Moses' Status in Egypt and the Enormity of What He Did

I have a little different sermon I want to do here today. The first half of this is for all the kids.

I want to talk about what it was like to live in ancient Egypt at the time of the Israelites. Then, after we do that, I want to talk a little bit about what it would be like to be Moses to live there at that time. There are some adult things we can learn from that, too. We have to speculate a little bit when we get to a few things about Egyptian history, because Egyptian history is not always easy to go through and pick out. But what's interesting about their culture is their culture didn't change much for 2,000 years. So we can't look at their culture, and we can't understand what was it like to be an Israelite living in slavery at the time of Moses. And then what was it like to be Moses and to understand the enormity of the decisions he had to make to follow God? And some of the mistakes he made that we just vaguely see in the Bible, but I think hopefully he can come to a deeper understanding of some of those mistakes he made, too, why he made them. We have to understand one thing about ancient Egypt at the time of Moses, and we're moving back into the 1500s BC. And in the 1500s and 1400s BC, Egypt was the superpower of the world. There was no country with the wealth or the influence or the military that Egypt had.

So it's hard for us today to understand that, and then we realize how old Egypt's been around. I mean, it's one of the oldest countries in all the world. And we go back to 1500 BC. It's the superpower. It controls the Mediterranean. It has this army. It has this influence. And the Egyptian army leaves Egypt and goes out through the Middle East and conquers wherever they want. They don't lose very much. For hundreds and hundreds of years, they're a dominating empire. It's not just Egypt. Egypt is actually an empire that dominates all throughout the Middle East. And there's a couple of reasons why they had that kind of power. One is that the Nile River is Egypt. There is no Egypt without the Nile River. The Nile River is everything.

It floods once a year. And when it floods, it overflows the banks and spreads out over, at that time, a much larger area than it does now because they've built dams. And what it did is it brought down or brought up, because this is in North Africa, it brings from Central Africa all this rich soil and dumps it. And because it dumps it, you have some of the most fertile land in the world. Now, you and I don't think of Egypt that way today. The reason Julius Caesar in the 40s BC marched into...now, we're talking a long time after 1500 BC...marsh into Egypt was because they could feed all of Europe with the grain that they grew in Egypt.

It was the breadbasket of the world for a long time. That's not that way now. And part of the reason why is because the desert has encroached in on to what had been ancient Egypt. And we begin to understand why the Nile is everything in Egypt when we look at this satellite picture. See the green? This green is where the Nile is. That's the Nile River.

And that's what it's like on both sides of the Nile River.

You can see where there's green over here. At the time of Moses, this was a wider area.

This was a wider area. Although much of this was still desert. The Sinai was still desert. That's one reason why it was so hard for anyone to conquer Egypt. You had to cross hundreds of miles of desert to get there. And they controlled the roads that came across here because that's how you got up into what's the Fertile Crescent. You know, the area of Israel and Syria and Iraq and Iran today up into what is now modern day Turkey. That whole area up there where Babylon was and the Hittites and all those peoples. They traded with Egypt. And now Egypt controlled this part of the Mediterranean. They had a fairly large navy. But this is what's interesting. Look how protected they are. You're on horseback or camel or you're walking. It takes a lot of effort to cross this desert from here or from North Africa over here to get here.

Egypt had enough power that they could march their armies this way or this way.

It was very few civilizations for thousands of years that could come through in to take Egypt. See this area up here was really, really green. Now this is a modern satellite. If you would have gone to the time of Moses, this area would have been probably slightly larger. You know what this is? Anybody know? Goshen. Yeah, it's the Nile Delta, right? It's the delta. It's because it's flowing north into... In fact, you see this little green haze here in the Mediterranean as the Nile flowing in. That's Goshen. That's where the Israelites were settled in Goshen. It was up here because the Israelites raised flocks. The Egyptians raised animals, but not like the Israelites because the Egyptians raised food along the Nile. So they got settled up here because there was area to feed their flocks. So you begin to realize this... When Moses comes into this world, this is the superpower. This is why they were able to keep so many Israelites, a number that just was overwhelming. They were able to keep them down. They were able to control them because they had so much power and so much of the wealth of the entire Fertile Crescent flowed into this country. They were the United States of their day. Think of the reach of the United States where we can go out and reach out. They didn't do it by airplanes. They marched their soldiers and on chariots, but they had this reach that went out. And the wealth of the world came in to these people. So once again, the Nile is everything. And because of the yearly flooding, the soil was always fertile and they could grow all this food. Because of that, now, remember, everybody lives, even now, the Nile, if you go to the Nile, sometimes it's only a quarter of a mile to half a mile on both sides of the river that's green. You could be standing there and look and see the desert. Other places, it's a mile. It was probably at this point more places where it was much wider. And one reason they know that is they keep discovering out in the desert, they keep discovering cities, foundations of more pyramids. So the civilization was larger than, of course, in anything that's been since the Romans were there.

So what you have up and down the Nile are very large and prosperous cities.

