Reflection of Exodus 1:1 – 2:10
by Joy Kingsbury-Aitken
“Moses and Pharaoh’s Daughter”
We are exhorted to grow in grace and knowledge. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we grow in grace by letting Scripture change us, and we grow in knowledge by changing our understanding of Scripture. Until fairly recently I accepted the majority opinion, in scholarship and popular imagination, that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was Rameses II. Those who remember the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, will recall Charlton Heston in the lead role of Moses, and Yule Brunner playing Rameses II. I now think that academics and film makers have got it wrong. There is wide agreement that the Pharaoh who Joseph served and who invited him to settle his extended family in the land of Goshen on the eastern side of the Nile delta was a Hyksos king. The Hyksos were not indigenous Egyptians but Semites who had settled in the Nile delta area of Egypt and for a little over a century, when Egypt was split into two regions, ruled Lower Egypt from Avaris, a city that was later renamed Pi-Rameses, while the indigenous Egyptian rulers governed Upper Egypt from Thebes. Eventually the Egyptians drove out the colonists and reunited the two halves of their country.
In the twelfth chapter of Exodus we read “that the time the Israelites had lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years.”[1] If we count back that many years from Rameses II we get to the Hyksos period, which seems to indicate the he was indeed the Pharaoh of the exodus. However, the Septuagint, a third century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew text, adds the phrase “and in Canaan” to the period to be counted, reducing Israel’s time in Egypt to two hundred and fifteen years, and putting the exodus into the eighteenth Thutmoside dynasty not the nineteenth Ramesside dynasty. Dating the reigns of Egypt’s kings is problematic with different scholars interpreting the available data differently. There are high and low chronologies to choose from. So it is simply impossible to say with any certainty when any particular king reigned. However, the Bible does say that “in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel… he began to build the house of the LORD.”[2] There seems to be considerable agreement among scholars that the temple began to be built in 967 BCE. Go back 479 years and we come to 1446 BCE, which would be four years into the reign of Amenhotep II according to the high chronology or mid-way through the reign of his predecessor Thutmose III according to the low chronology. I think Amenhotep II fits the Biblical exodus story better.
Exodus begins with the Hebrew word for “and”, indicating that this is a continuation of the story of Israel begun in the book of Genesis. In Genesis we read about a period of widespread and prolonged famine, when Jacob resettled his family in Egypt, where there was food to be purchased and where his favourite son had a powerful government position. The names of seventy people descended from Jacob are listed in Genesis – all are male, except for Dinah.[3] The text says it excludes the wives of Jacob’s sons, and clearly it also excludes his granddaughters, one of whom was the mother of Moses. Her son was eighty years old when he led Israel out of Egypt. Eighty years before 1446 BCE is 1526, which is a couple of years into the reign of Thutmose I according to the high chronology. Within forty years of the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, Thutmose I, with a lingering concern about foreigners living in Egypt and worried about a population explosion among the Israelites, issued a decree that was monstrously cruel but entirely rational.
The Bible is androcentric, so only the stories of exceptional women are recorded. Exodus begins with the extraordinary actions of five extraordinary females – one and possibly two of whom were children. The only males in the story are a pitiless king and a baby he wants killed. Only the names of the two midwives, who risked their lives by engaging in civil disobedience, are given. Shiphrah and Puah refused to kill the Hebrew boy babies at birth because they feared God more than they feared the Egyptian king, and their reward for doing the right but dangerous thing was to be protected and have families of their own. His first strategy having failed, Pharaoh then commanded everyone to drown Hebrew boys in the Nile, while allowing the infant girls to live. This gendercide was a gradual genocide. Pharaoh maintained his current enslaved adult male workforce to labour on his building projects and on agricultural production, while ensuring there would be no future generations of Israelites.
The narrative then moves onto the story of one family belonging to this persecuted people. A son had been born to them and keeping him safely hidden was becoming increasingly difficult. To save her son the child’s mother was prepared to give him up, and so she embarked on an audacious plan. She wove a basket from papyrus as she had probably done many times before, and then waterproofed it by coating the outside with pitch. With her baby inside it, she and her daughter went down to the Nile to the royal bathing pool adjacent to one of the temples, where the king’s daughter was known to come daily. As the Nile was considered sacred, bathing in its waters was not just a matter of hygiene for the Egyptians, it was a matter of worship. The baby was set afloat in his ark among the reeds on the edge of the river with his sister nearby to keep watch over him, and undoubtedly primed to offer her mother as a wet nurse for the baby when the princess discovered him. The boy was found, the daughter of Pharaoh had compassion on him and decided to keep him in defiance of her father’s edict, and the boy’s mother was employed by her to care for the child until he was weaned. All had gone to plan, but not without grief as any mother who has given her child up for adoption, for the benefit of her child, can attest to. At the end of the story, the princess named the baby Moses, from the Egyptian meaning to beget and therefore be a child of, in Moses’ case, the Nile. It was a favoured suffix of Egyptian royal names at the time – for example Ahmose the child of the moon, Ramose the child of the sun god, and Thutmose the child of the god of wisdom. Moses sounded like the Hebrew word for drawing out, which is the meaning the Bible gives. Of course, he would become Moshe the one who draws out the Israelites from Egypt. Moshe, anglicized to Moses, was the name the Israelites knew him by. According to the third century BCE Egyptian historian Manethos, as quoted by Josephus, Moses had a different name among the Egyptians to the one used by the Israelites.
