2017
YAMAUCHI LECTURE
|
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXODUS |
|
by
Doug Ward |
OXFORD, OHIO-Some people seem destined from birth to follow a
certain path in life.1 Professor
James K. Hoffmeier of Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School may be one of them.
Hoffmeier, the son of Christian missionaries, grew up in Egypt, where
he was surrounded by the relics of a great ancient civilization. Not
surprisingly, he became interested in learning more about that civilization and
its connections with the Bible.
In
addition, around the time Hoffmeier was born, a
British university student came to faith in Jesus Christ. Along with other
Christian students, this young man began to pray on a regular schedule for a
group of missionaries. In particular, every month there was a day on which he
prayed for Hoffmeier.
That
young man, it turns out, was Kenneth Kitchen, who went on to become one of the
world's foremost Egyptologists and a formidable advocate for the historical
validity of the Bible.2 When Hoffmeier met Kitchen years later, he found out that
Kitchen had been praying for him throughout his life. Therefore it seems
entirely fitting that Hoffmeier would follow in
Kitchen's footsteps as an Egyptologist and defender of the faith.
|
Slaves
in Egypt |
Egypt is the setting for some of the key events in the biblical
narrative-the migration of Jacob's family from Canaan to Egypt, followed by
centuries of slavery and a dramatic exodus. Some skeptics
doubt that these events ever occurred, citing the lack of direct historical
evidence of Israel's presence in Egypt.3
Other scholars, including Kitchen and Hoffmeier,
counter that the biblical account is consistent with what we know of Egyptian
history. Hoffmeier has compiled historical evidence
of this consistency in two meticulously researched volumes, Israel in Egypt
(Oxford University Press, 1997) and Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford
University Press, 2005). On March 4, 2017, he gave an overview of the evidence
in a lecture at Miami University entitled "New Evidence from Egypt for the
Exodus."
Hoffmeier began by considering the biblical account of the
enslavement of the Israelites in Exodus 1:11, which states that the Egyptians
"put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they
built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh"
(NIV). Verse 14 adds that the Egyptians "made their lives bitter with
harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields."
This description of slave labor is consistent with wall paintings found at the
tomb of Rekhmire, an Egyptian vizier from the early
fifteenth century B.C. One painting shows foreign workers, including Nubians
and Syrians, making bricks under the supervision of taskmasters. The Egyptians
often brought back slaves from their military campaigns and set them to work. Hoffmeier mentioned that most vintners in Egypt in those
days were from Canaan.
Hoffmeier explained that archaeologists have found examples of
"store cities" like those mentioned in Exodus 1:11. These storage facilities
were attached to palaces and temples. He showed a picture of some vaulted arch
mud brick storage facilities from a funerary temple for Rameses II built 3300
years ago. This store city survives because it was built in a dry region of
southern Egypt. The area of Goshen, where the Israelites settled (Gen 46-47),
was much wetter, which is likely one reason we have not found direct evidence
of the Israelite presence in Egypt.
A
work roster from the Egyptian village of Deir
el-Medina mentions that workers could be excused for religious holidays, the
kind of thing requested by Moses in Exod 5:1.
(Perhaps the God of Israel was not on their list of approved deities-Exod 5:2). Supervisors did impose quotas on workers-even
Egyptians ones-as mentioned in Exod 5:13.
|
Egyptian
Names |
One strong line of evidence that Israel was once in Egypt comes
from the presence of many Egyptian names among the Israelites, starting with
Moses and Aaron. Hoffmeier presented a list of
several of these names.4 Aaron's
grandson Phineas, for instance, had an Egyptian name meaning "the
Nubian." Hophni, the brother of a later Phineas
(1 Sam 1:3), had a name meaning "tadpole." The names Merari and Miriam probably come from an Egyptian name
meaning "love" or "beloved."
Several
names of Israelites are related to Egyptian deities. The names Hori (Num 13:5) and Hur (Exod 17:10, 12; 24:14), for example, come from the name of
the sky god Horus, as does Harnepher (1 Chron 7:36), which means "Horus is good" or
"Horus is beautiful." Assir (Exod 6:24) could come from the name of the god Osiris or
from an Egyptian word for a tamarisk tree. Ahira (Num 1:15) could mean "brother of Re," the
Egyptian sun god. Hoffmeier has suggested that Jeremoth (1 Chron 7:7-8) means
"begotten of Mut," an Egyptian goddess.
