There's No I in Exod-Us
My thanks to everyone (Jess) who informed me about evidentiality in linguistics. Unfortunately, most of the languages that feature it grammatically are either too obscure and therefore lacking in learning resources or feature it in ways that don't sufficiently indicate personal level of credence. Bulgarian, however, has eight million speakers and a dubitative verb form, which as a skeptic is the only one I need. Bulgarian still isn’t on Duolingo, so it might take me a while to learn, but I'll switch to it as soon as I've attained proficiency.
Emails cut off after a certain file size. Footnotes add way more to file size, and obviously those are non-negotiable. Substack puts a header over posts in the danger zone that says “Near email length limit” which really stresses me out, so I’ve been making a concerted effort not to go over it. But that sucks. I’m allowing myself to be influenced by the platform’s bias towards attention economics. If I was doing this as a blog file size wouldn't be an issue.1 The ACOUP guy doesn't worry about this shit.2 So: I’m going to stop limiting my word count. Emails may get cut off at the bottom. You can open posts in a browser by clicking the title. You really need to for the footnotes anyway.3
The Pod Prize is not named after me because I’m a paragon of intellectual honesty. It’s named after me because I funded it. Think Nobel Peace Prize, not Fields Medal.
Hi! I’ve been at work on my next post on John Van Seters, which is coming soon. In honor of Passover, however, I’m very excited to present a guest post by my sister, Jessica, on the historicity of the exodus. (Writing it was a collaborative effort, but mostly her, and all the research was done by her — we’ll make it clear when something is coming from one of us in particular.) Enjoy!
Three Stories
Here’s a story: A man named Israel and his family travel to Egypt. They are fruitful and multiply; their descendants enjoy status as privileged foreigners in the land. Eventually, after several generations, their fortunes change. Pharaoh enslaves them and forces them to work construction without a union or any proper safety gear. The descendants of Israel cry out to their God, who hears, and remembers Their promise to the peoples’ ancestors.4 God turns to Moses and says to this heretofore unintroduced character, “I’m YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I didn’t tell them my name. But I did make a bunch of promises to them about giving them the land of Canaan. I need you to tell their kids I’m coming to get them and bring them to their ancestors’ favorite vacation spot.”
Moses dutifully speaks to the children of Israel, but they hearken not, because they are on the clock and suffering. God decides to try a different approach. They direct Moses and Aaron to speak to Pharoah, who also isn’t impressed. God then performs a series of seven wonders through Their dual agents Moses and Aaron, pauses to command a holiday, and then performs Their closing act: killing all the firstborn of Egypt. The Israelites then leave Egypt under the hand of their God in broad daylight and without seeking permission. God forces Pharaoh, who had only spoken to these two guys once before his kingdom went to shit and his people’s kids were killed, to pursue. Moses raises his staff and splits the sea. The Israelites walk across on dry land in a beautiful blend of traditional and computer-generated animation. The Egyptians try to follow; the sea returns and drowns them. God is mighty.
Three months later, the emancipated group arrives at a mountain topped by the glory of God. Moses enters the cloud of God’s glory and receives a blueprint for the Tabernacle. 13 chapters later, the Tabernacle is built and the cloud of God’s glory takes up residence in a grand climax of the Pentateuch.
Here’s another story: A man named Israel follows his son Joseph to Egypt, where Joseph is a powerful and beloved figure. Joseph’s family is treated well; they are fruitful and multiply. Joseph dies. A new Pharaoh comes into power who is not grateful to Joseph and enslaves the Israelites in a failed attempt at population control. An Israelite named Moses grows to adulthood in this environment, kills an Egyptian taskmaster, and flees to Midian. Eventually the oppressive Pharaoh dies. While watering his flock in the wilderness, Moses encounters a burning bush. YHWH, already known to both Moses and the Israelites, tells him to return to Egypt, gather the Israelites, and ask Pharaoh for a long weekend to make sacrifices to Them. Moses is hesitant; his brother Aaron accompanies him as an enforcer.
