Cheremon's Amenophis could be who you think.

This is a follow-up to my post about Amenophis in Manehto as Quoted by Josephus. 

After dealing with Manetho in Against Apion Book 1 section 32 Josephus recounts a certain Cheremon’s version of the Exodus, which Josephus then critiques in the following two sections. 

As someone who believes Manetho as received by Jospehus was already corrupted from the original in part by these Alexandrian Judeophobes, it’s possible that this story in Cheremon predates and references to Moses ever being added to Manetho, but it would probably have to be older then Cheremon himself for that to be the case. 

This account also has a Pharaoh named Amemenophis and he also has a son named Rameses.  One thing I glossed over in the prior post is Josephus saying Seti II was also called Ramses, in fact he winds up calling him Rameses more than he does Seti/Sethos.  There are to my knowledge no Egyptians records of Set II having Rameses among his names. But in the version where Seti II is the one identified with Aegyptos, Rameses is the name of his brother he had a civil war with, and since the New Kingdom loved Synchronizing Amun with Ra it’s easy to imagine Amenmese being also called Rameses. 

This version does not mention the name Osarshiph or refer to anyone as a Priest of Heliopolis. 

If we look at Cheremon’s account without Manetho based preconceptions then the only thing that might lead one to looking at the 19th Dynasty is the use of the name Rameses.  But the name Rameses was already being used in the 18th Dynasty, one just hadn’t been the King yet.  Wikipedia pages use Ramose when talking about the 18th Dynasty ones but it’s the same name in Egyptian just with arbitrary differences in transliteration. 

However there is currently no known correlation with a Pharoah named Amenhotep with a son named Ramose. The only Ramose who was the son of a Pharoah was the son of Ahmose the first 18th Dynasty Pharoah. Then there is the father of Senenmut who likely lived during the reigns of Amenhotep I through maybe the early years of Hatshepsut. Then there is one who was a Vizier under Amenhotep III and Akhenaton, and a general during the Amarna period, and possibly another general.

Of course there is also the matter that the Meneptah discrepancy is not the only time when Manetho called Amenophis doesn’t line up with who we call Amenhotep.  And Manetho could still be who the creator of this story got the name from.

Manetho’s first Amenophis has the right reign length to be Amenhotep I but is placed too late in the sequence The scholars Wikipedia cites use reign length to decide who is who in Manetho which for the Amenhoteps works here and here alone. The first Amenophis’s placement in the sequence is as the brother and predecessor of Hatshepsut (called Amesses but this is the least disputable identification, the 18th Dynasty had only two ruling Queens and only she reigned between 21 and 22 years, the name Amesses probably comes from her mother Ahmose) telling me he’s supposed to be Tuthmosis II with an exaggerated reign length.

The second and last 18th Dynasty Amenophis in Manetho has a reign length that lines up perfectly with none of the Amenhotep, but the same scholars cited by Wikipedia say he is Amenhotep II. He is in the placement of Amenhotep II however, being the 4th King after Hatshepsut. Orus has the reign length of Amenhotep III but is in the placement Akhetnaten as the father and predecessor of the other ruling Queen called Achenres by Manetho, among her known Egyptian names was Ankheperure, she didn't rule 12 years but isn’t the only one Manetho gives way too long a reign length to.

In Manetho as quoted by Josephus the Pharaoh in the place of Amenhotep II is Mephramuthosis who also has a pretty close reign length, 25 years and 10 months. He’s followed by a Tuthmosis who reigned about a decade, a rare case of Manetho using the right name in the right position and the right reign length. 

So could the popular Exodus Pharoah choice Amenhotep II have had a son also known as Ramose? Well there is an Ahmose who was High Priest of Ra at Heliopolis and is presumed to be Amenhotep II’s son. 

Let’s step back a moment.  Remember the Ramose I referred to before as a son of Ahmose?  Well it’s actually who his father was, our source for him is a much later 2oth Dynasty Tombs depicting various Pharaohs and Princes where the order seems to be random. 

My using Hatshepsut as the main anchor in how I deciphered Manetho’s account of the 18th Dynasty has the issue of there being only 3 Pharoah’s before her not 4. There is ambiguity on when to distinguish Dynasty 17 from 18, they are technically the same Dynasty by the same Royal Family definition. Dynasty 17 as we know it isn’t in Manetho at all, his later transcribers just mirror the Hyksos account there.  Cheremon’s account of Amenophis kind of sounds like the entire Hyksos period condensed to the reign of one Theban King. 

