Does this question really not bother you, even as a believing person who invests his whole life in Torah and commandments?
On the face of it, there is a head-on contradiction here with your faith..
(If this sounds provocative, that’s not the intention; I’m genuinely trying to understand..)

I understand the question, and I’ll answer briefly.
My trust in research in these fields is very limited. They are saturated with assumptions and researchers’ prejudices, and with speculation by the very nature of these disciplines. So from the outset, the claims underlying these difficulties carry only limited weight for me.
Beyond that, there are many ways to reconcile difficulties like these, through interpretation of the findings, interpretation of the verses, and so on.
Especially for me, since in my view various principles of faith and tradition are not binding in the strict sense (for example, that literally every word in the Torah was given to us at Sinai and that there are no later additions or edits), the situation is even easier and less troubling.
Therefore, a priori, I don’t place these pursuits very high on my list of priorities (time is limited and you can’t do everything).
That’s why I wrote to you that if this troubles you, it’s worth turning to people who work in these areas.

See:

Hello Rabbi, thank you for the answer.
With your permission, I’ll just clarify why in this case it’s hard to say this is a matter of "speculation" or of "the researchers’ prejudices." Precisely in the specific field of demography, Egyptian documentation, and agricultural capacity, the data are among the most stable and clearest we have about the ancient world.
We are talking about actual administrative papyri of the Egyptians themselves, tax lists, supply and military lists, the quantity of grain produced by the Nile, and the actual size of villages and cities uncovered archaeologically. These are quantitative data—not interpretation.
And therefore all researchers, from every camp, arrive at the same population range for Egypt (2.5–3.5 million), without any substantive dispute.
In such a situation, it’s hard to say this is merely "speculation," because these are not conspiratorial hypotheses but physical calculations: amount of cultivated land, amount of grain, district capacity, and actual lists of foreign populations. There is no evidence whatsoever—not in documents, not in archaeology, and not in logistics—for a foreign population of millions in Egypt or in the Sinai desert. Therefore this is a real factual difficulty, not one that can be brushed aside with a wave of the hand or apologetic hairsplitting. One can of course propose ways of reconciling it or new ways of understanding the texts, but it is hard to say that this is not a serious, well-founded difficulty worthy of substantive engagement.

Test comment

I think any layman can understand that anything connected to researching the past is complicated; we can barely figure out the present. Take a case like that of the military advocate general—you can see how much emotion-soaked politics there is in it just to get to the truth, with all the technology and innovation of our day. So to examine periods from thousands of years ago on the basis of such flimsy things as you presented is utterly ridiculous. I’m amazed at you. Isn’t it more reliable to rely on historical documentation? Even if the Torah were only a history book, it is far stronger in terms of reliability and accuracy than any other route—how much more so when this is something original, straight from the very generators of the events themselves. But the matter will be decided next week by the High Court, with God’s help.

These are not “speculations,” but real Egyptian data found on the ground: tax and grain papyri, labor and military records, and Egyptian settlements uncovered along the Nile.
This is exactly what expert researchers of ancient Egypt like Barry Kemp and Mario Liverani (both among the world’s leading scholars in the study of Egypt’s economy and settlements) analyze. All these data accumulate into one clear picture: Egypt could support about three million inhabitants—and there is not a single piece of evidence, either in documents or in archaeology, for a foreign population of millions.
In Sinai too, where preservation conditions are excellent, not even the slightest trace of a mass migration has been found.
So to say that the evidence is “flimsy” does not really confront the simple facts: these are physical numbers, Egyptian documentation, and findings from the ground—not opinions.
The difficulty stands, and apologetic pilpul disguised as rational arguments will not help and will not solve the problem.

Why not? For example, I could tell you that the Egyptians didn’t want to publish the true numbers in order to hide the fact that they had an entire nation of slaves among them, for all sorts of reasons, and all kinds of explanations like that. Besides, usually from my impression, when people bring explanations like these they only bring the scholars’ opinion and present them as experts instead of bringing the body of evidence, which usually can be interpreted in a few directions. And another thing: why should the Egyptian data be seen as more reliable than the Torah?

