Is This Moses?

Hello and welcome to Let the Stone Speak. My name is Nicholas Irwin. I'm the assistant managing editor of our magazine and your host for today's show. On today's program, I'm going to interview Christopher Eames. He's one of our contributing editors and one of our most prolific writers. In the March-April issue of our magazine, he asked the question, is this Moses? In that article, he looked into the life of a man from Egyptian history who parallels really closely with that of biblical Moses. So in today's interview, we'll be talking to him a little bit more about that and getting some more information from him on that subject. This is a super interesting topic. It's something that requires a lot of deep research. There's a lot of details. There's a lot of information. So in addition to this interview, I highly recommend that you go back and read Christopher's article from the March-April issue titled, Is This Moses? I will put that into the show notes so that you can find that easily. In addition to that article, I also recommend that you read his article from last year titled, Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus? This article really does go hand in glove with his article on Moses because it gives you a little bit more about the time frame, a little bit more about the Egyptian key players at this time. So I'll be sure to put that in the show notes as well. If you enjoy this interview, then please subscribe to our channel. Be sure that you turn on notifications so that you're notified whenever we post new content. And then of course, if you're not already, please sign up for our free bi-monthly biblical archaeology magazine, Let the Stones Speak. You can sign up for that at armstronginstitute.org forward slash magazine. But for now, enjoy this interview. Thank you, Christopher, for taking the time to this interview. My pleasure. In your article at the very beginning, you say that one of the biggest questions in the field of biblical archaeology is, Who is the Pharaoh of the Exodus? That's a subject that you've tackled in the article. You did an interview with Brent Knoxball about it. I think it was this time last year that that article came out. So in this article, you ask the question, Well, what about Pharaoh's arch rival? Is he presented anywhere in Egyptian history? And then in 5,000 or so words, you give this pretty thorough and interesting option for the identity of Moses. So before we get into the nitty gritty details of that, what brought this subject about? What was the process of coming to find out about potential Moses? OK, so whenever it comes to dealing with a subject like this, there's going to be a lot of controversy. There's a lot of debate surrounding not just who was Moses, who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but especially when was the time frame of the Exodus. You've got to have the time frame locked in mind before you can start making these other associations. So like you mentioned, this latest article on Moses really builds off of last year's article on the Pharaoh of the Exodus and the time frame. That earlier article makes the case for the time frame in which I go with the more literalist time frame of the 15th century BCE for the Exodus and then identifying the Pharaoh with Amenhotep II. So within that framework, then, you can start to look more closely for a Moses figure. To answer your question as to what prompted this particular individual, a feature of this article, I was reading a book one day, I think two or three years ago. It's a co-authored book by Scott Alan Roberts and John Richard Ward. Both were making different cases for the Exodus. The book is called The Exodus Reality. So it's a bit of a different book. It kind of jumps from one theory to the next. Within it, Scott Roberts made the case for a certain individual called Senenmuk in Egyptian history. He identified this Senenmuk as none other than Moses. He goes outright in that book. There is no one that matches up so well. This has to be Moses. Boom. Period. That's the language he uses in the book. He made an interesting case for it. I thought, okay, well, this is pretty interesting. This is something I'd like to tackle, maybe look a little bit into. I'm sure it's probably going to come apart in the details. Surely it's got to be too good to be true. I'll look into it. It makes an interesting case, but it's probably going to be too good to be true. A lot of these kinds of things can turn out that way. Much later on, more recently as well, in putting together this article, I'm going into more of these details and doing my own study. I realized that, wait a second, he could have made a much stronger case for this individual. There's all these other angles that line up to where now I'm thinking, well, this is a really good potential identification with Moses. In the article, I don't come out and say this absolutely is Moses, but then I try and flesh out some of these ideas that he at least had started to put together, pointing to this as none other than Moses. What do we know about the life story of Senenmut, and then who are some of the key Egyptian players at this time as well? Again, going back to our time frame, this is the really critical thing, establishing the chronology. We've done this in previous articles. You can find a lot of detail on our website about this. Basically, for