The Exodus

I'm well out of Egypt at this point, but I thought that on this leisurely Sunday afternoon, while I'm resting up for a possible hike into Jericho tomorrow, I'd take time to bang out my assorted chaotic thoughts about the Exodus.

So we all know the story: Moses, raised as an Egyptian aristocrat, comes to find himself caring for the enslaved population of Hebrews. Defying his Egyptian way of life, he defends one mistreated slave to the point of killing a fellow Egyptian, and so spends forty years in the Sinai wilderness. There he meets his father-in-law and wife, and, more importantly, he meets the god of the Hebrews, who tells him that he is Yahweh, 'I am who I will be,' revealing this tribal god to be the creator-God of the universe. He is commissioned by this Yahweh to bring the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, and does so despite personal inadequacies and political opposition.

The dating given in the Torah and Former Prophets (J0shua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) is somewhat unclear, but it places the exodus somewhere in the second half of the second millennium BC, between 1500 and 1200. The exodus cannot have been any later than 1203, since that is the latest possible date of the Merenptah stele. The pharaoh Merenptah of the 19th dynasty reigned in Egypt from 1213 to 1203 BC, and his stele- a slab of rock prepared for a funeral and placed at the tomb to record the great deeds of the person in question- mentions, among other things, his great victory over an otherwise unknown tribe in Canaan called Israel, alongside victories elsewhere in Palestine.

So by 1203 Israel is already in existence as a power in Canaan, but only as one tribe among many. This is prior to the days of the United Monarchy (which is generally agreed to be about 200 years later), when tribal warlords- out of respect, we call them judges- fought against neighboring powers.

What about the earliest possible date?

The beginning of Exodus makes reference to the city of Pi-Ramesses, where the Hebrew slaves worked with mud-brick building materials (at this point the limestone pyramids at Giza were a thousand years old, so the Hebrews certainly did not work them). The city of Tanis (the later Greek name) was once identified as this site by the archaeologist Pierre Montet, who found inscriptions here labeling the site Pi-Ramesses. Unfortunately, Tanis was built far too late for the exodus, during the twentieth dynasty, and it was thus thought that the reference was merely an anachronism. However, it was later discovered that the building materials at Tanis were taken from a separate site after its destruction, and Montet's inscriptions did not identify Tanis as Pi-Ramesses, but rather the site from whence the building materials had been removed. This was traced to Avaris.

Avaris, as it turned out, was the capital of the Hyksos invaders of the Second Intermediate Period (more on that below) and entered into a new round of construction under the Pharaoh Horemheb. Horemheb, the final pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, reigned 1319-1292 BC, is likely the earliest possible pharaoh for the exodus.

This leaves only five possibilities: Horemheb of the 18th dynasty, and Ramesses I, Seti I, Ramesses II, and Merenptah of the 19th dynasty. Does this make sense?

On the one hand, there is the story of Joseph, who goes before his family into Egypt and establishes himself there. Later, a pharaoh who does not know about Joseph enslaves the resident Hebrew population. To me, this makes the most sense if Joseph's pharaoh and the exodus pharaoh are from different dynasties or, as I believe, different kingdom periods altogether. The Middle Kingdom came to an end with the Hyksos invasions around 1650 BC. The Hyksos were a Semitic people from Asia, like the Hebrews, who wrecked havoc on the established rule in Egypt and ended up controlling the Nile Valley for themselves. This lasted until the beginning of the 18th dynasty, when Ahmose I consolidated the Egyptian people and drove the last of the Hyksos out of Egypt around 1550. However, while the Hyksos were conquered and driven out, Semitic peoples show up as slaves working on mud-brick structures three hundred years later. It seems apparent that if the hated Hyksos were driven out by the Egyptians while the Hebrews were kept as slaves, the Egyptians would have good reason to fear and hate these fellow Semites. And if the Hyksos and their fellow Semites were concentrated at Avaris, where else would one expect to find Hebrew slaves working to rebuild the site?

On the other hand, the 18th dynasty had seen a major upset in the world of Egyptian religion. Thirty years before the reign of Horemheb, the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV, known to us as Akhenaten, abolished the pantheon of Egyptian gods and introduced the first monotheistic religion known to the world: Atenism. Notice the change in name: Amenhotep, or Amun-hotep, means Amun, the sun god, is satisfied. Akhen-aten, on the other hand, means 'the effective spirit of Aten,' or the power behind the sun. Atenism looked beyond Amun-Ra, the amalgamated sun god of Upper and Lower Egypt, to the inner force behind. His most famous successor, Tut-ankh-amun (living image of Amun), was originally named Tut-ankh-aten (living image of Aten).

While the priests and the people despised Akhenaten and Atenism, it had to wait until Horemheb, who came to power fifteen years after the former's death, to truly end the monotheist heresy. None of the other pharaohs had been effective enough or lived long enough (remember the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen), but Horemheb was first and foremost a general. He was not technically a family member of the 18th dynasty, and was therefore a transition figure between the family of Ahmose I and his successor, the Vizier Ramesses I. Yet when he came to power, he persecuted Atenism viciously.

So here are the Hebrew slaves, Semites like the hated Hyksos, worshipers of one single god like the Atenists. And here, too, is Moses, an Egyptian aristocrat, and possibly raised as an Atenist, now out of favor with the court? It seems to me that Horemheb is an excellent candidate for the pharaoh of the exodus, placing it somewhere at the end of the 14th century BC. This is enough time for the Hebrews to become established enough in Canaan to be worth mentioning in the Merenptah stele.

Anyways, those are my own musings. If this actually interested anyone, I highly recommend James K. Hoffmeier's excellent books Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai.