Tell Me The Story...In Order
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and as promised we are discussing Egypt today.
We’re going to start off with the chronology of ancient Egypt because we realize there’s no way to proceed until we’ve addressed this snafu. Wherein consists this snafu? Would you please inform us, Greg?
Greg: Let me read a verse from the book of 1 Kings 6. This is verse 1.
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.
The date here has given us a relative date for the construction of the temple – 480 years after the Exodus. We know more or less when Solomon built his temple. There’s general agreement on that. The date still may be a little shaky, a little off, but not by tremendous amounts. And when we count back 480 years from there and say, “All right, so the exodus should be around here someplace,” as we look at Egyptian records and what little histories we have of Egypt from other sources, there’s no exodus. It seems to be missing.
First of all, we probably should talk a little bit about what the exodus looked like. The exodus involved the movement of some 600,000 footmen, so around 2 million or more people who had been slave labor for Egypt, out of the country. That in itself should kind of leave an impression historically.
Emily: Something must have changed.
Greg: Yes. Think of our own civil war. It’d be strange if in a few hundred years people look back and said, “What civil war?” That’s not likely.
Rachel: Also even before the exodus there should be evidence that that many people were living in Egypt and they would look distinct from the rest of the Egyptians, archeologically speaking.
Greg: Yes, so you’ve got that going on. Then we come to this whole matter of how God got his people out. It was not a slow trickling out, family by family, that the Egyptians kind of overlooked while a few puddles became blood and a few frogs hopped across them.
As God describes the plagues, they were dramatic, traumatic, and disastrous. By the time God was done, the crops were gone, all of them because it lasted through all of the harvest seasons. The cattle were gone, except those that Israel had inherited. People had suffered horrible diseases after being deprived of drinking water for a solid week.
Their king was lost in the exodus proper, and the heir to the throne and one boy child in every single house had died the night before. The army was lost, together with all its chariots. This is not looking good for anybody. And the slaves as they left, they asked for payment for their years of service and so they took all the treasures with them, too. That’s not a little hiccup in history that if you turn your head you missed. This is something that would absolutely devastate Egypt and leave it in chaos and open to invasion.
But following traditional histories and chronologies, we count back 480 years from the time that Solomon’s temple was built and that’s not the Egypt we find. In fact, we find Egypt in one of its highest periods – names like Thutmose III, who was one of the foremost exporters of conquest and war for Egypt, and Hatshepsut, the female emperor, who raised Egypt to the heights of its economic power, and the boy king Tutankhamun.
These are names we know from the history books and they were all powerful kings, or at least surrounded by powerful advisors, and nothing really bad happened. We know way too much about these time periods and these people.
And remember, the pharoah of the exodus died in the Red Sea – sunk. The Egyptians were kind of busy and probably didn’t have time to go hunt for him under water, pull him out, and mummify him, so we should expect that there would be no mummy for this king. Well, for the kings that actually reigned at that time, according to traditional chronologies, we have the mummies. We know their names, we know their successes, we know all about them. This just plain wasn’t it, and so we’re left with a couple possibilities.
The one that humanists pick is obviously, “Well, the Bible is just wrong. We never expected it to be accurate in the first place, so no surprise.” Even among evangelicals you get a taste of this. “Well, you know…”
Emily: “It’s a symbolic 480 years. It just meant some time. That’s what I always say when I want to say it was some period of time. I always tell you how many years.”
Rachel: What’s very interesting here is I recently watched a video, which will probably be my recommendation at the end, and they were talking to Jewish scholars and rabbis. “Well, we can’t find any proof for the exodus. What does that do to your Jewish faith? How can you possibly carry on?”
They said something like, “Well, it’s not about it being true, it’s about it providing meaning, and that’s what matters.”
Emily: Even if it’s fake meaning?
Rachel: Yeah, the truth of history doesn’t matter in this context, just as long as it provides meaning to your faith, which is the very thing we are speaking against. No, it’s history and meaning, truth and significance for faith. You don’t need to separate the two.
Greg: For us that would be saying, “It doesn’t matter if Jesus actually rose again, as long as he’s alive in your heart.”
Rachel: Yes, exactly the same thing, just a slightly different angle.
Greg: But for us as Christians, that Old Testament story is ours too, and this is something evangelicals sometimes have a hard time with. They far too often are willing to give it away because, “Well, it’s Old Testament. We’re talking about archeology and pagan history. Does it really matter, as long as we know that God rescues his people?” Yes.
Emily: Does he really? Because I want to know if he really rescues his people.
Greg: Yes, did he really rescue them, or is it just a story, a fairy tale?
When we moved into the facility the school uses now and I was setting up my classroom, I found that someone had left behind a Bible called the Life Application Study Bible. I had never seen it before and I just glanced at it, and I turned to Exodus and this is what I found there. “No evidence of this great exodus has been discovered in Egyptian historical records.”
Apparently there wasn’t much else there, or I think I would have written it down. No attempt to explain why that should be, just an observation that we haven’t found any reference to this in Egyptian history.
This Life Application Bible seemed like it was a Bible aimed at teenagers and college students, so you think you might want to take a guess at what’s going on here? Have a hypothesis, offer some explanation, or maybe just state the obvious that Egypt’s historical records stink.
Emily: The pagan world is not great at history in general, but let’s take this statement on its face value and ask, “Is it true? Myth or fact? Has there been no evidence discovered of the exodus?”
Greg: Well, where they’re looking, no. If mom has scrawled a note to you and you don’t read it very well and you just glance at something, and you go out in the garage to get the thing the note says you should get, you look around and nothing seems to fit and nothing seems to make sense, it might occur to you that you’re looking in the wrong place. Just maybe the fault isn’t with mom. Maybe you just read things wrong or are misinterpreting what she actually did in fact say.
If we look at the historical records where we think we’re supposed to be, and what God says should be there isn’t there, could it just be possible we’re looking in the wrong place? How about if we look around and see if there is evidence someplace else in the historical record? Then if we find something, or even if we don’t, we might want to ask how reliable is the chronology that holds this record together anyhow?
Before we pursue this further, I think I’d like to talk about the nature of chronology. When people want to read the Bible and the hit the so-called boring parts, what are we usually talking about? What are the boring parts?
Rachel: Counting years. He lived this long, he lived that long, he died.
Emily: Genealogies. Also Numbers where it’s listing out all of the offerings.
Rachel: Or all the different people that came here or went there, and how many were in each tribe.
Greg: To an archeologist or anthropologist or historical sociologist those are called treasure troves. That’s exactly the kind of data we wish we had for every ancient nation, and we don’t. The Bible supplies it aplenty for Israel.
You said genealogies and I said chronology. They’re not exactly the same thing because a genealogy can be incomplete and provide a chronology with some gaps and missing steps in it. On the other hand, a complete genealogy with all years accounted for and all people descended from whomever are recorded, the two become identical. You can look at a genealogy and say, “Oh, I can add up how many years this person lived before he had a son, and then how long that son lived before he had a son, and how long he lived,” and you can come up with a number. This is called arithmetic.
Since Genesis 1 we believe that God can count. “Oh wait, we’re not sure about Genesis 1 either. Can God count days? Does God know what a day is and can he count them accurately?” Apparently not, according to a lot of evangelicals. Forget the liberals, they’re already convinced God can’t count.
So when we get to the genealogies it’s no big deal to say, “Well, God wasn’t trying very hard. Yes, he could count. He can do anything, but he obviously didn’t hear because, as we consult with our archeologists and our ancient historians, they come up with very different numbers and they’re the experts. I mean they have degrees from Harvard and Oxford and all kinds of places. They obviously know what they’re talking about. It would be rude to challenge them or ask, ‘Are you idiots or something?’ so we’ll just go with that. Whatever God is getting at, what matters are the spiritual truths. What matters is the gospel message. What matters is that God is a mighty God who rescues his people and values liberty and freedom. If you get that out of it, when it happened and how it happened and whether it was really such a big deal, that’s not really what the Bible is about.”
As you say, one of the major themes of this podcast and its predecessor has been the biblical unity of truth and history. God reveals himself in history, because if he didn’t it wouldn’t be revelation. It would be some kind of hidden esoteric something that nobody knows about, because we live in history. We act in history. We move in history. Jesus came down into our history.
If we’re going to blow away history, we end up with the kind of thing Paul was tackling in 1 Corinthians 15 where “Some of you say there’s no resurrection of the dead. What’s with that? If Jesus didn’t rise in time and space…if he did not rise on the third day, then Christianity is a lie.”
He’s willing to tie the truth of the gospel to the calendar, to a specific time, a specific geographical location, under the rule of a particular Roman procurator, and say “This is when it happened. This is how it happened, and if we’re wrong or if we’re lying or if we’ve made this up or God can’t tell time, there’s no gospel.”
There are an awful lot of people who still don’t get that, so we are challenged, as so many people are in Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 and 10 and 11, with the question of is the Bible historically accurate? And if it is, then what kind of rethinking of history and chronology do we have to do?
That brings us to this. What is the importance of chronology, which is to say an ordered proper sequence in a story? You want to tell me the story of your life? What kind of things probably would you want to make sure you don’t screw up, either of you ladies? What things kind of have to be in the right order or we’ll get very wrong ideas?
Rachel: You should probably start with birth, coming into the world. Anytime you want to tell about something that’s significant in your life, you’re going to want to tell what led up to it, because things don’t just come out of nowhere.
If I was telling about how I ended up in Africa, I would have to go back to before I was born when my parents went to Africa, which tells why they wanted to go again, but also the process of trying to get out there and what we had to do along the way, because all of those build into each other and create a full picture. But I’m not going to start at the end now and then tell you about grad school, and then suddenly tell you about getting married, and then tell you about when I was 5 and somehow explain how I got to Africa.
Emily: I would probably want to precede the fact of my having a child with the fact of my marriage. And that the jobs I got that were contingent on my graduating college were preceded by me graduating college and things like that.
Rachel: I often grade literature take-home tests, and students often answer questions in non-chronological order from the book. They’re having a character already finish the story and then they’re jumping back to tell me a different event, and it just creates so much confusion. If they had put it in order it actually would have helped their argument a lot more.
