First post back after awhile. The timing of it was due to recent attention on a ten-year-old article addressing an inscription that, if true, will prove wrong the scholarly consensus regarding the beginning of the Israelite people. Yes, quite a sensational sounding premise, but there's meat on these bones. See the more recent retread in Hershel Shanks, "When Did Ancient Israel Begin?",
BAR. January/February 2012. pps 59-67.
Many of us are at least passingly familiar with the Merneptah Stela, which contains what has been regarded as the earliest extra-biblical reference to Israel ("Israel is laid waste. His seed is not"). This provided a seemingly solid anchor for the
terminus a quo of Israel as an ethnic group from between 1213 to 1203 BCE. This more recent discovery may substantially push that date back. Manfred Gorg (Egyptologist, University of Munich) found in the storerooms of the Egyptian Museum of Berlin a granite slab with hieroglyphics inscribed on it.
The slab, measuring 18" high by 15.5" wide, contains three hieroglyphic name-rings, translated left-to-right as Ashkelon, Canaan, and Israel. The left-most two rings are intact and open to no interpretation as to their structure. The rightmost ring is approximately 2/3 visible across the face, with the right-most portion chopped off. Gorg is confident in his reading of the ring as Israel, using an archaic form of the "s" sibilant that was still being used in the 18th Dynasty. Profs. Peter van der Veen and Christoffer Theis (University of Mainz and University of Heidelberg, respectively) have independantly examined the slab and agree with Gorg's reading. They've all three cowritten an article fortifying their reasons for the identification, in "Israel in Canaan (Long) Before Pharaoh Merneptah? A Fresh Look at Berlin Statue Pedestal Relief 21687",
Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections", Vol. 2:4, 2010, pps 15-25.
Stregthening the argument of the German scholars is the order of name rings in the Merneptah stela. They read, left to right - Ashkelon, Canaan, and Israel. Further, looking at the depiction of the peoples in the three name rings on the Berlin slab, they have the trademark shoulder-length hair, headbands and pointed beards that indicate West Semites.
Regarding the dating of the slab, there is nothing on it that would indicate the date of its composition, so they turned to paleography and orthography, and found something interesting. Egyptologist Raphael Giveon looked at it and determined the inscription was made in the 18th Dynasty, based on the structure of the hieroglyphs and structures of names within. The 18th Dynasty ran from between 1550 to 1300 BCE, and included such famous Pharaohs as Tuthankamen and Akhenaten, the heretic king.
See, the controversy for this article and inscription arises due to the fact that scholarly consensus for those who understand an Exodus event, is that it most likely occurred during the reign of Rameses II (1279-1213 BCE). A large fortification for this association has been the fact of the Merneptah Stela and the consensus that it does not allow for an earlier date. The observation preserved in the Hebrew Bible is that the Canaanite cities at the time of the Exodus were heavily fortified, something factual in the material remains at the end of the Middle Bronze Age ( ca 1550 BCE), but not factual in the remains at the end of the Late BRonze Age (1200BCE).
Professor van der Veen was kind enough to provide me a copy of the 2010 article for perusal. If anyone has any questions about it, please ask. I'm more than happy to share that information.
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I also have independently arrived at a likely Exodus date in the 18th Dynasty.
We can't
prove any date for the Exodus. To be fair, given the same high standards, there's little we
can prove about the ancient past.
That said, I'm a fan of the circa 1373 BC date. It coincides with the likely death of Amenhotep III and the sucession of Akhenaten to the throne.
This puts several things in context:
1. The mud brick references in the Pentateuch can relate to the construction of Amarna (a site known to have been built out of mud bricks)
2. Amenhotep III lost his first son - Thutmose - as a child.
3. The
Hymn to the Aten mimics the imagery and text of
Psalm 104 (this has long been established. What is in dispute is the direction of inspiration. ie, did the Yahwists get it from the Atenists or was it the other way around?)
4. The sudden henotheism of Akhenaten can be explained as a fear response after having witnessed the events that inspired the biblical writers to record the dreadful biblical plagues, including the death of his father and brother. He feared the Hebrew god and felt compelled to pay him homage in a very sudden and exclusionary way. This was also not popular among the priesthood at Thebes, who eventually found their way to remove him, sometime around 1349 BCE.
5. There is enough wiggle room in the Egyptian chronologies to massage the transfer of power from Amenhotep III to Akhenaten by a couple decades, especially given the understanding that some sort of co-regency occurred between Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, before the son's heresy began. (see
http://ib205.tripod.com/co-regency.html for elements that speak to this).
6. An exodus at this time fits perfectly with the attested timespan between the Exodus and the ascension of Solomon in the 10th century. The Masoretic 480 year span is a formulaic creation (40 x 12), and thus far less likely to represent the actual historical span of time. We have even more reason to doubt it when we become aware of the 440 year span mentioned by the Septuagint text. 440 years from year four of Solomon (Year Four of Solomon being 933, counting backward to 1373 BCE). I will be the first to admit that my date of 1373 is open to change, It has to be. Chronologies are by nature messy.
7. Also, houses at Amarna had a shrine consisting of fake doorway with red-painted jambs and lintels. (This echoes perfectly the biblical accounts of how the Hebrews spread blood on the door jambs as a sign to the death angel). The shrine held a picture of the royal family (Redford, Donald B. 1984.
Akhenaten the Heretic King. Princeton University Press.) This fits in with a 1373 Exodus.
8. Connecting this data with destruction layers identified by Kenyon at Jericho that date to 1325 BCE, this would give us a 40-42 year wandering period. The layer was dated by using the discoveries of 80 scarabs identified with certain Pharaohs, the last of which was - surprise - Amenhotep III. Kenyon used the death date of Amenhotep III to secure that destruction layer. She did not consider the possibility of a 440 year gap between Solomon and an Exodus event, but she did attempt to harmonize the archaeology with the Hebrew Bible. Keep in mind that the 1325 layer is not the famous City IV conflagration. It postdates it. Given that someone came through Jericho and clearly ATTACKED it and burned substantial parts of it, demonstrates that someone was still occupying the city in 1325, when the wandering Hebrews would have come through, according to my Exodus date.
Read "Digging Up Jericho". p. 262 in the chapter "
Jericho And Coming Of The Israelites":
"As concerns the date of the destruction of Jericho by the Israelites,
all that can be said is that the latest Bronze Age occupation should, in my
view, be dated to the third quarter of the fourteenth century B.C. This is
a date which suits neither the school of scholars which would date the
entry of the Israelites into Palestine to c. 1400 B.C. nor the school which
prefers a date of c. 1260 B.C.."
This is her specific dating for destruction of Jericho by the Israelites. The third quarter of 14th century BCE would be 1350-1325 BCE. On page 261 she specifically refers to the use of some tombs "c. 1350-1325 B.C."
10. This dating gives time for the Hebrews to grow and form the polity known as Israel, in time to be mentioned about a century later in the Merneptah stela.
The most exciting bolstering of my theory is that, since the Berlin slab inscription that I began my post with puts the name rings in the context of prisoners (while mentioning their ethnic group without knowing their location dueto the fragmentary nature of the pedestal relief that the slab was part of), this inscription says in a very clear way that Egypt had Israelite prisoners at the time of its composition.
