Ancient Egypt: at the Time of Moses

Egypt, at the time of Moses, was like the United States in some ways, in that it was the world superpower. It literally controlled the Middle East. And the power of Egypt at the time is hard for us to understand. I mean, there was no country in the entire Middle East, and nothing in Europe, that even remotely could stand up to Egypt, both in its military might and in its economic might. Now, we look at Egypt today, and it's hard for us to understand Egypt as an economic and military powerhouse. But at that time, it was the greatest power on the face of the earth. And why it had that power is very interesting.

The reason it had that power is because the Nile River. A river? It was because of the Nile River. The Nile River was the longest river, well, second longest in the world. And its applied Egypt was something that was absolutely unique. Here we go.

We're going to talk about this, the uniqueness of the Nile River, and how their entire lives, everything the Egyptians did centered around that river. Everything the Israelites would have done as slaves centered around that river. The Nile River today is a, you know, I've never been to Egypt. But what's interesting about this picture is that you see the Nile, you see all the green. What do you see in the desert?

Desert. You take the Nile away, and it's desert. And you don't realize how great that desert is until you see a satellite photo of Egypt. Here's a modern satellite photo of Egypt. See the green strip? That's the Nile. Everything else is desert. And this is one reason why, this is one reason why, they were so protected, and they had such a military might. Because of their chariots and their horses, they could cross the desert.

This is where the Israelites eventually settled in, this modern day Israel. They could cross this desert. All the Arab tribes that lived in here and up through here, they could conquer all the way up into what is modern day Turkey. And then they just came back to their protected area because anybody else getting here had to cross this desert. And they had outposts, so they knew they were coming. So their military could extend out, but nobody could really get to them.

And they even went this way across the desert and conquered what is now Ethiopia, Libya, and that area. But once again, the problem was, how do you get back across here? Now, there's something that happened in Egyptian history that is interesting in understanding why the Egyptians forgot Joseph. Remember? You know, Joseph was such a great figure in Egyptian history, and then it says a pharaoh came along that forgot him, didn't know him, didn't remember him.

Well, the reason why is, for one of the few times in about a thousand years, a group of people came out of the desert and conquered Egypt for a short period of time. They were known in the Hiscoes.

And they spoke a language that was similar to Hebrew. Probably, it is probably Arabic. They're probably Arab tribes. So when the...if you look at Egyptian history, when they finally kicked the Hiscoes back out into the desert over here, they enslaved the other peoples that were living there, who spoke a language and looked a lot like these people who came out of the desert. So, at this point, they had to subjugate the Israelites. Remember, one of the reasons the Bible says there's so many of them? They keep growing, they kept growing? Well, yeah, they were growing, and they were a people that in appearance and in language was similar to the only people that had conquered them in hundreds of years.

And so, they enslaved the Israelites. You know, you heard of the land of Goshen? Well, the Israelites were...that's this area right through here. So this is the Delta. That's why it winds out. This is where the Nile flows into the sea. In fact, you could see here into the water, see how it's green?

That's the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean. So, it expands out, and this area right here...so this is...one of the reasons they lived here...you see how green it is. Remember, they were herders of cattle and sheep, and it says that the Egyptians really looked down on people that were herders of cattle and sheep.

They were sort of a lower-class people. So, they got in here, but this was a very fertile ground, and they kept growing in population, growing in population. The Hiscos come over, you know, they kicked them out, and then somewhere in here they decide, these people can't live here. They can't live here. They're going to overthrow us, so we have to make them slaves.

So, I mean, they put upon them a very cruel slavery. So that's the beginning of the slavery period. Now, we don't know exactly which pharaoh did it. We can narrow it down to a few. But it went on for a number of generations. Now, what happened there? That was weird. Okay. Now, the Nile River, it doesn't do this much anymore because the Russians built a dam that kept them from happening.

It really hurt the growing seasons in Egypt. The Nile River would flood every single spring. And when it flooded, it would bring down from the southern part of Egypt and down in Africa. It would bring up soil, and it would dump this soil and fertilize the entire floodplain around. And the result was, is the floodplain around Egypt was the most fertile land in the entire Middle East. Now, that's hard for us to understand today.

Egypt was the breadbasket of the world for over a thousand years. The Roman Empire conquered Egypt for one reason. Well, two. One, they wanted to conquer people, but two, they're wheat. Because Egypt produced more wheat than all of Italy. They produced more wheat than the Romans could produce conquering Europe. Now, that's hard for us to imagine today because of the down... you know, because Egypt has collapsed so much. But at this point, it was this enormous empire, and it could grow more food than it could ever believe eating themselves.

And at the time of Moses, they had lost the slaves. Millions of them. What this did is it freed them up to do other things. See, if you have slaves during your media work, you are now free to do other things. And so, the Egyptians were able to expand out into mathematics and engineering and all kinds of things because of this huge slave population that they had.

