Exodus for Humanists

Statues at the boundary of the archaeological dig at Tell el Amarna, Egypt. Image credit: Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    In 2015, thousands of graves of children and teens from biblical-era Egypt were found at the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna, once the capital city of the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten. The skeletons showed signs of heavy labor, and had been wrapped only in rough matting before being dumped into the ground. Their families were unknown.
    A Times of Israel reporter, Amanda Borschel-Dan, asked Amarna Project director Barry Kemp whether these skeletons could be the remains of Israelite slaves under Pharaoh.
    His answer was a quick no.
    “I am afraid that I do not accept the Old Testament narrative as a historical record, and therefore that there is any connection between Amarna and ‘Hebrew slaves,'” he replied promptly in an email.
    From its very beginnings, archaeology has literally dug into the foundations of ancient beliefs. But while frescoes from the world’s first archaeological dig at Pompeii render religious scenes that today’s devout Christians would consider sinful, biblical archaeology in and around Egypt, Israel and their neighbors cuts closer to home. The Hebrew Bible feels like history, with its detailed navigational verses mixing proverbial and exotic place-names (e.g., “run a line from Hazar Enan to Shepham . . . go down from Shepham to Riblah on the east side of Ain and continue along the slopes east of the Sea of Galilee. Then . . . go down along the Jordan and end at the Dead Sea” (Numbers 34:10-12). Zionism, a secular movement declaring that the true home of the world’s Jews is in modern-day Israel, depends on a historical understanding of the Bible. So archaeologists like Kemp, who delve into ancient religions that probably were as different from our own monotheistic beliefs today as the sacred stories of Pompeii are from the encyclicals of Pope Francis, are sometimes uncovering deeply held convictions that most of us recognize and many of us share.

"No archaeologist has attempted to discover The Shire or Mordor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy . . . but the Exodus sites are different."

    Kemp, in his abrupt rejection of the reporter’s perfectly understandable question, is expressing what scholars call the “minimalist historical theory” of biblical archaeology. Minimalism has been prevalent in the field for decades. “No archaeologist to my knowledge has attempted to discover, for example, The Shire or Mordor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy,” wrote James K. Hoffmeier, professor of Old Testament and Near Eastern History at Trinity International University, in a 2007 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.     

    And yet, the latest trend in the field is rounding back to some original premises. Hoffmeier continues: “The Exodus sites are different.”

    So-called “maximalists'' are finding evidence for various parts of the Exodus stories, from the location of the capital city of Ra’amses the Great, to contemporaneous reports of Semitic tribes flocking to Egypt in times of famine as told in the tale of Joseph (Genesis 42:2), to archaeological finds showing Egyptian influence on ancient Israel.  And there have been recent articles on plenty of popular science websites as well as in newspapers about the possibility that the Ten Plagues story, as told in the ninth chapter of the book of Exodus, is explicable by modern climate science.

Ancient beads and seals found in modern-day Israel showing clear signs of Egyptian influence. Image credit: Primula Bosshard, Freiburg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    Lots of books have been published, too, including The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist’s Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories by Cambridge University physicist Colin J. Humphries. I read it ten years after its 2003 publication, when I was first researching a novel about the Exodus told from the point of view of Israelite teenagers. Although I found that Humphries was a little too keen to prove every bit of the biblical story, and his theories sometimes seemed to stretch to fit the ancient text like a record-setting piece of gum, everything in his book seemed at least plausible if not always extremely likely. So I decided to base my own young adult fiction on it.

    I’ve been writing it ever since. I still am.

    Along the way, I’ve amassed hundreds of links to solid research on an extensive assortment of topics. I’ve got stuff on limb amputation in ancient Egypt and beer-drinking among the Israelites. I’ve read up on conflicting biblical assertions about how long the Israelites were enslaved to Pharaoh. I’ve scanned chapters on Israelite marriage contracts in the Egyptian enclave of Elephantine, and articles on how to monitor a volcanic eruption through sound. Biblical archaeology is a hot field of debate and constant groundbreaking developments - pun intended - and as I take a break between drafts of what has become a 170,000-word manuscript, I thought a blog like this might be both educational and entertaining.

    The organizational principle of the website where these posts are linked is the three main areas described in the Exodus stories (and the titles of the novels in my trilogy): Goshen, in the northeastern Nile river delta; Midbar, variously translated as “wilderness” or “desert” beyond the rich soil of the Nile floods; and Sina’i, or the Mountain of God sometimes called Horeb in the Hebrew Bible. Colin J. Humphries’s The Miracles of Exodus places this mountain in present-day Saudi Arabia, and gives a pretty detailed analysis of the walking route from Goshen through the Midbar to Sina’i. That’s why I started the blog with this flyover video I made in Google Earth, and the first post is the script of the narration. I hope to publish blog posts every two weeks or so, but realistically it might be once a month.     If you’re curious, I hope you’ll consider subscribing at the top of the blog.

Path to the northern tombs at Amarna. Image credit: Markh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons