Dead Men Tell Tales

by Harry Rimmer

It is a matter of common knowledge in our day that the word, or name, pharaoh, may be applied either to a person or to an office. Exactly as our modern word “president” may be applied to the function of the office, or to the possessor of it in person, so the ruler of Egypt could be known simply as The Pharaoh, or shorter still, as Pharaoh. As every president, emperor or king, however, has his own proper name, so each pharaoh also is designated by his personal name. Fortunately for our purpose, many pharaohs are mentioned in the pages of Holy Writ under the clear identification of their proper names. Many of them, however, are not identified by their personal name but are referred to only by the title of their kingly office. Thus, for instance, the pharaoh of the Exodus is not named personally in the text. Such attempts at identification of this pharaoh as are made, must be made from external sources. However, there can be no question of the identity of the rulers of Egypt, who are specifically named in the Word of God. Such men as the Pharaoh Shishak, the Pharaoh Zera and the Pharaoh So, are identified beyond any possibility of question.

It is a happy circumstance for the student of apologetics that each of the pharaohs who is so named in person by the writers of the Bible, has been discovered and identified in the records of archeology. No more emphatic voice as to the credibility and the infallible nature of the historical sections of the Scripture can be heard than that which is formed by the chorus of these pharaohs.

To note the background of this record, may we remind the reader that in early times, Egypt was a divided kingdom. It was known as Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, and a separate monarch reigned over each section. It happens that in the period of the divided kingdom, there were fourteen dynasties in each section of the land. The Egyptian, like all Eastern people, highly prized ancestral antiquity. The farther back into antiquity a man’s family could be traced in his genealogy, the more the honour that accrued to him. We are not without modern counterparts, even in our present democracy.

Therefore, when the two kingdoms were united, the first kings of the united kingdom added together the fourteen dynasties of Upper and Lower Egypt, making them consecutive instead of contiguous. Thus they built a spurious antiquity of twenty-eight dynasties to enhance their greatness.

The earlier archeologists fell into this trap, and consequently erected an antiquity phantom which obscured the problem of chronology for some considerable time. When it was discovered that these dynasties were concurrent, a great deal of the fallacious antiquity of Egypt was abandoned. This fictional antiquity, which doubled the factor of time for that period, had been used to discredit the text of the Bible by the critical scholars, so-called. Now, in the light of our present learning, we find no discrepancy between the antiquity of Egypt, properly understood, and the chronology of the Scripture, when it is divorced from the errors of Ussher. Incidentally, the chronology and antiquity demands of both archeology and revelation coincide beautifully with the demands of sane anthropology.

To delineate this background so necessary to the proper understanding of the record of the pharaohs, it is necessary to introduce the first occasion of the coincidence of the text of the Scripture with the land and the people of Egypt, as it is here that the streams of revelation and history begin to converge. This beginning is made, of course, in the flight of Abraham into Egypt at the time of a disastrous famine. Overlooking for the moment the reprehensible conduct of Abraham concerning the denial of his wife Sarah, and the consequent embarrassment of the pharaoh, we digress to make a brief survey of the incidents that lead up to the kindness of Pharaoh to Abraham.

There had been previous Semitic invasions of Egypt. The first reason for these forays, of course, was famine. Due to the unfailing inundation by the river Nile, the fertile land of Egypt was a natural storehouse. The land of Egypt is fertile, the sun is benevolent, and wherever water reaches the land, amazingly prodigious crops are the inevitable result. So in the ancient days, whenever there was drought in the desert countries surrounding Egypt, the hungry hordes looked on the food supplies of their neighboring country, and, naturally, moved in that direction. Thus the pressure of want was the primary reason for these early Semitic invasions.

The secondary cause was conquest. These people of antiquity were brutal pragmatists, as are certain nations in our present Twentieth Century. The theme song of antiquity undoubtedly was, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The motive for living in those stern days seems to have been, “He takes who can, and keeps who may.”

The activating motive of much past history is simply spoils. Here now is a case in point. A family of kings ruled in Syria, who counted their wealth by flocks and herds. Driven by a combination of circumstances, they descended upon Egypt. They were pressed by the lack of forage in their own land, due to the drought, and they also lusted after the treasure and wealth of the neighboring country. So, without need for any other excuse, they descended with their armed hordes and conquered Egypt. There they ruled, established a dynasty and possessed the land for themselves. Since their principal possessions were their flocks and herds, they were known as the Shepherd Kings. They have come down in history as the Hyksos Dynasty. They unified Syria and Egypt, and it is intriguing to study the development of this unification as that process is seen in the pottery of that period. The work of Egyptian artisans began to take on certain characteristics of Syrian culture until, finally, the characteristic Egyptian line and decoration disappeared and the pottery became purely Syrian. The Shepherd Kings established commerce between the two halves of their empire and prosperity followed their conquest. These kings imported artists from their native Syria, together with musicians and dancers innumerable.

This intrusion of a foreign culture so changed the standards of Egypt that for generations the ideal of beauty was a Syrian ideal. Later, when the Syrian kings were expelled by Tahutmas the 2nd, the situation was reversed and Egypt, now governed by an Egyptian, kept Syria as her share of the spoils.