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Battle of Kadesh

The Battle of Kadesh: Meaning for Israel and the Bible

December 2, 2023
by Peter Feinman
Ramses: Moses showdown in The Ten Commandments

The Battle of Kadesh:
Meaning for Israel and the Bible
Paper presented November 16, 2023
Annual Conference of ASOR

The Battle of Kadesh in year 5 of Ramses II between Egypt and the Hittites is one of the best documented battles in the ancient Near East. Records of the battle exist in multiple copies and formats throughout the land of Egypt including in giant billboard color. By now Egyptologists know that these accounts should not be taken as gospel. Instead they are royal propaganda by a king who did not win the confrontation.

This paper takes the position that there are specific elements in the Kadesh battle report that can be identified as contributing to the royal spin. These elements do not reflect historical events even though they give appearance of doing so. By examining these incidents and motifs, it is possible to determine if there is a pattern to them or their message. In other words, they do not exist by chance. Quite the contrary, they reflect a conscious decision by Ramses and are directed towards the audience who would read, see, and hear, about the battle in these reliefs distributed nationwide. They reveal the historical context not in which the battle was fought in year 5, but the subsequent context in which that battle was spun. Some of the incidents and motifs in these versions have direct bearing on both the history of Israel and the writing of the Hebrew Bible.

SLIDE Question #1: How Do We Know the Battle of Kadesh Occurred?

(Battlefield in modern Syria, courtesy Steven Weingartner)

What is the archaeological evidence that proves that the Battle of Kadesh occurred?

Is there a destruction level at Kadesh that can be definitively attributed to this confrontation between these two ancient superpowers, the Hittites and the Egyptians?

Are there battlefield artifacts that can be assigned to both sides? A mound of chariots?

The Way of Horus connecting Egypt to Asia (Courtesy Jim Hoffmeier)

There is archaeological evidence for a campaign route from Egypt part of the way to Kadesh, the Way of Horus, but not the entire way. Is there evidence of a comparable route for the Hittites and their presumed allies? Let’s put this in context. Suppose over three thousand years from now there was proof of an airport in this city and an Interstate highway with rest stops to this location. Would that prove that on a specific date, you travelled it to attend this specific conference?

The general answer is “No.” There is no archaeological proof that a battle occurred in Ramses Year 5 between Egypt and the Hittites at Kadesh. Somehow an armed force of 20,000 plus support people and including horse and chariot marched hundreds of miles across Sinai and Canaan into Syria where it confronted a roughly comparably sized Hittite foe with both sides leaving no artefactual trace for archaeologists to discover. Good thing the only record of the battle wasn’t in the Hebrew Bible otherwise who would believe it happened.

SLIDE Question #2: Why Are there so many textual and relief records of the battle in Egypt?

No incident in Egyptian history is so impressed upon the mind of the traveler in Egypt as this battle between the forces of Ramses II and those of the Hittites at Kadesh on the Orontes, in the fourteenth century before Christ [now dated to the thirteenth century]. The young king’s supreme effort to save himself and his army from destruction is so often depicted and in such graph pictures upon the walls of the great temples, that no visitor, not even the most blasé “globe-trotter” can ever forget it (James Henry Breasted, The Battle of Kadesh: A Study in the Earliest Known Military Strategy, 1903 4).

The main source of information for the Battle of Kadesh consists of texts and reliefs found in Egypt. There are a plethora of such sources to be found throughout the country. These locations include: Abu Simbel, Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, and the Ramesseum. There are so many records that Egyptologists differentiate them into the Poem and the Bulletin, two sources about the same event with the relief captions providing another source. Egyptologists examine these different versions the way Biblical scholars investigate different textual versions of the same passage.

Instead of wrestling with the multiple versions of the Battle of Kadesh to create an historical reconstruction, let’s pause, take a deep breath and stand back and ask why are there so many versions of precisely the same battle?

For example, how many records of Thutmose III at the Battle of Megiddo in the 15th century BCE are there?

Thutmose III at Megiddo boldly choosing the middle route and catching the Canaanites by surprise. A role model for Ramses II.

The legacy of battle reliefs can be pushed back to Pharaoh Ahmose against the Hyksos in the 16th century BCE from the excavations at Abydos by Steve Harvey.

Excavations by Steve Harvey showing the similarity of fragments he found at Abydos from the 16th century with those from Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE.

Almost all the great warrior kings of the 18th, 19th, and 20th Dynasties, are consistent in the campaign reliefs they created for their battles – one set of reliefs at one location. Ramses is the anomaly. So even without delving into the weeds to historically recreate the Battle of Kadesh based on multiple texts and reliefs in the first place, it is legitimate to wonder why there are so many versions of the one battle and why are scattered throughout the land?

Question #3: What Does It Mean to Call the Ramses II record royal propaganda?

The classic image of Pharaoh smites the enemy from Narmer, c. 3100 BCE, showing the king restoring order and preserving ma’at

Given this abundance of textual and visual evidence, what does it mean to call it royal propaganda? What are the elements, motifs, and portions of the record that would cause one to identify the record as propaganda? I am using the term in the sense of spin. Spoiler alert. I hope I am not disclosing any information not already known to you.

