Answer

You are right. Whenever my family has spent even a few days in a place, there is lasting evidence of our presence. So there should be plenty of archeological evidence for our time in Egypt. And there is.

I even have an artifact that I can show you, which is clear evidence of the Israelite slavery in Egypt. But first, let’s look at the archeological discoveries (which are obviously subject to debate and much speculation).

Paintings of Semitic-looking slaves have been uncovered, like the Ibscha relief, showing bearded Semites arriving in Egypt, and the Rekhmire tomb from the 15th century BCE, depicting Semitic slaves building bricks out of mud.

Jewish names such as Menachem, Asher and Shifra appear in an ancient list of slaves known as the Brooklyn Papyrus. So yes, there is evidence that Israelites were slaves in Egypt.

As for the Exodus, the biblical tale of plagues that eventually broke Egypt and allowed the Israelites to leave with great wealth is backed up by evidence too. The Ipuwer Papyrus, written in the 13th century BCE, records a series of plagues visiting Egypt, including blood (“the river is blood, yet men drink of it”), disease (“pestilence is throughout the land, blood is everywhere, death is not lacking”), and darkness (“the land is without light”). The upheaval turned Egyptian society upside down: “Poor men have become owners of wealth, and he who could not make sandals for himself is now a possessor of riches.”

There are many other such discoveries, which you can find with a simple web search.

They may or may not be convincing to you, and we may even learn more about these things and discover that they are not connected to the Exodus. But nothing compares with evidence that you can see with your own eyes. So let me show you an original artifact of the Exodus. When you see this, you can never doubt the veracity of our story.

The evidence is you.

You are an Israelite. As a child, you sat at the Seder and heard the story of the Exodus firsthand from your grandparents, who heard it from theirs, as it was told every year in an unbroken chain all the way back to our ancestors who left Egypt.

Every year we start the Seder by saying, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” It didn’t happen to someone else, it happened to us. This is our family story. We look at the matzah and say, “This is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate in Egypt.”

Let’s stop for a moment and marvel at this. We are telling our family’s story to our children as we received it from our parents, together with props and a themed menu, as it has been done for three millennia. Our ancestors ate matzah when they left Egypt, and the next year they ate it again with their children. And we haven’t stopped doing that for 3337 years.

You are more than a walking piece of archeology. You are a living, breathing symbol of the everlasting. G‑d took us out of Egypt and He will redeem us again.