What was exodus

They were, by all available evidence, primitive, illiterate and brutal. They built large but crude fortress cities and were constantly at war. At the end of the Early Bronze Age, they were obliterated. Who destroyed Early Bronze Age Canaan? Before the vast amount of information we have today had been more than hinted at, some early archaeologists suggested that they were Amorites.

The time, they thought, was more or less right for Abraham. So why not postulate a great disaster in Mesopotamia, which resulted in people migrating from there to Canaan?

Abraham would have been thus one in a great crowd of immigrants scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often felt compelled to debunk the idea of Divine commands. Today, the picture is different. Initially, they moved up into the Transjordan, and then crossed over north of the Dead Sea, conquering Canaan and wiping out the inhabitants. Two archaeologists have already gone on record identifying the invaders as the Israelites. In an article published in Biblical Archeology Review 7 , Israeli archaeologist Rudolph Cohen demonstrated that the two invasions match in every detail.

Faced with the problem that the two are separated in time by some eight centuries, Cohen backed down a bit:. I do not necessarily mean to equate the people with the Israelites, although an ethnic identification should not be automatically ruled out. But I am suggesting that at the very least the traditions incorporated into the Exodus account may have a very ancient inspiration reaching back to the MBI period.

The Italian archaeologist, Immanuel Anati, has come to similar conclusions. Since the Iron Age is when Israel supposedly invaded Canaan, we have been in the embarrassing position of having the Bible describe the destructions of these cities at the very time that they were being resettled for the first time in almost a millennium.

When the conquest is redated to the end of the Early Bronze, history the Bible and physical evidence archaeology are in harmony. Anati goes further than Cohen in that he claims the invaders really were the Israelites. How does he get around the eight hundred year gap?

Both Cohen and Anati are in the unenviable position of having discovered truths which conflict with the accepted wisdom. And there is good reason to do this. It is not only the period of the Exodus and Conquest which suddenly match the evidence of ancient records and archaeology when the dates of the archaeological periods are brought down:. The Middle Bronze Age invaders, after some centuries of rural settlement, expanded almost overnight into an empire, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.

History knows of one such empire. Archaeology knows of one such empire. The same adjustment which restores the Exodus and Conquest to history does the same to the United Kingdom of David and Solomon. The Empire fell, bringing the Middle Bronze Age to an end.

The biblical accounts of the revolt of the ten northern tribes and the invasion of Shishak king of Egypt make the debate irrelevant. The period following the end of the Empire was one of much unrest, but saw tremendous literary achievements.

Strangely, these Canaanites spoke and wrote in beautiful Biblical Hebrew. Semitic Canaanites? Did the Bible get it wrong again? The speakers and writers of Biblical Hebrew were, as might have been guessed. Biblical Hebrews. Finally we get to the Iron Age. This is when Israel supposedly arrived in Canaan. But it has been obvious to archaeologists for over a century that the archaeology of the Iron Age bears little resemblance to the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan.

There were invasions, but they were from the north, from Syria and Mesopotamia, and they came in several waves, unlike the lightning conquest under Joshua. The south remained in the hands of the Bronze Age inhabitants, albeit on a lower material level. The conclusions drawn from this evidence have been devastating. Like the Israelites who left Egypt, all believers in Christ are redeemed and consecrated to God. Under the Mosaic Covenant, people annually sacrificed unblemished animals according to specific regulations in order to have their sins covered, or borne, by that animal.

As the perfect Lamb of God, He took away our sin permanently when He sacrificed Himself on our behalf. Have you accepted His sacrifice on your behalf? View Chuck Swindoll's chart of Exodus , which divides the book into major sections and highlights themes and key verses. Who wrote the book? Where are we? Why is Exodus so important? What's the big idea? How do I apply this? Together with his now grown up son Ramses, he fought the joint forces of the lepers and the Jerusalemites, and pursued them into the Syrian mountains.

We have here a story of an ethnic group in Egypt that threatened the indigenous Egyptian religion and objected to the worship of Egyptian idols and sacred animals.

This group was reinforced by people arriving from the north, from the direction of Canaan, and together they seized power over Egypt, until Pharaoh Amenophis, aided by his son Ramses, drove them out.

And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them. And he said to his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: come, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply and it come to pass that when any war should chance, they also join our enemies and fight against us and so go up out of the land Exod.

Here, too, is a scenario whereby an enemy from within joins forces with an enemy from without. Either way, this provides convincing evidence that a correlation between these narratives truly exists. The story of the exodus from Egypt is very complex and may be taken two ways. On the one hand, it is the story of a group of miserable slaves coerced into forced building labor in Egypt.

Also, contrary to the notion that the Israelites were very downtrodden, other verses describe them as leaving Egypt with great wealth: God lends the people favor in Egyptian eyes, and the Egyptians give them gold and silver vessels Exod.

According to these verses, then, the exodus included a military element: armed Israelite soldiers and foreign mercenaries who came from abroad to help them. I think one can point precisely to the time when these events took place, based both on the biblical story and the Manetho tradition.

We have to go back to the story of the Egyptian prime minister Bay-Joseph and the child pharaoh Siptah, whom Bay puts on the throne. Her reign only lasted two or three years, ca. We have two Egyptian documents on the subject: one is a huge papyrus, the largest in existence today. These two sources complement each other. The Harris Papyrus tells of a neglected Egypt, lacking a single ruler. Each region had a local officer or king, and they quarreled and murdered each other.

Then it says that someone took over the throne. This would mean that the text is about someone who appointed himself as a ruler, meaning he was not worthy to inherit the throne of the pharaohs and took power by improper means. He levies taxes on the entire country. He and his followers despoil the Egyptian gods and prohibit the bringing of offerings in the temples. The papyrus goes on to tell of a turning point when the Egyptian gods took pity on the land and restored the son born of them to power.

That was Setnakhte, founder of the twentieth dynasty. He restored order throughout the country, executed the evildoers, and cleansed the great throne of Egypt. He brought with him a large group of followers who objected to the Egyptian gods and their rituals. He and his followers took over the country for a time and exploited it economically. Setnakhte then battled this foreigner, removed him from the throne, stripped him of power, and ascended the throne in his place.

I mentioned another document we have, however, which was written soon after the battle for power in Egypt. There it is written that Setnakhte cleansed Egypt of those who had led her in a mistaken direction, who had defrauded her.

This plan of bringing mercenaries paid with Egyptian silver and gold failed, and Setnakhte drove them all out of Egypt. If I were to conflate what is written in these two Egyptian sources, the following story of the end of the nineteenth dynasty and the beginning of the twentieth emerges. Tausert died around BCE, and her death was followed by two years of internal conflict in Egypt, because she did not have any living offspring and therefore no clear heir.

Then someone of Canaanite or Syrian origin took over rule in Egypt. This man despised Egyptian rituals and prohibited offerings to the Egyptian gods. He imported allies from Asia—from somewhere in Syria, Lebanon, or Canaan—whom he paid with silver and gold.