The Exodus & the Expulsion of the Hyksos - Archaeology of the Bible - Peter Myers, June 3, 2004; update August 26, 2008. My comments are shown {thus}.

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Current Egyptology and Archaeology deny that there was an Exodus. Instead, they say that this is a confused memory of the Expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt.

Archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman agree with Egyptologist Donald B. Redford that there was no Exodus.

Redford, in attacking Freud's linking of Moses with Akhnaten, misses Freud's point. Freud admits that Yahweh is a vindictive tribal god, but TRANSFERS Jewish Monotheism to the allegedly universalist deity of Akhnaten. I say "allegedly", because of Akhnaten's intolerant iconoclasm.

Freud on Akhnaten and Moses: moses.html.

Redford and Finkelstein say that the geographical place-names in Biblical accounts are reliable for the 7th & 6th centuries BC, but not for earlier times, showing that it cannot be regarded as a "history" of those earlier times.

Manfred Bietak and the Hebrew/Israelite Four-Room houses at Avaris (Hyksos capital in the north of Egypt): four-room-house.html.

(1) The Exodus story as the foundation of Judaism (2) Egyptologist Donald B. Redford on the Exodus story (3) Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (4) Jewish chutzpah in praise of the Hyksos (5) Martin Bernal, in Black Athena, equates the Exodus with the Expulsion of the Hyksos (6) John Romer on the Exodus (7) David Ben-Gurion on the Exodus (8) Thomas L. Thompson, "one of the world's leading Biblical archaeologists", branded an "Anti-Semite" for saying that the Bible is not History but Literature (9) The Israel Stela (Merenptah Stele); more from Romer, Finkelstein and Silberman (10) The Sea Peoples destroy the Hittite Empire, weaken Egypt, and lead to the formation of the Hebrew states - Redford

(1) The Exodus story as the foundation of Judaism

The Exodus myth is the foundation of the notion of "liberation" within Judaism. It's not like the personal (individual) concept within Buddhism or Christianity, but a collective, political, concept as "national liberation" struggle against an external oppressor.

The liberation myths, celebrated on Jewish holidays, provide the motivation for Jews to free themselves - in Zionism - and to free other oppressed minorities, in "international socialism".

These two causes can collide, e.g. when the push for Eretz (Greater) Israel conflicts with solidarity with the Palestinians.

Yet Archaeologists are increasingly concluding that the Bible stories are not history but fiction.

"LONDON: The first 10 books of the Old Testament are almost certainly fiction, written between 500 and 1500 years after the events they purport to describe, according to a 15-year study of archaeological evidence.

"The study, whose conclusions would mean Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King David and King Solomon never existed, was carried out by Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world's foremost authorities on biblical archaeology, yesterday's Independent on Sunday newspaper reported.

"The claims by Professor Thompson, of Marquette University, Milwaukee, are outlined in a new book, The Early History of the Israelite People. ...

"Professor Thompson ... says the inevitable conclusion is that the Israelite exile in Egypt, the Exodus and Israelite conquest of the Promised Land never took place.

"Excavations have found no trace of a settled population around Judea and Jerusalem during the 10th century BC, when the Kingdom of David and Solomon was supposed to have flourished.

"A community that could have supported a kingdom did not form in Judea until at least a century later, Professor Thompson said. Jerusalem did not become a large and politically influential city until about 650 BC. ... - AAP"

- Canberra Times, March 29, 1993.

Folk Christianity does not make much of the "Exodus" story; it merely serves as a backdrop for the Ten Commandments. The Passover holiday of Judaism is replaced by Easter within Christianity, and the Crucifixion story contains a quite different theme of Liberation - Liberation from Judaism.

(2) Egyptologist Donald B. Redford on the Exodus story

Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1992).

{p. 408} THE SOJOUURN AND EXODUS

There is perhaps no other scriptural tradition so central to the recontruction of Israel's history that Deuteronomy presents us with than the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. It has become a prototype of salvation, a symbol of freedom and the very core of a great world religion. Yet to the historian it remains the most elusive of all the salient events of Israelite history. The event is supposed to have taken place in Egypt, yet Egyptian sources know it not. On the morrow of the Exodus Israel numbered approximately 2.5 million (extrapolated from Num. 1:46); yet the entire population of Egypt at the time was only 3 to 4.5 million! The effect on Egypt must have been cataclysmic - loss of a servile population, pillaging of gold and silver (Exod. 3:21-22, 12:31-36), destruction of an army - yet at no point in the history of the country during the New Kingdom is there the slightest hint of the traumatic impact such an event would have had on economics or society. As we have already seen, the Asiatic population in Egypt had lingered during the New Kingdom and a part of it had been assigned construction tasks (p. 221ff.); but the "store-cities" of the Exodus story (1:11) are a purely Israelite phenomenon, and the progressive assimilation of the Asiatic population during the New Kingdom is not reflected in the Exodus at all. Clearly something is wrong. Are we approaching the subject from the proper direction? Have we been reading the primary source in Exodus too naively? Is there evidence we have missed? The almost insurmountable difficulties in interpreting the Exodus narrative as history have led some to dub it "mythology rather than ... a detailed reporting of the historical facts" and therefore impossible to lo-

{p. 409} cate geographically. This is a curious resort, for the text does not look like mythology (at least on the definition of the latter as a timeless event set in the world of the gods). The Biblical writer certainly thinks he is writing datable history, and provides genealogical material by means of which the date may be computed. He also thinks it is possible to locate this event on the ground, and packs his narrative with topographical detail. That the resemblance in plot pattern and motif (especially in the "Song of the Sea") to the "Hero-god versus the Monster Sea" suggests a mythic basis to the story, which only later underwent historicization, is more ingenious than illuminating. After all, the feats of Ramesses II on the battlefield occasion the abundant use of imagery drawn from the motif Hero-god versus Chaos; but Kadesh was a real battle nonetheless!

Of prior concern here should be the date of the sources in Exodus 1- 14 judged empirically on the basis of datable details. The latter, it must be admitted, are few and most are of a toponymic nature. Research on these place-names, however, has proceeded far beyond the stage of Cazelle's classic article of thirty-five years ago; and we can now genuinely speak of a unanimity of the evidence. Whoever supplied the geographical information that now adorns the story had no information earlier than the Saite period (seventh to sixth centuries B.C.). The eastern Delta and Sinai he describes are those of the 26th Dynasty kings and the early Persian overlords: his toponyms reflect the renewed interest in the eastern frontier evidenced for this period by fort building and canalization. He knows of "Goshen" of the Qedarite Arabs, and a legendary "Land of Ramesses." He cannot locate the Egyptian court to anything but the largest and most famous city in his own day in the northeastern Delta, namely Tanis, the royal residence from about 1070 to 725 B.C. (cf. Psalm 78:12, 43), which survives as a metropolis into Roman times; and he mistak-

{p. 410} enly presses into service the adjacent marshy tract "the reed-(lake)" as the "Reed-sea," the scene of Israel's miraculous passage to safety. The route he is familiar with is that which traverses the same tract as the canal of Necho II (610-594 B.C.) from Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes; then he moves north in his mind's eye past the famous fort at Migdol to Lake Sirbonis (Ba'al Saphon) where Horus had already in the mythical past thrown Seth out of Egypt. In short, with respect to the geography of the Exodus, the post-Exilic compiler of the present Biblical version had no genuinely ancient details. He felt constrained to supply them from the Egypt of his own day and, significantly perhaps, cited several places where Asiatic elements and especially Judaean mercenaries resided in the sixth and fifth centuries.

When we move beyond toponymy, the Egyptian origin of specific details and even the Egyptian locale of the tale become very hazy indeed. The Nile and its plant life are mentioned, as well as mud brick as a building material (especially common in the Delta); and certain plagues (e.g., frogs, gnats, flies) seem appropriate to a Nilotic setting. A knowledge of the agricultural year in the Nile Valley may also be attested by 9:31-32. But apart from these few features of the plot, the story could have taken place anywhere.

A perusal of the Bondage and Exodus narratives strains the imagination to elicit Egyptian background; but the following details may be passed in review. The term "Pharaoh" is ubiquitous and is used, as it was in the first millennium B.C., as a synonym for the word "king," or even misunderstood as a personal name (cf. Exod. 6:29). The birth of Moses and his being secreted in the rushes has been likened to the fate of Horus in late mythology; but in fact the motif of the "Birth of the Hero" has much wider currency in antiquity and is not Egyptian in origin. The rod that turns into a serpent (Exod. 4:2-4, 7:10-12) recalls the wax model

{p. 411} that turns into a live crocodile when grasped; and the "magicians" who can emulate this trick derive their designation from an Egyptian loanword. Apart from a vague appropriateness of some of the afflictions, the Ten Plagues are not especially "Egyptian" in background, although pestilence and cataclysm were very well known in ancient Egypt. The motif of turning the river into blood (7:20-24) is known from Mesopotamia, as well perhaps as a plague of flies. Darkness (10:21-23) certainly was feared by the Egyptians, and failure of the sun to shine signaled a desperate state of affairs; but it could not be construed as a plague. The slaying of the firstborn does, indeed, enjoy some parallels in Egyptian mythology (none however of much prominence); and attention has been drawn with respect to blood on the doorposts (12:22) to the apotropaic use of the color red among the Egyptians. The possibility of offending the Egyptians by offering items that are somehow taboo (Exod. 8:26) recalls the piety attached to wholesale animal worship in the Late Period and the revulsion caused by the inadvertent killing of individuals. The "pillar of fire" curiously recalls a common figure used in high-flown jargon of the Egyptian king leading his troops into battle as a "sun disk (or other luminary) at the head of his army." Finally, the rolling back of the water to get at the dry bottom, and the flood of water to drown enemies are both known in Egyptian folklore.

None of this suggests a close familiarity with Egypt. But it might be explained as a "demythologizing" tendency, or even a sort of Interpretatio Hebraica of certain myths and cultural traits, indulged in by Israelite

{p. 412} aliens living among Egyptians, or close enough to have limited and distorted knowledge of their customs.

Despite the lateness and unreliability of the story in Exodus, no one can deny that the tradition of Israel's coming out of Egypt was one of longstanding. It is found in early poetry (e.g., Exod. 15) and is constantly alluded to by the prophets. One cannot help but conclude that there was an early and persistent memory of a voluntary descent into Egypt by pastoralists in which one Jacob, who was later to achieve a reputation as an ancestral figure, played a leading role. Those who had made the descent the tradition went on to elaborate, had not only prospered and multiplied, but had for a period of four generations grown exceedingly influentlal in Egypt. Subsequently a strong hostility had been evinced by the autochthonous population toward the Asiatic interlopers; and the latter had been forced to retire to the Levanthine littoral whence they had come.

There is only one chain of historical events that can accommodate this late tradition, and that is the Hyksos descent and occupation of Egypt (see chapter 5). The memory of this major event in the history of the Levant survived not only in Egyptian sources. It would be strange indeed if the West Semitic speaking population of Palestine, whence the invaders had come in MB IIB, had not also preserved in their folk memory this great moment of (for them) glory. And in fact it is in the Exodus account that we are confronted with the "Canaanite" version of this event, featuring the great ancestral leader Jacob, the four-generation span, the memory of political primacy, the occupation of the eastern fringe of the Delta, and so on. It became part of the origin stories of all the Semitic enclaves of the area, and from there it even spread to the north and west where It became current among the non-Semites.

Since we have next to nothing by way of textual witnesses to the folklore of the Canaanites of the Levant, traces of an "Exodus" tradition apart from the Hebrew version are difficult to find. But they do exist Strabo preserves the memory of an army drowned in the sea, localized on the Palestinian coast north of Acre, and is aware of similar phenon-lena at Mount Caslus "near Egypt." Legend had it that certain communities in Asla and Mesopotamia had originated in Egypt; and in early Roman times the population of Palestine was considered to have originated from "Egyptian, Arabian and Phoenician tribes."

