Friedman, “The Exodus” (reviewed by Gary McCary)

Review

Title: The Exodus
Author: Richard Elliott Friedman
Publisher: Harper One
Genre: Jewish History
Year: 2017
No. of Pages: 282 (including Index)
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 9780062565242
Price: $27.99

Reviewed by Gary McCary for the Association for Mormon Letters

I am a Christian believer, though a “progressive” one. Richard Elliott Friedman is, in my view, a member of “the loyal opposition” (a term that originated in 18th century England to let the out-of-power party express its views without fear of being charged with treason). As a Biblical and historical scholar who is also Jewish, and an agnostic, he has not allowed his skepticism to get in the way of honest investigation. His latest work, “The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters,” is a prime example of such intellectual honesty.

At a time when most historical-critical scholarship is doubtful that the biblical story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the Sinai Peninsula ever occurred, Friedman boldly casts doubt on both the assumptions and conclusions of such scholarship.

He does so with the same detective panache that made his bestselling “Who Wrote the Bible?” such an eye-opening classic some three decades ago. Friedman makes a convincing case that the Exodus really did occur–just not in the same way that the Bible suggests it happened.

This argument is a key component underlying his entire historical detective drama. According to Friedman, the scholars who are skeptical of the exodus as a historical event are tripped up by a flawed assumption–that the biblical text’s description of 600,000 men should be taken literally. With women and children counted in, this would suggest that around 2 million people left Egypt and went into the Sinai. Neither archaeology nor Egyptian records give any evidence of such an exodus.

But what if, instead of 2 million people, there was an exodus from Egypt of a much smaller number of people (say five hundred or a thousand) around 1200 B.C., people who called themselves “Levites.” And what if they eventually merged with indigenous people already in Canaan–people who called themselves “Israelites” and who referred to their god as “El.” And what if these Levites from Egypt called their god “Yahweh.” And what if, years later, the writers of this joint narrative history had pet versions of their stories, coming from priests, Levites, Elohists, Yahwists, Deuteronomists, and the like? According to Friedman, this is entirely plausible.

Friedman spends a good deal of time looking directly at the Hebrew text and its implications Source criticism is examined closely. The “Priestly” source is written by Levites, according to biblical scholarship.

There are eight central figures in the Hebrew Bible with Egyptian names, people like Moses, Aaron, Phinehas, and Hophni. Each of these eight names come from Levite-priest sources, according to Friedman. In the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), recorded in the text just after the exodus from Egypt, the word “Israel” is missing, or non-existent. Why would this be, unless the Song originated with a group of people unfamiliar at the time with “Israel.” In the Levitical sources of the Hebrew Bible, various Egyptian practices are mentioned, while no Egyptian themes or practices are mentioned in the non-Levitical sources.

And so Friedman draws these conclusions: (1) there was an exodus event, but only of Levites; (2) the Levites were of Egyptian origin, and were perhaps a small group of laborers, perhaps even slaves; (3) the Levites did not spend 40 years in the desert and they were not large in number; (4) these Levites ended up in Midian, a place where the Shasu lived (who called their god Yahu), and possibly adopted that god as their own and later called him Yahweh; (5) the Levites eventually ended up in Canaanite lands, and joined with the resident “Israelites,” who worshiped the god El. The Levites, in a compromise move, eventually merged El with Yahweh, and for this compromise, they accepted tithes from the people; (6) this merger of peoples resulted in the beginning stages of what would eventually be known as “monotheism.”

Friedman’s book does not answer all of the difficult questions, but it does address most of them from a textual point of view. And it is an enjoyable and highly readable argument. There is an excitable twinkle in Friedman’s eye as he writes the following: “Does it really ruin your day if the exodus was historical but not ALL of the Israelites were in it?” That is a question we are asked to ponder throughout. It’s enough to make even an agnostic want to believe!

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