Up from Egypt The Date and Pharaoh of the Exodus
~= """'''''"'~ ~ ~ ~_ ~ "" ~ ""''"~ =~~ ""'",,"'''' <==~_....=~=".,~"" "'~~= _~ 0_ ~ ~ ¥ _ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~~~~ V~= ...... ~=~""""__=~ ~ 'f,.' 'f,.' j\"'A''''A''A'''A'''},/''i•.''''A' 'A "'f..t"A:" A' A.:''A:'''fl,''''A'}j: Introduction The question of the date and pharaoh of the Exodus has been much disputed for over a centwy and has been a favorite passion and voluminous pastime of biblical scholars. The story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt told in the first fifteen chapters of the Book of Exodus is magnificent as literary art and inspiring as a scripture of faith. It is the founding event of a great religion, and has been a symbol of salvation and freedom ever since. But is it history? This question has exercised the best scholarly minds for more than a centwy, but has still to be conclusively answered. Given the state of our evidence greater certitude may forever elude us. For outside of the Bible no clear references have been discovered. The Egyptian sources are silent as the tomb, and Near Eastern documents say nothing. None theless, the more we learn about ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern history the more realis tic and authentic in its general features the story appears. Much of what we know about the second millennium BCE and the New Kingdom pro vides a plausible and ordinary context for the extraordinary and miraculous events of the Exodus. The problem with this plausibility is that it comes from other periods as well, from the Middle Kingdom to the Saite-Persian era, as has been asserted by Donald Redford. 1 The absence of hard evidence has led to two main approaches to the Exodus in twentieth .. century scholarship: to regard the text as literature or to make the best we can of the evi dence we do have and to glean out the most probable historical reconstruction. Many schol ars laboring in these vineyards are agreed that the Exodus narrative, to whatever degree it is an imaginative production, is steeped in authenticity of detail about Egyptian culture and history. John Currid and James Hoffmeier are; Donald Redford, for one, is not? In fact, the core of the story has been shown by archaeology to be highly realistic. ~C;. "" I).. L,e· Throughout the second millennium Asiatics(and Semites\were present in Egypt in many (, ht., '/ ways: as herders, traders, immigrants, refugees from famine, recipients of foreign aid, immi grants, POWs, forced labor, slaves, government officials, and invaders. The involvement of West Asian peoples in Egyptian life was long, complex, and variegated. The Nile Delta had been swarming, as it seemed to some xenophobic Egyptians, with "vile Asiatics" since the Middle Kingdom. During and after the Hyksos era relations with them were conflicted and strife-ridden. The story of Joseph and the sojourn of Israel in Egypt are clearly reflective of this general state of affairs. A story of Canaanites and bedouins who migrate into the territory of Egypt, are subjected to forced labor on the Pharaoh's public building projects, resist and escape led by a charismatic figure is at every point composed out of elements that do occur and reoccur 1 Egypt, Ca1utan, and Israel in Andmt rrmeslPrinceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 199.1, 257-82. 2 James Hoffmeier, Israel in Eg)1.1t,(.Oxfo;a; Oxford U~versity Press, 199~ John Cwrid, Ancimt Egypt and the Old Testament,fGrand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 199~ Donald Redford, "Observations on the Sojourn of the Bene-IsraeT," in Exodus: The Egyptitm Evidena!, editea by Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko (Wmona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 1997). in Egyptian history. But the leap from plausibility to truth, to pinning down this narrative in a precise and concrete historical way as a real event like the Battle of Waterloo is an arguable enterprise. Many scholars have devoted the greatest ingenuity and scholarly acumen to doing so. If the Exodus is to be considered a history, it is of a peculiar kind-theology in the form of history. As such, it is very difficult to fit it smoothly into the framework of known ancient history. Should we even expect to? The composers of the Pentateuchal narratives were not working on modem historiographic principles. They had quite other fish to fry. The Exodus narrative was sacred history meant to function as a foundational epic for the origins of the Hebrew people. Such reflections have led many scholars to consign the Exodus to the realm of epic poetry to a greater or lesser extent. Like the Iliad there may be real history behind it, but transformed into art. This is the view with many qualifications of Baruch Halpern and J. Maxwell Miller.3 For both, historical memory is embedded in the biblical narratives, although very deep indeed. Notwithstanding all of this, there are some that have diligently persevered in maintaining its essential historical truth. The Standard Dates for the Exodus Scholars now defend two principal dates for the Exodus: the fifteenth century and the thirteenth century BeE. The oldest date favored by many early Egyptologists was in the Nineteenth Dynasty with Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the Oppression and his successor Merenptah the pharaoh of the Exodus. c.R. Lepsius first proposed this theory in 1849.4 3"The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?" in The Rise ofAncient Isrf1£l: Symposiwn at the Smithsonian Insti tution October 26, 1991, edited by Hershel Shanks, 87-113..(washington, D.C: Biblical Archaeology Society, 199~and 'The Exodus and the Israelite Historians," Eretz Israel 24, 1993. 4 I rely on Bimson's account of this in Raiatingthe Exalus and O:l JSOTSupplement Series %tLeiden: Brill, 1n..,.O\10 .... -'= Until modem archaeology appeared to undennine it, the second oldest date in the fif teenth century~ was also highly popular, especially among Roman Catholic scholars. In this theory the pharaoh of the Oppression was Thutmosis III, and the pharaoh of the Exo dus was his successor Amenophis II. As Bimson remarks, by the 1890's Egyptian chronol ogy had been refined to the point that a fifteenth..century date seemed appealingly to harmo nize with the date given in I Kings 6:1. Although a fifteenth century date is not now the most favored, nonetheless, there are in certain scholarly circles a surPrising number who still sedulously defend it as the most con sistent with the evidence we do have. A fifteenth.century date has the merit of keeping with the Bible's own chronology (I Kings 6:1). I concern myself here only with the views of his torians, not those with commitments of faith. Prominent among defenders of a fifteenth· century date have been John Bimson, Hans Goedicke, and