But the reason this still isn't a final gotcha for Amenhotep II theorists is how this narrative makes the Pharoah of The Oppression the same as the Pharoah of the Exodus. And if it's possible to deduce a separation from it it's that Amenophis was The Oppression Pharoah and his son the Exodus Pharaoh.

The reason why we call the Pharaoh from whom Moses fled the Pharoah of the Oppression traditionally is because a casual reading of Exodus with no attempt to synchronize with known Egyptians history it's natural to assume the Pharoah who "knew not Joseph" and Oppressed the Israelites and when Moses born and from whom Moses fled were all the same Pharoah. These hostile retelling are oddly more faithful to that assumption then any modern theories informed by actual Egyptology. 

In addition to all the things Josephus should be taking issue with in these hostile versions of The Exodus, he also objects even to the suggestion that the Jews are of partly Egyptian stock. But that is consistent with what The Pentateuch says, it was a Mixed Multitude (Exodus 12:38 and Nehemiah 13:3), probably mostly made up of other slaves, but slavery in Ancient Egypt wasn’t categorially race based the way the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was, those slaves would have included Egyptians who were outcasts, some perhaps exactly the way these accounts are describing. “Leprosy” in ancient text usually doesn't mean the exact disease we today associate it with, even Albinos were included in it. Leviticus 24 refers to a person whose mother was a Danite and father was an Egyptian, they probably weren’t the only one. Deuteronomy 23:7-8 makes clear Egyptians in the congregation are to be Nationalized. 

The overarching theme of these hostile retellings of The Exodus is to change it from a story of slaves escaping a tyrant who wouldn't let them go to outcasts being forced out of a country that didn’t want them, and blaming them for everything that was going wrong.  To us moderners neither version makes The Jews look like the bad guys or the Egyptians look good. And the tragic irony is that kind of thing would become the origin story of Modern Israel.

Acts 13:17-22 vs 1 Kings 6:1

There is a conflict between the face value reading of these passages that most Bible Literalists don’t want to face, and when they do they have oddly decided it’s Paul who needs to be reinterpreted.

1 Kings 6:1 says Solomon started building The Temple in the 480th year since the Exodus, while Paul says after the 40 years wandering and then the conquest of Canaan then there were 450 years of Judges then 40 years under Saul then David who we know reigned 40 years.

Honestly people prefer just citing 1 Kings 6:1 because it’s convenient, they want to say the total time from of this entire era is settled by one simple verse and not actually properly divide the Word of Truth, they don't want to actually check the difficult math. 

Adding up the numbers in Judges on their own also agrees with Paul, it totals 450 years from the start of the first oppression to the Anointing of Saul. And it also vindicates Jephthah in Judges 11 by showing it was 300 years from the beginning of the first oppression to the beginning of the Ammonite oppression in Judges 10, meaning if anything Jephthah and Paul were rounding down. 

Those numbers were based on math done by people do before whose names I've forgotten unfortunately, but it was base don including Samson 20 years as Judge within the Philistine Oppression because he arguably never fully liberated Israel from the Philistines. But I could instead reinterpret how this interact with Acts 13 by saying the 450 years ends with the start of Samuel rather then the end of Samuel's 20 years, Paul's summery already has a gap without a specific number between the wandering and the start of the 450 years.

I have long favored the approach that 1 Kings 6:1 is excluding the periods of oppression for some ceremonial reason. But as I've become more open to the Amenhotep II Exodus model recently, I decided to revisit these matters and look into how apologists seek to reconcile this from the other angle. 

First thing I found was someone arguing that Acts 13 only reads this way in the Textus Receptus and we should trust the Alexandrina Manuscripts. Naturally I am firmly opposed to that approach.  I’m not a strict KJV Onlist but I am in agreement with them on the matter of the source texts.  It looks like the Alexandrians sought to reword things so it could conform with a shooter timeline because they liked to shorten Biblical timeframes in Alexandria hence the LXX version of Exodus 12:40-41, or for that matter the LXX version of 1 Kings 6:1 which changed it to the 440th year. 

That’s an issue for the Late Exodusers, I imagine they say once you agree not to take a certain time period passage at face value obviously they would exaggerate not deflate. But since no serious scholar thinks the LXX is the original of 1 Kings 6:1 we see there is sometimes a willingness to deflate. But there are also times when if anything it would serve your agenda to round down your estimate, to say at least this much time had passed.

