Highlights in Exodus: The Exodus In Controversy and History

Historical Exodus, Exodus chapter 1

CHR20260710-Exodus-01.mp3

Highlights in Exodus: The Exodus In Controversy and History

Here I am going to endeavor a discussion of the Book of Exodus. This will not be a verse-by-verse commentary. Rather, I will focus on the historical details of the Exodus, on an outline of the history of the children of Israel in the Book of Exodus, and also on the Law, as Christians are often confused concerning the Law, in reference to which commandments are those that Christ expects His disciples to keep, and which commandments are the rituals and civic laws of Israel which are now obsolete under the New Covenant. I may interject comments on other passages where it is fitting. As we always have done in our Old Testament commentaries, we shall follow the King James Version, and do our best to note the significant differences which may be found in the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls and even the early translations found in the Hexapla of Origen.

On the history of the Exodus, most Christians who pay attention to the mainstream academic jargon, especially when it is echoed in popular media, should already be aware that this is always under attack by one academic scholar or another, and there are always fascinating new “discoveries” which seek to discredit the Exodus account. However sometimes there are discoveries which demonstrate its historicity, and hopefully we shall discuss the more significant of those here.

Academic scholars of antiquity, archaeologists, anthropologists or one of several other disciplines, love to discover new things, to make “breakthroughs” into what they perceive as the ancient world, often accompanied by press releases and sometimes, media fanfare. Quite frequently, these “breakthroughs” are announced and followed by sensational headlines for a few weeks or months, making an impression on the public that something wonderful and even paradigm-changing was discovered. The alleged discovery of the tomb of Gilgamesh in Iraq twenty-three years ago is an example. The media ran with a story, but even the German archaeologist who discovered a tomb under the Euphrates River professed having not been able to find who was buried there. However to this day, there are conspiracy theories circulating that claim that it was all covered up. Most people have no concept as to how archaeology actually works.

But sometimes archaeology does not work well, and maybe forty or so years ago, there had been announcements that the Name of God, Yahweh, was discovered in tablets uncovered at Ebla, a city in northwestern Syria, which were estimated to date to at least eight hundred years before the time of Moses. Ancient Mesopotamian texts inform us that Ebla had been destroyed by Naram-Sin, a grandson and successor of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled in the second half of the 23rd century BC. Of course, this “discovery” would be perceived as discrediting the account of Moses here in Exodus chapters 3 and 6, where Yahweh is recorded as having attested that He had not revealed His Name to men before that time.

But all of this was only rooted in the fact that some of the personal names on the Ebla tablets ended in the sound “ia”, which is similar, but not necessarily equivalent, to what we see in Scripture in names such as Jeremiah, Obadiah or Azariah, and a host of others which have the shortened form of the Name of Yahweh as their final component. So for that reason, an archaeologist from the University of Rome, Paolo Matthiae, and his colleague, epigrapher Giovanni Pettinato made international tours to report this and their other findings to other scholars, giving sold-out lectures to their peers at university halls and convention centers. Therefore to this day, even lay people critical of Scripture raise the objection that the Name of Yahweh was found at Ebla, and for that reason the Bible is a lie. In addition to this, Pettinato had made other claims based on his readings of the tablets, which also remain under academic dispute. There is absolutely no certainty of a god named Ya at Ebla, among the other five hundred or so gods that Pettinato himself is recorded as having found mentioned explicitly in the Ebla tablets. [1] The -ia ending of personal names at Ebla had very well existed for some other cultural reason. Sometimes the need for peer review is self-evident, but sadly, it rarely comes before the sensational announcements are made. The pursuit of money and fame sometimes seems to be as much of a motivation for some archaeologists as it is for at least most professional athletes, and perhaps Pettinato is the Ron Wyatt of epigraphy. He makes lots of spectacular claims, and all of them are without substance.

Many parallels were found in the tablets at Ebla, relating to certain personal names discovered there which are very similar to the personal names of many Biblical figures, and also relating to certain Hebrew customs. However these we shall not discuss, as they are outside of our context here which regards the Exodus. Sadly, to this day, over fifty years after their initial discovery, it is reported that only a few hundred of these Ebla tablets have been translated and published, out of eighteen hundred complete tablets and many thousands of fragments which had been discovered. One of the barriers is that apparently the language of Ebla and the cuneiform signs it employs appears to have been Sumerian, but is not quite Sumerian, so it is not yet fully understood. Today it is called Eblaite and it is recognized as not yet having been deciphered. Perhaps if and when it is, even those tablets which have been translated will require another review.

