Part 3: What about the Exodus?

If you were even half awake during my last posting, you might have noticed the omission of a small little thing called the “Exodus story.” If early Israelites and Canaanites were one and the same, what about the bulk of the content of the Torah – which describes the Hebrews’ flight from Egypt and return to Canaan?

All I can say is: the Exodus from Egypt very definitely didn’t happen the way the Torah says it did, it very possibly didn’t happen it all – and I hope I’m not the first person you’re hearing this from.

This is the consensus of modern biblical scholarship. How so? Because of the absence of evidence of an exodus, and the profusion of evidence of an indigenous Isreo-Canaanite culture (and I think I made that last word up).

-- There is no record in any Egyptian annals outside of the previously mentioned Merneptah stele, of a people called Israel, of an exodus, or of a series of plagues.
-- It would be impossible for an encampment of one million people (which is beyond enormous given the population numbers of the ancient world) to leave no archaeological trace, and yet there are none in any of the areas where the route could have occurred.
-- Even an exodus of much smaller numbers than the Torah reports – say 20,000 – would have left traces, and yet there are none.

+ The homes that suddenly proliferated in the highlands are the same architectural style found in the coastal Canaanite cities.
+ The pottery styles are also Canaanite (though of lesser quality, as previously mentioned)
+ The widespread use of cult objects, such as Asherah goddesses, and symbols for the gods of Baal, El and Yhvh, all of which are Canaanite in origin, are also found in the central highlands where ‘Israel’ is unanimously identified by the Bible, the Egyptians and the archaeological record.

What modern biblical scholarship cannot say with consensus is whether an even smaller group of slaves left Egypt, traveled to the central highlands of Canaan, and melded with the growing population of Canaanites fleeing the coastal cities. Their story could have merged and become part of the burgeoning self-identity of these people, and in time become part of the collective history.

Given the centrality of the Exodus narrative to Jewish tradition, theology and psyche, it seems a pretty reasonable assumption to make.