..and I have already stated that the inaccuracy of the OT is not a good reason to assume that the exodus did not occur.
Had you read this you would know this isn't just about what the OT said. But you did say the OT is "inaccurate" and in the same sentence suggest a myth from the OT is TRUE????????
And a God form the OT is true??????? While admitting the "inaccuracy of the OT"??? HA!
There are two main positions on the historicity of the Exodus in modern scholarship.
[3] The majority position is that the biblical Exodus narrative has some historical basis, although there is little of historical worth in it.
[23][6][11] The other position, often associated with the school of
Biblical minimalism,
[24][25] is that the biblical exodus traditions are the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis.
[26] The biblical Exodus narrative is best understood as a
founding myth of the Jewish people, providing an ideological foundation for their culture and institutions, not an accurate depiction of the history of the Israelites.
[27][11] The view that the biblical narrative is essentially correct unless it can explicitly be proved wrong (
Biblical maximalism) is today held by "few, if any [...] in mainstream scholarship, only on the more fundamentalist fringes."
[3] There is no direct evidence for any of the people or Exodus events in non-biblical ancient texts or in archaeological remains, and this has led most scholars to omit the Exodus events from comprehensive histories of Israel.
[28]
Reliability of the biblical account
Mainstream scholarship no longer accepts the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. Most scholars agree that the Exodus stories were written centuries after the apparent setting of the stories.
[5] The
Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40-41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1-2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40-41), and including place names such as
Goshen (Gen. 46:28),
Pithom, and
Ramesses (Exod. 1:11), as well as stating that 600,000 Israelite men were involved (Exodus 12:37).
[29] The
Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelite males aged 20 years and older in the desert during the wandering were 603,550, including 22,273 first-borns, which modern estimates put at 2.5-3 million total Israelites, a number that could not be supported by the
Sinai Desert through natural means.
[30] The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch.
[14] No modern attempt to identify an historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus.
[31] Some elements of the story are
miraculous and defy rational explanation, such as the
Plagues of Egypt and the
Crossing of the Red Sea.
[32] The Bible did not mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative, making it difficult for modern scholars to match Egyptian history and the biblical narrative.
[33]
While
ancient Egyptian texts from the
New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible.
[34] The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites, the Egyptian
Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus.
[35] Archaeologists
Israel Finkelstein and
Neil Asher Silberman say that archaeology has not found any evidence for even a small band of wandering Israelites living in the Sinai: "The conclusion – that Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable [...] repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence."
[36] Instead, modern archaeology suggests continuity between Canaanite and Israelite settlement, indicating a primarily Canaanite origin for Israel, with no suggestion that a group of foreigners from Egypt comprised early Israel.
[37][38]
Joel S. Baden
[43] noted the presence of Semitic-speaking slaves in Egypt who sometimes escaped in small numbers as potential inspirations for the Exodus.
[44] It is also possible that oppressive Egyptian rule of Canaan during the late second millennium BCE may have aided the adoption of the story of a small group of Egyptian refugees by the native Canaanites among the Israelites.
[45] The expulsion of the
Hyksos, a Semitic group that had conquered much of Egypt, by the
Seventeenth Dynasty of Egypt is also frequently discussed as a potential historical parallel or origin for the story.
[45][46][47] Alternatively, Nadav Na'aman argued that oppressive Egyptian rule of Canaan during the Nineteenth and especially the
Twentieth Dynasty may have inspired the Exodus narrative, forming a "
collective memory" of Egyptian oppression that was transferred from Canaan to Egypt itself in the popular consciousness.
[48]
Many other scholars reject this view, and instead see the biblical exodus traditions as the invention of the
exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis.
[26] Lester Grabbe, for instance, argued that "[t]here is no compelling reason that the exodus has to be rooted in history",
[49] and that the details of the story more closely fit the seventh through the fifth centuries BCE than the traditional dating to the second millennium BCE.
[50] Philip R. Davies suggested that the story may have been inspired by the return to Israel of Israelites and Judaeans who were placed in Egypt as garrison troops by the
Assyrians in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE.
[51]
