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I'm currently standing on top of a mountain where it is said that the prophet Moses once looked out from and gazed upon the promised land, a land that he himself was not allowed to enter. This is Mount Nebo in northern Jordan, the ancient land of the Moabites.
Looking out, I can see the Dead Sea in front of me and beyond there is the West Bank, cities like Jericho. And on a good day in the distance, you can also see Jerusalem in present-day Israel.
Now Moses is a really interesting figure, one of those great figures of the Old Testament and on Mount Nebo there are a couple of stories associated with him. One, that this was a place where he got his staff, he smashed it against the rock and water seeps from it. But also in a couple of traditions this is where Moses died aged 120 in the kingdom of Moab.
His story is one that deserves to be told and that is why he is the subject of our ancient episode today. It's all about the Exodus. To explain all, our guest today is Dr Dylan Johnson from the University of Cardiff, an expert on the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, including the book of Exodus. I really do hope you enjoy.
Dylan, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. What a topic, the Exodus, Moses and the Exodus. Dylan, this is one of those massive stories, isn't it, that has been told and retold. I mean, I remember first hearing about this story when I was very, very young. First off, no such thing as a silly question. What is the story of the Exodus and who is this central figure of Moses?
Right. So started off with some pretty big questions. Let's start with the Exodus. So first and foremost, the Exodus is technically two things. It's a narrative, but it's also a book of the Bible. So to preface, I guess, the second one first, the Exodus is the book of the Bible that follows Genesis. So Genesis is a story of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all of those important characters about the family that basically follows
is what Israel ultimately emerges from. So the story of the Exodus is really the story of a nation then. So if Genesis is the story of a family, Exodus is the story of the birth of this nation called the children of Israel. And it concerns a lot of different things. It's not a singular narrative, nor did it come into existence as a singular narrative. But if we can kind of encompass one single theme, it's the story of this nation,
burgeoning relationship between the children of Israel and this God whose name is revealed to them and who they come to know, and the unique legal relationship that they form what we know as the covenant. Now, the individual pieces are also quite interesting. So if that's the overarching narrative, then the individual pieces are, of course, open with this people who are in fact the
well off in Egypt. So these are non-Egyptians. These are essentially Canaanites, soon to become Israelites, who are dwelling in the land of Egypt. They stay there for about 400 years and over this time become very numerous, but eventually they become more or less enslaved. What's called bondage if you read the King James Version of the Bible. And
And so these enslaved peoples are tasked with building various important places. In fact, we have a couple names of these places. One of it is called Pyrramses, and the other is called Pithom, which is probably something like P. Autumn or the House of Autumn. So these are Egyptian cities that they're tasked with building.
until this figure emerges by the name of Moses. Famous birth story: the Pharaoh orders the death of all firstborns, firstborn Hebrews because they're too numerous,
They pose a threat to the Egyptians, so Moses' mother puts him in a basket. He's raised as an Egyptian in the Egyptian royal court, only to ultimately rediscover his Hebrew identity. He encounters God. He leads his people to freedom. He encounters God again on this famous mountain that's got a couple names in the Bible, either Horeb or Sinai.
receives this long list of laws, including the only text ever written by God himself, the Ten Commandments, inscribed by the finger of God himself on two stone tablets. Quite a few more details occur. Golden calf, wandering the desert, and ultimately his death on the mountain known as Mount Nebo, overlooking Israel. So...
That's a lot, I know. We'll leave it there and kind of fill in the details. But it's an epic. It's an epic tale of the emergence of this nation. It is absolutely epic, and thank you so much for being able to summarize it so quickly there, Dylan, because that is a task in itself. But as I say, it is one of the most famous of the biblical stories, the 10 plagues of Egypt, the
parting of the Red Sea, the commandments, as you say, and then, you know, finally ending on Mount Nebo. And Moses, I mean, according to the tradition, he's some 120 years old at that time when he looks upon the promised land and then he dies atop that mountain, if I'm correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. He dies there. We don't know where he's buried. He's
It's actually explicitly said they don't know where he's buried, but it's kind of a bittersweet ending to this epic story of this individual because he's taken this people from slavery, and just as they're about to get the great reward that is the promised land, he's unable to enter it.
