It cannot be doubted that waves of foreigners used to move into Egypt, at the time of the patriarchs, in search of the gifts with which the Nile often crowned that land. The rulers of Egypt even booked a specific place to house the foreigners who flocked thither, namely the Nile Delta.
At that site, we assume that the Israelites have lived. And it is indeed there that the Bible places Jacob’s sons, when arriving at Egypt, since the Land of Goshen, mentioned as their abode, was on the Delta. There also emerged Moses, upon returning from Midian. And the Bible also tells Moses and Aaron’s frequent displacements to Pharaoh's court, to ask him to free the Israelites. If the court were not in the Delta, it would have been impossible for the two brothers to have come as often to the ruler’s presence as Exodus tells us.
However, History shows that the Court of Pharaoh was established in the Delta in only two seasons: during the Hyksos Period and in the long reign of Ramses II of the XIX Dynasty. In all other stages of Egypt’s history, the Pharaohs’ court settled in places far from the Delta , which prevents the constant displacements from Goshen to the king’s palace and vice versa.
This leaves us with only two periods when the Exodus may have occurred. Not only that. Another set of data reinforces this double possibility: only the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries b. C. provide traces of the destruction of cities in Canaan which the Bible locates shortly after the Exodus. In all other ages, no such traces are available.
Of course the existence of two possible locations for the Exodus does not justify the thirteenth century having been taken as the time of the great event by the vast majority of historians. What is the reason of such a preference? The answer is related to the general attitude of scholars towards the chronological data of the Old Testament. The Pentateuch and the historical books provide us with two sets of chronological locations of the events they narrate. The first one can be called remote chronology. The other is the more recent chronology, formed with data from the courts of Samaria and Jerusalem.
Historians do not doubt the accuracy of Bible’s recent chronology, since, in the courts of Ancient Orient, there were officials responsible for recording the main events, whereas in other contexts events were narrated much less accurately. It was no different in the case of the Israelites, whose first court was organized by David. The oldest evidence of Hebrew writings we know come from places near Jerusalem, where David and Solomon’s court was established. It is thus believable that the records related to recent chronology have been composed in that language.
But since Israel had no court and no written language before that time, the accuracy of the chronology of Kings and Chronicles is apparently not repeated in the remote chronology. It is meaningful that most of the time slots of that chronology is constituted by round numbers such as 40. For example, the pilgrimage of Israel in the wilderness (Num. 14:33-34), the activity of judges like Othniel (Judges 3:11), Ehud, Shamgar (Judges 3:30), Barak (Judges 5:32) and Gideon (Judges 8:28) were all assigned this term. The same happens with the reigns of Saul (Acts 13:21), David (1 Kings 2:11; 1 Cr 3:4) and Solomon (2 Chron. 29:30), which are supposed to have lasted 40 years. Not to mention other round numbers, like the 140 years between the births of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 11:26,32 ; 12:4 ) and the 100 between Isaac and Jacob (Gen. 21:5). Historians think that the actual lengths of the periods related to these numbers are uncertain.
For these reasons, they also conclude that the times and content of remote facts of Israel’s Prehistory were arbitrarily established, so that trusted history starts from the period of the divided kingdom. This is the present status of the discussions on the history of the Israelites and their peculiar chronology.
However, the conclusion just mentioned contains a hole, a flaw that can be demonstrated as follows. It is possible to establish a few fixed points, which correspond to events that appear both in the Bible and in parallel History. Noah's Flood is one of these possible points. If it can be identified with the events referred to in Gilgamesh’ poem, it probably took place in the first half of the third millenium b. C. Traces of flooding have been dated from that period, thus providing a good example of outward confirmation of biblical data.
But this is not the only case of convergence of biblical and non-biblical data. The founder of Ancient Assyria (Sargon) is widely known from inscriptions and testimonies. It is not unlikely that Sargon was one of Nimrod’s descendants (Gen. 10:10-11). We have much archaeological evidence that biblical Nimrod was an outstanding personality. So, this is a second point of convergence of biblical and extra-biblical information coming from remote times. Though the details about those characters and their deeds remain unclear, their existence at the time in which the Bible situates them can be fairly drawn from all data available. And we can also mention the conquerors of the Tribes, at the period of the judges, such as Chushan-Rishathaim, Eglon, Jabin and others whose deeds are consistent with what we know of Old Palestine and its neighborhood. So, not few events are confirmed both by biblical and extra-biblical information about that age.
