1

Jon Burke (2014)

The Historicity of the Exodus 1
Abstract: The absence of indisputable direct evidence for the Exodus has led many scholars to deny its
historicity. However, although the archaeological record represents an undeniable challenge to
traditional interpretations of the Biblical record, there is sufficient evidence to convince even skeptical
archaeologists that the Scriptural account describes a genuine historical exodus event.
The scholarly consensus
Although it is overwhelmingly agreed that there is clear evidence the Hebrews were already well
established and known in Canaan by the mid-13
th
century BCE, many archaeologists believe they emerged
from within the existing Canaanite population, rather than emigrating from Egypt.
Modern archaeologists and Bible scholars typically express skepticism of the Exodus, claiming there
is insufficient evidence to establish its historicity. Such comments are usually cited as the scholarly consensus.
Putting aside the possibility of divinely inspired miracles, one can hardly accept the idea of a flight
of a large group of slaves from Egypt through the heavily guarded border fortifications into the
desert and then into Canaan in the time of such a formidable Egyptian presence.
1

There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century
BCE.
2

Nothing in the archaeological record of Egypt directly substantiates the Biblical story of the
Exodus.
3

But it is most unlikely that a group of some three million peopleor even 80,000, which is
Manethos figureleft Egypt down the Wadi Tumilat in the reign of Ramesses or Merneptah. It is
completely unthinkable that any group of any related size went rattling around in the Sinai
Peninsula or the Negev for any length of time thereafter.
4

Accounting for the absence of evidence
It is a fact that there is no direct archaeological evidence for the Exoxus. This is acknowledged even
by professional archaeologists who believe the Exodus happened, such as James Hoffmeier.
Despite over a century of archaeological excavations in Egypt, proof of the dramatic Exodus has
not been found.
5

Is the absence of direct evidence only explicable if the Exodus never happened, or could there be
alternative explanations? The following list assess alternative explanations for the lack of various forms of
evidence.
1. How did a large Hebrew population live in Egypt without leaving direct archaeological evidence?
The areas in which the Bible says the Hebrews were settled are still largely unexamined by
archaeologists,
6
due to environmental conditions making excavation dificult.
7
Even in well examined
1
Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of
Sacred Texts (2001), 61.
2
Ibid., p. 63.
3
Malamat, Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go, in Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus (2012), 17.
4
Halpern, The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?, in The Rise of Ancient Israel (2004).
5
Hoffmeier, Out of Egypt: The Archaeological Context of the Exodus, in Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus
(2012), 2.
6
The Bible locates the Hebrews in Egypts northeastern Delta, called the Land of Raamses (Genesis 47:11) and
Goshen (Genesis 45:10, 47:4, 6; Exodus 8:22; 9:26). Although the Delta contains hundreds of archaeological sites,
comparatively they have not received as much attention as sites on the Nile from Cairo south to Aswan., ibid., p. 3.

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Jon Burke (2014)
archaeological sites, physical evidence for large groups of people who were there for some time may still be
completely absent.
Several major ancient Egyptian military campaigns have failed to leave any direct archaeological
evidence at all, despite involving tens of thousands of soldiers, and thousands of chariots and horses. The
greatest battle ever fought by Egypt was the Battle of Kadesh, against the Hittites. Yet the Egyptian army of
20,000 soldiers and 2,000 chariots left no archaeological record of their march from Memphis in Egypt to the
river Orontes in Kadesh, a journey of approximately 1,600 kilometres which would have taken weeks.
8

The combined numbers of the Egyptian and Hittite armies amount to around 50,000 soldiers and
around 5,000 chariots, but no direct archaeological evidence has ever been found of the battle. Historians
attribute this lack of evidence to the terrain, rather than dismissing the event as fictional.
The textual and iconographic evidence points toward an open-terrain battle. Such a battle would
leave little preserved in archaeological contexts.
9

This demonstrates that even very large groups of people in the Ancient Near East could move, settle,
and fight on a massive scale, without leaving any direct physical evidence of their presence in the
archaeological record.
2. Why are there no Egyptian written records of the Hebrews?
Egyptian written records for the Northern Delta and Goshen (where the Hebrews settled), were kept
in military and administrative buildings in this area,. However, the wet environment has resulted in the
destruction of almost all such written records.
10
In fact no written records have been found in this area which
provide useful historical information from any period, not just the time of the Exodus.
11

There is direct evidence that this area was settled by people the Egyptians called Asiatics (Semitic
people, of which the Hebrews were a sub-group),
12
and Goshen itself was referred to by the counsellors of the
16th century Pharoah Kamose as the land of the Asiatics.
13

