This post is a follow-up from the previous post in that it continues discussing Passover. This time, however, we are focusing on the pharaoh, believed to have been Rameses II.

Keep in mind that there is no actual evidence of an exodus taking place, especially at the scale Exodus recounts. The story is likely a myth passed down orally from generation to generation with no obvious origin. In that sense, it is similar to the Adam story (about the creation of the universe and the human race), the Abraham story (in which the community adopts this particular deity out of the many worshiped at the time) and the Jacob story (which serves as a basis for the origin of the Israelite tribes). We can include the Noah story as well, but in that case there may be an actual geological cause (a comet impact in the Indian Ocean triggering a global flood).

When it does come to historical fiction in the Old Testament, we can probably assume that its setting is fairly accurate. In particular, when Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, the price they charge is actually consistent with archaeological records for the price of an adult male slave.

At any rate, back to Rameses. Rameses II (1279-1213 BC) was one of the most powerful rulers Egypt ever had. He embarked on extensive construction programs, some of which are even referred to in Exodus. He was a seasoned diplomat and war hero, leading Egypt on many campaigns against the Ethiopians and Hittites.

Yes, he did in fact reign for 66 years, living into his nineties (yes, Elizabeth II beat him). For large numbers of Egyptians, he was pharaoh their entire lives. The fact that he was not overthrown during this period likely means that he was well-respected (or feared). This likely means either he was very smart or he had men around him who advised him well. Most likely both.

Finally, keep in mind that in ancient Egypt, the pharaoh was seen as a living god and wore paraphernalia which maintained this illusion. This will become important later on.

Now to the Exodus story.

Suppose you are Rameses. A nobleman who is an Israelite or supports the Israelites asks you to let the Israelites go. He presents a case that the slaves are suffering and that they should be released to worship their personal god, whose name is not mentioned. This man seems to have a valid case, and you can see where he is coming from. What do you do?

The answer is obvious. Hell no, and for several reasons. You may sympathize with the lobbyist, but politically it would be a disaster and as pharaoh you have to keep the entire kingdom in mind.

First, emancipating a group of slaves by royal decree is going to set a bad precedent. Your entire society is built on slaves, and releasing one group is going to inevitably encourage everyone else to start asking for freedom. Inevitably you will wind up with all of your workers leaving, ruining your economy and supply chains.

Backing down at any point after this make you look like you are flip-flopping, favoring some groups of slaves over others, and could conceivably trigger a slave revolt. That is not good for your administration.

Second, this community is going to worship one god. This god is not named. In particular, it is not you, since you are seen as a god. This is effectively treason, and it must be stopped in its tracks.

There is actually a more serious issue, however, associated with worshiping one god, one which was likely baked into Egyptian culture less than a century earlier. It was as likely as important to them today as World War II is to Americans today.

Akhenaten.

Akhenaten was a heretic pharaoh who reigned about 70 years before Rameses. In defiance of all established tradition, he imposed monotheism on the country, worshiping only the sun god and ignoring the others. Needless to say, disrespecting most of your pantheon is likely going to bring disaster on your country. Who is going to make the rain fall if you scorn the god controlling that? Who is going to present disease and blight?

Most people thought Akhenaten was completely insane, and his successors undertook a campaign to suppress monotheism after his death and erase all references of him from monuments and documents. His son, in fact, was none other than the famous Tutankhamen, who was originally born Tutanhkhaten and changed his name in an attempt to atone for his father’s misdeeds. “Sorry, Thoth! The guy was an idiot. I’ll fix that!”

With this in mind, suppose you are Rameses. What are you going to think if someone is going to tell you he is going to start a community to worship one god? “Oh great. Just what we need. This god has to be the Aten. Another Akhenaten heresy to jeopardize the safety of my kingdom. There is no way I’m letting that slide!”

The Akhenaten connection plays an interesting role in the case where Moses asks Rameses to let the Israelites worship their god in the wilderness after promising they will come back. Even if the Israelites did in fact come back and resume their servitude, the ceremony will still risk bringing back monotheism, which is a no-no. Needless to say, Rameses is not stupid. He tell the Israelites to leave their cattle behind to ensure their return and prevent animal sacrifices. Moses responds by saying the cattle have to be taken along as this deity has not told them which animals to sacrifice they need to hedge their bets. Rameses sees through this immediately and turns him down.

