The problem of returning to Egypt : disintegrating Israelite ethnic identity

In the Hebrew Bible, returning to Egypt or even the prospect of returning there is a problem. In the Torah alone it is prohibited (Deut 17:16), seen as a curse (Deut 28:68), and Egypt is promised to never be seen again (Exod 14:13). It is also seen as an act of rebellion as we have multiple stories where groups of Israelites problematically desire to go back or indeed do go back to Egypt (Ex 16, 17, Num 11, 14, 20, Jer 42-44). And finally, we have texts in the prophets that proclaim this as a punishment for Israelite infidelity (Hos 7:11, 16, 8:13, 9:3, 11:5). This thesis argues that many of these texts, which display a fundamentally negative attitude toward returning to Egypt comprise a literary motif in the Pentateuch and the Prophets. I argue that the persistent negative attitude articulated in these texts is meant to indicate that the reason why returning to Egypt is problematic is that it presents a reversal, an undoing of the origin myth: the exodus from Egypt. This literary motif is meant to assert that returning to Egypt will lead to the diminishment and disintegration of biblical Israel’s distinctive ethnic identity as a people. These texts also do not operate in isolation from one another as many are intertextually linked by scribes through a variety of text-referencing techniques such as allusions, analogies, and inversions. I aim to highlight the motif, and the scribal text referencing and compositional techniques used to convey it. This study contributes to research on the nature and function of “myth” in the corpus, the configuration of ethnic identity in antiquity, the age-old question of the relationship between the law and the prophets, the role of Egypt in the literature, and lastly, inversions/reversals as an understudied technique used by ancient Israelite scribes.