On another note, we shall turn to ancient Egypt. Things move very slowly in the academic world. Sometimes, complete archaeological reports on findings in the field may not be fully published by the archaeologists for ten or fifteen years, if at all, and even if the same archaeologists are engaged in some new excavation next year, or every year. I can only imagine that funding is the primary consideration in their scheduling, but laboratory consume many times more hours than what had been spent in the field. So a lot of the sensationalism comes from brief preliminary reports issued soon after a dig.

So the earliest reference I have seen thus far in articles that mention the discovery of an Egyptian phrase translated as “the Shasu of Yahweh” is in a book titled Israel in Egypt by Siegfried Herrmann which was published in 1973, and Hermann evidently wrote an earlier article on the subject in 1966. However looking further, I have found that an Egyptologist named Raphael Giveon discovered the inscriptions containing the phrase at sites at Soleb and Amarah West, which are places of archaeological distinction in ancient Egypt, and first published a summary of those findings in English in 1964. These discoveries evidently have been peer reviewed.

An article titled Yahweh in Egyptian Topographic Lists by Michael C. Astour was published in a German-language archaeological journal in 1979. The topic was treated by other writers, but I have not seen anything in the general media concerning the discovery. However in all fairness, the general media really did not have a presence on the internet until the late 1990’s. Most of this information concerning the phrase “the Shasu of Yahweh” comes from the footnotes to an article titled The Name Yahweh in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts written by Clyde Billington, a PhD, and first published in the Autumn, 2009 issue of a journal called Artifax. It was reproduced by the Associates for Biblical Research website in 2010, and that is our source here. [2] He did not mention Raphael Giveon, perhaps because Giveon’s full report was published in French.

So Billington prefaced his article with a summary which says:

It is generally accepted that the term Shasu means nomads or Bedouin people, referring primarily to the nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples of Syria-Palestine. There are two significant hieroglyphic references in New Kingdom period texts to an area called ‘the land of the Shasu of Yahweh.’ Except for the Old Testament, these are the oldest references found in any ancient texts to the God Yahweh. The purpose of this paper is to study these two references and assess their possible importance in dating the Exodus account… [3]

Later, Billington explains that Shasu tribes of Seir are also mentioned in the inscriptions, and how they are distinguished from the Shasu of Yahweh. Therefore it is evident that shasu is an Egyptian word for tent-dwelling nomads, as at least many of the Edomites were also nomads and herders in the areas around Seir. Then even later in his article, in a section subtitled The Shasu Of Yahweh And The Date Of The Exodus, Billngton has no objection to the date of the Exodus having been earlier than the time of Amenhotep III, the pharaoh of the time when the Soleb and Amarah West inscriptions were made. So he wrote in part:

There are two indisputable facts that Old Testament scholars must face when dealing with these hieroglyphic references to the Shasu of Yahweh. First, there is no doubt that the name of the Israelite God Yahweh appears in these hieroglyphic texts at Soleb and Amarah-West, and also probably at Medinet Habu. And second, at Soleb the reference to Yahweh dates to ca. 1400 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. In other words Pharaoh Amenhotep III, or at least his scribes, must have at least heard about the Hebrew God Yahweh in ca. 1400 BC. This fact is highly significant when trying to date the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt under Moses. [4]

Then after citing certain passages from Exodus which indicate the fact that Moses had used the Name of Yahweh when speaking to the pharaoh, he states:

If the Pharaoh of the Exodus had never before heard of the God Yahweh, this strongly suggests that the Exodus should be dated no later than ca. 1400 BC because Pharaoh Amenhotep III had clearly heard about Yahweh in ca. 1400 BC. [5]

With this we would fully agree, and in our recent Genesis commentary we have given our reasons for assigning a date for the Exodus at about 1450 BC. The Name of Yahweh as it was used by Moses in his addresses to the pharaoh must have remained in the accounts of the Egyptians. But this chronology of an Exodus before 1400 BC conflicts with claims made by many, if not most, modern academics, and we shall visit this issue as this discussion progresses.

In the conclusion to his article, Billington wrote the following:

The fact that the Shasu of Yahweh first appear in topographical lists under Amenhotep III in ca. 1400 BC fits perfectly with the Early Date of the Exodus, but this fact presents major problems for those scholars who believe that the Exodus took place during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses II in the 13th century BC. In any case, these references to Yahweh have been ignored for far too long by both conservative and liberal biblical scholars.

