter.”
“The Torah,” he continued, “is not a book we turn to for historical accuracy, but rather for truth. The story of the Exodus lives in us.”
I cite Rabbi Wolpe because of my respect for his intellectual honesty, for his Jewish seriousness, and because what he says represents the thinking of many modern Jews.
I do, however, differ. I think it does matter if the Jews were slaves in Egypt and whether the Exodus took place.
First, the Jewish people would not have survived, let alone died for their faith, if they had not believed that the Exodus really happened. It takes much more than metaphors for a small, dispersed and horribly persecuted people to survive for thousands of years. And this will be equally true in the future. If Jews come to believe that one of the Torah’s two most important stories (the other, as I will explain, is the Creation) never happened, it is hard to imagine that they will devote their lives to Judaism — no matter how much “truth” a myth may contain. The ancient Greek stories, as, for example, those of Homer, also contained “truth.” But they didn’t perpetuate Greek culture, which was wholly taken over by Christianity. And few, if any, Greeks outside of Greece have ever retained a strong Greek identity thanks to Homer’s stories.
Second, as noted, the Exodus is one of the two essential stories not only of the Torah, but of Judaism and Jewish history. Our prayer book regularly contains the phrases zecher l’ma’asei bereshit and zecher litziyat mitzrayim — “to commemorate the acts of Creation” and “to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt.” Just as Christianity is founded on two events — the atoning death and the Resurrection of Jesus, so Judaism is predicated on two events: Creation and Exodus. The Shabbat Kiddush consists of two paragraphs. The first recounts Creation; the second, the Exodus.
Apparently God (or, if you prefer, whoever gave the Ten Commandments) thought the Exodus significant enough to open the Ten Commandments with reference to one event — the Exodus: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.” Even one who doesn’t believe that God gave the Ten Commandments would have to explain why reference to something that never happened would so move the ancient Israelites. In addition, the two versions of the Ten Commandments — the one from God in Exodus and the one from Moses in Deuteronomy — differ with regard to the reason for Shabbat. The first version’s reason is the Creation (by keeping the Shabbat, we reaffirm weekly that God created the world); the second version’s reason is the Exodus (“You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt” — and only free people can have a day of rest each week).
Third, if the Exodus never happened, what biblical story did? Did Abraham live? Did Moses? Was there a revelation at Mount Sinai? Did the Jews enter the Promised Land? Did King David live? According to scholars such as Niels Peter Lemche, an internationally recognized biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, “The David of the Bible, David the king, is not a historical figure.”
Are they all fables? If so, it’s really hard to make the case for taking the Bible particularly seriously, let alone base one’s identity and values on it.
Fourth, that we cannot prove that the Jews were in Egypt means little to me. Many biblical stories that were once dismissed as fables were later shown to have a historical basis. Therefore, my belief in the Exodus story does not depend on archaeologists telling me whether they have concluded that Jews were enslaved in and later left Egypt. In any event, what archaeological evidence can one expect to find? The Egyptians didn’t record defeats. And the Jews were in the desert/wilderness with temporary dwellings that would hardly leave traces after 3,000 years.
Logic, however, does strongly argue for the historicity of the Exodus story. What people ever made up as ignoble a past as the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible relate about the Jews? Every other people in the world made up a grand and powerful history for themselves. They were all mighty and courageous. We Jews, on the other hand, were slaves, idol worshippers, rebels and ingrates. Why make that up? And why make up that so many non-Jews were heroes — such as the daughter of Pharaoh, the Egyptian midwives and the pagan priest Jethro? Why make up that Moses was raised an Egyptian? Why credit God for the Exodus rather than bold Israelites?
At the Passover seder, you have good reason to believe avadim hayeenu b’eretz mitzrayim, “we were slaves in the land of Egypt.” Recite it with conviction.
Passage #4
Evidence for the Exodus story
Richard Elliott Friedman, who holds a Th.D from Harvard, is the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and was a visiting fellow at Cambridge and Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. He is the author of seven books, including the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible? and Commentary on the Torah. He participated in the City of David Project archeological excavations of biblical Jerusalem and served as a consultant for PBS’s Nova: The People of the Covenant: The Origins of Ancient Israel and the Emergence of Judaism and A&E’s Who Wrote the Bible? and Mysteries of the Bible.
Following the publication of Reform Judaism’s Spring 2013 edition in which Professor David Sperling and Rabbi David Wolpe asserted that the biblical Exodus is a fiction, you wrote expressing concern to the magazine editors. Why?
After reading those articles, your readers may have concluded that scholarship shows that the Exodus is fictional, when, in fact, that is not so. There is archeological evidence and especially textual evidence for the Exodus.
