The Exodus is a foundational narrative in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, recounting the Israelites' liberation from slavery in Egypt. However, questions persist about the historicity of the event and the number of people involved. Many historical scholars believe that at least 80 percent of the children of Israel who lived in Egypt under Pharaoh’s rule stayed behind. Rather than following Moses into the desert, most chose to remain in subjugation rather than face the unknown.
Pyramid construction in ancient Egypt. Woodcut engraving, published in 1864.
The Biblical Account of the Exodus
The story of the Exodus is told in the first half of Exodus, with the remainder recounting the 1st year in the wilderness, and followed by a narrative of 39 more years in the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the last four of the first five books of the Bible (also called the Torah or Pentateuch). In the first book of the Pentateuch, the Book of Genesis, the Israelites had come to live in Egypt in the Land of Goshen during a famine, under the protection of an Israelite, Joseph, who had become a high official in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh. The pharaoh becomes concerned by the number and strength of the Israelites in Egypt and enslaves them, commanding them to build at two "supply" or "store cities" called Pithom and Rameses (Exodus 1:11).
According to Genesis 46:27, Jacob and his family numbered 70 people when they moved to Egypt. The book of Exodus describes their descent into slavery and miraculous rescue after some 430 years. Scripture indicates Israel grew rapidly during their time in Egypt (Exodus 1:7). That growth was fast enough to make Egyptian leaders nervous (Exodus 1:8-10). Shortly after leaving Egypt (Numbers 1:17-46), while Israel was at Sinai, God commanded a census. As typically translated into English, the post-exodus Israelite army numbered well over 600,000 men. This figure implies a total Israelite population of about 2.4 million, a staggering figure for that era.
One detail is the number of people who are said to leave Egypt with Moses. Six hundred thousand men of fighting age are counted in Exodus, and when the elderly, women, and children are counted with that number, the population of Israel rises to easily two million. There are several data points we have to nail down in order to properly defend the Bible’s assertion that 600,000 men left Egypt with Moses in the Exodus. First, we need to estimate the population that went down to Egypt with Jacob, the amount of time and generations that elapsed between then and the Exodus, and any relevant data points that would explain the growth of the population.
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At first glance, the question of how many people went to Egypt with Jacob is simple. Genesis says, “All the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were seventy” (Genesis 46:27). However, this total specifically does not include the wives of all the sons. The men who had sons had at least one wife each. If any brought more than one wife, that increases the total even more. The text also mentions Jacob’s daughters-plural-even though Dinah is the only one mentioned explicitly, and granddaughters, even though only Asher’s daughter Serah is explicitly named.
There is another group of people that the text does not address but who must have been there-the servants and members of the wider household. Abraham had a great household which Isaac inherited and added more servants to (Genesis 26:14) and which ultimately would have passed to Jacob. These servants were circumcised from the time of Abraham and were also considered part of the covenant community. Jacob’s great wealth he accumulated while living with Laban would have also included servants (Genesis 32:5). Easily hundreds of people would have come along with the family to survive the famine. So the caravan that went to Egypt was at least hundreds of people, importantly including a possible population to produce non-related wives for Jacob’s male descendants.
This is only a snapshot of Jacob’s family tree at that moment, however, and doesn’t include new descendants born in Egypt. In fact, Jochebed is an important linchpin for the chronology of how long Israel was in Egypt, because Exodus says specifically that she was born to Levi after he came to Egypt. To put the chronology together, we have to go back to chronological statements made earlier in Genesis. Jacob fled to Laban and had 11 of his 12 sons in the 13 years between marrying his wives and leaving Laban’s household (Genesis 31:38). Levi was born third, and Joseph eleventh. Joseph rose to power when he was 30, and Jacob came to Egypt at 130 years old after 7 years of plenty and 2 years of famine-so Joseph was 39.
We can then deduce that Joseph was born when Jacob was 91, and Levi could be, at most, about 10 years older, so Levi would have been about 50 years old when he migrated to Egypt. Exodus 6:16 tells us that Levi lived to 137, meaning that he was in Egypt for just under 90 years. Jochebed could have been born any time during that span because men’s fertility is not as age-dependent as women’s. If Jochebed was a female descendant of Levi and not his direct daughter and there were a few hundred years of missing genealogical data, that would make the population growth easier. So if one solves the problem for the short sojourn with less time, that solution works just as well for the long sojourn where there is more time for possible generations.
