Yet there are tantalising glimpses in the story of something that may be more than mere folk tale.
Not even the Bible account claims that the Israelites were employed as slaves to build the pyramids as they are in Hollywood. There is no archaeological evidence for the biblical story, and certainly no extra-biblical evidence, in Egyptian inscriptions. This date is about 900 years earlier than the period in which the Hebrew Bible is supposed to have been codified and written down, including its first five books that were supposedly written by Moses himself. A more moderate conclusion comes from the historian Tom Holland: “The likelihood that the biblical story records an actual event is fairly small.”Ĭyprian Broodbank, the Disney professor of archaeology at Cambridge University, wrote in his recent history of the Mediterranean that the exodus was “at best a refracted folk memory of earlier expulsions of Levantine people” following the reconquest of the Nile delta by the Egyptian king Ahmose around 1530BC. “Moses himself has about as much historic reality as King Arthur,” British archaeologist Philip Davies famously concluded.
Ridley Scott’s film turns God’s parting of the sea into an earthquake.īut the problem with historical evidence goes much deeper. One of the earliest attempts to demythologise the story occurred with the suggestion that the Red Sea was actually “the sea of reeds”, a swamp that might have been temporarily cleared by wind. The controversy so far has usually dealt with the miraculous elements of the story – the plagues of blood and frogs and locusts, God’s slaughter of the firstborn children of Egypt and, especially, the parting of the Red Sea.
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