We recently began reading the book of Exodus, the interwoven story of how we became a people with a specific religious orientation. Exodus moves us from the story of a particular family to a confederation of 12 tribes whose relationships with each other need to be defined.

It also moves us from the story of a family which has no laws, to a people that receives a revelation and begins creating legal codes and structures to govern everyday life. These laws and the leadership of the particular priestly groups are buttressed by the fact that their God, YHVH, is the one who brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

There is significant evidence, however, that Exodus never happened. There are no Egyptian sources describing the departure of a large group of people or the drowning of the Pharaoh and his army. The material culture of our Hebrew ancestors from the time of Joshua, including the pots, baskets, agricultural tools, etc., show no Egyptian influence, which would be the case if we really resided in Egypt for 400 years.

Instead, the material culture of our ancestors is identical to their Canaanite neighbors. The scholarly conclusion is inescapable, it seems to me—there was no prolonged period of settlement in Egypt and no great Exodus.

So why tell the story this way? Perhaps our ancestors believed that our spirituality needed to be grounded in the wilderness, even as it was practiced in their settled villages.

Settled life is noisy—physically noisy and psychically noisy as a whole complex of relationships surrounds us. Sure it was less noisy back then, but it was still noisy. If we want to hear the divine, it’s a lot easier if we step outside of our routine, step away from the noise of our day to day lives that can literally drown out the divine.

Hearing the divine also takes time. Do you know anyone who can just turn on that receptive mindset like an on–off switch? The wilderness offers us the time to get to the point where we can listen. Hearing the divine is also a challenge to the status quo—maybe a small challenge, maybe a big challenge—but all of us always have ways in which we are not in alignment.

The divine calls us, if we can but hear. And the wilderness lets us hear. And maybe this is one way to understand why we have a foundational myth of a settlement and an exodus that never actually occurred, even though it is presented as if it did.