Rosa Rubicondior: Bible Refuted - A Possible Explanation for the Origin of the Implausible Exodus Myth

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Bible Refuted - A Possible Explanation for the Origin of the Implausible Exodus Myth

Fig. 1. Map of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean (modified from Cohen and Westbrook 2000, xii).

Gretchen R. Dabbs & Anna Stevens (2025)

Mortality Crisis at Akhetaten? Amarna and the Bioarchaeology of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Epidemic | American Journal of Archaeology: Vol 129, No 4

This paper in American Journal of Archaeology is tentative support for a theory that I find fascinating because it offers an explanation for the implausible Exodus myth in the Bible. The theory is that the myth is an exaggerated retelling of the expulsion or voluntary exile, of the Ahtenist sect from Egypt, complete with a 'royal' leader in the form of 'Moses' (an Egyptian name) - a retelling that grew over time and incorporated multiple miracles and the origins of the 'Law', with each telling until a small band became a mass exodus from which an entire new nation was built.

The exodus of Hebrew slaves from Egypt has too many inconsistencies for it to be real history - for example, the claim is that "600,000 men on foot" (Exodus 12:37), complete with their women, children and livestock, fled from Egypt into Sinai. That would mean some 2-3 million people - more than the then entire population of Egypt, plus livestock - far more than could be supplied with food and water in Sinai. There is also no archaeological evidence of such a large population ever living in Sinai for 40 years. It is inconceivable that they would leave no trace, not even the graves of those who died.

Then there is the story of 600, (horsedrawn) chariots (Exodus 14:7) pursuing them into the Red Sea, right after all the livestock, including, explicitly, all the horses, were killed in one of the plagues (Exodus 9:3-6).

Then there is the small geo-political problem that the story of crossing the Red Sea into Sinai 'from Egypt; ignores the fact that at that time Egypt not only controlled Sinai but its political and military control extended into Canaan, so the Israelites were leaving Egypt into... Egypt.

It is probably significant that during the entire telling of the tale of the Israelite's supposed captivity in Egypt, the pharaoh is invariably named 'Pharoh' (A Hebrew word), but never by his real name - Imhotep II, Rameses, Akhenaten, etc. It's as though the story-teller didn't know their names. This would be the equivalent of telling the Medieval history of England and only ever referring to 'King', never John, Henry IV, Edward II, etc.

Assuming they walked 8 abreast and spaced 1.5 meters apart, how long would it have taken 2 million men, women and children and their livestock to cross the Red Sea, assuming the sea 'parted' as per the Exodus story? Assumptions

Population: 2,000,000 people (mixed ages)
Formation: 8 abreast (baseline), spacing 1.5 m front-to-back
Walking speed: 1.0 m/s (~3.6 km/h) for people on firm ground
Crossing distance: use 10 km as a representative gulf width (the distance term is small compared to the queue length)

Key formulae

Rows = \(N/\text{abreast}\).
Queue length = \(\text{Rows} \times \text{Spacing}\)
Time for last person to leave the start
= \(\frac{\text{Queue length}}{\text{Speed}}\)
Total time until last person reaches the far side = \(\frac{\text{Queue length + Distance}}{\text{Speed}}\)

People only

8 abreast;

Rows = \(\frac{2,000,000}{8}\) = 250,000
Queue length = \(250,000 \times 1.5\ \text{m}\) = 375,000 m (375 km)
Time = \(\frac{375\ \text{km} + 10\ \text{km}}{1}\ \text{m·s}^{⁻¹}\) = ~106.9 hours (~4.5 days)

If we widen the corridor (more abreast):

50 abreast → queue = 60 km → total ~19.4 hours
500 abreast → queue = 6 km → total ~4.4 hours
2,000 abreast → queue = 1.5 km → total ~3.2 hours

Rule of thumb: to finish in ~12 hours (with a 10 km walk), you’d need on the order of 90–100 abreast. To finish in ~6 hours, you need roughly 260 abreast. In practice that means a people-only corridor hundreds of metres wide (allow ~0.8–1.0 m lateral width per person plus elbow room).

Add livestock (more realistic)

Livestock slows and widens the column. A conservative tweak:

Add 500,000 animals (counting each as a “slot”)
Increase spacing to 3.0 m (safety/handling)
Slow to 0.6 m/s (herds on soft seabed)

Results (10 km crossing):

8 abreast → queue = 937.5 km, total ~438.7 hours (~18 days)
50 abreast → total ~74.1 hours (~3.1 days)
500 abreast → total ~11.6 hours
2,000 abreast → total ~6.4 hours
5,000 abreast → total ~5.3 hours

Takeaways

Even with miraculously parted waters, time is dominated by the queue, not the distance.
A people-only crossing in one night is barely plausible only if the path is very wide (≈100+ abreast).
With livestock, you need several hundred to a few thousand abreast to get everyone across in <12 hours — i.e., a corridor hundreds of metres to kilometres wide, moving continuously and flawlessly.

This arithmetic is why historians flag the Exodus headcount as rhetorical inflation; unless the corridor was implausibly wide and movement perfectly choreographed, a group counted in the millions would still take days to clear, even with the sea “standing as a wall”.

But, what if the Exodus wasn't invented from whole cloth — but was, in part, the transformed memory of a displaced religious elite?

Around 3,300 years ago, Pharaoh Akhenaten, the father of Tutankhamun, introduced a radical religious revolution in Egypt — worship centred on a single god, the Aten (or sun god). In an effort to break the power of the Temple priesthood centred on Karnak, he moved his capital to a newly constructed capital at Akhetaten (modern Amara) but after his death, this “Atenist” cult was famously dismantled, its capital at Akhetaten abandoned, and the temples of the old gods and the power of their priesthood restored.

Conventional wisdom long held that Amarna’s abandonment was abrupt and catastrophic — perhaps due to devastation, plague, or divine retribution. But this new study argues otherwise: there is no evidence of a plague, but instead Akhetaten’s depopulation was more gradual, a complex process rather than a sudden evacuation.

That re-evaluation gives fresh nuance to an audacious hypothesis: perhaps a small core of Atenist devotees, marginalized or displaced over decades, drifted eastward and merged into nascent Israelite religious memory. Perhaps their story survived in fragmentary oral form, later crystallised into the Exodus epic — one of the founding myths of Judaism.

In this post, I’ll sketch how a modest “Atenist exodus” might have seeded later mythic layers, how editorial redactors could have blown a minor memory into a grand national saga, and how the very new evidence about Amarna’s slow decline helps soften some of the objections that have long plagued this hypothesis.

First a comparison of the arguments for and against:

Arguments For and Against an “Atenist Exodus”

Arguments For

Chronological Proximity: The collapse of Akhenaten’s religious reforms in the 14th century BCE roughly precedes the period when early Israelite identity began to coalesce in Canaan. A memory of displacement could feasibly have persisted for generations.
Theological Parallels: Atenism’s monolatry, rejection of idols, and emphasis on a single, universal god resonate with early Yahwism. While not proof of direct influence, the similarity is striking in a Near Eastern context dominated by polytheism.
Gradual Migration Fits the Evidence: With the new paper indicating that Akhetaten was not abandoned suddenly due to plague, the notion of a small, gradual movement of Atenist loyalists eastward becomes more plausible — and less archaeologically problematic than a single mass flight.
Mythic Amplification Over Time: A small-scale exodus could have been magnified over centuries through oral tradition and textual redaction. This would explain the inflated numbers and epic scale in Exodus without requiring literal historicity.