And these cities are packed with people. It gives you sort of an idea because they're houses upon house and they live in these packed areas. The Israelites who were slaves would have lived in similar communities, although their houses wouldn't have been as nice.

Some slaves lived in little huts. It depended on where you were as a slave. A slave could be the worst thing to do would be in the salt mines or the copper mines out in the Sinai. You didn't live very long. But it didn't matter. You just replaced them with another slave. It was cheap, cheap labor. But the Egyptians lived in these cramped areas and they produced a surplus of food. Now you think about Abraham when there was a famine in Canaan.

Where did he go? Egypt. Joseph goes to Egypt and God tells him, look, you're going to have to start storing food to feed the world. So in the story of Abraham and Joseph, we both find out how incredible the agriculture was in Egypt. Now history now points all that out. The stories of the Bible are just made up. They're real people doing real things and they really would go to Egypt. Now once again, we would look at Egypt that way today.

But we've got to go back 3,500 years. And at the time of Noah, almost 4,000 years, we see a different place. We see a remarkable place. Because of their ability to produce surplus food. You know what happens in any society where there's surplus food? People don't have to spend all their time growing food.

They have extra time. And the Egyptians were very industrious people. And so what they did was they made fine linen. They made pottery. They took papyrus, which was a plant, and made it into paper. So they were the paper producers of the world. And they produced all this stuff so people would come into Egypt to buy food and the things that they made, and they would bring their goods. So even the average Egyptian was able to own things that in other parts of the world nobody could own because of this trade that's going back and forth.

I would just read something. Ask some of you, especially if you're a young person, if you could picture this. This was written many years ago by Gaston Maspero. He was a famous Egyptian archaeologist. He was French, but he spent most of his life in Egypt. And he put together a book of describing what it would have been like to live in Egypt. And his descriptions today are still some of the best you can find. Now think of a city like this, and in the middle of that city is a big open square.

And you know what happens at that square? It's the shopping mall. So everybody brings their stuff and they set it up in the square. And then when it gets full, all the little streets coming off the square, everybody sets up their wares. Now it's not a permanent shopping mall because at the end of every day everybody packs up their stuff and goes home. It's more like a giant flea market. But a lot of it's food also. And this is where if you were an Israelite and you had any time off, you would go to this bizarre, as they would call it, you would go there because you would have to trade.

If you're an Israelite slave, you know what you were given? A little bit of food every day for you and your family. And you had a little plot of land where you lived in your hut and you would, or a lot of them would be similar to this, in that they lived in these clay buildings made out of bricks.

And you lived maybe in a clay building. You were a little bit better off than the person that lived in a hut, but you still had to grow your own food. Or you had to manufacture things. So after your hard day of 10-12 hours out working as a slave, you came home and worked so you could take something from the bazaar and trade it for food. So maybe you got really good at making little fish hooks and somehow you could get some metal.

So you would make really good fish hooks and you have a day where you only had to work half a day, so guess what you did? You went to the bazaar and you traded your fish hooks, hoping you could get leeks or maybe coconuts or something you didn't have or maybe onions. So you're an Israelite and it's your little time you have off and maybe you and your wife have made something, you created something, and now you're going to go trade.

Here's what it was like. You're walking into this bazaar and here's how the stone must pero describes it. In Thebes, after threading one's way through dark and very narrow streets, because you can see this is all very narrow streets here. You know, you can't even see them here because well you can see would there be one there because you're looking down on this.

One would last immersion to the full sunshine of a noisy little square where the market is being held. Here are all kinds of cattle for sale and peasants and fishermen and small retail dealers squat several deep in front of the houses displaying before them in great rush baskets or on low tables, loaves of pastries and fruit and vegetables and fish and meat, some of it raw, some of it cooked, jewels, perfumes, stuffs, and all the things that people needed in Egyptian life.

The customers stroll past and examine leisurely the quality of the commodities offered.

Each carries something of his own manufacture in his hand. Maybe a new tool, some shoes, a mat, or small box filled with rings. This was very interesting. They didn't have official currency in ancient Egypt, so they would make rings out of copper or out of silver or out of gold. So obviously no Israelites would have those. They were slaves. And these little rings had a hole in the middle. The Egyptian word for them was an out-now. An out-now, they had to go in and weigh them because they had to weigh what we would call three ounces. So they had to weigh three ounces. So now you could go barter that. You say, okay, I got a copper out now. And someone would say, oh, I'll give you half of a bushel of pineapples or whatever because the food was coming. Or maybe I'll give you three fish. So you'd have to cut your out-now in half and give them half and then they'd give you...then you know, you'd melt your out-nows down and make a new one. But then you have to go get it weighed. It's got to be three ounces. So Israelites wouldn't have any out-nows unless you happen to be an Israelite that was privileged and you were maybe a household slave to some rich people and maybe they gave you some money.

And maybe you had a copper out-now. You wouldn't have any silver or gold out-nows.

