Confidence in the History of the OT (Part 1)

Israel in Egypt, by Edward Poynter

We are in the midst of a series on the Bible, and in particular, on how we can have confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible.  We have looked at the confidence we can have that the table of contents in our Bibles is correct – that is, that the canon of Scripture that we have in the 66 books in our OT and NTs is composed exactly of the books that ought to be there.  Today, we want to shift and look at the confidence we can have in the history that the Bible relates.  

We need to do this because the Bible is largely composed of history, the telling of what God has done in our space-time world, beginning with its creation from nothing.  The Pentateuch is composed of law but also of a lot of history.  Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, are all history.  Even the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel contain lots of narrative about the history of God’s people Israel.  In the NT, the gospels and Acts are history.  Paul gives bits and pieces of history of his ministry and the early church in his letters.  

Again, the reason for this is that God is accomplishing his saving work in history, culminating at the Cross of Jesus Christ and the empty tomb.  God has given us inspired history, not only to tell us what he has done but also to interpret it for us.  And we need both.  We need the narrative of events, and we need the interpretation of the events.  For our purposes today, it’s important for us to realize that without an accurate accounting of the narrative, we can’t possibly begin to interpret.  The gospel is rooted in history.  If we want to have the gospel right, we have to have the history right.

Liberal theologians always want to keep the interpretation but ditch the history.  But this is to get it exactly backwards and to gut the gospel of any real meaning.  We must have confidence in the history of Scripture if its meaning is to have any real and lasting relevance.  

But as I say, liberal theologians and scholars must ditch the history of the Bible if they are to maintain their rejection of orthodoxy.  So there has been a relentless attack on the history of the Bible, and the OT, from beginning to end, has been the constant target of the enemies of truth.

Today, we want to look at the history of Israel at what is probably one of the most mentioned episodes in Israelite history, the Exodus.  We have to pick and choose here, not because we want to, but because the subject is so voluminous.  Next time, hopefully we will look some more at OT history, but today, I want to concentrate on this one event, and event which not only determined the character of OT Israel, but also was meant to be a type of the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

I want to precede in four stages.  First, I want to look at where the critique of this part of OT history comes from.  I think it is important for us to realize that it does not come from a context of the objective study of history but precedes upon very questionable assumptions.  Second, I want to ask then how we should appraise evidence for ancient history?  Then I want us to look at what the data we have from the ancient world from both the negative and positive angles: what it does not tell us and what it does.

Where does the critique of OT history come from?

When I talk about the critique of OT history, there are two primary ways this is done.  One is to say that the entire OT history is a complete fabrication by later Jewish priests, sometime during the reign of Josiah, and continuing to develop during the exilic and post-exilic periods.  Others say that it may not all be fabricated, but we just can’t know how much of the OT history is real history and what is not.  This is the minimalist approach.  They say that the OT is a witness that something happened in the ancient past, out of which the nation of Israel emerged, but we just can’t know it.  Practically speaking, however, there is little difference between these two views.

One of the great expressions of this approach to Biblical history is found in the theory of the German Biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen.  He is most known for the JEDP theory of the Pentateuch, or the Documentary Hypothesis.  This theory claims that the books of Moses didn’t come from a single author (like Moses) but rather is a compilation of multiple sources, and in particular a compilation of four various schools of thought.  Moreover, it is claimed that the Pentateuch didn’t take its current form until very late, perhaps as late as the fifth and sixth centuries BC.  But the main takeaway is that since the Books of Moses were tinkered with over a long period of time, we can’t really know what is history and what is not.  

But it’s important that you understand that this critique of OT history, and the Pentateuch in particular, does not come from the discoveries of the scientific exploration of ancient history.  Wellhausen published his Documentary Hypothesis in 1878, but, as K. A. Kitchen notes,  “At that time there were no Amarna letters (only found in 1887), no Code of Hammurabi of Babylon (only dug up in 1901), no other early law collections, no Siloam inscription (found only in 1880), no Hittites . . . . There was no systematic archaeology by strata . . . . Large-scale and scientifically enhanced archeology lay far into the future, unimagined.  No Ugarit, no Hurrian, no vast Ebla, Mari, Ugarit, Emar archives from outside Mesopotamia” (487).[1]   The point is that whatever qualifications Wellhausen had as an Orientalist, he worked on his theory in a virtual vacuum of real evidence.  Consequently, his theory has been rejected not only by conservative but also by scholars of all stripes.  But this does not mean it has gone away!  Christopher Wright, an OT scholar, comments:

