Then there are examples of scribal errors that have been copied and recopied. A good example concerns Abraham's father, Terah, in Genesis. According to Genesis 11:26, he was 70 years old by the time Abraham was born and, according to Genesis 11:32, he lived to the age of 205. However, in Genesis 12:4 – after we are told Terah has died – Abraham leaves home, aged 75. This means that Terah could have been no older than 145 when he died. Even if we attribute such an incredible age to divine intervention, we cannot accept both accounts. At some point, it seems, someone must have mistranslated what the original author had said.
The entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb shortly after it was discovered in 1922. It lay only thirteen meters across the valley floor from the mysterious Tomb 55. (Griffith Institute.)
Lord Carnarvon (left) and Howard Carter (right) dismantling the entrance to Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. Within a few weeks Carnarvon would be dead, some believe the victim of an ancient curse. (Griffith Institute.)
‘Wonderful things!’ The southern end of the Antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb. This was the first glimpse of Tutankhamun’s treasures seen by an ecstatic Howard Carter on the evening of 28 November 1922. (Griffith Institute.)
The entrance to Tutankhamun’s burial chamber with most of the plastered blocking removed to reveal the outermost shrine. (Griffith Institute.)
Carter examines Tutankhamun’s middle coffin, at once realizing that it did not bear the image of the young king whose mummy it was supposed to contain. (Griffith Institute.)
When the second coffin was raised it was found to be much heavier than anyone had thought. The reason – it contained a third coffin of solid gold. (Griffith Institute.)
Tutankhamun’s inner coffin still in situ in the tomb. (Griffith Institute.)
Carter carefully cleans Tutankhamun’s inner golden coffin. (Griffith Institute.)
The outer coffin, depicting Tutankhamun around the time of his death, which forensic examination of the mummy has revealed to have been around seventeen. (Cairo Museum.)
The inner coffin, made of solid gold and depicting Tutankhamun while he was still a child, shortly after becoming king. (Cairo Museum.)
The middle coffin used for Tutankhamun’s burial. Although the image it bears is that of a king it is clearly not the same person represented on the other two coffins. (Cairo Museum.)
Other examples reflect the multi-authorship of the Pentateuch. For instance, in Exodus, the Mount of God, where Moses communes with the Lord, is called Sinai; whereas in Deuteronomy it is called Horeb. We appear to have separate authors, at different times, independently interpreting the Mount of God's location. Even if these are different names for the same place, we must still have separate authors involved, each using the common name of their period or locale.
Such are the problems with the Pentateuch from an historian's perspective, that the more sceptical scholars question the entire Old Testament narrative prior to the time of David. To them Joseph, Moses and Joshua are just mythical Israelite heroes who were slotted into a vaguely historical framework by much later writers. Regardless of whether this is right or wrong, the Israelites had to have come from somewhere. The question that concerns us at the moment is, was this from Egypt?
In order to gain any kind of insight into the historicity of the Pentateuch account of the Israelite period in Egypt, we must start with the earliest historical reference to their existence in Canaan and work backwards. The Israel Stela, found by Petrie, gives us the first – but infuriatingly oblique – reference to Israel. It is simply included among a list of Egyptian campaigns. We are told nothing more than 'Plundered is the Canaan with every evil' and 'Israel is laid waste'. Whether this refers to Egyptian military activity or some natural catastrophe, such as famine, is difficult to tell, although we can infer from their inclusion in the list that the pharaoh had sent troops to oppose the Israelites. It certainly shows that the Israelites were in Canaan when the stone was inscribed, during the reign of the nineteenth-dynasty pharaoh Merenptah. As this was around 1220 BC, at least two centuries before David's creation of a unified kingdom, the reference must pertain to the separate tribes of Israel; presumably in the period the Bible refers to as the age of Judges, such as Samson and Gideon.