The biblical account indicates that the extraordinary growth of the nation of Israel was from God’s blessing (Exodus 1), so we would not be constrained to solely naturalistic explanations. If Israel had a better rate of infant survival and women’s fertility, it is not hard to imagine that alone making up a large part of the explanation. A baby was counted as an Israelite as long as the father was a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and some men likely took multiple wives and concubines if they could support them. If polygamy were practiced by even a significant minority of the population, that would affect the growth of the population because men can father many more children with multiple mothers.
Read also: Migration to Egypt
Genesis 50:22-23 says, “So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s house. Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation.” We know that Joseph rose to power when he was 30 and his two sons were born during the seven years of plenty, meaning that the oldest was born when Joseph was 31-36 years old. Ephraim’s great-grandchildren were born by the time Ephraim was 80 years old and likely several years earlier.
Population Estimates: Conflicting Views
The number of Israelites who came up from Egypt and eventually entered the Promised Land is a matter of some debate. The two most common views on the population of the children of Israel are that they numbered over 2 million people or only about 30,000. That’s quite a difference. Notably, no doctrinal or theological points rely on the precise population of Israel at the time of the exodus. Whether God freed 2 million or 30,000 from Egypt, Scripture is clear He did so miraculously (Exodus 6:6; Acts 7:35-36). Whether Israel’s fighting force was more than half a million or several thousand, their conquest of Canaan is credited entirely to God’s intervention (Deuteronomy 9:4-5).
As traditionally interpreted, the population of Israel would have been strikingly large for that era. That does not mean it is impossible. God’s miraculous provision could feed millions just as well as thousands. The idea of a people group growing from 70 to more than 2 million in 430 years is not implausible. It would require a population growth rate of 2.6 percent. This is extraordinarily high but not too far beyond the 2.2 percent growth rate seen worldwide in the middle of the twentieth century. This “traditional” view comes with the primary concerns noted above. It would suggest that secular historical understanding of the sizes of other nations and their military forces is drastically wrong.
The common Hebrew term ‘elep is typically translated “thousand” (Exodus 18:21), such as in the first chapter of Numbers. The counts given in this chapter are composed of words, not numerals. Numbers 1:21, for instance, records the men of Reuben’s tribe as sis’sāh vav arbā’im ‘elep vav hamēs mē’owt. However, two words in this phrase are subject to variations: ‘elep and vav. The term ‘elep (or ‘eleph) is used elsewhere in Scripture as a reference to groups, not a literal number, including descriptions of Israel during and after the exodus. Further, the connecting word vav can mean “and,” but it can also mean “or,” depending on context. Such a scribal or typographical error is entirely plausible.
Another possibility is that Moses was not using a base 10 numeric system. Especially in the ancient world, cultures might count by other quantities, such as 60, rather than by 10. This changes the meaning of recorded numbers. Another possibility is that extremely large numbers were assumed by readers to be divided by some standard ratio, such as 6 or 60. A few scholars have suggested that the figures given in Numbers chapter 1 are, in fact, the population of those tribes around the time of Solomon.
Read also: History of Israelites
Evidence from the Bible suggests that the Exodus from Egypt formed a "foundational mythology" or "state ideology" for the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The northern psalms 80 and 81 state that God "brought a vine out of Egypt" (Psalm 80:8) and record ritual observances of Israel's deliverance from Egypt as well as a version of part of the Ten Commandments (Psalm 81:10-11). The Books of Kings records the dedication of two golden calves in Bethel and Dan by the Israelite king Jeroboam I, who uses the words "Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28). Scholars relate Jeroboam's calves to the golden calf made by Aaron of Exodus 32. Both include a nearly identical dedication formula ("These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt", Exodus 32:8). This episode in Exodus is "widely regarded as a tendentious narrative against the Bethel calves".
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Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus
Although the biblical text clearly and explicitly documents Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, some scholars reject the idea that the Hebrews ever dwelt in Egypt. One primary reason they reject this biblical account as fiction is because of a purported lack of archaeological evidence. Is there really no evidence outside of the Bible to support Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus?
