(2:2) Part Two: Egypt’s Golden Age

So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labour; and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Ramesses.

Exodus 1: 12.
The Jewish Study Bible. Tanakh Translation. Oxford University Press 1985.

Pharaoh’s boundary markers.

The unidentified pharaoh gives the order that will allow his officials to assign the Israelites to work camps. The bondage for them is not the race based negro slavery, familiar to us from American 16th to 19th century history, but rather that of forced corvée or compulsory state labour, in which large groups of people were conscripted for large public work projects. Here may lie the difficulty of reconciling our understanding of the Biblical account, with that of Egyptian history. If the work gangs that built Egypt’s pyramids can be demonstrated to have been eating prime cuts of meat, what would the work gangs of the Nile Delta, building Pithom and Pi-Ramesses, be eating? “Fish that cost nothing, pots of meat and all the food they wanted, cucumbers and melon, leeks and onions and garlic.”

The root word (לַעֲבוֹד) “to work” or “to serve” is repeated five times in the Biblical text, the repeating of which intensifies the impression of suffering. The passage identifies the two public works; the storage facilities in the regions of Pithom and Ramesses in the eastern Nile Delta. The location of these two cities is explored in Part Two: Egypt’s Golden Age. The ancient audience would have recognised that the building of these two garrison locations would have helped strengthen the ‘Walls of the Ruler’ and guarded the access points into Egypt.

The first point to make, therefore, is that the pharaoh was placing his pile of rocks down to mark his border. From this point of awareness, we can quickly establish two more points of concern; that pharaoh, through his refusal to recognise the other side’s god, is not willing to negotiate with his opposite number. And that pharaoh’s pile of rocks would have created several ethnic implications for the wandering tent dwellers.

A bedouin boundary marker. Madaba plane, Jordan.

To the Egyptologist, Ramesses may be a reference to a region, a city or a later deity of the Late Period. We must be mindful that the historians employment of a linear timeline and the marking of events upon it can create some difficulties, given that the Torah’s genre is not primarily concerned with recording history, but a conveying of God’s teaching. However, highlighting the geographical location and the social implications created by the building of the storehouses can be useful to our investigation.

Point 1: The boundary cities.

The region of Ramesses was immediately adjacent to the Hyksos’ former capital of Avaris (Tell el-Dab’a), which, by the 13th Dynasty, had a large number of Asiatics already living there. The founding date for Pi-Ramesses, the principal settlement for the region, is around 1270 B.C.E and was founded under pharaoh Rameses II. By the later periods, numerous temples of Rameses are found in the eastern Delta where Rameses II, in particular, was worshiped.

Pithom is a temple location, the “Domain of the god Atum” and is attested from the time of the Hyksos and on through the Ramesside 19th and 20th Dynasties. Given that this is a temple location, there is a high probability of a settlement or city associated with the temple. However, unlike Pi- Ramesses, its location has not been established with absolute certainty.

The ongoing excavations at Tell el-Retabeh, which lie at the strategic heart of the Wadi Tumilat, have revealed a Hyksos cemetery, 18th Dynasty buildings and several large barracks that date to the early 19th Dynasty, suggesting that a large military presence was located here during the time of Rameses II. [33]

The Wadi Tumilat, a narrow strip of arable land that this fortress garrison guarded, was a well established access route, connecting Syria and Canaan with Egypt. In pharaoh Merneptah’s day, military reports from the boarder posts guarding the Wadi Tumilat conveyed that the annual entry of the Shasu, from Edom, had taken place. This shows that the Shasu’s origins lay within the Transjordan region and also that it was common for these pastoralists to cross the Sinai in order to water their flocks. The region was associated with the worship of the god Atum and a later, 26th Dynasty settlement, Tjeku, (Tell el-Maskhuta) is found to have the Semite word ‘Succoth’ contained within its name.

Many scholars believe Tell el-Retabeh should be considered as the site of Biblical Pithom, the Wadi Tumilat region to be Succoth, and that Ramesses was either the region adjacent to the Hyksos’ former capital of Avaris or the later principal city for the region. It also suggests that the timeframe within which the Exodus events happened extend from the Hyksos period and on to the end of the Ramesside period in Egyptian history. Based on these locations, we would place Exodus much later in history, to the New Kingdom, to that of the earlier periods we have so far explored.