Greg: And as I’ve pointed out many times now, an awful lot of Christians learn the Bible exactly that way in Sunday School. You go one Sunday and David is killing Goliath. You go another Sunday and Jonah is trapped in a whale. You go another Sunday and Jesus is raising Lazarus. You go another Sunday and Paul is going over a wall in a basket. The next Sunday God is creating heaven and earth. Then there’s a Sunday where, “God loved the world. Let me tell you about the love of God.” How does any child make sense out of that?
The meaning is in the story, which is to say in a sequence of events. Otherwise you have just cute little anecdotes that lose their integrity and their meaning. You hear David and Goliath and you decide, “Well, the meaning of that is the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” It gets reduced to little moralisms along the lines of Aesop’s fables because it doesn’t tie into anything. It doesn’t come out of anything or go anywhere.
Emily: It doesn’t point to anything.
Greg: Right, so the gospel stories are lost. So what happens in Sunday School – and unfortunately often from the pulpit as well – is that we recognize names and events. Daniel in the lion’s den, okay, we know that one. And Esther and that golden scepter that’s being raised to her, we may know about that. But when was that with relation to Elijah going up into heaven in a whirlwind? And where was that compared with Peter being thrown into prison, or John the Baptist beheaded?
Meaning slips away because story is gone, and story is gone because there’s no sequence because the chronology is not there. We just have random events unconnected, disconnected, put in false connections, and we’re supposed to make something of this? No wonder children don’t like history. Why should they? And no wonder that so many Christian young people don’t understand the Bible. They may or may not recognize characters and events, but ask them to put it together in a continuous story? Most of them can’t.
I would challenge right now anybody who’s listening, pause this, turn to the person next to you and say, “Let me tell you the story of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and then go until Jesus ascends into heaven, at the very least. Tell the story. Try to do it under 10 minutes. And if you can’t, and you’ve been a Christian for more than a few years, you probably should ask yourself why that is.
Maybe you can blame somebody else, and that may be valid, but maybe you need to challenge yourself and ask, “Why haven’t I insisted on understanding what this Bible thing is – why all these pages are here, why all these books are here, and what in the world this book is about.”
When I was in about kindergarten I remember thinking to myself, “I wonder which books of the Bible have the Bible stories and which have the memory verses.” I don’t know how old I was before I figured that one out, because generally the memory verses don’t come from the historical section so much, unless it’s Jesus’ sermons.
Rachel: One of the things I’ve been thinking as you’ve been talking, Greg, is that a lot of our issues since the mid-1800s is we’ve kind of surrendered everything to experts. In Egyptology the experts know, we don’t know, so we just leave it to them, but we do that to the Bible as well. We only grab the surface and we expect other people to figure out the rest for us.
I don’t necessarily want to know the answer, but how many Christians have never read through the whole Bible? I was speaking to a long-time Christian lady, I think she’s in her 70s, and she didn’t know the story of Jonah and had never read the Bible, and she’d been a Christian for at least 40 years. She’d never read the whole thing straight through, or even the whole thing in general. We’ve kind of gotten the sense that we just learn little bits, and there are other people who learn all of it and tell us what we need to know.
Emily: Academic consensus is not a good proxy for truth. It’s just not. If you’ve spent any time in academia, you know this. Your own experience can testify.
Greg: You must realize, ladies, that we think of ourselves more or less as scholars, let’s face it. We teach and talk about some rather abstract things at times, and some topics that ordinary people don’t give a lot of time to because, you know, they have to make a living and take care of their kids and things. And there is a sense that, if we’re gifted and called this way, we’re supposed to help people understand.
One of the problems is that we wait so long to do it – ‘we’ generally and generically, those who are called to teach, whether it be the Bible or education in general – that sometimes we don’t start or we’re not allowed to start or our parents don’t want us started until the kids are in high school, juniors and seniors, or junior college or juniors in college.
Emily: I think part of that is waiting for the inner light to testify to you being an expert. It turns out that that feeling doesn’t come, even when you have achieved relative expertise.
Greg: It doesn’t, no. The first hint probably is people start asking you questions and you actually know the answers. People have asked me, “What was your major in?” and when I tell them physics they’re generally shocked. “What seminary did you go to?” I didn’t. For some people that’s been a stumbling block. “Well, if you haven’t been in seminary…”
There’s this tug of war I see going on in their thinking. “Well, how can he know this stuff?” and the second thing is, “Why does he know it and I don’t?” That’s a question people don’t want to answer.
It would be easy to conclude that people like the three of us, we’re scholars and we have a lot of time to study and maybe we’re super geniuses. You know what? Um, no.
Emily: No. In fact, for me currently, neither of those are true. Not a super genius and also no time to study.
Greg: No. God blessed me with a very good memory, but beyond that – okay, I can go analytical when I need to, and I can go big picture and little picture. God has given me that. I can switch back and forth. But in school there were always kids who knew more than I did. There were always kids who got better grades than I did. I wasn’t that special. I really wasn’t special at all. Sometimes I got really stinky grades compared to some of the kids, out of public schools.
Learning is something God calls us to, and you either take it seriously and you want to do it because you learn more about God’s world and therefore more about God, or you don’t care, or you haven’t made that connection yet. You haven’t seen that if you want to know your Lord and Savior you need to know more about his world so you know what kind of God you’re dealing with. And if you want to know the Bible you need to first of all read the Bible and you need to find out what chronological order lies underneath it. Then you actually do need to read some history and figure out what other things were spinning around it.
