When Pharaoh Knelt to the Slaves of Goshen

How History Corroborates the Exodus of Moses

Perhaps that most insightful commentary regarding the haughtily arrogant dynasties of Egypt came from the 19th century poet Percy B. Shelley. In his short classic "Ozymandias," the author described a chance encounter with a desert traveler who had witnessed an incredible scene. There, amidst the desolation of the barren wilderness lay a statue in ruin. Engraved was the phrase "King of Kings" atop the declaration, "nothing beside remains." In one of life's bittersweet ironies, the statue boasting the enduring legacy of a mighty king had been reduced to desert debris like the very people the king had once conquered.

Ozymandias is a depiction of the greatest of all the Egyptian pharaohs, Rameses II, of the nineteenth dynasty. Rameses (or Ramses, or Ramesses) sat upon the throne of Egypt for nearly seven decades, and was so powerful and revered that he became a legend in his own time. He was a mighty conqueror, a fierce warrior, and a capable administrator who saw Egypt rise to a powerful zenith. Rameses was, militarily, the most prolific conqueror since Thutmose III. Early church historians like Eusebius of Caesarea even attributed the Biblical exodus of Moses to the reign of Rameses, reasoning that God must have elected Rameses for the humiliation of the slave revolt.

Historically, no exodus can be traced to the reign of Rameses the Great. Rameses held his court in Egypt during the 13th century B.C., from approximately 1280-1210. In the Bible, the Israelite exodus from Egypt began from the city of Rameses in lower Egypt and proceeded unto Succoth where the children of Israel stayed in booths (Exodus 12:37). The identification of a city called "Rameses" led many to conclude, falsely, that Rameses the Great was the reigning Pharaoh during the exodus. In fact, a region known as Rameses existed long before the Israelites came to be slaves in Egypt. It existed during the time when Joseph (son of Jacob and Rachel) served as vizier in Egypt (Genesis 47:11), hundreds of years before the Israelites were forced into slavery in the land of Goshen. Goshen was a region on the East Nile Delta, near the Suez Canal.

When Cecil B. DeMille and Hollywood got their hands on the Torah, they found an amazingly romantic story. "The Ten Commandments" with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner became a money-making masterpiece. Rameses the Great, with his famous queen Nefertiti, would fall into a love triangle with Moses, the fallen prince of Egypt. During the next three hours, a bunch of English-speaking Semites would run away from Egypt, flaming ping-pong balls resembling hail would rain down upon a movie lot, and a giant backdrop of jello would be parted like the Red Sea. I'm sure you've seen it on screen. Charlton Heston lifts a staff, the jello is parted, the Israelites run to safety, and Pharaoh's chariots are submerged when the walls of the Red Sea collapse around them.

Although hard to believe, it seems that Hollywood may have slightly (substantially) altered history in the pursuit of a massive pile of money. While such a maneuver would come as a surprise to virtually no one, it does a great deal to discredit the Bible as a historically accurate document and portrays Jews as the spinners of webs of whimsical folk tales and farces. Neither subliminal suggestion is acceptable. First, there is absolutely no occurrence when the Bible has been proven inaccurate historically. From the Hittites to Sodom and Gomorrah and the Pool of Siloam, the Old and New Testaments have been proven historically accurate. Second, the idea that Jews concocted some elaborate exodus hoax to explain their "unjustified occupation" of Palestine is factually inaccurate and blatantly anti-Semitic.

The fact is that in spite of the concentrated efforts of anti-Semitic historians, those who would seek to strip Israel of her national statehood and dethrone her from God's list of preferred subjects, the account of the exodus from the Torah is historically accurate and provable with overwhelming archaeological evidence. The major difficulty in finding evidence for the exodus was that historians were looking in the wrong century, and in the wrong places. Rather than following the Hebrew version (a primary document), historians disregarded the Torah account because it had been written by Jews, and of course, the Jews had to have lied.

A close reading of the Tanakh, including the Books of Moses, places the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the 15th century BC, long before the time of Rameses the Great. Thus, the reason that no evidence has ever been found linking the exodus of the Israelites to the reign of Ramses is self-explanatory. According to the Bible, 480 years had elapsed since the exodus from Egypt unto the early years of the reign of Israel's King Solomon (I Kings 6:1). Solomon had claimed the throne from his father, David, in approximately 970 BC. On the modern Gregorian calendar, this corresponds to about 1450-1440 B.C. as the timing of the exodus. This timeline is historically viable for several reasons.

