Book offers credibility for Exodus

By RICHARD N. OSTLING
AP RELIGION WRITER
ABC-TV anticipates the Jewish Passover with a lavish new two-part miniseries, "The Ten Commandments," which dramatizes Moses' story from birth through Mount Sinai. It will be broadcast Monday and Tuesday.
For thousands of years, Jews have commemorated the liberation from Egypt led by Moses, fulfilling the Bible's command: "You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants."
ABC's version closely follows the Bible's Book of Exodus, regarding which there's perennial debate. The latest example is a chapter in "The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures" (Columbia University Press) by Daniel Hillel, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Massachusetts.
The Bible is the earliest effort to "describe a people's history as a continuous progression of events," Hillel writes, and the Exodus is pivotal for that story.
This scientist is a middle-of-the-roader, neither accepting everything as literally true nor dismissing Exodus as a fable. Historical proof or disproof "is not easy, and perhaps not possible, to resolve entirely," he says, since archaeological finds are chancy, much has been wiped away and the lack of remains doesn't confirm anything.
Outside the Bible, there's no hard proof of Israel's sojourn in Egypt and escape. But Hillel figures if the accounts "were entirely contrived, they could hardly have had such lasting power" and "there appears to be a believable core of authenticity."