Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus — Part 3

In my last two posts entitled “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” and in “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus — Part 2“ I narrowed the list of suspects of Pharoahs of the time period that may have been the monarch that could have confronted Moses.

Now, in part 3, I am going to confirm or deny a third candidate that has been mentioned my some.

In the History Channel documentary “The Exodus Decoded” Simcha Jacobovici attempts to identify the Pharaoh of the Exodus by citing The Tempest Stela of Ahmose. He says in the documentary that he attempted to get access to the ancient stela which lies abandoned in the basement at the Cairo Museum. Since he couldn’t get access to it, he reconstructed it, apparently from descriptions of the archaeologist that had discovered it. (The reconstruction is the picture on the side.)

– He attempts to connect the disaster that the stela speaks about to the ten plagues of Egypt that Moses inflicted. These are the points that Simcha Jacabovici uses to tie the Exodus to the Ahmose Stela:

• “The Bible says that at the time of the Exodus there was a great storm. Ahmose’ stela also speaks of a great storm . . .”
• The Bible says that Egypt was enshrouded in darkness. Ahmose’ stela says that Egypt was covered in darkness.
• The Stela says that even though the Egyptians worshiped many gods, that this disaster happened when “God, in the singular, manifested his power.”

Simcha Jacabovici continues, saying:

The Bible describes Pharaoh, but never names him. Because of this stela we now know his name: Ahmose.

Now that we know a major claim that is used to justify the identification of Ahmose as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, we should now see if the Stela that Jacabovici cites actually supports what he claims. — As a matter of fact, the Tempest Stela of Ahmose I does in fact not seem to parallel the Exodus plagues. My personal reading of it only describes a rain storm:

The gods (made?) the sky come with a tempest of (rain?); it caused darkness in the Western region; the sky was unleashed, without [ . . .] more than the roar of the crowd; [. . .] was powerful [. . .] on the mountains more than the turbulence of the cataract which is at Elephantine. Each house, [. . .] each shelter (or each covered place) that they reached [. . .] were floating in the water like the barks of papyrus (on the outside?) of the royal residence for [. . .] day(s), with no one able to light the torch anywhere.

His citation of the stela saying that the storm happened when “god” manifested his power seems to be the strongest evidence to back him up:

Then His Majesty said: ‘How these (events) surpass the power of the great god and the wills of the divinities!’ And His Majesty descended in his boat, his council following him. The (people were?) at the east and the west, silent, for they had no more clothes (?) on them after the power of the god was manifested.

But the problem is that this mention seems to be the only somewhat strong evidence that Jacabovici has from the stela to affirm his belief that Ahmose is the Pharaoh that confronted Moses. But when the entire stela is understood, I just don’t find that claim credible.

Christopher Heard, in his extended review of “The Exodus Decoded”, says:

It should be clear that Jacobovici’s claim that the Tempest Stela of Ahmose reports, from an Egyptian perspective, the same events as the biblical ten plagues story hangs by the slimmest of threads. The Tempest Stela’s catastrophe could, at most, be seen as vaguely parallel to the plagues of hail and darkness, but even here there are enough significant differences to cast serious doubt on the suggested parallel. To try to connect the Tempest Stela with the ten plagues story as a whole, one must suppose either that the Tempest Stela (whose inscription dates within Ahmose’s twenty-five-year reign, as does the catastrophe itself) presents an exaggerated version of only one of ten catastrophes, or perhaps a mangled conflation of two of them, or that the biblical version (whose linguistic properties are characteristic of an era hundreds of years later than any proposed time frame for the exodus) presents a vastly expanded list of plagues based on a single, albeit devastating, thunderstorm.

So, I’m not the only one that disagrees with Simcha Jacabovici. Several learned people, even many who believe that the Exodus story is true, do not think that the connection is there. The fact is that there is no thunderstorm described in the Book of Exodus for any of the ten plagues. — To be fair, Simcha doesn’t say that, but that is what would be implied if, in fact, the Tempest Stela is indeed describing the Exodus story.

But moving on, just because the Ahmose Stela isn’t connected to the Exodus, that doesn’t show that Pharaoh Ahmose isn’t the Pharaoh of the Exodus. — Another basis that Jacabovici has that he is the Exodus Pharaoh is that he was the Pharaoh that expelled a Semitic race of people called the Hyksos. He believes that the Hyksos are, in fact, the Israelites.

