Patterns of Evidence: Exodus, A Filmmaker’s Journey by Timothy P. Mahoney was Mom’s coffee table book this Thanksgiving.  I have a bit of history with my mother’s coffee table books.  This time I even asked her if she leaves them out for my benefit.  (She said, “No.”)

I can relate to the need to pursue this kind of project.  If there is something dissuading you from believing the Bible it’s best to take Jesus by the hand and hit it head on.  With a history background I’m a little more inured apparently to the historical dabbling of archaeologists than Mr. Mahoney was.  My bias toward historical documents has afforded me a measure of protection here.

Mr. Mahoney’s book is the companion to a film of the same name.  It’s a good film.  He described it in an interview: “Is there a pattern of evidence at any time in the archaeology of Egypt and Israel that matches the events of the Exodus and the Conquest as recorded in the Bible?”^[1]  I won’t steal his thunder.  He and his investors deserve to make their money back.  The companion book was more detailed and much more troubling to me.

The confessions he elicited from Jews (on camera) without torture or duress of any kind disturbed me.  Had you asked me I would have said yes, not all those who are descended from Israel are truly Israel, nor are all the children Abraham’s true descendants.^[2]  But I was clearly not prepared to have my nose rubbed in it, like some naughty puppy that has peed the carpet.

Mr. Mahoney interviewed a Jewish anthropologist in his museum workroom:

Anthropologist: I always have been Jewish, I always will be Jewish, and I believe in the tradition of Judaism.  Do I think of the Bible as the word of God?  No (Luke 24:25-27), I don’t….^[3]

Mahoney: Do you believe that the Exodus occurred as it is written in the Old Testament—do you believe it was a miraculous event with God intervening?

Anthropologist: No, I don’t.  Do I believe the event may have happened?  Yep.  Sure I do.  But do I believe that there was a miraculous event with God intervening?  I don’t believe it… (Exodus 3:1-22)  But I’m willing to be shown.^[4]

He interviewed a Jewish archaeologist in the hill country of Israel.

Mahoney: So was there an Exodus?

Archaeologist1: My easy answer to you, as an archaeologist, it didn’t happen.  Not in the way its written down in the Bible…If we didn’t have the Bible, we would never, as archaeologists or as Egyptologists, be able to say this happened….^[5]

I’m Jewish, and I like to sit down at a Seder meal and enjoy recounting the Exodus.  But that’s a tradition.  That makes me who I am culturally.  As an archaeologist, we do not see this happening as a one-off event….^[6]

Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, Jesus said to the Pharisees and the experts in the law.  And you do many things like this.^[7]  Jesus’ actual point here was some specific legal wrangling about corban (κορβᾶν).  And you do many things like this, opens it up in my mind to the kind of mental gymnastics cited above.

Mr. Mahoney interviewed another Jewish archaeologist in his workroom.

Archaeologist2: Exodus did not happen in the way it is described in the text of the Bible on the background of the 13^th century BC….^[8]

This same pattern of traditional thinking informed his view of the Hebrew Bible.

Archaeologist2: We are dealing with traditions (2 Timothy 3:16, 17).  Let’s say that the author of this or that part of the Hebrew Bible sits in Jerusalem.  And people have traditions.  Grandpa says this and Grandma says another story, and there is one tradition of this village and another tradition of that family, that clan and this tribe and so on and so forth…They collected all sorts of stories, memories, myths, tales, you know.  And they put them together in such a way that transmits an idea….^[9]

Mahoney: Do you believe in celebrating Passover?

Archaeologist2: When I sit at a Passover meal and we read the Haggadah with the family, that evening, it’s all history from A to Z.  Perfect history…about all those many generations of my forefathers who were sitting to the same table at Passover at the same time and reciting the Haggadah….

Mahoney: What would you say to those people who are concerned with the idea that these stories didn’t happen as they are written?

Archaeologist2: I would tell them that it is not important…I think that it is more important to understand the meaning of Exodus, the moral of Exodus, for our civilization, for humanity, for mankind, for understanding the biblical text and the authors….^[10]

“As I have mentioned before,” Mr. Mahoney wrote, this particular archaeologist’s “work and ideas greatly influenced” a Jewish Rabbi “to write his controversial Passover sermon.”^[11]  Michael Medved asked this Rabbi about that sermon:

Rabbi: I said that the Exodus certainly didn’t happen the way the Bible depicts it, assuming that it was a historical event in any description….

Medved: Why did you say that?

Rabbi: I said it for two reasons.  One was because I knew that these students and others would go off to college and hear people talk about biblical archaeology and comparative religion, and I wanted them to know that that was not a frightening topic….^[12]

This Rabbi regarded the Exodus as fiction:

Rabbi: The extent to which the Exodus story has a historical core is very hard to say, but my deeper conviction about it is that it’s a story that whether it was true, it is true.  And those are two different things…there are things that aren’t facts that can be truths….^[13]

Medved: What did you want people to feel, not to think, but to feel about the Exodus?

Rabbi: I wanted them to feel that their faith was unshakable, that it didn’t matter what the conclusions were of archaeologists, scientists and historians….^[14]

Medved: What does [Passover] mean if we weren’t delivered from Egypt?

Rabbi: Whether or not people were delivered then, does that affect my ability to empathize with what slavery is like now?^[15]

Mr. Mahoney interviewed a Jewish politician in the Knesset who seemed to echo the Rabbi’s emphasis on slavery:

Moses was the greatest revolutionary of all time.  Remember that in antiquity there were grand empires that were based on one principal: slavery (Deuteronomy 15:12-18).  Moses challenged that twice.  He challenged it by taking his people, who were slaves in bondage in Egypt, freeing them, and taking them to their promised land.  But Moses also challenged the empires of the world by providing a moral code for mankind that said it is not the king or the emperor who decides the law.  There is a higher law (Deuteronomy 17:18-20).  These were absolutely revolutionary ideas.^[16]

If the reason given for celebrating the Passover was: for in this selfsame day have I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt,^[17] a feast to HaShem,^[18] then staying home to celebrate it “to empathize with what slavery is like now” is almost as disobedient as going out and doing something else instead.

