display
The second book of Moses in the Old Testament, aptly called the Exodus, has the theme of Israel's entry into history: “But the time the children of Israel lived in Egypt is four hundred and thirty years.
When these were over, on that very day the whole army of the Lord left the land of Egypt. "
Generations of scientists have tried to find traces of this exodus.
Vain.
Instead, with their research, they continually produced new evidence for the opposite view: that the conquest of the land, in all of the early days of the people of Israel, must have happened completely differently from what the Bible tells us.
In the last twenty years in particular, there have been finds that show the archeology of the Holy Land in a new light.
With his book “History of Israel in Antiquity”, the Berlin Old Testament scholar Bernd U. Schipper presented a compact summary of the state of research in 2018.
In it the theologian and Egyptologist clears up many beloved ideas that creationists still hold as the ultimate wisdom.
The Old Testament, according to Schipper's basic assumption, is not a history book, but a bundle of theological texts "which, with reference to the past, want to explain the present and provide orientation for the future".
Pharaoh Merenptah (ruled around 1213-1204) slays his enemies
Source: picture alliance / © Bruce Coleman / Photoshot
display
This also applies to the story of Israel's exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan.
The earliest mention of a group of this name comes from the year 1208 BC.
At that time, the Egyptian pharaoh Merenptah (r. 1213-1204), the son of Ramses II, celebrated his victories over a coalition of Syrian-Palestinian princes with a triumph song that has been preserved on steles in Karnak and West Thebes.
"Israel lies bare, it has no more seeds," it says, whereby the hieroglyphic form clearly designates a group of people and not a region.
That would mean that at the end of the Bronze Age people settled in Palestine who lived off agriculture.
From the geographical breakdown of the list, Schipper concludes that their settlement area could have been in the vicinity of an Egyptian-controlled city in the southern vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, probably Beth Schean.
The ancient ruins of Beth Schean
Source: Wikipedia / Grauesel / CC BY-SA 3.0
That fits with the archaeological findings.
Around 1200 BC
In BC, there was increased settlement activity in the mountainous region of Samaria, while areas in the plains were being abandoned, so "no longer have any seeds", as it says on Merenptah's stele.
This retreat into the mountains fits in with the decline of the Bronze Age urban culture in the Levant in the 12th century BC.
Chr.
display
For a long time, the so-called Sea Peoples, whose attempts to land in the Nile Delta are testified by Egyptian sources, were considered to be the originators.
But their work has also been fundamentally reinterpreted in recent years.
No longer armed invaders from the north are said to have roamed the Mediterranean Sea, murdering and plundering and destroying entire empires, but they were at best an actor in a complicated doom scenario.
Supply crises, uprisings, and natural disasters caused a veritable systemic collapse in which marginalized groups - starving, uprooted, semi-nomads - saw the opportunity to develop new settlement areas.
In Egyptian sources, these people also include the Hapiru, a restless people on the border between fruitland and desert, whom historians identify with the Hebrews.
From this mixture of small farmers of the plains, semi-nomads and other groups a culture formed in the mountains in the early Iron Age, whose members understood themselves as "Israel" and whose center was after Schipper around the city of Shechem, where according to the Old Testament Moses his people swore by faith in Yahweh.
For the theologian there is no question that Israel “emerged from 'Canaan' and did not come into the country from outside”.
The Mediterranean world at the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC
Chr.
Source: Infographic Die Welt
display
Unlike some “minimalists” who only grant the Old Testament narratives a minimum of credibility, Schipper presents an interpretation that leaves at least a historical core to Israel's central belief that Yahweh led out of Egyptian slavery.
It is true that he rejects the long-held assumption that the Israelites under Ramses II.
But a group of prisoners of war from the Shechem area could very well have reached the Nile land in the course of the campaign of Ramses' successor Merenptah.
It would fit in with the fact that “Moses” is documented as a typical form of the name of the Ramesside period, while it later disappears.
"Moses" must have found its way into the Semitic language of Israel by the time it ended around 1070.
It is concluded that a man of this name could actually have led a group of prisoners of war out of Egypt when they regained their freedom under circumstances that can no longer be reconstructed and merged with the people who settled in the mountains of Shechem.
Your story of a wonderful escape from Egypt and the preservation by the God Yahweh, writes Schipper, then became an identity-building for all of Israel.
Bernd U. Schipper: "History of Israel in antiquity". (CH Beck, Munich. 128 p., 9.95 euros)
You can also find “World History” on Facebook.
We look forward to a like.
This article was first published in 2018.