Pharaoh is not receptive. He rejects Moses’ plea for vacation and instead increases work quotas. God sends six plagues. Each is a genuine attempt to change Pharaoh’s mind, and in each case Pharaoh relents and then afterwards recants and doubles down. Finally, God kills all the firstborn in Egypt. The Israelites flee in the dead of night. When Pharaoh realizes they’re not just taking PTO, he pursues. God sends an east wind which blows back the sea, allowing the Israelites passage. In the morning, the Egyptians follow along the false coastline and become mired in the seabed. The sea returns and they are drowned.
In the wilderness, the Israelites complain about the lack of provisions (they made no preparations for leaving). God sends them manna but finds their lack of faith disturbing. So God appears in plain sight of all the people on Mount Sinai. They invite Moses up to see them, where They tell Moses that They’re sick of these whiners. In a fun reversal, Moses convinces God to go back to the Israelites. Out of love for Moses, God relents, and allows him to glimpse the divine backside.5
Here’s a third story: The descendants of a man named Israel live in Egypt. They are manifold. Pharaoh attempts population control through the genocide of all male newborns. An Israelite boy named Moses is secreted away in a reed basket set upon the Nile. He is found by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the palace as her son.
At some point, God calls to Moses from somewhere called Horeb. They reveal Their name is YHWH and enjoin Moses to free the Israelites. Moses returns to Egypt and leads the Israelites out, armed for war. They battle with Amalekites in the wilderness and win with the help of a divine miracle.
The Israelites arrive at Horeb. God reveals Themself to the people, which prompts them to accept Moses as their prophet and divine intermediary. Moses ascends the mountain and enters the divine cloud. He receives a code of law, which the people wholeheartedly accept. Moses goes back up the mountain to retrieve the paperwork. The people get antsy and construct a golden calf to replace Moses as their intermediary, immediately violating the very first law in the code they just agreed to (to not make gods out of metal). Moses returns with the tablets, is infuriated, and smashes them. He climbs the mountain a third time and pleads with God on the behalf of the people. God agrees to forgive them, with conditions: the Levites must go on a killing spree of their neighbors, brothers, and friends, and the survivors will be allowed to carry on to Canaan.
Priestly source, Jahwist source, and Elohist source.6 Three very different stories, with some common threads. All agree that there were Israelites oppressed in Egypt. Moses, who was 100% for sure definitely an Israelite, speaks to God, who tells him to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt; they triumph over their foes with the aid of divine miracles by YHWH. There is a divine revelation on a mountaintop before they continue their journey to Canaan.
So what’s the real story?
Two Schools of Thought
Scholars agree that the story of the exodus as portrayed in the bible cannot have occurred. There is no evidence of hundreds of thousands to millions of Israelites living in Egypt or traveling through the Sinai desert. Egyptians kept good records, which have reached us. All evidence suggests that the Israelite culture developed in situ in Canaan; their pottery is Canaanite, and their culture shows little evidence of strong Egyptian influence.7
On the other hand, the exodus is the central event of the Pentateuch, and the defining event of the Israelite religion at least from the post-exilic period onwards.8 According to Nadav Na’aman "the theme of Egyptian subjugation and the Israelite exodus is the most frequently mentioned historical event in biblical literature." It holds such a toweringly significant place, and is such a massive claim, that it cannot simply be considered a whole-cloth invention. All scholars agree that there were foreign groups in Egypt: the Hyksos, the Shasu, the Habiru, the Apiru (who may or may not be the same as the Habiru). There were also undoubtedly Canaanite slaves in Egypt. Slavery was a big business there; Egypt was indeed a house of bondage.
Thus the questions are: Were there ever Israelites in Egypt? Who, if anyone, left and came to Canaan?
We’ll look at two major approaches to answering these questions. The first starts with the biblical accounts, and seeks to construct a plausible historical narrative to fit them. The second treats the biblical account as a cultural memory, and seeks to uncover how the memory itself took shape.
