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fdelopera · 7 months

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Hi curious anon here. You mentioned in one of your posts (I think the sennek one? If I’m spelling it right) that the exodus from Egypt was metaphorical as the enslavement in Egypt didn’t happen, but I thought it did? Can you explain? (If you’re happy to of course)

Hi Anon! Thanks for your question. My response is looong lol (you got me going about a special interest), so buckle up!

Sooo I’m going to make a few guesses here, based on the way you’ve phrased your question. Judging from the fact that you’ve written Sukkot as “sennek” (I've looked through recent posts, and I think this is the post you're referring to), I’m going to guess that you’re not Jewish.

And judging from the fact that you think that Shemot, or “Names” (commonly written in Christian bibles as Exodus), is a literal historical account of Jewish history, I’m guessing that you have a Christian background.

You’re not alone in this. And I’m not saying this to pick on you. Many Christians have a literalist interpretation of the Bible, and most have zero knowledge of Jewish history (aside from maybe knowing some facts about the Holocaust). And so, what knowledge of Jewish history you have mostly comes from the Tanakh (what you call the Old Testament).

Tanakh is an acronym. It stands for Torah (the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets), Ketuvim (Writings). Also, the Tanakh and the “Old Testament” are not the same. The Tanakh has its own internal organization that makes sense for Jewish practice. The various Christian movements took the Tanakh, cut it up, reordered it, and then often mistranslated it as a way to justify the persecution of various groups of people — I’m looking at you, King James Bible.

But back to Shemot, the “Exodus” story. The story of Moshe leading the Israelites out of Egypt is more of a Canaanite cultural memory of the Late Bronze Age Collapse between around 1200 – 1150 BCE, which was preserved in oral history and passed down through the ages until it was written down in the form that we know it in the 6th century BCE by Jewish leaders from the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Since the text is influenced by Babylonian culture and mythology, just as Bereshit is (which you know as Genesis), it is likely that some of the writing and editing of Shemot took place during and after the Babylonian exile in the 500s BCE.

Now, I’m guessing that what I’ve just written in these two paragraphs above sounds very strange to you.

Wait, you might say, didn’t the Israelites conquer the land of Canaan?

Wasn’t the "Exodus" written by Moses’s own hand during the 13th century BCE?

And wasn’t the Pharaoh in the Exodus Ramesses II (aka Ramesses the Great), who ruled in the 13th century BCE?

Actually, no. None of that happened.

The Israelites didn’t conquer Canaan. The Israelites were the same people as the Canaanites, and these are the same peoples as who later became the Jews, as I will explain. The Semitic peoples who would become the Jewish people have been in this area of the Levant since the Bronze Age.

Moshe was not a historical figure and did not write the Torah.

The “Pharaoh” in Exodus is not any specific Egyptian ruler (Ramesses the Great as the “Pharaoh” is mostly a pop culture theory from the 20th century).

Okay, now that I’ve said all that, let’s dive in.

The first ever mention of Israel was inscribed in the Merneptah Stele, somewhere between 1213 to 1203 BCE. Pharaoh Merneptah, who was the Pharaoh after Ramesses the Great, describes a campaign in Canaan to subdue a people called Israel. But there is no mention of plagues or an exodus because those things didn’t happen. The Canaanites were not slaves in Egypt. Canaan was a vassal state of Egypt.

In fact, the events that occurred during the reign of a later Pharaoh, Ramesses III, relate more to Jewish history. Ramesses III won a pyrrhic victory over the Peleset and other “Sea Peoples” who came to Egypt fighting for resources during a time of famine, earthquakes, and extreme societal turmoil. And Ramesses III would witness the beginning of the end of the Bronze Age.

The Canaanites, who were a Semitic people in the Levant, gradually evolved into the people who would become the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah (i.e., Jewish people), but during the 13th Century BCE, they were Canaanites, not Jews.

The Canaanites were polytheistic, worshiping a complex pantheon of gods; they didn’t follow the later Jewish dietary laws (i.e., they ate pork); and their religious practice bore little to no resemblance to the Jewish people of the Second Temple Period.

