James McGrath at Exploring our Matrix has a question about the historical Exodus and its lack of evidence:

To treat the Exodus story as literal, factual history, one would have to believe that at some point God devastated the agriculture, economy, and military of Egypt, and yet somehow not only no king but no other person saw fit to mention these events in a letter.

Which is the greater miracle? Believing that God sent plagues and drowned soldiers? Or believing that God ensured that no one in Egypt made any mention of these occurrences and that no shred of tangible archaeological evidence would be left?

McGrath mentions the lack of “correspondence, fiscal transaction records, and other textual as well as archaeological evidence,” which warms my archivist heart (acid-free and buffered). That’s exactly the sort of evidence that we would hope to see. Historians acknowledge that Egyptian scribes generally did not report the bad news, but there still should have been some physical evidence of a mass migration of people out of Egypt.

If nothing else there should have been spin. While we don’t get the bad news directly, there will frequently be back-handed acknowledgements of a crisis. For example, an inscription might read, “Praise to the Pharaoh for guiding us through a time of famine.” So we know that there was a famine, even if no official at the time wrote about it.

Egyptologist Bob Brier quipped that you know that the Egyptians were losing a war when the glorious victories kept getting closer to Egypt. Still, we do tend to find out about the battles and we can piece together the actual results.

The usual response to this is to draw back from the popular depiction of the Exodus. Perhaps it wasn’t as large as the scriptures indicated. Perhaps there are errors in the translation, or things got exaggerated. Perhaps there was no dramatic confrontation.

Which leads us to a tricky question of identity: how large did the migration from Egypt have to have been in order for it to be the Exodus? If a small family escaped during the Fall of the Bronze Age, ditching the slave masters in a swampy “reed sea,” does that mean that Exodus occurred?