We can talk about that in more detail. But it is a very Hollywood-esque ending, I think, in some respects, and in some respects not. But interesting all the same. We're going to be exploring various parts of this story, and I think we'll be largely focusing in on places like Egypt and the relationship with Egypt and so on and so forth. But another big question to kind of set the scene a little more, with this whole story, we
We've got big names and such as the pharaohs of Egypt and these great cities. When is this story supposed to have taken place? So the short answer is we have no idea. The longer answer is there's a few proposals.
So the first proposal we can work out from the internal chronology of the Bible itself. So the Bible gives us dates and lengths of kings' reigns. So based on the numbers that both rabbinic sages but as well as modern biblical scholars have devised, it would place it sometime in the 15th century BCE.
This is largely based on a quick little note in the Book of Kings, chapter 6, 1 Kings 6, that says the Exodus took place 480 years before the construction of Solomon's temple. So if we work from, again, the internal biblical chronology, Solomon's temple was built sometime in the early 10th century. We're in the 15th century.
Major problems with that date, based on archaeology and other historical evidence. So the other major proposal places the Exodus sometime in the early 13th century. And I can get to why it has to be the early 13th century. It can't be the late 13th century.
And then the third proposal is it never occurred. There is no date to give because it's completely a folk legend. It's based on maybe snippets and memories of events and experiences, but it's impossible to date the Exodus because it's a narrative. It's a foundation myth.
It'd be like dating the Aeneid. It's pretty difficult to do. You mentioned the word archaeology. So actually, is there any archaeological evidence of people finding traces of these 40 years wandering the desert and so on? Yes and no. So the first thing we have to simply accept, if we're going to have a critical historical understanding of what this narrative really is, is a few caveats about the biblical story as we know it.
And if we can't accept these caveats, then really we can't really bring the archaeology in. So the first caveat is that there's no Hebrew writing before 800 BCE, or let's say the midnight century. So whatever we have in terms of this narrative has to derive from cultural memory.
The other major caveat is whenever the Exodus is imagined to happen, we have a fixed date of 1207 BCE that it has to precede. It cannot happen later than that date because we have a massive Egyptian stela attributed to a pharaoh named Merneptah. And he mentions a people and it's very clearly labeled as a people here.
who he conquered and he encountered them somewhere in the Judean highlands or the central highlands of Israel in and around just north of Jerusalem, basically. In the year 1207 BCE, he describes this people as Israel, and we're pretty confident on the reading of that. And he boasts Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more. So at that date, Israel is in the land of Canaan. So we have to have the Exodus at some point before that, which puts us in the 13th century or earlier.
But then we have some other considerations. The first one being that the Exodus and some wilderness tradition is known to 8th century Israelite prophets. And we're pretty confident on the dating of these prophetic texts. So it's an important story already by the 8th century. Then we have the other problem that the Exodus story as we have it in the biblical text is clearly...
an accretion of tradition. It's not just all written in the 8th century. What the 8th century prophets knew of the Exodus story probably didn't look a lot like the Exodus story we have now. There's very clear evidence of internal development of that narrative, with a lot of it actually happening quite late, maybe even during the exile, so in the 6th, 5th centuries BCE. So it's not a singular problem, either in terms of history or in terms of literary analysis.
So only with all that can we even begin to think about the archaeology. And what the archaeology tells us is not a whole lot. The archaeology can tell us about interactions between Egyptians and peoples from this region that would become called Israel.
And we can kind of just move down a chronological list of those encounters. So we can start with the earliest evidence, which is probably 16th, 15th century with this people called the Hyksos. This is one group that people point to as potentially the
inspirations for the Exodus story. In the Hyksos, they are a group of Canaanites, and the Canaanite is an inhabitant of this region that would become called Israel and Judah. And the Hyksos, or the Hekau Hasut, as they're called in Egyptian, which just means rulers of foreign lands, they enter in the second intermediate period, and they come to dominate Egypt, establishing its 15th dynasty, basically between the 17th and 16th centuries.
