The Truth of the Exodus and the Exodus of Truth

Last month, Katherine Maher became the new CEO of the NPR. Since that announcement, a verbatim quote from her 2023 TED Talk has been making the rounds:

“Perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. Now, that is not to say that the truth does not exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn't important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things. But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one of the things we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles of the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge that there are many different truths.”

At first reading, it’s no surprise that this quote earned Maher much criticism. It reads like a Postmodern (or at least Soft-Postmodern) rejection of Truth as a uniting value in favour of subjective narratives and beliefs. That is obviously not something anyone (regardless of their own political bias) wants to see from the head of a major news outlet.

Luckily, that is not, in fact, what Maher said in her TED talk. Instead, based on her experience as CEO of the Wikipedia Foundation, she advocated utilizing people from all sorts of different perspectives to collectively and collaboratively reach what she called the Minimum Viable Truth of what can be known at any given moment. That is, “getting it right enough of the time to be useful enough to enough people.” This involves “setting aside our bigger belief systems and not being quite so fussy about perfection” in order to reach a starting point that can be broadly agreed upon. Importantly, MVT is not meant to be the endpoint but rather the acknowledgement of “uncertainty, bias, and disagreement on our way to the search for the answers.” It is a starting point for broader conversation and understanding, rather than the abandonment of objective Truth.

To insure that MVT is a steppingstone rather than a destination, though, there must be rules in place to facilitate consistent forward motion. The first is utilizing “productive friction” by encouraging people to defend their positions with facts and citations rather than only personal opinions or beliefs. This produces two overarching rules that can be applied not only to Wikipedia but to how we handle disagreements in general - clear rules and strong community norms. “Clear rules help us engage with the substance of the issue rather than debating the identity of the author” and “in order for contributions to stick, they need to earn the agreement of fellow contributors.” With so many edits per minute, Wikipedia is constantly self-correcting because of these norms. Of course, Maher acknowledges that this system naturally leads to getting things wrong sometimes, but she argues that “getting it wrong some of the time is worth it for getting it right most of the time.”

A fascinating example of this, outside of the realms of religion and politics, was championed by psychologist Ray Hyman. Hyman was perhaps best known for his thorough and sustained critiques of parapsychological research - experiments that purported to prove the existence of psychic phenomena such as ESP, Clairvoyance, Psychokinesis, and the like. Hyman worked as both a palm reader and a mentalist before becoming a psychologist, and lectured widely on the value of critical thinking (his 10-lecture series on the subject on behalf of the James Randi Educational Foundation is excellent).

Interestingly, amongst those Hyman most vociferously critiqued, he is best known for a joint article that he wrote with Charles Honorton. Honorton was a leading parapsychologist who, at the time, boasted the most replicable data in the entire field with his Ganzfeld Experiments. Hyman’s critiques of Honorton’s experiments led to much back-and-forth, ultimately resulting in the two agreeing to co-author a paper. Here is the abstract:

Instead of continuing with another round of our debate on the psi ganzfeld experiments, we decided to collaborate on a joint communique. The Honorton-Hyman debate emphasized the differences in our positions, many of these being technical in nature. But during a recent discussion, we realized that we possessed similar viewpoints on many issues concerning parapsychological research. This communique, then, emphasizes these points of agreement. We agree that there is an overall significant effect in this data base that cannot reasonably be explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis. We continue to differ over the degree to which the effect constitutes evidence for psi, but we agree that the final verdict awaits the outcome of future experiments conducted by a broader range of investigators and according to more stringent standards. We make recommendations about how such experiments should be conducted and reported. Specific recommendations are about randomization, judging and feedback procedures, multiple analysis and statistics, documentation, and the growing role we believe meta-analysis will play in the evaluation of research quality and the assessment of moderating variables. We conclude that psi researchers and their critics share many common goals, and we hope that our joint communique will encourage future cooperation to further these goals.

The upshot of this is that the two put aside their different worldviews in order to offer something substantive to more than either would individually be able to reach. In theory, such an approach could only lead to positive scientific developments.

Having said that, however, I should note that I do not follow current parapsychological research. My own background in magic and mentalism predisposes me to skepticism about the field and I cannot say it is overall a subject that interests me much (any readers who want to send me books on the current state of the discourse are welcome to!). But a timely subject that I do have some area of expertise in is exploring the Exodus from Egypt. While many call attention to the lack of evidence for such an event (in 2001, prominent Conservative Rabbi David Wolpe found himself in hot water for suggesting to his Los Angeles congregation that it did not happen), many scholars argue for a true historical core. One of the most minimalist approaches is that of Richard Elliot Friedman:

I respect Professor Sperling and Rabbi Wolpe. They were understandably following the claims of some of our archaeologists. Those archaeologists’ claims that the Exodus never happened are not based on evidence, but largely on its absence. They assert that we’ve combed the Sinai and not found any evidence of the mass of millions of people whom the Bible says were there for 40 years. That assertion is just not true. There have not been many major excavations in the Sinai, and we most certainly have not combed it. Moreover, uncovering objects buried 3,200 years ago is a daunting endeavor. An Israeli colleague laughingly told me that a vehicle that had been lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was recently uncovered under 16 meters—that’s 52 feet—of sand. Fifty-two feet in 40 years!

