The curious chronology of Moses' birth

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27 August 2022 index-topical-hb

There is a remarkable sort of compression in Genesis and Exodus, especially once you start adding up the numbers of the Masoretic Text. Adam is alive when Methuselah is born. Methuselah is alive when Shem is born. Shem is alive when Jacob is born. Jacob is alive when Kohath is born.

So from the birth of Adam to the birth of Kohath, all the events described in Genesis occur during five overlapping human lives.

Kohath is the father of Amram, and Amram is the father of Moses. Depending on whether Kohath is alive at the birth of Moses, from creation to the death of Moses is six or seven overlapping human lives.

According to Exodus 12:40, as it stands in the Masoretic Text, the Israelites spent 430 years from their entrance into Egypt until the Exodus. However, there is another way of counting the time involved which suggests a much shorter exodus (see chronology-exodus). Additional complications are posed by the strange genealogy of Moses found in Exodus 6.

Let us start with the 430-year chronology and work from there, at least to start with. On the a quo side of things, we read in Genesis 46 that Kohath was among the persons who went down into Egypt with Jacob. On the ad quem side, we read in Exodus 7:7 that Moses was 80 years old at the time of the Exodus. So a little math, then, tells us that Moses is born 350 years after Kohath went down into Egypt.

We read in Exodus 6 that Kohath was the father of Amram, and that Kohath lived 133 years. If Kohath was taken to Egypt as an infant, and became the father of Amram on his deathbed, the very longest amount of time that can have passed from the entry into Egypt to the birth of Amram is 133 years.

We read in Exodus 6 that Amram was the father of Moses, and that Amram lived 137 years. So when Amram died, the total time from the entry into Egypt cannot have been more than 270 years. And so Amram dies 80 years before his son Moses is born. This is a problem.

The problem becomes more interesting when we consider Amram's wife Jochebed, who is described in Exodus 6 as Amram's "father's sister". So Jochebed is the daughter of Levi.

Levi was already an adult at the time of the entry into Egypt, having already had three sons and with just his brother having massacred the entire town of Shechem. Levi was the third son of Leah, and Zebulun her sixth. So we can say that Levi must be at least three years older than Zebulun. Given that Zebulun was born before Joseph, Levi must also be at least three years older than Joseph.

"Now Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh" (Genesis 41:46). And Joseph served Pharaoh through seven years of plenty (Genesis 41:53) and two years of famine (Genesis 45:6) before Jacob came down to Egypt. So Joseph must be 39 and Levi must be at least 42 when Jacob and company enter Egypt.

As Levi lived 137 years according to Exodus 6, and according to the materials in Genesis must have been at least 42 years old upon entering Egypt, he cannot have been in Egypt for more than 95 years. Even if he became the father of Jochebed on his deathbed, she cannot have been born more than 95 years into the time in Egypt. Now, as we have calculated before, Moses was born 350 years into the time in Egypt.

A little math, then, tells us that Jochebed was at least 255 years old when Moses was born, and because he was born at least 80 years after the death of his father, she must have been pregnant for at least eighty years.

But all these calculations assume a 430-year sojourn in Egypt.

The simpler explanation, the explanation of the Documentary Hypothesis and related hypotheses, is that Genesis and Exodus are stitched together from multiple documents that have multiple perspectives on the stories they tell. So in one telling of the story, the time in Egypt is short, perhaps short enough that Kohath could go down into Egypt and his nephew Moses could lead the people out. In another telling, the israelites were in Egypt 430 years.