And you go in, but so if you're an Israelite, maybe you went out and caught a fish that day. Well, a bunch of fish. You fed your family, okay, I have a couple fish left over. I can go trade them. See what I can get. And you're walking through this bazaar. Two customers stop at the same moment before a peasant who exhibits some onions and weed in a basket. Instead of money, one holds two necklaces of glass, the second a round fan with a wooden handle that they used to quicken a fire. He goes on and describes the argument everybody has. Oh no, I want some onions. I'll give you a fan for three onions. I'll give you one of these glass necklaces I made. No, no, no. I'll give you two glasses. Oh, you can't get one. And they're arguing.

And back and forth. So there's all this arguing going on. Now, if you're an Israelite slave, you can't argue much because the Egyptian looks down on you and they're just gonna say, get out of here. I mean, so you've got to take basically whatever you get.

But you can see, you can hear this. And there's cattle for sale and sheep for sale. It smells really, really weird. Because not only are all these animals, there's restaurants. You know, I wouldn't think of restaurants in ancient Egypt. Yeah. People come, they set up their little stand, and they start cooking. And you could go down these narrow streets, and now all the narrow streets have people down there. They're setting up and they're cooking. And you can buy food. In fact, on the street level, there's actually restaurants set up around this area. There are permanent restaurants where you can go in and buy your food.

Now, I don't know if they let Israelites come in, but the Egyptians would come in and out. And not only Egyptians, there's people there from all over the world because people are coming into Egypt all the time. It's this huge melting pot. And people are coming in and they're selling their wares. Think about when Abraham entered Egypt, and Pharaoh notices him. Why would Pharaoh notice him? Because he was the king of a tribe, a nomadic tribe coming in. And I'm sure there's Egyptian soldiers and there's government officials checking out every tribe of people that comes in. And someone goes to Pharaoh and says, we got a tribe from Canaan. We got a tribe from Canaan, and there's a lot of them. Because remember, he had hundreds of armed servants, plus their families.

So I don't know, a thousand, twelve hundred. There's Abraham's tribes for a big group.

And they come in. And of course, the Egyptians take notice. And they go to Pharaoh. You know, because they're coming in all the time. Coming and going. And of course, Pharaoh's happy because every tribe that comes in means they brought stuff to barter, and they're going to get the better end of the deal. The Egyptians are, and then off they go.

And so this is the town in which the type of town that Israelites would have been in, and they would have gone to when they had that little time off. What I find interesting is the barbers. They didn't have barber shops. So what you would do is barbers would stroll through the crowd, and you would argue with the barber with how much you were willing to pay for a haircut or beard cut. And then you would squat down on the ground, and they'd cut your hair while you squat on the ground. And then you'd pay him your piece of it out now, or here's a fish, or whatever you were paying him with. And then he would stroll through and do more haircuts.

They also had taverns, and they were permanent. So they were open all day long.

And the Egyptians made beer. And I actually talked to someone who took one of the ancient Egyptian beer recipes and made beer. I said, what did that taste like? He said, horrible. They had beer, and they made wine. And what probably the only thing that tasted good to us was palm brandy. That probably tasted good. I don't know. Restaurants, bakeries, all these smells, all this noise. This is what it's like for a slave who works all day long and spends the evening trying to grow some food, trying to make a few things, and they go and barter. They go and barter. There wasn't any Sabbath. In fact, the Egyptians had a 10-day work week, and slaves didn't get time off. You had to be pretty high in the social status to get your 10 days off, or every 10th day. They had a 10-day work week. Now, over this thriving, noisy, smelly, exciting place called Egypt, over all this, you have a social pyramid. And at the very top of that social pyramid is Pharaoh. It is hard for us to understand a Pharaoh because he's not just the ruler. He is a living God. If you look at him and he doesn't like the way you look, he can have you tortured to death, and it's his right to do so. Total, complete power. There's no legislature.

The power that a Pharaoh had was complete because he was a God. He was worshipped. One of the things the Pharaoh did was every morning, he had to go out at sunup, stand in front of the Nile, give a prayer so that the sun god, Ra, would appear. The fear was whatever, what happened if the Pharaoh didn't do that? Maybe the sun wouldn't show up.

And so he has power that they believe is absolute spiritual power. He is a God. This is why he resisted God so much. The idea that a bunch of slaves could have a God more powerful than his gods was inconceivable. The proof is, look at Egypt. There's nothing like it in the world.

And you're saying the God of a bunch of people we beat up every day, that we let die in the street because they're not worth it. Their only value to us is the work we can get out of them. And you're saying their God is more powerful than ours? And I'm the living representative of the gods?

