The Exodus: sources and parallels

The scholarly consensus is that there was no Exodus as described in the Bible. Modern archaeologists believe that the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan and were never in Egypt, and if there is any historical basis to the Exodus it can apply only to a small segment of the population of Israelites at large. Nevertheless, there is also a general understanding that something must lie behind the traditions, even if Moses and the Exodus narrative belong to collective cultural memory rather to history. Most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some highland settlers came from Egypt.

A proposal by Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that the Exodus narrative has no single origin, but rather combines numerous historical experiences into "a coherent story that is fictional as to its composition but historical as to some of its components." These traumatic events include the expulsion of the Hyksos; the religious revolution of Akhenaten; a possible episode of captivity for the Habiru, who were gangs of antisocial people operating between Egypt's vassal states; and the large-scale migrations of the 'Sea Peoples'.

The Expulsion of the Hyksos

The Hyksos were a Semitic people whose arrival and departure from Egypt has sometimes been seen as broadly parallel to the biblical tale of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Canaanite populations first appeared in Egypt towards the end of the 12th Dynasty c. 1800 BC, and either around that time, or c. 1720 BC, established an independent realm in the eastern Nile Delta. In about 1650 BC, this realm was assumed by the rulers known as the Hyksos, who formed the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs.

It has been claimed that new revolutionary methods of warfare ensured the Hyksos the ascendancy in their influx into the new emporia being established in Egypt's delta and at Thebes in support of the Red Sea trade. However, in recent years the idea of a simple Hyksos migration, with little or no war, has gained support.

In any case, the 16th Dynasty and the 17th Dynasty continued to rule in the South in coexistence with the Hyksos kings, perhaps as their vassals. Eventually, Seqenenre Tao, Kamose and Ahmose waged war against the Hyksos and expelled Khamudi, their last king, from Egypt c. 1550 BC.

The saga of the Hyksos was recorded by the Egyptian historian Manetho (3rd century BC), chief priest at the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis, and is preserved in three quotations by the 1st century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. In Manetho's History of Egypt, as retold by Josephus, Manetho describes the Hyksos, their lowly origins in Asia, their invasion and dominion over Egypt, their eventual expulsion, and their subsequent exile to Judaea and their establishing the city of Jerusalem and its temple. Manetho defined the Hyksos as being the Hyksos or "Shepherd Kings" or "Captive Shepherds" who invaded Egypt, destroying its cities and temples and making war with the Egyptian people to "gradually destroy them to the very roots". Following a war with the Egyptians a treaty was negotiated stipulating that these Hyksos Shepherds were to exit Egypt.

Josephus said that Manetho's Hyksos narrative was a reliable Egyptian account about the Israelite Exodus, and that the Hyksos were 'our people'. Martin Bernal found that a direct relationship between the Hyksos and Israelites is plausible, although it cannot be proven. He noted that the name of the pharaoh Yaqub-Har is similar to the name of the Israelite patriarch Jacob, and that the highest density of Hyksos scarabs is found in the Israelite West Bank. Donald Redford said that the Exodus narrative is a Canaanite memory of the Hyksos descent and occupation of Egypt. Jan Assmann said the biblical narrative is more like a counterhistory: "It turns kings into slaves; an expulsion into a ban on emigration; a descent from the Egyptian throne to insignificance into an ascent from oppression to freedom as god's chosen people."

Most modern historians reject any identification of the Hyksos with the Israelites, largely because it is generally believed that the early Israelites evolved within the land and culture of Canaan, rather than emerging from Egypt. There is a current scholarly consensus that if the Israelites did emerge from Egypt, it must have occurred sometime during the 13th century, because there is no archaeological evidence of any distinctive Israelite material culture before that time.

Minoan eruption

In her book The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Story of the Exodus, geologist Barbara J. Sivertsen explored links between the biblical Exodus narrative, the Hyksos expulsion, and the Minoan (Thera) volcanic eruption.

Apocalyptic rainstorms, which devastated much of Egypt, and were described on the Tempest Stele of Ahmose I, pharaoh of the Hyksos expulsion, have been attributed to short-term climatic changes caused by the Theran eruption. In 2014, Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner offered a new translation of the Tempest Stela. They believe the unusual weather patterns described on the slab were the result of a massive volcano explosion at Thera. They also suggest that the Egyptian pharaoh Ahmose I ruled at a time closer to the Thera eruption than previously thought.

The difficulty with this interpretation is that in the conventional but disputed Egyptian chronology Ahmose I ruled from c. 1549–1524 BC, whilst the eruption is thought to have occurred somewhere between 1642–1540 BC. Alternatively, if the eruption occurred in the Second Intermediate Period, the absence of Egyptian records of the eruption could be caused by the general disorder in Egypt around that time.

