ReViews

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Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition

James K. Hoffmeier

(New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999) 280 pp., $18.95 (paperback)

Dust-jacket praise for James Hoffmeier’s book heightened my expectation that the author might actually make a reasonably strong case for the historical Exodus, something that has eluded other scholars. I was encouraged in my hope by Hoffmeier’s background in Biblical studies and Egyptology and by his recent fieldwork near Egypt’s ancient border with the Sinai.

Scholars have been long aware of a Semitic presence in Egypt. They have known that the city of Pi-Ramesses existed and that Pharaoh Merneptah mentioned “Israel” in his famous stele. This evidence satisfied believers that there was a historical Exodus, but the data have never been sufficiently clear or incontrovertible to convince skeptics that we can answer the major questions about the Exodus: “Who? When? Why? Where? How?”

The Biblical account shows some, even considerable, familiarity with ancient Egypt, but it is frustratingly vague about crucial details (the most glaring example: Who was the pharaoh of the Exodus?) and apparently will always present irreconcilable problems, primarily with the dating of events and with the dating of the Biblical account. This has led many to regard the Exodus story as a confused or vague recollection or, even worse, as a fiction. The data from Late Egyptian texts and especially from archaeological work in the northeast Delta, on the other hand, continue to expand and improve but still fail to provide any firm evidence.

In Israel in Egypt, Hoffmeier attempts to piece together all the evidence—however minute, broken or contradictory. In so doing, he presents numerous unproven hypotheses to deal with the anonymous pharaoh, the plight of the deportees, the length of a generation and the plagues, but he succeeds only in building a very elaborate house of cards, which, albeit attractive, easily collapses. His methodology parallels that of Martin Bernal’s very controversial Black Athena (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), which argues that a number of classical Greek paradoxes can be explained by “African” influences resulting from Middle Kingdom Egyptian conquests; both works hold forth promise of proof for their claims, but in the end rely too heavily on accumulated hypotheses.

Nevertheless, Hoffmeier’s new book contains some of the best arguments in support of a 13th-century B.C.E. (19th Dynasty) Exodus. There is evidence for a large foreign population in Egypt at that time, for the construction of new cities in the Delta and for the route emigrés would presumably take out of Egypt.

Hoffmeier’s chapter “Moses and the Exodus” discusses possible Egyptian loanwords in the Exodus account that give chronological or geographical information. He restates what can be said about Moses’ name and explains the plagues as natural events that would logically follow one another in the order presented except, of course, for the last, which is meant to represent God’s triumph over Pharaoh.

Hoffmeier also discusses the geography of the eastern Delta and northern Sinai as 059they relate to the Exodus story. Numerous recent surveys of ancient sites between the Pelusiac branch of the Nile and the Wadi Tumilat indicate both a shifting of the Nile’s course and the presence of various man-made canals. Archaeological evidence of stone-lined embankments and fortifications indicates that some of the canals may have been intended to protect Egypt’s eastern frontier from foreign penetration by immigrants rather than to keep would-be emigrants in.

These are the most up-to-date and interesting chapters in the book and might lead to an answer to the question of “Where?” If the Lake Timsah-Bitter Lakes route was taken by the departing Israelites, the late 19th Dynasty constructions nearby provide a possible answer to the question “When?” However, these new findings would still leave “Who,” “Why” and “How” unanswered.

Israel in Egypt might be welcomed by some as an antidote to the nihilists who consider the Exodus story total fiction. But the evidence Hoffmeier presents is evidence of what Egypt was like in the period in which he sets the Exodus—it is not evidence of the Exodus itself. His is a rather subjective assessment that might satisfy middle-of-the-road readers, but will not win over many converts either from among those who have been most deeply enthralled with the story or from those who have challenged it. Indeed, Hoffmeier’s narrow focus will ultimately enhance the case of those minimalists who see the story as a later conflation of several historical episodes.