Gleason Archer. Others such as William Shea and Byrant Wood also think the evidence bends in the direction of the higher date without directly defending it. Others such as W. F. Albright, most famously, and Ken neth Kitchen, James Hoffmeier, and Nahum Sarna, to name a few, have more recently deemed the textual, geographical, and archaeological to favor a thirteenth-century date.s Some regard the evidence as too inadequate to support either date. Consequently, there are advocates of alternative dates such as Gary Rendsburg, who argues for the eleventh century. Some conclude that the question is beyond solution until more evidence is forth coming. Still others regard the effort to tie the Exodus down to one date as a futile fixation. A leading Israeli historian, Abraham Malamat, suggests that we should not look for a specific date for the Exodus because it involved a steady flow of migration of Israelites from Egypt over a long period of time. 6 And, of course, due to Hollywood biblical epics, Ramesses II is in the popular mind thought to be the pharaoh of both the Oppression and Exodus. Only in the nineteenth century did the historicity of the Exodus narrative begin to be se riously questioned. With the advent of biblical criticism and archaeology it became clear that the narrative could not be taken simply as an historical report. In the main scholars applied the new textual analysis and archaeology to the task of proving the veracity of the biblical narrative. To speak only of the United States, the school of Biblical archaeology inaugurated by W. F. Albright predominated until recent years and found its classic statement in John Bright's Histmyoflsrael. Bright granted that we have no means of testing the details of the Bible narrative and that the actual happenings were, to be sure, more complex than our dramatic narrative. None theless, he believed that the biblical account was rooted in historical events. Many so-called minimalists are willing to allow that there may be some kernel of truth at the center of the biblical narrative. Bright, however, was much more positive in 1958 than most investigators of the subject will risk today. There can be little doubt that ancestors of Israel had been slaves in Egypt and had escaped in some marvelous way. Almost no one today would question it. The traditional date of the Exodus had been calculated on the basis of I Kings 6: 1. It was in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the second month of that year, the month of Ziv, that he began to build the house of the Lord. It is generally agreed that King Solomon came to the throne in about 960 BCE. According to this reckoning the Exodus would have occurred in about 1440 'BCE (or 1436, since he started to build the Temple four years after he became king). This established the fifteenth .. 6"The Exodus: Egyptian Analogies," in Exodus-The Egyptian EUdence, edited by Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko (Winona Lake: Ind, Eisenbrauns, 1997) 15-26. centwy as one of the principal dates for the Exodus. A fifteenthoocentwy date, however, is regarded nowadays as the least probable. For, there are serious questions about this figure. If 480 years is a realistic number, then the Exodus would have taken place about 1450 BCE, that is, in the time of Thutmosis III. This is a most unlikely date, from one point of view, but has its partisans. Bright was already saying in 1958 that this date had been almost univer sally abandoned because it contradicted the archaeological evidence of the Conquest. The evidence for the date or even the actuality of a Conquest has since then run into its own problems, and cannot be incontrovertibly used to control the evidence for an Exodus. The higher date has since resumed some of its previous popularity. Be that as it may, Nahum Sarna has pointed out other difficulties.7 In the fifteenth cen twy Thutmosis III (1479-1425 BCE), the "Napoleon" of the New Kingdom, as he has been called, and his son Amenophis II (1425-1401 BCE) were campaigning enensivelyin Palestine. It is very unlikely that the Exodus could have occurred during the reigns of these imperial pharaohs. There is no mention of such an event in any inscriptions or records. But, as has been remarked, the pharaohs were not given to referring to reverses or minor disturbances like a slave revolt in their royal propaganda. A tale of resistance to Egyptian oppression could have originated from any period of the New Kingdom domination of Palestine, but the probability is against an escape of runaway slaves to Canaan at a time when Egypt was exerting imperial control over the area. It would, indeed, have been a miraculous and memo rable delivery. In fact, this is a serious problem for any Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty date. Furthermore, the biblical account of joshua's conquest of Canaan does not even men tion Egypt-Q strange omission if the Conquest occurred during the acme of Egyptian su 7 In "Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus,» In Ancient Israel. From Abraham to the Reman Dest:ructionofthe Tfm!J/e, edited b Hershel Shanks ashin on: BiblicalArchaeolo Soci ,1999) 34-54. premacy in the region. These considerations argue for a later date when Egyptian power was in decline. Sarna also agrees with Bright that a fifteenth-century date conflicts with the archaeological evidence. Bright accepted the findings of W.P. Albright that indicated a violent thirteenth century irruption and bloody conquest of Canaan just as the Book of Joshua described. Al bright thought that the archaeology exhibited a pattern of city destructions in late Bronze Age Palestine and attributed it to the invading Israelites. He was joined in this assessment by the Israeli archaeologists Yigael Yadin and Abraham Malamat.8 The actuality was no doubt more complex, but at its core was a military conquest. This is an absorbing question in its own right but is beyond the scope of my paper. A fifteenth-century date is, not surprisingly, favored by defenders of the historical accu racy of the biblical account, as well as those who want to trace a connection between Mosaic monotheism and the Amarna age. In their attempt to salvage the fifteenth-century date, to "save the phenomena" so to speak, scholars have adduced other significant criticisms of a thirteenth-century dating. Both dates, it must be said, are so contingent on fragmentary and interpretive reconstructions that they look at times as though they are built on shifting sand. Archaeological work in Edom, Moab, and Ammon was thought to show that these areas were not settled before the thirteenth century. Biblical descriptions of conflict with the populations of these areas, therefore, indicated that there was no encounter before then. The critics countered that these findings in Transjordan had been adjusted in the light of later work. Another problem is historiographic: assuming that the biblical account of conflict is an historical datum in the first place. 