The Biblical Account of the People of Israel

After Jacob and his family traveled to Egypt, their descendants remained there for several generations; they grew from a family into a people. Upon their return to the promised land, they would settle there as a nation with YHWH as their God. The first step in that process is the Exodus from Egypt, when God delivers Israel from oppressive servitude, and the protracted journey through the wilderness to the promised land. The highlight of the wilderness stories is the divine revelation at Mount Sinai, the giving of the laws that form the covenant between God and Israel. God dwells among the people in the Tabernacle. After forty years in the wilderness, when the generation of the Exodus is gone, a new generation is to enter the promised land. Moses takes his leave of the people in his speeches in Deuteronomy, and Joshua takes his place, leading the people across the Jordan River into Canaan. They must conquer the Canaanites who live there before they can establish themselves securely.

There is no external evidence for the Exodus from Egypt, nor can its attendant miracles be regarded as historical. It is plausible, though, that some Israelites were once slaves in Egypt. Northwestern Semites, of the same ethno-linguistic stock as Israelites, from Canaan, Transjordan, and Syria—the Egyptians called them Aamu, a term conventionally translated as “Asiatics”—are known to have migrated to Egypt during times of famine or to have been brought there as captives following Egyptian military campaigns in Canaan. Some served as slaves on royal building projects, as the Israelites are said to have done. The Egyptian names of Israelites such as Moses, Aaron, and Phinehas bespeak a connection with Egypt. It is not surprising that Egyptian sources do not refer to the Exodus, since records from Raamses, the Egyptian capital when the Exodus would have taken place, have not survived. If there was once an Exodus, it would have involved a relatively small number of people, not the millions implied by the Bible’s figure of six hundred thousand men of military age (Exodus 12:37).