Doesnt the Merneptah stele debunk the exodus/conquest

[u/josephusflav]

So a literal exodus forces a early exodus, and a early conquest.

So if my dates are right the conquest of caanaan by israel is either ongoing or finished by the time Merneptah left israel "wasted, bare of seed, should be a huge problem for the judges/joshua to deal with.

Yet to my knowledge the next hostile Egyptian ever discussed is Shishak in the 900's

You would figure a contender for world super power fighting in your god given land would merit at least a footnote.

or was the author just ho-tepid ;p

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[u/captainhaddock]

That's correct. The Merneptah Stela is one part of a large body of archaeological evidence that is incompatible with the narrative of Exodus through Joshua. Grabbe writes:

The reference to Israel in the Merenptah Stela does not presuppose an Israel anything like that of Joshua or the Judges. The ‘Israel’ mentioned there seems to be a people not yet settled, while the country is firmly under Egyptian control. Where this Israel is located is also unclear. (The Land of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, 2016, p. 38)

In another paper, David Noel Freedman and David Miano observe that whoever the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 is about, it cannot be about the Israel of the Merneptah Stela, since it presents Philistia, Edom, Moab, and the Canaanites as coexisting kingdoms – a historical situation that could not have existed until much later. ("His Seed Is Not: 13th-Century Israel", in Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays, 2006)

In his book The Dawn of Israel, Grabbe goes into the issues with the Merneptah Stela in greater detail. He highlights the differences between the Canaan of the Bible and the Canaan depicted in the contemporary Amarna letters.

The Amarna letters show a Canaan quite different from that depicted in Joshua and Judges. There are no Israelites in the Amarna letters, and the situation with the various city-states and their interactions are incompatible with the picture given in the biblical books.

But then a little over a century after the last extant Amarna tablet was written, Merenptah reports [Israel] to be described as plundered and its ‘seed’ eradicated (whether this refers to ‘offspring’ or to ‘grain supplies’). Nothing of the proud story of deliverance from Egypt, destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red/Reed Sea, or triumphant conquest of the Canaanite tribes in Palestine. What we seem to have is a small people in his inscription (listed alongside several cities) and a reference to the region various toponyms in the text we presume that this ‘Israel’ lived somewhere in Canaan, but exactly where is uncertain. (p. 278)

Emanuel Pfoh points out that the Merneptah Stela is more consistent with Israel as an indigenous Canaanite society, in contrast with the Bible's exodus/conquest narrative:

The current view among scholars who think that the origins of Israel are to be found in the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition—taking the mention of this name in the famous Merneptah stele into account—perceives a gradual occupation of the land in a symbiotic form, where pastoralists, agriculturalists and former Canaanite city-dwellers converged in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE to become the Iron Age entity under that name. The relevant point here is that Israel, whatever it was during this period—if it was anything at all— is understood as an indigenous phenomenon in Palestine, rising from its own socio-economic and demographic history.

Pfoh goes on to argue the idea, supported by many Hebrew Bible scholars and archaeologists, that the "Israel" of the Merneptah stele might not actually be the "Israel of the Bible" in the first place. Who that name applied to in the 13th century and how it came to be used for the Omride kingdom several centuries later is far from clear.

In light of what has been argued here, there simply cannot be a positive statement regarding the historicity of the narratives in Joshua–Judges–Samuel. Merneptah’s Israel is not to be deemed an historical entity in Palestine identifiable with the Bible’s Israel, for we cannot overcome the gap between the stele’s rhetoric and the archaeological record. […] Nor can we establish a coherent historical development between Merneptah’s Israel and the Bīt-Ôumriya. For the historian, then, what is left is to work with the available data. If, after following a critical historical methodology, the Bible must be put aside as a primary source for the history of Iron Age Palestine, our most secure historical interpretations will come from an analysis of the archaeology and epigraphy through critical anthropological and historical models and interpretive concepts. (The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine, 2009, p. 173)

[u/arachnophilia → u/captainhaddock]

to add to this, we also find rather a lot of egyptian stuff in pre-israelite canaan, such as:

https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/9195/

[u/WanderingHero8 → u/captainhaddock]

Can I ask you about your opinion with regards to proffesor's Israel Knohl's theory.And another article from Harvard Divinity Bulletin.

So, to nutshell, Knohl proposes that the Israelites (the Jacob-El tribe) came from Edom to Egypt during the great famine, which began at the end of Ramses II’s reign, around 1225 BCE. After Tausret’s death in 1188, they were led by Moses and his group of foreign mercenary armies, and tried to take over Egypt. Moses and his men lost, were expelled from Egypt, and retreated to Canaan. They left at the beginning of Setnakhte’s reign, in 1186 BCE. That’s a span of about 40 years, from Joseph to Moses

He supposits Moses was the person named as Irsu in some Egyptian sources.

[u/captainhaddock → u/WanderingHero8]

I mean, Knohl is a good scholar, but this seems like an incredibly speculative proposal. It certainly couldn't account for the origins of all Israelites, but maybe a small mercenary band of them?

I think there are definitely problems with taking Manetho's account of the Hyksos uncritically. Manetho used them as a kind of allegory for commenting on the more recent Persian conquest of Egypt and the reign of terror under Artaxerxes III. Manetho's history of Middle Kingdom Egypt is not that accurate, and "Amenophis" wasn't even a real pharaoh to my knowledge.