Pharaoh just couldn't accept that. Under that, you have the government officials, you have priests, you have the nobles, which are just wealthy landowners. Soldiers are very important. Then you have the scribes. These are the educated people. They can read and they can write. And so they're very important to Egyptian society. Then you have the merchants. So there's a lot more merchants. You can see as you go down this, there's more and more people in these groups. The merchants, they run the business. And Egypt is a big business. Now, it's not like the Romans who had free enterprises. This really was the Pharaoh owned everything. He could come take anything he wanted from you. The laws are really set up quite differently. People do have some rights, but they don't when it comes to Pharaoh. Then you have the craftsmen. These are the people who work with stone. They're the builders. They create linen. They create paper. So, you know, there's a large amount of people here in the society that are actually creating things other than food, pottery. And down here you have the farmers. Isn't it amazing? In almost every society, at the bottom of the rung are the people who feed us. And that's strange when you think about it. I mean, there's nothing more important than farmers. And then actually beneath them are the slaves. The slaves only have value in what they produce for you. They have no value other than that.

The Israelites, of course, were in that last group.

And the fortunate ones worked in a house. The unfortunate ones, the worst, like I said, worked out in the copper mines out in Sinai. Or they worked on the giant construction projects. Because the Egyptians were the most incredible builders of the age. Even today, engineers marvel at the pyramids. How did they build those without giant cranes? Well, we know they described how they did it. They did it on the backs of hundreds of thousands of people. It wasn't easy. Everything they did was hard work for somebody. And these were people that basically had no choice in the matter.

So this is the world the Israelites live in. And they're way down here, even below the farmers.

But they're actually very important to Egyptian culture. They need these slaves for their country to run. And one of the reasons for that... Now, before I go there, let me do something else.

Someone, maybe one of the younger people. What was it the Israelites had to make? You think, wow, they spent most of the Israelites were making one thing. What was it they made?

Bricks. Mix with straw, right? Okay, they still use it today. There you go. See the straw in it? See the straw in it? Hold it together. In that kind of climate, some of this stuff, some of these bricks have lasted thousands of years. I don't know what happens if they get real wet. I'm often wondering about that. But they're very sturdy, and this is what they did. And the reason why is because the Egyptians built things. Now, a lot of it was made out of stone. That's why the pyramids still exist today. And there's ruins all over Egypt of places that they built out of stone. Anybody know what the name of their writing is? Hieroglyphics. If you can read hieroglyphics, please explain that to me. I had a book at one time on how to read hieroglyphics. Someone borrowed from me, and I never got it back, and I've never found the book again at a bookstore or anything. So I have no idea how to read hieroglyphics. They were builders. Their engineering is amazing. But they did it on the backs of people. And some of the things that today, like I said, are still there. They're amazing. Their religion was one of the most superstitious religions you'll ever find.

The Egyptians worshipped a whole host of gods. The most important, of course, was Horus and Erysis and Isis. But they had a god for everything, and they were so superstitious. They did all kinds of little rituals to protect yourself. They believed in magic. They believed in evil spirits. They had lucky days and unlucky days, and they were superstitious about everything.

And they had a cat god, and they had a crocodile god. They had a hippopotamus god. I'm just going to slide past this. I'll just say it. The hippopotamus god was the god of pregnant women.

These are Egyptians, okay?

Many of their gods could take different forms. So one god could look one way in one situation and another way in another situation. And people were very aware of this. There was a lot of fear in their religion because these evil spirits want to get you, or the gods would get mad at you, and a god would hurt you. So everything every day was trying to be protected so the gods would take care of you. Guess who is the one contact in the entire nation with the gods?

Pharaoh. See how important he is? You live in fear every day, and there's only one man powerful enough to influence the gods because he is also a god. And so they became obsessed with the afterlife. Now here's the part that so many of the young guys really get excited about. Mummies. Okay? How do you make a mummy? Well, one of the things you would do is if you were going to mummify somebody, they were somebody important. The average people got thrown into a grave.

But the person in charge of it would actually wear that costume there because they represent Ambeus Anibus. Anibus is the god of the dead. And see, he supervise everything that they do. They would take out certain organs and put them in jars. The person would be anointed with all these fragrant oils, and they would be wrapped. And of course, there's lots of mummies. I mean, I've been to many museums all over the world, and one thing they all have in common, they all have mummies from Egypt. Lots of mummies survived.

Unlike the movies, none of them will come back to life, so you don't have to worry about that.

This was because they had to prepare the person to go into the afterlife. They believed when you died, and especially if you were a pharaoh, or a priest, or a general, or one of the top government officials, or a very rich Egyptian, you got a special place in this afterlife that everybody else didn't get to go. I mean, if you were a slave in this life, guess what you were in the next life? You were basically a slave. So, there are cases where you have pharaohs who, when they died, they killed all their slaves and put them in the tomb with them. Because when he goes into the afterlife, what does he want around him? His slaves to take care of him. Sometimes they kill all his wives, because he, I want all my wives too.

So, you know, it'd be pretty tough, because when he dies, lots of other people die. So, they go with him. And if he gets mummified, what do they look like? But this was so you could be protected as you go into the afterlife. This obsession with death was at the center of their whole society. An obsession with death, a fear of death, and all these superstitions that everyday life was controlled by this fear of death and these superstitions and making sure that somehow you pleased the gods. So the good things happen to you. Because when bad things happen to you, well, it's because some evil spirit got ahold of you. Or because the gods, one of the gods are upset with you.

