Hebrew Bible Professors Joel Baden and John Collins discuss Historical issues with Exodus. This video is part of a larger project called Yale Bible Study.

Dealing with Contradictions

While all of the stories in Joshua and Judges emphasize that obedience is good and disobedience is bad, undeniable contradictions in the text remain. Not all of the stories agree with one another, and it appears that the Deuteronomistic Historian is not particularly interested in reconciling those inconsistencies.

In addition to contradictions within the stories in Joshua and Judges, we must also contend with the reality that contradictions exist between what the story says happened and what historical evidence says happened. Archaeology became the primary method scholars used in the 19th-20th centuries to substantiate the accounts of Israel’s history found in the Bible.

What scholars have found, however, is that much of what these stories describe does not align with archaeological evidence. The events in Joshua, for example, were assumed to have happened in the 13th century BCE, yet scientific dating indicates that the fall of Jericho must have happened hundreds of years earlier.

Tradition vs. History

Some argue that Joshua and Judges are products of “historical memories” from oral tradition recorded later. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests a more complex relationship between these texts and the historical events that preceded them.

A better way to understand these stories might be as attempts to make sense of the things that the people of Israel were already seeing around them. The city of Jericho, for example, had been a pile of ruins for centuries by the time the book of Joshua was written. The story of the battle of Jericho we now read in Joshua could be the result of generations of attempts to explain why Jericho is a giant pile of ruins.

In other words, it is true that something probably happened to spark this story. The story itself, however, is likely a result of an ongoing process of meaning-making and identity-construction that unfolded over time in Israel.

Recommended Reading:

• William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2003)
  

Dr John J. Collins is Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. Dr Collins has served as editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and as president of both the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. Dr Collins is a native of Ireland, and a practicing Christian.

Prof. Joel Baden works widely in the field of Hebrew Bible, with special attention to the literary history of the Pentateuch. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019).