Evidence for Exodus

Interesting article from the NYT on this Easter holiday:

Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

It’s a bit difficult to imagine what evidence there could be for this kind of event. Wave fossils? Sedimentary chariots?

I’m a bit more interested in the idea that the Hebrews were never in Egypt at all. One linguistic argument is that if they had been, we should expect to see lots of Egyptian loan words in Hebrew, and we don’t. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

[N]otwithstanding the long sojourn in Egypt, the number of Egyptian words that have found a place in the Hebrew vocabulary is exceedingly small.

This is probably something I’ll be posting on more as I learn more about it.