Map Sequence showing the New Kingdom (Ramesside 19th and 20th Dynasty) Delta Sites.

Point 2: Pharaoh refuses to negotiate.

The text suggests that pharaoh, through his refusal to recognise the other side’s god, is not willing to negotiate with his opposite number. This opposition included Israel, being represented by both Aaron and Moses.

Detailed work registers which recorded the days spent at work and the days off are known of from the workforce at Deir el-Medina in western Thebes. These workers constructed the tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens. One register (Ostracon BM 5634), in year 40 of Rameses II reign, shows that the requests made by individuals or the whole crew for time off included reasons such as making offerings to their god. [34]

Point 3: The ethnic implications.

You made the earth as you wished ... you set every man in his place ... Their tongues differ in speech, their characters likewise; their skins are distinct, for you distinguished the peoples.

Akhenaten c.1350 B.C.E.
The Hymn to the Aten. Inscribed in the tomb of Ay.

The 3000 year old words of Akhenaton, demonstrate that all peoples are seen as the creatures of the sun-god, who has made them diverse in skin colour, speech and character. Their ‘ethnic’ diversity is described objectively, without any claim of Egyptian superiority. [35]

The Bible suggests the Israelites had become fully integrated within Egyptian society during its sojourn. Over the years they would have become assimilated into the Egyptian culture, but would have also influenced and changed that culture through the exchange of ideas, trade and technologies. For example, the names contained within the genealogical list in Exodus, contains several Egyptian names like; Merari (Mrry = beloved) and Hur (Horus, the Egyptian sky god) suggesting a level of Egyptian cultural absorption had taken place. Just how far this had changed the wanderers’ working practices is difficult to ascertain.

One only has to consider recent history to understand this assimilation. If we look at the settlement of people coming from the Indian subcontinent, with the ending of the British mandate in India, some of those people were familiar with British culture, some not. But today, the third and fourth generation descendants of those who came to Britain are British. [36]

As for Ancient Egypt, if you behave like an Egyptian and spoke the Egyptian language you were accepted as an Egyptian. Moses is shown to have been loyal to his adopted family until the persecution of pharaoh forced him to reject his Egyptian family. At the same time, it is clear that Moses was always loyal to his natural family culture. [37]

But with the building of Pi-Ramesses during the 19th Dynasty, the population growth would have had a major impact on the resources of the Delta. Excavations are gradually revealing this metropolis to have occupied an 18 km square area and would have had upwards of 300,000 inhabitants. Providing for such a population would have required the employment of intensive farming techniques. This suggests that part of the conflict was not about suppression but about land use and flock management. The process transformed the tent dwellers’ former status, as autonomous herders of sheep and goats, to workers in charge of huge institutional herds belonging to the temples and the crown. The competition over traditional grazing areas in Lower and Middle Egypt would have created social tensions that would have become more acute during the Ramesside era.

The scale of social change, can be gained from contemporary documents. An inventory of staff of the northern estates of Amun, Ostracon Gardiner 86 (20th Dynasty c.1189 B.C.E), records 8,760 farmers were each responsible for producing 200 sacks of barley for the temple. A number of cow herders, each in charge of 500 animals, were also employed, together with 13,080 goat herders, 22,530 bird keepers (each in charge of 34,230 birds), 3,920 donkey drivers (each with 870 animals), 13,227 mule drivers (each with 551 mules) and an unspecified number of fishermen. This administrative document demonstrates the intensive farming and herding activities of just one of Amun’s domains. [38]

A further point to make is that the food that was once free for the tent dwellers now has a price, their labour. The concept of an exit represents the reality of voting with one’s feet, or strike action, where the conditions have become intolerable and the solution is to leave. The 18th Century B.C.E. texts from Mari, highlight the tribal groups that owed allegiance to the king had once tried to emigrate from his control, and so this is not an unprecedented move. But this does raise another question, Is this conflict of an ethnic nature? Or is it a disagreement over conditions of service? [39] [40]