The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  All Canaan’s residents melted.

  Terror and fear came over them.

  At the power of your arm they hushed like a stone.

  ’Til your people passed, Yahweh,

  ’til the people you created passed.

  You’ll bring them, and you’ll plant them in your legacy’s mountain,

  your throne’s platform, that you made, Yahweh;

  a sanctuary, Lord, that your hands built.

  Yahweh will reign forever and ever!

  (Exodus 15:1b–18)

  The first thing to notice is that the text never gives any numbers. Our original source for the event never even hints at whether the group that made it to the Red Sea was large or small. It also never says that they passed through walls of water. What happened to the people is not clear. What is clear, though, is that some catastrophe at the sea happened to the Egyptian force that was pursuing them.

  But the more surprising thing to notice is that the word “Israel” does not occur in the Song of the Sea. The text never speaks of the whole nation of Israel. It just refers to a people (in Hebrew, an ‘am) leaving Egypt. David Noel Freedman wrote: “The group that was the object of divine intervention, who were rescued from the pursuing chariots, is known only as the people of Yahweh. Although they have been redeemed by him, even created by him, they are not called Israel.”20 And God does not lead this ‘am to the entire land. It says that

  He leads them to His “holy abode,”

  He plants them in His “legacy’s mountain,”

  at the Lord’s “sanctuary” (Hebrew miqdash),

  where His “throne’s platform” is.

  That last phrase occurs only here in the Song of the Sea and in reference to the Temple.21 The term miqdash (“sanctuary, temple, holy place”) likewise commonly refers to a temple or the Tabernacle in the Hebrew Bible (fifty-two times).22 This arrival only at the Temple, not at the whole land, makes sense if we are reading about Levites, who became the Temple priests. It does not apply to all of Israel. In the past, scholars have proposed a variety of possible locations to which these words might refer. They have identified the holy abode, mountain, sanctuary, and throne platform as Mount Sinai, Gilgal, possibly Shiloh, or Canaan.23 The first three are all possible as sanctuaries. The last (Canaan) really does not correspond well to the words of the song, which uses those four different terms or phrases that imply a sanctuary. So if a group left Egypt in an exodus, they were a people, an ‘am, who ended up in some priestly status, in service of the God named Yahweh, in a location belonging to Yahweh.

  Now what does the Song of Deborah have to do with this? It has no reference to the exodus. It appears in the book of Judges, which is set back in Israel. Composed in the twelfth or eleventh century BCE, it celebrates the battle in which the tribes of Israel united and triumphed over the Canaanite army led by the powerful king of Hazor and his general Sisera. This was likely the battle that first established Israelite hegemony as a country. It hails Deborah, who musters the tribes with her commander Barak. The song lists the ten tribes of Israel whom Deborah summoned to battle.24 It calls each tribe by name. But one is missing. It does not mention Levi. Why? Either (a) the Levites were not there yet. They were in Egypt (or on the road). Or (b) the Levites were not a tribe of Israel going into battle; they were a priestly group, dispersed among the tribes.25 Actually the answer involves both. But first let us appreciate this most basic fact about our two earliest sources: The Song of Deborah, set in Israel, does not mention the Levites; and the Song of Miriam, set in Egypt, does not mention Israel. It was David Noel Freedman who especially emphasized this crucial fact.

  And just to add another ancient piece to that ancient evidence, Freedman pointed to another of the songs that he and Cross had identified as the oldest texts in the Bible: the Blessing of Moses, found in Deuteronomy 33. It contains oracles about many of the tribes of Israel and Judah, and it includes Levi among them. But Freedman emphasized this about the oracle of Levi (Deuteronomy 33:8–11):

  This is the only tribal oracle with an explicit and necessary association with the wilderness wanderings. If the oracle may be trusted as authentic and ancient, then we have here the transference of tribal status to a group which participated in the Exodus and Wanderings, without, however, a comparable territorial allocation.26

  This fits with the other evidence we have tallied here. The Levites came to be accepted and counted as one of the tribes of Israel. But, unlike the rest of the tribes in the song, they are the only ones who are connected in any way with the journey from Egypt to Israel. Their role in that journey is explicit. No other Israelite group has any role at all. Thus in all of our earliest sources, only the Levites have any connection with the exodus.

