Introduction
While I was doing research for Genesis 4–11, I got sidetracked on the topic of the patriarchs, and made a note to come back to read more on it. I initially only intended to write about Gen 2–3 (Eden) and 4–11 (Cain, Noah, Babel, and things in-between). After following up on that note to myself, I decided to expand my research into a third article.
While I cannot possibly cover every detail of interest here, I will first look at concerning issues in the patriarchal narratives in a light similar to Gen 2–11, then the exodus narrative, then how the two narratives relate to each other.
The Patriarchs
Many readers note the tonal difference between Gen 1–11 and the rest of the book. The early chapters are a quick series of shorter narratives, built from a common set of tropes found throughout ancient Southwest Asian myths. The stories are etiologies; they serve to explain where this thing came from, or why things are this way. Characters act within those stories, but we receive very little detail about their lives outside those stories.
In contrast, the rest of Genesis focuses on four generations of men and their immediate families — Abraham (aka Abram), Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph — whose stories are not so ‘mythological’. Readers familiar with their stories may notice that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are frequently mentioned together in the Bible, while Joseph, whose own story is the longest of the four and has the largest narrative impact (bringing Jacob and his twelve sons’ families into Egypt), is rarely mentioned in tandem with the other three.
One of the most obvious irregularities in the patriarchal stories that readers notice is a certain story that is told three times. Gen 12.14–20 and 20.1–18, 21.22–33 and 26.6–33 tell how Patriarch settled in Country and told King that his wife was his sister because he feared King would kill him. In the first two, the patriarch is Abram/Abraham, while the third concerns Isaac. The latter two stories are nearly identical. (I’ll return to the first story, Gen 12.14–20, further below.)
This is not a ‘like father like son’ string of coincidences, for the broader details are identical, the cast of secondary characters is the same, and each story functions as an etiology for the place-name ‘Beersheba’. Whether one was the original and the other an intentional rewrite, or whether both evolved out of an earlier version, is irrelevant at the moment; the fact is we have the same story told twice.
Abraham’s version of the story is also interrupted by the birth of his son Isaac and the exile of his son Ishmael. By itself, this suggests that the two stories — one of Abraham and Sarah in Gerar, the other of Isaac and Ishmael — are themselves from two different traditions about Abraham. This suspicion is bolstered when we see that Ishmael and his mother flee to Beersheba (21.24), which doesn’t receive that name until after they flee (21.31).
Another discontinuity is found regarding Jacob’s son Judah (patriarchal namesake of the southern kingdom). Everything from Gen 37 onward concerns Jacob’s son Joseph. Yet chapter 38 abruptly swerves sideways to tell a different story: Judah failed to uphold the levirate marriage custom for his daughter-in-law Tamar, so Tamar tricked Judah into impregnating her, which led to the birth of twins.
Many modern commentators consider Genesis 38 to be an intrusive addition to the larger Joseph story (Genesis 37–50).1
Gen 38’s awkward placement (takes place after most of Gen 39–45, but is found before that) was recognized by ancient interpreters as well, who danced around the issue by moving the chapter’s story later into the Joseph narrative. But the larger problem with this story is a matter of chronology. Joseph was gone in Egypt about twenty-four years, and when he reunites with his family, they all move down to Egypt to be with him. Yet, Judah has left his father’s household to make his own in another region of Canaan, and three full generations pass while he is living there. (Gen 46.12 adds a fourth generation, the sons of one of Judah’s twins.) Joseph’s story in Gen 37–50 cannot be completely reconciled with Judah’s story in Gen 38. Instead, it must have come from another source.
The Exodus
Like the stories of the flood, and the patriarchs, the exodus narrative involved a cluster of traditions that grew in separate directions, until they were eventually combined by the authors of the Torah. These different traditions can be detected — as with the two flood stories in Gen 6–9 — by differences in the writing style and themes.
The easiest place to find these disparate traditions are in the ‘plagues of Egypt’. The narration around each plague is formulaic: Yhwh instructs the prophet, Pharaoh is warned, the plague happens, Pharaoh remains unmoved, repeat. The formula changes inconsistently between different paragraphs. If the narrative is laid out, and we split it into two columns according to the contrary formulas, we discover they had two versions of the same story, with different lists of plagues. My review of the text following this method gave me the two following lists, which I’ll call Source A and Source B.
Source A
Source B
Staff turns into a snake
Nile River turns to blood
All waters in Egypt turn into blood
Frogs
Frogs
Flies
Gnats
Livestock diseased
Boils
Thunder and hail
Locusts
Darkness*
Death of the firstborn
There are some things to note about these two lists. First, their overlaps are not surprising, since they’re evolving from a common ancestor story. The boils are ‘the most poorly attested’, found only here in Source B.
