The Historicity of Joseph in Egypt
When was Joseph in Egypt?
Alright, you’re here, which means you’re interested in the question of when Joseph was actually in Egypt. So, let’s chat.
First off, I should admit that I’ve gone back and forth on this issue. There are several possibilities, and it’s ambiguous enough that I would struggle to argue anyone is definitively right or wrong, even based on several pieces of evidence. One thing I’ve noticed about religious people, myself included, is we often get into a rut of having to “be right” about a specific issue. This desire for truth isn’t a bad impulse, but it can be a struggle to accept that ambiguity may legitimately exist in many cases. This is one of those cases, so try to keep that perspective in mind.
I’ll also briefly mention that, especially for some people, this sort of discussion about how history fits in with the Bible can actually damage and confuse their faith. People walk away thinking that the Bible is false because of some tiny detail that seems to not align with some other tiny detail. And if you’re that person, I want to encourage you that Biblical and Jewish scholars far more intelligent than both of us have thought about this issue far more than you or I ever will. I’m genuinely not aware of anyone who’s read all the other wacky stuff in Genesis, then got to Joseph’s story and said, well the chronology here just doesn’t make any sense and gave up.
A big part of my purpose here, is to give you tools to reckon with seeming contradictions in the Bible. I would argue that’s far more valuable than simply resolving the debate on Joseph’s chronology, which I don’t believe is fully possible.
Finally, a few quick disclaimers.
First, while I’ve tried my best to learn what I can in the process of writing these books, I’m ultimately just a guy cruising the internet, reading articles and browsing old books trying to do my best reconstruction of Joseph’s life. I do this for a hobby. I have an actual day job and other hobbies that consume most of my time. That means there are guaranteed to be sources or facts that I have missed. I know it's popular on the internet for people to claim to be authoritative sources on some topic they read about for 15 minutes one day, so I’ll just throw out that, while I have read a good deal on this, I am not a truly authoritative source. I’m just sharing some thoughts I’ve learned on my own journey.
Second, I’ll reference various dates throughout this article, but you should know, that at a basic level, all in dates in ancient Egypt are made up. This is not a malicious thing, there’s no one in a room somewhere just shifting around Egyptian chronology to confuse people. But the information we do have is very difficult to decipher. A lot of it comes from a guy named Manetho, who was an Egyptian priest around 250 BC who essentially wrote a list of ancient kings. The problem is, a lot of their reigns are believed to overlap, with a father and his son co-ruling for decades sometimes. In the ancient world this made a ton of sense because it served as an apprentice kingship and ensured dynastic stability when the old king died. For modern historians, it’s a real pain though, because even though a king may be listed as reigning for twenty years, ten of those may be reigning with his father and are thus double counted. But coregencies aren’t always listed. On top of that, sometimes Manetho’s order of kings appears to be wrong based on later archeological discoveries. There’s just a lot of uncertainty about these things, so understand that in that context, dates are really just best estimates.
With all that out of the way, let’s get to the fun part.
When was Joseph in Egypt?
The Problem
First off there are in general, four possible dates. This is based on there being 2 main Exodus dates and from each Exodus date we can rewind either 400 or 215 years for a total of four possibilities.
The Exodus dates are split into what we’ll call an Early Exodus around 1446 BC and a Late Exodus in the general vicinity of 1225 BC.
Which Exodus?
So what Exodus date is correct? The early date is derived from 1 Kings 6:1 where Solomon is said to have started building the temple 480 years after the Exodus in the 4th year of his reign (or 440 years in the Septuagint or Greek translation). If we assume a date for Solomon’s reign beginning in 970 BC (this is based on Biblical chronologies that rewind from a known reference point in the time of King Ahab) then do some math, we end up at the Exodus occurring around 1446 BC.
The late date is based on based on several things. One of the big items is the note in Exodus that Hebrew slaves built the store cities of Pithom and Rameses. To my awareness, Pithom has evaded clear identification, but a city called Pi-Rameses has been located in what would historically have been regarded as the region of Goshen (where the Hebrews were already living). So, perhaps this is the city called Rameses in the Bible. Since the bulk of construction activity is believed to have commenced after Rameses came to power in 1279, it’s reasonable to then say the Hebrews must have been around to build it. For various other reasons, assuming a departure date around 1250-1200 makes reasonable sense in this context. It roughly lines up with the Bronze Age collapse, which was a time of tremendous churn in general across the Eastern Mediterranean. The collapse saw Egypt’s power seriously diminished and would have given an opening for the Israelite conquest of Canaan some years later.
Okay, so now we have a bunch of conflicting information… what to do?
Well, step one is to acknowledge that real life is messy and this messiness makes it difficult to know anything in the past with absolute certainty. This uncertainty expands as we head further back in time, and when we go back 3000 years it becomes very significant.
What is Rameses?
So, when someone with authority claims that Pi-Ramses was the historical city of Rameses in the Bible, a valid response is maybe… maybe not.
We do have positive evidence in the form of a name that is similar to the text in Exodus, and it does appear to be in approximately the correct region, those are both significant pluses. But we also have evidence against it, specifically being that the internal timeline provided by the ancient Israelites suggests that this may not be the city. It’s very possible that there was a different city called Rameses that simply hasn’t been found, or the city has been discovered, but had a name change in the following years and is no longer known to us as Rameses.
But the city of Rameses question gets even more convoluted. For example, it’s unknowable if there may have been another more ancient city nearby which was long ago swallowed by the Nile. An ancient scribe familiar with the area and aware that the Israelites had built said ancient city, but unaware of the original name might simply have pointed to the large city nearby and called it Rameses as opposed to ancient unnamed mudbrick pile near Pi-Rameses.
This isn’t as wild as it may seem either, since up until the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the Nile had flooded to varying degrees every single year in recorded history. So, if you’re mudbrick, or a piece of parchment, or a body in the ancient Nile basin, you may not be around for very long.
Okay but what if the Later Exodus Date is Correct?
Now for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, some people do prefer to place the Exodus date during the Bronze Age Collapse. So if we wanted to accept the later dating of the Exodus, what do we do about the reference in Kings to the Exodus being 480 years earlier?
I see a few basic possibilities. These are: one, the scribe who recorded the 480 years in 1 Kings believed the incorrect number to be true. Two, he wrote a number with symbolic rather than literal meaning when he wrote the account. Or three, the number was changed later for some reason.
At a cursory glance, there is some dispute between the Masoretic (or Hebrew) text and the Septuagint (or Greek) text which claims it was 440 years. That raises the possibility of textual corruption of some sort. There’s also the fact that 480 years is a nice and oddly round number, so potentially a lot of rounding errors got rolled into the number. Then there is the consideration that it may have symbolic meaning. 40 x 12 = 480. Forty is sometimes used as the length for a generation. So it might be that the scribe is telling us that the construction began 12 generations after the Exodus, although that doesn’t line up very well with other Biblical genealogies. Possibly also since 12 is a number often associated with completeness, the scribe was conveying the idea that in the fullness of time since the Exodus, the temple construction had begun. Or perhaps the scribe regarded the maximum lifespan as 120 years and wanted to emphasis that it was 4 of those periods.
Now, it’s difficult to prove any of this, especially from 3000 years distance. But this is the thought process to take when resolving these problems.
We either accept the scribe’s number, in which case Pi-Rameses simply isn’t the correct city based on the dates we do have. Or we decide that we want Pi-Rameses to be the correct city and perhaps there’s some reason why the number of years since the Exodus presented isn’t reflective of the literal number of years that passed.
Now, someone is going to read this and respond:
Well great, now I know even less than before, and all this really does is muddy the waters even further.
And, yes, that’s true that this does muddy the waters. But it’s also true that the waters were in fact muddy in the first place, they just appeared to be clear from far off.
What do we really know?
And this taps into several larger bigger issues that need to be resolved before we can discuss Exodus dates any further. In the modern world information often gets passed to us as fact, when it’s actually little more than educated conjecture. And please understand, my argument here isn’t that historians are evil and archeologists are all out to trick everyone. As someone who loves history, I think they do really important and valuable work. It’s just that what they are doing is legitimately very difficult.
Imagine if your house burned to the ground and a hundred years later, your great grandkids show up with a dozen pages out of your favorite cookbook and tried to reconstruct your daily life, not to mention figure out what year you were married and where you worked.
That’s not easy. It might even be impossible. And since we live in a society that prizes simple facts, whatever conjectures they made would likely be distilled into a fifteen second soundbite and passed along as the definitive truth with all the qualifying nuance stripped out.
How Literally should we interpret The Bible?
Our job is made even more difficult since ancient people didn’t always think the same way that we do about facts.
That’s not to claim that ancient people were stupid, they weren’t, not by a long shot. The person who made the first bow and arrow, the first baked clay pot, the first cart axle, the first rope, those are inventions of genius on par with the first transistor, car, or radio.
So, what do I mean when I say that ancient people sometimes treated facts differently? To start, not every book in the Bible was written with the intent of being a history. Some were. The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts seem to have been a two-part history commissioned by a guy known to us only as Theophilius, or lover of God and done in a literary style that matched other popular Roman histories. Others, such as the books of Kings and Samuel seem to be generally written as historical accounts, but with a very topical and polemical focus. These accounts exclude a huge amount of material that isn’t relevant to the author’s point. So, it’s not crazy to expect that some details we care about might be straight up missing, simply because the author didn’t think they mattered to the story they were trying to tell. These accounts also aren’t necessarily arranged in a neat chronological order. If you don’t believe me, go read 2 Samuel Chapter 23 and note how David gives his “Last Words” there but then does a bunch of stuff in Chapter 24.
