Date of the Exodus

The Bible gives a date for the Exodus of c 1450 BC based on it being 480 years before the building of the temple in the 4th year of the reign of King Solomon and 430 years after the first arrival of Abraham in Egypt. Conjectures about the Exodus having taken place at other times are generally intended to demonstrate its agreement with other historic sources, archaeology, textual artifacts such as the form of contracts and the price of slaves, the geopolitical context, Egyptian campaign accounts and various king lists. Suggested dates range from 1450 to 1208 BC in the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt and the Nineteenth dynasty of Egypt. At any time in this period the capital of Egypt is at Thebes and the crossing of the Red Sea from Thebes Red Sea Port Elim to Elat would be made in the company of Hatshepsuts Red Sea Fleet which was engaged in bringing mortuary supplies to the Temple of Karnak where frankincense, myrrh, bitumen, natron and linen from across the Red Sea were used in mummification.

Based on the passages which say that Moses was born in a time when war threatened and there was a new Pharaoh who knew Joseph not and the passages in Genesis 14 describing Abrahams encounter with Chedolaomers campaign the geo political context suggests the Exodus occurred sometime around expulsion of the Hyksos by Kamose and the formation of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt by Amose. The building of a Red Sea fleet by Hatshepsut c 1458 BC and the campaign of Thutmosis III in pursuit of the Hyksos which lead up to the Battle of Megiddo c 1470 BC are considered compatible with the Bibles dating.

It is thought to have occurred in the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, because this is the period when the Amarna letters, found in the library of Akhenaton at Amarna detailing the events that occurred in the reigns of himself and his predecessors Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) tell of Canaan being invaded by "Ha ibru". Inscriptions portraying the battle of kadesh show ha ibru (the horsemen plural) as mounted bowmen serving as couriers for the Egyptians a couple of centuries later. This is the period when the Bible tells of the people of the Exodus attacking the same cities mentioned in the Egyptian accounts and placing them under the ban. There were also campaigns by Chedarlaomer against the cities of the Amalek along the Seir in the time of the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob some centuries before the Exodus. Doubt is thrown on the literal dating of the Bible suggesting that "forty years" might be just an idiom for "a long period of time", in the Old Testament despite the correlations. Further doubt arrises in that some scholars view the Habiru as members of a social underclass of people the MARTU, SAGAZ, KUR and apiru who are notorious as displaced semitic agricultural workers. Certainly there are plenty of brigands, vagrants, drifters, and nomadic pastorialists causing trouble throughout the Ancient Near East. Offshore its waters are full of sea people and pirates its trade routes regularly traversed by warlords, their campfollowers, sacred prostitutes, mercenaries, Shashu, bedouin raiders, warlike Amalek giants, Hittites, Mitanni and other trouble makers inclined to prey upon its merchant caravans and unwalled cities and villages. The sons of Israel are not the only candidates for hapiru or habiru anymore than they are a group of tribes, gene, oinkos and phratre confined to Egypt.

A century ago some scholars thought the Exodus may have occurred during the 13th century BC, if the pharaoh of that time, Ramesses II, could be considered to be the pharaoh with whom Moses squabbled — either as the 'Pharaoh of the Exodus' himself, or the preceding 'Pharaoh of the Oppression', who is said to have commissioned the Hebrews to "(build) for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses." These cities are now know known not to have been built under either Seti I or Rameses II, and are in fact the remains of a Twelfth dynasty of Egypt canal system. It was conjectured by some that the stele of Merneptah might refer to campaigns in Canaan and even to refer to Israel making him the 'Pharaoh of the Exodus until it was realized that there were problems with the reading of the inscription made by Fliders Petrie in 1896. The phrase he translated as mentioning "the people of YISRAEL their seed is not" actually refers the campaigns of his predecessors against Syrians. This is considered plausible by those who view the famous claim of the Year 5 Merneptah Stele (ca. 1208 BC) that "Israel is wasted, bare of seed," as propaganda to cover up this king's own loss of an army in the Red Sea. Taken at face value, however, the primary intent of the stela was clearly to commemorate Merneptah's victory over the Libyans and their Sea People allies. The reference to Canaan occurs only in the final lines of the document where Israel is mentioned after the city states of Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam perhaps to signal Merneptah's disdain or contempt for this new entity. In Exodus, the Pharaoh of the Exodus did not cross into Canaan since his Army was destroyed at the Red Sea. Hence, the traditional view that Ramesses II was the Pharaoh of either the Oppression or the Exodus is affirmed by the basic contents of the Merneptah Stele. Under this scenario, the Israelites would have been a nation without a state of their own who existed on the fringes of Canaan in Year 5 of Merneptah. This is suggested by the determinative sign written in the stela for Israel — "a throw stick plus a man and a woman over the three vertical plural lines" — which was "typically used by the Egyptians to signify nomadic groups or peoples without a fixed city-state," such as the Hebrew's previous life in Goshen.

An unverified theory places the birth and/or adoption of Moses during a minor oppression in the reign of Amenhotep III, which was soon lifted, and claims that the more well-known oppression occurred during the reign of Horemheb, followed by the Exodus itself during the reign of Ramesses I. This is supported by the Haggadah of Pesach, which suggests that they were oppressed and then re-oppressed quite a few years later by Pharaoh. The Bible and Haggada suggest that the Pharaoh of the Exodus died in year 2 of his reign, matching Ramses I. The fact that Pi-Tum and Raamses were built during the reign of Ramses I also supports this view. Seti I records that during his reign the Shasu warred with each other, which some see as a reference to the Midyan and Moab wars. Seti's campaigns with the Shasu have also been compared with Balaam's exploits. However, many Egyptologists reject these comparisons as spurious.[citation needed]

A more recent and non-Biblical view places Moses as a noble in the court of the Pharaoh Akhenaten (See below). A significant number of scholars, from Sigmund Freud to Joseph Campbell, suggest that Moses may have fled Egypt after Akhenaten's death (ca. 1334 BC) when many of the pharaoh's monotheistic reforms were being violently reversed. The principal ideas behind this theory are: the monotheistic religion of Akhenaten being a possible predecessor to Moses' monotheism, and the "Amarna letters", written by nobles to Akhenaten, which describe raiding bands of "Habiru" attacking the Egyptian territories in Mesopotamia.

David Rohl, a British historian and archaeologist, author of the book "A Test of Time", places the birth of Moses during the reign of Pharaoh Khaneferre Sobekhotep IV of the 13th Egyptian Dynasty, and the Exodus during the reign of Pharaoh Dudimose (accession to the throne around 1457–1444), when according to Manetho "a blast from God smote the Egyptians".