  3. Who Wrote the Exodus Story?

  Examining those poetic texts, our oldest sources, produced some useful information. That information is intriguing as pieces of the puzzle. If we examine the old prose sources embedded in the Bible, we can learn a good deal more. Figuring out how the Bible came to be composed—who wrote the parts, who put the parts together—has been a central question of Bible scholarship for the last two centuries. It has yielded phenomenal information about the Bible’s sources.27 When we put that information together with our archaeological information, that is when the puzzle starts to come together into a picture. Our mistake until now, as I have been stressing, is that we have looked almost solely at archaeology. We left out our biggest source, the Bible itself, because that was the thing that we were testing. We were trying to see if its stories were reliable as history or not. But our research on the Bible for over two hundred years has been much more sophisticated than merely reading stories and rating them as true or false. We have used the stories and poetry and laws as source material to study in order to see what history we can recover behind them. That is comparable to what we do in archaeology, studying sites and artifacts to see what history we can recover behind them. The methods are sometimes the same, sometimes different. But the goal and the end results are the same: to see what these two kinds of evidence can reveal. And best of all: to see what we can bring to light when we combine the two. Some years ago, at a united meeting of archaeologists and Bible scholars, I proposed as a thought experiment: what if we had had the archaeological work first, and then someone discovered the Bible? What would be our reaction? Front page New York Times! Headline news! Blogs going crazy with discussion of all kinds. From archaeology we would have had two inscriptions that referred to a king of the House of David,28 but we would have had no idea to whom or what that referred. But now, in this newly discovered Bible, we would have long, detailed accounts of King David and his descendants on the throne of Judah in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. From archaeology we would have had an inscribed prism from the Assyrian emperor Sennacherib claiming that he besieged a King Hezekiah the Judean in Jerusalem, his royal city. And now, in this new book, we would have the Judean report of the same event from their perspective inside the city in the Bible’s books of 2 Kings and Isaiah.29 These texts would confirm much of what the Sennacherib prism claimed, and they would challenge parts of it.

  What would be the reaction to this find? Some would say that this newly discovered book was a forgery. But it would in fact be the greatest literary, archaeological, historical, religious discovery of all time. To the religious it would be a revelation. To the secular it would be the stuff dissertations are made of. To Reader’s Digest it would cry out for an abridgment.

  Just as we see and hear excitement over a new archaeological find that sheds light on the Bible, we would get excitement over this new long text that sheds light on our excavated artifacts. In fact, this latter excitement would be greater. This book would put flesh on the archaeological bones. Most of all, this book would give us connections, continuity, chronology. In other words: it would help to give us history.

  We have been collecting evidence of the actual history that we can derive from the Bible, rat
her than just accepting or rejecting its stories, for about two centuries. Why would we not use two hundred years of research and learning on the exodus question? We needed to reach a point in both this textual research and archaeological research where we could be able to put the two together meaningfully. We are now at that point.

  The best-known, most compelling explanation of all of our textual evidence is called the documentary hypothesis. A lot of people will tell you that this hypothesis about who wrote the Bible has a smaller consensus than it used to. That is true. Others will tell you that it has been disproved. That is false. The part about consensus, I must admit, reflects a rather strange breeze blowing through the field of Bible scholarship in recent years. The situation is not that the documentary hypothesis does not have a clear consensus of Bible scholars. It is that no hypothesis has a clear consensus of Bible scholars. The documentary hypothesis is just what it says: the Hebrew Bible is made up of documents, of source texts that editors (redactors) put together in several stages. That is the central idea, and nearly all scholars known to me outside of orthodox or fundamentalist communities are persuaded by that idea. (And even the orthodox and fundamentalist communities are beginning to come to terms with it just in the last few years.30) The point about consensus is that we are now getting a profusion of variations of this central idea. There are supplementary hypotheses, meaning that authors wrote some of the documents and then other authors wrote more pieces around those documents as supplements. There are hypotheses of many very small documents that were expanded and connected to each other. There are hypotheses that date the documents later and later in Israel’s history. Some hypotheses propose a different order in which the source documents were written. There are hypotheses that deny that one or another of the documents ever existed.31 In all of these variations, the scholar remains critical: not automatically accepting or rejecting the Bible’s reports, but rather identifying the Bible’s sources and their history to see what trustworthy information they can yield.32

