The Exodus

Consequenses for Egypt

In the centuries before and during the approximately 200 years that the children of Israel were in Egypt, it was a great empire which exerted its control or influence far beyond its own borders, and also held subject many of the city-states of the Levant as vassals. But from the time of pharaoh Thutmose III, which is when the Exodus had occurred, to the time of Akhenaten not even a hundred years later, Egypt had rather quickly decreased in power to the point where, as the Amarna Letters fully reflect, it would not even care to defend its vassal states in Palestine against the invading Hebrews.

For several centuries thereafter, throughout the Judges period and until the time of the divided kingdom and the chastisement of Rehoboam, Egypt had not been a threat to Israel, and apparently showed little interest in regaining its dominion over Palestine. During a short-lived revival, Rameses II exerted Egyptian military strength at the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, where he failed in his attempt to gain the northern Syrian city. However whatever he may or may not have done in Palestine was unnoticed in Scripture and seems to have been of no consequence, as his own inscriptions were boastful and his achievements were overstated.

Then by the time of the prophet Isaiah, Egypt was invaded and was ruled over for a time by Nubians, and its blood was spoiled forever. During another short-lived revival, over a century after the deportations of Israel and apparently soon after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, Egypt once again sent its armies north, in an attempt to gain control of the ancient Hittite capital city of Carchemish for itself, which is when Josiah king of Judah was slain in battle. Shortly thereafter Egypt would fall subject to the Babylonians, and then to the Persians, and continued its decline until it became a colony for both Macedonians and Romans. So while Egypt has not really been Egypt in well over 2,500 years, its decline and inevitable destruction truly did begin with the Exodus.

Scoffers

With this there are many scoffers who try to dispute whether the children of Israel were ever slaves in Egypt for “four hundred years”, as the Judaized denominational Christians claim. First, discussing Galatians chapter 3 here some 16 months ago, we determined that Paul had reckoned a period of 430 years from the call of Abraham to the giving of the law at Sinai. Of that period, it is determined from Scripture that there were about 215 years from the call of Abraham to the time when Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt, and from then the children of Israel were actually in Egypt for the next 215 years, originally as guests, where they could not have been held in bondage for more than two hundred years. In our Galatians presentation, we elucidated the corroborating evidence for all of this from the genealogies and other aspects of Scripture.

Furthermore, in our presentation of Acts chapters 6 and 7, given here over three years ago, we illustrated that the entire period of that 200 years of captivity was during the time of the 18th dynasty, where we wrote the following:

Regardless of the mainstream academic contentions over the pharaoh and the time of the Exodus, which generally place it in the 19th Dynasty and at the time of Ramses, both the testimony of Josephus and an honest study of the chronology of the period tell us that an 18th Dynasty pharaoh named Thutmose, whom Josephus calls Tethmosis, was the pharaoh of the Exodus. There were four pharaohs by this name, and they were all related. Thutmose I and Thutmose II were the third and fourth pharaohs of this dynasty. Hatshepsut was fifth, and it is very likely she who drew Moses out of the water, thereby giving him a form of her family name. The sixth and eighth pharaohs of this dynasty were Thutmose III and IV. The death of one more Thutmose, who never became pharaoh, led to the ascension of his brother Akhenaten. It was during the reign of Akhenaten that the Amarna Letters were written. These archaeological relics were written to Akhenaten by various kings of the land of Canaan and in them it is apparent that they had beseeched him for protection from the invading Hebrews.

Much of the history of White nations from the earliest times was never recorded, or it was recorded so concisely that there is often difficulty creating a narrative from the few facts which have survived. And just as often, histories which were written were destroyed and ultimately replaced by accounts that are not as incriminatory or perhaps are even more complimentary of the parties in power. This is true, for examples, of the life of Alexander the Great in ancient times, and of the crimes of both the Bolshevik Jews and the allied nations which defeated Hitler’s Germany in modern times. The Adamic, or White race, has not always had a penchant for leaving accurate records of the past for their posterity. So it was with the Egyptians, and the Pharaohs had frequently destroyed the records and monuments of their predecessors. Here is a description of this very phenomenon which is found in an article on the pharaoh Horemheb, at the Ancient Egypt Online website:

Horemheb ([which means] "Horus is in festival") was the last pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, but can also be considered as the founder of the nineteenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt. [He really belonged to neither dynasty, he was a military general and was replaced by a military general, Ramesses I, the same level to which Rome also devolved in its decline] He rose from an obscure background to serve up to four kings of Egypt (Akhenaten, Smenkhare, Tutankhamun and Ay) before finally becoming pharaoh of ancient Egypt in his own right.

