Exodus

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“tradition (which is a product of oblivion and memory)”

—Jorge Luis Borges

The Exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious literature in the Hebrew Bible-prose narrative, liturgical poetry, didactic prose and prophecy—celebrates the Exodus as a foundational event. Israelite ritual, law and ethics are often grounded in the precedent and memory of the Exodus. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh identifies himself as the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2 = Deuteronomy 5:6). The deliverance from Egypt is the main historical warrant for the covenanted religious bond between Yahweh and his people Israel. In some texts 040(and featured prominently in the Haggadah, the traditional retelling of the Exodus story at the Passover Seder), the historically distant event is drawn into the present by the elastic quality of genealogical time: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what Yahweh did for me when he brought me out of Egypt’” (Exodus 13:8; see also Deuteronomy 6:20–25). In its existential actuality, the Exodus, more than any other event of the Hebrew Bible, embodies William Faulkner’s adage: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”¹

But is it true? Well, yes and no.

Does the story contain real history? Very probably yes, although it’s not easy to pinpoint.

The biblical account is a conflation of history and memory—a mixture of historical truth and fiction, composed of “authentic” historical details, folklore motifs, ethnic self-fashioning, ideological claims and narrative imagination. It was communicated orally and then in written texts and circulated in a wide discursive network. We may plausibly assume that the Bible (including its constituent documentary sources) depends in various ways on earlier discourses, both oral and written. The collective memory of the Exodus is, in this sense, situated in a history of discourses. It is the remembered past that we have in our Bibles. The past and the present are interrelated in collective memory.

Let us examine the story to see if we can disentangle these elements.

The pharaoh of the Exodus is not named. Why should the name of pharaoh be a blank, with no surrogate name inserted in its place? This may be a case of inadvertent forgetting, with no guiding motive, just as one effortlessly forgets the names of past presidents or prime ministers. Or it could be a sign of the stock function of this figure, as in the nameless pharaoh who takes Sarah into his harem (Genesis 12:15–20) or the pharaoh who exalts Joseph (Genesis 41). But, in this case, the absence of pharaoh’s identity may also be a strategic feature of the tradition, providing a widening boundary of inclusion for those who share this memory.

The oppressive rule of pharaoh and the enslavement of the ancestors are memories that could have been shared by many segments of the population of early Israel. Some people in early Israel had indeed probably escaped from slavery in Egypt. The Egyptian name Moses (as in Ra-messes, Tut-mose, Ah-mose, etc.),² as well as the Egyptian names of Phinehas and Hophni, priestly names in the stories of the Exodus and later (Numbers 25:3; 1 Samuel 1:3), are perhaps testimony to the Egyptian origin of some of the Levite lineages. But—and this is the important point—for the Exodus story to take root in early Israel it was necessary for it to pertain to the remembered past of settlers who did not emigrate from Egypt. By leaving the name of pharaoh a blank, the memory of Egyptian oppression could extend to all who had felt the oppression of pharaoh at any time in the remembered past.

From the conquests of Thutmose III (1479–1425 B.C.E.) through the reign of Ramesses III (1186–1154 B.C.E.) or Ramesses IV (1154–1148 B.C.E.), the land of Canaan was a province of the Egyptian empire. Egyptian power manifested itself in various ways and with varying degrees of intensity throughout this period. The Egyptian administration was largely concerned with control of trade routes and the appropriation of resources from its northern province. The objects of taxation and tribute included wood, precious metals and copper, gemstones, glass, foodstuffs—and also people. Slaves were demanded as tribute from the rulers of the Canaanite city-states, who presumably rounded them up from the local population or captured them from other towns. The correspondence (dating to around 1360–1335 B.C.E.) between Canaanite rulers and the Egyptian pharaoh discovered at El-Amarna, Egypt, records the following human tribute sent to or requisitioned by pharaoh:³

10 women sent by ‘Abdi-Asûtarti of Amurru
(El-Amarna letter [hereafter, EA] 64)

46 females and 5 males sent by Milkilu of Gezer (EA 268)

[x (number is lost)] prisoners and 8 porters sent by ‘Abdi-HÉeba of Jerusalem (EA 287)

10 slaves, 21 girls, and [8]0 prisoners sent by ‘Abdi-HÉeba of Jerusalem (EA 288)

20 girls sent by Sûubandu [place unknown] (EA 301)

[x +] 1 young servants, 10 servants, and 10 maidservants sent by an unknown ruler (EA 309)

[2]0 first-class slaves requisitioned by pharaoh [along with the ruler’s daughter in marriage] (EA 99)

40 female cupbearers requisitioned by pharaoh of Milkilu of Gezer (EA 369)

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Comparable shipments of human tribute, we presume, were sent before and after the brief period of the Amarna archive.

