Egypt

Two things need separating before any of this is useful. Semitic speakers from Canaan were in Egypt in large numbers across the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, as household servants, as officials, as herdsmen admitted at the frontier in a famine, and for about a century as rulers of the Delta. Egyptian texts and excavated settlements both show it, and no one argues about it. What is argued about is whether any excavated material is the Israel of the Exodus, and when. Egypt is the best documented civilisation of the ancient world, which makes the silence about Israel worth stating plainly rather than explaining away. Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Delta is ancient Avaris, and Manfred Bietak has directed the Austrian excavation there since 1966. The site yields a large Canaanite population from the Middle Bronze Age: Syro-Palestinian house plans, Middle Bronze burial customs including donkey burials at tomb entrances, Canaanite pottery and Canaanite weapons. Avaris became the capital of the Hyksos, the foreign kings who held the Delta from roughly 1650 to 1550 BC, until Ahmose I took the city and drove them out. Bietak himself does not read the site as evidence for the biblical Israelites; he documents a Semitic presence in the region Scripture calls Goshen. Nearby Qantir is identified as Pi-Ramesse, the Ramesside capital, and is the site most scholars connect with the Rameses of Exodus 1:11. In one area the excavators found a large Middle Bronze house of Syrian plan with a tomb holding a fragmentary colossal statue of a seated Asiatic official, painted with a multicoloured coat, and the tomb had been emptied of its occupant. David Rohl in A Test of Time (1995) and, on a different chronology, Charles Aling have argued that this is Joseph's house and cenotaph, with the empty tomb matching the carrying up of his bones. Bietak rejects the identification and reads the statue as one of several high Asiatic officials the site attests. Nothing at the site names Joseph, and this page says so. Egyptian documents show the same population from the other side. The Brooklyn Papyrus, Brooklyn Museum 35.1446, is a Middle Kingdom administrative text from Thebes in the reign of Sobekhotep III, around 1740 BC, published by William C. Hayes in 1955. Its verso lists the servants of a Theban estate: of 95 names, more than 40 are Northwest Semitic, many marked aamu, Asiatic, and one of them is Shiphrah, which is the name of one of the two Hebrew midwives at Exodus 1:15. Tomb 3 at Beni Hasan, the tomb of the Twelfth Dynasty nomarch Khnumhotep II from about 1890 BC, carries a painted procession of 37 Asiatics with their donkeys, weapons and coloured garments, led by a man labelled Abisha. Papyrus Anastasi VI, a Nineteenth Dynasty frontier report, records Edomite Shasu being let past the fortress at Tjeku in the Wadi Tumilat to keep them and their cattle alive. None of these names Israel. What they show is that everything Genesis and Exodus describe about Semites in Egypt was ordinary Egyptian practice. The first mention of Israel outside the Bible is Egyptian. W. M. Flinders Petrie found the Merneptah Stele in 1896 in Merneptah's mortuary temple at Thebes and published it the following year; the Israel line was read by Wilhelm Spiegelberg, who was working with him. The stone is black granite, about 3.18 metres tall, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as JE 31408, and dated to year 5 of Merneptah, about 1208 BC. Its closing section lists Canaanite conquests and includes the line "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not." The name carries the hieroglyphic determinative for a people rather than the one for a land or a city-state, which most Egyptologists read as Israel being a population group in Canaan at that date rather than a settled kingdom. What the stele fixes is a lower boundary. By about 1208 BC there is a people called Israel in Canaan and Egypt knows its name. The one place where an Egyptian record and a biblical record meet on the same campaign is Shishak. 1 Kings 14:25 and 2 Chronicles 12:2 put his attack in Rehoboam's fifth year, about 925 BC on Edwin Thiele's chronology. Shishak is generally identified with Shoshenq I, the Libyan founder of the Twenty-second Dynasty, who reigned roughly 943 to 922 BC, and who recorded a campaign into Canaan on the Bubastite Portal at the temple of Amun at Karnak, with a topographical list of more than 150 captured place names arranged as rows of bound captives. A fragment of a victory stele of Shoshenq I was found at Megiddo, which puts him physically in the land. Two caveats belong beside it. Jerusalem does not appear in the surviving list, and the damaged sections are read in more than one way. That absence is not a contradiction: 2 Chronicles 12:7 says the LORD would not let Shishak destroy Jerusalem, 12:9 says he took the