The Date of the Exodus

The early date adds 1 Kings 6:1 as a plain number. Four hundred and eighty years from the exodus to the temple's foundation, and the foundation in Solomon's fourth year. Working back from Assyrian contacts in the divided kingdom, that fourth year is about 966 BC. Subtract 480. About 1446 BC. Forty years in the wilderness puts the Jordan crossing about 1406. This is the date the timeline prints first, and it prints it as an estimate, because the subtraction is only as firm as the 966 and as the decision to take 480 as a serial count of years.

The late date says 480 is a round or symbolic span, twelve generations of forty, and that the Egypt of the story fits the 13th century better. Exodus says the people built store cities, Pithom and Raamses. Exodus 1:11 Raamses is a royal name of the 13th century, Ramesses II. A city called that in the narrative pushes the slavery, for these readers, down toward his reign, and the exodus toward the 1200s, often about 1260, with the conquest in the late bronze collapse. They also point to destruction layers at some Canaanite cities in that century, and to the absence of a clear Egyptian collapse in 1446.

Both dates have a cost. The early date has to explain the name Raamses in a book set, on its view, before that king. A place can wear a later name when a book is written, or an older site can be called by the name it later had. That is possible, and it is an explanation, not a line in the text. The late date has to set aside the plain reading of 480 years, or turn it into generations without Moses saying so. Judges then has to be compressed, which the other scroll on the judges' years is about.

What the stone actually says

In about 1208 BC, Pharaoh Merneptah sets up a victory hymn. Near the end he names Israel, with a mark that in Egyptian writing means a people, not a city or a land with a king. "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not." The boast is propaganda. The name is the point. A people called Israel is in Canaan by the end of the 13th century, and Egypt thinks them worth a line on a stele.

That stele does not say when they left Egypt. It does end the game of pushing the exodus later and later. If Israel is already a people in the land around 1208, the exodus and the wilderness are before that. A 1260 date is tight against the stele. A 1446 date has room. The stele is not a vote for 1446. It is a wall. The timeline says "about 1446 if the 480 are straight, about 1260 on the later reading," and it puts Merneptah in the ground note as the wall, not as the date of the night itself.

No Egyptian record has been produced that says Moses led a nation out and the army was lost in the sea. An empire does not usually carve its drownings. Absence is not the same as a record of the opposite. It is absence. The date stays an estimate. The Hebrew year 2668, on the reading that starts the 430 at Jacob's arrival, is the biblical sum sitting beside that estimate, not a translation of 1446 into Hebrew numerals.