The Writing Isn’t Always on the Wall

“Most researchers, and apparently with good reason, argue that to examine the historical truth of any event in the Bible, we must examine the external sources available to us from that period,” says Bible scholar Prof. Joshua Berman. “In the case of the Exodus, this is even more tempting, since Egypt offers a lot of findings from the relevant era.

“The event described in the Book of Exodus is monumental, and we would expect it to have left some trace in the abundant Egyptian inscriptions, yet we see no mention of Israel, of slaves rising up and leaving, and certainly no reference to Moses, the Ten Plagues, and so on. Therefore, the prevailing scholarly conclusion is that there is no historical truth in what our scriptures tell about the Exodus. However, I and others like me argue that there may be reasons why the Egyptians did not mention the Exodus, and to understand those reasons one must be familiar with the nature of Egyptian sources – where texts were found and where they were not, and what they do or do not write about. But beyond the question of Egyptian sources and the reasons they chose not to address the Exodus, we also use an entirely different methodology to approach the search for historical sources on the event.

“There is a reverse way to examine the historicity of the Exodus: we propose studying what Egyptian sources tell us about Egypt – that is, getting to know what Egypt says about itself – and then identifying the clear echoes of those accounts within the Torah. When you do this, you discover that the Torah is aware of what was happening in Egypt, and even appropriates Egyptian inscriptions in order to wage a cultural battle against Egypt. The way the Hebrew sources engage with Egyptian sources helps us understand where and when the biblical text was written.”

How does this cultural appropriation manifest itself?

“I’ll give you an example: if I use the phrase ‘the bombs bursting in air’ with an Israeli, they won’t know what I’m talking about. If I say that phrase to an American audience, everyone will understand that I’ve quoted a line from ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Any speaker or author who references another composition or casually mentions another work does so only assuming that their target audience understands what they mean. So if we see in the Book of Exodus unmistakable allusions to some of the most central and

important sources in Egyptian culture, we can infer that the text’s original audience understood these references – meaning they were familiar with Egypt.

“We cannot know every detail of how the text came to be: did it begin orally? Did it undergo editing and receive additions? Possibly – but I can say that at the very least, we can estimate that the primary material of the Book of Exodus was written by people who knew Egypt in the XIII century BCE.”

Can you give examples of the Torah’s cultural appropriation?

“At the Passover Seder we read in the Haggadah that God brought Israel out of Egypt ‘with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.’ This phrase appears several times in the Haggadah and its source is the Torah. There are many miracles and wonders in the Bible, and this phrase is never used to describe them. Divine actions are usually described differently – for example, through the phrase ‘the hand of God.’ Only in the description of the Exodus does the specific phrase ‘mighty hand and outstretched arm’ appear, and not by accident. When we examine Egyptian sources from the era of the empire’s zenith – the New Kingdom, dated between 1500 and 1200 BCE – we see in the inscriptions of the pharaohs of that period hundreds of descriptions of Pharaoh doing this or that ‘with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’: Pharaoh repelled the Libyans, his enemies from the west, with a mighty hand; he went out hunting and struck 120 elephants with a mighty hand; and one day as he walked, he found at his feet the largest diamond ever seen in Egypt and lifted it with his outstretched arm. From this we can understand that the biblical portrayal of the Exodus as an event that occurred ‘with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’ is a prime example of cultural appropriation. The Bible takes Egyptian royal propaganda and wages a cultural battle against it using that very same language.

“There are more such examples in the story of the Exodus, and even in other parts of the Book of Exodus. You can see it, for instance, in the Book of Exodus’ description of the Tabernacle. It is described as a tent with two spaces – two rooms. A similar structure can be found in illustrations from the time of Ramesses the Great, Ramesses II, who reigned for 80 years in the XIII century BCE. His greatest achievement – the greatest achievement of the greatest pharaoh of the greatest era in all of ancient Egyptian history – was the Battle of Kadesh, in which he fought the Hittite kingdom. This battle was documented in illustrations, a kind of comic strip, in which you can clearly see that his command tent closely resembles the structure of the Tabernacle. These illustrations appeared everywhere; there are at least ten known sites depicting this battle. The resemblance goes so far that in the inner chamber, two Horus falcons (the Egyptian deity) spread their wings over Ramesses’ head – similar to the Tabernacle, where in the inner room, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant is placed with the cherubim spreading their wings toward one another above it. The resemblance is truly astonishing. This cultural appropriation appears not only in the Exodus story but continues throughout the Book of Exodus – all in order to show the people of Israel, who could neither see their God nor hear Him: If you want to understand who the God of

Israel is, take the greatest achievement of the greatest pharaoh of the greatest era in Egyptian history – the God of Israel is greater than him, and this is His field HQ.”

Can we conclude from this that the Israelites were the descendants of Abraham who went down to Egypt? How far can the conclusions be taken?

“What I draw from this is that the origin of the story we know from the Book of Exodus must be the work of someone who was there – in Egypt, in the XIII century BCE – and that if this was sanctified and became the most frequently mentioned event in all of the Bible, then in all likelihood the Israelites really were there during the reign of Ramesses II, and they understood that they had somehow emerged from oppression under his rule and attributed that to the Creator. From this I cannot of course conclude that there were walls of water on their right and left, that the Splitting of the Sea actually occurred, or that the Ten Plagues came upon the Egyptians – I still have something left to prove. I don’t know about all the miraculous elements, but I can say that it appears they went through something momentous, attributed it to their God, and built the literary framework of the event on the model of what they had seen in the Kadesh inscriptions describing that battle.”

Are there other cultures the Bible engages with? Is this a recognized biblical methodology?

“Yes, absolutely. One of the clearest examples is the Book of Isaiah: some scholars point out that the prophet Isaiah was thoroughly familiar with the royal propaganda of the Assyrian empire, and in chapter 10 he appropriates it. My colleague at Bar-Ilan University, Prof. Shawn Zelig Aster, wrote about this.”

On a personal level – does the question of whether the Exodus happened matter to you?

“I am a religious person. That said, I know very religious people who tell me that the question of whether the Exodus actually took place doesn’t matter to them. They say: ‘I am religious because my father was religious and my grandfather was religious, and perhaps the whole thing is allegory and metaphor. It doesn’t matter to me whether it happened factually or not.’ In my view, the Bible is founded on the premise that this really occurred. The Ten Commandments, for example, open with the verse: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.’ That is to say, the people of Israel are obligated to serve the Creator – not because He is true or because He created the world – but out of duty, because He saved us. I believe the assumption that something happened there is deeply and fundamentally rooted in the Bible. To tell you that everything happened exactly as written? Even among the great Jewish authorities of our generation there are those who try to find ways to interpret the plagues in a more naturalistic way. So I don’t know – but I do think that for the Bible itself to have integrity, when God says that the reason we must enter into a covenant

with Him is because He saved us from Egypt, then something must have been there. So for me, personally, it does matter.

“But even after saying that it matters to me religiously, and even after having tried and managed to find some narrative that happens to align with my prior worldview, I don’t think that importance diminishes the scholarly and academic value of the inquiry. In my view, having an agenda is not a disqualifying thing. Even feminist readings of the Bible raise very important points. Everyone comes with their own agenda and their own particular sensibilities. The important question is whether you can prove your case in a way that someone who does not share your underlying assumptions would still be able to accept your argument.”

This article was originally published in Hebrew. 

Main Photo: Moses parts the Red Sea (1907 print)\ Wikipedia