It is into this world that Moses is born. It's into this world with its bazaars and with its huge, incredible buildings and temples and pyramids. It is in this world where you have an army that the Pharaoh sends out all over the world and he stamps his power wherever he goes. Oh, there's all kinds of stories from ancient Egypt. Stories from ancient Egypt. You'll find the Egyptians show up in everything from Ethiopian to on the African coast, all the way up into the Hittites, all through the Middle East. Everybody has stories of when the Egyptians got upset with you and the army showed up.

For thousands of years! Well, 1200 years, maybe a thousand years, a little longer. When the Egyptian army showed up, you were in trouble. And he did. He could exert his power.

It is where a slave is born and God has a plan for that slave.

You know the story. We're going to rehearse it a little bit, but you all know the story about how Pharaoh decides, and we don't know exactly which Pharaoh that was. We think we know. He decided to kill the male Israelites because there were too many of them.

They feared they would take over. There's a reason for that.

The Israelites are what they call a Semitic people. One of the few times in 2000 years of Egyptian history that any army showed up and conquered Egypt was while the Israelites were there. And there were Semitic people. There were nomadic people from the Middle East. Probably one of Abraham's descendants from another group. Probably, you know, what we would call an Arab group. They show up and conquer Egypt. And Egypt finally drives them out. But they don't trust anybody from the Middle East ever again.

And it's probably then that they said, these people, there's too many of them. Their language is just like the people we kicked out. This is at least what historians think. Because we know the Hiscos came in. We know what type of people they were. And we know somewhere in this time period the Israelites were enslaved. And it probably has to do with, uh-uh, we're never going to let some people from the Middle East, because they're different than us. And we're going to enslave them, and they start to kill off the children, the boys. And we know the story. Moses is saved by God. And his mother puts him in a little boat, sends him out on the Nile. And he's not eaten by crocodiles. In fact, he's saved by Pharaoh's daughter. And Pharaoh's daughter takes him in, and he grows up in the world of the pharaohs.

Now we have to remember, Moses grows up in the world of the pharaohs.

The wealth of the world pours into Egypt. And there's one person in his family who are the wealthiest people in the world. They also have the most power of anyone in the world. And this is the world in which Moses is introduced to, in which he's raised him.

Now here's where we have a problem. So I said the first part was for the young people. Now we get into a problem. I just want to spend a little time on here for us adults, okay? And that is, when did this take place? And knowing when it took place is actually very interesting. It gives us a viewpoint of Moses. Who does most people believe the pharaoh of the Exodus was? Anybody know?

Ramesses. Right. Now there were at least 11 pharaohs named Ramesses. So which Ramesses? The second. Why they say Ramesses the second? Because he built a big city named Ramesses. Okay. So we know over Ramesses who built a big city named Ramesses, he used slaves to do it. He has to be the pharaoh of the Exodus. Besides, it says in Exodus 1.11 that they built the city called Ramesses. Okay. So there you go. That's all the proof you need. We have a problem. Let's go to 1 Kings 6.

1 Kings 6.11 When you look at ancient history, there are certain dates that we sort of know exactly when they were real close. And there's other dates that are very fluid. Okay. So you always build things on the dates you know. Now you read this and it says in verse 1, And it came to pass in the four hundredth and eightieth year after the children of Israel come out of the land of Egypt, and the fourth year of Solomon reigns over Israel in the month of Ziv, which is the second month that he began to build the house of the Lord. Okay. Solomon began to build the temple and the fourth year of his reign, 480 years after the Israelites came out of Egypt. Simple. 480 years. Here's the problem. There are certain dates everybody agrees on.

And one of the dates that everybody agrees on, and I say everybody, I mean the great overwhelming, I can't say everybody, the great overwhelming majority of historians, conservative historians, religious historians, liberal historians, secular historians, atheist historians, they all agree that Ramesses II reigned between 1279 BC and somewhere around 1212-1213 somewhere in there. So give or take a couple of years, he reigned you know between 1279 BC and 1280 BC, 1213 BC, 1212 BC, somewhere in there. Okay, everybody agrees.

Also everybody agrees that Solomon began to reign in Israel somewhere around 970 BC.

Now, do you ever take a year or two? Some will say 971 BC, 972 BC. But it's always only a couple years apart. Everybody said, okay, we've got these dates down. Other dates we don't know. And take 970 BC, it's four years into its reign, so it's 966 BC.

Add 480 years on the 966 BC, somebody to come up with.

1466 BC. No, 1446 BC. 1446 BC. So what do you think? Hundreds of years before Ramesses, we have a problem. Either the Bible chronology is wrong, or everybody else's chronology is wrong. Or how do we fix this problem?

