It is commonly asserted that “there is no evidence for the Israelites in Egypt.”

Archaeological evidence has confirmed the presence of Semites in Egypt.

Their roots are Canaanite and Amorite and they came from the larger territory of Israel.

You can see what these Semitic people looked like from the Ibscha Relief, a 19th century B.C. tomb painting found at Beni Hassan in central Egypt.

A Semitic dynasty called the Hyksos even ruled Egypt for a time, before they were overthrown.

But were there really Semitic slaves in Egypt as the Bible says?

Here’s a scene from the Tomb of Rekhmire, dated to the 15th century B.C.

It shows foreign laborers making bricks for the Karnak temple.

Other scenes depict the slaves working under the watchful supervision of Egyptian overseers.

The Rekhmire art supports Exodus 5 where Pharaoh orders the Hebrew slaves to make bricks using mud and straw.

Archaeological excavations in Egypt also confirm the customary use of bricks and straw to build cities like ...

Yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, provided stunning confirmation of the reliability of the Hebrew Bible.

Previously the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Masoretic text, was from around 1000 A.D.

That text is called the Leningrad Codex.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the 3rd to the first centuries BC, proved the Masoretic scribes had not altered the text in over a thousand years.

The Great Isaiah scroll for instance was virtually identical to the Masoretic version, with the differences being tiny and insignificant.

But interestingly the reliability of the Masoretic text could have been largely established without the Dead Sea Scrolls.

After all, the Hebrew Bible had between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC been translated into Greek.

This was done by scholars working in Alexandria and a few other places, and the translation is called the Septuagint.

So one could easily compare the Septuagint with the Masoretic script to see if, and to what extent, the text had...