Exodus 7 - 24: Miracles, Miracles, lots of Miracles

Exodus 7-24 (Links: Exodus 7 - 9, Exodus 10 - 12, Exodus 13 - 15, Exodus 16 - 18, Exodus 19 - 21, Exodus 22 - 24) has caused me more faith problems than any other part of the Bible so far, including Genesis. There is so much ground to cover I’m going to need to split my discussion into two posts – the first to discuss the lack of historical evidence for the Exodus, and the second discussing, even if the events were true, how a loving God could issue some of the laws that scripture says He did.

The start of Exodus finds the Israelites – descendants of Jacob – living in Egypt. Joseph has been forgotten by subsequent generations of Egyptians, and the Israelites have increased in number so much that Egyptians consider them a threat and have enslaved them. Moses, a Hebrew adopted into Egyptian royalty then banished for murder, is chosen by God to lead them out of their oppression.

Still from 'Prince of Egypt'

The most important question for me when dealing with these chapters is: Is there any historical evidence for the plagues and Exodus? 

As an aside, I typed “Is there any evidence for . . . ” into Google (intending to finish with “for the Exodus”), and found that after “for God” and “for Jesus”, the most popular search question is: “Is there any evidence for mermaids?”. Mermaids beat vampires, aliens and werewolves in the popularity stakes! Sometimes I love the internet for these surprising revelations about the human mind.
 
Back to work . . . With the book of Exodus, it’s not just the reputation of the Old Testament at stake here – it’s the reputation of Jesus. He referenced the Exodus in his teachings and spoke as though it was a real event, so if the Exodus didn’t happen, that throws doubt on the reliability of Jesus’ testimony too.

"Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven" (Jn 6:49—51).

He ties his importance to that of the God of Exodus. If this account isn't true, then Jesus was wrong, and potentially so are some of His teachings.

There are reams of articles on the internet with apparently contradictory arguments - both sides are biased and thoroughly convinced of their own argument so it’s hard to find anything neutral, if there is indeed such a thing as a neutral person. I myself know that I am biased and want the story to be true to shore up my beliefs, but am not able to just ignore any conflicting doubts.

Those that claim the Exodus is fictional do so mainly due to lack of mention of the Israelites in Egyptian records, lack of references to the plagues in Egyptian records, and no evidence of a large group of people spending forty years wandering the Sinai Peninsula (the number of Israelites fluctuates from tens of thousands to two million depending on sources).

Trusty Wikipedia goes further in saying that not only is there lack of evidence for the Bible, there’s evidence that directly contradicts the Bible: Edom is one of the places listed that the Hebrews supposedly stopped at during their sojourn in the desert, yet it was not yet a nation at the time when they were meant to be there. The region wasn't even inhabited during the period in question. The place the Hebrews stop at wasn't built until 800 BCE, but the latest the Exodus could have occurred and still be biblically accurate is in the 13th century BCE.  

Israeli archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog provides the following view on the historicity of the Exodus: “The Israelites never were in Egypt. They never came from abroad. This whole chain is broken. It is not a historical one. It is a later legendary reconstruction—made in the seventh century [BCE]—of a history that never happened.” 

We still don't know where exactly the Red Sea was.

However, there are just as many people out there who claim the arguments above are explainable and do not rule out the Exodus being a historical event.

Firstly, they argue that archaeology has limits to how much it can discover. Very little of what was made in antiquity survives to this day, and only a fraction of ancient world sites have actually been excavated. With regards to a lack of grave sites for the Israelites during their wanderings, scripture indicates the bodies were just left to the elements and not buried in graves.

Secondly, the Egyptians had a tendency to destroy any evidence or references to events where they came out looking humiliated or weak. The Egyptians did this with the Hyksos people who were expelled from Egypt and all records of them erased, and many new kings destroyed evidence of the previous king or queen and their policies.

Thirdly, there are several arguments that the general consensus on the dates of the Exodus are wrong, therefore any evidence discovered on the route of the exodus is discarded as not pertaining to the Israelites because it doesn’t fit the accepted time line.

Finally, there is the argument that the currently accepted route through the Sinai Peninsula is slightly inaccurate – that Mount Sinai was in north Arabia and the Israelites followed a route that looped lower than the one currently popular, therefore archaeology has been looking in the wrong locations.

There is some evidence supporting the Bible account of events: In the early 1800s, a papyrus was found written by an Egyptian named Ipuwer. This papyrus references a series of plagues befalling Egypt that sound very similar those described in the Bible (whether it does reference the story of Exodus or something else entirely is another hotly debated argument in archeological circles).