Psa 78 has a list of plagues very similar to Source A, though there is debate whether verse 45 portrays the ‘flies’ and ‘frogs’ as two plagues closely related or as a single plague, and whether verses 49–51 portray ‘destroying angels’ as the agents of God’s wrath in killing the firstborn, or whether the angels are a distinct plague. The late Psa 105 also has a list close to Source A; it lacks the diseased livestock, but places the darkness at the top of its list. The fragmented Dead Sea Scroll 4Q422 contains a list of plagues closer to the canonical version of Exodus, though it appears to be missing the boils, and the darkness is in the middle of the list, rather than near the end. Josephus, at the end of the first century CE, has a list almost identical to the canonical version, missing only the plague of flies after the frogs and before the gnats/lice.
The different accounts in Psalms 78 and 105, however, suggest that in ancient Israel there was no standard order for these plagues and that not all traditions agreed that there were ten plagues.5
The evidence available in Gen 2–11 places the Torah’s authorship during or after the Babylonian period in Judean history. The texts above show how traditions about the exodus were still in flux even as late as the second century BCE, with Source B showing the widest divergence.
most scholars separate the plague account into an original two or perhaps three sources […] and they posit that one or more of these had a seven-plague tradition before they were combined and redacted and a final number of ten was achieved.6
Some biblical texts put an unusual spin on the plagues: Israel was the target of God’s wrath because they committed idolatry while in Egypt. Ezek 20.5–10 recaps the familiar exodus narrative, but before the Israelites are rescued, God commands them to give up their ‘detestable things’ and the ‘idols of Egypt’. The only allusion to the plagues is when God threatens to ‘pour out my wrath’ on Israel ‘in the midst of the land of Egypt’ for refusing to give up their idols (verse 8). Deut 7.15 mentions how Israel suffered ‘all the evil diseases of Egypt’, which are identified as the plagues which God threw against Egypt (Deut 28.58–60; cf. Exo 15.26).
Deut 28.58–60 comes at the end of a long chapter where God warns the Israelites of worse and worse punishments that will come upon them if they persist in breaking the divine law. These punishments include some similar to the exodus plagues: disease (verse 21), boils (27,35), midday darkness (28–29), and locusts (38). The rest of the chapter, and the parallel Lev 26, describe war, famine, fire, slavery, exile, family deaths, cannibalism, scavenger animals, and attacks by wild animals. These kinds of threats are held by prophets over various kingdoms and kings (e.g. Jer 16.1–4; Ezek 5.17; Nah 3.15; Joel 1–2).
These dangers are not unique to biblical literature. After the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1754 BCE) lays out its law code, the Babylonian king initially warns that future kings who break his law will suffer famine, darkness, and exile. He then invokes various gods to contribute disaster to the kingdom: Belit will devastate the land, Ea will stop rivers and bring famine, Adad will bring drought and famine, Zamama will turn day into night, Nintu will stop births, and Ninkarak will bring disease.
The vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, a king of Assyria, bind his subjects to an oath to serve the laws of his kingdom. If they violate this oath, ‘all the gods of every land’ will bring down terrifying punishments: Anu, Sîn, Nergal, and Gula will bring diseases, Shamash will bring darkness, Ninurta will bring scavenger birds, Belet-ili will stop births, Adad will bring drought, locusts, famine, and cannibalism, one god (name unknown) will bring wild animal attacks. Esarhaddon’s threats even include the following:
May all the gods who are named in this treaty tablet reduce your soil in size to be as narrow as a brick, turn your soil into iron, so that no one may cut a furrow in it. Just as rain does not fall from a copper sky, so may there come neither rain nor dew upon your fields and meadows, but let it rain burning coals in your land instead of dew.8
This is very close to Deuteronomy (cf. Lev 26.19–20):
Deuteronomy 28.23–24
The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. Yhwh will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.
If this is the right track to follow, it appears the exodus plagues may have grown from a common Southwest Asian motif of threatening environmental and social disasters against a kingdom for refusing to do what the gods ordered them to do.
Moses is mentioned by name just twice in biblical texts predating the Babylonian exile: Jer 15.1 and Micah 6.4. The former — written during the Babylonian period, but before the exile — is unsurprising. The prophet Micah was active more than one hundred years before Jeremiah, in the Assyrian period, but the reference to Moses in Micah 6.4 is regarded as ‘a late addition’,
There is some evidence of Moses’ identification as a military commander which, though impossible to reconcile with the biblical narrative, was nevertheless used by Judean authors in the first century CE.
