Is there any evidence for the Exodus from Egypt?

The passages

And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children.

Exodus 12:37

Even all they that were numbered were six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty.

Numbers 1:46

The problem

Six hundred thousand men implies a total of two million or more with women and children. A group that size crossing the Sinai for forty years would leave debris, campsites and burials. Surveys of Sinai and the Negev have found remains from other periods but none that archaeologists accept as the Exodus. Egyptian records, which are detailed on border affairs, do not mention an escape of slaves on this scale. The first extra-biblical mention of "Israel" is the Merneptah Stele (about 1208 BC), which places a people called Israel in Canaan, and does not say where they came from.

What believers and scholars say

The numbers are not literal. The Hebrew word 'elep, translated "thousand," can also mean "clan" or "military unit". If so the numbers describe something like 5,500 men from 600 units, and the total might be in the tens of thousands. Mendenhall defended this reading. It makes the logistic problem more manageable.

Absence of evidence in a hard place. Kitchen and Hoffmeier note that nomads leave little, that Sinai is a difficult place to excavate, and that Egyptian records almost never recorded defeats. They point to Egyptian details in the story (the Semitic presence in the eastern Delta, store cities, names of places, a place called Rameses) as consistent with a historical kernel.

A smaller, different event. Dever, Finkelstein and others argue that there was no mass exodus, and that the Israelites emerged largely from Canaan's own population, perhaps with a small group that did come from Egypt, whose story became the story of all. They consider the biblical account a later memory shaped by theology.

Where this leaves it

Nothing so far confirms the biblical scale of the Exodus, and a number of details fit Egypt of the late second millennium. Scholars move between "a small group, remembered large" and "a real event whose traces are lost". A reader who needs the text to be reportage will find the silence uncomfortable. A reader who treats the story as founding memory will find it less so.