8 "Is the Biblical Account of the Israelite Conquest of Canaan Historically Reliable?" BAR, MarchiApril 1982, 18. In response to the influential view of Albright and Yadin that the archeological evidence of destruction of Canaanite cities in the thirteenth centwy confinns a conquest at that time, critics ascribe it to the Philistines and the Judges, i.e., to peoples already in the region rather than to recent invaders. In any case, a nwnber of scholars now regard the evidence for a military invasion and conquest of Palestine in the thirteenth centwy as more problematic and uncertain than it was for Albright and Yadin. The third reason proposed against a thirteenth century dates depends on the significance placed on the mention of Pharaoh's store-house city, Rameses, in Exodus 1:11 that the Isra elites were put to work building.9 So they were made to work in gangs with officers set over them, to break their spirit with heavy labor. This is how Pharaoh's store-cities, Pithom and Rameses, were built. Although Ramese is a common place-name in Egypt this reference is taken to be to Pi- Ramesses, the major delta capital built by Rameses II (1304-1238 BCE) around the summer palace of his father Seti I. It has been located on the same site once occupied by the Hyksos at Avaris. The later city of Pi-Ramesses existed from the reign of Horemheb (ca. 1320 BCE) to Ramesses IV (ca 1279-1140 BCE); afterward, according to Kitchen, it declined. This would seem to be a strong argument for a late second..millenniwn date for the Exodus. Critics at tempt to dispose of it by suggesting this is a case of anachronism: calling a place by a later, better-known, or contemporary name, for instance, speaking of the Miami Indians of Ohio in 1776 when there was no Ohio. The problem with this argument is that it may imply a later date of composition for the narrative, hardly a consequence the defenders of a fifteenth centwy date would welcome. But it can be rebutted that such substitutions do not disprove 9 My discussion here depends heavily on Kenneth Kitchen's excellent article, "The Exodus," and bibliography • 'rl.... __,__ .. n:l_'- n.:-:____ . _..l:~_..l L.... n __.:..l 1I..T__1 u ___..l___ .....') I'!I..T_. V __1... n_..1...1_-I_•• 100,)\,7'''''' 7('\0 the authenticity of the tradition. Gardiner and Montet believed that A varis/Pi- Ramesse was the great city that the Greeks called Tanis and the Bible Zoan. Van Seters put Pi-Ramesses at Qantir and ;be. Tell el-Daba and has been followed by Kitchen, Hoffmeier, Bimson, and Shea. There may be some consensus here, but there still remains much disagreement about the locations, dates, and names of other places in Goshen. The whole project of verifying the geographical references of the Exodus account and mapping out the itinerary of the es caping Israelites is, perhaps, a game the appeal of which depends principally on how much one trusts the accuracy and authenticity of the account. But a consideration of this ques tion-tracing the route of the Israelites out of Egypt, over the yan suph, and into Sinai-I am afraid, lies far beyond the scope of the paper. Some scholars adjust the 480 years to fit other longer or shorter chronologies, by com pression, addition, and concurrence. The solution that Yamauchi found attractive to the problem of squaring I Kings 6:1 with the archeology is that of Kenneth Kitchen.tO He col lapsed the 480 years of I Kings 6: 1 to about 200 years on the conjecture that there is an overlapping of the periods of rule of the Judges during the intermediate age between Joshua " and the United Monarchy similar to that we see in Egyptian dynastic lists. rv-)- 0.\c;.i '- • .c-t. ~ iu,~ ~ )v..t>(::IQ"" Sacred Arithmetic Many scholars regard the number 480 as purely symbolic rather than literal. Occurring as it does in the Priestly strata of the Bible it is readily assumed to be typological and without historical validity. There are too many of the earmarks of schematic, sacred chronology about it. The number 480 is the sum of twelve generations of forty years each. A rounded- off forty years was a traditional sacred number for the length of a generation. Twelve was likewise a typological nwnber. The existence of Solomonic records of priestly generations reaching back to the Exodus is dubious. Furthermore, Sarna remarks that exactly 480 years are given in Kings as the time from the building of the Temple to the end of the Babylonian Exile. The Biblical writer placed the Temple at the center of Hebrew history. Another telltale sign may be seen in the fact that the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 15:13; Exod. 1:2, 6:14-20, 12:40) makes the sojourn of Jacob and the Israelites in Egypt about four centuries, reckoning these as four patriarchal generations of 100 years each. This kind of temporal symmetry leads one to suspect that sacred figuration is at work. Who is the Pharaoh? If we accept a fifteenth century date, it is interesting to speculate who is most likely to have been the pharaoh of the Exodus then. Hatshepsut, Thutmosis III, and Amenophis II have all at one time or another had their backers. Most of the chronological arguments for an Eighteenth Dynasty date would place it in the reign of Thutmosis III or his son Ameno phis II. But the Eighteenth Dynasty seems on the face of it an inauspicious time for an exo dus of escaped Israelite slaves, especially in the reigns of these two pharaohs. In any case, let us consider the probabilities for them individually. The Thutmosids During the Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt reached a zenith of power and prosperity.11 After 1i ~f"Oo-o'r-,> the expulsion of the Hyksos ~ embarked on a course of aggressive imperial expansionism. The country was ruled by a brilliant set of warrior pharaohs who commanded one of the 11 My discussion of the Thutmosids draws extensively on Maurice Grimal, A Histmy ofAncient Egypt (Ox· ford: Blackwell, 1992),199·225. most effective anrues in the Near East. After Amenophis II (c. 1550-1528 BCE) the New Kingdom basked in a centwy and half of unbroken dominance and social stability, a pax Aegyptiaca. These were halcyon days for Egypt, as Gardiner says, when she became a world power and extended her sway over Palestine and Syria. Thutmosis I (1504-1492 BeE) mounted the first large incursions of the New Kingdom into Western Asia. Beginning with him the Egyptians made a concerted effort to maintain an empire in Palestine. The dark experience of the Hyksos oppression during the previous gen erations had taught them the necessity of exerting control more forcefully over the Asiatics. Prior to the New Kingdom Egyptian intervention in the region had been