NUBIAN MOSES, ETHIOPIAN/ERITREAN EXODUS, ARABIAN SOLOMON

SBL Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario. Oral Presentation, 2002

It is well accepted that the prophets of ancient Israel provide a window into the culture, religion, theology and history of their respective times and nations. Writing from the mid-eighth to the fourth centuries BCE they speak, in particular, of the exodus from Egypt, its relationship to the nations Israel and Judah and their association with each other. A progressive evolution in these relationships is noted in the texts, leading to a proposed reformulation of the system which defines and describes the sources J and E. Within the eighth century prophets the nations of Israel and Judah are clearly distinguished from each other. Whether Israelite (Hosea) or Judean (Amos, Micah and First Isaiah) they identify the exodus from Egypt as having been experienced by Israel, alone. By the time of the pre-exilic and exilic prophets Judah is understood as part of the greater Israelite family, the ancestors of which had experienced the exodus centuries before. It is only with the later exilic and post-exilic prophets that Judah is equated with Israel. Thus, although the post-exilic prophets do not mention the exodus from Egypt, it is clear from other post-exilic texts (e.g., Chronicles and Nehemiah) that the combined nation Israel (=Judah + Israel) was brought out of Egypt. Thus, the prophetic literature presents a gradual acquisition of the Israelite Exodus tradition by Judean writers. Until the time of the Babylonian Exile, at the very earliest, the exodus from Egypt is not a part of Judean tradition and history. Rather, it is solely an origin tradition of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, recognized as such by both Northern and Southern writers. This also bears strong implications pertaining to the relationship between the sources J and E. The foundational text of the Exodus story is an Israelite text, thus E. If there is any Judean contribution to the Exodus story it must be dated, at the earliest, to the exilic period. J is no earlier than the 6th century. If J is still to be maintained as an early text, it contains nothing referring to the Exodus. A reformulation of the parameters defining E and J is thus required.

Israel Affairs, 2018

Sentience Publications, 2018

The historicity of Exodus has been under serious attack over the last century, fuelled primarily by the absence of evidence for a large-scale migration out of Egypt and an influx of hundreds of thousands of people into the lands that became Israel and Judah. What cannot be ignored, however, is the fact that this story amounted to the cultural memory par excellence of the people called Israel, and of the Jewish identity which emerged from the ancient world and continued into modern times. In short, it was believed – and celebrated – by the people by whom and for whom it was composed. While incorporating the ongoing debate, this book takes a slightly different approach to Exodus, seeing it as a story evolving over time in relation to a specific chain of events in the development towards the ethno-religious identity, Biblical Israel. By investigating each of these historical contexts seen in retrospect as pivotal by the biblical writers, the author identifies a relationship between perceptions of identity crisis and the application of a ‘grand narrative’ of liberation from oppression. More than this, however, the author introduces a singular motif as that which copper-fastens the literary interdependence between all of these representations of the past; and in doing so, opens the way for new conversations about the development of the history of Israel itself.

WHEN DID THE EXODUS OCCUR?, 2024

Establishing the date of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, a story contained in the Old Testament (OT) of the Bible, has been one of the greatest challenges for biblical studies researchers, historians and archaeologists who consider at least a historical background for this story. And the fact is that the OT does not mention dates or names of kings or pharaohs, and the signs or "clues" that it does provide in its text are often vague, contradictory, or subject to interpretation. For this reason, numerous (tens of thousands) books, articles and essays have been written in which theories are proposed that have generally not been satisfactory or universally accepted. A meticulous analysis of the biblical account of the Exodus, and in particular of the signs or clues that could generate a valid answer to the enigma of when did the exodus occur?, finds that there appear to be fragments in which two versions (traditions) of this event are mixed. Specialists in biblical studies know them as the "Y" version (Yahwist or from Jehovah) and the "P" version (Priestly). If these were two exodus episodes remembered as one, the apparent contradictions in the text could be explained without much problem. The purpose of this essay is to propose the existence and present evidence of two stories in the OT from different times, about the departure, escape or flight from Egypt of Israelites who had been oppressed and enslaved, and their return to the land of Canaan. In this essay, the conventional dates used by most historians for Canaan and Egypt during the so-called Second Intermediate Period (2 nd IP), the New Kingdom, and the corresponding Egyptian dynasties are utilized. AUTHOR'S NOTE. In this essay the terms Israelites, children of Israel, and tribes of Israel are used as they appear in biblical quotations to refer to the descendants of Jacob-Israel in Egypt, in the Exodus and in Canaan, but in reality the correct use of these terms began much later than that epoch, and probably dates back to the times of kings David and Solomon who ruled the Kingdom of Israel.

The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, 2020

In the Hebrew Bible, God’s covenant and promise of the Land of Canaan as Abraham’s and his descendants’ eternal inheritance mark the emergence of the people of Israel. But before Abraham’s progeny can take possession of the promised land, they embark on a detour to Egypt as recounted in Genesis 37–50. Abraham’s grandson Jacob (whom God renames “Israel,” Gen. 32:28) witnesses his favorite son Joseph’s sale into slavery, orchestrated by jealous brothers. The saga, which continues with Joseph’s subsequent rise to a position of power and the migration of Joseph’s brothers to Egypt during a time of famine, serves as a literary bridge to one of the central themes of Israel’s emergence—their ensuing enslavement in Egypt and escape to freedom as described in the book of Exodus. The books of Joshua and Judges continue to tell the story of how the twelve tribes, or “sons” of Israel, after four decades of desert wanderings, conquer the Land of Canaan and settle there. For millennia, this story was taken for granted as a reliable account of the genesis of Israel as a people in its land. However, with the advent of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century post-Enlightenment methods of text criticism and the discovery of contemporary ancient Near Eastern texts and cultures, the historical reliability of the biblical text came into question. Aided by an ever-growing body of archaeological evidence, our understanding of early Israel has been transformed during the past century. This essay will review the theories of Israel’s emergence that have been advanced by critical scholarship, beginning with a critique of the two schools of thought developed during the first half of the twentieth century that use the Exodus story and the books of Joshua and Judges as their starting point. Subsequently, two additional models, utilizing sociological, anthropological, and archaeological approaches, attempted to write a secular history of early Israel largely independent of the biblical account. The essay concludes with recent efforts to reconcile the biblical, extra-biblical textual, and archaeological primary sources, considered together with contemporary sociological and anthropological models to reconstruct Israel’s ethnogenesis.