This becomes a real problem though when we get to books like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which were not written as histories at all. They tend to use highly poetic or metaphorical language, they generalize whole nations into individuals and talk about things like God forgetting entire countries, only to remember them later. So, what does all that mean?
Well, we have to remember that these books were written with a goal in mind. Specifically, to tell people living 2,700 years ago to repent of their evil deeds. This means the authors didn’t use the measured, analytical tone we might expect from a modern historian. They wanted to get their message across. To that end, they used metaphor to help their audience understand. They used symbolic language to illustrate ideas beyond just the here and now, and they leaned on idioms and cultural references so as to be better comprehended. These things all sacrifice pure, rationalist, descriptive accuracy for in order to convey the overall message. So just like we wouldn’t read too deeply into the literal meaning of a poem today, we should be careful about trying to tease too much from the text.
A good modern example would be CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I think most people reading this, understand that those books are meant as a blend of allegory, fantasy and children’s story. So, when you’re reading them, you read them in that context. Aslan isn’t just the random Lion King of Narnia, the Last Battle isn’t just about a random Donkey and Ape who decide to pull a fast trick on all the other forest creatures. When the Jadis turns people to stone and Aslan breaths on them to bring them back to life, you can read a lot into that beyond just the literal description. And at least in part, that’s how Jeremiah and Isaiah are probably meant to be interpreted. There’s a lot more there than just the words, and sometimes hyper focusing on the literal words can actually miss the point.
An interesting example I’ve stumbled over is in Habakkuk 2:2, which the King James translates as:
And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
I was talking with a friend who mentioned that he’d had a lot of difficulty understanding the verse. He’d thought that perhaps the meaning was that if you read it you were supposed to be afraid and run away. But actually, according to my The New Bible Commentary: Revised, it mentions that this is a Hebrew idiom meaning so that he may read it quickly. And thus has a completely different meaning, that would only be understandable to someone living in ancient Jewish culture.
And in case you’re still not convinced, I’ll finally point out that Jesus also used lots of symbolic language and routinely sacrificed technical precision in order to get a broader point across. Fundamentally, that’s what a parable is. It’s a simple story that conveys a core message, but isn’t necessarily worried specific details.
A great example is the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31-32.
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
Now, allow me to share something interesting with you, mustard seeds are not actually the smallest of all seeds. Granted, they are very small, but some varieties of orchids have smaller seeds. So from a purely modernist scientific standpoint, this statement is false. And as best as I can tell the Greek word used for smallest here, mikroteron does legitimately mean smallest in a comparative sense.
So what gives? If the Bible is supposed to be true but misrepresents the size of mustard seeds, is it all a lie? Can we believe anything written Jesus said?
Well, yeah, it just requires some context. First off, it helps to acknowledge that the parable isn’t making a scientific statement about seed sizes, it’s making a metaphorical one about the kingdom of heaven. It’s set in the context of an agricultural society where people were familiar with common seeds and plants, and leans into that. In today’s society, where most people have never even seen a mustard tree, He probably wouldn’t have chosen that metaphor at all, because it wouldn’t be culturally relevant.
Potentially the story was told while the disciples were walking a local market were someone was selling mustard seeds, alongside a bunch of other common garden seeds. Everyone knows what all the seeds are, and what all the plants look like when they grow up, and Jesus uses that to make a point, about how even small things can have massive impacts. And it’s memorable, because the next time they walk by a mustard tree, they’ll think of the parable.
So, with that in mind, when the Bible gives specifics such as numbers, we should be careful about reading those though a modernist scientific lens, because that’s not how the people writing the bible viewed what they were writing.
What do Numbers Mean?
The last item is numbers, not the book, just numbers in general. Sometimes in the ancient world, numbers were used symbolically to represent ideas. I think I mentioned at the end of my book about Elijah that one of the key ways we date Biblical events is through a battle between an alliance including King Ahab of Israel and King Shalmaneser the 3rd of Assyria. This event essentially syncs up the Jewish and Assyrian Calendars, and since the Assyrian calendar records eclipses, we can work back to derive actual fixed dates for these eclipses and apply them to both calendars.
Shalmaneser records his battle against Hadad-ezer of Aram. He then lists out unusually precise round numbers of troops and chariots for a series of 11 opposing armies in the alliance. Then closes it out with these twelve kings he brought to his support despite only listing Hadad-ezer and 10 others. So what gives? Were Shalmaneser’s scribes just stupid and unable to count?
Probably not.
Which means whoever wrote the description felt that they were conveying a meaningful message about the battle, despite it being factually wrong from a modern viewpoint. Potentially the number 12 was itself significant and represented something like completeness, so the Assyrians might claim that any alliance was a Twelve Kings Alliance regardless of the actual numbers involved. And maybe not, maybe there was something else going on entirely. But the key fact remains, these scribes were writing down something that would make us say, ‘hold up, something’s wrong here,’ but they didn’t see any issue with it.
What does inerrancy actually mean?
So if we were to find that statement about a Twelve Kings Alliance in the Bible when there were only Eleven kings listed? Would that mean the Bible is false, everything you’ve ever learned is a lie and Jesus isn’t real because twelve is obviously a different number than eleven?
No, not really.
The ancient scribe said exactly what he intended to say and meant it to truthfully reflect reality in his time and place. He just didn’t intend for that part of his statement to be interpreted literally. And it’s not necessarily fair to point a finger several thousand years later and call our nameless scribe a liar because we struggle to understand his original message.
And this taps into a deeper issue. We say that the Bible is inerrant meaning ‘without error’ but that means different things to different people. It’s a sliding scale. Inerrancy stretches between highly metaphorical interpretations of the Garden of Eden conveying an abstract story about humanity falling short of God’s perfection, all the way to the view that Eden was a literal place 6000 years ago where a literal Adam and Eve ate an actual forbidden fruit because a snake suggested it. (Probably not an apple though, because apple trees require a certain number of cold hours in the winter in order to trigger fruiting the following year. If the garden was down in the region of the modern Persian Gulf, then it likely would never get cold enough for apples to grow.)
I’m not attempting to stake out an explicit stance on creation here. But hopefully you see in this illustration that people on both sides of the debate could claim that they believe the Bible is inerrant despite have radically different interpretations.
Now, where does the truth sit, likely somewhere between the two extremes. In the case of someone who takes absolutely everything in the Bible as a metaphor (including Jesus) I’d have serious questions if they qualify as a Christian under the Nicene or Apostles creeds, since those do hinge on a literal death and resurrection of Christ.
However, I think someone who insists in reading the Bible in a hyper literal sense is likely on dangerous ground as well. A great example is Psalm 18:2 which opens with the iconic, The Lord is my rock. (NIV) and emphasizes this again down in verse 46 with Praise be to my rock (NIV). Now a straight reading of these lines to say that God is a literal rock is obviously wrong. If you read the rest of verse 2, you’ll conclude that as well, and I don’t know anyone who would seriously argue that point.
However, I say this to point out that parts of the Bible absolutely are metaphorical, they must be interpreted that way in order for the rest of your theology to make sense. And some or even most of these metaphors are not explicitly flagged out. As an exercise in just how thorny this can be, go read the rest of Psalm 18 and for each line try to decide if it is meant literally or not. It’s not easy.
That means hyper literalism (every single word in the Bible as I/my local church interpret it is true) cannot be completely valid. And the real question is where we draw the lines between literal and metaphorical interpretations.
The classic example I mentioned above is the creation account in Genesis. Again, I’ve been around churches long enough to know not to take a position here. But I will point out that the divide between young and old earth creationism really demonstrates how small tweaks in what you read metaphorically vs literally can lead to dramatically divergent theological views and positions. Much of that debate hinges simply on the interpretation of the Hebrew word yom as either day or age and how metaphorically you choose to interpret the surrounding text.
In that vein, it’s good to remember that unless we are talking about key foundational aspects of the Christian faith such as Jesus’s literal death, resurrection and ascension, there is a lot of room for interpretation in the tent that is Christianity. And we ought to heed Paul’s words in Titus 3:9 to avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.
I think most readers will agree with me that no one ought to have their faith shipwrecked because of interesting but ultimately minor questions, such as exactly when Joseph was in Egypt. And that may require us to acknowledge that there are some gaps in what we know that make it difficult, if not impossible to decisively answer the question. And that’s not a statement about the Bible being true or false, but rather just to say that it records a vanishingly tiny slice of the ancient world, so plenty of contextual things that we might be interested in just aren’t there.
And that’s okay.
Back to Joseph
With all that out of the way, let’s circle back to Joseph. There is much more that can be said about the Exodus dating, whole books worth in fact. But I think it’s sufficient to just say you can make compelling arguments to accept both an early date around 1450 BC or a late date around 1200 BC.
Using those dates, there are two possible durations of the Israelite stay in Egypt, either 430 years (long stay) or 215 years (short stay). The 430 year time is based on Exodus 12:40 which reads, Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. (NIV) People also commonly refer to Genesis 15:13 Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there (NIV). These numbers don’t perfectly match but the argument is that while the Israelites were actually in Egypt for 430 years, they were only enslaved and mistreated for 400 of those years.
So, case closed, right?
