Endnote 23 – The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?

See Caminos, Late-Egyptian Miscellanies, p. 188. The laborers in the biblical account are deprived of their straw allotment and compelled to gather straw locally in order to meet their quotas (Exodus 5:5–19). That is, the nature of Israel’s conscription is lavishly illustrated by Egyptian documents and art: corvée among Semites, brickmaking with straw, even brickmaking quotas are amply documented. See esp. C. F. Nims, “Bricks without Straw,” Biblical Archaeologist 13 (1950), pp. 22–28. For the scale of such enterprises, note the XIXth Dynasty scroll assigning “stablemasters”—presumably offficers like the Israelite overseers in Exodus 5—quotas amounting in all to 80,000 bricks. See on this and further, Kenneth H. Kitchen, “From the Brickfields of Egypt,” Tyndale Bulletin 27 (1976), pp. 136–147; A. Spenser, Brick Architecture in Ancient Egypt (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1979).