Documentarian History
Friedman and the Levites
In Who Wrote the Bible? (1987), Richard Friedman hypothesized that a group of Canaanites — the Levites — did leave Egypt and return to Canaan. In his 2017 book The Exodus he is even more assured. He acknowledges the substantial body of evidence contravening the occurrence of the exodus. The mistake, he thinks, is that this evidence focuses on a substantial body. With the introduction of the idea that it was only a small group involved in the exodus, the arguments against a mass exodus become irrelevant.
Friedman gives several reasons for thinking the exodus group consisted only of Levites. The Levites are the only Israelites in Tanakh with Egyptian names. They are not just priests — they are portrayed as quite violent, and take up roles as teachers and lay leaders.
Friedman examines a group of textual extracts which are generally agreed to be among the oldest works incorporated into the Pentateuch.9 The Song of the Sea10 asserts that some catastrophe happened at sea to an Egyptian force pursuing the people of YHWH, but there is no mention of the word ‘Israel’. The people were led to YHWH’s mikdash, a sanctuary, which Friedman says makes sense if this was a group of priests. The Song of Deborah11 is a victory hymn describing the triumph of Israelite tribes over Canaanite enemies. Levi is not included among the tribes listed as going into battle.12 In the Blessing of Moses13 each tribe is blessed in turn, and Levi is the only tribe explicitly connected to wandering in the wilderness.
The Jahwist source (J) is the only source not written by Levites. The other sources do not use the name ‘YHWH’ until it is revealed to Moses. J uses this name from the start. Friedman explains this as because the Levites brought YHWH with them to Canaan from Egypt. The Israelites were indigenous Canaanites who worshiped El until the Levites joined with them and somehow convinced them that YHWH and El were one and the same. The Levitical sources maintained this history, while the non-Levitical writer had no motivation to.14
The Levites had other cultural connections to Egypt, as evidenced in differences between J and the Levitical sources. The Tabernacle has architectural parallels with Rameses II’s battle tent. It goes entirely unmentioned in J, the non-Levitical source. There are also parallels between the ark of the covenant and Egyptian barks.15 The Levite source documents command circumcision, a known Egyptian practice, as a requirement and hallmark of the covenant with God. J describes circumcision only as a known practice in stories. Exodus 1-15 is entirely the Priestly and Elohist sources, and includes a great deal of Egyptian lore and shows familiarity with the conditions in Egypt in the Bronze Age such as the use of straw in brickmaking. J makes no mention of the plagues — the story in J16 goes straight from Moses saying “let my people go” to the people having gone. J instead sets a story of plagues in Egypt during Abraham’s time, perhaps indicating that there was a broader tradition of troubles in Egypt which the sources differently incorporated into their narratives. There is great emphasis on slavery both in narrative and laws in the Levitical sources, while J never even says that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. And the Levitical sources are very concerned with treating aliens well, something unmentioned in J and unique in Ancient Near Eastern law codes.
If the Levites were the only group to experience the Exodus, then much of the evidence that has been taken to disprove the occurrence of the exodus entirely can be discarded or reinterpreted. The Merneptah Stele, c. 1208 from the Pharaoh Merneptah (natch) may be the earliest extra-biblical reference to ancient Israel.17 It describes an Egyptian conquest of Canaan. The mention of Israel as an existing entity in Canaan around the time when the exodus is supposed to have occurred poses no challenge to Friedman’s view. On the flip side, the otherwise total lack of any evidence for the presence of a significant Canaanite group can also be dismissed by Friedman; the Levites could have been known by another name.18
How did the experience of a few become the founding myth of the many? The Levites were the only ones who had been slaves and aliens in Egypt, but all of Israel could relate to being subjected to Egyptian hegemony and oppression, as Canaan was from the 15th to 12th centuries until the Late Bronze Age collapse.19 According to Friedman, in such circumstances the Israelites would have been predisposed to accept the Levitical story as part of their own history after being taught it for some generations. The Levites then had to invent numbers to reflect all of Israel being involved in the exodus, as was now the story. They had to invent a conquest of Canaan, to explain how Israel had come to be living in the land. So we end up with the story we have now, expanded to the miscellaneous who don’t qualify for the first two aliyahs.
