Summary: British Orientalist Alan Millard provides some intriguing insights concerning the Bible’s Exodus account.
These are the stages of the people of Israel, when they went out of the land of Egypt by their companies under the leadership of Moses and Aaron. Moses wrote down their starting places, stage by stage, by command of the LORD, and these are their stages according to their starting places. – Numbers 33:1-2 (ESV)
A Second Bible Scholar
On Tim Mahoney’s first overseas trip to investigate the Biblical Exodus account in 2002, he interviewed two prestigious scholars at the University of Liverpool, England. In our previous two Thinker Updates we covered the discussion with Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Today we feature excerpts from the talk with the former Ranking Professor of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages, Alan Millard.
Like Kitchen, Millard held to what could be called the “standard” view of the Exodus regarding its time and place. While Tim Mahoney was impressed with the arguments against the standard view, he was not an expert and wanted to hear what Professor Millard had to say. As he would discover, there are always things to learn from talking with scholars you disagree with on certain ideas. Typically, no one view has all the answers, and different positions may have pieces of the puzzle. The late Professor Millard, like Ken Kitchen, was an Evangelical Christian who vigorously defended the historical reliability of the Bible. He appeared in Patterns of Evidence: The Red Sea Miracle and passed away in June of 2024 at the age of 86.
It is not surprising that Millard’s views often mirrored those of Ken Kitchen. Institutions frequently attract scholars who take similar approaches to major questions in their field. For example, the archaeology department at Israel’s Tel Aviv University in recent years has been headed by Professor Israel Finkelstein, who is quite critical of the Bible’s account of Israel’s history in its earlier periods (Exodus, Conquest, the judges, and the early kings). Other professors at Tel Aviv have similar views. They don’t consider themselves minimalists (those who think the Biblical record in this period has no historical credibility whatsoever), only because their skepticism does not reach the levels of some of the world’s most radical scholars.
In contrast, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem features a group of scholars such as Yosef Garfinkel that have a much higher regard for the historical reliability of the Bible, at least for the era of the early kings. Garfinkel has made many discoveries in Israel of evidence he interprets as showing a highly organized and powerful kingdom in the days of David and Solomon. The two camps are often on different sides of the debate on issues of Biblical archaeology.
Groups of scholars are more apt to adopt one another’s views as they become familiar with the arguments involved and gain respect for their colleagues’ intellects. Over time these views can become a paradigm that is passed on to the next generation with littlescrutiny and favored positions largely assumed, while other views not seriously considered. In time, if the paradigm becomes solidified, alternate views may even be considered unscholarly or unscientific because they go against what has become the consensus view of scholars.
The Date of the Exodus and Conquest
TIM MAHONEY: Is the Biblical record of the Exodus a myth or is that real history?
ALAN MILLARD: The Exodus story is the story of the definition of Israel as a nation. I believe it’s a real story. The Exodus as we have it, the book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, is known to us from manuscripts that are a little over 2000 years old and from later copies. But, I think those are accurate copies of much older books that were handed down by the Jewish scribes who we know worked with great care in copying them. When the book of Exodus was actually written is the question that nobody can answer decisively. In my opinion much of it will go back to Moses, who probably lived in the 13th century BC. But, as we have it now the book is written in a form of Hebrew which is not so ancient as the time of Moses. So, older books have been revised to make the language up to date. Just as nowadays people bring out newer issues of the Bible in current English as opposed to the King James Version.
TIM MAHONEY: So, the time period of the Exodus, when do you believe that took place?
ALAN MILLARD: The date of the Exodus is a question that is very widely debated. There are two main schools of thought, but the majority of scholars would take what we call a later date, which is more likely. That is to say that the Exodus happened somewhere between 1300 and 1200 BC. Probably a little earlier rather than later in that century. Ramesses II was the great Egyptian pharaoh who ruled for the greater part of the 13th century BC and he was building important cities in the delta area, which was the area where Goshen was, where the Israelites were living. One of the cities he built was called Ramesses and that fits very well with the Exodus record.
The other opinion would place the Exodus in the 15th century BC somewhere before 1400. But, I think that the evidence available at present speaks very strongly in favor of the later date. I would be willing to be convinced of the earlier date if I felt the evidence were strong, but at present I don’t think it is.
