How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

As time passed, Abraham and his descendants multiplied and became the people of Israel. In the story, the Israelites went down to Egypt to escape a famine up north. As more centuries passed, they became slaves of the Egyptians. The story has a twist at this point, as God’s chosen people were no longer in the land God had promised them. They were slaves living in the land and culture of the Egyptians. Keep in mind this was not just for a few years, but for around four hundred years.‡ Generation after generation of God’s chosen people were being immersed in a world controlled by the Egyptians, learning the Egyptian origin stories, their values, and their religious beliefs. There is debate on the exact years, but scholars believe the Israelites were in Egypt for the approximately four hundred years in slavery either in the 1200s BC or the 1400s BC.