What does the Bible assume that we know, because strangely God assumes at many points that we’re not stupid, and I’ve never figured that one out. As we look beyond the book of Acts and see the church moving out into the world, we should want to know, “What happened next? Jesus has ascended into heaven, the church is on the march, and don’t I want to know how we got from there to here?”
I don’t know if we’ve done this yet, but I’m going to remind you. I know Rachel has heard me do this. I’ll introduce a world history class by picking out one student and say, “You open your eyes. You’re laying down in wet grass and the sky above you is gray. The air is cold, and as your hearing comes back you hear in the distance some kind of clanging and stomping and yelling. It’s rather faint but does not sound good.
“As you register your body, you don’t seem to be in your nice jeans and tennis shoes. You’re wearing something kind of flowy and girlish, and there’s some tight belt you’ve got on and you don’t know about that. So what do you do?”
The first response, without thinking, is “I stand up and look around.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Are you sure about that?”
“What? Why? No, I don’t. I don’t do that. Why am I not doing that?”
“You should peek first.”
“Okay, I peek to the left. There’s a large man lying over there and he’s not moving. He seems to be in some kind of armor, and armor not like our soldiers wear today but an armor that’s very old.”
“You see blood pooling beneath him, and you look the other way and you see another man very much the same. These guys are big. They look tough. They’re in armor. You see a sword thrown to one side with blood all over it. And now that you’re listening a little better, you think that maybe what you’re hearing is a battle – not with guns, but with horses, swords, and shields. What do you do?”
I continue like that, and sooner or later they hopefully start making good choices. But at the end of it all I say, “You know there’s a battle going on down there, and you know these people beside you have been killed and you haven’t. And you find that you’re carrying something around your waist in a packet. It looks like some kind of official writing, but unfortunately you can’t read it because you don’t know the language.”
“Wouldn’t it be really cool right if I knew who these people were and what battle this is.”
“Why?”
“Because then I’d know whose side I’m on.”
“Oh, yes. Wouldn’t that be really nice right now to know whose side you’re on, to know what that battle is, and to know what happens to you if one side wins and the other loses. Too bad you can’t read Latin.”
They kind of get it at that point. “Oh, so history is a story and we’re in the story. Might it help if we knew our part of the story? But that would involve knowing how this huge spiritual battle began – who’s winning, who’s on the battle line, who are our allies, who are our enemies, who can I trust, and who can I not trust? And that pretty girl who calls to me from the tree line and says “Nomen est meum Morgana.”
Emily: Don’t trust her! And don’t tell her your name.
Greg: Now, we’ve all heard people who can’t explain stories try to tell us the plot of the book or a movie, and it’s horrible. We go, “What? Who did what to whom?”
“Oh, that was before this happened.”
“To whom?”
“To the girl.”
“Which girl?”
“The other one.”
“What other…?”
As we come to study history, we have to recognize that this is God’s story in the truest sense of the word – not simply in the sense that he guides the broad parameters, but that he has ordained every bit, every part, every detail to the last syllable of recorded time. If we are to understand this story we need his official commentary as it’s revealed in scripture, and we need to know the broad principles of who he is as revealed in scripture so we know what kind of God he is, how he acts, what his ways with men are like. Then we need to know what’s already happened and where we are in the story.
Jesus went back to heaven 2000 years ago. That’s meaningful. That’s significant, unless you’re writing a history that doesn’t include Jesus. Unfortunately, not only secular texts have a habit of ignoring Jesus, but some Christian texts. They will mention that, “Yeah, Jesus was born and he was the Son of God and his followers said he rose from the dead, and people went out and preached in his name. Next chapter – then there was Rome, and Rome fell. Then there were the Middle Ages and they were horrible.”
Emily: Wait! Why did Rome fall?
Greg: It just did. And not only does Jesus get left out, but a lot of textbooks do things like, “There was this thing called Constantinople, but that’s Far East. We won’t worry about that. What really matters…” A 1000-year Christian kingdom and you don’t know anything about it?
We’re laying foundation here. We’re looking at the beginning of the story as far as secular history goes. They don’t have much. The Egyptians did not keep good records. No pagan nation kept good records. First of all, they didn’t really grasp the idea of linear time. They had no concept of successive story. They sometimes tracked dynasties, but not always accurately because whoever was in control always wanted to make believe that his was the longest and the best. He would include his time on the throne with his father and his time on the throne with his son, so his reign became particularly long because that’s just cool. And the reigns of his ancestors, well, they must have lived for thousands of years, maybe remembering back to biblical histories.
When we come to pagan chronologies, such as they are, and there’s not much, we find messes. We find people who don’t respect history and don’t record it accurately. As archeologists turn up documents, as I’ve said a number of times, it’s mostly slave trade deals, wheat sales, and a lot of magical spells, both in Egypt and Assyria particularly.
What we would love is a history of Assyria from the beginning, written by successive eyewitnesses, with a chronological table beside it detailing the lives and deaths of all of the emperors and their territorial gains. Wouldn’t that be great?
