No, but those who blather about "true history" are outliers whose existence is of little statistical import. They serve as little more than fundie fodder.
Scholars classify the Exodus as the
founding myth[d] of the
Israelites,
[18][e] recounted in the
Book of Exodus. It tells a story of Israelite
enslavement and eventual departure from Egypt, revelations at
biblical Mount Sinai, and wanderings in the wilderness up to the borders of
Canaan.
[6] Its message is that the Israelites were delivered from slavery by
Yahweh their god, and therefore belong to him by
covenant.
[18]
The majority view of modern scholars is that the
Torah does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium
BCE from the indigenous
Canaanite culture.
[19][20][21] Most modern scholars believe that the story of the Exodus has some historical basis,
[22][23] but contains little material that is provable.
[24]
Origins and historicity
See also:
Sources and parallels of the Exodus and
Historicity of the Bible
There are two main positions on the historicity of the Exodus in modern scholarship.
[19] The majority position is that the biblical Exodus narrative has some historical basis, although there is little of historical worth in it.
[24][25][18] The other position, often associated with the school of
Biblical minimalism,
[26][27] is that the biblical exodus traditions are the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis.
[28] The biblical Exodus narrative is best understood as a
founding myth of the Jewish people, providing an ideological foundation for their culture and institutions, not an accurate depiction of the history of the Israelites.
[29][18] The view that the biblical narrative is essentially correct unless it can explicitly be proven wrong (
Biblical maximalism) is today held by "few, if any [...] in mainstream scholarship, only on the more fundamentalist fringes."
[19]
Reliability of the biblical account
Mainstream scholarship no longer accepts the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. Most scholars agree that the Exodus stories were written centuries after the apparent setting of the stories.
[21] The
Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40-41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1-2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40-41), and including place names such as
Goshen (Gen. 46:28),
Pithom, and
Ramesses (Exod. 1:11), as well as stating that 600,000 Israelite men were involved (Exodus 12:37).
[30] The
Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelite males aged 20 years and older in the desert during the wandering were 603,550, including 22,273 first-borns, which modern estimates put at 2.5-3 million total Israelites, a number that could not be supported by the
Sinai Desert through natural means.
[31] The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch.
[9] No modern attempt to identify an historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus.
[32] Some elements of the story are
miraculous and defy rational explanation, such as the
Plagues of Egypt and the
Crossing of the Red Sea.
[33] The Bible did not mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative, making it difficult for modern scholars to match Egyptian history and the biblical narrative.
[34]
While
ancient Egyptian texts from the
New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible.
[35] The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites, the Egyptian
Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus.
[36] Archaeologists
Israel Finkelstein and
Neil Asher Silberman say that archaeology has not found any evidence for even a small band of wandering Israelites living in the Sinai: "The conclusion – that Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable [...] repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence."
[37] Instead, modern archaeology suggests continuity between Canaanite and Israelite settlement, indicating a primarily Canaanite origin for Israel, with no suggestion that a group of foreigners from Egypt comprised early Israel.
[38][39]
I believe that Israelite ethnogenesis is far more complexed and nuanced than that offered by either the conquest or the organic evolution models, but talk of accepting the book of Exodus as accurate history is simply nonsense.