7
The picture has improved somewhat since 1980 but the fact remains that high water tables in the Delta make
excavating to early levels difficult and expensive., ibid., p. 4.
8
Even if the army could have maintained an average marching speed of six kilometers an hour for twelve hours
each day, it would take them three weeks to travel 1,600 kilometers.
9
Hasel, Domination and Resistance: Egyptian Military Activity in the Southern Levant, Ca. 1300-1185 B.C. (1999),
176.
10
Moreover, in the moist environment of the Delta, surviving papyri are rare.6 The excavation at Tell el-Daba
(ancient Avaris, the Hyksos capital), directed by Manfred Bietak of Vienna University, uses a pump and an
elaborate network of pipes in order to remove water from the ground to allow diggers to reach New Kingdom
levels. During a visit in 2002, I saw the scribes quarter of the early-18th-Dynasty palace (c. 15001450 B.C.) that
was being exposed from the moist mud of the Delta. A number of inscribed clay seals and seal impressions were
found, some of which date to the 12th Dynasty (c. 1900 B.C.), but no papyrus had survived.7 Indeed, after more
than 35 years, Bietaks team has not discovered any papyri., Hoffmeier, Out of Egypt: The Archaeological
Context of the Exodus, in Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus (2012), 5.
11
In short, the Nile Delta where the Bible says the ancient Israelites lived has produced no historical or
administrative documents that might shed light on any period., ibid., p. 5.
12
Thus both texts from Egypt and archaeological evidence from the second millennium B.C. agree that Semites
entered Egypt with flocks and herds, especially in times of drought in Canaan. This is precisely the picture
portrayed in Genesis regarding Jacob and his family. Drought and famine in Canaan prompted the patriarch to
send his sons to Egypt where there was grain, which eventually led them to settle in Egypt with their flocks and
herds (Genesis 43:115)., ibid., p. 7.
13
He [the Hyksos king] holds the land of the Asiatics; we hold Egypt, Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts
(1969), 323.

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Jon Burke (2014)
But the Egyptians did not distinguish between one group of Asiatics and another at this time, so they
had no word to describe the Hebrews specifically, even in their written records.
3. Why are there no Egyptian texts, inscriptions, or monuments recording the plagues and the
events of the Exodus?
Archaeologists such as Hoffmeir and Kitchen argue that such records are not found because the
Eygptians chose to conceal defeats rather than recording them, especially when the Pharaoh was involved.
14

Assessing the available evidence
Whilst skepticism of the historicity of the Exodus is certainly the scholarly norm, there is a great deal
of indirect archaeological evidence which gives good reason to accept the Biblical account.
While there is no direct extra-biblical source on the Exodus (or Conquest) or on the Israelite
servitude in Egypt, we do possess several significant indirect sourcesa sort of circumstantial
evidence that lends greater authority to the biblical account.
15

Cosequently, even archaeologists who do not believe the Exodus occurred as described in the Bible
still agree there is plenty of archaeological evidence supporting the historical background of the event, even if
not the event itself.
One thing is certain. The basic situation described in the Exodus saga - the phenomenon of
immigrants coming down to Egypt from Canaan and settling in the eastern border regions of the
delta - is abundantly verified in the archaeological finds and historical texts.
16

There were Semites there, there was forced labor, there was brickmaking, there was intense
building activity under Ramesses II, including of the city of Ramses. The list could easily be
extendedMoses name is clearly Egyptian, the story of Moses growing up in the court mirrors
the practice of Egyptian kings raising the children of their Semitic vassals as hostages in the
court.
17

Although this does not prove the Exodus did happen, it does prove that the Bibles description of the
Exodus is not a literary fiction of later centuries; it contains accurate knowledge of the geographical and
socio-cultural background in which such an event would have occurred, proving it is grounded in authentic
historical records and events. The following is a list of indirect evidence supporting the Biblical Exodus.
1. Semites and Canaanites typically moved down to Egypt with their flocks in times of drought and
famine, and settled in Egypt as Jacob did.
The universal experience of Canaanites, in other words, was that in times of famine, Canaanites
were sent down to Egypt. And when the Canaanites were pastoralists, it was to the land of
Goshen they wentthe area where the Israelites settled.
18

14
Moreover, the types of royal inscriptions found on stelae and temples never include any negative reports
about Pharaoh and his armies. Rather, they speak of his triumphs and deeds of valor, and even distort set-backs
such as the near disaster to Ramesses IIs army at the battle of Kadesh, about which we know from other sources.
Consequently, no one will ever find a stela commemorating the humiliation of Pharaoh as a result of the plagues or
the defeat of the Egyptian forces dispatched to bring the fleeing Hebrews back to Egypt., Hoffmeier, Out of Egypt:
The Archaeological Context of the Exodus, in Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus (2012), 5.
15
Malamat, History of Biblical Israel: major problems and minor issues (2001), 59.
16
Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of
Sacred Texts (2001), 52.
17
Halpern, The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?, in The Rise of Ancient Israel (2004).
18
Ibid.