So, they began to build more and more cities. They were always city builders, but they... towns and cities all along that Nile, there were towns and cities. And in those towns and cities, they became craftsmen. They could work with stone. They could... they created beautiful jewelry. They created pottery. They did... they created crafts that people all over the world wanted. So, everybody came to Egypt to trade.

They were the... you know, that Delta area was the New York City of their time. All the world's goods flew... or came into... flowed into Egypt. And what Egypt produced, which was food... think about Abraham. When there was a famine in the world, where did he go? Egypt. Joseph. Why did God have him there? Because there was going to be a famine in the world, and they fed the Middle East out of this country.

Because every year, all this soil was brought down... brought up from Africa and dumped in this plain, and they could grow anything there. Huge amounts of it. More than they could ever eat. So, not only did they now export food, they exported the stuff they made.

And one thing they did was papyrus, which made paper. Nobody else made paper, but the Egyptians did for a long, long time. They were the only paper makers. So, they could export paper. They could export pottery. They could do stonework, and they would do statues, and all that got exported. And so, these cities, or these towns, were where the Egyptians thrived.

And one of the reasons they were able to thrive is they didn't have to do all the farming. And they didn't... you know, they began to build huge pyramids. Well, the Pyramids Act were very ancient, but at the time, most of the pyramids had been there a long time. But they began to build more and more monuments, more and more things, because they had people to do those things.

Now, what was it like to be in an Egyptian town or city? I read one time... there was... from the late 1900s... early 1900s... There was a French archaeologist who spent his whole life excavating sites in Egypt. And he wrote a book of what was it like to be in Egypt, in ancient times. And he gives a description, and it's a very long description, so I'll just give you a few points of it, of what it would have been like to go to market in an Egyptian town. You would have left your house. Most houses were made from mud brick. Now, remember the Israelites made mud brick? That's because they built everything except monuments. Monuments were made out of marble because they knew how to work with stone. In fact, today, they're not even sure how they got the stones cut for the pyramid so precise. It would take us, you know, diamond machinery to cut that precise, and they did it by measuring it and doing it with hand tools. It's just amazing. Of course, you could do that when you have lots of time and hundreds of thousands of workers.

You could do certain things. But what was it like? You're an Egyptian. You live in this town. You live in something like this. It's a mud house, and your neighbors are real close. Don't have much of a yard here. It's a two-story, so you can go upstairs onto your balcony up here, and it's nice where there's a little breeze coming off the Nile. This is pretty middle-class here, but you go down this little road here. You can see the little pathway right here. And you go down there, and you go to the town square. And walking into the town square, you would have just been inundated with noise and smells. Because in the town square, squatting all over the place with either little tables or just their goods laid out are dozens and dozens and dozens, depending on the size of the town. It could be thousands of people selling stuff. Now, coming off the town square, almost all the Egyptian cities were the same, were little streets where the shops were. These were the permanent shopkeepers. And when you walk in, the reason there's so much noise is everybody is arguing. I was talking to someone who went to Egypt a while back, and they said they realized the Egyptians aren't much different today. A guy had a flat tire, and some guys went to help him. And then they got into an argument on how to help him. And before it was over, there were 20 Egyptians standing around arguing about how to fix the guy's tire. And finally, they all sort of worked together and got his tire fixed, and they went off, but it took them like an hour because they had to argue over how to get it done. Well, they're arguing because it's a barter system. So, you have some farmer that comes in, and he has a basket of onions. And he walks up to a guy who's selling tools, and they're arguing how many onions it takes to buy this tool. Now, he put a lot of time and effort into those onions, and this guy wants some onions. But he said, I put a lot of time and effort into this tool. How much is it worth? And then somebody else comes up and says, well, I'll give you two bracelets with glass, you know, little glass bracelets here. He says, oh, I like the guy. My wife will like that. Okay, you get the tool. The guy with the onions goes on. Okay, what am I going to do? He has to go find somebody else who's making tools. So then you go down these little side streets, and now you have permanent merchants. And permanent merchants, you know, they have a little room, and using the back is their apprentice, who are making furniture, whatever they sell. You also have on these side streets permanent restaurants. Some of them are fast food restaurants. You just go order, and you order a chunk of fish, and they give you a chunk of fish, and you walk out, and you eat it. You know, they plop it in your hand, and off you go, you eat your fish while you're walking up and down, and whatever you order. Others are sit-down restaurants. One thing that's real popular that they were really famous for is Egyptian beer. They were beer makers. Beer, wine, and palm brandy.

And there's some people that have tried to find those ancient recipes and make them, and they say, the taste of them is quite different than anything we're used to. So, there's actually bars along there, you know. How do you go ahead and shop? I'm going to go down and have a beer. Well, yeah, you go in the beer, and it's like, okay, what did you bring to trade for the beer? Okay, I only got one onion left. Okay, you get that much beer for one onion. And you trade your last onion for some beer. Or, if you were wealthy, you had what was called an out-nile. An out-nile was a three-ounce ring of either copper, silver, or gold.