So, to reiterate, the people in Canaan who called themselves Israel during the Bronze Age were a Semitic people, but they were not recognizably Jewish, at least not to us Jews today. Canaan was a vassal state of Egypt, just as Ugarit and the Hittite Empire were.

Canaan was part of the vast trading alliance that allowed the Bronze Age to produce the metal that historians have named it for: bronze.

Bronze is a mixture of copper and tin (about 90% copper and 10% tin), and in order to make it, the kingdoms of the Bronze Age had to coordinate the mining, transportation, and smelting of these metals from all over the known world. This trading network allowed for the exchange of all sorts of goods, from grain to textiles to gold. Canaan was just one of these trading partners.

Well, between 1200 BCE and 1150 BCE, this entire trading alliance that allowed Bronze Age society to function went (pardon the expression) completely tits up. This is likely due to a large array of events, including famine and earthquakes, which led to an overall societal disarray.

Some of the people who were hardest hit by the famine, people from Sardinia and Sicily to Mycenae and Crete, came together in a loose organization of peoples, looking for greener pastures. These were all peoples who were known to Egypt, and many of them had either served Egypt directly or had traded with Egypt during better days. According to ancient records, this loose grouping of peoples would arrive at various cities, consume resources there, and then leave for the next city (sacking the city in the process).

Just to be clear, these people were just as much the victims of famine as the cities they sacked. There were no “good guys” or “bad guys” in this equation, just people trying as best as they could to survive in a world that was going to shit.

Well, these “Sea Peoples” (as they were much later dubbed in the 19th century CE) eventually made their way to Egypt, but Ramesses III defeated them in battle around 1175 BCE. He had the battle immortalized on his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu.

We don’t know much about these Sea Peoples, but we do know what the Egyptians called them. And from those names, we can figure out some of their origins. Peoples such as the Ekwesh and the Denyen. These were likely the Achaeans and the Danaans.

If you’re familiar with Homer’s Iliad, you’ll recognize these as some of the names that Homer gives to the Greek tribes. Many of the Sea Peoples were from city states that are now part of Greece and Italy.

Yes, the Late Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th Century BCE didn’t just get handed down as a cultural memory of the “Exodus” to the people who would centuries later become the Jews. That cataclysm also inspired the stories that “Homer” would later canonize as the Trojan War in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Exodus and the Trojan War are both ancient cultural memories of the same societal collapse.

And neither the Trojan War nor the Exodus are factual. However, despite having little to no historicity, they both capture a similar feeling of the world being turned upside down.

Well, back to the Sea Peoples. Remember the Peleset that I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? They were one of these “Sea Peoples” that Ramesses III defeated. They were likely Mycenaean in origin, and possibly originated from Crete. After Ramesses III defeated them, he needed a place to relocate them along with several other tribes, including the Denyen and Tjeker. It was a “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” situation.

So, Egypt rounded up the surviving Peleset and sent them north to settle — to the land of Canaan.

Now, if you have some Biblical background, let me ask you this. What does “Peleset” sound like? What if we start it with an aspirated consonant, more of a “Ph” instead of a “P”?

That’s right. The Peleset settled in Canaan and became the Philistines.

This is where the real story of the people who would become the Jews begins.

As the Mycenaean (aka Greek) Peleset settled in their new home, they clashed with the Semitic Israelite people of Canaan. Some of these Canaanites fought back. These Canaanites also organized themselves into different groups, or “tribes.” (See where this is going?) Some of these tribes were in the Northern area of Canaan, and some were in the South, but there was a delineation between North and South — aka they did not start out as one people and then split in two. They started as two separate groups.

If you’re following me so far, you’ll know that I’m now talking about what would in time become the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Well, backtracking a bit. The Bronze Age was ending, and the Iron Age was about to begin. The Peleset/Philistines were experts at smelting iron, which was harder to work with than bronze due to it having a much higher smelting temperature. When the Peleset settled in Canaan, they brought this iron smelting knowledge with them, and they used it to make weapons to subdue the local Canaanite peoples. The Canaanites therefore had to fight back “with sticks and stones.”