Long story short, they're expulsed. They're forced out. And so maybe this memory, and early scholars propose this is a potential memory of the Exodus, that these Canaanite peoples being forced out of Egypt en masse, it seems. Maybe that's the source. But again, that needs to get from the 1550 BCE to about 850 BCE, 700 years before
between those two events. Very difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy what that memory could be. I mean, it is all very interesting, Dylan. And as you say, with the whole story of the Exodus, and it has all these various different parts. And for instance, as you highlighted at the start, you have the Canaanites and the Egyptians, they are living side by side harmoniously. And it almost seems like, yes, although there's no archaeological evidence for that story, and this massive amount of people going through the desert and so on and so forth,
that maybe there is that historical core. And it's interesting to examine that historical core. For instance, we know that there were these great interactions between the Canaanites and the Egyptians in the second millennium BC. Exactly. And the Hyksos was just the first interaction. This was the first,
Maybe not the first, but the most important one as far as the Egyptians were concerned. But there's also later interactions. And one of the major historical periods that scholars then point to, because the chronological distance is a bit too much for the Hyksos, is the experience during the Amarna Age.
So I'll probably need to preface a little bit about what I mean when I say Amarna Age. This is the period in basically between the 14th century BCE when Egypt comes to dominate the land of Canaan. In fact, Canaan becomes a province of Egypt under the conquest of a pharaoh named Tipmosis III.
And it's one of his successors, a pharaoh by the name of Amenhotep IV, as he's more famously known, Akhenaten. He establishes kind of an international system of diplomatic exchange, which is very helpful to us because we have a lot of texts coming out of the land of Canaan. And what's coming out of the land of Canaan is a very unique relationship between the inhabitants of this region. Again, probably the ancestors and the predecessors of Israel and their Egyptian overlords. And so the experience, again, could give us some insight
epigraphic archaeological evidence of the memory, again, just the memory, not the narrative, of Egyptian domination, servitude under the Egyptians. We have many, many letters written in cuneiform Akkadian between the pharaoh and his vassal rulers in and around cities that would become the home of Israelites, places like Jerusalem, places like Gezer.
And they talk about sending slaves to the Egyptian pharaoh. So maybe this is a cultural memory. And these ideas are very much promoted by a scholar named Ron Hendel, that it's the experience of servitude or vassalage under the Egyptians during not the Middle Bronze Age or the Hyksos, but later in time in the 14th and into the 13th century under the Egyptian hegemony of the region in the Late Bronze Age.
The benefit with that time period is it gets us a little bit closer to that 850-year date when biblical writing at least can start, or at least we think it starts.
It gets us, you know, within five, 400 years, not 700 years, but it still needs a considerable length of time for these ideas and memories to be transmitted, probably orally because we don't have the texts. So if they are writing, they're writing on perishable material that we don't have access to. And in fact, the language isn't the same. The writing system's different. They're writing not in anything like Canaanite. They're writing in a foreign language in these Amarna letters,
So the continuity is always a problem for us about trying to connect
the potential historical time period of the Exodus and the actual writing of those stories. There's always this dark age, this chasm separating us. One thing I'd also love to ask quickly, because I remember doing an interview about this recently and knowing that at that time, Dylan, you have a great array of very powerful empires in the Eastern Mediterranean who at times, they have control over the land of Canaan. Of course, you've got the Egyptians, but you've also got the Hittites further north.
Is it still quite interesting? And I know, as you've highlighted there, that there is that historical context and that evidence for the interactions between Egypt and Canaan. But presumably there were also interactions between Canaanites and Hittites further north as well. Do we have any idea as to why it is the Egyptian pharaoh and the Egyptians? Is it interesting to kind of look at that as to why that power exists?
is focused on in this story and the pharaoh is the big bad guy rather than, let's say, the Hittite king or someone else. Exactly. It could be a reflection of genuine historical memory because the Hittites were not the overlords of the southern Levant where we would expect to find early Israel or Canaanites, whatever they called themselves at that time. It is the Egyptians. That is the direct experience. Egyptians had governors ruling these areas
So the encounters with a foreign, not quite imperial, but at least a foreign power would have been Egyptian. They would have been aware of the Hittites. And if you move much further north along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to places like Ugarit, to sites like Imar, which is on the Euphrates, these are Canaanite sites, and they're under the political sway of the Hittites. So their experience is very different. They have Hittite overlords.
But for the Southern Levant, this really is the proximate experience of empire, is Egypt.