My mother, the high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not over me.13
This story is almost identical to Exo 2.2–3, and it has been noted the absence of the father and the ‘careful construction’ of the basket work within Sargon’s birth story, but not Moses’.
Beyond these, there are many other examples of discontinuity within the biblical exodus narrative that we can point out. Num 22 has two versions of the story of the Moabites hiring Balaam to prophesy against Israel. Exo 25.10–22 and 37.1–9 contradict Deut 10.1–5 on when the ark of the covenant was made, and who made it. As the list of discontinuities keeps building, it is amply demonstrated that the exodus narrative — with its many alternate traditions sitting beside each other — evolved in many different ways over a long time, such that the Torah could not have been written by anyone involved in the events portrayed.
Further Discontinuities
As the product of scribes in the Babylonian or Persian period, the Torah conveys a single grand narrative: God made the world (roughly seven thousand years ago, according to the Hebrew Bible), then after twenty generations he chose a man, Abraham, to be the forefather of a mighty nation to live in the land of Canaan, and they emerged several generations later, after they had been made slaves in Egypt and God rescued them and gave them a divine law to follow.
The first hint that something is ‘off’ about the relationship between Genesis and Exodus is that Joseph’s death is repeated. The opening of Exodus is pointing readers over to the end of Genesis, to remind them of ‘how we got here’. This kind of ‘doubling’ is a sign within other parts of the Torah that different traditions are being combined; it shouldn’t be necessary if all five books of the Torah were designed to be read together. It is comparatively easy to find the seams of alternate traditions within each the patriarchal stories of Genesis and the plague traditions of Exodus. Something harder to notice is that the two narratives do not sit together that well. Once one clue is discovered, others start to become more obvious.
Mentioned above was the story of Judah and Tamar, and its discontinuity with Joseph’s story. Another obstacle to Joseph’s story is that the new pharaoh has no idea who Joseph was (Exo 1.8). Egypt’s pharaohs appointed their successors as coregents in their final years. Joseph ruled over all Egypt, second only to the pharaoh (Gen 41.39–45). Our historical knowledge of Egyptian politics makes it difficult to accept that the new pharaoh never knew the highest member of his predecessor’s court. Textual criticism of Gen 50 also suggests the narrative concluded with Joseph and his brothers traveling from Egypt to Canaan to bury their father, where Joseph’s brothers remained, while only Joseph returned to Egypt. The story has been redacted to keep all twelve sons of Jacob in Egypt.
Jerusalem’s temple was built circa 970 BCE, four hundred eighty years after the exodus (1 Kings 6.1), which puts the exodus around 1450 BCE. However, the enslaved Hebrews built the city Pi-Rameses (Exo 1.11) before Moses’ birth (2.1–2), who led the escape from Egypt when he was about eighty years old (Deut 29.5; 34.7). Rameses was built around 1290 BCE. This requires the impossible situation where the Israelites escaped their enslavement a century and a half before they built a city while slaves.
The Israelites also could not have escaped Egypt when fleeing to Canaan, because Egypt controlled Canaan.
The dates provided by the Bible for the exodus and conquest are impossible. […] During that era, the mighty Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty was at the height of its power. Under King Thutmoses III, Egyptian armies pushed northward through Canaan and established a provincial border region for the Egyptian Empire. […] not a single biblical author expresses any awareness that there ever had been an Egyptian empire in Canaan.17
In a more general sense, there is also a large division of the ethos in Genesis from the one in Exodus. The former is actually quite inclusive of different ethnicities, cultures, and religious expressions, with God extending favor to the patriarchs all the same. The latter is extremely exclusive, heavily discouraging intermarriage with non-Israelites, and prescribing very strict cultural and religious practices. The patriarchs interact positively with various people from Canaan, while the Israelites are instructed to expel the Canaanites without mercy, or in some cases slaughter entire tribes.
Finally, the biggest dilemma of all is that, after decades upon decades of searching, archaeologists and historians have found zero evidence of millions of slaves suddenly leaving Egypt all at once and conquering Canaan forty years later.
Rival Origin Stories
What we’re left with is a tangled web of traditions, of patriarchs and of an exodus. Details within either story don’t fit together, and the two stories don’t fit with each other. Where did these two origin stories come from, then?
It has long been recognized that the traditions about the patriarchs as the ancestors of the Israelites were at one time independent from the tradition placing the people’s origin in Egypt, its exodus from there and the subsequent conquest of Canaan as their new homeland.21
The ‘Deuteronomistic History’ — the Book of Joshua on through the Books of Kings — regularly portrays the exodus as the true beginning of Israel.
