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 24  Exodus - an Authentic Record of Events

It has been said that anti-Semitism has existed wherever Jews have lived outside their land of Judea. Forty years after the birth of Jesus Christ, and as a result of the rebellion by Jewish extremists against Roman occupation, the Jewish state was destroyed. The surviving Jews were deported from their land and anti-Semitism has continued ever since.

Fifteen hundred years before that event, the nation of Israel was born in Egypt, when God sent Moses to declare to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord: Israel is My son, My firstborn” - Exodus 4:22, and later remembered by God, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son” - Hosea 11:1.

As a result of the supernatural events of the ten plagues, the crossing of Israel through the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian armed forces there, the surrounding nations were in awe and in fear of Israel - Joshua 2:9-10; Numbers 22:1-4. Egypt, one of the two major political powers in the civilized world of that time, was evidently left defenceless by the power of Israel’s God, Yahweh. As a result, foreign invaders poured into Egypt and began to rule over some of the country.

Earlier in our current era, a variant form of anti-Semitism sprang up in the writings of men who were attempting to discredit the Bible. The Higher Literary Critics in particular, conspired to defame the divine character of the holy scriptures (Romans 1:2; 2 Timothy 3:15) by conjuring up the Documentary Theory.

By this they claimed that the books of Moses (Genesis to Deuteronomy) were a late mixture of old writings and folk lore. In this way they denied the historical fact of the events described in the book of Exodus concerning the beginnings of Israel the nation.

This effort was nothing new. A reading of the works of Flavius Josephus reveals him as a first-century AD writer replying to much earlier anti-Semitic writers who also denied the Exodus account of Israel’s beginnings as a nation.

Josephus would have been in his thirties in AD 70 when the Romans destroyed the Jewish state. After that time this Jewish priest and scholar decided to write a history of these events in The Wars of the Jews. Josephus also saw the need to defend the Jews by addressing the widespread feelings against the Jews, most of whom were by then living away from their homeland.

So Josephus wrote The Antiquities of the Jews, presenting the history of the Jews, ending with the overthrow of Judea in AD 70. He endeavoured to make the Jewish religion appear more palatable to the Pagan world of his time. By writing carefully worded comments, he aimed to exhibit the Jewish religion in an appealing way to the educated and rational in his audience.

Josephus also wrote On the Antiquity of the Jews and Against Apion to answer several anti-Semitic accusations which had been aimed against the Jews by those writers who had adopted the Greek language, culture, and mode of thought.

Before this there had been the production of national histories which were also written in Greek. Examples is seen in Berosus (290 BC), a pagan priest in Babylon who wrote in Greek on the history and culture of Babylonia. Another, of particular interest in the present context, was Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek, (300 BC).