The Exodus from Egypt, had it occurred in literal fashion as described in the Bible, would have been (at the very least) ancient Egypt’s “September 11th”. Even if it did not wipe out every single firstborn child, and the cattle, not to mention Pharaoh’s army, even an event that decimated (in the literal or metaphorical sense) these elements of Egyptian society would have been noteworthy, to say the least, not to mention deeply traumatic.
Those who maintain Biblical inerrancy work largely in isolation from the huge enterprise of scholarly investigation of Ancient Egypt. The may dabble looking for evidence to support the Bible’s factuality, but more is needed. In the periods during which various scholars have placed the Exodus, such as the Ramessid era, Egyptian people wrote things. Claims to the Bible’s precise accuracy do not merely confront absence of evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian sources – we all know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is as though claims were being made thousands of years from now that September 11th 2001 was the date of a major terrorist attack, and yet at the same time having US newspapers from September 12th 2001 and onwards and yet none of them mention anything out of the ordinary.
This is not to suggest that Israel’s folkloric tradition about the Exodus has no connection to any historical event. It is often overlooked that Israelites could have experienced being ‘slaves of the Egyptians’ without ever having left Canaan. A mythologized folktale that combined a memory of liberation from slavery with the classic language of creation by God’s splitting of waters to symbolize the creation of a new people might be sufficient to account for what we find in Israel’s traditions.
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