It thus appears very likely that the Shasu of Yahweh, who are mentioned in the topographical texts at Soleb and Amarah-West, were the Israelites who by about 1400 BC had settled into their own land (t3) in the mountains of Canaan. It also appears that for the ancient Egyptians the one feature that distinguished the Israelites from all the other Shasu (Semitic herders) in this area was their worship of the God of Yahweh. [6]

There is very little, if anything, in Billington’s article which I would protest, but somehow most of my own reading in archaeological journals was from the late 1990’s to today, and this information only came to me a few years ago. This is the first opportunity I have had to write about it. This, in my opinion, is a very significant fact which helps to establish the historicity of the Exodus as well as our chronology of the event. We did have help with that. On three occasions in his treatise Against Apion, the Judaean historian Flavius Josephus, citing the older Hellenistic Egyptian historian Manetho, clearly stated that the Exodus had happened in the reign of Thutmose, but he does not say which Thutmose [1.94, 1.231 and 2.16]. However before we move on, I want to discuss a contrary, and once again, incredibly hostile criticism of the Bible based on this same information from these same inscriptions.

At Cambridge University Press there is an advertisement for a book titled Yahweh before Israel, Glimpses of History in a Divine Name, and rather than consider the possibility of an earlier date for the Exodus, the author, one Daniel Fleming, would evidently be happy to portray Moses as a liar, and discredit Scripture. This is chutzpah, as the jews call it, as Fleming displays a blatant academic bias and an even greater arrogance. However even the publisher’s title for the page is dishonest, where Cambridge has Yhwʒ of Shasu-Land. There, the final letter in a name which is widely accepted by Egyptologists as representing Yahweh is ʒ, which is also often represented with the Latin numeral 3, which is a transliteration of a certain hieroglyphic sign. [7] So in the title Yahweh is represented with Y-h-w-3, the ‘3’ representing a certain sound, and they use that as a device by which to cast doubt on the association of this name with Yahweh.

Going back to the Billington article, he also offered a transliteration of the hieroglyph, where he wrote: “the Egyptian phrase is t3 sh3sw ya-h-wa, i.e. ‘the land of the Shasu of Yahweh.’” [8] If the editors at Cambridge wanted to be honest, they would have titled their article honestly, and left the hieroglyphic symbol in the word Shasu in their title as they had left it in the word for Yahweh. Then, disguising that final sound in the word Yahweh behind the symbol representing a hieroglyph, they wrote:

At the center of any evaluation of early evidence for Yahweh must stand a pair of related texts from New Kingdom Egyptian sites in northern Sudan: one from Soleb, during the reign of Amenhotep III (ca. 1390–1352); and the second from ‘Amarah West, during the reign of Ramses II (ca. 1279–1213). Both are monumental inscriptions for display on temples, lists of places and peoples that create a map of Egypt’s world. This material is far older than any potential reference to Yahweh, and if the name Yhwʒ does match the deity rendered as Yhwh, even if it did not yet identify a god, it becomes the chronological starting point for all historical evaluation. [9]

This entire attitude concerning the date for when Moses could have written the Name of Yahweh is based on a long-time error which has been made by many archaeologists, Egyptologists and even Bible commentators. Just because a place named Rameses appears in Scripture, it is assumed that such a place could not have existed until the time of the pharaoh Ramesses, who is said to have ruled Egypt in the 13th century BC. So on account of this error in judgment, the Exodus is wrongly assigned a date of about 1250 BC, since Ramesses I only ruled for a short time early in the century, and Ramesses II for a significant time, generally dated from about 1279 to 1213 BC. Therefore it is evident that not only Fleming, but Cambridge University itself, would accuse Moses of lying, before considering the fact that the Exodus happened before 1400 BC. That is arrogance.

In a Britannica article discussing the city Rameses, we read the following, in part:

Per Ramessu, ancient Egyptian capital in the 15th (c. 1630–c. 1530 bce), 19th (c. 1292–c. 1191 bce), and 20th (c. 1190–c. 1077 bce) dynasties. Situated in the northeastern delta about 62 miles (100 km) northeast of Cairo, the city lay in ancient times on the Bubastite branch of the Nile River.

In the early Middle Kingdom (c. 1980–c. 1760 bce) the city witnessed the gradual influx of Palestinian peoples, and it became the Hyksos capital about 1540 bce. Sacked by the victorious pharaoh Ahmose I about 1521 bce, it remained obscure until the advent of the 19th dynasty, whose home was nearby. Sometime during this period the Hebrews settled in this area.