Before we answer, it’s helpful to appreciate why evidence of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt can be hard to come by. First, many archaeologists simply cannot agree on when the Israelites were in Egypt. Second, only a tiny fraction of ancient Egypt has been excavated in controlled excavations. Third, slaves do not usually leave behind scads of evidence. Fourth, the ancient Egyptians are infamous for blotting out embarrassing historical events that would tarnish their reputation (which would certainly include the Exodus).
There’s also the challenge of the location in which the Israelites lived: Goshen, within the Nile Delta. “The Delta is an alluvial fan of mud deposited through many millennia by the annual flood of the Nile; it has no source of stone within it,” writes Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. “[M]ud-brick structures were of limited duration and use, and were repeatedly leveled and replaced, and very largely merged once more with the mud of the fields. So those who squawk intermittently, ‘No trace of the Hebrews has ever been found’ (so of course, no Exodus!), are wasting their breath. The mud hovels of brickfield slaves and humble cultivators have long since gone back to their mud origins ….“Even stone structures (such as temples) hardly survive …. [In this region] 99 percent of discarded papyri have perished forever; a tiny fraction (of late date) have been found carbonized …. Otherwise, the entirety of Egypt’s administrative records at all periods in the Delta is lost, and monumental texts are also nearly nil” (On the Reliability of the Old Testament).
Despite these significant challenges, there is actually a reasonable amount of compelling evidence testifying to Israel’s time in Egypt. Following are some points of evidence:
- The Ibscha Relief: The Bible mentions several “migrations” of the patriarchs into Egypt, particularly to escape famine events. The Ibscha Relief is a famous tomb painting discovered at the site of Beni Hassan, depicting a train of Asiatic (Semitic) men, women and children with goods, wearing unusual, bright, multicolored garments, arriving in Egypt from either Canaan or somewhere in the vicinity.
- The Famine Stele: The Famine Stele is a mammoth boulder inscription found on Sehel Island in the Nile River. The inscription is carved in Ptolemaic Egyptian script, probably as late as either the third or second century b.c.e. It recounts a story from Egypt’s distant past of a famine “in a period of seven years. Grain was scant, kernels were dried up, scarce was every kind of food. … Children cried, youngsters fell, the hearts of the old were grieving; legs drawn up, they hugged the ground, their arms clasped about them. Courtiers were needy, temples were shut, shrines covered with dust, everyone was in distress” (emphasis added).
- Turin and Manetho King Lists: Rise of the Hyksos: The Turin King List is an ancient document created during the 13th-century b.c.e. reign of Pharaoh Ramesses ii, listing earlier Egyptian rulers. Later Egyptian pharaohs erased the history of this dynasty. The Hyksos were a group of immigrant Semitic rulers from the region of Canaan who rose to prominence in the northern Delta region of Egypt for a roughly 100-year period, around the 17th to 16th centuries b.c.e. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian-based on the writings of the third-century b.c.e. Egyptian historian Manetho-directly identified these “Hyksos” as the Israelites and pointed out an interpretation of the name as meaning “shepherd kings.”
- Yaqub-har: One of these especially prominent Hyksos individuals is a man known from nearly 30 royal scarab seals found primarily throughout Canaan but also in Egypt. These scarabs, believed to date to the 17th century b.c.e., bear the name Yaqub-har. Yaqub is the exact transliteration of the Semitic name Jacob. The “har” in Yaqub-har is also a Hebrew-Semitic word that can mean hill, mount or mountain. This word is connected with Jacob several times in the Bible (Genesis 31:25, 54; Isaiah 2:3).
- Avaris: Classical historians record that the capital city of the Hyksos dynasty was called Avaris. Josephus, relying largely on Manetho, relays a significant amount of information about Avaris as Israel’s “capital” while in Egypt. Archaeologists have identified the ruins of Tell el-Dab’a in northern Egypt with ancient Avaris (fitting with the biblical location of the land of Goshen). Excavations at the site have revealed evidence of a clearly foreign, Semitic population, with housing styles similar to that of Canaan, along with Levantine-style weapons and pottery.
- The Carnarvon Tablet: The Carnarvon Tablet is a mid-16th-century b.c.e. wood-and-plaster inscription discovered in 1908 adjacent to the entrance to a tomb near the Deir el-Bahari mortuary complex. The text belongs to the native Egyptian pharaoh of Upper (southern) Egypt, Kamose. The text reveals that Kamose feared the Hyksos were getting too powerful and needed to be overthrown.
