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Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go, Abraham Malamat, Biblical Archaeology Review (24:1), Jan/Feb 1998.

Merneptah Stele Full View

Merneptah Stele

Egyptian records support a centuries-long exodus

Nothing in the archaeological record of Egypt directly substantiates the Biblical story of the Exodus. Yet a considerable body of Egyptian material provides such close analogies to the Biblical account that it may, in part, serve as indirect proof for the Israelite episode.

No other event figures so prominently in the Biblical tradition as one of the foundations of Israelite faith. The Bible refers to the Exodus from Egypt more often than it does to any other event in Israel’s past—in the historical narratives, in the prophets and even in the psalms.

Is the Exodus story merely the product of later, primarily theological, contemplation, or was it a historic event? To decide, we must first recognize that the Exodus story is a folktale. This does not automatically deprive it of all historicity, but it does require us to focus not on the elements of folklore and artifice in the account, but on what Goethe called die grossen Züge, “the broad sweep of affairs.”

Read the rest of Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.

Posted in: Exodus

1 Comment on "Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go, Abraham Malamat, Biblical Archaeology Review (24:1), Jan/Feb 1998."

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  1. akhil sahoo says:

    Dear Editor

    Exodus was a real geographical compulsion of its time; but, ancient Israel is not represented by the present Israel. The real site for ancient Israel can be identified from the Hebrew words which have gone into the Hebrew Bible. The real site is in ancient India not represented by the present political India. Ptolemy’s peripheral map for the ‘inhabited world’ clearly shows this land on the ‘east’ as Yama-kote, land of Yam, same as Jerusalem.

    Prof Sahoo(Retd)