Wrong. You see, the ancient Jewish Historian Josepheus, who was likely born within ten years of the time that Jesus was crucified and who is one of our most critical sources for intertestamental Jewish history disagrees with you. In The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 2 Chapter 15 subsection 318 (More commonly denoted as Josepheus, Ant 2.15.318) He explains that They left Egypt in the month of Xanthicus, on the fifteenth day of the lunar month; four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham came into Canaan, but two hundred and fifteen years only after Jacob removed into Egypt.
And what about those 400 years that God spoke of to Abraham? Well, Josephus kind of drops the ball on that one and essentially says yeah that happened too (Josepheus, Ant 1.10.185). The general interpretation I’ve heard though is that those 400 years refer to the time in which Abraham’s descendants are strangers in the land where they live, which is true of their time in both Canaan and Egypt. And that only during part of that were they slaves.
Similarly, Exodus 12:40 which seems pretty cut and dried could also be read differently. In the KJV the verse is rendered Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. Josephus defines sojourning as the time since Abraham left his home in Harran, and says that Egypt was only a portion of that time. In a way Abraham also agrees with this interpretation in Genesis 23:4 where he describes himself to the people of Kiraith Arba (presumably speaking with one of those Mamre the Great’s from the last book) as a stranger and a sojourner with you (KJV).
Even Stephen’s quotation of all this to the Sanhedrin from Acts 7:6 ultimately contains the same ambiguity in that it can be read to support either position if you tease the text the way you prefer. For four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated (NIV).
The other bit of biblical evidence comes from those genealogies, that thing Paul explicitly warned us not to dig too deeply into. Let’s ignore him for a few minutes though. If you go to Exodus 6:13-26 the genealogy of Moses is given and the two key points are verses:
16: These were the names of the sons of Levi according to their records: Gershon, Kohath and Merari. Levi lived 137 years.
18: The sons of Kohath were Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. Kohath lived 133 years.
20: Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed, who bore him Aaron and Moses. Amram lived 137 years.
Without boring anyone with too much math, if you add these numbers up and add in Moses living 80 years before the Exodus and Levi probably being around 50 when he arrived in Egypt you get (137-50) +133 + 137 +80 = 437. These are dates that people lived though, not dates at which they had children. So if we assume a 400 year stay in Egypt, each one on average had their son only about 10-15 years before their death. That feels unlikely.
How do we Unravel these Mysteries?
So what to do?
This can honestly all seem very intractable to navigate, however if we circle back to some of the tools we discussed earlier, we might find some assistance.
First off, if you accept that Moses authored at least the base account of Genesis and Exodus (some people don’t for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion), then presumably he wrote all this down and felt that it made sense. So our default position ought to be that this all should fit together.
Let’s start with the genealogy. Moses provides a few generations worth of information, however it’s entirely possible that there are intermediate ancestors who are not named. In that case the word sons could just be used to mean descendants. And this has some precedent in other parts of Exodus where the word for son, Bene is used to refer to the people of Israel in general as the Sons of Israel despite being several generations removed.
So why would Moses skip some generations? Perhaps he wanted to emphasize specific individuals who were well known in his family history. Levi is an obvious mention since he founded the tribe and Kohath seems to be the founder of Moses’s clan within that tribe. So perhaps Moses is actually trying to tell us that he was from the tribe of Levi, the clan of Kohath and his immediate father some generations later was a guy called Amram.
We could read the genealogy either way. Similarly, we could read most of the other dates either way as well.
In my view that just means that both views are acceptable. And while it’s fine to hold one or the other, you shouldn’t criticize someone for holding a different perspective, especially if they’ve simply considered to the topic and decided to read several texts differently.
What about Extra Biblical Evidence?
Now, without digging too much deeper, this largely brings us to the end of the biblical source evidence. But we also have some extra biblical evidence to consider, regarding both Joseph and the Exodus.
Now there’s always some dispute in Biblical circles as to what importance extra-scriptural evidence ought to take. I won’t wade into that argument except to say that it should at least be considered, and it is important. This is always a charged issue because people on both sides have become deeply invested in either proving the Bible right, or proving the Bible wrong. But as we’ve just seen, often historical evidence is more ambiguous than it is initially presented, and doesn’t lend itself well to these sorts of proofs.
In any case, let’s begin with the Exodus. To the best of my knowledge, the critical scholarly consensus as of writing this is that there is no strong extra biblical evidence for the Exodus or Joseph’s presence in Egypt.
Now, it’s important to realize that’s not the same thing as saying the events recorded in Genesis and Exodus never happened, just that there is no strong archeological evidence for it. Now, mind you, up until the discovery of the Pilate Stone in 1961 we also didn’t have firm archeological evidence for Pontius Pilate’s existence either, so this isn’t an uncommon situation.
Honestly, the lack of evidence for the Exodus isn’t that shocking. First off, the whole event is deeply shrouded in the supernatural. Under normal circumstances there is no way that any serious sized group of people could survive in the deserts of North Saudi Arabia and East Jordan for any extended period, let alone 40 years. But if you accept the story as real, then God is supernaturally providing mana and quail for these people.
There’s also a rather cryptic reference in Deuteronomy 8:4 that For all these forty years your clothes didn’t wear out, and your feet didn’t blister or swell (NLT).
You can interpret this however you want, but one simple way is that potentially God supernaturally stopped the Israelite’s stuff, pots, clothes, tents, ect from wearing out or breaking since they couldn’t easily replace it. If you read the story of Elijah where the widow has a jar of oil and a pot of flour that lasts for several years without running dry, this feels like a very God sort of solution to their problems.
This would mean that there may not be much material evidence of the Exodus for us to find. Usually, archeologists look for things like broken pots and trash heaps to learn more about ancient cultures, but if you add a supernatural element into the equation, the Israelites may not have left much behind in the desert. And given the size and remoteness of that area, it's perfectly probably that any remaining evidence may be nigh on impossible to find.
Additionally, I’ll just add that it’s not obvious that the traditional Exodus route or location of Mount Siani is even correct. The traditional Mount Siani location was established during the Late Roman Empire, but there are competing locations, some of which would take the Israelites on extremely different routes. So we could also be looking for evidence in all the wrong places.
We also wouldn’t expect the Egyptians to make much mention of the Exodus. As a rule, kings tended not to write about their failures, so there wouldn’t be much impetus to permanently preserve a record of that one time when there were a bunch of awful plagues, everyone’s firstborn died, and Pharoah led a major military expedition to their deaths in the Red Sea.
Now there are some possible records. Manetho, who we referenced earlier, might possibly mention Moses as being around near the start of the 18th dynasty, which would argue for the 1450 BC Exodus date (From: Manetho, with an English translation by W.G. Waddell, Fragment 52, pp 111). But this is hardly a slam dunk, since Manetho’s original manuscript is reconstructed from quotations by other authors. In this particular case, a quote by a 3rd century AD Christian named Africanus, which was re-quoted by a Byzantine monk named Georgius Syncellus from 800 AD. Did one of them just decided that Moses fitted in there and add in that information? Possibly. It’s also possible that Manetho included it in his original text, although given he was a pagan, I rate that as significantly less probable. Truth is, we will likely never know for certain.
There’s also the Jericho problem. If you’re not familiar, the Jericho problem can be summarized as, there is strong archeological evidence that Jericho was burned and the walls destroyed sometime between 1600 and 1350 BC. But nailing down specific dates has been difficult. Initial excavations in the 1800s suggested a 1400 BC date for the destruction, but later excavations moved that date back to around 1550 BC based largely on pottery evidence. This pottery evidence was later contested, but carbon dating from the site does generally yield results around 1550-1500 BC.
Now, pottery evidence is a complicated topic, but the basic idea is that different time periods used different shapes and styles of pottery. You can think of this as the equivalent to how certain countertop, flooring, or bathroom tile styles phase in and out of fashion in modern homes. So just like you can tell that your high school’s bathrooms haven’t been updated since the 90’s, you can also correlate pottery styles from different eras and use that to date settlements.
This makes a bunch of assumptions though, because in the same way that your grandma isn’t perpetually stuck in 1975, even though her bathroom may be, ancient people didn’t always have the newest pots, and trends were unquestionably slower to propagate than today. So while pottery evidence can push a site’s date forward, it’s difficult to definitively pull it backwards based just on the contents of grandma’s kitchen.
Radiocarbon dating has a similar problem, in that radioisotope levels are locked when a piece of wood is harvested. (Really when it’s grown, ie a 50 year old tree, when cut down, will have an apparent average radiocarbon age of maybe 20-40 years depending on growth rates and tree ring size and a bunch of other factors such as how you cut your board from it). Beyond that though, if you take that freshly harvested piece of timber, use it to build your house, then 100 years later, your house burns down, the radiocarbon dated age of your house would show that it is from the late 1800’s (20-40 years + 100 years). This is even more problematic because in intense fires all the ash gets mixed up, so you’re not looking at just one piece of wood, potentially you are looking at a melding of dozens of pieces. So again it’s hard to say exactly what those dates mean except that Jericho clearly wasn’t burned before about 1600 BC.