Did the real Pharaoh look like Yul Brenner? We just don't know

There are various contenders for the identity of the two Pharaohs in Exodus – the one in power during the oppression of the Israelites, and the one in power during the plagues and Exodus itself. Some archaeologists have proposed that the plagues occurred at the ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between around 1279BC to 1213BC. The city appears to have been abandoned around 3,000 years ago and scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation. 

The sequence of natural events follow thus:

• A documented dry period during Rameses II reign could have caused the Nile to turn slow and muddy, which incubates toxic fresh water algae that turns the river red like blood. 
• The algae triggers hormonal development in frogs and would have led to a massive increase in frog numbers and force them to leave the water and invade the surrounding land. 
• But as the frogs died, it would have meant that mosquitoes, flies and other insects would have flourished without the predators to keep their numbers under control. 
• These insects often carried diseases which could have been responsible for the boils the Egyptians and their livestock suffered.
• A volcano on the Santorini islands 400 miles away exploded around 3,500 year ago, spewing billions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, which clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt to produce dramatic hail storms. 
• The ash fall-out caused weather anomalies, which translates into higher precipitations and higher humidity – classic conditions for attracting locusts. 
• The volcanic ash could also have blocked out the sunlight causing the stories of a plague of darkness. Scientists have found pumice, stone made from cooled volcanic lava, during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt. Analysis of the rock shows that it came from the Santorini volcano, providing physical evidence that the ash fallout from the eruption at Santorini reached Egyptian shores. 
• The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt, has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first pickings and so been first to fall victim.

Personally, I don't find the fact that the plagues could have natural causes as conflicting with the idea that God was the power behind them - if God is God then He can control the natural world and perform miracles through cause and effect. This goes back to the argument that events can have both a physical and spiritual meaning. As a note, natural events like these (apart from the volcano) occurred at various intervals in Egyptian history, and this does not limit them solely to the reign of Rameses II.

Another possible contender for the Pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites was Pepys II (although as he reigned later than Ramases II, this would rule out Ramases being the Pharaoh who was in  power during the plagues and Exodus itself).  In the Bible we hear that the same Pharaoh who ordered the death of the Hebrew infants was in power up until God 'hears' the cries of the Israelites and remembers their plight. We know that Moses was eighty when God asked him to speak to the new Pharaoh, although we don't know what time had lapsed between the previous Pharaoh dying and God speaking to Moses. However, it suggests that the previous Pharaoh had reigned for a very long time. Pepy II was thought to have governed for ninety four years, from the age of six until one hundred (although Ramases II also reigned from his teens until his nineties). From the Biblical account we would expect the reign of Pepy II's successor to be quite short. This pharaoh had to deal with Moses and the plagues, and the Bible indicates that he drowned in the Red Sea with the rest of his army (although whether Pharaoh himself died at the Red Sea, or just his army is not clear. Very little is definitely clear!) The Abydos king-list mentions that the successor to Pepys II was called Merenre II (also called Antiemdjaf), who reigned for only a single year. Not long after his death, Egypt collapsed both economically and under foreign invasion. No one knows exactly what happened.

Whilst I would love to resolve my thoughts on the matter conclusively, I am again left not knowing what to conclude about the validity of Exodus. Archaeology is constantly moving on, with previously accepted theories being revised as more evidence emerges, so it may be that some of the stumbling blocks to trusting the Bible account are removed in time. It may prove the opposite, and the story is shown to be definitively false. Or it may turn out that the story of Exodus is a combination of several events in Egyptian history and that whilst there may be some truth to the events, the facts as given in scripture are not strictly accurate. To what extent this impacts my faith is not something that I have yet resolved - this is definitely a subject I will have to park and come back to at a later date. On the plus side, my faith may be hanging on by a thread, but at least I've learned how to spell "Pharaoh".

*The arguments I've presented here are purely based on the reading below, I take no credit whatsoever for these theories.

Sources:
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/exodus_egypt.php
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7530678/Biblical-plagues-really-happened-say-scientists.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-isaacs/passover-in-egypt-did-the_b_846337.html
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_Exodus
https://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2009/06/Where-are-the-Israelite-Burials-From-the-Wilderness-Wanderings.aspx#Article
http://carm.org/why-isnt-there-any-record-millions-jews-wandering-desert
http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/exodus.html
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/exodus/exodus-in-the-bible-and-the-egyptian-plagues/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/world/africa/03exodus.html?_r=0
http://freethought.mbdojo.com/archeology.html
http://www.thescienceforum.com/pseudoscience/14214-why-there-no-evidence-exodus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipuwer_Papyrus