In Search of Solid Ground
 Alan Millard (University of Liverpool)

How can anyone today decide whether books written over two thousand years ago present factual reports of events at so remote a time? Should people of the twenty-first century expect writers of those days to have the same historical sense as they have? If only one report exists, how can its reliability be tested? Questions like these have been constantly raised for more than a century. Answers fall into two distinct camps. On the one hand is the sceptical attitude, of which an extreme form is currently receiving wide publicity. On the other hand is the positive attitude which accepts the ancient statements as true. How can archaeological research contribute to the debate? The following paragraphs offer various examples of discoveries which, the writer maintains, should affect modern attitudes to the Hebrew Bible.

The Text
No ancient manuscript is an exact duplicate of another. The scribes were human, they made mistakes and sometimes they thought they could improve on their exemplars. This situation is common to all manuscripts, Greek and Latin, Egyptian, Babylonian and Hebrew. The Hebrew Bible is only available in complete copies which are about 1,000 years old. They were made by scribes inheriting old traditions (the Massoretes) who worked with strict rules to try to ensure accuracy. The variations between them are indeed very small. There are copies that are one thousand years older, the Dead Sea Scrolls, but only one book, Isaiah, is preserved completely. However, comparison of the text in that book and the fragments, some quite extensive, of other biblical books among the Scrolls shows that something very close to the Massoretic text already existed then. There are texts which show greater variations, some agreeing with the Greek translation (the Septuagint) in places where it differs from the Massoretic text. None of the variants is extensive or significant for the message of the books. Modern Bible translations give footnotes where their translators believe the Dead Sea Scrolls offer a better text to than traditional one (e.g. Deuteronomy 32: 43, cf. Hebrews 1; 6; Isaiah 33: 8). The Scrolls testify to the care taken in transmitting the text from at least the second century B.C.

Without earlier copies, it is impossible to know how faithfully earlier scribes worked, but there are some indications. A striking one is the preservation of Assyrian kings' names in the way they were pronounced in their days. Assyrian scribes usually wrote names in their historical, Babylonian spelling, so Tiglath-pileser appears as Tukulti-apal-esharra. However, an Aramaic inscription set up by a vassal of the Assyrian king writes his name with the consonants, tgltplsr. That is exactly the same way as the name is written in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 16: 7, etc.), the vowels being secondary. There is sufficient evidence now to reconstruct the Assyrian dialect, in which phonetic shifts would produce the name as Tugulti-apal-esarra, with g for k and s for sh. Despite its foreign form, meaningless to them, the Hebrew scribes did not try to make sense of it, nor did they treat it lightly, they copied it exactly, century after century, long after the Assyrian dialect had disappeared.

As in other ancient societies, Hebrew scribes are likely to have modernised the texts, conforming old-fashioned or out-of-date grammar and vocabulary to current use. That means the reader should not suppose that were speeches attributed to Abraham or to Moses written in their times they would be preserved in the language they would have spoken. Certain passages judged to be very archaic Hebrew evidently escaped the process, probably because they are poems (notably Exodus 15; Deuteronomy 33; Judges 5).

The Content

Historical Events: Direct References
If the biblical text may be treated as fairly sound, what can be said about its contents? Here we shall be concerned firstly with the historical information it offers. For very many episodes there is no other witness. Remarkably, where there is another written record, its testimony is always harmonious with the Hebrew one. That is not to say that each one tells an identical story, for each is written from a particular point of view, but that there is no blatant contradiction between them.

