The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  The Bible pictures the Israelite and Judean populations and their governments there starting at least in the twelfth or thirteenth century BCE and continuing until the end of the Hebrew Bible’s history about eight hundred years later. But, just as we asked in Chapter 1, how do we know if this is true? As scholars, we cannot just say, “The Bible tells us so.” We need to see evidence that could be presented to any honest person, whether that person is religious or not, Jewish or Christian or from some other religion or no religion, or from Mars. If we want to know what the Levite immigrants found there, we have to see how we know that there was a there there.

  INSCRIPTIONS IN HEBREW

  First, the land is filled with inscriptions in Hebrew. I do not mean just an occasional message on a piece of pottery or carved in a wall. Nor should we even start with one or two of the most famous archaeological finds. Rather, we have thousands of inscriptions. They come from hundreds of excavated towns and cities. They are in the Hebrew language. From whatever the point that Yahweh was introduced in the land, the inscriptions include people’s names that bear forms of the name of their God, Yahweh (thought to be pronounced Yahwéh, with the accent on the second syllable). This means names like:

  Hoshaiah

  which means

  “Yahweh Saved”

  Ahijah

  which means

  “Yahweh Is My Brother”

  Shemariah

  which means

  “Yahweh Watched”

  Gemariah

  which means

  “Yahweh Accomplished”

  Ge’alyahu

  which means

  “Yahweh Redeemed”

  Azaryahu

  which means

  “Yahweh Helped”

  Hilqiyahu

  which means

  “Yahweh Is My Portion”

  Berekhyahu

  which means

  “Blessed by Yahweh”

  Shelemyahu

  which means

  “Made Whole by Yahweh”

  The inscriptions also refer to their rulers. Both Israel and Judah had kings. The inscriptions include stamps and seals from official documents. The seals were people’s engraved names, which were imprinted on small chunks of clay, producing a stamp, also called a bulla. The inscriptions also come from tombs where that land’s people were buried. They name people who appear in the Hebrew Bible. Just while I was writing this chapter, a beautiful clay stamp was made known that had been discovered in Jerusalem bearing the name of King Hezekiah son of King Ahaz. Hezekiah and Ahaz are two of the most prominent kings in the Bible, appearing in the books of Kings, Chronicles, and Isaiah.2 A seal at Ezion Geber (the contemporary city of Eilat) says “lĕyōtām,” meaning “belonging to Jotham,” which was the name of the king-regent, son of Uzziah, who is reported in the Bible to have built Ezion Geber.3 A seal at Megiddo says, “Servant of Jeroboam.” Jeroboam is the name of a king of Israel in the Bible.4 We have found pottery jars and handles stamped with the word lmlk, which means “By the King” or “According to the King.” They are like stamps of government-approved measurements on bottles and packages today. Altogether there are thousands of lmlk seal impressions on jar handles.5

  Some of the bullae identify the person as “Who Is over the Building” (’ašer ‘al habbayit) or “Who Is over the Work Force” (’ašer ‘al hammas), which are titles for officials in the government. Some identify the person as “The Scribe” (hassōphēr); or as “Servant of the King” (‘ebed hammelek), which is another term for a royal official; or as “Son of the King” (ben hammelek), meaning a prince; or as “Mayor of the City” (śar hā‘îr); or as “Officer of the Army” (śar haṣṣābā’).6 These references to titles of civil and military officials are not just a matter of getting some people’s names from those times. They are specific signs of the existence of a government, of official organization and administration.

  In the City of David excavations of Jerusalem, where I spent four seasons with my students from the University of California, San Diego, fifty-one bullae were found, many with names ending in -yahu. And one of them had the name Gemaryahu ben Shaphan. He was a man mentioned by name in the book of Jeremiah.7

  Inscriptions include wording that also appears in the Hebrew Bible. They reflect a widespread community whose dominant language was Hebrew and who worshipped a God named Yahweh.

