December
1446-1406 B.C. Exodus—ONLINE
RESOURCE of Lecturers
Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus
Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination
Watch full-length lecture videos as dozens of top scholars
discuss new Exodus research at a recent UCSD conference
“The closest parallel to the Book of Exodus in
the ancient West is Homer’s Odyssey. Both are stories of
migration—of identity suspended until the protagonist—Odysseus or Israel—reaches
a home. Neither account records events of the sort that are likely to have left
marks in the archaeological record, or even in contemporaneous monuments… But
the Exodus is not the story of an individual; it is the story of a nation. It
is the historical myth of an entire people, a focal point for national
identity.”
–Baruch Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?” The Rise of Ancient Israel, 1991.
The Exodus sits at the heart of
Israelite religion, literature and identity, and aspects of the narrative
helped shape independent Islamic and Christian traditions. Yet challenging
textual and archaeological evidence has led some scholars to question whether
the Biblical narrative reflects a single historical event or if it should be
read, as Ronald Hendel wrote in Bible
Review, as “conflation of history and
memory—a mixture of historical truth and fiction, composed of ‘authentic’
historical details, folklore motifs, ethnic self-fashioning, ideological claims
and narrative imagination.”
A recent international conference
hosted by Calit2’s
Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego addressed
some of the most challenging issues in Exodus scholarship. According to the Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus
Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination website, the conference “brought together more than 40
of the world’s leading archaeologists, Biblical scholars, Egyptologists,
historians and geo-scientists. In tandem, the Qualcomm Institute staged an
exhibition, EX3: Exodus, Cyber-Archaeology and the Future … as an experiment in trans-disciplinary research, team
science, and scholarly communication using technologies developed for the
museum of the future.”
Lectures
The
Ark of the Covenant and Egyptian Sacred Barks: A Comparative Study. Scott Noegel, University of Washington (video
unavailable).
Outside
of Egypt: Joseph, Moses, and the Idea of Pastoralism Across Distance, Daniel Fleming, New York University (video
unavailable).
Exodus
Welcome and Introductions, Thomas Levy, Conference Chair; Jeff
Elman, Dean, Division of Social Sciences, UCSD; Ramesh Rao, Director, Qualcomm
Institute; Pradeep K. Khosla, Chancellor, UC San Diego
Welcome, Seth Lerer, Dean, Division of Arts + Humanities, UCSD
Closing
Remarks
Out
of Egypt Conference: Summation, Thomas Schneider, University of British Columbia.
Closing, Thomas Levy, University of California, San Diego.
Permalink:
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/exodus/out-of-egypt-israels-exodus-between-text-and-memory-history-and-imagination/
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