Hmm. Does that sound familiar? Who is one of the most famous Philistines you can think of from the Tanakh (the Old Testament)? I’ll give you a guess. It’s in the Book of Samuel (in the Tanakh, that’s in the Nevi’im — The Prophets).

That’s right. Goliath.

The story of “David and Goliath” is likely a Jewish cultural memory that was transmitted orally from the time of the Canaanite struggles against the Peleset.

The man who would become King David used a well-slinged stone to fell the much greater Goliath, and then he used Goliath’s own iron sword to cut off Goliath’s head.

In this metaphor, we can see the struggle between the Canaanite tribes and the Peleset, as the Canaanites fought to hold off the Peleset’s greater military might.

Historically, the Peleset eventually intermarried with the Canaanites, and within several generations, they were all one people. Likewise, the Mycenaean Denyen tribe may have settled in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, intermarried with the Canaanites, and become the Tribe of Dan.

The Book of Samuel, containing the story of David and Goliath, was written down in the form we would recognize today in the 500s BCE during the Babylonian Exile. It is a cultural memory of the time that the Canaanites were unable to wield iron weapons against a much more technologically advanced society, and it would have resonated with the Jews held captive in Babylon.

And with this mention of the Babylonian Exile, I come to the question that remains. And I think the question that you are asking. Where did the story of Shemot, the “Exodus,” the “Going Out,” come from?

And more importantly, why was that story so important to canonize in the Torah — the Jewish people’s “Instruction”?

The Shemot was likely written down and edited in a form that we would recognize today during and after the Babylonian Exile.

So, what was the Babylonian Exile? And what was its impact on Judaism?

To answer that, I need to start this part of the story about 130 years before the Babylonian Exile, in around 730 BCE. We’re now about 450 years after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, when the Canaanites were fighting the Peleset tribe.

Between about 730 and 720 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Now, you may know this as the time when the “Ten Tribes of Israel were lost.”

In reality, the Assyrians didn’t capture the entire population of Israel. They did capture the Israelite elite and force them to relocate to Mesopotamia, but there were many people from the Israelite tribes left behind. The Ten Tribes were never “lost” because many of the remaining people in the Northern Kingdom migrated south to the Kingdom of Judah.

One such group of people from the Northern Kingdom of Israel maintained their distinct identity and still exist today: the Samaritans. These are the people who today are the Samaritan Israelites. They have their own Torah and their own Temple on Mount Gerizim, where they continue the tradition of animal sacrifice, as the Jews did in Jerusalem before the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Samaritans keep the Sabbath, they observe Kashrut laws (i.e., they keep kosher), and they hold sacrifices on Yom Kippur and Pesach. In short, they have maintained religious practices that are similar to Judaism during the Second Temple period.

This mass migration into the Kingdom of Judah in the late 700s and early 600s BCE is where Judaism as we know it today really started to take shape.

At that time, the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel were polytheistic. They ate pork. They did many of the things that the writers of the Torah tell the Jews not to do.

This is where many of these commandments began, when the priests of Judah needed to define what it was to be a Jew (a member of the Tribe of Judah), in the face of this mass migration from the Kingdom of Israel.

You see, the Ancient Jews didn’t know about germ theory or recognize that trichinosis was caused by eating undercooked pork. That’s not why pigs are treyf. Pigs are treyf because eating pork began as a societal taboo. In short, pigs take a lot of resources to care for, and they eat people food, not grass (i.e. they don’t chew a cud). So if you kept pigs, you would be taking away resources from other people. When you are living in a precarious society that is constantly being raided and conquered by outsiders, you have to make sure that your people are fed, and if you’re competing with a particular livestock over food, that livestock has to be outlawed.

This time period is also likely when the Kingdom of Judah started to practice monolatry (worshiping one God without explicitly denying the existence of other Gods). The people of Judah worshiped YHWH (Adonai) as their God, and the Northern Kingdom of Israel worshiped El as the head of their polytheistic pantheon. The Jews put both of them together as the same G-d. That is why the Bereshit (Genesis) begins:

When Elohim (G-d) began to shape heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste, and darkness over Tehom (the Deep), and the breath of Elohim (G-d) hovering over the waters

NOTE: This is a modification to Robert Alter’s translation of the first two lines of Bereshit (Genesis) in the Tanakh. In a few paragraphs, I will explain the modification I’ve made of transliterating the Hebrew word “Tehom,” instead of (mis)translating this word as “the Deep” as in nearly every translation of Genesis.

