Who was the Pharaoh of Egypt in Moses time?

Answer 1

Previous post stated:

We are not certain which pharaoh was contemporaneous with the Moses and the exodus. Alot of people say Rameses II is the Pharaoh of the Oppression but at the moment it is not possible to tie the history of the book of Exodus to that of the Egyptian writings. If you think about it while the Israelites find the episode of key importance, seen form the Egyptian viewpoint it may not have been seen (or recorded) as an event of importance (human nature is not usually to make big of defeats!)

According to Wikipedia Pharaohs of Exodus there are 14 candidates;

• Amenemhat IV (1815 BC to 1806 BC)
• Tutimaios (circa 1690 BC)- also known as Dudimose
• A Hyksos king (circa 1648 BC to 1540 BC)
• Ahmose I (1550 BC to 1525 BC)
• Thutmose I
• Thutmose III (1479 BC to 1425 BC)
• Amenhotep II (1427 BC to 1401 BC)
• Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten (1352 BC - 1336 BC)
• Horemheb (circa 1319 BC to 1292 BC)
• Ramesses I (circa 1292 BC to 1290 BC)
• Ramesses II (1279 BC to 1213 BC)
• Merneptah (1213 BC to 1203 BC)
• Amenmesse (1203 BC to 1199 BC)
• Setnakhte (1190 BC to 1186 BC)

(The following was added on 3/20/2015):

Increasing evidence points to Thutmose II as being the most likely pharaoh of the Exodus. For the past several years, more people have been suggesting he was the likely candidate, and the fact that his cause of death is unknown leads additional credence to this possibility. Most recently, studies of the mummy of Thutmose II have given even further cause to accept him as the most likely Pharaoh of the Exodus. Since links are not allowed in answers, please do a Google search for an article on release wire entitled "Archaeologist: Reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose II Suggests Crisis" which quotes HarvardUniversity educated archaeologist and president of the Paleontological Research Corporation, Dr. Joel Klenck.

Note that if The Bible account in the Book of Exodus is true, then the "crises" mentioned in the above article make perfect sense. Note that the article does not mention Moses or the Exodus, but the timing of Thutmose II fits well with the understood timeline of the Bible, and the article states the following:

- An inscription by the succeeding Pharaoh Hatshepsut (ca. 1,479-1,457 B.C.) in her Underground Temple at Speos Artemidos states that Egypt was "ruined" and "had gone to pieces" before the beginning of her reign. This makes perfect sense if the previous Pharaoh, Thutmose II, and his entire army were killed in the Red Sea.

- Further, there is evidence that disease affected the royal court before the reign of Hatshepsut. The mummy of Thutmose II is the only corpse of a pharaoh during the Eighteenth Dynasty covered with cysts from an unknown malady.... In addition, Hatshepsut and her successor, Thutmose III (ca. 1,457-1,425 B.C.), bear traces of the disease suggesting their skin healed after a period of time. Recent DNA evidence suggests that Thutmose III might not be related to Thutmose II. That Sitre-In and Thutmose III show evidence of this disease suggests the disease was not hereditary but widely affected Thutmose II and his court. If the plague of the boils in Exodus 9 affected even the Pharaoh, you would expect to find evidence of these boils on his corpse as noted here. Note that commoners were not normally embalmed, so the few mummies of Thutmose II's court would be the only ones we would be able to see today with evidence of the boils... and all of them have such evidence.

- Klenck remarks "From the end of the rule of Thutmose II and throughout the reign of Hatshepsut, Egyptian armies did not leave their country for a period of at least twenty-two years, until the reign of Thutmose III." If the entire Egyptian army was destroyed in the Red Sea, it would have taken several years, or perhaps even a couple of decades to rebuild it.