Emily: Funny, that’s what we have in the Bible.
Greg: Yes, we have that in the Bible, and ever since Christianity has gone worldwide, almost every nation on earth has adopted the same procedure, but the ancient world just plain didn’t. As far as Egyptian chronology is concerned, it is based on a sequencing of dynasties, but that series of dynasties was not recorded.
There was a priest historian named Manetho and he lived 300 BC.
Rachel: Not an eyewitness.
Greg: Not to much, no.
Rachel: You can’t really eyewitness the entire history, for one thing.
Greg: Yeah, and by 300 BC Egypt is no longer Egyptian. It’s a Greek satellite kingdom ruled by the Ptolemaic dynasty. The pyramids have been standing for 1500 years or more. What we have from Manetho is several different lists of different names that seem to be in some kind of order.
I said we have them from Manetho. That’s actually a misstatement. We don’t have them from Manetho. Whatever he wrote didn’t survive. What we have are later historians who copied him and put his writings into their books, which is legitimate. You can repeat ancient records, except when we compare the copies they don’t agree.
So the one person who seems like maybe he was trying to figure out Egyptian chronology came 1,000 years too late. We don’t have what he wrote, and people who did try to copy him got it wrong, and we’re not sure what all those names mean or how they’re to be arranged.
Were these all pharaohs? Did they reign in succession? Was there any overlap of father and son, as is often the way? Were any of these dynasties reigning at the same time, because we do know there was an upper Egypt and a lower Egypt and they were not always united, meaning supposedly united at the beginning of the first kingdom, but after that there’s historical evidence that the kingdom was split a number of times.
Even the standard chronologies tell us that on a couple of occasions Egypt ascended into chaos for X number of years and we’re not really clear what happened there, so that’s the backbone for our understanding of Egyptian chronology.
If that were not bad enough, of the ancient kingdoms, Egypt was the first that historians and archeologists really latched onto because so much of it was still standing above the sands of Egypt. Once Champollion was able to translate the Rosetta Stone and figure out hieroglyphics, you could simply go out a day’s walk from Cairo and look around and read ancient records that mostly were about the gods and magic spells and such, but occasionally you’d get names of kings and things.
Egypt had a special prestige for a while and, since it was a good starting point, the timelines of every other nation in the ancient world that existed in and about the Mediterranean got pegged into Egypt’s timeline, so if we’re wrong about Egypt we’re wrong about everybody and we have a problem.
Then when you look at the Bible and say, “Hey, it’s funny the Bible doesn’t agree with us,” funny is not exactly the word you want to use here. It sounds like God kept his own records and he does not appreciate yours.
God says your records and your reconstruction of the timeline is incorrect, and he actually has the courtesy to show us, “Here’s when these things happened. Solomon’s temple, back up 480 years and you’re at the exodus. Back up from there 430 years and Abraham is entering the Promised Land. Ten generations before that we have a worldwide flood. Ten generations before that God created the heavens and the earth.”
No other nation/culture/society gives us anything remotely like that, but the world looks at that and scoffs, and unfortunately evangelicals do too and say, “But that’s so superstitious and silly. A world that’s only 6,000 years old? And you think this book has all kinds of information about it? No, the Bible is there to talk about deep spiritual realities,” yes, which played out in a historical context of this planet we call Earth, in particular geographical settings which, strangely enough in God’s providence, centered in and about the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, in this land called Mesopotamia and Judea and yes, Egypt, and finally a little bit of Greece and a little bit of Rome before the Bible stops and opens the gospel up to the world.
We’ve kind of danced around, but these are some of the things that any serious consideration of teaching history has got to get under its belt. If you’re going to teach history, one of the first things you’ve got to do is start a timeline. Maybe you don’t put it all up front. Maybe you build it a little bit as you go.
I know one of my first encounters with earth’s history was sitting in Pastor Powell’s class. I think I was in 7th grade, and he – without a textbook – just started diagramming timelines of medieval and modern Europe, one country at a time – Germany, England, France – and that’s how I learned to understand history.
Interestingly enough, I think we were doing Germany and we hit the 1200s or something and I said, “Ooo, and the next thing is the Magna Carta,” and the other students turned to me and said, “What are you talking about? That’s England.”
“But it comes next on the timeline.”
Emily: These things are happening simultaneously.
Greg: I got that. I didn’t know why anyone else would be surprised at it. I was kind of poo-poo’d by the other students like, “What? We’re not talking about that country.” I get that but it was important and there is overlapping of what’s going on and these countries do influence one another.
When we’re studying the history of Israel, knowing what’s going on in Egypt in helpful. To put it the other way, if we want to study Egypt, knowing what’s going on in Israel is essential because that’s where the promise is. That’s the covenant. That’s the word of God and the worship of God. That’s the promised seed. That’s the heart of what God’s doing, so we need to be able to fit these things in.
Let me give you one really simple example. Anybody who’s studied much Egyptian history will run into the heretic king Akhetaten, Amenhotep IV. He supposedly is the first monotheist. They’ve even done movies about him, the first one who believed in a single god, before Moses, before Israel, before the Bible (assuming Moses wrote the Bible). There was this man who shines like a shining star in the darkness, believing in one God and a high moral code.