This theory does have one major advantage: I’m a Levite. Nevertheless, it has some flaws. E and J are very difficult to differentiate, and even firm documentarians disagree over what they comprise. Friedman relies heavily on certain elements being found only in priestly/Levitical sources and not in J, but that only works using his reconstruction of the sources. This is a common flaw to most of Friedman’s evidence for his theory. Many scholars reject the underlying assumptions, as we’ll see below.
Hagens and the Two-Sojourn Hypothesis
Like Friedman, Graham Hagens in his 2007 paper ‘Exodus and Settlement: A Two Sojourn Hypothesis” starts with the biblical text and seeks supporting evidence. For Hagens, an Egyptologist, there’s a lot to like in Exodus. The details match well with late 19th Dynasty Egypt.20 The reference to Per-Ramesses21 is significant because from the mid-11th to late-8th century BCE the Egyptian capital was Tanis, and thus the biblical verse shows historical knowledge of the earlier capital. Ramesses II enacted many building projects which required an increase in forced labor, including slaves brought in from Canaan. There’s evidence of Levantine influence in the eastern Nile Delta at this time. And the Egyptian names of Levites are characteristic of the era. With the Late Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century, Egyptian hegemony in Canaan disintegrated, and the name ‘Canaan’ ceased to appear in Egyptian records. The Early Iron Age saw new settlements in the northern highlands of Canaan of a pastoral nature, with few cultic sites and cultural continuity except for the disappearance of pork from diets.22
All of this confirms for Hagens that an exodus did occur in the 12th century. Hagens suggests that a large number of “Israelites” (several thousand) did leave Egypt, but most of them quickly arrived in northern Canaan and practiced a more primitive Yahwism. A much smaller group sojourned longer in the Sinai and then settled in the Judean lowlands and practiced Judahite-Yahwism.
This theory allows Hagens to account for many of the tensions within the narrative. He follows the typical Documentarian identification of the E source with the northern kingdom and the J source with the south. J and E have very different portrayals of Moses and Aaron. E is significantly more negative about Aaron and Miriam, which Hagens attributes to anti-Moses sentiment. In J, Moses and Aaron ascend the mountain at the theophany. In E, Joshua, a northern figure, ascends with Moses, while Aaron is left behind to lead the people, with disastrous results. J distances Moses from the Midianites, while E links them more closely together. Both sources describe a crisis at God’s mountain.
Hagens thinks that all of this points to a genuine schism among the exodus population. There was some crisis in the wilderness. At that point, Joshua and Caleb brought most of the populace out of the desert and across the Jordan, which became the basis for Joshua’s “Conquest”. Meanwhile, Moses and his Levites stayed in the desert, accreting Midianite customs through assimilation into a more sophisticated form of Yahwism. After the death of Moses and his siblings, this group also entered Canaan, a minority with limited influence until the rise of the Aaronites during the monarchic period.23
Mnemohistory
The mnemohistorical approach focuses not on reconstructing history, but on how events are remembered. This is the approach taken by Nadav Na’aman.24 Na’aman wants to explain how the Exodus can be so significant in biblical literature and yet seemingly non-existent in extra-biblical sources. He rejects the assumption made by many scholars, including Friedman, that "a small group of people of West Semitic origin was initially in Egypt and, upon migrating to Canaan, joined the pastoral groups that settled in the highlands [...], and in light of its political-social-cultural influence was able to transform its exclusive historical memory into an all-Israelite historical consciousness." A small group could not have so deeply entrenched this story of a foundation myth for an entire nation.25
Let’s look at the history. In the 15th century BCE Canaan became an Egyptian province, divided into tributary city-states. Things were quiet until the 13th century, when Egypt fought with the Hittite Empire and lost control over the north of Canaan to them. Ramesses II was defeated in a major campaign in central Syria in 1275 which further shook control over Canaan. This led Egypt to enhance control over the route through the north Sinai from Egypt to Canaan through heavy construction of fortifications, silos, way stations and centers of government. They campaigned against the Shashu — Semitic-speaking nomads who are sometimes connected to the origins of Yahwism — in this region, and Merneptah quashed a rebellion in Canaan which included an ethnic group called Israel. In the 12th century Rameses III’s reign saw intensive fighting against the Sea Peoples, and the broader Ancient Near East underwent a series of crises. Egypt at first intensified control in Canaan, annexing large areas of south Canaan directly. But eventually Egypt withdrew from Canaan, leading to the collapse of the Canaanite city-states.
