"Researchers were unable to find evidence of a Hebrew presence in Egypt at any time, much less the 13th century BCE when the Exodus was most likely to have occurred."
"Searches of sites where the Israelites were said to have camped during their forty years in the wilderness came up dry."
"While Genesis 15 promised that Abraham's offspring would rule 'from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates', the actual kingdom of Judah, from which the term 'Jew' derives, was never more than a hilltop duchy some thirty miles across."
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"After the 1967 war, when Israeli archaeologists gained access to the West Bank, the heartland of ancient Israelite culture, they expected to find the rich cities of the Book of Judah. But instead they found evidence only of a society impoverished by centuries of Egyptian taxation. Jericho turned out to have been poor and unfortified in the14th century BCE and totally abandoned in the 13th, when its walls supposedly came tumbling down."
Two books, both written by Shlomo Sand and both apparently popular in Israel, make such statements, according to a lengthy review in the 20 June 2013 London Review of Books:
The Invention of the Jewish People is described as "dismantling of nationalistic historical myth." The Invention of the Land of Israel "aims to trace the concept of a Jewish homeland from the vague territorial references of the Torah to today's armed and embattled Jewish state."
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After quoting the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the reviewer, apparently paraphrasing Sand, asks, "If they 'never ceased to pray and hope for their return', why did so few bother to visit their homeland for centuries on end?"
The concluding paragraph in the 3,600-word review:
"The Palestinian hill country is central to the mythology of the Hebrew Bible, and the West Bank has always been the prime target. But other prizes lie not far off, and there will be no shortage of opportunities for expansion as violence envelops the Muslim world."
Frank Versagi is the editor of Versagi Voice.
