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Ali Hammoud
3 October 2014
HIST 134
Jewish Slavery in Egypt
The notion of Jewish slavery in Egypt is interpreted by some researchers as a common
misconception, and by others a probable historical occurrence. The notion of Jewish slavery
stems largely from the book of Exodus (which tells the story of the enslavement of the Jewish
people by Egypt and finally their liberation – or Exodus back to the promised land, led by
Moses), as well as other biblical accounts which detail the slavery of the Jews. The Jewish
festival of Passover, in fact, celebrates the alleged liberation of the Jewish people from Egyptian
slavery that is said to have occurred over 3,300 years ago. However, despite these long-held
traditions, many historians argue that there exists absolutely no evidence for the existence of
Jewish slavery in Egypt. The great question in pertinence would then be: Were the Jews ever
enslaved in Egypt at all?
Some argue that Jewish slavery did indeed exist in Egypt, and that there exists viable
evidence to suggest so. Professor Galit Dayan, an Egyptologist, argues that the evidence for the
existence of Jewish slavery in Egypt, as well as evidence that there is some historical truth to the
story of Exodus lies in existing Egyptian hieroglyphics. According to the Jewish Journal, “In
each of the Egyptian manuscripts Dayan discussed, the same familiar characters are mentioned:
Moses (“an Egyptian name”), Pharoah, the Red Sea/Sea of Reeds (“Yam Suf” in Hebrew),
Hebrews, Israelites and the presence of slaves in Egypt.”i However, the Journal admits “So far,
evidence of the Exodus exists only as pieces of a puzzle. These fragments of history, Dayan
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admits, appear within different manuscripts written at different times. “People today are still
looking for the one piece, the one story — the Egyptian haggadah — that will include all the
elements of the story together,” she said” i So there are obviously problems with the thesis that
Jewish slavery exists simply because of a comparable correlation between some hieroglyphics
and elements portrayed in the story of Exodus. One of the major problems for those attempting
to argue for the existence of Jewish slavery in Egypt, is that there is absolutely no evidence for
this aside from biblical accounts and the book of Exodus itself. There are no real archeological
findings that would suggest the Jews were actually enslaved in Egypt – certainly modern
archeologists have declared the struggle to find evidence for Exodus itself to be “a fruitless
pursuit”ii
One of the biggest problems with this narrative is that there is not a lot of evidence that
would suggest slavery as a widespread institution existed in Egypt in the way that some would
think. It is widely known and widely accepted by modern historians today that, for example, the
Egyptian pyramids were not built by slaves, but were built by a mandated corvee issued by the
Egyptian government. According to Mark Lehner, an archeologist who specialized in answering
the question of who built the pyramids: “There were slaves in Egypt, says Lehner, but the
discovery that pyramid workers were fed like royalty buttresses other evidence that they were
not slaves at all, at least in the modern sense of the word”iii. Carol Meyer’s scholarly book Exodus
claims that mentions of actual slavery in the book of Exodus are not directly found, and that
such an interpretation is a result of linguistic complications. According to Meyer, the book of
Exodus uses the word “ebed”iv to summarize the condition of the Israelites – but this word does
not necessarily translate into slave. The world translates into roughly servant, which can mean a
variety of things: one who is subordinate to a higher government official in some way, or – it
could mean a servant of god, a title that the ancient Israelites proudly identified with. Indeed,
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according to the same source no form of race-based slavery was ever even mentioned in the
Hebrew bible.
Overall, the evidence that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt is very limited, or
arguably even non-existent. That is not to say it is impossible for the Jewish people to have
endured many hardships at the hand of the Egyptians, but that there is simply no conclusive
evidence that this took the form of bondage.
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1.
1Danielle,
Berrin. "Passover Proof Lies in Egyptian Hieroglyphs | Passover." Jewish
Journal News. Jewish Journal News, 24 Mar. 2010. Web. 03 Oct. 2014.
2. Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?:
What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans Pub., 2001. Print.
3. Shaw, Jonathan. "Who Built the Pyramids?" Harvard Magazine. Harvard Magazine,
July-Aug. 2003. Web. 05 Oct. 2014.
4. Meyers, Carol L. Exodus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.2