The biblical exodus is described in four of the five books of the Torah: the titular Exodus and the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The story focuses on how “the Lord brought the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:51) with “a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders” (Deu. 26:8-11).

This entry will discuss the historicity of the exodus, the typologies of maximalism and minimalism in relation to this issue, and a few of the factors that have caused most historians to have doubts regarding the historicity of the biblical exodus as it is described in the biblical sources.

See: The Biblical Exodus: The Story (Part 1)
See: A Response to Christian Apologetic Uses of the Ipuwer Papyrus (Part 2)
See: A Critical Response to the “Early Date” of the Exodus (The Merneptah Stele) (Part 4)

A Question of Historical Interest

The exodus of the Hebrews from slavery under the leadership of Moses toward the Promised Land is one of academic and historical interest. Referring to the plagues sent by the deity Yahweh upon Egypt, Pharaoh, its people, and cattle, Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen explains that readers are dealing with events that are described as taking place in the real world.

“We are dealing with realia here: river, fish, frogs, insects, cattle, humans, and not a fantasy world of (e.g.) dragons, monsters, genies, Liliths, or other plainly mythical beings, and in a real country (Egypt), not an imaginary place unknown to geography” (2003, 249).

What Kitchen says here about the plagues also applies to the many events taking place after the Hebrews had fled from Egypt. Regardless of how one interprets details such as the Hebrew deity, Yahweh, revealing to Moses the Law on Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:12-18), the theophanies of Yahweh being present with the migrating Hebrews in pillars of cloud and fire (Ex. 13:17-14:29), or the famous parting of and passing through the Red Sea of Exodus 14, it remains indubitable that in the Book of Exodus we have many “real world” markers and identifiers that differentiate it from pure mythology (e.g., ocean, mountains, wildernesses, deserts, tabernacles, chariots, settlements, flora and fauna, and much more). The “Exodus narrative is filled with a wealth of detailed and specific geographical references” (Silberman and Finkelstein 2001, 59). As such, the exodus renders itself open to objective, critical historical analyses and methodologies.

Doubting the Biblical Exodus

In terms of a strict objectivist historical hermeneutic, the majority of historians doubt most of the descriptions of the exodus in the biblical sources. At the very least, if it happened, it was largely unlike how the late biblical accounts describe it.

Perhaps the biggest reason for doubt is that no ancient extra-biblical source or record dating near to the time, whether Egyptian or Ancient Near Eastern, corroborates or mentions it.

Historians therefore only have incredibly late biblical sources removed by many centuries. The earliest record for Israel is the Merneptah Stele, which dates to c. 1200 BCE and offers a single line making a reference to an entity called Israel. Unfortunately, it makes no mention of an exodus or shows any awareness of a migrating Hebrew population.

Although one might expect this lack of attestation from the Egyptians themselves, since Pharaohs did not commemorate their defeats on temple walls and the overwhelming majority of textual manuscripts did not survive in the Delta given flooding and other climatological phenomena (Kitchen 2003, 246), the silence elsewhere raises questions. One might wonder if the comprehensive, spectacular defeat of the Pharaoh’s army described in Exodus (14:5-10) would not have garnered the attention of any other nations or writers in the historical record, as such a defeat of Pharaoh’s forces would render Egypt vulnerable to invasion by its enemies or at least become the subject of mockery. Instead, one only finds silence with the exception of late biblical sources written long after the fact.

Rather, the New Kingdom period (1549–1069 BCE), in which Pharaoh and his forces were handed such a comprehensive defeat, as described by Exodus, was one of the more prosperous periods in Ancient Egyptian history. The Egyptian empire reached its greatest territorial extent, and around the time of the exodus in the thirteenth century, building projects of grand temples and statues were commissioned by Ramesses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE), while agriculture and religion also prospered. Although this period certainly had its difficulties, especially toward its end (c. 1069 BCE), when civil unrest, droughts and famine, and the corruption of officials became more commonplace, the circumstances were by and large not what one would expect if Pharaoh and his forces were comprehensively defeated.