But the best-preserved non-Biblical memory of the sojourn and Exodus

{p. 413} was that preserved in "Phoenician" legend, and surviving today in classical sources. From at least as early as the fifth century B.C. and perhaps earlier - the details are already a commonplace in Herodotus - Levantine communities remembered a descent to the Nile of one Io, her marriage to the reigning king and the list of her descendants through her son Epafos (Apophis). Io's line ruled over Egypt for four generations, whereupon her great grandson Agenor retired to Phoenicia, where he became a great king, and his brother Belos (Ba'al) to Mesopotamia. Belos's son Danaos, after a contretemps with his brother Aegyptos, fled to Argos. Both the origin and the ultimate settlement, however, of the main elements of the movement are linked with "Phoenicia": Epaphos's brother is said to be "Phoenix" and Epaphos himself at one stage in his career was in Byblos, while Kadmos, son of Agenor, in concert with Danaos, led the foreigners expelled from Egypt.

In sum, therefore, we may state that the memory of the Hyksos expulsion did indeed live on in the folklore of the Canaanite population of the southern Levant. The exact details were understandably blurred and sub-consciously modified over time, for the purpose of "face-saving." It became not a conquest but a peaceful descent of a group with pastoral associations who rapidly arrived at a position of political control. Their departure came not as a result of ignominious defeat, but either voluntarily or as a flight from a feud, or yet again as salvation from bondage. Nor are we justified in construing as a difficulty the discrepancy between the bondage tradition of Exodus 1:11-14 and the historical reality of the Hyksos expulsion: the Biblical writer has here incorporated another figment of legend for which, in fact, he had Egypt to thank.

During the Saite and Persian periods there took shape in Egypt two types of popular story, redolent with a patriotic jingoism. One took as its plot the invasion of Egypt from the north, the destructiveness of a foreign occupation, and the eventual expulsion of the invaders by Egyptian forces coming from the south. The other centered upon the infestation of Egypt by plague-ridden or leprous peoples (usually foreign), and the steps taken

{p. 414} to rid Egypt of their plight. It takes little discernment to recognize in the first plot pattern a repeated motif in Egyptian history - Thebes in the south had thrice attempted to spearhead wars of liberation against the north - but in its present formulation the story owes more to the national fervor awakened by the disastrous invasions (or attempted invasions) of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian states from 671 to 525 B.C. The second story-type, on the other hand, has deeper roots, although it too was shaped and brought to relevance by the ubiquity of foreign enclaves in Egypt from Saite times on. As we have them for the Hellenistic age - none earlier have survived - examples show that both plot patterns could be welded into a single tale, although they also appear separately. Certainly the earliest to come down to us in detail - Hecataeus of Abdera bears an earlier but imperfect witness - is the account in Manetho's Aegyptica (first half of the third century s.c.). The "bare bones" of Manetho's account runs as follows:

A. 1. The King (Amenophis/Hor) desires to see the gods.
2. Amenophis son of Paapis the seer declares he may if he cleanses the land of lepers.
3. The King sends all lepers to the quarries east of the Nile.
4. Amenophis the seer predicts an invasion of thirteen years.
5. Amenophis commits suicide.
6. The lepers ask that they be allowed to live in Avaris.
7. In Avaris the lepers choose as their leader Osarsiph, priest of Heliopolis.
8. Osarsiph makes monotheistic and racially exclusive laws.
BRIDGE 9. Osariph invites the Shepherds "back" to Avaris.
B. 10. The Shepherds return.
11. The King hides the divine images and sends his five-year-old son to safety.
12. The King declines to fight the Shepherds and retreats to Ethiopia.
13. The Shepherds lay Egypt waste.
GLOSS 14. Reiteration of the PN Osarsiph and identification with Moses
A + B 15. Amenophis and his son Rapsaces drive out the Shepherds.

It is clear that numbers 10-13 with the addition of 15 is but a variant of the "Invasion-from-the-North" theme. In fact, the details of numbers

{p. 415} 12 and 13 point directly to the inspiration of the popular view of events in the seventh and sixth centuries. Both Tararqa and Tanwetaman, as noted, had beat a hasty retreat from Memphis to Nubia, not wishing to engage the Assyrians in battle. And in the slaughter of the sacred animals, the Shepherds emulate the reputed acts of the Persians.

But items 1-8 and one form of 15 compose our version of the tale of the unclean ones, and here at least the underlying historical reality can be extracted easily. "Amenophis" the king (or Hor, a sobriquet) is Amenophis III, and his desire to see the gods a folk interpretation of passages from his inscriptions. Amenophis son of Paapis is Amenhotep son of Hapu, the historical secretary of labor who served under Amenophis III, gained a reputation for wisdom while he lived, and for over fifteen centuries was revered as a healing "demigod." The dispatch of the impure ones to quarries east of the Nile is an etiological explanation of the whirlwind of quarrying and construction that went on during the reigns of Amenophis III and Akhenaten, prominent textual records of which remained on view for all to see. Memorial stelae commemorating the quarry work were inscribed at Tura opposite Memphis in Middle Egypt under Amenophis III; and the stela of Akhenaten at Gebel Silsileh is the most prominent monument at the site. The text of the latter suggests a magnitude for the operation not much different from that of Amenophis's roundup of lepers: "The first occasion when His Majesty issued a command ... to pursue all work from Elephantine to Sam-behdet, and to the commanders of the army to levy a numerous corvee for quarrying sandstone in order to make the great benden of Re-harakhty ... the princes, courtiers, supervisors and managers were in charge of its impressment for transporting the stone." The use of the Greek terms "lepers" and "unclean" suggests a pejorative in the original Egyptian (or demotic) that in Pharaonic propaganda was customarily attached to undesirable antisocial elements, whether native or foreign. In the present case it seems clear that the devotees of Akhenaten's sun cult are the historical reality underlying the "lepers," and this is confirmed by the iconoclastic nature of the lepers' legislation and the figure of thirteen years for the occupation, which corresponds to the period of occupation of Amarna. Osarsiph moreover is remembered as a priest of Heliopolis,

{p. 416} where sun worship was endemic, and his name may be construed as a perjorative applied in later tradition to Akhenaten.

From what has been adduced to this point it is clear that the first half of Manetho's Osarseph tradition (the "A" pattern) descends from an etiological tale bearing upon the Amarna period of Egyptian history. The story probably originally concluded with the 19th Dynasty kings Sety I (Mernepath) and his son Ramesses II finally putting an end to the Amarna interlude; thus it would conform to the revised king list of later Ramesside times, in which the four "Amarna" reigns are excised and their years added to Horemheb, so that the 19th Dynasty follows Amenhotep III immediately. The pattern A, then, would probably have originated toward the end of the New Kingdom, as one of the many legends told of illustrious kings of the 17th and 18th Dynasties; but it must have come into Manetho's hands in a demotic version of the Saite or early Persian periods.

The fate of the victims in the Osarsiph legend differs from that of the Hyksos. The latter were expelled through war, whereas the lepers were enslaved. It is from Osarsiph or its prototype that the "Bondage" tradition of Exodus originated. To the conceivable argument that the direction of dependence might be reversed, a cogent rebuttal can be given. The assignment of quarry work and heavy-stone construction to captives in Egypt is better attested than brick making, and is thus more appropriate in a tale with an Egyptian setting. The use of brick is, of course, ubiquitous in Egypt, and especially in the Delta; but "store-cities" are an Asiatic phenomenon and brick making as the appropriate job for a captive servile population is well known in the Neo-Assyrian empire. If one cannot resist the urge to read scripture uncritically as history, the blocks of material describing the lives and careers of Moses and Joseph teem with pitfalls. For there are no more enigmatic and elusive figures in the entire Bible.

Moses, in the final form the P-editor gave to the Pentatuch, is tied to

{p. 417} four major traditions: the Exodus itself, the law-giving at Mt. Sinai, the wandering in the wilderness, and the initial stages of the conquest. The question as to which of these traditions did Moses originally belong, if not to all, is one that has bedeviled scholarship for decades. It is tempting to argue that the law-giving as well as the institution of passover and related agricultural feasts had in their origin nothing to do with the Exodus, and should be removed from the previous list. The blanket denial of the Prophets that Israel in the wilderness had possessed the elaborate cultic laws that are now credited to Moses' mediation in Exodus and Leviticus could only have meaning if this was a commonly accepted view at the time.115 It was only in post-Exilic times, then, that Moses became the great "lawgiver." On the other hand, that Moses is somehow associated with formulation of the Yahweh covenant, as a "prophet," may enjoy deeper roots in Israelite tradition. That is not to say that this was Moses' historical origin; but a quasi-priestly role is one of his functions in the tradition.

The connection with Egypt in the Mosaic tradition holds primacy of place in popular and scholarly thinking. But this belief cannot look to the birth narrative for support, for the motif of the exposed child has nothing intrinsically to do with Egypt. Nor can one base this contention on Moses' confrontation with Pharaoh, since it would appear that this was secondarily imposed on an earlier tradition in which the Israelite elders directly negotiated with the Egyptian monarch. Yet, it has been maintained, the PN "Moses" (Hebrew Moseh]) enjoys excellent credentials as an Egyptian name; and indeed it does. The verbal affix -mose, which turns up in such well-known names as Thutmose, Amenmose, and Ptahmose, was in the New Kingdom pronounced -mase, and in the first

115 Cf. Amos 5:21-25; Jer. 7: 22; cf. Hos. 8:12-13; Mic. 6:6-8.

{p. 418} millennium -mose. Moreover, whereas the vocalization did not fossilize but kept pace with the tomes, the sibilant with which the name was transcribed into Hebrew shows that the name must have entered the language before the eighth century B.C., and perhaps even in the late New Kingdom itself.

That Moses was originally a "priestly" figure with Midianite connections and associated with an early cult center of the proto-Israelite tribes at Kadesh has of late become popular. Does not the presence in neighboring Se'ir of a Shasu tribe that bore the tetragrammaton as a designation lend support to such a suggestion?

It is hard in the present state of our knowledge to come to any decision in this matter. One cannot rid oneself of the dismay attendant upon the realization that our lengthy and detailed account of Moses, in all his roles, is late, either Exilic or post-Exilic; and that, although the figure of this charismatic leader may well have been the focus of legend much earlier, for us this prior stage in the formulation of the tradition is a dead letter. Moreover, one cannot help but sense in the entire Mosaic tradition, as we now have it, a pervasive, informing element, which produces nought but effect. From the outset Moses' rejection by his own people provides a tension that runs through the whole; his slowness of wit and inarticulateness make him virtually useless to god. He is, in addition, skeptical of his ability and at times of the almighty as well. All this constitutes a convenient backdrop against which the power of Yahweh may be seen to greater advantage. All this may be highly entertaining; but it is literary artifice, not history. The author is playing secondarily upon a primary Mosaic tradition that he does not allow us to see. The vast majority of the "facts" he now gives us about Moses are demonstratively late, and worthless in the task of uncovering the historical basis for the early "hero."

Another source of chagrin is the suspicion that even the present P-redaction of the Moses story is not a prime source, but conceals and omits certain details widely known at the time. The burial on Mount Nebo (Deut. 34:1-6) and the hint of a Mosaic origin for the Danite priesthood are passing allusions to stories now lost. To what extent would they shift the center of our search for the historical Moses to Transjordan and the Jordan Valley? It is sometimes maintained that, of all the Israelite tribes,

{p. 419} only that of Levi displays Egyptian names in its onomasticon; but this is somewhat misleading. Apart from "Moses" the only PNN that are indubitably of Egyptian origin are Hophni and Phinehas, and once again we find ourselves in a certain milieu at Shiloh, with a priesthood explicitly stated to date from the time of the Bondage (1 Sam. 3:27-28). Again: the laconic reference to Moses' marriage in Numbers 12:1 (immediately followed by the editor's assurance that this had taken place) is an inadvertent slip apprising us of the sometime existence of an incident now lost. It is usually assumed that this is the ultimate source of much of the tangential midrash about Moses' early career that one finds in Judaica of the intertestamental period. And yet, could this not be a reference to a preexistent tale relating Moses to Kush? In particular, Artapan has been thought to preserve a genuine, extra-Biblical tradition, although it is quite true that most of his work takes the form of an implicit rebuttal of Manetho. In particular his story of the invasion of the Kushites and the great seige of Hermopolis in which Moses took part is a clear reminiscence of the invasion of Piankhy around 717 B.C. There are parallels between Moses and Tefnakhte of Sais (c. 724-717 B.C.): both organized peoples in the Delta against oppression, and both led hosts into "Arabia" where living proved rigorous.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT THE EXODUS?

It seems fatuous to attempt to answer this question, but perhaps it must be posed.