Thutmose III, the Napoleon of Egypt who fought campaigns 17 of his 21 years often in Canaan and brought back many captives

 The crux of the matter appears to be in a society of Pharaoh smites the enemy, when an Egyptian king actually did fight an enemy king, and not just some mayor of a Canaanite city, he did not smite the enemy. In fact, Ramses did not even win the confrontation with the Hittites.

Furthermore everyone who participated in the battle knew that Ramses did not smite the enemy. I suggest, based on the nationwide distribution of reliefs, that knowledge of this failure by Ramses similarly was widespread as well. Hence the need to spin the story and to ensure the spin was made known throughout the kingdom.

In this paper, I wish to suggest three ways in which Ramses spun the story. There are three events in the Battle of Kadesh inscriptions that look like they could be historical but which never happened. They are:

1. he was led astray by the Yahweh-worshipping Shasu – Thutmose III made a bold decision at Megiddo and was successful. He was a great leader. By contrast, Ramses’s bold decision before he arrived at Kadesh did not work out so well. But he was not responsible for the failure. How better to explain his failure than to blame a wilderness people of chaos? Isn’t the failure to restore or maintain ma’at normally attributed to these forces of chaos? Why should scholars even assume this event occurred? Would you with a biblical spy story? When Seti fought the Shasu were they in Syria? Shouldn’t the Shasu be in wilderness east of Egypt?

2. he was deserted by his troops – Seriously!!!! People who had fought under the command of Seti and in his own earlier campaigns, now deserted Ramses after marching with him for hundreds of miles away from home! Why take this claim seriously? This charge raises a topic typically ignored by biblical scholars: the role of the military in Egypt during the 19th Dynasty particularly in the time of Ramses.

His capital city was a military one. Power had shifted from the priests in Thebes to the generals in Avaris. The military was in ascendancy. The capital culture was mixed or hybrid. The 19th Dynasty royal family was from the northeast Delta; its precise connection to the Hyksos whom Seti honored at an event and Ramses later commemorated remains unknown. The armed forces were multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The young king needed to earn their loyalty especially if there was an alternative to his leadership. The military knew it had not deserted the king in battle, yet he publicly claimed they had. Ramses’s accusation of a great crime by the military was a post-Kadesh effort to assign blame later offset by his attempt instill loyalty in them with his 400 Year Stela. He was not deserted at Kadesh. Perhaps he had been deserted later somewhere later when the army stood down and did not interfere with a challenge to him.

3. he prayed to Amun – his lengthy well-crafted prayer to his father deity did not occur on the field of battle; this expression of personal piety would have been well-known to the audience he was trying to con. Ramses stood alone, triumphing over the enemy while his supposed supporters watched. One can almost hear him saying:

Stand still, and see the salvation of the Amun, which he will shew to you to day: for the Hittites whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever (based on Ex. 14:13).

Neither Thutmose III nor Seti I ever seemed to have needed such a prayer when in combat.

One may add, how did the naar feel after rescuing their king and not getting the recognition they deserved since Ramses triumphed on the battle field all by himself?

I suggest that these items are not historical from the Battle of Kadesh inscriptions. Nor are they simply spin conjured up out of thin air. Instead they reflect the needs of the king in the aftermath of the Battle he had lost. They derive from another confrontation where he had to explain his defeat where the military did not support him, where his foe was allied with Yahweh-worshiping wilderness people, and his foe had prayed for his father deity to divinely intervene in history.

Question #4 The Song of the Sea and the Battle of Kadesh

Speaking of the Song of the Sea, now consider Joshua Berman’s scholarship on it in relation to Ramses II at Kadesh. Berman has carved out a niche for himself over the years in asserting the interrelationship between Ramses and the Song of the Sea as shown here.

2014 SBL Conference “The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II and the Song of the Sea”
2015 SBL Conference “Juxtaposed Conflicting Compositions: A New Kingdom Egyptian Parallel”
2015 Mosaic article “Was there an Exodus?”
2016 JNSL article “Juxtapose Conflicting Compositions: A New Kingdom Egyptian Parallel”
2016 Book chapter “The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II and the Song of the Sea Account (Exodus 13:17-15:19) in “Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt?”: Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives (James K. Hoffmeier, Alan R. Millard, and Gary A. Rendsburg, ed.)
2017 Book chapter “The Exodus Sea Account (Exod 13:17-15:19) in Light of the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II” in his book Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism
2017 Book chapter “Diverging Accounts within the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II” in his book Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism.

The details of this proposed relationship between the Song of the Sea and the Kadesh Inscriptions are not the issue here. The methodology is. The relevance is in the use of the Egyptian literary texts and reliefs as part of the discussion about the historicity of the Exodus. The typical approach to examining the archaeology of the Exodus omits this area of study. If minimalists wish to deny a connection by postulating a late date for the composition of the Song of Sea that somehow by chance is consistent with imagery and motifs used by Ramses II, they are, of course, free to do so. They also can reject the alleged parallelisms proposed by Berman.

Suppose now one were to take Berman’s analysis one step further. Suppose instead of simply postulating a borrowing from Ramses by Israel, consider applying a “Na’aman” reversal to the process. He among others have proposed that Canaanites in Canaan experiencing Egyptian imperialism and slavery celebrated the Egyptian departure from Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age which subsequently was transformed into the Exodus story. Israel didn’t go forth, Egypt did. Let’s try a similar reversal here. Did Ramses borrow from or respond to the Exodus in his portrayal of the Battle of Kadesh? The question at least deserves to be explored as a legitimate alternative explanation for the Exodus.