Still, all of us would admit that two million people—603,550 males and their families, as the Torah describes—should have left some remnants that we would find. But few of us ever thought that this number was historical anyway. Someone calculated long ago that if that number of people were marching, say, eight across, then when the first ones arrived at Sinai, half of the people would still be in Egypt!

There is no archaeological evidence against the historicity of an exodus if it was a smaller group who left Egypt. Indeed, significantly, the first biblical mention of the Exodus, the Song of Miriam, which is the oldest text in the Bible, never mentions how many people were involved in the Exodus, and it never speaks of the whole nation of Israel. It just refers to a people, an am, leaving Egypt.

Friedman ultimately suggests that it was only the Levites who left Egypt - supporting this with the prominence of Egyptian names amongst the Levites in the Torah - and that other groups joined them to unite as the Israelites. But he is far from the only scholar to point towards a historical kernel in the Exodus narrative. A recent Orthodox thinker who has taken a similar (though nowhere near identical!) approach is Rabbi Dr. Raphael Zarum, who recently spoke about his view at length on the Orthodox Conundrum podcast. In his book, Questioning Belief, Zarum makes the “deeply uncomfortable” admission that “from a historical point of view, it seems impossible to prove conclusively that the events recounted at the beginning of the book of Exodus ever occurred” and even when we do have our historical story straight, we still “cannot be sure about the who, what, when, where or even the how many of the Exodus story.”

Regardless of this, or perhaps because of it, Zarum explored the “educational imperative, literary forms, and Egyptological resonance” of the Exodus story in order to “rescue it from the unending, sterile, and ultimately unsatisfying debates about its literal historicity.” My full review of Zarum’s fascinating book is forthcoming, so it will have to suffice for now to say that Zarum’s approach of reading the Exodus story “cinematically” rather than purely historically (or, as he said in his interview, “seriously, not literally”) is one worthy of much discussion. I highly recommend listening to his interview and, of course, reading my full review once it is published.

Does this mean, though, that there is no way to argue for a historically accurate Exodus from Egypt? Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman does not think so. This article is a wonderful introduction to his arguments, which are much expanded in his books Inconsistency in the Torah and Ani Maamin. Here’s just a selection from the article:

Many details of the exodus story do strikingly appear to reflect the realities of late-second-millennium Egypt, the period when the exodus would most likely have taken place—and they are the sorts of details that a scribe living centuries later and inventing the story afresh would have been unlikely to know:

• There is rich evidence that West-Semitic populations lived in the eastern Nile delta—what the Bible calls Goshen—for most of the second millennium. Some were slaves, some were raised in Pharaoh’s court, and some, like Moses, bore Egyptian names.

• We know today that the great pharaoh Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BCE, built a huge administrative center out of mudbrick in an area where large Semitic populations had lived for centuries. It was called Pi-Ramesses. Exodus (1:11) specifies that the Hebrew slaves built the cities of Pithom and Ramesses, a possible reference to Pi-Ramesses. The site was abandoned by the pharaohs two centuries later.

• In the exodus account, pharaohs are simply called “Pharaoh,” whereas in later biblical passages, Egyptian monarchs are referred to by their proper name, as in “Pharaoh Necho” (2 Kings 23:29). This, too, echoes usage in Egypt itself, where, from the middle of the second millennium until the tenth century BCE, the title “Pharaoh” was used alone.

• The names of various national entities mentioned in the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15:1-18)—Philistines, Moabites, Edomites, et al.—are all found in Egyptian sources shortly before 1200 BCE; about this, the book of Exodus is again correct for the period.

• The stories of the exodus and the Israelites’ subsequent wanderings in the wilderness reflect sound acquaintance with the geography and natural conditions of the eastern Nile delta, the Sinai peninsula, the Negev, and Transjordan.

• The book of Exodus (13:17) notes that the Israelites chose not to traverse the Sinai peninsula along the northern, coastal route toward modern-day Gaza because that would have entailed military engagement. The discovery of extensive Egyptian fortifications all along that route from the period in question confirms the accuracy of this observation.