To this point the discussion has established the following scenario. In Egypt the Hyksos occupation and expulsion were remembered fairly accurately in the king list tradition, although the folk memory tended to confuse the events of the fall of Avaris with the siege of Megiddo. In Canaan it was remembered too, but here no fixed narrative or king list held imagination in check. Memory fastened on the century of occupa-

{p. 420} tion, translated into a four-generation span; the names of illustrious leaders Sheshy, Ya'akob, Io, and Apophis; the antipathy between Egyptian and Asiatic; the withdrawal of the Hyksos to Palestine; and the attendant cataclysm.

One might dwell for a moment on this final point. Sources contemporary with the expulsion of the Hyksos apprise us of curious atmospheric disturbances, strange for the Nile Valley, although not entirely unknown there. The snippet of a diary now preserved on the verso of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus records the final events leading up to the fall of Avaris: "Year 11, tenth month - one entered Helipolis; first month, day 23 - the Bull of the South(?) gores his way as far as Tjaru; day 20 [+ x] - it was heard tell that Tjaru was entered; year 11, first month, 'Birth of Seth' - the sky rained." This rainstorm may or may not be identical with another downpour that proved very destructive and was recorded on a stela of Ahmose together with the measures the king took to alleviate the resultant misery of the people. "The sky came on with a torrent of rain, and [dark]ness covered the western heavens while the storm raged without cessation ... [the rain thundered(?)] on the mountains, (louder) than the noise at the 'Cavern' that is in Abydos. Then every house and barn where they might have sought refuge [was swept away, .. and they] were drenched with water like reed canoes ... and for a period of [x] days no light shone in the Two Lands."

The striking resemblance between this catastrophic storm and some of the traditional "plagues" seems more than fortuitous. The subsequent interpretation of such an event by the Canaanites as divine punishment on the Egyptians in this moment of triumph would be a natural construction to place upon it. And it is but a step from interpreting the disaster as punishment on Egypt for an expulsion, to construing it as pressure exerted to effect a release. One other legend helped to shape the tradition, and this was a native Egyptian reworking of the Amarna event. Here the "renegade leader"

{p. 421} entered the Canaanite tradition and partly transformed it. ...

{p. 422} It is ironic that the Sojourn and the Exodus themes, native in origin to the folklore memory of the Canaanite enclaves of the southern Levant, should have lived on not in that tradition but among two groups that had no involvement in the historic events at all - the Greeks and the Hebrews. In the case of the latter, the Exodus was part and parcel of an array of "origin" stories to which the Hebrews fell heir upon their settlement of the land, and which, lacking traditions of their own, they appropriated from the earlier culture they were copying. One batch of tales centered upon an "ancestor" called Abram whose memory lived on in Beer Sheva and in the Negeb; another took its rise at Shechem in the highlands and revolved around the figure of a Canaanite leader Jacob. The Canaanite origin of these figures is now only dimly reflected, as most of the Biblical stories told about them took shape much later and served etological needs felt by Israel in the first millennium B.C. But they themselves were un- doubtedly bona fide historical figures of the Middle Bronze Age

One final irony lies in the curious use to which the Exodus narrative is put in modern religion, as a symbolic tale of freedom from tyranny. An honest reading of the account of Exodus and Numbers cannot help but reveal that the tyranny Israel was freed from, namely that of Pharaoh, was mild indeed in comparison to the tyranny of Yahweh to which they were about to submit themselves. As a story of freedom the Exodus is distasteful in the extreme - I much prefer the account of Leonidas and his three hundred at Thermopylae - and in an age when thinking men are prepared to shape their prejudice on the basis of 3,000-year old precedent, it is highly dangerous.

JOSEPH

No piece of prose elsewhere in the Bible can equal the literary standard attained by the Joseph story of Genesis 37-50; and few extra-Biblical works in the ancient Near East can rival it for excellence of style and composition. The story is constructed around a beautifully turned and symmetrical plot that displays a unity and integrity that bespeak single authorship. The author's style is spare and unpretentious, and, because of the dramatic effect, achieves a height it might otherwise have missed. No mechanism or tool is alien to this matter: he can retard or accelerate the pace of the plot to heighten suspense; he can develop character more subtly yet deftly than anywhere else in scripture, save perhaps in the Succession Document; he uses a gentle and superb irony throughout his work

{p. 423} to provide unity. Doublets and recapitulation can be deadly, yet in the Joseph story they provide emphasis. Embellishment can be tiresome; yet our author uses it, though sparely, to the best advantage. In short, the nine or so chapters that comprise the Joseph story show all the earmarks of a composition, rather than a record.

For, as has long been realized, the Joseph story is in fact a novella or short story. It shares with other Egyptian and Near Eastern stories of the same genre a number of specific characteristics. As in folktales and wisdom there is a preference for the generic "god" as opposed to the name of the deity, and proper nouns are likewise avoided. Terms of relationship ("father," "older brother," "younger brother") and titles are preferred to names; and toponyms, while a few are present, are generally suppressed. This all contributes to an atmosphere of timelessness and placelessness in the setting of the story: admittedly, as the story is now placed, it takes place in Egypt; but the basic shape of the plot does not demand a Nilotic setting.

The identification of the genre of the Joseph story as that of the novella helps to explain why the narrative makes such a "poor fit" as a component in the chain of Patriarchal Tales in Genesis. Not only is there a marked change in style when one passes from the short and disjointed sections dealing with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to chapter 37 of Genesis, but the author's interest and purpose change also. Unlike the earlier narrative, the Joseph story proper shows no interest at all in cult topography or origin tales; god and his angels do not descend to earth or stand on ladders, make promises, blow up cities, or engage in wrestling matches. Genesis 12-36 has focused repeatedly on the covenant of God with the patriarchs, has reiterated the promises time and again, and sought to establish precedents for the Israelite occupation and cult associations. In the Joseph story these voices fall silent, and these concerns cease to inform the narrative. The "poor fit" of the Joseph story extends to factual detail. According to Genesis 45:11 the descent of Jacob and his family was an ad hoc measure to help them survive the remaining years of famine; elsewhere it is clear their purpose was to settle in Egypt. Again, the Joseph story brings all the sons of Jacob to Egypt, where they live out their lives, even the "baby" Benjamin already blessed with ten sons! This contradicts emphatically the traditions of individual tribes in later times in which the

{p. 424} eponymous ancestors live, marry, raise families, and die in Canaan. Finally, in contrast to the ubiquitous use of "Joseph" as the eponymous ancestor of the "House of Joseph" (Ephraim, Manasseh, Machir) in the central highland, "Joseph" the hero of the novella is almost totally absent from the rest of the Bible until the intertestamental period is reached. In short the Joseph story could easily be excised from the Patriarchal Tales without doing any damage to the main course of the history of Proto-Israel. ...

{p. 429} We conclude that, on a judicious appraisal of the evidence, the Biblical Joseph story was a novella created sometime during the seventh or sixth century B.C. (the end of the Judaean monarchy or the Exile). Its present position provides a free expansion on the theme of Israel's descent to Egypt, although it is wholly unnecessary to the ongoing account of the Patriarchs: Jacob and family arrive on the banks of the Nile without the help of Joseph in the earlier tradition. As the Sojourn and Exodus narrative is an adaptation by Israel of an earlier Canaanite tradition, so the Joseph story is the Hebrew exemplar of a widespread story line much in use in Egypt and the Levant at the time the Pentatuch was being committed to writing. There is no reason to believe it has any basis in fact - the absence of the story from the earlier tradition in the prophets speaks against such a belief - and to read it as history is quite wrongheaded.

{p. 470} THE EVENTS of 586, construed at the time as but a stage in the annihilation of the independent states of the southern Levant, were to prove a major watershed in the history of the Hebrews. The rump community that returned to Jerusalem from Babylon at the close of the century was a new beginning, markedly different from what had gone before in politics, culture, and religion. To us moderns the Judaism of an Ezra or a Nehemiah is familiar and living, the religion of an Amos or a Jeremiah strange and almost "prehistoric."

Egypt's moment of truth was shortly to come, in 525 B.C., when the expanding Median empire of Cambyses overwhelmed the forces of Psammetichos III; but for the Nilotic community the cultural impact was less traumatic. True, the state lost its independence and was demoted to the status of a remote province in a vast, world-empire; but the administration, religion, and cultural expression changed only imperceptibly. Only experts can distinguish between statues and texts of the fifth century and those of the seventh or sixth; and while the fourth century was to throw up Egyptian rebels who took the crown and proclaimed themselves Pharaoh, their short-lived regimes were but extensions of the earlier Saite experience.

The political defeats of 586 and 525 B.C. were destined ultimately to exert a deleterious influence on the intellectual life of both Egypt and the Levant. The reputation of Egypt for "metaphysical" inquiry into imponderables, which brought many a Greek of the seventh and sixth centuries to the feet of an Egyptian priest, vanished in the fifth and fourth, as Greek admiration gave way to contempt. Similarly the heights achieved by the Hebrew prophets in ethics and theology before the Exile dwarf the attainments in the same spheres of the restrictive, ritual-conscious community of the Second Temple. The dominance of foreigners in the affairs of Egypt and Judah set the intelligentsia in both communities in a defensive posture. In Egypt, certainly from the Greek conquest, the ten-lple personnel turned in upon themselves, and with the progressive loss of patronage and approbation by the authorities, began to consider themselves the last repository and bastion of the old ways of pharaonic times. In Judah, in a reactionary effort to hold the line, the sacerdotal mentors of the community linked orthodoxy with nationalism, and produced the intransigence of the Maccabees and the savagery of the zealots. The stultifying trends in both communities may be observed to advantage in the literature each produced: the Egyptian temple, the arcane lore of cryptographic inscrip-

{p. 471} tions; the Judaic community, the Mishnah. Neither enjoyed an acceptable fit in the new world of Hellenism.

One might almost say that "God was dead." The erstwhile parochial deities of Thebes and Memphis, Jerusalem and Tyre had all mutatis mutandis hitched themselves to nationalist resistance, and in so doing had determined their own fate. Their municipal bailiwicks during the two centuries at the turn of the present era became hotbeds of jingoist sentiment; and some, like Thebes and Jerusalem, reveled in the role of beleaguered fortresses of the old order now under attack.

But Amun and Yahweh had failed. Both Egypt and western Asia proved powerless to withstand the onslaught of Greek and Roman arms on the battlefield, and retreated perforce in the realm of ideas as well. Resistance was futile: by the end of the first century the temple of Amun lay derelict, Yahweh's house destroyed. Literary "counterattacks" proved to be nothing more than pitiable attempts to curse the impure 3styw (foreigners) or the vile Kittim (Greeks or Romans). The best this folk literature could offer was the promise of a brighter day ahead, a forlorn and desperate hope. Through all the railing of the faceless apocalyptic writers one can discern the frustration of disenfranchised cultures that have been outstripped by a new and imaginative way of life from across the seas.

Yet in this long and lamentable twilight of the old communities of the eastern Mediterranean, the autochthonous populations might have taken satisfaction in one signal achievement. Where national gods had failed, the numina populi began to exert on the European conquerors an irresistible appeal, which eventually compromised any loyalty they might have showed toward their own pantheons. Zeus could not compete with Serapis, nor Athena with Cybele. The old nation-states whose long and checkered history we have traced were now defunct, and no longer provided security or fulfillment for the communities that had once compromised them. The individual had now perforce to seek his salvation elsewhere, outside the group, outside the nation. He was on his own in a brave new world where no one cared. The personal need thus evinced elicited a response, as far as the masses of the new Hellenized world were concerned, from one source: the circle of personal, "humanized" deities who filled the spiritual void in every psyche. Like the human sufferer, they too had suffered; like the mortal soul, they too had faced death and judgment. The parallel demanded a spiritual union, and called forth piety and repentance. Only in the Mysteries could union with the divine and salvation be achieved.

The effects are still with us. The saving grace of an Isis, a Christ, or Mithra triumphed everywhere in the Mediterranean world of the universal empire of Rome, and in a transmuted state has even descended to the twentieth century. But all this is another story.

{end} Donald B. Redford replies to Freud on the Akhenaten-Moses link: moses.html.