There’s more to be said on this, and I’ll link an excellent article if you’re interested. I think it gives a relatively fair treatment of the evidence without taking too much of a biased position, and essentially ends with the conclusion of, it’s complicated.
https://armstronginstitute.org/1239-jericho-ai-hazor-investigating-the-three-cities-that-did-joshua-burn
But What About Joseph
Regarding Joseph’s presence in Egypt, the archeological evidence is thin on the ground, but again for understandable reasons. Much of ancient Egypt has been melted by the Nile floods or built over by several thousand years of more modern Egypt. Much of what we do have comes from tombs in places like the Valley of the Kings of the Giza complex. The heretic king Akhenaten (from that one time Egypt randomly decided to be monotheistic for some unknown reason circa 1330 BC) did leave us the city of Amarna and there are some glimpses into Egyptian life like the city of Lahun in the Faiyum Oasis, but generally most of everyday Egypt is long gone. This heavy reliance on tombs is a serious issue, because if we believe the Biblical account Joseph wasn’t buried in Egypt. Usually we might confirm his presence either by a tomb carved into the rock or by the existence of what is called a Mastaba, essentially a miniature tomb adjacent to a Pharoah’s larger tomb, where important advisors might be buried and potentially list out their achievements. And Egyptologists will rightly point out that no such tomb has been found, which makes sense given that basically all traditions agree that Joseph’s body was carried out during the Exodus and interred in Canaan.
Now that said, there is some interesting evidence for Joseph’s existence. One is the existence of a place called the Bahr Yussef or Joseph’s Canal. This canal connects the Nile to Faiyum Oasis. In ancient times this connection helped moderate Nile floods and significantly expanded the land area under agricultural cultivation. As best as I can tell it was dug, or at least dramatically expanded during the Middle Kingdom, which would fit with the earlier date of Joseph’s arrival in Egypt.
However, before the Egyptologists get together to mob me, I should point out that this appellation probably post dates the Roman Empire. Bahr is an Arabic word, so whatever the Egyptians called the canal… it likely wasn’t that (it could have been something like Amer or Omari or maybe Dadukwe who really know). The Bahr Yussef is a very strongly Quranic reference and Egypt has been majority Islamic for over 1000 years, so there’s a strong possibility that this was a later name that caught on. At a quick glance, I couldn’t actually find any hard evidence for or against that was actually backed by a real reference. So I’ll punt on this one and say that while it’s interesting, it’s difficult to determine either way.
The other more interesting evidence is from a site called Tell el-Daba, or as it’s referenced in this story Avaris. There were material finds that indicated Semetic (read possibly Hebrew) occupation potentially during the 12th Dynasty as well as a monumental statue head with an Asiatic (ie non-Egyptian) mushroom hairstyle that appears to have been deliberately defaced located in an otherwise empty tomb. So we have a foreign born, high ranking Egyptian official from about the right time period whose body is mysteriously absent from its sarcophagus for unknown reasons. All this does stack up to at least point towards a possible identification with Joseph. Now I urge caution about all this because here we have a possible identification, but to the best of my knowledge no hard physical inscriptions. That’s a high standard, certainly but without it we ultimately just have conjecture. It is well known that the area around Avaris was later occupied by a group of Asiatics broadly called the Hyskos and it’s possible that these remains are somehow tied to one of them.
Unfortuantely, a lot of first hand details on the expedition that excavated Avaris, led by a guy called Manfred Bietek, are paywalled in some capacity. I can link you to this article which covers the details salient to Joseph (although admittedly offering a very biased and pro-Joseph interpretation which I urge you to treat with some caution).
https://biblearchaeology.org/research/patriarchal-era/3317-the-sons-of-jacob-new-evidence-for-the-presence-of-the-israelites-in-egypt
But I’ll terminate this part of the discussion because I’m absolutely getting out of my depth. I am but a humble engineer, not an archeologist, I can’t go excavate the site and ultimately I’m just trying to pass along some of what I’ve learned about all this. To my eye, the conclusion is that there is some interesting circumstantial evidence for Joseph’s existence in Egypt, but nothing definitive.
What about secondary clues
The last item I’ll discuss here circles back to the long or short sojourn question we mentioned earlier. There are some tantalizing context clues in the text of Joseph’s story that may point to a specific time period in which Joseph came into Egypt.
Largely these clues center around placing Joseph into one of two periods, either the 12th Dynasty at the end of the Middle Kingdom, or as living under a set of foreign kings broadly referred to as the Hyskos who took power afterwards in the Nile delta and maaaaaybe in upper Egypt… for a while… to some degree.
The first one of interest is that there are some references to individuals being clean shaven. As you hopefully gathered from the reading this story, shaving was an extremely Egyptian habit while long beards were typically associated with Cannanites. When the Hyskos kings, migrated into the northern delta and somehow (we don’t know if it was peaceful or not) took power, my understanding is that what depictions we do have didn’t show them as clean shaven, but as wearing beards.
Now this could purely be stylistic. Egyptian art is highly stylized, meaning it has its own internal sets of rules that the artists would follow regardless of the real situation being depicted. Size is a great example, in Egyptian art, important people tend to be many times larger than less important people. Once you know to look for it, it’s common to see a painting with Egyptian man who is 50% larger than his wife perhaps with a son who seems to be the size of a baby or infant despite visually appearing 8-12 years old. Then if there are slaves, they are somtimes the size of rabbits if not smaller (although not always). Similarly, Egyptian art will use specific colors for specific races regardless of individuals actual skin color. Often Egyptians tend to be dark red, while Asiatics are a more orangish yellow, and Kushites tend to be a rich brownish-black.
So it’s possible the Hyskos are depicted with beards because that’s what the artist was trained to do. Likely the artist never saw his actual subjects and was drawing from existing patterns. But it’s also reasonable to think that the Asiatic Hyskos weren’t big fans of emasculating themselves by shaving and legitimately may have worn beards. If that’s true then the references in the story to people being shaved would point to Joseph’s story being set during the middle kingdom.
Set against that though, is a reference to chariots later in Joseph’s story. We know that chariots were heavily used in Egypt in later periods, but the prevailing consensus is that they were not widely used until introduced during the Hyskos period. So if chariots were involved in Joseph’s story, that would hint at a date later in the Hyskos period.
Again though, it’s not impossible that some early chariots were at use in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom. Just like the first cars were built in the late 1800’s but didn’t become commonly available until much later, there’s not necessarily a sharp line where, pre-Hyskos no one in Egypt had so much as heard of a chariot and a few years later suddenly there were chariots as far as the eye could see.
The next item of interest is how Joseph’s story changes in different periods. I mentioned earlier that I personally think it likely that Jospeh was either sold in Avaris itself or somewhere nearby. But depending on the period, this could have very different implications.
During the earlier Middle Kingdom, the capital of Egypt was located first at Thebes and later transferred to a new city in the Faiyum Oasis (both of which are quite a distance south of both the Nile Delta and Avaris). But during the later Hyskos period the capital was in Avaris itself.
If we assume an earlier dating, then Joseph likely does end up on a crazy adventure much like this book just to get from Avaris to Potiphar’s house. Alternatively, if Potiphar is in Avaris, then the pipeline becomes substantially more direct.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but it is interesting.
So what now?
At this point it’s fair to ask the question, what does all this actually mean? People reading this probably expected answers, and instead I’ve mainly just explained how the accounts of both Joseph and the Exodus are a mess of conflicting information that defies easy categorization most of which could be interpreted multiple ways.
Normally, in a situation like this, we would use a preponderance of evidence to decide one way or the other. But quite simply put, even now, I don’t honestly see the tower of evidence leaning overwhelmingly in either direction. There are good arguments both ways and either interpretation requires that we discount some evidence and essentially assume that there’s information missing somewhere.
In this case my recommendation is to accept that either possibility may be true. Potentially Joseph could either have shown up in Egypt either during the Middle Kingdom or during the Hyskos period. For what it’s worth, this book is set during the Middle Kingdom, although you could tell a similar but slightly modified story during the Hyskos period as well.
I think the real lesson in these sorts of questions is threefold. First, this is a great example of why people ought to be careful about pinning their faith on specific interpretations of nonessential Biblical events. Often the simplified interpretation of events that we read at a first glance becomes more complicated the deeper you dig. When I first began writing this series I did a relatively deep dive on this exact topic and initially decided that I preferred an earlier dating scheme. Since then I’ve gone back and forth several times, because it really is a thorny question that seems to defy a clear-cut answer. And ultimately, if we’re looking for truth, that has to be the attitude that we take. We need to have humility and at least consider that we and our interpretation of the Bible may be incorrect. And that’s okay. It’s actually part of life.
Second, we ought to be careful about getting too heated about these issues. I know some people have extremely strong opinions, and that’s great, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing the truth and trying to understand more. But ultimately, that needs to be done with the right heart posture. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) and if we reach the point in our arguing where those are lost, it doesn’t matter if we’re technically right or not, we are in error.
I’ve sometimes heard theology described as a three-tiered set of doctrines. We have essential doctrines at the top, things like: who is Jesus, why did he die, and did he come back from the dead. Below that live important doctrines such as how do we interpret the Bible, what the heck is the book of Revelation talking about, and how are churches suppose to be administered. Then we have a bunch of other stuff, like how to conduct worship, how loud should the music be, and is Sunday school a good idea. And the precise historicity of Joseph’s story lives so far down that list you’d need a submersible to find it. It’s interesting, but in the end it doesn’t truly matter, and in that light, we should be careful about taking too ferocious a stance on it.
Thirdly, and last of all. I hope this whole analysis provides some small encouragement to those of you who find yourselves filled with doubts every time you see some two minute article about how this, that or the other in the Bible is totally false because of some rock a guy found in a dump outside Hebron. Perhaps after taking a peek behind the curtain and glimpsing how complicated this all is, you’ll find it easier to just ignore that stuff. Life is ultimately about following God, not… whatever this is. So just keep that in mind.