Booth suggests he was "either a genuine individual who was charismatic and trustworthy or a duplicitous man who was clever and deceitful, convincing each king of his loyalty whilst being loyal only to himself". Whether he is considered as a saint or a sinner depends in large part on a consideration of his role in events following the demise of the Atenist experiment of Akhenaten [the monotheistic worship of the sun-god Aten], the details of which are steeped in controversy and open to debate. He has been described both as "the saviour and father of his country" (Weigal) and the "restorer of just and effective government" (Kitchen) or as a "military strongman" (Kemp) and [a] "general without an inheritance" (Van de Meiroop) who tried to remove his predecessors from the historical record, usurped their monuments and on whose orders a Hittite prince was murdered.

From this and similar descriptions in other references, it is evident that the Wikipedia article on the pharaoh Ay correctly summarizes Horemheb’s rise to power where it says that “It appears that one of Horemheb's undertakings as Pharaoh was to eliminate all references to the monotheistic experiment, a process that included expunging the name of his immediate predecessors, especially Ay, from the historical record.” But this is not all. Returning to the article on Horemheb found at Ancient Egypt Online, where in relation to these rulers, and because of the dearth of surviving records, several possibilities from various scholars are once again discussed, we read:

Van de Meiroop suggests that when Horemheb did become pharaoh he "expressed his displeasure at having been upstaged" by removing Ay's name from monuments and destroying the monuments of Nakhtmin [an Egyptian official and the designated heir of Ay, whom Horemheb had usurped]. However, Booth has suggested that Horemheb was not moved by petty revenge and that as an ultra-traditionalist defender of [the Egyptian idol] Maat he was happy to allow the elderly Ay (as the surviving male member of the previous dynasty) to rule knowing that he would not live long. The text of the Coronation Decree is ambiguous but could be interpreted as confirming that Ay (as the living Horus) named him as heir (although Gardiner notes that it could also mean that Horemheb carried the cult statue of Horus of Hnes to Karnak) so it is possible that Ay and Horemheb worked together to achieve their common goal of restoring Egypt to glory. There is no definitive evidence to confirm the position one way or another, however, his destruction of the monuments of Nakhmin would suggest that there had been an attempt to prevent Horemheb gaining the throne.

Horemheb did usurp the mortuary temple of Ay (and numerous monuments of Tutankhamun), but Ay had himself already usurped this monument from Tutankhamun. Ay's tomb was certainly defaced but Booth suggests that Horemheb caused only "cosmetic" damage and limited his attacks on Ay to the Theban area and that it was the Ramesside kings [of the 19th dynasty] who undertook more consistent attacks on the memory of Ay. Horemheb also began to dismantle the temples of the Aten at Karnak during his fifteenth year (using the blocks as fillers for his own buildings) and may also have begun to dismantle the city of Akhetaten, yet this may have been pragmatic and political rather than personal and vindictive. Hornung has suggested that "Haremheb in no way contemplated an obliteration of the Amarna period but rather attempted to combine tradition with revolution and thus to initiate a new and practicable course of action".

From an article titled Ramses II as the Builder of Monuments found at a another website with the name Ancient Egypt Online, we read the following of the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramses II:

Throughout his life, Ramses II went on to build various monuments and thus his legacy of being a builder in Ancient Egypt and Nubia was born. Ramses II constructed monuments such as Abu Simbel, the mortuary temple Ramesseum, Pi-Ramesses in the Delta, and most notably completed the Temple at Karnak. On many already built temples and existing statues he had his own cartouche inscribed to ensure that his name lived on. The inscriptions were deeply carved into the structures to ensure that they could not be easily destroyed or removed by succeeding empires. In addition, Ramses II had an abundance of colossal statues erected which depicted him as pharaoh. It was more statues than any other pharaoh before him had erected. This helped to solidify his existence and reign in the 19th dynasty and make him more powerful.

It is important to note that many of the monuments from previous pharaohs were destroyed and the materials were used to build things that represented Ramses II, his dynasty, and his god-like status. Chefren’s pyramid at Giza became a target for needed materials. As a result, some of the blocks from this structure were taken to help build the base at Ptah’s Great Temple in Memphis.

So it is, that the pharaohs of the post-Exodus period sought to destroy the historical monuments and records of their predecessors, and they did this for hundreds of years. Any records of the captivity of Israel in Egypt would naturally have been destroyed along with them, since they would have represented a shameful scar on the history of an Egypt which later pharaohs such as Horemheb actively sought to restore to glory. And it is a marvel that in spite of this, Flavius Josephus still understood that a pharaoh who bore the name Tuthmosis was indeed the pharaoh of the Exodus, as he cites three times from the writings of Manetho, in his treatise Against Apion. Today even the writings of Manetho are mostly, but not quite completely, lost. The pharaoh of the Exodus is not known from our Scripture, and the names of these ancient pharaohs were obscure to the historians of the Greeks and Romans. Manetho himself was an Egyptian priest of the 3rd century BC, but many of the writings later attributed to him were probably not his. However in this regard, while the words of Josephus and Manetho could not be corroborated from the Bible or the histories, they have been corroborated to some degree by the archaeological discoveries of modern times. And if much of the history was lost along with the purposeful destruction of the ancient Egyptian records, we nevertheless have an assurance that our Biblical accounts are true.