That is clearest for the historical framework of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. From the middle of the ninth century B.C. until the sixth century a series of Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions assures us that the names and sequence of the kings of Israel and Judah given in the Bible can be accepted. Shalmaneser III (858-824 B.C.) mentions Ahab and Jehu of Israel, or the dynasty of Omri, Adad-nirari III (810-783 B.C.) names Joash and Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 B.C.) names Menahem, Pekah and Hoshea, as well as Jehoahaz (Ahaz) of Judah. Sargon II (722-705 B.C.) claims the capture of Samaria and his son Sennacherib (704-681 B.C.) has left an account of his attack on Hezekiah of Judah (see below). Sennacherib's son, Esarhaddon (680-669 B.C.) and grandson Ashurbanipal (668-627 B.C.) both mention Manasseh of Judah. The Babylonian Chronicle mentions the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C. and the capture of Jerusalem in 597 B.C. Babylonian administrative texts record provisions given to the exiled Judaean king Jehoiachin and his retainers in Babylon.

It is not only in mentioning rulers of the great empires that the biblical writers give accurate information, that is also true when they refer to lesser kings, neighbours of Israel and Judah. Here the sources are rarer because few monuments have survived. An accidental discovery at Dhiban in Jordan in 1868 supplied the now famous Moabite Stone. It was set up to celebrate a victory of Mesha, king of Moab, over Israelites of the tribe of Gad who lived in the region east of the Dead Sea. Mesha is named in 2 Kings 3: 4 and Numbers 32 tells of Gad settling in that territory. The history of the kingdom of Aram, based at Damascus, is reconstructed from Assyrian and Biblical reports. No texts relating the achievements of the kings of Damascus have yet been found. Where the Assyrian and Biblical texts deal with the same rulers, they can be seen to be harmonious. The most notable example is the accession of Hazael to the throne, where 2 Kings 8 :15 explains how he murdered his predecessor and an Assyrian inscription describes his succession as illegitimate.

Historical Events: Indirect References
There are some texts which tell of events that can be connected with the biblical narrative, although their references are not precisely the same. Two significant examples are the inscription of Shishak and the Tel Dan stele. After Solomon's death, his son Rehoboam suffered an attack by 'Shishak king of Egypt' who carried away all the treasure Solomon had accumulated in Jerusalem (1 Kings 14: 25, 26). Shishak was a newly powerful pharaoh who had details of his expedition to the north-east recorded on one wall of a new courtyard he built in the temple of Amun at Karnak. The text listed 154 places the Egyptian army visited. Several of the names have been destroyed, many are damaged, but it is clear that they are the names of places in Judah and Israel, including Aijalon and Gibeon near Jerusalem and Megiddo, Taanach and Beth-Shan to the north. Jerusalem itself does not appear, either because it opened its gates to the conqueror or because its name has been broken away. Shishak did not provide any description of his campaign, only this list of names, so there is no mention of the kings he subjugated, or the booty he took. At the site of Megiddo itself, a fragment of a stone stele bearing Shishak's name in hieroglyphs was unearthed. The absence of a direct link between Shishak's monument and the biblical text, i.e. Shishak mentions neither Jerusalem and its treasure, nor the king of Judah (who would have been out of place in the list of names), does not prevent the historian associating them and deducing that they recount the same event. Shishak died shortly after his campaign and his successors made no effort to build on his success. The donations by his son of larger quantities of gold and silver to the gods of Egypt than known for any previous pharaoh can be seen as the fate of the loot from Solomon's Jerusalem.

In 1993 and 1994 archaeologists working at Tel Dan in northern Israel recovered pieces of a stone stele inscribed in Aramaic. The style of lettering indicates a date in the latter part of the ninth century B.C. Much of the stone is missing, including the top, where the name of the king whose triumphs it commemorates would have stood. It is widely supposed that he was Hazael of Damascus. The surviving fragments tell of his accession to the throne and the favour the god Hadad, the weather-god of Damascus, showed to him. They continue with the words 'king of Israel' in one line and 'house of David' in the line below. The names of the kings of Israel and the house of David may be restored as Joram son of Ahab and Ahaziah son of Joram, although the loss of several letters from the lines leaves this uncertain. The notable element in this text is the phrase 'House of David'. Extremely sceptical scholars have tried to interpret it as the name of a shrine, 'House of the Beloved' (David means 'Beloved'), but almost everyone competent to judge is now satisfied that it was the name of a dynasty, following a well-attested pattern, and, as dynasties were often named after their founders, there was a dynasty founded by a David. It would be asking too much to suppose that there was more than one dynasty in the Levant in the period between 1,100 to 850 B.C. with that name, so there can really be no doubt that the Tel Dan inscription indirectly testifies to the existence of king David.