  I happened to be present at the time of the discovery of another important inscription in Jerusalem, though I didn’t know it until years later. In the summer of 1979 I was staying in Jerusalem at the Scottish hospice, a guest house connected with the Church of Scotland. One morning I looked out my window and saw people engaged in archaeological work below. Since I am in the business, so to speak, I went out and chatted with them. I learned that they were doing an excavation under the direction of the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay of the University of Tel Aviv, and they had uncovered some tombs from the seventh century BCE. In one of these burial caves they found a cylindrical object made of silver. The silver had been beaten into a flat sheet like foil. Words were inscribed in it, and then it was rolled up so a string could be placed through it and it could be worn like a necklace. The problem was that it was twenty-seven-hundred-year-old silver, and whenever anyone tried to unroll it to see what it said, it cracked. (It was sort of the archaeological equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If you looked, then it could not be seen.) So it appeared that we might never know what was inscribed in it. But Ada Yardeni, a curator and conservationist at the Israel Museum, would not give up. She put a concoction of thick glue around the cylinder and then opened it a tiny fraction of an inch. She then applied more of the concoction and then opened it another minuscule amount. This process was painstaking and slow, but she finally unrolled the silver. And this is what she read:

  May Yahweh bless you and keep you.

  May Yahweh make his face shine to you and give you peace.

  It is the words of the Priestly Blessing in the Hebrew Bible. You will find it in Numbers 6:24–26. It is thus the oldest text known from the Bible ever found.8

  That was just one inscription. In a Harvard expedition at the city of Samaria in 1910, over sixty were found. Later excavations brought the number to 102.9 In the excavation of the city of Lachish, a British archaeologist, J. L. Starkey, found twenty-one drafts of letters in Hebrew on pottery shards (ostraca) in 1935. Lachish was the second biggest city in Judah after Jerusalem.10 At the city of Arad, the archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni, of Tel Aviv University, discovered over one hundred inscribed Hebrew ostraca. Those ostraca range across centuries. They include three personal seals of one of the Judean commanders of the fort there, a man named Elyashib son of Ashyahu—another name with a theophoric element of the name Yahweh.11 On ostracon number 18 at Arad are the words “House of Yahweh,” meaning a Temple.12 An inscription on a bowl there refers to the sons of Korah. The Bible identifies the sons of Korah as composers of psalms.13 It lists them as a Levite clan, the descendants of Korah, a first cousin of Moses and Aaron who challenges their leadership in a story in the book of Numbers.14 Twenty-eight inscribed ostraca in Hebrew were found at Horvat ‘Uza.15 Ostraca with Hebrew inscriptions on them were also found at Yabneh-yam, at Tel ‘Ira, and at Beer Sheba.16

  The distinguished scholar Jeffrey Tigay of the University of Pennsylvania summed up: “The names of more than 1,200 pre-exilic Israelites are known from Hebrew inscriptions and foreign inscriptions referring to Israel.” Of these, 557 have names with Yahweh as their divine element, and seventy-seven have names with El.17

  The existence of this many inscriptions means that there had to be a fair number of people who could write them and read them. One of the indicators that people were learning and practicing writing is the discovery of texts with the alphabet written on them. These are called “abecedaries.” People would just write out the alphabet in order. These may have been school texts, they may have been for practice, or just graffiti. Some scholars think they may
have also had a magical purpose. They range through nearly the entire biblical period, from the twelfth century (or tenth at latest) BCE forward.18 The ‘Izbet Sartah inscription, dating from the twelfth century, was found in 1976.19 The Tel Zayit inscription, dating from the tenth century, was found in 2005 in excavations by the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary directed by the archaeologist Ron Tappy.20 My former student Michael Homan, now Professor of Theology at Xavier University of Louisiana, who made the connection between the Tabernacle and Rameses’ Tent (Chapter 2), was the supervisor of the area where it was discovered. He wrote about what transpired on the day of the discovery:

