Was There an Exodus?

To this day, no pulpit talk by a contemporary American rabbi has generated greater attention or controversy than a sermon delivered by Rabbi David Wolpe on the morning of Passover 2001. “The truth,” Rabbi Wolpe informed his Los Angeles congregation, “is [that] the way the Bible describes the exodus [from Egypt] is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

Beyond dropping a theological bombshell, the sermon ushered in a new era, one in which synagogue-attending Jews could increasingly expect to be confronted with the findings of academic study of the Bible. To Rabbi Wolpe, intellectual honesty mandated that, with respect to the exodus in particular, these findings be not only confronted but embraced, and it was the duty of spiritual leaders like himself to help the faithful assimilate them.

In the intervening years, thanks in no small part to the Internet and the ubiquity of social media, exposure to these findings has increased exponentially, much of it focused on one issue: the historicity, or especially the non-historicity, of the biblical exodus. In, for example, an inaugural essay for The Torah.com, a website devoted to “integrating the study of Torah with the disciplines and findings of academic biblical scholarship,” Rabbi Zev Farber declared categorically that “Given the data to which modern historians have access, it is impossible to regard the accounts of mass exodus from Egypt, [or] the wilderness experience . . . as historical.”