Yes, they are said to build cities, namely the cities of Pithom and Rameses
There were certainly slaves around, and slaves from that region, but the skilled work at least was by skilled paid workers and farmers during the off season doing the heavy lifting. But saying “the pyramids were build by Jewish slaves” is at least 90% wrong. There might not even have been what we know think of as the Jewish religion back around 2600BC. We only know of that people being mentioned in 1200BC.
There is still clear evidence of US Army maneuvers in the CA desert from the early 1940s (I have seen it myself) , not to mention the Nazca lines and stuff found by satellites in the Northern Africa desert.
Not much room in there, the entrances sealed off , and no grain found. They’d make terrible storehouses.
Yeah, I recall reading that the way agriculture worked in that place and time meant that there were long periods where there were large numbers of incredibly bored farm workers with essentially nothing to do. So much so that “haul big rocks around for a wage” was an actually attractive offer. It meant they got paid, and actually had something to do other than sit and vegetate (it’s not like they could surf the net for kitten videos).
“I swear that if I reveal the secrets of the Stonecutters, may my stomach become bloated, and my head be plucked of all but three hairs.”
Sure. The “kernel of historical fact” is being occupied by the Babylonians and saying “See, in this totally not at all fabricated foundational myth, we were slaves to the Egyptians, back when the Egyptians were WAY more powerful than the Babylonians. But our god delivered us from Egypt over the Egyptian gods, and so too will we be delivered from the Babylonians if we just pray a little harder and sacrifice ever more to me and my family of Levites, as we have conveniently discovered that god designated us to be His priestly class.”
There may have been small numbers of Semitic people enslaved in Egypt. But the tales in Exodus are so wild as to have been impossible. The mere act of the Nile River being turned to blood alone would have probably spelled doom for the nation. There is no way Ancient Egypt could have had even a few of the Ten Plagues without tremendous data being recorded in history about it. And those plagues as described would have ended the nation as is.
Richard Eliot Friedman wrote a book recently which proposes that the historical inspiration for the exodus story was a migration of about 3,000 Yahwists from Egypt to Midian and then Israel over the course of several generations, and that upon arriving they assimilated into an already-existing Israelite culture and became the tribe of Levi. He further proposes that they brought Atenist-inspired monotheistic ideas with them and this assimilation was the cause of Yahweh being merged with El and the transition from henotheism to monotheism that occurred during the First Temple era, and that the story of the migration gradually became a national origin story in the same way “the first Thanksgiving” is a national origin story for America even though few Americans are descended from the Mayflower pilgrims. His argument is largely based on linguistics and DNA, along with certain Torah passages (in particular the Song of Miriam) that he proposes predates the end of this migration.
I’m not fully convinced by all of Friedman’s claims (he proposes that the Torah was completed during the First Temple era, while I think it was likely finished during the time of the Great Assembly), but it’s a compelling read.
IIRC, it was Josephus who claimed the Hebrews built the pyramids, but then he also claimed one of Abraham’s granddaughters was married to Hercules.
Remember folks, Josephus is a reliable historian!
Compared to other historians of his time? He’s probably about the best we’ve got.
But yes, of course, like any historian, he can’t be treated as infallable.
I’ve been reading Antiquities of the Jews bit by bit lately. The impression I get is that he was trying to get the Romans to see the Jews in a more sympathetic light by tying them into ancient Hellenic culture.
I understand that this is the explanation for the story of Masada - that kind of suicide before dishonor trope was alien to Jewish culture of the era but would have been very familiar to his Roman audience.
Well, sure but algae bloom, minerals and such can turn fairly large bodies of water reddish in color.
But there almost certainly were significant numbers of semitic people enslaved by the Egyptians.
Yeah, and the Pyramids were built like 2500 years before his time. However, Herodotus did claim that the Pyramids were build by slaves. That was “only” 2000 years before his time. But many well read ancients took Herodotus as … well.. err.. gospel..
Yeah but that’s not generally what historians mean when they assess the historicity of a story. When historians debate the historicity of the Iliad they are not discussing the likelihood of the god of the seas coming to land to aid one side of a battle.
@Thing.Fish’s excellent analysis completely matches my own. So, I’d say it’s a fiction as a whole, but very likely with a seed of fact, though likely only as much as seen in the "inspired by a true story 
" genre.
You mean this?
Of course, the fact that there is no historical evidence for the existence of Moses or the ten plagues doesn’t necessarily mean they were purely mythical. There’s little historical evidence to establish the existence of anybody from the period, except for those who happened to be head honcho at some point.
On the other hand, it seems likely that much of the detail of the biblical account was borrowed from Egyptian sources. The name “Moses” apparently derives from the common Egyptian suffix -mose, “born of,” as in Thut-mose, “born of the god Thut.” The Old Testament claim that the name comes from the Hebrew mashah is thought to be wishful thinking. The story of the infant Moses’s rescue from the canebrake, interestingly, parallels the Egyptian legend of the goddess Isis, who hid her son Horus in a delta papyrus thicket to protect him from some nasty fate.
Being the money paragraphs for this discussion IMHO.
A comparison I saw recently was that it was as if Moses’ name was Drew, which originates (via Andrew) from a Greek word for “brave/manly”, but the text said that his adoptive mother named him that because she drew him out of the water.
The Old Testament is full of name-puns. Pretty much any time you see “And she named him _____ because _____”, the second word isn’t actually the name, but some other word unrelated to the name, but which has a similar sound.
Most cultures’ myths are allegorical, taking bits of common current cultural knowledge and extrapolating them back to unrecorded times when everything could be presented as larger and more amazing than the humdrum world around them. No one should be surprised that the Torah contains historical references that can be substantiated; it would only be amazing if there were none at all.
I’m one of the minority who regards the New Testament, at least the Gospels, as mythology similar to the earlier books of the Torah, admittedly set in recorded historic times but even so containing no verifiable single events. Also like the Torah, the New Testament contains elements from earlier myths of other cultures that were repurposed and rewritten to fit into new religious traditions. If this is possible over a time lag of a generation, then a time lag of hundreds of years shouldn’t be expected to produce anything but invented events.
Believers have over many centuries sifted every grain of sand in the Middle East as well as every surviving word that had been set into writing for “proofs” of the two books. Nothing has ever been found that would authenticate the depicted events in the religions’ foundations. That is exactly as everyone should expect for the time period.
What is mostly done, and almost exclusively done here, is to try to sift through that historic knowledge and somehow make a pleasing connection that is entirely conjecture and wishful thinking. Erich von Däniken is being remembered because of his recent death. He was a complete charlatan, but he would have been pleased by these efforts so similar to his own fabrications.
Related: historicity of Joseph, who in Genesis rises from lowly slave to become grand vizier of Egypt then brings his extended family (the Israelites) from Canaan to live in the land of “Goshen”.
There is evidence of Semetic presence in Egypt, particularly the Hyksos kingdoms, and the memory of those people may have been incorporated into a later Israelite creation myth.
~Max
I’ve been reading a lot about the history of the Bible recently. One of the most interesting things I learned was that the whole “golden calf” narrative in Exodus is almost certainly a late First Temple era political commentary about how the Samarians worshipped El/Yahweh as a bull god of fertility as opposed to an incorporeal god who dwelled on mountaintops. Jeroboam constructing temples in Bethel and Dan with bull icons and a non-Levite priesthood essentially got back-projected into the Exodus story in a manner comparable to something akin to what you’d come up with if you wrote a story with a premise like “What if Donald Trump was president during the War of 1812?”
Lots of my ancestors were slaves in ancient Rome.