The First Passover and the Exodus from Egypt

Two weeks before the departure the people received their first commandment as a nation: this month shall be for you the beginning of months—the right to count time themselves. On the tenth of Nisan each household took a lamb and kept it in plain view of the Egyptians, for whom the ram was sacred. On the fourteenth it was slaughtered, its blood put on the doorposts and lintel, and on the night of the fifteenth the roasted meat was eaten with matzah and bitter herbs, loins girded, shoes on the feet, staff in hand. At midnight the firstborn of Egypt died and Pharaoh himself drove the Hebrews out. They left Ramses, about six hundred thousand men on foot besides women, children and the mixed multitude that joined them; the dough had no time to rise and became matzah. Moses carried Joseph's bones, keeping an oath made a hundred and forty years earlier. From this night comes the commandment to tell the story to one's child in every generation.

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.