CAN WE REALLY BELIEVE THE EXODUS STORY?

I discovered another site on the internet which is antagonistic toward Christianity and the Bible. It is called “Medium” and is put out by Tim Zeak, who is described as: “formerly an evangelical who read the Bible from cover to cover a dozen times.” In one of his posts he gives the various reasons one can simply not take the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt seriously. I have listed them in italics with my own comments following.

Many of these objections can be eliminated or at least mitigated greatly if the number of Israelite men (said to be about 600,000 in Exodus 12:37, and consistent with census figures in Numbers 1:46 as well as with the redemption money listed in Exodus 38:25-26). That would calculate to approximately 2,500,00 total Israelites taking part in the exodus. Thus, I will discuss that problem first before going to Zeak's objections. I turns out that there have been various ways of understanding Exodus 12:37 in addition to either accepting the number at face value or totally rejecting it as being entirely fictional.

    1. Cole: “We may assume, if we like, that the figures have been wrongly preserved in the manuscripts (perhaps in earlier days having been written in cipher, not in full)...It was great enough to terrify the Moabites (Nu 22:3), yet small enough to be based on the oases around Kadesh-barnea (Dt. 1:46). No theological point depends on the exact numbers, and so the question is unimportant. Whether there were six thousand or six hundred thousand, their deliverance was a miracle.” It is a well known fact that there is little to no redundancy to numbers compared to words, which makes it next to impossible to restore a number in the text which has been wrongly copied by a scribe.

    2. “Doughty observes a Bedouin tendency to hyperbolically magnify numbers by factors of ten.” (Propp) Other ancient Near Eastern cultures inflated their numbers even more so.

    3. Durham cites Beer, who feels the phrase 'about six hundred thousand' in Exodus 12:37 came from gematria, a practice in which each Hebrew letter stood for a corresponding number, all of which could be added up. Using this method the numerical value of the phrase “sons of Israel” in the verse equals 603,551, amazingly close to the 603,550 of Numbers 1:46.

    4. Thompson on Numbers 1:1-46: “Assuming that the terms in Nu. 1-4; 26 and 31 are military in nature and that the lists were ancient and authentic, it is possible that a later compiler of ancient source material misunderstood the true meaning of the terms, and assuming them to be numbers [instead of military leaders or units], simply added them up and arrived at the total of 603,550 in 1:46.”

    5. “Or alternatively the term 'allup, 'captain', may have been confused with 'elep, 'thousand', so that, e.g., in 1:39 the 62,700 men of Dan may have read originally '60 captains, 2,700 men', or even '60 captains, 27 me'ot'. The problem is thus complex and a variety of mathematical solutions has been offered.” (Thompson)

Depending on which of these mathematical solutions is correct, we arrive at much more realistic numbers for the total population of the Israelites at the time – between 16,000 people (according to Ramm) and 27,000 by the reckoning of Mendenhall and Jarvis.

Gordon also mentions these two possibilities but notes that they would not explain the number deduced from Exodus 38:25-26 and Numbers 1:17-46. However, he does not count on the fact that these passages may have been composed by another author or later editor who misunderstood the meaning of 'eleph in Exodus 12:37 and adjusted their figures accordingly so as to be consistent.

    6. Freitheim explains another approach, which is to “understand the number in terms of the approximate population of Israel at the time of David and Solomon; the number would be a way of confessing that all Israel from this later time came out of Egypt.” Ramm echoes this possibility: “In Israel's concept of 'corporate personality' (a group viewed as one person) all Israel did participate in the exodus as Christians believe that all Christians participated in the cross.” See Romans 6 for this idea.

Also illustrating this principle, and even closer to the context, is the way the census of all the Israelites coming to Egypt is enumerated in Genesis 46:8-27 as 70. It actually counts children who had not yet been born to the 12 patriarchs at that time. They are included because the potential for their birth was already present.

Keep the above possibilities in mind, as I go through Zeke's objections.