The other method was arguing that the various Judgeships in Judges overlap. This ignores how things are worded, they record oppression, then rest, then oppression again, then rest again.  Some periods of Rest aren't claimed to be one single Judge, but the general period of rest between oppressions, like the 80 year rest that began with Ehud, it doesn’t actually lay he personally was alive that whole time, or the 40 years the began with Deborah. 

Early Exodus proponents want this adding up of years in Judges to vindicate Jephthah; they cite him all the time as a second witness against the Late Exodus model. It is self serving to then read the text differently after that, and the room for overlaps will still not be enough to fix an over 90 year discrepancy. 

I also think it is possible to conclude a 40 year reign for Saul from The Books of Samuel alone, but it involves the matter of the controversially difficult to translate or even understand in Hebrew opening of 1 Samuel 13, which in Hebrew uses the word for Son but the KJV obscures that. Of Saul’s 4 sons by his wife, the youngest Ishbosheth is never referred to before Saul became King. I think 1 Samuel 13 is telling us Saul had a son in the first year of his reign and that is naturally Ishbosheth.  And we’re later told Ishbosheth was 40 when Saul died and he began to reign in 2 Samuel 2:10.

I’ve also struggled with the fact that the model I favored in the past doesn’t have enough time between The Exodus and the first oppression for Joshua to die before the first oppression. Joshua 14:7 tells us Joshua was 40 when he spied out the land during the second year of the wandering in Numbers 13-40, and Joshua 24:10 and Judges 2:8 say he was 110 when he died. Which means he died about 31 years after the start of the conquest and 24 years after when the initial conquest is typically viewed to have ended. And Judges 1 and 2 clearly seem to place his death before the first oppression. 

The Late Exodus proponents who argue against taking 1 Kings 6:1 at face value with the agenda of wanting a smaller time period typically argue it’s a symbolic number representing 12 generations of 40 years. They seek to roughly equate that to 12 generations of 20 years but I could translate it into 12 generations of 50, 60 or 70 years based on various Biblical significance those numbers have, but 50 is all I’d need, roughly 600 years. I find that logic interesting, but the language of 480th Year still has me feeling it means an exact count.  Their 20 year logic is because we today assume that's when males would start having kids, but Isaac didn't have Esau and Jacob till 60, and Jacob didn't start having kids till over 47. Moses likewise didn't marry Zipporah till he was 40. 

Which got me to wondering why the author of this part of Kings even thought he could know such an exact year?

Remembering the context that this is about The Temple, which will replace The Tabernacle once it’s finished. I think about The Tabernacle rituals that are done annually, particularly Yom Kippur near the middle of each Torah Year. They may have been keeping records of how many times they did each of those. And perhaps during the oppressions they were prevented from observing them by the oppressors. 

And/or maybe they had stopped doing them for a while after the Philistines destroyed the Tabernacle Shiloh and took The Ark, The Ark and Tabernacle were not in the same place again till Solomon consecrated The Temple. Maybe they were in a sense Levitically in the 480th year until The Temple was consecrated. 

So the weight of The Biblical Data definitely supports a longer view of the time from Exodus to Solomon, the face value reading of 1 Kings 6:1 stands on its own.  It takes two or more witnesses to establish something, the face value reading of 1 Kings 6:1 has no second witness. 

To bring some not inspired but still perhaps enlightening Extra Biblical Testimony into this, there’s Flavius Josephus.  He was from a Cohen Family and had access to Temple Records. In Antiquities of the Jews Book 20 Chapter 10 he says based on counting the terms of the first 13 High Priests (Aaron to Abiathar) that it was 612 years from Aaron being consecrated in the same year as The Exodus till Solomon built The Temple. 

Abiathar was deposed early in Solomon’s reign, but we don’t have the exact year, it seems to have been before The Temple construction started. So it could be 480 is really 612. Making a 132 year difference. 

That makes the 16th Century BC date for the destruction of Jericho the most likely conclusion. If we had taken that approach to Biblical Chronology all along then Kathleen Kenyon’s discoveries would have never been a problem. 

The Samaritan tradition actually places the entry into the Promised Land under Joshua in 1639 or 1638 BC.  That’s too ancient to be reconcilable with the other data in my view. 

Of course the Samaritans having that as a calendar start date in the first place is interesting.  Leviticus 25 says to start the counting of the Levitical and Sabbatical years after entering The Land.

Perhaps another factor in 1 Kings 6:1 is in-spite of how it’s worded actually starting it’s count of whatever it’s counting with the entry into the land not actually the Exodus. Maybe in a sense they weren’t fully spiritually out of Egypt until they were in The Land?  

