So, the centerpiece of any even-slightly-traditional Seder is a detailed recounting of the Exodus story. But, as I understand it, Biblical archaeologists have complicated things lately by insisting that the Jews weren’t in Egypt for any lengthy period of time during the era in question.* “Hold on, Mr. PhD in Archaeology Smartypants, how do we know this for sure?” asks the obnoxious Jew.** Because the Egyptians were excellent record keepers, even taking detailed note of the many peoples they brutally subjugated. Which is all well and good, at least from the perspective of someone interested in the intersection of history and memory. In other words, it’s not unusual for discrepancies, rooted in methodological, epistemological, or political differences, over how the past is recalled to crop up from time to time.
But then there’s this: why would the long-ago Jews have invented this history of oppression, history that features the enslavement of their people across generations? And why would they have memorialized this history in a story that isn’t, if you look away from the super-cool burning bush and pay attention to the other plot points, really all that flattering*** to their forbears? The tempting answer, I guess, is that today, when out groups sometimes play misery poker, trying to climb to the top of a hierarchy of victimization, it might make some sense to concoct such a tale. But! In addition to being totally presentist, and thus unsatisfying as an answer to a historical question, I also can’t think of another case, at least not off the top of my head, in which a race has made a spurious and enduring claim about the past like this one.
I suppose the problem is that it’s likely impossible to know the context in which the Exodus story was invented. And absent that context, it’s impossible to know why the story was invented, what purpose it served, how, in short, it was used to screw the Palestinians out of land. Or maybe it wasn’t invented at all. Maybe the relevant archive burned down or collapsed during an earthquake and hasn’t been excavated.
Also, matzo with butter and salt is delicious for the first few days. Happy Passover.
* Nope, no link. I’m a bad blogger. And a bad Jew. Actually, I’m just repeating snippets of a conversation I overheard involving my co-conspirators colleagues.
** Yes, “obnoxious Jew” is redundant. Whatevs. Eat your gefilte fish and shut up.
*** Except, I mean, for the whole “chosen people” part of the story. But even including that, the Jews still come off looking like small-minded jerks, craven douchebags, and flat-out cowards during significant parts of the narrative.
The Edge of the American West 
32 comments
March 30, 2010 at 7:13 pm
emdash
But even including that, the Jews still come off looking like small-minded jerks, craven douchebags, and flat-out cowards during significant parts of the narrative.
Israelites, technically. The craven douchebags don’t become Jews until considerably later. (But point taken.)
March 30, 2010 at 7:17 pm
ari
Dammit, I meant to fix that. Oh well. Like I said, I’m a bad
IsraeliteJew.March 30, 2010 at 7:35 pm
grackle
So, I’m supposing the smarty-pants archaeologists take the Aegyptians at their word, like because dissimulation to cover over embarrassing uprisings and rebellions hadn’t been invented yet? Because, the Jews, that weren’t yet Jews, or even Israelites for that matter, I mean they stay lost for forty years, long enough to walk back and forth from Giza to Jerusalem several times and over and over before they find the empty land of Israel so what exactly would the Aegyptians have mentioned about these douche-bag rebels? Plus, the Moses story was lifted from the Iranians or some-one even older and the Seder is remarkably similar to Norooz even to the items displayed at table. Happy Passover – one of the great holidays, centered as it is in the home.
March 30, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Jackmormon
I always thought that the parts about the Israelites screwing up were there to get the audience to go “ooo, you idiots, you’re going to get smitten AGAIN, why do you keep denying God and misbehaving?” At which point the audience is beginning to internalize the moral framework of the story. I mean, you’d never catch ME worshipping a golden calf, not even after all this time.
March 30, 2010 at 7:58 pm
kevin
Passover? Seder? Exodus?
I’m sorry, but all of my knowledge of the Israelites comes from Desmond Dekker.
March 30, 2010 at 8:00 pm
ari
I mean, you’d never catch ME worshipping a golden calf
You’ve just never been exposed to the right calf.
March 30, 2010 at 8:01 pm
ari
Wait, that sounds flirty. And kind of creepy. That’s not how I meant it.
