Did Moses Exist?

Welcome to a very special collaboration between Useful Charts Let's Talk Religion and Al Muqarma in this series of three videos, we will be exploring whether or not the following three religious figures existed in real life. Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. In this video, I'll be discussing Moses, Let's Talk Religion, we'll be discussing Jesus, and Al Muqadama will be discussing Muhammad. In each case, we'll be looking at things from a historical perspective and focusing on what evidence is available for each religious figure outside of religious tradition. So after watching this video, I recommend that you check out the other two videos as well. I'll leave a link in the description, or you can simply click on the next video at the end of this one. Foreign. Let's start by asking the question, how do we know that anyone in history really existed? Well, the best evidence would be, of course, to find a person's physical remains. So take for example, King Richard III of England. According to the historical record, he died in 1485 during the battle of Bosworth Field, after which he was supposedly buried at a small church in the nearby town Lester. However, over time the exact location was forgotten and thus became unknown. That is, until 2012, when researchers found his skeleton under a parking lot. Using radiocarbon dating, DNA tests, and other forms of analysis, scientists were able to conclude beyond any reasonable doubt that the bones were in fact those of Richard III. But what about someone from much further back, say for example, Alexander the Great, who supposedly died in 323 BCE? Unfortunately, the exact location of Alexander's tomb has become lost to history and therefore we do not have his physical remains. However, in the case of Alexander, we have the next best thing, which is solid archaeological evidence for his existence. For example, we have many sculptures of his face, some of which date very close to his lifetime or are exact copies of now lost originals that were made when he was still alive. We also have coins with his face on them which were minted during his lifetime. We also have inscriptions like this one from the Temple of Athena in Prien, Greece that dates from when he visited the location. It reads, King Alexander dedicated this to Athenia polias. We even have foreign sources like this one, written in Babylonian cuneiform and dated to his lifetime, which records Alexander's victory over the Persian king Darius iii. So even though we do not have the physical remains of Alexander the Great, we can still say beyond any reasonable doubt that he did in fact ex. But what about cases where we don't have any archaeological evidence dating from when the person was still alive. All three of the religious figures in this series, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad fall into this category. In these cases, we have to rely entirely on textual sources. And by textual sources, I don't mean a few words carved into stone. I mean lengthy works of literature, usually written first on parchment and then later copied onto paper and made into books. This is where things get a bit tricky, because when it comes to ancient history, we often get textual sources that differ from one another when it comes to what actually happened. This leads some people to conclude that there's no way of knowing the truth and that it's just a matter of arbitrarily choosing who you want to believe. But this is not the case. Scholars have developed a method called the historical Method for determining which sources are more likely than others to be true. Here are some of the things that they consider. First, does the source match the archaeological record? So, for example, if a text claims that king so and so had an army with 1 million soldiers, but but archaeologists dig up that king's main cities and discover that they were much too small to support a number that large, the accuracy of that textual source is definitely going to come into question. Two, are there multiple sources that all tell the same story? Say we have 10 different sources that all state that the Greeks beat the Persians in a particular battle, but only one source that states that the Persians beat the Greeks. In a case like this, it's probably safe to assume that the 10 are right and the one is wrong. Three, is there any chance that the source is biased? It's quite obvious from ancient sources that rulers liked to boast about their accomplishments and often exaggerated things. So if we happen to have an account written by a neutral third party who just happened to be living nearby, there's a greater chance that their account is going to be more accurate. Four, how much time passed between the event and the written account of the event? This one's easy. Basically, if a text was written very close to an event, it's far more likely to be accurate than a text that was written many centuries later. Finally, number what genre of writing was used? Another assumption that a lot of people make but are wrong in making is that all ancient people wrote history in the same way that we write it today. Nowadays, history falls very clearly into the category of non fiction and tends to be written in a very straightforward linear fashion, focusing on facts and figures with utmost accuracy. But history was not always written like this. The further back in time you go, you'll find that for ancient people, history was more of a story. And the main point of the story was far more important to them than all the nitty gritty details. If we come across a text that clearly uses literary tropes that were common at the time, we need to consider whether or not the details in that text should be considered in a literal or a figurative way. Lets now turn our attention to Moses and go through these five questions again, this time with Moses in