The Exodus

An Egyptian Story

Peter Feinman

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789254754
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Did the Exodus occur? This question has been asked in biblical scholarship since its origin as a modern science. The desire to resolve the question scientifically was a key component in the funding of archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century. Egyptian archaeologists routinely equated sites with their presumed biblical counterpart. Initially, it was taken for granted that the Exodus had occurred. It was simply a matter of finding the archaeological data to prove it. So far, those results have been for naught. The Exodus: An Egyptian Story takes a very real-world approach to understanding the Exodus. It is not a story of cosmic spectaculars that miraculously or coincidentally occurred when a people prepared to leave Egypt. There are no special effects in the telling of this story. Instead, the story is told with real people in the real world doing what real people do. Peter Feinman does not rely on the biblical text and is not trying to prove that the Bible is true. He places the Exodus within Egyptian history based on the Egyptian archaeological record. It is a story of the rejection of the Egyptian cultural construct and defiance of Ramses II. Egyptologists, not biblical scholars, are the guides to telling the Exodus story. What would you expect Ramses II to say after he had been humiliated? If there is an Egyptian smoking gun for the Exodus, how would you recognize it? To answer these questions requires us to take the Exodus seriously as a major event at the royal level in Egyptian history.

Chapter 1

The Egyptological search for the Exodus

Moses led people out of Egypt against the will of Ramses II (1279–1213 BCE) on the seventh hour of New Year’s Eve at the end of Ramses’s seventh year of ruling. It is an Egyptian story.

Why that time? Why that day? Why that year? Why against Ramses II? [‘Ramses’ is the spelling of his name to be used in this study except when quoting people who used a different spelling.] The answers to these questions are found not in the Hebrew Bible but in Egypt. To understand what Moses did, it is necessary to place him in the Egyptian context in which he had been raised and against which he acted. The search for this understanding also is the search to understand Egypt. Typically, that is not the way the search for the Exodus is conducted.

With these brief introductory remarks in mind, let us turn to the Egyptological search for the Exodus. Initially, the specific goals were to find archaeological and textual evidence for it and to locate the route from the unknown location of the capital city of Ramses II, the presumed Pharaoh of the Exodus, to the wilderness. This chapter traces the development of Egyptology, the formation of the Egypt Exploration Fund, its initial archaeological efforts, how leading Egyptologists have addressed the Exodus in their histories of Egypt, and the challenges within the discipline itself. The review will set the stage for defining the Egyptian cultural construct and the historical reconstruction of the Exodus.

Napoleon and the birth of Egyptology

‘Napoleon in Egypt: The general’s search for glory led to the birth of Egyptology’ was the title of an article by Bob Brier (1999). What previously had been a remote and inaccessible land of myth and mystery suddenly became part of current events. Napoleon would go in 1798 where Alexander the Great had gone before him over 2000 years earlier. Included in the expedition were people one would not normally expect: 167 scientists or savants representing a range of artistic, scientific, and engineering skills. They traveled the length and breadth of the country gathering data in various formats about both the ancient land and Egypt in their present. Eventually, that information coalesced into the monumental 20-volume Description de l’Égypte in 1828. While in Egypt, Napoleon created the Institute d’Égypte. Napoleon lost at Waterloo to the English, but his expedition put France in the lead for the battle over ancient Egypt.

One savant has been singled out for special notice, the artist Dominque Vivant Denon. At age 55, he was one of the oldest people on Napoleon’s expedition. He also was one of the most enthusiastic. For an artist, the experience of seeing ancient Egypt from Upper Egypt to the Delta was an overwhelming experience. The sights were unexpected, extraordinary, and too numerous to count. Imagine seeing ancient Egypt before tourists, pollution, and a rising water table wreaked their havoc. Today we cannot see the Egypt Denon experienced over two centuries ago except through his drawings. Denon returned to France and published Voyage dans la haute et la basse Egypte/Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt in 1802. The book was phenomenally successful just as an English travel book would be in 1877 (see below).

Perhaps the foremost archaeological discovery occurred in July 1799 at Rosetta. There the still famous Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French. However, subsequently it was taken by the victorious British as war booty in 1801 and it now resides in the British Museum. As a result of this discovery, the race was on to crack the code of the ancient Egyptian languages from the Greek, hieroglyphic, and demotic scripts inscribed on the single stone with the same message. Once again France emerged triumphant thanks to Jean François Champollion in 1822. This incident reveals the importance of non-archaeological and non-historical concerns in the study of ancient Egypt.