And you say, well, that's not that big a deal. Well, people will use this, by the way, to disprove the Bible. They'll use it to disprove the Bible, because if Ramesses is that the Pharaoh, then the whole book of Judges can't be completely true, because the dates in there aren't true. And since we know Solomon took over about 970, you really have to throw out the entire chronology of the book of Judges. The book of Judges can't be trusted in anything. So it seems like it's not important, but it is to those who look at the Bible and try to prove it, right or wrong. Actually, we're about to open a story that explains ancient historical writings about Moses. By the way, let me make a comment about Ramesses. In the book of Genesis, it talks about a district in Egypt called Ramesses. When the events of Genesis took place, there were no Ramesses in Egypt. It wasn't there. None of them had reigned yet.

What we have to understand, and you see it really in Genesis a lot, but you see it all through the Pentateuch. Many, many years after Moses died, there was an edit made to the names of towns.

I'll give you a perfect example. Abraham chased the five kings of Assyria to the land of Dan. Who's Dan? Great grandson. Okay, so Abraham was...

Abraham didn't know Dan. Dan didn't live for three more generations. And Dan, you say, okay, well maybe Moses did it. The problem is Dan wasn't settled into the Promised Land too long after Moses died. So how could he chase him to the place of Dan when Dan wasn't there for hundreds of years later? This is why the Jews believe that it was Ezra.

They believe Ezra went back and updated place names in the Bible because they made no sense anymore. It'd be like there was an American Indian tribe that lived here in Nashville. So I'm going to talk about Nashville, but I'm going to use the name of that, the tribe, what they called. And in a language no one understands. And you'd say, well, where's that? Well, you all live there. It would make any sense, would it? So we actually have an update. We know it took place because there's updates of names. We know there was no Ramesses in Genesis, yet it's mentioned in Genesis. We know there was no Dan in Genesis, yet it's mentioned in Genesis. Because of that, we actually know where these events took place. We know where the area of Dan was because we know when we get into Joshua and it tells us where Dan settled long after the Pentateuch had been written. Now, there's not a lot of cases, but there's just a few sprinkled through there, and without them we wouldn't know where these places are. I have no problem with that. God can edit it however He wants to edit it. He said, well, nobody edited, nobody edited the Pentateuch. Nobody edited Genesis, Exodus, the Phidicus, and the number of the seduter on me. And I said, okay, then answer one thing. And Moses died and was buried in such and such a place. No, no, he went off and they couldn't... Moses died and he went off and they couldn't find his body. Who wrote that? It was Moses.

Right? So, okay, Joshua wrote that afterwards. And yeah, no problem. It doesn't have to tell us Joshua wrote it because Moses didn't write it. It doesn't change the Bible as being inspired. What it means is we don't have to look. We don't have to try to cram Ramesses in here. And literally by doing so, we change all the chronology of the Old Testament. We don't have to do that. We just know. Oh, they built a city that later became known as Ramesses. By the way, they have excavated Ramesses. You know what they found out? Underneath of it is an older city.

There's an older city under there. Oh, okay. And so the name of that city couldn't have been Ramesses, right? It's older than Ramesses. So, so you say, okay, I'm not trying to get confusing I'm just trying to show that this whole thing of Ramesses being the Pharaoh is based on something that is not...there's another explanation that changes it. And now we can move it in and make the Bible right. We can make what the Bible says correct.

If we go back to 1446 as our starting point, because we're starting with the Bible, right? 966, 480 years. You with me here? As I said, the first part of this was for the kids, the second part's for us. We get to what is called the Egyptian 18th dynasty. Oh, by the way, there's another mummy. I thought young guys would like to see another mummy.

That's the way most of them look today, you know. Actually, I've seen the Ramesses mummy on a picture of it. They have it. One of the Ramesses. Okay. What we find is the 18th dynasty. There are two different sets of dates for the rulers of the 18th dynasty. And you say, how could they do that? Why don't they know? Very simple. Early in the 18th dynasty, there was, I believe, was a comet that went across Egypt. And it's quoted that, okay, in the rain of such and such, the comet came across Egypt. There's a problem. The comet took a long time to go across the sky. And we know the dates. They've been able to go back and figure out the dates, the years, of which it went across the sky. If you were in Memphis, it came across in one year. If you were in Thebes, it came across in another year. So they know, that's why if you look at dates of the 18th dynasty, they can be like eight years difference. And the reason why is everybody's trying to figure out where the guy was standing when he wrote, I saw the comet. And nobody knows. See, these are the problems you have with ancient chronology. It's all based on a guy seeing a comet. And everybody knows the comet was there. We're actually able to figure out when it was there, but where was the guy standing in Egypt when he saw it? And nobody knows. So there's a little difference in dates. This is the way most biblical scholars, the dates they use. And I'll show you why. Ammonhotep I is here. Thutmose I, or as it is pronounced, can be pronounced Thutmoseus. Thutmoseus is born here. Thutmose is born here. I use the English version of it. And he reigns and Moses is born. Then you have Thutmose II, who is only, look, he only reigns for a very short period of time.

