I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 1-3.

When I first started to actually pay attention to history, I “learned” that the Exodus has to be a myth because none of the Egyptian (or other archeological records) support the idea that the events in Exodus happened.  Then I learned about the Hyksos “invasion” and rule over Egypt.  My mind immediately thought that a Hyksos ruler becoming Pharaoh would perfectly explain the line in today’s passage where it says, “a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.”  However, I was told that would not work because the Exodus happened long after the Hyksos were driven from Egypt.  As I learned more, I discovered that despite historical scholars dating the Exodus to the 13th Century BC (1300-1200 BC), Biblical dates put the Exodus at 1446 BC.  While I question the logic of arriving at such precise dates from Biblical sources (all other written records from the time period when the Old Testament was written were not concerned with precise dates), it fits with the date of the transformation in character of an Egyptian Pharaoh (before 1446 BC Pharaoh Amenhotep II was portrayed as arrogant and bombastic, after 1446 he was portrayed as thoughtful and wise).  And 1446 BC would have been about 100 years after the Hyksos were driven from Egypt.  Which allows time for what happened in verses 1-15 to happen.  Relative to my questioning of using the Bible for precisely identifying a year, there are debates about the chronology of Egypt.  One set of scholars has Amenhotep II ascending to the throne in 1454 BC and another saying that happened in 1427 BC.

While there are many spiritual lessons for us in this passage, this year I am going to spend a little more time on the “history” of the passage (although I hope, as always, that you read the passage for yourself).  One of those points is Moses’ name.  If the Exodus happened in 1446 BC, the Pharaoh when he was a child would have been Thutmoses III.  Note the similarity in names.  This is especially important when you realize that the first part of Thutmoses was a variation of the name of the Egyptian god Thoth, and that the name meant “born of Thoth.”  Similarly, other Pharaohs had names which ended in “moses” or “mses” and started with the name of an Egyptian god.  Now, the Israelites did not speak the name of God, as a general rule.  So, Moses being raised by a daughter of Pharaoh, who knew he was a Hebrew (an Israelite), may have named him “__Moses”, meaning “born of __” where “__” was the unspoken name of God.