Did the Exodus happen?

A granite victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah, dated to around 1207 BC, lists the places and peoples his army claims to have defeated. One line reads "Israel is wasted, bare of seed". It is the earliest secure mention of Israel outside the Bible; some read the name on an older statue base of Ramesses II, now in Berlin.

The hieroglyphic marker attached to the name identifies Israel as a people rather than a city or territory, which suggests a group without major urban centres, in the hill country, at the end of the thirteenth century.

That establishes something real and limited. There was an Israel, in the right region, early. It says nothing about where it came from.

Exodus describes a departure of a whole population, with a stated figure of about six hundred thousand men on foot besides children, and forty years in the wilderness before entry into Canaan. It is not a story about a family group leaving quietly.

The scale is not incidental to the account. It is the point of the account, which is about a nation being made.

The settlements of the central highlands are where an arriving nation would have to show up, and they are the best-studied part of the question. A review of Iron Age Levantine archaeology reports that reading their population as indigenous to the Levant “is now largely a scholarly consensus”.

That is a positive finding about where these people came from rather than an absence of one. It does not rule out a smaller group arriving from Egypt and joining them, which is one of the positions below, and it does rule out the account at the scale the book gives.

What this page does not have is the other half of the usual argument. Whether any Egyptian text records the departure, and what repeated surveys of the Sinai have and have not found, are claims it could not source, so it does not make them.

The live positions are not the account at full scale. Some scholars read the whole founding narrative (patriarchs, exodus, conquest) as a legend written in the seventh century BC or later with no history behind it; the view that has gained broad agreement sits between.

The question has been argued from two schools for almost two centuries. One holds that the early Israelites came from outside Canaan and conquered it; the other that they rose from within it, forming a new polity and culture.

The reading that keeps a real departure alive sits between them: a smaller group, plausibly with genuine Egyptian experience, joining a population already in Canaan, with its story becoming everyone’s. Killebrew, whose chapter on forced migration, slavery and the emergence of Israel is cited here, has developed it as the “mixed multitude” theory, after the crowd that goes up out of Egypt with Israel in the book itself.

The two schools are not a believing position and a skeptical one. Both are historical reconstructions, held by people who take the text seriously.

A small group crossing a frontier in the late Bronze Age is exactly the sort of event that leaves nothing. It could be small enough for Egyptian records to miss, too mobile for a settlement layer, and made by people unlikely to write it down.

So the question cannot currently be answered in either direction. Absence of the event at the scale described is well established. Absence of any event behind the tradition is not, and probably could not be.

Whatever its history, the Exodus is the load-bearing story of the Hebrew Bible, and the texts say so in the reasoning rather than in the framing. Deuteronomy’s sabbath commandment gives it as the reason, where Exodus gives the creation: “you shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt … therefore Yahweh your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” The treatment of foreigners gets the same structure: “love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”

And it is rehearsed as something that happened to the people saying it. The instruction for the festival is to tell your son “it is because of that which Yahweh did for me when I came out of Egypt”, in the first person, and the Mishnah reads that verse as binding on every generation: each person is to see himself as though he had come out of Egypt.

For some believers a great deal rides on this, because a God who acts in history has to have acted in some. For others, the founding significance of the story does not depend on its being reportage. Rabbi David Wolpe, who told his Los Angeles congregation at Passover in 2001 what archaeologists had concluded about the Exodus, said that "faith ought not rest on splitting seas".

That is a disagreement about what kind of text this is, and it is not the one the archaeologists are having.