The claim that “maybe the Egyptians hid an entire nation of slaves” doesn’t stand up against what we actually have: the Egyptian settlement strip along the Nile—where almost all of Egypt’s inhabitants lived—is well documented in texts and archaeological sites, including the Wilbour Papyrus (tax and agriculture lists), the Harris Papyrus (state balance sheet), and work lists from Deir el-Medina documenting every worker and every food allotment. There are also lists of war captives and foreign slaves with their origins noted, but there is not even the slightest trace of a huge group called “Israel.” If there had been a foreign population of hundreds of thousands or millions, there would have had to be some evidence—documents, grain, storehouses, or settlement mapping. Also in the Sinai desert, where remains are well preserved, no sign whatsoever of a camp on that scale has been found. So this is not “blind faith in scholars,” but the totality of physical and written evidence showing that there was no foreign population in Egypt on that scale.

I don’t understand. I’m telling you it could be they didn’t want to reveal it in documents for whatever reasons, and you’re bringing me other documents to show it’s impossible? That itself is exactly my claim against this.

And can you send the documents and the proofs for what you’re claiming?

The reason it is impossible that Egypt held millions of Hebrews is not “because the Egyptians didn’t write it,” but because the physical data themselves do not allow it.
Here are some pieces of evidence and examples, as you asked; I hope this will suffice:
The Wilbour Papyrus documents over 2,000 agricultural plots in just two districts, with an average yield of about 1.5–2 tons of wheat per inundated dunam; this documentation makes it possible to calculate Egypt’s total annual grain output in the time of Ramesses: about 3–4 million tons.
A person needs about 1,000–1,200 kg of wheat per year (direct food + feed for livestock).
This means Egypt could at most feed 3–4 million inhabitants, including the army, bureaucracy, urban classes, and priests—and this fits the data from the writings of Ramesses III in the Harris Papyrus, where the number of workers, laborers, and priests who are paid and receive regular food rations is detailed.
There is no anomaly anywhere near the amount of food that would have been needed for another 2–3 million people; the agricultural system could not have produced such a quantity, and it would necessarily have left a mark in the tax lists and storehouses—which are management documents, not propaganda, and therefore are not subject to censorship out of “national embarrassment.” In addition, lists of slaves and captives found in hundreds of documents (such as the Anastasi papyri and Deir el-Medina records) include thousands of foreign slaves by name and origin, but there is not a single list of a large ethnic group called “Israel.” And this is not a matter of “erasure,” but of grain management, labor, and supply—areas that are not censored because they are essential to the functioning of the state. These physical data are the proof: the quantity of produce, the number of fields, the quantity of storehouses, and the worker lists prove that millions of Hebrews were not there—not because of Egyptian silence, but because of the limits of Egypt’s own economic capacity.

This seems really unfounded to me. First of all, you wrote the measures in tons. Were the measures in the papyrus in tons?
Because if not, maybe the unit conversion isn’t good (and likewise for all the other measurements).
And the fact that it describes 2,000 farms in two districts—how does that show how many farms there were in the other districts, and whether they produced more or less grain?
You also wrote that a person needs a certain amount of wheat per year. Why is it so obvious that in the past they consumed like today? And if you wrote it based on the past, where does that measure come from?
And in addition, how do you know these are management documents and not propaganda?
Regarding the number of workers—it could be that this was a list of workers who were not Israelites. For example, in Israel today it would make sense to have a list of Sudanese workers, Chinese workers, etc..
In short, in my opinion there are a lot of unnecessary assumptions here, and I could add many more.

Excellent question

It could be that the number 600,000 is inflated
and 300 people came out of Egypt
and we are their descendants

Some of the tribes were not in the Egyptian bondage at all
Chronicles supports this direction somewhat, with whole verses that intentionally omit the Exodus from Egypt, and with the verses about Upper and Lower Beth-horon which the grandchildren of our forefather Jacob lived in continuously?
Also some of the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim held onto their ancestral land; they stayed here and did not go into exile at all, and that’s why their share in the land is so large.
Maybe the whole repetition of the Torah in Deuteronomy, including the revelation at Mount Sinai, happens when they are in the plains of Moab before entering the land, and the Israelite tribes that weren’t exiled come, meet Moses and the part of the people of Israel that had been lost to them, and for their sake the story is repeated in summary?