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Jon Burke (2014)
2. Foreigners such as Semites and Canaanites could become appointed to high government
positions, as Joseph was.
'In the wider population of the whole Theban region, however, both in the government and in the
administration of the great funerary temples, one finds Canaanites in very responsible
positions, such as the Semite Zabu, a Scribe of the Vizier (also in no. 35) who penned one of the
Deir el Medina papyri.
19

Sometimes these slaves rose to positions of considerable prominence in Egypt, often to major
power.
20

3. Many personal names of people born in Egypt (according to the Exodus record), are genuine
Egyptian names of the era.
The presence of such Egyptian personal names as Hophni, Phinehas, and Merari among
members of the house of Levi would argue for the assumption that members of this group were
also in Egypt. Moses, also a Levite, bore an Egyptian name (from a verb meaning to beget)
which appears as an element in such Egyptian names as Thutmosis and Ramesses.
21

4. Egyptian records describe people called Apiru, a term used by Egyptians to describe certain
Semitic groups. Although this term does not refer exclusively or specifically to the Hebrews, it
was the word which the Egyptians would have used to refer to them.
The Bible places this event overtly under Merneptah (c. 12371227 B.C.E.), and the oppression
under Ramesses II (c. 13041238). And there are convincing details: Texts of Ramesses II
even refer to construction by captive Apiru,* an Egyptian term for a type of Semite
sometimes encountered in small numbers on military campaigns. This term is probably
related to the later Israelite word, Hebrew (ivri), used in the Bible to describe Israelite
ethnicity to foreigners, and used frequently in the Book of Exodus.
This word fell out of use a couple of hundred years after the Exodus,
22
so its use in the Exodus
account shows the record was written with accurate historical information of the era in which it
is set. If the Exodus account had been written after the 10
th
century, the writer would not have
known this word.
5. Archaeologists acknowledge there is abundant evidence for Semitic people (such as the
Hebrews), living in Egypt and its surrounding areas at this time.
There is no doubt that there was a significant Semitic population throughout Egypt during
the New Kingdom (see chap. 3). Because of the preponderance of epigraphic evidence for a Syro-
Palestinian presence in Egypt from the mid to late second millennium B.C., even the most
skeptical historian cannot dismiss the fact that both the Bible and Egyptian sources agree on
this situation.
23

6. References in the Exodus account to brickmaking by foreign laborers, brick tallies, and shortage
of bricks resulting from inadequate supplies of straw, all show accurate historical knowledge of
the era in which it was set.
The brickmaking, too, described as part of the oppression, reflects close knowledge of
conditions in Egypt. A 15th-century tomb painting depicts Canaanite and Nubian captives
making bricks at Thebes. One text even complains about a dearth of straw for
19
Lesko, 'Pharaoh's workers: the villagers of Deir el Medina', p. 68 (1994).
20
Halpern, The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?, in The Rise of Ancient Israel (2004)/
21
Hayes, 'Introduction to the Bible', p. 64 (1971).
22
But the Egyptian term, Apiru, lost its currency by the tenth century., Halpern, The Exodus from Egypt: Myth
or Reality?, in The Rise of Ancient Israel (2004).
23
Hoffmeier. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (1996), 112.

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Jon Burke (2014)
brickmakinga situation encountered by Israel in Egypt.* In Canaan, by contrast, straw was
not typically an ingredient of mudbrick. Almost every detail in the tradition mirrors
conditions under the XIXth Dynasty.* Especially, the idea of a sudden rise in forced labor
around the time of Ramesses II is entirely consonant with historical reality.*
24

7. Using the term Pharaoh without a specific name, was common in Egypt at the era of the Exodus,
but not earlier or later.
By the Ramesside period (1300- I 100 B.C.), "Pharaoh" is widely used and continued popular in
the late period. 114 From its inception until the tenth century, the term "Pharaoh" stood
alone, without juxtaposed personal name. In subsequent periods, the name of the monarch
was generally added on. This precise practice is found in the Old Testament; in the period
covered from Genesis and Exodus to Solomon and Rehoboam, the terns "pharaoh" occurs alone,
while after Shishak (ca. 925 B.C.), the title and name appear together (e.g., Pharaoh Neco,
Pharaoh Hophra). Thus, the usage of pharaoh in Genesis and Exodus does accord well with
the Egyptian practice from the fifteenth through the tenth centuries.
25

Conclusion
Despite a lack of indisputable hard evidence for the exodus as commonly understood from
the Biblical text, here is sufficient archaeological evidence to convince even skeptical archaeologists
that the Scriptural account describes a genuine historical exodus event.
The next section of this study will review and address typical arguments made against the
historicity of the Exodus.
24
Halpern, The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?, in The Rise of Ancient Israel (2004).
25
Hoffmeier. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (1996), 87-88.