And this is going to change what happens here in Egyptian history.

So it's at this time that Moses is born, and at this time Pharaoh's daughter, okay, the daughter of Thutmose, or Thutmose I, is the Pharaoh. You with me?

Thutmose takes Thutmose II, declares him Pharaoh, and they reign for a little period together. This is another thing that problems in Egyptian history. You have co-regents. People are Pharaoh at the same time. Thutmose II marries his half-sister. Her name is Hatshepsut.

He has a child through a concubine, and he dies. He declares this child the Pharaoh, and he dies.

And now, of course, this is Thutmose III, but he's a little child. He's now Pharaoh. And what happens is Hatshepsut takes over and literally becomes Pharaoh for the child.

You will find pictures, little carvings of Hatshepsut, and you'll look, and she has the little beard, like all the pharaohs did, little goatee.

And then you look at her and say, Ooh, that's either a very strangely formed man or that's a woman.

You have a 20-year period where they have a woman Pharaoh, and this would be the daughter of the pharaoh, the daughter who fished Moses out of the Nile.

She's not just the daughter of the pharaoh. She becomes co-regent, and for 20 years, she is the power. Oh, the little boy is Pharaoh. Every place he goes, everybody worships him, but she's the power. Now, by the way, nobody disagrees with this. All historians agree with this. Yeah, this really happened. Hatshepsut is really famous as one of the first great women of ancient times who had power. But you have to understand, if this is Moses' stepmother, what does that make him? There is a power struggle that happens in Egypt, according to the Bible, that's so severe that the stepson of Pharaoh's daughter has to run away. I used to be confused. So what? The stepson of Pharaoh's daughter killed an Egyptian slave master. If you were part of the royal family, you could kill whoever you wanted. So why was this an issue? That always was confusing to me.

Well, this power struggle may be a little more than we thought.

Josephus, the famous Jewish writer, historian, who wrote in the first century A.D., he says in his writings that Moses was brilliant, he was a beautiful child, and from the time she brought him into the court, the priest would be saying to Pharaoh, Kill him! He has been sent here to bring down our country.

From the very earliest age when he showed up at court, there were priests saying, Kill this boy! He knew it, too. He knew it. That there was this desire, this attempt to constantly kill him all his life. And what Josephus says is very strange. And that is, the only reason they didn't was because the power of his mother.

His mother intervened and kept the priest from killing him. He also says that by the time Moses is an adult, he becomes the general of an Egyptian army and conquers Ethiopia. One of the few things that we've seen, the Ten Commandments were Charlton Heston, and the Ethiopian king offers him his daughter as a prize. That's real. They get a lot of other things wrong, but that was real, at least according to Josephus. So what we have is, this is a powerful man. Moses isn't just some guy that hangs out, you know, because this woman who adopted him just happened to be Pharaoh's daughter.

If this chronology, and it's the chronology that, like I said, everybody now agrees this is the except for a few differences in dates because of the comment, okay, this is it. That what we have is, according to the Scripture, according to what we read in 1 Kings, this is the time that Moses lives.

He's a general. He is the adopted daughter or adopted son of a woman who is the co-regent and the power behind the throne.

Now, after Hapshatod died, by the way, top Moses III tried to destroy everything about her, but there was one thing he didn't destroy.

Her temple. That's what her temple looks like today.

The temple that she built for her worship, where she would go worship. That's a powerful person. You see the little people here?

That's little people. This is what's happened 3,500 years later.

This is what her temple still looks like today. You can imagine what it must look like then.

This is a powerful woman who expends huge amounts of resources. Where does she get that power from?

Well, if she's co-regent, she can do whatever she wants as she's taking care of the son as he grows up. Well, it wasn't her son. It was her nephew.

So, according to Josephus again, the Egyptians, when they had been preserved by Moses, in other words, after he had conquered Ethiopia, entertained a hatred towards him and were very eager in compressing their designs against him as suspecting that he would take occasion from his good success to raise a sedition and bring innovations into Egypt.

They feared Moses because he had the army behind him and he was promoting innovations. He wanted to change their culture and told the king that he ought to be slain. So now the entire court is trying to get the king to kill him. The king also, or Pharaoh, had some intentions of himself for the same purpose, basically because he was envious of him.

So the king wanted to kill him. They're looking for an excuse to kill him.

Now I want to go to Acts 7 because there's something said in Acts 7 that you can't find in the Old Testament. It's not in the Old Testament. It's something that had been passed on orally through the Jewish society and ends up in the Bible.

Acts 7, verse 20.

This is Stephen giving his defense that he is teaching the truth of God and Jesus is the Messiah. And in verse 20 he says, At this time Moses was born and was well pleasing to God, and he was brought up in his father's house for three months, but when he was sent out Pharaoh's daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son. He brought him up as her own son. She adopted him. He's a member of the royal family of Egypt.

And there's a power struggle going on.