  The square that I supervised was O-19, right on the shoulder of the tel. Ron was in a metal basket suspended over the site by a tractor arm for taking pictures. While we were waiting up on top for Ron to finish photographs of the Trench, a volunteer named Dan Rypma from Colorado State approached me. Dan said he had seen some scratches on a rock while he had been sweeping the stones in a wall the day before. He said he wasn’t sure what these scratches were, but he had thought quite a bit about them the night before and he wanted to make sure that we didn’t leave the site without at least pointing them out to me. We carefully went into the square into this Iron Age room that had cobble stones and well preserved walls. Just over a meter up, sitting in the wall, was the stone Dan wanted to show me. I could see, sure enough, the scratches Dan mentioned. But, looking carefully at the stone for quite some time, I could recognize what appeared to be the letters mem and a nun in an ancient West Semitic script. Let me be clear in stating that these letters and the others that we saw shortly thereafter were HARD to see, as other scholars who saw the stone in more favorable conditions have attested. The light had to be coming from the side just right. It reminded me of Indiana Jones and the staff of Ra. So here I was, the first person in nearly 3000 years to read letters carved on the stone. I was extremely overcome with excitement. I’m not the type of person who jumps up and down though. I just kept telling Dan and the assistant supervisor Dale Swindel how amazing all of this was. I told Gabi Barkai that I thought we had an inscription in a stone in the wall. He was of course very excited, as the wall provided a great archaeological context, and the thought of a 10th century BCE inscription in Judah is rare. Impossible some would have argued. When Ron was lowered back to the ground, I told him about Dan’s amazing find, and we led him and Gabi over the rock. Then we celebrated, and then the entire team celebrated, and then we took a bajillion pictures of the rock in situ. We excavated the top of the wall down to the stone, and when we were set to remove it, my hand felt that the bottom was carved out. That was even more exciting, as the inscription was on some sort of a stone bowl, or mortar, or something. Dale and I had the privilege of carrying the soon-to-be-famous stone down the tel. I remember asking Dale “Are you ready for one of the most important walks of your life?” It was a few days later, after the stone was photographed and drawn by an expert, that Ron was able to discover that it was in fact an abecedary (the entire alphabet from aleph to taw).21

  We often hear claims that there was very little literacy in early Israel. That is patently false. A recent study of pre-exile inscriptions further confirmed this.22 It made the international media, so perhaps we can hope that these claims will finally be put to rest. This was a land where people were writing the alphabet. This was a land where there were people who were literate. They read. They wrote. And they left their writings, large and small, for us to find.

  INSCRIPTIONS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES

  Imagine the excitement of finding such things. Mike’s and Dan’s experience has happened to thousands of participants in excavations from dozens of countries. And that is just the Hebrew inscriptions from the lands of Israel and Judah. Plus we have those foreign inscriptions that Tigay mentioned. Texts from the neighboring lands refer to the people, to their kings, to their government, to their armies, and to their cities. The basic fact is: everybody knew that Israel was there: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arameans, the Moabites, the Persians.23 In the last chapter we spoke of Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 BCE), who refers to the people of Israel in a stone stele.24 Pharaoh Shoshenk I, in the tenth century BCE, describes his campaign in which he refers to cities in Israel (including Ayalon, Beth-Shan, Megiddo, Rehob, and Taanach).25 Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, in the ninth century BCE, names King Ahab “the Israelite” among his opponents in his Kurkh monument and names and pictures King Jehu of Israel on his Black Obelisk, which is now in the British Museum.26 The Assyrian emperor Sennacherib, in the eighth century BCE, describes in detail his siege of Jerusalem and its king “Hezekiah the Judean,” also in the British Museum.27 Six other Assyrian emperors refer to Israel and Judah as well and name kings whose reigns are also recorded in the Bible. The Babylonian sources, too, refer to the Jews and their monarchy in the years after the Babylonians replaced the Assyrian empire. And the record continues when the Persians replace the Babylonians, as documented in the Cylinder of Cyrus, the Persian emperor. Cyrus’ decree in 538 BCE let the exiled Jews return to their land. It was followed by an influx of Jewish population. There was population growth from the reign of Darius I to Artaxerxes I. The country that the Babylonians had conquered was reestablished as a state of Judah (yehud medintha) within the Persian umbrella. You want irony? Persia, today called Iran, the country that reestablished the Jews’ country in biblical times, had a president who said that Israel has no roots there.

  Also from that period come the Elephantine papyri, a collection of documents that include letters from the Jewish community in Egypt in the fifth century BCE to the Jewish community back in Jerusalem.28

  Closer to home, right across the Jordan River from Israel, was Moab, in what is now Jordan. In the ninth century BCE, its king Mesha erected a stele referring to Israel and its king Omri, which I cited in Chapter 2. He also refers to the royal House of David.29 An inscription erected by an Aramean (what is today Syria) also refers to a king of the House of David.30 In all, these ancient texts refer to fifteen kings of Israel and Judah who are known from the Bible, and all of them are referred to in the right periods.

