The use and abuse of the exodus story

Abstract

The Exodus was a defining moment, perhaps the defining moment in ancient Israelite tradition. As the legend has it, the Israelites' escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses shook off the yoke of Egyptian oppression and gave them the impetus for articulating principles and values, surmounting an arduous journey through the wilderness, and shaping their identity as a people and a culture. The day of their release from the tyranny of Pharaonic Egypt, so the Lord declared in the Book of Exodus, would thereafter be commemorated in an annual festival, among the most sacred on the calendar, the ceremony of Passover.1 The Exodus generated high drama, an unforgettable tale in the Bible, perhaps the single most familiar one to Jew and Gentile alike. As inspiration to subsequent generations of Jews and their admirers, its power is manifest. But what of the villains of the piece? They, or rather their presumed descendants, would not have found this story very entertaining. Indeed, we might imagine, they would have reason to feel maligned and defamed. The heartless Pharaohs, the hostile Egyptian populace, and the royal army as an agent of evil hardly supplied models for imitation. And the tale could bring little satisfaction to the indigenous dwellers in the land of the Nile. The spread of the story should only have aggravated matters. Jewish soldiers and Jewish settlers in Egypt occasionally appear on record in the centuries that followed the supposed time of the Exodus, most notably in the garrison at Elephantine.2 But the principal wave of Jewish reentry into Egypt appears to have come at the end of the Persian period and in the early years of the Hellenistic age.3 The Exodus story could have seeped into Egyptian consciousness in the course of this era, thus to stir reaction and response. Indeed, echoes of a very different variety of the tale emerge in the literature produced by pagan authors in Egypt. In assorted versions, Jews appear as villains rather than victims,