2024-09-19

Problems Dating Israel’s Exodus and Conquest of Canaan

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by Neil Godfrey

I use two sources for this post. The first is a widely used text for advanced studies (seminaries and universities) in the “biblical history of Israel”. The second is a research conference paper by a specialist in the Middle Bronze Age Levant.

Let’s get our bearings with respect to the various ages that will be referenced in what follows:

Ancient Times From the emergence of cities and the beginning of writing to Alexander the Great—i.e., the first three thousand years of recorded history. This was the era of the ancient empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah appeared toward the end of Ancient Times, during the Iron Age.

Early Bronze Age 3200 to 2000 B.C.E.
Middle Bronze Age 2000 to 1550 B.C.E.
Late Bronze Age 1550 to 1200 B.C.E.
Iron Age 1200 to 330 B.C.E.

Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd Ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. p. 2

Under the heading Questionable Correlations between Archaeology and the Bible Miller and Hayes explain the problem with early attempts to line up the Bible’s accounts of Israel’s origins with archaeology:

During the early years of archaeological research and throughout most of the twentieth century many archaeologists and biblical scholars attempted to cor­relate the constantly increasing archaeological evidence with an essentially uncritical reading of the biblical account of Israel’s origins. This approach has been largely abandoned in recent years, for two reasons. First, both the biblical story and the archaeological evidence had to be used selectively, and often given strained interpretations as well, in order to achieve even a loose correlation. Second, an increasing number of biblical scholars and archaeologists have come to view the biblical account of Israel’s origins as idealistic and not historically trustworthy. It will be instructive to review some of the proposed correlations between the biblical account and archaeology that linger on in the public media but do not represent the current thinking in most scholarly circles. (p. 51)

The first of the “proposed correlations . . . lingering on in public media” they discuss is:

The Amorite Hypothesis

In the Early Bronze Age we have strong city states flourishing in the Fertile Crescent until towards 2000 B.C.E. when we find “a breakdown of this urban phase . . . followed by a period of largely nomadic and seminomadic society”.

Mesopotamian texts around this time or shortly before the “urban breakdown” phase mention Amurru (the Amorites). During the Middle Bronze Age there is said to be a “resurgence” of urban centres along with Amorite rulers of major Mesopotamian cities.
The hypothesis formulated in the 1930s was that Amorite migrations into the Levant had been responsible for the “urban breakdown” and it was the Amorites who were responsible for the waves of nomadic or seminomadic movements. The patriarchs of Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were said to have arrived from Ur of the Chaldees and who moved around the region of Canaan were understood against this background. The biblical patriarchs belonged to this “(semi)nomadic” time.

The hypothesis matched one selection of the Bible’s chronology:

And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord. — 1 Kings 6:1

Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. — Exodus 12:40

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
(Absence of strong city states allows easy movement between Mesopotamia and Egypt; customs of the time were supposed to match those depicted in the Bible’s patriarchal narratives)
ca 1900 to 1800 B.C.E.
Hyksos rule in Egypt
// Israelites enter Egypt
ca 1700 to 1550 B.C.E.
400 + years —–> Exodus // conquest of Canaan ca 1100 B.C.E.
Solomon’s temple ca 980  B.C.E.

Miller and Hayes point out that “there are serious problems” with the above hypothesis, noting:

A frontal assault on this view was carried out by T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (BZAW133; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); and John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).  (p. 52)

  1. There is no consensus among archaeologists that the Amorites were responsible for the urban changes between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.
  2. A timeline of biblical chronology using the genealogical data (Genesis 15:16, 46:8-11 and Exodus 6:18-20) requires four generations (Jacob-Levi-Amram-Moses) with each generation averaging 100 years.
  3. The earliest extra-biblical reference to Israel is the Merneptah stele of ca 1200 B.C.E. announcing that Egypt had defeated “Israel” in Canaan so that they “were no more”.
  4. The parallels between biblical names and customs, on the one hand, and those known from Middle and Late Bronze Mesopotamian texts, on the other, become less impressive when one takes into account that the sorts of names and customs involved were not confined to the second millen­nium b.c.e. but were apparently characteristic of the first millennium as well. This renders the parallels relatively useless for pinpointing any particular period as “the patriarchal age.” (p. 53)
  5. Biblical “traditions” associate the patriarchs with Iron Age Arameans (Deuteronomy 26:5) and other Iron Age people (Moabites, Edomites, Philistines) — never with the Bronze Age Amorites.