These two inscriptions are the only documents outside the Bible which can be related to the reigns of David and Solomon. That surprises many people. Surely, they ask, 'If those kings were as great as the Bible portrays them, would not clear signs of their power be found? Are there no traces of the buildings they erected in Jerusalem?' To-day, the lack of indubitable remains or inscriptions from David and Solomon forms part of the basis for an argument that Israel was never so great a kingdom, nor Jerusalem the seat of a powerful ruler. Yet it has to be observed that Jerusalem has been sacked and rebuilt many times. In some areas, rebuilding has removed all traces of earlier structures and other areas are not open to archaeologists because houses cover the ground and because the Dome of the Rock and its surroundings, once the enclosure of King Herod's Temple, occupy a large sector. Excavations that have been made in the oldest part of the city have been confined to the steep eastern slope of the hill now known as the 'City of David' and a limited area at its northern end. As to inscriptions, in the whole of Syria-Palestine very few inscriptions set up by local kings have come to light, one like the Moabite Stone is a rarity. One thousand years after David, a powerful king ruling in Palestine had many buildings erected and they, or their remains can still be seen, yet not one monumental inscription honouring King Herod has been discovered in his realm. (His name only appears on coins and on minor objects.)

Circumstantial details
In a trial it is often the circumstantial evidence that will prove a case, where direct testimony is lacking. Similarly, with the Old Testament statements, there are rarely direct witnesses, like those mentioned already. What can be most instructive is to read the biblical texts in the light of knowledge of the customs and attitudes of the ancient world. That is also a safeguard against interpreting the texts as if they were modern writings. Again, two examples will be sufficient to make the point.

The first example concerns money. An authority writing about ancient Israel cited two passages from the books of Samuel which, he claimed, refer to coined money. Now coinage was only invented about 600 B.C. in Lydia, in western Turkey, so the mentions of coins in accounts of affairs set before 1,000 B.C. would obviously be anachronistic and so the accounts would be judged historically unreliable. The first passage sets the prices the Philistines charged the Israelites for refurbishing various agricultural tools at two thirds or one third of a shekel (1 Sam. 13:21). The second passage is Joab's offer of ten shekels of silver to the man who saw Absalom hanging by his hair from a tree and the man's reply that one thousand shekels would not persuade him to kill the king's son (2 Sam. 18:11-12). The first passage mentions neither shekels nor silver, having only 'the price was two thirds (pym)...one third'. The second passage has 'ten of silver' and 'one thousand of silver'. The Hebrew text does not include the word for 'shekel', a linguistic feature (ellipsis) also common in business transactions of the second millennium B.C. in the Levant at Alalakh and Ugarit, at the latter site both in Akkadian and in Ugaritic texts. The shekel being the basic unit of currency across the ancient Near East, there was no need to mention it in every case, it was understood, other units, such as the talent, were named. Payment was made by weighing the silver, as the man expressed to Joab, 'Even if a thousand shekels were weighed out into my hands...' Hoards of silver bullion have been recovered from various sites, made up of pieces cut from rings and lumps, evidently to appropriate weights. There are no grounds at all for assuming that coinage, which did not appear until the seventh century B.C., was envisaged in either passage in the books of Samuel. Indeed, the first passage has only been fully understood since the discovery of small stone weights engraved in Hebrew with the word pym, the term used in the verse to describe the amount paid. Weighing the stones in conjunction with others shows that pym means 'two thirds' of a shekel. The weights date from about 700 B.C., but that does not mean the unit was unknown earlier.