limited to punitive strikes and raids. As trade expanded in the Late Bronze Age defensive bases were set up in Western Asia. Forts and canals were built along the eastern frontier of Egypt. In no less than seventeen campaigns Thutmosis III (c. 1479-1425 BeE) quelled revolts in Retenu, sup pressed the bedouins, and fought off Mitannian expansionism in Nahrin and among the Phoenician cities. The later years of his reign were more peaceful and foreign relations with the Near East and the Aegean were cordial. He now turned his attention to building pro grams and patronizing the arts. The imperious and ferocious son of Thutmosis III, Ameno phis II (c. 1427-1400 BeE), continued his father's campaigns in Asia, ruthlessly deporting masses of people and brutalizing prisoners in order to terrorize the local populations On the one hand it is difficult to imagination anything like the Exodus occurring in such glorious and aggressive reigns. On the other hand, eras of warfare such as this are precisely the breeding ground of heroic and memorable exploits. The policing actions against Shasu bedouins, Sinai desert peoples, and Canaanites could very easily have been the milieu for tales of escaped war prisoners, deportees, and forced laborers led by rebellious princes edu cated as hostages at the Pharaoh's court. There is not a shred of evidence in the Egyptian sources, but then, for the Egyptians dealing with unruly Asiatics or rebellious laborers was routine, not a matter for annals or monuments. John Bimson Although many scholars continue to subscribe to a date in the 1400s, one of the most outstanding in recent years has been John Bimson, who tried to vindicate the Biblical chro nology.12 He thinks that Thutmosis III was the pharaoh of the Exodus when he reigned alone. He attempted to retrieve a fifteenth century date through a radical reconstruction of Egyptian chronology. He lowered the date for the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in order to correlate site destructions usually associated with the end of the Hyksos era with the arrival of rampaging Israelites. He dated the Exodus to c. 1470, the Conquest forty years later c. 1430, and drops the end of the MBII, usually dated to 1550, to 1430. Needless to say, such an effort has not met with wide acceptance. As Egyptian chro nology provides the framework of so much of ancient Near Eastern history, not surprisingly, this audacious venture was subjected to severe scrutiny, which led Bimson to retreat from his revised chronology. These problems of chronology are extremely complicated, so I refer you to Stie¥ing's lucid analysis of them.13 "-' Critics, furthetmore, say that Bimson's new chronology obviated none of the difficulties of a fifteenth.century date. 14 These are chiefly two. A fifteentholCentury date for the Exodus and an early fourteenth. century date for the Conquest puts these events in the period of maximum Egyptian power and control in Palestine. How could these things have occurred without a major confrontation with the Egyptian army and without a word of the Egyptians 12Re1ating the Exodus rrnd Conquest(gOT Supplement Series 5,·Leiden: Brill, 1978J 13 Stieb1ng.... 137f. ./ in the biblical account? Joshua and Judges show no sign of them (but then, they show no sign of the campaigns of Merenptah and Ramesses III either for the lower date). And, very few of the sites in Palestine that are mentioned in the biblical account were destroyed or even occupied at that time. In short, a fifteenth-century date just does not fit into the political and archaeological picture of the time. Hatshepsut A number of scholars have and still do find Hatshepsut (1478-1458 BCE) an appealing figure for the Exodus drama. A number of authors have imagined that Hatshepsut, the daughter of Thutmosis I, half-sister and wife of Thutmosis II, step-mother and regent to Thutmosis III, in her youth was the "daughter of pharaoh" who rescued the infant Moses from the bulrushes of the Nile. Then, about thirty-five years later, Thutmosis III took power and consigned her usurpation to a d:imnatio rmmoriae. ,Moses was obliged to flee to the coun try of Midian. He later returned and entered into conflict with Amenophis II, who is the pharaoh of the Exodus. This historical romance seems to be especially popular among the French. Gleason Archer subscribes to a variant of this scenario.Is He believes that Hyksos rulers began a policy of repressing the Israelites, subjecting them to hard labor, and retarding their population growth. Thutmosis I (1539-1514 BCE or thereabouts) continued this anti-Israelite policy even more sternly, since the Israelites, worshipping their invisible god, refused to as similate into Egyptian culture. A time-frame for events following a 1526 birth date for Moses agrees with an adoption by a very independent, strong-willed princess like Hatshepsut. Moses would then have been about forty years old in 1486 when Thutmosis III engineered the assassination, as Archer thinks probable, of his stepmother and seized power. Moses fled the country and returned forty years later when Thutmosis III passed away. Amenophis II (1425-1401 BCE) was the pharaoh of the Exodus and his oldest son died in the tenth plague. Archer, moreover, thinks that Reharakhti's promise to the younger prince Thutmosis IV (1401-1390 BCE) that he would become pharaoh if he cleared away the sand from the shrine between the Sphinx's paws proves his unexpected accession. A date of 1445 BCE for the Exodus is thusly sustained. Hans Goedicke on the Island of Thera Hans Goedicke is of the view that Hatshepsut herself was the pharaoh of the Exodus. He has worked out one of the most ingenious theories of the Exodus by connecting it with a volcanic eruption on Thera.16 The most notorious attempt to explain the miraculous events of the Exodus by cata strophic causation is, of course, that of Velikovsky.17 He believed that ancient texts, myths, legends, and epics preserved cultural memories of a disaster due to a comet that passed ex tremely close to the earth around 1450 BCE. This comet was ejected from Jupiter. As it passed, it caused all the spectacular phenomena described in Exodus--darkness, burning hail, the Nile bloody with a rain of red, fiery, meteoric dust, a tidal wave generated by gravi tational perturbations, and the wall of water that swept Pharaoh's chariots away. The comet later returned causing the sun to stop during joshua's siege of Gibeon. After colliding with Mars, it finally settled down into orbit as the planet Venus. 