The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity: From Alexander to Bar Kochba

John H. Hayes and Sara R. Mandell

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 272 pp., $28.00 (paperback)

Military campaigns and political intrigue are the focus of this short, jargon-free history of the Jews in the Land of Israel from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East in 332 B.C.E. through the unsuccessful Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, led by Bar Kochba in 132–135 C.E. Like most political and military histories, it is arranged chronologically, following the reigns of the various rulers of ancient Palestine. The book pays virtually no attention to social, economic or religious history. As a result, the authors tell a conventional story—a great historical drama played out in the Machiavellian royal courts while the passive masses observe from the peanut gallery.

John Hayes and Sara Mandell take great care to place Jewish history during this period in the larger context of the Roman world. When Alexander’s empire was divided at his death, Judea suddenly found itself sandwiched between the Seleucid kingdom in Syria and the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt. Control of Judea passed back and forth between these two great powers for 150 years until the Jews, led by the Maccabean family, established an independent dynasty, known as the Hasmonean dynasty.

Mandell and Hayes successfully explain that the great shadow of an expansionist Rome shaped Seleucid and Hasmonean diplomatic strategies in the second and first centuries B.C.E. For example, they correctly emphasize that Rome’s early intervention in the Maccabean uprising and incorporation of the Hasmoneans into her protectorate severely curtailed the maneuverability of both the Seleucids and the anti-Hasmonean Jewish factions. Ironically, though, when the authors discuss the period of direct Roman control of Palestine (starting in 63 B.C.E.), they neglect to compare Rome’s treatment of Palestine with her treatment of other colonies.

Much less successful is the authors’ shrill and polemical rejection of the idea that there was a single common Judaism during this period. Not content to talk about the “Judaisms” of the time, as many scholars do today, they speak instead of communities that “differently practiced Yahwistic faith.” 060The significance of this distinction is not clear and opens up no fresh perspectives. Even worse, the replacement of “Judaisms” with “communities of Yahwistic faith” appears to be misguided. Different Jewish communities in antiquity shared more than the worship of the same God: They shared the same or similar Scriptures and certain ritual practices, as well as an adherence to the belief in common biological and spiritual descent. The relationships between Jewish communities in antiquity and the ways in which they identified themselves and other Jews were surely complex, and the authors miss an opportunity to explore this topic.

When the narrative strays from the conventional story, it often hits rocky terrain. While any history of this period must rely heavily on the works of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, Hayes and Mandell often lapse into an uncritical paraphrase of his work. The causes of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.) are drawn directly from Josephus, ignoring modern scholarly perspectives. The treatment of the origins of the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrates a disturbing ignorance of recent scholarship: Hayes and Mandell posit that it was a calendrical dispute that caused the Qumran group to break off on its own, pointing to a parallel in the Canopus decree, issued in 238 B.C.E. by Egyptian priests attempting to reinforce the importance of using a solar calendar. The parallel is intriguing, but insufficient. Hayes and Mandell make no mention of the “Halakhic Letter” (4QMMT), almost certainly a foundational document of the Dead Sea community, which discusses several legal issues (most dealing with issues of ritual purity) that divided the community from the Jerusalem Temple establishment. Instead, Hayes and Mandell unquestioningly accept the mythical prologue of the Damascus Document, according to which the community was formed in 196 B.C.E. and went into exile in Damascus around 170 B.C.E., where it formed a new covenant of true believers before returning to the Land of Israel. In light of the flurry of scholarly research over the last decade, such a reconstruction is hardly tenable. Closer attention to the archaeological evidence might have enhanced their discussion here and at the very end of the book, where they discuss the Bar Kochba Revolt. Hayes and Mandell reject the ancient historian Dio Cassius’s explicit testimony that Hadrian’s founding of the city Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem was a cause of the Bar Kochba Revolt and instead date the founding of Aelia Capitolina to the end of the revolt, “as a punishment of the Jews” (numismatic finds from the second century C.E. confirm Dio’s chronology).^a

The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity is accessible to the general reader and does a good job of citing relevant primary sources. Nine extended textual selections sprinkled throughout are well chosen and interesting. The book contains useful maps, genealogical charts and timetables, but otherwise lacks illustrations.