The Bible tells us a Hebrew slave from the land of Canaan named Joseph gained favor in the eyes of Pharoah and grew in power as an administrator, pretty much running all of Egypt.
Later, all the hebrews were enslaved, until an adopted prince named Moses was revealed to be a hebrew and demanded release of his brethren, lest all manner of calamity befall Egypt.
When said prophecies came to pass, the hebrews (by now a sizable population) were let go. Pharoah changed his mind and sent an army to recapture the fleeing slaves, and were swallowed up by the sea.
Has ANY egyptian heiroglyphics been found confirming any of these biblical accounts?
The religious accounts are based on faith and I for one do have that faith. But, as for history, from what we have been able to tell,
i) Egypt did rule Canaan at that time period and did have workers from that (and other regions)
ii) They did hold sons of foreign rulers and nobles as guests/hostages to be educated in Egypt and at least some of them achieved high rank within Egypt itself
iii) Egyptian rule in Canaan was not liked and they faced many rebellions, which were crushed.
iv) Egyptian rule ended sometime before the formation of Israel in Canaan.
So the story told in Exodus certainly stripped down to bare bones was possible.
Traditionally, the Exodus story has been attributed to a mythologizing of the anti-Hyksos reaction against “asiatics”:
And
The theory: that the Bible simply overlooks the fact that the Hyksos had been rulers in Egypt, in the interests of painting a one-sided account; that the “anti-Asiatic” sentiment (and subsequent harsh treatment by Egyptians of “Asiatics”) is the historical event that the Exodus mythologizes.
Problems: the Hyksos expulsion was centuries earlier than the alleged events in Exodus. The attribution was made by historians much later, such as Josephus and the “Egyptian priest and historian” Manetho, and may simply have been a conflation of the actual history with mythology. There is no evidence that defeated Hyksos were enslaved (though in the ancient world, that would be a reasonable fate).
Where would the Philistines fit into that, I wonder? Were they expelled Hyksos who ended up in Canaan, or cousins of the Hyksos brought to Canaan by the same “Sea Peoples” migration that brought the Hyksos to Egypt, or what?
I guess we’ll never know – nobody even knows what language the Philistines spoke. We only know (if we know even that) that they didn’t get along with the Hebrews.
I watched a show on TV that showed the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt, they uncovered an entire area where people had houses and also found many writings on stone tablets and pieces of stone that spoke of high wages and daily work on the pyramids.even men came from other countries to work there.
Does the Bible ever say that the Israelites were enslaved to work on the Pyramids? As opposed to the Kohl Mines or the Loincloth Weaving sweatshops? It just says something like “work in brick and mortar, and in the fields” and the Pyramids are cold-lain stone.
Not that I don’t think the Exodus story isn’t complete bunk, you understand, I just think there’s a tendency to conflate media representations, like movies showing the Hebrews slaving on pyramids, with what the Bible actually says.
I have no quarrel with you, because I also realize that not all things written in History are exactly what happened, it is the writings of other human’s with their spin on it, but why people would be enslaved would make one wonder, since Moses was said to be adopted into the Pharoah’s family, nor is there any evidence that Moses ever existed.
The great pyramids were built thousands of years before the events in Exodus were supposed to have occurred, of such folks as the Hebrews even existed. So Hebrews doing slave-duty on the pyramids is right out.
I don’t believe that the Exodus happened in anything like what is described in the Bible (although there was probably some kind of migration that provided the germ of the story), but I do marvel at the specificity of claiming 603,550 men. I wonder how that number got into the story.
