“Its seed no longer exists.” These few words constitute the first known written reference to the Israelites. But it is the final three lines of the inscription that has arguably excited most interest among historians. The stele, which was discovered at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes in 1896, contains 28 lines of text, mostly detailing the Egyptians’ victory over the Libyans and their allies. The medium on which the pharaoh chose to trumpet his martial prowess was a three-metre-high lump of carved granite, now known as the Merneptah Stele. And when he led his armies on a successful war of conquest at the end of the 13th century BC, he wanted the world, and successive generations, to know all about it. Like all good autocrats, Merneptah, pharaoh of Egypt, loved to brag about his achievements. In fact, the best corroborating evidence for the Bible’s claim that the Israelites surged into Canaan is Merneptah’s Stele. St Catherine’s Monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where the Codex Sinaiticus came to scholars’ attention. In this podcast, biblical scholar John Barton considers the historical background to the most influential book in western culture, exploring its creation and how it fits into the histories of Judaism and Christianity: It’s been argued that Pi-Ramesses was the biblical city of Ramesses, and that the city was built, as Exodus claims, by Jewish slaves.
Pi-Ramesses was the great capital built by Ramesses II, one of Egypt’s most formidable pharaohs and the biblical tormentor of the Israelites. That’s the question that some historians have been asking themselves since the 1960s, when the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak identified the location of the ancient city of Pi-Ramesses at the site of the modern town of Qantir in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which chronicles the Israelites’ escape from captivity in Egypt to the promised land.īut has archaeology unearthed one of the sites of the Israelites’ captivity? The murderous history of Bible translationsįor centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue – of the Israelites falling from grace before picking themselves up, dusting themselves down and finding redemption.Perhaps the best place to start the story is in Sun-baked northern Egypt, for it was here that the Bible and archaeology may, just may, first collide. These findings may be incomplete and they may be highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images) Where does the Bible originate?Īrchaeology and the study of written sources have shed light on the history of both halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the story of the Jews’ highs and lows in the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus and the New Testament, which documents the life and teachings of Jesus. An illumination from a Byzantine manuscript depicting Jesus Christ.
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