So that actually fits quite well. And not only that, we also know that it's in this time period that places like Pyramaces, which just means the House of Ramesses, is actually constructed. It's built in the 13th century. So that gives us a little bit of context that maybe the biblical authors did know when that city was built. The Egyptians would have known quite well when the city was built. They have very detailed chronological records.
Pithom, the other city mentioned that the Israelites construct in Exodus 1. We're not really sure where it is, so it's not as helpful in that regard. I think that whether or not the story originates or in some ways remembers the late Bronze Age experience, there's enough evidence for me to think that there is some kind of a cultural memory being transmitted over time
but the details are very much lost because all it takes is just a memory of Egyptian domination. And then the narrative can take off from there. Slavery had always been a common feature. The departure of slaves from Egypt, again, maybe the numbers are not exactly the same, but that memory, I think, is our anchor here in terms of history and then archaeology. And
And then the narrative is a whole other question. Talk to me about the name Moses, because right away I think of, I know that there's one pharaoh called Ahmos. So it actually sounds like quite an Egyptian name. What do we know about that? Well, it's not just quite Egyptian. It's Egyptian. It's an Egyptian name. It means beloved. That pharaoh I mentioned who conquered the land of Canaan in the late Bronze Age, Tutmosis means beloved of Tut.
Thoth, the famous Ramesses. It's a bit hidden there because of the way we pronounce this, but Ra, Moses, beloved of Ra, the sun god. And here's what's really interesting, is that everything points to this name being a great way to give the narrative of the Exodus an Egyptian flavor.
The lead figure has an Egyptian name, which makes sense. He's raised by Pharaoh's daughter. He's brought up in the royal household. And so everything would suggest that, and not only Moses, by the way, but also other figures like Hophni and Phinehas. Those are Egyptian names as well. But let's stick with Moses here. So everything about that name tells us that this would be a great addition, feature, characteristic to give this narrative more authenticity.
And yet the biblical authors forget that it's an Egyptian name. They give a Hebrew etymology for the name. Masha, or Moshe as he's known in Hebrew, the biblical text, the Exodus story explains, is derived from the word mashah, to draw up, to draw up water.
which we know is actually not correct. It's a folk etymology, which we get quite a few of in the biblical text, and this one just happens to be mistaken. So they've actually forgotten this detail that gave the story more credibility, more credence to the Egyptian-ness and the Egyptian knowledge of the narrative.
which only reinforces that, well, maybe it is a genuine feature that this figure was named Moses and this figure did exist because he bears an Egyptian name, and yet the biblical authors forget that it's Egyptian. So very, very interesting. And a lot of scholars point to that fact, that the biblical authors themselves misinterpreted
Maybe they remember the name, but they don't know Egyptian anymore. So they don't remember that it has this origin. And in regards to the story of Moses himself before he leads his people out of slavery, it's also quite an interesting one, Dylan, because he said, raised in the court of the Pharaoh, Egyptian name, but then has to go away from Egypt and marries a foreign woman and lives there for decades, living quite a simple life before, of course, the burning bush experience.
But looking at the details of the story of the Exodus, let's say you've seen with the flood myth that there is flood myth stories in other cultures as well. Are there parts of Moses's story that you can also see reflected in other Near Eastern Mesopotamian cultures? Is it a story that is repeated or is it quite a unique one?
It's not unique. There is a very, very similar birth narrative to a Mesopotamian king known as Sargon of Agade, or Sargon of Akkad. It's known as Sargon's birth legend. Now, when we first found the text, it dates about to the reign of Ashurbanipal. It comes from his library, the copy. So Neo-Assyrian period, we're talking about 8th, 7th century BCE here. It purports to describe the birth of this king who lived in the 25th century BCE, so an incredibly ancient king.
So originally we assume this is the birth story of this figure named Sargon of Akkad. Maybe it's actually just a birth story of Sargon II, who was an Assyrian king who lived about that time anyway. Neither here nor there. The point is that it tells the story of this individual named Sargon, whose mother places her baby in a reed basket covered with bitumen, places it in a river. His mother, by the way, is an entomb priestess, so she's a religious elite of sorts, much like Moses.
And she places the baby in the basket, he flows downriver, and then it gets a little bit fragmentary, but you can tell ultimately this is part of his ultimate trajectory to becoming king, king of Akkad. So the parallels are quite obvious here. The question is, would a biblical author have known this birth narrative, which again, we have one copy from a library in Nineveh. You know, it's possible because again, dealing with the ancient world, lots of things are possible.