But then you had to argue what it was worth, and every merchant had to weigh it. So, if you bought something with it, and then he walked across the street and tried to buy something with it, they'd have to weigh it, too. And then they'd argue about how much it weighed.

And there's animals being sold in this mess, so there's someone herding in some sheep, and, of course, there's sheep droppings all over, and, you know, they're fixing some... they're roasting a sheep over here, and there's one over here that's still... And so all this is all going on! Absolute mayhem! And that's what it is to go shopping as an Egyptian. But they did shopping a lot, because they did not have refrigeration.

And if you were a small farmer and you grew one thing, you had to go barter for your other food. But in all this, you could walk through a medium-sized town, and you could buy embroidery clothes from Babylon. You could buy... and they loved perfume. Egyptians loved perfume, because I think it's probably... everybody smelled pretty bad. But anyways, it didn't take a lot of bass, so they loved perfume.

And you would have perfumes from all over the world. You'd go in a perfume shop, and they all smelled this. This is from the Hittites. Why are the Hittites? Of course, that would be what we call Southern Turkey today. Oh, you know, they brought it in, and maybe, well, that's not really Hittite.

That's made by this guy down the street. You're trying to cheat me. They've got a fight going on, okay? But it is amazing, even the middle class, to buy things from all over the world. So that way, they were sort of like us. Because they had a fairly large middle class. But their middle class was made possible because of slavery. Because it was those people that did the jobs they couldn't do. Then we get sort of to the pyramid here. This here is Egyptian society. I'm going to walk over. You can hear me. Are we recording this? I guess I better stay here in case we're recording it.

Okay. Up here is Pharaoh. And Pharaoh is a god. In fact, too much of their history, he would have to go out every morning and call the sun to come up. I don't know what happened if he ever got sick and didn't happen. The sun came up anyway. Maybe he's not so powerful as we thought. He literally is a god. He's in communion with the other gods that nobody else can see. It's a very class-conscious society. So here you have government officials, and you have priests, and you have different people here that are in this second class.

Moses would have lived in this class of people. Understand this. He didn't live in a brick house, made out of mud, with some old beat-up wood furniture, where you had a little garden out back where you grew as much food as you could, and you had to go down to them.

Because that's what the slaves did, too. The slaves got paid sometimes in food. Here's a chunk of fish, because there's always lots of fish from the Nile. Here's a chunk of fish and a few leeks. They're like, I need more than this to eat, and I sure would like a beer. So the slaves would make things and take it, too, and they would barter in the town. They would have to go to town, and they'd have to barter. Moses didn't do that. Moses never walked through the bazaar in Thebes or Memphis or any other place, and had to barter for some food.

He lived in absolute luxury. The palace he lived in was amazing. It would be like going to the Vanderbilt home over in North Carolina. It would be like living in the Biltmore. Moses lived in the Biltmore. You have to understand, he lived in a world that was so different than the average person. Then you have soldiers and scribes. Now you get an educated group of people here. This group's educated. Soldiers could be educated or not, but they got certain privileges because they maintained the empire. You have merchants, and you have all these craftsmen. You see this person using a loom. One thing the Egyptians were famous for was their linen. They grew cotton.

They grew different things, so they made clothing. They were famous throughout the world for different clothing and so forth. Down here you have the average farmer. Now this average farmer, when he wasn't growing food, he was basically hiring himself out to anybody he would hire. This is an unskilled labor pool.

So a lot of the monuments, government things, they would just hire these guys, and they'd give them a little bit of food. That's basically what they got. But they didn't have the slaves. The slaves get basically whatever will keep them alive, and everything else they have to do for themselves.

They have to make their own furniture, they have to make their own clothes, they have to grow a bunch of their own food. These people at the bottom of this pyramid, all society is weighed down on them, because all society depends on them producing.

They're the people who build, they're the people... and remember, one of the things that they had to do was make bricks. Because they were constantly building new things, and mud bricks were out. So you have to keep replacing them. So, what's a mud brick look like? Remember what a mud brick looks like? There you go. Now if you look real close, I don't know if you can see it from there, but if you want to see this mud brick, it's straw. See? It's sort of the thing that helps bind it together, because it's mud. So they have to dig up mud from mud pits, and they would put it...

they'd make them in the bricks, and they'd mix straw with them. And the straw helps hold it together, they dry it, and this... you know, they do have... I mean, some of these would last hundreds of years. But it would weather, you know, the wind, and of course, being out in the desert helped... they didn't weather as much, but wind, especially, would wear them out. Or the flood... the Nile would flood a little more than usual, and take out whole towns.

Just wipe out whole towns. And throughout history, there's always recording of towns being wiped out from floods, because it would flood more than usual. So that's what the Israelites made. And remember... some of the young people remember... what was it that Pharaoh punished them with about making bricks? They had to get their own straw. They were supplying the straw for it. Okay. You people want time off? Now, Egyptians, if you were in the higher classes, if you weren't the farmers or the slaves, you got one day off every ten days. Plus, you got... they were all kind of holidays, because they were incredibly superstitious people, and they were holidays for every god you could imagine.

