When Was The Exodus?

VIDEO: "How Long Were The Israelites In Egypt?"--NathanH83 (13 min.)

I have posted a bit, recently, about problems or suspected problems with various chronologies. In doing so, I mentioned a video from NathanH83 where he discussed errors in the Masoretic Text (the 24 books of the Tanakh in Rabbinic Judaism which dates from around 1100 AD, and is the basis for the Old Testament translations of most English Bibles). In the video above, NathanH38 discusses another error in the Masoretic Text which leaves the impression that Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, referencing Exodus 12:40. However, going to earlier sources, including the Septuagint, he shows that the original text indicated that Israel was in Canaan (the period from Abraham down to Jacob) and Egypt for a total of 430 years. That is, the whole of the Canaanite and Egyptian period was 430 years. Through some calculations, NathanH83 shows that the time split between the two was an even 215 years each.

    I had mentioned in an earlier post a book by S.C. Compton, Exodus Lost, gives compelling evidence, based on pollen counts from Red Sea core samples, that the entry into Egypt was around 1628 B.C. Sepecifically, the evidence shows that Egypt experienced its time of plenty around the time of the 1645 eruption of the Anaikchak volcano in modern day Alaska, and its famine in approximately 1628 BC, following the eruption of Thera. If Israel was in Egypt for 215 years, entering at or around 1628 BC, that means that the Exodus would have been around 1413 BC. Although this completely destroys my prior theory that the Exodus was linked to Late Bronze Age Collapse, such is the price of following the evidence.

    However, this would confirm what a lot of Bible scholars have argued: That "Pharaoh's daughter" was Hatshepsut, who would go on to become Pharaoh in her own right. If Moses was 80 years old when Israel left Egypt, that would put the date of his birth as around 1493. This puts Moses within the lifetime of Hatshepsut, who lived from 1507–1458 BC. In fact, she would have been a teen (about 14 years) when Moses was born. Her father was Thutmose I (sometimes read as Thutmosis or Tuthmosis I)--you can see that similarity in the names, with Moses essentially having a similar name absent the reference to Thoth. Thutmosis was the third pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. The first pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty was Ahmose I, who is believed to have reigned from 1549–1524 BC. Ahmose and his father were notable for driving the Hyksos from Lower Egypt (that is, the delta region of the Nile, including where the Hebrews had settled in Goshen). In fact, the Hyksos rulers make up the 15th Dynasty, approximately 1650–1550 BC. 

     Putting this all together, the dating suggests, then, that Israel entered Lower Egypt during the Hyksos period, and that it was with the Hyksos being driven out by the Egyptian pharaohs from Thebes about 1550 BC that the Israelites came into bondage. This also suggests that Hatshepsut was the "Pharaoh's daughter" that raised Moses. In fact, it begs the question of whether Moses was Senenmut, Hatshepsut's architect and adviser.

    If the foregoing is correct, and the Exodus was in 1413 B.C., it would have been during the reign of Amenhotep II (1427–1401 BC) which seems to be accepted by Bible scholars. Amenhotep's oldest son apparently died young, which also supports the Biblical account of the death of the first-born of Egypt. I will have to re-read my Josephus to see how this matches up to his history.