And the similarities are striking. So perhaps both are just reflecting a more common folkloric motif, the birth of the hero. And I think there are other parallels beyond this specific one, but this one's really close to home as far as the ancient Near East is concerned. So there's that. In terms of other features, yes. This is the tricky thing with Moses, is Moses is used in the biblical narrative to represent quite a few different things. He's a prophet, he's a judge, he's a war leader, he's a
He's a king without being called a king. So if we're looking for parallels, there's no shortage of them, none at all. There's famous examples that have been pulled through history. In fact, Sigmund Freud wrote a book on Moses the Monotheist, and he was convinced that Moses was more or less emulated on Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh of the 14th century. Now, Freud's not an Egyptologist, biblical scholar, Near Eastern historian. He was just fascinated with this topic.
So the catch is not so much finding the parallels for Moses as trying to actually resist the temptation because there's so many. But the birth narrative is one really clear narrative connection, I think, with the Near Eastern world. Hey, folks, since you're a fan of history, you clearly want to understand how we've ended up with the world that we have. Well, I'd like to tell you about my show. It's called Dan Snow's History Hit. And on that show, you get a daily dose of history and the stories that really explain just about everything that's ever happened.
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Do you see parallels continuing with the whole larger story of the Exodus, with this as it becomes like the origin story of the Israelites and reaching the Promised Land? Do you see more similarities with other texts in the Near East with that wider story? Actually, no. Here's the interesting feature.
If we think about what the Exodus represents, and if we think about maybe what it represented for those prophets who lived in the 8th century in the northern kingdom of Israel, it's a foundation myth. It's an origin story. So then those would be the logical comparisons that we would look to. Origin stories, how different peoples explain where they, their culture, their nation come from.
And pretty much every other origin myth, whether that's the Babylonian Enuma Elish or even the Bible's other origin story, the Patriarchs, because remember there's not one origin story but several, it's fairly unattested to find a people who explain their origins as emerging out of slavery and, more importantly, a people who explain their origins as not based in the land where they currently occupy.
Most Near Eastern myths are going to talk about the foundation of Babylon, the foundation of Ashur, the foundation of Memphis. It doesn't matter where. And the embeddedness of these people in the place that they live. Not so with the Exodus story. The Exodus story always explains the origins of Israel as outside of Israel, of Judah, the
The Promised Land, which I think is wholly unique. I think you're right. And it's a very humble beginning, isn't it? As you say, and it's very different to other great origin stories, which are normally linked to certain deities that they believed in, and a certain figure being blessed by the gods and going to found a great city and so on and so forth.
Is there archaeological evidence that the Israelites come from abroad and settle there or there are various theories about that? I think there's another theory that they come down from the mountains almost. What are these theories actually about where the Israelites come from? And then it's interesting to see then how they embrace that idea of actually in their beliefs that they come from elsewhere.
So this is a huge topic, actually, that I cover in my courses that I teach to my students, is the difference between origins and origin stories, and how we grapple with these sometimes contradictory views on the matter. So the Exodus tells us the Israelites come from outside. And if you keep reading, by the way, if you read into, well, you can skip Leviticus because it's a whole bunch of priestly laws. But if you get into Numbers and then Deuteronomy and then Joshua and Judges,
It's not just the story of these people leaving Egypt. It's also the story about them coming into the Promised Land. And their archaeology really starts to pick away at the narrative because the sites that are mentioned in this story of conquest, and that's basically what the book of Joshua is, the story of Moses dies, is spiritual and
and social successor, this figure named Joshua. He is who leads the Israelites into the Promised Land, crossing the Jordan. And in certain senses, he's a second Moses. Moses, in fact, imbues his spirit onto Joshua, it's said in the Book of Numbers. And Joshua crossing the Jordan is very much a second crossing of the Red Sea, where the Israelites crossed this body of water into a new existence.
But once he gets there, they start to name places. Jericho, Ai, others which are escaping my memory. But the point is that archaeologists back in the 50s, 60s went and excavated these sites and they realized many of them would have been ruins in the times that these events were purported to happen. Then the Merneptah Stele emerges, which places Israel extremely early in the land and most importantly in this area known as the Central Highlands.
