Direct Evidence of “Hebrew” Slaves in Bronze Age Egypt?  Apologetic Misuse of Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 (Guest Post by Lex Lata)

According to the consensus position of modern mainstream scholars, we have “no direct evidence to support the Bible’s contention that the descendants of the sons of Israel were among those enslaved in Egypt.”¹ Even James Hoffmeier, a noted evangelical Egyptologist who champions the plausibility and historicity of certain aspects of the Exodus tradition, acknowledges “there is no direct evidence to prove the exodus” described in the Pentateuch.²  To be sure, we know a good deal about many West Semites more generally being present in the Bronze Age Nile Valley, in roles ranging from slaves to suzerains.  Yet we lack any compelling archaeological or documentary confirmation of a distinctly Israelite or Hebrew presence then and there.

Not everyone is content with this state of affairs.  Eager to find corroboration for the biblical account, some apologists point to Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 (“PB,” going forward), a damaged but substantially legible document in hieratic script produced in the 18^th century BCE, possibly around Thebes.  Among its contents is a list of servants’ names, some of which closely resemble names appearing in the Bible.  According to advocates, these biblical-sounding names furnish confirmation that Hebrews in particular were enslaved in Egypt. 

Such thinking works, however, only if one applies motivated eisegesis to PB, and ignores (or is ignorant of) the relevant historical linguistics and demographics.  In truth, as we’ll see after briefly surveying a few background considerations, the papyrus is support for merely the uncontroversial proposition that a number of servants in 18^th century Egypt had West or Northwest Semitic origins.

Semitic Peoples and Languages in the Fertile Crescent

The Hebrews were only one of many Semitic ethnolinguistic groups in the ancient Near East. Others included the Akkadians, Ammonites, Amorites, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Edomites, Moabites, and Phoenicians. The Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal? Semitic. The Amorite-Babylonian king Hammurabi? Semitic. Nebuchadnezzar? Sargon the Great? Sennacherib? All Semitic. In short, most of the Fertile Crescent, from Mesopotamia in the east to the Levant in the west, was home to various Semitic peoples in antiquity. And the majority of those Semitic peoples were not Israelites.

The Hebrew dialect and its siblings most likely began diverging from their Canaanite parent around the late 2^ndmillennium BCE, the early Iron Age, and remained mutually intelligible for some time.³ (A reflection of this relationship surfaces in Isaiah 19:18, which refers to the language we call Hebrew as
שְׂפַ֣ת כְּנַ֔עַן, s’phat C’na’an, the tongue of Canaan.)  Not until the early 1^st millennium BCE does the extant written record start to furnish clear and convincing evidence of Hebrew as a separate language, readily distinguishable from Aramaic, Canaanite, Moabite, Phoenician, and other close relatives.⁴

Semites in the Nile Valley

Ancient reliefs and records tell us the Nile Valley supported a significant, complex, and variable West Semitic (ꜥꜣmw, Aamu or “Asiatic,” in Egyptian terms) population during the Bronze Age.  Over the centuries, Egypt was a temporary or permanent place of residence for assorted captives, corvée laborers, craftsmen, entertainers, envoys, farmers, mercenaries, merchants, refugees, slaves, and others of Semitic origin with roots in Canaan or occasionally farther afield.⁵  West Semites even came to rule as pharaohs during what we call the 15^th or Hyksos Dynasty of the 17^th-16^th centuries BCE.  While the contemporaneous evidence for an identifiably Hebrew group of Elohim/Yahweh-worshippers in Bronze Age Egypt is lacking, the evidence for polytheistic West Semites is substantial.

The apologetic argument

With this background in mind, let’s examine one of the more recent iterations of the apologetic interpretation of PB.⁶  Apologist and archaeologist Titus Kennedy states, in pertinent part:

A section of Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 contains a list of 95 servants, many of whom are specified as “Asiatic” or coming from western Asia (i.e. Canaan). The servants with foreign names are given Egyptian names, just as Joseph was when he was a household servant under Potiphar (Genesis 41:45).  The majority of the names are feminine because domestic servants were typically female, while the male servants often worked in construction or agricultural tasks. Approximately 30 of the servants have names identified as from the Semitic language family (Hebrew is a Semitic language) . . . .

So far, so good.

. . . . but even more relevant to the Exodus story is that several of these servants, up to ten, actually have specifically Hebrew names.

Okay, not so good.  We don’t actually know that these ten or so names on PB are “specifically” Hebrew.  But let’s read the argument.

The Hebrew names found on the list include: Menahema, a feminine form of Menahem (2 Kings 15:14); Ashera, a feminine form of Asher, the name of one of the sons of Jacob (Genesis 30:13); Shiphrah, the name of one of the Hebrew midwives prior to the Exodus (Exodus 1:15); ‘Aqoba, a name appearing to be a feminine form of Jacob or Yaqob, the name of the patriarch (Genesis 25:26); ‘Ayyabum, the name of the patriarch Job or Ayob (Job 1:1); Sekera, which is a feminine name either similar to Issakar, a name of one of the sons of Jacob, or the feminine form of it (Genesis 30:18); Dawidi-huat a compound name utilizing the name David and meaning “my beloved is he” (1 Samuel 16:13); Esebtw, a name derived from the Hebrew word eseb meaning “herb” (Deuteronomy 32:2); Hayah-wr another compound name composed of Hayah or Eve and meaning “bright life” (Genesis 3:20); and finally the name Hy’b’rw, which appears to be an Egyptian transcription of Hebrew (Genesis 39:14).  Thus, this list is a clear attestation of Hebrew people living in Egypt prior to the Exodus, and it is an essential piece of evidence in the argument for an historical Exodus. 