The Exodus and Natural Catastrophes

Quora image

Immanuel Velikovsky argued for catastrophes on earth resulting from earth’s close encounter with a mammoth comet, specifically resulting in the pulling of the waters of the Red Sea apart and returning them in a tidal wave to drown Pharaoh’s army. The Egyptian plagues and subsequent “long day” of Joshua were likewise the ripples from cosmic phenomena in dance.

Others have bucked the trend to date the volcanic eruption of Thera to around 1600 B.C.E. by marking it around 1450 B.C.E. Ash was responsible for the plagues and geological shifts produced massive waves destroying the Egyptian army pursuing Israel.

Bryant G. Wood and Piotr Bienkowski argue — behind the paywall of the Biblical Archaeological Review — over just how early in the Bronze Age an earthquake brought down the walls of Joshua’s Jericho. (When Miller and Hayes wryly comment on Wood’s argument, “apparently in perfect timing for the seventh day of the Israelite march around the walls”, I assumed they were being cynical. But no, a reading of Wood’s article does make it clear that the “earthquake” presumably struck after the Israelites had marched around the walls seven days!)

Theories of this sort attempt to give naturalistic and scientifically acceptable explanations for the more fantastic and miraculous biblical claims. In our opin­ion, however, these theories presuppose such hypothetical scenarios, such a catastrophic view of history, and such marvelous correlations of coincidental factors that they create more credibility problems of their own than the ones they are intended to solve. (p. 53)

The Ramesside Period as the Setting of the Exodus

Ramesses II — Wikimedia commons

The famous Ramses/Ramesses name featured eleven times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt — from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. And since in Exodus 1:11 we read . . .

So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh

. . . and since that bland “statement of fact” has, for some, a “ring of authenticity”, the Exodus is best dated during the reign of one of the Ramesses. The great Ramesses II is the one of choice. He began his long reign around 1300 B.C.E. One detail in favour of this time slot is that it would allow the Israelites to reach Canaan in time for the above mentioned Merneptah stele inscription to record that “Israel is no more” after an Egyptian campaign.

Hayes and Miller again draw readers’ attentions to the drawbacks of this hypothesized date:

For one thing, we would expect Israelite storytellers to be familiar with and to use Mesopotamian and Egyptian names and customs in their narratives. Another problem with this proposed correlation between Egyptian history and the bib­lical narrative is that it does not square very well with biblical chronology. The Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties ruled from the end of the fourteenth cen­tury until after the beginning of the eleventh century. Yet biblical chronology seems to place the exodus already in the fifteenth century. (p. 54)

Transjordanian Occupational Gap

It was once believed that there had been a significant gap of more than half a millennium in settlement in the region east of the Jordan River prior to the thirteenth century. From the 1200s B.C.E. renewed settlements and the rise of the kingdoms of Edom and Moab were witnessed. Given that the Biblical account of the wandering Israelites encountering the kingdoms of Edom and Moab on their way to Canaan, it followed that the Exodus and conquest of Canaan could not have happened before the 1200s B.C.E.

This line of argumentation was combined with, if not inspired by, the identification of Pharaoh Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus (see above).

But there is a but

More recent archaeological exploration in the Moabite and Edomite regions of southern Transjordan has discredited the idea of a sharp occupational gap prior to the thirteenth century. (p. 55)

Thirteenth-Century Destructions

West of the Jordan River, in the land of Canaan, there is evidence of “widespread city destructions” toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. Here is the accompanying map from the Miller and Hayes volume (p. 56):

Again, M&H list the problems with this hypothesis:

  1. Late Bronze Age city destructions “were part of a general pattern throughout the ancient world”. We cannot know if the destructions occurred simultaneously or even with the onslaught of a common enemy. We do not know if warfare was responsible in most cases.
  2. With the exceptions of Lachish and Hazor, the cities destroyed in this period are not the ones listed in the biblical account of the conquest.
  3. Most of the sites that are identified with cities that the biblical account does associate with the conquest, on the other hand, have produced little or no archaeological indication even of having been occupied during the Late Bronze Age, much less of having been destroyed at the end of the period. Prominent among such “conquest cities” are Arad (present-day Tell Arad), Heshbon (Tell Hisban), Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), Ai (et-Tell), and Gibeon (el-Jib). (p. 55)

The Search for a Distinctively Israelite Material Culture

If only distinctive cultural remains could identify “Israelites” in distinction from other ethnic groups in the land! Some scholars have focussed on “collared-rim jars and four-room houses”:

The collared-rim jars; the four-room house: room 1 is a narrow courtyard, rooms 2, 3 and 4 are separated by pillars – room 3 likely being unroofed. People likely slept in the upper storey, animals below. – (Images from Dever, Rise of Ancient Israel)

Yet there is nothing intrinsically “Israelite” about either of these features, and in fact they show up in the regions of ancient Ammon and Moab, east of the Jor­dan River, as well as in the areas generally associated with Israelite settlement. Apparently these items belonged to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Palestine and therefore cannot be used to isolate particular sites, geo­graphical areas, or historical periods as “Israelite.” (p. 57)

And as for pig bones? Surely the absence of pigs would indicate Israelite settlement, yes?

