Biblical History

The Book of Exodus is one of the world’s oldest written texts, created long before history was an intellectual discipline. But some scholars insist it holds kernels of historical truth.

This is the second in a series of posts that is either defending or being defensive about my approach to rewriting the Exodus as historical fiction. Whether I am confident or have my back up depends mostly on how my novel is progressing: If I’m deep in my mind, smelling the wilderness and feeling its worn rocks underfoot, I am certain that the biblical stories are true at their roots and the mitochondrial DNA in every cell of my body was there slaving in Egypt, fighting a windstorm before the Red Sea, and trembling at Sinai. If I’m getting curious about who’s knocking on my across-the-street neighbor’s door or remembering that I really, really need to buy milk tomorrow, I can lose confidence not only in my ability to retell this story, but even in the Bible’s historicity itself.

The focus for this month is on an article from Biblical Archaeology Review originally published in 2000, but recently included in a selection of pieces about evidence for the truth of the Exodus narrative. It’s by Alan Millard, an English archaeologist who died in June 2024 and whose scholarly work included the discovery of a clay tablet with a Babylonian account of the Flood story that is in the collection of the British Museum. Millard, according to one of his obituaries, “modeled cautious conclusions in the context of biblical archaeology.” His BAR title asks the question: How Reliable is Exodus?

Unlike Manfred Bietak, who authored the piece I wrote about last month, Millard does not base his analysis on the results of a dig. He is trying to determine the plausibility of the idea that some Exodus texts, the earliest extant copies of which date from only the third century BCE among the Dead Sea Scrolls, reflect historical facts that were almost a dozen centuries older.

“In considering the accuracy of the Biblical account,” Millard writes, “we must treat the story in its context, as a product of the ancient Near East. The preservation of records over many generations is a standard feature of those societies.” Millard gives the example of a cuneiform tablet from about 650 BCE in the British Museum, translated and published in 1875, about a king of Babylon named Sargon. Today we are aware of at least three Sargons who reigned in Babylon, but in 1875 only a late ruler by that name was known — and the details of his life did not match up with the story on the tablet. It was only in the 20th century that archaeological evidence for a king Sargon who had ruled in Akkad almost two thousand years earlier was found — the Sargon to whom the tablets referred, as we know because of inscriptions from the 22nd century BCE that corroborate the events described in the British Museum tablet. So the Babylonian scribes had kept the faith, and the narratives of historical events, with surprising meticulousness for about 1400 years.

The tablet also describes a startlingly familiar story from Sargon of Akkad’s biography. “The cuneiform text tells of a baby born to a priestess who belonged to a class prohibited from bearing children,” according to Millard. “She hid him in a basket coated with pitch and placed the basket in the Euphrates River. Carried downstream, the basket was opened by a gardener, who took the child and raised him as his own. Favored by the goddess Ishtar, the boy advanced and eventually became the first known emperor.”

This is almost precisely the story of Moses from Exodus 2, except the Israelite mother set her baby in the Nile instead of the Euphrates and he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and not a mere commoner. This could mean that Sargon’s story had been picked up and slightly adjusted by rabbis creating the final version of the Torah, possibly during the 40-year Babylonian Exile of the Israelites that started in about 587 BCE. But, Millard points out, “Babylonia and Egypt are both riverine cultures . . . Putting the baby in a waterproof basket might be a slightly more satisfactory way to dispose of an infant than throwing it on the rubbish heap, which was more usual. Today unwanted babies are frequently dumped on hospital doorsteps or in other public places in the hope that they will be rescued. The story of the foundling rising to eminence may be a motif of folklore, but that is surely because it is a story that occurs repeatedly in real life.”

Millard also examines the biblical text closely for anachronisms in both events and language. Finding no evidence of Aramaic, Persian, or Greek grammar or vocabulary in the Book of Exodus, and most importantly realizing that the city of Ramses had already been drowned by the ever-shifting Nile by the time the Israelites were taken to Babylon, he concludes that arguing for a relatively late 6th or 5th century BCE composition date “involves assuming that all the necessary information was accessible at that later time.” In other words, there is both textual and factual evidence to buttress the idea that the Exodus stories originated much earlier than the Babylonian Exile, during the era of pharaohs named Ramses.

And finally, Millard addresses the miracles in the Bible by comparing them to non-biblical stories from Egypt and Assyria, one in which prayers averted a potential disaster to travelers and the other describing how a thunderbolt determined the outcome of a battle. “The report of the crossing of the Red Sea, when ‘the Lord drove the sea away with a strong east wind all night long’ (Ex. 14:21), is basically no different. In both cases the narrators attribute to divine intervention events that they could not control and that benefited them,” he writes.

Thirteen years after Millard wrote his BAR piece, an article by a National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Plos One. It explained how strong winds could have opened a path through an otherwise impassable body of water like the Red Sea, if the land contours below the surface were suitable. The parting of the Red Sea could have been a perfectly natural phenomenon, like a bolt of lightning on a battlefield or unusually good weather in a place that can be treacherous to travel through; it was attributed by the ancient authors to godly powers, but the only real miracle was timing. It’s possible that a group of escaped Israelites were trying to get away from Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea was in their way just as the winds picked up.

In keeping with his reputation for caution when reaching conclusions about events that took place more than 3,000 years ago, Millard points out that “none of this proves that the Exodus narratives stem from the era they purport to describe. They could have been created centuries later.” 

But I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m trying to create in your imagination a story that feels like it could be the memory of a past life. All I need, so as not to sacrifice my intelligence — or yours — is plausibility. And all of this research I’m doing is giving me plenty of it.