ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #10 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Is the presence of the Hebrews and their exodus recorded in any of the historical records of Egypt? The Egyptians were a fairly advanced civilization. There should be records, shouldn't there? >> Well, that's a really interesting question. And the answer is there may be. But we don't know for sure. To understand this, you have to sort of stop and think a little bit about the kind of records that survive from the ancient world. What kind of literature, what kind of documents, do we actually have? In general the kind of material that has survived falls into one of two categories. On one hand we have what we might call monumental inscriptions, the things that people write on public buildings and statues that they set up and so forth. And on the other hand we have what we would today think of as documents, things that were written and typically written on smaller scale kinds of documents because they didn't have big books and things at the time. The monumental records are the kind of things that kings or politicians want the world to remember about them. So they tend to record victories, great battles, things that the king accomplished during his reign or pretended to accomplish. In any case, things that they wanted to have mentioned for all time. And Israel is mentioned in monumental records from Mesopotamia and Egypt from later dates. For example, there is a -- the earliest mention of Israel from Egypt, the earliest clear-cut mention of Israel comes on a monument called the Merneptah Stela set up by a king named Merneptah to celebrate his victory over some people in Palestine. And he mentioned just in passing one of the groups that he defeated was this group called Israel. So that's the first mention. It's not quite as early -- the first clear-cut mention. It's not quite as early as Moses and the exodus. But it's from perhaps 100 BC. So it's not too much later than the exodus. So getting back to the kind of things that were preserved in addition to monuments, we have things that we would call documents. In Mesopotamia we have a lot of documents. And the reason we have so many is they wrote on clay. And we'll talk about writing in just a minute. But for the moment, they wrote on clay tablets. And clay was handy for writing because it was erasable. If you didn't need it, you could dunk it in water and erase it off and write on it again. But if you wanted to keep it, you could bake it in an oven and it would become fixed. Sort of like a CD-ROM. You would burn it onto a CD-ROM, but they literally burned it. Well, most tablets they didn't actually bake, they just kept them. And they dried out. And they were sort of semi permanent, sort of a rewritable CD-ROM, if you will. But what tended to happen is they would -- particularly in royal archives, they would stick all of these clay tablets in a library. And at some point the city would be conquered and the library would be burned down. And what happens when you burn a library down? It gets hot. And the tablets all get baked. So we have all of these tablets from Mesopotamia that were baked. And ironically, the ones that survived were from the cities that were destroyed because those were the libraries that were burned and the tablets got baked hard and didn't get reused. So thousands and thousands and thousands -- literally hundreds of thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia because of these documents because they wrote on clay. Well, what did they write on in Egypt? They didn't write on clay. They wrote on papyrus. They used sort of like a small paint brush to write on a kind of paper that was made from reeds. It was -- we don't call it paper because it wasn't really exactly the same thing. But it was similar to that. They also wrote sometimes on leather. And these two materials are much easier to handle than clay. But unfortunately, they tend to decay, as well. So we don't have nearly as many documents from Egypt as we do from Mesopotamia. All the documents written on papyrus and so forth that were put in the royal libraries of Egypt for the most part have disappeared. We have interestingly some clay tablets from Egypt that were written from Mesopotamia and sent down to Egypt. Those survived. But most of the documents written on papyrus or leather have disintegrated and simply haven't survived. The ones that have survived from Egypt were the ones that were placed in tombs because they were placed in sealed containers that were stored underground so they didn't get wet and they weren't exposed to the elements. And they have survived. But those are the sort of things that would preserve the kind of information that we were interested in historically. So we have a lot of funeral texts from Egypt. But we don't have nearly as many economic texts. We have some. But by comparison with Mesopotamia, not the same number and not the same type of texts. So in Egypt we have largely at least monumental inscriptions. And we have, you know, a lot of funereally texts and religious texts that were preserved as part of grave goods, as well. And not so many everyday kind of documents. We have some. But they tend to be from later periods so that -- that would have survived. So why isn't Israel mentioned earlier? Well, partially simply, again, because of the kind of