A: The Bible, in its story about the Exodus, would have you believe that 2,500,000 runaway slaves outran the entire Egyptian military who were chasing them on horses and chariots. That would have created a line over 200 miles long (at eight abreast) not including their animals, that the Bible says were many.

In the first place, there was no question of the Israelites “outrunning” the Egyptians who were right at their heels. If you read the account, you will clearly see that the Jews had left some time earlier, having time to make two stops along the way. Only then, after an undisclosed period of time, did Pharaoh call out his army to chase them down. Not only that, but Exodus 14:1-9 God told the Jews to actually turn back toward Egypt so that the army could find them more easily, in order to eventually trap them in the Re(e)d Sea.

Kitchen states, “That a large group of subject people should go out from a major state is neither impossible nor unparalleled in antiquity. In the late 15^th century BC people of some 14 mountain regions and townships apparently decamped from their habitats within the Hittite kingdom and transferred themselves to the land of Isewa...”

B: The story of the Exodus only appears in the Hebrew Bible/the Christian Old Testament and nowhere else. Not in Egyptian history, nor in any other history. Despite decades of extensive archaeological endeavors, not one trace of it has ever been found...nothing from the 42 largest and most populated “cities” that the Bible claims were in the same area.

As many Bible scholars have pointed out, it is actually quite rare for the annals of a country to record their military losses. Of his early military campaigns, the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptal recorded in his fifth year that “Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe; Ashkelon has been overcome; Gezar has been captured; Yano’am was made nonexistent; Israel is laid waste, its seed is not.” The Merneptal Stele is the first (and only) mention of “Israel” in ancient Egyptian records.

And since Israel obviously continued to prosper and grow numerically for years to come, the bragging words concerning their disappearance prove to be just that – a case of fake news. The pharaoh was, however, not telling a total lie – the Israelites were not...in Egypt anymore.

It is also well recognized that the Egyptians attempted to expunge from their records and statuary the whole time period during which the Hyksos people were in charge of the country until the native Egyptians drove them out of power.

R.P. Gordon cites historical examples ranging from a battle fought by Rameses II's troops in ca. 1285 BC to a devastating earthquake in China in 1976 in which 5000,000 people were killed. In both cases, the nations involved perpetrated cover-up attempts to minimize the amount of damage.

It is telling how the word “Israel” is written. At the end of every other mention of a people group is a hieroglyph of three hills, standing for “country.” At the end of “Israel” is the drawing of a man and a woman, a glyph denoting that Israel is not yet an established place, not yet a country. It is still a people wandering in the Sinai wilderness.

Next, in regard to the “42 largest and most populated cities” in the region of wandering, almost none of the place-names can be identified with certainty, which is not surprising since none of them need be a “city” at all. Some of the names obviously refer to small towns, oases, temporary camping places or villages instead. The Hebrew word for “city” does not even appear in the Exodus account of the wanderings and rarely in the Numbers parallel.

C. The Bible tells us that all two million plus of them were informed that the very next day, they would be escaping from Egypt and had to immediately get prepared. (see Exodus 11:2–4 and Exodus 12:21–24). How could that many be told without the use of bullhorns?

In saying that, Zeak has obviously never worked in a large company or the military. Even before the days of the computer (I am dating myself here), our lab director would have his secretary tell the department managers some piece of news for them to spread to the troops; they would in turn inform the supervisors, who would then tell all the people reporting to them. It was not at all unusual for those at the bottom of the totem pole to know about the news well before the supervisor informed them of it a little later in the day. Even in prison, there are methods of incarcerated prisoners rapidly communicating with one another even while in their individual cells.

Also, the people would have been already prepared to leave at a moments notice when the word came since Moses had warned them well in advance that the exodus was to be expected soon. It at least gave them the time to gather their things together as well as contact their Egyptian neighbors for any parting “gifts” they wished to give them.

For another thing, there was a least a two-week delay between the warning given by Moses and the time of the actual departure (see 12:1-13). This would have allowed plenty of time for them to prepare for the trip.

