And when he led his armies on a successful war of conquest at the end of the 13th century BC, he wanted the world, and successive generations, to know all about it. Like all good autocrats, Merneptah, pharaoh of Egypt, loved to brag about his achievements.
In fact, the best corroborating evidence for the Bible’s claim that the Israelites surged into Canaan is Merneptah’s Stele. St Catherine's Monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where the Codex Sinaiticus came to scholars' attention. As John Barton, former professor of the interpretation of holy scriptures at the University of Oxford, puts it: “There is no evidence of a great invasion by the Israelites under Joshua the population doesn’t seem to have changed much in that period as far as we can tell by archaeological surveys.” The historical sources, however, are far less forthcoming. It tells us that Moses led the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt (whose population had been laid low by ten plagues inflicted on them by God) before Joshua spearheaded a brilliant invasion of Canaan, the promised land. But if it were true, it would place the enslaved Israelites in the Nile Delta in the decades after 1279 BC, when Ramesses II became king.
It’s an intriguing theory, and one that certainly has its doubters. In this podcast, biblical scholar John Barton considers the historical background to the most influential book in western culture, exploring its creation and how it fits into the histories of Judaism and Christianity: It’s been argued that Pi-Ramesses was the biblical city of Ramesses, and that the city was built, as Exodus claims, by Jewish slaves. Pi-Ramesses was the great capital built by Ramesses II, one of Egypt’s most formidable pharaohs and the biblical tormentor of the Israelites. That’s the question that some historians have been asking themselves since the 1960s, when the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak identified the location of the ancient city of Pi-Ramesses at the site of the modern town of Qantir in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which chronicles the Israelites’ escape from captivity in Egypt to the promised land.īut has archaeology unearthed one of the sites of the Israelites’ captivity? The murderous history of Bible translationsįor centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue – of the Israelites falling from grace before picking themselves up, dusting themselves down and finding redemption.Perhaps the best place to start the story is in Sun-baked northern Egypt, for it was here that the Bible and archaeology may, just may, first collide. These findings may be incomplete and they may be highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life.
(Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images) Where does the Bible originate?Īrchaeology and the study of written sources have shed light on the history of both halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the story of the Jews’ highs and lows in the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus and the New Testament, which documents the life and teachings of Jesus. An illumination from a Byzantine manuscript depicting Jesus Christ.
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