16Hershel Shanks, "The Exodus and the Crossing of Red Sea, According to Hans Goedicke,» BAR VII: 5, (Sept.lOct. 1981,421 Charles Kralmalkov, "A Critique of Professor Goedicke's Exodus Theories," BAR VII: 5 fSept.lOct. 198~ sf. Velikovsky thought all this could be read out of texts such as the Adm:nitions of I:fJtfU£r. Needless to say, such questionable readings were sharply attacked, as were his mutilations of Egyptian chronology. Nevertheless, cataclysmic theories have made a comeback in recent years in astronomy and geology, most popularly with the theoty of the asteroidal demise of the dinosaurs. Goedicke, as a leading Egyptologist and archaeologist, has advanced a theoty of geologi cal, rather than cosmic causation. He created a sensation in 1981 when he proposed that not only did the Exodus happen, but that the crossing of the yam suf, wherein the Egyptians drowned, was an actual event. It occurred in 1477 BCE, which by the standard chronology places it in the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III. He believed that it took place on the coastal plain west of Suez. A giant tidal wave or tsunami swept over the Nile delta causing a flash flood that drowned the Egyptians. This tidal wave was the result of a volcanic explosion on Thera. Much speculation has risen over an eruption on Theraj it has been seen as the putting an end to Minoan civilization and as the origin of the legend of Adantis. Many have attributed the miracles of Exodus to it as well: the darkness in the middle of the day, swarms of insects, lightening, severe hail, smothered and starved livestock, pink dust turning the Nile red, the pillars of cloud and fire, and even the propitiatoty sacrifice of first-boms. These theories are all, to say the least, vety doubtful, as is, I am sony to say, Goedicke's own ingenious coincidence. The most recent geological studies have shifted the date for the eruption back before 1525 BCE and into the seventeenth-centuty date. And it is improbable that volcanic ash and a tsunami from north of Crete could have had the cataclysmic impact on Egypt reported in Exodus. Goedicke also supports his view that these events occurred in the reign of Hatshepsut by his readings of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions and Hatshepsut's Temple Inscription at Speos Artemidos. In the former he takes Ba·alat to refer to Hatshepsut, and in the latter, the Se mitic immigrants, shemau, expelled from Egypt as the Israelites. Critics say that Goedicke's readings are based on questionable translations. The Asiatics referred to were most likely the Hyksos, which might at the most indicate a connection of the Exodus with the Hyksos ex pulsion. What I find interesting about Goedicke's theory are his ideas about the Israelites. The Jo seph story indicates how the Israelites came to Egypt. They were a sedentary people, not nomads, who immigrated to Egypt from southern Palestine as part of a wave of Semitic movement during the Second Intermediate Period that included the Hyksos. Goedicke thinks that the Israelites were mercenaries who had been invited into Egypt and rebelled against being subjected to forced labor. They were settled as garrisons at Pithom and Raam ses. (He does not accept that these are Ramesside clues.) They lost favor and requested re lease from their employment, which was granted after long delays poeticized as the ten plagues. The Egyptians did indeed very often enlist foreigners as allies and troops-that much is quite plausible. William Shea and the Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions William Shea also believes that the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions support a fifteenth rather J than a thirteenth centwy date.1S He is of the view that the Proto-Sinaitic script originated in the sixteenth or fifteenth centwy BCE and was in use until the thirteenth century when it t 18 "New Light on the Exodus and on Construction of the Tabernacle," Andnws Uniwrsity Seminary Studies 25, l 199, 73-96. died out. Most interestingly he connects these inscriptions with the presence of the Israelites in Sinai. The Egyptians conducted mining operations in the Sinai, particularly for turquoise. There were Egyptianized settlements there with temples such as that of Hathor, the goddess of the turquoise mining region, at Serabit el-Khadem. Semitic peoples in the Sinai did mining and metalworking for the Egyptians. Shea thinks that one inscription actually refers to Ho bab, the brother-in-law of Moses, the congregation of Israel during the sojourn in the wil derness, and a mighty furnace in which the Kenites smelted bronze ore for the construction of the tabernacle. He also believes the evidence indicates that the Israelites took a southerly route into this region around Serabit el-Khadem in southern Sinai. Mt Sinai should be lo cated there. As noted above, proponents of a fifteenth.. century date have the daunting task of ex plaining the mention of the city of Raamses in Exodus 1:11 and of Israel in the Merenptah Stele (co 1207 BeE), both of which appear strongly to connect the Exodus with the thirteenth century. As noted before, it has been argued that the mention of Raamses is an anachronism. Some scholars have tried to circumvent the Merenptah Stele with the findings of Israel Finkelstein that there is a gap of several centuries between a thirteenth-century date and the appearance of archaeologically identifiable Israelite sites in Canaan. This may be, parentheti cally, consistent with the determinative designation of Israel on the Stele as an unsettled people and not a city. Unfortunately, it argues even more forcefully against a fifteenth·cen tury date because it leaves a hiatus of several more centuries until the appearance of Israel in the archaeological evidence for Palestine. In the end, the possibility has to be considered, as does Baruch Halpern, that the stories of exodus and settlement!conquest originated sepa rately or that the relations between Israelites or proto-Israelite tribesmen in Egypt and Pal estine are more complex and protracted than one national migration. Ramesses II and Merenptah Most scholars think. that there is a better fit between the biblical account and a date in the Nineteenth Dynasty. The picture of Palestine in the Books of Joshua and Judges confonns much more with the chaos and turbulence at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age c. 1200-1050 BCE when Egyptian power was waning.19 The toponyms in Exodus, such as Raamses, Succoth, and Pithom appear to be Ramessicijzand there are no co gent reasons to assume otherwise. A Nineteenth Dynasty context when the pharaohs were undertaking large building projects in the Delta, when it had become an important staging area for military' operations, the capital had been moved there, and the name Ramesses was ubiquitous, makes the long reign of Ramesses (1279-1213 BCE) the most probable. The tra ditional view was that Ramesses II was the pharaoh of the Oppression and Merenptah of the Exodus, despite Cecil B. DeMille. Stiel)ling and Kitchen think that the Exodus most likely did happen during the reign of Ramesses himself.20 