Hebrews Lesson 187 February 18, 2010
NKJ Acts 4:12 "Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."
We are in Hebrews 11. I will give you a little introductory background as we get into the next section, which focuses on the spiritual life of Moses, once again emphasizing the role of faith in Moses' spiritual life.
Back in verse 1 the writer said:
NKJ Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
…indicating that there is a reality (a spiritual reality) that is beyond the 5 senses that is not directly perceivable by our mind or our physical senses and that we can only come to know and come to understand when God tells us by way of His informing us. So God then stands in the position of authority telling us and describing to us things that we cannot come to know any other way other than by His revelation (His disclosure) of that information. It is that information that He discloses in His Word that is the critical information necessary to really be able to properly interpret everything around us in creation; everything from history and the meaning of history to the meaning of our own individual lives and the role of our own individual lives within the plan of God so that faith then meaning both the act of faith but including within that concept the content of the faith, i.e. what is believed. We have evidence of the reality of a world (an environment) that is not directly perceivable.
So we have emphasis on words such as evidence, promise, things of that nature, which are threads that run throughout this particular chapter because faith does not operate in a vacuum. Biblically faith is always in a propositional statement by God.
Now that sounds kind of fancy like it comes out of Philosophy 101; and it will and does because a proposition is a technical term for a statement that can be proved to be true or false. Questions are not propositions. What's the temperature outside? You can't prove that to be true or false. That is a question. If I ask you to go into the kitchen and get me a bottle of water, that cannot be proved to be true or false. It is a request. So orders, requests, imperatival statements are not propositions. Questions are not propositions. But declarative statements or what the Greek would put in the indicative mood and what you and I learned in high school would be just plain declarative statements (statements of fact) can be proved to be true or false. You either believe it to be true or you believe it to be false. If you say it is raining oil drops outside, you can believe that to be true or believe that too be false. If you say that it is snowing outside, then if it is August in Houston, you know that to be false that that cannot happen. So you have these various propositions. Faith is always related to a proposition of some sort.
That is why we refer to the Word of God as propositional truth because it is revealing to us things that can be demonstrated to be either true or false. They are to be believed. Sometimes there is not much evidence of some of the propositions. Sometimes there is a tremendous amount of evidence related to the propositions of truths that are revealed in God's Word; and we are to believe them.
The focus of the belief that we see in the Old Testament related to Noah, related to Adam, to Abel, to Noah, to Abraham, to Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses – that God gave revelation to each one of them. But it developed over time. That's what we call progressive revelation.
So far in this little introduction today I've given you several terms to define which are all at the very core of understanding basic doctrines about inspiration, infallibility of the Bible; what theologians call bibliology. So we have progressive revelation.
Progressive revelation is the idea that God doesn't just dump everything He wants people to know at the same time, that there is a progression of information given and that each individual in terms of the time in which they live is responsible for the amount of revelation that they've been given to that point so that Adam was given a set amount of information. There was a little more information available to his son Abel. There was a certain amount of information more available to Noah. There's even more information available to Abraham; and there's even more information available to Moses. That's the whole idea of progressive revelation.
With revelation comes at different times requirements that God sets forth for man. These are often stated as mandates. The major changes occur with the introduction of covenants and a covenant change. For example there is the initial creation covenant that God made with Adam in Genesis 1:26-27. Genesis 2:17 would be part of that: not eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Then there's failure. Man failed to live up to and obey the revelation that was given to him in terms of violating the prohibition. Now there's going to be a change. There's modification of revelation that occurs in Genesis 3. Now new information is brought forth that because of sin there are consequences that change the nature of reality, the nature of creation. The serpent is going to crawl on his belly. There are going to be certain changes in relation to the biology, reproduction parts of the woman and the man, different changes in relationship to how they relate to each other. The woman is going to desire to control the man; the man is going to want to rule over the woman, which is the beginning of the basic marital conflict that can only ultimately be resolved through sanctification. Then you have the problem of the thorns and thistles and physical death and all of these other things that mean that man has to earn his living by the sweat of the brow.
They are given new information about sacrifices. Then as time goes by man rejects that and God makes a statement that the thoughts of man's heart are evil continuously and so there is the judgment of the worldwide flood under Noah because of the invasion of the sons of god and the daughters of men. All those factors there bring about the Noahic flood.
Then, there's new information given. Always new information means new requirements, new expectations, new tests, and new responsibilities; and man fails.
