Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin was born in 1852 in the Saratov region of the Russian Empire, the son of a village priest, and he died in Saint Petersburg in 1904 at the age of fifty-one. His life belongs almost entirely to the schools of the Russian Church. He was trained first at the Saratov theological college and seminary, then at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, which he entered in the mid-1870s and to which he remained attached, one way or another, for the rest of his days. Even as a student he showed the two gifts that would define his career: an appetite for languages, ancient and modern, and a conviction that the newest findings of secular learning could be turned to the service of Scripture rather than surrendered to its critics.

A formative interlude came early. Around 1879 the young Lopukhin was sent to the United States to serve at the Russian church in New York, where he spent roughly two years. The experience left a lasting mark. He returned fluent in the currents of Anglo-American religious life and wrote his master’s dissertation on the growth of Roman Catholicism in North America, receiving the degree in the early 1880s. More important for the book before the reader, his years abroad gave him direct access to the English and French scholarship that was then reshaping the study of the Bible—the very literature on which this work draws. Few Russian churchmen of his generation read that literature as readily or as sympathetically as he did.

His academic life then settled into a single institution. At the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy he was appointed professor, first in comparative theology and shortly afterward in ancient civil history, a chair he held until his death. He was also a tireless editor and publicist, guiding several of the leading Russian church periodicals of the day and organizing large publishing ventures that brought serious biblical scholarship within reach of a wide readership.

It is for one of those ventures that Lopukhin is chiefly remembered. He conceived and edited the great Russian commentary on the whole of Scripture that has borne his name ever since—the Explanatory Bible (Tolkovaya Bibliya), a multi-volume verse-by-verse commentary on the Old and New Testaments. He died in 1904 while the work was still in production; colleagues and successors carried it to completion, and it went on to become one of the most widely used biblical commentaries in the Russian-speaking Orthodox world, reprinted in enormous quantities down to the present day. Alongside it stand his popular volumes of Biblical History for the Old and New Testaments. Readers who know Lopukhin only as the editor of that monumental commentary will find in the present book his earlier, more personal voice—the working scholar assembling his materials, still close to the excitement of the discoveries he describes.

A word on how he is named here. Lopukhin was a layman and a professor, not a cleric, and he is presented in this edition simply as Alexander Lopukhin, without honorific titles. That reflects both the plain facts of his life and the practice of this series, which credits authors as their tradition has received them and reserves other roles—translator, editor—for their proper places.

The Occasion of the Work

This book grew directly out of the intellectual excitement of its moment, and its opening pages tell the story with unusual candor. The nineteenth century had done something no earlier age could do: it had learned to read the hieroglyphic inscriptions of ancient Egypt. Lopukhin retells the now-famous chain of events—the chance discovery of the trilingual Rosetta stone during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, the labors of Champollion and those who followed, the sudden opening of a “whole world of historical knowledge” that had lain silent for millennia beneath the pyramids and in the papyri of the tombs. What made this revolution matter for a theologian was its bearing on the Bible. Egypt is the land of Joseph, of the bondage, of Moses and the Exodus; and the monuments, as they were deciphered, kept illuminating precisely the world in which those narratives are set.

Lopukhin wrote to bring that news to Russian readers, who, he observed, still had little access to it. He was frankly working from foreign models. In the preface he names his chief source: Hours with the Bible by the English writer Cunningham Geikie, a large work then appearing volume by volume and much admired in England, which set biblical history “in the light of modern discovery and knowledge.” He pairs it with the French La Bible et les Découvertes Modernes of the Abbé Vigouroux, and he ranges freely across the leading Egyptologists of the day—Wilkinson, Brugsch, Lepsius, Ebers, Chabas, Birch, Maspero—whose works he lists so that he need not keep citing them. His stated aim is modest and honest: rather than wait for these unavailable books to be translated whole into Russian, he offers “several biblical-historical sketches” on the subject where the new discoveries had yielded the richest harvest—the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, from Joseph to the Exodus and the wilderness.

