The Fight for History
In the Holy Land, archaeology itself is a battleground. Will the Bible win out?
Even so, some scholars say that archaeology provides "circumstantial evidence" of the historical backdrop of the patriarchal stories. Treaties and contracts, the price of slaves, and other details of law and commerce written into the narratives, for example, "match remarkably well" what scholars have found in documents from ancient Mesopotamia, says Kenneth Kitchen, a retired Egyptologist from the University of Liverpool. Similarities between Middle Bronze culture and the biblical text, adds Amihai Mazar of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, are "too close to be ignored" and suggest that the patriarchal narratives are "very old traditions . . . passed on from generation to generation" rather than later inventions.
THE EXODUS. As with the patriarch stories, there is no direct archaeological data to corroborate the biblical account of Hebrew slaves in Egypt, their release by a pharaoh after a series of plagues, or the existence of Moses. But that has not prompted the Bible's defenders to cede the field to the minimalists, who argue that the Exodus never happened. "Absence of evidence," says Kitchen, "is not evidence of absence."
Indeed, some scholars find striking circumstantial evidence in ancient Egyptian inscriptions that something like the Exodus could have occurred in the Late Bronze Age (1400-1200 B.C.). One inscription at the tomb of Rekhmire, an official under Pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century B.C., for example, depicts prisoners from Canaan and Syria making mud bricks, with stick-wielding taskmasters overseeing them, during construction of the temple at Karnak. The scene closely parallels the Israelites' plight described in the book of Exodus. And Hoffmeier of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School notes that the use of forced labor in Egypt "is documented only for the period 1450 to 1200, the very time most biblical historians place the Israelites in Egypt."
More intriguing is a line in an ancient Egyptian document dating from the reign of Ramses II, considered by many to be the pharaoh of the Exodus, ordering that food be distributed to "the Apiru who are dragging stone to the great pylon." Although the meaning of the term "Apiru" is hotly debated, some scholars believe it may refer to the Hebrews, or more generally to Asian Semitic people.
Perhaps the most dramatic indirect evidence of a 13th-century B.C. Exodus, some scholars say, is a line of hieroglyphics in a temple monument commemorating the military conquests of Pharaoh Merneptah, a son of Ramses II, during a campaign in Canaan in 1207 B.C. Included in a boastful listing of vanquished enemies is a line declaring: "Israel is laid waste." The inscription clearly establishes Israel's presence in Canaan by the end of the 13th century B.C., prompting some scholars to speculate that the Exodus would have taken place about 50 years earlier.
The biblical details do "conform to the Canaanite experience of Late Bronze Age Egypt," says Baruch Halpern, a professor of ancient history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. "There were Semites there, there was forced labor, there was brick making, there was intense building activity under Ramses II." There were even reports in ancient Egyptian papyri of small numbers of runaway slaves fleeing into the Sinai desert. Though far short of proving the Exodus, some scholars argue, such evidence gives the story a ring of truth. If one is going to invent a past, says Eric Meyers, archaeologist and religion professor at Duke University, "why create a story of slavery, or suffering, and miraculous deliverance like the Exodus?"
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