Following the pattern of my prior post LDS Genesis, let’s take a look at Exodus. I know, the LDS Come Follow Me curriculum won’t get to Exodus until March and April, but that’s not my fault. The lesson for March 23-29 covers the first six chapters of Exodus and devotes just two sentences to the actual material in those chapters: “The invitation to live in Egypt saved Jacob’s family. But after hundreds of years, their descendants were enslaved and terrorized by a new pharaoh who “knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).”

The balance of the lesson applies “liken unto us” thinking to the material, such as asking: “You might wonder, “Does God know what I’m going through? Can He hear my pleas for help?”” There’s no real engagement with the text. What’s really funny (that is, not funny at all) is that the section titled “Ideas for Teaching Children” presents more or less the same discussion and prompts as the “Ideas for Learning at Home and Church” section does. In other words, LDS adults get basically the same lesson as Primary children. The LDS curriculum treats adults like children. That’s why anyone who really wants to learn anything about the Bible reads non-LDS scholarship. LDS Bible scholarship (at least what is presented in the LDS curriculum and from LDS leadership) is largely worthless.

So here’s some adult-level material, pulled from a few pages in the Alex Douglas book The Old Testament for Latter-day Saints (Signature Books, 2023).

Among the few authentic aspects of the [Exodus] story seem to be the fact that the names of Moses, Aaron, and Phineas are indeed Egyptian in origin, but evidence for the historicity of the narrative beyond these few indications is decidedly sparse. (p. 34)

The evidence that has led scholars to this conclusion (questioning the historicity of the Exodus narrative) is largely archeological.

Even more problematic is the lack of Egyptian influence in Israel’s culture. Archeologists can tell a lot about a people from their material culture …. When the evidence of Israelite settlements starts appearing in Canaan, their material culture shows no Egyptian influence whatsoever. It does, however, show extensive influence from Israel’s Canaanite neighbors. … Consider how improbable the claim is that a group of Israelites lived among the Egyptians for 400 years without any discernable impact on their language and culture. (p. 34-35)

For a longer discussion of how archeology has informed the study of Israelite origins, read Dever’s Who Were the Early Israelites and Where did they come from? (William B. Eerdmans, 2003) or similar books. The bottom line is this: there might have been a few stragglers, escaped slaves perhaps, that wandered from Egypt to Canaan and ended up in Israelite villages, but there was no mass exodus of a distinct Israelite nation or ethnic group from Egypt that then settled in the hill country that came to be later Israel (Samaria) and Judah. The Isrealites were basically just Canaanites who moved into the hills.

Now I wouldn’t argue for putting five paragraphs about the non-historicity of the biblical Exodus narrative in an LDS lesson. People don’t come to church for a graduate seminar on authentic biblical archeology. On the other hand, you can’t write a modern curriculum on the Bible or Exodus in complete ignorance of reliable scholarship, either, any more than you can write a modern astronomy curriculum quoting Ptolemy and taking the idea of the Sun and planets as embedded in crystalline spheres encircling the Earth as the basic model.

Maybe the best approach is to bring up the idea of genre when teaching this material. History in the sense of a factually accurate narrative using reliable sources is a modern genre, and to impose that genre on early biblical narratives is terribly misleading. Call it myth, legend, story, didactic narrative, whatever, but don’t call it history as if it is an inerrant factual recitation of actual events. We’re not Evangelicals. Mormons don’t take biblical inerrancy as an article of faith, despite what the LDS curriculum often implicitly implies.

So what do you think?

  • Have you seen the movie? I mean The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, of course, which is where most people get their ideas about Exodus rather than from the actual text of the Book of Exodus.
  • Have you ever spent more than a day or two in a desert? How about forty years?
  • If we can learn moral lessons from parables while understanding and accepting that they are not historical accounts, why is it so difficult to take the same approach to early biblical narratives like the Exodus?
  • Some people just don’t want to be bothered with archeology and serious history, call it the ignorance is bliss crowd. Then there is the smaller “I want the real history, warts and all” group. Which are you? Why do some people prefer the ugly facts of history to pleasant, reassuring fables?