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"Were we really slaves? How have these stories affected the Jewish psyche? Are we really free now?" she would ask herself over and over.

At the Pessah table shortly after her 17th birthday, she mustered up courage to add a new question to the prescribed four: "Nu, Abba," she said to her father. "Are the stories in the Hagadda and Exodus true?"

Her father turned red.

"He became a lunatic; he said don't ask such questions at my Pessah table," she recalls. At school the next week, she didn't find a clearer response. "I asked my Bible teacher if Exodus was fact or fiction and she told me I'd understand when I grew up."

By the time she registered a few months later in biblical studies at the University of Haifa, she was determined to find answers. But she kept coming up short. It was 1968 and almost no biblical scholars had tackled the Exodus story as a historical document.

One Bible scholar took the discouraged Galpaz-Feller under her wing and suggested that although the answers she was seeking would not likely be found in the biblical scholarship of the day, they might come to light through the study of Egyptology.

Yet while local biblical archeology was making continual advances, Egyptology was not. Israel had no diplomatic relations with Egypt that would allow hands-on study or digging, and Israel's few Egyptologists focused mostly on language and culture as ends in themselves.

But Galpaz-Feller was heartened.

"After all, the written Jewish history in the Bible as a nation begins and ends in Egypt," she says.

As there were no courses at the University of Haifa at the time, Galpaz-Feller cross-registered at Tel Aviv University to study Egyptology - a decision that would establish her course for the next 35 years and earn her the nickname of Nefer, short for Nefertiti. But her ruling passion differed from the Egyptian queen's: She was consumed not only by Egypt, but also by the study of the Bible.

At first she went from disappointment to disappointment.

"Many things written in the Bible were recorded hundreds of years after the events, and can't be relied on as evidence," she says, discounting the Orthodox view that the Bible is the word of God.

"I was frightened of finding evidence that the Israelites had never even been in Egypt, even though in a way it didn't really matter. The most important idea was that this event had molded the history of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. This was more important than any archeological evidence."

Meanwhile, the idea that Exodus was fictional gained popularity in scholarly circles, but she wasn't convinced. For the next 10 years, until Egypt and Israel negotiated a peace agreement, she scoured documentation on Egyptian artifacts, amulets, figurines, hieroglyphic inscriptions on tablets, wall paintings, and biographical, coffin, funeral, and pyramid texts - anything at all from ancient Egypt - looking for words such as Israel, Israelites, Moses, and Aaron. She joined one of a handful of Israeli scholars who became fascinated by the Exodus story and its Egyptian roots.

The first obvious indication of a connection to the Exodus story was found in the records of a stele - an inscribed stone tablet - at the Cairo Museum that was dated to 1208 BCE. The nearly seven-foot-high, black granite stone, discovered a century ago, is inscribed with a victory hymn of Pharaoh Merneptah which reads:

Canaan is captive with all woe
Ashkelon is conquered and Gezer seized
Yano'am made nonexistent
Israel is wasted, bare of seed

When Israel and Egypt established diplomatic relations in 1979, Galpaz-Feller could barely contain her impatience to examine this much-debated artifact in person.

One warm morning not long after the peace agreement was signed, she arrived at Cairo's airport and took a taxi to the museum, even though it was well before dawn. Hours later, as the first guard showed up for work, he asked Galpaz-Feller what she was doing alone on the steps in the dark.

"I was afraid to go to sleep and miss anything," she explained.

The guard took pity on the curious traveler and let her in early.

"I had seen artifacts all over the world, but I was so excited that I had studied the map of the museum and knew exactly where to run the moment he opened the door."

The guard was alarmed. Galpaz-Feller not only went flying through the museum, but he found her moments later crumpled up crying. She was simply overwhelmed.

The word for Israel was written in hieroglyphic signs, the last resembling two humans. While these characters used at the end of a word usually describe a nomadic people, indicating that the stele referred to a wandering people rather than a place called Israel, this did not conclusively show that it meant the "Children of Israel" described in Exodus. But the date did match.

None of this was news to Galpaz-Feller or her fellow scholars, but seeing it in person caused an epiphany.

"I knew this had to be the same Israel, and I wanted to believe these were the same people who settled later in Israel. But little by little I came to understand that though a people called Israel existed, I couldn't prove they were our ancestors, what their language was, or what their numbers were," she says.