Such names would not have been invented by Israelite writers
centuries later. Israelite theophoric names (names containing the name of a
deity) from the time of David and later used "el" (for God) or
"yah" (for Yahweh).
The
biblical Exodus account also makes frequent reference to Egyptian place names.
One of the most important is Rameses (Exod 12:37; Num 33:2-5), the starting point of the Exodus. This city
was known as Pi-Ramesses ("house of Rameses") and was built by
Pharaoh Rameses II in the northeastern Nile delta region. It was a capital city
that flourished for about two centuries starting in 1270 BC. Its location (at a
place now called Qantir) was identified by
archaeologist Labib Habachi
in the 1950s, and German archaeologists have been excavating there since the
1980s. The royal stables in that ancient city could have held up to 500 horses
or outfitted 250 chariots. Based on magnetometer surveys, the area of
Pi-Ramesses has been estimated at ten square kilometers, giving it the largest
area of any known city in the ancient world.
This
capital city fell into disuse when the course of the Nile shifted, and it was
replaced by a city known as Tanis or Zoan, which was
located twelve miles from Pi-Ramesses. Zoan was
occupied from 1070 BC until Roman times, and it is mentioned in the Bible in
several places (Ps 78:12, 43; Isa 19:11, 13; 30:4; Ezek
30:14). The mention of the city of Pi-Ramesses in the books of Exodus and
Numbers shows that the authors of the Torah had knowledge of Egypt going back
to the time when that city still existed.
|
Locating
the Route of the Exodus |
The Bible reports when the Israelites departed from Egypt, they did
not take "the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter."
(Exod 13:17) Instead they went by the safer but more
indirect "desert road" (v. 18).
Hoffmeier explained that "the road through the Philistine
country" was a road along the Mediterranean coast. We know something about
it from a relief on the outer wall of the Great Karnak
Temple in southern Egypt. The relief depicts Seti I
(the father of Rameses II), Pharaoh from 1294 to 1279 B.C., returning from
battle on this road, which the Egyptians called the way of Horus. Included in
the relief are pictures of a series of forts stretching from Egypt to Gaza. On
the Egyptian border is the Fortress Tjaru (pronounced
"Charoo"), which Hoffmeier
jokingly referred to as "Checkpoint Tjaru."
After that come the "Dwelling of the Lion" and "Migdol of Seti I."
Using
satellite images of the region, archaeologists know the location of the ancient
Mediterranean coast and the coastal road. The road was paved with crushed
limestone, Hoffmeier noted, because chariots cannot
be driven over sand. They have also found the Fortress Tjaru,
a large structure that measured 800 meters by 400 meters. (Two inscriptions at
the site, found in 1999 and 2005, identify it as Tjaru.)
More forts have also been found, and Hoffmeier
believes that he has identified the locations of the Dwelling of the Lion (at a
site called Tell el Borg) and the Migdol of Seti I. The excavations at Tell el Borg have found evidence
of chariots.
Based
on this information, we can see why the Israelites did not take the coastal
road. To the north of this road was the sea, and to the south a branch of the
Nile and a marshy wetland. On the road were massive forts that travelers could
not avoid. And so the Israelites, instead of going northwest on the coastal
road, went southwest to Succoth (Exod 12:37; Num 33:5), a place known today as Maskhuta.
After
that, however, God directed Israel to "encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the
sea" (Exod 14:2). Hoffmeier
noted that the name Migdol was not common in Egypt,
and so the Migdol in Exodus 14 is probably the site
of the third Egyptian fort, the Migdol of Seti I. Migdol was located in the
region of the Ballah Lakes, and Hoffmeier
believes that these lakes could have been the famous Yam Suf
("Sea of Reeds") where the Israelites were saved and the Egyptian
army drowned. Geologists estimate that the water there was 18 feet deep, deep
enough to swallow up Egypt's chariots.
Archaeological
evidence from Egypt continues to accumulate and also to corroborate the
biblical account, as Hoffmeier's fascinating lecture
demonstrated.
1Think, for instance,
of Jeremiah, whom God consecrated as a prophet before he was born (Jer 1:5).
2See On
the Reliability of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003.
3For example, Israeli
archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has referred to the narrative of Genesis and
Exodus as "a brilliant product of the human imagination" (The
Bible Unearthed, Free Press, 2001, pp. 7-8.)
4Hoffmeier
discusses this topic in Chapter 10 of Israel in Sinai.
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