An Old Testament KnoWhy relating to the reading assignment for Gospel Doctrine Lesson 13: Bondage, Passover, and Exodus (Exodus 1-3; 5-6; 11-14) (JBOTL013B)
Question:Many people nowadays believe that the Exodus never happened. Are there traces of the historical Exodus from sources outside the scriptures? And do they help us to identify the Pharaoh of the Exodus?
Summary: Traces of the historical Exodus from sources outside the scriptures are available — but only if you are looking for the right things in the right direction. For example, if you are expecting to find archaeological evidence for a group of millions of Israelites crossing the Sinai desert after leaving Egypt in shambles, you are likely to be disappointed. True it is that large numbers of Semitic people came and went from Egypt in the centuries before a much smaller group eventually left in the Exodus. But teasing out the subtleties of the historical context of scripture requires tedious and diligent efforts of dedicated scholars. In this article, we present a few tentative conclusions to help familiarize readers with the current landscape.
A video version of a presentation by Richard Elliott Friedman on the subject entitled “The Exodus Based on the Sources Themselves” can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-YlzpUhnxQ
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (PhD, Cognitive Science, University of Washington) is a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Florida. His professional writings have explored a wide range of topics in human and machine intelligence (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_M._Bradshaw; www.ihmc.us/groups/jbradshaw).
Jeff serves as a vice president for The Interpreter Foundation and is on the Advisory Board for the Academy for Temple Studies. He has lectured at BYU Campus Education Week and the Sidney B. Sperry Symposium and has presented at FairMormon meetings in the United States, Germany, and France. His articles on temple studies and the ancient Near East have appeared in Studies in the Bible and Antiquity, Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, Meridian Magazine, and BYU Studies. Jeff has written detailed commentaries on the book of Moses and Genesis 1-11 and on temple themes in the scriptures. For LDS-related publications, see www.TempleThemes.net.
Jeff was a missionary in France and Belgium from 1975–1977, and his family has returned twice to live in France: once from 1993–1994 as a Fulbright Scholar and a second time from 2005–2006 as an unexpected “sabbatical” in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan. Jeff has served twice as a bishop and twice as a counselor in the stake presidency of the Pensacola Florida Stake. He and his wife, Kathleen, are the parents of four children and eleven grandchildren. In July 2016, they began two years of service in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa Mission.
