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Ancient times

In the Elephantine papyri, caches of legal documents and letters written in Aramaic amply document the lives of a community of Jewish soldiers stationed in there as part of a frontier garrison in Egypt for the Achaemenid Empire. Established at Elephantine in about 650 BC during Manasseh's reign, these soldiers assisted Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign. Their religious system shows strong traces of Babylonian polytheism, something which suggests to certain scholars that the community was of mixed Judaeo-Samaritan origins, and they maintained their own temple, functioning alongside that of the local deity Chnum. The documents cover the period 495 to 399 BC.


The Hebrew Bible also records that a large number of Jews took refuge in Egypt after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 597 BC, and the subsequent assassination of the Jewish governor, Gedaliah. (2 Kings 25:22-24, Jeremiah 40:6-8) On hearing of the appointment, the Jews that had fled to Moab, Ammon, Edom and in other countries returned to Judah. (Jeremiah 40:11-12) However, before long Gedaliah was assassinated, and the population that was left in the land and those that had returned ran away to Egypt for safety. (2 Kings 25:26, Jeremiah 43:5-7) The numbers that made their way to Egypt is subject to debate. In Egypt, they settled in Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph, and Pathros. (Jeremiah 44:1)
Although the Book of Exodus describes a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, more than a century of archaeological research has discovered nothing which could support its narrative elements— the four centuries sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, or the three months journey through the wilderness to Sinai.The Egyptian records themselves have no mention of anything recorded in Exodus, the wilderness of the southern Sinai peninsula shows no traces of a mass-migration such as Exodus describes, and virtually all the place-names mentioned, including Goshen (the area within Egypt where the Israelites supposedly lived), the store-cities of Pithom and Rameses, the site of the crossing of the Red Sea (or, more commonly among modern Biblical scholars, the Sea of Reeds), and even Mt Sinai itself, have resisted identification. Scholars who hold the Exodus to represent historical truth concede that the most the evidence can suggest is plausibility.

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