“Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That’s when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University’s archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank.
The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua’s conquests in the 13th century BC and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers.
If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys’ final results were published three years ago.
The settlement research marked the turning point in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed that Egypt’s voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 BC inscription did mention them in Canaan.
Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries BC.
Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of the pharaoh’s charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea.
And some of the story’s features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at UC Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a “formulaic genre of catastrophe” found in other Near Eastern texts.
Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. “People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections,” she said. “That wasn’t considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across.”
Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would have meant there were a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, guarded by fortresses along the way.
Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said “you’d have to be a bit crazy” to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a swift military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan.”
