In the previous video, we considered which 18th-dynasty pharaoh was most likely to be
the pharaoh of the Exodus. I concluded with two possibilities:
If the pharaoh’s body was recovered, then my pick for the pharaoh of the Exodus is Thuthmose
IV. If the pharaoh’s body was lost during the sea crossing, then I would suggest that
a ruling intermediary during the early years of Amenhotep III’s reign was the pharaoh
of the Exodus.
I favor the former idea because the latter relies on speculation. However, I don’t
believe the latter can be ruled out due to the possibility that the pharaoh’s body
was lost in the sea. For the purposes of organizing a timeline, I will regard the Exodus as the
event that resulted in the death of Thuthmose IV. With this recognition, we can propose
a timeline of events for the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt through the beginning
of the time of the judges. The next question then becomes, “who was the pharaoh who oppressed
the Israelites?”
In order to offer a proposal, I first need to refer back to an earlier video I produced
about the length of the sojourn. For reasons that I covered in that video, I favor the
Septuagint’s reading of Exodus 12:40 – that the Israelites spent 430 years in Egypt & in
Canaan. Thus, this 430 year period refers to the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 through
the giving of the Mosaic law at Mount Sinai. The result of this is that the time period
of the Israelites in Egypt should be understood as ~215 years, with a portion of that time
being a time flourishing in Goshen and the remainder as the time of oppression. Genesis
15:16 describes the length of the oppression as, “four generations.” Assuming a bronze-age
generation to be between 20-40 years, this would be a time period of 80-160 years – somewhere
around half-to-two-thirds of the total sojourn period. When we attempt to identify the pharaoh
of the Israelite oppression, this means we are looking for a figure who existed in this
length of time prior to the Exodus. Using the end of the reign of Thuthmose IV as our
starting point (~1400 BC), 80-160 years prior would point us to ~1480-1560 BC as the beginning
of the oppression period.
The upper end of this scale happens to coincide well with the end of the Second Intermediate
Period and the beginning of the 18th-dynasty. A little bit of historical background of this
time period reveals some interesting circumstances relative to the Bible’s testimony.
Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period was divided between northern and southern
rulers. Dynasties 16 and 17 ruled out of the southern capital of Thebes (modern Luxor).
Meanwhile, the north was ruled by dynasties 14 and 15 – known to students of Egyptology
as the Hyksos. The Hyksos are famous for being a ruling dynasty of semitic-speaking people,
whose ancestors likely migrated down from Canaan and Syria during the Middle Kingdom.
The collapse of the Middle Kingdom saw a prominent group of these semitic people acquiesce power
in the north out of their capital city, Avaris. (In a previous video, we considered that Avaris
is the original store city referred to in Exodus 1:11 before the text was redacted to
read Ramses at a later date.) The Hyksos dynasties ruled for around 150-200 years. Considering
a ~1400 BC date for the Exodus, this would mean that Joseph would have come to power
in the court of one of these Hyksos rulers. There are a lot of things that prove very
attractive by locating Joseph and the migration of the Israelites to Goshen during the Hyksos
period, but there are also those who raise objections to this. We will look at Joseph
in a separate video; for now, I ask that you would humor this timeline.
The latter portion of Hyksos rule saw warfare with the 17th-dynasty kings – the native
Egyptian rulers from Thebes in the south. The conclusion of this conflict saw the Hyksos
rulers expelled from Egypt entirely by a man named Ahmose I. Ahmose would re-unify Egypt
under a single pharaoh, thus establishing the 18th-dynasty.
The reign of Ahmose is typically thought to have begun around 1550 BC. His ascension to
the throne fits within the upper end of the scale for the period of oppression. Probably
as a reaction to the animosity between himself and the Hyksos rulers, Ahmose begins revenge
campaigns into Canaan and Syria. It doesn’t appear that Ahmose was interest in annexing
territory, rather that he was interested only in destroying any remaining Hyksos holdings
in the Levant. One thing he does do though is bring back captives into slavery in Egypt.
This policy would be furthered by the successive pharaohs of the 18th-dynasty, who continually
raided the Canaanite hill country for slave labor. Some Egyptologists have interpreted
these actions as being rooted in a reactionary anti-semitism; the result of the embarrassment
of lower Egypt having been ruled by semitic peoples (whom the Egyptians referred to as,
“Asiatics”) for so long. It’s entirely reasonable to conclude that any semitic people
who remained in or around Goshen after the expulsion of the Hyksos would have been made
liable to this type of treatment as well, Egypt not wanting to allow any possibility
for foreign rule again.
If we overlay this with the testimony of Exodus 1, a few things stand out immediately. First,
if Joseph rose to power in the court of a Hyksos king, then it is unlikely that Ahmose
would, “know,” of him. The Hebrew of, “know,” in verse 8 is יָדַע. Two
possible interpretations of this verse arise: 1) the pharaoh did not know about Joseph or
2) the pharaoh did not regard/respect Joseph. Ahmose is a good candidate for either interpretation.
If Joseph was in power about 75-100 years before Ahmose in the north, he may very well
have not known who he was. If Ahmose did know who Joseph was, then it’s likely that he
would have no respect for him or the things he did for the Hyksos rulers. Second, the
combination of Ahmose’s vengeful attitudes with his paranoia over Egyptian sovereignty
could very easily have led him to issue a decree similar to that recorded in verses
9-10.
Finally, verse 11 describes the cities as, “store cities.” In other words, these
weren’t cities that were populated by common citizens; they were established for the purpose
of storing goods and raw materials. Subsequent to his overthrow of the Hyksos, Ahmose largely
depopulated their former capital city, Avaris. He did however initiate the building of, “enormous
storage facilities…among them numerous silos,” probably as a launchpad for Egyptian military
expeditions into the Levant. Before this, Avaris was a metropolitan area, densely populated
with Hyksos aristocracy. If Ramses in Exodus 1:11 is a redacted place name for Avaris (as
we have previously proposed), then this becomes another synchronism we can use to link the
Biblical timeline with Egyptian chronology.
Some alternative candidates present themselves in the form of Ahmose’s two successors:
Amehotep I and Thuthmose I – Amenhotep I probably still being close enough to the Hyksos
expulsion to have held on to the same hostilities as his father; Thuthmose I being the first
18th-dynasty pharaoh who aspired to Egyptian hegemony over the Levant. Still, I find Ahmose
to be the most likely – though he lies toward the upper end of the scale for the beginning
of the oppression period, many circumstances of his reign accord well with the Bible’s
testimony.
Now that we have proposed a pharaoh of the Exodus and a pharaoh of the oppression, we
can propose an overall timeline of events from Israel’s migration to Goshen through
the conquest of the promised land under Joshua. We will do so in the next video.
Please subscribe and click the notification bell so that you will be notified when I release
the upcoming videos in this series. For further reading on this subject, I recommend, “Let
My People Go!” by Steven Collins. You will find a link to this book in the description.