part0086

The Myth: And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. (Gen. 15:13–16)

One of the biblical myths most widely accepted as fact is the claim that the House of Israel spent four hundred years as slaves in Egypt. This belief, contradicted by other passages in the Bible, stems from a reading of Genesis 15:13–16, which mistakenly combined two different traditions as if they were one.

In the text, God spoke with Abraham and predicted that his seed would be afflicted for four hundred years in a land where his descendants shall be strangers but in the fourth generation they would return (implicitly, to their home land). As presently written, the narrative indicates that the four hundred years and the four generations encompass the same timeframe. There is an error in this standard biblical interpretation, and we will reconstruct the original intent, but first, let’s look at some of the other evidence concerning the duration of Israel’s stay in Egypt.

According to the Book of Exodus, Israelite slavery began sometime after Joseph died when “there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exod. 1:8). Exodus also says that the total sojourn (i.e., the period of freedom plus the period of slavery) of Israel in Egypt lasted 430 years (Exod. 12:40). The sojourn began with the arrival in Egypt of either Joseph or Jacob—the text is not specific. Joseph came to Egypt at the age of seventeen; Jacob arrived during Joseph’s thirty-ninth year. Joseph lived to the age of 110. Since the bondage didn’t begin until after Joseph’s death, Israel had to be in Egypt prior to the bondage for at least seventy-one years if we count from Jacob’s arrival. If the total sojourn in Egypt lasted 430 years, then the maximum period of slavery could only be 359 years (430 – 71 = 359).

Were there four hundred years of bondage or only 359 years? Actually, neither, because other biblical passages shorten the period even further.

The line of descent from Jacob to Moses spans five generations: Jacob, Levi, Kohath, Amram, and Moses. According to various passages in Exodus, Levi lived 137 years, Kohath 133 years, and Amram 137 years. Moses led the Exodus at the age of eighty. Since Levi and Kohath both came into Egypt with Jacob, the maximum period of the sojourn could only be 350 years—Kohath’s 133 years, Amram’s 137 years, and Moses’ eighty years—and only if we assume that Kohath fathered Amram in his last year of life and that Amram fathered Moses in the last year of his life, neither of which assumptions are very credible. Therefore, if the maximum sojourn is only 350 years, the maximum period of bondage could be no more than about 280 years (since the bondage started about seventy years after the beginning of the sojourn).

As early as the first century A.D. and probably well before that, the Jewish historians and biblical scholars of the time recognized that something was wrong with the numbers. A tradition developed that the 430-year sojourn actually combined two separate periods of 215 years each, the first beginning with the arrival of Abraham in Canaan and the second beginning with the arrival of Jacob in Egypt. By this tradition, the sojourn lasted no more than 215 years, and the bondage, therefore, couldn’t have been more than about 145 years. Genesis states that the period of time from Abraham’s arrival in Canaan to Jacob’s arrival in Egypt is 215 years, but there is no direct evidence that the period of time from Jacob’s arrival to the Exodus lasted 215 years.

To appreciate the confusion this caused in the first century A.D., consider that Josephus, the leading Jewish historian of that time, wrote in one part of his biblical history, Antiquities, that the sojourn lasted 215 years, but elsewhere in the same book wrote that the bondage lasted four hundred years, and made no effort to reconcile the two conflicting claims. Furthermore, in his calculation of the 215-year span he used data that contradicted the chronology in Genesis.

Despite these errors, he and the other scholars of his time were on the right track in counting the 430-year sojourn in Egypt from Abraham’s arrival in Canaan. In that same year, Abraham moved to Egypt, so an Egyptian sojourn actually began at that time. Further, as you may recall from the discussion in Myth #49, the biblical authors tried to place Abraham in Canaan right after he departed the pharaoh’s household, but the preceding biblical text says that he headed into the southern part of Egypt.

This brings us back to the prophecy to Abraham. The text indicates that the four hundred years of affliction would begin with his seed, i.e., his children:“thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.”