March 30, 2010 at 8:07 pm
foolishmortal
the Jews still come off looking like small-minded jerks
The Big Guy doesn’t come off much better. The minor prophets largely consist of a bitchy God devising ever crueler and more capricious punishments to be inflicted on the insufficiently loving. No one walks away from the exercise covered in glory. Well, almost no one.
March 30, 2010 at 8:26 pm
urbino
As we Christians know, Moses wrote this stuff down so thousands of years later we could explain how it prefigured Christ (that’s Jesus) in some way or other.
Y’all probably don’t talk about him at your little Seder parties.
More seriously, and following up on grackle: I think they might have been Israelites, already, since the name comes from one of Abram’s sons, already long dead, not from the later existence of the state in Palestine.
March 30, 2010 at 8:59 pm
Vance
Happy Passover, everybody. (Can one say that?) Good to see you posting, ari.
March 31, 2010 at 4:14 am
jhm
Without wanting to seem like a spoil sport, or totally humorless, I really recommend Nova’s treatment of the early bible:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/
There’s this on the exodus:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/meyers.html
and this is my favorite:
March 31, 2010 at 4:25 am
LizardBreath
I also can’t think of another case, at least not off the top of my head, in which a race has made a spurious and enduring claim about the past like this one.
The Romans as the last refugees from the fall of Troy? I assume that’s spurious, although maybe there’s scholarship I don’t know about suggesting that there’s some basis to the Aeneid.
March 31, 2010 at 4:36 am
politicalfootball
ari, talk of an exposed calf hasn’t been flirty since the 1920s.
JMormon, I grew up Catholic, and golden calf worship is looking pretty good to me right about now.
March 31, 2010 at 5:41 am
Charlieford
“. . . the Jews weren’t in Egypt for any lengthy period of time . . . why would the long-ago Jews have invented this history?”
Maybe they were just bad at math?
March 31, 2010 at 6:10 am
Fats Durston
I also can’t think of another case, at least not off the top of my head, in which a race has made a spurious and enduring claim about the past like this one.
Then check out the East African coast, the (Wa)Swahili and Shungwaya and the Shirazi. In fact, a number of interior East African agriculturalists’ mythistories have the weird habit of claiming they were not the first group to occupy the land they occupy at present, but newcomers/outsiders/refugees of some sort.
March 31, 2010 at 6:13 am
dana
The Romans as the last refugees from the fall of Troy?
Here, though, even if it were taken as fact, there’s a reason to promote one’s society as the descendants of the badass Trojans.
March 31, 2010 at 6:13 am
Erik Lund
I probably shouldn’t be mouthing off, since most of what I know about this stuff was gleaned from watching the kooks pop on Wikipedia. I’m going to do so anyway, because the expert witness of archaeology has been brought in, so historiography and scientific inquiry are at least peripherally at issue. (And the periphery is where I live, baby!)
If a label is assigned to a scheduled class of Egyptian labourers and then to a faction in Canaanite politics 40 years later, it would be a mistake to assume the two groupings are the same. Because what we know is only that the label has been used as a heuristic twice. What we need to know next is the political work that it does in these two circumstances. To assume that etymological identity maps onto society just reinforces essentialism.
Very careful inquiry has established a surprising amount about the Late Bronze Age Middle East, but hardly enough for us to deconstruct the Passover story. So we’re not getting anywhere with that, even if it were not a moot point, inasmuch as in no meaningful sense does the story come from then. On textual evidence alone, we want to focus on the mid-600s BC, when the story, even if it is that old, began to be told again.
At that point, it is not hard to imaginatively reconstruct a context in which this story might have been told. The Judaean kings balanced between various great power influences, one of which was Egypt. It is easy to imagine that in the wake of the death of, say, King Amon, a well-known (say) pro-Assyrian politician would get up at a banquet and tell this story about Moses that he had from his grandfather. (It’s admittedly a bit of a stretch to call Josiah “pro-Assyrian,” but there is an interesting argument about how Josiah’s policy might have been ideologicallly aligned with Assyrian ideas of kingship.)
I’m not saying that that’s the context of the Passover story. It’s a story, and the context is what is made of it –which would mean that as a gentile, I can’t really say what its context is, only what its historical context was not. At the periphery where scientific inquiry, as opposed to identity, matters.
