Four Hundred and Thirty Years

Three numbers get forced into one slot, and then a contradiction is announced.

In the covenant of pieces, God tells Abram that his offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and will be servants, afflicted 400 years. The nation they serve will be judged, and they will come out. Genesis 15:13 The 400 is the affliction of the offspring, and it is a round figure in a vision at night. Four generations are named in the next verse. Genesis 15:16

Exodus says, "the duration of the Israelites' stay in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the LORD's divisions went out of the land of Egypt." Exodus 12:40 Exodus 12:41 The Samaritan and the Greek Old Testament add "and in Canaan" to that verse, so the 430 includes the patriarchs in the land, not only the years after Jacob's wagons. The Hebrew text as we have it says Egypt.

Paul says the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. Galatians 3:17 His 430 runs from the promise to Abraham to Sinai, not from Jacob's arrival in Egypt to the night of Passover. If you start Paul's clock at Genesis 15, the years in Canaan are inside it, and the years of hard slavery are only the end of it.

A common careful reading, and the one this timeline uses when it prints year 2668, is the Hebrew of Exodus 12:40 taken from Jacob's entry. Jacob enters in year 2238. Add 430. The exodus is year 2668. That is one reading, labeled as one. Paul's sentence is the reason not to sneer at the other. He is counting from the promise, and he is making a legal point about a covenant that the law did not cancel. He is not correcting Moses with a different watch.

The 400 of Genesis 15 is not ruined by the 430. Affliction and sojourn are not identical spans, and a vision's round number and a book's "to the very day" are not the same kind of sentence. Four hundred years of affliction can sit inside four hundred and thirty years of living in the land of Egypt, if the first years were not yet the brick pits. The book of Exodus itself shows a turn: a king who did not know Joseph, and only then the slavery. Exodus 1:8

Do not invent exactness in the other direction either. Year 2668 is the sum of this reading. It is not an Egyptian monument. The BC estimates, 1446 or about 1260, belong to The Date of the Exodus, where the 480 years and Merneptah have to be heard too.