“A creature stalks the halls of biblical studies. It is routinely raised up from the grave in classrooms and it haunts textbooks and monographs that deal with the Hebrew Scriptures. Wherever it roams, it distorts the analysis of the text of the Bible, confounds readers, and produces strange and irrational interpretations. This undead creature sometimes goes by the quasi-mystical sounding sobriquet ‘the JEDP theory,’ but it is better known by its formal name, the documentary hypothesis. The time has come for scholars to recognize that the documentary hypothesis is dead. The arguments that support it have been dismantled by scholars of many stripes—many of whom have no theological commitment to the Bible. The theory is, however, still taught as an established result of biblical scholarship in universities and theological schools around the world. Books and monographs rooted in it still frequently appear. Laughably, some of these books are touted for their ‘startling new interpretations’ of the history of the Bible while in fact doing little more than repackaging old ideas. If the sheer volume of literature on a hypothesis were a demonstration of its veracity, the documentary hypothesis would indeed be well established. Nevertheless, while the dead hand of the documentary hypothesis still dominates Old Testament scholarship as its official orthodoxy, the cutting edge research of recent years has typically been highly critical of the theory.”[2]

In other words, if we ask where this theory came from, we have to admit that it didn’t come from the sands of any archeological dig.  It came from the head of a German scholar who a priori rejected the trustworthiness of Scripture and its inspiration from God.  More particularly, it came out of an uncritical fascination with the theory of Darwinian evolution, which was then applied to everything, including history.  It was believed that the religion of Israel couldn’t have been as developed as the books of Moses claim that it was, all the way back in the thirteenth or fifteen century BC.  

I’m saying all this because skeptics of the Bible like to present Christians as if they were just gullible people who believe things without any reason to do so.  But even if that is true, the same can very often be said about the skeptic.  The basis for the skepticism of OT history is often not rooted in hard, cold evidence, but in the subjective appraisal of the OT text preceding from unproven philosophical assumptions.  You need to recognize that the skeptic often has as much or more faith in unscientific presuppositions than the next person.

But that leads naturally to our next question:

How should we appraise the scholarly evidence for the ancient history of Israel?

A few thoughts to get us going.

First, evidence from scholarship cannot be ultimately determinative for our faith (though I don’t say it can’t help!).  What ought to be ultimately determinative is a personal relationship with God through Christ in his word.  This doesn’t mean we need to fear science, or historical scholarship.  But beware of casting your faith upon what the “experts” say.  They often contradict themselves, and what is the current view among them today will often be counted as foolishness in the next generation.  But God’s truth is for all generations and will never fail.  The Bible is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.  I want especially to encourage all the young folks in our congregation to seek the Lord with all your hearts.  This cannot be replaced with arguments from books.  Meet God and you will have a strong bulwark against all the deceitful machinations of skeptical scholarship.

Second, the history of the ancient world is only to be gotten in bits and pieces.  It’s very, very incomplete.  For example, it’s estimated that 99% of all ancient Egyptian papyri from the Egyptian delta region has disappeared (due to unfavorable climate for storing them).  This doesn’t mean it never existed!  We have to be careful that we don’t build an argument on silence or incomplete evidence.  This is very easy to do with ancient history just by the nature of the case.  The evidence from archeology is never complete and always needs to be held with tentativeness.  This goes for both sides of the debate.

Third, it is important to not only have the raw data from the ancient world, but also how to interpret and understand that data.  You need to understand the cultures that produced the evidence you are looking at, their languages and customs, etc.  I am not an expert in this area, of course, but K. A. Kitchen is, which is one reason why I will be leaning so hard on this particular scholar .  Kitchen is an author and scholar who for many years was the Personal and Brunner Professor of Egyptology (died this year).  

Fourth, though historical research and archeology is not determinative for our faith, neither should it be ignored or eschewed.  Our faith, after all, is a historical faith, by which we mean that God saves us by acting in history.  For that reason, we of all people should be interested in the study of history!  We need not be afraid of it, when it is rightly viewed.  

Finally, sometimes in order to prove the reliability of the historical narratives of the Bible, the miracles are reinterpreted and recast in terms of natural events.  We have to be careful here, though.  We need to recognize that, on the one hand, that God in his providence can provide a miracle through a natural event.  But on the other hand, we shouldn’t feel like we need to interpret every miracle in terms of God’s ordinary providence.  Let’s not explain away the supernatural out of the Bible.

Now, what does the archeological evidence have to tell us?  We proceed, first negatively, then positively.

What the evidence doesn’t say

What we don’t have: we have no direct physical evidence (e.g., in terms of manuscripts or tablets or monuments) for the specific man Moses, nor for the Exodus itself, nor for the stay of the Israelites in Egypt or for their journey through the desert in Sinai or for their stay in Kadesh Barnea.  So no evidence for the Exodus, right?