Seti I (c. 1290–79 bce) built a palace on the site and started a faience-manufacturing industry. His successor, Ramses II, decided to move his capital there to utilize the military potential of the site. Early in his reign large temples, residences, storehouses, docks, and military facilities were built… [10]

So in the Britannica article, while its chronology is several decades later than our own, and it has the entry into Egypt by Jacob at a very late time, at least there is no insistence concerning the name Rameses and its appearance before the time of the pharaohs who had also born the name. Furthermore, it is possible that the Exodus account is the authority for the statement that the name was used in the 15th Dynasty, which evidently began soon after the time at which Jacob had gone down to Egypt.

Furthermore, this article concludes with the following line:

Excavations started in the 1940s by Egyptian archaeologists and carried forward by an Austrian expedition since 1975 have firmly located Ramses II’s capital at Per Ramessu and also have elucidated the Hyksos period of the city. [11]

Therefore Seti I and Rameses II, who are credited in some sources as having built the city of Rameses, had actually only built up an already existing city. In the Wikipedia article for Ramesses I we read in part:

Originally called Paramessu, Ramesses I was of non-royal birth, being born into a noble military family from the Nile Delta region, perhaps near the former Hyksos capital of Avaris. He was a son of a troop commander called Seti. His uncle Khaemwaset, an army officer, married Tamwadjesy, the matron of Tutankhamun's Harem of Amun, who was a relative of Huy, the viceroy of Kush, an important state post. This shows the high status of Ramesses' family. Ramesses I found favor with Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the tumultuous Eighteenth Dynasty, who appointed him as his vizier. As Paramessu, Ramesses also served as the High Priest of Seth—as such, he would have played an important role in the restoration of the old religion following the Amarna heresy of a generation earlier, under Akhenaten. [12]

The prefix pa- in ancient Egyptian was affixed to names of gods or localities to indicate devotion or belonging. Pa-Canaan was land of Canaan. So I would assert that Pa-ramessu may very well have been the land of Rameses, or described an individual from that land. The name Ramesses is an English innovation on the Egyptian name Ramessu. The land may have even been awarded to his family some time after the conquest of the Hyksos by the 18th Dynasty pharaohs. So it is very possible that the city which Moses had simply called Rameses, or in one place in the King James Version, Raamses (Exodus 1:11) did exist before the birth of Rameses I. This is more certain, since it is reported that the Hyksos had occupied the city before their expulsion. However alternatively some sources translate the word Paramessu to mean "The one whom Ra has fashioned", indicating devotion to Ra, the Egyptian sun idol. That is also acceptable, and the same meaning can be applied to the city named Rameses, because they are essentially the same Egyptian word, minus the prefix pa-.

With all of this, it is evident that Moses may have used the name Rameses, or Raamses, to describe the place where Israel had been settled rather anachronistically, because it was probably not called Rameses in the days of Joseph, where Moses also used the term Goshen. Rather, in Exodus chapter 1, we see that the Israelites were enslaved, and they were used to build this city named Rameses. That probably happened under the Hyksos rulers who had been ejected by the Egyptians, and the control of the Delta had been returned to the Egyptians with the 18th Dynasty.

As for the Soleb inscription, which contains the mention of the “Shasu of Yahweh”, which is nomads of Yahweh, there is an article by one Bryan Windle at a website called Bible Archaeology Report which is titled Three Egyptian Inscriptions About Israel, which describes the Soleb Inscription, and we read:

At the end of the 15th century B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III built a temple to honor the god Amun-Ra at Soleb in Nubia (modern-day northern Sudan). Within the temple area are a series of columns on which Amenhotep III listed the territories he claimed to have conquered. Each territory is listed by a relief of a prisoner with their hands tied behind their backs over an oval “name ring” identifying the land of the particular foe. The most interesting from a biblical perspective is a column drum that lists enemies from the “the land of the Shasu (nomads) of Yahweh”. Given the other name rings nearby, the context would place this land in the Canaanite region. In addition, the prisoner is clearly portrayed as Semitic, rather than African-looking, as other prisoners in the list are portrayed. Two conclusions are almost universally accepted: this inscription clearly references Yahweh in Egyptian hieroglyphics (the oldest such reference outside of the Bible), and that around 1400 B.C. Amenhoteph III knew about the god Yahweh. Moreover, it would indicate an area in Canaan in the 15th century B.C. inhabited by nomadic or semi-nomadic people who worship the god Yahweh.

