The Merneptah Stela
The Conventional Chronology
"The period of Egyptian oppression that drove the Israelites to revolt and escape probably occurred during the reign of Ramses II (1304-1237 B.C.). Most scholars believe that the Exodus itself took place under his successor Merneptah. A victory stela dated 1220 B.C. relates a battle fought with the Israelites beyond Sinai in Canaan. Taken together with other evidence, it is believed that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century B.C. and had been completed by about 1225 B.C."
- Army Area Handbooks, "Ancient Israel"
"Discovered in 1896 in Merneptah's mortuary temple in Thebes by Flinders Petrie, the stela is a poetic eulogy to pharaoh Merneptah, who ruled Egypt after Ramesses the Great, ca. 1212-1202 BC. Of significance to Biblical studies is a short section at the end of the poem describing a campaign to Canaan by Merneptah in the first few years of his reign, ca. 1210 BC....Here we have the earliest mention of Israel outside the Bible and the only mention of Israel in Egyptian records."
- Bryant G. Wood of Associates for Biblical Research, "The Merneptah Stela"
"Israel is desolated, his seed is not;
Palestine is become a widow for Egypt."
- Stele of Merneptah
"It refers to a plundering of Canaan, a defeat of Askelon, a capture of Gezer and the annihilation of Yaro'am, a town which lay just to the south of Lake Galilee. Then came the vital words: 'Israel is laid waste and his seed is not'. Merneptah's reign belongs in the late thirteenth century BC (c. 1224-1214 BC, on the likeliest dating). By c. 1220, therefore (the text belongs in his fifth year), Israel certainly existed in Canaan, any Israelite conquest or Exodus must have belonged at an earlier date. The Pharaoh's text...uses the hieroglyphic sign for a people, not a place. It also uses a distinctive gender: place-names in Egyptian texts are feminine, but Israel, here, is masculine."
- Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version
"It is remarkable that none of the letters from Tel Amarna refer to central Palestine. There is no mention of any town in lower Galilee or in Samaria, except Zabuba, and Megiddo. Taanach, Shechem, Jezreel, Dothan, Bethel, and other such places are unnoticed, as well as Heshbon, Medeba, Rabbath-Amon, Ramoth-Gilead, and the places in Moab and Gilead. The Egyptians probably had no stations in these wild mountains, where their chariots could not pass. No towns in the regions of Samaria or Gilead or Moab occur in the list of places taken by Thothmoses III; nor were there any stations in the Hebron mountains. The nearest places to Hebron seem to have been Nezeb, in the valley of Elah, easily reached by a broad, flat road, and on the south Kanaan (Kanana), a fortress, which is only two miles southwest of Hebron. The inhabitants of Hebron were never apparently disturbed by the chariots, and appear in the Tel Amarna tablets as marauders of the Egyptian stations. On the other hand, many places in Sharon and Philistina, and in the lower hills to the east, and in the Nezeb hills south of Hebron, were conquered by Thothmoses III."
- The Tel Amarna Tablets, translated by C.R. Conder, 2ed., London , 1894
"Israel, identified by the determinative for people, is a socioethnic unity powerful enough to be mentioned along with major city-states that were also neutralized."
- Hasel, M.G. 1994 "Israel in the Merneptah Stela". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296: 45-61.
"Turning to the meaning of the Egyptian word prt, 'seed', there are only two possibilities, 'grain' or 'offspring'. Based on the use of prt in other Egyptian texts, Hasel deduces that it refers to grain. Thus, the phrase "its seed is not" indicates that Israel's food supply was no longer in existence."
- Bryant G. Wood of Associates for Biblical Research, "The Merneptah Stela"
"We may perceive Israel within the context and information of the Merneptah stela to be a rural sedentary group of agriculturalists without its own urban city-state support system."
- Hasel, M.G. 1994 "Israel in the Merneptah Stela". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296: 45-61.
"This is exactly the picture we have of Israel from the Old Testament. Gideon lived close to the time of the Merneptah Stela and he was a farmer living in a small village (Judges 6).
"Archaeological evidence supports the fact that the Israelites were agriculturalists in the late 13th century BC. Grain storage pits were a common feature of hill country sites of this period. Teeth from a tomb dating to ca. 1200 BC excavated by the Associates for Biblical Research at Kh. Nisya indicate that the inhabitants of the site ate grain."
- Bryant G. Wood, "The Merneptah Stela"
"This is consistent with a date of about 1270 BC for the Exodus and with the biblical period of a generation in the wilderness before entry into Palestine. Recently discovered archaeological evidence shows that the Palestinian city of Hazor - destroyed by fire by the invading Israelites under Joshua (Joshua 11:10-13) - was destroyed in the later part of the thirteenth century, which confirms this date."
- David Daiches, Moses - Man in the Wilderness
"The final strophe on the 'Israel Stela' is not a record of Merenptah's personal military activities but rather a view of the international scene as it appeared in his reign."
"The aged Merenptah, incapable of doing very much more than defend Egypt from attack by Libyan tribes and perhaps undertake the suppression of a revolt led by the city of Gezer (hence the carving of his cartouches over those of Ramesses II on the Gezer register), was bathing in the reflected glory of his more powerful predecessors."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), pp. 169, 170
Rohl persuasively argues that Merenptah and Ramesses could not possibly have been the pharoahs of the oppression and Exodus. Ramesses II is the only pharaoh known to have recorded a defeat of Jerusalem and Rohl dates his campaign to 925 B.C.E.
For more on David Rohl's dating of Ramesses II, see: |
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