D. Despite the Bible saying elsewhere that they only took food wrapped in their shoulder sleeves and some treasure they obtained from the Egyptians, we see soon after this one-day escape that they all had tents to live in, along with tools and weapons. They also had plenty of wood and unblemished, one-year old male lambs for the many required daily sacrifices that their God demanded. (see Exodus 29:25).

In the first place, Zeak has misspoke here. It doesn't say that besides the treasures they only took food wrapped in their sleeves. It says that the only food they took was that which was wrapped in their sleeves. The text says nothing regarding all the other things they took with them.

At this point, it is also obvious that Zeak has not at all understood the way the Exodus story is being told. The account goes back and forth between telling the story of the actual exodus and outlining the detailed procedures for later years when the Jews were to celebrate the event annually. Thus, the elaborate instructions regarding how they were to celebrate, how the tabernacle was to be outfitted, and the later daily sacrifices to be performed applied to the time once they were settled in the land, not to requirements during the exodus period itself.

E. Water distribution in the desert would require an amazing network of wells, cisterns, and piping, assuming you can find the water to begin with. Since their food was rained down for them as manna, we can skip that necessity. Sanitation would be huge, manufacturing of clothes for those born in the wilderness, hospitals, first aid stations, schools, day care, where to gather wood for the many daily sacrifices (in the desert), medicines, soap, blankets or sleeping bags for those cold nights, and countless other needs that cannot be ignored. Factories and mining facilities were needed as they all had spades, tools, and weapons.

Ramm points out that “The Sinaitic Peninsula could have supported about 16,000 people at that time for it was much greener, but it could not have supported 2,500,000.” So Zeak's objection is only true if one demands that there were millions of Israelites on the journey. And as to all the other elaborate paraphernalia he mentions, apparently the nomadic tribes of that area managed to subsist quite well for generations without having most of those items which he enumerates.

F. Obviously, these slaves were apparently wealthy, as they all had houses with doors and a sizable herd of sheep.

In the first place, even slaves had to have someplace to sleep at night even if it was just an improved lean-to or tent. And since the Jews had lived in Goshen for quite a while before a pharaoh put them to hard labor, there is no reason why they couldn't have continued to live in the houses they had already built for themselves. Similarly, they had been raising sheep there for generations, and there would have been no reason for the Egyptians to take those away from them since (1) we know that the Egyptians themselves refused to eat goats or sheep and (2) by allowing the Israelites to keep their livestock, that would have greatly alleviated the necessity of the Egyptians having to provide food for them.

G. Moses did not write any of the Torah: It is very easy to confirm and to understand why the overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars today have determined that the “Books of Moses,” the first five books in the Old Testament, were not written until during or after the post-exilic period (later than 586 B.C.E.) and absolutely not by Moses, who would have died many centuries before.

Although we are told several times in the Pentateuch that Moses wrote something or other down, it never states that he wrote the Pentateuch itself. “The Books of Moses” is a title that can just as easily and naturally be understood as books concerning Moses as its main character or the times in which Moses lived. But even if a post-exilic date is determined (and that statement is by no means as established as many liberal scholars would have you believe), that does nothing to disprove the historical accuracy of the account. In basically preliterate cultures around the world, it has been demonstrated that even detailed oral traditions are able to be accurately preserved from generation to generation. Thus, a combination of preserved written and oral traditions dating back to Moses' day is by far the best explanation for the wealth of accurate cultural information regarding Egyptian customs found in the Pentateuch, information which would have been hard to capture if the whole story were merely fabricate at a much later date.

H. Many locations named in this story were not even in existence at that alleged time, clearly proving the story was developed at a much later time than it claims to be. This is called an anachronism, one of several factors that scholars use in dating old manuscripts.

The previous explanation above well explains this objection also. It is as if someone took original accounts of the early populating of North America by Europeans and said, for the benefit of a current audience, that the Dutch settled in New York City (rather than the pedantically correct “New Amsterdam”).