I submit these portions of Ramses’s song of victory at the waters of Kadesh derive from his recent failure in the Exodus following shortly after his failure at Kadesh. Knowing that helps resolve the conundrum of determining of when a purported Exodus could have occurred given the Egyptian timeline.

Question #5 When Could the Exodus Have Occurred?

One approach to rejecting the validity of an historical Exodus is to document that there is no place in Egyptian history where it could have happened. This effort to demonstrate the absence of any such time has been critical to the work of Lester L. Grabbe.

2000 “Adde Praeputium Praeputio Magnes Acervus Erit: If the Exodus and Conquest Had Really Happened…” in Virtual History and the Bible, ed. J. Cheryl Exum
2010 “From Merneptah to Shoshenq: If We Had Only the Bible…” in Israel in transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (C. 1250-850 BCE) Volume 2 The Text which he edited along with Volume 1 The Archaeology (2008)
2014 “The Exodus and Historicity” in The Book of Exodus: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, eds. Thomas Dozeman, Craig Evans, and Joel Lohr
2016 “Late Bronze Age Palestine: If we had only the Bible…” and “Canaan under the Rule of the Egyptian New Kingdom: From the Hyksos to the Sea Peoples” in The Land of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, ed. Lester Grabbe

First he (2014) states that there is nothing in the Egyptian texts that could be related to the story of the Exodus. Nothing in the second millennium BCE suggests a series of plagues, death of children, physical disruption of the country, and loss of huge numbers of its inhabitants. By his reasoning since it is unlikely that a bellowing hippopotamus in Thebes disturbed the sleep of Apophis in Avaris hundreds of miles away that therefore the Quarrel Story of it happening must also be of zero historical value. Disproving the physically-literal interpretation of biblical texts is irrelevant to determining if the Exodus occurred. He knows that the search for naturalistic explanations for the plagues misses the point because he says so himself (2010:67). He knows the plague stories are to deliver a message. So why raise that point that plagues can’t be found in Egypt as part of a proof that the Exodus could not have occurred if you know they are symbolic?

Sekhmet, the goddess of plagues especially in the New Year effort to restore cosmos or ma’at. How did her legacy live on in the Israelite story of the Exodus?

Better to try to understand what message Sekhmet and the plagues delivered within the Egyptian cultural context than to debate the historicity of the goddess or the occurrence of the plagues.

He spends 46 pages (2016) on an analysis of the Exodus as an event in history. He covers a great deal of ground both physically and topically. Many peoples, places, (time)periods, scholars, and definition of terms are included. His effort suggests a person who is trying to be fair, comprehensive, and thorough into his investigation into whether or not an historical Exodus occurred. Still one does wonder how many people would have to have left Egypt in open defiance of Ramses or any other Pharaoh to constitute an Exodus. More than two? Less than 600,000?

He is dismissive of an historical Exodus in the time of Ramses. His analysis of the reign of Ramses itself is his comment that identifying him as the Pharaoh of the exodus “is rather strange considering that far from being destroyed, Egypt was at its height under his reign!” (2016:55) He had said the same in Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? 2007:59).  In a table of Egyptian kings at the end of his chapter “Canaan under the Rule of the Egyptian New Kingdom,” he lists Ramses with the description “one of the greatest Pharaohs; an unlikely ruler for the exodus! (2016:101)” But does that perception accurately reflect the conditions which existed after the young ruler failed at Kadesh? He, like many Egyptologists, is a victim of the Ramses spin.

Consider this alternate view of Ramses II by the Egyptologist Kara Cooney.

Her chapter about Ramses is : “The Grand Illusion.” A subsection is entitled “Ramses the Gaslighter.” She asks: “What kinds of insecurities was this king hiding?”

Strangely, Grabbe himself provides the information for an Exodus in the time of Ramses without realizing it. He writes that there were very few periods during the Late Bronze Age when Canaan was not firmly under Egyptian control (2016:99). He claims his survey indicates one of the main difficulties with the concept of an historical Exodus: “THERE IS NO ROOM FOR SUCH AN EVENT DURING THIS TIME” (2016:99; capitalization added). Furthermore, as he stated the page before:

Strangely, though, it is often proposed that the exodus and/or conquest of Canaan by the Israelites took place under his reign – apparently overlooking that he was one of the strongest of the Pharaohs who had firm hold of the whole region well into the Syria and reigned for so much of the thirteenth century (2016:98).

Yet a few sentences earlier he had written that following the failure at Kadesh by the strong Pharaoh, the “result was that Palestine (meaning Canaan) rebelled against Egyptian rule” (2016:98).

Why didn’t red lights blare, sirens shriek, and bells ring when he wrote that? Canaanites in the land of Canaan saw the weakness of the “strong” Pharaoh after Kadesh and rebelled while Canaanites in the land of Goshen remained silent! Egyptologists recognize that the very people who fought at Kadesh knew the truth of the battle. Ramses could not deceive them with his account. Canaanites in the military including Hyksos knew what Canaanites in the land of Canaan knew. This was the moment to rebel. This was the moment for a charismatic military leader popular with the troops to seize the opportunity to confront Ramses the failure Pharaoh and lead the Exodus.