He complains that many historians say the two peoples cannot be equated because the Hyksos and the Hebrews left Egypt separated by hundreds of years. – Just then a skeptic of the Exodus appears on a screen and says that even though one could play with Egyptian dates by moving them by ten years but that they couldn’t be moved by 50 or 100 years. But Jacabovici responds, saying:

But maybe we have to. What if scholars are placing the exodus in the wrong time period? Imagine the confusion if in the future scholars date World War II to the 1990s. They’ll never find any evidence that it actually happened.

Mentioning that many believe that the Exodus happened in the 13thcentury B.C. in the time of Ramses II he also correctly mentions that some scholars “are now breaking with that consensus.” He mentions a calculation that places the Exodus in 1470 B.C. (Hint: that is 23 to 32 years way to early) and then mentioned that the Hyksos expulsion traditionally happened less than a century before. He then says that the events happened to closely together to be a coincidence, so he now has a new date for the Exodus: 1500 B.C.  

There several problems with accepting Jacabovici’s conclusions. The first one is the major differences of the “exodus’” of the Hebrews to that of the Hyksos. — The Exodus story clearly shows that Pharaoh lost his will to fight against Yahweh and let the Israelites go. However, in the case of the Hyksos, The Encyclopedia Britannica shows that Ahmose rebelled against the Hyksos and forced them out of Avaris by force of arms.

The second problem is chronological. According to the most reliable Biblical dating, the Exodus happened between 1446 B.C. to 1437, and the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt in 1521 B.C., 75 to 84 years before the Exodus. Jocabovici realizes this but prefers to say that these events that happened nearly a century apart really occurred at the same time and that time was 1500 B.C. He also ignores, or at least overlooks, the the fact that the Hyksos were expelled by war, unlike the Hebrews.

So basically, I cannot agree with Simcha Jacabovici that Ahmose is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The fact is that none of the “evidence” he presents to support his suggestion really isn’t as strong as he thinks it is.

Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus? — Part 2

In my last post “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” I explained that the suspects for the Pharaoh that confronted Moses and his God could be narrowed down to either Thutmose III or Amenhotep II based on the fact that the historical dates of their reigns are more consistent with the Biblical date for the Exodus in the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. completely ruling out the popular theory that the Pharaoh that confronted Moses was Ramses II.

– In the last post, near the end I seem to lean towards the idea that Thutmose III was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but that is not to be taken as gospel. I think there is a somewhat good case, circumstantial though it is, that Amenhotep is a very promising candidate as the Egyptian monarch that we are trying to identify.

At the end of the last post I pointed out that retired-Professor William Shea in a paper he wrote on the subject entitled ”Amenhotep II as Pharaoh of the Exodus“ makes an interesting case for identifying Amenhotep II.

Alright, so before I go over the evidence he presents I’m going to explain that his dating of the Exodus is nine years off my date. — He places it in 1446 B.C. and I place it in 1437. This shouldn’t be problematic because the two dates are within the same decade, and there is uncertainty about the dating of Egyptian dynasties anyway.

Shea says that in an earlier paper he selected Thutmose III as the Pharaoh because, using a certain system of dating his reign, he was the monarch that died closest to the time of the Exodus and therefore may have drowned in the Sea of Reeds. –Some historians date Thutmose III’s death to 1450 B.C., just 4 years from Shea’s date for the Exodus. So therefore, from this it should be reasonable to assume such. But this is no reason to assume it cannot be Amenhotep, his successor.

By placing the Exodus in the fifth year of Amenhotep (in 1446 B.C.) he begins to show circumstancial evidence that he may have, in fact, died in the Red Sea. I’ll try to present it as best as I can, but for a better understanding of his hypothesis I’d recommend clicking on the text-link above to read what he has to say.

William Shea cites the ancient Amada Stela which shows Amenhotep II, in his third year (possibly 1448 B.C.) in which it is said that the Pharaoh extended his boarders on his “first victorious campaign.” - He then points out an inconsistency with a later Egyptian inscriptions (the Menphis and Karnak Stelae) which say that the same Pharaoh is said to have gained “his first  campaign of victory” in the seventh year, four years later after the former inscription.. They were, of course, two very different first campaigns.

From this, there are two details that don’t seem right. 1) Amenhotep II was obviously Pharaoh of Egypt beyond Shea’s Exodus date so one may reject his idea, if in fact the Pharaoh had to have drowned in the Red Sea. And 2) The same Pharaoh apparently had two first campaign victories. The first seems unlikely and the second reveals a discrepancy in the Egyptian historical records as far as the chronology goes.