We come up to Abraham. Abraham is given more information. Now God is going to specifically relate to the entire human race through Abraham and through his descendents: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. We have the Abrahamic Covenant and the focus on the 3 provisions of the Abrahamic Covenant: land, seed and blessing. That is the promise of God.
What we have seen in our studies since we got into Abraham in verse 8 down through Joseph in verse 22 is the focus on this promise that they never saw fulfilled in their lifetime. In their living life on the planet, they came under various measures of adversity and testing. They failed at times; they succeeded at times. They trusted God at unique and significant times in their life. For those times when they trusted God in light of this unfulfilled promise that was still far off in the distance and even though they never saw it in their lifetime; they were steadfast. They never gave up. They persevered. They endured; and they didn't give up because it got hard or because they became weary or became it was tough.
Now that application will come into play in the next chapter; but in this chapter the writer is going through evidence after evidence after evidence through all these key people in the Old Testament and what underlies all this is this key doctrine of progressive revelation that each one is responsible for the amount of revelation given to their generation to fulfill the responsibility God gave to them in terms of their dispensation. So dispensational truth really undergirds. It's the thread that runs through this whole chapter that is not as obvious as you would think it would be. But there is the emphasis on not growing weary, which is really driven home when we get down into the middle part of the next chapter.
Now we come to the next key person in line, which is Moses. What lies behind this and the question we ought to ask initially is: what's the promise that Moses is focusing on? When we get into this section from verse 23 down to 29, what is the promise? What was the promise that was the focus of the last section on dealing with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph? It's the Abrahamic Covenant: land, seed and blessing. Guess what. It really isn't going to change much. It's still within that same basic framework and in Genesis 15:13-14 God in this chapter where He officially cut the covenant He officially entered into the one-sided covenant with Abraham. It's one-sided because typically in the ancient world when they would sign a contract rather than calling for the local authority to come and validate their signature to make sure that everything was right and get the lawyers involved and everything else; what they would do is offer sacrifices. They would split the animals in two and then the two parties to the contract would walk between the two halves of the sacrifice indicating that they are both bound to the point of death to the covenant they were entering into.
But when God in Genesis 15 has Abraham cut the animal (sacrifice the animals) and lay them out; God causes a deep sleep to fall on Abraham. God alone (signified by a torch moving between the animals) moves between the animals indicating that He alone is bound by the covenant. Abraham is not. God is making this is an unconditional permanent covenant with Abraham and his descendants.
Well, as part of that covenant He warns Abraham that he will not always live in the land. In fact there's going to come a time soon in terms of just a few generations when his descendants will be out of the land.
NKJ Genesis 15:13 Then He said to Abram: "Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.
Now it's really easy to count up to 400 unless you put billion or trillion behind it and then nobody can figure out how much it means; but it just a simple 400 years. You can count that up. By the time Moses is born it's easy for his parents and that generation to be able to count how many years it has been since Jacob moved the family with 70 people down from Canaan to Egypt. So they can count up 400 years.
They're saying, "Hmm, it's getting pretty close."
They're about 320 years from the 400 so they would know that we're approaching this and we're going to be delivered and whoever's going to deliver us is going to be born sometime soon. Remember Moses' life breaks down very easily into three 40 year segments: 40 years in Egypt, 40 years with his father-in-law in Midian and then 40 years wandering in the wilderness. You have the first 40 years he's still functioning in Pharaoh's court. Then in the second 40 years he's out in the desert with the sheep learning a few things that God has to teach them about real leadership in terms of being in obscurity and learning humility and authority orientation. Then when he's ready God brings him back to Egypt. So 80 years before the Exodus (80 years before those 400 years over with) is when Moses was born. So that's why I said 320 years.
So God prophesied and made it clear that there would be 400 years when they were out of the land.
He went on to say in verse 14:
NKJ Genesis 15:14 "And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.
The Israelites knew that as they were in servitude and had become enslaved to the Egyptians that God has promised to judge the Egyptians and that they would come out as the promise says with great possessions. They can anticipate that.
That is the promise that they're latching on to in terms of the key focal point of the faith rest drill in their life. Every morning when they're getting up and they have to go out and work as slaves for the Egyptians, there is a promise from God that this is temporary that they're going to go back to the land and when they go back to the land they're going to have great possessions. That is the backdrop for understanding the faith operation of Moses' parents in verse 23 and Moses in verses 24 down to 29.