TIM MAHONEY: What is some of the evidence you see for the later, more recent, date?
ALAN MILLARD: I will leave my colleague, Professor Kitchens, to talk about the Egyptological material for you – the information from Egypt that is very important. If we look at the archaeology of Palestine, Israel-Canaan, I think that the period of about 1200 BC is the most satisfactory period to see the Israelites entering the Promised Land. We can’t find any site where there is an inscription saying, “I Joshua conquered this city,” or, “I so-and-so the Israelite lived here.” But then there are hardly any inscriptions or written documents from any site of Palestine in that period. I think that the difference we see between the religious activities revealed by archeological excavations in Palestine in the 13th century BC and the difference in the following centuries when there is very considerable change, there is a complete break of use of ancient cultic sites, indicates that a people arrived in the country with a different religious system. That would fit very well with what the Bible tells us about the Israelites’ occupation of their Promised Land.
People have looked very hard to find cities that have been destroyed in Palestine. But if you look very closely at the book of Joshua and the book of Judges it doesn’t claim that very many cities were destroyed. Jericho, Ai, and Hazor are the only ones that Joshua burnt. Obviously the Israelites entering the land wanted to occupy the existing towns, so it would have been rather foolish for them to destroy them.
The Tel el-Amarna Letters
Editor’s note: Discovered at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, these letters preserve correspondence between rulers in Canaan (and other locals) and the 18th Dynasty pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaton. The letters are important because they refer to conditions and conflicts in Canaan at the time, so they have featured prominently in debates about Biblical history. In the standard “Late Exodus” view, the date of the Conquest of Canaan (40 years after the Exodus) happened around 1200 BC, so the letters would be referring to events one-and-a-half centuries before the Israelites arrived (when using the conventional chronology for Egypt). Many scholars holding to an “Early Exodus” view date the Conquest to around 1400 BC and argue that the conflicts in the letters pertain to the Israelites pushing out the Canaanites in the Conquest. However the letters date to several decades after their favored time for the Conquest. Chronological revisionists also date the Conquest to around 1400 BC, but pull Egypt’s timeline forward by centuries. Some of these scholars such as David Rohl put the Amarna Letters at a time when King Saul was expanding Israelite power and David was a rogue captain of bandits in the wilderness.
TIM MAHONEY: In the Tel Amarna letters, I believe there is some reference to a plea for help because there was a group the Canaanites were struggling against. That might confirm the Israelite conquest.
ALAN MILLARD: The Tel el-Amarna letters come from the middle of the 14th century BC and, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the Israelites or their occupation of the Promised Land, which I believe happened in the following century. A lot of the Tel el-Amarna letters are letters from rulers of cities in Syria and Palestine to the pharaoh, and in many cases they are asking the pharaoh for military help – sometimes against their neighboring cities, sometimes against groups of people who seem to be landless groups roaming the outback, people who were known in these letters as “Habiru,” a term which may be related to the word “Hebrew.” But while I think the Hebrews may have been Habiru, I don’t think all the Habiru were Hebrews.
In the Bible we find in Genesis, especially, that the term “Hebrew” is used when Abraham and his descendants are speaking to foreigners and describing themselves. Who was Joseph, Joseph replies, “I was stolen from the land of the Hebrews.” The Egyptians wouldn’t have known who Abraham was. It would have been no use for Joseph to say, “I am a descendant of Abraham.” But they would have known it was Hebrews. They were people who had no known home or land of their own. Some of them were criminals, fleeing from justice. Some of them were people who had been ousted from their land in warfare. Some of them may have been escaped slaves. Some of them were groups of people like Abraham and his descendants who had moved out from the cities of Mesopotamia and hadn’t yet found a permanent home of their own.
The Jewish Historian Josephus
Editor’s note: Josephus described several aspects of the Exodus including the fact that the sea crossing site was hemmed in by impassable mountains, a situation that does not fit the border lakes or even the north end of the Gulf of Suez. So his reliability as a historian is an important question.
TIM MAHONEY: Who is Josephus?