Mr. Mahoney interviewed another Jewish archaeologist in his teaching lab.

Archaeologist3: …as I used to tell my students, archaeology is about 10 percent data and 90 percent interpretation.  And this is why I’d say it is controversial in many aspects and open to different opinions….^[19]

This confession proved to be more important than it appeared at first.  Mr. Mahoney, a filmmaker, did an admirable job of demonstrating from archaeological data and a few documentary fragments where the events of Exodus in the Bible fit sequentially into that archaeological data.  He went on to demonstrate that Jewish archaeologists (among others) reject this correlation in favor of their own interpretations of the data.  In other words, they reject the Hebrew scriptures to cling to their faith in their own works, their own interpretations as archaeologists.  You can’t make this stuff up.

The interview continued:

Mahoney: You believe the Exodus and the Conquest are legendary stories?  You don’t see them in the archaeology, is that right?

Archaeologist3: No, we don’t see them at all.  We see something different.  Many times people tell us absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but the point is, as I used to say, paradoxically, the more information we have on biblical matters, the more contradictions we’ve found…we have hundreds of sites now of different periods and millions of objects which indicate an archaeological reality.  And this reality says the Israelites did not come from outside the land of Canaan.  They did not conquer the land.  They simply evolved from within the local community to a new phase of economic and social organization, which later developed into the state of Israel.  So, the process was entirely different than described in the Bible….^[20]

The Exodus story is a very important and interesting legend about the people of Israel, but it has no real historical basis….^[21]

So Israelites are merely Canaanites with delusions of grandeur?  Why do I, a natural born Gentile Christian turned atheist, have more confidence in the Hebrew scriptures than a Jewish anthropologist, Jewish archaeologists, a Rabbi or a Jewish politician?  Jesus.

Jesus is dragging me out of my Gentile-Christian-turned-atheist-ness to Himself (John 12:32).  His own confidence in the Hebrew scriptures directed his actions toward their fulfillment: How then would the scriptures that say it must happen this way be fulfilled?^[22] He asked Peter.  Does this mean that I am inspired to faith by Jesus’ faith?

Well, okay, sure.  But I’m also inspired to courage, determination and some faith at the climax of Avengers: Endgame when Captain America (Chris Evans), bruised, fallen, all but defeated, tightens the strap of his broken shield on his arm and stands again to face Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his armies, alone if necessary.  The trouble with this kind of inspiration is that it can only awaken the courage, determination or faith already latent within me.

In Jesus I am born from above and filled with his own Holy Spirit just as He promised.  My faith is not my faith^[23] but his (it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me^[24]), the same faith that flowed into and through Him from the same Spirit when He asked: How then would the scriptures that say it must happen this way be fulfilled?  Jesus also said, Do not be afraid^[25] of those who kill^[26] the body but cannot kill the soul.^[27]

Archaeologists cannot kill the body.  This is not to say that an individual archaeologist is incapable of murderer, just that archaeologists as archaeologists have no authority beyond the grades handed down in their classrooms.  The entire field of archaeology, that interpretive work of archaeologists, is a “finite province of meaning” relative to the “paramount reality” of most people’s everyday lives.  Most people are unlikely to hear, in fact most people do not hear, about most of the interpretations of data uncovered by archaeologists, unless those interpretations prove useful to Satan, who deceives the whole world.

Given the limited authority archaeologists actually have over others it may seem like overkill to apply Jesus’ prohibition to them: Do not be afraid of archaeologists.  But I actually agree with the Rabbi that archaeology is “not a frightening topic.”  When I understand Jesus’ prohibition as a negation of the definition I gleaned from Deuteronomy of the the fear of the Lord—Do not have a heart to hear and do whatsoever archaeologists shall speak—I am free to choose what I will hear with what measure of faith.

Anyone interested in archaeology should take the Jewish archaeologist’s instruction to his students to heart: “archaeology is about 10 percent data and 90 percent interpretation.”  Every student is free to distinguish that germ of data from the mass of interpretation and judge that interpretation accordingly, based on all that student’s knowledge, including the Bible as the word of God.

Answers to test questions in school are not assertions of truth a student must believe.  They are simply a measure of a student’s proficiency taking notes and repeating what a teacher has said.  A student is not forsworn by recalling what a teacher has said and writing it down accurately on a test.  All rights to one’s own thoughts and beliefs are fully retained, even after an archaeology test.

Archaeology, archaeologists’ interpretations of archaeological data, is no reason to let Satan rob you of your opportunity to know…the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [He] sent,^[28] to be born from above (John 3:5-7), to receive his Holy Spirit, to be bouyed up and carried along by a continuous stream of God’s own love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control^[29] here and now.

Jesus said: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him….^[30]  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, He promised, will draw all…to myself.^[31]  Paul wrote: So then, it does not depend on human desire or exertion, but on God who shows mercy.^[32]  For God has consigned all…to disobedience so that he may show mercy to…all.^[33]

When I hear these things I tighten the strap of the shield of faith on my arm.  Do you?  Or are you hurting yourself by kicking against the goads?^[34]

Tables comparing Exodus 12:17 and 12:14 in the Tanakh, KJV and NET, and tables comparing Exodus 12:17 and 12:14 in the Septuagint (BLB and Elpenor) follow.  A Table comparing Matthew 10:28 in the NET and KJV follows those.