And Lizardbreath: don’t forget that bit about Etruscan being an Anatolian language. Although admittedly this isn’t the line that Virgil was taking in giving the Romans a Trojan ancestry, historiography is full of migration stories. Either you’re some kind of crazy radical who prefers ethnogenetic formation to Kurgans and Aryans, Dorians and Sea Peoples, barbarian invaders and Vikings, Puritans and Scotch-irish, or you take some of them seriously. And the Aeneas story is rather sweet. If Ursula LeGuin can use it, why can’t the Romans?
March 31, 2010 at 6:14 am
dana
That, and “a demigod hero founded our city” is a reasonably common classic trope.
March 31, 2010 at 6:52 am
JPool
To build on Fats’s comment, and I’ve probably related some version of this here before, there are any number of groups in Africa, such as the Ewe of Ghana and Togo, many of whom think of themselves as descended from Jews. They conceive of this heritage, not in the Ethiopian sense of ancient converts, but in the classic lost tribes sense. In some East African cases this has lead to Israeli sponsored genetic testing to document plausible links with Jewish communities in the Arabian Peninsula. In other cases though, there isn’t even that sort of thing to hang your hat on.
So what’s the attraction? Part of it certainly seems to be a way of indigenizing Chrstianity: we were always secretly part of this tradition. The other big factor though, seems to come from trying to take the long and detailed migration, settlement and conquest stories in the Bible seriously and finding point of connection for ones own oral traditions. As Jan Vansina and others have argued, oral traditions seem to be a mix of historical memory, cultural symbolism (directions and places get changed and retconned to reflect symbolic values and oppositions, ala Levi-Strauss), and stories of various groups get absorbed as ones own.
In an oral culture, the accretion of seemingly relevant details can be more important than narrative coherence.
So in Exodeus, you have a migration story and a story of liberation from someone’s yoke, and an origin story of priest-judge based social order, which may initially have been separate stories brought together and whose details may have changed over time as the Jews tried to make sense of their own stories in relation to those of their neighbors.
March 31, 2010 at 9:59 am
elizardbreath
That, and “a demigod hero founded our city” is a reasonably common classic trope.
Sure, and it’s one you can shoehorn Exodus into if you mumble over the difference between a demigod and a prophet. Exodus just doesn’t seem all that far out of the norm.
Question for the Jews in the room. So, if you go to seders on both the first and second nights of Passover, is an acceptable answer to:
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
“It isn’t. We did all this stuff yesterday.”?
March 31, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Ralph Hitchens
Personally I think it likely that people from Canaan dwelt in Egypt for long periods when things were tough back home and there was work in Egypt, like all the building that went on during the 18th & 19th dynasties. These Canaanites were, like, laborers, indentured workers, you know. And I further speculate that it’s no coincidence that the Exodus is supposed to have happened around 1300 BC or thereabouts, around the time Egypt itself went thru an experiment with monotheism. So maybe a lot of these Canaanites got enthusiastically caught up in this weird business that Akhenaton started, and then they all got kicked out of the kingdom after he was either assassinated or exiled. If you want to stretch things, maybe Akhenaton was Moses, as was speculated in bygone days in obscure corners of the Internet when Usenet reigned. Anyway, it seems possible that there is a core of truth about the Exodus that won’t show up in the archeological record. Hard to believe some old guys just made up the whole thing, right?
March 31, 2010 at 8:15 pm
chingona
Without thinking too hard about it, I had always assumed there was some element of truth to the story, and I’m a bit amused at myself to realize I would be disappointed to learn definitively that it was a complete fabrication (amused because I don’t feel this way about anything else in the Bible, at least not anything that’s coming to mind right now).
That’s the presentism, though, that we invest the story with significance because of the things that happened afterward. As for why it would have been made up in the first place, I’m with Jackmormom that the story makes a lot more sense as a stage on which God demonstrates his terrible, awesome, don’t-mess-with-me power than as an uplifting story of liberation. I mean, Pharoah was ready to let them go after the first plague and after every subsequent plague but God keeps hardening his heart until he gets to kill the first-born.