our starting point, we take 967, which is a widely agreed upon date for the start of Solomon's Temple, from a number of different sources converging on that date as the time in which Solomon started building his temple, 967 BCE. 1 Kings 6 verse 1 gives us a period of 480 years from the Exodus to when Solomon started the temple, or it gives in the 480th year, i.e. 479 years. Winding that back gives us an Exodus date of 1446, 40-year sojourn in the wilderness, puts them arriving in Canaan 1406 BCE. Now with that, we can apply the lifetime of Moses, which the Bible gives as 120 years, and it splits apart into three 40-year brackets. It has him dying just before the Israelites entered Canaan. If the Israelites are entering Canaan 1406 BCE, 120 years earlier puts his birth at around 1526 BCE. With that date, we can compare that to Egyptian chronology, but it's not quite that simple because there are several different Egyptian chronologies. There's a high chronology, there's a low chronology, and we deal with the sum in the article, but basically we align this with a high chronology to make it long story short. This would put Moses' birth during the reign of Thutmose I. Thutmose I, and it would put Amenhotep II as the pharaoh of the Exodus, but again, that's the subject for that article from last year. It puts Moses' birth during the reign of Thutmose I, and it identifies the pharaoh's daughter, the all-important pharaoh's daughter, with Hatshepsut, who was the daughter of Thutmose I. It would make her around 10 to 15 years old at the time of the discovery of Moses, depending on what version of high chronology you go with. That would have his discovery at that time period, and then it would basically have his first 40 years in Egypt going all the way to 1486 BCE. Do we see anything interesting during that window of time in ancient Egyptian history? Well, we do see the rise of a nobody, a no-name, to the very highest levels of Princeton during this period, during the reign of Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut, she was this royal pharaoh's daughter during the reign of Thutmose I, and especially so because she was a fully royal daughter. Thutmose I did not produce a fully royal son. He had a half-royal son, Thutmose II. Just before he died, he made Thutmose II marry Hatshepsut, who was fully royal, in order to bring the royal line together like that. After Thutmose I, then Thutmose II reigns. He was a rather sickly pharaoh and didn't have a long reign before he had a son, not with Hatshepsut. He only had a daughter with Hatshepsut, but he had a son with another minor wife who would become Thutmose III. So Thutmose II now dies, but Thutmose III is only two years old. His stepmother, Hatshepsut, begins a co-regency with Thutmose III for something like 20, 22 years. During this time of Hatshepsut, there's this individual called Senenmut, who goes from a no-name to the highest ranks of power. He has nearly 100 different titles. He is named the Crown Prince. He's named the head of the Certain League of Prophets. He's named the Royal Architect. He's named the Overseer of the Granaries. Right down the list, all the top titles for this guy, to where some of the experts on this period feel like there's no way that Senenmut can even fulfill a fraction of these responsibilities. But for whatever reason, Hatshepsut is giving this no-name all of these titles. So Senenmut, he comes from a family which is often referred to as this peasant family, just this no-name, commoner class. Next to nothing is known about his family. They're not mentioned with any titles. His father evidently had a pretty poor burial. But as Senenmut got older and was beginning to be raised in rank, he was able to rebury his father in a more royal kind of way, later along with his mother. So we have this Senenmut coming from peasant status and being gradually catapulted all the way to what some say is he was the de facto ruler of Egypt, basically, under Hatshepsut. It just matches so well with what we read about in the early Exodus account. This nobody, Moses, taken and then raised as prince of Egypt, thanks to the kindness of what at the time was Pharaoh's daughter, who we identify as Hatshepsut, who later became a queen or a pharaoh in her own right. Then there's a lot of really interesting angles with Hatshepsut as well and her benevolence toward foreigners, her inscriptions which speak to such a thing, her heart full of love. As a pharaoh, these are kind of amazing sentiments which kind of match really well with the biblical account of the pharaoh's daughter and someone who would raise this nobody to the highest level of power in the land. So I'm not sure if I answered that entirely or maybe too much. Well, you definitely gave a really compelling case just as you do in your article. When I was first going through your article and I was introduced to the name Senedlid, one of my first questions was, why is the name so different from Moses? We have the Hyksos rulers and the names there match very closely with the names of the patriarchs, the Hebrew names of the patriarchs. So I wondered, you know, why is the same very different? But then, pretty quickly in your article, you give a really compelling answer to that. Okay, yeah, that's a good point. This is really the first question that has to come. Why isn't he called Moses? If Senenmut is Moses, then