The title is from an article by Brad Aaronson at Orthodox Union. I have come across articles and videos in my studies that indicate that the traditional timeline and dating of significant events in the Old Testament is incorrect. In fact, I posted on some ideas about how long the Israelites were in Egypt and when they left a couple years ago based on data on pollen counts that seemed to indicate a rough date when Israel entered Egypt combined with information from older versions of the Old Testament that used by most modern Bibles that indicated that Israel remained in Egypt for 215 years.
Aaronson takes a different approach, ignoring the official dating and instead trying to match (synchronize) events. While I believe that there are significant problems with his theory (see below) he does raise some interesting points and disputes in the archeological record concerning Israel.
Aaronson analysis really begins in a footnote where he asserts that the dates commonly given for events in Egypt are off by 166 years citing “Fixing the History Books – Dr. Chaim Heifetz’s Revision of Persian History,” in the Spring 1991 issue of Jewish Action. Thus, while the accepted dating places the Exodus in the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III, believed by some to be the pharaoh at the time of the Exodus (in my post, cited above, I suggested that Thutmose's son, Amenhotep II, was the pharaoh of the Exodus). Aaronson observes, however, that nothing like the Exodus (or, more precisely, the plagues) occurred in the reign of Thutmose III or even Ramses II, another pharaoh that has been suggested as the pharaoh of the Exodus.
Aaronson goes on (footnotes omitted):
Both Thutmose III and Ramses II date to a period called the Late Bronze Age, which ended with the onset of the Iron Age. Since the Iron Age has been thought to be the time when Israel first arrived in Canaan, the Late Bronze Age has been called “The Canaanite Period,” and historians have limited their search for the Exodus to this time. When we break free of this artificial restraint, the picture changes drastically.
According to the Midrash, the Pharaoh of the Exodus was named Adikam and he had a short reign of four years. The Pharaoh who preceded him, whose death prompted Moses’ return to Egypt (Exodus 2:23, 4:19), was named Malul. Malul, we are told, reigned from the age of six to the age of 100. Such a long reign – 94 years! – sounds fantastic, and many people would hesitate to take this Midrash literally. As it happens, though, Egyptian records mention a Pharaoh who reigned for 94 years, and not only 94 years, but from the age of six to the age of 100! This Pharaoh was known in inscriptions as Pepi (or Phiops) II. The information regarding his reign is known both from the Egyptian historian-priest Manetho, writing in the 3rd century BCE, and from an ancient Egyptian papyrus called the Turin Royal Canon, which was only discovered in the last century.
Egyptologists, unaware of the midrash, have wrestled with the historicity of Pepi II’s long reign. One historian wrote:
Pepi II … appears to have had the longest reign in Egyptian history and perhaps in all history. The Turin Royal Canon credits him with upwards of ninety years. One version of the Epitome of Manetho indicates that he “began to rule at the age of six and continued to a hundred.” Although modern scholars have questioned this, it remains to be disproved.
While the existence of two kings who reigned a) 94 years, b) in Egypt, and c) from the age of six, is hard enough to swallow a coincidence, that is not all. Like Malul, Pepi II was the second to last king of his dynasty. Like Malul, his successor had a short reign of three or four years, after which Egypt fell apart. Pepi II’s dynasty was called the 6th Dynasty, and was the last dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Following his successor’s death, Egypt collapsed, both economically and under foreign invasion. Egypt, which had been so powerful and wealthy only decades before, suddenly could not defend itself against tribes of invading Bedouins. No one knows what happened. Some historians have suggested that the long reign of Pepi II resulted in stagnation, and that when he died, it was like pulling the support out from under a rickety building. But there is no evidence to support such a theory.
A papyrus dating from the end of the Old Kingdom was found in Egypt in the early 19th century. It is an account of an Egypt suddenly bereft of leadership. Violence is rampant. Foreign invaders are everywhere, with no one to hold them in check. The natural order of things has come to a crashing standstill. Slaves have disappeared and taken all the wealth of Egypt with them. Based on its literary style, it seems to be an eye-witness account of Egypt not long after the dissolution of the Old Kingdom. Its author, an Egyptian named Ipuwer, writes in the document below:
Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. (2:5)
The river is blood (2:10)
That is our water! That is our happiness! What shall we do in respect thereof? All is ruin! (3:10-13)
Trees are destroyed. (4:14)
No fruit or herbs are found . . . (6:1)
Forsooth, grain has perished on every side. (6:3)
The land is not light [dark]. (9:11)
Nile overflows [bringing the harvest], yet no one ploughs for him. (2:3)
No craftsmen work, the enemies of the land have spoilt its crafts. (9:6)
Gold and lapus lazuli, silver and malachite, camelian and bronze . . . are fastened on the neck of female slaves. (3:2)
Velikovsky recognized this as an eyewitness account of the ten plagues. His evaluation has been criticized on the basis that Ipuwer describes an overall breakdown of Egyptian society, and that the parallels to the plagues and the plundering of Egypt the night before the Exodus are not the central point of his composition. But Ipuwer was an Egyptian. His concern was the general state in which Egypt found itself, and what could be done to correct it. Had Ipuwer been a member of Pharaoh’s court, and witnessed the full drama of Moses and Aaron confronting his king, he might have written in such a way as to make the dating of the Exodus clear to even the most skeptical. As it is, we have an account of how the events of the Exodus affected Egypt as a whole.
