Nothing about the Exodus adds up archeologically.
- No contemporary Egyptian records, such as papyrus or monuments, mention the plagues, the death of a Pharaoh’s army in the sea, or a massive slave population. And there are records of the food rations for the men (who were not slaves) who built the pyramids and other monuments.
- The story’s timeline does not align well with known historical periods, and the estimated size of the escaping population (>2 million) is deemed unrealistic for that era.
- Surveys in the Sinai Peninsula have failed to find evidence of large, long-term, nomadic camps from the timeframe in question. Sustaining millions of people and their livestock in a desert for four decades would require massive infrastructure for water and sanitation that isn’t supported by the geography or archaeological record.
- How do more than 2 million people wander for 40 years lost in a desert that a reasonably fit person can hike across in two days? There were not even two million Egyptians living at the time.
- The text mentions cities and locations, such as Pithom and Ramesses, that do not correspond to the era in which the event is typically placed. They were build long AFTER the Exodus supposedly took place.
As the old lady said in the commercial, “Where’s the beef?”
I hate to sound like a “me too”…
However, the reason Egyptologists, as well as other archaeologists, continue to say that the exodus appears to be fictional is that there is NO archaeological evidence to support that it ever happened.
According to the story around 2 MILLION Jews spent forty years wandering around a patch of desert that should have taken an average person about a week to walk across.
Yet…
- There is ZERO evidence of that area being occupied by such a large group of people around that point in history.
- The Egyptians, who kept lots of excellent records, made NO NOTE WHATSOEVER of a slave revolt, or of a large groups of slaves leaving, at that point in history.
- From the actual numbers it seems unlikely that such a large number of Jewish slaves even lived in Egypt… let alone escaped Egypt.
- As I understand it, at the time the exodus was SUPPOSED to have taken place, the DESTINATION was also under Egyptian control… so the supposed route itself simply leads from one Egyptian territory to another at that point in history.
I believe the current theory is that, if it happened at all, “the exodus” was a MUCH SMALLER event than described, and has been “inflated”… probably as a way to provide the new Jewish cultural group with an impressive “origin story”.