191n support of a late date of the Exodus, c. 1250 BCE, John Defelice looks at metallurgical use in the Hebrew Bible, sources of tin and copper, and trade patterns in the Late Bronze Age. He believes that the evidence shows a loss of metal technology in Canaan at this time. He infers that the narrative traces from Exodus to I Kings of this loss coheres with the archaeological record, which shows that trade was disrupted and the sources of tin were blocked off by the coinciding invasions of Sea Peoples, Philistines, and Israelites in the thirteenth centwy. As a maximalist Defelice concludes that this demonstrates a thirteentl:J..,(:entwy Conquest/Settlement of Canaan just as the Bible recounts. This fit of archaeology and narrative buttresses a thirteenth.centwy much better than a fifteenth-centwy date when stable international palace trade was flourishing in the Levant and power of the Eighteenth Dynasty was at its apogee. In this scenario Israel must have moved out of Egypt be fore the political turbulence and economic collapse at the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty and settled in Canaan within a generation of the wandering in the wilderness. Tin and Trdde, An A rr:haeanetalJur Approach to Dating the Exrxius, Dies. submitted to MiamiUnivers' , Oxford, Ohio, 1994) 20 Stietfmg, William H Out 0/the Desert? A and the Exrxius/Conquest Narratir:e, BuffaloiN.Y.: Prometheus Books, 198; 38-63; Kenneth Kitchen « es, Succoth, and Pithom," Exrxius Symp;si:um,'Who Was the Phar aoh 0/the Exrxius{.Sponsored by Th ear East Archaeological Society, April 23-25, Memphis, Tennessee, 198' When Flinders Petrie found the Merenptah Stele in 1895 it was a sensation and caused considerable confusion for the received view that Ramesses II was the pharaoh of the Op pression and Merenptah the pharaoh of the Exodus. If Israel was already a people in Pales tine in 1207 BCE, when did the Exodus occur? Some decided that Merenptah could not be the pharaoh. Nevertheless, many scholars then and now have continued to hold to the old view, as did Petrie himself. Some took the Stele to be referring to an incident subsequent to the Exodus, and others, like Montet, believed that it referred to the Exodus itself. More re cendy, the French scholar Maurice Bucaille has actually proposed that the mummy of Mer enptah show the signs of the death by drowning he suffered according to the Bible ac count.21 Apropos of Merenptah, Frank Yurco has made some startling and controversial discov eries. He thinks that the military victories celebrated on the Merenptah Stele were illustrated on reliefs at the temple of Karnak. He identifies the men dt.cted in one battle scene as Is · . 1 f dr R . d' V'Od hinksrJAcff-ShJ?o.b' d)oV.. ... r.J rae li tes m a Canaarute-sty e 0 ess. amey eru;sg.~ -thls an t ~. the asu e ouMs'~d\ c e ~ 61t)'):.. r 'h ~ v. ('"~ to- \ "" ",~ picted are to be so identified. Yurco even more startlingly thiriKs that anoth%rlPscriptioq in L/s.,-ClJ,.C,\,1b,., .. dicates that Ramesses' first-born son and crown prince Amun-her-khepesh-ef perished young c. 1259-49 BCE.22 Albright most influentially defended the theory that Ramesses II was himself the pharaoh of the Exodus and not just the Oppression?3 He seems to have thought that there was a two-phased Exodus: an earlier one by the Joseph tribes whom he identified with the Habiru c. 1400 BCE, and by the Leah tribes led by Moses c. 1290 BCE. He, therefore, placed the 21Maurice Bucaille, Moise et Pharacn. U:s Hebreux en Egypt4paris: Seghers, 199; 143f. 22 See Frank Yurco, "Merenptah's Campaigns and Israel's Origins," in Exodus: The Egyptian Eviden:1:, edited by Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko(Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 199zjand Anson Rainey, "Can You Name the Panel with the Israelites," BAR XVI1:: 6(199~ 56-60. " CA_ n:_~~_ 1Q70 +~~ ..J:P~'P • Exodus early in the reign of Ramesses and the beginning of the Oppression under his prede cessor Seti I when the Egyptians were engaged in a new build-up in the delta with increased forced labor. Many scholars have followed his view: Wright, Bright, de Vaux, Aharoni, Kitchen, Stjieb)fug, and Halpern. Alternative Dates Given the problems of the conventional dates some scholars have turned to more radical hypotheses ranging from the Early Bronze Age to the twelfth century and beyond. The Twelfth Century One such is Gary Rendsburg who makes a case for the 1100s or Iron Age 1.24 The Bible relates an idealized history, a narrative filled with epic qualities. He concurs with those who believe that there exists sufficient evidence on the Egyptological side to substantiate the ba sic picture portrayed in Exodus, but that recent archaeological evidence better supports a twelfth-century date. There are the faults with both standard dates that we have already dis cussed. Proponents of the fifteenth century, most eloquently Bimson, must ignore or explain away the reference to Raamses and the mention of Israel in the Merneptah stele. Proponents , ~ ~ \Ao--~ o-.r\d. of the thirteenth-century date must explain away th~ habintythe Amarna letters. The facr flo. - ~ ~ that Israelite sites are not archaeologically attested until the twelfth century is also a problem for both dates. Many sites that the Israelites conquered, such as Jericho, Ai, and Arad did not exist in the thirteenth century. Ussishkin, on the other hand, has excavated a destruction layer at Lachish c. 1150, which supports a twelftlrtentury date. 24 "The Date of the Exodus and the Conquest/Settlement: The Case for the 1100s," Vetus Testa17l'J11Wn 41,.. (199), 510-27. On the basis of such arguments Rendsburg places the Exodus in the reign of Ramesses 1[[ (1195-1164 BeE). This has a certain plausibility. Ramesses III was the last great pharaoh of the New Kingdom. He repelled the invasions of Sea Peoples, including the Philistines, who were on the move again in the twelfth century in the Eastern Mediterranean from the bor ders of Egypt, commemorating his victories in the reliefs at Medinet Habu. Despite these victories Egyptian power soon went into a steep decline and her sporadic control of Pales tine completely collapsed. The Exodus is more convincingly dated in Rendsburg's view to such a period of turmoil and catastrophe when the Egyptians were diverted by serious dan ger and their dominance was falling apart than to the earlier and stronger Ramesssids. In fact, Rendsburg considers the mention of Raamses in Exodus 1:11 to refer to the op pression under the early pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty. He also interprets the mention of Philistia in Exodus 13:17 as referring to the Sea Peoples. Additionally, he tries to reinter pret the Merenptah Stele by proposing that "Israel" refers to Israelites enslaved in Israel and that not all the Israelite tribes were in