(3) Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (The Free Press, New York, 2001)

{p. 36} Some Telltale Anachronisms

The critical textual scholars who had identified distinct sources underlying the text of Genesis insisted that the patriarchal narratives were put into writing at a relatively late date, at the time of the monarchy (tenth-eighth centuries BCE) or even later, in exilic and post-exilic days (sixth-fifth centuries BCE). The German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen argued that the stories of the patriarchs in both the J and E documents reflected the concerns of the later Israelite monarchy, which were projected onto the lives of legendary fathers in a largely mythical past. The biblical stories should thus be regarded as a national mythology with no more historical basis than the Homeric saga of Odysseus's travels or Virgil's saga of Aeneas's founding of Rome. In more recent decades, the American biblical scholars John Van Seters and Thomas Thompson further challenged the supposed archaeological evidence for the historical patriarchs in the second millennium BCE. They

{p. 37} argued that even if the later texts contained some early traditions, the selection and arrangement of stories expressed a clear message by the biblical editors at the time of compilation, rather than preserving a reliable historical account.

But when did that compilation take place? The biblical text reveals some clear clues that can narrow down the time of its final composition. Take the repeated mention of camels, for instance. The stories of the patriarchs are packed with camels, usually herds of camels; but as in the story of Joseph's sale by his brothers into slavery (Genesis 37:25), camels are also described as beasts of burden used in caravan trade. We now know through archaeological research that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden earlier than the late second millennium and were not widely used in that capacity in the ancient Near East until well after 1000 BCE. And an even more telling detail - the camel caravan carrying "gum, balm, and myrrh," in the Joseph story - reveals an obvious familiarity with the main products of the lucrative Arabian trade that flourished under the supervision of the Assyrian empire in the eighth-seventh centuries BCE.

Indeed, excavations at the site of Tell Jemmeh in the southern coastal plain of Israel - a particularly important entrepot on the main caravan route between Arabia and the Mediterranean - revealed a dramatic increase in the number of camel bones in the seventh century. The bones were almost exclusively of mature animals, suggesting that they were from traveling beasts of burden, not from locally raised herds (among which the bones of young animals would also be found). Indeed, precisely at this time, Assyrian sources describe camels being used as pack animals in caravans. It was only then that camels became a common enough feature of the landscape to be included as an incidental detail in a literary narrative.

Then there is the issue of the Philistines. We hear of them in connection with Isaac's encounter with "Abimelech, king of the Philistines," at the city of Gerar (Genesis 26:1). The Philistines, a group of migrants from the Aegean or eastern Mediterranean, had not established their settlements along the coastal plain of Canaan until sometime after 1200 BCE. Their cities prospered in the eleventh and tenth centuries and continued to dominate the area well into the Assyrian period. The mention of Gerar as a Philistine city in the narratives of Isaac and the mention of the city (without the Philistine attribution) in the stories of Abraham (Genesis 20:1) sug-

{p. 38} gest that it had a special importance or at least was widely known at the time of the composition of the patriarchal narratives. Gerar is today identified with Tel Haror northwest of Beersheba, and excavations there have shown that in the Iron Age I - the early phase of Philistine history - it was no more than a small, quite insignificant village. But by the late eighth and seventh century BCE, it had become a strong, heavily fortified Assyrian administrative stronghold in the south, an obvious landmark.

Were these incongruous details merely late insertions into early traditions or were they indications that both the details and the narrative were late? Many scholars - particularly those who supported the idea of the "historical" patriarchs - considered them to be incidental details. But as Thomas Thompson put it as early as the 1970s, the specific references in the text to cities, neighboring peoples, and familiar places are precisely those aspects that distinguish the patriarchal stories from completely mythical folk-tales. They are crucially important for identifying the date and message of the text. In other words, the "anachronisms" are far more important for dating and understanding the meaning and historical context of the stories of the patriarchs than the search for ancient bedouin or mathematical calculations of the patriarchs' ages and genealogies.

So the combination of camels, Arabian goods, Philistines, and Gerar - as well as other places and nations mentioned in the patriarchal stories in Genesis - are highly significant. All the clues point to a time of composition many centuries after the time in which the Bible reports the lives of the patriarchs took place. These and other anachronisms suggest an intensive period of writing the patriarchal narratives in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.

A Living Map of the Ancient Near East

It becomes evident when we begin to examine the genealogies of the patriarchs and the many nations that arose from their trysts, marriages, and family relations, that they offer a colorful human map of the ancient Near East from the unmistakable viewpoint of the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. These stories offer a highly sophisticated commentary on political affairs in this region

{p. 39} in the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. Not only can many of the ethnic terms and place-names be dated to this time, but their characterizations mesh perfectly with what we know of the relationships of neighboring peoples and kingdoms with Judah and Israel.

Let us start with the Arameans, who dominate the stories of Jacob's marriage with Leah and Rachel and his relationship with his uncle Laban. The Arameans are not mentioned as a distinct ethnic group in ancient Near Eastern texts before c. 1100 BCE. They became a dominant factor on the northern borders of the Israelites in the early ninth century BCE, when a number of Aramean kingdoms arose throughout the area of modern Syria. Among them, the kingdom of Aram-Damascus was a sometime ally, sometime rival of the kingdom of Israel for control of the rich agricultural territories that lay between their main centers - in the upper Jordan valley and Galilee. And, in fact, the cycle of stories about Jacob and Laban metaphorically expresses the complex and often stormy relations between Aram and Israel over many centuries.

On the one hand, Israel and Aram were frequent military rivals. On the other, much of the population of the northern territories of the kingdom of Israel seems to have been Aramean in origin. Thus, the book of Deuteronomy goes so far as to describe Jacob as "a wandering Aramean" (26:5), and the stories of the relations between the individual patriarchs and their Aramean cousins clearly express the consciousness of shared origins. The biblical description of the tensions between Jacob and Laban and their eventual establishment of a boundary stone east of the Jordan to mark the border between their peoples (Genesis 31:51-54, significantly an E, or "northern," story) reflects the territorial partition between Aram and Israel in the ninth-eighth centuries BCE.

The relationships of Israel and Judah with their eastern neighbors are also clearly reflected in the patriarchal narratives. Through the eighth and seventh centuries BCE their contacts with the kingdoms of Ammon and Moab had often been hostile; Israel, in fact, dominated Moab in the early ninth century BCE. It is therefore highly significant - and amusing - how the neighbors to the east are disparaged in the patriarchal genealogies. Genesis 19:30-38 (significantly, a J text) informs us that those nations were born from an incestuous union. After God overthrew the cities of Sodom

{p. 40} and Gomorrah, Lot and his two daughters sought shelter in a cave in the hills. The daughters, unable to find proper husbands in their isolated situation - and desperate to have children - served wine to their father until he became drunk. They then lay with him and eventually gave birth to two sons: Moab and Ammon. No seventh century Judahite looking across the Dead Sea toward the rival kingdoms would have been able to suppress a smile of contempt at a story of such a disreputable ancestry.

The biblical stories of the two brothers Jacob and Esau provide an even clearer case of seventh century perceptions presented in ancient costume. Genesis 25 and 27 (southern, J texts) tell us about the twins - Esau and Jacob - who are about to be born to Isaac and Rebecca. God says to the pregnant Rebecca: "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger" (25:23). As events unfold, we learn that Esau is the elder and Jacob the younger. Hence the description of the two brothers, the fathers of Edom and Israel, serves as a divine legitimation for the political relationship between the two nations in late monarchic times. Jacob-Israel is sensitive and cultured, while Esau-Edom is a more primitive hunter and man of the outdoors. But Edom did not exist as a distinct political entity until a relatively late period. From the Assyrian sources we know that there were no real kings and no state in Edom before the late eighth century BCE. Edom appears in ancient records as a distinct entity only after the conquest of the region by Assyria. And it became a serious rival to Judah only with the beginning of the lucrative Arabian trade. The archaeological evidence is also clear: the first large-scale wave of settlement in Edom accompanied by the establishment of large settlements and fortresses may have started in the late eighth century BCE but reached a peak only in the seventh and early sixth century BCE. Before then, the area was sparsely populated. And excavations at Bozrah - the capital of Late Iron II Edom - revealed that it grew to become a large city only in the Assyrian period.

Thus here too, the stories of Jacob and Esau - of the delicate son and the mighty hunter - are skillfully fashioned as archaizing legends to reflect the rivalries of late monarchic times.

{p. 41} The Peoples of the Desert and the Empires to the East

During the eighth and seventh centuries the lucrative caravan trade in spices and rare incense from southern Arabia, winding through the deserts and the southern frontier of Judah to the ports of the Mediterranean, was a significant factor in the entire region's economic life. For the people of Judah, a number of peoples of nomadic origins were crucial to this long-range trade system. Several of the genealogies included in the patriarchal stories offer a detailed picture of the peoples of the southern and eastern deserts during late monarchic times and they explain - again through the metaphor of family relationships - what role they played in Judah's contemporary history. In particular, Ishmael, the scorned son of Abraham and Hagar, is described in Genesis as having been the ancestor of many of the Arab tribes who inhabited the territories on the southern fringe of Judah. The portrait is far from flattering. He is described as a perpetual wanderer, "a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man's hand against his" (Genesis 16:12, not surprisingly a J document).

Among his many children are the various southern tribes who established new contact with Judah in the Assyrian period. Among the descendants of Ishmael listed in Genesis 25:12-15, for example, are the Q(K)edarites (from his son Kedar) who are mentioned for the first time in Assyrian records of the late eighth century BCE and are frequently referred to during the reign of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE. Before that time, they lived beyond the area of Judah's and Israel's immediate interest, occupying the western fringe of the Fertile Crescent. Likewise, Ishmael's sons Adbeel and Nebaioth represent north Arabian groups that are also first mentioned in late eighth and seventh century Assyrian inscriptions. And finally Ishmael's son Tema is probably linked with the great caravan oasis of Tayma in northwest Arabia, mentioned in Assyrian and Babylonian sources of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE. It was one of the two major urban centers in north Arabia from c. 600 BCE through the fifth century BCE. The group named Sheba, which is mentioned in another list of southern people (Genesis 25:3), also lived in northern Arabia. Since none of these specific names were relevant or even present in the experience of the people of Israel before the Assyrian period,

{p. 42} there seems little doubt that these genealogical passages were crafted between the late eighth and sixth centuries BCE.*

Other place-names mentioned in the patriarchal narratives relating to the desert and surrounding wilderness serve further to confirm the date of the composition. Genesis 14, the story of the great war waged by invaders from the north (led by the mysterious Chedorlaomer from Elam in Mesopotamia) with the kings of the cities of the plain is a unique source in Genesis, which may be dated to exilic or post-exilic times. But it provides interesting geographical information relevant only to the seventh century BCE. "En-mishpat, that is, Kadesh" (Genesis 14:7) is most likely a reference to Kadesh-barnea, the great oasis in the south that would play an important role in the Exodus narratives. It is identified with Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, a site that has been excavated and shown to have been occupied primarily in the seventh and early sixth century BCE. Likewise, the site referred to as Tamar in the same biblical verse should most probably be identified with Ein Haseva in the northern Arabah, where excavations have uncovered a large fortress that also functioned mainly in the Late Iron Age. Thus the geography and even the basic situation of frightening conflict with a Mesopotamian invader would have seemed ominously familiar to the people of Judah in the seventh century BCE.

And this is not all. The Genesis narratives also reveal unmistakable familiarity with the location and reputation of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires of the ninth-sixth centuries BCE. Assyria is specifically mentioned in relation to the Tigris River in Genesis 2:14, and two of the royal capitals of the Assyrian empire - Nineveh (recognized as the capital of the empire in the seventh century BCE) and Calah (its predecessor) - are mentioned in Genesis 10:11 (both are J documents). The city of Haran plays a dominant role in the patriarchal stories. The site, still called Eski Harran ("old Haran"), is located in southern Turkey, on the border with Syria; it prospered in the early second millennium BCE and again in the Neo-Assyrian

* It is important to note that some of this genealogical material in Genesis, such as the list of the sons of Ishmael, belongs to the P source, which is dated, in the main, to postexilic times. While some scholars argue that P has a late monarchic layer, and thetefore may very well reflect interests and realities of seventh centurv Judah, it is possible that some allusions may also reflect realities of the sixth centuty BCE. But in no case is there any convincing explanation for the mention of all these desert dwelling peoples in the patriarchal genealogles except as late litetary attempts to incorporate them in a systematic way into the early history of Israel.

{p. 43} period. Finally, Assyrian texts mention towns in the area of Haran that carry names resembling the names of Terah, Nahor, and Serug - Abraham's forefathers (Genesis 11:22-26, a P source). It is possible that they were the eponymous ancestors of these towns.

Judah's Destiny

The German biblical scholar Martin Noth long ago argued that the accounts of the events of Israel's earliest periods of existence - the stories of the patriarchs, the Exodus, and the wandering in Sinai - were not originally composed as a single saga. He theorized that they were the separate traditions of individual tribes that were assembled into a unified narrative to serve the cause of the political unification of a scattered and heterogeneous Israelite population. In his opinion, the geographical focus of each of the cycles of stories, particularly of the patriarchs, offers an important clue to where the composition - not necessarily the events - of the story took place. Many the stories connected with Abraham are set in the southern part of the hill country, specifically the region of Hebron in southern Judah. Isaac is associated with the southern desert fringe of Judah, in particular the Beersheba region. In contrast, Jacob's activities take place for the most part in the northern hill country and Transjordan - areas that were always of special interest to the northern kingdom of Israel. Noth therefore suggested that the patriarchs were originally quite separate regional ancestors, who were eventually brought together in a single genealogy in an effort to create a united history.

It is now evident that the selection of Abraham, with his close connection to Hebron, Judah's earliest royal city, and to Jerusalem ("Salem" in Genesis 14:18), was meant also to emphasize the primacy of Judah even in the earliest eras of Israel's history. It is almost as if an American scripture describing pre-Columbian history placed inordinate attention on Manhattan Island or on the tract of land that would later become Washington, D.C. The pointed political meaning of the inclusion of such a detail in a larger narrative at least calls into question its historical credibility.

As we will see in much greater detail in the chapters to follow, Judah was a rather isolated and sparsely populated kingdom until the eighth century BCE. It was hardly comparable in territory, wealth, and military might to

{p. 44} the kingdom of Israel in the north. Literacy was very limited and its capital, Jerusalem, was a small, remote hill country town. Yet after the northern kingdom of Israel was liquidated by the Assyrian empire in 720 BCE, Judah grew enormously in population, developed complex state institutions, and emerged as a meaningful power in the region. It was ruled by an ancient dynasty and possessed the most important surviving Temple to the God of Israel. Hence in the late eighth century and in the seventh century, Judah developed a unique sense of its own importance and divine destiny. It saw its very survival as evidence of God's intention, from the time of the patriarchs, that Judah should rule over all the land of Israel. As the only surviving Israelite polity, Judah saw itself in a more down-to-earth sense as the natural heir to the Israelite territories and the Israelite population that had survived the Assyrian onslaught. What was needed was a powerful way to express this understanding both to the people of Judah and to the scattered Israelite communities under Assyrian rule. Thus the Pan-Israelite idea, with Judah in its center, was born.

The patriarchal narratives thus depict a unified ancestry of the Israelite people that leads back to the most Judean of patriarchs - Abraham. Yet even though the Genesis stories revolve mainly around Judah, they do not neglect to honor northern Israelite traditions. In that respect it is significant that Abraham builds altars to YHWH at Shechem and Bethel (Genesis 12:7-8), the two most important cult centers of the northern kingdom - as well as at Hebron (Genesis 13:18), the most important center of Judah after Jerusalem. The figure of Abraham therefore functions as the unifier of northern and southern traditions, bridging north and south. The fact that Abraham is credited with establishing the altars at Bethel and Shechem is clear testimony to the Judahites' claim that even the places of worship polluted by idolatry during the time of the Israelite kings were once legitimately sacred sites connected to the southern patriarch.*

* Another exdmple of the unification of northern and southern traditions under Judahite supremacy is the location of the tombs of the patriarchs. This sacred place - where Abraham and Isaac (southern heroes) as well as Jacob (a northern hero) were buried - is located at Hebron, traditionally the second most important city in the hill country of Judah. The story of the purchase of the tomb of the patriarchs is generally ascribed to the Priestly (P) source, which seems to have more than one compositional layer to it. If this tradition is late monarchic in origin (though its final version came later), it is a clear expression of the centrality of Judah and its superiority over the North. The specific land transaction described in the story has strong pararrels in the Neo-Babylonian period - another clue to the late realities underlying the patriarchal narratives.

{p. 45} It is entirely possible and even probable that the individual episodes in the patriarchal narratives are based on ancient local traditions. Yet the use to which they are put and the order in which they are arranged transform them into a powerful expression of seventh century Judahite dreams. Indeed, the superiority of Judah over all the others could not be emphasized more strongly in the last blessing of Jacob to his sons quoted earlier. Though enemies might be pressing on all sides, Judah, it is promised, will never be overthrown.

The patriarchal traditions therefore must be considered as a sort of pious "prehistory" of Israel in which Judah played a decisive role. They describe the very early history of the nation, delineate ethnic boundaries, emphasize that the Israelites were outsiders and not part of the indigenous population of Canaan, and embrace the traditions of both the north and the south, while ultimately stressing the superiority of Judah.* In the admittedly fragmentary evidence of the E version of the patriarchal stories, presumably compiled in the northern kingdom of Israel before its destruction in 720 BCE, the tribe of Judah plays almost no role. But by the late eighth and certainly seventh century BCE, Judah was the center of what was left of the Israelite nation. In that light, we should regard the J version of the patriarchal narratives primarily as a literary attempt to redefine the unity of the people of Israel - rather than as an accurate record of the lives of historical characters living more than a millennium before.

The biblical story of the patriarchs would have seemed compellingly familiar to the people of Judah in the seventh century BCE. In the stories, the familiar peoples and threatening enemies of the present were ranged around the encampments and grazing grounds of Abraham and his offspring. The landscape of the patriarchal stories is a dreamlike romantic vision of the pastoral past, especially appropriate to the pastoral background of a large proportion of the Judahite population. It was stitched together from memory, snatches of ancient customs, legends of the birth of peoples, and the concerns aroused by contemporary con-

* Since the Priestly (P) source in the Pentateuch is da[ed by most scholars to post-exilic times, and the final redaction of the Pentateuch was also undertaken in that period, we face a serious question of whether we can also identify a post-exilic layer in the stories in Genesis. In many ways, the needs of the post-exilic community were quite similar to the necessities of the late monarchic state. Yet, as we try to demonstrate here, the basic framework and initial elaboration of the patriarchal narratives point clearly to a seventh century origin.

{p. 46} flicts.* The many sources and episodes that were combined are a testimony to the richness of the traditions from which the biblical narrative was drawn - and the diverse audience of Judahites and Israelites to whom it was aimed.

Genesis as Preamble

Though the Genesis stories revolve around Judah - and if they were written in the seventh century BCE, close to the time of the compilation of the Deuteronomistic History - how is it that they are so far from Deuteronomistic ideas, such as the centralization of cult and the centrality of Jerusalem? They even seem to promote northern cult places such as Bethel and Shechem and describe the establishment of altars in many places other than Jerusalem. Perhaps we should see here an attempt to present the patriarchal traditions as a sort of a pious prehistory, before Jerusalem, before the monarchy, before the Temple, when the fathers of the nations were monotheists but were still allowed to sacrifice in other places. The portrayal of the patriarchs as shepherds or pastoralists may indeed have been meant to give an atmosphere of great antiquity to the formative stages of a society that had only recently developed a clear national consciousness. The meaning of all this is that both J of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History were written in the seventh century BCE in Judah, in Jerusalem, when the northern kingdom of Israel was no more. The ideas, basic stories, and even characters behind both compositions were probably

* The territorial ambitions of seventh-century Judah to reclaim Israelite lands conquered by the Assyrians are also expressed in the Abraham traditions. In the story of the great war in Genesis 14, Abraham pursues rhe Mesopotamian kings who captured his nephew Lot, chasing them all the way to Damascus and Dan (14:14-l5). In this act he liberates his kinsman from Mesopotamian bondage and ejects foreign forces from rhe larer northern boundary of the kingdom of Israel. Also relevant to Judah's territorial ambitions in this period is the special focus on the "Joseph" tribes - Ephraim and Manasseh - and the strong message of separation of the Israelites from the Canaanites in the patriarchal narrarives. The immediate agenda for Judah after the fall of the northern kingdom was expansion into the former Israelite territories in the highlands directly north of Judah - namely the territories of Ephraim and Manasseh. The Assyrians, after destroying Samaria, settled deportees from Mesopotamia in the terrirories of the vanquished northern kingdom. Some were settled in the area of Bethel, close to the northern border of Judah. The Pan-Israelite idea had to take into consideration this situation of new "Canaanites" living in the territories Judah saw as its inheritance. The patriarchal narratives, which place strong emphasis on the importance of marriage with kinfolk and avoidance of marriage with the other peoples of the land also perfectly fit this situation.

{p. 47} widely known. The J source describes the very early history of the nation, while the Deuteronomistic History deals with events of more recent centuries, with special emphasis on the Pan-Israelite idea, on the divine protection of the Davidic lineage, and on centralization of cult in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The great genius of the seventh century creators of this national epic was the way in which they wove the earlier stories together without stripping them of their humanity or individual distinctiveness. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob remain at the same time vivid spiritual portraits and the metaphorical ancestors of the people of Israel. And the twelve sons of Jacob were brought into the tradition as junior members of more complete genealogy. In the artistry of the biblical narrative, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were indeed made into a single family. It was the power of legend that united them - in a manner far more powerful and timeless than the fleeting adventures of a few historical individuals herding sheep in the highlands of Canaan could ever have done.

{p. 52} Canaan, possessing a typically Mediterranean climate, is dry in the summer and gets its rain only in the winter, and the amount of rainfall in any given year can vary widely ... And in times of severe famine, there was only one solution: to go down to Egypt. Egypt did not depend on rainfall but got its water from the Nile.

... Yet

{p. 54} archaeology has provided a far more nuanced picture of the large communities of Semites who came in the Bronze Age from southern Canaan to settle in the delta {Egypt} for a wide variety of reasons and achieved different levels of success. Some of them were conscripted as landless laborers in the construction of public works. In other periods they may have come simply because Egypt offered them the prospect of trade and better economic opportunities. The famous Beni Hasan tomb painting from Middle Egypt, dated to the nineteenth century BCE, portrays a group from Transjordan coming down to Egypt with animals and goods - presumably as traders, not as conscripted laborers. Other Canaanites in the delta may have been brought there by the armies of the pharaohs as prisoners of war, taken in punitive campaigns against the rebellious city-states of Canaan. We know that some were assigneJ as slaves to cultivate lands of temple estates. Some found their way up the social ladder and eventually became government officials, soldiers, and even priests.

These demographic patterns along the eastern delta - of Asiatic people immigrating to Egypt to be conscripted to forced work in the delta - are not restricted to the Bronze Age. Rather, they reflect the age-old rhythms in the region, including later centuries in the Iron Age, closer to the time when the Exodus narrative was put in writing.

The Rise and Fall of the Hyksos

The tale of Joseph's rise to prominence in Egypt, as narrated in the book of Genesis, is the most famous of the stories of Canaanite immigrants rising to power in Egypt, but there are other sources that offer essentially the same picture - from the Egyptian point of view. The most important of them was written by the Egyptian historian Manetho in the third century BCE; he recorded an extraordinary immigrant success story, though from his patriotic Egyptian perspective it amounted to a national tragedy. Basing his accounts on unnamed "sacred books" and "popular tales and legends," Manetho described a massive, brutal invasion of Egypt by foreigners from the east, whom he called Hyksos, an enigmatic Greek form of an Egyptian word that he translated as "shepherd kings" but that actually means "rulers of foreign lands." Manetho reported that the Hyksos established themselves in the delta at a city named Avaris. And they founded a

{p. 55} dynasty there that ruled Egypt with great cruelty for more than five hundred years.

In the early years of modern research, scholars identified the Hyksos with the kings of the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who ruled from about 1670 to 1570 BCE. The early scholars accepted Manetho's report quite literally and sought evidence for a powerful foreign nation or ethnic group that came from afar to invade and conquer Egypt. Subsequent studies showed that inscriptions and seals bearing the names of Hyksos rulers were West Semitic - in other words, Canaanite. Recent archaeological excavations in the eastern Nile delta have confirmed that conclusion and indicate that the Hyksos "invasion" was a gradual process of immigration from Canaan to Egypt, rather than a lightning military campaign.

