Why Moses Went the Long Way

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]."