Egypt. Hoffmeier finds these proposals strained: it is better to proceed by accepting that the Merenptah Stele precludes a date after 1200 BeE. Sixth-Fifth Century Philip Davies makes an intriguing suggestion to date the "exodus" to the post-Exilic pe riod.2s As a minimalist Davies believes that the Biblical Israel is something quite different from the historical Israel and it is improper to harmonize them. In his In Searr.h ifAncient Is rael he examines the sociology of the biblica1literature- how it came to be produced, by whom, and for what purposes. He sees ancient Israel as largely a later scribal construct. The Hebrew Scriptures, as we have them, were compositions of the Persian and Hellenistic peri 25Tn SpmrJ,nf AndentIsrael (Sheffiel . heffieldAcademic Press 1992 143. ods. The Hasmonean Judean state (200-70 BeE) was a major stimulus to their formation as a national heritage. The Exodus was one of a number of alternative stories of origin through immigration included in the holy books. Davies, therefore, agrees with the other minimalists) Thompson and Lemche)n seeing the Exodus as a foundation myth for the Judean nation. Davies tends to think that the biblical narratives are about as historically true as King Arthur and Camelot. To be sure, for Davies, the composition of the Exodus story is more plausibly located in the Persian period than in the Late Bronze Age or Iron Age. As many have observed, the Mosaic story of a return to Canaan from Egypt may be an imaginative dramatization of the return from Babylonian exile to the Persian province of Yehud. But in the case of the "exodus" Davies offers a novel genesis. It may represent the experiences of Judeans who went down to Egypt at the end of the sixth centwy after the fall of Jerusalem, and later returned. They may have been Judeans and Israelite Palestinians serving the Per sians as garrison troops such as those at Elephantine who fled from hostile Egyptians during a period of revolt against Persian rule. A man may even have led them with the Egyptian ~~ \~ "'" """"~ ~~ \IIV\ ~"Ci..,T-- I.AI\'\. tOt"-",, \. f ~Lo.. name Moses. rO h.... If' ~ 6. \'T'cjM'tn) frrch\~.s ~ ~\c5?he.V\t,~" What I find compelling about this th;;;y is thaia band of mercenaries again ap}?ears as it \. ~ {"b-.\'~'\ \AlA \"t\~\~ t>f. Co\fo:.c'~\... ~C"(!rs., t t;6~}, does in Goedicke's fifteenth-centwy, £aximalist hypothesis. Escaping mercenaries, or har assed bedouins, or a deponed population whose deliverance from the Egyptian army was attributed to God's handiwork were more likely origins of the Exodus tradition than a united, national, mass migration. The End of the Early Bronze Age One of the most radical alternatives places the Exodus at the end of the Early Bronze Age c. 2300 BeE. Building on the work of Kathleen Kenyon some Israeli archaeologists have associated the Exodus and Conquest with the transition f5Hn Early Bronze III to Middle Bronze I. The evidence of destruction of EBIII cities such as Jericho and Ai and the cultural break at the end of the Early Bronze Age is attributed to semi-nomadic invaders. MBI cul ture seems to have spread from the Sinai, to Transjordan, and thence into Palestine, accord ing to Rudolf Cohen, in the pattern Joshua recounts. He does not identify the MBI people with the Israelites, but suggests that the traditions incorporated into the Exodus account may have a very ancient inspiration reaching back to the MBI. The migration of these MBI peo pIe from the southwest made a lasting impression, memory of which was preserved as a tribal tradition for generations~oPted by the Israelites as their own. Emmanuel Anati re gards as evidence for the Sinaitic origins of this people the rock art found at Har Karkom in the Negev. There are clearly many problems with this theory, for a discussion of which I re fer you to Stie~g.26 Moses, Amarna, and the Hyksos I cannot conclude my alternatives without mentioning in passing the possibility that Moses was an Egyptian. In O:ntra Apiunem Josephus gave excerpts of Manetho's account, which connected the Exodus of the Israelites with the expulsion of the Hyksos to West Asia and also with an expulsion of lepers led by a rebellious Egyptian priest named Osarsiph, who is taken to represent Moses. Other Greek writers gave curious variants of this account. The problem of whether or not the Hebrews and the Hyksos were related is one of the most 26 0uJ; ofthe Desertf A~ ctnd the Exodus/Conquest Narratite (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989))123 137. puzzling and unsolved. Donald Redford goes so far as to assert that the expulsion of the Hyksos is the only real history we have that has the remotest connection to the Exodus. He also correlates the legend of the lepers with the Amama period. The idea that Moses was an Egyptian has given rise to much speculation about the influence of Amama "monotheism" on Hebrew religion, most famously Freud in his Moses andMonotheism. These questions are fascmatm. . gly expI ore d'ill Jan A ssmann'ely s stu 0 f mnemohi story ill. JVJ.oses~I the~E-gypttan.~b~~ v...w}""-,,, ,.. Goo" shows how cultural memories of the Hyksos expulsion and the purging of the Amama abomination were combined and projected onto the Hebrews. This suppressed cultural memory is the only trace of the Exodus on the Egyptian side. Conclusions There is not a shred of hard extrabiblical textual or archaeological evidence that the bibli cal narrative as it now stands is historically true. The Bible tells a story that never happened as far as the Egyptians were concerned. All we have is the biblical account. The lack of any verifying evidence has led some to deny the account entirely any historicity and regard it a later and imaginative construction. They may grant that it has a kernel of tradition at its ori gins, but has been epically elaborated into a majestic saga of godly deliverance to serve relig ious and national purposes. Many other scholars, however, have persevere~in helt~ac cording the biblical account more historical validity than the so-called minimalists. The maximalists have devised many ingenious theories and reconstructions, none of which can be decisively convincing due to the dearth of evidence. Although there is no Egypti:m evi dence that offers direct testimony to the Exodus as described in the Bible, there are hints that suggest that something like an exodus with a lower case e could have happened on a smaller, less heroic scale, the tradition of which was magnified into an epic of national mi gration and foundation by later Hebrew scholars. Exciting stories of plagues and of the sea sweeping Pharaoh's chariots away may be pure fiction, but there is a lot of circumstantial plausibility and verisimilitude in a tale of forced Asiatic laborers, a maltreated minority population group, mercenaries, or deportees escaping from the Egyptian army in the North east Delta. Redford has had ideas along these lines.27 There is not enough concrete evidence, however, to pin it down more precisely than that. Such minor occurrences do not appear in the Egyptian sources simolv because theMwere of no interest to them. ~~~...v~ T U The!J'abint menriplled in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century are no longer confi "'. ~\ t' "'" \... 