"I realized that if I couldn't find direct hints about the Israelites, I could look for indirect hints."

She returned from Egypt to begin a new journey: Instead of studying Egyptian history for clues about the Israelites, she began scouring the biblical chapters for suggestions of Egyptian influence.

"I studied the Bible carefully to look for words and beliefs that showed the [Israelite] people had once lived in Egypt," she says, explaining that she analyzed nearly every word in Exodus for possible influences.

Her first project was examining Exodus's description of the Israelites' work, and comparing it to Egyptian documents about the lives of farmers and workers. She uncovered the first of what were to be dozens of coincidences, where the descriptions of the Israelites' lives in Egypt perfectly or nearly matched the lives of the Egyptian farmers and workers in ancient times.

These and dozens of other anecdotes are explained in Galpaz-Feller's latest book, Exodus: Reality or Illusion? (Shocken Publishers, December 2002). She is now considering translating the book into English.

The book starts with the latter part of Genesis, and looks at why Joseph was mummified. It takes readers through explanations of such events as the birth of Moses, monotheism, circumcision, the symbol of the serpent, hardening the heart of Pharaoh, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and lastly the stone tablet inscribed with the word "Israel."

Since publishing, Galpaz-Feller has been invited to speak in Egypt, Turkey, and England. Today a lecturer in Ancient Eastern Studies and Bible at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, Galpaz-Feller was recently awarded the Kekst Prize for her teaching and research.

Though interest in the Bible and Egyptology seems strong - hundreds of students and members of the public pack her Schechter classes, and the book has already gone into a second edition - Galpaz-Feller remains one of less than a dozen Israeli academics who analyze the Exodus story from a historical and Egyptological point of view.

Though such scholarship is rare, it makes ripples in Israel's deeply divided academic community. On one side, the "biblical minimalists," sometimes referred to as "biblical nihilists," say in no uncertain terms that the Bible is purely or largely legend, and has led archeologists, historians, and scholars astray.

On the other side, the "biblical maximalists" hold that the Bible is based on a framework of historical narrative, in some cases more or less accurate.

Though members of both camps are usually affiliated with all academic institutions, rumor has it that they are often at each other's throats. One Egyptologist declined an interview, saying it could be uncomfortable for him around his minimalist colleagues if he were to speak in public. A second Egyptologist said that the minimalist camp held the most power in Israel and "nobody on either side would speak in public [about the conflict] because they are too afraid of losing their chairs."

Hebrew University Egyptologist Raheli Shlomi-Hen explains that the maximalists look at Genesis and Exodus as "propaganda encouraging a return to Zion from Babylonia. The others say [the stories] may have been revised in a later period, but still contain seeds of truth."

Shlomi-Hen joins Galpaz-Feller in the minority of Israeli scholars who believe that the Exodus story happened, even if some of the details are not accurate. Unlike the minimalists, they don't base their findings solely on historical evidence (or lack of historical evidence). They focus more on the matching of dates and the uncanny similarities in language, words, customs, behavior, and influences that lead to the belief that the Israelites were indeed working under oppressive conditions in Egypt alongside native Egyptians and other foreign workers.

Galpaz-Feller describes her own approach as neither maximal nor minimal, but "exactly in the middle."

Though academics debate if the Israelites were indeed in Egypt, they are in agreement about one thing: The Israelites did not build the pyramids. It is widely believed that the pyramids were built more than 1,000 years before the time the Israelites first appeared in Egypt. The story is believed to have been propagated by historian Josephus Flavius, who described a towering edifice which scholars now say may have been the Tower of Babel - not a pyramid.

Galpaz-Feller says it is still too early to prove conclusively that the Israelites described in Exodus are the ancestors of modern Jews, but she no longer has a single doubt when reading Exodus that the Israelites toiled in Egypt under difficult conditions, and helped build the cities of Pitom and Ramses.

"I can prove from Egyptian documents that more ideas in Exodus 1-15 have a background in reality than fiction," she says. "So now I feel excellent when my kids ask me, 'Mom: is it real or illusion?' I can absolutely say some details may be illusion, but some of our ancestors were in Egypt and came out of Egypt."

April 10, 2003