- Klenck states, "After the reign of Thutmose II, the Egyptian court seems to have had a crisis of faith in their principal deity Amun-Re." If the Egyptians witnessed the plagues of Exodus and the incredible power of the true God, it stands to reason their faith in their previous deities would have been shaken. The Bible even indicates in Exodus 12:38 that some of the Egyptians may have had their faith so thoroughly shaken they decided to join the Israelites.

Answer 2

A:

The Bible says that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt when he was already 80 years old, and lived to the age of 120 years. Taken literally, this means he lived through the reign of several pharaohs. The trouble is that we do not know which ones. The historical record, and even the copious and detailed writings we now have from Egypt give no clue as to which pharaohs could have been alive at the time of Moses. In fact, it is not even possible to identify any historical pharaoh with the biblical Exodus.

Answer 3

The Bible does not name him.

The pharaohs named in the Bible are Shishak(1Kings 11:40) , So (2Kings 17:3, 4) , Tirhakah(2Kings 19:8, 9), Nechoh(2Kings 23:29-35), and Hophra(Jeremiah 44:30), ...and possibly Zerah(2 Chronicles 14:9) though this is uncertain.

Other pharaohs are left anonymous. Egyptian chronology tends to be confusing and conflicting, so it's impossible to know the names with any certainty.

The pharaoh in power before Moses returned from Midian (Exodus chaps 1, 2); the one ruling during the Ten Plagues and the time of the Exodus (Exodus 5-14); the one who tried to take Sarah (Genesis 12:15-20); the one who helped Joseph gain power in Egypt (Genesis 41:39-46); Bithiah's father(1Chronicles 4:18); the one who helped Hadad of Edom (1King 11:18-22); Solomon's father in law (1Kings 3:1); and the pharaoh who struck down Gaza during the days of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 47:1) were all anonymous.

Answer 4

We ought to be able to determine which pharaohs ruled during the time of Moses, bearing in mind that the Book of Exodus credits him with being 80 years old when he left Egypt, simply by examining the Bible. If we can establish which pharaoh let the Israelites go, we could say that Moses dealt with other pharaohs over the preceding 80 years.

1 Kings 6:1 places the Exodus from Egypt approximately 1440 BCE, because this verse dates the Exodus 480 years before the fourth year of Solomon's reign, and the Bible dates this year of Solomon's reign at 960 BCE. That would mean that the pharaoh who let Moses and the Israelites go was Thutmose (or Tuthmosis) III. However, Thutmose III's death is accounted for, and he was buried in the Valley of the Kings, so he could not have been the pharaoh who perished in the Red Sea. In any case, the Amarna letters prove conclusively that the Canaanite petty kings were still ruling their cities, subject to Egyptian overlordship, decades after the biblical date.

Ramses II was the great pharaoh who built the city of pi-Ramses, mentioned in the story of the Exodus, but once again his death in about 1213 BCE is accounted for, and in any case this is much too late for the Exodus. We know there were new settlers in the Canaanite hinterland, presumably the Israelites, from about 1250 BCE.

Although we have only looked at two candidate pharaohs, no pharaoh of the Late Bronze Age fits the account in the Book of Exodus. In fact, archaeologists have found nothing to support the biblical story of an Exodus from Egypt, with nothing in any Egyptian texts that could be related to the story in the Book of Exodus. Lester L. Grabbe says (Ancient Israel) that it is not just a question of the official ignoring of defeats of the pharaoh and his army, because there is no period in the second half of the second millennium BCE when Egypt was subject to a series of plagues, death of children, physical disruption of the country and the loss of huge numbers of its inhabitants. He says there is no external evidence for such an event and any arguments must depend on the biblical tradition alone.

For more information on Moses, please visit:

http://christianity.answers.com/theology/moses-in-history-and-tradition

For a summary of the Book of Exodus, with commentary, please visit: http://christianity.answers.com/bible/the-book-of-exodus

Answer 5

Ramses's the 2nd was the Pharaoh at that time

Answer 6

Technically, it was not Pharaoh but his daughter that raised Moses as her own son. The name of the Pharaoh is never given.