Arguments Against

Chronological Gap: Even if Atenists migrated eastward, several centuries separate Amarna’s fall from the earliest identifiable Israelite settlements. The continuity of memory over that span is uncertain.
Lack of Direct Evidence: No text, inscription, or artefact directly links Atenist refugees with the proto-Israelites. All connections are circumstantial or thematic.
Alternative Sources for the Exodus Story: Other historical events — such as the Expulsion of the Hyksos or experiences of Semitic groups under Egyptian rule — may have contributed to the Exodus myth. The Atenist episode need not be involved at all.
Mythic Syncretism: Founding epics often blend multiple strands of memory and myth. Even if Atenist echoes exist, they may be just one of several threads woven together — not the dominant source.

In short, the Atenist expulsion hypothesis doesn’t ‘prove’ the Exodus happened. What it does is offer a plausible seed — a historical event or set of events — that could, over centuries of oral transmission and theological reframing, have grown into one of the most enduring stories in Western tradition.

How the Exodus Myth Could Have Grown Over Time

Origin stories are rarely created fully formed. They grow, like coral reefs, layer upon layer — a living structure built on a small foundation. If the Atenist expulsion did occur, the earliest version of the story would not have resembled the Exodus we know today. It might have been little more than the remembered tale of a few families or a small religious faction leaving Egypt with their leader, a man who was important to them but unknown to history at large. Over the generations, that story would have taken on the weight and grandeur of legend.

~ In the earliest oral stage, what may have begun as a simple migration story — “our ancestors fled Egypt” — would have expanded with each telling. Leaders became heroic; hardships became divine trials. A river crossing in the night could become the parting of a sea. A fortuitous drought that weakened pursuit might transform into plagues from heaven. This process is not unique to Israelite tradition. As scholars such as Jan Assmann have noted, oral memory has a way of amplifying moral and theological meaning over time, turning ordinary events into divine encounters.

Another crucial factor is what historians call mythic syncretism — the way in which different strands of memory fuse into a single narrative. Even if Atenist refugees were one source of the Exodus story, they were probably not the only one. Memories of Semitic groups in Egypt — possibly including echoes of the Expulsion of the Hyksos centuries earlier — could have merged with local tribal migrations and existing Canaanite motifs of divine deliverance. Over time, what had been several separate memories may have been woven together into a single story of a people led out of bondage by their god.

By the time parts of this tradition were set down in writing — perhaps in the monarchic period — the story had already accumulated centuries of elaboration. Scholars working with the Documentary Hypothesis (e.g., Richard Elliott Friedman) have long noted that the earliest narrative strands in Exodus (the so-called J and E sources) already contain a rich mixture of folk motifs, miraculous elements, and national identity themes. Moses emerges not merely as a leader but as a lawgiver and prophet; the people are no longer a small faction but a “great multitude.”

Later priestly writers and redactors added further theological and institutional weight. They gave the story structure and law — tablets, covenants, the Ark of the Covenant — and grafted genealogies onto it, rooting the narrative in a larger national and theological framework. In doing so, they transformed what might have been a small historical event into a founding myth — a cosmic drama in which a god liberates his chosen people and grants them a destiny.

In a series of blog posts, I showed how the story of the 'Ten Commandments' resembles a confused attempt to merge several different narratives into one, so, in the end, we are not sure what they are (Exodus 20-2-1 and Deuteronomy 5:7-21, or Exodus 34: 17-26), who wrote them on the 'Tablets' - God (Exodus 34:1) or Moses (Exodus 34:27) - and we have the glaring hypocrisy of one of them forbidding killing then Moses's first act when he came down the mountain was to order the execution of 3,000 men (Exodus 32-27-28), followed by stories of God ordering the Canaanite genocide (Deuteronomy 20:16-17).

By the post-exilic period, the Exodus was more than a story: it had become a national charter, celebrated liturgically at Passover and recited as historical truth. Like many national epics, it served not simply to recount the past, but to shape the identity of a people in the present.