- Rekhmire’s Tomb: On the walls of the Tomb of Rekhmire (the mid-15th-century b.c.e. vizier for Thutmose iii and Amenhotep ii), painted images depict light-skinned Semitic slaves making bricks out of mud, water and chaff. The Bible also records the Hebrews making bricks in Egypt: “And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and in brick …” (Exodus 1:13-14).
- Serabit el-Khadim: Serabit el-Khadim was a sporadically operated Egyptian turquoise mine on the western side of the Sinai Peninsula, in operation between the 19th and 15th centuries b.c.e. In 1905, Sir William F. Petrie discovered examples of early alphabetic script at Serabit el-Khadim. These “proto-Sinaitic” inscriptions, dating more specifically to the 16th-15th centuries b.c.e., are a precursor to the Hebrew alphabet (and other Levantine languages).
Theological and Cultural Significance
Commemoration of the Exodus is central to Judaism, and Jewish culture. For Jews, the Passover celebrates the freedom of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, the settling of Canaan by the Israelites, and the "passing over" of the angel of death during the death of the first-born. Passover involves a ritual meal called a Seder during which parts of the exodus narrative are retold. In the Hagaddah of the Seder it is written that every generation is obliged to remind and identify itself in terms of the Exodus.
The Christian ritual of the eucharist and the holiday of Easter draw directly on the imagery of the Passover and the Exodus. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently associated with motifs of the Exodus. The Gospel of Mark has been suggested to be a midrash on the Exodus, though the scholar Larry J. Perkins thinks this unlikely. Mark suggests that the outpouring of Jesus' blood creates a new covenant (Mark 14:24) in the same way that Moses' sacrifice of bulls had created a covenant (Exodus 24:5). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reverses the direction of the Exodus by escaping from the Massacre of the Innocents committed by Herod the Great before himself returning from Egypt (Matt 2:13-15).
The story of the Exodus is also recounted in the Quran, in which Moses is one of the most prominent prophets and messengers.
Those Who Stayed Behind
Some sources indicate that not all of the Israelites left Egypt during the Exodus. There’s considerable disagreement among researchers of that time period as to how many Israelites stayed behind (some believe the number was upwards of 90 percent, others dismiss the possibility altogether.) But for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that only one of five Jews in Egypt decided to take the risk of trusting Moses’ promise and setting out into a dangerous wilderness on the vague hope of finding a new home for their people.
On one hand, that’s somewhat discouraging. We like to think of the Jewish people as a unified and presumably unanimous collective who together possess the valor and character to take control of their destinies. The fact that most of them lacked the necessary conviction to stand up for themselves is not the type of uplifting story that fits neatly into the biblical narrative. But that actually makes the actions of the 20 percent who did follow Moses even more admirable.
Like all religious celebrations, the benefit of evoking these triumphs serves as an important reminder of how our people have overcome tremendous obstacles and how we as their descendants are capable of similar victories. Denying ourselves leavened bread for eight days to demonstrate abstinence and sacrifice, eating maror to imitate the bitterness of slavery and reciting the ten plagues to commemorate the suffering are fairly low-impact ways of evoking past hardships that for most of us are unimaginable. But what about the Jews who weren’t brave enough to leave, who didn’t have the mettle or the audacity to abandon their homes in Egypt?
Modern Implications
We live in a world in which we are surrounded by rising levels of antisemitism - and see a puzzling level of apathy toward this threat from many of our fellow Jews. This lesson from ancient Egypt should remind us not to be surprised that many 21st century Jews have decided that the potential difficulties that come up with confrontation are not worth the disruption to their otherwise comfortable lives. Instead of waiting for those in our community who are not willing to push back against bigotry, better to move forward without them.
Table: Population Estimates of Israelites During the Exodus
| Estimate | Population Size | Supporting Evidence/Arguments | Criticisms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional High Estimate | 2.4 Million | Literal interpretation of biblical census figures (600,000+ men of fighting age). | Implausibly high growth rate, conflicts with historical understanding of population sizes. |
| Low Estimate | 30,000 | Reinterpretation of the Hebrew word "elep" as a group or unit, not necessarily "thousand." | Difficult to reconcile with the number of deaths recorded in plagues. |
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