At this point, archaeological excavations in Egypt had not yet started and there was no search for the Exodus. For readings on this topic see Brier (1999); Parkinson (1999); Peters (2009); Robinson (2012); Wilkinson (2020, 19, 22–30, 38–43, 55–75, 102–104).

Austen Layard and the birth of Assyriology

‘Hasten, O Bey! Hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself!’ (Layard 1849, 65). These words to Austen Henry Layard ushered in a new era in understanding the ancient Near East and in biblical studies. True, he did not practice scientific archaeological standards as practiced now, he was more of a treasure seeker. Still Layard’s work brought home to England the world of ancient Assyria. The multi-facets of his excavations anticipated many of the issues and conditions that Egyptology would experience decades later when archaeological excavations began in Egypt. They include:

1. The national pride from the accomplishment particularly in regard to the longtime rival France with France still maintaining the cultural upper hand in Egypt.

2. The geopolitics of operating within the crumbling Ottoman Empire with England actually taking over in Egypt in 1882.

3. The connection with the Bible but the route of the Exodus being the goal in Egypt and not Nimrod (Gen. 10).

4. The struggle to find a place in the British Museum for Assyrian and Egyptian objects given the exalted status of Greek art and the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in 1816.

5. Race – Assyriology provided a preview for Egyptology in how the scholars chose to classify the people they studied (Cooper 1983; 1991; Yurco 1986b; 1990; Larsen 2009).

One should keep in mind that museums then were not what museums are today. The British Museum, chartered in 1753, and the Louvre, opening in 1793, were still comparatively new. Issues about what to collect and display were still being debated. So was the question as to who the intended audience was. It was a long time before Tut (Tutankhamun) changed everything and the blockbuster museum exhibition became the norm. In the meantime, the rivalry between the two national museums in England and France was real.

Layard discovered so many ‘cherubim’ and reliefs, they could not all fit in one museum, not that the British Museum considered Assyrian reliefs to be real art in the first place. Layard realized he needed to reach out to the general public to obtain support for his work. The result was book publications and an exhibition in 1851 at the newly-built Crystal Palace in London. The hook was the Bible. The names of multiple biblical kings were contained in the Assyrian reliefs and monuments including even images of them.

For additional readings on these subjects see Jacobsen (1939); Lloyd (1947); Kildahl (1959); Brackman (1978); Bohrer (1989; 1994; 1998, 2001); M. Larsen (1994); Holloway (2001; 2006); Malley (2008).

George Smith and Heinrich Schliemann: jump-starting Egyptology

These archaeological events did not occur in a vacuum. In the 1880s England was not simply playing catch-up with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. Since that time, a lot had happened besides the deciphering of hieroglyphs by Champollion in 1822. A slew of academic and archaeological developments substantially changed the way the human past was understood. These developments included:

1. The principles of geology established by Charles Lyell which extended the age of the earth well beyond anything previously contemplated.

2. The aforementioned Assyrian discoveries such as by Layard which brought to life the existence of the people who had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel.

3. The new ways of arranging the biblical texts in what would become known as the Documentary Hypothesis thereby undermining the position of Moses as the author of the Five Books of Moses.

4. Charles Darwin – need more be said about a person whose teachings still cannot be taught in many American schools.

Collectively, these changes in the paradigm threatened the place of the Bible. Individually and combined these developments undermined the biblically-based 4004 BC date Bishop Ussher had calculated for the origin of the universe. The response in biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, especially the later decades and in England, are outside the scope of this study (Rogerson 1985). However, it should be noted that what became Egyptology was not immune to the forces unleashed by these actions.

Two archaeological events thrust Egyptology into this academic maelstrom. The first was the discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1871 (S. Allen 1989; Traill 1995). His discovery was presented in England as an antidote to the assaults on Homer and the Bible during the previous decades (Gange 2013, 40). The second event was the translation in 1872, by George Smith of the British Museum, of a non-biblical flood story with many similarities to the story of Noah. Smith’s reaction to his discovery has become part of archaeological lore. It resulted in a public presentation attended by Prime Minister Gladstone. The presence of the political leader of a country at an archaeological lecture was highly unusual. Gladstone also was fixated on Homer (Gange 2013, 141–150). The flood story was part of the Gilgamesh Epic, not yet known by that name. It launched a quest into the twentieth century to equate this Sumerian king of Uruk with the biblical Nimrod (Gen. 10:1–9). Together these events raised the prospect that at any moment an archaeological discovery could be made which would validate the historicity of these two revered ancient texts, the Iliad and the Old Testament.