I respect Professor Sperling and Rabbi Wolpe. They were understandably following the claims of some of our archeologists. Those archeologists’ claims that the Exodus never happened are not based on evidence, but largely on its absence. They assert that we’ve combed the Sinai and not found any evidence of the mass of millions of people whom the Bible says were there for 40 years. That assertion is just not true. There have not been many major excavations in the Sinai, and we most certainly have not combed it. Moreover, uncovering objects buried 3,200 years ago is a daunting endeavor. An Israeli colleague laughingly told me that a vehicle that had been lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was recently uncovered under 16 meters—that’s 52 feet—of sand. Fifty-two feet in 40 years!
Still, all of us would admit that two million people—603,550 males and their families, as the Torah describes—should have left some remnants that we would find. But few of us ever thought that this number was historical anyway. Someone calculated long ago that if that number of people were marching, say, eight across, then when the first ones arrived at Sinai, half of the people would still be in Egypt!
There is no archeological evidence against the historicity of an exodus if it was a smaller group who left Egypt. Indeed, significantly, the first biblical mention of the Exodus, the Song of Miriam, which is the oldest text in the Bible, never mentions how many people were involved in the Exodus, and it never speaks of the whole nation of Israel. It just refers to a people, an am, leaving Egypt.
It wasn’t until a much later source of the Exodus—the so-called priestly source, some 400 years later—that the number 603,550 males was added to the story.
So are you suggesting that a smaller group may have left Egypt? And if so, who might they have been?
Yes. At a recent international conference entitled “Out of Egypt” on the question of the Exodus’ historicity, one point of agreement, I believe, among most of the 45 participating scholars was that Semitic peoples, or Western Asiatics, were in fact living in Egypt and were traveling to and from there for centuries. And the evidence indicates that the smaller group among them, who were connected with the Exodus, were Levites. The Levites were members of the group associated with Moses, the Exodus, and the Sinai events depicted in the Bible. In the Torah, Moses is identified as a Levite. Also, out of all of Israel only Levites had Egyptian names: Moses, Phinehas, Hophni, and Hur are all Egyptian names. We in the United States and Canada, lands of immigrants, are especially aware of how much names reveal about people’s backgrounds. The names Friedman, Martinez, and Shaughnessy each reveal something different about where they came from. Levites have names that come from Egypt. Other Israelites don’t.
Present scholarship on the question of who wrote the Bible bolsters this picture that the Levites were the group who departed Egypt. The Five Books of Moses were not written by Moses but by authors of four main texts, known as J, E, P, and D. Three of the four texts—E, P, and D—are traced to authors who were Levite priests, and these three are the only ones telling the story of Moses, Pharaoh, and the plagues. The fourth main source, called J, the one that shows no signs of having been written by a Levite priest, makes no mention of the plagues. It just jumps from Moses’ saying “Let my people go” to the story of the event at the sea.
The Levite authors also devote more ink in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to the Tabernacle—the Tent of Meeting, which held the ark in the Exodus account—than they do to any other subject. The non-Levite text, J, doesn’t mention it. This is also significant because the architecture of the Tabernacle and its surrounding courtyard matches that of the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II, for which we have archeological evidence, as was shown by Professor Michael Homan in a brilliant combination of archeology and text (To Your Tents, O Israel, 2005). Professor Sperling had emphasized in the RJ article that, archeologically, there are no Egyptian elements in Israel’s material culture. But in the Tabernacle, we do have those Egyptian elements. Egyptian culture is present, but, again, only among the Levites, not all of Israel.
Likewise, only the Levite authors emphasize that males have to be circumcised, which was an Egyptian practice. They write of God commanding Abraham to make circumcision the sign of the covenant (Genesis 17), and they include the commandment for all males of Israel to do so (Leviticus 12:3.) Only the non-Levite source, J, does not command it. Again, the connections with Egyptian culture are there—but only among the Levites.
And the Levite authors are also the ones who explicitly insist that Israel must not mistreat aliens (foreign residents). The first occurrence of the word “Torah” in the Torah, in Exodus 12, says, “You shall have one Torah for the citizen and the alien.” The Levite sources say it about 50 more times, and several times tell us why: “Because we were aliens in Egypt!”—We know how it feels. And, again, the non-Levite source, J, doesn’t command this. This most explicit reflection of the Egyptian experience in Israel’s culture occurs in all of the Levite sources and not in the non-Levite source.
So if you’re talking about the Levites rather than all of the Israelites, the argument archeologists have made that we haven’t found evidence of Egyptian cultural influence on the Israelites is not true. It is present in the Egyptian names, circumcision practices, the teachings about aliens, and in the design of the Tabernacle.
Is there any other evidence that the Levites left Egypt at the time of the Exodus?