And with all that said, I’m going to call this finished and go write something else.
Alright, you’re here, which means you’re interested in the question of when Joseph was actually in Egypt. So, let’s chat.
First off, I should admit that I’ve gone back and forth on this issue. There are several possibilities, and it’s ambiguous enough that I would struggle to argue anyone is definitively right or wrong, even based on several pieces of evidence. One thing I’ve noticed about religious people, myself included, is we often get into a rut of having to “be right” about a specific issue. This desire for truth isn’t a bad impulse, but it can be a struggle to accept that ambiguity may legitimately exist in many cases. This is one of those cases, so try to keep that perspective in mind.
I’ll also briefly mention that, especially for some people, this sort of discussion about how history fits in with the Bible can actually damage and confuse their faith. People walk away thinking that the Bible is false because of some tiny detail that seems to not align with some other tiny detail. And if you’re that person, I want to encourage you that Biblical and Jewish scholars far more intelligent than both of us have thought about this issue far more than you or I ever will. I’m genuinely not aware of anyone who’s read all the other wacky stuff in Genesis, then got to Joseph’s story and said, well the chronology here just doesn’t make any sense and gave up.
A big part of my purpose here, is to give you tools to reckon with seeming contradictions in the Bible. I would argue that’s far more valuable than simply resolving the debate on Joseph’s chronology, which I don’t believe is fully possible.
Finally, a few quick disclaimers.
First, while I’ve tried my best to learn what I can in the process of writing these books, I’m ultimately just a guy cruising the internet, reading articles and browsing old books trying to do my best reconstruction of Joseph’s life. I do this for a hobby. I have an actual day job and other hobbies that consume most of my time. That means there are guaranteed to be sources or facts that I have missed. I know it's popular on the internet for people to claim to be authoritative sources on some topic they read about for 15 minutes one day, so I’ll just throw out that, while I have read a good deal on this, I am not a truly authoritative source. I’m just sharing some thoughts I’ve learned on my own journey.
Second, I’ll reference various dates throughout this article, but you should know, that at a basic level, all in dates in ancient Egypt are made up. This is not a malicious thing, there’s no one in a room somewhere just shifting around Egyptian chronology to confuse people. But the information we do have is very difficult to decipher. A lot of it comes from a guy named Manetho, who was an Egyptian priest around 250 BC who essentially wrote a list of ancient kings. The problem is, a lot of their reigns are believed to overlap, with a father and his son co-ruling for decades sometimes. In the ancient world this made a ton of sense because it served as an apprentice kingship and ensured dynastic stability when the old king died. For modern historians, it’s a real pain though, because even though a king may be listed as reigning for twenty years, ten of those may be reigning with his father and are thus double counted. But coregencies aren’t always listed. On top of that, sometimes Manetho’s order of kings appears to be wrong based on later archeological discoveries. There’s just a lot of uncertainty about these things, so understand that in that context, dates are really just best estimates.
With all that out of the way, let’s get to the fun part.
When was Joseph in Egypt?
The Problem
First off there are in general, four possible dates. This is based on there being 2 main Exodus dates and from each Exodus date we can rewind either 400 or 215 years for a total of four possibilities.
The Exodus dates are split into what we’ll call an Early Exodus around 1446 BC and a Late Exodus in the general vicinity of 1225 BC.
Which Exodus?
So what Exodus date is correct? The early date is derived from 1 Kings 6:1 where Solomon is said to have started building the temple 480 years after the Exodus in the 4th year of his reign (or 440 years in the Septuagint or Greek translation). If we assume a date for Solomon’s reign beginning in 970 BC (this is based on Biblical chronologies that rewind from a known reference point in the time of King Ahab) then do some math, we end up at the Exodus occurring around 1446 BC.
The late date is based on based on several things. One of the big items is the note in Exodus that Hebrew slaves built the store cities of Pithom and Rameses. To my awareness, Pithom has evaded clear identification, but a city called Pi-Rameses has been located in what would historically have been regarded as the region of Goshen (where the Hebrews were already living). So, perhaps this is the city called Rameses in the Bible. Since the bulk of construction activity is believed to have commenced after Rameses came to power in 1279, it’s reasonable to then say the Hebrews must have been around to build it. For various other reasons, assuming a departure date around 1250-1200 makes reasonable sense in this context. It roughly lines up with the Bronze Age collapse, which was a time of tremendous churn in general across the Eastern Mediterranean. The collapse saw Egypt’s power seriously diminished and would have given an opening for the Israelite conquest of Canaan some years later.
Okay, so now we have a bunch of conflicting information… what to do?
Well, step one is to acknowledge that real life is messy and this messiness makes it difficult to know anything in the past with absolute certainty. This uncertainty expands as we head further back in time, and when we go back 3000 years it becomes very significant.
What is Rameses?
So, when someone with authority claims that Pi-Ramses was the historical city of Rameses in the Bible, a valid response is maybe… maybe not.
We do have positive evidence in the form of a name that is similar to the text in Exodus, and it does appear to be in approximately the correct region, those are both significant pluses. But we also have evidence against it, specifically being that the internal timeline provided by the ancient Israelites suggests that this may not be the city. It’s very possible that there was a different city called Rameses that simply hasn’t been found, or the city has been discovered, but had a name change in the following years and is no longer known to us as Rameses.
But the city of Rameses question gets even more convoluted. For example, it’s unknowable if there may have been another more ancient city nearby which was long ago swallowed by the Nile. An ancient scribe familiar with the area and aware that the Israelites had built said ancient city, but unaware of the original name might simply have pointed to the large city nearby and called it Rameses as opposed to ancient unnamed mudbrick pile near Pi-Rameses.
This isn’t as wild as it may seem either, since up until the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the Nile had flooded to varying degrees every single year in recorded history. So, if you’re mudbrick, or a piece of parchment, or a body in the ancient Nile basin, you may not be around for very long.
Okay but what if the Later Exodus Date is Correct?
Now for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, some people do prefer to place the Exodus date during the Bronze Age Collapse. So if we wanted to accept the later dating of the Exodus, what do we do about the reference in Kings to the Exodus being 480 years earlier?
I see a few basic possibilities. These are: one, the scribe who recorded the 480 years in 1 Kings believed the incorrect number to be true. Two, he wrote a number with symbolic rather than literal meaning when he wrote the account. Or three, the number was changed later for some reason.
At a cursory glance, there is some dispute between the Masoretic (or Hebrew) text and the Septuagint (or Greek) text which claims it was 440 years. That raises the possibility of textual corruption of some sort. There’s also the fact that 480 years is a nice and oddly round number, so potentially a lot of rounding errors got rolled into the number. Then there is the consideration that it may have symbolic meaning. 40 x 12 = 480. Forty is sometimes used as the length for a generation. So it might be that the scribe is telling us that the construction began 12 generations after the Exodus, although that doesn’t line up very well with other Biblical genealogies. Possibly also since 12 is a number often associated with completeness, the scribe was conveying the idea that in the fullness of time since the Exodus, the temple construction had begun. Or perhaps the scribe regarded the maximum lifespan as 120 years and wanted to emphasis that it was 4 of those periods.
Now, it’s difficult to prove any of this, especially from 3000 years distance. But this is the thought process to take when resolving these problems.
We either accept the scribe’s number, in which case Pi-Rameses simply isn’t the correct city based on the dates we do have. Or we decide that we want Pi-Rameses to be the correct city and perhaps there’s some reason why the number of years since the Exodus presented isn’t reflective of the literal number of years that passed.
Now, someone is going to read this and respond:
Well great, now I know even less than before, and all this really does is muddy the waters even further.
And, yes, that’s true that this does muddy the waters. But it’s also true that the waters were in fact muddy in the first place, they just appeared to be clear from far off.
What do we really know?
And this taps into several larger bigger issues that need to be resolved before we can discuss Exodus dates any further. In the modern world information often gets passed to us as fact, when it’s actually little more than educated conjecture. And please understand, my argument here isn’t that historians are evil and archeologists are all out to trick everyone. As someone who loves history, I think they do really important and valuable work. It’s just that what they are doing is legitimately very difficult.
Imagine if your house burned to the ground and a hundred years later, your great grandkids show up with a dozen pages out of your favorite cookbook and tried to reconstruct your daily life, not to mention figure out what year you were married and where you worked.
That’s not easy. It might even be impossible. And since we live in a society that prizes simple facts, whatever conjectures they made would likely be distilled into a fifteen second soundbite and passed along as the definitive truth with all the qualifying nuance stripped out.
How Literally should we interpret The Bible?
Our job is made even more difficult since ancient people didn’t always think the same way that we do about facts.
That’s not to claim that ancient people were stupid, they weren’t, not by a long shot. The person who made the first bow and arrow, the first baked clay pot, the first cart axle, the first rope, those are inventions of genius on par with the first transistor, car, or radio.
So, what do I mean when I say that ancient people sometimes treated facts differently? To start, not every book in the Bible was written with the intent of being a history. Some were. The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts seem to have been a two-part history commissioned by a guy known to us only as Theophilius, or lover of God and done in a literary style that matched other popular Roman histories. Others, such as the books of Kings and Samuel seem to be generally written as historical accounts, but with a very topical and polemical focus. These accounts exclude a huge amount of material that isn’t relevant to the author’s point. So, it’s not crazy to expect that some details we care about might be straight up missing, simply because the author didn’t think they mattered to the story they were trying to tell. These accounts also aren’t necessarily arranged in a neat chronological order. If you don’t believe me, go read 2 Samuel Chapter 23 and note how David gives his “Last Words” there but then does a bunch of stuff in Chapter 24.