If the Israelites were in Egypt, as the Bible relates, then it has to have been before this time. They are already in Canaan around 1220 BC, and had presumably been established there long enough to pose some kind of threat to the pharaoh. It would therefore seem that the Israelites would have to have been in Canaan from at least as the middle of the thirteenth century BC. Is there archaeological evidence to support this?
In the biblical account, the Israelite entry into the Promised Land of Canaan began with Joshua's conquest of the city of Jericho, forty years after the Exodus from Egypt. According to the Book of Joshua, many further cities fell to the Israelite armies until the destruction of the last, the city of Hazar. From historical sources we know that contemporary Canaan comprised many independent city states, just as the Old Testament tells us, and of these, both the cities of Jericho and Hazar have been excavated.
In 1952 the British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon excavated a Bronze Age fortification at Tell es-Sultan near the Dead Sea, thought to be the site of ancient Jericho. She concluded that from 1900 BC the city was a prosperous walled town, just as the Bible describes, until it was destroyed by fire around 1500 BC. Many scholars took this to be evidence of Joshua's capture of the city, as Joshua 6:24 tells us that after its capture the Israelites burned Jericho. However, more recent excavations around the Dead Sea have uncovered no evidence of Israelite occupation until around 1250 BC. It is now generally agreed that Kathleen Kenyon's excavations uncovered evidence of an early conquest of the city by the Egyptians, probably by Tuthmosis III. Unfortunately, no evidence of Joshua's campaigns came to light in the area. There was more luck at Hazor, however.
Joshua 11:11 describes Joshua's destruction of Hazor: 'And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there were not any left to breathe, and he burned Hazor with fire.'
In the 1950s excavations were conducted at the site of ancient Hazor, modern Tell el-Qedah, some fourteen kilometres north of the Sea of Galilee. Here the eminent Israeli archaeologist Dr Yigael Yadin unearthed the remains of a huge fortified palace which had been destroyed by fire around 1250 BC. The precise dating was made possible by broken Mycenean pottery found lying in the level of destruction. Such ceramics were popular throughout the Near East during the thirteenth century BC, but ceased to be imported into Palestine by the twelfth century. The destruction of the city had almost certainly been the work of an enemy, rather than accidental, as statues and temple decorations had been deliberately defaced. Because of the remains of hearths, tent bases and hut footings, together with a characteristic desert-style pottery, the next level of occupation was found have been by tent dwellers – a previously nomadic people. Part of the area was rebuilt again as a fortified city in the tenth century BC, and distinctive artefacts, such as beads, show this to have been the work of the Israelites.
Dr Yadin was satisfied that the discoveries at Hazor matched the biblical account of Joshua's conquest in a number of ways. The conquerors had razed the city to the ground, just as the Bible says; they had attempted to destroy the cultic practices of the Canaanites, as we are told God charged the Israelites to do; and they had been a nomadic people just as the Israelites had recently been. He was certain that the Israelites had occupied the area from the time of the burning, but had not had the power or motivation to rebuild the city until the creation of the unified kingdom after the time of David.
Although there is much difference in opinion as to how structured their civilization was, there is little doubt that the Israelites – or at least the people who would later form the kingdoms of Israel and Judah – were in Canaan as a distinct culture by around 1250 BC. According to the Old Testament, the period between Joshua's campaigns and the e
stablishment of the united kingdom of Israel by David was the age of the Judges, when the Israelites existed as twelve tribes who were constantly fighting the Philistines. Historically this would seem to reflect the period between 1200 and 1000 BC when both the Philistines and the Israelites (among others) were struggling for possession of Canaan. This is known from Egyptian and Hittite sources to have been a time of considerable upheaval, when both the Egyptian and Hittite empires were collapsing. The golden age that linked Canaan to Egypt ended with the collapse of the trade routes, which in turn resulted in the collapse of the city states. It seems that in many ways it was a period similar to the European Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Britain, for instance, descended into virtual anarchy, allowing the Anglo-Saxons from Scandinavia and northern Germany gradually to take over the country. Today most archaeologists agree that after the upheavals of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC, the kingdom of Israel emerged.
