You're listening to the Bible for normal people, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Bias.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast.

Today our topic is history and the Exodus.

One of the questions we get asked most is how the Bible interacts with history.

Did the things we read about in the Bible actually happen?

Of course, just as with so much when it comes to the Bible,

if you've listened to almost any of our episodes, it's complicated.

Fortunately, we talked with Gary Rinsberg for today's episode,

Chair in Jewish History from Rutgers University, who helped us walk through some of these questions

of history in the Bible.

Rinsberg's latest book from 2019 is How the Bible is Written, but today,

we talk more about how scholars try to figure all this out,

how they try to determine what happened historically.

And specifically today, we aim that scholarship at the Exodus story, so hope you enjoy.

The historian in me wants to remove all of that epic treatment

to reveal the historical kernel, the literary scholar in me,

never wants to end the two apart.

So it's one thing as historians to attempt to do it,

but as readers of the Bible to appreciate literature,

we need to keep it as one single, whole, incredible story

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