He adds:
When the Bible tells us that Egypt would never be the same after the Exodus, it was no exaggeration. With invasions from all directions, virtually all subsequent kings of Egypt were of Ethiopian, Libyan or Asiatic descent. When Chazal tell us that King Solomon was able to marry Pharaoh’s daughter despite the ban on marrying Egyptian converts until they have been Jewish for three generations because she was not of the original Egyptian nation, there is no reason to be surprised.
The impact on the region outside of Egypt also supports a re-examination of the dating. Aaronson writes:
It was not only Egypt which felt the birth pangs of the Jewish People. The end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt preceded only slightly the end of the Early Bronze Age in the Land of Israel. The end of this period, dated by archaeologists to c.2200 BCE (in order to conform to the Egyptian chronology), has long puzzled archaeologists. The people living in the Land of Israel during the Early Bronze were the first urban dwellers there. They were, by all available evidence, primitive, illiterate and brutal. They built large but crude fortress cities and were constantly at war. At the end of the Early Bronze Age, they were obliterated.
Who destroyed Early Bronze Age Canaan? Before the vast amount of information we have today had been more than hinted at, some early archaeologists suggested that they were Amorites. The time, they thought, was more or less right for Abraham. So why not postulate a great disaster in Mesopotamia, which resulted in people migrating from there to Canaan? Abraham would have been thus one in a great crowd of immigrants (scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often felt compelled to debunk the idea of Divine commands).
Today, the picture is different. The invaders of the Early Bronze/Middle Bronze Interchange seem to have appeared out of nowhere in the Sinai and the Negev. Initially, they moved up into the Transjordan, and then crossed over north of the Dead Sea, conquering Canaan and wiping out the inhabitants. Of course, since we are dealing with cultural remnants and not written records, we don’t know that the previous inhabitants were all killed. Some of them may have remained, but if so, they adopted enough of the newcomers’ culture to “disappear” from the archaeological record.
And more:
... It is not only the period of the Exodus and Conquest which suddenly match the evidence of ancient records and archaeology when the dates of the archaeological periods are brought down:
1. The Middle Bronze Age invaders, after some centuries of rural settlement, expanded almost overnight into an empire, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. This empire has been termed the “Hyksos Empire,” after a group of nomads that invaded Egypt, despite the fact that there is no historical evidence for such an identification. History knows of one such empire. Archaeology knows of one such empire. The same adjustment which restores the Exodus and Conquest to history does the same to the United Kingdom of David and Solomon.
2. The Empire fell, bringing the Middle Bronze Age to an end. Archaeologists and Egyptologists are currently involved in a great debate over whether it was civil war or Egyptian invasions which destroyed the “Hyksos” empire. The biblical accounts of the revolt of the ten northern tribes and the invasion of Shishak king of Egypt make the debate irrelevant.
3. The period following the end of the Empire was one of much unrest, but saw tremendous literary achievements. Since this period, the Late Bronze Age, was the last period before the Iron Age, and since the Iron Age was believed to have been the Israelite Period, the Late Bronze Age was called the Canaanite Period. Strangely, these Canaanites spoke and wrote in beautiful Biblical Hebrew. Semitic Canaanites? Did the Bible get it wrong again? But then, coming after the time of David and Solomon, they weren’t really Canaanites. The speakers and writers of Biblical Hebrew were, as might have been guessed . . . Biblical Hebrews.
4. Finally we get to the Iron Age. This is when Israel supposedly arrived in Canaan. But it has been obvious to archaeologists for over a century that the archaeology of the Iron Age bears little resemblance to the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan. There were invasions, but they were from the north, from Syria and Mesopotamia, and they came in several waves, unlike the lightning conquest under Joshua. The people who settled the land after the invasions also came from the north, though there is much evidence to suggest that they weren’t the invaders, and merely settled an empty land after it had been destroyed by others. The south remained in the hands of the Bronze Age inhabitants, albeit on a lower material level.
And:
What is most strange is that multiple waves of invasion followed by northern tribes settling in the north of Israel is not an event which has gone unmentioned in the Bible. The invaders were the Assyrians. The settlers were the northern tribes who eventually became the Samaritans, And if the people in the south were descended from the Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the land, why, that merely means that the kingdom of Judah was a continuation of the kingdom of Judah. The only historical claims which are contradicted by the archaeological record are those of the Samaritans, who claim to have been the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel.
There are some problems with Aaronson's thesis, not the least of which is that the dating on which he relies are contested. For instance, Pepi II is believed to have ruled for 64 years; the end of the Old Kingdom in approximately 2200 B.C. puts the Exodus as roughly 1,600 years before the destruction of Solomon's temple by the Babylonians, which is far outside the 910 years in common Biblical chronologies. (Although even the Egyptian chronologies and Near East chronologies are nowhere as exact as most scholars would like you to think and not everyone agrees on the dating). The text of Ipuwer Papyrus, which according to Aaronson's thesis would have been composed about the time of the end of the Old Kingdom or shortly thereafter, is believed to have been composed hundreds of years later, in the late Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt (c.1991–1803 BC) (the actual papyrus has been dated to 1250 BC) and certain of the events do not match up with the Exodus. There was no Hyksos Empire as Aaronsen describes: the Hyksos were immigrants that flowed into Lower Egypt and then overthrew the Egyptians (see here and here). The more likely explanation is that Israel was the part of this Hyksos immigration, with Joseph being one of the "Hyksos" that obtained power by marrying into powerful Egyptian families, rather than the Hyksos being the empire of David and Solomon. Finally, the 166 year correction that Aaronson relies upon is based on faulty dating.
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