Manetho’s Amenophis isn’t who you think.

As someone who is open to an Amenhotep II Exodus model, and strongly opposed to any 19th Dynasty Model. I’m going to advise Early Exodus daters to stop thinking the name Manetho uses is some kind of proof. 

The name Amenophis isn’t the only thing about this Pharoah that Manehto as quoted by Josephus says, it also placed him in a clear chronological sequence as the Pharaoh following the Rameses Miamun who reigned 66 years, and he is then followed by his son a Seti/Sethos. Basically he is in the place of Merneptah, 19th Dynasty models were originally based on Merneptah as the Pharaoh of the Exodus and Rameses II as the Pharaoh from whom Moses fled, it was the Israel reading of the Merneptah Stele that changed that. 

Manetho is to blame for the 19th Dynasty Exodus model, Jospehus’s quotations of Manetho exist in the context of a discourse that was happening between Alexandrian Jews and Alexandrian Judeophobes. Part of it is the antiquity of the Exodus, there is over 300 years from the Expulsion of the Hyksos (start of what we call Dynasty 18) to when this Amenophis becomes king.

So it really bugs me to see enemies of the 19th Dynasty model advocating for Manetho and defending his reliability. It’s funny when they dismiss the “multiple versions of Manetho” by saying to just trust Josephus’s version.  Because Josephus himself seems to be using conflicting versions of Manetho. 

In Against Apion Book 1 Josephus first lays out his own view on where The Exodus happens in Manetho’s chronology of Egypt in sections 14-16. Then much later in sections 26-31 goes about refuting what he dislikes in Manetho. He must have written these sections on different days borrowing different manuscripts from the Library because there is a discrepancy. They agree on the key chronological placement of this Amenophis I laid out above. But in the first version Seti I doesn’t exist (there is no one between Rameses I and Rameses Miamun) and it’s Seti II who has a civil war with his brother. But in the second version Seti I does exist and it’s he who has the civil war with his brother. The existence of Seti I makes the second version more accurate. But it's easy to assume the civil war with a brother fits Seti II’s conflict with Amenmese. But we don’t know if Amenmese was Seti II’s brother or not. The “Tale of Two Brothers” text is not as similar to what Josephus describes as some claim either. It is still uncertain whether or not Seti I had any siblings. It’s also possible Manehto made up this brother just to make an identification for Danaus and Aegyptus for his Greek audience, but others think Manetho didn’t name Danaus and Aegyptus at all and those are just Josephus’s or some prior transcriber's speculations. The story even as it’s described when in the Seti II placement better matches Seti I since conquered parts of the Levant. The Vizier of Lower Egypt during Seti’s reign was Nebamun, the son of a Ramose so he could have been confused for another son of Rameses I if he wasn’t. 

Also the division into 30 Dynasties doesn’t come from Manetho himself, there is no hint of it in Josephus's quotations.  That comes from the later transcribers. Which is why it’s possible to skim Josephus here and miss that he’s left the 18th Dynasty, but even then this is the 3rd Amenophis to show up in Josephus’s list of Egyptian Kings following the Hyksos expulsion, not the second. 

I’m growing partial to the theory that the original version of Manetho didn't mention Moses or the Israelites or Jerusalem at all, in either the Hyksos context or the 19th Dynasty context, and all of this was stuff added later. 

What I do believe is that Manetho did tell a story set in the late 19th Dynasty that was a distorted memory of the history involving Chancellor Bay and Irsu from Papyrus Harris I conflating them and how they tied into the civil war between Seti II and Amenmese, calling that composite figure Osarsiph for some reason. A statue of Bay has been found at Heliopolis so he could have been a Priest there. Then these Judeophobes further fused that narrative with Moses and The Exodus. 

Some who want to keep using Manetho as evidence for the Exodus Pharoah being an earlier Amenhotep while acknowledging all of this could say “when that story got conflated with The Exodus is when Merneptah’s name was changed to Amenhotep/Amenophis because people remembered that was the name of the Pharaoh of the Exodus”.

The thing is this isn't the only time Manetho calls a Pharaoh by a different name than modern Egyptologists are used to, his 18th Dynasty rarely uses names we recognize, nor is it the only time he gets their reign length wrong (Merneptah reigned only a decade while this Amenophis reigned 19 years). Manetho's version of the 18th Dynasty as quoted by Josephus even gets the order wrong.

