What can the sciences actually establish about the Exodus when evidence, models and conclusions are kept distinct?
Who Left Egypt? reopens the dossier without asking science to prove the Torah and without turning the absence of direct evidence into a refutation.
An inquiry into the available evidence
The book brings the narrative into contact with the disciplines capable of illuminating it: the archaeology of Egypt and the Levant, Egyptology, chronology, radiocarbon dating, ancient DNA, historical linguistics and the study of collective memory.
Each discipline provides a different kind of information and has different limits. An inscription may document a name or a population without narrating an event. Archaeology establishes what has survived and been found, not everything that occurred. Genetics describes populations and admixture, but cannot by itself identify the actors of an ancient narrative.
What an absence of traces does—and does not—mean
The book examines arguments used against the historicity of the Exodus as well as arguments advanced in its defence. It distinguishes absence of evidence, evidence of absence, and cases in which the expected traces would have had little chance of surviving.
The result is not manufactured certainty. It is a disciplined account of what is established, what remains compatible with the available knowledge and what lies beyond the reach of the historical sciences.
Book Three of The Investigation
Following Who Wrote the Torah? and Who Invented God?, this third volume follows the same rule: state the strongest opposing case, present the exhibits and limit the verdict to what those exhibits can actually support.
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