Evidence for the Biblical Exodus

What do you do when science and the Bible seem to disagree? Secular scientists claim there is no evidence for many events in the Bible including the exodus. Now even if that were true, if we believe the Bible is God’s word then we should trust God over humans. BUT THEIR CLAIM IS NOT TRUE!

No Evidence?

If there is a ton of evidence then why do so many claim that there is none? At least some people have already decided they don’t want to believe the Bible and refuse to accept what they see before them. For others though they say the evidence is from the wrong time period. To understand this we need a basic lesson of how they date the evidence.

Dating the Evidence

Radiometric Dating

One method of dating artifacts is using radiometric dating. Some examples of this would be uranium-lead dating, potassium-argon dating, rubidium-strontium dating, and radiocarbon dating. Aside from the fact that these have many issues in dating accurately (I will post about this in future posts), these methods would be used to tell when the raw material was formed. So if you found a stone hammer, these theoretically could tell you when the stone used to make the hammer had solidified, but it could not tell you when the hammer was constructed. To date when things were constructed or used we need a different method.

Pottery

Most cultures have particular items they used that others did not. Pottery is something we often find remaining from previous cultures. The theory is that each culture and time period had it’s own style and decoration, and that they went from simple to more complex. Based on the complexity, the archeologists place the pottery in the order they believe to be correct oldest to newest. Then they look at where the pottery was exactly found.

Tels

At first glance a tel is just a hill – sometime large and sometimes small. When you dig into it though you’ll find an amazing story. Over the course of history a city occasionally got destroyed for various reasons. The city was usually built at that location for an important reason and so a new city would get built on the exact same spot. Sometimes that happened a few times. Eventually the pile of debris would get taller and taller until it was a hill with each previous city’s debris forming one layer each with the oldest at the bottom.

These layers make the sequence within the tel easy to see but how do we know the time period of one tel compared to another? This is where the pottery comes into play. When archeologists find the same type of pottery in two different tells, they conclude that the layers with the matching pottery would have been at the same time period. Now with just a few gaps, we can sequence a lot of the archeological artifacts we find. To find the dates though and place these artifacts on a timeline we need more information.

Egypt

The extra information used by archeologists is the Egyptian timeline. Other cultures typically used early forms of paper or clay tablets or something like that but rarely made inscriptions on stone. We all know about all the monuments the Egyptians left behind covered in hieroglyphics. These inscriptions leave us quite the record of Egypt’s history including dates that archeologists use as the basis for every cultures’ timeline.

Starting to Break Down

So far it seems relatively simple with no major errors. We get the dates from the Egyptian timeline interacting with other cultures and then use matching pottery to transfer the dates to other locations. This all begins to fall apart when we investigate the Egyptian timeline.

Egyptian Dates

Today we use a fairly universal date system that is based on one fixed point – the year “0”. The Egyptians of antiquity were not worried about being universally understood and did what many cultures have done basing it on the year of the reign of their leader. So whereas we would say this is the year 2023 AD using our system, if we were using the Egyptian system we would say this is the “Eighth year of the reign of Trudeau the II”. This works so long as you know the order of the pharaohs but is a mess if you don’t.

The Pharaohs

There are two problems with the current order of pharaohs as is currently generally accepted.

The first problem is that we don’t have any good records. All the records recorded by the pharaohs themselves on stone are very selective in who they list. The most detailed list is from Manetho although many of the anecdotes he records seem fictitious which lends doubts to his factualness. We also do not have his original documents. The best document we have is probably the Turin King List and even this has major flaws. The document is missing large pieces (actually half the scroll!) as it has begun disintegrating. It was written on the back of an old tax scroll making it seem like simply a notepad and not an important document. The names are not listed in chronological order and while they do list the length of the pharaohs reign, it does not list the start or end.

The second major problem is that the currently accepted timeline has assumed that there was only one pharaoh at a time. The reality is that we know there was sometimes two, three, or even four co-regents!

There is a solution

A New Egyptian Chronology

There is a theory put forward by the Agnostic Egyptologist Dr. David Rohl that would correct for these problems as well as some others. Once you apply his corrections to the timeline, all of a sudden the evidence for the Bible that wasn’t in the right time period lines up perfectly!

The Evidence

So what is the evidence? Here are some highlights:

• A time of extreme famine in which the power is consolidated to the pharaoh and the vizier (second in command) rises to immense power.
• A group of Semitic people settle in the land of Goshen and prosper. Their population greatly expands.
• The semitic people are turned in to slaves. Later many of the semitic baby boys are killed.
• There are a series of plagues.
• The semitic people disappear from Egypt.
• At the same time, the pharaoh also disappears and his son does not take his place.
• Shortly after that, the Hyksos people walk in and take over Egypt without a fight.
• The city of Jericho is destroyed. After a short siege the entire city wall except one small section collapsed. After the city was defeated it was burned.

I honestly don’t know how much more conclusively the archeological evidence can support the Bible.

So what do you do when science and the Bible seem to disagree?

You trust the Bible of course!

The Bible is God’s word. If there is ever a difference between human science and God’s word it means the science is lying or there is something the science doesn’t understand. Also, educate yourself. Often when you study a topic you will discover there is evidence to support the Bible.

Patterns of Evidence

If you want to study the evidence for the Exodus further, check out Patterns of Evidence. The original film “The Exodus” is a great place to start. There is even a series to simplify things a bit for kids (Young Explorers). If you want to dive deeper in to the exodus, “The Moses Controversy” looks into whether Moses could have written the first five books of the Bible; the film “Red Sea Miracle” (Parts 1 and 2) investigates the possible locations for where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea; finally, “Journey to Mount Sinai” part 1 (part 2 is scheduled to be released this Summer) investigates the evidence for the location of the real Mount Sinai.

Check out your church library to see if any of these films are there and if not ask if your church can get them! These are an amazing resource to help strengthen your faith. I can tell you that both my current and previous churches have a copy of all or most of the films currently released.