1.     Joseph asks his relatives to take his bones with them when they leave Egypt. (Gen 50:24-25)

1.     [See Below]

2.     Joseph dies at the age of one hundred and ten. (Gen 50:26)

1.     Akhenaten did not live to be 110 (although, coincidentally, Amenhotep Son of Hapu is said to have). But could this be a date? Akhenaten is believed to have died about ten years after Amenhotep III. If the first date in this story, Year 30, took place on the calendar of Amenhotep III, wouldn’t following dates in succeeding reigns need a way to relate to the "base date"? Could what we read as the number of centuries today originally have been the number of calendars, or reigns? Could we read 110 as "after 1 Pharaoh" in the year 10? This might sound ridiculous on its own, but perhaps it will get more appealing below, when it is applied to the 430 years of the Israeli sojourn in Exodus.

3.     After Joseph died, the Israelites prospered until a pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph. (Ex 1:6-8)

1.     Akhenaten was at first succeeded by apparent members of the royal family who had been close to him during his reign: Tutankhamun and Ay:

1.     Redford says that the Aten cult thrived for ten years after the death of Akhenaten. (207)

2.     Desroches-Noblecourt says that Tutankhamen continued to worship the Globe and that the name of the Aten continued "to be seen, side by side" with Amun’s. (179)

3.     Redford quotes Tutankhamun’s edict as saying, "This land had been struck by catastrophe: the gods had turned their backs upon it." Redford says that Tutankhamun restored the neglected temples and built new idols. Redford also says that "this was a move based publicly on the doctrine that Egypt’s woes stemmed directly from its ignoring the gods". (208-209) [Doesn’t this sound ironic, especially given the failed effort to prevent the famine?]

4.     Desroches-Noblecourt says of Tut, "Few Egyptian kings ascending the throne as young have left their mark by so many foundations in a limited number of years." (190) [This could suggest also that Tut had inherited a lot of resources – all those that Akhenaten had collected?]

5.     Aldred says of Tut’s rule, "The reins of government were picked up from the point where Amenophis III had dropped them." (295)

6.     Aldred says that Ay continued Tut’s policies and building projects, and that he added his name to Tut’s, rather than usurping his work. (300)

7.     Redford, describing the Amarna-like scenes in Ay’s tomb, calls them "the last gasp of the anti-cultic spirit of the iconoclast". (222)

2.     These pharaohs were followed by someone whose royal status and linkages to Akhenaten are unclear at best: Haremhab:

1.     Aldred says that Haremhab secured his claim to the throne by marrying the next surviving heiress, Mutnodjme, Nefertiti’s sister. (301)

2.     Redford says that Horemheb "was untainted by the Amarna heresy" and that his appointment "signaled a change in the internal affairs of Egypt: the army had taken over…. Even priests at times are now chosen from the army!" (220)

3.     Although Haremhab was old enough to have known Akhenaten, Haremhab is the pharaoh who tried to erase the memory of Akhenaten from the land. Haremhab tried to make Akhenaten "unknown". Could the phrase "did not know" in the current translations of the biblical text be mis-translated? Could the original meaning have been less passive, and more active, than just "knowing"? Could it originally have meant that he caused this state of Akhenaten’s being "unknown", that is, purged from the Egyptian records?

1.     Redford says of Horemheb, "the new heir to power knew nothing of Akhenaten and his movement." (222) [Nice of Redford to use basically the same language as Exodus.]

2.     Aldred says that the defacing of the reliefs, statues, and names of the Amarna royalty occurred under Haremhab. Aldred says that after Mutnodjme died the pace accelerated. He says, "Her departure from the scene must have cut the last links with the personalities of Amarna, and the king now seemed determined to obliterate all visible traces of the Aten religion and its memorials in Thebes…. A campaign was now initiated, presumably at a high level, for the total destruction of the recent past." (302) Aldred says that the Egyptians had "done their best to blot out of their consciousness the recollection of a pharaoh who had apparently not conformed…" (114)

3.     Redford says "…the first five years of Amenophis IV’s reign represent a shocking hiatus in our historical knowledge. So thoroughly were memorials of this period eradicated on the morrow of the Amarna period, whether temple reliefs, steles, or tombs, that little if anything remained on public view for succeeding generations…. So complete and thorough was the destruction wrought by pharaoh Horemheb, whose reign terminates the Amarna period, that literally no stone was left upon another." (64-65)

4.     Aldred says, "By the time the Ramses had climbed into the saddle, virtually all visible traces of the Amarna reform and its instigator had ceased to exist." (302)

5.     Pharaohs of the Sun says of the end of the Atenist regime, "The anti-foreigner backlash that doubtless followed may well represent one of the strands making up the biblical tradition of Exodus. (91)

6.     Amongst the targets of the desecration were: the names and faces of the royal couple and the names and arms of the Aten (Redford, 228); the announcement stela at Aswan (Aldred, 93-94); the stela at Gebel es Silsila (Aldred, 88); the texts in the tomb of Khereuf, which "contains unique records of events in the first and third jubilees of Amenophis III" (Aldred, 92); the House of Aten, upon which "the most brutal destruction had been wrought in antiquity" (Aldred 54); and, the troops of the foreign legion (Aldred, Plate 61).

7.     Aldred says that it was [ironically] the extensive use of plaster [which quickened the building process] that made Akhenaten’s constructions so vulnerable to the iconoclasts. (32)