Archæology and the Bible

by George A. Barton

7. Egyptian Discoveries which Bear on the Bible.

(1) Texts Bearing on the Story of Joseph.—A number of texts from the Middle Kingdom and other periods present features similar to parts of the story of Joseph and afford somewhat faint parallels to certain conceptions of the Hebrew Prophets. These are translated in Part II, [p. 300], ff., and [p. 418], ff.

The name of Joseph’s wife, Asenath (in Egyptian As-Neit, “favorite of the goddess Neith”), occurs from the eighteenth dynasty onward. Such names as Potiphar, the master of Joseph (Gen. 39:1), and Potiphera, Joseph’s father-in-law (Gen. 41:45), in Egyptian Pedefre, “he whom the god Re gives,” as well as the name given to Joseph, Zaphenath-paneah (Gen. 41:45), in Egyptian De-pnute-ef-‘onkh, “the god speaks and he lives,” are common in Egypt from the beginning of the twenty-second dynasty, 945 B. C.

(2) The Invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos.—This took many Semites to Egypt. The very name Hyksos is held by Breasted to mean “ruler of countries.” It was probably a title by which these kings called themselves, for they evidently ruled a considerable portion of western Asia, as well as Egypt. “Ruler of countries” is just the Semitic-Babylonian and Assyrian shar-matâti, a title which Mesopotamian kings gave to themselves through much of their history. It had been employed by the Sumerians before them, being the familiar Sumerian lugal kurkurra, “king of countries.” If the Hyksos were Amorites, kinsmen of theirs had ruled in Babylonia long before their invasion of Egypt, and that these may have been Amorites is indicated by the name Jacob-her, which was borne by one of their kings. This is an Egyptian form of the Babylonian Yagub-ilu, or Jacob-el, an Amorite name found on business documents in Babylonia three or four hundred years earlier. In the time of Thothmes III this name was, Thothmes tells us, borne by a Palestinian city, to which it had apparently been given by some Amorite from Babylonia. Whether the Hyksos were Amorites or not, a number of Semitic names were given to places in Lower Egypt at the time of their occupation. Such was the name Magdol, or Migdol. The Egyptian name of Tanis was Zar, which Brugsch claims as Semitic. Thakut, an old name of Pithom, is the same as the Semitic Succoth, “booths.”

In the winter of 1905-1906 Petrie, excavating at Tell el-Ye-hudiyeh,[4] about 20 miles north of Cairo, discovered what he believes to have been one of the original encampments of the Hyksos in Egypt. This encampment consisted of a large space, averaging about 1,500 feet in each direction, surrounded by a wall of sloping sand and mud. This wall, varying from 80 to 140 feet wide at the top and from 130 to 200 feet wide at the bottom, presented on the outer side a long slope, and is quite unlike any structure of the native Egyptians. From the nature of the wall and the small objects found near it, Petrie infers that it was the rampart of a people who defended themselves with bows and arrows. A cemetery of the same level yielded to the explorer a considerable amount of black pottery, not at all like pottery of native Egyptian manufacture, and a number of crude scarabs. These objects Petrie believes are products of the art of the Hyksos before they had been in Egypt long enough to adopt Egyptian civilization. In 1912 Petrie discovered a similar Hyksos camp at the site of Heliopolis, the Biblical On.

It has been held by many that Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob all went to Egypt during the reign of the Hyksos dynasty. It would be natural for Semites to enter such a country, if it were ruled by a dynasty of the same blood as themselves. Egypt has, however, furnished no positive archæological evidence of this view. The Semitic names just alluded to, which are sometimes cited as evidence of it, in reality only prove that many Semites came with the Hyksos. They make it probable, indeed, that some of the Hyksos were Semites, but give us no positive evidence concerning the patriarchs. On the other hand, nothing has been discovered in Egypt to disprove this view.

(3) The El-Amarna Letters.—In the winter of 1887-1888 a native Egyptian woman, according to one account, accidentally discovered some clay tablets in the soil at Tell el-Amarna, about 200 miles south of Cairo on the east bank of the Nile. She is said to have sold her rights in the discovery for about 50 cents. It was thus that nearly four hundred clay tablets, inscribed in the Babylonian language and characters, which opened an entirely unknown vista in the history of Palestine and the surrounding countries, were found. These were letters written to Kings Amenophis III and Amenophis IV, of the eighteenth dynasty. (See § 6 (7).) Seven of them were written by Ebed-hepa, King of Jerusalem, about 1360 B. C., and give us a glimpse of that city more than 350 years before David conquered it for Israel. Others of the letters came from other cities of Palestine and Phœnicia, and reveal to us through contemporary documents the conditions there in the patriarchal age. Some of these are translated in Part II, [p. 344], ff.

(4) Period of the Oppression and the Exodus.—The statement in Exodus 1:11 that the Pharaoh who oppressed the Egyptians built the store-cities of Pithom and Raamses, indicates that this Pharaoh was Ramses II, for Naville, who excavated the site of Pithom (Egyptian Pi-tum, “House of the god Tum”) in 1883, found much work of Ramses II there, including colossal statues of this king, and also found no evidence that there had been any town of importance on the site before.[5] The name of the other city, Raamses, also points to the same king, since Ramses I, the only other king of the name Egypt had known, reigned less than two years—a time insufficient for the building of a city. The Bible evidently refers, then, to Ramses II. Concerning Ramses II and his reign much is now known, as has been pointed out in § 6 (7); (see [Fig. 10]).

All through the nineteenth dynasty peoples from Syria were employed by the kings on public works. Among these was a people called ‘prw = Aperu or Apuri, which some have thought to be Hebrews. Whether the Hebrews are really mentioned in this way is doubted by others, for references to the ‘prw do not cease at the time the Exodus of Israel must have occurred. They were employed by Ramses IV, of the twentieth dynasty, as late as 1165 B. C.

Much has been learned from archæology about Egyptian brick-making, and it corresponds to the description of it given in Exodus. We have pictures of men at the work. No one thought of burning bricks in Egypt. The clay was moulded and dried in the sun. Straw was mixed with the clay to increase its adhesive quality. Naville says that some of the corners of some of the buildings at Pithom were actually built of bricks without straw. (See Exod. 5:7-18; and [Fig. 11].)