This inscription is also evidence that points to an early date for the exodus. According to a literal reading of 1 Kings 6:1, Solomon began building the temple in the 480th year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, placing the exodus around 1446 B.C. Moreover, when Moses first went to Pharaoh to deliver God’s message to let His people go, Pharaoh responded by saying, “Who is the LORD [Yahweh], that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD [Yahweh], and moreover, I will not let Israel go” (Ex. 5:2). By around 1400 B.C., when the Israelites would have been nearing the end of the conquest of Canaan, the ruling Egyptian Pharaoh does know about Yahweh. Egyptologist, Dr. Charles Aling and historian Dr. Clyde Billington summarize: “If the Pharaoh of the Exodus had never before heard of the God Yahweh, this strongly suggests that the Exodus should be dated no later than ca. 1400 BC because Pharaoh Amenhotep III had clearly heard about Yahweh in ca. 1400 BC.” [13]

According to the account of Moses, he certainly did confront the pharaoh Thutmose III with the Name of Yahweh, something with which, as the author here had cited, the pharaoh was unfamiliar and dismissive. The very fact that the Egyptians even remembered the name fifty or sixty years later is in itself a tribute to the truth of the Exodus account, that the event left much more than a minor impact on Egypt. Notice the author dates the Exodus to 1446 BC, which is very close to our own date. Egyptian dates are also often debated, so according to Wikipedia, for example, the rule of Thutmose III is dated from 1479 to 1425 BC, and it is stated that the date is according to the “Low Chronology”. But then the article remarks that “in some circles the older dates 1504 BC to 1450 BC are preferred from the High Chronology of Egypt.” [14] But Amenhotep III is said to have ruled from 1388 to 1351 BC, so the author’s dating of “around 1400 BC is much earlier, and Wikipedia does not offer that version. [15]

So if the Exodus took place around 1450 BC, as we have asserted in our Genesis commentary and elsewhere, and if Amenhotep III wrote about the nomads of Yahweh in the region of Canaan, after the forty years during which Israel had wandered the desert were complete, and adding at least several more years for Israel in the time before and after those forty years, then we would expect them to have begun the conquest of Canaan around 1400 BC, and the Soleb Inscription of Amenhotep III helps serve to prove that the Exodus account is completely historical in this regard.

The other two inscriptions which are discussed in this article by Bryan Windle are the Merneptah Stele, which is dated to about 1208 BC, and the Shishak Inscription from 925 BC which records an event from the rule of Rehoboam king of Judah found also in 1 Kings chapter 14. Among other inscriptions which have been discovered elsewhere, these are valuable to establish the existence of Israel and Judah according to the Scriptural record, but they are rather late for this discussion. There are also the Moabite Stone which details a revolt of Moab against Israel, and the Tel Dan Stele which mentioned the house of David, both from the 9th century BC. Then there are the Amarna letters, which we hope to discuss some time in the future. In those letters, kings in Canaan had appealed to pharaoh Akhenaten for his assistance against the invading Habiru, whom we would with certainty identify as the Hebrews, and Akhenaten was evidently unwilling to provide such help, ignoring the pleas of Canaanite kings who had been vassals to Egypt. Perhaps Akhenaten was also weary of the God of Israel. He ruled Egypt immediately after Amenhotep III.

So this leads us to discuss our own chronology of the Exodus. This we had done in our Genesis commentary, however we shall offer it again here, because this is where it properly belongs. Once we realize the chronology, it shall become evident that the Egyptian reference to the “Shasu of Yahweh” helps to establish the truth of our chronology and the history of the period as well as the historicity of the Exodus account.

For the history of the children of Israel in Genesis, we had used a period provided by Paul of Tarsus, who in Galatians chapter 3 (3:17) had said that the Law had been given at Sinai four hundred and thirty years after the initial promise to Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15 (15:13), some time after the initial promise to Abraham, Yahweh had told him to “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years”. But we would assert that the four hundred years mentioned there are inclusive from the time of the utterance of those words, to the time when they would be released from that captivity in Egypt. They must be inclusive, because from the initial call of Abraham to the time when Jacob had went to Egypt is about two hundred and fifteen years, and there is no space for four hundred full years of Israel in Egypt to satisfy the chronological demands of the events in Moses, Joshua, Judges and the Kingdom period down to the time of the Assyrian conquests. However a sojourn and captivity in Egypt for the remaining two hundred and fifteen years is very reasonable. The “four hundred” figure is also just a round number, since in Genesis chapter 15 Abraham is not yet a hundred years old. When Isaac is born, there are four hundred and five years left in Paul’s four hundred and thirty.

So Isaac was born when Abraham was a hundred years old, and Jacob was born when Isaac was sixty, which accounts for the first eighty five years of Paul’s four hundred and thirty. Then Jacob went to Egypt at the age of a hundred and thirty years, which is two hundred and fifteen years of Paul’s four hundred and thirty. We had reckoned in our Genesis commentary that since Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before pharaoh in Egypt (Genesis 41:46) that he was about forty in the middle of the seven years of famine, when Jacob came to Egypt at age one hundred and thirty. So when Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten, Israel had been in Egypt for about seventy years. This leaves about 145 years of the final two hundred and fifteen. In our Genesis chronology, we dated the death of Joseph to about 1595 BC.