So let me just give you a breakdown of what we see here. There are 5 events mentioned in Hebrews 11. First of all in 11:23 the focus is on the faith of his parents.
NKJ Hebrews 11:23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden
… passive verb. Moses isn't the one exercising faith. He didn't have anything to do with being hidden. He received the action of that. It was his parents' faith.
three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child;
That is an interesting word in that Greek; but it's just a translation of the word that is used back there in the Hebrew. It means that he was exceptional in his appearance. Even as an infant there was something physically distinct about him that made him stand out. They knew that there was something special about this child.
and they were not afraid of the king's command.
They're not afraid because they're trusting in God.
We have the birth of Moses in verse 23 and then in verses 24 to 26; again, one whole sentence. This now speaks of Moses' faith. Moses got some doctrine somewhere and before he departed from the court of Pharaoh, not like the movie. After you read this section, go back and read what Stephen says about Moses in Acts 7. Then go back to the book of Exodus and read the first 25 chapters of Exodus. Read that about 8 or 10 times, make some notes, write down the chronology, identify who the key people are and what names they are given in the Bible, and then give yourself a little test and watch the Ten Commandments. It's not long until Easter so you can read that section of Scripture 15, 20 or 30 times between now and Easter. Then typically at Easter they'll show the Ten Commandments; and you can watch it and give yourself a little test and see how many errors you can find in the film. If you find less than 30 discrepancies between the film and the Bible; then you didn't read very well. There are a lot of little distinctions and one of these is that it seems in the film Moses surprisingly discovers that he is not the physical child of the pharaoh's daughter who he thought was his mother, but he is actually a Hebrew. But the indication from this section is that he knew that all along and that before he comes to that point of making a decision as to which way he's going to go, he has some real doctrine in his soul that's the basis for that decision. He knows what the significance and the consequence of that decision is and what the real spiritual issues are, because verse 25 says:
NKJ Hebrews 11:25 choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God
He understands they are the people of God that there is a destiny for those people and that it would also mean that he understands who God is and why that's important.
than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin,
NKJ Hebrews 11:26 esteeming the reproach of Christ
Wait a minute. I didn't think Christ was mentioned in the Old Testament. Hmm...he had a pretty good understanding of the Messianic promise.
greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.
He's doing the same thing that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph did. He's doing the same thing that Adam and Abel and Enoch and Noah did. He sees a future fulfillment that's not going to be realized even in his own life. Yet that is more real to him than the circumstances of his present condition. He considered the ultimate future reward he would receive from the Lord a greater treasure than all of the treasures that he had.
As the son of a pharaoh there are very few people in this life who've had the power and the privileges and the prestige and the education and the treasure that Moses had. I mean Bill Gates doesn't even comprehend what this is. You cannot name 5 political leaders who had the kind of power in combination that the pharaoh had. He not only had power; he had the wealth. He not only had the power and the wealth, at this time the pharaoh is god and he owns all the land (It was an early form of socialism) and all the means of production in Egypt. It all belongs to the pharaoh. People are just living there and paying property tax so to speak. The god-king of the pharaoh was unlike anything we could ever imagine in our world. We've never seen anything like this. He has it all and he turns his back on it because the reality of the reward of God it's more concrete to him than all of this that he has around him.
If you watched the movie that helps you to get a little bit of a physical grasp (an empirical grasp) of what it must've been like. And he walked away from it, not simply by mistake, not simply because he got angry, and he kills the overseer, and he suddenly discovered to be a Hebrew which is how the movie portrays it: that this shocks everybody in the court and shocks everybody in the pharaoh's household, so he has to be banished. That is not how it happened. It is a choice he made that he wasn't that the victim of something. He wasn't mistreated and kicked out. He made the choice to leave. That is a phenomenal decision that can only come from somebody who has already learned a certain amount of doctrine and is applying it.
Then the third event that is emphasized is in verse 27.
NKJ Hebrews 11:27 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king;
Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Ahmadinejad - all of these are just would be 10-horned dictators who just in their wildest dreams they think would like to have the power the pharaoh had. I mean, if there is any historical figure on earth to be really afraid of because of the real power they wielded, it would be the pharaoh. Yet, Moses as a relaxed mental attitude; and he's not afraid of the wrath of the king because he knows that the king serves at God's pleasure.
for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.
Notice the irony of those words. He sees the One who was invisible. We know that his seeing the One who's invisible isn't a physical site; but it is a mental perception of the One who is invisible.