{But Redford disagrees (p. 413). Martin Bernal also provides contrary evidence: gimbutas.html}

The most important dig has been undertaken by Manfred Bietak, of the University of Vienna, at Tell ed-Daba, a site in the eastern delta identified as Avaris, the Hyksos capital (Figure 6, p. 58). Excavations there show a gradual increase of Canaanite influence in the styles of pottery, architecture, and tombs from around 1800 BCE. By the time of the Fifteenth Dynasty, some 150 years later, the culture of the site, which eventually became a huge city, was overwhelmingly Canaanite. The Tell ed-Daba finds are evidence for a long and gradual development of Canaanite presence in the delta, and a peaceful takeover of power there. It is a situation that is uncannily similar, at least in its broad outlines, to the stories of the visits of the patriarchs to Egypt and their eventual settlement there. The fact that Manetho, writing almost fifteen hundred years later, describes a brutal invasion rather than a gradual, peaceful immigration should probably be understood on the background of his own times, when memories of the invasions of Egypt by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE were still painfully fresh in the Egyptian consciousness.

But there is an even more telling parallel between the saga of the Hyksos and the biblical story of the Israelites in Egypt, despite their drastic difference in tone. Manetho describes how the Hyksos invasion of Egypt was finally brought to an end by a virtuous Egyptian king who attacked and defeated the Hyksos, "killing many of them and pursuing the remainder to the frontiers of Syria." In fact, Manetho suggested that after the Hyksos were driven from Egypt, they founded the city of Jerusalem and constructed a temple there. Far more trustworthy is an Egyptian source of the

{p. 56} sixteenth century BCE that recounts the exploits of Pharaoh Ahmose, of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who sacked Avaris and chased the remnants of the Hyksos to their main citadel in southern Canaan - Sharuhen, near Gaza - which he stormed after a long siege. And indeed, around tne middle of the sixteenth century BCE, Tell ed-Daba was abandoned, marking the sudden end of Canaanite influence there.

So, independent archaeological and historical sources tell of migrations of Semites from Canaan to Egypt, and of Egyptians forcibly expelling them. This basic outline of immigration and violent return to Canaan is parallel to the biblical account of Exodus. Two key questions remain: First, who were these Semitic immigrants? And second, how does the date of their sojourn in Egypt square with biblical chronology?

A Conflict of Dates and Kings

The expulsion of the Hyksos is generally dated, on the basis of Egyptian records and the archaeological evidence of destroyed cities in Canaan, to around 1570 BCE. As we mentioned in the last chapter in discussing the dating of the age of the patriarchs, I Kings 6:1 tells us that the start of the construction of the Temple in the fourth year of Solomon's reign took place 480 years after the Exodus. According to a correlation of the regnal dates of Israelite kings with outside Egyptian and Assyrian sources, this would roughly place the Exodus in 1440 BCE. That is more than a hundred years after the date of the Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos, around 1570 BCE. But there is an even more serious complication. The Bible speaks explicitly about the forced labor projects of the children of Israel and mentions, in particular, the construction of the city of Raamses (Exodus 1:11). In the fifteenth century BCE such a name is inconceivable. The first pharaoh named Ramesses came to the throne only in 1320 BCE - more than a century after the traditional biblical date. As a result, many scholars have tended to dismiss the literal value of the biblical dating, suggesting that the figure 480 was little more than a symbolic length of time, representing the life spans of twelve generations, each lasting the tradiional forty years. This highly schematized chronology puts the building of the Temple about halfway between the end of the first exile (in Egypt) and the end of the second exile (in Babylon).

{p. 57} However, most scholars saw the specific biblical reference to the name Ramesses as a detail that preserved an authentic historical memory. In other words, they argued that the Exodus must have occurred in the thirteenth century BCE. And there were other specific details of the biblical Exodus story that pointed to the same era. First, Egyptian sources report that the city of Pi-Ramesses ("The House of Ramesses") was built in the delta in the days of the great Egyptian king Ramesses II, who ruled 1279-1213 BCE, and that Semites were apparently employed in its construction. Second, and perhaps most important, the earliest mention of Israel in an extrabiblical text was found in Egypt in the stele describing the campaign of Pharaoh Merneptah - the son of Ramesses II - in Canaan at the very end of the thirteenth century BCE. The inscription tells of a destructive Egyptian campaign into Canaan, in the course of which a people named Israel were decimated to the extent that the pharaoh boasted that Israel's "seed is not!" The boast was clearly an empty one, but it did indicate that some group known as Israel was already in Canaan by that time. In fact, dozens of settlements that were linked with the early Israelites appeared in the hill country of Canaan around that time. So if a historical Exodus took place, scholars have argued, it must have occurred in the late thirteenth century BCE.

The Merneptah stele contains the first appearance of the name Israel in any surviving ancient text. This again raises the basic questions: Who were the Semites in Egypt? Can they be regarded as Israelite in any meaningful sense? No mention of the name Israel has been found in any ofthe inscriptions or documents connected with the Hyksos period. Nor is it mentioned in later Egyptian inscriptions, or in an extensive fourteenth century BCE cuneiform archive found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, whose nearly four hundred letters describe in detail the social, political, and demographic conditions in Canaan at that time. As we will argue in a later chapter, the Israelites emerged only gradually as a distinct group in Canaan, beginning at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. There is no recognizable archaeological evidence of Israelite presence in Egypt immediately before that time.

{p. 58} Was a Mass Exodus Even Possible in the Time of Ramesses II?

We now know that the solution to the problem of the Exodus is not as simple as lining up dates and kings. The expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt in 1570 BCE ushered in a period when the Egyptians became extremely wary of incursions into their lands by outsiders. And the negative impact of the memories of the Hyksos symbolizes a state of mind that is also to be seen in the archaeological remains. Only in recent years has it become clear

{p. 59} that from the time of the New Kingdom onward, beginning after the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Egyptians tightened their control over the flow of immigrants from Canaan into the delta. They established a system of forts along the delta's eastern border and manned them with garrison troops and administrators. A late thirteenth century papyrus records how closely the commanders of the forts monitored the movements of foreigners: "We have completed the entry of the tribes of the Edomite Shasu [i.e., bedouin] through the fortress of Merneptah-Content-with-Truth, which is in Tjkw, to the pools of Pr-Itm which [are] in Tjkw for the sustenance of their flocks."

This report is interesting in another connection: it names two of the most important sites mentioned in the Bible in connection with the Exodus (Figure 6). Succoth (Exodus 12:37; Numbers 33:5) is probably the Hebrew form of the Egyptian Tjkw, a name referring to a place or an area in the eastern delta that appears in the Egyptian texts from the days of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the dynasty of Ramesses II. Pithom (Exodus 1:11) is the Hebrew form of Pr-Itm - "House [i.e., Temple] of the God Atum." This name appears for the first time in the days of the New Kingdom in Egypt. Indeed, two more place-names that appear in the Exodus narrative seem to fit the reality of the eastern delta in the time of the New Kingdom. The first, which we have already mentioned above, is the city called Raamses - Pi-Ramesses, or "The House of Ramesses," in Egyptian. This city was built in the thirteenth century as the capital of Ramesses II in the eastern delta, very close to the ruins of Avaris. Hard work in brick making, as described in the biblical account, was a common phenomenon in Egypt, and an Egyptian tomb painting from the fifteenth century BCE portrays this specialized building trade in detail. Finally, the name Migdol, which appears in the Exodus account (Exodus 14:2), is a common name in the New Kingdom for Egyptian forts on the eastern border of the delta and along the international road from Egypt to Canaan in northern Sinai.

The border between Canaan and Egypt was thus closely controlled. If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist. Yet in the abundant Egyptian sources describing the time of the New Kingdom in general and the thirteenth century in particular, there is no reference to the Israelites, not even a single clue. We know of nomadic groups from Edom who entered

{p. 60} Egypt from the desert. The Merneptah stele refers to Israel as a group of people already living in Canaan. But we have no clue, not even asingle word, about early Israelites in Egypt: neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri. Israel is absent - as a possible foe of Egypt, as a friend, or as an enslaved nation. And there are simply no finds in Egypt that can be directly associated with the notion of a distinct foreign ethnic group (as opposed to a concentration of migrant workers from many places) living in a distinct area of the eastern delta, as implied by the biblical account of the children of Israel living together in the Land of Goshen (Genesis 47:27).

There is something more: the escape of more than a tiny group from Egyptian control at the time of Ramesses II seems highly unlikely, as is the crossing of the desert and entry into Canaan. In the thirteenth century, Egypt was at the peak of its authority - the dominant power in the world. The Egyptian grip over Canaan was firm; Egyptian strongholds were built in various places in the country, and Egyptian of ficials administered the affairs of the region. In the el-Amarna letters, which are dated a century before, we are told that a unit of fifty Egyptian soldiers was big enough to pacify unrest in Canaan. And throughout the period of the New Kingdom, large Egyptian armies marched through Canaan to the north, as far as the Euphrates in Syria. Therefore, the main overland road that went from the delta along the coast of northern Sinai to Gaza and then into the heart of Canaan was of utmost importance to the pharaonic regime.

The most potentially vulnerable stretch of the road - which crossed the arid and dangerous desert of northern Sinai between the delta and Gaza - was the most protected. A sophisticated system of Egyptian forts, granaries, and wells was established at a day's march distance along the entire length of the road, which was called the Ways of Horus. These road stations enabled the imperial army to cross the Sinai peninsula conveniently and efficiently when necessary. The annals of the great Egyptian conqueror Thutmose III tell us that he marched with his troops from the eastern delta to Gaza, a distance of about 50 kilometers, in ten days. A relief from the days of Ramesses II's father, Pharaoh Seti I (from around 1300 BCE), shows the forts and water reservoirs in the form of an early map that traces the route from the eastern delta to the southwestern border of Canaan (Figure 7). The remains of these forts were uncovered in the course of archaeologi-

{p. 61} cal investigations in northern Sinai by Eliezer Oren of Ben-Gurion University, in the 1970s. Oren discovered that each of these road stations, closely corresponding to the sites designated on the ancient Egyptian relief, comprised three elements: a strong fort made of bricks in the typical Egyptian military architecture, storage installations for food provisions, and a water reservoir.

Putting aside the possibility of divinely inspired miracles, one can hardly accept the idea of a flight of a large group of slaves from Egypt through the heavily guarded border fortifications into the desert and then into Canaan in the time of such a formidable Egyptian presence. Any group escaping Egypt against the will of the pharaoh would have easily been tracked down not only by an Egyptian army chasing it from the delta but also by the Egyptian soldiers in the forts in northern Sinai and in Canaan.

Indeed, the biblical narrative hints at the danger of attempting to flee by the coastal route. Thus the only alternative would be to turn into the desolate wastes of the Sinai peninsula. But the possibility of a large group of people wandering in the Sinai peninsula is also contradicted by archaeology.

Phantom Wanderers?

According to the biblical account, the children of Israel wandered in the desert and mountains of the Sinai peninsula, moving around and camping

{p. 62} in different places, for a full forty years (Figure 8). Even if the number of fleeing Israelites (given in the text as six hundred thousand) is wildly exaggerated or can be interpreted as representing smaller units of people, the text describes the survival of a great number of people under the most challenging conditions. Some archaeological traces of their generation-long wandering in the Sinai should be apparent. However, except for the Egyptian forts along the northern coast, not a single campsite or sign of occupation from the time of Ramesses II and his immediate predecessors and successors has ever been identified in Sinai. And it has not been for lack of trying. Repeated archaeological surveys in all regions of the peninsula, including the mountainous area around the traditional site of Mount Sinai, near Saint Catherine's Monastery (see Appendix B), have yielded only neg-

{p. 63} ative evidence: not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment. One may argue that a relatively small band of wandering Israelites cannot be expected to leave material remains behind. But modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral activity in such eras as the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century BCE.

The conclusion - that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible - seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (Numbers 33) and where some archaeological indication - if present - would almost certainly be found. According to the biblical narrative, the children of Israel camped at Kadesh-barnea for thirty eight of the forty years of the wanderings. The general location of this place is clear from the description of the southern border of the land of Israel in Numbers 34. It has been identified by archaeologists with the large and well-watered oasis of Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, on the border between modern Israel and Egypt. The name Kadesh was probably preserved over the centuries in the name of a nearby smaller spring called Ein Qadis. A small mound with the remains of a Late Iron Age fort stands at the center of this oasis. Yet repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence for activity in the Late Bronze Age, not even a single sherd left by a tiny fleeing band of frightened refugees.

