The “Great Hypostyle Hall” at the Karnak temple complex in Egypt. One of the walls in pharaoh Thutmosis III’s resting place here has a list of cities along a route described in the Book of Numbers — although no archaeological evidence for a city from Thutmosis’s time on that route has been unearthed. Image credit: Eyup Sayar via Pexels.com.
The Hebrew Bible feels like history, especially in verses that describe various travel routes throughout the Holy Land. That geographical specificity recreates an intimacy growing rarer in these days of GPS signals and Google Maps: the trust between strangers that springs up when one of them asks for directions.
This sense of believability might be why so many archaeologists started digging all over Israel as soon as they got the chance, searching for cities, towns and even crossroads that get a mention in the Bible’s narratives. Many of these scholars with trowels were eager to prove the holy book’s historicity. Most came up short.
“No clear extrabiblical evidence exists for any aspect of the Egyptian sojourn, exodus, or wilderness wanderings,” wrote Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, of Wake Forest University and Point Loma Nazarene University, in 2011. Take, for instance, the town of Dibon-gad east of the Jordan River — where, according to Numbers 33:45, the Israelites camped shortly before launching their offensive into Canaan around the 13th century BCE. A dig in the 1950s uncovered nothing from before the 9th century BCE, which is when many experts say the Hebrew Bible was actually written. Dibon-gad didn’t exist, said the archaeologists, at the time that the Bible said it did.
This finding would seem to score a point for the Minimalists, a group of biblical archaeologists who believe the Five Books of Moses have nothing to say about the ancient origins of the Jewish people. Minimalists claim that most of the Pentateuch is really about political and geographical conditions that were current centuries after the events they purport to describe.
But as a novelist who is retelling the Exodus from the point of view of Israelite characters who are remembering the Ten Plagues, the Red Sea Crossing, and the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai from when they were teenagers, I of course root for Team Maximalist. My side — which, to be clear, I consider “mine” only because I find it more dramatically compelling — sees the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible as containing precious nuggets of historical information that can be separated from dusty piles of myth. I couldn’t keep working on this project if I didn’t think it was possible to reimagine the outgoing from Egypt by rooting it in scientifically plausible theories if not outright historical facts.
So what is a maximalist to do when the Bible says that the Israelites camped at a place called Dibon-gad, and archaeologists dug up a hill near Dhibon in today’s Jordan, and found nothing at all from the Mosaic era? If you’re Egyptologist Charles R. Krahlmakov, emeritus of the University of Michigan, you look at lists of cities and towns made from carefully-drawn Egyptian maps to determine when the route described in the Bible might have been active.
Krahlmakov wrote in the 1994 fall issue of Biblical Archaeology Review that no fewer than three lists of way stations on the road from the southern tip of the Dead Sea to the Jordan River include Dibon, documenting its existence from 1504–1212 BCE — centuries older than the most ancient remains found at the archaeological site. The lists were inscribed on the walls of three pharaonic funerary temples, among them that of Ramses II who is often considered the pharaoh of the Exodus.
In fact, by combining the three lists, Krahlmakov recreates an entire section of Numbers 33, which largely consists of a recitation of places the Israelites camped from the time they left Goshen until the beginning of their raids on Canaan, 40 years later according to the narrative. This is exactly the kind of “clear extrabiblical evidence,” admittedly not of the Exodus itself but of details associated with it, that Moore and Kelle said does not exist.
And since historical novelists are all about the details of life in the olden days, I am on it like a crocodile on a Nile swan.
And speaking of historical novelists, I recently read two bestselling novels from the 1990s about Ramses II. They were written by the French author Christian Jacq, who is also an honest-to-goodness Egyptologist with a degree from the Sorbonne. It made me reflect on the choices I am making in my own novels about the same time and place. Although Jacq is an expert and I am at best an enthusiastic amateur, he (along with his translator, Mary Feeney) decided to make ancient Egypt more relatable to contemporary readers by tossing in such modern notions as a “Secretary of State,” which is the title he gives to Ramses’s chief foreign diplomat, and mentioning pharmaceuticals in pill form. Despite the incredibly advanced medical culture in ancient Egypt, I can hardly imagine that pills as we know them today actually existed at the time.
In a sense, I am doing the exact opposite of Jacq. Since I want to subvert my readers’ expectations that they are going to be dealing with events and characters that are familiar to them from Bible stories, I am going with strict Hebrew vocabulary and pronunciation for everything from the Yor (the Nile, in the original) to Mitzra’yim (Egypt) to Hoshe’a (Joshua), and so on. A major element in Jacq’s novels is a kind of spirit magic, which I’m sure he understands deeply thanks to his true expertise in ancient Egyptian texts. Meanwhile, my first line is: “There are no miracles in the story of my people.”
Interestingly, we both characterize Moses as a bit of a religious fanatic. I guess there are aspects of the Bible that ring true no matter what approach one may have to understanding it.