Then over the next two hundred years, monolatry would gradually become monotheism. One of the Northern Kingdom’s gods, Baal, was especially popular, so the Judean leadership had to expressly forbid the worship of this god during the writing of the Tanakh.

The message was clear: If we’re going to be one people, we need to worship one G-d. And the importance of the Babylonian Exile cannot be overstated in this shift from monolatry to monotheism. The period during and after the Babylonian Exile is when most of the Tanakh was edited into a form that we would recognize today.

So, I come back to the question, what was the Babylonian Exile? It began, as many wars do, as a conflict over monetary tribute.

Around 598 BCE, the Judean King Jehoiakim refused to continue paying tribute to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. And so in around 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II’s troops besieged Jerusalem, killed King Jehoiakim, and captured much of the Judean leadership, holding them captive in Babylon. Over the next ten years, Nebuchadnezzar II continued his siege of Jerusalem, and in 587, he destroyed the First Temple, looted it for its treasures, and took more of the Jews captive. The deportation of the Jewish people to Babylon continued throughout the 580s BCE.

So, by the 570s BCE, the majority of the Jews were captives in a strange land. They were second-class citizens with few rights. The Jews feared that their people would start to assimilate into Babylonian society, intermarry so that they could secure greater freedom for their descendants, and then ultimately disappear as a unique people.

The Jewish leadership knew that this assimilation would begin by the Jews worshiping Babylonian gods.

So the Jewish leadership had a brilliant idea. They said, “We are not in danger of our people drifting into polytheism, assimilation, and cultural death, because we declare that the Babylonian gods do not exist. There is only one G-d, Adonai.”

Now we have left monolatry, and we are fully in monotheism.

And so, the Jews in captivity took Babylonian stories that their children heard around them, and they made these stories Jewish.

That is why the opening lines of Genesis sound so much like the opening lines of the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish.

And remember when I mentioned that I had transliterated “Tehom” in the first two lines of Bereshit (Genesis) above, instead of using the standard translation of “the Deep”? That is because Tehom is a Hebrew cognate for the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat, who the Babylonian god Marduk defeated and used to shape the heavens and the earth, just as Elohim shaped the heavens and the earth.

When you read the Enuma Elish, you can see the parallels to Genesis:

When the heavens above did not exist, And earth beneath had not come into being — There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter, And demiurge Tiamat, who gave birth to them all; They had mingled their waters together Before meadow-land had coalesced and reed-bed was to be found — When not one of the gods had been formed Or had come into being, when no destinies had been decreed, The gods were created within them

That is also why the flood story of Noah and the Ark sounds so much like the flood story from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

That is why the story of Moshe’s mother saving him by placing him in a basket on the Nile River parallels the story of King Sargon of Akkad’s mother saving him by placing him in a basket on the Euphrates River.

In order to survive as a people, the Jews consolidated all gods into one G-d. Adonai. Shema Yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai ehad. "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One."

The Jews said, yes, we acknowledge that we are hearing these polytheistic Babylonian stories in our captivity, but we will make them our own so that we can continue to exist as a people.

But back to your question. What about the story told in Shemot, the “Exodus” from the Land of Egypt?

I think by now you can see the parallels between the Jewish people held as captives in Babylon and the story that they told, of the Israelites held as slaves in Egypt.

And so, the Exodus story, which had been told and retold in various ways as a means to process the cataclysmic trauma of the Late Bronze Age Collapse (similar to the oral retellings of the Trojan War epic before they were written down by “Homer”), now took on a new meaning.

The Exodus story now represented the Jewish people’s hope for escape from Babylon. It represented the Jewish people’s desire to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that Nebuchadnezzar II had destroyed. It represented the acceptance that it would take at least a generation before the Jews would be able to return to Jerusalem.

And it represented a cautionary tale about leaders who become too powerful, no matter how beloved they may be.