Ramses after the Battle of Kadesh was not yet the ultimate Pharaoh, to borrow the title of Egyptologist Peter Brand’s new book.

Not yet after Year 5!!

The time between his failure at Kadesh in year 5 and his royal proclamations of Kadesh glory and his crackdown in Canaan beginning in year 8 provided a window of opportunity for a military figure to challenge the vulnerable and exposed king. That’s when the Exodus occurred. There is room in the Egyptian timeline for an Exodus in the time of Ramses. Is there room in biblical scholarship?

Conclusion

Ramses’s versions of the Battle of Kadesh is a prime example where an ancient source should not be taken as gospel.

Grabbe writes, “Historicity can be determined only when all possibilities have been considered” (2014). I submit that he has not considered them all. To answer the question of whether or not an historical Exodus occurred, one needs to engage the reign of Ramses II especially following his failure at Kadesh.

Grabbe writes “The Moses story shows ‘growth rings’ which indicate a development that drew on the Jeroboam tradition in order to develop the biblical like of Moses” (2010:228). The truth is the other way of around. The tree of the Exodus story began in the Exodus and it is the attempt to portray Jeroboam as a new Moses that drew on it.

“Moses led people out of Egypt against the will of Ramses II (1279-1213 BC) on the seventh hour of New Year’s Eve at the end of Ramses’s seventh year of ruling. It is an Egyptian story.”

That is the speculative historical reconstruction I propose in the opening sentences to my book The Exodus: An Egyptian Story.

To understand Ramses’s records of the Battle of Kadesh, one must recognize that his failure there provided the opening for the Exodus to occur.

Putin, Passover, and Ramses II

April 8, 2023
by Peter Feinman
Which one is real?

The war in Ukraine is Putin’s war. It will end the same way it started – when he decides he wants it to end … or when he is no longer capable of fighting it. To ask him to voluntarily cease fighting in Ukraine is the equivalent of asking him to give up his dreams of being Peter the Great. What does he have to live for then? All the external forces that the United States and the West have touted as deterrents to his stopping the war are meaningless especially given the wide spread support Putin has throughout the world including, of course, by China.

What can we learn from the past that will help us to understand Putin’s dilemma?

RAMSES II   

There is more to the figure of Ramses II than Cecil B. DeMille included in the movie. His reasons for excluding such information are not the subject of this blog. True, he was not an Egyptologists but by the 1950s sufficiently more was known than he showed. The same charge could be made against Disney for its cartoon Exodus decades later.

Without going into too much detail, here are items which should be included in the event there is a remake of a movie about the Exodus.

1. Thutmose III

Thutmose III was Ramses’ Peter the Great. Thutmose III in Egyptology is known as the “Napoleon of Egypt.” He earned that nickname due to his constant successful military campaigns, mainly in the Land of Canaan, following his succession from Hatshepsut, his step mother who ruled as Pharaoh.

He launched many campaigns and took many captives into slavery in Egypt. Foremost among his campaigns was the Battle of Megiddo early in his career. Megiddo is a well-known site in Israel today, the basis for The Source by James Michener, and the site of Armageddon in the Book of Revelation. Less well-known is that during World War I, Gen. Allenby consulted the (translated) records of what Thutmose III did in planning his own campaign against the same site.

When Thutmose III fought at Megiddo, he had a decision to make. He to decide which route to take when he approached the city. The Canaanites and their allies including the prince of Kadesh in modern Syria, anticipated that Thutmose III would choose one of the two easier possibilities. They guessed he would go around the mountains and they positioned their troops accordingly. Instead, Thutmose III, on his own initiative and against the advice of his counselors, boldly chose the middle and more risky route through the mountain passes. During the march, his military forces could touch the walls on both sides that is how narrow it was.

There also was the risk that when the forces emerged from the mountains they would not do so immediately in large numbers. Thus they would have been exposed had the enemy forces positioned themselves there. As it turned, the enemy had not. Thutmose III had prevailed. This campaign and others by him set the gold standard for subsequent Pharaohs – to match the decisiveness and success of this vaunted warrior king. His victory was displayed in color like a giant billboard in Times Square. Thutmose III was the man as well Ramses II knew.

2. Seti I

Closer to Ramses II, was his own father, Seti I. This warrior king also bears no resemblance to the figure in the movie or the cartoon. He launched two major successful military campaigns particularly during the early years of his reign. Ramses II was only a child then. He did not accompany his father on these campaigns. In fact, when he became king, he erased (chiseled out) the individual who had participated in these campaigns and then replaced him with himself. This action was rare in Egyptian history. When Hatshepsut and Akhnaton were cancelled, the erasures occurred after they were dead. It also means that that erased person who had help plan the military campaigns of Seti I and participated in them had been to the wilderness and the Land of Canaan and had logistical experience in moving large numbers of people from Egypt.

3. Ramses II

When Ramses II became king he was aware of his predecessors and his rival. He knew he had to live up to the glorious standards and achievements of the warrior kings who had proceeded him. He sought to do so in the Battle of Kadesh in year 5 of his reign as a young man in his 20s. At this point in his career his was not Ramses the Great. He was an unproven king trying to make a name for himself.