By the way, in the past I think I heard in Jerusalem in the name of Rabbi Leibel Mintzberg (rabbi of the “Matmidim” community, Kahal Adat Yerushalayim)
that he did not believe there were 600,000 at the Exodus from Egypt.
Maybe only 600, maybe 60…
The elders got furious with him and declared him a heretic.
Nu, so be it.

Your claim that everything is “unfounded” comes from unfamiliarity with what Egyptian documents look like and what exactly they contain.
First, in the Wilbour Papyrus the measures do indeed appear in clear Egyptian units, and the conversion to tons is not something made up but a standard operation in the study of Egyptian agriculture, carried out by many scholars over decades. There is nothing at all “dubious” here.
Second, 2,000 plots in two districts is not a “small number”—it is a very large sample, because the Egyptians documented every taxable agricultural plot. Therefore one can compare the yield data to other districts for which we also have additional documentation. That is exactly what historical demographers do.
As for food consumption—they do not assume people consumed like today. The figure of about 1 ton per year is based on the Harris Papyrus itself, where the annual grain rations distributed by the Egyptians to workers and priests are specified. In other words: this is an Egyptian source, not a modern figure.
The claim “maybe it’s propaganda” is also irrelevant. Propaganda is what you find in inscriptions on temples. Tax papyri, payroll lists, and grain-distribution records are internal technical documents; there was no point in turning them into propaganda, because they were intended for officials managing inventory—like Excel reports.
And finally, the idea “maybe the workers were Israelites and therefore were not recorded” does not fit the fact that hundreds of documents do record other foreign slaves by name and origin—Nubians, Libyans, Canaanites, Sherden—including groups far smaller than what tradition attributes to Israel. If the Egyptians were hiding “all the foreigners,” we would see that. But they hide only one group—the one that does not exist in those numbers.
So there are not “a ton of assumptions” here, but simply familiarity with the material: Egyptian units of measure, regular tax documentation, supply lists, and slave lists—all together create a picture that accords with all serious Egyptian scholarship, without exception.

Why assume the conversion is correct? Give proofs.
And how do you know they documented all taxable land? It could be only a partial list. I don’t see why compare to other districts. Maybe there was much more there and we don’t know how it was, and why they chose specifically those lists and those districts and not others. The claim that this is what historical demographers do doesn’t interest me that much; maybe they’re wrong. The Egyptian source you mentioned for the distributed rations does not have to apply to the Israelites; maybe that is how much the other workers consumed, whereas the Israelites were worked harder, as it says they worked them with crushing labor. How do you know what the documents were for and that they weren’t for propaganda? How do you know who used them, for what purposes, and to whom they were shown?
Your claim that they wouldn’t hide the people of Israel is not necessarily correct in my opinion. It could be, as I said, that the other slaves were minority groups compared to a large ethnic group like the people of Israel, who were in the millions, which is something exceptional, and because of that or for any other reason they didn’t want to put them in the lists because they knew that since they were such a large group they might be able to free themselves from them, and that it wasn’t really worth it and was also very hard to organize them in the data, so in case they escaped or anything else they preferred to put into the records only those they had control over.
And furthermore—I do not see why, even if this were true, that should make it more reliable than what is written in the Torah. Here you have two documents; what makes you prefer this one over that one? The Torah often uses lists and data where it is quite clear it is speaking historically (for example, the book of Kings on the dynasties of the kings, and the construction of the Tabernacle, etc.), so I don’t see why to prefer one over the other. (And if you say the Torah has an interest in falsifying, then I can find interests for the Egyptians to falsify too, even if not at the same probability, but in my opinion that still isn’t enough to negate the Torah’s reliability.) And besides, you sent the material in Hebrew—I don’t know whether it’s all really correct, because many times reading ancient texts can be interpreted in a few directions, and even if we say the material there is correct, you’re still missing information: maybe the Israelites also ate grain from Canaan or other lands that was brought to them because the Egyptians forced them or something like that. And I can find you a thousand more reasons and things to reconcile it. In short, even if some of the things I said seem forced, I only wanted to show that there are many possibilities.