  There is a classic story, some two thousand years old, of a teacher (Hillel) who is challenged to teach the entire biblical instruction while someone stands on one foot. He answers:

  What is bad to you, don’t do to someone else. Now go and learn.

  Brilliant (though a lot of people leave out that second sentence when they quote this story). So, in the name of brevity, I shall make this summary of the hypothesis by that one-foot standard of timing:

  First: The Bible’s first five books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. We call them the Pentateuch, the Torah, or the Five Books of Moses.

  Second: They are composed of four main documents. There are also some smaller ones.33

  Third: Brilliant editors (usually called redactors) used these documents as sources, which they combined in stages exquisitely to form the five-book work.

  We can read each of these sources individually. If you wish to do so, there are now several books and online treatments. I have translated them and printed them in distinct colors and fonts so you can read them either individually or in any combination you choose.34 There are other works that distinguish the sources in various graphic ways.35 And the text is available online in the original Hebrew with the sources in distinct colors.36 I have provided an example in Appendix A of how this works with a story from Exodus. I gave another example, the story of Noah and the flood from Genesis, in Who Wrote the Bible?37 Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have now been able to read the individual sources. The reaction of amazement at how smoothly and consistently each source reads when separated from the others is common. It would be as if we could find four originally separate works, by four different authors, that someone combined to make The Brothers Karamazov, and each work flowed as a whole continuous story with hardly a gap, each had its own very specific language and names of persons, and each had parallel stories in the other texts.

  We name the sources by letters:

  JIt is called that because Yahweh’s name in it (spelled Jahwe in early German studies) is known by humans from the very beginning of the story at creation.

  EIt is called that because Yahweh’s name in it is not known until the time of Moses. Before that Yahweh is called El or is just called generically “God,” which in Hebrew is Elohim. Hence the E.

  PIt is a Priestly source.

  DIt is exclusively in the book of Deuteronomy. It takes up almost the entire book.

  One more point turns out to be huge for our exodus investigation. The last three sources (E, P, and D) were written by Levites. J was not.38 This need not be controversial. The priesthood of ancient Israel came from the Levite group, and the concerns of Levite priests are all over those three sources. They contain long bodies of religious rules and laws. The other source, J, does not. Their stories have polemic between the various Levite priestly groups, reflecting their ancient competitions.39 The J stories do not develop this. The three Levite sources have more text on the period starting with Moses and the establishment of the Levite priesthood. The J text has more on the period before this, the period of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The J text reflects more familiarity and interest in the royal court than in the priesthood. It is so non-priestly that I raised the possibility that it could have been written by a woman, as opposed to the three Levite sources, which come from a priesthood that did not include women.40

  To be helpful, there is a chart showing what each of the main sources contains in Appendix B. The intriguing story of how we discovered the existence of the sources and separated them from one another is told in Who Wrote the Bible? and now in many other books. For now, I just wanted to give enough of a basic picture so that any reader will be able to understand what follows: we shall see how this basic model in biblical scholarship joins the other evidence about the Levites and the exodus.