Then the 4th event relates to the Passover.
NKJ Hebrews 11:28 By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them.
That has to do with the death of the firstborn as God came to take a life of all the firstborn in Egypt. No Jews died, only firstborn Egyptians did.
Then the final event is the event of the Red Sea, passing through the Red Sea on dry land where, instead, the Egyptians were drowned.
So that's the outline view of these 5 events that are used as illustrations in verses 23 to 29.
In the background we have to understand just a few things related to the Exodus. I don't want to belabor these points, but there are things that need to be addressed and questions consistently come up related to these. Let's just take it one verse at a time and work our way through this.
NKJ Hebrews 11:23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child; and they were not afraid of the king's command.
Let's turn away from Hebrews 11 and go to a couple of corroborating passages on our way back to Exodus 2. The first place we're going to stop on our little time travel back through history is in the 7th chapter of Acts. Now the 7th chapter of Acts gives us a tremendous example of an early church sermon. This is Stephen, one of the original deacons in the church that were chosen to assist the apostles in Jerusalem. As a famine occurred they were scattered, but Stephen was still in Jerusalem. He is ministering there, and he is brought before the high priest because of his stand that Jesus is the Messiah. He is being interrogated before the high priest and the Sanhedrin. He addresses them. It shows just how cool, calm and relaxed he is.
Now what's important to understand about this particular address is how he uses Old Testament events and weaves them together in order to make his point. What we see here if you trace it, if you read this is he goes to certain key events that happened historically in the Old Testament, and these are the key events that provide the major pegs on which biblical history and doctrine turn.
When Charlie Clough started his Framework series he recognized that people just don't have this biblical framework. It's not just Stephen's speech but in the life of Christ and various references that Paul makes, there are certain events that occurred in the Old Testament that are referred to again and again and again because in those events when they historically happened that is when certain key doctrines were revealed in and through those events. Doctrine wasn't just revealed in an abstract 20-point doctrine where God said, "Okay Noah. Come on over here. Let's sit down for a minute and let Me give you 20 points on the doctrine of the covenant I'm going to enter into with you."
That's not how it happened. Doctrine wasn't separated from historical situations and circumstances. You can't tear them apart. If you deny the historicity of the Bible, you have to deny the doctrine.
These people come along today and say, "Well, I believe what the Bible teaches; but I don't believe that it happened like that."
Well, they have the IQ of a grain of sand because in the Bible all the doctrines everything that is taught is anchored in a real time historical event. If the history didn't happen, doctrine is irrelevant. If you don't have a historic fall with two individuals (Adam and Eve) then all the Bible falls apart because the Lord Jesus Christ affirms that as a foundation for sin. Paul affirms their existence in the reality of the fall as a foundation for understanding justification by faith and reconciliation and everything that happened on the cross. If you deny the historicity of Genesis 2 and 3, you have to throw out the cross. If you deny creation in Genesis 1, you have to throw out the rest of the Bible.
A literal 24 hour, 6 consecutive day creation week is not optional because that is the foundation for everything else the Scripture. Jesus clearly affirms it. Paul affirms it and uses it to teach doctrine. So if the doctrine that they teach on the basis of those historical events; if that doctrine is taught on the basis of those historical events and those historical events are false, then the doctrine is irrelevant. It doesn't fit.
So I encourage you some time to read through Acts 7 as to the events that Stephen is going to emphasize. Isn't it interesting that he goes through the same thing. He starts with dealing with Abraham and the patriarchs and then they move of the patriarchs down to Egypt in verses 9-16 and that they become enslaved.
Then in verse 17 we read:
NKJ Acts 7:17 "But when the time of the promise drew near which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt
That's what we started with, Genesis 15:13-14, the promise God made Abraham that they would only be in Egypt 400 years.
NKJ Acts 7:18 "till another king arose who did not know Joseph.
When Joseph and his brothers moved down, they were under one regime in Egypt's history that had gratitude. But there was another group of foreigners that came in not long after that after the brothers all died. They came out of the area of southern Canaan somewhere in the Middle East called the Hyksos people. The Hyksos people were hated by the Egyptians and they dominated Egypt for about 100 years or so. They were eventually thrown off and when they were thrown off a new dynasty (Egyptian dynasty) came to power. This was the eighteenth dynasty. The first pharaoh in the 18th dynasty we'll see in a minute was named Ahmoses or Ahmose. Hear the ending? Sounds just like Moses, doesn't it? It is an Egyptian name and so a lot of the pharaohs had that "mos" as part of their name just like we have people named Johnson and Williamson and that "son" is a very similar idea to that part of the name "mos." Moses was probably not his full name. It was probably part of his name. Or it might have even been sort of a nickname that was given to him as opposed to the full name because just like if you examine someone like Prince Charles in England he has a lengthy list of names that were given to him; but he's just know as Prince Charles. That is only one of his several names.