And have you tried talking with archaeologists or historians from the other side too? I’m sure they also have answers and proofs in their favor against you. Usually in these things each side claims it has absolute proofs, and both sides bring things that can be interpreted based on ideology.

You’re right that there are many assumptions here, but the question is not “can one imagine another possibility,” but what is more probable according to the accepted tools of historians. Egyptian units of measure (aroura, hekat, khar) were not translated into tons out of thin air; they were identified out of dozens of mathematical papyri, lease contracts, and warehouse accounts that repeatedly show fixed relations between the units, yielding a fairly narrow range from which one gets an order of magnitude for yield per person, not an exact number. Also, the Wilbour Papyrus and the like are not “two random districts,” but part of a broad picture of archaeological surveys (cultivated areas, irrigation canals, storehouses) and tax documents from different places, all converging on the same general conclusion: Egypt was an economy of a few million people, not ten to fifteen million. Even if you argue that a person in antiquity consumed only half the amount assumed in the research, you still cannot fit another two to three million slaves into the same system without almost doubling the cultivated area and the number of storehouses—and here we run into physical findings that do not exist. The difference between propaganda and management is seen in the type of document: a victory inscription on a temple wall is propaganda; an inventory list from Deir el-Medina that counts how many sacks of grain each worker received each day, with handwritten corrections, is an internal working document intended for the bureaucracy, not for public impression. One can theoretically claim that precisely the biggest group, which supplied a huge part of the labor and consumption, was erased from all the accounts, in all the districts and at all levels—but then this is no longer “another possibility,” but a conspiracy assumption that complicates reality and requires more and more conjectures (“massive imports from Canaan,” “the lists are partial exactly where it suits us”) without any positive evidence. As for the Torah, it certainly serves as an important historical source, but it is a literary-theological text describing the past from its own angle, whereas tax and accounting papyri are contemporary records of what went in and out of the storehouse. When one asks a technical question like “how many people could Egypt feed,” the rules of historical research give greater weight to dozens of management documents and findings in the field than to a single verse, even if one believes in it. In other words: one can, on faith grounds, believe in the large numbers, but within rational tools the probability that Egypt held another two to three million slaves who appeared in no document whatsoever and left no trace in the economic system is very low. And the argument “you can always raise endless possibilities” does not make that possibility more convincing.

I still don’t understand why it’s impossible that in the other districts there was more grain. And in my opinion what you said about erasing the group is actually plausible; it could be that they really couldn’t control such a large group, but simply the Israelites had no better way to get food so they stayed there and things like that… so it’s pointless to try to control that many people, especially in a period that didn’t have all today’s technology. What you said about the documents is not absolute at all, and I’ll explain: maybe the documents were written after what actually happened, and therefore they are not accurate because they got corrupted in transmission, or were used as propaganda for the people to show what Egypt’s situation had once been, or things like that. And one could also say maybe they were written before, and that the Torah is talking about a different period—and don’t say you can measure by the years, because according to the Torah you have no way of knowing when it was, since you don’t know how the Torah’s count of years works, and even if you did know, when people calculate how long ago things were in the past, I understand that non-small errors can happen.
And another thing—how do you know the government wrote it? Maybe these were people who wanted to refute the Exodus story, so they deliberately lied.
And one last point—just as regarding the rationale of verses we do not know the reasons for the commandments, one could say the same here: maybe God provided each person food miraculously; after all, there were many miracles in Egypt. And if you say then why is there seemingly no trace? One can say this is like the rationale of verses: we do not know and do not presume to know why God gave certain commandments and not others, and for what reasons, so also regarding His miracles we do not know His policy in the world.

