Episode Details

Science now makes the Sunday School version of this story no longer tenable, leaving three options for believers: ignore the problem, reject the Bible, or revise one’s theology.

The story of “the Exodus” has traditionally been seen to involve millions of Israelites following Moses out of Egypt: this image is derived from a literal reading of the Old Testament, with more than a little help from Cecil B. DeMille’s iconic movie. However, scholars have given us several other versions of this story which are much, MUCH smaller in scale and quite different in many of the details … and which are much more believable, especially given that they’re based on actual data (archaeological; literary; genetic). This puts many believers in a difficult position: setting aside what they see/saw as the Biblical version forces them to devalue the Bible and possibly to reject their faith. In this episode, we talk about why the “Sunday School version” is really no longer tenable, and how to revise one’s theology to accommodate that paradigm shift. Discussion points included:

• how people respond when they grow up with one version (usually the “Sunday School version” and then later are confronted with a very different one (usually one of the scholar’s versions).
• “the numbers” that argue against the literal version (the “Sunday School version”):
  • (1) the numbers that the text give us which are just too hard to believe (several million Israelites marching out of Egypt? the logistics for a horde of this tremendous size)
  • (2) the numbers that you’d expect to find if the Sunday School version was historical, but which are nowhere to be found (the trail of dead bodies and garbage; surrounding cultures would have written something about this event)
  • (3) the numbers that we do find which point to a very different version (the Levites as late-comers to Canaan from Egypt; the genetics of the inhabitants of Canaan at that time)
• the perceived ris