Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 1-3.

A few days ago I had mentioned that one of the signs that a story you hear is an urban legend is that it does not contain the names of any of the people involved.  (I want to note that the absence of names does not prove the story did not happen.  It is merely an indicator that you should look at the story a little closer before accepting it as true).  This led me to take note that when the passage talks about the pharaoh telling the Hebrew midwives to kill the males born to Hebrew women, it mentions their names.  Further, the name of one of those midwives appears in a list of slaves held in Egypt from a time which could potentially have been the time of the Exodus, although a little early(I will note that recent discoveries have led to archeologists re-evaluating the dates they had previously given many events in Egypt, which might move this list right into the dates for the Exodus which can be derived from the Bible).  I found the information about the name of one of the midwives while doing a quick Internet search to see if they are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.  They are not.  As part of that search I came across the existence of a document written by an ancient Egyptian sage, Ipuwer, which recounts a time of great disruption in Egypt.  This document contains an account which resembles the account of the Israelites leaving Egypt found in Exodus.  The resemblance is similar enough that it could be describing the same event, but different enough that it may be about a completely different event.  So, while the Ipuwer Papyrus does not prove Exodus, it does mean there are the sort of records which one would expect to exist if it did.

I really struggled with today’s title, because the extrabiblical documents I mentioned in today’s passage do not provide evidence for the biblical account, but they do tell us something about the biblical account.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.