So, upper classes... the craftsmen got days off, and everybody else got days off, but not the farmers or the slaves. They worked all the time. So, you have these... every ten days, you got time off... it's interesting... I was reading something about ancient Egypt the other day. It was... they found some court records, and illegally this man, he was... he worked for one of the wealthier men. They had to give him a day off, because his wife had beat him up, and he was too hurt to put him to work. And so they... the judge said, you got to let him have a day off, you know, because this might beat him up. So, you know... you never think of those things. So, you know... but they found some court records.

Ancient... this is the writing of ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphics. I don't even pretend to understand the alphabet. I tried to learn it at one time. It's... it's very complicated. But you... you can see there's actually little animal pictures in here. There's lots of birds. There's... there's all kinds... there's eyes. There's... there's all... these are all... not only do they need letters, but sometimes one of those will mean a whole word or a whole phrase.

So, you know... if you can read hieroglyphics, that's probably a lot of stuff that's being said there. You know... and that's... that's because the language was very, very complicated.

They were also, as I said, the greatest engineers in the world. Even today, Egyptian engineering from the ancient world is absolutely marbled at.

What these people built... it's... and how they did it, and how they carved it. I mean, this is thousands of years old, and the carving of it is so precise. The facial features... you can... you'll see statues from... and it's just amazing, the facial features and what they were able to do. So, this is maybe what they're the most famous for in many ways, is the carvings and the... and the buildings. You know, if you go to Europe, you'll find Egyptian obelisks all over the place. Because every time someone would invade Egypt, they'd grab an obelisk and take it back and put it someplace in... in... throughout the country. Their... their... their religion is extremely superstitious.

They're afraid of everything. So, they have... they have a god for everything. I mean, they have Horus and Erysis and Isis as their three main gods. But they have a god for everything. They have a cat god. My favorite is the god of pregnant women. The hippopotamus god. I'm serious. That's the god of pregnant women. So, these people are... you know, the Nile River was full of crocodiles. So, they really worship the crocodile god. They want to be protected. They had the god of the underworld. And they were then fixated on death. Because they believed in an afterlife. And they believed that the richer you were, the better off you were in the afterlife.

So, that's why the pharaohs, when they were buried, they had buried with them everything that was important to them, including their slaves. If you didn't want to be one of the personal household slaves of the pharaoh and he'd get sick. Because he died. They killed all of you and put him in the tomb with him so that you went with him into the afterlife. Because he... you know, you need to serve him food and everything. So, yeah, they killed all the personal slaves of the pharaohs and stuck them in the tombs with them.

And they stuck their gold with them and everything else because they would need it in the afterlife because they were going to meet the gods. Which brings us to the thing that every boy here between the ages of seven and fourteen is interested in and that is mummies. Mummy! Mummy! Different mummy. I won't go through all this but they're using incense and special wrapping to create a mummy. This is what's interesting. This is the priest that would be in charge. He has a mask on because this is the mask of the god of the dead. So the god of the dead has to oversee the mummifying of people. And there are thousands of mummies that survived the times of Egypt. Because it wasn't just the pharaohs who were mummified. Anybody who could afford it wanted to do this. They also took and put different organs in pots and kept them there because they would need their organs in the afterlife. I never figured why they took them out and then had to put in the pots. You could have it when you get there. And of course the finished product that everybody likes to look at is that.

There's a mummy. Although it's amazing, some mummies how some of the wrapping has fallen off. And you can tell it's still a human being. It's 2,000 years old. So there you have a mummy. I've done all this just briefly. This was the world Moses was born into.

This was the world in which he would have known people who were mummified. This is a world in which he would have eaten food that no Israelite would have ever eaten. He had sucked in a bed that none of them could have ever dreamed of. Lived in luxury like none of them could have even imagined. And they were slaves. And contrary to the Ten Commandments, I love Ten Commandments because I really...

I'm going to talk about that last night. If in the resurrection Moses doesn't look like Charlton Heston, I'm going to be so disappointed. I think the Pharaoh will really look like Yom Moses! It's twice every time! And my favorite person is Edward G. Robinson playing Dathan. Because you know he played so many gangsters? Yeah, Moses! Say, we're going to rub you out, Moses! Say, me and the boys coming after you! I mean, he plays it like a gangster!

Watch it next time! You'll start to laugh! You can't help it! It's like you can't get out of the gangster mode. I don't know how I got off on that. He's born into this world around 1526. Now, I'm going to use some dates here. So I'm shifting a little bit from, okay, this hopefully helped... especially some younger people, get a little glimpse. I mean, we can talk about ancient Egypt. I've got pictures for hours up here. I mean, there's so much to learn about them.

Okay, a little bit of that world. And Moses is in this world. He's not living in the Israelite world. He's living in a world where he sees priests every day who come before Pharaoh and do all kinds of strange rituals and magic because they really believe in the Master. They wore all kinds of charms to keep the evil spirits away. They were always charms, they all were, because the evil spirits were after everybody.