The Chronicler presents a picture of undisturbed continuity of settlement stretching from ‘the children of Israel’, that is, the sons of Jacob, to the time of David’s reign, when already in their earliest days the people are settled throughout their broadest territorial reaches (I Chron. 13.1–5). The period between Jacob’s sons and David, which according to the conventional picture of Israel’s history includes the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus, the wandering in the wilderness, the conquest, and the unstable period of the judges, is not included in the Chronicler’s historical portrayal, but is rather ‘bridged upon’. […] severance from the land, whether in the beginning of Israel’s history or in its later phase, is reduced to the minimum. The tie with the land is an undisturbed continuity23
It may help to show a specific instance of this. First Chronicles 7.20–29 lists nine generations between Ephraim and Joshua. Israel’s enslavement happened during Ephraim’s generation, and concluded during Joshua’s. However, this genealogy depicts those nine generations living in the central highlands of Canaan, where Ephraim’s tribe is supposed to settle after the exodus. Ephraim’s sons (or grandsons) Ezer and Elead ‘came down’ from Canaan’s highlands to raid cattle in Gath’s lowlands (7.21), and Ephraim’s granddaughter Sheerah built cities located in the highlands (7.24). This obscure passage in the genealogy reveals a tradition where no exodus ever took place because Ephraim and his descendants always lived in Canaan.
The exodus is not found in any biblical literature until the eighth century BCE. The first references come from Hosea and Amos, both prophets in the northern kingdom Israel. This suggests the exodus tradition may have originated there.
The prophet, of course, is Moses, but if he is designated by his function and not by his name, it can only mean that it is the function that here is at stake. Hosea, himself a prophet and affirming his belonging to the line of prophets (see v. 11), does not oppose two personalities of Israel’s past but two conceptions of Israel’s identity. […] the only real “ancestor” is the prophet, the one who has called Israel into existence. No other biblical passage illustrates it more clearly: the Jacob story and the Moses story originally represent not two consecutive chapters in Israel’s history but two rival legends of Israel’s origins.27
This rivalry between the two stories, or at least a separation between them, is seen throughout the older literature in the Hebrew Bible. No psalms connect the two, not even ones surveying Israel’s past, except for the late Psalm 105. When the Book of Ezekiel does invoke both traditions, it never joins them together. Likewise, Micah 7 mentions the exodus (verse 15) and Abraham (verse 20), but without any connection between them. And so on.
Perhaps one of the earliest attempts to unify the two traditions is Deut 26.5–9, which refers to the Hebrews’ ancestor derogatorily as ‘a wandering Aramean’,
As the two traditions were joined together during the Babylonian exile (587–538 BCE) or the Persian period (538–330 BCE), redactors sought to harmonize them. Where the two narratives were previously irreconcilable alternatives — the one having Israel’s chief ancestors settle in Canaan and remain there all the way to the rise of the monarchy, the other having Israel’s ancestors immigrate to Egypt, where they were enslaved and had to return to Canaan — they were edited to fit together, both theologically and thematically, though this created new contradictions. This is most obvious with Exodus’ claim that God first revealed his name ‘Yhwh’ to Moses, and that he was known to the patriarchs only as the Canaanite god ‘El’, which contradicts large portions of Genesis where God does reveal himself by the name ‘Yhwh’ to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they ‘call on’ that name.
The story of a patriarch pretending his wife was his sister has three versions in Genesis. We looked at two of them, which were nearly identical, but the first one in the narrative is only broadly similar. In this one (Gen 12.10–20), Abram goes to Egypt because of a famine, and the pharaoh takes Sarai for himself; God sends plagues against the pharaoh until he sends the wronged foreigners out of his country. As with the other two, it’s irrelevant which of the three versions was the ‘original’, or which was earlier than the others.
Conclusion
Archaeological expeditions and textual studies over the past couple hundred years have pointed toward a single conclusion, and the evidence has only built up over time. The traditions of the patriarchs and of the exodus did not originate together. What’s more, the two traditions are diverse and contradictory.
This is exactly the same as we found with Genesis 2–11. An array of unrelated stories have been brought together, changing their shapes and messages in the process. Some tales were built out of tropes thousands of years old, while others had only been told for a few decades before they were taught with authority. As they were used to create a huge tapestry depicting Israel’s past, they were edited and altered, copied and rearranged. Smaller fragments were brought in, or created brand new, to cover the rougher edges.
I doubt we’ll ever fully understand where each and every piece was brought in, but scholarship has reached a point where the overall picture is undeniable. The Torah gives us myths, legends, and folklore, which cannot be reconciled with what we know about the universe, the human species, or the past of the Israelite and Judean nations. The Torah is an undeniably complex work — and, to me, endlessly engaging — but all the evidence we’ve accumulated over the last few centuries tells us that none of it is historical.