This becomes a real problem though when we get to books like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which were not written as histories at all. They tend to use highly poetic or metaphorical language, they generalize whole nations into individuals and talk about things like God forgetting entire countries, only to remember them later. So, what does all that mean?
Well, we have to remember that these books were written with a goal in mind. Specifically, to tell people living 2,700 years ago to repent of their evil deeds. This means the authors didn’t use the measured, analytical tone we might expect from a modern historian. They wanted to get their message across. To that end, they used metaphor to help their audience understand. They used symbolic language to illustrate ideas beyond just the here and now, and they leaned on idioms and cultural references so as to be better comprehended. These things all sacrifice pure, rationalist, descriptive accuracy for in order to convey the overall message. So just like we wouldn’t read too deeply into the literal meaning of a poem today, we should be careful about trying to tease too much from the text.
A good modern example would be CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I think most people reading this, understand that those books are meant as a blend of allegory, fantasy and children’s story. So, when you’re reading them, you read them in that context. Aslan isn’t just the random Lion King of Narnia, the Last Battle isn’t just about a random Donkey and Ape who decide to pull a fast trick on all the other forest creatures. When the Jadis turns people to stone and Aslan breaths on them to bring them back to life, you can read a lot into that beyond just the literal description. And at least in part, that’s how Jeremiah and Isaiah are probably meant to be interpreted. There’s a lot more there than just the words, and sometimes hyper focusing on the literal words can actually miss the point.
An interesting example I’ve stumbled over is in Habakkuk 2:2, which the King James translates as:
And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
I was talking with a friend who mentioned that he’d had a lot of difficulty understanding the verse. He’d thought that perhaps the meaning was that if you read it you were supposed to be afraid and run away. But actually, according to my The New Bible Commentary: Revised, it mentions that this is a Hebrew idiom meaning so that he may read it quickly. And thus has a completely different meaning, that would only be understandable to someone living in ancient Jewish culture.
And in case you’re still not convinced, I’ll finally point out that Jesus also used lots of symbolic language and routinely sacrificed technical precision in order to get a broader point across. Fundamentally, that’s what a parable is. It’s a simple story that conveys a core message, but isn’t necessarily worried specific details.
A great example is the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31-32.
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
Now, allow me to share something interesting with you, mustard seeds are not actually the smallest of all seeds. Granted, they are very small, but some varieties of orchids have smaller seeds. So from a purely modernist scientific standpoint, this statement is false. And as best as I can tell the Greek word used for smallest here, mikroteron does legitimately mean smallest in a comparative sense.
So what gives? If the Bible is supposed to be true but misrepresents the size of mustard seeds, is it all a lie? Can we believe anything written Jesus said?
Well, yeah, it just requires some context. First off, it helps to acknowledge that the parable isn’t making a scientific statement about seed sizes, it’s making a metaphorical one about the kingdom of heaven. It’s set in the context of an agricultural society where people were familiar with common seeds and plants, and leans into that. In today’s society, where most people have never even seen a mustard tree, He probably wouldn’t have chosen that metaphor at all, because it wouldn’t be culturally relevant.
Potentially the story was told while the disciples were walking a local market were someone was selling mustard seeds, alongside a bunch of other common garden seeds. Everyone knows what all the seeds are, and what all the plants look like when they grow up, and Jesus uses that to make a point, about how even small things can have massive impacts. And it’s memorable, because the next time they walk by a mustard tree, they’ll think of the parable.
So, with that in mind, when the Bible gives specifics such as numbers, we should be careful about reading those though a modernist scientific lens, because that’s not how the people writing the bible viewed what they were writing.
What do Numbers Mean?
The last item is numbers, not the book, just numbers in general. Sometimes in the ancient world, numbers were used symbolically to represent ideas. I think I mentioned at the end of my book about Elijah that one of the key ways we date Biblical events is through a battle between an alliance including King Ahab of Israel and King Shalmaneser the 3rd of Assyria. This event essentially syncs up the Jewish and Assyrian Calendars, and since the Assyrian calendar records eclipses, we can work back to derive actual fixed dates for these eclipses and apply them to both calendars.
Shalmaneser records his battle against Hadad-ezer of Aram. He then lists out unusually precise round numbers of troops and chariots for a series of 11 opposing armies in the alliance. Then closes it out with these twelve kings he brought to his support despite only listing Hadad-ezer and 10 others. So what gives? Were Shalmaneser’s scribes just stupid and unable to count?
Probably not.
Which means whoever wrote the description felt that they were conveying a meaningful message about the battle, despite it being factually wrong from a modern viewpoint. Potentially the number 12 was itself significant and represented something like completeness, so the Assyrians might claim that any alliance was a Twelve Kings Alliance regardless of the actual numbers involved. And maybe not, maybe there was something else going on entirely. But the key fact remains, these scribes were writing down something that would make us say, ‘hold up, something’s wrong here,’ but they didn’t see any issue with it.
What does inerrancy actually mean?
So if we were to find that statement about a Twelve Kings Alliance in the Bible when there were only Eleven kings listed? Would that mean the Bible is false, everything you’ve ever learned is a lie and Jesus isn’t real because twelve is obviously a different number than eleven?
No, not really.
The ancient scribe said exactly what he intended to say and meant it to truthfully reflect reality in his time and place. He just didn’t intend for that part of his statement to be interpreted literally. And it’s not necessarily fair to point a finger several thousand years later and call our nameless scribe a liar because we struggle to understand his original message.
And this taps into a deeper issue. We say that the Bible is inerrant meaning ‘without error’ but that means different things to different people. It’s a sliding scale. Inerrancy stretches between highly metaphorical interpretations of the Garden of Eden conveying an abstract story about humanity falling short of God’s perfection, all the way to the view that Eden was a literal place 6000 years ago where a literal Adam and Eve ate an actual forbidden fruit because a snake suggested it. (Probably not an apple though, because apple trees require a certain number of cold hours in the winter in order to trigger fruiting the following year. If the garden was down in the region of the modern Persian Gulf, then it likely would never get cold enough for apples to grow.)
I’m not attempting to stake out an explicit stance on creation here. But hopefully you see in this illustration that people on both sides of the debate could claim that they believe the Bible is inerrant despite have radically different interpretations.
Now, where does the truth sit, likely somewhere between the two extremes. In the case of someone who takes absolutely everything in the Bible as a metaphor (including Jesus) I’d have serious questions if they qualify as a Christian under the Nicene or Apostles creeds, since those do hinge on a literal death and resurrection of Christ.
However, I think someone who insists in reading the Bible in a hyper literal sense is likely on dangerous ground as well. A great example is Psalm 18:2 which opens with the iconic, The Lord is my rock. (NIV) and emphasizes this again down in verse 46 with Praise be to my rock (NIV). Now a straight reading of these lines to say that God is a literal rock is obviously wrong. If you read the rest of verse 2, you’ll conclude that as well, and I don’t know anyone who would seriously argue that point.
However, I say this to point out that parts of the Bible absolutely are metaphorical, they must be interpreted that way in order for the rest of your theology to make sense. And some or even most of these metaphors are not explicitly flagged out. As an exercise in just how thorny this can be, go read the rest of Psalm 18 and for each line try to decide if it is meant literally or not. It’s not easy.
That means hyper literalism (every single word in the Bible as I/my local church interpret it is true) cannot be completely valid. And the real question is where we draw the lines between literal and metaphorical interpretations.
The classic example I mentioned above is the creation account in Genesis. Again, I’ve been around churches long enough to know not to take a position here. But I will point out that the divide between young and old earth creationism really demonstrates how small tweaks in what you read metaphorically vs literally can lead to dramatically divergent theological views and positions. Much of that debate hinges simply on the interpretation of the Hebrew word yom as either day or age and how metaphorically you choose to interpret the surrounding text.
In that vein, it’s good to remember that unless we are talking about key foundational aspects of the Christian faith such as Jesus’s literal death, resurrection and ascension, there is a lot of room for interpretation in the tent that is Christianity. And we ought to heed Paul’s words in Titus 3:9 to avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.
I think most readers will agree with me that no one ought to have their faith shipwrecked because of interesting but ultimately minor questions, such as exactly when Joseph was in Egypt. And that may require us to acknowledge that there are some gaps in what we know that make it difficult, if not impossible to decisively answer the question. And that’s not a statement about the Bible being true or false, but rather just to say that it records a vanishingly tiny slice of the ancient world, so plenty of contextual things that we might be interested in just aren’t there.
And that’s okay.
Back to Joseph
With all that out of the way, let’s circle back to Joseph. There is much more that can be said about the Exodus dating, whole books worth in fact. But I think it’s sufficient to just say you can make compelling arguments to accept both an early date around 1450 BC or a late date around 1200 BC.
Using those dates, there are two possible durations of the Israelite stay in Egypt, either 430 years (long stay) or 215 years (short stay). The 430 year time is based on Exodus 12:40 which reads, Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. (NIV) People also commonly refer to Genesis 15:13 Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there (NIV). These numbers don’t perfectly match but the argument is that while the Israelites were actually in Egypt for 430 years, they were only enslaved and mistreated for 400 of those years.
So, case closed, right?