It sounds really impressive and it makes the Bible sound like kind of a Johnny-come-lately. “Oh yeah, Israel finally figured that out. Maybe they figured it out while they were in slavery.” But once we start reorganizing Egypt’s chronology in biblical terms, it turns out that Akhetaten didn’t live way back before Moses. He lived about the time of Isaiah.
So what is the solution for Egyptian chronology? For those of you who care and who want to do some reading, I’m going to recommend – not as an official recommendation at the end of things, but right up front – a couple of books.
Back in 1971, an Adventist scholar named Donovan Courville wrote a book called The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications. Don’t let the fact that he’s a Seventh Day Adventist scare you away. He doesn’t get very near any kind of serious theology beyond saying the Bible is accurate and inerrant. But he’s not a great writer and it’s hard sometimes to follow what he’s saying and to figure it out.
What he basically is getting at is that even secular scholars admit that you can’t simply lay Manetho’s dynasties one after another and have the history of Egypt. It doesn’t work. We already know there are problems with that, so even secular scholars have already begun to shorten Egypt’s history by what Courville suggests we do more of – recognizing that sometimes dynasties overlapped, that sometimes there was a dynasty ruling in the north and another ruling in the south, and such things. Courville just suggests that we do more of it and he begins to suggest ways that this could happen.
So if you want to go back to, as it were, an original source of a man who was thinking through these things on his own, Donovan Courville has The Exodus Problem. I don’t know how easy that book is to find anymore.
One book you can find, however, is by John Ashton and David Down. It’s called Unwrapping the Pharaohs: How Egyptian Archeology Confirms the Biblical Timeline. It’s Published by Master Books, which does a lot of publishing for Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis and all of that group.
This is written about the level of high school or junior high, so it’s not going to be beyond anybody’s ability to understand. It starts where Courville left off and acknowledges that they’re following his lead, and tries to bring things down to a very simple level so you can get it. It’s a coffee table book. It has pictures and charts and maps and it’s a nice presentation. So if you want a starting point to kind of get a grip on what’s going on here, this is a good book. And your children, if they’re interested in Egypt at all – and who isn’t interested in pyramids? – this is something that they would profit from.
Also Answers in Genesis’s multilevel series, The New Answers Book, by Elizabeth Mitchell is good. The whole series is certainly worth having. You can get it in paperback. I don’t know what it costs but it wouldn’t hurt you to have it. Again I believe she’s an Adventist scholar, not positive about that, but she’s writing in the same tradition and she’s asking the question does an Egyptian chronology disprove the biblical timeline? So she goes back and deals with a lot of what we’ve been talking about. “Here’s what we actually know.” Once we begin to put things in place, some things start becoming interesting.
We ask is there any record anyplace of the exodus? Once we rearrange things a bit, here’s something that just might be. This is from what’s called the Ipuwer papyrus. This is from one particular translation and it runs like this:
Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. Forsooth the river is blood, yet men drink of it. Forsooth gates, columns, and walls are consumed by fire. Forsooth men are few. He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere. Forsooth the desert is throughout the land. The nomes are laid waste. Barbarians from abroad have come to Egypt. Forsooth gold and lapis lazuli and silver, carnelian and amethyst are fastened on the necks of female slaves.
Female slaves wearing the treasures of Egypt? Huh. Egypt open to invasion by a foreign tribe? The river is blood? Huh!
Emily: The invasion is pretty well documented and acknowledged, the Hyksos.
Rachel: Yes. What’s so interesting again in the video that I saw, they actually interviewed the man who is the overseer of the museum that currently holds that papyrus in the Netherlands. This Christian man was saying, “The exodus account says this and this,” and every single time he kept saying, “No. No, it’s not from the right time period and I’m pretty sure the author was just speaking in myth and legend, because it’s too fantastical to have possibly happened; therefore, it doesn’t matter that it matches the Bible. I’m sure it’s not a confirmation,” as the guy is going, “But it’s the same!”
“No, no it’s not.”
It’s pretty amazing to watch how your presupposition will still determine how well you can actually see obvious truth in something like that.
Greg: In terms of Egypt’s political history, by the time Abraham reached Egypt it was a prosperous nation. Josephus says that Abraham taught mathematics and astronomy to the Egyptians. We don’t know if that’s true, but if it is it’s fascinating, particularly since the pyramids have that fine astronomical/mathematical edge to them, so some place around there we have the pyramids.
As we go through the Bible we’re in Egypt repeatedly, but no one ever says, “Hey, look over there, pyramids!” They were there. There’s a lot that the Bible doesn’t mention because why? Everyone knows the pyramids are there. Why bother? Are they relevant to the immediate discussion? The Tower of Babel was. After that we really don’t hear about ziggurats, and yet every pagan city had one, but having discussed the archetype, the biblical writers feel no great need to go back and talk about all of the copies, including the pyramids.
We track the family of Abraham as they go down into Egypt in the days of Jacob and Joseph. We see them grow and multiply. We see them come out of Egypt in the exodus. We see Egypt destroyed by God’s plagues and invaded by a foreign power, and it pretty much goes radio-silent for the next few hundred years.
