Tonight begins Passover, or Pasach, celebrated worldwide by Jews. As recounted in Exodus 13:3-10, this ritual meal marks their ancestors’ escape from Egyptian captivity.
About three weeks earlier, Christians celebrated Easter to commemorate Jesus’ Resurrection. Judaism and Christianity share not merely monotheism, but also recount their miraculous foundations as history.
Together they form the moral foundation for Western culture, a foundation that is collapsing, in part due to post-Enlightenment critiques of the historicity of these religions. But, as a careful examination of the historical record will show, these critiques can’t quite justify a wholesale rejection of Judeo-Christian values.
Many scholars dismiss the Exodus as a fable. Anthropologists contend that an enormous migrant population together with livestock could not have survived that journey in a desolate landscape, and the archaeological record is incomplete.
But the story does not end there. Textual critics study the Hebrew scriptures in the original languages to help contextualize our understanding and untangle questions. When did the Israelites escape from Egypt? How and where did they cross the “Red Sea”? Where was Mount Sinai? What route did they take? These questions are difficult, but intriguing answers exist.
Period
According to 1 Kings 6:1, Solomon began temple construction in his fourth year of reign (c. 966 B.C.), 480 years after the Israelites’ escape. That dates the Exodus to the mid-15th century B.C., presumably during the ambitious 18th-dynasty reign of Thutmose III as pharaoh.
This is too early, however, because of regional Egyptian dominance over the then-vacant Levant. Exodus 1:11 identifies Pi-Rameses (modern Qantir) as one
