Exodus - an Authentic Record of Events

The Bible is the inspired word of God. This page is a continuation in a series of articles about the Bible as God’s word.

Part 26  Exodus - an Authentic Record of Events

Flavius Josephus wrote in his work, On the Antiquity of the Jews and Against Apion, “Now the Egyptians were the first that cast reproaches upon us...”

(Bentwich points out in his book that the Stoics believed that their religious philosophy was the best one, and conducted an energetic missionary effort, while regarding the Jews as effective competitors. Consequently, “the Stoics” were in fact “the first professional Jew-haters.”)

Josephus continued, “and indeed the Egyptians took many occasions to hate us and envy us...And now I will turn my discourse to one of their principal writers...Manetho. He promised*... this: That our people had come into Egypt... and when he had farther confessed, that we went out of that country afterward, and settled in that country which is now called Judea, and there built Jerusalem and its temple.” *The archaic meaning: to affirm the truth of a statement.

“...but after this he...introduces incredible narrations, as if he would have the Egyptian multitude, that had the leprosy and other distempers, to have been mixed with us, as he says they were, and that they were condemned to fly out of Egypt together...

“But still Manetho goes on, ‘That after this, Amenophis returned...with a great army’ and ‘joined battle with the shepherds and the polluted people, and beat them, and slew a great many of them, and pursued them to the bounds of Syria’.” Josephus then went on to demonstrate the absurdity and inconsistencies in Manetho’s history. - Book 1, excerpts from sections 14-27, On the Antiquity of the Jews and Against Apion.

And so as Bentwich expresses it, “In this work [i.e., Aegyptiaca of Manetho] of the third century B.C.E. the children of Israel were represented as sprung from a pack of lepers, who were expelled from Egypt because of their foul disease” - p.88

This record by Josephus of what the Egyptian historian wrote concerning the Exodus is remarkable. Whereas the relatively modern Higher Critics denied the historicity of the book of Exodus, Manetho made himself an unwitting witness to the historical fact that Israel (Jacob and his sons and grandsons) entered Egypt, grew to large numbers, and then were expelled (as the book of Exodus states - Exodus 12:30-32.

There is no doubt that the book of Exodus puts the Egyptians in an unfavourable light. And so it does appear that the Egyptian historians responded by expressing their ill will towards Israel by portraying them in their history in Egypt as unpleasant and contemptible people.

But the fact still stands, that people who had no interest in the welfare of Israel, and in fact expressed hostility towards them, quite clearly corroborated the historical fact of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and exodus from there.

We now turn to another line of evidence, in which the reader will be invited to consider the testimony presented. Immanuel Velikovsky wrote his book, Worlds in Collision, to promote catastrophism in opposition to uniformitarianism. That author’s example of a historical, world wide catastrophe included, he contended, the events around the exodus of Israel from Egypt.

Velikovsky also explored for documentary evidence of the Exodus in Egyptian inscriptions. One of these was the Ipuwer Papyrus, in which he perceived allusions to these events.