The question, therefore, is if the dates of the events of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges (called remote history), indicated by round numbers, can be considered correct. It is obvious that the use of round numbers leads to the establishment of arbitrary times. How can it be different only with a few of them? For instance, how can the interval between the Flood and the occupation of Transjordan by the Philistines be correct, if it was established by so many round dates?
Let me try to make it more clear: if A, B , C, D, E and F are remote events, and if the distances between any two of them is arbitrary, how can the interval between D and E be correct? How can that be, if the events of old were dated by a method which involved so many round numbers?
On the other hand, we must not forget that many dates in remote history are not round. In the genealogy of Genesis 5, we have nine numbers, and only two round ones, which does not diverge clearly from the characteristics of a random distribution of numbers. The situation of the genealogy of Genesis 11 is not very distinct. In it, round numbers were used to complete the existing information, not to create information out of nothing.
And if the establishment of non-round numbers was based on real information, we must ask whether it was reliable. It probably was, since its use led to the establishment of correct dates. In fact, we cannot be sure that the non-round numbers of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 came from very ancient courts. The generations included in those lists are old, but not prehistoric. They also lived in one of the most developed places in ancient times: Mesopotamia. Lists with the dates we see in Genesis may have been written in small courts of that region. It is probably what happened. When the Jews got in contact with those lists, during the Babylonian Exile, in Mesopotamia, they used them to compose Genesis 5 and 11, which formed the framework of that period of Hebrew history.
All these facts tell us that biblical information about remote times may well be reliable. And if it is, the Exodus must be located in the sixteenth century, for it is there that the Bible places it. And when we read that Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and returned to the Hebrew homes, again and again, we know that scene was possible only in the Hyksos Period. Thus, Josephus hypothesis about the time of the Exodus is confirmed.
The palace in which Moses was raised was that of the Hyksos ruler. The daughter of Pharaoh, who nursed him in his first age, also had Hykso blood. Moses, therefore, absorbed the culture of that people as well as the Egyptian culture. Apparently, the Hyksos spoke West Semitic. However, they may not have used an alphabet-based writing, since there was no alphabet in Egypt or anywhere else in the seventeenth century. Though Moses must have learned the Egyptian hieroglyphics, it is doubtful that he used the language of Israel's enemies to write the sacred words of his God. If this were the case, the technique employed by Moses to register the words mentioned in Exodus 17,14 may have been similar to the first texts "made with what appears to be an alphabet". These texts were created "by a group of prisoners who were working in the turquoise mines of the Sinai peninsula in 1600 b. C." (Miller and Stephen M. HUBER, Robert V. The Bible and its history - emergence and impact of the Bible. Barueri Bible: Bible Society of Brazil, 2010. p. 17.). Since Israel's wandering in the Sinai occurred about 1,578 b. C., the use of the writing technique discovered in Sinai cannot be ruled out.
This book surrounded by mystery must have contained the first versions of the sagas of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as the story of the Israelites escape from Egypt. If it did, it will not be incorrect to state that it included a Short Genesis and a Short Exodus, which were the first embryonic forms of the Pentateuch. These ancient versions of Genesis and Exodus may be the reason why the writing of the Pentateuch was assigned to Moses throughout the centuries.
Joshua 8:32,34-35 confirm the Mosaic authorship of an ancient writing. It says that his successor Joshua wrote, on Mount Ebal, "a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written before the children of Israel [. ..] And Joshua also read all the words of the law, both the blessing and the curse, according to all that was written in the book of the law. Not a single word of all that Moses had commanded was ommited to the congregation of Israel." And, if Joshua read all the law to the people, at a time when illiteracy and disinterest for texts were very high, that law must have been much shorter than the Pentateuch or the set of books from Genesis to Exodus. It must have been no more than a few pages long, which fits perfectly into the theory of the authorship of a Small Genesis and a Small Exodus by Moses.
