I suppose using Penn and Teller as scholarly references can be a chancy endeavor, but in an internet video I came across, they made an interesting assertion that I’d like to be able to confirm or reject - namely, that there is no archaeological support for the idea that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. On top of that, there is no reason to believe that the Hebrews wandered in the desert for 40 years, and there is no historical evidence that Moses even existed. I guess I thought that there was some sort of tentative evidence - maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls or something - that gave some credence to those ideas. But apparently, the only source of those stories is the Bible, which is, to be charitible, a questionable historical source. I am given to believe that a number of historians have reason to believe that a guy named Jesus probably did exist - separate from accounts in the Bible - but the old testament is apparently the only source for the stories that are told of the enslavement, deliverance, wandering, etc. What is the straight dope on the current status of our understanding of that period of history, without relying on the Bible?
I’m pretty certain that there are no independent records egarding anthing about the Hebrews n Egypt. There is a record in the Tell el Amarna records aou the “habiru”, which most people think are the Hebrews, but they’re not a slve group within Egypt --they’re a bunch living up around moder Israel.
That said, I have to note that it’s the kind of thing that would easily be not recorded in the ancient world. I ee no reason to disbelieve it, even though we only have the Bblical records for it. It’s certainly possible enough. And I’m an agnostic and generally skeptical of historical claims.
I think the main problem is that the Egyptians, as far as I’ve been told, didn’t enslave people to build the pyramids as we know slavery today. Rather, they used farmers who weren’t tending their crops to build the pyramids, or cycled Egyptian citizens on and off construction.
Also, you have to remember that even if Egyptian texts referred to the Hebrew’s literally AS slaves (were there any written evidence as such), there’s quite a difference between what it meant in Egyptian then and what it means now.
Also, you have to ask if the Egyptians were really dumb enough to concentrate the masses of labor required to build pyramids in one area guarded by troops with relatively primitive weapons, especially those of the Old Kingdom.
We’ve gone over this exhaustively in previous threads. As Cal says, about the only record that the Egyptians even knew that Jews existed is the one mention of habiru. There is not a particle of evidence that any specific event in the Old Testament from Adam and Eve to hundreds of years after Moses took place.
The torah record certainly reflects knowledge of the region, its people and its history, but that is to be expected both because the authors lived there and their audience lived there and both sets of folk would be expecting what they knew.
Similarly, the Egyptians were a cosmopolitan people who traded and corresponded with everybody in the world they had contact with, and undoubtedly they knew of the Jews as a minor tribe. There are later records of Jews in Babylon and in other areas mentioned in the Bible.
And the Jews knew these people as well, and took many of their stories and legends to write their own stories and legends.
But any historical accuracy of the older parts of the Old Testament is purely a matter of belief. There is no evidence for any of it. Period.
The requisite book to read on this is called The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher silberman. Finkelstein is on of the foremost middle eastern archaeologists in the world. The book is a popular presentation of information which has been common knowledge in ME archaelogy for years but which has not really seeped into the popular consciousness.
Basically, the assertion is correct that there is absolute no extra-Biblical evidence that the Jews were ever enslaved in Israel and there is actually a lot of contrary evidence for the stories of the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan. The Israelites were supposedly enslaved for 400 years in Egypt, yet not a single trace of their presence can be found in either the written or the archaeological record. Some people claim that the Egyptians may have destroyed written evidence of the presence of the Israelites, but eradicating every archaeological trace would be akin to trying to remove every trace of the presence of African slaves in the United States. In addition to the lack of archaeological record, there is also the fact that there is no trace of any Egyptian influence on the Hebrew language. It’s basically impossible to be immersed in another language for 400 years without having it influence (if not replace) the original language. Yet Hebrew language seems to have emerged directly from Canaanite around the 9th or 10th century BCE Which would be [after the time of the alleged Exodus) with no Egyptian influence at all.
There is also no trace of the Israelites’ presence anywhere in the Sinai Peninsula, even at an oasis called Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are supposed to have lived for 38 of their 40 years in the wilderness, there is no sign of human presence anywhere near the time in question. There were supposed to be two million people living there for 38 years. Two million people is a city, yet there isn’t a single postherd or bone or sign of any human encampment whatsoever. Archaeologists can find campsites for for much smaller and more temporary travelling parties than that, but they can’t find any trace of two million Israelites.
The Bible also contains some anachronistic references to places which didn’t exist yet during the alleged time of Moses. For example Numbers 20:14 says that Moses sent messengers (from Kadesh-Barnea) to talk to the of Edom, but Edom did not exist until the 7th century BCE.
