The Book of Exodus tells the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The most important events include Moses' birth and survival, his encounter with God in the burning bush, the ten plagues that afflicted Egypt, the Israelites' escape through the parted Red Sea and their journey to Mount Sinai. At Mount Sinai, God gives Moses the Ten Commandments and other laws and makes a covenant with the Israelites.The Israelites wandered through the desert for 40 years, but this part of their journey is described in more detail in the book of Numbers. Was the Exodus a real historical event? Here are some views from the scholarly literature.

"Historians of Judaism cannot look back with much clarity into the lives of Abraham and Moses. In fact, they cannot be sure that these
men even existed. If they did, they surely live more in legend than in the archives of history. There is no hard evidence for the Exodus
either, at least not of the sort that might convince archaeologists or historians. In Judaism, as in so many other religions, there are
insider traditions that scholars must sift through with care as they create their own reconstructions." Stephen Prothero - Religion Matters, 2020, page 435.

"While no direct Egyptian textual evidence for the exodus has been found (Malamat 1997: 15–16),44 there are a number of ancient Near Eastern examples of exodus-like migration movements, including tribal groups trying to emigrate beyond the control of the king of Mari (Matthews 1978: 157–58; Kitchen 2003c: 254), and 14 tribes from Hatti (that is, Anatolia) trying to escape the control of the Hittite king and moving to Isuwa (Beckman 1996: 38–39; Kitchen 2003c: 254)." Gerald A. Klingbeil - Between North and South”: The Archaeology of Religion in Late Bronze Age Palestine and the Period of the SettlementHess et al (Eds.) - Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, 2008, page 124.

"Modern biblical scholars are savvy enough to recognize that the Egyptians would not have memorialized their defeat in a royal inscription. They “demand” no such thing. Instead, scholars suspect that calamities like the Passover and exodus—if indeed these events happened—would have
been remembered in Egypt in some kind of veiled form. The Egyptians would have interpreted these defeats as victories or, this failing, they would have explained them as acts of judgment from their own gods. These two interpretive strategies appear in the Bible. Judah remembered the nearly total annihilation of the nation by King Sennacherib of Assyria (see 2 Kings 18:13–16; Isa. 22:1–14) as a miraculous victory (2 Kings 18:17–19:37),52 and it interpreted an obvious military defeat at the hands of Babylon as an act of Yahweh (2 Kings 24–25). Given that these strategies for interpreting “defeat” were common in the ancient world,53 critical scholars are on the lookout for two kinds of Egyptian
evidence for the Passover and exodus. They expect either an inscription that recalls Pharaoh’s mighty expulsion of the Hebrews from Egypt, or some text that admits Egypt’s difficulties but attributes them to one of Egypt’s own gods, not to Yahweh. As it turns out, though the Egyptians have left us good evidence for two lesser “catastrophes” in their history (the Hyksos and Sea Peoples),54 they have left
us no evidence at all for the exodus or Passover. Critical scholars anticipate that the Passover and exodus would have left behind Egyptian
testimonies about these events if they had actually occurred. The silence of the Egyptian evidence on these matters is therefore an important argument against the historicity of these miracle reports. I must say, I quite agree with this expectation. While historians have no access to the supernatural miracles that would have caused the Passover, they should be able to find Egyptian evidence for this miracle’s effect: the death of a whole generation of New Kingdom Egyptians. Even if Harrison and Hoffmeier believe that the historicity of the exodus is essential for the health of the Jewish andChristian faiths, there is nothing untoward with admitting honestly that the usual historical evidence does not appear to support its historicity. Perhaps the original events were much less significant historically than the Bible now remembers. And, as we shall see, one does not always require historical-critical evidence to believe that some events are historical; theological evidence also
counts in our assessments of history." Kenton L. Sparks - God’s Word in Human Words; An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship, 2008, page 120-121.

Archaeology has, to date, not been able to “prove” the historicity of the book of Exodus, though the
authenticity of many of its claims has been shown to be credible. James K Hoffmeier - Why a Historical Exodus Is Essential for Theology
Hoffmeier & Magary (Eds.) - Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith; A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture, 2012, page 92.

"Similarly, perhaps the most vexing question asked by, and most
frequently of, biblical archaeologists, is whether there is evidence
that the Exodus took place. Exodus with a capital ‘‘E’’ refers to the
departure of the Hebrews from Egypt, where they had been
enslaved by a succession of pharaohs. Acknowledgment of that
event (or at least a portion of it) is celebrated annually by the
Jewish festival of Passover. However, despite attempts by a
number of biblical archaeologists—and an even larger number of
amateur enthusiasts—over many years, credible direct
archaeological evidence for the Exodus has yet to be found. While it
can be argued that such evidence would be difficult to find, since
nomads generally do not leave behind permanent installations,

archaeologists have discovered and excavated nomadic emplacements from other periods in the Sinai desert. So if there were archaeological remains to be found from the Exodus, one would have expected them to be found by now. And yet, thus far there is no trace of the biblical ‘‘600,000 men on foot, besides children’’ plus ‘‘a mixed crowd . . . and livestock in great numbers’’ (Exod. 12:37–38) who wandered for forty years in the desert. That is not to say that such an event did not take place, but merely that no archaeological evidence has yet been found for it." Eric Cline - Biblical Archaeology; A Very Short Introduction, 2009, page 76.