A second, apparently larger category of Canaanite slaves consisted of prisoners of war captured and brought to Egypt by military campaigns.⁴ The Egyptian term for such foreign captives was sqr.w-’nhÉ, literally “bound for life.” Thutmose III, the founder of the Egyptian empire, claims to have taken more than 7,300 Canaanite prisoners of war, and his son, Amenhotep II (1425–1401 B.C.E.), claims to have taken more than 89,600 Canaanite captives. In Ramesside times, the capture of Canaanite prisoners was a regular anthem in annals of military conquests, as in the following account of Ramesses III:

I have brought back in great numbers those that my sword has spared, with their hands tied behind their backs before my horses, and their wives and children in tens of thousands, and their livestock in hundreds of thousands. I have imprisoned their leaders in fortresses bearing my name, and I have added to them chief archers and tribal chiefs, branded and enslaved, tattooed with my name, and their wives and children have been treated in the same way.⁵

Aside from prisoners of war, sizeable Canaanite populations were also deported to Egypt by the Egyptians. The huge number of captives listed by Amenhotep II has been interpreted as victims of a deliberate policy of mass deportation of subject peoples, aptly described by Donald Redford as “tactics of terror.”⁶ An inscription of Thutmose IV (1401–1390 B.C.E.) 042notes that the captured Canaanite inhabitants of Gezer were resettled in Thebes. A letter from Akhenaten to the ruler of Damascus requests the deportation of a group of ‘Apiru to Nubia. An inscription of Ramesses II (1279–1212 B.C.E.) boasts of displacing Asiatics to Africa, and vice versa:

He has placed the Shasu Asiatics into

the western land,

he has settled the Libyans in the hills (of Asia),

filling the fortresses that he has built

with people captured by his mighty arm.⁷

In addition to Canaanites taken into Egyptian slavery by means of vassal tribute, military conquest and mass deportation, Canaanites were sold into slavery for purely financial reasons. In the Amarna letters, Rib-Hadda, ruler of Byblos, repeatedly reminds pharaoh that his people have sold their sons and daughters in order to buy grain.⁸ A tantalizing Egyptian record, reminiscent of the Joseph story, states: “His porters sold him to the Egyptians, and they seized him and took his goods.”⁹ During the Ramesside period, slave merchants operating in Egypt dealt in foreign slaves; legal systems were developed to regulate the purchase and sale of slaves by private individuals.

Many of the foreign slaves ended up working on the vast estates of the Egyptian temples. A regular motif in Ramesside inscriptions is the boast of “stocking 043(the temple’s) workhouse with male and female slaves of His Majesty’s captivity.”¹⁰

All this suggests that many of the local settlers in early Israel had memories, direct or indirect, of Egyptian slavery. These memories were linked to no single pharaoh, but to pharaoh as such, that is, to the array of pharaohs whose military campaigns, vassal tributes, mass deportations and support of the slave trade forced many Canaanites into Egyptian slavery. Not all of these slaves need to have escaped with Moses—or to have escaped at all—to create the bitter memory of Egyptian slavery among the early population of Israel. In this cultural setting, the story of a miraculous deliverance from Egyptian slavery would find ready ears. The indefiniteness surrounding the memory of which pharaoh may be a sign of the widespread resonance of this collective memory.

The Egyptian empire was crumbling during the early decades of Israelite culture, and it is no surprise that the settlers defined themselves, at least in part, as former victims of an oppressive regime. Memories of shared suffering are potent ingredients in the formation and persistence of ethnic identity. The nameless pharaoh of the oppression is, in this sense, an emblem of collective memory.

Event and motif may also intersect in the account of the plagues. In Exodus, the redemption of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt is brought about by a series of plagues, which Yahweh calls “my signs and wonders” (Exodus 7:3). Through these signs and wonders the Egyptians will know Yahweh (Exodus 7:5). The Israelites are instructed to recount the story of these wonders to future generations so that they too will know Yahweh (Exodus 10:1–2). The plagues are best understood as products of Israelite folklore and narrative imagination. But it is also possible that the plagues are, at least in part, a transformation and elaboration of the 044memory of real plagues, such as often occurred in the ancient world.

In his ability to inflict devastating diseases, Yahweh shares the role of other more specialized gods of disease, such as the Canaanite diety Resheph or the Mesopotamian Nergal. Debilitating diseases similar to those in Exodus are also included among the covenant curses in biblical and other texts.

