Just who was the Exodus Pharaoh?
Striving for Perfection Colin Jaque, Shieldcrest, £8.29
THROUGHOUT THE ages there have been those who have questioned the reality of the Bible stories, which do leave open hard facts and significant unexplained events. Sadly, this has led to observations that the patriarchs are just myth and that the record of events at the foundation of the Jewish religion never took place.
In the last 2,500 years so many experts have sought to rectify those omissions, but without evidence of any kind they have simply exacerbated the problem, particularly when their explanations and conclusions are wrong.
This whole subject has been a lifelong fascination for me, which some five years ago led me to question how most of the rabbanim had concluded that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was Rameses II. To rectify this wrong, I could not just be negative and had to show who he was. It was this that led me to an extensive research and the writing of my book Striving for Perfection.
Of course, there are some guides in the Bible that help, but a study of the history of the late 17th, 18th and early 19th dynasties of ancient Egypt and its social and economic circumstances, with information gathered from the tribes in and around Egypt, along with masonic history that also played an important role, elucidated some helpful facts.
The result is that it is now possible to show how the stories related in Genesis and Exodus do fit in with ancient Egyptian history, filling in the gaps and enabling accurate dates to be placed on the lives of notable characters from Abraham to King Solomon.
What comes out of this research above all else is that at the beginning of the 18th dynasty the Habiru tribe (Israelites) helped save Egypt from annihilation by the Hyksos and together they built a nation based on masonic principles (ma’at), which came closer to perfection than any civilisation has ever achieved until dictatorship of the Ramesian Dynasty took power. And I concluded that it was Rameses I, not Rameses II, who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus