The Evidence Presented in the Film "Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus" Demonstrating the Presence of the Israelites in Egypt Earlier Than the Accepted Timing

Since I'm into this I might as well give as much of the evidence as I can of the archaeological validation of the Biblical Exodus, against the accepted date for which there is no actual evidence.

The dating discrepancy starts with a verse in the Bible, Exodus 1:11, that says the Israelites made bricks for the Egyptian cities of Pithom and Rameses. Rameses was pharoah around 1200 BC so that date has been accepted as the time period of the Exodus although there is no actual physical evidence from that period that fits the Biblical narrative of the Exodus, nor does that date fit with the Biblical timing itself.

This reference to Rameses seems like a pretty solid clue, so it is easy to understand why it is so adamantly held as a time marker before which the Exodus could not have occurred. Unfortunately it makes a liar of the Bible since there is no evidence from archaeology to support it.

Some try to reconcile the Bible with this melancholy absence of evidence by claiming the Biblical narrative doesn't have to be factual in order to be "true" and other such tiresome sophistries. Supposedly it is enough that it has "meaning." This is a pretty anemic way to defend what has always been known as a history until "science" did its dirty work on it. "Let God be true but every man a liar" says Romans 3:4. I'm going with that. And true does not mean meaningful, it means factually true.

The point of the movie is that there does seem to be plenty of evidence from archaeology and other sources such as documents from ancient Egypt of the factual reality of the Biblical account of the Exodus, quite a bit of it, though not from the time of Rameses, rather from a few hundred years earlier.

In this earlier time period are found:

1. EVIDENCE OF A SEMITIC SHEEPHERDING PEOPLE IN GOSHEN PRIOR TO THE TIME OF RAMESES: A city called Avaris beneath the city of Rameses, the area where the Bible locates the Israelites, which had been populated by Semites or Canaanites. The excavator says they seem to be there by permission of the Egyptian crown, which exactly fits the Biblical narrative of the family of the patriarch Jacob, Joseph's father. The family was given the land by the pharoah of the time. There is also evidence of an abundance of sheep and goats with them. Egyptians were not allowed to be sheepherders but Jacob's family were, so this fact also fits very well. Yet the Austrian excavator, Manfred Bietak, denies that they could have been the Israelites described in the Bible, because, of course, the timing is wrong. He believes the accepted later timing of the period of Rameses. All this apparent evidence of exactly what the Bible describes is therefore tossed out because of the clinging to that date. (Starts about 13:19 into the film.)

2. EVUDENCE OF JOSEPH'S FAMILY IN GOSHEN: About 28:30 into the film, David Rohl offers as evidence that the city of Avaris is indeed where the family of Joseph settled, in the land of Goshen, the style of house built there. It is like those found in Syria, where Abraham originally came from. It's not an Egyptian style of architecture. He says it is the sort of house you'd expect Jacob to have built. Built on top of it was an Egyptian style palace Rohl suggests must have been for a very high dignitary who was being honored for his service to the nation. Its occupant was a Semite or Canaanite. There were also twelve tombs in the garden around it, and twelve pillars in its portico, all suggesting that the honored dignitary must have been Joseph, who was one of twelve brothers

3. EVIDENCE OF JOSEPH'S HIGH RANK IN EGYPT: At 30 into the film Rohl goes on to point out that one of the tombs is special in that it is a pyramid, a shape usually reserved for kings and queens though in this case it was for a Semitic official. There is a very large statue inside the chapel of the tomb that has the hair style and the skin color (pale yellow) by which Egyptians depicted northern people. It also had the remains of painted stripes of many colors which is awfully reminiscent of Joseph's signature "coat of many colors" given to him by his father. The statue has been reconstructed with such a multicolored striped robe covering it. The filmmaker consults another Egyptologist, a Dr. Charles Ailing, who agrees with Rohl that it must depict either Joseph or someone who had a career remarkably similar to Joseph's. Both scholars confirm that this tomb and its statue are unique in Egypt.

I think that is pretty impressive evidence myself that despite the dating problem the Biblical narrative of Joseph's life in Egypt is confirmed by archaeology, and this is only a quarter of the way into the film. It goes on to include a canal attached to the Nile that is named for a "Joseph" and the fact that the pharoah in this time period are depicted with worried features unlike the usual depictions of pharoahs. One important piece of evidence is that the pyramid tomb was completely cleaned out of its artifacts and bones when discovered, which fits with the biblical fact that Joseph had asked for his bones to be buried in the promised land. After that the film goes on to much evidence of other parts of the Biblical account, such as the seven years of famine, the enslavement of the Hebrew descendants of Jacob, then on to the time of Moses when God brought plagues on the land, the death of the firstborn on the night of Passover, the Exodus itself and then evidence from the later time of Rameses that the Israelites were now a nation in the land of Canaan. It's all very compelling but I'm going to stop here for now.