The length of the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt has been the subject of endless controversy. The Old Testament statements in regard to it are clear enough. Abraham is told (Gen. xv. 13) that his descendants shall ‘serve’ the Egyptians and be ‘afflicted’ by them for 400 years. As a generation was counted at thirty years, this implies that the whole period spent in Egypt was 430 years, though the statement is not quite exact, since Joseph lived more than thirty years after the settlement of his brethren in the land of Goshen, and their servitude and affliction did not begin till after his death. In Exodus (xii. 40) we are informed explicitly that ‘the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.’ Four hundred and thirty years, therefore, must have been the length of time during which Israel was officially regarded as having lived in Goshen.
But it is difficult to reconcile it with another statement in Gen. xv. 16, where it is said that ‘in the fourth generation’ the children of Israel should return to Canaan. As the words were spoken to Abraham, the fourth generation would be that of Joseph himself. Since this seems out of the question, they are usually interpreted to refer to Moses and Aaron, who are placed in the fourth generation from Levi. Moses and Aaron, however, did not ‘come again’ to Palestine, and the genealogy of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. xxvii. 1) makes the generation that did so the seventh from Joseph. Time, in fact, cannot be reckoned by generations; we do not know how many links in the chain may have been dropped, ‘son’ in Semitic idiom being frequently equivalent to ‘descendant,’ while the names are often merely geographical, like Gilead and Machir in the genealogy of Zelophehad, and therefore have no chronological value. It was, however, the mention of ‘the fourth. generation’ which produced the rabbinical gloss, alluded to by S. Paul (Gal. iii. 17), according to which the four hundred and thirty years of Gen. xv. 13 did not mean the time during which the Israelites were ‘afflicted’ in Egypt, but—in spite of the definite assertion to the contrary—a period which included the lives of the patriarchs as well as the government of Joseph.
If the statements in regard to the period of the Israelitish settlement in Egypt are contradictory, the statements in regard to the lapse of time from the conquest of Canaan to the building of Solomon’s temple are still more so. In 1 Kings vi. 1 we read that the foundations of the temple were laid in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign, and four hundred and eighty years after the Exodus from Egypt. If we add together the numbers given in the book of Judges, they amount to four hundred and ten years, thus leaving only seventy years for the wanderings in the desert, the judgeships of Eli and Samuel, the reigns of Saul and David, and the first four years of Solomon! The endeavours that have been made to get over the difficulty have all been fruitless. Wellhausen and others, for instance, have conjectured that the four hundred and eighty years are intended to represent twelve generations, each being reckoned at forty years, and the seventy years assigned to the five ‘lesser judges’ being overlooked. But the conjecture is destitute of support, and is contrary to such notices as we have of the number of generations which covered the period of the judges. Moreover, the five lesser judges do not constitute a group by themselves.
The period of four hundred and eighty years cannot be reconciled with the genealogies any better than with the apparent chronology of the book of Judges. Between Nahshon, who was a contemporary of Moses, and Solomon, only five generations are given (Ruth iv. 20-22); and between Phinehas and Zadok, whom Solomon removed from the priesthood, there were only seven generations of priests (1 Chron. vi. 4-8). Doubtless some of the links in the ancestry of David have been dropped, but that can hardly be the case as regards the priests. Seven generations would give, at the most, not more than two hundred and ten years.
That the number four hundred and eighty, however, has really been based on the number forty seems probable. Forty years in Hebrew idiom merely signified an indeterminate and unknown period of time, and the Moabite Stone shows that the same idiom existed also in the Moabite language.[[145]] Thus Absalom is said, in 2 Sam. xv. 7, to have asked permission to leave Jerusalem ‘after forty years,’ although the length of time was really little more than two years (2 Sam. xiv. 28 sqq.), and Jewish tradition has supplied the lost record of the length of Saul’s reign with a date of forty years. The period of forty years, which meets us again and again in the book of Judges, is simply the equivalent of an unknown length of time; it denotes the want of materials, and the consequent ignorance of the writer. Twenty, the half of forty, is equally an expression of ignorance; and the only dates available for chronology are those which represent a definite space of time, like the eight years of Chushan-rishathaim’s oppression of Israel, or the six years of Jephthah’s judgeship.
