The Ten Plagues of Egypt

Moses and Aaron come to Pharaoh with a demand: let My people go. Pharaoh answers with a question that has echoed ever since—who is the Lord that I should heed His voice?—and doubles the work quota. What follows is a year that split Egypt's history in two. Blood, frogs, lice, wild beasts, cattle plague, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn: ten blows, each striking an Egyptian god or a pillar of Egyptian power. The Nile that fed the country and was worshipped as a deity turned foul. The sacred herds died. The darkness that cancelled the sun cult was palpable—for three days no man saw his brother or rose from his place. Between the blows there were pauses, and each time Pharaoh was given a chance to relent. He agreed several times and each time took his word back. The last blow fell at midnight on the fifteenth of Nisan, and Egypt itself thrust Israel out.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.