Matthew accurately rehearses the stories of the Pentateuch relating to Israel’s origins in Egypt, the exodus, and the portrayal of Yahweh as a despotic, thoroughly harsh, petty, and cruel deity. But Yahweh doesn’t need to be rescued from that portrayal. Rather, it should be recognized that the entire account is a national founding myth and has no basis in actual history. The account of Yahweh in that myth is more reflective of the creators of those stories in the 6th century and after who wished to present their national god in that manner.
Generations ago, it was simply assumed by archaeologists and historians that the biblical account of Israelite enslavement in Egypt, of the exodus of a vast multitude out of Egypt, 40 year sojourn in the wilderness, and the conquest of Canaan was historical. But after many decades of the most intense examination of the evidence from Egypt and archaeological research of the entire region, it is now the consensus of the vast majority of scholars that those events never actually occurred. The Hebrews were never slaves in Egypt. They never escaped into the Sinai peninsula. They never spent 40 years in the wilderness. There was no conquest of Canaan. Rather, the Hebrews were an indigenous group of Canaanites who migrated from the coastal areas to the Judean highlands. They shared the most high god (El) of the Canaanite pantheon with the other groups in the region, also frequently worshiping the son of El (Ba’al) but finally conflating their war god (Yahweh) with El in an evolved and amalgamated monotheism, passing through henotheism on the way.
Nobody wants the Hebrew founding myth to be true more than the Israeli’s, for obvious modern political claims to the land, yet Israeli archaeologists have conceded that the stories are not historical.
Israeli archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog provides his view on the historicity of the Exodus: “The Israelites never were in Egypt. They never came from abroad. This whole chain is broken. It is not a historical one. It is a later legendary reconstruction of a history that never happened.”
Not only does the record show an entirely different historical sequence than that of the Pentateuch and Joshua, evidence which should have been expected if those events had actually occurred is absent. There is simply no detritus of hundreds of thousands or millions of people to be found in the Sinai; no mass burial sites, no garbage dumps, no latrines, no masses of broken pottery…nothing which would indicate large scale habitation.
In capitulation to the truth, the Israel museum has a dramatic section on the Exodus and conquest: The most provocative items in the huge archaeological exhibition at the Israel Museum are the ones that aren’t there. The exhibition, “Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story,” is about the long relationship between the land of Israel and ancient Egypt. The hall devoted to the best known part of the story — the Exodus from Egypt — is an empty room with exactly one exhibit on display: a movie featuring co-curator and Israel Museum Egyptologist Dr. Daphna Ben-Tor, who explains that the hall is empty because there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever to support the biblical tale.
So the picture of Yahweh as given in the Pentateuch and Joshua are simply myth and legend made up by later chroniclers meant to push the people into a unified Yahweh worship and to see themselves as “other” from the surrounding city-states.
Of course the New Testament accepts these stories in totality but attempts to soften them, even though both Jesus and the epistle writers continue to threaten horrible outcomes for the vast majority in the final judgment. And lest one think that the vengeful warlord Yahweh has disappeared in Christianity, just read Revelation…He’s baaaaack.
