Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?
How long was the Israelite bondage in Egypt? When was the Exodus from Egypt? Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus who refused to free the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt? The peoples of the Middle East witnessed a great exodus of Israelites from the land of the Nile following the initial Passover in Egypt, which was a long awaited deliverance for thousands of people who began an arduous journey to a Promised Land. However, we could say that the story of the Exodus really begins with Jacob’s son Joseph who was at the age of 17 sold into servitude by his brothers and taken to the land of Egypt. There he served for a short time in the household of Potiphar—considered to be the chief of the executioners—until false accusations caused Joseph to be thrown into prison where he would remain for 13 years. Then, through a series of unusual events, he was brought before Pharaoh to interpret the king’s troubling dream, and Pharaoh was so impressed by Joseph’s understanding that he set him over certain affairs of Egypt, which brought Joseph to prominence in Egypt at the age of 30 in the year c. 1695 BCE. Now according to the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream there would be several years when the crops would be bountiful before a time of severe and widespread famine that would overtake the land. So Joseph proposed to Pharaoh that a mandate should be given to the people to store sufficient food during the seven plentiful years, and thereby they would ensure that there would be enough food available to keep the people alive for the succeeding seven-year period of famine that would come upon Egypt. In time the famine did come upon the land and within two years many people in the region were increasingly coming to Egypt to buy grain, and this led to circumstances that allowed Joseph to bring his father and family into Egypt, which was an event that would influence the people of Israel and the Egyptians for more than 200 years. Now Joseph had been ruling in Egypt for nine years before his father Jacob saw him again, and Jacob lived for 17 years in the land of Egypt. That means Joseph had been in Egypt for 39 years by the time his father died at the age of 147 in c. 1669 BCE, which was about the time Joseph’s children were given the blessing of the birth-right promise by Jacob. Then after Jacob’s death, Joseph lived an additional 54 years in which time his great grandchildren were “brought up upon Joseph’s knees,” which brings us to the year c. 1615 BCE when Joseph died at the age of 110, which confirms something important about the period of Israelite bondage in Egypt. That is that from the time Jacob came to Egypt at the close of the second year of famine to the time Joseph died, the people were not in bondage in Egypt. In fact, we could reasonably say that for more than a century the Israelites lived in relative prosperity in Egypt until a period of severe bondage began at a time when a Pharaoh came to power who “knew not Joseph” (Acts 7:18). Historically, this period of increasing oppression is considered to have started during the rule of Ahmose I as early as c. 1570 BCE. Ahmose I was a Theban prince who drove the Hyksos rulers out of Egypt, and he eventually reorganized Egypt under his sole rule by c. 1550 BCE. This was a little more than 100 years before the Israelite exodus from Egypt, which allows us to reasonably conclude that the period of Israelite enslavement fell somewhere within this time period. Bringing us then to the story of Moses. From the biblical account we learn that Moses was born during the period of Israelite enslavement, and by God’s intervention he was raised in the royal house of Pharaoh. Then we learn from the story that when Moses was 40 years old he became a fugitive and was forced to flee and live among the people of Midian. There he remained for 40 years until after the death of Thutmose III, at which time Moses returned to Egypt to confront a notorious Pharaoh. “And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex. 2:23-24). [Author’s emphasis throughout.] Notably, by the time Moses returned to Egypt he was 80 years old when he came before Pharaoh to seek the release of the people of Israel, and what followed was a series of devastating plagues that came upon the land of Egypt. Forcing Pharaoh to free the Israelites from bondage, and marking the beginning of a forty-year period of Israelite sojourning that came to a close after the departure of Moses when the Israelites initially settled in the plains of Jericho (Jos. 5:9-10). (This was shortly before the reign of Thutmose IV in Egypt, which was at a time of relative peace for the warring kingdoms of the Egyptians, the Mitanni, and the Hittites.) Bringing us then to figure the date of the Exodus, which is calculated from the date of the building of the temple at Jerusalem by King Solomon. For we read that: “it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Zif [April/May], which is the second month that he began to build the house of the Lord” (I Kings 6:1). Interestingly, this verse gives us a time period of nearly 480 years that is reckoned from the time of the Exodus from Egypt