'iIf..')"'(jn...... "'T) dently identified with the 'ibn, or Hebrews, but are seen as a congeries of mercenaries, refu gees, renegades, bandits, nomads, slaves, and other marginal and shifting populations, not as an ethnic group. Some such peoples may have fonned a component of proto-Israel; it is pre cisely among such people that the Exodus legend may have arisen, or among Bedouin peo pIes flltering in and out of the eastem delta like the Shasu mentioned in Egyptian literature and government reports from frontier officials. The Shasu too may have been among the elements making up the proto-Israelites in the view of Anson Rainey.28 A fifteenth.century date was the oldest and long the most popular date since it vindicated the Bible's own chronology. However, with the discovery of the Memeptah Stele and ex panding knowledge of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age and its mi grations, wars, and massive social breakdowns, a thirteenth-century date has emerged as the most favored. The origins of the Israelites and of the Exodus tradition are now thought to have come out of this period, of collapse of Bronze Age civilization. The evidence for the Exodus is bound up with the problems of the conquest and/or settlement of Canaan, a 27 See Redford, Donald Redford, "Observations on the Sojourn of the Bene-Israel," Exodus: tbe Egyptian Evi dence, edited by Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko (Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 1997). 28 Rainer\.1991} 56-60. principal one being that it is not dear that the traditions of the Exodus and Conquest were originally connected. They may, in fact, have been two separate migration sagas, of the sev eral that the Bible contains, later woven together. Moreover, the thrust of current work on the Conquest is to deny that there W:tS one. The peaceful-emergence-in the-Palestinian-hill country model of Noth and Alt, as developed recently by Israel Finkelstein and others, has prevailed in recent scholarship. Bibliography Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Ahlstr6m, Gosta. Who Wm the Israelites? Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1986. Albright, W. F. Frcm the Stene Age to Onistianity: Monotheism and the Histariad Process (1940) 2nd ed. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1957. --.. The Biblical Peria/,firm Abraham to Ezra. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. --- ."Archaeology and the date of the Hebrew Conquest of Palestine." BASOR 58, 1935. 10-18. ~~,,(\~N~I~~I&-, "Moses in Historical and Theological Perspective." In Magnalia Dei, ed. F. Cross, et al. 1976, 120-31.' Anati, Emmanuel. The Mountain ofGcx1. New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Bietak, Manfred. "Comments on Exodus." In Egypt, Israel, and Sinai, edited by Anson Rainey. Tel Aviv; Tel Aviv University Press, 1987. Bimson, John. Ra1a.ting the Exodus and G1nquest, ]SOT Supplement Series S. Leiden: Brill, 1978. Bright, John. A History ofIsrael. London: SCM Press, 1960. s..u... h\ So '3 ~ ~ r\. W\.. Bucaille, Maurice. Moise et Pharaon.. Les Hebreux en Egypt.e. Paris: Seghers, 1995. Cassuto, U. A O:rrrrnmtary azthe Book ofExodus. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967. Cun1d, John. Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1997. Davies, Phillip. In Search ofAncient Israel. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. . ' De Felice, John. Tin and Trade. An A~ Approaih to Datirg the Exodus. Iliss.Vh~ T~\.t Submitted .w Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1994. De Wit, C. The Date and Ratte ofthe Exodus. London: Tyndale, 1960. Doumas, Christos. "Thera and the Exodus-When Was the Island Destroyed?" BAR XVII: ltJan.lFeb. 199~ 48. DurIiam,]. I. ExodUs. Waco, Texas: Word Book, 1987. Exodus: The Egyptitrn Eviderre Edited by Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko. Winona Lake, .r::1J: Eisenbrauns,1997. Exodus Symjmium. W1.u Was the Phar(Jf)/, of the Exodus? Sponsored by The Near East Ar chaeological Society, April 23-25, Memphis, Tennessee, 1987. Finkelstein, Israel, The Arclx:unlagy ofthe Israelite Settlenmt. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Soci ety,1988. Forster, K. P. "Texts, Storms, and the Thera Eruption," fNES 55~99~ 1-14. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheim. Translated from the German by Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage Books, 1939. Gardiner, Alan. Egypt ofthe Pharadls: An InmxluctWn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Goedicke, Hans. "Exodus: The Ancient Egyptian Evidence." A paper delivered at the "Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?" symposium, Memphis, Tennessee, April 23-25. Grimal, Nicolas. A History ofAncient Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Halpern, Baruch. "The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?" In TI:x: Rise ofAncient Israel: Symposium at the Smithsonian Institution October 26, 1991, edited by Hershel Shanks, 87-113. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992. ---,. 'The Exodus and the Israelite Historians," Eretz Israel 24,(!99), _ Hoerth, Alfred. ArCharolnt;yandtheOId Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1998. Hoffmeier, James. Israel in Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kitchen, Kenneth. The Third I~eria1 in Egypt (100-650 B.C). Wanninster: Aris & Phillips, 1973. ---,. Ancient Orimt and the Old Testammt. 0Jica!p: InterVarsity Press, 1966. --.....,. The Bible in its Wotfa'. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1978. ----.."The Exodus," in The Aruf.ur Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, ~ New York: Doubleday, 199~700-708. --,.Pharadl TriumJlxt~ 'The Life and Times ofRarmsses IL Mississauga: Benben, 1982. Lemche, Niels Peter. The Israelites in History and Tradition. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1998. --.. 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"Is the Biblical Account of the Israelite Conquest of Canaan Historically Reli able?" BAR,.\fy1arch/Apri1198j, ~ 18. Yamauchi, Edwin. The Stones and the Scriptures. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott Com pany,1972. Yurco, Frank. "Merenptah's Palestinian Campaign and Israel's Origins." In Exodus: The Egyptian E'llidena, edited by S. Frerichs and Leonard H Lesko, 27-56. Winona Lake: Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1997.