Subsequent archaeological survey work has been done looking at demographic patterns in the region, which to make a long story very short, what we see in the Late Bronze Age are Canaanite city-states. These are the city-states ruled by kings. We know quite a bit about them because of the Amarna correspondences. That system collapses, and I know you've had guests on that talk about this widespread Late Bronze Age collapse.
There's continuities as well, but for the most part, this city-state system collapses, and what happens is a whole bunch of smaller, more rural settlements pop up in the central highlands.
This is important because this is where Maneptostela places Israel. This is roughly the geographical region. And then slowly these smaller rural settlements start to conglomerate into larger settlements and then cities. And then suddenly in the mid-8th century, we have a full-blown kingdom of Israel.
which we have a mention in the end of the 13th century, and then a full-blown kingdom in the mid-9th century, and we're left, again, trying to fill in the pieces of how that actually happened. What we know didn't happen was widespread conquest. We don't have evidence for it.
And the archaeology, what it's revealing is actually more of a gradual cultural differentiation that's occurring. So those Canaanites who used to live in cities and have kings and correspond with the Egyptians, they don't go anywhere, despite the biblical narratives that talk about basically a genocide, an emptying of the land. This is, in fact, a process of historical forgetting that these are their ancestors that they're saying that they wiped out.
They don't go anywhere. They just become Israelites. And we know this because they have the same material culture, the linguistic features are the same, and there's quite a few religious features.
That, of course, the biblical text always purports to be influenced by all those horrible nations around you, but that's Israelite religion in the early years, because Israelite religion emerges out of Canaanite traditions as well. So the long story made short is that that's kind of the image we see, which obviously is very contradictory to not the Exodus story, but at least the conquest narrative.
which then just raises even further questions of, well, if they are of the land, if that is where they're from, why is their origin story saying that they come from outside? Well, would you like to address that next, Dylan? I don't know if I have the answer, to be honest with you. It's a question that really does beg an answer, but unfortunately, it falls, again, in that dark age between the end of the 13th and midnight century, where all those answers are to be held sometime later,
in that period when Canaanites become Israelites. And archaeology can help us a lot. We can see changes in some kind of settlement patterns, subsistence patterns, but the origins of Israel are left in this murky time period where we hear legends of people like Saul, like David, like Solomon,
who we know were probably, not probably, at least David for sure was an historical figure, but the details again are still left murky. And the reasons why we don't have adequate answers for. We don't know why those became the foundation myths. We just know that they were. I'd like to ask, I mean, we won't go too deep into that, as you say, because it's very difficult to entangle that whole story. But it is interesting from everything that you've highlighted there, Dylan, how the story of the Exodus is,
that there is, you can see almost like a historical core there almost in how it's set in Egypt and how that you know that there's interactions between the Canaanites and the Egyptians at that time, Moses being an Egyptian name and so on, these cities being constructed and so on.
but also that quite unique story of these people rising out of slavery and then coming from abroad and settling in this different land. I remember doing an episode more than a year ago with your colleague and good friend and brilliant speaker Lloyd Llewellyn Jones all about the Bible and the Babylonian exile.
which happens much later after the Babylonians sack Jerusalem. I believe it's in the late 7th century BC and how many Jews are then sent into exile or are living in Babylon. Do you think there could be a motive there for people who are writing at that time in the creation of the Exodus story because they can see parallels, the time when they are not in the land that, well, at least some of them may have wanted to be in, and this is the idea of kind of returning to that land almost? Yeah.
Absolutely. So when I kind of set up before we launched into the discussion of archaeology, I mentioned very briefly that the Exodus is a very layered, textured narrative, with a lot of it being written probably in the 5th, even 4th centuries, because of that exact reason. We know it was a story. We know it was a story from very early on, from the earliest of biblical writings in the 8th century.
that doesn't mean it stopped being added to. So these individuals who experienced Babylonian exile, this story spoke to them. It spoke to them very clearly. And we only have to look at what we consider the latest additions to the book of Exodus, what we call priestly writing. And priestly writing itself is layered. Long story short, priestly writing just means it's biblical narratives that we think were written by people with ties to the priesthood.