In contrast, books describing events in the Persian period do have references to coined money, the drachmas of gold (Ezra 2; 69; Nehemiah 7:70, 71). 1 Chronicles 29: 7 reports that the leaders of Israel gave to David 5,000 darics for building the Temple. The gold daric and silver siglos (=shekel) were coins stamped with the figure of the Persian king usually kneeling as an archer, issued from the reign of Darius I (521-486 B.C.) onwards. While the mention of the daric in connection with king David is, strictly, anachronistic, it is intelligible for Chronicles to use a monetary denomination current at the time when it was written, in the Persian period.

The use of shekels, their multiples and their fractions as units of currency, silver weighed, not coined, was normal across the ancient Near East. Hebrew weights of the seventh century attest a standard system, perhaps introduced by Hezekiah. Among the weights are some for 2/3 of a shekel, marked pym, the word found in 1 Samuel 13: 21 as the price the Philistines charged for sharpening Israel's iron tools. In fact, the term in that verse was not understood until the weights were discovered. To allege that use of fractions implies coined money and so is an anachronism is without any justification at all. The occurrence of the weights marked payim only in the seventh century does not imply the unit had no earlier existence; fractions of the shekel are normal in cuneiform documents.

The second circumstantial detail concerns the equipment of the giant Goliath (1 Samuel 17), The passage describes his armour and weapons: 'he had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of bronze scale-armour which weighed five thousand shekels. On his legs he had bronze greaves and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver's rod and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels.' Notice the metals named: bronze for the helmet, coat of scale-armour, greaves and javelin, iron for the spear point. Scale armour is well attested across the Near East in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550-1150 B.C.). Examples of scale armour have been excavated at Nuzi; coats are depicted in Egyptian paintings and mentioned in many documents. Goliath's helmet fits with various types of copper or bronze helmet which are known from the third millennium B.C. onwards. The giant also wore bronze greaves on his legs. These deserve a little more attention because all the ancient pictures of warriors in Egypt and the Near East show them bare-legged. Greaves were apparently not used. They did, however, form part of the armour of Mycenaean warriors of the thirteenth century B.C. and later. A famous bowl from Mycenae ('The Warrior Vase') depicts a row of spearman each carrying a shield and wearing greaves, and bronze examples have been found in tombs of the same time in Greece (at Dendra, at Kallithea in Achaea) and at Enkomi on Cyprus. Greaves are also attested in Greece during the Geometric period, from 900 B.C. onwards, so their use may have continued uninterrupted among leading warriors in the Aegean region from the Mycenaean period. The Aegean association of the Philistines is clear and the name Goliath itself may have an Ionian connection. Not only is the type of armour Goliath wore consistent with a date in the eleventh century B.C., its material points to that time rather than a much later one, for it was all of bronze. Had the account of David and Goliath been written later in the Iron Age we would expect a national champion to be depicted wearing the best, fashionable, armour of the time, which was made of iron, such as examples of scale armour and helmets known from Assyria, although bronze was still current. As it is, only the head of Goliath's spear was made of iron and that, again, is appropriate for the period at the beginning of the Iron Age when the metal was newly available and costly. These details, harmonious with the era described, strongly suggest that the narrative is a reliable report, composed close to the time of the events, rather than a much later, fictitious creation.