 I do think Merneptah’s Manethoean name change to Amenophis predates the story’s conflation with The Exodus or maybe even Manetho himself receiving it. 

For one thing it’s possible the Manetho text Josephus used the first time didn’t have this 19th Dynasty Exodus at all, though it has its own issues with being the original. Josephus when he’s refuting Manetho accused him of making this Amenophis up completely, yet he was there in exactly the right position in the version he quoted earlier as reliable history. But since in that version Amenophis was placed before the two brothers Josephus wanted to make the Exodus significantly more ancient then, it served his agenda to include his years. 

This Amenophis and Osarsiph narrative also involved another person named Amenophis, the “son of Papis”. So could the name of some contemporary of this Pharaoh accidentally had his name given to the Pharaoh?

When you go to the Wikipedia page List of children of Rameses II, Merneptah is listed as 13 among the sons, being it seems the oldest son to not predecease his long lived father. And the son listed as 14 is Amenhotep. We have no further information on him, we don’t know if his mother was one of the main wives, he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page.  Maybe his mother's name was something corrupted to Papis?  Rameses II did have a daughter named Pypuy who could’ve been named after her mother, or…. Rameses did add some of his own daughters to his Harem. 

Maybe this brother of Merneptah named Amenhotep was a very important advisor to Merneptah? And lived a decade longer being still around during the civil war between Seti II and Amenmese? And thus some oral memories of the late 19th Dynasty confused him with the actual Pharaoh and gave him a 19 year reign?  There is plenty of historical precedent for a King's brother becoming the de facto actual ruler when the King is away on military campaign, like Richard and John in England. Heck Josephus's Manetho just referred to it happening earlier in Egyptian history.

If the Pharaoh of The Exodus was a 18th Dynasty Amenhotep, Manetho as quoted by Josephus got the name right purely by accident. 

Joseph identification theory.

Some of the chronologies I’ve been considering would place Joseph during the time of Amenenhat III. I came to that conclusion before looking at the Viziers of Amenenhat III. But it also fits when we archaeologically know about his role in the history of Avaris. 

The Vizier that most caught my eye was Zamonth or Samontu, a name that Zaphnath from Genesis 41:45 could be a corruption of. 

His wife was named Henuptu, a name possibly rendered later as Henut, so I could see Asenath as having a connection to that. However contrary to popular assumption the name Asenath is a Hebrew name not Egyptian, it’s possibly a different form of Asnah from Ezra 2:50. But it could also be the same root as Asa being combined with Anath. So Genesis is referring to a Hebrew name she was given, not her original Egyptian name. 

One of their sons was named Senebtifi. His name means “the one who will be healthy”. Which is a different meaning I could see coming from the logic of what Joseph says explaining the name Manasseh in Genesis 41:51. 

One of their sons, probably the younger, was Ankhu whose name meant “life”, “living” or “he who lived”. Ephraim means Double Fruit, giving what Fruit often symbolically in The Bible Ankhu being his Egyptian name makes sense. 

They also had a daughter named Seneb, nothing in Scripture contradicts Joseph and Asenath having a daughter, sometimes the daughters just aren’t mentioned. 

Ankhu had a daughter named Senebhenas who was married to the “overseer of the half domain” whatever that means named Wepwawethotep.  She could be the Sherah of 1 Chronicles 7:24. 

Ankhu’s sons Reseneb and Iymeru I thus think can be identified with sons of Ephraim from 1 Chronicles 7 and Numbers 26. 

Moses in 18th Dynasty Theory

I have been very skeptical of the Amenhotep II as Pharaoh of the Exodus model, first because as my recent prior posts about Biblical Chronology show I favor Exodus dates older than 1446 BC, and because I have reasons for favoring the low chronology to the high chronology. 

But then I stumbled upon something potentially vindicating of it I have to share. Even as I remain undecided on the full implication. 

But first I need to state one aspect of the Amenhotep II model I find silly is identifying Hatshepsut as the Daughter of Pharaoh in Exodus 2 and Moses with Senenmut. Senenmut had a known Egyptian family, they were commoners but definitely not foreign slaves. The High Chronology timeline this model favors as the flight of Moses happening during the reign of Hatshepsut. That daughter ruling Egypt during all this would be a very weird thing to not mention. 

It’s commonly assumed a 1446 BC Exodus means a 1526 BC Birth for Moses.  But in my careful reading of Acts 7 and Exodus 2, I’d say the Three Months are also a separate time period. Each period of 40 years begins and ends around Passover, meaning the Birth of Moses could be the Hanukkah season, and in this timeline that means right at the end of 1527 BC. 