The evidence in Canaan itself is that the Israelites emerged as an indigenous Canannite population in the hills of Judea who never left and never came back. There was also no conquest of Canaan at the time alleged by the Bible.
Of which book you can read an incisive summary/analysis (with application to contemporary Israeli/Palestinian politics) by Daniel Lazare, here: http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/lazare.htm
I’m also agnostic but I would be far more surprised to learn that ancestors of the Hebrews didn’t live in Egypt (more as an underclass than as what we would call slaves) than that they did. Oral history can be amazingly reliable (more on the “big picture” than on the details- I seriously doubt that Paris pissed off goddesses in judging a beauty contest but we’re pretty sure that the walls of Troy were breached about when Homer said they were) and a period of time sojourning in the Egyptian empire would be a rather major think to make up out of whole cloth. It’s not as fantastic as mythology (i.e. no “we spent time on the moon or in a three headed serpent’s belly” type stuff) but an easily managable distance even by a large number of tribesmen. Also, the reason the Hebrews went there in the first place- it was a time of famine and Egypt had food and they were able to trade their loyalty for sustenance- is completely and totally plausible and even logical.
What I think is fascinating is this: the traditional year for the death of Moses in the Hebrew calendar is around 1270 BC. According to the Bible Moses was 120 years old (which I seriously doubt, of course, but bear with me). Moses’s life in the Bible was divided into equal thirds: he spent 40 years as an Egyptian nobleman, went into the desert for 40 years and lived as a bedouin, returned to Egypt for a few months and led the Hebrews to Canaan in a 40 year journey. By this reckoning, he would have been exiled from Egypt the first time around 1350 BCE.
Moses, the foster son of a pharaoh’s daughter according to Exodus, is considered the founder of Judeo monotheism, or at least its codification. If he lived and lived when tradition says he did, he would have have been born and reared under the reign of Akhenaton, history’s first monotheist emperor. Akhenaton and his queen Nefertititi were the parents of six daughters, most of whom disappear from the historical record. Upon his death the throne was inherited by his son-in-law Tut (who was possibly also his son- uncertain) who after a quick reign was replaced by a succession of rulers that were replaced by the general who became Seti I and his son, Ramses the Great (or Ramses II).
Is this a coincidence that monotheism happened in Egypt about 1350 BCE, only to be done away with in a coup/war, only to pop up again in Canaan’s fair and happy land just a generation later when a group of people removing themselves from Egypt are traditionally said to have settled there? I seriously doubt it.
Is it a coincidence that in Hebrew Moses (Moše) means “to draw out”, but that in Egyptian “Mosah”, a word that sounds almost exactly the same, means “son of” and was a standard suffix to proper names? (The pharaoh Tutmose, for example, was “Thoth-Mosa”, or “son of the god Thoth”, while the pharaoh’s named Ramses would in Egyptian have been “Ra-Mosa”, son of the sun-god Ra.) This leads many to theorize (including perhaps most notably psychoanalyst and Egyptologist Sigmund Freud) to theorize that the man recorded in the Bible as Moses was in fact an Egyptian, an adherent of Akhenaton’s monotheistic experiment who became the leader of a separatist schismatic sect around the same time. (Freud starts off strong with the evidence then gets all psychoanalytically wacky.) Personally I believe that the legend of the Golden Calf at Sinai is a parabolic recording of a civil war during which the ardent monotheists triumphed over the polytheists (the calf being perhaps almost jokingly a reference to the many bull worshiping cults throughout the Mediterranean- these people were a far less powerful entity, so their deity of choice was a calf rather than a grown bull).
Anyway, I don’t believe Genesis/Exodus are infallible by any means, but personally I do think that it’s very likely a Semitic people settled in fertile Egypt when famine devastated what’s now Israel, tensions grew between their descendants and the government, and that a religious reformation born perhaps in part of Akhenaton’s monotheistic movement galvanized and catalyzed (perhaps with the aid of a charismatic Egyptian or Egypto-Hebraic leader who legend begun in or soon after his own lifetime connected to the daughters of Akhenaton [to give him the right credentials]) monotheism among the Hebrews, who decided the post Akhenatonic civil wars were a good time to return to their ancestral homeland rather than live under the fully restored corrupt polytheism. (It is historical fact, of course, both in the Bible and the historical record, that polytheism would occur frequently for centuries among Israel’s leaders and laity alike.)
