Carol Dougherty has pointed out that many Greek cities claimed to be founded by murderers, in an article amusingly entitled "It's Murder to Found a Colony". I extended her findings to the "barbarian" Mediterranean nations of Carthage and Rome, and showed how the British extrapolated a Syrian colony legend to their entire nation, in Original Sin. Here I enter more controversial territory.
Like the British tale of Diocletian, the Exodus is a national origin myth rather than a local one, but one with several strata. When confronted with a contradiction between the Bible and archaeology, the extreme minimalists will play it up as proof that the Bible is hogwash. Hershel Shanks (with Josh MacDowell) would plead in response that we "read the Bible carefully". I tend to agree with Shanks and MacDowell, if not for their reasons. The "Bible" defined as the historical/legendary superstructure of Genesis-2 Kings is often so wrong as to be fictional, but certain legends scattered within that corpus tend to do a better job.
As an example: Genesis's Joseph narrative has all Joseph's brothers come down to Egypt - including Dan and Judah. In the Exodus narrative, no-one has left Egypt; all Israel has stayed in the Nile Delta as citizens, and then slaves. By the time they leave Egypt, there are 2 million Israelites outside Canaan (Exodus 12:37) and no Israelites inside. All Palestine is Canaanite and must be cleansed. True, Shechem surrendered before the sojourn in Egypt (Genesis 34) and for that matter Gibeon after (Joshua 9). But Levi razed Shechem and Joshua enslaved Gibeon. Neither city joined the house of Israel - in the ideal history.
Yet the actual memories differ. Even for poems within this epic, Asher and Dan were "abiding in ships" (Judges 5:17). Outside it, "by origin and birth you are from the land of the Canaanites - your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite" (Ezekiel 16:3). Sperling noted that Deuteronomy 33, another early text, does not know of the Exodus (p. 45). And Judges strongly implies that Dan had a distinct culture - a sort of syncretic Homericism centred around Samson and opposed to Philistia - which moved itself uphill to Laish while more-or-less adopting Levitism. So which is it - a Heraclid return from Egypt, or a hill-based revival in southern Canaan?
The Bible also overlooked the Sphinx in the bedroom of ancient Palestinian history: that Egypt ruled the highlands and the Jordan Valley for centuries, until 1000 BCE. During Rameses III's reign, the Philistines came and tried to take the Nile Delta. Pharaoh could not drive them off or even exact control over them, but he still held on to the areas surrounding them. Only much later did the Ramessides give up and stay home - and even then adventurers like Sheshonq (Shishak) and Necho were pleased to raid the place.
All the southern Canaanites remembered was they were once slaves of Egypt, after a period when Canaanites held authority in Egypt. The Torah and DtrH represent a harmony of these concepts, enslaving Israel in Egypt. Sperling believes there were nationalistic imperatives for Israel to assert itself as foreign to the land yet divinely entitled to it, particularly after Cyrus transplanted thousands of Babylonian Jews back into the now-province "Yehud". For whatever reason, Israel had lost all memory of life in Canaan under Egyptian rule, from the Hyksos to the New Kingdom. But it would have posed a problem to any historians of that era (like the Deuteronomist) - if Israel came from the Delta, how did it arrive in the Judaean and Samarian hill country?
Mazar and others have defined the XX Dynasty's tenure in Canaan to be "Iron Age IA" (p. 296) as opposed to the Late Bronze Age. This period represents the last gasp of Egyptian hegemony. By dated Egyptian objects it spans 50 years between Rameses III and VI. Most would put it early to mid 1100's BCE, but with a time so far away it is more useful to assign events to dynasties and pottery groups.
The principal fact of the age was the replacement of the indigenous population of the southern Palestinian coast with a foreign population, using pottery made on location in a style we call Late Helladic IIIC. LH IIIC was a lineal descendent of LH IIIB, Mycenaean ware, which in Ugarit last appeared during advisor Baya's and Pharaoh Tausert's reign, three years before Ramesses III. These LH IIIC outsiders burnt down every city they could reach, both Canaanite (Ashdod, Tel Miqne) and Egyptian (Tel Mor). In the case of Ashdod and Tel Miqne, the newcomers built newer, bigger, much different cities on their ruins.
Pharaoh Ramesses III would not go down without a fight. The best-excavated city of the period is Beth Shean, in the northern part of the Jordan Valley. As was typical of the period, Beth Shean VII got a good sacking in the earliest 1100's. It fared rather better than the now-Philistine coast and the Hittite heartland, in that its inhabitants were able to rebuild it right afterwards. (The same happened in Mycenaean Greece.) Beth Shean VI got a makeover in a more Egyptian style. Lachish, Megiddo, and Tel Sera' also succumbed to the age (strata VIIA, VII, and X respectively) but were again rebuilt (VIIB, VII, IX) and again according to Egypto-Canaanite aesthetic (papyrus columns, hieratic inscriptions, etc.). The only differences: 1) these cities had to be rebuilt and 2) there were no more Mycenaean/Cypriot trade goods.
In particular, the dead of these cities were buried in anthropoid clay coffins. This was the fashion of New Kingdom Egypt from King Tutankhamen down to the middle classes. Such coffins have been found in Beth Shean, Tell Fara Cemetery 500, and (centuries prior to the Sea Peoples) Deir el-Balah. Lachish Tomb 570 even contained one with an Egyptian funerary inscription.
The renewal of Egyptian interest in cities ringing the Philistine beachhead was clearly military in nature. The Egyptians rebuilt some outposts themselves, like Tel Mor; others, like Gezer, they seem to have helped the Canaanites resettle under their protection. In this the Egyptians behaved much like the Romans in their British coloniae Camulodunum and Glevum.
At the time Joshua and the Judges were supposedly making their rounds, the strongest Canaanite towns of the area lived under Egyptian governors. Some of these towns were even founded by Egyptians, as forts. The Bible seems to remember little of it - or does it?
Moses began his career with an Egyptian name. And, as the movie "Prince of Egypt" points out, he killed a man and fled to Midian - wherein he took a wife.
I think it possible that one of the Egyptian "coloniae" in Midian began to form a legend around (?-)Moses, an ancestral founder who killed a man in Egypt. Most likely this was an ethnically Midianite/Canaanite city which owed its foundation and/or protection to Egyptians. The rest of the Israelite nation at the time did not have a founding story: as Judges tirelessly reminds us, each tribe believed what was right in its own eyes. But as the Diocletian story explained where the Britons came from (and incidentally tied them in with ancient civilisation, against the Saxons and even Romans), the Jewish colonial story provided the missing link between the vague memories Canaan retained about being princes in Egypt and then slaves of Egypt. Moses killed a man while in Egypt. Since the Israelites were slaves at the time, the man he killed must have been an overseer. If he was to be a hero of Israel, he must be an Israelite, so he was pulled out of the water and merely raised as Egyptian.
This is all speculation. (It would help my case if I had more data on Phoenician founding myths.) But it does explain the core of the Exodus in a way consistent with such stories elsewhere.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
11 Feb 2001: started this project. 18 Feb: removed the background to this portion into "Original Sin" project. 26 Feb: cleaned up bibliography & improved notes on Egypt. 9 May 2004: Sperling.
Thanks to Marcovic in soc.history.ancient for the Monmouth tip, which split the project.