He lived in a capital city that bore no resemblance to the cities in the movie or the cartoon. The city of Raameses was military city. It was not a religious city like Karnak or Heliopolis. It was not even a political city like Washington. It was a military city where the military was the single most diverse institution in ancient Egypt to borrow a modern term. The Egyptian army in the time of Ramses II was multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious. It was not the type or organization that simply accepted someone as commander in chief because his father had been one. Seti I came from a warrior family in the northeast Delta (Land of Goshen). His father was a chariot officer from that area. Recent kings like Horemheb and Ay had proven military careers before they became king. Now this youngster, Ramses II, had become Pharaoh. He had a lot to live up to.

He failed to do so in the Battle of Kadesh. He did not have the success of Thutmose III. He did not have the success of his father Seti I. He did not smite the enemy. Instead he rushed pell-mell into a trap set by the Hittite king and barely escaped with his life. Naturally he could not accept blame for his own misjudgment in battlefield strategy. He needed a scapegoat, maybe more than one. He chose as a scapegoat his own military. He claimed that his army had deserted him on the field of battle. He claimed that he had had to fight alone to extricate himself from his self-created dilemma.

Need-less-to-say, that claim was not believable. The military who had been there knew the charge was false Egyptologists today know the charge was false. No matter how much Ramses II controlled the official record of the battle in monuments he erected throughout the land, the word of mouth proved stronger. Especially in the capital which was a military city of a mixed multitude, the people knew that Ramses II had failed. It was in the aftermath of that failure when the Exodus occurred, again, not in the movie or the cartoon. But Ramses II remained in power because departure in the Exodus and not replacement in a coup was the goal.

At some point the Russian people may learn and face the truth about Putin’s failure in the Ukraine, that Putin is not Peter the Great. Putin will never admit but the Russian people will. That moment will mean the end of Putin’s reign and that China backed the wrong side.

Exodus and Egypt: Biblical Minimalist Battlefield

August 1, 2022
by Peter Feinman

The current issue of Biblische Notizen (193, 2022) contains a series of articles about the confrontation in biblical scholarship between the biblical “minimalists” and the “maximalists.” The opening article by Lester Grabbe is entitled “How the Minimalists Won! A Discussion of Historical Method in Biblical Studies.” In it he claims not be a minimalist himself but declares in the opening paragraph:

Some will be surprised to hear that the Minimalists have won the battle in the struggle over history and the Bible….This paper discusses how, and especially why we are presently (almost) all minimalist, and why they should now cease to fight that battle.

In this article, Grabbe mentions two historical events to illustrate his points: the Mesha Stele and Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 BCE.

In his own work, the Exodus that has been a topic of great interest to him. A partial list includes:

2000 “Adde Praeputium Praeputio Magnes Acervus Erit: If the Exodus and Conquest Had Really Happened…” in Virtual History and the Bible, ed. J. Cheryl Exum
2010 “From Merneptah to Shosheng: If We Had Only the Bible…” in Israel in transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (C. 1250-850 BCE) Volume 2 The Text which he edited along with Volume 1 The Archaeology (2008)
2014 “The Exodus and Historicity” in The Book of Exodus: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, eds. Thomas Dozeman, Craig Evans, and Joel Lohr
2016 “Late Bronze Age Palestine: If we had only the Bible…” and “Canaan under the Rule of the Egyptian New Kingdom: From the Hyksos to the Sea Peoples” in The Land of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age ed. Lester Grabbe

In the first publication, Grabbe (2000) has a great deal of fun imagining what would have happened if an Exodus of 600,000 men had occurred. He continually mocks the biblical story by presenting the absurdities which would have resulted in an Exodus of millions of people, their animals, and the loot from despoiling the Egyptians. How could tiny Edom think of refusing such an enormous force passage through the land? How could the Canaanites have resisted such an occupying army? Think of the mighty empire, Israel could have created long before Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Alexander, and Rome with a population of that size!

What if Grabbe had decided to be a scholar instead of being content to ridicule the physically-literal interpretation of the biblical text? For example, Grabbe writes about the reputation this massive force of 600,000 would have had. It would have overwhelmed any who dared to stand it its way.  Suppose instead, he had mentioned:

And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, “What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?” And when they learned that the ark of Yahweh had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid; for they said, “A god has come into the camp.” And they said, “Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who smote the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage, and acquit yourselves like men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; acquit yourselves like men and fight” (I Sam. 4:6-9).

Then he might have pursued the issue of how did this reputation arise and what is the (military) meaning of the word Hebrew in this context.

He might have explored the violence of Levi and Simeon and inquired as to the origin of that tradition.

He might have explored the more reasonably-sized military forces of Gideon and David.

He might have explored the use of numbers and what the “thousands” mean in non-Exodus stories.

But Grabbe does not pursue these avenues of scholarship. Instead he just had fun at the expense of the physically-literal interpretation of the biblical text.