Wrong. You see, the ancient Jewish Historian Josepheus, who was likely born within ten years of the time that Jesus was crucified and who is one of our most critical sources for intertestamental Jewish history disagrees with you. In The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 2 Chapter 15 subsection 318 (More commonly denoted as Josepheus, Ant 2.15.318) He explains that They left Egypt in the month of Xanthicus, on the fifteenth day of the lunar month; four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham came into Canaan, but two hundred and fifteen years only after Jacob removed into Egypt.
And what about those 400 years that God spoke of to Abraham? Well, Josephus kind of drops the ball on that one and essentially says yeah that happened too (Josepheus, Ant 1.10.185). The general interpretation I’ve heard though is that those 400 years refer to the time in which Abraham’s descendants are strangers in the land where they live, which is true of their time in both Canaan and Egypt. And that only during part of that were they slaves.
Similarly, Exodus 12:40 which seems pretty cut and dried could also be read differently. In the KJV the verse is rendered Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. Josephus defines sojourning as the time since Abraham left his home in Harran, and says that Egypt was only a portion of that time. In a way Abraham also agrees with this interpretation in Genesis 23:4 where he describes himself to the people of Kiraith Arba (presumably speaking with one of those Mamre the Great’s from the last book) as a stranger and a sojourner with you (KJV).
Even Stephen’s quotation of all this to the Sanhedrin from Acts 7:6 ultimately contains the same ambiguity in that it can be read to support either position if you tease the text the way you prefer. For four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated (NIV).
The other bit of biblical evidence comes from those genealogies, that thing Paul explicitly warned us not to dig too deeply into. Let’s ignore him for a few minutes though. If you go to Exodus 6:13-26 the genealogy of Moses is given and the two key points are verses:
16: These were the names of the sons of Levi according to their records: Gershon, Kohath and Merari. Levi lived 137 years.
18: The sons of Kohath were Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. Kohath lived 133 years.
20: Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed, who bore him Aaron and Moses. Amram lived 137 years.
Without boring anyone with too much math, if you add these numbers up and add in Moses living 80 years before the Exodus and Levi probably being around 50 when he arrived in Egypt you get (137-50) +133 + 137 +80 = 437. These are dates that people lived though, not dates at which they had children. So if we assume a 400 year stay in Egypt, each one on average had their son only about 10-15 years before their death. That feels unlikely.
How do we Unravel these Mysteries?
So what to do?
This can honestly all seem very intractable to navigate, however if we circle back to some of the tools we discussed earlier, we might find some assistance.
First off, if you accept that Moses authored at least the base account of Genesis and Exodus (some people don’t for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion), then presumably he wrote all this down and felt that it made sense. So our default position ought to be that this all should fit together.
Let’s start with the genealogy. Moses provides a few generations worth of information, however it’s entirely possible that there are intermediate ancestors who are not named. In that case the word sons could just be used to mean descendants. And this has some precedent in other parts of Exodus where the word for son, Bene is used to refer to the people of Israel in general as the Sons of Israel despite being several generations removed.
So why would Moses skip some generations? Perhaps he wanted to emphasize specific individuals who were well known in his family history. Levi is an obvious mention since he founded the tribe and Kohath seems to be the founder of Moses’s clan within that tribe. So perhaps Moses is actually trying to tell us that he was from the tribe of Levi, the clan of Kohath and his immediate father some generations later was a guy called Amram.
We could read the genealogy either way. Similarly, we could read most of the other dates either way as well.
In my view that just means that both views are acceptable. And while it’s fine to hold one or the other, you shouldn’t criticize someone for holding a different perspective, especially if they’ve simply considered to the topic and decided to read several texts differently.
What about Extra Biblical Evidence?
Now, without digging too much deeper, this largely brings us to the end of the biblical source evidence. But we also have some extra biblical evidence to consider, regarding both Joseph and the Exodus.
Now there’s always some dispute in Biblical circles as to what importance extra-scriptural evidence ought to take. I won’t wade into that argument except to say that it should at least be considered, and it is important. This is always a charged issue because people on both sides have become deeply invested in either proving the Bible right, or proving the Bible wrong. But as we’ve just seen, often historical evidence is more ambiguous than it is initially presented, and doesn’t lend itself well to these sorts of proofs.
In any case, let’s begin with the Exodus. To the best of my knowledge, the critical scholarly consensus as of writing this is that there is no strong extra biblical evidence for the Exodus or Joseph’s presence in Egypt.
Now, it’s important to realize that’s not the same thing as saying the events recorded in Genesis and Exodus never happened, just that there is no strong archeological evidence for it. Now, mind you, up until the discovery of the Pilate Stone in 1961 we also didn’t have firm archeological evidence for Pontius Pilate’s existence either, so this isn’t an uncommon situation.
Honestly, the lack of evidence for the Exodus isn’t that shocking. First off, the whole event is deeply shrouded in the supernatural. Under normal circumstances there is no way that any serious sized group of people could survive in the deserts of North Saudi Arabia and East Jordan for any extended period, let alone 40 years. But if you accept the story as real, then God is supernaturally providing mana and quail for these people.
There’s also a rather cryptic reference in Deuteronomy 8:4 that For all these forty years your clothes didn’t wear out, and your feet didn’t blister or swell (NLT).
You can interpret this however you want, but one simple way is that potentially God supernaturally stopped the Israelite’s stuff, pots, clothes, tents, ect from wearing out or breaking since they couldn’t easily replace it. If you read the story of Elijah where the widow has a jar of oil and a pot of flour that lasts for several years without running dry, this feels like a very God sort of solution to their problems.
This would mean that there may not be much material evidence of the Exodus for us to find. Usually, archeologists look for things like broken pots and trash heaps to learn more about ancient cultures, but if you add a supernatural element into the equation, the Israelites may not have left much behind in the desert. And given the size and remoteness of that area, it's perfectly probably that any remaining evidence may be nigh on impossible to find.
Additionally, I’ll just add that it’s not obvious that the traditional Exodus route or location of Mount Siani is even correct. The traditional Mount Siani location was established during the Late Roman Empire, but there are competing locations, some of which would take the Israelites on extremely different routes. So we could also be looking for evidence in all the wrong places.
We also wouldn’t expect the Egyptians to make much mention of the Exodus. As a rule, kings tended not to write about their failures, so there wouldn’t be much impetus to permanently preserve a record of that one time when there were a bunch of awful plagues, everyone’s firstborn died, and Pharoah led a major military expedition to their deaths in the Red Sea.
Now there are some possible records. Manetho, who we referenced earlier, might possibly mention Moses as being around near the start of the 18th dynasty, which would argue for the 1450 BC Exodus date (From: Manetho, with an English translation by W.G. Waddell, Fragment 52, pp 111). But this is hardly a slam dunk, since Manetho’s original manuscript is reconstructed from quotations by other authors. In this particular case, a quote by a 3rd century AD Christian named Africanus, which was re-quoted by a Byzantine monk named Georgius Syncellus from 800 AD. Did one of them just decided that Moses fitted in there and add in that information? Possibly. It’s also possible that Manetho included it in his original text, although given he was a pagan, I rate that as significantly less probable. Truth is, we will likely never know for certain.
There’s also the Jericho problem. If you’re not familiar, the Jericho problem can be summarized as, there is strong archeological evidence that Jericho was burned and the walls destroyed sometime between 1600 and 1350 BC. But nailing down specific dates has been difficult. Initial excavations in the 1800s suggested a 1400 BC date for the destruction, but later excavations moved that date back to around 1550 BC based largely on pottery evidence. This pottery evidence was later contested, but carbon dating from the site does generally yield results around 1550-1500 BC.
Now, pottery evidence is a complicated topic, but the basic idea is that different time periods used different shapes and styles of pottery. You can think of this as the equivalent to how certain countertop, flooring, or bathroom tile styles phase in and out of fashion in modern homes. So just like you can tell that your high school’s bathrooms haven’t been updated since the 90’s, you can also correlate pottery styles from different eras and use that to date settlements.
This makes a bunch of assumptions though, because in the same way that your grandma isn’t perpetually stuck in 1975, even though her bathroom may be, ancient people didn’t always have the newest pots, and trends were unquestionably slower to propagate than today. So while pottery evidence can push a site’s date forward, it’s difficult to definitively pull it backwards based just on the contents of grandma’s kitchen.
Radiocarbon dating has a similar problem, in that radioisotope levels are locked when a piece of wood is harvested. (Really when it’s grown, ie a 50 year old tree, when cut down, will have an apparent average radiocarbon age of maybe 20-40 years depending on growth rates and tree ring size and a bunch of other factors such as how you cut your board from it). Beyond that though, if you take that freshly harvested piece of timber, use it to build your house, then 100 years later, your house burns down, the radiocarbon dated age of your house would show that it is from the late 1800’s (20-40 years + 100 years). This is even more problematic because in intense fires all the ash gets mixed up, so you’re not looking at just one piece of wood, potentially you are looking at a melding of dozens of pieces. So again it’s hard to say exactly what those dates mean except that Jericho clearly wasn’t burned before about 1600 BC.