During this period of Egyptian hegemony, Egyptian rulers often brought back enslaved delegations to Egypt. Slaves and prisoners were also sent as tribute by subjugated rulers. This led to a significant population of Canaanite slaves and laborers in Egypt. Beyond that, however, Na’aman rejects the evidence scholars like Friedman and Hagens present as suggesting knowledge of 19th Dynasty Egypt by biblical authors.
Instead, he argues that the exodus story largely reflects the circumstances of the era of the 7th century onwards when it was written. The depiction of a large, segregated, autonomous community in Egypt better fits the 26th Dynasty (664–525 BCE). In the 12th century the Eastern Nile Delta frontier was well-guarded by Egypt, in contrast with the biblical presentation. And descriptions of Egyptian bondage better reflect 8th/7th century Assyrian bondage.
Na’aman agrees with Friedman and Hagens that the exodus tradition likely emerged from a highly memorable past experience of at least a segment of the people of Israel. But he thinks trying to uncover that experience is a mistake:
“The discussion of the biblical story should not be directed to the past as it really happened, but rather at the manner in which Israelite society shaped its identity by creating a certain image of its past.”
To understand this idea, let’s take a detour to Ronald Hendel.26 Hendel borrows the concept of mnemohistory developed by Egyptologist Jan Assman, which Assman also applied to the exodus. Mnemohistory concerns the way a culture uses shared memory or reconstructed history to shape its identity. Analyzing the exodus through this lens can aid in identifying the historical memory the biblical authors were drawing on and recontextualizing.
In the exodus story, Pharaoh is unnamed. The oppression is not tied to any particular individual — it is instead broadly relatable to anyone who suffered from oppression by Egypt. In the Late Bronze Age and beyond, that was everyone in Canaan. The outsized role that the Exodus plays in the national identity is actually better explained by it not having been a singular, one time event, but instead representing a broader historical trend of Yahweh smiting the Egyptians and Canaanites emerging from under Egypt’s thumb. Everyone could relate to Egypt as a house of bondage and oppression.
Na’aman’s particular puzzle is how strange it is that Egyptian hegemony over Canaan goes completely unmentioned in the bible. He proposes that the memory of being freed from Egyptian dominion was preserved, but shifted context over time: "In my opinion, the riddle is resolved by the assumption that the vivid memory of the Egyptian presence in Canaan was absorbed within the Exodus tradition and thus disappeared from the collective Israelite memory." Egypt’s withdrawal from Canaan would have felt miraculous to the Israelites, who were not affected by the Sea Peoples.27
According to Na’aman, Israelite settlers in the northern highlands retained the memory of the destruction of Canaanite cities — they may even have played a role in it. But they repressed the memory of subjugation and oppression, and moved it to the land of the subjugators. Israelite memory shifted the relief of Egypt's withdrawal from Canaan into a withdrawal from Egypt.