Yes, and it comes from one of the earliest writings in the Bible, the Song of Deborah, composed in Israel in the 12th or 11th-century B.C.E. After the Canaanites suffer a major defeat, Deborah summons the victorious tribes of Israel. In uniting the tribes, which constitutes the founding event of Israel’s history as a nation in its land, 10 of the tribes are summoned—but noticeably absent is Levi. Their absence is perfectly consistent with all of the other facts we have observed. The Levites weren’t there in Israel yet; they were in Egypt. Think of this: The two oldest texts in the Bible are the Song of Deborah and the Song of Miriam. The Song of Deborah, in Israel, doesn’t mention Levi. The Song of Miriam, in Egypt, doesn’t mention Israel!
If the Levites were latecomers to Israel, how did they convince the Israelite tribes to adopt the Exodus story as their own?
The Levites were not people to whom one said “No.” Four different biblical texts connect them to violent acts. Levi is one of the brothers who massacre the city of Shechem for the violation of Dinah (Genesis 34), and he is also cursed for his general violence in Jacob’s deathbed testament (Genesis 49). The Levites slaughter the people associated with the golden calf incident, thus following Moses’ command to put them to the sword (Exodus 32:26–28). And in the poem at the end of the Torah (Deuteronomy 33), God is asked to “pierce Levi’s adversaries’ hips, and those who hate him, so they won’t get up.” These four texts come from four different authors. So basically everyone knew: You don’t mess with the Levites.
So they reached an agreement: The Levites got the priesthood, which included some cities (Joshua 21:13) plus a tithe (10%) of Israel’s produce (Leviticus 27:30). One of the Levites’ main tasks as priests was to teach Torah to the Israelite people. Deuteronomy 33:10 says, “They’ll teach your judgments to Jacob and your Torah to Israel.” Leviticus 10:11 commands that they are to teach what God spoke through Moses. Naturally, when the Levites taught Torah, they taught the tradition they had brought with them out of Egypt. And that is how every Israelite child learned, “We were slaves in Egypt and God brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” Much later, this Torah passage was placed in the haggadah—which is how most of us know it today.
And that is how a historical event that happened to the Levite minority became everybody’s celebration—how we all came to say that we were slaves in Egypt, although that was not the experience even of most Israelites of the period. It’s not so different from practicing, say, the American cultural tradition of Thanksgiving, which most Americans do, even though most U.S. citizens are not descended from Pilgrims or Native Americans.
How else did the Levites influence Jewish thought?
The Levites worshipped the God Yahweh, while the Israelite tribes worshipped the God of Canaan: El. Once the Levites arrived on the scene, the tribes needed to make a decision as to which God they would worship—Yahweh or El. They could have decided to worship both, in the manner of the pagan peoples around them who worshipped more than one god. They could have developed a mythology in which Yahweh was the son of El, or El the son of Yahweh, just as the pagans did when they said that Ba’al was the son of El. Alternatively, they could have decided to worship only El or only Yahweh. Instead, the tribes decided that El and Yahweh were one, in essence saying, “the same God by a different name.” That explains why two of the Levite-authored sources (E and P) both developed the point that God was known as El until the time of the Exodus, and then God revealed to Moses that his true personal name was Yahweh (Exodus 6:2–3 and Exodus 3:15). El and Yahweh were one and the same.
This decision was a crucial step toward the victory of monotheism over pagan religion. Who knows how long it would have taken—if ever—to have developed monotheism as we know it in Judaism if we had spent our first few centuries believing in two primary deities?
So, what we have been discussing here turns out to be vastly more important than just the question of whether the Exodus was historical. If the picture that I’ve been describing based on the facts that are known to us is correct, then those events were foundational to Judaism ever after.
Given the centrality of the Exodus story to Jewish tradition, does it really matter if the Exodus was history or a foundational myth of Judaism?
My rabbi used to tell me as a child that even if we could prove that biblical events were not true, the Bible still contained great lessons.
Over time, though, I’ve come to the opposite conclusion. History matters.
First, history is part of our legacy. The Jews, in fact, invented the writing of history. Prior to the court history of King David in Second Samuel, there was no history writing anywhere on Earth. We Jews haven’t taken enough cognizance of this. We’ve accepted the prevailing notion that the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., was the father of history, when in truth the court history of David, probably written in the ninth or eighth century B.C.E., preceded Herodotus by some 400 years.
Second, history is exhilarating. Think of the excitement we feel when an archaeologist verifies or challenges something in the Bible and we read about it on the front page of The New York Times, like when Avraham Biran of the Hebrew Union College uncovered the “House of David” inscription, the very first confirmation of the dynasty of David in an archaeological artifact, just 20 years ago.
I’m not arguing that everything in the Bible is factual. I may not believe, for example, that the world was created in seven days, or that humanity began with two naked people and a magic tree and a talking snake. But real evidence exists that the Exodus is historical, with text and archaeology mutually supporting one another. What lies next for us is to give due consideration to this evidence and refine it further in our work.