There was also a polemical occasion, and Lopukhin does not hide it. The same century that deciphered the hieroglyphs had produced a confident rationalist criticism that treated the narratives of the Pentateuch as legend and myth. He cites, as a specimen, the English bishop John Colenso, who had argued that the details of Exodus were as absurd as claiming that twice two is five. Against that current, Lopukhin sees in the monuments an “inexorable accuser” of hasty skepticism—a body of hard, external evidence that, in his reading, confirms rather than dissolves the biblical account. The book is therefore apologetic in the older sense: not defensive polemic against a rival communion, but a positive demonstration that faith and the newest science can stand together. The source manuscript places its composition in the mid-1880s, shortly after Lopukhin’s return from America, when this literature was fresh in his hands.

Argument and Structure

The book is compact and clearly built. A preface lays out the discovery of the hieroglyphs and the author’s purpose, and then eight chapters follow the biblical story in order, each opening with a running synopsis of its topics. The movement is straightforwardly narrative, tracing Israel’s fortunes in and out of Egypt.

The first chapter, “Joseph,” treats the patriarch’s descent into Egypt and his rise to power, and here the method is established at once. Lopukhin retells little of the familiar story; instead he lays each of its details against what the monuments reveal—the caravans of aromatic goods still crossing from Syria to the Nile, the price of slaves, the Egyptian titles and court offices that fit Potiphar’s rank, the pervasive bureaucracy of a land that registered even its slaves. The second chapter, “The Israelites in Egypt,” widens the lens to the political condition of the country, the change of dynasty, and the turn from favor to bondage, reading the biblical account of forced brick-making against the pictorial and documentary evidence of Egyptian labor.

The central chapters carry the drama of deliverance. “Moses” sets his birth, adoption, and Egyptian education within the reigns and monuments of the age; “The Plagues of Egypt” connects each visitation with the physical peculiarities of the Nile country while insisting on their religious and moral meaning; and “The Exodus” reaches the crossing of the sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s host, weighing the theories of the Egyptologists about the route and the identity of the reigning Pharaoh. The final three chapters—“On the Way to Sinai,” “At Sinai,” and “In the Wilderness”—follow Israel to the mountain of the Law and through the forty years of wandering, drawing now on the topography and traveler’s reports of the Sinai peninsula as much as on Egyptian remains, and closing with the death of Moses in sight of the Promised Land.

Part of the book’s appeal lies in the density and concreteness of these correspondences. Lopukhin delights in the small confirming detail: the twenty pieces of silver paid for Joseph, which he notes is the very price later fixed in the Law for a slave of that age; the announcements, preserved on papyri, in which Egyptian masters offer rewards for the return of runaway slaves; the pictured census of a whole district on a monument of the Nineteenth Dynasty; the “coat of many colours” still worn, he observes, by favored children in the unchanging East. He reaches, too, beyond the Egyptian monuments proper to the reports of nineteenth-century travelers and surveyors of Sinai, whose descriptions of the peninsula’s springs, storms, and serpents he uses to illuminate the wilderness narratives. The cumulative effect is meant to be persuasive by sheer convergence—a hundred independent particulars, drawn from stones, papyri, and living custom, all falling into place around the biblical text.

Two features of the argument deserve notice. First, Lopukhin’s consistent procedure is comparison: a biblical verse on one side, and on the other a monument, an inscription, a papyrus, or a modern traveler’s observation that answers to it. His confidence is that the “extraordinary coincidence” of the two is itself an argument for the truthfulness of the record. Second, for all his interest in stones and documents, he never lets the narrative become merely archaeological. He reads the story as sacred history with a moral and spiritual shape—the forming of a people, the testing of Moses, the education of a nation through hardship—and the human portrait of Moses in the closing pages, weary and magnanimous, is drawn with real feeling.