As the age of Judges – as described in the Book of Judges – seems to reflect historical events, then perhaps the same is true of Joshua. If he did exist, then, from the archaeological perspective, he would seem to have entered Canaan sometime around 1250 BC. Accordingly, if there is any historical truth reflected in the biblical account of the forty years previously spent in the wilderness, then the Israelites must have been in Egypt until around 1300 BC – the end of the eighteenth dynasty and the period of Horemheb. This is certainly interesting: Horemheb was the pharaoh who instigated the anti-Atenist reprisals. As the Bible seems to reflect some evidence of an Atenist element among the Hebrews when they left Egypt (see Chapter Seven), it may be that both groups were forced to flee Egypt at the same time, and for similar reasons: persecution under Horemheb. We shall return to this question later. For the moment, however, we still have no real historical evidence – outside the Bible – that the Israelites were ever in Egypt. We must, therefore, start at the begining. How and when does the Bible tell us the Israelites arrived in Egypt?
After the account of the Creation, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and the great flood, we come to the first of God's chosen people – Abraham. When Abraham's father dies God speaks to Abraham and tells him to move from his home at Haran, high on the Euphrates, and settle in the Promised Land of Canaan. According to Genesis 12:7, God tells Abraham: 'Unto thy seed will I give this land.' Canaan, therefore, is seen right from the beginning as the Israelites' true home. The name Israelite emerges with Abraham's grandson, Jacob, whom God renames Israel. According to Genesis 35:10, God tells Jacob, 'Thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name.' It was from Jacob that all the Hebrews later held captive in Egypt are said to descend. Hence the term children of Israel or the Israelites.
The Genesis account of how the Israelites came to be in Egypt begins with the famous story of Joseph and his 'coat of many colours'. Joseph is a younger son of Jacob, whose ten elder brothers grow jealous of him because he becomes their father's favourite. Eventually they come to detest him when he develops prophetic powers and tells them of a dream in which he sees them paying him homage. One day the brothers seize Joseph, stripped him of his 'coat of many colours', with which Jacob has honoured him, and sell him for twenty pieces of silver to a caravan of traders heading for Egypt.
In Egypt, Joseph is sold to an official who soon promotes him to the position of overseer of his household. Eventually, when the official's wife tries to seduce Joseph and he refuses her, she falsely accuses him of trying to seduce her and he is thrown into prison. In prison he developed a reputation as an interpreter of dreams, and when the pharaoh himself is disturbed by a series of strange dreams, Joseph is summoned to tell him what they mean. Joseph tells the pharaoh that his dreams predict a period of seven years of abundance in Egypt, followed by seven years of famine. He therefore advises the pharaoh to appoint someone to oversee the gathering of stockpiles of food to tide the country over the lean years that are to follow. The grateful pharaoh accepts Joseph's interpretation and appoints him as the grand vizier, or chief minister, to supervise the seven-year plan.
Eventually, when the famine occurs as predicted, it affects Canaan too, and Jacob sends his sons down to Egypt to buy corn. When they appear before the chief minister to beg for help, they do not recognize him as their grown brother Joseph. He, however, recognizes them and makes them humble themselves before him – just as his dream had once foretold. Ultimately, he reveals his true identity, forgives them and sends for his father. The entire family then settles in Egypt and are raised to high estate. Over the following centuries the descendants of Jacob – the children of Israel – remain in Egypt, their numbers continuing to grow until they are thousands.
Historically, the Israelites belonged to a large group of Asiatic people collectively called Semites, and Semite trading journeys into Egypt, as described in the Joseph story, did occur as early as early as the nineteenth century BC. A wall painting in the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep, at Beni-Hassan 322 kilometres south of Cairo, shows a group of thirty-seven Semites with laden donkeys entering Egypt at a border post where they are met by frontier officials. Described as traders, they are depicted wearing colourful striped garments which some biblical commentators once associated with Joseph's 'coat of many colours', as described in Genesis 37:3. More recent textual studies, however, have shown that this familiar phrase from the King James version of the Bible is another example of a mistranslation – the original Hebrew phrase seems to have meant 'a long, sleeved robe'. In any event, it would seem unlikely that these first Semite traders had any link with the Joseph story. There is no evidence of these early Semites ever having settled in Egypt: certainly not in any great numbers. Besides which, as the painting dates from around 1890 BC, it seems to be far too early for the Genesis account of Joseph.
