Endnote 43 – Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus

Myth, however, does not necessarily indicate a complete lack of historicity. Myth may have a historical core. See Bernard F. Batto, Slaying the Dragon—Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), p. 103 and passim. Batto contends that “it was the biblical writers’ intention to explode the exodus into an ‘event’ that transcends the particularities of space and time, making it the story of every Israelite in every generation” (p. 103). History has been “mythologized” (p. 109). For Batto, “myth is a sophisticated and abstract mode of thought” (p. 10). It “involves reflective thinking not through syllogistic reasoning or philosophical categories but through the medium of mythic narrative” (p. 40). “[Myth] attempts to express ultimate reality through symbol” (p. 11). “Whatever the historicity of the events that lie behind the biblical narrative, the exodus as story has been elevated to mythic proportions” (p. 103).