  MATERIAL CULTURE

  Material culture (in other words: stuff) fills out this picture. Thousands of people have now walked through the Siloam Tunnel in waist-deep water under Jerusalem. It is a major feat of engineering. It is a passage nearly six football fields long underground. A tremendous project like this and others that we shall see reflect a major organized society with a government that could bring such an undertaking off. If it were done today, the governor would be there for photo opportunities, and the architect and builder would be honored. When it was done twenty-seven hundred years ago, it took a substantial number of workers and tremendous cost. Also, in 1880, an inscription was found in its ceiling. The Siloam inscription is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. It actually describes how the tunnel was built. The tunnelers were in a hurry, so they started digging from both ends at the same time, planning (or hoping) to meet in the middle. There are old jokes about that: that the way to build a tunnel is to have two teams of men start from opposite ends and meet in the middle. And what if the two teams don’t meet? Then you have two tunnels! Just a joke, but apparently that is almost what happened in Jerusalem. According to the inscription, the two teams were not quite on track to come together, but they heard the sounds of each other’s tools. They followed the noise, and they met! We can date the Hebrew script of that inscription to the eighth century, which fits with King Hezekiah, the king of Judah who, according to the Bible, in fact built a water channel at Jerusalem (c. 715–687 BCE),31 the same Hezekiah whose stamp was made known this year.

  Likewise, when my students joined in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of Jerusalem under the archaeologist Yigal Shiloh in the 1980s, they uncovered the now-visible “stepped stone structure.” Whatever purpose it served—defense, soil or water retention, a platform for some other major structure—it was a huge proje
ct. It was not something that a couple of friends assembled. It required community organization, planning, design, a large number of construction workers, and funding. Then, in 2005, farther up the hill, the archaeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered the remains of a monumental building that was constructed along with the stepped stone structure. She identified it as King David’s palace. This caused much controversy at the time, as many people thought that she had overstepped the limits of the evidence.32 Maybe it was a royal palace. Maybe it was something else. What we do know, though, is that it is a construction of monumental architecture from an extremely early period in Israel’s history. And again, this was not built by some children as a playhouse. It reflects an enormous undertaking by an established organized society.

  This is the kind of thing we find in other cities as well. At Dan, the northernmost city of ancient Israel, we find a planned city, with a massive gate (over twenty-two feet high), fronting on a plaza and leading to a temple with adjoining halls for priests, plus cobblestone streets and other public buildings.33 At Hazor we find public buildings, a granary, and an underground water system.34 We also find underground water systems at Megiddo, Taanach, Ibleam, Beer Sheba, and Bet Shemesh. We find massive fortifications at Lachish and other cities.35

  Three of these cities proved not only revealing in themselves but truly astonishing as a group, a connected group. When the archaeologist Yigael Yadin excavated Hazor, he uncovered a tremendous gate made of six chambers. Then, when he excavated Megiddo, he found the same thing: a tremendous six-chambered gate. Now, a biblical verse refers to these two cities in a report about King Solomon. It says that, in addition to his building the Temple and his palace and other structures in Jerusalem, Solomon also had constructions at three cities: Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.36 Yadin therefore proposed an examination of the site of the third city, Gezer, to see if it had the six-chambered gate as well. And it did. So the archaeological picture and the biblical picture matched. It was one of the great early cases of finding archaeology and text corresponding to each other. Now, since then, some archaeologists have challenged this (which should come as no surprise). Our friend the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, codirector of subsequent excavations at Megiddo, questioned Yadin’s view that King Solomon built up these three cities. He argued that these structures were from a later period and that we should attribute them to a later king, perhaps King Ahab (ninth century BCE) or King Jeroboam II (eighth century BCE).37 Finkelstein’s codirector at Megiddo, Professor Baruch Halpern, disagreed and still supports Yadin’s original conclusion: King Solomon built these cities. I sat with Halpern on the top of that gate at Megiddo and went over the facts in light of its structure, and Halpern published his findings in a lengthy article.38 I am persuaded that Yadin and Halpern are more probably right. But for our purpose here, we do not need to argue those fine points of archaeology. The revealing point is: all three major cities were constructed according to a common plan. When we see several schools in a town today, all built according to nearly identical architectural plans—or several post offices or government buildings looking the same around the country—we know what that means. A central government planned and carried it out that way. In the case of Israel, our concern here is not the debate over whether that central government was in the tenth, ninth, or eighth century. It is the fact such a central government existed. Early in the world of biblical Israel, there was a large population living in major cities with a common government.