In addition, and perhaps another major cause for doubt, is that archaeology has been unhelpful and often unfavorable. If the exodus really occurred, then one should expect to find some physical evidence of incursions and huge devastation in Canaan/Palestine in the mid-1400s BCE (the early date) or the 1200s BCE (the late date). The biblical sources portray the Hebrews engaging in blitzkrieg campaigns into Canaan, which they believed Yahweh was handing to them in fulfillment of a covenant He had made with Abraham, namely is that his seed would grow into a nation and become a blessing to “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 11:27–12:8).

But the archaeological (and documentary) evidence for this is almost non-existent, and where archaeology may attest to something possibly pertinent to a biblical description, immediate problems emerge. In the next few posts of this series, we examine these challenges in greater detail.

A Double Standard and Maximalism vs. Minimalism

Advocates for the historicity of the exodus contend that there is a double standard in some academic writing on the Ancient Near East when it comes to how historians treat the biblical sources vis-à-vis non-biblical ones, allegedly applying kind gloves to the latter that are not applied to the former. Rabbi Joshua Berman stresses this,

“[The] biblical sources that make historical claims are regarded as untrue unless backed by airtight confirmation from archaeology, while non-biblical sources, even in the absence of archaeological authentication, are taken as containing a good deal of factual information” (quoted in Somer 2015).

If there are double standards involved, then Berman is right to raise critical awareness concerning them. But is his comment fair on the academy in general? I do not think so, and one might respond to Berman in a few ways. Noticeably, he commits a straw man fallacy by giving his readers the gratuitous impression that the academy of historians en masse has an ideological axe to grind with the Bible, which somehow motivates them to reject descriptions in the Old Testament because they are not attested to by archaeology and exist only in written, biblical sources.

This is not, however, the case. There are two main positions on the objectivist historicity of the Old Testament: minimalism and maximalism (Kitchen 2003, Preface; Grabbe 2017, 24–25).

The debates regarding minimalism-maximalism were particularly loud in the 1990s, although these typologies continue into the present. According to the former, the biblical texts are treated with suspicion (Grabbe 2017, 24), with advocates even dismissing them as sources from which historical data about ancient Israel can be obtained. The biblical sources and data are minimized with reference to archaeological data.

For example, the lack of archaeological data and evidence for the biblical chronology of the patriarchal period through the early monarchy has convinced some minimalists of the view that the patriarchs themselves did not exist and that the Israelite enslavement in and exodus out of Egypt did not happen. The concept of an “Israel” is even questioned (Thompson 1995, 697). The sources, for the minimalist, should be considered fictional unless backed by other non-biblical textual and/or archaeological attestation. Berman would seem to have readers think that most scholars are passionate minimalists.

The maximalist, on the other hand, is one who trusts the reliability of the biblical sources unless they can be proved wrong (Grabbe 2017, 24). Archaeological corroboration is not necessary for considering a biblical source as trustworthy, although such corroboration is still valuable.

But as with most artificial categories, it is difficult to confine such a variety of biblical scholars, archaeologists, theologians, Egyptologists, historians of the Ancient Near East, and more into two tidy camps. As such, the minimalism and maximalism typologies are “misleading” and “facile” (Lehmann 2003, 117). In my view, it is more appropriate to perceive scholars existing along a spectrum between these two extremes. Lester L. Grabbe contends that this typological polarity is unhelpful: “Such a characterization is a caricature since it fails to note the wide variety of positions or principles of working among different scholars” (2017, 26).

What Evidence?

For historians, literary sources and archaeological artifacts are the most important sources to which historical criteria may be applied. This process is meant to be objective, and once successfully applied, criteria allow historians to deduce the level of certainty we can have of a purported event in ancient history.

The historical method constitutes a range of criteria, such as the number of textual sources, independent cross-corroboration between sources (i.e., two independent sources are better than just one), internal coherence or consistency, archaeological attestation (i.e., do the text’s details of described events, locales, settlements, cultures, and so on cohere or conflict with established archaeology?), early attestation (i.e., a particular source’s earliness in terms of composition in relation to the described events), and other criteria (e.g., embarrassment, dissimilarity) that are applied by historians to ancient texts.

Once applied, clearly not all sources are found to be of equal credibility and quality. Some sources were produced well after the events described, may contain a plethora of internal inconsistencies and/or external inaccuracies, have authorial biases that may engender distortion, and more.

