Why Moses Went the Long Way

By Frederic Golden

A find in Gaza sheds new light on the riddle of the Exodus

The biblical account of the Exodus does not answer a tantalizing question. Why did Moses turn right when he reached the Sinai, taking his flock on an arid, roundabout 40-year odyssey, instead of heading directly along the Mediterranean coast to the promised land?

The Old Testament hints that Moses headed inland to avoid a confrontation with the Philistines. Yet archaeological findings have long indicated that at the time of the Exodus--about the 13th century B.C.--the Philistines had not yet established themselves in the coastal region around Gaza. Now after nearly ten years' digging in the Gaza Strip, Archaeologist Trude Dothan, 57, of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, has found indications that the Israelites went into the desert to elude not the Philistines but the very people from whom they were escaping--Egyptians. The evidence: the remains of a large Egyptian community just south of Gaza that flourished during the reign of Moses' putative foe, the Pharaoh Ramses II.

After the Six-Day War in June 1967, Dothan noticed that Arab antiquity shops in the Old City of Jerusalem--just conquered by Israeli troops--were stocked with ancient Egyptian artifacts. When Dothan asked where they came from, the dealers specified Hebron, in the mountains south of Jerusalem. That was clearly a tall tale; some of the artifacts--jewelry, clay masks, even coffins--still bore grains of yellow Mediterranean sand.

Dothan suspected that the antiquities came from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had also occupied during the war. She took her hunch to then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, an avid amateur archaeologist and collector. Three months later he not only told her where the Egyptian materials came from--how he found out he never revealed--but also provided a military escort to the site near the Arab town of Deir el Balah, about 18 miles southwest of Gaza.

Dothan quickly spotted numerous fragments of old pottery, including bits similar to the Egyptian-style artifacts in Jerusalem. Since there were signs that grave robbers had been at work, Dothan wanted to start excavating immediately. But terrorism was still rampant in the Gaza Strip; it was three years before the army let her team begin. Even then, a squad of soldiers always stood guard and allowed no digging after 4 p.m. Dothan was not deterred. To help locate promising sites, she hired as her foreman a Bedouin named Hamad who had been doing some freelance digging on his own. As he walked over the dunes, he would hold a long screwdriver before him like a divining rod and mutter in Arabic, "Yom assal, yom bassal [One day it is honey, one day it is onions]."

The diggers struck real honey in 1972. They found a so-called anthropoid coffin--one roughly shaped like a body--containing the bones of a man, a woman and two small children. Next summer, more coffins were unearthed, all decorated with human masks, wigged in the Egyptian manner and topped by Egyptian lotus flowers. Inside were the remains of long-faced, large-skulled people of apparently Egyptian origin. For their voyage to the nether world, they were accompanied by such Egyptian burial adornments as seals and scarabs, solid-gold teardrop earrings, beads of gold and carnelian (reddish quartz), lotus-shaped alabaster goblets. The coffins even contained alabaster spoons, in the shape of a swimming girl, to apply cosmetics. Some of the seals bore the name of Ramses II.

During last season's digging, Dothan made her most impressive find to date: 300 yds. south of the burial ground, her bulldozers uncovered foundations of what appears to be a large official residence, containing some 15 rooms, dating back to the 14th century B.C. Mud-brick walls of a second residence, atop the first, traced directly to the era of Ramses II.

In Cairo, the press glowingly, and incorrectly, trumpeted that an Israeli professor had found a pharaoh in Gaza. Newspapers in other Arab countries tried to turn science to political advantage by claiming the find was proof that Palestinians had been in Gaza for more than 3 ,000 years.

-By Frederic Golden. Reported by Martin Levin/Jerusalem

With reporting by Martin Levin

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