Do you know how hard it is to rebuild a nation when your leadership is gone, your cattle are gone, your treasures are gone? And you no longer believe in your gods because they just got smashed down by this God of Israel. Probably the most likely thing that’s going to happen is you’re not going to talk about it a whole lot. There would be a certain reluctance to write down in your hieroglyphics “…and our gods were smashed by this great God of Israel,” but would you even have time?
There’s no food. You don’t have time to go around carving things in hieroglyphics. You’ve got to find some food someplace, so maybe you’ll leave Egypt. Maybe you go upstream looking for something. Maybe you learn how to fish in the delta. Then this foreign power comes in and they’re going to take over and tax you, and they’re going to loot and pillage and destroy.
It was miserable to be an Egyptian for a long time and we really don’t hear much about Egypt as a historical power until the time of Solomon. Then suddenly Egypt is back on its feet again and we have a king in Egypt who’s powerful enough to come up and take frontier towns, give his daughter to Solomon, and give him a town he’s captured as a gift.
After Solomon’s death we have another Egyptian king who’s able to actually invade Judea, conquer Judea, and loot the temple and take its treasures. Courville’s reconstruction makes this Thutmose III, who was the great conqueror of that era, so that would make sense there.
Egypt continues to be a major player all the way up to the coming of Assyria, and actually through Assyria. Assyria conquers Egypt, each using the other to a certain extent, but Assyria being in charge. Then comes Babylon, and from there on Egypt fades. It’s conquered by Alexander and it’s never a major power again.
We run into it in the New Testament when Jesus is carried away in his infancy for his protection to Egypt. We run into the Ethiopian eunuch and we know that the early church got a foothold in Egypt, and then Egypt, except as a center of learning in Alexandria, isn’t that impressive.
It’s not the political center of the world, and we’ll talk about all these things as we come to them, but it is kind of a historical constant. It’s always there in the background, rising and falling, and it enters the biblical story many, many times. God uses it as a foil to judge his people, to move people and events around so they can be where he needs them to be.
As you read the Bible and take it with historical seriousness, this all makes sense and Egypt becomes kind of, “Oh yeah, here come the Egyptians again. I saw that coming!” We have some sense of them because we do have relics and artifacts and myths and legends and some stories and some histories eventually. So there you go.
This is the beginning of our march forward into history. Egypt’s a thing. It’s just not the most important thing. God’s covenant with his people is the most important thing. That’s the center of history. There are a lot of historians, and not only secular historians but even evangelical historians who have real trouble with that because it sounds like we’re playing favorites. We’re emphasizing one people above another. Isn’t that ethnocentric or something? Isn’t that bad? No.
Emily: It’s not ethnocentric, it’s covenant-centric.
Greg: Yes, indeed.
Emily: We are so out of time for today so let’s do some quick recommendations. Rachel, you mentioned you had one ready to go.
Rachel: Yes. My husband introduced me and my parents this last week to the first video in a series that’s called Patterns of Evidence: Investigating Biblical Evidence, made by filmmaker Timothy Mahoney. The first one we watched is on the evidence for the exodus. Of course it begins with all the experts saying there’s no evidence, but then he starts looking in different time periods besides what they think, and suddenly finds the perfect succession of all the archeological evidence up through the conquest of the land.
He talks a little bit about the shifting chronologies, but does a lot to document what actually is there in the ground that shows exactly what the Bible says. The only issue is it’s in the “wrong times,” so that’s why Egyptologists won’t accept that it happened.
Emily: “We want evidence, but not that evidence. That doesn’t count.”
Rachel: They all say no because they all think Ramses II is the pharaoh because his name is one of the cities named in the beginning of the book of Exodus, so he has to be the pharaoh. Nothing’s there, funny enough, but by the amount of things they find it’s like suddenly Semitic people showed up. They were shepherds. Suddenly they exploded in population. Suddenly they all disappeared. Suddenly for a generation there were 60% women and only 40% men, and tons of infant graves of boys.
Emily: “We can’t figure this out!”
Rachel: But none of them want to talk about those things, so the people that are looking for it are people who actually want to find things according to what the Bible says. It’s fascinating.
Greg: What is the name of the video again?
Rachel: Patterns of Evidence is the series, and then Patterns of Evidence: Exodus is the particular one.
Emily: And how long is the video?
Rachel: It’s about two hours so it’s pretty significant. Then they did some on the journey to Mount Sinai and where Mount Sinai is, and I think something on the Red Sea crossing. Basically they believe the Bible is history so they think there should be evidence there, and they’re looking for it.
Greg: One of the deans of Egyptian history in the 1800s was a man named George Rawlinson and this is his comment in 1886 – “It’s a patent fact that the chronological element in early Egyptian history is in a state of almost hopeless obscurity.” That’s one of the fathers of Egyptology saying, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” But the people who run the museums and the universities today are not going to admit that.
Rachel: That’s one of their big points. If we actually change the chronology, every single Egyptology book would be wrong and they’d have to rewrite all of them, and nobody wants to do that.
Emily: “Admitting we were wrong?”
Greg: What’s your recommendation, Emily?
