Tomb KV14 is a joint tomb, used originally by Twosret and then reused and extended by Setnakhte. Credit Francesco Gasparetti /Flickr – Wikimedia. See a virtual tour of Tomb KV14
Exodus: The History Behind the Story
The Elephantine Stele and the Great Harris Papyrus both describe Pharaoh Setnakhte’s war against the Levantine usurper Irsu in 1186 B.C.E. Reading these accounts together with Manetho’s story of the war against Osarseph offers us a possible historical context for what eventually became the Bible’s story of the exodus of Israel from Egypt.
Published: April 15, 2019
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
This essay is an edited version of a chapter from Israel Knohl, איך נולד התנ”ך [How the Bible Was Born] (Israel: Kinneret, Zmora-bitan, Dvir, 2018).
His writings have been lost, but some selections are preserved in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who lived in the first century C.E., and responded to some of Manetho’s claims about Jews, as they were recorded by Apion, an anti-Jewish scholar and author.
Editor’s note: For the possibility that the Manetho’s claim is ancient and that the Torah is aware of this connection between Israelites and Hyksos, see David Ben-Gad HaCohen, “The Israelites Are Not the Hyksos,” TheTorah (2016).
This first sentence is likely a confused version of the events during the reign of Amenhotep IV (ca. 1353–1336) of the 18th dynasty, who abandoned most of the Egyptian gods in favor of the sun-god Aten and changed his name to Akhenaten. See discussion in Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23–44. The rest of the story, as we shall see, is related to something that transpired more than a hundred years later.
Thomas Römer, “Tracking some ‘Censored’ Moses Traditions Inside and Outside the Hebrew Bible,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 1 (2012): 64–76 [p. 71].
The phrase appears one other time in the Bible, Hosea 2:2 [1:11 in English], and there NRSV translates it as “take possession,” i.e., conquer:
הושע ב:ב וְנִקְבְּצוּ בְּנֵי יְהוּדָה וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל יַחְדָּו וְשָׂמוּ לָהֶם רֹאשׁ אֶחָד וְעָלוּ מִן הָאָרֶץ…
Hos 2:2 [1:11] The people of Judah and the people of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head; and they shall take possession of the land…
Römer, who dates the final form of the Exodus narrative very late, concludes from these literary affinities that the writer of the exodus narrative borrowed these plotlines from Manetho. Others assume that Manetho was familiar with the Exodus story in some form and was influenced by it. A third possibility is that both texts are familiar with the same source, whether historical or literary. In any case, a correlation between these narratives does appear to exist.
See also Exod 3:21–22, 11:2.
We cannot be sure that חמשים means armed. For instance, see, William C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 487-488, who translates “resolute,” and HALOT, which translates as “lined up for war.” Nevertheless, I find the arguments of B.D.B (332) for translating it as “armed” convincing.
On biblical ערב and the Akkadian parallel urbi as references to mercenaries see: Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1979, 725; Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21-37, AB, N.Y. 1997, 621-2; Moshe Weinfeld, “ערב, ערב רב” [Mixed, Mixed Multitude], אנציקלופדיה מקראית [Encyclopaedia Biblica] 6 (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1971), 361–362; Haim Tadmor, אשור, בבל ויהודה [Assyria, Babylonia, and Judah], ed. Mordechai Cogan (Jerusalem: Bialik, 2006), 275–282.
The military meaning of ערב Exodus 12:38 is supported also by the use of the term רגלי in the previous verse. All the other 9 occurrences of this term in the bible, outside of the exodus context, refer to infantry.
/// marks illegibility
With some adjustments, translation follows, Patrick Van Gils, “Sethnakht, a descendant of Ramses II?” Varia Aegyptiaca 2, Kleine Berliner Schriften zum alten Ägypten Band 4, ed. Andreas Fingern and Christian Huyeng (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2014). See also, Alexander J. Peden, Egyptian Historical Inscriptions of the Twentieth Dynasty, Documenta Mundi Aegyptiaca 3 (Jonsered: Paul Åströms Förlag, 1994), 213.
Hans Goedicke argues that the text is not describing an invasion of Egypt proper at all, but only the loss of Egypt’s Levantine holdings, and he connects Sw with King Saul. See, Hans Goedicke, “‘Irsu the Kharru’ in Papyrus Harris,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 71 (1979): 1–17. This is difficult to accept considering the references to gods not being worshipped, which seems to envision Egyptian temples. Moreover, the description of events in the Setnakhte Stele does not allow for such an interpretation.
Goedicke (“Irsu the Kharru,” 6) believes that this is a proper name, Su, and that the ir is part of the previous phrase.
This is the option adopted by Danel Kahn, “Who is meddling in Egypt’s Affairs?”, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 2 (2010), 14-23.
This information came to like thanks to Pierre Grandet’s publication of both halves of a now reconstructed ostracon (ostracon IFAO 1864).
I am not the first to see the analogy between these ancient Egyptian sources about Setnakhte’s uprising and the Bible, particularly between the mention of silver and gold on the Yabe monument and the biblical story about the gold and silver vessels the Egyptians gave the Israelites on the eve of their exodus (Exodus 11:2; 12:35). See, specially Abraham Malamat, “The Exodus: Egyptian Analogies,” in: E. S. Frerichs and L. H. Lesco (eds.), Exodus – The Egyptian Evidence (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 15-26; and most recently Ernst Axl Knauf and Phillipe Guillaume, A History of Biblical Israel, (Bristol, CT, 2016), 36. These scholars, however, don’t point to the connection with Manetho.
Editor’s note: For more on Moses’ name, see David J. Zucker, “Did Pharaoh's Daughter Name Moses? in Hebrew?” TheTorah (2018).
