ABSTRACT
The Egyptian data that are expedient to match Old Testament narrative claims occupy confirming or justifying slots parallel with the biblical propositions. The linguistic context of the Egyptian text need not be parallel with the context of the alleged parallel in the book of Exodus, for there to be a parallel, since the presuppositions of the Egyptian and Hebrew genres are dissimilar to one another in many ways. Related to the semantics of ‘focus-islands’ is the way in which the absence of information in Egyptian and other texts or artefacts corresponds to a presupposition in, say, Exodus. Literary research of Exodus has regularly eclipsed exploration of possibilities of an empirical basis for narrative polemics and ideological conflicts in relation to Egyptian royal political and military biography. The serpent motif condenses the Mosaic versus Egyptian priestly opposition into a conflict of mythic identities, in which the projected ego-symbol of one group is eclipsed by the Other.