The deficiency in this approach is not difficult to discern.  Apologists such as Kennedy, who may not study comparative Semitic and historical linguistics in sufficient depth, appear to operate with an uncritical default assumption that the names (or their cognates) of Hebrew persons in a 1^st millennium text must have been uniquely Hebrew centuries earlier, in an unrelated 2^nd millennium text.  That assumption is incorrect, and a case study in motivated retrojection.

In the 18^th century BCE, no identifiable Hebrew language existed, and we have no cause to believe distinctively Hebrew names were yet in circulation.  Certainly there is insufficient justification to conclude the names flagged by Kennedy and his fellow apologists were “specifically Hebrew” at the time.  “Menahema” (more precisely, mnḥm’ or munaḥḥima’)?  A name meaning comforter or consoler, suitable in any number of Northwest Semitic communities in the Bronze Age; we even have extant cuneiform parallels from Ugarit.  “Shiphrah” (šp–ra)?  One expression of a Semitic root connoting beautiful, fair, pleasing, or shining not just in Hebrew, but also in Arabic and Aramaic.  “Ashera” (ʾš-ra)?  Another unexceptional name based on a generic Semitic root meaning happy, blessed, or fortunate.  “‘Aqoba” (‘qb’), a feminine form of Ya’aqov, or Jacob?  Variants of Jacob were relatively commonplace among ancient Semitic peoples; indeed, we find a version with one of the Hyksos pharaohs, Ya’qub-Har.

Even the intriguing Hy’b’rw, which at first does appear to resemble the modern English word, Hebrew, actually has nothing in particular to do with the biblical Israelites.  “Hebrew” in Hebrew is עִבְרִי‎, pronounced ivri, with no demonstrable connection to Hy’b’rw, which “would be vocalized Hay’abi-ilu.”⁷  Hy’b’rw seems to have meant something like “Where is my father, o El/God?”—a perfectly acceptable name for a Canaanite, with known close cognates in Amorite and Ugaritic.⁸

And so on.  These names in PB are accurately described as Asiatic, Semitic, or West or Northwest Semitic. Did some variants see use among Israelites or proto-Israelites at some point?  Sure.  But especially in the context of this 18^th century papyrus, describing the names as “specifically Hebrew”—that is to say, unused or unusable by any of the multitudinous non-Hebrew Semites of antiquity—is an anachronistic and ahistorical non sequitur.

Accordingly, credible and careful researchers with a firm grasp of the ethnolinguistic nuances exercise appropriate precision in their characterizations of the names in question.  William Hayes, for example, the Egyptologist who in 1955 published the first translation and analysis of PB in its entirety, consistently referred to these names not as Hebrew but as “Asiatic” (the term still used by the Brooklyn Museum).⁹  Even prominent scholars of an evangelical or biblical maximalist inclination favoring traditional ideas about Moses and the Exodus take care not to go too far.  Maximalist luminaries William Albright, James Hoffmeier, and Kenneth Kitchen have all prudently and correctly described the listed servants as “Asiatics” and “Semites” bearing names that are linguistically “Semitic” or “Northwest Semitic” (even while noting the similarities to certain names in the Bible).¹⁰Nowhere do they leap to the unjustified conclusion peddled by certain apologists that ten or so of the Semitic names in PB are distinctively Hebrew.

The apologetics name game

In terms of historical linguistics, citing Hebrew-sounding names in an 18^th century BCE papyrus as direct evidence of Israelites in Egypt is roughly analogous to arguing that the appearance of names such as Edith, Robert, and Walter in the Domesday Book of the 11^th Century CE demonstrates that some New Yorkers lived in medieval England.  Names don’t work that way.  Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 is good evidence for the presence of Northwest Semitic servants in Middle Kingdom Egypt; declaring it confirmation of Hebrews in Egyptian bondage is an exercise in apologetic embellishment, not rigorous scholarship.

---

1. Anne E. Killebrew, “Israel’s Origins, Settlement and Ethnogensis,” 80, in Brad E. Kelle and Brent A. Strawn, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press 2020); see also Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History, 93 (Eerdmans 2011); William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, 7-21 (Eerdmans 2003). ↩︎
2. James K. Hoffmeier, Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, 245 (Oxford University Press 2015). ↩︎
3. E. Kautzsch, A.E. Cowley, trans., Genesius’ Hebrew Grammar, 2d English ed., 1-17 (Oxford University Press 1910, 1980 reprint); Koert van Bekkum, “The ‘Language of Canaan’: Ancient Israel’s History and the Origins of Hebrew,” 86-87, in Koert van Bekkum, Gert Kwakkel, and Wolter H. Rose, eds., Biblical Hebrew in Context (Brill 2018). ↩︎
4. Seth Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew, 76-155 (University of Illinois Press 2009). ↩︎
5. Janine Bourriau, “The Second Intermediate Period,” 186-194, in Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (OUP 2000); Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, 98-237 (Princeton University Press 1992). ↩︎
6. This approach to PB goes back to at least 2015, when it appeared in David Rohl’s book, Exodus: Myth or History?, and the related film, Patterns of Evidence: Exodus.  For video of Rohl summarizing his version of the argument, see the 6:50 mark here.  For a written critique of Rohl’s case from Hector Avalos, see here and here. ↩︎
7. William F. Albright, “Northwest-Semitic Names in a List of Egyptian Slaves from the Eighteenth Century B.C.,” in 74 Journal of the American Oriental Society, 226 (American Oriental Society 1954). ↩︎
8. Id. ↩︎
9. William C. Hayes, A Papyrus of the Late Middle Kingdom in the Brooklyn Museum [Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446], 92-98 (Watkins 1955). ↩︎
10. Albright, “Northwest-Semitic Names,” 222-233; James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition, 61, 84, 86 (Oxford University Press 1996); Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 344, 346, 371, 576 n. 117 (Eerdmans, 2006). ↩︎