According to the Torah, the final and most lethal blow delivered by God unto the Egyptians was that the eldest male child in all of Egypt would die (Exodus 11:1). This, God's tenth and final plague, resulted in the death of Pharaoh's firstborn son (Exodus 12:29-30). The reigning Pharaoh at the time would have been Amenhotep II, who often ruled from Memphis, close to Goshen, where the Hebrew slaves were in bondage. Most historians do not believe that Amenhotep's eventual heir, Thutmose IV, was his eldest son. Amenhotep never made Thutmose his co-regent, likely indicating that Thutmose was an accidental heir. What is most probable is that the eldest son of Amenhotep II died at a young age, consistent with the account of Moses.

Tombs in Beni Hasan, Egypt are a popular tourist attraction for visitors and fans of antiquity. In recent years, ancient murals left on the walls near the Beni Hasan tombs have proven a provocative source of inquiry. These paintings, dated to about 1890 BC, show what appear to be migrations of Asiatic people traveling to Egypt. 1890 BC would be about the very time that Jacob (Israel) and his sons migrated to Egypt from Canaan to avoid a widespread famine, according to the Bible (Genesis 46).

According to Moses, the duration of time that the children of Israel spent in Egypt was 430 years (Exodus 12:41). If Jacob and his sons traveled from Canaan to Egypt at the time of the migration depicted in the Beni Hasan mural, advancing 430 years would lead to an exodus in approximately 1450 BC, consistent with the Jewish account in I Kings 6:1 and with the reign of Amenhotep II, who apparently lost his natural heir to premature death.

In 2006, Canadian documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici released a television special on the exodus entitled, The Exodus Decoded. Jacobovici, who is Jewish, traveled to Egypt to the ancient city of Avaris, near the land of Goshen where the Hebrew slaves had been held. According to the documentary, excavations at Avaris turned up nine signet rings bearing the name Yakov, which Jacobovici identified with Jacob, the father of all Jewish people. Whether or not the rings belonged to Jacob's son Joseph, who served as vizier for at least one pharaoh, the name Yakov clearly indicates the presence of Semitic people in Egypt hundreds of years before the exodus, which the Bible dates approximately 1445 BC.

Jacobovici's documentary team also examined inscriptions at the Serabit el-Khadem turquoise mines in the southern Sinai Peninsula, where the Israelites could have trekked having crossed the Red Sea. The Serabit inscriptions contain both Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as Semitic characters, indicating at the very least that there were Semitic slaves under the control of Egypt, which has long been denied by many anti-Semites and secular historians.

The Bible records that God destroyed the city of Jericho after the Israelite exodus from Egypt. The sudden, catastrophic destruction of the city's outer walls was dated by British archeologist John Garstang as having occurred about 1400 BC, which conforms to an exodus in about 1445 BC with four subsequent decades in the wilderness before reaching Canaan. Garstang's excavations took place in the early 1930s, and concluded that the walls of the city had inexplicably collapsed, as recorded in the Bible (Joshua 6:20).

It is known historically that the Israelites were ruled by various "judges" after the death of Joshua, the heir of Moses. These judges served as a bridge between Joshua and Saul, the first king of Israel. One of the ruling judges during this time was Jephthah, a war hero who had presided as Judge for several years in approximately 1100 BC. During Jephthah's tenure, the Israelites marked 300 years of continual residence in Palestine (Judges 11:26). This record is congruous with the exodus near 1445 BC, followed by 40 years of traveling in the wilderness (Numbers 32:13, Deuteronomy 2:7, 8:2), and eventually settling in Canaan in about 1400 BC.

Skeptics of the Biblical exodus note that there is no record of any prominent pharaoh having been drowned in the Red Sea. The response to such criticism is simple. First, the Bible does not state whether or not Pharaoh was killed with his men (Exodus 15:19). If Pharaoh was killed, then the Pharaoh of the Exodus was Thutmose III, who died in approximately 1450 BC. If the Pharaoh was not killed, then Amenhotep II survived the assault after his chariots were destroyed. This would help explain why the Egyptian conquests of Canaan were substantially scaled back sometime early during Amenhotep's reign.