Stephen says:
NKJ Acts 7:17 " But when the time of the promise drew near which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt
NKJ Acts 7:18 "till another king arose who did not know Joseph.
NKJ Acts 7:19 "This man dealt treacherously with our people, and oppressed our forefathers, making them expose their babies, so that they might not live.
Now that's a different piece of information than you get in Exodus 1. In Exodus 1 the midwives are directed to kill the male children. But this adds the idea that the people were to expose their children; just to take the male infants and leave them out to starve to death and die.
NKJ Acts 7:20 "At this time Moses was born,
…right in the midst of all of that happening.
and was well pleasing to God; and he was brought up in his father's house for three months.
Again it's that 3-month period that he is there with his mother.
NKJ Acts 7:21 "But when he was set out, Pharaoh's daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son.
This is the whole story about Moses being put out on the river and pharaoh's daughter discovering him.
NKJ Acts 7:22 "And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds.
He is exceptionally well educated. He had all of the best tutors and the best minds in Egypt who were teaching him in all of the various academic arts of military skills as well as architectural design, trigonometry, geometry. They couldn't build the pyramids as they did without a knowledge of these mathematical skills, like trigonometry and geometry. We think they came along later. I believe that they were still being remembered from the pre-flood period, that that memory eventually got lost and then rediscovered later under the Greeks and later Egyptians and others. But at this stage he is taught all of this. He had a phenomenal education.
We read in verse 23:
NKJ Acts 7:23 "Now when he was forty years old, it came into his heart
That is, his mind.
to visit his brethren, the children of Israel.
NKJ Acts 7:24 "And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended and avenged him who was oppressed, and struck down the Egyptian.
NKJ Acts 7:25 "For he supposed that his brethren would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand, but they did not understand.
That tells us that he had some sense (some realization) of his destiny that the reason that God has called him at that point. Now he's trying to do it in his own flesh. He hasn't matured enough to be able to do it in the power of God; but it shows that he has some doctrine at this point and has the sense of God's personal plan for his life.
We'll leave Acts 7 there and go all the way back to Exodus 2. There are 2 questions that always come up whenever you study Exodus. These are questions that come up again and again and again. The first question is: when did this happen? What is the date of the Exodus event? How can we date it? The second question that comes up, that is then sought to be answered after the first one, is: who was the pharaoh of the Exodus? Who was that? Was it Yul Brenner? Ramsey II? Or was it somebody else? Was it Amenhotep II? Was it Thutmose III? Was it somebody else, somebody we've never heard about? Somebody in one of the intermediate periods that is not really well known and there's no historical data because there are certain periods of Egyptian history where there's very little information left for us to understand.
The circumstance that we see is that this pharaoh that did not know Joseph, had no respect for the Hebrews, hated the Hebrews because the Egyptians hated the Hebrews more than any Mississippi Ku Klux Klan member ever hated a black person. I hope that will put that in context. I mean the prejudice and hatred (the racial hatred) that Egyptians had for Semites was unbelievable. They wouldn't even sit down and eat in the same room with them. They did not want to do anything with them at all in any way, shape or form. Yet during this time God has blessed them; that is, blessed the Hebrews so much that they have multiplied. They've had a very low infant mortality rate; and they have grown in abundance.
Back in verse 7 of chapter 1we're told:
NKJ Exodus 1:7 But the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.
They started with Jacob who came down from Canaan with approximately 70 people. Four hundred years later, they had 2 ½ to 3 million people. That is a healthy birthrate. The women were having lots of children. We live in a generation now where if you have 3 children it just kind of an aberration. If you have 6 or 7, it's thought to be strange. When I was in my first church there were several people who were in their 80's who were babies in families of 17 or 20 children. So there are generations before us who had more than just 1.5 children. The Jews had (the Hebrews had) had a tremendous number of children. They were healthy. They had a low infant mortality rate and as a result they had grown exponentially.