Hendel, in a 2015 paper, concurs with and reinforces Na’aman’s view. A small group came from Egypt and merged with the Israelites, and their story of escape from Egypt merged with the Israelite memory of deliverance from Egyptian hegemony until the latter was subsumed into the former. The final story of the exodus was shaped by the Judean experience of Assyrian dominion and of 26th Dynasty Egypt down to the 6th century BCE. The exile and return only further cemented the significance of the exodus memory in its new form.
Hendel takes it a step further. "According to Egyptian imperial ideology, the province of Canaan was the personal property of the Pharaoh. All of its inhabitants were his slaves, from kings to peasants." The period of Egyptian hegemony was the crucible in which Israelite identity was formed. The extraditing of Egyptian subjugation to Egypt itself allows Israel to distinguish itself ethnically from other Canaanites. Over time, it became the lynchpin of Israelite national and religious identity.
Conclusion
Jess here. What we have discussed is a small sample of the scholarship produced on the exodus narrative just in the last 15 years. In fact, Hendel’s 2015 essay is one of forty-three published in Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. I have yet to read the rest of the book, and I am sure there are other significant recent works I have yet to come across. So you might hear from me again when Em reaches the exodus in their readthrough, or during a future Passover.
From what I did read, I think the mnemohistorical approach is really useful, and I think Na’aman and Hendel have the right idea — the centuries the Israelites spend living in Egypt in the bible are a modified memory of the centuries of Egyptian dominion over Canaan. That doesn’t mean, however, that I think Friedman is entirely wrong. The biblical authors had a highly compelling reason for needing to situate all of the Israelites outside of Canaan.
Let’s look again at what the three exodus narratives have in common: There were Israelites oppressed in Egypt. YHWH tells Moses to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt; they triumph over their foes with the aid of divine miracles by YHWH. There is a divine revelation on a mountaintop before they continue their journey to Canaan.
What this suggests, to me, is that the core of the exodus narrative is not actually the exodus at all. The biblical authors used the Israelite cultural memory of relief from Egyptian oppression, and the tradition of a watery defeat of Pharaoh at the hands of YHWH as recorded in the Song of the Sea, to provide a suitably impressive and awe-inspiring context for the true centerpiece of the exodus narrative — the introduction of YHWH to the Israelites, via Moses. The exodus narrative is deeply entwined with Moses as an individual and a historical/mythic/cultic figure. And Moses is firmly established as the link, the middle-man, the connective tissue between YHWH and the Israelites.
We’ve intentionally avoided discussing theories about Moses, as well as extra-biblical evidence for the origins of Yahwism. This is because I am planning on doing a separate deep dive on those topics. I do think that background is indispensable to understanding the exodus narrative as a story the biblical authors are telling about how the entire Israelite people came to encounter and accept YHWH as their deity. For now, though, we only need to keep in mind two pieces of information that the pshat28 tells us: YHWH came out of Seir/Edom,29 and Moses was never in the land of Canaan/Israel.
Allow me to rephrase Friedman’s theory. We have a relatively small group of former slaves called the Levites arriving in Canaan from Egypt. They are plausibly of Canaanite origin themselves. They were led out of Egypt by a prophet of YHWH named Moses. They witnessed YHWH’s glory at his mountain in the desert, and they learned from Moses the testimonies, statutes, and laws YHWH commands.
Eventually Moses died, and now they have returned to their homeland. They tell the Israelites about the God who rescued them from Egypt. The Israelites are interested and impressed because they themselves were recently oppressed by Egypt. The Israelites begin to worship YHWH as well, with the Levites as their priestly caste.
The Levites consolidate their position by convincing the Israelites that YHWH and El are actually the same deity. They are very violent, which helps the process along. As the cult of YHWH gains ground, Moses is accepted as a hero, leader, and prophet by all. The priests teach that YHWH rescued everyone from Egyptian oppression.
