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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