His mother is raising the next Pharaoh and her son is her son. It doesn't take much to figure out that there's all kinds of factions now going on inside the power structure of Egypt. And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and deeds. Now we don't know what deeds he was mighty in except Josephus says, Yeah, he was a general over the army, conquered all of Ethiopia. Now when he was 40 years old, it came into his heart to visit his brother, the children of Israel. And seeing one of them suffer, he defended and avenged him, who was oppressed and struck down the Egyptian. Now that was in Exodus and that's why I didn't read that then. I wanted to read it now. For he supposed that his brother would have... Now this is real important because this isn't in the Old Testament. For he supposed that his brother would have understood that God would deliver them by his hand, but they did not understand.

When he killed the Egyptian, he thought they would understand God is sent down. God is sent me to save you. Now I want you to think about the power here.

Mom's the co-regent. I've got the army and I've got the slaves.

Moses had his foot on the throat of Egypt.

He was going to free the slaves because God had chosen to free the slaves. And all his life for 40 years he had heard all the priests tell the Pharaoh, Kill him, kill him, because his God has sent him to destroy us.

And he's got the power. He's finally got it. He's put it all together. I've got the army, I've got mom, and I've got the slaves. And it was the Israelites that said, No, no, no, no. Who do you think you are?

And all of a sudden he had nothing.

Mom probably died very quickly around this time period. He no longer had the army.

And most of the third said, Kill him. And he ran away.

He thought, this is what God wants me to do. He spent the next 40 years having Egypt taken out of him. What are we doing over this week? We're having Egypt taken out of us, right? That's what we're doing. We're having sin taken out of us.

He spent 40 years having Egypt taken out of him. So that when God finally came, and he's age 80, and said, I'm sending you back, he said, Oh, please don't send me back. I don't want to go back.

I'm not even good at talking. Look, I can't even speak Egyptian anymore.

I have no power. I smell like goats. I like goats. I'm raising goats. Goats are good. Don't send me back.

Okay, I'll send Aaron with you. He can talk for you. And all it is is, no, don't. Do not. Please don't. I don't want to. What a difference between a man who had Egypt by the throat.

He said, I get the power to bring you down and free the slaves.

The guy said, Now, you thought you had power. I'm going to show you what power is.

I'm going to show you what power really is, Moses. Not what you thought it was, but what it really is. See how this changes the story? This changes the story.

And the only questionable part of this has to do with, when we go back, if some of these dates are eight to ten years different than each other, because we don't know where the guy saw the comet from, where he was standing in Egypt when the comet went over. Other than that, everybody agrees this is where the 18th dynasty was. Everybody agrees that Ramesses was a long time later.

And everybody agrees that Solomon became ruler about 970 BC.

This agrees with the Scripture.

This now puts the Scripture together. But this comment in Acts that bothered me for years, it bothered me for years, he was going to free the slaves. How did he think he was going to do that?

God hadn't talked to him and told him he was going to do it yet. He hadn't talked to him in the burning bush. That was 40 years later. He had put all the pieces of the puzzle together, probably with Mom's help. Because she had so much power. Remember, she's the one with the little goatee and wearing the funny little hat. Because she's been reigning over Egypt for a long time.

The problem is, Thutmose III grew up and decided, no, Mom, you and Moses don't get the kingdom.

Thutmose III is also one of few Egyptian kings, pharaohs, that reigned for more than 40 years. Remember, you'll have to have somebody reign for 40 years. He reigned for over 50 years.

So that fits the biblical narrative, too. That's one reason Ramesses has put on there. You got, you know, you got, I think it's Seti I, whoever was before him, reigned for 40 years. But this one fits. And this fits the Bible.

So a little different sermon. Because I wanted to cover this. I wanted to show you something. I wanted to show you what it was like, first of all, the kids. Wow, this is what it was like to be a slave in Egypt. But I wanted all of us adults to see, wait a minute, this is what it was like to be Moses. And for one brief moment, he had the power of the greatest superpower in the world right there. And God said, oh no, you don't. That's not how we do this.

So let's finish by going to Hebrews 11. I try to stay away from speculation, but I can't give you the exact dates here, because once again, the comet has us all messed up. No, it's the guy who saw the comet. We don't know exactly, but these are real close. Okay, these dates are very close. 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 with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin. Esteeming the approach of Christ's greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, he looked to the reward. See, he could have fought. He could have tried to overthrow the kingdom with the army. He could have stuck with mom. He could have fought back. But he wasn't staying there because he wanted to become the Egyptian Pharaoh. He was staying there because he thought he was supposed to free his people. So all this time in the Egyptian world, he had a goal. He had a purpose. It was to get rid of it, to get his people out of there. He just misunderstood how God was going to do it. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king. For he endured his seeing him who was invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the first moon should touch them. And by faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, whereas the Egyptians attempting to do so were drowned. By faith let us keep the Passover, which we did two nights ago, but let us keep and draw close to God and receive the spiritual benefits we're supposed to receive by observing the Feast of Unleavened Bread.