However while Israel was in the Nile Delta, in Goshen, or Rameses, a group of tribes from Canaan had also settled in the Delta, and some time after Jacob had gone to Egypt, the country became divided, the Egyptian pharaohs had fled from the Delta region southward to Thebes, from where they only ruled over Upper Egypt for about a hundred years, and the 15th Dynasty of Hyksos kings of Egypt ruled Lower Egypt and the Delta area for all of that time, until they were driven out by 18th Dynasty Egyptian pharaohs around 1540 BC. Egyptologists explain that during the Hyksos period, their kings assumed the title of pharaoh and sought to assimilate themselves into Egyptian society.

While it is not directly evident that the Hyksos pharaohs had oppressed Israel in Goshen, that certainly is a possibility, and we shall now consider it here. The Hyksos certainly had not oppressed Israel before the death of Joseph, who died around 1595 BC when they had evidently already ruled Lower Egypt for at least fifty years. However there is reason to believe that they had oppressed Israel for their last fifty years in Egypt, since we have seen statements in Britannica, that there is evidence of Hyksos presence at Rameses. The 18th Dynasty pharaoh Ahmose I completed the conquest of the Hyksos begun by his predecessors and reunified Egypt, and while he seemed to be the best candidate for the “pharaoh who knew not Joseph” which is first mentioned in Exodus 1:8, examining the text of Exodus it seems probable that even before his time Israel had been reduced to slavery.

So in my opinion, the presence of the Hyksos had obscured the presence of Israel in Egypt. But by the time the Hyksos were expelled and the Egyptians once again ruled the area, Israel only had about ninety years left to the time they would remain in Egypt, and during that relatively short time it is reasonable that they are not mentioned in surviving Egyptian inscriptions. It is also well known, that Egyptian pharaohs had a practise which from Roman history is called damnatio memoriae, which is the deliberate erasure of a person or predecessor from all records and monuments. In a March 16th, 2026 article by Robert De Graaf titled Why Ancient Egyptians Tried to Erase the Memory of Some Pharaohs from History we read the following:

While most people who have ever lived are now forgotten, as humans, we tend to place value on our legacy. This was especially true in ancient Egypt, where the afterlife was central to cultural beliefs. Many people, especially the pharaohs, spent much of their lives preparing for life after death. This meant that erasing someone’s name and memory was considered a serious punishment, affecting the victim for eternity. We know this practice as damnatio memoriae, and it was used against several pharaohs in ancient Egypt. Ironically, being erased sometimes protected an erased pharaoh’s tomb and monuments, and as a result of modern archaeological finds, they are now among the best-known pharaohs. But who knows how many other pharaohs have been completely forgotten due to the process of damnatio memoriae.

…

In the ancient Egyptian belief system, the afterlife was everything, and they spent much of their lives preparing for death. The Egyptians believed that a person was made up of their physical body, as well as their Ka, or life force, their Ba, or personality, which continued on in the afterlife and could travel between the realms, and the Ren, or name. It was believed that if the Ren was no longer spoken regularly, the person’s Ba would either be forced to wander aimlessly in the afterlife, or worse, cease to exist entirely.

Therefore, when a person’s name was purged from records, it was not only a temporal punishment, but an eternal and spiritual one. Erasure included defacing statues and bas reliefs, carving away their names, toppling monuments, and desecrating their tombs. Any mention of them would be scrubbed from the monumental architecture, leaving their legacy as little more than chisel marks on stone. [16]

As a digression, I have found an article concerning an instance of this same practice but in Persia, where one scholar suspects that Cyrus had done this same thing, and it seems quite credible. I hope I can sort it out in time on the occasion that I have an opportunity to do a Daniel commentary.

As the article also explains, certain Roman emperors also suffered this practice, but evidently it was not as effective in Rome. Now here we must ask, that if Egyptian pharaohs were willing to erase all memories of their own predecessors, which they believed would also damn them to an afterlife spent in misery, or even in nothing, then why wouldn’t they also erase any memory of Israel in Egypt? For that Thutmose III had plenty of time, since he ruled for as long as another twenty-five years after the Exodus. However by the time of Amenhotep III and the mention of the “Shasu of Yahweh” in his inscriptions, perhaps it was safe to mention Israel because the mention was in the context of boasts of conquest, and the shame of the events of the Exodus were a dim memory.