Significance

The lasting interest of this book is twofold. As a document, it captures a distinctive moment in the meeting of faith and science. In the later nineteenth century the young discipline of Egyptology seemed to many believers a gift providentially timed: just as criticism was pressing hardest on the historical claims of the Old Testament, the spade and the decipherer’s key were returning a flood of contemporary evidence for the world those texts describe. Lopukhin belongs to a broad, cross-confessional company of scholars—Geikie in England, Vigouroux in France, and many others—who set out to marshal that evidence in defense of the biblical narrative. His book is the Russian contribution to that international effort, and it shows an Orthodox scholar reading the same monuments, and reaching the same confident conclusions, as his Western contemporaries. That shared enterprise, crossing the confessional boundaries of the age, is part of what the book quietly witnesses.

Its theological temper is worth naming. Lopukhin writes as a believer for whom the historical reliability of Scripture is not a peripheral question. He engages the criticism of his day directly but without rancor, meeting argument with evidence rather than anathema, and his tone throughout is one of reverent confidence: the more fully the ancient world is known, he is persuaded, the more clearly the sacred record is vindicated. At the same time he is no naive concordist. He is willing to weigh competing scholarly theories—about the manna, the tides of the Red Sea, the identity of the Pharaohs—and to leave some questions open, and he keeps his eye always on the religious meaning of the events rather than reducing them to natural curiosities.

Modern readers will bring their own historical perspective to some of his conclusions. Egyptology has moved a long way in well over a century, and the dating of dynasties, the correlation of Pharaohs with the biblical chronology, and the very framing of the questions have all been revised many times since Lopukhin wrote. His book is best read, then, not as a current handbook of the archaeology but as a vivid and learned witness to how a whole generation of Christian scholars received the first fruits of Egyptology—and as an early work of the man who would go on to give the Russian Church its most enduring commentary on the whole of Scripture.

Reception and Afterward

This was one of Lopukhin’s earlier productions, and its method proved to be a rehearsal for the labor of his life. The same instincts on display here—the mastery of foreign scholarship, the patient assembling of historical and archaeological detail in the service of the biblical text, the desire to make serious learning available to ordinary Russian readers—came to their fullest expression two decades later in his Biblical History and, above all, in the great Explanatory Bible that bears his name. That commentary, completed by others after his death and reprinted many times over, secured his place as one of the most widely read biblical interpreters in the Russian-speaking world. The present book is, in a sense, where that lifelong project begins.

This Edition

The work translated here is Lopukhin’s The Bible and Scientific Discoveries on the Monuments of Ancient Egypt (in Russian, Bibliya i nauchnye otkrytiya na pamyatnikakh Drevnego Egipta). This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation made from the public-domain Russian text, prepared for study and general reading. It is an English-only edition; the Russian original is not printed alongside.

The translation aims to carry Lopukhin’s own voice into readable modern English while preserving the substance and texture of his exposition—his running comparisons of Scripture with the monuments, his citations of the Egyptologists, and the moral seriousness with which he tells the story. In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is credited as Alexander Lopukhin and named without honorific titles, as the layman and professor he was; those who prepared the English text are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture references and numbered divisions follow the series’ modern citation style. Where Lopukhin’s own scholarship reflects the state of Egyptology in the 1880s, the text has been left to speak for its period rather than silently updated, so that the reader meets the book as its author wrote it.

For the Reader

A reader coming to this book for the first time may find it helpful to keep two things in view. The first is its date. Everything Lopukhin reports about Egypt—the dynasties, the identifications of Pharaohs, the theories about the Exodus route—represents the best scholarship available to him in the 1880s, not the settled findings of today; his enthusiasm for a young science is part of the book’s charm and its historical value. The second is its purpose. This is not a neutral survey but a work of confident apologetic, written to show that the discoveries of the age support rather than undermine the biblical narrative. Read with those two things in mind, it offers a rare pleasure: the chance to walk through the story of Joseph, Moses, and the Exodus in the company of a learned and warm-hearted guide, at the very moment when the buried world of ancient Egypt was first speaking again—and to watch a great biblical scholar in the making.