While it has been argued that the damage attributed to this storm may have been caused by an earthquake following the Thera Eruption, it has also been suggested that it was caused during a war with the Hyksos, and the storm reference is merely a metaphor for chaos upon which the Pharaoh was attempting to impose order. Documents such as Hatshepsut's Speos Artemidos depict storms, but are clearly figurative not literal. Research indicates that the Speos Artemidos stele is a reference to her overcoming the powers of chaos and darkness.

Akhenaten and the end of the Amarna period

Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV, was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. This Pharaoh presided over radical changes in Egyptian religious practices. He established a form of solar monotheism or monolatry based on the cult of Aten, and disbanded the priesthoods of all other gods. His new capital, Akhetaten or 'Horizon of Aten', was built at the site known today as Amarna. The city was built hastily, mostly using mud bricks. After Akhenaten's death, it was abandoned. The temples, shrines, and royal statues were razed later, during the reign of Horemheb.

The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism has been considered by various scholars. One of the first to mention this was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in his book Moses and Monotheism.Basing his arguments on a belief that the Exodus story was historical, Freud argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death. Freud argued that Akhenaten was striving to promote monotheism, something that the biblical Moses was able to achieve.

Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg, an Israeli archaeologist, suggested that conditions in the Amarna period ending with the reign of Akhenaten's son, Tutankhamun, very closely match those described in Exodus:

• a large mudbrick city having been just constructed by slaves of Akhnaten in two years at El Amarna, a site with little straw, and being abandoned with his religion
• a disenfranchised monotheistic priest class displaced by followers of the old gods of Saqqara & Luxor being restored
• extremely specific predictions of disaster - recorded on Tutankhamun's restoration stele - claiming "old gods would punish him if they were not given back their old rights and positions:
  • Hapi, the androgynous god of the Nile, would make its waters undrinkable;
  • Kermit, the goddess of fertility, would release her frogspawn to swarm over the land;
  • Osiris, the god of corn, would not prevent the locusts from consuming his cereals, and
  • Ra, the sun god, would refuse to shine."
• strong resemblance (cherubim, carrying poles) between a pharaoh's battle shrine and the portable Mishkan or Tabernacle that went into the desert with other riches - from a city that was abandoned
  • extremely strong similarity between the treatment of this portable shrine and the Temple rituals (inner and outer room) at Jerusalem.

Rosenberg further suggests that this date can be reconciled easily with Exodus 12:40 claiming 430 years in Egypt - since 1760 BC - and the theory that the Israelites came to Egypt with the semitic Hyksos, as proposed by Josephus, which modern scholars place within decades of that time. An also, that if the Solomonic Temple was built 12 generations after the Exodus (I Kings 6:1) and these are actually 30 not 40 real years, 360 years after 1330 is 970 BC, again within decades of modern estimates.

In 1973, William F. Albright noted that Moses and many of his family members had Egyptian names, and said that there is no good reason to deny that Moses was influenced by the monotheism of Akhenaten. However, Donald Redford said that there is little evidence that Akhenaten was a progenitor of Biblical monotheism. To the contrary, he said, the religion of the Hebrew Bible had its own separate development beginning 500 years later.

Egyptian and Hellenistic parallels

Several ancient non-biblical sources seem to parallel the biblical Exodus narrative, and/or the events which occurred at the end of the eighteenth dynasty, when the new religion of Akhenaten was denounced and his capital city of Amarna was abandoned. These tales often combine elements of the Hyksos expulsion. For example, Hecataeus of Abdera (c. 320 BC) tells how the Egyptians blamed a plague on foreigners and expelled them from the country, whereupon Moses, their leader, took them to Canaan. There are more than a dozen versions of this story, all of them adding more detail, most of them profoundly anti-Jewish. Manetho tells how 80,000 lepers and other "impure people", led by a priest named Osarseph, join forces with the former Hyksos, now living in Jerusalem, to take over Egypt. They wreak havoc until eventually the pharaoh and his son chase them out to the borders of Syria, where Osarseph gives the lepers a law-code and changes his name to Moses, although the identification of Osarseph with Moses in the second account may be a later addition. Josephus vehemently disagreed with the claim that the Israelites were connected with Manetho's story about Osarseph and the lepers. The stories told by Hecataeus and Manetho seems to be related in some way to that of the Exodus, although it is impossible to tell whether they both bear witness to historical events, or Manetho is a polemical response to the Exodus story, or the Exodus story a response to the Egyptian stories.

Three interpretations have been proposed for Manetho's story of Osarseph and the lepers: the first, as a memory of the Amarna period; the second, as a memory of the Hyksos; and the third, as an anti-Jewish propaganda. Each explanation has evidence to support it: the name of the pharaoh, Amenophis, and the religious character of the conflict fit the Amarna reform of Egyptian religion; the name of Avaris and possibly the name Osarseph fit the Hyksos period; and the overall plot is an apparent inversion of the Jewish story of the Exodus casting the Jews in a bad light. No one theory, however, can explain all the elements. A proposal by Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that the story has no single origin but rather combines numerous historical experiences, notably the Amarna and Hyksos periods, into a folk memory.