At a Torah study this Sukkot, the Rabbi discussed why the writers of Devarim (Deuteronomy) said that Moshe couldn’t enter Canaan, even though he'd led the Israelites out of Egypt (which, again, didn't literally happen). And one interpretation is because the Jewish leaders were writing and editing the Exodus during and shortly after the Babylonian Exile, and after seeing the Kingdom of Judah fall because of bad leadership. And they were saying, “It doesn't matter how beloved a leader is. If they start becoming a demagogue, and start behaving as someone who is drunk on their own power, you can't trust them as a leader. And you need to find new leadership.” And damn if that isn't a lesson that we could all stand to learn from!

So, was the Exodus story historically true? No. But does it matter that the Exodus story isn’t historically true? No, it does not. It was and is and will continue to be deeply meaningful to the Jewish people. The Shemot, the Exodus, the breaking of chains, the escape from the “Pharaohs” that enslave us — these are still deeply meaningful to us as Jews.

Was Moshe a historical figure? No, he was not. Is he one of the most fascinating, inspiring, and deeply human figures in Jewish tradition, and in literature in general? Yes, he is. Moshe was an emergent leader, an everyman, a stutterer, and yet he was chosen to lead and speak for his people. He was chosen to write the Torah, the “Instruction,” that has guided us for thousands of years. It doesn't matter that he was not a historical person. What matters is what he stands for. He is the one who directed us in what it is to be Jewish.

Now, fast forward to 538 BCE, around 60 years after the Jews were first taken as captives to Babylon. The Jewish people’s prayers were answered when Persian King Cyrus the Great defeated Babylon in battle, and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, where they began construction on the Second Temple, which was completed around 515 BCE.

The Persian Zoroastrians were henotheistic (they worshiped one God, Ahura Mazda, but they recognized other gods as well). They also had a chief adversarial deity, Angra Mainyu, who was in direct opposition to Ahura Mazda.

Just as the Jews had incorporated Babylonian stories into their texts as a way to preserve their identity as a Jewish people, the Jews now incorporated this idea of “good versus evil” (i.e., It’s better to assimilate the foreign god to us, than to assimilate us to the foreign god).

This shift can be seen in the later story of the Book of Job, which is in the Ketuvim (Writings). Jews have no devil and no hell. There is no “eternal afterlife damnation," and there is no “original sin.” Jews believe in living a good life, right here on earth, and being buried in Jewish soil. Some Jews believe that we go to Sheol when we die, which is a shadowy place of peaceful rest, similar to the Greek realm of Hades. In the Book of Job, the Hebrew word “hassatan” (which Christians transliterate as “Satan”) is just a lawyerly adversary, like a “devil’s advocate” who debates for the other side of the argument. It’s certainly not anything akin to a Christian “devil.”

However, throughout the Second Temple period, various apocalyptic Jewish sects would arise in response to Greek and then Roman persecution, inspired by the Zoroastrian idea of a battle between “the light and the dark.”

In the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, this would lead to a search for the Moshiach: a human leader (not divine) who was descended from the line of King David, and who would restore Jerusalem. And that would not culminate in Jesus (Jews don’t recognize Jesus as Moshiach — for us, he's a really cool dude who said some very profound things, but he's not That Guy).

Rather, the search for Moshiach would stem from the events leading up to the Jewish War, which concluded in 70 CE with the Romans destroying the Second Temple and sacking Jerusalem, and it would culminate in the Bar Kochba revolt between 132 and 135 CE. The Bar Kochba revolt resulted in a Roman campaign of systematic Jewish slaughter and “ethnic cleansing” that nearly destroyed the Jewish people a second time. But that’s a story for another day!

In closing, I encourage you to learn more about Jewish history. And don’t just learn about us from the Holocaust, our darkest hour. Learn about our full history. I highly recommend Sam Aronow’s excellent series on YouTube, which is an ongoing Jewish history project. The YouTube channel Useful Charts also provides excellent overviews of Jewish history.

#tfw a simple ask compels you to write 4000 words #i hope i've answered your question anon!#jewish history #jewish studies #judaism tag

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