  GOD’S NAME

  Probably the single most famous clue of the hypothesis is the point about God’s name. People who challenge the hypothesis often refer to this as a problem of “the names of God.” They think it means that God has one name in one of the sources and a different name in another source. But that is not correct. The distinction is not that God has different names in different sources. God’s name is Yahweh in all the sources. The distinction rather is that the sources give different pictures of when God revealed His name, Yahweh, to humans. In the Levite source E and in another Levite source P, they call God Elohim, which, as I said above, is not a name. It is just a generic word for a god. Or they call God El, which may be both a name and also a generic word for a god. They use El or Elohim consistently until God reveals to Moses that His name is Yahweh. After that He is referred to by this name as well as by Elohim. But in J, people know the name Yahweh from the beginning. It is already used by the first woman, Eve.41 In the J source, the story’s narrator never once refers to the deity as Elohim. Persons in the story use the term; but the narrator does not. The narrator always says Yahweh, without a single exception.

  People made the mistake of thinking that it was a matter of different names in different sources because the original work was done by a French physician, Jean Astruc, who worked only through the first book of the Bible, Genesis, and people still usually work through Genesis first. It is only in the second book of the Bible, Exodus, that we find out what the name thing has been all about: it is about when God first reveals to Moses that His name is Yahweh.42 In the Levite source E, God reveals it to Moses at a bush on the Mountain of God, where they first meet. Moses says that when he tells the people that their fathers’ God sent him they will ask, “What is His name?” They do not know it. The E text has not given the name up to this point. God answers:

  Yahweh, your fathers’ God, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered for generation after generation.

  (Exodus 3:15)

  And in the Levite Priestly source P, God reveals the name to Moses in Egypt. Go
d says:

  I am Yahweh. And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shadday. And I was not known to them by my name, Yahweh.

  (Exodus 6:3)

  It has been 260 years since Astruc, the text could hardly be more explicit, and at least some of us have read the Bible as far as Exodus, so we should regard this matter of the divine name as settled now.

  Just how carefully, consistently, is this distinction in the revelation of God’s name developed? The words El, Elohim, and Yahweh occur two thousand times in the Torah, and there are just three exceptions out of the two thousand. Three out of two thousand is amazing in a text that was copied by hand for its first two thousand years. There are differences in the Greek version, the Septuagint, which is no surprise since a translator from Hebrew to Greek can easily slip and substitute kurios (LORD) or theos (God) in Greek for the Hebrew Yahweh or Elohim and vice versa. But now we also have the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are Hebrew texts. They are a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew texts we had until that goat found the Scrolls in 1947. In the Dead Sea Scrolls the picture is the same as in those existing Hebrew texts, known as the Masoretic Text. The scrolls and the Masoretic Text are equally consistent with regard to the deity’s name. Only two verses have Elohim in the Dead Sea Scrolls where it is Yahweh in the Masoretic Text, and, as it happens, those are verses that do not contradict the hypothesis in any case.43

  The significance of this source distinction concerning the doctrine that God’s name was not revealed until Moses remains unrefuted and, I want to emphasize, underappreciated. It was a first clue that led us on a trail of working out who wrote the Bible. If it had done just that and nothing more, that would have been a tremendous contribution. But the reason I reviewed it here is to go further now. The question now is: what might be the reason for this?

  EL IS YAHWEH

  What is the shoe behind this story? What made it necessary for two of the Bible’s greatest writers to develop an idea that God did not reveal His name until the time of Moses and the exodus? Following the other evidence that it may have been just the Levites who made the exodus from Egypt, this makes sense. The ‘am who left Egypt are connected to the worship of the God Yahweh. In our oldest source, the Song of the Sea, their God is mentioned nine times, and in all nine the name is Yahweh. Where did they get the worship of Yahweh? We do not know. (We shall look at possibilities in Chapter 4.) But we do know that back in Israel the people worshipped the God called El. The very name Israel is Hebrew yiśrā-’ēl. That has been taken to mean everything from “El Persists” to “Struggles with El.”44 The first part, “yiśrā,” is uncertain. But there is no doubt of the second part: El. The Israelites and the Canaanites worshipped the chief god El.45 So when the Levites arrive with their God Yahweh, and they meet up with the resident Israelites with their God El, what do they do?