ALAN MILLARD: Josephus was a Jewish gentleman in the 1st century AD who left us a lot of writings, a lot of books. He was originally one of the rebels against the Romans in the Great Jewish revolt of 66-70, but in the middle of the rebellion he changed sides and the Romans made use of him and the emperor Titus, who was the commander who conquered Jerusalem in AD 70, took Josephus to Rome and gave him a pension so he was able to live in or near Rome where he wrote his books.
The most famous and most useful of his books is the history of the war between the Jews and the Romans. But, he also wrote the long book called The Antiquities of the Jews, in which he tries to explain Jewish history for a Greek or Roman audience. And, it is in the course of that where he talks about the Exodus. A lot of his information is based on the Bible, but he seems to have used other sources of information as well. And it’s quite clear that in some cases he didn’t really understand what he was writing or talking about. Not only necessarily in the Exodus period but at later periods of Israel’s history too.
TIM MAHONEY: How reliable is Josephus?
ALAN MILLARD: So far as the Jewish War is concerned he seems to be very reliable, although he is speaking from a particular point of view as most historians do. He also wrote in his history of the Jewish people a lot about the reign of King Herod and he is the major source for our knowledge about that reign. And, again, very often, archeological discoveries have proved his reports to be right. So we can rely on him about his own lifetime and just before, but where he’s rehearsing what we may call Biblical history he sometimes seems to embroider it, and sometimes he uses other sources of information which may not be so reliable. So, we have to check Josephus very carefully, as carefully as we check any other historical source. But we do find that when he’s dealing with the Biblical period he is not altogether reliable.
TIM MAHONEY: Can you give an example of his unreliability?
ALAN MILLARD: When he talks about the period of the kings of Persia, the time of Ezra and Nehamiah, he misses out on one or two of the Persian kings and he seems to compress the time period.
TIM MAHONEY: Are there other sources that you are aware of, besides Josephus, regarding the exodus of Israel?
ALAN MILLARD: For the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt we only have the Biblical record, and then secondary sources such as Josephus, which really are built upon the Biblical record. There is a very famous inscription from Egypt called the Israel Stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, who was the son of Ramesses the Great, in which he records his army defeating a group of people called Israel in Canaan late in the 13th century BC. That’s the only record outside the Bible for the presence of Israel in Canaan until the middle of the 9th century BC when we have Assyrian records referring to Ahab of Israel and other Israelite kings.
The Route of the Exodus
Editor’s note: There are numerous points that could be made to illuminate this part of the discussion, but I will make two. One: Moses (with Jethro’s sheep) encountered the burning bush on the slopes of Mount Sinai during his 40-year stay in Midian. So, wherever the burning bush was, is also where Mount Sinai was. And it seems to have been in or very near Midian. However, when talking about Midian/the burning bush, both Millard and Kitchen were very noncommittal about this location (perhaps because several indicators put it east of Aqaba), but they were much more confident about the area for Mount Sinai. Two: based on the time for the journey stipulated in the Bible, an overall average travel time to the traditional Mount Sinai site would have been about 4.5 miles/day.
TIM MAHONEY: Let’s talk a little bit about the route of the Exodus from your study. Where would you place the Hebrews at the start?
ALAN MILLARD: Somewhere in the area of the Suez Canal where they crossed one of the lakes and then they moved from there down, I believe, the western coast of the Sinai Peninsula to the traditional site of Mount Sinai. It seems to me that this is a very plausible identification. We musn’t dismiss the traditional identifications that exist in the Near East. Some of them are extremely ancient, some of them are very well founded and in some cases we can show where these traditions are correct. So, it’s dangerous to say, “Well, it’s simply a tradition, so we won’t pay any attention to it.
Where exactly they went when they left Egypt is, again, a difficult question. We know the names of some of the places that they reached on their journey to Mount Sinai but most of those places cannot be identified today on the ground. We don’t find sign posts saying, “five miles to such a place,” or “welcome to this place,” to tell us. So in the few cases we may find similarities in the names that still exist today – to the ancient names – to suggest that they are the same places, but this is very hard to prove. And of course people moving, as the Israelites did, from Egypt to Mount Sinai, are not going to leave relics such as heavy pottery for us to find to re-trace their footsteps. So it’s a matter, to a large extent, of hypothesis as to which route they took.
Others think that they went across the central part of the Sinai Peninsula to the Gulf of Aqaba, which was the Red Sea, or Sea of Reeds, which they crossed and came to a Mount Sinai in western Arabia. I find that route harder to support on various grounds of topography and for other reasons of travel, and so I prefer the traditional route.