There’s more to be said on this, and I’ll link an excellent article if you’re interested. I think it gives a relatively fair treatment of the evidence without taking too much of a biased position, and essentially ends with the conclusion of, it’s complicated.
https://armstronginstitute.org/1239-jericho-ai-hazor-investigating-the-three-cities-that-did-joshua-burn
But What About Joseph
Regarding Joseph’s presence in Egypt, the archeological evidence is thin on the ground, but again for understandable reasons. Much of ancient Egypt has been melted by the Nile floods or built over by several thousand years of more modern Egypt. Much of what we do have comes from tombs in places like the Valley of the Kings of the Giza complex. The heretic king Akhenaten (from that one time Egypt randomly decided to be monotheistic for some unknown reason circa 1330 BC) did leave us the city of Amarna and there are some glimpses into Egyptian life like the city of Lahun in the Faiyum Oasis, but generally most of everyday Egypt is long gone. This heavy reliance on tombs is a serious issue, because if we believe the Biblical account Joseph wasn’t buried in Egypt. Usually we might confirm his presence either by a tomb carved into the rock or by the existence of what is called a Mastaba, essentially a miniature tomb adjacent to a Pharoah’s larger tomb, where important advisors might be buried and potentially list out their achievements. And Egyptologists will rightly point out that no such tomb has been found, which makes sense given that basically all traditions agree that Joseph’s body was carried out during the Exodus and interred in Canaan.
Now that said, there is some interesting evidence for Joseph’s existence. One is the existence of a place called the Bahr Yussef or Joseph’s Canal. This canal connects the Nile to Faiyum Oasis. In ancient times this connection helped moderate Nile floods and significantly expanded the land area under agricultural cultivation. As best as I can tell it was dug, or at least dramatically expanded during the Middle Kingdom, which would fit with the earlier date of Joseph’s arrival in Egypt.
However, before the Egyptologists get together to mob me, I should point out that this appellation probably post dates the Roman Empire. Bahr is an Arabic word, so whatever the Egyptians called the canal… it likely wasn’t that (it could have been something like Amer or Omari or maybe Dadukwe who really know). The Bahr Yussef is a very strongly Quranic reference and Egypt has been majority Islamic for over 1000 years, so there’s a strong possibility that this was a later name that caught on. At a quick glance, I couldn’t actually find any hard evidence for or against that was actually backed by a real reference. So I’ll punt on this one and say that while it’s interesting, it’s difficult to determine either way.
The other more interesting evidence is from a site called Tell el-Daba, or as it’s referenced in this story Avaris. There were material finds that indicated Semetic (read possibly Hebrew) occupation potentially during the 12th Dynasty as well as a monumental statue head with an Asiatic (ie non-Egyptian) mushroom hairstyle that appears to have been deliberately defaced located in an otherwise empty tomb. So we have a foreign born, high ranking Egyptian official from about the right time period whose body is mysteriously absent from its sarcophagus for unknown reasons. All this does stack up to at least point towards a possible identification with Joseph. Now I urge caution about all this because here we have a possible identification, but to the best of my knowledge no hard physical inscriptions. That’s a high standard, certainly but without it we ultimately just have conjecture. It is well known that the area around Avaris was later occupied by a group of Asiatics broadly called the Hyskos and it’s possible that these remains are somehow tied to one of them.
Unfortuantely, a lot of first hand details on the expedition that excavated Avaris, led by a guy called Manfred Bietek, are paywalled in some capacity. I can link you to this article which covers the details salient to Joseph (although admittedly offering a very biased and pro-Joseph interpretation which I urge you to treat with some caution).
https://biblearchaeology.org/research/patriarchal-era/3317-the-sons-of-jacob-new-evidence-for-the-presence-of-the-israelites-in-egypt
But I’ll terminate this part of the discussion because I’m absolutely getting out of my depth. I am but a humble engineer, not an archeologist, I can’t go excavate the site and ultimately I’m just trying to pass along some of what I’ve learned about all this. To my eye, the conclusion is that there is some interesting circumstantial evidence for Joseph’s existence in Egypt, but nothing definitive.
What about secondary clues
The last item I’ll discuss here circles back to the long or short sojourn question we mentioned earlier. There are some tantalizing context clues in the text of Joseph’s story that may point to a specific time period in which Joseph came into Egypt.
Largely these clues center around placing Joseph into one of two periods, either the 12th Dynasty at the end of the Middle Kingdom, or as living under a set of foreign kings broadly referred to as the Hyskos who took power afterwards in the Nile delta and maaaaaybe in upper Egypt… for a while… to some degree.
The first one of interest is that there are some references to individuals being clean shaven. As you hopefully gathered from the reading this story, shaving was an extremely Egyptian habit while long beards were typically associated with Cannanites. When the Hyskos kings, migrated into the northern delta and somehow (we don’t know if it was peaceful or not) took power, my understanding is that what depictions we do have didn’t show them as clean shaven, but as wearing beards.
Now this could purely be stylistic. Egyptian art is highly stylized, meaning it has its own internal sets of rules that the artists would follow regardless of the real situation being depicted. Size is a great example, in Egyptian art, important people tend to be many times larger than less important people. Once you know to look for it, it’s common to see a painting with Egyptian man who is 50% larger than his wife perhaps with a son who seems to be the size of a baby or infant despite visually appearing 8-12 years old. Then if there are slaves, they are somtimes the size of rabbits if not smaller (although not always). Similarly, Egyptian art will use specific colors for specific races regardless of individuals actual skin color. Often Egyptians tend to be dark red, while Asiatics are a more orangish yellow, and Kushites tend to be a rich brownish-black.
So it’s possible the Hyskos are depicted with beards because that’s what the artist was trained to do. Likely the artist never saw his actual subjects and was drawing from existing patterns. But it’s also reasonable to think that the Asiatic Hyskos weren’t big fans of emasculating themselves by shaving and legitimately may have worn beards. If that’s true then the references in the story to people being shaved would point to Joseph’s story being set during the middle kingdom.
Set against that though, is a reference to chariots later in Joseph’s story. We know that chariots were heavily used in Egypt in later periods, but the prevailing consensus is that they were not widely used until introduced during the Hyskos period. So if chariots were involved in Joseph’s story, that would hint at a date later in the Hyskos period.
Again though, it’s not impossible that some early chariots were at use in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom. Just like the first cars were built in the late 1800’s but didn’t become commonly available until much later, there’s not necessarily a sharp line where, pre-Hyskos no one in Egypt had so much as heard of a chariot and a few years later suddenly there were chariots as far as the eye could see.
The next item of interest is how Joseph’s story changes in different periods. I mentioned earlier that I personally think it likely that Jospeh was either sold in Avaris itself or somewhere nearby. But depending on the period, this could have very different implications.
During the earlier Middle Kingdom, the capital of Egypt was located first at Thebes and later transferred to a new city in the Faiyum Oasis (both of which are quite a distance south of both the Nile Delta and Avaris). But during the later Hyskos period the capital was in Avaris itself.
If we assume an earlier dating, then Joseph likely does end up on a crazy adventure much like this book just to get from Avaris to Potiphar’s house. Alternatively, if Potiphar is in Avaris, then the pipeline becomes substantially more direct.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but it is interesting.
So what now?
At this point it’s fair to ask the question, what does all this actually mean? People reading this probably expected answers, and instead I’ve mainly just explained how the accounts of both Joseph and the Exodus are a mess of conflicting information that defies easy categorization most of which could be interpreted multiple ways.
Normally, in a situation like this, we would use a preponderance of evidence to decide one way or the other. But quite simply put, even now, I don’t honestly see the tower of evidence leaning overwhelmingly in either direction. There are good arguments both ways and either interpretation requires that we discount some evidence and essentially assume that there’s information missing somewhere.
In this case my recommendation is to accept that either possibility may be true. Potentially Joseph could either have shown up in Egypt either during the Middle Kingdom or during the Hyskos period. For what it’s worth, this book is set during the Middle Kingdom, although you could tell a similar but slightly modified story during the Hyskos period as well.
I think the real lesson in these sorts of questions is threefold. First, this is a great example of why people ought to be careful about pinning their faith on specific interpretations of nonessential Biblical events. Often the simplified interpretation of events that we read at a first glance becomes more complicated the deeper you dig. When I first began writing this series I did a relatively deep dive on this exact topic and initially decided that I preferred an earlier dating scheme. Since then I’ve gone back and forth several times, because it really is a thorny question that seems to defy a clear-cut answer. And ultimately, if we’re looking for truth, that has to be the attitude that we take. We need to have humility and at least consider that we and our interpretation of the Bible may be incorrect. And that’s okay. It’s actually part of life.
Second, we ought to be careful about getting too heated about these issues. I know some people have extremely strong opinions, and that’s great, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing the truth and trying to understand more. But ultimately, that needs to be done with the right heart posture. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) and if we reach the point in our arguing where those are lost, it doesn’t matter if we’re technically right or not, we are in error.
I’ve sometimes heard theology described as a three-tiered set of doctrines. We have essential doctrines at the top, things like: who is Jesus, why did he die, and did he come back from the dead. Below that live important doctrines such as how do we interpret the Bible, what the heck is the book of Revelation talking about, and how are churches suppose to be administered. Then we have a bunch of other stuff, like how to conduct worship, how loud should the music be, and is Sunday school a good idea. And the precise historicity of Joseph’s story lives so far down that list you’d need a submersible to find it. It’s interesting, but in the end it doesn’t truly matter, and in that light, we should be careful about taking too ferocious a stance on it.
Thirdly, and last of all. I hope this whole analysis provides some small encouragement to those of you who find yourselves filled with doubts every time you see some two minute article about how this, that or the other in the Bible is totally false because of some rock a guy found in a dump outside Hebron. Perhaps after taking a peek behind the curtain and glimpsing how complicated this all is, you’ll find it easier to just ignore that stuff. Life is ultimately about following God, not… whatever this is. So just keep that in mind.
And with all that said, I’m going to call this finished and go write something else.