When Historians Say "It Did Not Happen," the Encyclopedia Says "Tradition"

There is a finding in the history of ancient Israel that is about as settled as findings in that field get: there was no Exodus. No mass departure from Egypt, no forty years in the Sinai, no conquest of Canaan from outside. The archaeology is clear, the Egyptian records are silent, and the Israelites turn out to have been Canaanites all along. I have written about the evidence and about my argument with the editors of the Hebrew Wikipedia over how to state it.

This post is about something narrower than either. It is about the words.

Three Ways to Say the Same Thing

Here is what the field concluded, in the plainest available language: the events described did not occur.

Here is how a reference work will typically put it: the Exodus is a foundational narrative of the Israelite tradition, whose historicity is debated among scholars.

And here is the middle register, which is the interesting one: the Exodus is a myth.

These three sentences are treated as interchangeable. They are not. Each permits the reader a different amount of continued belief, and the choice among them is doing work that the writer would rather not acknowledge.

What "Tradition" and "Narrative" Do

"Narrative" and "tradition" are words about the telling. They describe the story's role in a culture and say nothing whatever about whether the story is true. A tradition can be entirely accurate. A narrative can be a court transcript.

So when an encyclopedia calls the Exodus a foundational narrative, it has made a statement that is true, uncontroversial, and empty on the one question the reader came with. The believer reads it and nods: yes, it is our foundational narrative, and it happened. The sceptic reads it and nods: yes, a narrative, which is to say a story. Both leave satisfied, and the finding that would have disturbed one of them has been written around.

"Whose historicity is debated" completes the job. It is technically defensible, since somewhere a scholar defends nearly anything, and it converts a lopsided consensus into an open question. A reader has no way to learn from that sentence that the debate is between the overwhelming majority of archaeologists and a small number of confessionally committed holdouts.

What "Myth" Does

"Myth" sounds stronger and is in some ways weaker.

In ordinary speech a myth is a falsehood, and the word carries that sting; this is why believers object to it and why using it feels like a stand. But in the vocabulary of religious studies a myth is a sacred story that carries meaning for a community, with no implication either way about its truth. The Resurrection is a myth in this sense to a scholar who believes it happened.

That ambiguity is convenient. The writer gets to feel that he has said something bracing, and the reader who wants to keep believing gets to hear the academic sense: a meaningful story, a sacred story, a story we should not judge by the crude standard of whether it occurred. The word raises the subject to a plane where the question of truth is bad manners.

Both vocabularies, the soft one and the seemingly hard one, share a property: neither says the thing did not happen. That is not an accident of usage. A word that plainly said it would be a word that could not be used in polite reference writing about religion, and so the field has evolved a lexicon of terms that carry the conclusion for those who already hold it while sparing everyone else.

Why This Matters More Than It Seems

A reader who consults a reference work is trusting it to tell him what is known. If the work has concluded, correctly, that an event did not occur, and reports that conclusion in words designed to let him keep believing it did, then the work has failed at its only job while appearing to perform it.

The failure compounds. People form their picture of what history says from exactly these summaries, not from excavation reports. When the summary says "tradition," they conclude the matter is open. When they later meet someone who says flatly that the Exodus did not happen, that person sounds like an extremist, because the encyclopedia was so much more measured. The measured vocabulary has manufactured a false middle, and placed the actual finding outside it.

The Test

The remedy is not a rude vocabulary. It is a simple test for any description of a contested historical claim: could a reader tell, from this sentence alone, what the field actually concluded about whether the event occurred?

If the answer is no, the sentence is not being neutral. It is protecting the reader from the answer, and a reader protected from the answer has been detached, very gently, from reality. "Tradition" is accurate and says nothing. "Myth" sounds like a verdict and can be heard as a compliment. "Did not happen" is three words, and it is the only one of the three that transmits the finding.

I would rather encyclopedias used the three words and took the letters.