Others have suggested that a company of 600 Egyptian chariots (Exodus 14:7) could not have been engulfed in the Red Sea without having left behind an insurmountable amount of physical evidence. This claim is rather implausible, as 3,500 years of erosion at the bottom of the Red Sea would leave just about everything covered in sand or coral. However, Christian archaeologist Ron Wyatt (now deceased) claimed to have found the remnant of an Egyptian chariot wheel hub in the Red Sea in the late 1970s. According to the Wyatt Museum in Cornersville, TN, the hub was dated to the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, sometime in the 15th century BC. Information about Mr. Wyatt's discovery find can be found here.

In 2003, online news source WorldNetDaily.com reported that two brothers from Great Britain claimed to have located what they believed to be chariot wheels and chariot parts while diving in the Gulf of Aqaba.

Even if we could definitively pinpoint the precise location where Moses and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, Moses recorded that Pharaoh's company was washed back onto the shoreline after its destruction (Exodus 14:30). In accordance with Egyptian tradition and religious law, the dead bodies would have been returned to Egypt and given proper burial. Salvageable military hardware would have been taken back to Egypt as well. After 3,500 years, the smaller pieces of debris, buried in the desert sands and beneath the depths of the Red Sea, remain elusive.

Secular historians have gone to great lengths to discredit the Bible for many reasons. For some, it is a frightening notion of absolute truth versus unbridled humanism. For others, it is probably scary that an omnipotent God would so brazenly choose sides with some (Israel, the Church of Jesus Christ) while cursing others (the antagonists of his chosen and his elect). Never to be discounted is the strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism that is fermenting throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. If the Old Testament can be proven to be false, it must be that the Jews have lied – and as they are liars, they have no right to seize land from peaceful Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Moses, the giver of the law, will always hold an important place in the heart of the Judeo-Christian world. Attempts to attribute the Torah to multiple authors and to assail the exodus from Goshen seek to destroy the credibility of Moses, to slander him as a prevaricator. To destroy Moses is to destroy the law, and with it, to dismantle Israel's claim to her homeland and strip Christ of his deity as the king of Israel.

Yet the murals at Beni Hasan indicate a migration to Egypt to avoid famine, as recorded by Moses, in approximately the 19th century BC. The Yakov signet rings found in Avaris, near Goshen, indicate the presence of Semitic people at the foot of Pharaoh in approximately 1700 BC. The Semitic etchings in the Serabit el-Khadem turquoise mines prove the presence of slaves, or former slaves, having crossed the Sinai Peninsula. The reign of Thutmose IV, the unlawful heir of Amenhotep II, leaves little doubt the eldest son of Pharaoh did not survive the Passover, the way that Israel did.

3,500 years ago, an arrogant and self-righteous Pharaoh hardened his heart before God. Likely, his name was Amenhotep, but like the haughty despot in Percy Shelley's poem, he was the great Ozymandias over Israel. He stretched forth his arms and said, "No Moses, I will not let your people go."

And, just as Ozymandias, Pharaoh found himself surrounded in the very ruin that he had pronounced upon the Hebrews. Did he call himself the king of kings when his chariots sank in the sea? Or did he realize that his enduring legacy would be that he had signed the death warrant for his first-born, by threatening the children of God?

Pharaoh, who built great cities, who conquered all things, who believed he was the child of the sun, standing there, on the shores of the Red Sea, in marvel of the God of Hebrew slaves. Perhaps Amenhotep II, as an old man, explained everything to his much younger namesake. Perhaps that is why Amenhotep IV, Pharaoh of Egypt, embraced a monotheistic god, to the consternation of the temple priests.

After 430 years of slavery, it wasn't the slaves of Goshen that ultimately resigned their heritage to Pharaoh. It was Pharaoh, a broken man, who bowed down to the slaves, and their god.

When you go out into battle against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and numbers greater than you, be not afraid of them: for the LORD your God is with you, which brought you out of the land of Egypt. -- Deuteronomy 20:1


Originally published by author on MySpace.com, 2006.