The arguments you present do not grapple with the evidence but cancel the very possibility of proving or disproving anything. To say “maybe the other districts produced much more,” “maybe all the documents are false,” “maybe they were written centuries later,” “maybe they erased only Israel,” “maybe nothing can be dated,” or “maybe it was all a miracle and therefore no traces remained” is not historical discussion but a total abandonment of rational thinking. Agricultural production in Egypt is calculated from dozens of administrative papyri, field maps, inundation depths, grain storehouses, and settlement sites. These data show clearly how much grain Egypt could produce and how many people it could feed. If you say “maybe the other districts were ten times larger,” you are inventing a reality that exists in no finding. If you say “maybe the documents are propaganda,” then you need to explain why tax lists, food allotments, and the names of foreign slaves are propaganda material at all. And if you say “maybe they erased only the Israelites,” that is not likely, because the Egyptians did in fact document captives, slaves, and foreign groups, and never erased vital economic information. And if one reaches the argument “maybe it was all a miracle,” that is already outside any historical discussion. One may certainly believe in the tradition for faith-based reasons, and that is legitimate, but proposing an endless chain of “maybes” does not make a position rational. Without respecting the physical, economic, and archaeological evidence, the discussion loses any factual basis.

You still haven’t answered my question: how do you know that what is written in the documents and the Exodus from Egypt happened at the same time? And regarding the thing with the districts, I disagree; in my opinion it is rational to think there was a different amount there, and that 2 is not a good sample.

The relevant Egyptian documents are dated quite precisely because they are written according to the names of the pharaohs and the years of their reigns, and the chronology of the Egyptian dynasties is one of the most stable in the ancient world, so there is no confusion here between “different times.” The Wilbour Papyrus and the Harris Papyrus, for example, were written in the periods of Ramesses II and Ramesses III, which are precisely the periods in which all researchers place the time of the bondage and the Exodus based on the style of the texts, the names of the cities, and the names of the pharaohs in the Torah. As for “maybe the other districts had more”: most of Egypt’s population then lived in the two core areas of the Delta and the Valley, and that is where most of the papyri, storehouses, canals, and settlements have been found; all point to the same average agricultural capacity. Even if there were one exceptional district, it would not produce an addition capable of supporting millions more people. The data are not a “small sample,” but dozens of farms, hundreds of kilometers of canals, and hundreds of tax documents from the whole Valley, presenting a consistent and systematic picture of Egypt’s economy. Therefore the claim “maybe it was different” is not a rational alternative but a theoretical possibility with no support whatsoever on the ground.

Yes, but can you determine a priori that there is complete coverage of the entire span of Egyptian history from a demographic and economic standpoint?
By the way, this question is also true regarding settlement in the Land of Israel. I remember once reading an archaeological book about Israelite settlement that claimed that the total population capacity under the existing physical conditions of the period of the Judges (the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age) did not support more than 40,000 inhabitants in the Land of Israel—certainly not the numbers described in Judges and Samuel. Historians in antiquity had a tendency to inflate numbers that were considered reliable until the moment modern historians started checking royal payroll ledgers and began subtracting a zero from the ancient numbers (an army once described as numbering in the hundreds of thousands became tens of thousands, and an army of tens of thousands became a few thousand at most). It may be that the Torah gives such numbers for spiritual reasons when from the outset it is clear that these are unrealistic numbers (as can also be seen from the number of firstborn and the number of Levites).

What you said about the city names being written in the Torah and stylistic details proves nothing.
It could be (and I’m not just saying some random theoretical conspiratorial thing, but something plausible in my opinion) that when the Torah referred to and wrote about the events of Egypt, it was only after the Israelites left Egypt (I don’t know when), and it referred to the places as they were at the time of the *writing*, and then the data prove nothing.
And as for the substance of the claims in case they were written in Egypt:

The Torah uses “Pharaoh,” which is a general name; how do they know which one is meant?

Also regarding the city names, maybe some were ancient cities that were called by a certain name over a long time, so that proves nothing.

And regarding the style of the texts—in my opinion you can’t prove anything based on style, unless it’s some really clear proof.
And our whole discussion in general is completely up in the air: you’re bringing me all kinds of data and proofs for your claim without my having seen the things myself, and I’m pretty sure these are things that are open to interpretation.