According to our Genesis chronology, Joseph died at the age of one hundred and ten years, around 1595 BC. Then Moses was born around 1530 BC, since he was eighty years old at the time of the Exodus, and the oppression of Israel had already been ongoing for some time before his birth. Since Moses was a great-grandson of Joseph’s brother Levi, and since many men did not marry until late in life, the sixty-five years between the death of Joseph and the birth of Moses is entirely plausible. Therefore, as we commence with our readings, or highlights in Exodus, we can only imagine that it is some time between 1595 BC and 1530 BC, and there is no indication of how much time had passed before the birth of Moses. Since the children of Israel are described as having been in bondage and having built cities before they began to be forced to expose their male infants, they certainly may have spent some decades in bondage before they were forced to do so.

The list of 15th Dynasty pharaohs as they survive in the fragments of the 3rd century BC Ptolemaic historian Manetho, or in the citations of Manetho found in the writings of Josephus, span as many as 284 years, or in Josephus, about two hundred and fifty four years, and they are not reliable since many of the pharaohs listed, who were said to have ruled Lower Egypt for as long as fifty years, have no trace in archaeology or history and the length of over two hundred and fifty years is not possible in light of all known ancient Egyptian history. But according to Egyptologists and surviving monuments, the Dynasty had a short list of seven or eight pharaohs who are generally attested in monuments. the last two of these pharaohs are within our scope of interest here: the pharaoh Apepe, who was also called Apophis by the Egyptians, is said to have ruled from some time around 1590 BC to about 1550 BC, and after him a pharaoh named Khamudi ruled for ten years until 1540, when the Hyksos were driven from Egypt by 18th dynasty pharaoh Ahmose I.

The thought that Apophis is the “pharaoh who knew not Joseph”, who had come to rule only a few years after the death of Joseph, is very inviting, even enticing. This is because Apophis was also the Egyptian god of chaos, darkness and fire, and was represented as a giant snake or serpent. Perhaps Apepe was called by that name as a pejorative. So while in my Genesis commentary, I leaned towards the probability that the Israelites were first enslaved by Ahmose I, now with further research, and at least some academic support for the existence of the city Rameses before the pharaoh who bore that name, I am willing to consider this pharaoh as the original oppressor of Israel. Otherwise, the treasure cities of Exodus 1:8 would only have a ten-year window in which to be built, between the rule in the Delta of Ahmose I in 1540 BC and the birth of Moses in 1530, and that seems even less likely.

So with this we shall begin some readings in Exodus, and have a digression to discuss the first few verses:

Exodus 1:1 Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob. 2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, 3 Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, 4 Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. 5 And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.

This list is concise, but the number of souls, or living people, who had come to Egypt with Jacob is the same number, which is seventy. However as we had discussed in our commentary on Genesis chapter 46, titled The Descent into Egypt, Joseph and his two sons are counted in the total of seventy, although they were already in Egypt, along with Jacob himself, and for one reason or another, two women out of what must have been many were also counted. They are Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and Serah the daughter of Asher. While the presence of many other women in the group is evident in Genesis chapter 46, for some reason they were not counted.

To continue with the Exodus account:

Exodus 1: 6 And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. 7 And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them. 8 Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. 9 And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: 10 Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land. 11 Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.

Here the spelling of Rameses differs from where it is mentioned in Genesis chapter 47, and twice in the Book of Numbers. Evidently, Rameses and Goshen were synonymous. In that chapter of Genesis we read:

11 And Joseph placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded.

But even earlier in the chapter there are several references to Goshen, so we shall read one of them, concerning where Joseph’s family would dwell:

5 And Pharaoh spake unto Joseph, saying, Thy father and thy brethren are come unto thee: 6 The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land make thy father and brethren to dwell; in the land of Goshen let them dwell: and if thou knowest any men of activity among them, then make them rulers over my cattle.

So the children of Israel had been enslaved and compelled to labor for their masters. As we have earlier discussed, there are claims that Rameses was a new city built by the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II, however we have seen evidence that the city existed in the time of his predecessor Seti I and even before that, as Britannica had acknowledged in its own article on the city.

Seti I had built a palace on the site, but here the city is only accounted as a “treasure city”. Such a city acted as a storehouse for goods, but not necessarily gold or silver. A “treasure city” could have stored goods and grain, military supplies and weapons, and a host of other items stocked for future use. But evidently Rameses was only a couple of kilometers from Avaris, the city which the Hyksos had used for their capital. When we had discussed the life of Joseph in Egypt, we described the capital of that time as Itjtawy, an ancient city about thirty miles south of the Delta. But the site of ancient Avaris, the capital of the 15th Dynasty pharaohs, was on the Delta and about 85 miles northeast of Itjtawy. Having been overpowered in the Delta by the Hyksos, and with a failing administration, the last of the 13th Dynasty pharaohs to rule in Itjtawy, pharaoh Merneferre Ay, had apparently moved his capital to Thebes some time around 1677 BC, which is rather early for our chronology. But as we had discussed in Part 57 of our Genesis commentary, titled The Double Portion, other chronologies have dated his rule somewhat later, to a time that does align with our Genesis commentary.