TIM MAHONEY: Let’s talk about the topography and the problem with the Jabal al-Lawz location.
ALAN MILLARD: I’m not an expert on that, so I don’t think I would be very helpful.
TIM MAHONEY: Okay, let’s talk about the topography around traditional Mount Sinai. Is there a place where you could have that many people camp? Actually, I haven’t even asked that question yet. How many people do you think were in the exodus from Egypt?
ALAN MILLARD: The Biblical record tells us that there were thousands upon thousands of people in the Exodus according to our common translations. There is a problem here, that if you have perhaps 2 or 3 million people moving in the direction the Biblical narratives require, then it’s almost impossible logistically for such a group of people to move. There are various ways of treating this problem. Some people simply discount the numbers altogether.
To my mind the more attractive way is to treat the Hebrew word for “thousand” as meaning the commander or leader of a group of people. This is possible because the ancient Hebrew writing was written without marking the vowels. So the consonants of the word that means a thousand can also mean a leader and, in fact, I think its the colonel in the Israel army today is known by this term. And, so, if instead of reading thousands, we have so many commanders, then the numbers are reduced very considerably. Several arguments along these lines have been proposed throughout the twentieth century and two of three of them are very well argued and they work very well if you follow them consistently through the Biblical texts, not only of Exodus but of other passages as well.
The other thing that we have to remember is that sometimes numbers become corrupted in the process of copying manuscripts over the centuries. And, if you compare numbers in the book of Kings with numbers in the books of Chronicles you can sometimes see where this has happened. So, it’s possible the numbers have grown, been exaggerated, been mis-copied. But I think it’s more likely that the understanding of the Hebrew terms has to be revised.
TIM MAHONEY: Let’s talk about the direction they were going and the question of the land of Midian, where Moses was when he fled Egypt the first time. Where do you think Moses was for those 40 years when he was in Midian with Jethro?
ALAN MILLARD: After Moses had killed the Egyptian he left Egypt, and the question is where is the land of Midian that he went to where he married the daughter of the priest Jethro, pastured the flocks and saw the bush that was burning but not destroyed? The answer is that we don’t really know because we have no ancient records about Midian. We don’t know anything about kings of Midian, about boundaries, or frontiers of Midian. It could well have been part of the Sinai Peninsula. It could equally well have been a part of western Arabia on the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba. And, I don’t think we have any means of deciding.
TIM MAHONEY: Let’s talk about the ability to travel distances in the Sinai.
ALAN MILLARD: So far as we are aware, ancient people would travel 20, possibly 25 miles a day, either on foot or by donkey. And that would involve stopping at different places for water, both for the people and for the animals. In the period we’re talking about at the end of the second millennium BC, the horse wasn’t used for long distance travel except possibly for messengers, not for large numbers of people. And the camel was only just beginning to be widely used, and again, wouldn’t have been used by a large number of people moving about as the Israelites did.
They had wagons. They would have moved relatively slowly. There were no paved roads, of course, there were only tracks and obviously there would be possibilities of potholes and landslides which would delay them on their journey. So 20 miles a day is probably a good average.
Conclusion
TIM MAHONEY: How reliable is the book of Exodus?
ALAN MILLARD: How reliable is the book of Exodus of something that would have happened in the 13th century BC or possibly even earlier? This is a question which is raised because the only copies of the books of Exodus that are available to us are just a bit older than 2000 years or so – the Dead Sea Scrolls. Could the scribes have handed down accurately records from a thousand years earlier. I believe they could, and we have examples from Babylonia and Assyria of scribes who copied documents which were already centuries old and copied them with great accuracy. So, I think the story of the book of Exodus as we have it in the Hebrew Bible is indeed a very ancient story written long before the surviving manuscripts. And the record it preserves is likely to be a very reliable record.
At points where we can check it against evidence from ancient Egypt and other aspects of the ancient world it is very consistent – it fits very well with the period late in the 2nd millennium BC, and I see no reason to suppose that it was composed at a later date. Let’s keep thinking.
TOP PHOTO: Alan Millard. (© 2002 Patterns of Evidence Foundation.)
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