This kind of transformation has close parallels elsewhere in world mythology. Small wars become Trojan epics; minor migrations become heroic sagas. The gradual abandonment of Akhetaten, as suggested by the recent archaeological study, fits this model more comfortably than any notion of a sudden, catastrophic mass flight. A slow dispersal of Atenist sympathisers or their descendants, fading into the historical background, would leave no great trace — but it might leave a memory. And that memory, once carried eastward and passed through centuries of retelling, could easily grow into the great national myth of Exodus.

References and further reading:

Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism - Jan Assmann (1997)
Who Wrote the Bible? – Richard Elliott Friedman (1987)
Moses and Monotheism – Sigmund Freud (1939)
Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times – Donald B. Redford (1992)
Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition – James K. Hoffmeier (1996)
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts - Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman (2002)

A Small Seed, Not a Proof The new findings on the gradual decline of Akhetaten give a fresh nuance to what has long been a speculative but intriguing hypothesis. For decades, those who entertained an Atenist connection to the Exodus were often forced to posit some dramatic catastrophe to explain a sudden, large-scale expulsion. But if the city’s population dispersed slowly and uneventfully — through political shifts, loss of patronage, and quiet realignments — the notion of a small, largely unrecorded migration of Atenist loyalists becomes more credible.

Such a movement would not have left the kind of archaeological footprint expected of millions on the march, nor would it have prompted Egyptian records of a national crisis - which are conspicuous by their absence. It could, however, have left an echo in the cultural memory of peoples along the eastern frontier. If, as seems increasingly likely, the Exodus story reflects a conflation of memories, rather than a single historical event, then the Atenist dispersal may represent just one thread in the weave.

This is not proof of Exodus, nor a rewriting of biblical history. Rather, it is an attempt to place a myth within its historical landscape, to identify the sort of modest, real-world events that can — through centuries of retelling, theological reflection, and editorial shaping — grow into the grand narratives that define civilisations.

In this view, Exodus is neither a pure invention nor a literal chronicle, but a mythic monument built on a very small foundation. And the slow fading of Akhetaten into the desert may well have been one of the whispers from which the legend grew.

Abstract
The question of whether the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten (14th century BCE; modern Amarna) was affected by an epidemic has long been debated. Evidence such as the deaths of several Amarna-period royals within a short period and the identification of Egyptian soldiers as the source of the plague that affected the Hittite empire in Muršili II’s plague prayers has been cited to support the idea. More recently, the presence of burials containing multiple individuals in the Amarna cemeteries, high disease frequencies, and some unusual demographic characteristics have been used to support claims of an epidemic. This paper surveys the debate and then discusses archaeological and demographic hallmarks of epidemics identified by others at cities with historically documented disease outbreaks. Through this lens of expectation, we integrate archaeological and bioarchaeological data from ongoing work at Amarna’s cemeteries with pertinent data from long-running settlement excavations at the site to assess whether there is empirical evidence of epidemic disease at Amarna and the wider implications of this. We conclude that when the evidence is considered as a whole, there is little to currently suggest Akhetaten was affected by a mortal epidemic.¹

Content warning: Readers are advised that this article contains a photograph of human remains.

Introduction
The study of ancient epidemics has often privileged written source materials over archaeological evidence, and there is a pressing need to include a wider range of data to assess these accounts.² The purported Late Bronze Age epidemic, attested mostly in Hittite plague prayers, offers a case in point.³ The Hittite prayers record a disease event in the late 14th century BCE that is said to have claimed many lives in the Hittite empire over at least 20 years, and they name Egyptian prisoners of war as its source. To date, however, there have been few attempts to assess these written accounts against archaeological data,⁴ and many questions remain about the described outbreaks. Was this an extended interregional epidemic, for example, or a series of smaller localized outbreaks that are not necessarily of the same disease? Was this a time of increased risk of disease, or is the clustering of written evidence a result of chance preservation of sources? Despite these gaps in knowledge, the events described in the plague prayers are often singled out as an influence on wider sociopolitical affairs. For Egypt, they correspond approximately with the much-discussed reign of Akhenaten (ca. 1352–1336 BCE),⁵ the king who worshiped the solar god Aten as the sole state deity and founded the royal city of Akhetaten (modern Amarna). It is often speculated that epidemic disease influenced Akhenaten’s actions and may have struck the city of Akhetaten.⁶ Over the last two decades, excavations at the ruins of Akhenaten’s city at Amarna have provided an assemblage of 889 interments⁷ that can be closely dated to the mid to late 14th century BCE and provide a unique opportunity to introduce bioarchaeological data into discussions of the proposed Late Bronze Age epidemic.⁸