By the way, the women really love perfume, makeup, and wigs. Rich women always wear wigs. Once again, if they had to do with you, you didn't get to wash your hair much. That may have been part of it. Moses is born into this about that time. Now, this could be awesome, but here's how we come up with a date close to that. You work through the Old Testament chronology backwards. No? Okay. We know when certain things happen. We know when Babylon took Judah. We know when that happened. The Babylonians recorded the time.

We know it within two years. That's pretty amazing. We're going back a long time. We know something happened within the two-year period. We start backing up and backing up and backing up. Then you get, okay, around this date, Moses had to be born, because we know he was 120 years old when he died.

Once you figure out, okay, this was the time they went into the Promised Land, you back up 120 years, you get about this time. It would take a few years either way. The problem is that most people are taught, and it was taught for decades and decades, and it's taught in the 10 Commandment movie, is that the Pharaoh was Ramesses II. Now, this is where I was speculating. We know it was Ramesses II. So why do we know that? Because it used to be Egyptian chronology was all over the place. You could get three books, and the difference between what this Pharaoh was and what this Pharaoh was, some would say this Pharaoh reigned here and here and here, and they'd be 500 years apart from each other.

There was no way to make sense out of any of it. Well, Oxford and Cambridge and these very smart people got together, started taking all the information about Egypt, and they put together a chronology that makes sense. Now, when we start looking at certain things, there's only a few pharaohs that reigned for 40 years or more. Remember, that's one thing we have to look for. A pharaoh that reigned, that was alive for more than 40 years. Now, Rambasees was one of them. But if Rambasees was the pharaoh, then you can't trust the biblical chronology at all.

It doesn't add up. So we have a problem. And the reason they say Rambasees is because it says they built the city of Rambasees. But there's a couple problems with that, even within the Book of Exodus.

Even within the Book of Exodus, if you add up all the events, it doesn't add up right. Let alone the rest of history. And we do know this, and people are always shocked when I say this, but I've said it before. We do know this. It has to be. There are places in Genesis and Exodus that were edited. Because there are places where the names were updated.

Like Abraham chased the Assyrian armies off to the place of Dan. Okay, we know where Dan is. We can look it up so you can get your Bible. You'll find a map and it will show you where Dan is, right? We know where Dan settled because when the Israelites went into the Promised Land, this area was given to Dan. So we know that's where Abraham chased the Assyrian army.

The problem is Dan wasn't even born from four generations later. And it was hundreds of years later before Dan even settled in that area.

So someone had to come along and say, no one will know where that is. So they wrote in Dan. Now, the Jews believe that. They have no problem with that. They think Ezra did it. I don't know who did it. But you have some updateings of names. We do know under the city of Ramesses is another city.

They've excavated. And that city was built at the time we're going to talk about now.

So there's another city there. And somebody updated the name. Now, that's a whole lot easier to believe than if you try to force Ramesses II into the Bible. He doesn't fit. It doesn't fit. But if we speculate here and say, okay, this fits. And by the way, every conservative Christian historian agrees with this.

Because once Cambridge put the together, it's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Now, they may disagree by 20 years or something. But they all have it down very close. Because once they put it together, it's like the whole Bible fits. You can even figure out when Joseph was there.

It all fits now. So instead of trying to cram things in, we know how they fit. So what we have here is Moses. Now, let's go to Exodus 2 and rehearse the story a little bit.

You know, this isn't the normal sermon that we usually give on a holy day, but I'd like to go back sometimes, especially if you can get a 10-year-old to say, ah, so those are what those bricks look like. You plant that, and next time they hear something, it'll make sense. You know, we make sense out of things because we associate it. You have to plant information. And over time, they can now associate it with other things. Ah, the Nile River. Wow. It's surrounded by desert.

Yeah, and it was then, too. The Nile area, the floodplain, was probably bigger than... the reason they know that is they keep finding cities outside in the desert. Whole cities covered by sand. So that floodplain was bigger than, it's narrowed. I mean, they built dams, they've done different things, they've changed the ecology of it. But we know the story here in Exodus 2. In Exodus 2, and a man of the house of Levi, what happens here is this Pharaoh wants all Israelite sons killed.

What's it? Once they've all killed. You keep the daughters. They don't turn into soldiers, but kill the boys. So you have mass murder taking place. We don't know who this Pharaoh was. We can sort of guess at it. There's about four or five of them, it could have been. And a man of the house of Levi went and took his wife, a daughter of Levi, so the woman could see him no more as a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she took an arc of bull rushes for him, dabbed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, laid it in the reeds by the river's bank, and his sister stood afar off to know what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maids walked along the riverside, when she saw the ark among the reeds, she went out and set her maid to get him. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrew children. Now this is very important. They knew this wasn't an Egyptian.

In the Ten Commandments, I keep going back to that because, you know, we won't watch it. I don't know about you, but I watch it almost every year at this time. I know other people do. But the Ten Commandments, nobody knows. They all knew. The Egyptians knew.