The Question of Miracles
Some of the Old Testament narratives include occurrences which we term 'miracles', cases of divine intervention in human affairs, and for the benefit of the Israelites. Modern historians cannot accept the miraculous, so it is common to find those narratives dismissed as folklore or the products of pious imagination, or religious propaganda; they are treated as devoid of historical value, except inasmuch as they reveal the attitudes of their authors. Study of ancient near eastern writings shows this attitude to be mistaken. Kings in Assyria and Egypt boasted of their victories, frequently admitting the help of their gods, and they were sometimes happy to explain that a success was due to divine intervention. In their terminology, the descent of a fog, which hid their advance on an enemy, was the work of the god responsible for the weather, where modern writers would simply call it opportune. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, gleefully told how an enemy advanced against the Assyrian frontier, but before the Assyrian troops could confront him, fire fell from heaven and burnt his forces, making him retreat. A few years later, the same king advanced again. This time the god of Assyria struck him with a fatal disease, so his attack was aborted. In neither case is there need to doubt the factuality of the enemy's advance; the explanations for his reverses are stated in the winner's terms and are beyond the possibility of investigation, in the absence of any documents from his side. Both explanations can be treated as 'natural' by the agnostic reader, and still historical. The same situation applies to biblical passages. The withdrawal of Sennacherib and his army from Jerusalem in 701 B.C. is a prime case. 'That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp' (2 Kings 19: 35). Widely discounted as 'unhistorical', the presence of this verse has coloured the approach to the whole episode, some even supposing that the Assyrian did capture Jerusalem and when the idea of its inviolability arose later in the seventh century B.C., the story was invented to support it. The well-informed historian will not treat the text in so cavalier a manner! Clearly something extraordinary happened which the Hebrew writer could only express in terms of divine intervention. Since it was greatly to the advantage of his people, he believed his God had acted. To-day the 'miracle' is commonly explained as an outbreak of plague, largely on the basis of a report by the Greek historian Herodotus that an Assyrian army in Palestine was brought to its knees when rats gnawed through the archers' bowstrings and, of course, rats spread plague. Whether or not such a prosaic explanation for the Assyrian's departure can be accepted, there is no good reason to deny the fact. Whether or not one shares the Hebrew writer's faith, it is not justifiable to dismiss his assertion that something unusual took place, which caused Sennacherib to leave without taking the city.

Offering a rational explanation for a 'miracle', does not ignore the miraculous, for that may lie in the timing as much as the occurrence. Thus the crossing of the Red Sea is described poetically as divine intervention, 'By the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up' (Exodus 15: 8). Previously, the narrator had told, 'all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind' (Exodus 14: 21). A modern narrator might simply tell of 'a strong east wind' driving the waters back. Here we are dealing with presuppositions and the danger of imposing ours on the ancient texts and so distorting their meaning, or dismissing it, is obvious.

Moses and the Exodus
The crossing of the Red Sea was accomplished under Moses' direction, according to the book of Exodus. It followed the Ten Plagues and the first Passover celebration, a most important event in Israelite history. No hint of Israel's presence in Egypt has come to light; Egyptian monuments know nothing of Moses. Again, the absence of evidence has led many writers to answer the question, why there is no sign of Moses or the Israelites in Egyptian remains, by labelling it a fiction. Yet before we accept that answer, the situation deserves more careful attention. The Egyptian monuments are well known, their hieroglyphic inscriptions famous, and there are hundreds of papyri and ostraca, but a little consideration of the situation at the time of the Exodus may help to explain why they give no evidence of it. The Israelites lived in the land of Goshen, somewhere in the north-east of Egypt and the pharaoh, whom I believe to be the great builder Ramesses II (c. 1279-1213 B.C.) was erecting a splendid new city not very far away in the Nile delta at Pi-Ramesse, modern Qantir, probably the store-city of Ra'amses (Exodus 1:11). Archaeologists are currently excavating parts of it. They have found that it was abandoned some two hundred years after Ramesses' time when the river had silted up and another city, Tanis, took its place. The builders of Tanis took most of the stone from Ramesses' city for their new structures. As both places lie in the Nile delta where the water level is high, records of the pharaohs' administration, written on papyrus, have rotted away long ago, so lists of provisions and of workmen such as Israelite brick-makers are not available. We know too little about the organisation of Ramesses' building work to be able to see the impact the loss of the Israelite brickmakers would have had. One document from his reign, found elsewhere in Egypt, does record work in some brickfields, noting the absence of certain brickmakers through illness, or for religious reasons. Ramesses and his successors have left inscriptions on their statues and monuments, but they all tell how powerful and devout those kings were, they boast of their victories, they never reveal a defeat or a disaster, so the absence of any reference to the sudden departure of a large labour force and of the catastrophic plagues is unremarkable, and is certainly not a reason for doubting the biblical record.

