Amarna Letters

State of 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.[1]

Script

Before the Israelite conquest of Canaan, the Canaanites were using a cunieform script for written communications. One proof of this assertion is found in the Amarna Tablets. These tablets are diplomatic letters from Canaanite kings made to the Egyptian pharaoh. In many of them, the Canaanites were begging for Egyptian assistance to defend against the invading Habiru, Abiru, or Hebrews. The name given these documents by academics comes from the fact that they were discovered in the ground at Tell el Amarna in middle Egypt. They are written in cuneiform and are commonly and appropriately dated to the 14th century BC. But cuneiform writing was not native to the Egyptians, so the Canaanites were not writing in cuneiform for the benefit of the Egyptians. This is one proof among archaeological relics that Canaanites did not use what we know as Hebrew or Phoenician characters in their writing. The writings in Canaan found with Hebrew characters, and the spread of those characters abroad, all belonged to the Israelites. This in turn serves to show that the Phoenicians among the Greeks, the Phoenicians who brought letters to the Greeks, who also predated the Trojan War, were indeed Israelites and not Canaanites.