Cruelty and Numbers
The Torah and the Midrash describe the Israelites enslavement in Egypt in harrowing detail. Yet many modern scholars insist that it must be exaggerated. It is said to be historically implausible, unsupported by archaeology, psychologically impossible. No society, they argue, could sustain such systematic barbarity. But we have learned, in our own time, how dangerously naïve such arguments are. Both the enslavement in Egypt and the Holocaust are “unbelievable” in exactly the same way: not because they did not happen, but because we desperately wish they had not.