The alternative is that for some odd reason, of all the places they could have chosen (Arabia, Syria, Greece, Germany, etc.), the ancient Jews just up and decided one day "Hey, lets say we came from Egypt!").PS- I should add that in my theory, it was not millions of Hebrews living in the Egyptian empire, but more likely a few thousand or even a few hundred separatists, Puritans if you will, who returned to the place their oral history knew as their homeland and there began a philosophical revolution of sorts (not unlike the spread of Buddhism or Islam during the historical era). Eventually it became not just a minor invasion of Egyptian born semites, but a mass migration of the entire people, who were in the oral histories by this time always one and united (unity and a mythological common heritage being needed by this time due to the centuries of external threat from Philistines, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, yapping poodles, Amway Salesmen, Romans, etc.).
They weren’t there at all, in any capacity. Read BrainGlutton’s link for a summary.
The Exodus story has no foundation in oral history. It’s a literary construction.
Why?
Once again- there is no archaeological evidence for this.
Akhenaton is too early. Exodus says that the Jews were forced to build the city of Raamses. The city of Raamses was built under Raamses II who didn’t come to power until 1279 BCE. That’s close to a century after Akhenaton.
You’re assuming too much. There is no evidence of monotheism in Canaan until the 7th century BCE. And the Israelites didn’t “settle there.” They were indigenous. The henothistic Yahweh cult emerged from the Canaanite pantheon,
Moses is indeed an Egyptian name but its application the Biblical hero probaly has its roots in some memory of the Pharaoh Ahmose 1, who kicked the Hyskos out of Egypt and chased them into Canaan. In fact, the Exodus story itself is likely based on the Hyksos expulsion.
Freud’s theory is no longer taken seriously.
There is no archaeological or historical evidence for any of this.
As I said, the story probably had its roots in the Hyksos expulsion.
The problem with this is that there is absolutely no basis for an assumption that monotheism existed in Canaan until centuries later.
Actually, Moses and Akhenaten were the same person! And a lineal descendant of the extraterrestrial/extradimensional “Anunnaki” gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunaki) of Mesopotamia!
Just ask Sir Laurence Gardner, Historiographer Royal of the Royal House of Stewart!* http://graal.co.uk/grailkings.html 
*See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Michael_of_Albany; http://www.royalhouseofstewart.org.uk/.
Unfortunately, this is a bit of a non-starter for this discussion. There is no claim that the Hebrews were used to build pyramids (the vast majority of which were built hundreds of years before the period during which the bible claims they were slaves).
In fact, the bible actually makes the claim that they were used to raise and harvest grain and also to build the store-house cities of Pithom (Per-Atun) and Raamses (Pi Ramesse). Leaving aside the other issues raised in this thread, that claim is mildly plausible because Egypt did rely on that type of agriculture and the cities named were enlarged or enhanced at about the time that the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. (Of course, anyone living in Canaan would know of the Egyptian grain and it would not be out of character for a story teller to describe one event (the known (re-)building of two cities) in a way to fix a date for the story.
Besides the similarity of “Moses” to the Egyptian suffix “-mose”, there’s also the name Miriam, which Elias auerbach claims derives from Egyptuan mrij = “beloved”. I’d say names qualify as as an “Egyptian influence on the languge”.
Actually, considering the size and influence of Egypt in that part of the ancient world, I’d be very surprised if there weren’t any influences on ancient Hebrew, regardless of whether or not thyere were enslaved Hebrews living there.
Linguists say there aren’t any influences. Moses is an Egyptian name, not a Hebrew one. It’s not an inliuence on Hebrew, it just isn’t Hebrew. a quick look at some Hebrew lexicons define miryam (or Maryam*) as probably deriving from the Hebrew word for “bitter” (from the root word mar).
Even if a couple of Egpytian names made their way into Hebrew legends, that is not so surprising since Egypt was in control of Canaan during the era in question and it doesn’t represent an influence on the Hebrew langage proper.
Keep in mind that the Egyptians themselves were a “Semitic people.”
The theory I have heard is that the Egyptian slavery/Moses story was put up as propaganda to persuade the Hebrews that they should leave Babylon. Egypt was close by and well-known, and on the other side of Israel from Babylon. Why not Egypt?
How much of a Babylonian influence is there on Hebrew? (I’m asking out of complete ignorance.)
Linguistically, I don’t know. I’d have to do some rading, it’s a good question. I do know that the religious influence was extensive. Babylonian Zorastrianism gave the Jews their eschaton. As far as language, I have to do some research but Finkelstein and Silberman claim that only the most elite upper classes of the Jews were physically taken into exile, not the whole population. So while the exile had a profound influence on Judaism and on the Bible, it might not have had a strong influence on the language.
From BrainGlutton’s link:
I never knew there was any significant doubt about Masada. What’s the story here?
I’m shocked that this thread has gotten this far without a reference to the Master.