Signs of Israelite Slavery in Egypt - The Exodus

a new pharaoh arises and he doesn't remember joseph he enslaves the people because they're becoming too numerous and becoming a threat so he puts them to work and embitters their lives building store cities of pittum and ramses and makes them create bricks out of mud and straw it was intriguing to see this type of construction in different parts of egypt were any of these bricks molded by the hands of israelite slaves however mansour was quick to remind me that these types of mud bricks are present throughout egypt's history and don't prove any connection to the israelites in a search for evidence that fits the idea of israelite slavery professor james hoffmeyer focuses on the first half of the new kingdom because he favors a ramesses exodus date there he finds a very interesting set of evidence it states in the biblical story that the hebrews were supposed to make bricks from mud and straw is there any evidence of that we have two lines of evidence that this practice referred to in exodus chapter one and exodus chapter five um really was a sort of thing going on we have the depiction in the tomb of reshmirei he was a vizier or prime minister under thutmose's third in the 15th century and there we can see pows both semites from canaan and syria working alongside prisoners of war from nubia black africans and there they are making bricks overseen by egyptian task masters with sticks and so it's very clear that this was the treatment of prisoners of war and we see these foreigners making bricks in southern egypt for a building project at karnak temple and i'm sure that picture could be replicated other parts of egypt especially in the north secondly we also have from the same time period the 15th century the 18th dynasty we also have pictures of agricultural work especially work in in the vineyards picking grapes stomping on grapes to make juice and wine here again we find the same prisoners of war engaged in agriculture exodus 1 14 actually says they worked in brick and mortar and agriculture so interestingly the very two areas the bible says the israelites were forced to work in agriculture and construction work is the very two places we see this sort of work going on in private tombs in egypt in the 15th century bc now were all these prisoners of war were the could these these have been uh people such as the bible states that were actually there that were became suspicious and and then were forced into labor in the case of the tomb of uh brechmire two 100 in the theban necropolis uh it actually tells us they were hawk they were plundered they were prisoners brought back from the king's campaigns so and these happen to be in the south in luxer the problem is we don't have corresponding tombs for what was going on in the delta which where the hebrews were so we lack that kind of evidence also during the 15th century bc we have the beginnings of the deportations of prisoners of war from the wars of the pharaohs that moses first thought moses iii ammon hotep ii these are bringing prisoners of war both from syria and canaan as well as from nubia to the south all these prisoners of war are flooding into egypt and are being pressed into hard labor for the state so we have both the old semitic population second third generation of whom are still around uh in the 15th 14th 13th century and then you have the new population of semites who were brought in as pows from the campaigns of the egyptian pharaohs so there was a significant network of foreign people living in egypt during the new kingdom while this is good evidence for the presence of semitic slaves doing the right types of work prisoners of war do not match the bible's account of the early israelites meanwhile david roll pointed to a different set of evidence that fits the pattern found in egypt's middle kingdom beginning with fines from avarus well what happened next what what does the archaeological record show what we then see is that the graves of these people we begin to this to see in the bones deterioration in the quality of life we see harris lines in the bones which indicate famine shortage of food and nutrients these people suddenly become impoverished not only that but we start to see larger houses which seem to be egyptian and design and then smaller houses attached to them which seem to be servants houses and this is what we see for the very first time and we even find papyri with lists of slaves with semitic names on them at this period as well tell me more about the the bones if we look at the cemetery population that's the the dead if you like and that's the evidence we have of the living is the dead and we look at their greys we find something very interesting happens at the beginning these people seem to prosper their quality of their lives is very good but all of a sudden at some point in the story we see a degeneration we see a degeneration in the burials and and the actual graves themselves the investigation of the anthropological data has shown us that we are dealing with people who live properly to about 32 to 34 years of age and then died that's the typical life expectancy of the time so we're not talking about a people who prospered and went on to live into their 50s and 60s as you might expect these people had really tough lives so how do we explain that what is the mechanism that we would understand why these people only live to such a short age and the obvious answer is slavery so you're saying that this group that came in that was prosperous then fell on hard times yeah we've got a situation of prosperity followed by a lack of prosperity and a shortage of life so it seems very clear that these asiatic peoples these people have come from the north speaking a semitic language who first of all prospered in this region have suddenly been enslaved is there any physical evidence that there was slavery of hebrew type people in egypt there's one particular document which is quite amazing it's called the brooklyn papyrus and this actually is a list of domestic servants from one estate we have maybe up to a hundred people listed as slaves in egypt when we look at those names seventy percent of them are semitic names and you can literally pick up israelite names in there menachem issachar and asha the names of two of the tribes of israel shifra one of the hebrew midwives in the exodus story a name that appears in this document these are hebrew israelite slaves and the inner papyrus from the 13th dynasty not from the 19th dynasty not from the time of ramesses ii in the new kingdom but from the 13th dynasty the middle kingdom what does this mean to you what does it say this is real evidence for the time when the israelites were in egypt as slaves it's when you get a text suddenly you've got history archaeology you have to interpret when you have a text this is something very different david can you put a specific date on the brooklyn papyrus the brooklyn papyrus is dated to one reign the name of the king appears on it and it's called and the king is called sobekotep the third now he's the the first king of a mini dynasty in the 13th dynasty where you have maybe four or five very powerful rulers coming to the fore a family of strong pharaohs and this could be the pharaoh who did not know joseph the one who enslaved the israelites because it comes maybe three or four generations after the middle kingdom when joseph arrives in egypt we suddenly find this strong pharaoh so because of the third and we have this list of slaves with israelite names david i the thing that i'm puzzled by is why so many egyptologists ignore the brooklyn papyrus well this is the old problem again about time isn't it you have a situation here where although everybody recognizes that this list is a list of semitic slaves and everybody recognizes that the names appearing in here are also israelite names these can't be the israelites because it's the wrong time period the israelites are much later in history so these people we're seeing here in this brooklyn papyrus in the time of subject of the third cannot be the israelites all this evidence that we're finding in avaris this this city in goshen in the eastern delta points us to the period when the israelites were in egypt and that is the period we call the middle bronze age most egyptologists put the period of the slavery in the new kingdom in the 19th dynasty and here we are in the 13th dynasty so the things don't match so that's why they disregard it so they put it to one side and say it's another coincidence

Channel: PatternsOfEvidence

Views: 341,954

Keywords: The Exodus, Joseph, Joseph of the Bible, Sons of Israel, Tim Mahoney, Archaeologist Scott Stripling, Tabernacle of the Lord, Shiloh, Historical Faith Society, Patterns of Evidence, Thinking Man Films Lecture Series, Thinking Man Films, Joshua’s Conquest, Jim Scudder Jr., InGrace, University of Northwestern, Marcela Zapata-Meza, Magdala, Mark Jenkins, Biblical Hebrew, Old Testament, Bible Evidence, Evangel University, Seth Rodriguez, Colorado Christian University

Id: lfQdjdSm2AE

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022