From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that no human behavioral evidence exists to indicate that pig avoidance was unique to any particular group in the ancient Near East. The fact that complex variables affect the choice to raise swine have confounded attempts to find an origin to the pig prohibition. Lots of people, for lots of reasons, were not eating pork. The bald fact is that there is no date before the Hellenistic period when we can assert with any confidence, based on archaeological and textual evidence, that the religious injunction which enjoined Jews from eating pork was actually followed by them alone as a measure of social distinction. (Hesse & Wapnish, p. 261 — referenced by Miller and Hayes — See also the post: The “Late” Origins of Judaism – The Archaeological Evidence)

The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist . . . 

Continued in the next post . . . .


Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

Hesse, Brian, and Paula Wapnish. “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, edited by Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small, 238–70. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

Shanks, Hershel, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr, and Bruce Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. Lectures Presented at a Symposium Sponsored by the Resident Associate Program, Smithsonian Institution. Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013.


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12 thoughts on “Problems Dating Israel’s Exodus and Conquest of Canaan”

  1. I think your title would be better as “Problems Evaluating Dating Claims for Israel’s Exodus and Conquest of Canaan”

    It is really hard to date events that didn’t happen, like what year was it that Hitler conquered Canada?

    I still argue that the so-called “Conquest of Canaan” was a metaphoric claim of converting Canaan from the Canaanite gods to Yahweh worship.

    1. You are quite right. I confess this post is written for readers less familiar with “the facts” of the matter. The next post will provide one strand of evidence that “it never happened”.

      I also want to have it on record what mainstream sources have to say, too.

  2. It seems to me that the Exodus from Egypt was really an expelling of foreign workers from Egypt — blaming the swelling ranks of foreign workers for national bad luck, bad weather, and plagues. Pushing foreigners out of a nation is a normal political movement even in modern times.

    Obviously Canaanite nomads would migrate to big cities like Egypt for work — or to sell oneself into slavery in times of famine. Without that we could hardly explain Canaanite tribes with Egyptian habits like circumcision and an obsession with the clean and unclean (a life and death obsession in Nile culture).

    igmund Freud thought the ADONAI of the Shema prayer was a Jewish variation of the name of the Egyptian deity ATON, promoted by Pharaoh Akhn-Aton (Akhenaten) as the only True God, for whom it would be illegal to erect graven images.

    Moses, as one of the Egyptian priests of ATON, would have been elected to lead the expelled workers out of Egypt (as ATON worship was banned as soon as Akhn-Aton died). Moses would have accepted like a true believer, ready to create a “nation of priests” out of this motley.

    Although the 613 Laws of Moses resemble Hammurabi’s Law Code (~1750 BC), the Ten Commandments more closely resemble positive versions of the Negative Confessions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And although the Sumerian Creation story was not monotheistic, the Egyptian Creation story was.

    In short — the culture of ancient Judaism appears to be a unique blend of Egyptian, Canaanite, and Assyrian cultures.

    The Bible reports that Israelites often reverted to golden calf worship — a relic of Canaanite Baal worship. Egyptian ideas didn’t always stick.

    Solomon’s brother, Jeroboam, split off the northern kingdom’s 10 tribes ~930 BC, we read , and built two golden calves at Bethel and Dan. So, Israel was a Canaanite offshoot with a special, collective past in Egypt, yet never lost touch with its roots.

    Nor can we explain the Global Resurrection and Last Judgment doctrines of Second Temple Judaism as the product of the Hellenistic period of Judaism, since Hellenistic culture mocked such doctrines.

    Yet the more ancient Persian religion celebrated those same doctrines. Some scholars (not apologists) see the universalism and stricter monotheism of Second Temple Judaism as a reaction to an extended exposure to the gigantic Imperialism of ancient Babylon.

    By using Freud’s dating of Moses (~1275 BC) we can meet Joshua and his Yahweh/Zadok movement by ~1200 BC, establishing Judges for a couple of centuries until an early monarchy over the 12 tribes evolved by ~1000 BC. Soon, however, the monarchy split (~930 BC) north and south.

    All this sounds historically plausible. The dating also fits archeology’s dates of cultural migrations and clashes.

