Rohl apparently has ties to people who today still support the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. To some degree he was trying to support the biblical view, claiming to have found the tomb of the "historic" Joseph, etc. He has tried to make various local rulers of Canaan referred to in the Amarna letters correspond to Saul, David and Joab, among others. The Amarna letters are archival cunieform tablets written in Akkadian, the international language of the Near East in the late Bronze Age. They were letters to Pharaoh Akhenaten, mainly from his Canaanite vassel kings.
It's somewhat amusing that Rohl tries to use the Amarna letters to support his thesis, because a mainstay of his theory is that the conventional chronology is way off, since the Egyptian and Assyrian king lists cannot be matched up except at one point: We know that the last pharaoh of the 26th. or Cushite dynasty, Taharka, was the contemporary of Asshurbanipul, the last great Assyrian king. Thus, Rohl feels he can slide the lists around by claiming that two minor Egyptian dynasties originally considered sequential were, in fact, contemporary. Using this wedge, he claims that the Pharaoh whom the Bible calls "Shishak," who attacked Judah and Israel after the death of Solomon, was not Soshenq I, first king of the Libyan or 22nd. dynasty, as commonly thought, but was instead Ramesses II of the 19th. dynasty.
However, among the Amarna letters are some written to Akhenaten from an Assyrian king named Asshur-uballit. While some names repeat quite often in the Assyrian king lists (there were three Tiglath-pilesers and five Shalmanesers), there are only two Assyrian kings named Asshur-uballit. Since the second of these was the younger brother of Asshurbanipul and only briefly ruled the city of Harran after Nineveh had fallen to the Medes and Chaldeans, he can't possibly be the contemorary of Akhenaten. Therefore the Asshur-uballit who was that pharaoh's contemporary was Asshur-uballit I, and the two king lists are actually stapled together at least at two points. Since Asshur-uballit I was a contemporary of Akhenaten, the Assyrian king named Adad-nirari, who wrote to Ramesses II has to be Adad-nirari I. Thus, contrary to Rohl's thesis, The Assyrian and Egyptian king lists can be matched together at three points, three sets of contemporaries: Akhenaten and Asshur-uballit I, Ramesses II and Adad-nirari I, Taharka and Asshurbanipul.
Thus, we cannot slide the pharonic king list around to play with the chronology; and the evidence of the Amarna letters supports the conventional chronology and discrdits Rohl's attempt at radical redating.