No.  Actually, this is to be expected. I would surmise that if someone dug up a monument in Egypt that recorded the Exodus of the Hebrews out of Egypt by a man named Moses, that it would be immediately suspect by all sides, conservative as well as liberal.  Why?

Well, take the Exodus.  The fact of the matter is that no Pharoah would ever have made a monument celebrating a defeat, or the destruction of a whole chariot battalion.  (We do, of course, have the Israelite version of it!  It amazes me how people just want to rule these witness out.  But they cannot be ruled out of bounds, except by sheer prejudice.)  We know by every piece of evidence that we have that monuments were only made by Egyptian Pharaohs to celebrate victory as a sign of the favor of the gods.  But the Exodus had to have been one of the most monumental defeats in Egyptian history.  They would never have advertised this in any monument!  This was not only true of the Egyptians, but also of the ancient world in general.

As for the stay of the Israelites in Egypt, we need to remember that they lived in the East Delta zone.  Kitchen comments: “This fact imposes further severe limitations upon all inquiry into the subject.  The Delta is an alluvial fan of mud deposited through many millennia by the annual flooding of the Nile; it has no source of stone within it.  . . .  So those who squawk intermittently, ‘No trace of the Hebrews has ever been found’ (so, of course, no exodus!), are wasting their breath.  The mud hovels of brickfield slaves and humble cultivators have long since gone back to their mud origins, never to be seen again” (Kitchen, 246).  The same could be said of their trek though the wilderness.  They never expected to stay there 40 years, and they would never had put down such roots as to leave behind the kind of evidence you would need to document their existence thousands of years later.

As for Moses, he would have been one of many Semitic men in the Egyptian court, an unremarkable thing in his day (Kitchen, 297, bottom of page).  There is no reason why we should have exceptional evidence in his case, especially when he would later have been branded an outcast and a traitor.  

So what do we have?

Note: Kitchen favors a 13th century BC date for the Exodus, whereas other conservative Biblical scholars favor an earlier date, in the 15th century.  I am not going to adjudicate between this at this time: either date is incompatible with the liberal belief a 6th or 5th century BC date for the Pentateuch, that it was composed hundreds of years after the events in question took place (which goes along with a belief that the Exodus is not real history but propaganda).

What the evidence does say

First of all, we have records of slaves been used in Egypt for building projects at precisely the time the Bible says the Israelites were doing this, during the New Kingdom period (ca. 1540 – 1170).  (247-248).  Kitchen comments, 

In brick making, the most famous example comes from a scene in the tomb chapel of the vizier Rekhmire of circa 1450.  It shows mainly foreign slaves “making bricks for the workshop-storeplaces of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Thebes” and for a building ramp.  Here, labeled “captures brought-off by His Majesty for work at the Temple of [Amun],” hence serving as forced labor, Semites and Nubians fetch and mix mud and water, strike out brink from brick molds, leaving them to dry and measuring off their amount.  And all is done under the watchful eye of Egyptian overseers, each with his rod.  As many have observed, it offers a vivid visual commentary on part of what one may read in Exod. 1:11-14 and 5:1-21. (247)

What is even more interesting is that, though foreign and imported slave labor was used in previous times, it was mainly domestic rather than the large-scale use you see in the New Kingdom.  How could later Israelite scribes known this?  How could they have picked just the right time to put Isreal in Egypt as slaves for their large brick-making projects?  Maybe because they didn’t make it up, but because it is real history!

Second, we have the reference to cities the Israelites built: “Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses” (Exod. 1:11).  Raamses was occupied by eleven kings of the 19th and 20th Dynasties, from 1290-1070 BC.  it is especially significant, for it “was largely abandoned from circa 1130 onward, and the new (Twenty-First) dynasty needed stone to build great temples at its capital, Tanis, . . . . And the mud brick of most of its nontemple buildings quietly subsided back into mother earth” (255).  What this means is that later Israelites wouldn’t have even known about this city if they had not been there at that time.  “Thus, the occurrence of Raamses is an early (thirteenth/twelfth century) marker in the exodus tradition, and that fact must be accepted” (256).    In other words, Raamses is not the place that a later Jewish writer would have guessed at if he were just making up history.  He would never have guessed at Raamses at all in fact.

Third, we have ecological factors that mark this narrative off as authentic rather than made up.  Take, for example, the river Nile turned into blood.  It’s possible that this was real blood, but it is also possible that what happened was that due to excessive flooding, the extra rain would bring red earth plus flagellates leading to a red coloring of the water oxygen fluctuations resulting in the death of fish, and becoming a breeding ground for infections. Kitchen notes that, “In the Middle Kingdom work, Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage (it’s modern title), the writer describes Egypt’s woes in a time of misery under an inept king, and remarks, ‘See the River (Nile) is blood, one shrinks from (other people), and thirsts for water.’” (250, 252). 