Emily: My recommendation is only tangentially related. It is related in that two of my friends are independently writing archeological thrillers and they have permitted me to glance at some of their early parts of their writing, which has been a delight. So my recommendation is sharing what you’ve written with people, even if you don’t think it’s very good.
Here is the key argument. If you do not share what you write with people, everything you make exists at their expense because it’s locked away. You’ve spent time on it and they don’t get to enjoy it, and that makes me feel sad so it makes me share what I write with people, even if it’s not very good.
Greg: I’m trying to think of something that I haven’t recommended before, and I’m not sure I can. I’m going to recommend reading British mysteries from the early 20th century. I’ve been dividing my time between older British mysteries and some modern American stuff, and there is no comparison.
First, most of the older British writers actually were female. You can think of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and there are others. Secondly, they knew grammar, unlike modern writers. I am so tired of dangling participles, and participles that are just randomly attached to anything at all, hoping that you can make the logical jump and figure out what in the world is going on here. I’m also tired of writers who write in the present tense.
Rachel: Amen to that.
Emily: Oh no. I just wrote a short story that’s in the present tense. Maybe I won’t share it with you guys.
Greg: We’re all tired of modern stories that have the obligatory sex scenes and all that, but in reading some of these modern writers, the ones I’ve been reading aren’t bad. That is they’re not particularly graphic, and they generally get through the sex scene real fast. They just think it’s an important step in the development of the character.
You go back and you read Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh and they’re not there. It’s not because they lived in a purer society. They acknowledge the fact that adultery happened, that there was prostitution, that this man is not quite nice, that these two females are living together. If you read between the lines you’ll say, “Oh, they’re homosexuals, they’re lesbians,” but they don’t feel a need to push your face into it.
On just about every level they are better writers, and as you read through them they are quoting the Bible, the prayer book, Shakespeare, and the whole host of western literature, with the assumption you know what in the world they’re making allusion to. It’s like sitting down and talking to educated people, as opposed to one authoress I’m reading right now. Her allusions are to McDonald’s and Sears and AT&T and Big Macs.
Emily: I’ve encountered those things in my life. I don’t need to read about them.
Greg: Yes. I appreciate and I know very well the world she’s describing. Her time period is the 1980s and she even mentioned the city I came from, Reading. One of her characters goes there and I’m like, “Oh, Reading, yeah! Well, that was thrilling. I’ve been to London too. You can talk about London.”
There is something to be said about the older sort of mystery, and not always but sometimes the trail of evidence is more logical and doesn’t depend so much upon coincidence or you accidentally discover something. With some of these authors I’ve found the pattern is that you’re working through and you’re looking for evidence and clues, and they don’t have any. They don’t know what’s going on. So you’re waiting together, then suddenly two-thirds of the way through something happens and, oh, now we have a lead. And now you say, “Oh, now I have a lead, too.” You’re trying to follow as fast as they are, and they’re kind of lost. It’s not a book that’s a mystery, it’s a book that sets up a mystery which it starts solving two-thirds of the way through.
Emily: As you watch, a passive observer.
Greg: Yes. Hopefully you’re interested in the characters because there’s not much going on with the mystery. Anyway, if you’ve never read one of the older British authors writing detective stories, you should try it out. You might learn some things about the English language and how to plot a story and character development that you’re not going to get by reading anything that’s been written in the last 50 years.
Emily: I love what you do with your students in expository writing, where you have them read a mystery, and partway through you have them all write essays on who they think did it and why.
Greg: Ideally they all pick the same book. Some of them have already read it and that complicates things. The book in question is The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie.
Emily: Oh, is it always the same book?
Greg: It’s always the same book, yes, because it’s a book that most people haven’t read. I can’t pick one of the big ones because most people have read them or seen the movies or something. This is obscure enough but it’s tightly written, and you’re not seeing it through the eyes of Miss Marple or Hercules Poirot. Miss Marple shows up very near the end and she doesn’t really give anything away.
You’re just looking over the shoulder of the narrator, who seems to be an okay guy. He’s a downed pilot who’s recovering in a small village. They’re allowed to read to the point where I band off the pages and say, “Here you stop. You may not read the rest.”
“Aaagh! But I need to know!”
“No, you’re going to go back and figure it out now, and you’re going to record all the clues, and then you’re going to make your best guess.”
This last time around they had great ideas and they had good evidence, and not one of them got it, but they were thinking.
Emily: Good times.
Speaking of good times, thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a delightful hour. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We really appreciate you.
Thank you for listening. Go ahead and tell a friend about us. Give us a 5-star review if you like us. Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast catchers, whatever you use. And if we’re not on your favorite podcast catcher, please let us know. You can email us at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com. You can also ask us anything you want there. David will read it and then we’ll read it.
Good night, Gracie.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: 1 Kings 6
Resources:
The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications (Donovan Courville)
Unwrapping the Pharaohs: How Egyptian Archeology Confirms the Biblical Timeline (John Ashton, David Down)
The New Answers Book (Elizabeth Mitchell, Answers in Genesis)
Recommendations:
Greg: Read the older British mystery authors vs modern mystery authors.
Emily: Share what you write with other people, so it’s not locked away – even if you don’t think it’s very good.
Rachel: Patterns of Evidence: Investigating Biblical Evidence, by filmmaker Timothy Mahoney