The Exodus An Egyptian Story By Peter Feinman

https://www.academia.edu/127089550/The_Exodus_An_Egyptian_Story?rhid=39204486914&swp=rr-rw-wc-2502302&nav_from=2b8f8dab-329f-4383-9d21-8df0ac45e9ad Moses led people out of Egypt against the will of Ramses II (1279-1213 BCE) on the seventh hour of New Year’s Eve at the end of Ramses’s seventh year of ruling and he constituted them in the wilderness as the covenant people Israel of Yahweh. It is an Egyptian story. Why that time? Why that day? Why that year? Why against Ramses II? [“Ramses” is the spelling of his name to be used in this study except when quoting people who used a different spelling.] Why the new religion? Why the wilderness? The answers to these questions are found not in the Hebrew Bible but in Egypt. To understand what Moses did it is necessary to place him in the Egyptian context in which he had been raised and against which he acted. The search for this understanding is the search to understand Egypt. Typically that is not the way the search for the Exodus is conducted. With these brief introductory remarks in mind, let us now turn to the beginning of the first concerted effort in Egyptology beginning in the 1880s to find the Exodus. The specific goals were to find archaeological and textual evidence for it and to locate the route from the unknown location of the capital city of Ramses II, the presumed Pharaoh of the Exodus, to the wilderness. This review entails tracing the development of Egyptology, the formation of the Egypt Exploration Fund, its initial archaeological efforts and how leading Egyptologists have addressed the Exodus in their histories of Egypt. This review will set the stage for how this study will proceed. ...