We can learn nothing, accordingly, from the books of the Old Testament about the chronology of Israel down to the time of David. For David’s reign we have the seven years of his rule at Hebron, followed by the thirty-three years of his sway over the whole of Israel. For the reign of Solomon we have again the indeterminate ‘forty years’; but since Rezon of Damascus, like Hadad of Edom, was ‘an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon,’ it is probable that the reign did not actually last more than thirty years at the most. Even the chronology of the divided kingdom after the death of Solomon, in spite of the synchronisms the compiler of the books of Kings has endeavoured to establish between the kings of Judah and those of Israel, has been the despair of historians, and scheme after scheme has been proposed in order to make it self-consistent. The Assyrian monuments, however, have now come to our help, and shown that between the time of Ahab and that of Hezekiah it is forty years in excess.
For Hebrew chronology, therefore, we must look outside the Bible itself. At certain points Hebrew history comes into touch with the monumental records of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria; and if we are to date the events it records, it must be by their aid. Egypt can assist us only after the rise of the eighteenth dynasty; before that period it is as much without a chronology as the Israelites themselves. But the case is different as regards Babylonia and Assyria. In Babylonia time was dated by the reigns of the kings and the events of the several years of each reign. The extensive commercial relations of the country, and the contracts that were constantly being drawn up, made accurate dating a matter of necessity. The Assyrians were even more exact than the Babylonians; they were distinguished among Oriental nations by their strong historical sense, and at an early epoch had devised an accurate system of chronology. The years were reckoned by a succession of officers called limmi, each of whom held office for a year and gave his name to it, the king himself, during the earlier period of Assyrian history, taking the office in the first year of his reign. Lists of the limmi were kept, and a reference to them would show at once the exact age of a document dated by the name of a particular limmu. None of the lists hitherto discovered are, unfortunately, older than the tenth century B.C.; but, thanks to those that have been found, from B.C. 909 to 666 we have a continuous and accurate register of time.
Abraham was the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Amraphel, and the position of Amraphel among the Babylonian kings has been given us by the native annalists. He was the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon, and reigned fifty-five years. Unfortunately, the only copy we possess at present of the native Babylonian list of dynasties is broken, and owing to the fracture of the tablet, a doubt hangs over his precise date. The most probable restoration of the text would make it about B.C. 2300.[[146]] Between this and the Exodus there would be an interval of more than a thousand years.
Dr. Mahler has attempted to fix astronomically the dates of the two leading Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, Thothmes III. and Ramses II., and his dates have been accepted by Brugsch and other Egyptologists. If his calculations are correct, Thothmes III. will have reigned from the 20th of March B.C. 1503 to the 14th of February B.C. 1449;[[147]] and Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression, from B.C. 1348 to 1281. The eighteenth dynasty, accordingly, would have commenced about B.C. 1600, and the Exodus would have taken place subsequently to B.C. 1280.
If Apophis II. was the Hyksos king under whom Joseph governed Egypt, he would have lived four generations before Ahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty.[[148]] The ‘four hundred years,’ therefore, during which Israel was evil-entreated in Egypt (Acts vii. 6) will correspond with the era of four hundred years mentioned on a stela discovered by Mariette at San, the ancient Zoan.[[149]] The stela commemorates a visit paid to Zoan in the reign of Ramses II. by Seti, the governor of the frontier, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, and ‘the four hundredth year of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the Sun, who loved him, also named Set-Nubti, beloved of Harmakhis.’ Since Set or Sutekh was the Hyksos god, and Zoan the Hyksos capital, it is clear that we have here a Hyksos era, the four hundredth anniversary of which fell in the reign of Ramses II. It seems probable that it marked the accession of the third and last Hyksos dynasty. According to Manetho, as reported by Africanus, this lasted for one hundred and fifty-one years, which would take us to about B.C. 1720, and the same date is obtained if we calculate the four hundred years of the stela of Sân, back from the thirtieth year of Ramses II. One generation more—the thirty additional years given in Exod. xii. 40—will bring us to the period of the Exodus, which, as we shall see hereafter, must have taken place under Meneptah, the son and successor of Ramses II.