MODERN EGYPT

Finkelstein and Silberman present the plausible thesis that the Deuteronomistic version of the Exodus, which brings together and embellishesthe chronicles in the first four books of the Torah, was written during the 7th century B.C. The intent of the story was to rally the inhabitants of Judah against Egypt, which had become its most powerful enemy as Assyrian hegemony waned.

Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the evil pharaoh in the Exodus story was actually modeled after the domineering Psamethicus I, who reigned from 664 to 610 B.C., approximately during the time that the Deuteronomistic version was written. This account was "powerful propaganda" that created "an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah's dreams" in order "to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead." In fact, the Egypt described in the Deuteronomistic account is "uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psamethicus."[11]

According to Redford, the memories of the Canaanite Hyskos ruling Egypt and subsequently being driven out (though not enslaved and not Hebrew) most likely formed the basis for the Exodus story.[12] The sequence of plagues in the Exodus may be related to the ancient Egyptian belief that the inability to worship multiple gods causes illness.

The Amarna tablets indicate that Akhnaten imposed monotheism on polytheistic Egypt during his reign between 1372 and 1354 B.C., allegedly causing the populace to suffer a variety of maladies, which abated with the restoration of polytheism by Akhnaten's successor.[13, 14]

Jonathan Kirsh notes that the basket-in-the-bullrushes infant-Moses story is clearly a "cut-and-paste" plagiarism copied almost verbatim from a Mesopotamian text.[15] In the words of Daniel Lazare, the stories of infant Moses, the plagues, and final exodus are "unconnected folktales," linked together "like pearls on a string."[16] What we have, according to David Denby, is a "self-confirming, self-glorifying myth of origins," with Moses as "the hero of the greatest campfire story ever told."[17]