While epidemics are notoriously difficult to identify in the archaeological record, in part because they need not cause large numbers of deaths or create large death assemblages,⁹ archaeological work at settlements and cemeteries associated with known epidemic outbreaks (especially from medieval Europe) is providing a series of commonly observed hallmarks, particularly where catastrophic mortality has resulted. From these, it is possible to develop a basic set of archaeological, taphonomic, and demographic features that provide a starting point to survey sites for evidence of epidemics where historical records are patchy (as for Amarna) or entirely silent. While caution is required in transposing disease hallmarks across temporal and cultural boundaries, Amarna itself has unusual analytical potential for the study of disease. The city of Akhetaten had a main occupation period of only around 20 years and after its abandonment saw relatively little overbuilding. It is now one of the best-preserved cities from the ancient world. Here, we also explore how Amarna’s short-lived and well-preserved cemeteries and settlement areas provide the opportunity to integrate bioarchaeological and urban data in the study of past disease, and in doing so further introduce data from the ancient world into scholarship on the history of epidemics. We first survey the broader historical evidence for a Late Bronze Age epidemic in the Mediterranean and situate Amarna relative to this, before introducing the Amarna burial assemblage. We then assess this assemblage, and Amarna’s urban footprint more broadly, for evidence of epidemic in terms of burial practices, the construction and occupation history of the city, and its demography as regards both the anticipated number of dead relative to occupation period and who among the population are represented in its cemeteries.

Fig. 4. An undisturbed burial at the North Tombs Cemetery containing three individuals (Inds. 1167, 1168, and 1169), who were wrapped together in a single burial mat before interment. The matting survived in patches on the sides and base of the grave and is visible beside the skull and right forearm of the individual to the right.
(Courtesy the Amarna Project).

Dabbs, Gretchen R.; Stevens, Anna
Mortality Crisis at Akhetaten? Amarna and the Bioarchaeology of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Epidemic American Journal of Archaeology; (2025) 129(4) 455-489; DOI: 10.1086/736705

Copyright: © [year] The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The Exodus story as told in the Bible asks us to believe in an event of truly impossible scale: millions of people, their children, their livestock, and their household goods marching across the desert and a miraculously parted sea in a single night. A simple calculation of logistics — the time needed to move two million people in an orderly column — shows how implausible this really is. Even with the sea held back indefinitely, a movement of that size would take days, if not weeks, to clear. No such event is recorded in Egyptian sources, nor has it left a trace in the Sinai Peninsula.

This is not to say the entire story must have been invented from nothing. Myths are rarely created ex nihilo; they are more often built on small, real events which grow with each retelling, absorbing other memories, being shaped by theological and political agendas, and finally canonised in written form.

The recent findings suggesting that Akhetaten was not suddenly abandoned because of plague, but gradually depopulated, lend weight to one such plausible seed: the quiet dispersal of Atenist loyalists after the death of Akhenaten. A small, unrecorded migration could have carried the story of religious persecution and flight eastward, where it may have fused with other Semitic memories of Egypt, ultimately flowering into the Exodus epic.

This hypothesis does not “prove” the Exodus, nor does it claim a direct line of descent from Atenism to Judaism. What it does offer is a historically credible mechanism by which a modest episode of displacement can, over centuries of oral tradition and theological embellishment, grow into a founding myth of national identity.

And that, ultimately, is what makes this new research so interesting: it doesn’t salvage the biblical story as history — it suggests how the myth could have begun.

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