Before I go on to part 4 of my extended review of The Exodus Decoded, I’d like to briefly revisit part 2, specifically, Simcha Jacobovici’s invocation of John Bimson’s proposed date for the exodus, c. 1470 BCE. At the time that I wrote part 2 of my extended review, I could only go on my memory of Bimson’s book, Redating the Exodus and Conquest (1st ed., 1978; 2nd reformatted ed., 1981; Almond/JSOT Press). Since then, I’ve been back to the library to refresh my memory of Bimson’s treatment. I didn’t take time to reread Redating the Exodus and Conquest in detail, but I did review some key points that I’d like to mention here.

To oversimplify matters dramatically, Bimson gets to his date of c. 1470 BCE by taking the elapsed-time figure in 1 Kings 6:1 seriously, but not literally. The Masoretic Text (Hebrew) version of 1 Kings 6:1 states that 480 years elapsed from the exodus to the inception of construction on Solomon’s temple; the Septuagint (Greek) version gives a figure of 440 years. In Redating, Bimson argues against the various proposals that would shorten the 480 years to a much shorter 310 years or so (e.g., taking 960 as Solomon’s fourth year and Jacobovici’s version of the “consensus” date for the exodus, 1270 BCE), but he agrees that the number 480 is schematic, derived from multiplying 12 by 40. Over the course of chapter 3 of Redating, Bimson argues that the schematic number 480 has been rounded down from a larger actual total, which by Bimson’s calculations would be somewhere in the range of 30–40 years higher. Bimson has many detailed arguments for this redating that I don’t wish to underplay here, but also don’t wish to rehearse in detail here. (You can read the book for yourself.) The fact is that in the end I don’t find Bimson’s argument persuasive, but Bimson definitely deserves credit for laying all of his data out on the table and being very clear about what he’s doing with it and how he reaches his conclusions.

Bimson’s proposed date for the exodus is c. 1470 BCE, but—as noted in my extended review of The Exodus Decoded—Jacobovici “rounds” Bimson’s number up thirty years to 1500 BCE. Jacobovici also “rounds” the accepted range of dates for the Hyksos expulsion—somewhere in the range of 1546–1534 BCE—down 34–46 years to 1500 BCE. Jacobovici wants Ahmose to be the pharaoh of the exodus, and so he also has to stretch, or round off, the end of Ahmose’s life, 1525 BCE, to 1500 BCE, granting Ahmose an extra-long reign. In so doing, Jacobovici departs sharply from what Bimson himself actually argues. Bimson is quite clear in Redating the Exodus and Conquest that he does not consider the Hyksos expulsion and the Israelite exodus to be one and the same event, although this is the use to which Bimson’s comments are put in The Exodus Decoded. Bimson is absolutely explicit on this point in Redating. Bimson’s dating of the exodus would place it some 65–75 years after the Hyksos expulsion, or 80 years later if you use Bimson’s date of c. 1550 BCE for the Hyksos expulsion (four to 16 years too early by the standard chronology). In stark contrast to what Jacobovici wants to say, riding on the back of Bimson’s date, Bimson himself writes:

Finally, something must be said concerning the Oppression and the Hyksos Period. There is no reason to assume that this period brought a relaxation of the Opression for the Israelites. It is quite illogical to assume that because both Hyksos and Israelites were of Semitic stock there would be feelings of identity and friendship between them. The politics of the Near (or Middle) East in both ancient and modern times underline the fallacy of such an assumption. Egyptian traditions concerning the Hyksos refer to them as treating with great brutality all whom they found in Egypt, taking many into slavery (e.g. in Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, Against Apion I, 14). There is nothing inherently improbable in the notion that the Hyksos continued the Oppression of the Hebrews whom they found in Egypt.

It is likely, however, that under the XVIIIth Dynasty pharaohs, conditions for the enslaved Asiatics became even harsher. After the expulsion of the Hyksos overloards from Avaris, Egyptian rulers were determined to avoid any repetition of the Hyksos domination. Egyptian suspicion of Asiatics, attested in very early times, was intensified into hatred by the Hyksos episode. (232)

Bimson could hardly be clearer. Moreover, on the previous pages, Bimson explicitly identifies the pharaoh of the exodus, in his view, as Thutmose III, not Ahmose (the two kings are separated in time by three other pharaohs, Amenhotep, Thutmose I, and Thutmose II).

I don’t find Bimson’s arguments persuasive, but arguing with Bimson is not the point of this post or of this series. The point of this post is to show that in The Exodus Decoded, Jacobovici takes Bimson’s date for the exodus in a direction that Bimson himself would not go. Using the little blue-screen snippet, Jacobovici makes it look like he is following Bimson’s date. But in fact, he’s not. He trots out Bimson only to show that there are actual, legitimate scholars who don’t agree with the majority (of those who still try to date the exodus) in dating the exodus to the first half of the 13th century (though he makes it sound like this is something new, which it isn’t; scroll back up and look at the publication date of Bimson’s book). But then he departs wildly from Bimson’s explicitly stated conclusions, by a matter of several generations. I’ll let you, dear reader, come up with your own adjective to describe Jacobovici’s procedure, but I’ll confess that none of the ones I can think of are polite.