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Egyptologists and the Israelite Exodus from Egypt

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Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Early Egyptologists were steeped in interest in biblical history and in particular the Hebrew exodus story. Edouard Naville and W.M.F. Petrie were among the early pioneers. Of interest to early Egyptologists was the geography of the exodus and the route of the Hebrew departure from Egypt. By the mid-twentieth century, Egyptology’s love affair with Old Testament matters had soured, but this allowed the discipline to develop as its own science.

Over the past decades, Biblical scholars have largely been swept into the current of historical minimalism, leaving Israel’s origin story on the dust heap of history. This development serves as a pressing call for Egyptologists to return to the debate to bring data from Egypt to bear on historical and geographical matters. Indeed some have responded in constructive ways.

This chapter examines interaction between Egyptology and the exodus narratives and then reviews some of the newer archaeological, toponymical, and geological data from Northeastern frontier of Egypt that shed new light on the biblical narratives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Regarding the skepticism of the historicity of the biblical accounts of David and Solomon, see Miller (1987, 1991: 28–31) and Garbini (1988: 21–32).

  2. 2.

    For a critique of these various positions see Hoffmeier (1997: chapters 1 and 2).

  3. 3.

    I am grateful to the secretary of the EES, Dr. Patricia Spencer, for providing me a copy of the original founding charter.

  4. 4.

    He speaks of a “dialogue” between Bible and archaeological data (Dever 1992: 358–359) and elaborates it in more detail recently (Dever 2001: chapter 3).

  5. 5.

    For a complete bibliography of Couroyer, see Marcel Sigrist (1997: 20–28).

  6. 6.

    This suggestion was first proposed by Ahlström a year earlier in an article which was coauthored by another Hebrew Bible scholar, Diana Edleman (Ahlström and Edelman 1985: 59–61).

  7. 7.

    (Hoffmeier 1997: 138–140). Interestingly, my book is listed in a “Select Bibliography” at the end of the chapter, and it offers the following annotation: “A detailed examination of the biblical account of the Exodus incorporating recent textual, historical, and archaeological scholarship, which concludes that the main points of the narratives are plausible” (120). It is not clear whether this is the conclusion of the author or the editor. Regardless, nowhere in Redmount’s chapter is there evidence that Israel in Egypt was considered in drawing her minimalist conclusions.

  8. 8.

    Surprisingly, Israeli Egyptologists have had little to say about the sojourn–exodus traditions. In a search of the Egyptological Bibliography (1822–1997), I found only a few articles by Israeli Egyptologists that dealt with the sojourn–exodus narratives. One important contribution is by Sarah Israelit-Groll, “The Historical Background to the Exodus: Papyrus Anastasi VIII (Groll 1997: 109–115).

  9. 9.

    For some reason, all the other chapters in this book are updated by leading scholars in their respective fields, while the Exodus chapter is revised by the editor!

  10. 10.

    I point the readers to Bietak’s paper in this volume. It is evident from his presentation at this conference on May 31, 2013, that his work in the NE Delta and particularly at Tell el-Dab‘a have provided extremely valuable information about the Semitic-speaking population (including the Hyksos) living in the Delta, which could well have included the Hebrews among them.

  11. 11.

    The late Habachi Labib (2001: 119–127) wrote at some length on the sojourn–exodus in his publication of materials from his excavations in Qantir (Pi-Ramesses) in the 1950s, but his work only appeared in 2001, over 15 years after his death in 1984. Clearly in this chapter he demonstrates a rare interest among Egyptian Egyptologists in biblical history and the sojourn–exodus tradition, but that may be due to the fact that he was a Coptic Christian.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Divinity School, Trinity International University, Deerfield, IL, USA

    James K. Hoffmeier

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  1. James K. Hoffmeier
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Correspondence to James K. Hoffmeier .

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  1. University of California, San Diego, California, USA

    Thomas E. Levy

  2. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Thomas Schneider

  3. University of California, San Diego, California, USA

    William H.C. Propp

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Hoffmeier, J.K. (2015). Egyptologists and the Israelite Exodus from Egypt. In: Levy, T., Schneider, T., Propp, W. (eds) Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04768-3_15

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