By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
ALEXANDRIA, La. (LBM) – Many Bible critics attack the historicity of the exodus by arguing that the royal records of ancient Egypt do not offer an official account about the 10 plagues, the escape of millions of slaves and the crushing loss of pharaoh’s elite chariot corps.
However, these naysayers ignore the obvious — that ancient rulers rarely documented the failures of their leadership.
Moreover, these same detractors also brush aside the glaring evidence of other sources that confirm many of the details of God’s deliverance of Israel from captivity in Egypt. Indeed, some of the most dramatic examples prove the deniers wrong about their claims that Israel never dwelt in Egypt and did not serve as slaves to build the Egyptian empire.
First, the Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446, which is described by historians as “one of the most important surviving administrative documents from Egypt in the Middle Kingdom” (the timeframe just prior to the exodus) lists the names of 95 slaves, including 45 “Asiatics” (how the Hebrew people were described by Egyptians at that time). What researchers concluded from these entries about a transaction (the sale or transfer of slaves) is that a high proportion of Semitic foreigners lived in Egypt during the 13th Dynasty (correlating to a timeframe within Israel’s 430 years of captivity).
Second, Egyptian records, including two papyri in the British Museum and a leather scroll in the Louvre offer details about brickmaking, the use of straw as a binder, mandatory brick quotas and the mention of “no men to make bricks and no straw in the district.” On top of that, a painting in an Egyptian tomb dating to 1470-1445 B.C., depicts Nubian and Asiatic slaves (again, what ancient Egyptians called Semitic people from the Promised Land) making bricks for the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, Egypt.
If that is not enough evidence, there are ancient Egyptian stone carvings/reliefs too:
— The Soleb Inscription, which honors victories by Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III (one of the pharaohs who ruled Egypt during the captivity of Israel), depicts a captured enemy from “the land of the [nomads] of Yahweh” (one of the oldest references to the God of Israel outside of the Bible) and the carved likeness of the prisoner has Semitic features.
— The Berlin Pedestal, an inscription housed in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, Germany, refers to “Ishrael” as a nation in Canaan, and the dating of the inscription confirms the time that the Bible says Israelites were there.
— Meanwhile, a 10-foot-tall victory monument known as the Merneptah Stele, named for a pharaoh who ruled Egypt for about 10 years, mentions the name “Israel.” Indeed, it is the first official record of the existence of Israel as a people group.
Then there are the mass graves of infants near the ancient city of Kahun, correlating to the Bible’s description of pharaoh’s decree to kill all male Hebrew babies. There also is evidence of the sudden abandonment of Kahun (with household items, tools and other possessions left behind), consistent with the hasty departure for the exodus described in the Bible.
Moreover, the ancient Egyptian manuscript known as the Ipuwer Papyrus (preserved in a Dutch museum) contains a poem that describes calamity and chaos, including statements that there is a “plague is throughout the land,” “the river is blood,” and widespread plunder, “the servant takes what he finds.”
Jesus faced disbelief throughout His ministry on Earth. Indeed, after healing a man who had been beridden for 38 years, Jewish leaders ignored the fact that this was a sign that identified the Messiah and instead sought to persecute Jesus for performing the miracle on the Sabbath. Jesus admonished them for their rejection of Him, saying in part,”if you believed Moses. you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?” (John 5:46-47).
Importantly, His words then apply as well today.
Those who naysay the historicity of the exodus reject the proof about the life of Moses because it also is evidence of the existence of Christ.