treasures, and tribute paid is not the same as a town captured, which is what Egyptian triumph lists record. A minority reads the Karnak list as a different campaign altogether. The standard treatment is Kenneth Kitchen's study of the Third Intermediate Period. The Jews Jeremiah wrote to left an archive. The Elephantine papyri are Aramaic documents of the fifth century BC from a Jewish military colony on Elephantine island at Aswan, in Upper Egypt, published by A. E. Cowley in 1923 and by Emil Kraeling from the Brooklyn Museum collection in 1953. They record a Jewish temple to YHW on the island, its destruction in 410 BC, petitions in 407 BC to Bagohi the Persian governor of Judah and to the sons of Sanballat in Samaria for help rebuilding it, and a letter of 419 BC about keeping the days of unleavened bread. Elephantine lies in Pathros, which is exactly where Jeremiah 44:1 says Judahites were living. The awkward part belongs on the page too: the colony was syncretistic, and its own documents name Anath-Yahu and other deities alongside YHW, which is the charge Jeremiah 44 brings against the very people who went down there. One Egyptian text is regularly offered as a record of the plagues, and it is presented here as what it is, a disputed parallel. Papyrus Leiden I 344 recto carries the text usually called the Admonitions of Ipuwer, surviving in a Nineteenth Dynasty copy of about 1250 BC and published by Alan Gardiner in 1909. It describes a country turned upside down, and some of its lines sound like Exodus: the river is blood, the land is without light, there is wailing everywhere. David Rohl and a number of popular treatments read it as an Egyptian memory of the plagues, a reading first made widely known by Immanuel Velikovsky in 1952, whose wider chronology is rejected across Egyptology. Most Egyptologists read the text as belonging to a known Egyptian genre of national lament, in which the collapse of order is described in set images, and date its composition to the late Middle Kingdom or the Second Intermediate Period, centuries before the thirteenth-century date many hold for the Exodus; John Van Seters argued that date in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 1964. What is not disputed is that the text exists, that it says what it says, and that it never mentions Israel. Both readings stand here and neither is settled. The live question is the date of the Exodus, and two positions are held by serious people. The early date, about 1446 BC, follows 1 Kings 6:1, which puts the fourth year of Solomon 480 years after the Exodus; Solomon's fourth year falls about 967 BC on Thiele's chronology, and Judges 11:26 supports it independently, since Jephthah tells the Ammonites Israel has held the Transjordan for 300 years. On that reading the oppression falls under Thutmose III and the Exodus under Amenhotep II. It is held by Bryant Wood and Associates for Biblical Research, which is a confessional body and is named as one here rather than presented as neutral ground, and by Eugene Merrill and Douglas Petrovich. The late date, in the thirteenth century, follows the name Rameses at Exodus 1:11, since Pi-Ramesse was built by Ramesses II between about 1279 and 1213 BC, which puts the Exodus around 1260 to 1250 BC with the Merneptah Stele as the outer limit. It is held by Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeier, and reads the 480 years as twelve generations counted at a round forty each. Each side has an answer to the other. The early date explains the name Rameses as an editorial update of an older place name, pointing out that Genesis 47:11 uses the same name for the district in Joseph's day. The late date explains the 480 years and Jephthah's 300 as schematic figures. Neither answer settles it, and this page prints both and lands nowhere. A third position denies the event. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed (2001), hold that there was no exodus of the biblical kind, that Israel emerged from within Canaanite society, and that the Egyptian colour in the narrative reflects the seventh century BC. That is answered on the evidence rather than waved off. Hoffmeier and Kitchen reply that the Egyptian material in Exodus fits the Late Bronze Age and not the seventh century: the personal names Moses, Phinehas, Hophni and Merari are Egyptian, the titles and administrative terms are period-correct, the brick quota system and the straw and the organisation of the labour match Egyptian records, and the geography of the eastern Delta in the text matches the Late Bronze settlement pattern rather than the later one. They add that Egypt recorded its victories and not its defeats, and that papyrus does not survive in the wet soil of the Delta, so the absence of an Egyptian record of the Exodus is what the sources would look like either way. This site teaches the Exodus as history because Christ and the apostles do.