History of the Ancient Near East · Part 25 · Texts and temples · C1
The Exodus and the Conquest: What Archaeology Finds
Part 25 of History of the Ancient Near East: the story of slaves who escaped from Egypt and conquered a land of their own is one of the most powerful ever told. What does the evidence say about it? The negative present perfect passive (no trace has ever been found), cleft sentences (what archaeology shows is…), and even so, that said, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the hardest lesson for Philo, and I will try to be fair to him and to the evidence.
Every year at Passover, I tell the story of how we came out of Egypt. Here I am, in Egypt, telling it. You have already shown me that Israel was in Canaan in Merneptah’s day, and that Egypt ruled Canaan. Go on.
The book of Exodus tells how the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, building the store cities of Pithom and Rameses; how ten plagues struck Egypt; how about 600,000 men, with women and children, perhaps two million people, left Egypt, crossed the sea, and spent forty years in the desert, many of them at Kadesh Barnea. The book of Joshua tells how they then conquered Canaan in a few swift campaigns, destroying cities such as Jericho, Ai and Hazor.
Egypt kept detailed records, and archaeologists have searched Egypt, Sinai and Canaan for more than a century. No Egyptian text mentions Israelite slaves, the plagues or a mass departure. No trace of a large population has been found in Sinai, and Kadesh Barnea was not settled until centuries later. Most of the cities in the conquest story were either empty or destroyed at different times.
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