The Exodus Enigma
Stephen Rosenberg, THE JERUSALEM POST Apr. 11, 2006
It is impossible to get away from the Exodus. It is folk history at its
finest. Thanks to the Exodus the 12 sons of Jacob mutated into 13 tribes.
Thanks to the Exodus the Israelites transformed themselves from a crowd of
slaves into a rowdy tribal nation. Thanks to the Exodus, they trusted their
leader enough to plunge blindly into the sea to escape the Egyptian
chariots. And thanks to the Exodus they perceived their Maker and accepted
His Commandments.
Without the Exodus there would be no Jewish nation and no set of laws for
them to live by. Without the Exodus there would be no generation of bonding
in the Desert, and without the Exodus there could be no entry into the
Promised Land. Above all, we need the Exodus on Seder night, the first night
of Pessah, when we should try to consider ourselves as having taken part in
it.
<snip>
WE CANNOT reconcile all the differing dates, thus it suggests that we are
reading a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of many events, again a feature of
"mnemo-history." The folk mind wants to remember many different events and
put them together into one coherent, if miraculous, whole. As it does so it
combines many memories and many numbers, in the process postulating
miraculous explanations and inflated totals.
My proposal is that this miraculous account of the Exodus is describing a
series of events that took place over more than 300 years, when Semitic
foreigners, including the Jews, left Egypt in wave after wave. Some came and
went with the Hyksos, and destroyed Jericho on their way back. Some were
expelled by Queen Hatshepsut and 480 years later helped to build Solomon's
Temple. Some came after the Hyksos and were forced to build Pithom and
Ramesses, and then left in haste to get to Canaan before Merenptah could
claim to have destroyed Israel in their land. And some perhaps never left at
all and stayed on to tell the tale from an Egyptian point of view, with an
Egyptian slant to the agriculture of Canaan and an Egyptian description of
the Mishkan.
One question still looms large. Which set of caravans was led by Moses and
which group received the Ten Commandments? That I cannot say but,
sake on Pessah night, I really do believe it was the caravan that I was on.
The writer is a Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research
in Jerusalem.
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