Importantly, none of these issues rule out a priori that a particular source is devoid of historical value entirely. Every author has biases, and most ancient sources contain inconsistencies and were written long after the described event, yet may still contain some reliable information. For example, it would be unjustified for historians to dismiss Joseph Flavius’ (c. 37/38–100 CE) descriptive account of the Pharisees of the first century CE because he wanted to portray them in a more positive light, since he himself was once one (The Life of Flavius Josephus 10.12:2), or dismiss his descriptions of the Jewish rebels and brigands given his overt hatred of them (Jewish Wars 4.135, 4.138, 7.268-270). Rather, historians will take these into consideration and treat their sources with appropriate caution in light of them.

With all this said, the biblical exodus faces some serious challenges on historical grounds. We will examine the dates for the biblical sources in a follow-up, but assuming that the Hebrews fled Egypt at some point in the thirteenth century BCE (the consensus date among historians based on the assumption the exodus was a historical event), the historian has no more than a handful of incredibly late textual sources with which to work by applying historical criteria. This challenge is even greater for the early date of the exodus, which places the migration in the mid-1400s BCE.

The Book of Exodus is the primary source and was composed at some point between the ninth and fifth centuries BCE (Livingstone 2006). Exodus is therefore centuries removed from the time of the Hebrew migration, and the greater the length of time between the described event and the source that describes it, the greater the embellishments and legendary accretions tend to be. The stories about the Hebrew exodus and other important foundational narratives to Judaism were handed down generationally to illiterate masses over centuries and via important figures in the tradition, such as elders or priests, or singers or storytellers (Miller 2012). 

The silence of archaeological evidence for both a mass Hebrew migration out of Egypt or their sojourn in the wilderness and the Hebrew conquests into the Promised Land of Palestine under Joshua, combined with the fact that when and where archaeology can be viewed alongside the biblical sources typically cited for the conquests and vice versa, they often do not match up well at all and are at times conflicting, renders reasonable skepticism not gratuitous.

This skepticism is not to slide into the biblical minimalism in the crosshairs of Berman’s critique. One is not concluding that the lack of archaeological evidence for the Hebrew exodus and their period in the wilderness means that these events never happened historically. Rather, as a critique, it brings awareness to the fact that the archaeological evidence in its favor is non-existent and that when this is combined with the other aforementioned concerns, which include the lateness of the primary sources and inconsistencies with established archaeology as we get into the conquest stories, reticence and doubt become reasonable positions.

In fact, contrary to Berman’s critique, even in light of these challenges, some historians still think there is historical truth in the Book of Exodus and the other primary sources for the exodus and wilderness period (e.g., Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy). Although these historians mostly agree that the historical events of the exodus and the wilderness journey likely have little resemblance to the descriptions in these primary sources, the events were not invented whole cloth; according to professor of biblical studies and Old Testament scholar Peter Enns (2024), “The scholarly consensus (and it is a consensus) is not that “nothing happened”… Many—I would say most–biblical scholars and historians would say that the biblical narrative echoes real, though distant, historical events. (For the record, that’s my opinion, too.)”

Part 4 [forthcoming]

References

Enns, Peter. 2024. “First of All, There is no Conspiracy: A Review of Patterns of Evidence.” The Bible for Normal People. Available.

Lehmann, Gunnar. “The United Monarchy in the Countryside: Jerusalem, Judah, and the Shephelah during the Tenth Century B.C.E.” In Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, edited by Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew, 117–162. Atlanta City, Georgia, United States: Society of Biblical Literature.

Grabbe, Lester L. 2017. Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?: Revised Edition. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Livingstone, Elizabeth A. 2006. “Exodus, Book of.” In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2nd edition), edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 210–211. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Somer, Benjamin. 2015. “Biblical Criticism Hasn’t Negated the Exodus.” Mosaic Magazine. Available.

Thompson, Thomas. 1995. “A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?” Journal of Biblical Literature 114(4):683-698.

Miller, Robert D. 2012. “Orality and Performance in Ancient Israel.” Open Edition Journals. Available.

Silberman, Neil Asher., and Finkelstein, Israel. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York, United States: Free Press.