He wasn't an Egyptian. But she takes him in. And you know it says that, you know, his sister comes up, Miriam comes up and says, you know, I know somebody could nurse this baby for you. Well, she can figure out, oh, must be Mama. Well, you go tell her to come nurse the baby. And she takes him in. And she raises this child. He is taken out of a crude brick and straw hut and taken into the palaces of Pharaoh. And he's raised there. He's educated there. He knows the language. He knows hieroglyphics. He reads hieroglyphics. Understand, he's immersed into what it is to be an Egyptian. And not just a normal Egyptian, but right up underneath the highest peak of that pyramid in an incredibly society that is very class-conscious. When Moses walked down the street, everybody got out of the way. Because of the way he dressed. This is nobility. This isn't just somebody normal. This is nobility. So we have to understand who he was in that society. He's nobility. He's somebody really special. He has power. Now, if we take the most modern chronologies of the Exodus, we come up with something like this.

Oh, wow. These are weird names, right? Although I have to admit, Hamidhotep is just a cool name. I think if I had to have a son again, I'd name him Hamidhotep. But you got... No, my wife would not let me. This is the Egyptian...the beginning of the 18th dynasty. Remember, I said we know Moses was born around 1526, somewhere near. What's happening in Egypt in 1526? Well, you have Hamidhotep I, and he's followed by his son, Thutmose I. And he's born in here. That means...it's very interesting. Hamidhotep I dies, and Thutmose I comes in in power here in the same year. Probably around...you know, this is all...remember, this all could be off by a couple of years, but this is all happening very, very at the same time. And Thutmose I, he only reigns a short period of time. And the one at this time had Shepsit, who's probably... I say, well, let me talk about whether it's half Shepsit. Let's just say the daughter of Pharaoh is probably a young teenager. And what she does, she brings him into the court now. And he's being raised in this environment. He's being raised where he is in regular contact with a god. Understand, when he walked into the presence of Pharaoh, you know, he toddles in there in age 5 or 6 with his Egyptian stepmother, he has to act a certain way because he is in the presence of a god. To be raised in that environment is almost inconceivable.

He has to bow. He has to say certain things.

Absolute respect. Because this isn't just every man in this society. This man is a god.

He has eternity in him. It's just a guy with pyramids. Remember, the pyramids were already hundreds of years old. And they looked at those as a dats for the pharaohs. And he's in the presence of this all the time.

There's nothing like it in the world. There's no place that has this kind of wealth, and there's no place that has this kind of power. And he's exposed to it all the time.

Now, here's where you have to speculate some, but it's worth saying. So I always try to tell you what to speculate. See this person right here? This is a weird name for a pharaoh.

The reason that's a weird name for a pharaoh is it's a woman's name.

In fact, if you ever see statues of Hatshepsut, she has the little beard that the pharaohs have. And then you look and say, oh, that's a woman. Okay, the dress number is a woman.

But she has to wear a little beard. She would have scrapped it on. It wasn't real. Okay, she didn't have a real beard. She had a fake beard, she wore. But it's a woman.

And that's because when Thutmose II dies here, and he only reads about eight years. He's not there very long.

He makes his son Thutmose III the pharaoh. The problem is, Thutmose III is a child.

And he's not the product of his wife Hatshepsut, but he's the product of him in a concubine. But he declares him. So what happened is, is Hatshepsut becomes the co-regent. And she becomes pharaoh, which is not legal, but they can't do anything about it. So she's the co-pharaoh. And that's why you see her. And it's amazing, because the next 20 years, she reigned. She ruled Egypt.

That's only happened a couple of times in the history of Egypt.

Now here, what if this is the woman who pulled him out?

What that means is Moses isn't just nobility. Mom is pharaoh. And this brother here, of course he's not related to any of them, this brother here is the next pharaoh.

Which means that every brother that's alive is what? A rival.

Now, you say, well that's a little bit stretching, although those numbers all add up. I mean, that's when these things happen. But here's a couple things that Josephus tells us. Now, Josephus is one of the few sources we have that tells us about Moses, because there's no Egyptian sources about Moses. You know what? There's hardly anything about Hatshepsut, and there's a reason why. They discovered within the last hundred years, Hatshepsut had everything about her, and they didn't know about her before, because what was really her statues and her information was all hid. There's a reason why.

Josephus tells us what had been passed down through Jewish history.

This is what had been passed on verbally about Moses. And what they say, or what he says, is that Moses was so brilliant and such a beautiful child. And it's interesting, because the Bible says he was beautiful. He was so brilliant that Pharaoh could not help but recognize his brilliance. But ever since he was brought into the court as a baby, the Egyptian priest would say, He is ordained to destroy your kingdom. Now, remember, they're all involved in demonism. He is ordained to destroy your kingdom. Kill him.