documents that have survived. The kind of things that have survived are not the kind of things that would mention Israel in them. But there are some interesting things that may be references to Israel. The most famous have to do with this group that ruled Egypt for a time called the Hyksos. And to understand the Hyksos, we probably need to back up a little bit and get just a little bit of an overview of Egyptian history. If we were to look at a timeline of Egyptian history, we see that it's broken up into major periods. And that these major -- between these major periods are what scholars call intermediate periods. The intermediate periods were really probably times of civil war. They were times where -- I mentioned earlier in this course that one of the challenges for Egyptian history was holding this two-pronged -- this two-pronged nation together, southern and northern Egypt. And there were times when the central political power of the pharaohs just wasn't strong enough to hold Egypt together. And it kind of fragmented into two or sometimes even three or four smaller states, all of which claim to be Egypt. And each of them claimed to have a pharaoh. And so you'll get multiple dynasties not ruling in succession but in different places at the same time. And so if we trace Egyptian history, we usually start around 3000 BC or perhaps a little earlier. But usually anything before 3000 BC we call predynastic because it dates the first clear-cut dynasty of pharaohs in Egypt. The first dynasty of pharaohs begins somewhere a little -- around 3000 BC or a little before. And so the first three dynasties we call the early dynastic period from roughly 3000 BC or a little later down to around 2575 BC, something like that. And it was at the end of this period that in the third dynasty that the Egyptians began to build the pyramids. We get the earliest pyramid building in this third dynasty period. And then we make the transition from what we call the third -- the early dynastic period to sort of what we might think of as the classical period of Egyptian history. The academics and archeologists call it the Old Kingdom. The Old Kingdom was from about 2575 to about 2134 or thereabouts. And this was the fourth dynasty through the eighth dynasty. The fourth dynasty is important because the fourth dynasty contained those kings that built all the big pyramids that you see in Egypt today, the ones you think of when you think of pyramids. Those were built in the fourth dynasty. And by the way, this was 2500 BC. The Hebrews didn't come on the scene for another 500 years at least. So the Hebrew slaves in Egypt did not -- contrary to popular opinion, did not contribute to building the pyramids. The pyramids were there, you know, 500 years before Joseph came to Egypt. At least 500 years. They were already old by the time Joseph came to Egypt. So the Old Kingdom period ends when the first of these periods of civil war and breakdown of central authority begins. We call that the First Intermediate Period. And this was interpreted by the theologians of ancient Egypt as a period where the power of -- the power of the gods to control nature was weakening and sort of chaos was reemerging. And they interpreted the political chaos in theological terms. And we'll talk -- when we talk about the religion of the ancient world, we'll explain why they understood it that way. But it was interpreted theologically as well as historically and politically. And this First Intermediate Period lasted for about 100 years, from 2134 down to about 2040. So roughly 100 years in this period. And then we come to another very high point in Egyptian religion that we call the new -- the Middle Kingdom Period, which extends from a little before 2000 BC, usually 2040, down to about 1640. And this was the period in which the Hebrews came to Egypt. If we use the traditional dating, the Hebrews would have come to Egypt somewhere around 1900 BC or a little after that. So right in the middle of this middle kingdom period the Israelites or the Hebrews first came to Egypt. This was followed by another period of Civil War and strife that we call the Second Intermediate Period. And during this Second Intermediate Period, part of the Egypt, the Delta, particularly the northeastern Delta, was ruled by a group of people who were not Egyptians. They were actually Canaanites. Or at least they were Semites. They were people who were closely culturally related to the Hebrews. And they were known in Egyptian as the Hyksos, as the foreign rulers. And they are identified as being Semites. Again, culturally related. They didn't speak Egyptian. At least they perhaps spoke Egyptian but they would have also spoken a Semitic language. It would have been very similar to Hebrew. And it's in this period that undoubtedly the Hebrews were important because they would have been closely connected to this Hyksos group in some way, at least culturally if not politically. This Second Intermediate Period, again, runs from just about 100 years, from 1640 to 1550. And at about that time, the first ruler of what later becomes the 18th dynasty expels the Hyksos from Egypt. In other words, the 17th dynasty was located down in Thebes in the south. And the last king of the 17th dynasty claims to have expelled the Hyksos from -- and all these other people from Egypt and reestablished control of native Egyptians