The normal lifespan was between 100 and 130 years of age. So you have at least two more generations living at the same time than we do today. That would just explode the population. That scared the Egyptians to death because it was like having an enemy within your country that was another ethnic group with another culture; and they were threatening the very culture and existence of the Egyptian people. People today don't often recognize now how that happens. The French recognized it some years ago and quit letting citizenship be determined simply by being born in France because so many Muslims had moved to and immigrated to France that they were being born there and being given French citizenship. They knew that if that continued then they would lose all of French identity. So they stopped that. Other nations haven't been quite as wise. Other European nations are beginning to wake up and do the same kind of thing; otherwise the will lose their historic ethnic identity. Germany won't look like Germans any more and Danes won't look like Danish anymore and the Norwegians won't look like Norwegians any more because of the huge influx of Middle Eastern Arabs into their nations.
So in order to exercise a little population control:
NKJ Exodus 1:22 So Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, "Every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive."
All of the male children were to be destroyed by drowning in the river and then every daughter saved. This is an attempt to destroy and wipe out the Hebrews.
But the question is: who's this pharaoh? To understand this we have to have a timeline (go through a little chronology) and we're going to build this backward. We know pretty well when the cross occurred. It was approximately 33 AD. There are some who say it was 30. I think the best date is 33. So now we're going to build our timeline going backwards and extending it back in time.
We'll put a marker in here for just after 1000 BC, about the time that David was king. About 970, David died and Solomon took the throne. In 966 BC - we can date this. It's fairly solid. It's not completely solid though. I'll have some caveats a little later on. But what I'm presenting to you is pretty much the standard accepted chronology at this point. There are a few people (conservatives) who believe the numbers in the Bible who are challenging this because as I'll show in just a minute after about 700 BC there's just not as much certainty as we have for events after 700 BC. But this is the standard accepted chronology that you'll have in most of your study Bibles or any other commentaries you read by conservatives who believe the numbers in the Bible are accurate.
Solomon dedicates the temple in 966 BC and we're told that it was 480 years after the Exodus in 1 Kings 6:1 - states it very clearly, 480 years. Unless you doubt the Bible - liberals will come along and say, "Well, you divide 480 by 40 you get 12 generations and so this is sort of the perfect number. Yet generations were actually only 25 years so it really wasn't that long. That's their way of denying the historicity of the text. But that's how they'll end up with a date of the Exodus of around 1250. That's when Ramses II was the pharaoh. But if you take the biblical numbers literally, you end up with the date of the Exodus at 1446 BC.
We also know that there were 430 years between Jacob entering Egypt and the Exodus. 1876 BC is when Jacob would enter Egypt. That would mean Isaac was born in 2066 and Abraham would be born in 2166. This is accepted within let's say plus or minus 100 years.
There have been some studies that have come out recently. I just haven't had the time, the energy, or the mathematical capacity to really get into the technicalities of a lot of this chronology, which suggests this that this may be off maybe 50 years even. I don't know how valid that is, but there are some chronological problems that we have to deal with. Now when we look at this timeline, we have to then look at the basic timeline of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. The 18th dynasty comes in after they kick the Hyksos out in 1570. The first is Ahmoses or Ahmose. You see that there are certain names that continue over again. You have Amenhotep and Thutmose I, II, III and IV. You have Amenhotep I, II and III all the way down to Tutankhamen.
Now there was an article in the paper yesterday about the analysis of DNA on King Tut and that he had all kinds of degenerative bone disease and all these different things. He is the son of Amenhotep IV otherwise known and Akhenaton or Ikhnaton who is sometimes said to be the first Egyptian to try to bring monotheism to Egypt.
Now this is a favorite liberal ploy because the monotheism that he's bringing in isn't really a true monotheism. Akhenaton is the sun disk, the sun god. He just wants to do away with the other gods and goddesses and promote his favorite deity, sort like what Muhammad did when he instigated Islam. He got rid of the 359 other gods in the Arabic pantheon. He just wanted to promote Allah; but initially there were other goddesses that made up Allah's three wives. Then later on they sort of got taken out of Islam. But it's not a pure monotheism, at least originally and neither was that. But what you hear in the typical Western Civilization university class is that the Exodus occurred in 1250 to 1260 BC. Well, that's after Tutankhamen and Akhenaton. Moses got his ideas of monotheism from Akhenaton, not from God.
Now, I was 18 years old I never heard any of this. I'm sitting in Western Civ and this is what I'm hearing.
I'm going, "I know that's not right; but I've got to be able to answer this guy."
