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Just as I figured, Finkelstein is your authority.
And you prefer a book that begins wioth a talking snake and ends with a 7 headed monster.
The Exodus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Numbers and logistics
According to Exodus 12:37-38, the Israelites numbered "about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children," plus many non-Israelites and livestock.[16] Numbers 1:46 gives a more precise total of 603,550.[17] The 600,000, plus wives, children, the elderly, and the "mixed multitude" of non-Israelites would have numbered some 2 million people,[18] compared with an entire Egyptian population in 1250 BCE of around 3 to 3.5 million.[19] Marching ten abreast, and without accounting for livestock, they would have formed a line 150 miles long.[20]
No evidence has been found that indicates Egypt ever suffered such a demographic and economic catastrophe or that the Sinai desert ever hosted (or could have hosted) these millions of people and their herds.[21] Some scholars have rationalised these numbers into smaller figures, for example reading the Hebrew as "600 families" rather than 600,000 men, but all such solutions raise more problems than they solve.[22] The view of mainstream modern biblical scholarship is that the improbability of the Exodus story originates because it was written not as history, but to demonstrate God's purpose and deeds with his Chosen People, Israel.[3] Thus it seems probable that the 603,550 people delivered from Egypt (according to Numbers 1:46) is not simply a number, but a gematria (a code in which numbers represent letters or words) for bnei yisra'el kol rosh, "the children of Israel, every individual;"[23] while the number 600,000 symbolises the total destruction of the generation of Israel which left Egypt, none of whom lived to see the Promised Land.[24]
Archaeology
A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness,[3] and most archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit".[4] A number of theories have been put forward to account for the origins of the Israelites, and despite differing details they agree on Israel's Canaanite origins.[25] The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains in the local Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite, and almost the sole marker distinguishing the "Israelite" villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether even this is an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute.[26] There is archeological evidence of the Caananite Hyksos people moving into and out of northern Egypt, though the relation of their dates to the biblical account is debated by scholars.
Regards
DL
