Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [51]
The circumstances may have been very different for the Hebrews of Moses’ time. There are numerous guesses and scenarios as to the timeline going from Joseph to Moses, a chronology complicated by very basic scholarly disagreements over Egyptian historical dates. Three of these scenarios are worth noting:
• The first, and perhaps most widely held theory, asserts that Joseph lived in Egypt in the time of the Hyksos, an Asiatic or Semitic group that invaded Egypt and held on to the Nile Delta area for a century, starting from around 1665 BCE. The Hyksos, who pioneered chariot warfare, gradually assimilated Egyptian practices and would have been open to another Semitic person, such as Joseph, rising to prominence. The Hyksos were driven out of the Nile Delta around 1570-1565 BCE by Ahmose (Amosis) I, first of the 18th Dynasty rulers of Egypt. This famous line of Egyptian rulers later included Thutmosis I and II, the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, the “boy king” Tutankhamen, and the general-turned-Pharaoh Horemheb. During this period, any Asiatics, including the Hebrews, would have been viewed as a threat, and the Pharaoh’s grim order to kill the Hebrew boys would have made strategic and historical sense.
In this time scheme, as Exodus suggests, the Hebrews remained in Egypt for several hundred years, and were enslaved by the Pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty, the first of whom was Ramses I, who came to power around 1309 BCE. Although Ramses I died after a one-year reign, to be succeeded by Seti (Sethos) I (1308-1291 BCE), the name Ramses is specifically mentioned in Exodus, although this might have been a later editor’s addition. The cities that the Hebrews were forced to build fit in with the building program of Ramses II and his heirs. During this time, Egypt consolidated its power over the Nile Delta and moved aggressively into Canaan and an eventual confrontation with the Hittites, a powerful group moving south from their base in what is now Turkey.
In this scenario, the most likely culprit for the Pharaoh at the time of Moses is Seti’s son Ramses II (1291-1224 BCE), and the Israelite Exodus occurs around 1290 BCE. Another possibility in this chronology is Seti’s son Merneptah, who actually recorded a military victory over Israel around 1235 BCE, by which time the Israelites are thought to have been established in Canaan.
• Cyrus Gordon, one of the most esteemed historians of the Bible and ancient Near East, and his coauthor Gary A. Rendsburg, make a case for a much later arrival of Joseph in Egypt. Using Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, along with biblical genealogies, they select Seti I as Joseph’s Pharaoh but maintain that Seti’s son Ramses II was Pharaoh when Moses was born. Gordon and Rendsburg argue that the long stretch of time between Joseph and Moses mentioned at the beginning of Exodus is unlikely. They conclude that the biblical Exodus did not occur until around 1175 BCE, when Egypt was at war with the so-called Sea Peoples, a collection of Mediterranean groups who included the Philistines. The Exodus account supports this theory, as it says that the Israelites detoured away from the “way of the land of the Philistines” to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
• A far more radical view comes from Charles Pellegrino in Return to Sodom and Gomorrah. Using a starkly different dating system, and geological evidence resulting from a tremendous volcanic eruption on the Mediterranean island of There in 1628 BCE, Pellegrino shows how each of the plagues—the red Nile, the darkened skies, etc.—could have been related to the aftermath of this explosion. The Thera eruption, Pellegrino argues, was fifty to one hundred times more powerful than the devastating 1883 CE explosion of Krakatoa. Pellegrino presses this notion further to suggest that the aftereffects of that eruption would have also affected the Mediterranean, spawning powerful tsunamis—or tidal waves—that might explain the parting