In considering the question of the reality of the Exodus, among the first topics to be raised is that of anachronisms. Are there any references to customs, concepts, or events which belong centuries after the time of the Exodus, which, on the basis of the biblical evidence, should be placed in the 13th century B.C., assuming it took place? To that question I answer, 'No!' There are passages that look forward to Israel living in her own land, but they do not have to imply that the writer was already there. People living in Egypt between 1,500 and 1,100 B.C. knew, or could find out, about the land of Canaan, as Egyptian texts reveal, so the Israelites could have known something about the country before they reached it, or sent spies to it. For generations they had been living in the north-east of Egypt, where people arrived from Canaan.

Then the converse should be examined. Do features in the Exodus narrative fit well in the Late Bronze Age period, the period from approximately 1,550 to 1,150 B.C.? To that question I answer, 'Yes!' Here are some examples.

1. The name of the pharaoh. A lot of debate would have been avoided had the book of Exodus reported the name of the pharaoh who would not let the Israelites go! In both the books of Genesis and Exodus, the pharaohs are unnamed, yet in later books pharaohs are named, e.g. Shishak, Necho (2 Kings 23: 29), Hophra (Jeremiah 44: 30). The anonymity of the earlier figures indicates to some that the writers did not know the names because they were creating their stories long after the events. That seems to be a reasonable position until it is recognized that it was normal for people in the New Kingdom period in Egypt, which covers the time of the Exodus, to refer simply to 'the pharaoh' in everyday situations. Later the custom changed.
2. The places Ra'amses and Pithom were constructed in the New Kingdom period. Ra'amses was replaced by Tanis (biblical Zoan) in the middle of the twelfth century B.C., so a writer at a later date could place the Exodus in 'the fields of Zoan' (Psalm 78: 12, 43).
3. Once out of Egypt, one of the first tasks assigned to the Israelites to build a shrine for the God who had rescued them. It was not to be a permanent temple, but a portable structure, prefabricated. The design is carefully laid down and so are the materials for the construction. Again, scholars have ridiculed this Tabernacle. It would be impossible, they claim, to create such a thing in the desert and the Israelites would not have the skill or the resources to do it. Again, the objections need to be held back until the text has been examined in the light of discoveries about the ancient world. Egypt, one more, provides the most valuable evidence. Portable pavilions and shrines were made there from early times. One example is a thousand years older than Moses' time, others come from about the time his biography is set. They were provided for the pharaohs and other royalty as they travelled through Egypt or went on campaign. They were made of wooden poles and frames that slotted together and those frameworks were plated with gold and the roofed with fine fabrics. The same techniques were used for the nest of shrines which housed the coffin of Tutankhamun; they were too large to bring into the tomb complete, so they were made of posts and planks which could be carried in separately, then erected in the tomb chamber. Clearly, the Tabernacle was something that fell within the abilities of craftsmen of the time to create. The biblical narrator explains that the Israelites sacrificed their jewellery and other valuables to provide the precious materials needed and the other components could have been obtained in the Sinai peninsula.
4. Inside the Tabernacle was the Ark of the Covenant. That was a box about 3'9" x 2'3" (1.1 x 0.7m.). It had poles that slid through sockets at each of the bottom corners for one man in front and one behind to carry it with the poles on their shoulders. The whole thing was plated with gold. Here, too, Egypt gives us an illustration. In Tutankhamun's tomb there was a chest for his clothes made to a very similar design, although slightly smaller and with a gabled lid. Underneath this chest there are sockets for carrying poles and the poles themselves are neatly and invisibly stowed in other sockets beneath the chest when it is resting. The Ark was not a clothes chest, of course, but a container for the tablets Moses brought from Mount Sinai. It was necessary for them to be kept safely because they were the terms of God's covenant or treaty with Israel, the basis for her existence as a nation. Keeping the texts of a treaty in the shrine of the god was the custom in the ancient Near East, as treaties from the Late Bronze Age state in their terms. The god was expected to take action against any party who broke the treaty. That is why the blood of the Atonement sacrifice had to be poured on the Ark in the Israelite cult, to make amends to God for any breach of the covenant that had occurred during the year, otherwise he might harm the Israelites.
5. The most distinctive feature of the Old Testament is the acknowledgement of one God alone. According to the history of religions, monotheism came at the end of a long evolutionary process, with people moving from animism to polytheism and eventually to monotheism. Israel reached the final stage, as commonly held, in the sixth century B.C., as the poems of the Second Isaiah display. Monotheism would not have been conceivable in the second millennium B.C. Here, again, ancient history opens another possibility. Worship of a single deity, not acknowledging any others, was the policy of the 'heretic' pharaoh, Akhenaten, in the mid-fourteenth century B.C. His innovation was short-lived. Nevertheless, the fact that he could impose a form of monotheism warns against assuming that another form could not have existed within a century of his lifetime.