why isn't he called Moses? So Scott Roberts handles this pretty well because actually the meaning of the name Senenmut is really strange as well. It means mother's brother, like what on earth kind of a name is this? And he sees this name as another title, like all these other titles that Senenmut has been given, and Senenmut as a personal name given to him as well, as another form of title, meaning this mother's brother, and that this was the pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut's way of basically elevating Senenmut to the level of pharaonic royalty by tying him in as almost a familial kind of member. Because you've got to remember that the pharaohs were like a demigod class, or even more than that, like they were seen as divine, and so they had no interactions with the commoners like this. And so in order to make this commoner what he became, he would need to be raised to that kind of a level as well. And so that would make sense of this, in its own right, really strange name, Senenmut meaning mother's brother. And it would kind of fit as well with this idea of adoption by a young Hatshepsut. If you look at the timeline, she would have been fairly young, 10 to 15 years old. And so not so much of a mother's son as kind of like a mother's brother. So it emphasizes that familial link and also raises him to that rank where he can be kind of classed on par with the pharaohs, with the royalty, which he very much wasn't originally. There seems to be some more kind of familiar relationship there with Hatshepsut's daughter, correct? Yes. With his statues, maybe you can tell us about that. Exactly. So again, Hatshepsut was married to her half-brother, Thutmose II. And again, he produced an heir through a minor wife, his son Thutmose III. But he did produce a daughter with Hatshepsut, Neferrure. So Senenmut actually became the tutor to Neferrure on behalf of Hatshepsut. And there are actually several statues of Senenmut seated and holding Neferrure, the princess, on his lap in his position as tutor and her as his student. And this is really weird. This has been described in scholarly articles for the past century or more, how odd this image is. Because commoners cannot touch royalty. This is the divine pharaonic family. And so not only can commoners be interacting in this way or touching in this way, even the fact that you have this young child, this princess, depicted so much smaller than a commoner breaks various taboos, normal restrictions in the way art was done, things were portrayed in ancient Egypt. Anything in the royal family would have to be depicted much larger than the commoner. But you have this slew of statues of Senenmut as a tutor with Neferrure seated in front of or on him, depicting this really close, intimate relationship with the pharaoh's family, which really was a sign of how close Hatshepsut and Senenmut were in order to allow those kinds of interactions to take place. And naturally, it's taken to another level in the theories about what the relationship between Senenmut and Hatshepsut was like. There's been a lot of speculation. Were they lovers, even? Did they have some kind of a relationship? At Hatshepsut's mortuary complex in Deir el-Bahari, there is a graffito that's pretty lewd of the two of them kind of hidden away, and it was accomplished by one of the workmen at the site. So there are some theories and speculations, like was there some kind of a relationship, forbidden relationship between the two. But there was a study done, I forget exactly the name of the individual who did it, a study done in the 1980s, which pretty effectively went through all of that and debunked the idea of any kind of sexual relationship between the two. But all of it does just show how close Senenmut had become with the royal demigod pharaonic family at the time. You said before that he had about 100 royal titles, I think it was. More around 90, but yeah, basically. And he's known for having many achievements, many skills. We know that among some of his achievements, Senenmut was a royal architect. And you already mentioned Hatshepsut's mortuary, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about how he contributed to that monumental structure. Sure, so he's widely attributed as having built it. There's nothing anywhere that says outright that he built it, but most people agree, especially in his role as chief royal architect, that he completed it. There is some debate, but not too much about that. So this huge complex is really one of the wonders of the world. You can see it parked up right against the cliff face there in Egypt, just incredible design and layout. And it consists of this huge outer courtyard framing this inner Jezer Jezeru, or Holy of Holies, which was part of the whole funerary complex layout. Which itself is really interesting in relation to Moses, for a number of reasons. Because, of course, Moses in the wilderness oversaw the construction of the tabernacle, which also is described in similar terminology with the Holy of Holies. So it kind of makes you wonder if that terminology was kind of understood already as being like that inner sanctum type area. But then the Bible also describes a kind of obscure pillared building that Moses also made up against the side of the mountain in the wilderness as well, with a number of pillars or colonnades, which this there al-Bahari complex