"In view of the lack of direct evidence for the exodus, it is necessary to consider whether any extra-biblical ancient evidence exists that
intimates a historical Israelite exodus from Egypt. If something on the scale of the biblical story occurred in ancient Egypt, it is reasonable to expect that it would have found its way into their historical chronicles. But it has not." Hays & Ansberry (Eds.) - Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, 2013, page 60.

"The Book of Genesis brings the Hebrew people to Egypt for a considerable length of time. Then the actions of an oppressive pharaoh force an end to the sojourn. The revised timeline starts with the events leading up to and culminating with the Exodus. As described in the Bible, the plagues are God’s punishment against the pharaoh for not allowing Moses and his people to go free. A sequence of natural disasters fails to change the pharaoh’s mind until the crushing finale when pharaoh drowns in a whirlpool of water that had just allowed the Hebrews to escape. It is little wonder that Egyptologists can find no place in accepted history for this combination of events. If the Exodus occurred anytime close to the stated 400 years before Solomon’s Temple was built, it would have to be placed squarely in the middle of the powerful 18th Dynasty. Efforts to find a more suitable placement have forced a shortening of the time of the Judges, from the 400 years of the Bible to perhaps 200, allowing the Exodus to occur under the 19th Dynasty, maybe under Ramses II. Unfortunately, the interactions with Egypt’s eastern neighbors as depicted
on Ramses’ inscriptions are no help. And for slaves in any number to escape from the mighty Ramses seems improbable. Perhaps there was not a single large migration but rather a few families at a time in several waves, meeting up with some families that never left Palestine for Egypt in the first place." Roger Henry - Synchronized Chronology; Rethinking Middle East Antiquity, 2003, page 17.

"The Exodus, in short, was the event of Hebrew history. A natural catastrophe of almost unparalleled dimensions had apparently dissolved royal
authority, allowing the Israelites to escape their bondage. But modern scholarship here stands in total disagreement with tradition. According to
conventional ideas, the Exodus was not a notable event; there were no extraordinary happenings; the country was not beset by plagues; there was no unnatural darkness; pharaoh and his army were not drowned in the Red Sea. Indeed, historians now hold that the Egyptians were so unimpressed by the Exodus that they didn’t even bother to mention it. If the Exodus occurred at all, conventional scholarship believes, it was merely the departure from Egypt of a minor band of Semitic shepherds." Emmet Sweeney - The Genesis of Israel and Egypt, 2008, page 102.

"It is true that we have no archaeological evidence for the exodus from Egypt or Palestine, but we can at least be certain that the tradition was in place long before the Persian period." Joseph Blenkinsopp - The Pentateuch - The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, 1998, page 185.

"Although there is no definite archaeological evidence for the Exodus, there are many things we do know happened. The details of the Pharaoh’s
court life mentioned in the Bible match what we know from other evidence, suggesting the writer of Exodus was basing his account on firsthand knowledge. Egypt suffered from events that resemble the biblical plagues at various points in its history. There is plentiful evidence that people, often nomadic pastoralists from Canaan, came to Egypt, settled there, and were sometimes seen as a problem by the Egyptians. We know that the Egyptians employed huge numbers of foreign slaves for various Pharaonic building projects and we know that sometimes these slaves escaped. Canaanites lived in the Nile Delta, and for a while took control of it. Couple this with the central place the Exodus
has in Jewish memory, the many references to it in other books of the Bible, the extraordinary longevity of the Seder ceremony (the oldest continually enacted ritual in the world) and the fact that peoples only record periods of slavery when they are true, then the balance of evidence points clearly to the historicity of the overall events of the Exodus, even if the exact dating and details are unclear." Philippa Grafton (Ed) - All About History - Story of the Bible, 2019, page 107-8.

So, there is no tangible archeological evidence for the Exodus. There is no mention of the Hebrews' slavery in the Egyptian records, either. There is some circumstantial evidence that there were some Hapirus, nomads who lived on the fringes of Egyptian society. They may have been enslaved by the Egyptians and, when they were freed, entered the "Holy Land". Over time, the stories were dramatized and exaggerated. Centuries later, it was said that manna rained supernaturally from the sky,that water gushed from the ground, that the Red Sea parted, that a pillar of cloud and fire led the people through the desert and that millions of people experienced a supernatural vision of God. Some still believe this today.

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