These points do not prove that the Exodus happened as the Bible describes, but they do demonstrate that it is wrong to dismiss the biblical record as impossible and so as imaginary. Of course, the historical background of the Exodus narrative might be accurate but the events and the figure of Moses to be imaginary, as in the best modern historical fiction, but it is very easy for someone creating an historical novel to make a little mistake that reveals the work was written long after the time described. That is evident in some ancient books purporting to describe adventures of earlier centuries (e.g. the apocryphal books of Judith, Tobit). It is remarkable how well the accounts of Moses and the Exodus fit with the Late Bronze Age, about 1550-1150 B.C.

One Egyptian monument is deserves notice. The son and successor of Ramesses II was Merneptah. He only had a short reign (c. 1213-1203 B.C.), but he made at least two military campaigns, a major one against Libya to the west and a smaller one into Canaan. His scribes wrote a triumphal poem about his victories on a stone stele which was found about a hundred years ago. It is called 'the Israel stele' because it proclaims that, among those conquered in Canaan, 'Israel is laid waste, without seed'. Here, about 1209 B.C., is an undisputable mention of a group of people called Israel being in Canaan. That is far from saying Israel was a nation or occupying the whole land, indeed other lines in the stele imply she did not, but clearly she was there, perhaps, we may speculate, in the process of taking possession of the land. While Moses and Joshua remain leaders known only from the biblical books, there is no objective reason to deny their existence and the circumstantial evidence indicates that the narratives about them could stem from the times they describe.

Wherever there is another witness with sufficiently precise testimony, there is agreement with the biblical texts, or, if not agreement, complementarity. Repeatedly, the Hebrew books can be seen to portray accurately the times they describe. Their accuracy on points of detail as well as basic history make it very unlikely that they could have been created many centuries after the events in very different environments. If they were, then they were based upon very reliable sources which were incorporated without alteration. The circumstances in which those stories would have been invented with such verisimilitude are hard to envisage. It is simpler to accept the biblical narratives as what they claim to be, accounts of the events which shaped ancient Israel.

'Solid ground' can be found! In the nature of the case, proof cannot, for the Bible is primarily about God and his words and deeds. There is no way his existence or intervention in human affairs can be proved; that is a matter of faith. When the reports of those who claim to have experienced him can be shown to be reliable in every other respect, then their testimony deserves to be heard with respect. Even if their accounts of the divine are not believed, their other assertions should not be rejected. A myth may have some power without being a reality, yet it cannot compel acceptance, for another myth may rival it, with equal strength. A fact commands acceptance, it is inescapable, although it may be ignored. The Exodus is the founding fact of Israel's existence. It may be re-interpreted within Judaism and Christianity, replaced in the latter by a new saving event. If it is treated as imaginary, then its value is lost, for anyone can dismiss it, like any fairy tale, it cannot supply a rational basis for faith. The more the records are examined, the more accurate their reports are found to be, yet they will never be proved beyond all doubt, for then there would be no need for faith.