The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism Volume 3 Print Reference: Pages 9-16 Article 8 1994 The Exodus Happened 2450 B.C. Gerald E. Aardsma Institute for Creation Research Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings DigitalCommons@Cedarville provides a publication platform for fully open access journals, which means that all articles are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication. However, the opinions and sentiments expressed by the authors of articles published in our journals do not necessarily indicate the endorsement or reflect the views of DigitalCommons@Cedarville, the Centennial Library, or Cedarville University and its employees. The authors are solely responsible for the content of their work. Please address questions to [email protected]. Browse the contents of this volume of The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism. Recommended Citation Aardsma, Gerald E. (1994) "The Exodus Happened 2450 B.C.," The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 3 , Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol3/iss1/8 THE EXODUS HAPPENED 2450 B.C. GERALD E. AARDSMA, Ph.D. Institute for Creation Research 10946 Woodside Avenue N. Santee, Califomia 92071 KEYWORDS: Biblical chronology, date of Exodus, date of Flood ABSTRACT The Exodus of the Israelites was immediately preceded by an outpouring of God's power in judgement upon Egypt. This judgement took the form of a series of devastating national disasters. By the time it was over the crops and herds of Egypt had been decimated, the firstbom sons were dead, the pharaoh and his army had been destroyed, the slave labor (i.e. Israelites) had gone, and they had carried away all the wealth of the land with them. The obvious implication of these Biblical facts is that the nation of Egypt must have suffered a most severe setback, if not complete hiatus. as a result of the Exodus. Such a pronounced setback should be an easy thing to locate In the standard, secular history of Egypt. However, nothing remotely resembling the Biblical Exodus is discemable in the secular history of Egypt anywhere near the traditional Biblical date for this event (i.e., 1450 B.C.). In fact, roughly the oppOSite of what one would expect of the Exodus is observed at this date; this was a period of unprecedented prosperity and power for Egypt. Interestingly, a full millennium before this traditional date (i.e., at about 2450 B.C.) Egypt's secular history fits the Biblical description of the Exodus extremely well. This suggests the possibility that traditional Biblical chronology may have aCCidently lost 1000 years between the Exodus and the commencement of the Israelite monarchical period. This suggestion is found to work out very well when explored In depth, allowing much secular historical and archaeological data to be harmonized with the Biblical record from Abraham to Samuel for the first time. This discovery raises the minimum age of the earth from 6000 to 7000 years, and the minimum elapsed time from the Flood to the present from roughly 4300 years to 5300 years. This additional millennium Significantly Impacts the time scale of such post-Flood dynamical processes as the development of a post-Flood ice age, dispersion of animal life and man over the globe, growth of radiocarbon in the atmosphere and oceans, etc. PROLEGOMENON In a perceptive invited paper for the December 1986 issue of the Creation Research Society Quarterly, Erich A. von Fange [6, page 97] wrote: "Creationists ought to encourage the responsible study of chronological problems. The final answers are not as yet in for this immensely complicated problem of dating the ancient world. To a large extent we must playa waiting game and hope that in future excavations some Incontrovertible synchronism will be found that will put at rest the present uncertainty about dating the Exodus and other issues. One conclusion seems safe. No side or faction has yet to come up with a satisfactory solution to dating the Biblical world before 1000 B.C .... " Though this work has been supported in part by the Institute for Creation Research, the views which are expressed by this paper are those of the author and do not represent any Officially endorsed ICR position. 9 I discovered a radically new possible solution to this well-worn problem of how to date "the Biblical world before 1000 B.C. " in the summer of 1990. Following extensive critical investigations of this solution -- of an archaeological, historical, and Biblical sort - I have come to believe that it is the correct solution. If I am correct, we need play von Fange's waiting game no longer. Indeed, I am now questioning why we ever supposed we needed to play this game in the first place. It now seems to me that the "incontrovertible synchronism" which von Fange suggested might solve the problem has existed for at least the last eight decades. I refer here to the Exodus. It now seems to me that anyone who was familiar with the Biblical account of the Exodus and also the secular history of Egypt (no doubt there are many here whose education in science, like mine, has not served to familiarize them with this fascinating history), and who was prepared to take both seriously, could not fail to see that the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, as recorded in secular history, and the Exodus event, as recorded in the pages of SCripture, must, in fact, coincide. INTRODUCTION This small paper is a defense of the claim, expressed by its title, that the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt happened ca. 2450 B.C., at the end of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, as opposed to the traditional view that this historic event should be dated to ca. 1450 B.C., during the New Kingdom. I have briefly discussed this assertion previously within the much broader context of Biblical chronology from Abraham to Samuel [2). There I elaborated the hypothesis that traditional Biblical chronology has accidentally dropped out a full millennium between Solomon and the Exodus, and showed how Biblical history in the period before Samuel immediately finds many supporting evidences from secular history and archaeology when this lost millennium is restored. In the present paper I focus on the Exodus alone. My thesis here is that what we know about the Exodus from the Bible and what we know about the history of Egypt from secular sources is sufficient to establish 1. that 1450 B.C. cannot possibly be the correct date for the Exodus, and 2. that 2450 B.C. must surely be the correct date. I will argue that the only pOint in Egyptian history which can possibly accommodate a truly Biblical Exodus is at the end of the Old Kingdom, and that the proper date for the end of the Old Kingdom is ca. 2450 B.C. (I feel it is unnecessary to explicitly address the alternative view, unique to the more recent decades of the Christian era, that the Exodus should be dated to ca. 1210 B.C. , as this view Implicitly denies a literal, plain . sense, approach to the Interpretation of Scripture, and It seems unlikely that many who adhere to such an approach would be found at a conference such as this. Notice, however, that it is implicitly denied by the second part of my thesis above. For the same reason It seems unnecessary to discuss the current "mainstream" view, that the Exodus is a theological story only, for which one should not expect to find any real-life evidence.) The date of the Exodus Is a major landmark In the chronology of the Old Testament. It constitutes a major link in the chain of Biblical numbers which must be used to compute the date of any Biblical event prior to the Exodus, such as the Tower of Babel or the Flond. Thus, the date of the Exodus Is quite important to Biblical chronology. Biblical chronology is, in tum, Important to scientific creationists. Chronology is the backbone of history. Obviously, we need to get our chronology right if our current efforts to build a Biblically sound, quantitatively defensible model of earth history from the Flood to the present are to succeed. WHAT THE BIBLE DEMANDS It seems to me that there are several parallels between the way many conservative Christians treat the Biblical Exodus account and the way the Biblical Flood account is often treated. In both cases there is a tendency to completely overiook what the natural outwOrking of such events would be in the real world. In the case of the Flood, for example, it is generally acknowledged by conservative Christians that the Flood really happened , and that it accomplished God's purpose of judging the world. But, often, that's where thinking stops. Only when it is explicitly pOinted out that a global Flood WOUld, for example, necessarily bring about much erosion and deposition of sediments do many Christians begin to recognize this fact and wonder where these sediments are to be found. So it is with the Exodus. It is generally acknowledged that it really happened, and that it accomplished God's purpose of setting the Israelites free from Egypt, but that's where thinking tends to stop. I suggest that just as surely as we can assert that the global Flood must have left behind large sedimentary layers, we can also assert that the supernatural outpouring of God's power which accompanied the Exodus must have crushed the nation of Egypt, and must have done so to such an extent that this singular event could not possibly be hid from the historian'S eye.