EGYPT IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

EGYPT IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

Some Egyptologists have suggested that the ‘pharaoh’ of the Exodus was actually Ramesses’ son and successor Merenptah, partly on the basis of a ‘victory stele’ from the latter’s reign that is the earliest document of any kind to mention Israel. Dating to the ﬁfth year of his reign (c.1208), it consists of a series of hymns celebrating Merenptah’s victories over various foreign enemies. Among the Palestinian enemies is the word Israel, signiﬁcantly accompanied by a hieroglyph that indicates a people rather than a town or geographical area:
Plundered is Canaan with every evil; carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer; Yanoam is made as that which does not exist; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not; Hurru has become a widow for Egypt. All lands together, they are paciﬁed.
However, as this translated extract shows, the stele actually tells us very little about the origins or nature of Israel, and certainly makes no reference to the presence of Israelites in Egypt, let alone their expulsion. As John Laughlin puts it, rather emphatically,
Some textual evidence, such as the Papyrus Anastasi V . . . might allow one to hypothesise that a few Egyptian slaves could have slipped out of Egypt from time to time, but all of the known Egyptian texts put together do not even remotely hint at an ‘Exodus’ as described in the Bible. The Merenptah stele is simply irrelevant to this question.

The best-known, and most informative, ancient Greek visitor to Egypt was of course Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the traveller and historian. His nine volumes of Histories were written between 430 and 425 bc, and the second book is entirely devoted to Egypt. Herodotus is the earliest major textual source of information on mummiﬁcation and other ancient Egyptian religious and funerary customs, and he attracted numerous later imitators, including Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. His travels in Egypt may has emerged as a possible contender for the Exodus pharaoh, on the somewhat dubious grounds that the parting of the waters of the Red Sea could then be explained as a result of the volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini in the Aegean (although most estimates of the date of this eruption now set it at c.1620, about 150 years before her reign). However, the Canadian Egyptologist, Donald Redford, argues more radically that the Exodus account is simply a mishmash of stories which probably originated in distant memories of the expulsion of the Hyksos (the Asiatic kings who ruled northern Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period). In Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann suggests that it represents not only a folk memory of the end of the Hyksos period, when Egypt expelled Asiatic rulers from northern Egypt, but perhaps also a kind of mythologization of the so-called ‘heretical’ Amarna period (for more on which, see Chapter 9). He concludes that the Exodus story is ultimately to be regarded as a convenient use of such folk tales to allow the Israelites to deﬁne themselves as a distinct nation: ‘Egypt’s role in the Exodus story is not historical but mythical: it helps deﬁne the very identity of those who tell the story.’