Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 2021 Vol. 35, No. 1, 111-125, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09018328.2021.1908017 Egypt without Slavery—Tracing the Tradition of Israel’s Residence in Egypt Gili Kugler The Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies The University of Sydney gili.kugler@sydney.edu.au ABSTRACT: The narrative of the people’s redemption from Egyptian op- pression plays a central role in the Hebrew bible in numerous books, genres and literary sources. Among these biblical references some occurrences lack a central element of the familiar story—the peoples’ slavery. This article dis- cusses the narrative of the Israelites’ experience in Egypt as presented in the idiosyncratic review of Israel’s chronicle in Ezekiel 20 and as implied by other references in the biblical laws, narratives and prophecies. It argues for a gradual evolution of the narrative of the Egyptian slavery and oppression, and thus of the redemption of Israel. Key words: The exodus story, Slavery in Egypt, Ezekiel 20, Exodus 2, Exo- dus 6, LXX, Anti-Egypt prophecies 1. Introduction* The account of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is commonly assessed in biblical scholarship as a “memory figure,” in Assmann’s words, which pro- vides a core narrative “for the identity not only of the people, but also of God himself.” 1 While the significant role of the exodus account in the Israelite memory cannot be overestimated, historical-literary examination of the bibli- cal literature reveals phases of the national consciousness that preceded the account known to us today. Schmid argues for the existence of a pre-P liter- ary stage in which the ancestral tradition known from Genesis was recounted as the basis for the origin of the Israelite people and the justification for their connection to the land. This stage did not regard the exodus as part of the * My thanks go to Marc Brettler and Oren Thaler for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 1. Jan Assmann, Cultural memory and early civilization: writing, remembrance and political imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 180. More on the evolution dynamic of national and collective memory as demonstrated in the exodus story, see Ronald Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” JBL 120 (2001), pp. 601-622, here pp. 604, 608, 621. The Editors of the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament © 2021