You know, how do I know he's wrong? I mean, that's what the textbook says that's what he says. And that is standard liberal approach.
Ramses II then comes after Tutankhamen. He's the most powerful pharaoh. There was an assumption made back in the very beginning of Egyptology in the 19th century that said that the only pharaoh we know that was really a big, bad, powerful dude that had a tremendous amount of wealth was Ramses II. So that must have been the pharaoh that Moses was dealing with. Notice there's no data there. There's no archaeological data. There's no historical data. It's just this assumption that Ramses was rich and powerful. The pharaoh that Moses dealt with as rich and powerful so that must have been Ramses. Egyptologists still do not want to give that up. They want to believe that it had to be Ramses because Ramses was a bad, powerful dude. But that doesn't fit the biblical data at all. So we've got this chronological problem.
Here's the chronological problem. Here's our timeline. The Exodus occurs in 1446 BC according to the Bible. Abraham would be born in 2166 BC as I just showed you in that timeline earlier. But if we take the numbers strictly in the genealogy in Genesis 11, then that would indicate that the flood of Noah would end about 2503 BC. According to standard Egyptian chronology we have a little problem because the first dynasty would have begun in 2920 BC, some 400 years before the flood ended. Hmm… Well if it's worldwide flood it would have wiped everything out, so how would we have the pyramids and everything else? Somebody is wrong. Somebody is getting dates wrong. Somebody is getting all confused on this. So how are we going to resolve this? The problem that we have is there's a 387-year difference plus or minus a few. Maybe the flood was a little earlier; maybe the flood was 3000 or 3100. One approach that is being taken by some conservatives today is that they're recognizing we have got some problems in the intertestamental period and the early period from Babylon on, and that we need to maybe find another 50 or 100 years in there. But that really doesn't solve the whole problem.
Another approach that was made up about 10 to 15 years ago by a guy named David Rohl called Pharaohs and Kings. There are problems with his view as well; but at least here's a secular Egyptologist who's taking the biblical numbers at face value. Now he said that the problem we have in ancient chronology is that we've got this initial assumption that Ramses II was the pharaoh of Exodus. This goes back to when Champlain first discovered (translated) the Rosetta Stone and gives birth to Egyptology. This was the assumption that they made. They still don't want to get this up.
In 664 BC we know that Ashurbanipal invades and sacks Thebes. That's almost a 100% sure. That's about as far back as we go with any really solid dating. Then we know that in approximately 925 BC there is this invasion by Shishak. That is mentioned at the time of Hezekiah, I believe. So there's an equation between Shoshank I of Egypt with Shishak. The trouble with that is that the SH sound in Egyptian, when those words get converted to Hebrew, becomes an S sound. When an S sound in Hebrew goes to Egyptian, it would become a SH sound. The SH would go to S and the S would go to SH in both languages. So it's very difficult identify Shoshank with Shishak. This is a false identification.
Then there's a calendar know as the Ebers calendar which is the basis for arguing that the 18th dynasty began about 1550 BC. But the only date that we know of for sure is the 664 date; everything else this is sort of in flux. The Ramses date was based on the Ebers calendar. But if that's off, Ramses is off. So all of that is rather speculative; and we really don't know for sure.
This is why this really makes a difference and this is just one reconstruction. In conventional Egyptian chronology, you have a timeline up there that starts in 1526 BC. At the beginning of the timeline you would have the 18th dynasty. The benchmark dates would be 1526, 1446 BC for the Exodus, 966 BC for when the temple was dedicated. The New Kingdom (18th dynasty) runs in that period from 1539 – 1550, depending on who you're looking at today to 1069 BC. In this time period you have Ahmose I. The reason I have two sets of dates there is because Kenneth Kitchen (who's evangelical, but he doesn't fully accept all the numbers in the Bible as literally true) went back and he reconstructed the chronology in what's called the third intermediate period in Egyptian history.
He said, "Well, Ahmose didn't really start in 1570, that's more the traditional date. He was 1539."
So that's this disagreement within the Egyptian chronology. Now they don't tell you that on the History Channel. They don't tell you on the Discovery Channel that even among Egyptologists there's disagreement as to when these people ruled.
I'm working off the traditional dates.
Then after Ahmose (several generations later), you had Hatshepsut came to the throne. Then her nephew Thutmose III was the coregent with her from 1504 to 1450. If the Exodus occurs in 1446, we're getting really close now to the Exodus. Thutmose dies in 1450, 4 years before the Exodus. He is succeeded by Amenhotep II, whose dates are 1450 to 1425.
