Posted on 10/12/2003 4:59:10 PM PDT by nwrep
By Helen Fields
Egyptologist Manfred Bietak was reading a 60-year-old report of a dig near Luxor in Egypt when a surprising find caught his eye. Near a mortuary temple from the 12th century B.C., archaeologists had uncovered a grid of shallow trenches, which they guessed was the base of a workers' hut. Bietak, head of the Institute of Egyptology at Vienna University, recognized the floor plan as that of the four-room houses used by almost all Israelites from the 12th to the sixth century B.C. What was it doing in Egypt? If Bietak is right, the trenches could be the first physical evidence for the Bible story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt.
The problem has been that in a century of digging, archaeologists had found no physical evidence that Israelites were in Egypt in the second millennium B.C.--said to be the time of Exodus. Recognizing the house was a stroke of luck, says archaeologist Larry Stager, the director of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University. "It's a wonderful discovery, to see very probably an Israelite house in Egypt."
House proud. The structure had three long parallel rooms, with a wide room across one end. The Israelites weren't the only people to build such houses--a few have also been found in what is now Jordan, where Israelites generally did not live. But the distinctive houses dominated Canaan's hill country, now the West Bank. Families lived on a second floor and kept animals in the rooms below. With strong stone foundations and thick walls, the houses lasted for decades.
The house in Egypt was of flimsier construction. It "would have been considered a bit of a shack compared to how they were built in ancient Israel," Stager says. The narrow trenches of the foundation probably supported only thin reed and mud walls. Yet the light construction makes sense if it were a workers' or slaves' hut. The hut was built in the courtyard of the temple of Ay and Horemheb, probably by laborers who were taking that older temple apart to erect a 12th-century B.C. Pharaoh's mortuary temple, Bietak writes in the latest Biblical Archaeology Review.
But one house doesn't prove the Exodus. When droughts hit in Canaan, people often wandered southwest into well-irrigated Egypt. Some could have stayed and become laborers, says Stager, who adds that he's still "agnostic" on whether the Exodus actually happened. Archaeologist Larry Herr of Canadian University College speculates that someone with no connection to the Israelites could have, by coincidence, built a hut with the familiar floor plan. "Give me a slave city where all of the houses are like this," he says. "Then I'll see some sort of connection."
Building a history. Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University also points out that there's no physical evidence that thousands of people wandered for decades in the desert. Besides, Jericho and other Canaanite cities described in the Bible didn't exist when the Israelites were supposed to be conquering them. Finkelstein says the Bible isn't just fantasy, though. He thinks the first books of the Bible were written in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., long after the Exodus might have happened. The writers drew on a pool of folk tales, of myths, of shreds of evidence to build a history for Israel, he says.
Maybe, suggests historian Baruch Halpern at Pennsylvania State University, the Exodus actually happened over and over. Everyone knew someone who'd gone to Egypt and come back complaining. "That's basically what the story is about," Halpern says. "God, you know how much taxes they make us pay in Egypt?" Maybe through years of retelling, he says, their grousing became an epic of enslavement and escape.
Think Egypt's bad? Try living in Maine.
|
|
||
 |
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
|
It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
||
The prepared mind was appropriately favored, it seems.
However, I suppose others may believe a different date.
I wonder if the Ipuwer Papyrus counts. It is an Egyptian document that is in the Leiden Museum in Holland. Its description of the plagues is very similar to that in Exodus. See:
http://www.errantyears.com/1998/nov98/000038.htmlML/NJ
http://www.geocities.com/regkeith/linkipuwer.htm
Ping to our OT Scholars.
Or, you could live in Egypt, Maine (east of Ellsworth).
Bean there, done that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.