Read that way, the Israelites don’t need to come off that well for the story to work. What I find more confusing is why they made themselves descended from Jacob, the swindler. I believe there’s already a spoof out there in which Abe Foxman writes angry letters about how anti-Semitic the Bible is.
March 31, 2010 at 8:54 pm
teofilo
In attendance at my family’s seder was a family friend who is an Assyriologist, and she had some interesting stuff to say about this issue. Her interpretation, based on some pretty recent research, was that the whole seder tradition (and possibly the Passover story as we know it today, although it wasn’t totally clear to me if she was including that to) developed in the era shortly after the return from the Babylonian exile, and that “Egypt” in the Haggadah was mostly understood to stand in for “Babylonia,” of which the Jews would have had clear memories. The core of the story itself would presumably go back further, of course, since it does in fact refer to Egypt rather than Babylon.
March 31, 2010 at 8:56 pm
teofilo
Oh, and Etruscan is not an Anatolian language. It may or may not be related to one or more extremely poorly documented languages apparently spoken on the fringes of the Anatolian Peninsula, but that’s not the same thing.
April 1, 2010 at 1:10 am
dave
That rather depends on your definition of ‘Anatolian language’, doesn’t it?
April 1, 2010 at 3:55 am
kid bitzer
teofilo–
that sounds right, that references to egypt are really covert references to the more recent experience in babylon. but of course, when post-exilic literature refers to babylon, it really means trenchtown in any case.
April 1, 2010 at 5:23 am
Brock
Forgive my goyim ignorance, but at what point in history do the Israelites become Jews? After the return from the Babylonian exile?
April 1, 2010 at 9:15 am
Josh
Question for the Jews in the room.
Fun fact: Jews in Israel only have one seder. The practice of having two seders came about because Jews outside of Israel wanted to make sure they were celebrating a seder on the appropriate day Israel-time. Once you’ve gone down that road, literalism is pretty much out the window.
(That said, are you sure you’re not Jewish? That sort of wise-ass question would fit perfectly into the Talmud.)
April 1, 2010 at 9:30 am
elizardbreath
Only in the Lenny Bruce sense</a).
April 1, 2010 at 10:27 am
teofilo
That rather depends on your definition of ‘Anatolian language’, doesn’t it?
Yes, but in historical linguistics it’s usually a technical term referring to a specific group of Indo-European languages, including Hittite, that were spoken in Anatolia, and even with a more expansive definition along the lines of “language of any family spoken in Anatolia” it doesn’t apply to Etruscan per se, which as far as anyone can tell was only ever spoken in Italy, but at most to some languages related to Etruscan, and possibly (but this is very controversial) to the language ancestral to both them and Etruscan.
Forgive my goyim ignorance, but at what point in history do the Israelites become Jews? After the return from the Babylonian exile?
Pretty much, yeah. Theoretically the key change is the disappearance of the ten lost tribes, which just left the tribes of Judah (i.e., that of the “Jews” in the narrowest sense) and Benjamin, along with the handful of priestly and associated families from the tribe of Levi.
April 1, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Erik Lund
I consider it extremely unlikely that Etruscan has any close relationship with any language spoken contemporaneously in Anatolia. The nuts who are carrying Herodotus’ torch on this and making that claim usually link Etruscan to a supposed pre-Indo-European “Tyhrrenian” language.
I also think that there is a case for taking the Egypt of the Passover story as actual Egypt, because at various points there might be a political point to make by referencing an “Egyptian captivity.”
Anyway, here’s actual experts, summarised in a rather odd article, even for Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed
April 1, 2010 at 4:39 pm
teofilo
I also think that there is a case for taking the Egypt of the Passover story as actual Egypt, because at various points there might be a political point to make by referencing an “Egyptian captivity.”
Certainly, but the point to be made would have varied depending on when and where it was being written. The history of Levantine-Egyptian relations is very long and complicated, and attitudes toward Egypt would surely have varied over the millennia. And, of course, there must be some connection to the actual Egypt for it to be in the story in the first place. The argument I mentioned was really more about the Haggadah than about Exodus. Although they tell the same basic story and there’s a lot of textual overlap, they almost certainly come from very different times, and maybe different places too.