My usual answer to the question of how I got started writing a new version of the Exodus is that I was following Toni Morrison’s dictum, “If there is a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I don’t know if Morrison was thinking about storytime involving the book you want, but that was my impetus: My six year-old had been requesting that I read aloud the same Exodus story from the Jewish Publication Society’s Illustrated Children’s Bible every Friday night for eight months.
Once I decided to write something I would want to read – to my child – I knew I had to avoid insulting their intelligence by allowing miracles to steer the plot. But at the same time I acutely wanted to give them a sense of what it might have been like to live through the events that come down to us as the Ten Plagues, the Parting of the Red Sea, and the Revelation at Sinai. A 2,000 year-old teaching says that every Jew should feel as if we personally had escaped from Egypt; to me, that sounds like a rabbi setting a challenge for historical novelists. Not only did I have to find out or make reasonable conjectures as to what really might have happened to give rise to the Exodus myths, I had to make the sequence of events believable to 21st century readers while writing from the perspective of characters who know nothing of climate change (probably a factor in the first three plagues), germ theory (that likely sparked the next three), or volcanology (the nature of the Mountain of God).
But I am an unlikely author for a book that involves meticulous Bible study and biblical archaeology research.
According to my agnostic paternal grandmother, my great-grandfather picketed his own father’s synagogue in Ukraine because he believed to the depths of his nonexistent soul that religion was the opiate of the people. Another member of the family, so the story goes, smuggled himself out of prison camp in a pickle barrel after he’d been convicted of giving communist aid to the 1905 anti-Tzarist revolution. My mother’s side of the family, shtetl Jews who lived in what my great-grandmother called “Russia-Poland” before she came over as a teenager on the boat, were essentially illiterate when they arrived on the Lower East Side. I was bat mitzvahed at 22, of my own volition and without a big party. No one in my family had joined a shul since the first generation had arrived on American shores.
Still, the rabbinical admonition to identify with the Exodus spurred me. It is part of what I do not get to choose about myself. I have a perplexing feeling of comfortable helplessness whenever I face the beauty and humanity and obscurity and jumble of Torah. Jewish culture and history, its riches as well as its horrifying recent past and present, is there for me whether I want it or not. I can, like Jerry Seinfeld, refuse delivery of the package — but it is always and forever addressed to me. And it is addressed to my child, as it was to my godless great-grandparents in the old country.
So I hold fast to it, as the song goes, the only way I can. I don’t believe the Torah to be factual, but I am trying to find myself in the stories of the Exodus. And the way I do that is by braiding archaeology and personal insight with a historical fiction imagination.
A magazine I’ve subscribed to for years, Biblical Archaeology Review, recently put out a collection of articles discussing the science behind the Exodus myths. These have been so essential to my research, I’m going to spend the next few posts bringing them to you.
The first article is by the Austrian Egyptologist Manfred Bietak, whose work includes the excavation of Avaris, the capitol of the Semitic Hyksos invaders who ruled Egypt as the 15th Dynasty. Bietak found reed huts constructed in the same manner as contemporaneous dwellings in Canaan — called “four-room houses” — during the pharaoh Ramses III’s reign. Bietak argues, based on this and other documentary evidence, that “proto-Israelites” were indeed employed as slaves in Egypt during the Ramesside period and possibly earlier, although the location of the four-room huts he uncovered suggests that these particular proto-Israelites were involved in tearing down a funerary temple, not building store-cities.
By comparing the dates when four-room houses were being widely constructed in the Levant with the scholarly consensus on when the most ancient sections of the Hebrew Bible were written down, Bietak concludes that the so-called “Song of the Sea” (Exodus 15:1) may have been composed only one or two centuries after a possible escape from slavery by a group of proto-Israelites — certainly within the usual limits of historically reliable memory.
Bietak is careful to say that there is no explicit evidence for an exodus, but there are strong indications that a significant population of Israelites were “slaves unto Pharaoh.” That’s all the plausibility I need, as a novelist, to start writing in the first person as if I personally had come forth out of Egypt.
Meanwhile, how my child chooses to live with the package of their Jewish identity is completely up to them.