Now here's an interesting question. Did the pharaoh die in the Red Sea? I almost feel like saying, " Raise your hands." How many of y'all think the pharaoh went down in the Red Sea? He didn't. Well there's debate on that. Today I sent out a link to 5 or 6 articles on the Biblical Research Associates website. These are really solid guys. They publish a journal. Some have been put out in the lobby called Bible and Spade. There are really conservative biblical archeologists. No two of them agree as to who the pharaoh of the Exodus is. We had a pastor's conference with Chafer Seminary back in the mid 90's up in Minneapolis and 3 or 4 of these Egyptologists came and spoke and they didn't agree with each other as to who the pharaoh of the Exodus was. So when you think it was Hatshepsut was the mother and you think it was Thutmose and Amenhotep because it's been drilled into you; we don't know that. We really don't. The Bible doesn't give a name to pharaoh or to pharaoh's daughter or any of these other people.
So this is the traditional view, but look at the yellow dates. If the yellow dates are true (that's Kenneth Kitchen's reconstruction), then Thutmose III is still on the throne from 1479 to 1425, which would mean he was the pharaoh of the Exodus, not Amenhotep. We know the graves of both of them. We've recovered the mummies of both of them. But if you read carefully Exodus, you read "the pharaoh and his chariots, the pharaoh and his chariots are pursing the Israelites." "The pharaoh and his chariots.. the pharaoh and his chariots… and then Moses parts the Red Sea" and then "the army of pharaoh pursues them and then the waters close in." It didn't say pharaoh. It was "pharaoh and his army, the pharaoh and his chariots, the pharaoh and his chariots; then the army of pharaoh."
There's one reference in Psalms, Psalm 136:15 which reads:
NKJ Psalm 136:15 But overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, For His mercy endures forever;
So a lot of people say, "Ah! See, he drowned pharaoh."
No! The word for overthrow is naar which means to shake, to rattle his cage or to mess things up; but it doesn't mean to drown. So you can't go to Psalm 136:15 to argue that pharaoh was drown in the Exodus. But that's what a lot of people believe.
Now if you actually go read some articles that I recommended, you will have one by Bryant Wood who's very good. I love his stuff; but Bryant Wood believes this supports the view that pharaoh was drowned. But then there's another article by someone else on the identification of the pharaoh, and he says no.
This shows you the disagreement there. That's part of what I wanted you to understand tonight: that when we talk about these things related to the Exodus event and who is the pharaoh and who's the daughter of the pharaoh and everything – you've heard for years who that was – we don't know.
Now let me go back and do one more thing here before I finish. We've gone through the chronological conundrum here (We did that. Let me get through this slide) the conventional Egyptian chronology. This is what we've all been taught, what we've all heard going back to Unger's Bible Dictionary, even before that. But if this chronology is off – for example with David Rohl says it is off 300 years – then those people in the New Kingdom aren't reigning at this time. They're reigning after the Exodus. Do you see that? Let me do that again for those of you are asleep. This is the new kingdom period with these as your key pharaohs. That's the traditional date for when they rule. But if we're off by 300 years which several people have suggested. Immanuel Velikovsky was one. I think he had 450 years that were artificially put into the Egyptian chronology. If we're off two or three hundred years, then Ahmose and Hatshepsut and Thutmose and Amenhotep did not reign during the life of Moses and overlap the Exodus.They're not even alive yet. They're actually 300 years later. Now I'm not sure that Rohl is right. His is one of about 6 or 7 competing reconstructions of Egyptian chronology.
The mainstream Egyptologists don't like any of it, because there are bound and determined to hold onto the same structure that they've always held onto, and it's as politicized as climatology. It's as politicized as any science department in any university or anywhere else. So there are all sorts of problems related to that.
So historically we don't know exactly who the pharaoh was. We don't know exactly who the daughter of pharaoh was. But we do know that the events of the Exodus happened exactly as the Scripture said. When the time came for Moses to be born, his parents understood enough doctrine not to be afraid of the pharaoh and to relax and then they hid him instead of drowning him by putting him out in the river and basically letting God take care of it. It's a great illustration of casting all your cares upon Him because He cares for you – just faith rest drill in action. And look at what God did with that.
So we'll come back next time and we'll get into the life of Moses a little more and his faith rest drill in relation to God.
Illustrations