In which case Amenhotep I would be the Pharaoh when Moses was born, he had a daughter named Ahmose who was a wife of Tuthmosis I. Ahmose bore Tuthmosis I two daughters but no known sons. But I should not that a granddaughter of the current Pharoah would probably also be called Daughter of Pharaoh as a title. If the Daughter of Pharoah of Exodus 2 is a daughter of Tuthmosis I then I would consider Neferubity more likely then Hatshepsut. Neferubity's name mean "Beauties of Lower Egypt" so her spending time in the Nile Delta makes sense. 

Tuthmosis I has an obscure son whose mother is unknown named Wadjmose. No Tomb was built for this son, yet he didn’t inherit even though it looks like he was older than Tuthmosis II. It may be he was never an actual son but a ward being raised in the royal household.

And now for the real main point of this post. 

Some have theorized that Moses, or Moshe in Hebrew, was originally a fuller Egyptian Name but that he dropped the Theophoric part when he became a strict Monotheist. Usually people suspect an Egyptian word for water or The Nile River, like Hapi.  But when you read Exodus 2 closely, it's possible when the Daughter of Pharaoh says "because I drew him out of the water" she was making a comparison to the reeds (or flags in the KJV) that were growing out of the water which the basket containing Moses was found floating amongst.  

I double checked to make sure I wasn't just assuming, and the reeds that grow in the Nile Delta area are typically green. The Wadj part of Wadjmose is a word for the color green but also associated with happiness and prosperity. 

And it was also the name of a god, Wadj-wer was an Egyptian god whose name meant " the great green", he was a personification of the Mediterranean Sea but also symbolized the riches of the Waters of the Nile. He was strongly associated with the Lagoons and Lakes of the northern Nile Delta, exactly where Avaris and later Pi-Rameses were located.  

The fate of Wadjmose is unknown; we don't have his Mummy, but a depiction of him on a tomb built for his Egyptian tutor named Paheri. He had another tutor named Senimes. Sounds like he fits Acts 7:22 pretty well. 

If I made a movie based on this theory, I’d identify the Egyptian he killed with Senenmut. 

Late Date Exodus proponents have a major problem.

Dr. David Falk is willing to acknowledge the Biblical use of Anachronism when talking about the use of Rameses as a place name in Genesis, or calling The King of Egypt Pharoah in Genesis, but not for Exodus. 

Falk’s justification for this not working for Pi-Rameses in Exodus is the term translated “Store Cities”, somehow that precludes this being anything other than the Israelites building that City when it was founded by that name. 

The problem is that view doesn’t fit Ramses II as the Pharaoh of The Exodus, it would make him an Earlier Pharoah on the timeline, that Pharaoh who had the Israelites build those cities can be still the same as the one when Moses was born or from whom Moses fled when he turned 40 at the latest, but there was definitely at least one change of Pharoah during the 40 years in between. At the earliest Pi-Rameses was founded during the reign of Horemheb.

However the near universal acceptance of the Israel reading of the Merneptah Stele has forced them to rule out any later Exodus model later than Rameses II. 

I do not believe Israel was ever an Exonym for Israel prior to the birth of Christianity. OT era Gentiles called the Israelites Hebrews or Aramean, or referred to specific Tribes or houses, or specific cities or regions. 

Attempts to debunk the Jezreel reading of Merneptah Stele usually just resort to strawmaning it by thinking the proof that this isn't a City name rules Jezreel out.  Jezreel the city was founded by the Omrids so no one thinks that’s what Merneptah mentioned, most Biblical uses of the name are to the Valley, especially early on, it was the name of the Valley long before the city existed.  I have no doubt that the Canaanites of the valley felt they were the seed of an ancestor figure named Jezreel, which could have been true, a tribe of the Hivites or something.  Jezreel is a name commonly interpreted as meaning “God will Sow” because of how the word for “Seed”, Zerah, is one of its core roots. So what the Menreptah Stele says about their “Seed is naught” makes perfect sense as a play on the name Jezreel. Ya know what cities are suspiciously missing from the Merneptah stele given what Canaanite cities were mentioned just before this? The cities of the Jezreel Valley from 1 Kings 4:12, Joshua 17:17 and Judge 1:27 like Megiddo and Bethshean. Megiddo Stratum VIIA is contemporary with Merneptah at least in its end. 