Even when the opportunity to investigate the Exodus is staring him right in the face, he is Balaam and cannot see it. Grabbe writes that if Israel had been as strong as implied by the numbers of fighting men, it could have taken control of at least Lower Egypt? Isn’t that what the Hyksos did? Grabbe’s comment that nothing in the Hyksos account by Josephus evokes Israel omits an analysis of the Hyksos in the 19th Dynasty (2014:81). If Grabbe had realized that there was a connection between the Hyksos and the Exodus, he also would have realized that there were references in the Egyptian records from the time of Ramses and Merneptah that should be explored in an historical reconstruction of the Exodus.

Grabbe (2014) subsequently states that there is nothing in the Egyptian texts that could be related to the story of the Exodus. Nothing in the second millennium BCE suggests a series of plagues, death of children, physical disruption of the country, and loss of huge numbers of its inhabitants. He neglects to mention that it is unlikely that a bellowing hippopotamus in Thebes disturbed the sleep of Apophis in Avaris hundreds of miles away and that therefore the story of it happening also is of zero historical value. Disproving the physically-literal interpretation of biblical texts is irrelevant to determining if Moses led people out of Egypt against the will of Ramses and constituted them in the wilderness as Israel or not. Grabbe knows that the search for naturalistic explanations for the plagues misses the point because he says so himself (2010:67). He knows the plague stories are to deliver a message. So why raise that point that plagues can’t be found in Egypt as part of a proof that the Exodus could not have occurred?

Grabbe considers it strange that there is not even a hint in Egyptian literature, iconography or legend of the Egypt stories in the Books of Genesis and Exodus. This is the precise dilemma I avoided in my book The Exodus: An Egyptian Story. Any attempt to create a historical reconstruction of the Exodus as an event of people leaving Egypt in open defiance of Ramses or any other Pharaoh inevitably leads to issues of biblical exegesis – when were texts written? By whom? For what purpose? Grabbe brings his biblical preconceptions to his analysis that undermines his effort to reconstruct the historical Exodus without his being aware of it. For example, to continue with his plague example, what are the cosmological plague traditions in Egypt, meaning what message did the Egyptians deliver through their plague myths? Based on that analysis one would then try to understand what message Israel sought to deliver through its version of the plague myths in rebuttal to the Egyptian cultural construct. The physical historicity of the ten plagues (except the last one) is not the issue. Grabbe’s search for the physical plagues in the Egypt record is comparable to the search for them by evangelicals. He is as much a literalist in disproving the Exodus as they are in proving it.

Grabbe (2016) here spends 46 pages on an analysis of the Exodus as an event in history. He covers a great deal of ground both physically and topically. Many peoples, places, (time)periods, scholars, and definition of terms like nomads and tribes are included. His effort suggests a person who is trying to be fair, comprehensive, and thorough into his investigation into whether or not an historical Exodus occurred. Still one does wonder how many people would have to have left Egypt in open defiance of Ramses or any other Pharaoh to constitute an Exodus. More than two? Less than 600,000?

Grabbe opines that no event of the size and extent to the Exodus could have failed to leave significant archaeological remains. One might also ask what are the archaeological remains in Canaan and Syria of Ramses’s army of 20,000? What is the archaeological evidence of the Shasu in the wilderness for centuries beyond Egyptian Pharaoh’s mentioning their existence? Without the texts, how would know that the Shasu existed or the large-scale Battle of Kadesh had been fought?

He concludes his analysis by organizing the data into the following sections:

Biblical data confirmed
Biblical data not confirmed though they may be correct
Biblical picture incorrect
Biblical picture omits/has gaps.

Grabbe employs a similar schematic in other publications as well as an illustration of his thoroughness and fairness in dealing with the question of the Exodus and biblical texts. His analyses always led him to believe based on the evidence that an historical Exodus did not occur: people did not leave Egypt in defiance of Pharaoh.

One critical question is given the assumption of no historical Exodus, how did it come to be that there is such an extensive story of the Exodus in the biblical narrative? How come it shows signs of being revised on multiple occasions delivering multiple messages?

Grabbe is enamored of the speculative hypothesis that Merneptah took Israelites captives in his 1207 BCE campaign. These slaves in Egypt were the source of the Exodus story whenever they returned to Canaan after Egyptian imperial rule collapsed or in the Iron Age. This speculative historical reconstruction is based on the premise that the Exodus did not occur, the biblical story does, therefore there has to be an explanation for how that happened.

A more popular explanation is a speculative historical reconstruction by Nadav Na’aman, “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition” (JANER 11 2011:39-69). His theory, later supported by Ron Hendel, posits a reverse exodus. Instead of Israel going forth from Egypt, Egypt left Canaan. Na’aman is referring to the departure of Egypt after centuries of rule in the New Kingdom generally ending somewhere around 1139 BCE in the reign of Ramses VI. During that time people in the land of Canaan thought of themselves as slaves of Egypt and not slaves in Egypt. After Egypt withdrew, the people left in the land transformed the memory of that occurrence into the story of the Exodus from Egypt we know today.

Here is an example of another speculative historical reconstruction from a different perspective: the Song of the Sea (Ex. 15) was not composed as a single song. Instead it grew by stanza in response to different encounters between Israel and Egypt

Stanza 1 the Exodus showdown in the time of Moses and Ramses also known as the Song of Miriam
Stanza 2 Merneptah’s failure to destroy the seed of Israel in the time of Joshua and added at Mt. Ebal
Stanza 3 the defeat of the forces of Ramses III (Se-sera, Sisera) in the time of Deborah probably added at Mt. Ebal
Stanza 4 celebrating the withdrawal of Egypt by Ramses VI added at Shiloh.