If we take this to mean that the four hundred-year period of affliction begins with Abraham’s seed, to wit, the birth of Isaac, and ends with the Exodus from Egypt, as the biblical author surely intended, then we have an interesting chronological congruence between the prophesy to Abraham and the 430-year sojourn. Isaac was born in Abraham’s one hundredth year, and Abraham began his sojourn in Egypt in his seventy-fifth year. Counting from Abraham’s sojourn instead of Jacob’s gives us a total period of 425 years from Abraham’s arrival in Egypt to the Israelite departure from Egypt. This is reasonably close to the duration of the 430-year sojourn mentioned in Exodus.

But, you might ask, where are the four hundred years of affliction? This is where the biblical redactors confused two stories. One was about Canaanite affliction over Egypt, a description of the Hyksos era when Canaanites ruled Egypt. The other was about a departure of Israel from Egypt. Let’s look at the Genesis prophecy to see how these two stories were combined .

The first thing we notice is that the affliction takes place in a land where Abraham’s seed “shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs.” Where is that land? The assumption has always been that the strange land was Egypt, but throughout the Bible, it is Canaan that is identified as the strange land, not Egypt. Consider these statements appearing in Genesis:

And I will give unto thee [i.e., Abraham], and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. (Gen. 17:8)

And give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou [i.e., Jacob] art a stranger, which God gave unto Abraham. (Gen. 28:4)

The first stage in our reconstruction, then, is to recognize that Canaan caused the affliction, not Egypt, and that in the prophecy, the seed of Abraham will “come out” of the land of affliction. Next, look at the passage about “the fourth generation.”

This passage has always been interpreted to mean that Israel will come out of Egypt, but that it will have to wait until problems with the Amorites disappear. It is then argued that Moses fulfilled the prophecy in that he was in the fourth generation after Jacob. But the prophecy says in the fourth generation, not after the fourth generation. Since Moses is in the fifth generation beginning with Jacob, he doesn’t fall within the terms of the prediction.

The Hyksos, the basis of the story about affliction, were of Canaanite origin, but which Canaanites they were we don’t know. They ruled parts of Egypt from about 1750 B.C., and all or most of Egypt from about 1680 B.C., and remained in power to about 1572 B.C. The name Hyksos means “chieftains from the hill country.”

The term Amorite originally meant specific groups of people in Canaan. It eventually evolved into a term describing Canaanites from the central hill areas in Canaan. So, Hyksos and Amorite both referred to people from the hill country, although the similar definitions don’t necessarily mean they referred to the same groups of people.

In any event, when Abraham went to Egypt, the Hyksos were in charge of the northern delta and Abraham later fled from that territory. The very next Israelite to come to Egypt was Joseph, and lo and behold, Joseph is in the fourth generation from Abraham—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Chronologically, following the Jewish tradition, Joseph arrived in Egypt at about 1564 B.C., which is right after or just about when the Egyptians decisively defeated the Hyksos.

Reducing God’s prophecy to Abraham to its essential components, we have the following scenario:

What we have here are two separate stories that have become entangled due to confusion by the biblical redactors.

The first story described an affliction by Canaanites in Egypt for four generations. The second described a departure from Egypt after four hundred years. Both stories included a period of affliction, one by Canaanites over Egypt and one by Egyptians over the Israelites .

The biblical redactors, who no longer remembered that the Israelite ancestors of the patriarchal age had lived in Egypt, only knew of Israelites as a Canaanite people who had been afflicted in Egypt. They read these two stories from a Canaanite rather than Egyptian perspective. From that point of view, persecution in a land of strangers meant persecution in Egypt rather than Canaan. They integrated the first story with the second story to reflect a single affliction. For this reason, they assumed that the time spans of four hundred years and four generations were one and the same when in fact they actually measured two different durations. Consequently, the biblical redactors erroneously created a period of four hundred years of slavery in Egypt.

Because we have no actual direct evidence for Israelite slavery in Egypt, it is difficult to determine when (or if ) Israel ever suffered under bondage in Egypt. In my previous book, The Bible Myth, I present an extensive argument that the Israelites originated in Egypt and that the period of slavery lasted less than thirty years, from about 1340B.C. to 1315 B.C.