Then in the wilderness travels of the Israelites, it is a fact that quail migrate through the Sinai peninsula twice a year and that there is water under the sand.  “One may cite an amusing incident from back in the 1920s, when an army NCO likewise produced a good flow of water when he accidentally hit a rock face with a spade, to be teased with his companions’ cry, ‘What-ho the prophet Moses!’ as Jarvis reported” (273).  As Kitchen notes: “[T]he narratives show a practical knowledge of Sinai conditions not readily to be gained by late romance writers in exilic Babylon or an impoverished Persian-Hellenistic Judea, hundreds of miles from the places and phenomena in question” (274).

Fourth, it has often been claimed that the Israelites could not have had a tabernacle, that it was too advanced for the 13th-15th centuries BC.  “In biblical studies, for over a century, ‘critical orthodoxy’ (current ‘minimalism’ being no different) has decreed that the tabernacle is an exilic or postexilic figment of the imaginations of Jewish priests (ca. sixth to fourth centuries B.C.), seeking to glorify their cult, giving it a long ‘history’ before the monarchy by projecting a ‘tented’ form of Solomon’s temple back to the time of Moses, their first national leader.” (275). But Kitchen shows that tabernacles like the one Moses constructed, and even far more advanced tabernacles existed, going back to the third millennium BC.  He gives specific examples.  Moses’ tabernacle, furthermore, used Egyptian technology.  Finally, as Kitchen points out, “Any Hebrew account of first-millennium date should have had a round, not rectangular court.”  Later Assyrian tabernacles were round, not rectangular.  It all fits!

Finally, perhaps the most important marker of the Pentateuch as a document from the 15th – 13th centuries BC. is the form of the covenant that God made with Israel.  Kitchen writes: “Today we can establish an outline history of treaty, law, and covenant through some two thousand years, from circa 2500 down to circa 650, in six distinct phases, using between eighty and ninety documents.  That history provides an objective and fixed frame of reference against which we can set the biblical examples, in dating them and evaluating their part in that overall history” (283-284).  His conclusion: “Sinai and its two renewals – especially the version in Deuteronomy – belong squarely within phase V, within 1400-1200, and at no other date.  The impartial and very extensive evidence (thirty Hittite-inspired documents and versions!) sets this matter beyond any further dispute.  It is not my creation, it is inherent in the mass of original documents themselves, and so cannot be gainsaid, if the brute facts are to be respected” (287-288).

In the Biblical documents of Exodus through Deuteronomy, we see that the form of Sinai Covenant goes like this and in this order: title, historical prologue, stipulations, a place for its deposit and a rule for its reading, witnesses, blessings and curses.  Compare this then to Hittite Corpus of phase V, which were composed of  title, historical prologue, stipulations, deposit and reading, witnesses, curses and blessings.  The main thing that is different between these two forms is that in the Hittite corpus, the curses come first followed by the blessings, whereas in God’s covenant the blessings come first.  Again, the thing is that covenants didn’t follow this form before or after the period of Isreal’s exodus.  The fact that the Sinai covenant did take this form is a witness to its antiquity and its authenticity.

By the way, this also necessitates a man like Moses, who would have had experience with documents like this in Pharaoh’s court.  How could brick-building slaves known about international treaties and covenants and their specific forms?  Of course God could have revealed it to them! But what this shows us is that God was communicating to Israel through Moses in terms he especially would have understood and appreciated (295,ff.).

Now, what do we do with all this evidence?

Some final thoughts

First, the purpose here is not to “prove” the Exodus by reference to what has been dug up in the desert.  We cannot prove it like a mathematical theorem.  But neither can you prove any historical event of the past that way.

Second, what we’ve shown is that there are not one, but many, features of the Exodus story that are best explained by the fact that the one who gave us this account was very familiar with Egyptian topography, with Egyptian law and covenant, with Egyptian tech, with the routes through the Sinai desert, with the flora and fauna of the Sinai peninsula, among other things, and that this would only have been possible for someone who had lived in Egypt during the 15th-13th centuries BC, and not later, as it often averred.  Thus, we have very good reasons, in other words, to believe that the Exodus account was indeed written by Moses and that it does indeed relate real history.

Final word: why should we ultimately accept the historicity of it all?  Not because Kitchen (or others) say so, but because Jesus said so!  Mk 12:26, “And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?”  Jn. 3:14, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.”  Jn. 6:32, “Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.”

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[1] K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2003).  All quotations from Kitchen are taken from this book. 

[2] Qtd. in https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/the-yawn-of-jedp/