This composite song was part of the Book/Scroll of the Wars of Yahweh (against Egypt) which served as a source document when the alphabet narrative prose account was written.

I submit that this speculative historical reconstruction is more plausible, more reasonable, more comprehensive, and more coherent than the reverse exodus hypothesis of Na’aman. It also addresses some on the concerns raised by Grabbe about the maintenance of the memory of the Exodus and the continuity of the Israel/Egypt relationship from the end of the Late Bronze Age into the Iron I period before becoming part of a prose narrative in Iron II.

Speaking of the Song of the Sea, now consider Joshua Berman’s scholarship on it in relation to Ramses II at Kadesh. Berman has carved out a niche for himself over the years in asserting the interrelationship between Ramses and the Song of the Sea.

2014 SBL Conference “The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II and the Song of the Sea”
2015 SBL Conference “Juxtaposed Conflicting Compositions: A New Kingdom Egyptian Parallel”
2015 Mosaic article “Was there an Exodus?”
2016 JNSL article “Juxtapose Conflicting Compositions: A New Kingdom Egyptian Parallel”
2016 Book chapter “The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II and the Song of the Sea Account (Exodus 13:17-15:19) in “Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt?”: Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives  (James K. Hoffmeier, Alan R. Millard, and Gary A. Rendsburg, ed.)
2017 Book chapter “The Exodus Sea Account (Exod 13:17-15:19) in Light of the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II” in his book Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism
2017 Book chapter “Diverging Accounts within the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II” in his book Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism.

The details of this proposed relationship between the Song of the Sea and the Kadesh Inscriptions are not the issue here. The relevance is in the use of the Egyptian literary texts and reliefs as part of the discussion about the historicity of the Exodus which Grabbe does not do. The typical approach to examining the archaeology omits this area of study. If minimalists wish to deny a connection by postulating a late date for the composition of the Song of Sea that somehow by chance is consistent with imagery and motifs used by Ramses II, they are, of course, free to do so. They also can reject the alleged parallelisms proposed by Berman.

Suppose now one were to take Berman’s analysis one step further. Suppose instead of simply postulating a borrowing from Ramses by Israel, consider applying a “Na’aman” reversal to the process: did Ramses borrow from or respond to the Exodus in his portrayal of the Battle of Kadesh?

I submit the following portions of Ramses’s song of victory at the waters of Kadesh derive from his recent failure in the Exodus following shortly after his failure at Kadesh.

1. he was led astray by the Yahweh-worshipping Shasu – Thutmose III made a bold decision at Megiddo and was successful. He was a great leader. By contrast, Ramses’s bold decision at Kadesh did not work out so well. But he was not responsible for the failure. How better to explain his failure than to blame a wilderness people of chaos? Why should scholars assume this event occurred?

2. he was deserted by his troops – Seriously!!!! People who had fought under the command of Seti and in his own earlier campaigns, now deserted Ramses after marching with him for hundreds of miles away from home! Why take this claim seriously? This charge raises a topic typically ignored by biblical scholars: the role of the military in Egypt during the 19th Dynasty particularly in the time of Ramses.

His capital city was a military one. Power had shifted from the priests in Thebes to the generals in Avaris. The military was in ascendancy. The 19th Dynasty royal family was from the northeast Delta; its precise connection to the Hyksos whom Seti honored at an event and Ramses later commemorated remains unknown. The armed forces were multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The young king needed to earn their loyalty especially if there was an alternative to his leadership. The military knew it had not deserted the king in battle, yet he publicly claimed they had. Ramses’s accusation of a great crime by the military was a post-Kadesh effort to install loyalty as was his 400 Year Stela. He was not deserted at Kadesh, he was deserted at Goshen when the charismatic, popular, and superior military-leader Moses led people out of Egypt and the army stood down and did not interfere.

3. he prayed to Amun – his lengthy well-crafted prayer to his father deity did not occur on the field of battle; this expression personal piety would have been well-known to the audience he was trying to con. Ramses stood alone, triumphing over the enemy while his supposed supporters watched. One can almost hear him saying:

Stand still, and see the salvation of the Amun, which he will shew to you to day: for the Hittites whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever (based on Ex. 14:13).

4. how did the naar feel after rescuing their king and not getting the recognition they deserved since Ramses triumphed on the battle field all by himself?

Muwatillis knew where the battle would be fought. He arrived there first.
Muwatillis knew where the waters were.
Muwatillis knew the route Ramses would take.
Muwatillis baited Ramses to charge into a trap.

The same strategy would work when leaving Egypt in defiance of the king.

Ramses’s versions of the Battle of Kadesh is a prime example where an ancient source should not be taken as gospel. I submit, it is possible not only to examine the Song of the Sea based on the Battle of Kadesh poems, bulletins, and reliefs, but possible to examine them as part Ramses’s response to a second failure following shortly after his first failure. In fact that is the speculative historical reconstruction I propose in my book The Exodus: An Egyptian Story.