As much as part of me wants to make my support of the Jezreel reading a distinction without a difference, as long as my Chronology places this in the Judges period I'm reminded of how Judges 1 specifies that it was int he Valleys and Plains the Canaanites held out when the Israelites too over the mountains. That's also why I can't agree with the Talmudic tradition that Kitron of Judges 1:30 is Sepphoris, instead the Canaanites of Kitron and Nahalol may be among the people of Jezreel who Merneptah wiped out.  

The Israel reading being correct is also a problem for the Rameses II Exodus view. Mernepetah reigned only about a decade and the victory this Stele celebrates is supposed to be before his year 5, so at least 40 years since the Exodus would force The Exodus to be fairly early in Rameses II’s long reign, forcing the birth of Moses to be probably back in the 18th Dynasty given how short the reigns of Rameses I and Seti I are currently considered to be, thus before the founding of Pi-Rameses.Horemheb began his reign in 1319 BC so even if all of Exodus 1-2:9 including the birth of Moses happened right away, 40 years later would still bring us to the year Ramses II became King. To be fair Rameses II is believed to have become King in May and Acts 7 can be interpreted as implying Moses' flight happened exactly 40 years before the first Passover, so late March or early April, but that’s still cutting it close. And the problem with placing the Exodus in Rameses II’s year 40 or 41 is we know which of his sons was legally considered the first born from year 25 to year 40, it was Rameses the firstborn of Isetnofret, the first born of Nefertari had died in year 25.

That’s another thing about a Rameses II Exodus model, we don’t have as much wiggle room for when in his reign the Plague of the First Born could have happened, we know exactly when each time a current first bone of his died. And the only one to happen soon enough to allow the flight of Moses to be from a prior Pharaoh is year 25 when Amun-her-khepeshef died. And that is too soon, it placed the flight of Moses back in the reign of Horemheb and his birth back in the reign of Tutankhamun. There is zero chance The Bible meant the eldest still living son of Nefertari which was Meratum following this point, he was never crown prince and I firmly believe what Exodus means by first born here is the appointed Heir. But even he didn’t die till year 46 at the earliest. 

I’m willing to entertain the possibility of not accepting the implausible life spans of Genesis at face value, but Moses' 120 years is absolutely not implausible.  The ability of humans to live that long today is NOT because we're living longer now, the average life expectancy statistics people abuse are factoring in the massive drop in infant mortality. Psalm 90:10 records that the Ancient Israelites absolutely saw between 70 and 80 as the average life expectancy and Genesis 6 tells us that 120 was known to be possible.  As someone who is 40 right now,, I can absolutely relate to that being the age when someone would want to get in touch with their roots they only abstractly knew about before. Also when Falk wanted to criticize someone taking the Abraham was born when Terah was 70 view of Genesis 11-12 he really took the attitude of “how dare you question Stephen's inspired knowledge of Old Testament chronology in Acts 7”, and that’s also exactly where Moses being 40 when he fled came from. Moses being 80 at the time of The Exodus comes right from Exodus 7:7, no NT clarification necessary, and Aaron being 83 shows this is exact ages they are recording not poetic estimates. 

Honestly I do think it's possibly to deduce a 40 year age for Moses during the events of Exodus 2:11-21 from the Pentateuch alone. Verse all says when Moses was "grown", there are a number of ages that could imply base don different standards with some even arguing we psychologically fully grown till 40. This same Hebrew word being used to describe someone's age appears in one other passage f the Pentateuch, Genesis 38:11-14 where it's used of Shelah for when he should be old enough to marry, and low and behold in Exodus 2 getting married is also something Moses does during this year. Now to use saying your aren't old enough to marry till 40 sounds odd, but that was when Isaac married Rebecca in Genesis 25:20 and how old Esau was when he got married in Genesis 26:34, with his twin Jacob being instructed to go find a wife that same year. Those are the only times The Pentateuch directly links marriage to an age. So it looks like the Patriarchs were part of a culture where the norm was for men to not get married till 40. 

In spite of what I shall do rhetorically in this post, I ultimately favor a much earlier Exodus, chronology.  So that isn’t why I oppose the Israel reading, it is simply what the facts lead me to conclude.

Remember the chapter divisions were not in the original texts, the start of Exodus 3 is directly in the context of the end of Exodus 2.  Exodus 2:23 days a very long time passed before the King who Moses fled from died, and then presents his death as a key impetus for God finally taking action, telling Moses it’s safe to return to Egypt because those seeking him are dead now. So I lean towards The Exodus happening mere months after the Pharaoh takes the throne, Rameses doing so in May makes his ascension too early. But it makes it being during his reign Moses fled very plausible. 