And most people would date those, again, late, talking 5th, 4th centuries BCE. And these scribes had a very, very deep interest in the Exodus and a major hand in not only expanding the narrative. There's huge sections of Exodus that are clearly the work of Priscius scribes. The entire section about the construction of the movable tent shrine, the tabernacle, that's got priestly interest written all over it.
Moses becomes more of a priest. Aaron is a priest. Miriam is tied to the priesthood. So this experience of these priests, again, these individuals who would have been exiled because they're educated, so they would have been living in Babylon, and this experience of then being more or less in bondage, which, by the way, is not true. The Judahites were not slaves in Babylon. They were, in fact, landholding individuals. But nonetheless, they weren't free to leave.
And then that experience of return. That return is going to be the major connection between Babylonian exile and the Exodus.
being away from the land and then coming back to the land. And so, again, it's not the origin of it. The origin is much earlier than this, but it certainly explains the picture that we have now. The story that we have now is intimately tied to the experience of exile. That's another big challenge for us trying to disentangle is there's very early memories and then there's very late additions.
This is such a challenging area of research. And this is something I need to get my head around too, Dylan. So the story of the Exodus that we have now, it's not written by one person. As you say, it's almost like an onion. It's many layers of stories that have been added together over time. And it's trying to sometimes disentangle parts of those stories to see if there is a historical core of certain parts of it and trying to understand what the influence is for other parts of this narrative. It's almost like the Greek myth. There's not one version of
of every Greek myth. There are versions of the myths that are added to over time and we just have almost the latest edition of it. Yeah, except it's even harder than the Greek myths because they actually have different versions so they can compare and contrast. We just have the one version. So at some point in antiquity, all of these different versions
of the Exodus story, and there probably were quite a few different versions. The version that the prophet Hosea and Amos, who lived in the 8th century in the northern kingdom of Israel, knew is probably very, very different from the version that, let's say, the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, our earliest physical manuscript copy, which looks pretty much like the version we have now. They would have been very different narratives. But the problem for us as biblical scholars is we only have the end product.
So we don't know the constituent pieces like you have with Greek mythology. It would help us greatly if we could see some of these components, some of how these constituent elements went together into the finished product, but we don't. So we have to rely on different methodological techniques and honestly just intuition to try and tease out what's early, what's late. Thankfully, we do have references in Hosea and Amos to anchor us to say, okay, at least
Those people knew an Exodus story, so we're not just completely without any kind of chronological anchors here. But it is kind of like an onion in the sense that there are clearly much later pieces added.
And thankfully, the Priestly editions, remember Priestly just means late, basically, those do stand out. They have a very set vocabulary and certain ideas that are just dead giveaways that, okay, these are those Priestly writers. But beyond that, we're kind of in the midst, just trying to pick out what could be a memory of this major foundation experience that
And that's why archaeology can only help us so much because we have this full rich narrative and archaeology can give us dates and dates.
cultural contact, but the details are completely left up to the story. Are there any key episodes from the story that we have of the Exodus now, Dylan, that really stand out that you can say, right, that was a priestly addition almost? Because when I think of the Exodus, you've got that kind of historical basis in Egypt of Canaanites being in Egypt. But then, of course, you also get epistemology.
episodes like the parting of the Red Sea, which is arguably one of the most extraordinary parts of the story. Are there episodes that you can identify and say, yes, that was added by these people? Yeah. So the one that I have already mentioned is the construction of the movable tent shrine. It's basically the temple.
It's essentially the temple. And what function did these people actually needed for a tent shrine and the elaborate descriptions that are fed into it? It's clearly they're imagining the temple and they're retrojecting it into a nomadic pre-state context. That's very obviously priestly. There's sections of the Passover story in Exodus 12, the really
specific details about how you're supposed to prepare the Passover, and not leaving any over until the next night. A lot of specific details that would have been of interest to priests who are in charge of these kind of ritual activities.
That's got priestly handprints all over it. And then the desert stories are extremely priestly. So everything in Numbers, and Numbers is a whole other entity unto itself in terms of how we try to treat it. The story of the 40 years wandering the desert, the death of the Exodus generation, and the second generation of Israelites, the ones who will actually enter the land.
That's all priestly with a couple of very ancient stories, but for the most part, it's describing kind of priestly interests, cultic purity, cultic laws. So it's no small part of the story that's priestly. It's major components.
