Dating the Exodus

This week I am taking a look at Coogan’s overview of attempts to put an accurate date on the Exodus. In terms of the text of the Bible itself, 1 Kings states that the Exodus took place 480 years before Solomon built the Temple. Most scholars put that date at around 965 BCE, so the Exodus would fall during the mid-fifteenth century. This is not as straightforward as it sounds, however, since Coogan explains that the figure of 480 is suspect: “It is the product of twelve, the number of the tribes, times forty, the typical length of a generation.” The authors of the book of Kings, he says, presumably want to connect the building of the Temple to Moses.

There are also problems with dating the Exodus in the mid-fifteenth or sixteenth century, as that leaves a long period of time written about only in the book of Judges, which does not mention any Egyptian presence. There is also no mention of Israel in the Amarna letters, which we have discussed in class before.
An alternative followed by many scholars is to date the Exodus later, in the thirteenth century BCE, partly because of the hymn from a victory stele quoted in our text, which shows that Israel had established some significant presence in Canaan by the end of the thirteenth century. The Exodus, it would then seem, must not have occurred before this time. According to this chronology, Rameses II may have been the pharaoh during the Exodus. As Coogan adds that this view is held by “most, but by no means all” biblical scholars, I would be curious to also know what some of the alternative views are.