Maybe Moses could actually be listed as a son of Rameses, one of the more obscure ones. Rameses-Uderkhapesh or Rameses-Userpethi are both names that have “Meses” as part of them, and a name that could explain the origin of the name Osarseph (the relevance of that name will come up later). 

Merneptah abandoned PI-Rameses as capital but we don’t know exactly when.  The consequences of the Exodus could be a factor in why.  This would make the fight of Moses about the year 26 or 27 or 28 of Ramses II reign, this would place the birth of Moses either late in the reign of Rameses I or early in the reign of Seti I, Rameses I has no known daughter but Seti I has at least one but maybe two, Tia and Henutmire. There are extra Biblical traditions that Moses was involved in a campaign against Cush (often mistakenly confused with Nubia still), Rameses did campaign there about year 22 of his reign. 

Maybe the Israel reading of the Merneptah Stele doesn’t actually contradict the Exodus happening during Merneptah’s reign if it happened in the first year. The Stele’s poetic language is vague, it may be wrong to make assumptions about where anyone is, maybe it is another example of the Egyptians recording a defeat as a victor? 

Merneptah (or whatever name was given to the son of the Rameses Miamun who reigned 66 years) was the original 19th Dynasty Exodus model. The Israel reading of the Merneptah Stele is what changed that. Its own origins however are tied to narratives invented by Alexandrian Judeophobes of the Hellenistic Era where Moses is identified with a semilegendary 19th Century villain named Osarseph. 

Back to arguing against the Late Exodus. 

I think part of the argument against the anachronism interpretation of why Pi-Rameses appears in the text is an outdated belief that it stopped being well known or important very quickly. We now know people were writing poetry about the magnificence of Pi-Rameses over a century after the death of Rameses II, which as a proponent of Ussher’s dates for the divided kingdom brings us to about the time of Samuel. Even past then it remained the most notable city with a known name in the area of where Avaris had been. Avaris is confirmed by Egyptian records to be where Semitic immigrants from the Levant lived in Egyptian from its 12th Dynasty founding onwards till its destruction, those people were not only the Israelites but the Israelites were among them. 

I don’t believe The Pentateuch was entirely personally written by Moses.  At the very least I think none of the narrative parts really were. This was all being passed down by Oral Tradition originally. The term Torah does not refer to the entire Pentateuch but mainly the Laws given in the second half of Exodus and perhaps their key amendments provided in Leviticus and parts of Numbers. 

The written narratives I believe began being a thing during the Samuelite period, for reasons perhaps explained by the history recorded in 1 Samuel.

I believe 1 Kings 6 has subtracted the years of oppression from the real total perhaps in part because of Tabernacle records of things they were unable to keep doing properly during the oppressions. Perhaps principally the Yom Kippur ritual, they may have properly kept Yom Kippure only 480 times, or maybe 479 times given the implied conclusion count. 

The Context of Genesis 14 is the early Isin-Larsa Period soon after the fall of Ur III.

I understand why the Amraphel=Hammurabi identification is so popular, but here's the thing, Babylon looms so large in The Biblical imagination that is Babylon specifically had been his royal capital that too would have bene specified here.

Some people in their desire to really sell that identification want to treat Shinar and Babel like synonyms because of how they are sometimes paired together, but they are not.  Shinar is a region which multiple cities as we see in Genesis 10:10.  Now the reading of that verse I favor is "And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, all they in the land of Shinar.". But even in the KJV reading this still makes Shinar a region with more then one city in it. 

Ellsar is definitely Larsa, "Er-Akhu" is a known Ephates some kins of Larse had, the earliest know example is only a generation before Hammurabi but it certainly could have gone back further.

The Amorites were already invading Sumer during this period. And that is all the main etymological element Amraphel and Hammurabi have in common implies, their Amorite heritage. 

This period is when Elam was the height of it's power, this alone is when Elam leading a coalition to the Western Levant is plausible. At the start of Hammurabi's reign Elam was powerful within Mesopotamia, but still not plausible to each this far west. 

There is also the record of an Abuha Son of Ishmael during the reign of Hammurabi. This Abuha must be actually a grandson at least since that's not the same of any of Ishmael's sons in Genesis 14. So generations separated Abraham from Hammurabi.