Several of the Egyptian plagues are natural calamities rather than diseases. They too are paralleled elsewhere. The Sefire inscription (eighth century B.C.E.) relating a treaty between two Syrian kings includes the following curse:

[May Ha]dad [pour (over it)] every sort of evil (that exists) on earth and in heaven and every sort of trouble; and may he shower upon Arpad [ha]il-[stones]! For seven years may the locust devour (Arpad), and for seven years may the worm eat.¹¹

The sequence of hail and locusts in this inscription is the same as in Exodus 9–10, perhaps suggesting they both derive from a common pool of West Semitic curse formulas.¹²

The plagues could have been introduced into the Exodus story at any time as the effective “signs and wonders” of Yahweh (Exodus 7:3; Deuteronomy 34:11), sent through the agency of Moses, the incomparable man “whom Yahweh knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10). The story of Moses’ birth, life and death forms a frame for the stories of the Exodus and wanderings—the long transition from slavery in Egypt to freedom as Yahweh’s people on the threshold of the Promised Land. The genre of the Pentateuch as a whole has been characterized as the biography of Moses. In the ancestral history recounted in the Pentateuch, Moses is the savior and founder of the people.

The details of Moses’ life that best withstand historical scrutiny—and hence are the most likely to be historical—are his name and his marriage to a Midianite woman. Everything else about Moses’ life is so interwoven with narrative motifs and religious ideology that it is impossible to disengage the history from the 045tradition. But Moses’ name and his wife’s ethnicity are details that are unlikely to have been invented by tradition.¹³ His name is Egyptian, a fact that has been forgotten in biblical tradition. And his wife’s Midianite affiliation (a group later hated by the Israelites—Numbers 31:1–12) seems too peculiar to have been invented by folklore or ideology.¹⁴ These items meet the test of “dissimilarity,” that is, they go against the grain of Israelite culture and tradition, and so may plausibly be regarded as accurate historical memories.

Moses’ multiple roles in biblical memory may best be linked together by his status as a mediator, one who bridges differences and frictions among various categories of biblical thought and experience. Moses is the unique man, the likes of whom “never again arose in Israel” (Deuteronomy 34:10), in large part because he combines the traits of so many opposed and even incompatible categories. Because he is the multifaceted man, he is able to unite together all of the stories of Exodus, Sinai and the wanderings into a coherent collective memory. The functions of Moses as a mediator are extraordinarily rich, perhaps allowing a glimpse into the relation between memory and history in the figure of Moses.

Moses’ role as mediator may be related to the betwixt-and-between qualities of a dimly perceived historical Moses. He is a slave and a free person, an Egyptian and an Israelite. He is a mediator between Yahweh and the Israelites and between Yahweh and Pharaoh.

In biblical discourse he thus becomes the mediator of many aspects of Israelite memory and identity. His end is also, in a different way, a mediating force. His death and burial outside the land—in a place “no one knows” (Deuteronomy 34:6)—correlates, on a symbolic level, with the extraterritorial site of the sacred mountain, Sinai/Horeb. The twin memories of the sacred mountain and of Moses belong to all Israel. And yet the present location of these memories—Sinai/Horeb and Moses’ tomb—are forgotten.^a Perhaps to belong to all the people’s memory it is necessary for both to be indeterminate, in no-man’s land, absent to the present. These are memories that function in 052biblical thought as unifying principles, joining many different things together.

The collective memories that constitute the story of the Exodus—the Egyptian oppression, the plagues and the towering figure of Moses—may well contain traces of historical events and persons, mingled together with mythic motifs, themes and structures—the stuff that makes the past truly memorable—that make a complex tale. The past as people remember it is a meaningful past, perceived and colored by subjective concepts, hopes and fears. Memory is always selective, and it is organized and embroidered according to the desires of the present. The historically true and the symbolically true are interwoven in such a way that the past authorizes and encompasses the present. The Exodus, in this sense, is not a punctual past but ongoing, a past continuous.

The historical events are difficult to isolate, since they have been transposed into a larger scale. I have observed above that certain actions and policies of the Egyptian empire in Canaan may be discerned in the portrait of the Egyptian oppression. A devastating epidemic in the late 14th century B.C.E., interpreted as an act of divine punishment, may be distantly recalled in the story of the Egyptian plagues. A historical figure named Moses may have been transformed into the savior and mediator of all Israel, perhaps generalized from the memory of a smaller group.

As a story of deliverance from oppression, the birth of freedom, and the divine sanction of human rights and responsibilities, the Exodus story has served as a paradigm for over two and a half millennia. From Second Isaiah to Nelson Mandela, the images and ideas of the Exodus persist. There is something in the story that pertains to the human spirit irrespective of cultural difference. The human condition is illuminated by the encounters of Moses and pharaoh, Yahweh and Israel, the holy mountain and the Promised Land. The Exodus is a paradigm, or a congeries of paradigms, of human oppression and salvation in the temporal horizon of the grand sweep of history.

For more details, see Ronald S. Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120 (2001), pp. 601–622.

“tradition (which is a product of oblivion and memory)”