• Archaeologists have documented hundreds of new settlements in the land of Israel from the late-13th and 12th centuries BCE, congruent with the biblically attested arrival there of the liberated slaves; strikingly, these settlements feature an absence of the pig bones normally found in such places. Major destruction is found at Bethel, Yokne’am, and Hatzor—cities taken by Israel according to the book of Joshua. At Hatzor, archaeologists found mutilated cultic statues, suggesting that they were repugnant to the invaders.

• The earliest written mention of an entity called “Israel” is found in the victory inscription of the pharaoh Merneptah from 1206 BCE. In it the pharaoh lists the nations defeated by him in the course of a campaign to the southern Levant; among them, “Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more.” “Israel” is written in such a way as to connote a group of people, not an established city or region, the implication being that it was not yet a fully settled entity with contiguous control over an entire region. This jibes with the Bible’s description in Joshua and Judges of a gradual conquest of the land.

Throughout his works, Berman has also argued extensively that the language of the various parts of the Torah represents the purest preservation of cultural memories, particularly the poetic Song of the Sea. Berman writes that

The fact that the Kadesh poem retained such currency throughout biblical Israel suggests that the book of Exodus preserves the memory of a moment when these Israelites were relieved from Ramesses II’s subjugation. Reaching for language with which to exalt God’s mighty virtues, they found material in the tropes of one of the best-known accounts of perhaps the greatest Egyptian monarch — and proceeded to “out-Pharaoh” the Pharaoh himself.

Like Zarum, however, Berman ultimately acknowledges in his book that

when we approach our sacred texts, we do not do so in a vain search for the real facts behind the narrative so that we may then determine their meaning. We take it as axiomatic that the reporting of an event stripped down solely to its factual components will not accurately convey the message that we need to take from the event. Instead, we approach our texts seeking out the Almighty has authorized that these events be told. We welcome whatever embellishment may be added upon the basic factual dimension of the event, for we take it as religiously axiomatic that this is the only way to grasp how the Almighty wished for the event to be remembered and meditated upon by the ages.

The lasting message of the text and its power to inspire our people throughout time, then, may well be more important than whatever historical may or may not underlie it. It is perhaps for that reason that even YU Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Jeremy Wieder publicly stated that despite his personal lack of doubt and “profound discomfort” with those who say that the Exodus never happened, he is “not sure that they have crossed a line into heresy” provided that they accept the historicity of the Giving of the Torah.

Where, then, does this leave us? Regardless of what exactly took place, the Exodus happened. Not only that, but it happened in such a way that it shaped Judaism forever moving forward. Every Passover involves telling that story to in our own way, adding our own commentary and jumping into various discussions from it. One way or the other, our ancestors left slavery to accept the Torah, enter Israel as God’s chosen people, and continue our holy mission until today. We can rest assured that some amount of historical facts truly support this. Embracing that Minimum Viable Truth on the way to uncovering further discoveries can only serve us well as a people.

Shabbat HaGadol Shalom and Chag Kasher Ve’Sameach!

Postscript: It was brought to my attention that another position worth discussing is that the miraculous nature of the Exodus (and the sojourn in the dessert which followed) perhaps precludes evidence itself. In the words of Rabbi Dr. Sam Lebens,

we don’t have overwhelming reason to think that the national narratives of the Bible are inaccurate… [W]hen you’re dealing with the miraculous stories of the Exodus and the wilderness years, there are good reasons to assume that there wouldn’t be too much empirical evidence left over—Egyptians wouldn’t have been keen to record their own downfall, and the miraculous sustenance of the wilderness encampments wouldn’t have left behind regular archeological remains, nor do we really know exactly where to look.

Alternatively, as he puts it elsewhere,

what we call the Sinai desert is 60,000 km2 of forbidding terrain. The Israelites often stayed for long periods of time in just one place. Place names in the narrative are ambiguous, making it hard to retrace their steps. Archeological surveys may have been extensive, but surely, we’re talking about needles in a haystack. Moreover, we also have no reason to think that what we call the Sinai desert is the same expanse of land as that which the Bible calls the Sinai desert. When are we to assume that the failure to find traces of the Israelites, in such a massive, difficult, and ambiguously located terrain, constitutes proof that the story didn’t happen? How many stones have been left unturned? How many need to be turned in order to render the story unlikely to a person already assuming that God exists and that the revelation at Sinai likely occurred?

Lebens therefore argues that “as long as we have reason to think that there was a theophany at Sinai, even if it happened only to one or two tribes—who were, at that time, an entire nation— that later merged with others, you still have reason to think that the national religious traditions that tumbled out of that moment received a divine stamp of approval.” Evidence, therefore, is perhaps not required at all to explain the Exodus.