THE EXODUS 407 
The date of the Exodus, like most Egyptian dates, hitherto 
a matter of considerable contention, is now generally agreed 
as falling between 1300 and 1200 B.c. Petrie! fixes on 
“‘ 1220 B.C. or possibly rather later,” Hanbury Brown places 
the Flight ten years earlier, .e. 1230, for reasons based mainly 
on the stele of King Menephtah.? 
So if the contention that the Israelites could not well know 
of the Rod because of its invention after their flight holds 
water, any representation of Rod fishing must obviously be 
subsequent to the year 1230 or 1220 B.c. Only two such 
representations exist: (A) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 370) comes 
from the tomb (No. 93) of Kenamiim at Thebes, and dates 
from about the second half of the XVIIIth Dynasty, or some 
200 years before the Exodus, while (B) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 371, 
and in Newberry’s Beni Hasan, vol. I. Plate X XIX.) goes back 
to the early XIIth Dynasty or some 750 years before the 
Exodus.? 
The Exodus, whatever date be assigned, probably occurred 
in the time of and was occasioned by a dynasty non-Semitic, 
and unfavourable to Israel. The corvée enforced doubtless 
by the kourbash was exacted from the aliens, whose task 
(Exodus i. 11) included the building of two brick fortresses to 
block the eastern road into Egypt. 
1 Op. cit., p. 53. , 
2 The inscription mentions the existing conditions of foreign affairs with 
neighbouring countries as satisfactory. It is in this connection that the 
“* people of Israel’? come in. Their Exodus, according to Pharaonic fashion, 
would have been described by the King as an expulsion and not as an escape 
against his will. The author of the inscription, who wrote from a point of 
view which was not that of the Biblical account, seems not unsupported by 
Exodus xii. 39, ‘‘ Because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not tarry.”” 
Even stronger is the Revised Version marginal rendering in Exodus xi. 1, 
‘* When he shall let you go altogether, he shall utterly thrust you out hence.” 
Sir Hanbury Brown, Journal of Egyptian Archeology (Jan. 1917), p. 19. 
3 In connection with, perhaps even helping to fix, the date of the Exodus, 
it is in the victorious hymn of Menephtah that the earliest written reference 
to Israel appears: ‘‘ Israel is desolated: her seed is not. Palestine has 
become a (defenceless) widow of Egypt’ (Breasted), or ‘‘ The Israelites are 
swept off: his seed is no more” (Naville). Petrie’s translation, ‘‘ The people 
of Israel is spoiled: it has no corn (or seed),” does not for various reasons 
seem to find favour. The majority of Egyptologists now identify Aahmes I. 
with the “ new king who knew not Joseph,” c. (1582), Rameses II. as the first 
Pharaoh of the Oppression, and of Exodus ii. 15 (c. 1300), and Menephtah 
the son of Rameses II. with the Pharaoh of the Plagues and the Flight from 
Egypt (c. 1234). 