over the whole country. And this marks the beginning of what we call the New Kingdom Period, which runs for about 500 years from about 1550 to about 1070 BC. Now, the reason this is important for our story in the Bible is the book of Exodus begins with -- by telling us that there arose a pharaoh who did not know Joseph. And remember, Joseph has been dead for about 400 years by this point. So obviously there are pharaohs who didn't know him in between. And most scholars today believe that this statement at the beginning of the book of Exodus that there arose a pharaoh who didn't know Joseph is actually a reference to not just a pharaoh but a dynasty of pharaohs that did not know Joseph because they were not the Hyksos rulers. That is to say the Hyksos were expelled. The natural Egyptians reasserted control. And it was at this point that the Hebrews became slaves in Egypt. Because they were probably identified -- whether they were actually part of the Hyksos or not, because they were culturally and linguistically related to them, it was at this point that they probably became slaves in Egypt at the beginning of the New Kingdom Period. And this pharaoh who didn't know Joseph didn't know about Joseph. It probably actually means obviously he didn't know him personally since he had been dead for 400 years. But he didn't know about him, either. And it probably means that he had no knowledge of the traditions because he wasn't one of the Hyksos rulers. They had been expelled. They were politically outcast now. And so they were now subject to -- they were made slaves in Egypt at the beginning of our story. So there are some accounts of -- in Thebes of the expulsion of the Hyksos that some people like to connect to the story of Exodus because they read the Hyksos as being very closely connected to the Hebrews. And some people even claim -- although I don't think this is a position that I would take. There are some people who would claim that the exodus is really the story of these expelled Hyksos rulers who get kicked out of Egypt. That doesn't connect with the biblical story. The only way you can hold that is to claim that the biblical story isn't true historically. So I think it's much more likely that what happens is that at the beginning of the 18th dynasty, the Hyksos are expelled. The Hebrews are now political outcasts and are made slaves. And they are slaves in Egypt for probably another 100 years before Moses comes on the scene and is -- and then moves forward. Well, we have more to Egyptian history after that. After the New Kingdom Period we have another period of civil war called the Third Intermediate Period. And this is actually important for the biblical story for another reason. The Third Intermediate Period begins about 1070 and lasts until about 712 BC. And this is exactly the period in which the kingdoms of Israel are at their strongest. David -- you know, Saul becomes king in this period. David becomes king right around 1000 BC followed by Solomon. Israel is able to develop into a powerful kingdom, humanly speaking, because Egypt is in a state of chaos and disintegration politically. It also happens to be at the same time period when Mesopotamia is politically weak, when Babylon and Assyria are both down politically. So Israel, again, is able, humanly speaking, to become an important world power to the extent that it is one simply because everyone else is down at that time. And as -- at the end of this period as Egypt begins to reassert itself, Assyria is beginning to reassert itself at the same time in the 8th century. And so things start to become difficult for Israel as Egypt comes out of the Third Intermediate Period and as the Assyrians begin to reassert themselves in Mesopotamia leading to, you know, fighting between the two of them that Israel finds itself right in the middle of again. So again, God uses things, historically speaking, within human history to accomplish his will. And we can see this happening. Well, after the Third Intermediate Period Israel is actually conquered -- I'm sorry; Egypt is conquered by the Assyrians and ruled again by foreigners really for quite a long time. A whole series of foreigners rule Egypt until 333 when it was conquered by Alexander the Great. And Egypt did not actually become ruled by Egyptians again until the 20th century after the British turned over control of Egypt back to the Egyptian government in the 1950s. So a long period of decline in Egyptian power from 700 BC to the 1950s in which -- 1950 AD. That is in which Egypt was always ruled by somebody else. First by the Assyrians and then by the Libyans and then by the Romans -- by the Greeks and then by the Romans and, you know, then ultimately by the Islamic groups and the French and the English until modern time. So remarkable later history of Egypt. But that's beyond our story. So there aren't really any records of the -- of Israel in Egypt. There are records that tell us quite a bit about the time. And it was a very dynamic time in Egyptian history. And the exodus occurred at a very interesting point in Egyptian history, as well. But again, by looking at the history of the ancient world, we can see how God worked all things together to accomplish his will both not just in the history of his people but in the secular history of the world, as well. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***