    I myself am astonished that any quasi-Assyrian culture has persisted since Assyrian times into modern times. Mixed with Egyptian and nomadic cultural memes — this quasi-Assyrian culture kept the most ancient Sumerian myths of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel alive and current ever since.

    Even a secular historian could be impressed.

    1. All very plausible, agreed, but to the best of my knowledge the archaeological evidence indicates Israel and Judah emerging as indigenous to Canaan — and Israel only appearing on the scene at the time of Omri.

      I think also broad strands of mainstream scholarship find the evidence (even “biblical evidence” despite itself) points to polytheism being the rule in those states/kingdoms until around the Hasmonean era.

      Have you seen Yonatan Adler’s work on the archaeological evidence for the emergence of Judaism as we would recognize it?

    2. “Nor can we explain the Global Resurrection and Last Judgment doctrines of Second Temple Judaism as the product of the Hellenistic period of Judaism, since Hellenistic culture mocked such doctrines.”

      Just curious as to your thesis here.

      (1) Do you believe the “Global Resurrection and Last Judgment doctrines” were characteristic of Second Temple Judaism as a whole? And on what basis? Do you have any specific texts and passages in mind? If so, which? You are aware that Josephus claims the Sadducees rejected the notions of an immortal soul or judgment or resurrection after death, right? And that only the Pharisees held just beliefs? (Antiquities 18.14-17.) And that Pharisee beliefs as Josephus described entailed neither a global resurrection nor a last judgment? Are you thinking maybe of Revelation, or the Enoch literature (which was not universally accepted), or what?

      (2) Clearly Dan. 12:2-3 envisions some sort of resurrection and judgment, and it is equally clear that this passage is a product of the Hellenistic Era. Your point is simply to suggest it shows Persian influences, right?

      (3) Who (that is, which modern author) do you have in mind who claims that these doctrines are (solely) a product of (Greek thought in) the Hellenistic period? Do you have someone specific in mind who excludes and Persian influences in Jewish Hellenistic Era thought? For instance, as far as I know, all scholars acknowledge Persian influence in the dualism of the Dead Sea Scrolls, although there is lots of discussion as to when and where this influence took place. Are you also saying that no Persian influences took place in the west during Hellenistic times?

      (4) Plato is of course a prominent advocate of the myth of judgment of souls after death as well as reanimation (that is, reincarnation). This seems to EXACTLY correspond to the Pharisee doctrine as found at Ant. 18.14-15: “They believe that souls have the power to survive death and that there are rewards and punishments under the earth for those who have led lives of virtue or lice: eternal imprisonment is the lot of evil souls, while the good souls receive easy passage to a new life.” How do you maintain your thesis in light of the exact correspondence of Platonic myths with Pharisee doctrines?

      (5) What sources do you refer to when you say “Hellenistic culture mocked such doctrines”? I am really at a loss here.

      Just trying to clarify your position to see understand your thesis and to determine if you have any new or interesting facts at your disposal to support it.

  3. So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh

    Huh, you always hear ‘they were forced to build the pyramids’, but ‘store cities’ are more like food & medicine storage, aren’t they? Were slaves used for building often, or at all? ‘Ancient’ Egypt is a very long time, so I guess there’s not just one answer to it all. …I think I might need to swap my old Egyptology books for more serious and updated ones.
    Assuming this was still mostly done by paid free men: Out of curiousity, Neil, do you think placing the creation of the Hebrew scriptures fairly late (I think you often mention the 2nd century in your posts) would make less, just as much or more sense of the writers thinking that the Egyptians used so much slave labour to build stuff?
    Would they just assume because almost all hard labour was done by slaves around them? Was it true of the Egypt of their day? Or can we not tell because the practice of slavery came in waves and wasn’t consistent from place to place?

    1. The most cogent explanation for depicting Israelites as slaves to the Egyptians is found in chapter 7 of Russell Gmirkin’s Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. Chapter title, “Manetho and the Hyksos”. Also in Jan Rückl’s “Israel’s Alliance with the Enemies of Egypt in Exodus 1,10” — online through academia.edu.

      And discussed in a recent MythVision podcast by Derek Lambert on the invention of Moses.

      Persian rule of Egypt won for the Persians a reputation for being intolerant oppressors; the harsh rule of the Persians was read into the earlier rule of the Hyksos over Egypt — the the extent that it was believed by Manetho’s time that the Hyksos had enslaved the Egyptians. The story of the Exodus is based on the story of the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt — with the exception that the Israelites claimed it was the Egyptians, not the Israelites/(shepherd kings), who had been the cruel slave masters.

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