has. It's a big colonnaded building. And then it's interesting from another angle as well. Because in the Exodus 2 account, you have Moses who visits the workmen, some of them Hebrew workmen, at this certain work site. And he watches an Egyptian master beating one of the Hebrew workmen. And then he makes sure that no one's watching, and goes and kills this Egyptian workman and buries him. And, of course, everyone knows the story. The story goes that word got out about this. Moses realized it. And that's when he fled into Midian for his life. So this story kind of brings up some logical questions as well. What was Moses doing at this work site? Like, did he have perhaps some kind of responsibilities in this kind of an environment as maybe some kind of architectural guide? Maybe he was overseeing certain Egyptians at the site himself and went to check on how the Hebrews who were working at the site were being treated. And maybe this even took place at Deir al-Bahari. So there's room for a lot of speculation. But certainly this idea of architecture and Moses slash Senenmut having skill in this area would seem to be a really good fit. Senenmut had his own tomb at that complex, right? How does that contribute to this narrative? Yes. So Senenmut had a twin tomb which started to be made for him. Nothing unusual. Anyone in his kind of high office would have a royal tomb set up. The thing that is unusual is that his tomb was never finished. His tombs were never finished. And they were pretty violently destroyed. So the archaeologists have found these tombs having been prematurely closed up, blocked off. Inside of them, there are still quarry remains from the rocks. There are still workman's tools. His sarcophagus had been smashed into pieces, absolutely obliterated. So for whatever reason, Senenmut came under Senenmut's memory. And even before he died, because he obviously wasn't buried in there, I mean, they were half finished, these tombs. Senenmut came under someone's bad graces to a pretty extreme degree. And this is one of the most interesting parts of the story. Because Senenmut, we don't know where he's buried. We don't have his tomb. He disappears. Someone that goes from nobody to such a high princely level in ancient Egypt completely disappears at or around 1486 BCE, if you're following the chronology, which we walk the readers through in the article. And this would be right at the time when the biblical Moses disappeared. The last mention of him on an artifact in ancient Egypt would align, following our chronology that we lay out, with 1486 BCE. Like there's a mention of him a few years earlier with Neferure in the Sinai. And then a few years later, there's this other mention, and then that's it. He disappears. And one of the leading experts on this time period, she writes that this, we quote it in the article, I forget the quote exactly, but she writes how this disappearance has led to all manner of theories, like some of them befitting a murder mystery for why Senenmut completely disappears from the record. Well, if you know the Bible and why Moses disappears, well, that may not be too far from the truth. Maybe this is why Senenmut completely disappears because of his story paralleling that of Moses. Him being Moses and therefore at this time fleeing from Egypt for his life. After working on this article, doing all of the research, how convinced are you that Senenmut is Moses? I think I'm as convinced as can be. It's interesting that you put it like that. Someone came by the institute yesterday and asked that very question. On a percentage level, I said maybe 90%, but it's hard to say. I'm as convinced as can be. The way this lines up is just so incredible. Right the way down the list, there are still questions. The most obvious being, the thing that would settle it would be the name Moses. If ever that kind of equivocation was found, that Senenmut equals Moses, like Scott Roberts deals with this question of the meaning of the name Senenmut. Even the later Egyptian priest historian, Menetho, of the 3rd century BCE, he writes that actually Moses used that name Moses among the Israelites and another name among the Egyptians, which would also make sense. The question remains open-ended until you have that absolute equivocation, Senenmut is Moses, somewhere. Besides that, I just think it lines up so well that who else could it be? There is one specialist for this time period and for Queen Hatshepsut that notes that during her reign, she elevated several other commoners into high-ranking positions. So this is something I mentioned in the article. Could it be another commoner during her reign was Moses? Yes, it could be, and there could be something to that. But really, nothing quite hits the level of Senenmut, nothing that we know about. And you go right down the list from his position in life when he started, to his position in life when he ended, his disappearance, the later destruction of his remains, as well as Hatshepsut's remains. It's pretty remarkable all the way down. So maybe 90-95%, maybe I would say, but as much as can be, I think this is Moses that the Bible is describing. Well, you frame it so well in the article, just telling the reader, decide for yourself. Here's the research. So we thank you for that research. We thank you for the article and for taking time to do this interview. My pleasure. Thank you very much.