Incidentally, there are those who believe the man we know today as Moses could have been Akhenaten himself. This has largely been debunked. Akhenaten would have almost certainly been too old at the time. However, to be fair later officials could have been inspired by Akhenaten’s beliefs and developed monotheistic practices themselves.

Rameses refuses Moses’s request, which prompts Moses to perform several miracles to show that his deity is angry. We will assume, for the sake of realism, that there is no actual divine intervention here.

The first thing Moses does is turn his staff into a snake. If you are Rameses, you roll your eyes at this as this is a common court parlor trick, one which he knows himself. He instructs his aides to do the same thing. Moses’s snake eats the other snakes, which could be a bit worrisome but could be just due to chance. At this point, Rameses has no definitive proof that Moses has a god backing him. Consequently, it would be unwise for him the pharaoh to back down.

Moses then causes his hand to become leprous and then spontaneously heal himself, an act which Rameses’s men do not know how to duplicate. However, Rameses has seen enough tricks during his life to conclude this is also slight-of-hand. Moses hides his hand during the act, which immediately screams a standard magic trick. Rameses is aware that some magicians have tricks others do not. If he is wise, he encourages his aides to learn to reproduce this trick.

At this point Moses invokes the plagues. First the blood, then the frogs (crocodiles in some interpretations), and so forth. There have been several articles written on how the first nine plagues could have been caused by a sequence of natural phenomena triggered by unusual runoff in the mountains feeding the Nile and a few other events. This would almost certainly have been known to members of the court, including both Moses and Rameses. Once again, Rameses does not take the bait. There is no evidence for divine intervention here, either, so he still has no need to back down. Sure, your peasants are likely panicking and pressuring you to submit to Moses’s demands. However, there is nothing he can do about it either, so he keeps his mouth shut. Besides, like any high-ranking politician, he has likely been spared from any real hardship and cannot really relate to the lives of the 99%.

The Torah says that the proto-Israelite community is spared from the plagues. My personal theory is that Moses, who knew that they would be coming once he heard about what was happening upstream, told the Israelites to make preparations and as a result the Israelites were affected less than Egypt as a whole. The idea that the Israelites were not affected at all (barring divine intervention, as we are doing here) is implausible — but remember that the text is a biased source supporting the Israelite cause.

The tenth plague, the deaths of the firstborn, is where things get interesting. As described the plague makes no sense (again, barring divine intervention). How would its instigators know who was the firstborn? Where would the Israelites find the manpower to kill all of those people? Why kill the firstborn of the peasantry, who had never served as overlords in the first place and whose deaths would almost certainly cause Rameses to get even angrier at you? Why go after the cattle?

History has in fact documented that Rameses’s firstborn son predeceased him, so Rameses did indeed lose him. What’s interesting, however, is that the Wikipedia page dedicated to this man indicates that

Among the artifacts found in the tomb were canopic jars labeled with Amun-her-khepeshef’s name and containing organs. Also found were bones from four males including a skull with a deep fracture, believed to have been made by a mace.

It sure looks like this man was assassinated along with several of his guards.

I can imagine like many repressed communities, the Israelite slaves and their supporters had some kind of terrorist organization. Suppose you are a member of this organization and are reporting to Moses. Moses is complaining that Rameses isn’t listening and that the pharaoh is not really suffering any hardships from the plagues in the palace. You then suggest that you have a way to have Rameses experience firsthand what it feels like to have your sons persecuted or thrown into the Nile.

Assassinating the crown prince and some of his supporters would have been a clever strategy. It would explain the Israelites and their allies placing blood on their doorposts (“we support you: don’t go after us while you are in the area”). It would throw the succession into a turmoil if Rameses himself were to be targeted in a future mission. And it would certainly bring Rameses to experience the full wrath of the Israelites.

Why not target Rameses himself the first time around? For one thing, the pharaoh himself would have been a much more difficult as he would have been almost certainly guarded (whereas the crown prince is one of many possible heirs). Furthermore, the cell has no idea what Rameses’s successor will have as his policy, let alone who he will be if the crown prince is also killed. Lastly, the Israelites need Rameses around to officially let them leave. This is part of the reason the Allies did not kill the Japanese emperor during World War II: someone had to sign the surrender documents.

