Friday, August 2, 2024

Excerpt from Brad C. Sparks, "Egyptian Texts relating to the Exodus Discussions of Exodus Parallels in the Egyptology Literature" (2013)

  

Long-standing arguments over the seeming lack of archaeological traces of the Israelites in the Sinai have been revisited in this conference without resolution (see various contributions to this volume of Dever, Halpern, Maeir, Propp, et al.; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 62).

 

Richard Friedman pointed out at the conference that the failure to find archaeological artifacts in Egypt or the Sinai would not prove the Exodus did not happen at all, because the Sinai has not been fully explored archaeologically even to date. Some Sinai archaeologists have reported archaeological evidence of the Exodus in the Sinai, Negev, and Canaan, in the EB-MB transition (IBA or EB IV) that they correlate with Egyptian text parallels to the Exodus (Cohen 1983; Anati 1986, 1997, 2001, this volume, Chap. 35; Alon 1999; cf. refs. in Geraty, this volume, Chap. 4).

 

Halpern (this volume) notes “land armies did traverse that terrain, without leaving detected archaeological traces.”

 

Seminomadic peoples and continual caravan crossings do not leave special, identifiable ruts in the hard gravel or the soft sand—one rut looks like another. Nor do they usually leave inscriptions with labels identifying the travelers or the herders and the dates of their migration. Ernst Knauf quips that pottery does not give “passport information” and “Almost never is it possible to identify the nationality of a cooking pot” (Knauf 2013: 66, 68). The “archaeological invisibility of tent-dwelling nomads” as well as transient caravans and migrants, and the lower classes in sedentary populations, make it difficult though not impossible to find some scattered traces (Martin and Finkelstein 2013: 39 fn.39; Fantalkin 2008: 21; Zorn 1994: 45a n.5; Finkelstein 1995: 23–30, 79–85, 97–101, 122, 155–156; Finkelstein and Perevolotsky 1990: 75). Again, finding some “traces” still is not necessarily the finding of the ethnic identity that left those traces.

 

Referring now to the most commonly cited Exodus number as the extreme case—“two million” people have the same wear and tear and leave the same amount of trace evidence in 40 years of wandering or crossing the Sinai as 20,000 Bedouins and caravaners wandering or crossing the Sinai over 4,000 years. They are indistinguishable. The math is simple:

 

2 million x 40 years = 80 million person-years

20,000 x 4,000 years = 80 million person-years

 

The present author is not asserting that there were two million or asserting any particular number here, simply using the extreme to make the most forceful rhetorical point. Order-of-magnitude numbers like these can easily be in error by a factor of 10[1] without affecting the overall conclusions. If the Exodus wandering involved far fewer than two million (as is often asserted too) then even less trace evidence would be left behind and hence less of a problem of nonidentification. Censuses of the population of Bedouin tribes in the Sinai in the early twentieth century counted about 40,000, and the population appears to be static (cf. Har-el 1983: 114). “Trace evidence” includes evidence of the dead. The granite shield of the southern Sinai would make burials in hard gravel very difficult; hence the Israelites would likely take the discarnated bones for secondary burial (as with Joseph’s bones: Exod 13:19; Josh 24:32) when reaching better soil. The greater question is where are the bodies or the burials of hundreds of thousands to millions of Bedouins in some 100–200 generations since the Bronze Age? No one suggests that the Bedouins never existed from ancient times to date just because millions of remains are not found. (Brad C. Sparks, "Egyptian Texts relating to the Exodus Discussions of Exodus Parallels in the Egyptology Literature," in Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience, ed. Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider, and William H. C. Propp [Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences; New York: Springer, 2013], 275-76)

 

 

   

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