The Exodus in the Qur’an, the Bible, and History (Part 6): The Identity of the Pharaoh

The Bible provides several details that historians can use to identify the pharaoh of the Exodus.  Interestingly, as we will see, the Qur’an also gives separate indications that lead to the same conclusion.

First of all it is important to establish the general time period of the Exodus.  It is almost universally agreed that the Exodus, if it happened, had to have occurred during the New Kingdom period.  Here I will mention three of the main reasons for this:

1. The enslavement of Semitic people and their exploitation as forced laborers in construction projects was an innovation of the New Kingdom period (c. 1540-1170 BCE).  During this period, Egypt’s sovereignty extended to Syria and Canaan (Palestine), and massive numbers of Semitic prisoners were brought into Egypt as slaves.  While foreign slaves had been used in Egypt before the New Kingdom period, they served domestic roles in large households or cultic roles in temples.  Only during the New Kingdom period were they used as forced laborers in building bricks and constructing buildings and cities.[1]

2. The biblical account states that the Israelites were used in the building of the store-city Ramses (Exod. 1:11).  Historians and archaeologists identify this with the city of Pi-Ramesses, where the Pharaoh Seti I (r. 1295/1290-1279 BCE) built his summer palace, and which his son Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BCE) expanded it into a great city and made his capital.  Along with the biblical Pithom (Exod. 1:11), identified as Per-Atum, the city was located in the eastern Nile Delta, which must therefore be the region in which the Israelites were located.  Pi-Ramesses continued to thrive as the royal capital only until the reign of Ramesses VI (r. 1143-1136 BCE), when it was abandoned.[2]  Based on this evidence, the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt must have taken place in the thirteenth or twelfth centuries BCE.  Richard Hess is even more precise.  He writes,

Again, only in the thirteenth century B.C. was it known for the pharaoh of Egypt to have his capital in the eastern Delta region, the only region in Egypt that would allow for Moses and Aaron to visit pharaoh and return on the same day to the oppressed Israelites working on the cities of Pithom and Ramesses.[3]

Therefore, the story of Moses fits remarkably well with this historical context, and in no other.  Moreover, as Kitchen and Hoffmeier point out, because the city was abandoned in the 1130s BCE, it could not have been known to the author(s) of the Book of Exodus if they were recording a made-up story many centuries later.  They could only have received it as an authentic detail preserved in the memory of an actual historical Exodus from Egypt.

3. The first explicit mention of Israel in the archaeological record is in a stone slab (called a stele) erected by Merneptah (r. 1213-1203 BCE), the son and successor of Ramesses II.  In it, Merneptah boasts of his military forays in Canaan and among the vanquished peoples he mentions Israel.  Merneptah’s Stele dates to c. 1208 BCE, and indicates that the Israelites were already located in or near the region of Canaan by this time.  The name Israel is written with a hieroglyphic determinative signifying a “people” rather than a territory or city-state, unlike the other nations.  This indicates that Israel was still only a tribal entity, and had not yet matured into a city-state.[4]

For these reasons, most historians accept Ramesses II as the pharaoh during the time of the Exodus.  This is also the view of Kitchen and Hoffmeier.

Although the Qur’anic story modifies the biblical one in several relevant details, it only supports—rather than contradicts—this identification:

First, while the biblical account distinguishes between the pharaoh during Moses’ youth (who in this case would be Seti I) and another after his escape to Midian (Ramesses II), the Qur’an does not make this distinction.  Instead, it identifies the pharaoh during Moses’ childhood and after his call to prophethood as the same pharaoh.  As Fatoohi and Al-Dargazelli point out, this requires that the pharaoh of the Qur’anic exodus autonomously ruled Egypt for at least around forty years.[5]  The only pharaoh in Egyptian history who had such a lengthy reign as an absolute monarch was Ramesses II, who ruled for about sixty-six years.[6]  Therefore, the Qur’an provides a separate indication for identifying the Pharaoh of the Exodus as Ramesses II.  This argument may not be conclusive, since the Qur'an often adapts details of its stories to make them more accessible to contemporary audiences.  Nonetheless, it points in the same direction as the rest of the evidence.

Second, the Qur’an refers to Pharaoh several times with the unique title of “Pharaoh of the Awtād.”  This will be the subject of the next article.  In the subsequent articles, we will also see how other details the Qur’an gives are consistent with the identification of Ramesses II.

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[1] Kitchen, 247.

[2] Hoffmeier, 117; Kitchen, 256.

[3] Hess, Richard S. “Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed” (Review).  Denver Journal 4 (2001): Denver Seminary, Mar. 2001. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.

[4] Kitchen, 451.

[5] This figure is an estimate based on Qur’anic indications about “The time that Pharaoh ruled before Moses’ birth…Moses’ age when he left Egypt to Midian…The time that he stayed in Midian [and]…The length of his second sojourn in Egypt after returning from Midian” (Fatoohi and Al-Dargazelli, 101).  The pharaoh Tuthmosis III ruled nominally for forty-six years, but assumed the throne as a mere child and only became an absolute ruler after the death of Hatshepsut in 1483 BCE, more than two decades later.  Similarly Amenhotep III ruled nominally for thirty-seven years, but was also only a child when he assumed the throne and ruled autonomously for a shorter period of time.  See Fatoohi and Al-Dargazelli, 101-106. 

[6] Fatoohi and Al-Dargazelli, 105.