If you are Rameses, you are absolutely shocked by the assassination. For the first time, the horror hits home. To add insult to injury, Moses comes up and says his god did the job (he obviously can’t reveal the existence of the cell). If Moses times it right, he can catch Rameses while he is grieving and is not thinking straight.

There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If you are in the denial phase at the time you just want to get Moses off your back. You relent and let the people go. Eventually you will have to deal with the point you need to train a new heir, but that’s far in the future for now.

Shortly after issuing the decree to emancipate the Israelites, you progress to the second stage of grief, anger. You now want to avenge yourself on the people who killed your heir, so you order your men to butcher some of the Israelite slaves. However, you have a problem: Moses, expecting this response, has urged the Israelites to leave as quickly as possible so that they are out of harm’s way before the pharaoh gets his act together. Furious, you order your soldiers to chase them down, hopefully pinning them against the Sea of Reeds.

On paper, chasing down the Israelites should be relatively straightforward. Most of them were slaves, they are almost certainly on foot, and very few are armed. Your forces have chariots with you and are much more maneuverable. If they intend to cross the Sea of Reeds they will have to use one of the few known paths across this area.

However, Moses has anticipated this as well and has chosen a crossing point which is dry at some times and flooded in other times (depending on the wind direction and so forth).

Suppose you are the officer in charge of the Egyptian recapture expedition. You see exactly what he is trying to do, trying to cross on a dubious land bridge. The obvious solution is to pursue, naturally. However, that solution is too obvious. The ground looks muddy and looks like it will not be able to support chariots (and you do not want to lose your chariots in the mud there, especially if the water comes back). You could leave your chariots behind and try to cross mounted, but then you will need a rear guards and lose men: who will watch the chariots in case the Israelites come back for them on some other path? Finally, you can cross on foot, but then you lose your maneuverability and will be unable to catch the Israelites.

Your best bet is likely to try to send your forces over to a different, more permanent land bridge, get across the Sea of Reeds, and then catch up with the Israelites. The catch is, Moses knows this as well. There is no way he is going to follow any predictable route through the Sinai wilderness, especially if it goes anywhere near any Egyptian fortresses.

Needless to say, you are concerned that if you lose sight of the Israelites now you will not get another chance at them. However, given that you can move more quickly than they are you may be able to look around for a while and catch them before you go too far.

In this case, however, the officer makes a mistake and decides to take the chariots across the temporary land bridge in pursuit of the Israelites. Although this is a foolish mistake, keep in mind that he almost certainly had to deal with the fact that Rameses was NOT in a good mood issuing him these orders. This officer could very well worry that Rameses will execute him if he comes back without Moses’s head. Faced with a no-win situation, he risks the crossing. In doing so, he violates a cardinal principle of military strategy: never engage the enemy on terrain of the opponent’s choosing.

“The Egyptians pursued and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. ²⁴ And in the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw the Egyptian forces into a panic, ²⁵ clogging^[b] their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily. And the Egyptians said, ‘Let us flee from before Israel, for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians.’”

Good luck escaping if it requires leaving the chariots. You’re probably having trouble marching through the mud as well. You can only hope that you can get across before the land bridge disappears.

“So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared. And as the Egyptians fled into it, the Lord threw^[c] the Egyptians into the midst of the sea. ²⁸ The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen; of all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained.”

Needless to say, that hope was dashed fairly quickly. The Egyptians lose all men who engaged in the crossing (good luck swimming in armor), including almost certainly this officer. Although the text seems to indicate that those who stayed on the Egyptian side of the Sea of Reeds survived, it would be unlikely that they would have been able to find the Israelites without calvary. They would also have had to determine who was now in command of that unit, which may have also taken time.

In a nutshell, this is what Rameses had to deal with. He was a smart man, well-respected by his people. However, he lost much of his advantage when he had to face an opponent who knew him well and was as politically savvy as he was.

The photo is of the throne room of the Iolani Palace, in Honolulu. This is the only royal palace in the United States, as Hawaii had been a kingdom prior to its incorporation into the American overseas empire.