The ‘extraordinarily good’ evidence for the Exodus

As I often share in this regular column, the archaeological evidence for the Bible continues to grow. New discoveries and fresh interpretations give an ever-increasing pool of data to establish that the Bible is real history and not embellished legend or fiction.

But when is the evidence overwhelming? There will always be doubts, gaps and reasons why sceptics can dismiss the case if they choose. We can look at the account of Moses and the Exodus as a test case.

The dramatic events surrounding the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is a good example. It is a foundational event for Bible history. It includes some of the greatest miracles recorded in the Old Testament. It establishes the covenant and laws that Biblical history is based upon. If you prove the Exodus, then everything else follows.

However, the Exodus as history has frequently been dismissed. Bart Ehrmann calls it a ‘founding legend’. Cyprian Broodbank, Cambridge University archaeology professor, describes it as ‘a refracted folk memory’. If proving the Exodus provides a foundation for the rest of the Bible, then wouldn’t disproving the Exodus undermine everything else we read?

Before we consider the evidence for the Exodus, it is worth considering what archaeology can and cannot do. Firstly, archaeology is rarely about proving historical events. In fact, the further back in time we go, we can only really rely on written records. Outside of those writings, archaeology only provides circumstantial evidence that what we read fits with what we what we know of the ancient world. The gripping story of the pre-Colombus Viking discovery of America (The Vinland Saga) provides many details about peoples, places, and boats. Only in the 1960s did archaeology provide evidence of Norsemen in North America. In fact, an entire Viking camp in Canada was uncovered that is now considered to be the base of Leif Erikson. These events took place 1,000 years ago; for the Exodus we need to go back another 2,000 years.

A second problem for debates over the Exodus is that the further back we go the less dogmatic we can be about the chronology. Adding numbers together in the Bible gives us a date of approximately 1446 BC for the Exodus. However, many scholars suggest caution over adding numbers together in this way. We also have to be careful about the accuracy of the dates we use in Egyptian and Babylonian chronologies, which may have gaps. Generally, historians would place the Exodus sometime in the 15th or, later, in the 13th century BC.

Given a rough idea of when the Exodus happened, what is the evidence? It is extraordinarily good. We can identify a town built by settlers from Canaan beneath the city later known as Ramasses, called Avaris. There are wall paintings that show settlers from Canaan migrating to Egypt, settling down and eventually being used as forced labour to make bricks. We know that the first five books of the Bible, unlike those that follow, are full of Egyptian loanwords including the words for ‘river’, ‘basket’, ‘magician’, and official titles. The early Hebrew script emerges in Egypt, long before it is found in Canaan (called Proto-Sinaitic). There are important Egyptian inscriptions that refer to a people much like the Israelites as settlers in Egypt and later as enemy nomads in Canaan (the Soleb inscription, Berlin Pedestal, Amarna Tablets and Merneptah Stela).

Putting this together, what does the evidence show? Archaeology shows that a people from Canaan originally settled as welcome migrants in Egypt but later were used as slave labour. They developed a script of their own, worshipped a God called Yahweh, and helped build a city at a location that would become known as Pi-Rameses. They left Egypt to settle in the land of Canaan where they would be regarded as enemies of Egypt.

Does this sound like proof of the Exodus? It does to me. For those who want a recovered sandal signed by Moses or the retrieval of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian army from the depths of the Red Sea, they simply demand more than is ever likely to be found. Archaeology does not provide anything like that level of direct corroboration for anything from the Roman invasion of Britain under Julius Caesar. By the normal standards of archaeology, we have good reason to trust that the Exodus account belongs in the non-fiction section of any library.