Ezion-geber is another place reported to be a camping place of the children of Israel. Its mention in other places in the Bible as a later port town on the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba has led to its identification by archaeologists at a mound located on the modern border between Israel and Jordan, halfway between the towns of Eilat and Aqaba. Excavations here in the years 1938-1940 revealed impressive Late Iron Age remains, but no trace whatsoever of Late Bronze occupation. From the long list of encampments in the wilderness, Kadesh-barnea and Ezion-geber are the only ones that can safely be identified, yet they revealed no trace of the wandering Israelites.

{p. 64} And what of other settlements and peoples mentioned in the account of the Israelites' wanderings? The biblical narrative recounts how the Canaanite king of Arad, "who dwelt in the Negeb," attacked the Israelites and took some of them captive - enraging them to the point that they appealed for divine assistance to destroy all the Canaanite cities (Numbers 21:1-3). Almost twenty years of intensive excavations at the site of Tel Arad east of Beersheba have revealed remains of a great Early Bronze Age city, about twenty-five acres in size, and an Iron Age fort, but no remains whatsoever from the Late Bronze Age, when the place was apparently deserted. The same holds true for the entire Beersheba valley. Arad simply did not exist in the Late Bronze Age.

The same situation is evident astward across the Jordan, where the wandering Israelites were forced to do battle at the city of Heshbon, capital of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who tried to block the Israelites from passing in his territory on their way to Canaan (Numbers 21:21-25; Deuteronomy 2:24-35: Judges 11:19-21). Excavations at Tel Hesban south of Amman, the location of ancient Heshbon, showed that there was no Late Bronze city, not even a small village there. And there is more here. According to the Bible, when the children of Israel moved along the Transjordanian plateau they met and confronted resistance not only in Moab but also from the full-fledged states of Edom and Ammon. Yet we now know that the plateau of Transjordan was very sparsely inhabited in the Late Bronze Age. In fact, most parts of this region, including Edom, which is mentioned as a state ruled by a king in the biblical narrative, were not even inhabited by a sedentary population at that time. To put it simply, archaeology has shown us that there were no kings of Edom there for the Israelites to meet.

The pattern should have become clear by now. Sites mentioned in the Exodus narrative are real. A few were well known and apparently occupied in much earlier periods and much later periods - after the kingdom of Judah was established, when the text of the biblical narrative was set down in writing for the first time. Unfortunately for those seeking a historical Exodus, they were unoccupied precisely at the time they reportedly played a role in the events of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness.

{p. 65} Back to the Future: The Clues to the Seventh Century BCE

So where does this leave us? Can we say that the Exodus, the wandering, and - most important of all - the giving of the Law on Sinai do not possess even a kernel of truth? So many historical and geographical elements from so many periods may have been embedded in the Exodus story that it is hard to decide on a single unique period in which something like it might have occurred. There is the timeless rhythm of migrations to Egypt in antiquity. There is the specific incident of the Hyksos domination of the delta in the Middle Bronze Age. There are the suggestive parallels to elements of the Ramesside era relating to Egypt - together with the first mention of Israel (in Canaan, not Egypt). Many of the place-names in the book of Exodus, such as the Red Sea (in Hebrew Yam Suph), the river Shihor in the eastern delta (Joshua 13:3), and the Israelites' stopping place at Pi-ha-hiroth, seem to have Egyptian etymologies. They are all related to the geography of the Exodus, but they give no clear indication that they belong to a specific period in Egyptian history.

The historical vagueness of the Exodus story includes the fact that there is no mention by name of any specific Egyptian New Kingdom monarch (while later biblical materials do mention pharaohs by their names, for example Shishak and Necho). The identification of Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus came as the result of modern scholarly assumptions based on the identification of the place-name Pi-Ramesses with Raamses (Exodus 1:11; 12:37). But there are few indisputable links to the seventh century BCE. Beyond a vague reference to the Israelites' fear of taking the coastal route, there is no mention of the Egyptian forts in northern Sinai or their strongholds in Canaan. The Bible may reflect New Kingdom reality, but it might just as well reflect later conditions in the Iron Age, closer to the time when the Exodus narrative was put in writing.

And that is precisely what the Egyptologist Donald Redford has suggested. The most evocative and consistent geographical details of the Exodus story come from the seventh century BCE, during the great era of prosperity of the kingdom of Judah - six centuries after the events of the Exodus were supposed to have taken place. Redford has shown just how many details in the Exodus narrative can be explained in this setting, which

{p. 66} was also Egypt's last period of imperial power, under the rulers of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.

The great kings of that dynasty, Psammetichus I (664-61O BCE) and his son Necho II (61O-595 BCE), modeled themselves quite consciously on Egypt's far more ancient pharaohs. They were active in building projects throughout the delta in an attempt to restore the faded glories of their state and increase its economic and military power. Psammetichus established his capital in Sais in the western delta (thus the name Saite as an alternative for the Twenty-sixth Dynasty). Necho was engaged in an even more ambitious public works project in the eastern delta: cutting a canal through the isthmus of Suez in order to connect the editerranean with the Red Sea through the easternmost tributaries of the Nile. Archaeological exploration of the eastern delta has revealed the initiation of some of these extraordinary building activities by the Saite Dynasty - and the presence of large numbers of foreign settlers there.

In fact, the era of the Saite Dynasty provides us with one of the best historical examples for the phenomenon of foreigners settling in the delta of the Nile. In addition to Greek commercial colonies, which were established there from the second half of the seventh century BCE, many migrants from Judah were present in the delta, forming a large community by the early sixth century BCE (Jeremiah 44:1; 46:14). In addition, the public works initiated in this period mesh well with the details of the Exodus account. Though a site carrying the name Pithom is mentioned in a late thirteenth century BCE text, the more famous and prominent city of Pithom was built in the late seventh century BCE. Inscriptions found at Tell Maskhuta in the eastern delta led archaeologists to identify this site with the later Pithom. Excavations there revealed that except for a short occupation in the Middle Bronze Age, it was not settled until the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, when a significant city developed there. Likewise, Migdol (mentioned in Exodus 14:2) is a common title for a fort in the time of the New Kingdom, but a specific, very important Migdol is known in the eastern delta in the seventh century BCE. It is not a coincidence that the prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, tells us (44:1; 46:14) about Judahites living in the delta, specifically mentioning Migdol. Finally, the name Goshen - for the area where the Israelites settled in the eastern delta (Genesis 45:1O) - is not an Egyptian

{p. 67} name but a Semitic one. Starting with the seventh century BCE the Qedarite Arabs expanded to the fringe of the settled lands of the Levant, and in the sixth century reached the delta. Later, in the fifth century, they became a dominant factor in the delta. According to Redford, the name Goshen derives from Geshem - a dynastic name in the Qedarite royal family.

A seventh century BCE background is also evident in some of the peculiar Egyptian names mentioned in the Joseph story. All four names - Zaphenath-paneah (the grand vizier of the pharaoh), Potiphar (a royal officer), Potiphera (a priest), and Asenath (Potiphera's daughter), though used occasionally in earlier periods of Egyptian history, achieve their greatest popularity in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. An additional seemingly incidental detail seems to clinch the case for the biblical story having integrated many details from this specific period: the Egyptian fear of invasion from the east. Egypt was never invaded from that direction before the attacks by Assyria in the seventh century. Yet in the Joseph story, dramatic tension is heightened when he accuses his brothers, newly arrived from Canaan, of being spies who "come to see the weakness of the land" (Genesis 42:9). And in the Exodus story, the pharaoh fears that the departing Israelites will collaborate with an enemy. These dramatic touches would make sense only afer the great age of Egyptian power of the Ramesside period, against the background of the invasions of an Egypt greatly weakened by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians in the seventh and sixth centuries.

Lastly, all the major places that play a role in the story of the wandering of the Israelites were inhabited in the seventh century; in some cases they were occupied only at that time. A large fort was established at Kadeshbarnea in the seventh century. There is a debate about the identity of the builders of the fort - whether it served as a far southern outpost of the kingdom of Judah on the desert routes in the late seventh century or was built in the early seventh century under Assyrian auspices. Yet in either case the site so prominent in the Exodus narrative as the main camping place of the Israelites was an important and perhaps famous desert outpost in the late monarchic period. The southern port city of Ezion-geber also flourished at this time. Likewise, the kingdoms of Transjordan were populous, well-known localities in the seventh century. Most relevant is the case of

{p. 68} Edom. The Bible describes how Moses sent emissaries from Kadesh-barnea to the king of Edom to ask permission to pass through his territory on the way to Canaan. The king of Edom refused to grant the permission and the Israelites had to bypass his land. According to the biblical narrative, then, there was a kingdom in Edom at that time. Archaeological investigations indicate that Edom reached statehood only under Assyrian auspices in the seventh century BCE. Before that period it was a sparsely settled fringe area inhabited mainly by pastoral nomads. No less important, Edom was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, and sedentary activity there recovered only in Hellenistic times.

All these indications suggest that the Exodus narrative reached its final form during the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, in the second half of the seventh and the first half of the sixth century BCE. Its many references to specific places and events in this period quite clearly suggest that the author or authors integrated many contemporary details into the story. (It was in much the same way that European illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages depicted Jerusalem as a European city with turrets and battlements in order to heighten its direct impact on contemporary readers.) Older, less formalized legends of liberation from Egypt could have been skillfully woven into the powerful saga that borrowed familiar landscapes and monuments. But can it be just a coincidence that the geographical and ethnic details of both the patriarchal origin stories and the Exodus liberation story bear the hallmarks of having been composed in the seventh century BCE? Were there older kernels of historical truth involved, or were the basic stories first composed then?

Challenging a New Pharaoh

It is clear that the saga of liberation from Egypt was not composed as an original work in the seventh century BCE. The main outlines of the story were certainly known long before, in the allusions to the Exodus and the wandering in the wilderness contained in the oracles of the prophets Amos (2:1O; 3:1; 9:7) and Hosea (11:1;13:4) a full century before. Both shared a memory of a great event in history that concerned liberation from Egypt and took place in the distant past. But what kind of memory was it?

The Egyptologist Donald Redford has argued that the echoes of the

{p. 69} great events of the Hyksos occupation of Egypt and their violent expulsion from the delta resounded for centuries, to become a central, shared memory of the people of Canaan. These stories of Canaanite colonists established in Egypt, reaching dominance in the delta and then being forced to return to their homeland, could have served as a focus of solidarity and resistance as the Egyptian control over Canaan grew tighter in the course of the Late Bronze Age. As we will see, with the eventual assimilation of many Canaanite communities into the crystallizing nation of Israel, that powerful image of freedom may have grown relevant for an ever widening community. During the time of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Exodus story would have endured and been elaborated as a national saga - a call to national unity in the face of continual threats from great empires.

It is impossible to say whether or not the biblical narrative was an expansion and elaboration of vague memories of the immigration of Canaanites to Egypt and their expulsion from the delta in the second millennium BCE. Yet it seems clear that the biblical story of the Exodus drew its power not only from ancient traditions and contemporary geographical and demographic details but even more directly from contemporary political realities.

The seventh century was a time of great revival in both Egypt and Judah. In Egypt, after a long period of decline and difficult years of subjection to the Assyrian empire, King Psammetichus I seized power and transformed Egypt into a major international power again. As the rule of the Assyrian empire began to crumble, Egypt moved in to fill the political vacuum, occupying former Assyrian territories and establishing permanent Egyptian rule. Between 640 and 630 BCE, when the Assyrians withdrew their forces from Philistia, Phoenicia, and the area of the former kingdom of Israel, Egypt took over most of these areas, and political domination by Egypt replaced the Assyrian yoke.

In Judah, this was the time of King Josiah. The idea that YHWH would ultimately fulfill the promises given to the patriarchs, to Moses, and to King David - of a vast and unified people of Israel living securely in their land - was a politically and spiritually powerful one for Josiah's subjects. It was a time when Josiah embarked on an ambitious attempt to take advantage of the Assyrian collapse and unite all Israelites under his rule. His program was to expand to the north of Judah, to the territories where Israelites

{p. 70} were still living a century after the fall of the kingdom of Israel, and to realize the dream of a glorious united monarchy: a large and powerful state of all Israelites worshiping one God in one Temple in one capital - Jerusalem - and ruled by one king of Davidic lineage.