And so we have a couple of pharaohs here that are told all the time, Kill him! He goes to two years old and eight years old and ten years old and fifteen years old and twenty years old. He's being told, God, kill this man, all the priests. He is ordained to destroy you. And according to Josephus, Jewish tradition, the only reason why was that Mom was so powerful that she could stand up to the priests. Now, there's only one person that can stand up to the priests. Pharaoh. So, when you put this together, it is possible that this woman right here was the woman who actually raised him in that environment. This also, there's another great tradition, because from Josephus and other places, that Moses became the general of the Egyptian army and he conquered Ethiopia. Now, in the Ten Commandments, don't you remember? He comes before the pharaoh and he just conquered Ethiopia and they gave him an Ethiopian wife as part of the agreement. That actually could be true. How does a man who was a slave become the general of an army? Because a mom. She protects him all this time. Now, that little bit of speculation, I'm going to show you how that means something in one verse in the Bible. There's a verse in the Bible that comes out of nowhere because it's in the New Testament. Well, there's actually two verses, but they seem to come out of nowhere. But if this all adds up, and if it doesn't, something like this had to happen. Even if this doesn't add up, something like it had to happen. There had to be somebody protecting him in his time inside that. Because it's not normal for them to bring someone related to the Hyksos into their nobility. And according to the Bible, it's because she's the daughter of Pharaoh. That is where he gets his protection from. So he is this general of the army. Also, according to Josephus, Pharaoh wanted to kill him. All his advisors said, kill him. And all of his priests said, kill him, because he now has the army, the very tool he needs to fulfill the prophecy. He has the army, the tool he needs to fulfill the prophecy, because the army was very loyal to him. Okay, now let's go to Acts 7. I usually don't speculate, but let me have once in a while, okay?

Acts 7, verse 20. Now, Stephen is filling in things that aren't mentioned in Exodus. So where does Stephen get it from? It had been passed on from generation to generation within the Jewish community. Just like what we have from Josephus. So even though we have to take Josephus with a great assault, I think we could take... Stephen is in the Bible, so we could take what he says as true. At this time, Moses was born, verse 20, and was well pleasing to God that he was brought up in his father's house for three months. But when he was set out in the ark, Pharaoh's daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son. He is considered royalty within the court of Pharaoh.

And Moses was lured in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and deeds. Now, see, we don't know when he was mighty in words and deeds, so the Bible doesn't tell us.

But it's possible he actually was the general in charge of the Egyptian army.

I mean, I don't know, that's pretty mighty. Whatever he did, understand, even if Josephus is wrong, according to what we have in the Scripture, whatever he did, it was spectacular. As a young man, he impressed all Egypt.

He was mighty in deeds. All of Egypt looked up to him. And he lived through a couple different pharaohs, and all the priests were saying, Kill this man! Kill this man! He's prophesied to destroy you.

And now he has control of the army.

Verse 23. Now when he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brother and the children of Israel. And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended and avenged him, who was oppressed and struck down the Egyptian. And we know that. He saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite slave, and he killed in his anger, he killed the Egyptian. There's something interesting about this. Brought up as the son of the daughter pharaoh, he could kill any Egyptian he wanted to. There was no law of the nobility. So the fact that we know he had to flee makes little sense. If you just read Exodus, it's like, why did he have to run away?

But then you read this next sentence, this next part here. For he supposed that his brother would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand, but they did not understand. And the next day he appeared to two of them as they were fighting and tried to reconcile them, saying, Man, you're a brother. Why do you wrong with another? But he who did his neighbor wrong pushed him away, saying, Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you did the Egyptian yesterday? That saying, Moses fled, and they came and dweller in the land of Midian, for he had two sons. The important thing here is, why was he doing this? Because he thought that he would understand, I'm the one who frees you. So we think of the forty years later, where God comes to him and says, okay, I'm sending you back. And he says, I'm not going. But at forty years old, he knew he was the one that God was going to free them. And it was time. Now, what's interesting is what is happening in the Egyptian nobility at this time. What's happening is, Thutmose III has reached his twentieth birthday, and in his sides, and Hatshepsut has no power over him anymore. And there is a power struggle going on in Egypt. And Moses, if he's in the court, which he is, even if Hatshepsut isn't his stepmother, he's on the wrong side of the power struggle. If he had the army, he at least thought he had a slave army. I'm here to free you. God has sent me to free you. And he thought they would understand, and he said, Who in the world made you look at you in your fancy clothes, in your fancy sandals, eating your fancy meals? You don't live in a brick hut like we do. Who made you over us? Get out of here! Did it kill me like it did the Egyptian? He didn't have an Israelite army. That's army of slaves. He didn't have the army either. They must not be willing to follow him. The man who thought he was supposed to overthrow Egypt had no power at all. And it says he ran. He ran. He got out across this desert, absolutely. Oh, I forgot. Don't hit the map up there. As fast as he could run! Because they were going to kill him. Mom lost, by the way. And that's why, after her death, taught Moses the third or second that everything in his power to erase the fact that she ever lived. Go online now and just Google in her... they found her temple. She's this beautiful temple where she worshiped. And you can find statues of her and everything now. But there was an attempt to just erase her from history. We know Moses doesn't appear any place in Egyptian history. It's like he didn't exist. So even if Hatshepsut is not his stepmother, this is the intrigue that's going on. And Moses is in the middle of this. And he loses. He thinks God's using this for him. I mean, you guys are supposed to know who I am. I'm here to save you. And see, if we didn't have that from Stephen, we wouldn't know that was his motivation. But Stephen tells us his motivation. I'm here to save you. God was going to use him. God was going to use him. But not the way he thought. And there's the problem. Not the way he thought. Of course, what's interesting, you get down here to Ammon Hotep II. And what you see is topmost, the third, reigned for over 40 years. We have one of the few pharaohs that reigned over 40 years. Now, part of it was with Hatshepsut's thumb on him, but he added it all up. It's more than 40 years. Ammon Hotep II is a very interesting man. Even among pharaohs, this man was arrogant.

