Papyri and stone inscriptions buttress many Hebrew Bible stories, including the Exodus.
Were the Israelites really slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, and did they actually escape from Goshen to return, after 40 years in the wilderness, to the Promised Land? There is evidence that the Bible stories have roots in historical truth, say archaeologists, Egyptologists and Jewish historians publishing over the past 25 years in the Biblical Archaeology Review. This research is a big part of what inspired my novel rewriting the Exodus as historical fiction. My nonbiblical characters move through familiar events like the Ten Plagues and the Red Sea Crossing that unfold in unfamiliar ways, thanks to what scientists have learned about cultural history and climatology, among other disciplines. My last two posts were about other BAR pieces on this topic — which can be found on the blog, on Substack, and on Medium. This one is the third.
Abraham Malamat, a professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who died in 2010, wrote in 1998 about Egyptian papyri and inscriptions on triumphal stone pillars that seem to reflect quite a few aspects of the Exodus tales. One document he cites refers to people known as Apiru or Habiru who were compelled to help build the city of Pi-Ramesses. The similarity between the word Habiru and Hebrew, and the description in the Bible of Israelites building the “store-cities” of Pithom and Ramses (Exodus 1:11) constitutes evidence that is “circumstantial at best,” admits Malamat — but he includes it.
Cuneiform writing of the Sumerian logograms KU6, KAŠ, and RU (equated with the pronunciation “ḫa-bi-ru” or “ḫa-pi-ru”). Because the Habiru appear in both Sumerian and Egyptian documents, scholars suspect that they were a nomadic people — which would comport with the Israelites’ origin story in the Book of Genesis. Image credit: Imerik ial-Shimoni, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Malamat conceives of the Exodus not as a discrete, “punctual” event that happened at a particular time, but rather as a “durative” event — a series of exoduses, or possibly a “steady flow of Israelites from Egypt over hundreds of years.” But he does believe that there was probably a “peak period” of flight towards Canaan, which he calls the “Moses movement.” This, he says, came in the leadup to a famous battle between Ramses the Great and the Hittites, the ancient world’s other superpower besides Egypt. In the early 12th century BCE, “both the Egyptian and the Hittite empires suffered breakdowns,” says Malamat. This historical lapse in Pharaoh’s power, especially given that his attention was elsewhere preparing to deal what he hoped would be a killing blow to the Hittites, might have given small ethno-religious groups a number of opportunities to escape their drudgery and ill treatment at his hands.
Malamat also points out that any groups or even individuals attempting to leave Egypt without permission would be forced into the wilderness of Sinai thanks to a string of fortresses along the Mediterranean shoreline — a subject of discussion among the characters in my novel, who don’t understand why their people aren’t on the most direct path to Canaan. Malamat describes how scrupulously the Egyptians kept records of their nation’s border crossings, both the ingress of foreigners and the outgoings of residents: Papyri collected over the reigns of various pharaohs have been preserved and analyzed by generations of Egyptologists, establishing that no one could enter or leave Egyptian territory without Pharaoh’s dispensation. “Without this strict border control,” Malamat writes, “minorities as well as entire groups of Egyptians could have escaped from the Nile delta into Sinai and Palestine. No wonder Moses and Aaron had to repeatedly plead with Pharaoh to ‘Let my people go!’”
There is also Egyptian documentary evidence for other biblical stories, like the fact that various ethnic groups regularly came to Egypt for food in times of drought and famine, as Abraham does (Genesis 12:10); that escapees, pursued by Egyptian soldiers, took the route described in Ex. 13:17–18; and that fugitives often chose nighttime to begin their illicit journey, hinted at in Ex. 11:4.
By accruing all of this extrabiblical evidence for so many parts of the story, Malamat makes the case for its historicity. I find it personally less convincing than the hard-and-fast archaeological finds I describe in my first post in this series, but it certainly provides a lot of juicy novelistic details that I’ve made copious use of in my current draft of the book.
And speaking of details, Leonard and BarbaraLesko’s 1999 BAR examination of how some of Pharaoh’s workers lived is also chock full of them. The Leskos, both of Brown University’s Egyptology department, describe the wealth of documents and paintings at the site known as — and how I wish I lived in a town with this name! — the Village of the Place of Truth. Known today as Deir el-Medina, it was built especially for skilled artisans working on fabulous royal gravesites in the Valley of the Kings.
The Leskos write that the village was occupied for more than 400 years, that literacy was widespread enough for notes from working husbands to their wives at home about dinner plans were a part of daily life, and that a few of the workers grew rich enough to plan, build and decorate beautiful tombs of their own. “We should remember that the Biblical narrative describes the Israelites as leading very comfortable lives in Egypt,” write the authors. “They are represented as being generally satisfied with their lot . . . [and] even after their departure, many Israelites, we read over and over again, express regret at leaving.”
The craftspeople of Deir el-Medina were not Semites, as far as we know. But the economic stratification of their society, as well as the high level of education, provided plenty of fodder for my imagined city of Pi-Habiru in Goshen where my protagonists grew up.
There’s a lot of world-building that happens when you’re a historical novelist — but it truly pales in comparison with the worlds that Egypt’s artists built.
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