mind. But first, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that in addition to being a history educator, I also happen to be Jewish. So if you don't like my conclusions, please don't assume that I came to these conclusions simply because I'm anti religious. Cause. Well, I'm not anyway. The oldest source we have for the life of Moses is, as you might have guessed, the Bible, in particular the Torah, which refers to the first five books of the Bible. According to the Torah, Moses was born in Egypt during a time when his people, the Israelites, were slaves there. As a baby, Moses was placed in a basket in the Nile river, where he was then found by one of Pharaoh's daughters. After growing up in the royal palace, Moses then commits murder as an adult and has to escape to the land of Midian, where he then has a spiritual experience in which God speaks to him in the form of a burning bush. There, God instructs Moses to return to Egypt and to lead his enslaved people out of that country and into Canaan, the Promised land, which he then does after God sends a series of ten plagues on Egypt. From there, we get the famous Parting of the Red Sea story, the receiving of the Ten Commandments, and the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years. At the end of the biblical account, Moses is not allowed to enter the Promised land. So it is his successor, Joshua, that takes over and conquers most of the land of Canaan in a very dramatic fashion. Okay, so let's first consider whether or not this account lines up with the archaeological record. According to the Bible, the number of male slaves who left Egypt with Moses was 600,000, meaning that the total number of Israelites, counting women and children, was likely around 2 million. Also, according to the Bible, Moses would have lived somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE. The exact date depends on one's interpretation of the chronological data, and there are a lot of conflicting theories on that that I won't go into. Suffice to say it was somewhere around 1500-1200 BCE. Well, there is nothing in the archaeological record for that time period or any other time period for that matter to suggest a sudden population drop of 2 million people within Egypt, nor 2 million people traveling through the Sinai Peninsula, nor 2 million people suddenly arriving in Canaan and replacing the existing population there. Even if the Egyptians tried to cover up their embarrassing defeat in their records and monuments, there would have been no way to cover up all the physical evidence that would have resulted from the movement of that many people. However, this doesn't prove that there was never a guy named Moses that left Egypt. It simply indicates that he didn't leave Egypt with 2 million people. There's still the possibility that there might have been some sort of exodus led by some sort of Moses like figure this, but that it was simply on a much smaller scale. This is what Hebrew scholar Richard Friedman suggests in his book the Exodus. He points out that members of the tribe of Levi often had Egyptian sounding names, but that other Israelites did not. Names like Hophni and Phinehas and even Moses. All of these Levite names have Egyptian origins. So maybe out of the 12 tribes, it was only the tribe of Levi that came from Egypt. As I mentioned earlier, the Moses story is also closely associated with a place called Midian. And according to the archaeological record, we know that there was a people group living in that area around that time called the Shasu, who happened to have been sometimes enslaved by the Egyptians and who happened to have worshiped a God with a very similar name to the God that the Israelites ended up worshiping. So there's also the possibility that Moses was actually a Midianite or a member of the Shasu, and that he became an important figure in Israelite history because he was the one who introduced them to Hashem. Moving on, let's now consider the second question. How does the source, in this case the Bible, compare to other textual sources? Well, you might be surprised to find out that there were actually many different versions of the Moses story floating about in the ancient world. For example, in some Hellenistic versions, he's mostly remembered for building a city or establishing a temple, often within Egypt itself, not in Israel. In others, he's the one who invented the Alphabet through the guidance of Thoth, or the one who first introduced the Egyptians to the idea of written laws. According to the famous Roman historian Tacitus, Moses did leave Egypt to colonize Canaan. But according to that version, the Israelites were in the desert for only six days, arriving in Canaan with Moses on the seventh. But perhaps the most interesting variant is the one written by Manetho, who was an Egyptian priest and historian living in the Ptolemaic period. It is primarily from Manetho that we learn about an Asiatic people called the Hyksos who temporarily ruled Lower Egypt just prior to the time of Moses before getting kicked out and forced back to Canaan. However, Manetho also tells a story about an Egyptian priest named Osarseph who lived just after the Hyksos period. In this story, the Pharaoh enslaves a group of lepers, but then Osarseph unites the lepers with the help of the Hyksos and forms an army, defeating the pharaoh. Osarseph then goes on to rule Egypt for 13 years, destroying all other temples except his own, before finally being defeated by the returning pharaoh and forced out of the country. At this point, Osarsif changes his name to Moses. Obviously this story about Moses has some parallels to the biblical story about Moses, but it also has some major differences. On top of this, Manetho's account and the biblical account both seem to have parallels to the reign of a historically verified Pharaoh named Akhenaten, who lived around the