The ambitions of mighty Egypt to expand its empire and of tiny Judah to annex territories of the former kingdom of Israel and establish its independence were therefore in direct conflict. Egypt of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, with its imperial aspirations, stood in the way of the fulfillment of Josiah's dreams. Images and memories from the past now became the ammunition in a national test of will between the children of Israel and the pharaoh and his charioteers.

We can thus see the composition of the Exodus narrative from a striking new perspective. Just as the written form of the patriarchal narratives wove together the scattered traditions of origins in the service of a seventh century national revival in Judah, the fully elaborated story of conflict with Egypt - of the great power of the God of Israel and his miraculous rescue of his people - served an even more immediate political and military end. The great saga of a new beginning and a second chance must have resonated in the consciousness of the seventh century's readers, reminding them of their own difficulties and giving them hope for the future.

Attitudes towards Egypt in late monarchic Judah were always a mixture of awe and revulsion. On one hand, Egypt had always provided a safe haven in time of famine and an asylum for runaways, and was perceived as a potential ally against invasions from the north. At the same time there had always been suspicion and animosity toward the great southern neighbor, whose ambitions from earliest times were to control the vital overland passage through the land of Israel northward to Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. Now a young leader of Judah was prepared to confront the great pharaoh, and ancient traditions from many different sources were crafted into a single sweeping epic that bolstered Josiah's political aims.

New layers would be added to the Exodus story in subsequent centuries - during the exile in Babylonia and beyond. But we can now see how the astonishing composition came together under the pressure of a growing conflict with Egypt in the seventh century BCE. The saga of Israel's Exodus from Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of

{p. 71} change. The confrontation between Moses and pharaoh mirrored the momentous confrontation between the young King Josiah and the newly crowned Pharaoh Necho. To pin this biblical image down to a single date is to betray the story's deepest meaning. Passover proves to be not a single event but a continuing experience of national resistance against the powers that be.

{end}

(4) Jewish chutzpah in praise of the Hyksos

(4.1) http://www.hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp010-1_egypt.htm

Fact Paper 10-I

© Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved

The dean of Egyptian archaeologists, James Henry Breasted, to whom Egyptology is everlastingly indebted for having spent a lifetime copying and preserving Egyptian inscriptions, wrote of what he had learned about the Pre-Dynastic people of Lower (northern) Egypt. They were Asiatics, he pointed out, Semites who played a critical role in the birth of Egyptian civilization. As far back as 1905 Breasted wrote: "It was chiefly at the two northern corners of the Delta that outside influences and foreign elements, who were always sifting into the Nile valley, gained access to the country... The Semitic immigration from Asia, examples of which are also observable in the historic age, occurred in an epoch that lies below our remotest historical horizon." ...

(4.2) http://www.hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp010-2_egypt.htm

Fact Paper 10-II

© Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved

Egyptian Progress to Stagnation

Immigrants from southwest Asia with Semitic characteristics established villages in the Nile Delta and Fayoum regions of Lower (northern) Egypt from 5500 to 3100 B.C.E., as was seen in Fact Paper 10-I. They introduced husbandry and agronomy, the twin foundations of civilization, as evidenced by the wide variety of Asiatic plants and animals raised in their settlements The agricultural tools employed by these villagers and the other technological and cultural attributes they possessed contrasted sharply with the hunter-gatherer culture of the indigenous Stone-Age populations of Egypt of the period.

As F. Wendorf pointed out, this new population of Asiatic peoples instituted a cultural foundation in Lower Egypt on which all subsequent Egyptian civilization was based.1

The inhabitants of Upper (up-river or southern) Egypt began to absorb some of the Asiatic agronomic and technological attributes from the Semitic traders passing by up the Nile on their way to Nubia. This traffic became frequent at the end of the Predynastic period (Gerzean Period, 3500 to 3170 B.C.E.). As a result, the Egyptians began to emerge from the Stone Age into the Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone) Age. Irrigation began to be employed, enabling the arid region to sustain a larger population than had heretofore been possible.

Egyptian overlords ensconced in enclaves along the Nile also benefitted from the imposition of tribute. As Nile traffic increased, as agricultural areas widened, and as the population burgeoned, a new Egyptian social order arose, in which power was wielded by an ever-growing hierarchy. As overlords gained power, they took to raiding each other.

One such warlord attained the right to wear the "White Crown" of Upper Egypt, that is, to rule over all of Upper Egypt. Eventually he became powerful enough to raid and conquer Lower Egypt. He donned the symbol of this conquest by donning the "Red Crown" of Lower Egypt and commemorated the event on the so-called "Narmer Palette." ...

All these and many other Asiatic revolutionary cultural and technological innovations were soon to be implanted in Egypt under a succession of six Hyksos kings during whose reign Egypt was propelled into the Bronze Age. Unfortunately, the record of the most progressive period of ancient Egyptian history was compromised by three factors:

The succeeding Egyptian "Warrior Pharaohs" of the Eighteenth Dynasty ruthlessly ravaged every trace of the presence of the Canaanite kings. They almost succeeded in obliterating two centuries of Egyptian history.

Our knowledge of the events of the early Dynastic periods is skewed because it derives in great measure from the writings of Manetho (323-245 B.C.E.), a highly prejudiced source. Manetho was an Egyptian who rose to become the High Priest of the cult of Serapis at Heliopolis during the reign of Ptolemy II (283-246 B.C.E..

Manetho's version of Egyptian history, taken from inscriptions that the ravagers left to justify their actions, became the standard by which that history is written! His system of dynastic succession was perpetuated by archaeologists despite the fact that it has long been proven to be inaccurate, misleading and prejudicial.

Manetho and Egyptian History

Manetho wrote on Egyptian history during turbulent times in which the Jews were making a profound impact upon Ptolemaic society. A massive immigration of Jews began to tale place under Ptolemy I, swelling the numbers of Semites who traditionally inhabited the Nile Delta. Ptolemy II freed Jewish slaves upon his ascension to the throne and decreed privileges to the literate, technologically proficient Jews that were denied to the illiterate, unskilled Egyptian masses. Jews, including the former Jewish slaves, were placed in a social class above that of the Egyptians.

The humbling Ptolemaic statutes were undoubtedly among the causes of the festering hate that Manetho, who has been dubbed "The First Anti-Semite," bore toward the Jews. As an Egyptian he resented the demeaned status of the Egyptians. In this he identified with the Upper Egyptian barons who had rebelled fourteen hundred years earlier against the "Hyksos" whom Manetho identified as the forefathers of the Jews. Manetho repeated the slanders that the baronial conquerors employed to justify their overthrow of Semitic rule. Manetho embellished them with new anti-Semitic scuttlebutt. ...

Archaeological evidence likewise draws a different picture of events. It is clear that a peaceful infiltration of Semitic peoples of Lower Egypt took place over centuries, and that by the time of Hyksos rule, scores of their villages were in existence. Hundreds of scarabs and seals of the heads of these villages have been unearthed. They bear mute testimony to that fact, as do several surviving lists of "kings" (that is chieftains) of the period bearing Semitic names. The villages headed by these chieftains functioned autonomously. As Manetho and the future warrior pharaohs who overthrew Hyksos rule all stated, these chieftains "appointed" one of their own to become the chief-of-chiefs, the Hyksos who then assumed rule over all Egypt and Canaan, evidently with Egyptian consent.

The truth begins with the correction of an error in the translation of the phrase Hyk-Khase. The condensed version "Hyksos" is taken to refer to an entire race, and is thus blithely employed by historians. The word has been translated variously as "sand-dwellers'" "desert raiders," "barbarians," "bedouin invaders," and "desert despoilers." The myth of a mysterious invading horde of unknown race who came from an unknown area and disappeared just as mysteriously was born. The myth was promulgated throughout the corpus of scientific literature with scarcely a critical murmur to be heard.

Until, that is, that Sir Alan Gardiner came along. Gardiner, whose philological expertise and archaeological scholarship deserves the high respect accorded to it, pointedly took Egyptologists to task. "The word Hyksos undoubtedly derives from the expression Hyk-Khase, 'chieftain of a foreign hill country'... It is important to observe, however, that the term refers to the rulers alone, and not, as Josephus thought, to the entire race."3

"The invasion of the Delta by a specific new race is not out of the question." continues Gardiner... Some, if not most of these Palestinians were Semites. Scarabs of the period mention chieftains with names like "Anat-her'" and Yacob-her'" and whatever the meaning of her, "Anat was a well-known Semitic goddess, and it is difficult to reject the accepted view that the patriarch Jacob is commemorated in the other name.4

The term that the Egyptians employed for the peoples who came into Egypt from beyond the Sinai was Aamu. The term had earlier appeared as the designation for Southwest Asiatic captives and hirelings residing in Egypt as servants.5

Aamu has a marked similarity to the Akkadian word Amurru. Significantly, the Akkadian Amurru means "westerner," referring to the Semitic people to the west, whereas the Egyptian word Aamu means "right hand," or "East"! From the Egyptian point of view the Aamu were from the east and are clearly none other than the Amurru.

It will be recalled that the ancestral home of the Jews is biblically identified as Aram-Naharaim, the town in which Abraham's relatives dwelt, in which his father Terach and brother Nahor returned and stayed while Abraham and his entourage went on to Canaan. It is also the native town of the mothers of the Jewish people, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. They were Amurru by Akkadian definition, and Aamu by Egyptian definition.

Aramaic, the ancestral language of the tribe of Abraham, become the lingua franca of international discourse during the Hyksos period.

Manetho unmistakably identified the Hyksos as progenitors of the Jews. First, he states that the Hyksos "built a great capital walled city Avaris, extending over an area of ten thousand acres from which successive "foreign kings" ruled for 511 years." The biblical reference to Avaris is thus confirmed.

Then, reporting on the exodus of the Aamus from Egypt, Manetho wrote: "They went away with their whole family and effects, not fewer in number than two hundred and forty thousand, and took their journey from Egypt, through the wilderness for Syria... They built a city in that country which is now called Judea, and that large enough to contain a great number of men, and called it Jerusalem.6

The parallels with the biblical account of the Exodus is obvious. How much more definitive can it get?

Manetho's fulminations are mindlessly repeated by most historians and their disciples. who promulgate and perpetuate Manetho's myth of cruel and massive invasion by the Hyksos. ...

The Second Intermediate Period

The Hyksos, or chieftains from hilly Canaan, erected no gigantic monuments, self-glorifying statuary and temples such as those that had drained Egypt of its resources of labor and material over many centuries, for there were none among them that claimed godly status. As Manetho sarcastically relates, the Hyksos kings were without divine attributes, for their king was no more than a chief-of-chiefs, appointed by the other chieftains to rule over them and over Egypt! The statement has two implications. That village chiefs enjoyed a great deal of autonomy, and that the accession to power of the six Hyksos rulers took place peacefully by election. The records show that they enjoyed among the most enduring reigns of Egyptian history!

The Hyksos recognized but one god, to whom they prayed at their capital at Avaris. He was named Sutekh, and he is depicted in clothes and a headdress that resembled that of the Semitic god Baal8. .. Is it significant that Sutekh is also the name of the Egyptian God who slew Osiris? ...

The Hyksos sculpted neither great statues of themselves nor idols of fabulous gods. But the arts and expertise they infused into the fabric of the culture of Egypt were of a subtler nature, more durable than the stone of which the idols were carved, The innovations they wrought benefitted all Egyptians through all the generations to come. ...

During the tenure of the Hyksos chieftains Egypt leaped forward into a new era, advancing enormously in every field of knowledge and endeavor. ...

{end}

Here's a painting of Egyptian women - 18th Dynasty, c. 1400 B.C. - from The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson (The British Museum Press, London 1995; pocket edition 2002), p. 193: egypt-women-2.jpg.

Here's another: egypt-women.jpg.

These images of Egyptian women - I could not help noticing how beautiful they were, not at all "Feminist" - are clearly not "Aryan". Nor are they "Semitic".

Rather, their frizzy Afro hair looks "African".

Egypt called Semites "Asiatics". Our concept "Asia" comes from Egypt; the Greeks adopted it.

Egyptian artwork always depicts Asiatic (Semitic) men as having thick beards. Egyptrian men are always d