Exodus 12:40 tells us that the Sojourn – the period that the children of Israel spent in Egypt before the Exodus – was 430 years. As we have seen, if the Exodus did occur it must have been somewhere around 1300 BC – about half a century before the destruction of Hazor and the first archaeological appearance of the Israelites in Canaan. If the Joseph story in any way reflects historical events, it would therefore need to be set around the eighteenth century BC. The peoples who occupied much of Canaan at this time were the Hyksos, a people who seem originally to have come from the Mesopotamian kingdom of Mari. The site of the city of Mari lies on the west bank of the Euphrates, just inside Syria on a hill called Tell Hariri (about twenty kilometres north of what is now the Iraq boarder). In 1933 a team of French archaeologists, led by Professor Andre Parrot, began excavating the site. Here they discovered a splendid royal palace dating from around 2000 BC, which had more than 300 rooms, richly furbished with statues and frescoes. Since 1933, the Mari excavations have unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets which provide valuable information about the history of the Mari kingdom and its vassal states.
The Mari kingdom was invaded by the Babylonians around 1750 BC, and its capital taken and destroyed. With the overthrow of the kingdom, many of the various peoples previously under its sway migrated south into Canaan, and within about a hundred years they had formed themselves into an effective alliance of tribes with considerable military muscle – enough, in fact, to invade northern Egypt. The Egyptians at the time refer to the tribal chiefs of these people as Hikau khasut – 'rulers of the desert uplands' – a term which the Graeco-Egyptian historian Manetho later rendered as Hyksos – 'desert princes'. Hikau khasut seems to have been the term the Egyptians used for the chieftains of the city states which the migrant Mari people had established in Canaan. City states is actually a misleading term – they were in fact fortified Bronze Age hilltop enclosures, from where a regional warlord could dominate the immediate countryside. To save confusion, the word Hyksos is now generally used to describe all these peoples, but what they actually called themselves is unknown. It is doubtful whether they had anyone name, as they existed as separate tribal groups.
The f
irst of the Hyksos in Egyptian records appear shortly after the collapse of the Mari kingdom. Unlike the previous Semitic traders, these people seem to have been settling in the country. A text dating from around 1745 BC, for instance, in the reign of the pharaoh Sobekhotep III (now in the Brooklyn Museum), contains a list of seventy-nine household servants, of which forty-five seem to be Hyksos. Over the next half century, increasing numbers of Hyksos continued to settle in the Nile Delta, where the authority of the ailing Middle Kingdom pharaohs was weak, and within a further fifty years they had set up their own rival kingdom in the area. For the next century, the Hyksos would rule northern Egypt. According to Manetho, writing in the late fourth century BC, the Hyksos came to power through a fierce and bloody invasion, but modern scholars tend to discount the invasion theory in favour of a steady build-up of power from within.
Were the Hebrews the Hyksos? Or at least one of the tribes which the Hyksos comprised? It certainly appears to sit with the story of Jacob's family settling in Egypt, attaining an exalted position and ultimately growing in number. According to Exodus 1:7, 'The children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.' Then in verse 9, the pharaoh says to his people: 'Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we.' There is only one historical period when any Semites were so mighty and numerous within the boarders of ancient Egypt, and that was during the Hyksos era. Perhaps the family of Jacob represent an influential Hyksos tribe of this time. The words used by the pharaoh in verse 9 appear to suggest just this: he refers to the threat coming from the people of the children of Israel, seemingly implying that the Israelites were part of a larger group over which they held sway.
Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings Page 17