same time as Moses and is mostly remembered for having promoted an early type of monotheism. But the bottom line is there are many different versions of the Moses story out there in the historical record, but none of them seem to line up nicely. The only common thread seems to be that he was some sort of renegade leader who introduced some bold ideas. In other words, based on other textual sources, there is nothing available that could be used to demonstrate that the details given in the Bible about Moses life are historical. The third thing we need to consider is the possibility of bias in our various sources. And here, unfortunately, I think it is fair to say that no unbiased sources of Moses life exist. The biblical account is obviously biased because the main point of the Bible is to promote a particular religious worldview. However, the non biblical accounts are just as biased. Most of them were written during the Hellenistic period, a time when anti Jewish propaganda was common. So it's quite possible that the non biblical versions of the Moses story were deliberately crafted to put some sort of a political twist on the Jewish version of the Moses story. What about the time difference for the various sources? As Al Muqadima points out in his video about Muhammad, the amount of time between the death of Muhammad and the first mention of his name in a non Islamic source is eight years. And as LetsTalkReligion points out in his video about Jesus, the amount of time between the death of Jesus and the first mention of his name in a non Christian source is 63 years. For Moses, it's a completely different story. Using round numbers, the amount of time between the death of Moses and the first mention of his name in a non Jewish source is approximately 1,000 years. And even the time difference between the death of Moses and the earliest stage of the Torah's development is around 750 years. So considering the fact that the archaeological evidence contradicts the biblical account of Moses, and that there are numerous conflicting accounts of Moses life in the various other textual sources, and, and that all of these textual sources are likely biased and were written many, many centuries after he supposedly lived, I think the only conclusion we can come to is that Moses is more of a legendary figure than a historical one. Now, this doesn't mean that he for sure didn't exist. It simply means that the information we have about him is probably a mix of truth and fiction. And we have no way of knowing how much is truth and how much is fiction. Unless of course, we rely solely on religious faith. But there's one more question that we haven't yet considered, and that is what genre of writing was used in the biblical account of Moses? Like I said, ancient people did not always write history in the way that we write it today. For them, historical accounts were often far more literary in nature, and they mixed facts with embellishments in order to craft an overall story that made an important point, not one that simply recorded exactly what happened and when. There are many clear examples of literary tropes. In the biblical story of Moses, for example, although he was born into a low class family, he ended up being adopted into royalty. This is a common theme found in many ancient stories as well as several modern ones. Even the fact that he was placed into a basket in a river was a common theme. One legend, a source for which is older than the Torah, states the following about Sargon of Akkad, who lived over 1,000 years before Moses and is well attested in the historical record. My mother, the high priestess, conceived in secret. She bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes with bitumen, she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. Then there's the familiar trope of the prince or princess who wanders out of the palace one day only to discover how hard life is for the everyday folk. Or the hero who has to go on the run only to come back and accomplish some major feat at some later point. Even the Parting of the Red Sea has much in common with ancient hero stories. Long before the Bible started to be written, crossing an important body of water was often used as a metaphor for leaving behind an old life and beginning a new one. I could go on, but my point is the Biblical story of Moses is a beautifully crafted work of literature that took common themes and images used at the time and wove them together to create a new story, one that explained Israel's origins and defended their most deeply held beliefs. Think of it this There are many Americans today whose ancestors were not at Plymouth Rock or around during the American Revolution, but they still celebrate Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Likewise, even if the ancestors of most ancient Israelites weren't involved in a major exodus from Egypt, or even if the exodus never happened at all, the point is that the story and what it symbolized to them became an important part of their national identity. And not only that, the story of Moses also went on to inspire people in other parts of the world as well. So in my view, the fact that it is not 100% historical doesn't lessen its value at all. For well over 2000 years, the story of Moses has both inspired those who have been oppressed and instructed those with power not to do the oppressing. A common theme found throughout the Torah is this shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Considering the fact that racism and xenophobia are still major problems in the world today, I think a more important question than did Moses exist? Is are we going to take to heart the main lesson from his story? As a reminder, be sure to check out the videos on Jesus and Muhammad as well. You can find the links in the description, or you can simply click on the next video right now. Thanks for watching.