Egyptologists then repeatedly referred to Smith and Schliemann as reminders of the power of the spade (Gange 2013, 156–157). Egyptology arose as a weapon intended to be wielded against the forces attacking the acceptance of the literal historical truth of the Bible. The forces of darkness represented by elitist rationalist criticism would be vanquished by this new tool being deployed on behalf of the people’s religion. It was precisely in the waning decades of the nineteenth century when these pro-biblical forces were strongest. They became manifest in the institutional effort of the newly-formed Egypt Exploration Fund to lead that effort through excavations to determine the route of the Exodus. The highbrow Academy, the popular science journal Knowledge and various other newspapers and publications would be the means through which the results of this Egyptological initiative would be disseminated to the public (see below) (Gange 2013, 3, 5–6).

Histories of Egyptology have tended to minimize the significance of the biblical connection to the origin of the discipline in England:

it was precisely because Egyptology was felt to have so powerful a role in accommodating the Bible to the needs of contemporary culture that its technical development was pushed forward rapidly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century …

… the biblical enthusiasms of the new Egyptological organizations of the 1880s have been studiously ignored …

Egyptology’s new-found popularity was formed and sustained by this range of efforts to undercut scientific naturalism, rationalism, sceptical criticism of the Bible, and secularism itself. Indeed, the central assertion of this chapter is that after 1880 Egyptology became a powerful component in a broad fight-back of popular religion against perceived ‘irreligious’ tendencies in British intellectual life. (Gange 2013, 9, 158, 163)

The 1880s may be characterized as the high tide of biblical Egypt as a focus of attention in England. The biblically-inspired public provided the audience for the discoveries of the archaeologists (Gange 2013, 153). The communication between Egyptology and this public was led by two individuals. One was a writer and artist by training and not a professionally trained scholar, Amelia B. Edwards. The other R. S. Poole, was from the British Museum. Together they launched the organization that would begin the archaeological search for the route of the Exodus.

Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892)

Today Amelia B. Edwards’ contributions to Egyptology are not well-known outside the circle of people who are interested in the history of Egyptology. In the beginning, she was the prime mover in the creation of an organization dedicated to Egyptology (see below). She endowed the first chair in the United Kingdom in Egyptology and arranged for it to be held by Flinders Petrie, the foremost Egyptologist of his day. Her interests helped set the tone for what English Egyptologists did in that first decade and for communicating those actions and results to the general public.

A biography is not warranted here but some salient points of her life deserve mention in a study of Egyptology and the Exodus. Her training definitely differed from that of an Egyptologist in the academic context. In her pre-Egyptological life she was an artist in the broadest sense. Poetry, stories, novels, music, opera, painting, sketching, all were part of her childhood, early adulthood, and middle age before she took the plunge into Egyptology at age 51. She was most successful in her travel books. The first was Unbroken Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873) about the Dolomites. The one which changed her life was A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) about her trip to Egypt in 1873. The delay in the publication was due to the meticulous research she conducted on her return to England to ensure the accuracy of the information in the book. She wanted all visitors to Egypt to be knowledgeable in what they experienced there; she wanted all armchair visitors to feel as if they had been there in person.

Before turning to her Exodus-related work, some of her other Egyptological reports deserve attention. In 1881, she was scathing in her book review of History of Ancient Egypt by George Rawlinson. The non-scholar took the renowned scholar to task for his shortcomings as an Egyptologist (Edwards 1881). For example, she extolled the achievements of Hatasu (Hatshepsut, 1473–1458 BCE). This female had publicly succeeded in a man’s world just as Edwards was doing. The female Pharaoh built monuments. She was the first explorer in history, the discoverer of an unknown land [meaning Punt which was not unknown to Egypt], who had dispatched ‘the first exploring squadron known in the history of the world’ (Melman 1995, 266 quoting Amelia Edwards unpublished paper ‘The social and political position of women in the Ancient World’, Edwards nd, 22). Edwards’s Hatasu is a scientist like Napoleon whose sailors and navigators were like ethnographers and naturalists. Edwards’s travel and writing and the birth of English Egyptology occurred after British explorers had successful...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Chronology
• 1. The Egyptological search for the Exodus
• 2. Egypt, Egyptology, and the Exodus
• 3. The Hyksos: the people of the 400-year sojourn
• 4. The Hyksos: the triumph and defeat of Apophis
• 5. Ramses, the Pharaoh of the Exodus
• 6. The Exodus: death on the Nile
• 7. Post-Exodus Stress Disorder
• Bibliography