But again, that's not saying that the stories are just created out of these late scribal ideas because they're elaborating on a received tradition. So we're always kind of doing this balancing act of the stories are old. We know the stories are old. How old? We're not sure.
But there's a lot of interest later in time. And then that later interest is what gives us the fully fleshed out narrative that we all know and we've seen in film and things like that. You mentioned the tabernacle there, and you'll be back on the show very, very soon to expand on that a bit more, which is very interesting. I mean, I mentioned, you know, the party, the Red Sea, that seems to be such a big part of the narrative and said one of the most extraordinary parts of it. Do we know much about influences for that?
Yes, so there are connections. The most important connection would actually be in Exodus 15, what's known as the Song of the Sea. And so the Song of the Sea describes this. It's basically a contest. It's the part of the story where Moses has caused the Red Sea to part. The Israelites have passed through. The Egyptians are hot on their heels, and then the sea closes on behind them. So the narrative itself is fairly unique. There's not really a good parallel for this kind of miracle that happens.
And you'll actually see there's been conferences and books trying to explain through seismology and understanding of the geography and geology of the Red Sea how this could have actually potentially happened. I think that kind of misses the point. It's a miracle. So if you can't explain it naturally, it completely takes away from the story. The story is supposed to say this is genuinely an act of God.
But then we get into the language. There's times when it's not just the Israelites versus the Egyptians, it's really God versus Pharaoh. And in kind of a complex, ironic way, because ultimately Pharaoh is no match for God, because he's just a man, despite what the Egyptians believed.
But there's undertones, and scholars have recognized this for a long time, of Canaanite myth in the description here, especially with the notion of the sea. Because we have these stories from places like Enchidu Garit, which is up in Syria, known as the Baal Cycle.
Where there are these conflicts, divine conflicts, between the storm god, or the god that would be the head of the pantheon, versus this cosmic sea. And we see reflections of it all throughout the biblical text as well. Very clear in the book of Job, very clear elsewhere. But here in Exodus, it's a bit more complicated because we have this Egyptian connection, who's the actual enemy here.
So there are inklings of earlier mythology sprinkled in, but nonetheless, this is something very new as well. So there's innovation as well as influence.
Well, Dylan, this has been absolutely fantastic. Lastly, is there anything else that you'd like to mention briefly about the Exodus, about Moses, and how we should view this today? I think there's not one way to view it, first off. I think it's really an incredible story in the way that it has spoken to people. I talked a bit about what the story represented, obviously, to these Babylonian exiles, but
But if we look into the reception of this narrative, it's a powerful story.
And I think that's what I like to kind of end on, is reflecting on what the story can represent in terms of a narrative of self-determination and liberation. It played a major role in the civil rights movement. Obviously, the famous speech by Martin Luther King Jr. when he talks about standing on the mountaintop, he's embodying Moses there. Of course, you wouldn't know that his premature death would happen.
in many respects, reflect Moses' death before he enters this promised land. So I think that's the really enduring legacy of the Exodus narrative and why, as much as we get into the nitty-gritty details of the historical construction, the message itself is really remarkable. And it's kind of a testament to kind of the collective project and how it can still produce an incredibly coherent and meaningful narrative, even if it does develop not by a single author.
And that's what I want to end. Absolutely. The legacy of the Exodus from Roman times down to the present day could be a podcast episode in its own right. Dylan, this has been wonderful to listen to. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thanks.
Well, there you go. There was Dr. Dylan Johnson talking all the things Moses and the book of Exodus. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, the latest in our Old Testament mini-series this June. If you want even more, then I recommend you listen to a previous episode in this series where Dr. Irving Finkel explains the amazing Mesopotamian origins behind the Noah's Ark and the flood story. That episode is
has had an incredible reaction so far and I really would encourage you all to listen to that one too. If you want even more Old Testament content, well we have recorded a number of episodes about that over the years on the ancients. Either search for the Dead Sea Scrolls or Jericho or Babylon and the Bible or Persia and the Bible and you'll be able to learn even more about the stories of the Old Testament and how they relate to different cities and civilizations of the
of the ancient Near Eastern world. Go listen on Spotify. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to the podcast, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the ancients so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.