With this information, the view that Apophis was the pharaoh who had enslaved Israel aligns much better with Scripture and history. When Pharaoh Ahmose I ran the Hyksos from Lower Egypt, why would he build treasure cities in the Delta region, so far from his own capital Thebes where his power was consolidated? Ancient Thebes is over three hundred miles from the Delta. But the site of Rameses is only a couple of kilometers from the ancient site of Avaris, and it is much more plausible that a pharaoh would want his treasure cities within reasonable distance of his capital. With this, I shall consider Apophis as the most likely pharaoh to have enslaved Israel, and his name certainly makes the association enticing. The site of ancient Pithom, the other treasure city built by the Israelites, is debated by scholars, however there are several candidate sites proposed in the eastern portion of the Delta, which would also have been reasonably close to Avaris.

Furthermore, the revelation that Apophis must have been the pharaoh who had enslaved Israel also reveals the fact that during the first fifty or sixty years of Hyksos dominance in Lower Egypt, the Israelites must have continued to keep themselves distinct and set apart from the invading Hyksos, in spite of the fact the the Egyptians consider both groups to have been Asiatics, and they most certainly had a reasonably common language.

As the account in the balance of the first chapter of Exodus goes, after the treasure cities were built, the pharaoh, whether it were Apophis or his successor, had begun forcing the children of Israel to expose their male infants at birth, and save only the females. The midwives are portrayed as having resisted.

The practice of exposing infants is discussed elsewhere in the ancient world, and especially in early Greek literature. The Greeks had evidently exposed unwanted children, and especially girls, since by parents who were impoverished they were seen as a burden rather than as a potential source of help or profit. According to the poets, the practice freed the parents of any culpability in the event that the infant died, because upon exposure its fate was seen as having been in the hands of the gods. While there are competing accounts of the life of Cyrus of Anshan, the Persian emperor, among Greek historians, in the one offered by Herodotus, even he was exposed as an infant, since his grandfather Astyages had a dream and was afraid that he would be overthrown by the lad, who was born to his daughter and a noble Persian father. Of course, Christians should view such a pagan practice as a crime tantamount to infanticide.

So as the Exodus account opens, we can see that it certainly is a historical book, its veracity is only doubted by so-called scholars who consistently get their facts wrong, so that they are not really facts at all, and perhaps, it seems, at least some of them may even do that purposely, which is the impression I had of the article from Cambridge University Press which we had discussed earlier.

Hopefully soon we shall return and commence our discussion with the early life of Moses.

Footnotes

1 Assessing Ebla, Paul Maloney, Biblical Archaeology Review, March, 1978, https://library. biblicalarchaeology.org/article/assessing-ebla/, accessed July 9th, 2026.

2 The Name Yahweh in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Clyde E. Billington PhD, Associates for Biblical Research, https://biblearchaeology.org/the-name-yahweh-in-egyptian-hieroglyphic-texts/, accessed July 9th, 2026.

3 ibid.

4 ibid.

5 ibid.

6 ibid.

7 Yhwʒ of Shasu-Land, Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/ yahweh-before-israel/yhw-of-shasuland/119116DC7806AE299828B5D58EA06539, accessed July 9th, 2026.

8 The Name Yahweh in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Billington

9 Yhwʒ of Shasu-Land, Cambridge University Press

10 Per Ramessu, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Per-Ramessu, accessed July 9th, 2026.

11 ibid.

12 Ramesses I, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_I, accessed July 9th, 2026.

13 Three Egyptian Inscriptions About Israel, Bryan Windle, Bible Archaeology Report, March 8, 2019, https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2019/03/08/three-egyptian-inscriptions-about-israel/, accessed July 9th, 2026.

14 Thutmose III, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thutmose_III, accessed July 9th, 2026.

15 Amenhotep III, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenhotep_III, accessed July 9th, 2026.

16 Why Ancient Egyptians Tried to Erase the Memory of Some Pharaohs from History, Robert De Graff, The Collector, March 16th, 2026, https://www.thecollector.com/damnatio-memoriae-ancient-egypt/, accessed July 10th, 2026.