He liked to be called the Lord of Glories, the Good God, the Lion over Egypt, Lord of Might, and giving life like the Son. And that was just one of his many things he liked to be called. He was also a remarkably strong human being. Well, I don't know. It is said he had a bow that only he could pull. He was so strong when he could pull it. But I wonder if that's true. I was a really strong guy, and pharaoh said, I'm the only one who can pull this. See if you can. I'd go, no, I can't. I sure wouldn't pull it back. You don't want to, you know, you don't want to put down a God in front of everybody. You're not going to live very long. So I don't know if he was really that strong or just everybody else was smart enough not to pull the thing. He was known as arrogant. He was vicious. He was cruel. He's the type of man who did not exactly what the pharaoh did. God can't be... that Israelite God cannot be greater than me. I am a God. And my gods, there's a bunch of them, and we're all greater than him. And that's Ammon Houtep II. It's interesting if you go... if you would go on another, I don't know, 150 years, one of the pharaohs came along and tried to make Egypt monotheistic. Maybe this one God's true, so let's all worship the sun. But he couldn't get him to... you know, the sun god's just one God. They believe in the sun god. He's the only God. Just one God is the sun. And this one God just did something to them. And generations later, a pharaoh actually tried to create some kind of monotheism. Of course, it was just as wrong, but it never lasted. It lasted his lifetime. And then all the Egyptians went back to what they always believed. I know, you know, history's not exciting for a lot of people. It's speculation. We have to be real careful with speculation. I'm saying this is the absolute truth. I am saying that if you put together the chronology of the Bible and move backwards, and you use the new chronology from Cambridge... I say new, it's been out 50 years, but you know, of what? Did you ever call it chronology? And you put them on top of each other, this is where you are. One of the few times you have somebody who's reigned over 40 years. You actually have a woman powerful enough to protect him. And you have a situation where what Josephus says could be true. It actually could be true. And why did he have to go out and wait for that pharaoh to die? So he appears, and they leave at about 1446. 1445, 1443, you know, it goes back and forth to the different scholars. But it's about 1446. They get to the Promised Land about 1406. 1405, you know, once again, depends on... you can't figure the exact year. But now you can actually... all the biblical chronology of the Judges, everything fits. Everything fits right up to the Solomon's Temple.

So we look at this... I think there's something learned from it. Because even if it wasn't, like I said, exactly like this, it had to be similar in some way. It had to be similar in some way for all of us to fit together. And I just find it fascinating that he had to learn something. God had called him to do something. And he thought God had made him Prince of Egypt to take over Egypt. And he said, no, I made you Prince of Egypt to free my people. And that doesn't mean you get to take over Egypt. It means I'm going to free my people. And it took 40 years of him being humbled. Because he's 80 years old when God sends him back and he says, I don't want to go back. And he says, oh no, no, this is why I'm aging. I mean, yeah, it just took 40 years to prepare you this way and another 40 years to get you humbled enough to go do it. To realize you don't have an army, the Israelites aren't even going to want to follow you. And you're going to do it because I'm going to do it. And look what God did through Moses. Let's conclude in Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11. Another New Testament passage that talks about Moses. Hebrews 11. Verse 23. By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king's command. By faith, Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction. He said, well, when did he do that? The moment he went out and killed that Egyptian and said to the Israelites, I'm here to free you, he just turned his back on to Hashepsin. He just took his back. And remember, there's a power struggle going on, and he's starting his back on everything that can protect him. Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin. Estealing the reproach of Christ's greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. He had everything you could ever want, and he could have been taken care of the rest of his life. Every woman he wanted, every wealth he wanted, every food he wanted, anything he wanted. And he turned it all down. And by faith, 27, he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king. For he endured as seeing him who was invisible. And by faith he kept the Passover, and a sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them. And by faith he passed through the red seas dry land, or as the Egyptians, attempting to do so, were drowned. But he learned the faith, not as the prince of Egypt. He learned the faith by the forty years of living in the wilderness. And that is an important lesson for us to remember.