However, the hypothesis is not dead. — He points out another discrepancy in the Egyptian record: Shea points out that Thutmose III, Amenhotep II’s predecessor died on VII/30 (or, on the thirtieth day of the seventh month of the Egyptian calender.) Therefore, since the Egyptians didn’t have an ascension calender system, that Amenhotep II would have ascended the throne exactly on the next day on VIII/1 (on the first day of the eighth month). — However, it is said on the Memphis and Karnak Stelae that Amenhotep II became Pharaoh on the eleventh month. So there seems to be something a miss in the Egyptian history. From this, Shea comes to the conclusion that these discrepancies can be resolved if there were two Pharaohs with the same name: The first one died in the Red Sea and that the second one took over to cover up the disastrous death of the former.

That there could have been two Pharaohs with the same name seems to be the only way to harmonize the history is insisted by Shea’s emphatic claim that these discrepencies cannot be simply the textual errors of a scribe. He therefore calls the first Pharaoh “Amenhotep IIA” and the second one “Amenhotep IIB.”

Amenhotep II was 18 years old when he became Pharaoh, so if he were indeed the Pharaoh of the Exodus he would have been 22 years old in 1446 B.C. at the time of the Exodus. — About this , after admitting thate there is indeed a mummy for Amenhotep II, William Shea says:

Is there any evidence for another mummy that might be connected with Amenhotep IIA? There is a free floating royal mummy of the 18th Dynasty that has not yet been identified and this mummy is that of a king who was about the right age at death for what we have proposed for Amenhotep IIA. In his inaugural text, the Sphinx Stela, he indicated that he was 18 years of age when he came to the throne (Cumming, pt. 1, 1982: 20). Since he died about Year 5 of his reign, this would have meant that he was in his early 20s when he died in the Sea of Reeds. There is a mummy of this approximate age that has been misidentified as Thutmose I. There was no label on this mummy’s wrappings to identify him as such; it was only assumed that this was Thutmose I because he was found in the Deir el-Bahr mummy cache near a coffin that belonged to a Thutmose. The mummy of Thutmose I was a well-traveled mummy. Originally, he was undoubtedly buried in his own tomb. Then Hatshepsut later had her father moved into her own tomb. Still further, Thutmose III built another tomb for Thutmose I (No. 38). His body, however, was not found there, so when this unidentified body was found near one of the coffins of a Thutmose, Maspero, who made this discovery, assumed that it was Thutmose I.

Thutmose I was not related to the Pharaoh under whom he worked, Amenhotep I. Amenhotep I had no surviving male issue, so Thutmose I, formerly a general in the army, came to the throne. The length of his reign is disputed but he probably ruled for at least a decade. Thus he should have been a man of middle age when he died. The mummy that had previously been identified as that of Thutmose I has now been x-rayed and it shows instead that it belonged to a young man of about 18 years of age (Harris and Weeks 1973: 132). Thus this mummy cannot be that of Thutmose I. The question then is, to whom does this mummy of the 18th Dynasty belong? Could it be Amenhotep IIA?

The age would fit reasonably well with what we know of the early career of Amenhotep IIA. He should have been in his early 20s at the time of his one major military text, that of Year 3, and by the time of the Exodus in Year 5. Also there are some interesting features to this mummy. First, it is not desiccated like the normal mummies that were either soaked in a solution of natron, a sodium salt, or packed in dry natron. This argues for a rapid burial of this body. Second, there was no resinous coating applied to this mummy, as commonly was done, which provides a second argument for a rapid burial. As a result, this has been called “one of the best preserved of all royal mummies” (Harris and Weeks 1973: 34). The irony of this may be that it is the best preserved because it was not preserved in the normal way. His head was shaved and there are abrasions on the tip of his nose and on his right cheek that look like they may be antemortem or intramortem injuries, not postmortem changes.

In discussing this mummy, J. Tyldesley speculates that since it is not Thutmose I it may be one of his sons (1996: 127). Perhaps he was not one of the sons of Thutmose I but rather one of the sons of Thutmose III, Amenhotep IIA, to be more specific. It is probable that we never will know the identity of this mummy but it does raise the tantalizing possibility that this body could be that of the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Pretty interesting stuff, if you ask me. Granted, it’s speculation, but it is speculation with a basis which, after consideration, seems plausible. — Even though I don’t rule out Thutmose III, I wouldn’t rule out Amenhotep II. And Shea’s evidence, after consideration, seems logical. My attitude is “Why not? –Why can’t this be the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” It certainly is a new way to look at it. — But, if you want a better idea of what Prof. William Shea says, go and read ”Amenhotep II as Pharaoh of the Exodus“ since he can explain it better than I can.

Go to Part 3 of this blog post