Perhaps, as memory of Egyptian hegemony over Canaan fades, this morphs over time into the belief that all Israelites were slaves in Egypt. Perhaps the Levites want historical memory to reflect all of Israel experiencing YHWH’s glory, an event which could not have happened in Canaan because it was well known that Moses never entered Canaan, and you can’t have the divine revelation without Moses, the very famous and beloved prophet of YHWH. Perhaps crafting a narrative of all the Israelites sojourning in the desert under Moses’ leadership allows the priests to situate historical rebellions against themselves as rebellions against Moses.
Perhaps I’m moving to the realm of pure speculation; if so, I’m in good company. We will never know what really happened 3,000 years ago, or what exactly gave rise to these traditions. What the mnemohistorical approach suggests is that the most important commandment regarding the exodus may be this: to imagine that we were all slaves in Egypt.
Happy Passover!
Bibliography
Baden, Joel S. (2019). The Book of Exodus: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Friedman, R. E. (2017). The Exodus. New York, NY: HarperOne.
Hagens, G. (2007). Exodus and settlement: A two sojourn hypothesis. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 36(1), 85–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/000842980703600105
Hendel, R. (2001). The Exodus in Biblical Memory. Journal of Biblical Literature, 120(4), 601–622. https://doi.org/10.2307/3268262
Hendel, R. (2015). The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Egyptian Bondage and the Song of the Sea. In: Levy, T., Schneider, T., Propp, W. (eds) Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04768-3_5
Naʾaman, N. (2011). The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 11(1), 39-69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156921211X579579
RIP Google Reader.
Also, I already gave people a way to skip ahead. If you're reading this, you must be either sufficiently interested in the subject or just here for the jokes. I value everyone who's reading because they're interested. But I only crave an audience for the jokes. Here's to you, Frank.
Alex, if you don’t read these I’ll be sad :(.
Like when you put cookies in the oven and then three hours later hear beeping and are like, “what’s that sound,” and it’s the fire alarm.
Nobody sees full frontal and lives.
According to Joel Baden, The Book of Exodus: A Biography, chapter 2.
With perhaps the notable exception of circumcision.
Early references to the exodus appear in Hosea, an 8th century Northern prophet. By the post-exilic period the exodus had inarguably assumed its enduring position as the crux of Israelite identity.
Em: Though not universally, as we’ll see both with Van Seters and when we get to them in the readthrough.
Exodus 15:1-18.
Judges 5:2-31.
This wouldn’t be all that surprising if Levi were a dispersed group of priests, but it contrasts with the militarized presentation of Levi in the Pentateuch.
Deuteronomy 33:2-27.
This would also explain why the Levites have no land of their own, and why they had a monopoly on the priesthood.
Sacred ritual objects in the form of boats, divine vessels used to transport gods. They were carried in processions by priests.
According to Friedman, who differs from Baden in what he attributes to J versus E.
”Israel is laid waste—its seed is no more.”
Em: ’Could have’ is often enough for Friedman.
Em: I’m saving discussion of the Late Bronze Age collapse for Joshua, but I want you to know that doing so is very difficult for me.
The 19th Dynasty in Egypt lasted from 1292 BCE to 1189 BCE. According to the Masoretic dating, the exodus supposedly took place in the early 12th century.
’Rameses’ in Exodus 1:11.
Archaeologists largely determine cultural continuity in the area from pottery and building styles, while diets are determined from animal bones and plant remains.
It’s me boy, I’m Jess, speaking to you inside your brain. I included Hagens here even though his evidence is flimsy because the concept of a schism is intriguing. The main pastime of the Israelites in the wilderness, like all Jews in all eras, seems to have been complaining, occasionally rising to rebellion. Nothing in all of history is more Jewish than splinter groups and factionalism.
’The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition’, 2011.
Em: I broadly agree. The only way I can imagine that happening is by force; but I think that’s not entirely impossible, given the militarized presentation of the Levites in the Pentateuch.
“The Exodus in Biblical Memory”, 2001.
Em: At least, not during the Bronze Age collapse. The Sea Peoples became the Philistines, and are mentioned in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
The literal or surface-level reading of the text.
Song of Deborah, Judges 5:4.