Grabbe is dismissive of an historical Exodus in the time of Ramses. His analysis of the reign of Ramses itself is his comment that identifying him as the Pharaoh of the exodus “is rather strange considering that far from being destroyed, Egypt was at its height under his reign!” (2016:55; also used in Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? 2007:59). In a table of Egyptian kings at the end of his chapter “Canaan under the Rule of the Egyptian New Kingdom,” Grabbe lists Ramses with the description “one of the greatest Pharaohs; an unlikely ruler for the exodus! (2016:101)” But does that perception accurately reflect the conditions which existed after the young ruler failed at Kadesh?

Strangely, Grabbe himself provides the information for an Exodus in the time of Ramses without realizing it. He writes that there were very few periods in during the Late Bronze Age when Palestine (meaning Canaan) was not firmly under Egyptian control (2016:99). He claims his survey indicates one of the main difficulties with the concept of an historical Exodus: “THERE IS NO ROOM FOR SUCH AN EVENT DURING THIS TIME” (2016:99; capitalization added). Furthermore, as he stated the page before:

Strangely, though, it is often proposed that the exodus and/or conquest of Canaan by the Israelites took place under his reign – apparently overlooking that he was one of the strongest of the Pharaohs who had firm hold of the whole region well into the Syria and reigned for so much of the thirteenth century (2016:98).   

Yet a few sentences earlier he had written that following the failure of the strong Pharaoh, the “result was that Palestine (meaning Canaan) rebelled against Egyptian rule” (2016:98).

Why didn’t red lights blare, sirens shriek, and bells ring when he wrote that? Canaanites in the land of Canaan saw the weakness of “strong” Pharaoh and rebelled while Canaanites in the land of Goshen remained silent! Egyptologists recognize that the very people who fought at Kadesh knew the truth of the battle. Ramses could not deceive them with his account. Canaanites in the military including Hyksos knew what Canaanites in the land of Canaan knew. This was the moment to rebel. This was the moment for a charismatic military leader popular with the troops to seize the opportunity to confront Ramses the failure and lead the Exodus.

Ramses after the Battle of Kadesh was not yet the ultimate Pharaoh, to borrow the title of Egyptologist Peter Brand’s forthcoming book. The time between his failure at Kadesh in year 5 and his royal proclamations of Kadesh glory and his crackdown in Canaan beginning in year 8 provided a window of opportunity for a military figure to challenge the vulnerable and exposed king.

Here are some questions Grabbe might have asked if he was seriously interested in pursuing the possibility of an historical Exodus in the time of Ramses.

Why did the adult Ramses insert himself as child accompanying his father on his campaigns? Why did he erase or “cancel” the person who actually had? This action was not standard operating procedure. It was personal.

What happened to the person Ramses erased? Did he disappear from history or discover a God in history?

Why did Ramses need to create so many portrayals of his battle at Kadesh? How many duplicate copies did Thutmose III, Seti, and Ramses III make of their battles? Is there anyone in the ancient world who made a greater effort to make his name great than did Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh? Archaeologists love it when kings make their names great, but that was not the religion Moses created as part of his rejection of the Egyptian cultural construct.

Why did Ramses add the non-historical elements to his Battle of Kadesh reports noted above?

Why did Ramses need to gain the loyalty of the Hyksos who remained in the land of Goshen with the 400 Year Stele?

Grabbe should follow his own advice here.

The biblical text is indeed often unreliable, but so are primary sources in many cases.

Egyptologist Kara Cooney in The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (2021), takes Egyptologists to task for succumbing to the hype, spin, and propaganda of Egyptian rulers. In her opening chapter entitled “We Are all Pharaoh’s Groupies.” She states:

I work in a field of apologists who believe in an Egypt of truth, beauty, and power—and in many ways, I am still an adherent to my chosen faith…. I, myself, have been co-opted, unable to recognize the propaganda that the ancient Egyptians were creating.

She asserts that Ramses tried to convince the populace that he was truly what he said he was. Ramses appears to have successful not only with Egyptologists but with biblical scholars.

Cooney’s chapter about Ramses is subtitled “The Grand Illusion.” A subsection is entitled “Ramses the Gaslighter.” She describes him as a figure of optics not substance, of spin not achievement, of hyperbole and not accomplishment except to gaslight Egyptologists and biblical scholars. She asks: “What kinds of insecurities was this king hiding?” The answer is the Sun King lived in the shadow of the man Moses all his life.

Grabbe writes, “Historicity can be determined only when all possibilities have been considered” (2014). I submit that he has not considered them all. To answer the question of whether or not an historical Exodus occurred, one needs to engage the reign of Ramses II especially following his failure at Kadesh.

Grabbe writes “The Moses story shows ‘growth rings’ which indicate a development that drew on the Jeroboam tradition in order to develop the biblical like of Moses (2010:228). The truth is the other way of around. The tree of the Exodus story began in the Exodus and it is the attempt to portray Jeroboam as a new Moses that drew on it.

The histories of Israel need to be rewritten.

The commentaries on the origin of the Hebrew Bible need to be rewritten.

That is the minimum of what needs to be done.

See previous blogs:

Passover and Pharaoh Smites the Enemy February 19, 2022

Egyptologists, Biblical Scholars, and The Exodus March 10, 2022