The Bible is totally silent about the forty years of Moses’ life from his adoption into the Egyptian court to his hurried departure from Egypt after having killed an Egyptian slave master. Historical records, if we can establish who the Egyptian princess was, may not be so silent, however. Hence all the arithmetic earlier on. What follows is speculative because we cannot with certainty align the Biblical record with what we know of Egyptian history. At best we can only offer an interpretation of the available evidence. Scripture informs us that Moses’ birth parents were Amram,[4] a grandson of Levi, and Jocebed,[5] a daughter of Levi. The ancient world did not appreciate the dangers of intermarriage with close relatives. Amram and Jocebed were probably of a similar age. It is not unusual in large families for the youngest children to be of a similar age to the oldest children of their oldest siblings. Moses being the grandson of Levi further strengthens the argument that he was born within living memory of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt, not hundreds of years later, and this supports the argument that the father of the daughter of Pharaoh was Thutmose I.
Only children born of a queen, a Great Royal Wife, were fully royal in the Egyptian system, so Thutmose I had only two royal children, both daughters, the second of which died young. The surviving sister was Hatshepsut, who married her younger half-brother Thutmose II to give his reign legitimacy. They had one child, a daughter. Thutmose II died after having reigned for only three years, leaving a two year old son from a lesser wife as his heir. Thutmose III became co-regent with Hatshepsut, who within seven years declared herself Pharaoh. She ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. Long after the death of her father, Hatshepsut emphasized her legitimacy as supreme ruler by having herself described as the “daughter of Pharaoh” on her monuments. Only a daughter of the royal standing of Hatshepsut would have dared to defy Thutmose I by adopting a Hebrew boy baby, making her the best candidate for the Egyptian princess of Exodus 2. She would have been quite young at the time, perhaps about twelve years old. Her reign was one of peace and prosperity. She described herself as having a heart full of love. She prided herself on being friendly to foreigners and focused on trade not conquest, unlike her stepson Thutmose III who became a great military strategist.
There was in Hatshepsut’s court a man acknowledged as being of very humble birth who was her chief courtier. She bestowed on him almost ninety titles. His responsibilities were so vast that it is difficult to see how he could have carried them all out. Some historians believe he ruled Egypt on her behalf. She treated him as though he was royal, giving him the name or title Senenmut, which means “mother’s brother”. This title elevated a son to a status equal to his mother, allowing him to claim the same filial relationship with the gods she enjoyed. Statues depict Senenmut holding Hatshepsut’s only biological child, her daughter Neferure, which non-royals were not permitted to do. Besides which, when non-royals are depicted with royals the royals are always larger even if they are children. In the case of Senenmut and Neferure he is the larger figure. Senenmut did not have a wife and children of his own, but appears as a fatherly figure for Neferure and was her tutor. As a young man Senenmut had served in the army of Thutmose I, particularly in the war against the Kush, and had risen in rank to a brigade commander. According to Josephus, drawing on Egyptian sources, Moses was also involved in that campaign as a commander. One of the greatest achievements attributed to Senenmut was as royal architect overseeing the construction of Hatshepsut’s mortuary complex, which remains a wonder of the ancient world because of the perfection of its architectural proportioning. His own tomb had a detailed star-map ceiling, which is the earliest astronomical map discovered in Egypt. This and other contents of the unfinished tomb suggests a man of wide ranging interests. Then after the 18th year of Hatshepsut’s reign, around 1486 when Moses would have been forty, all references to Senenmut end. Some Egyptologists speculate that he was murdered. Some Biblical scholars speculate that he fled Egypt after murdering a brutal slave taskmaster. During the reign of Amenhotep II, the Pharaoh after Thutmose III, many of the monuments and inscriptions depicting and referring to Senenmut were damaged, as were monuments of Hatshepsut. One can understand why such desecration happened if Moses was Senenmut and Amenhotep II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus. According to the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manethos, as quoted by Josephus, the Pharaoh of the Exodus was Amenophis, the Greek form of Amenhotep.
God said to Moses at the burning bush, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.” God had done so right from the start and had immediately begun preparing a man to bring them out of Egypt, who learnt military strategy as a commander in the Egyptian army, learnt how to govern a nation as an official in Egypt’s court, and learnt how to survive in a sometimes harsh wilderness environment as a shepherd in Midian. A better equipped man to undertake the task given him is hard to imagine. Perhaps his speech impediment was an inability to speak fluently the Hebrew dialect of the Israelites, thus requiring his brother Aaron to speak for him. Today’s story shows a God who knows of, and knows the solution to, his people’s troubles. They just had to patiently wait. God knows that the church has been struggling to survive, but a faithful remnant remains, and we trust that God will give us growth just as God multiplied the Israelites in spite of the Egyptians brutally oppressing them, and when the time was right God saved them. God ensured the Israelites had a future. God will ensure that the church has a future. We just need to be far more receptive to God’s plans than the Israelites often were, but that’s another story for another day.
[1] Exodus 12:40
[2] 1 Kings 6:1
[3] Genesis 46:8-27dop
[4] 1 Chronicles 6:21
[5] Exodus 6:20