Daily Devotional – July 26

History

It is widely and routinely taught in Bible colleges that the Exodus from Egypt never happened. This is one of the most longstanding criticisms of the accuracy of the Old Testament – based on the fact that no Egyptian documents mention the Hebrew slaves and their exodus from Egypt. In addition, the books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) make no mention of specific pharaohs of Egypt. Thus, Bible skeptics assume there was no exodus from Egypt and that the Bible cannot be trusted to mean what it says.

To understand this omission from Egyptian documents, we need to understand the Egyptian culture.

1. The Egyptians were infatuated with the afterlife, and their religious dogma convinced them that if they were forgotten by the living, they lost their immortality in the afterlife. This is why they spent enormous effort to record their names and images on monuments throughout Egypt.
2. Egyptians despised their enemies. To not even mention the names of their enemies was the ultimate in contempt and disrespect.
3. Egyptian hieroglyphics alter and ignore historical events to favor Egyptians. Revisionist history (to fit the viewpoint of the historian) is indeed a very old practice.
4. For Moses to not name the pharaohs would be his way of rejecting their authority over him – a practice he may have adopted having been raised in Egypt.

Thus, when the entire nation of Egypt was decimated by a series of plagues; followed by the lowest members of society walking away with much of the wealth of the nation; followed by Egypt’s powerful military being drowned in the Red Sea – it is little wonder that all records of the people responsible for these events (the Israelites) would be purged from Egyptian records and monuments.

The justification used by theologians and skeptics to ignore God’s Word are excuses, not facts. God’s word speaks the truth; there was an Exodus.

And the waters returned, and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.

~ Exodus 14:28

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.