The truth behind the book of Exodus

Everyone knows the story in the bible from the chapter ‘Exodus’ in the old testament, where Moses is found in a basket in the nile and is then raised by one of the many daughters of Pharaoh Ramses II (also known as Ramses the Great).
In the story, during the 19th Egyptian dynasty, Moses then grows up as a friend of the pharaoh Ramses the II and he is well aquainted with him. Moses is aware that the Isralites are slaves in Egypt and that he himself is an Israelite. Hundreds of his people are being forced to commit blasphemy by being forced to build the now well known temples at Abu Simbel and highly religious tombs for the Pharaoh and his concubines. Moses is then angered by an Egyptian who beats an Israelite to death, he in turn kills the Egyptian. He had to run away to another land. He then has visions of his God speaking to him from a burning bush and he has told him he must go back and free the Hebrews from slavery.
Moses runs back to Egypt and demands Ramses to free the Israelite slaves as his god had commanded. Naturally, Ramses would have refused. Ramses was known as a forgiving and peace making Pharaoh, even after his long painstaking war with the Hittites, he signed out a peace treaty, but he didn’t want his burial chamber and his temples left half done, as he felt (as all Egyptian Pharaohs) if these buildings were not spot on, his journey to the afterlife might not have been successful. This ‘hero type’ Moses (at least so depicted in the bible) then supposedly threatens Ramses and tells him that if he doesn’t free the Israelites, he will have to encounter his ten plagues sent by the god of the Hebrews.

Plague #1: The Nile will turn to blood.
Plague #2: There will be a Frog infestation.
Plague #3: There will be a Gnat infestation.
Plague #4: There will be a Fly infestation.
Plague #5: All the cattle will die.
Plague #6: Everyone’s skin will be covered in boils.
Plague #7: There will be a hail storm.
Plague #8: There will be a Locust infestation.
Plague #9: There will be total darkness for three days.
Plague #10: Ramses’ first born son will die.

In the story in the Exodus, all these plagues take place. Supposedly this is true, though not all plagues are mentioned on the writings on the walls (that I consider most accurate) in the temples that Ramses built. Ramses’ temples were his sort of journal. Ramses would have a temple built after any war or a struggle and left what seems a most accurate report as possible of the occurrence. There are many stories left on his walls of his battles with the Hittites, his marriage to the Hittite princess and the peace treaty between his people and theirs. The Egyptians were very ahead of their time, as the Romans stole their calender from the Egyptians later on during the Ptolemy dynasty. This means that their times were more accurate and their years and dynasties were fixated accurately. These people worked by the stars, which are all the same sequences that we even use to this day. The biblical chronology dates the birth of Moses to around 1527 BC. In the new chronology of Egypt, the Pharaoh on the throne of Egypt at that time was Djeserkare Amenhotep I of the 13th Dynasty. Not Ramses.

Uh-oh!

I think that 6 dynasties are quite a difference. That should have been about roughly two hundred and thirty years difference according to archaeologists and Egyptology scholars. Ramses the Great reigned from 1292–1225 BC. Where did they get Ramses from? Perhaps wanting to exaggerate their story by saying they had to deal with and overcome the most imperious and egoistical Pharaoh there ever was…
No Egyptian document related to Ramses the second indicates that there were ever any plagues. There was even little famine at the time, since Ramses was very responsible for his country and made sure that food was at reach and that all was fertile, as himself… fathering over one hundred children! Ramses administered a strong and powerful economy.
Some Christian fundamentals tend to place the biblical plagues one century earlier, though they have no proof of this, and it’s still well off from the time that Ramses had reigned. These people are still searching for archaeological proof to be able to state that their beliefs are true.
Then I sat and thought about it. If the plagues could have taken place at any time, they could have easily been looked by as a coincidence. Frog, gnat, fly and locust infestations were more common in Egypt than the usual person might have thought. Queen Hatshepsut (1475 BC) spoke of the lands being swallowed vastly by the sands. Nowadays, scientists would call that a sand storm. Sand storms happen in deserts constantly. Sand storms could be predicted even back then. These storms would make temperature rise around the calm areas, and this makes animals and cattle fall dehydrated and pass out or die.
Now, the total darkness for three days… could be a slight exaggeration for a solar eclipse. An eclipse can actually stir the world and is sure to bring on sand storms and all sorts. The bible has been proven to have stories of exaggeration. This could be because the writers wanted to put forward a moral, as in the stories from the Genesis chapter in the Old Testament.

Examples of exaggeration in the bible:

GE 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heaven(s) and the earth.” (But where did God dwell before he had created heaven and earth?) (Note: Biblicists have determined that biblical chronology fixes the date of creation at 4004 B.C. thereby making the earth about six thousand years old. Creationists stubbornly adhere to this timetable in spite of overwhelming evidence that the earth is actually billions of years old. Archaeologists tell us that the biblical city of Jericho has, itself, been continuously occupied for more than ten thousand years.)

EX 4:24 The Lord sought to kill Moses (one of his own prophets.)

EX 12:30 The Lord kills all the first-born of Egypt and there is not a house where there is not at least one dead. (This means that there was not a house in Egypt that did not include at least one first-born—a most unusual situation.)

EX 12:37, NU 1:45-46 The number of men of military age who take part in the Exodus is given as about 600,000. Allowing for women, children, and older men would probably mean that a total of more than 2,000,000 Israelites left Egypt at a time when the whole population of Egypt was less than 2,000,000.

EX 17:14 God says that he will utterly blot out the remembrances of Amalek. (That remembrance is now permanently preserved in the Bible.)

EX 28:34-35 Entering the holy place without wearing bells can result in death.

Source

Or the exaggeration could just be there in order to convince the simpler people of their times to believe in their book.
Everyone in Egypt had boils then. The pharaohs themselves bathed in monthly sequences. The cleanliness was poor, from this you’re sure to develop boils.
All it takes for your firstborn to die abruptly and out of nowhere is for somebody to secretly poison him, and if Moses ever did that, then he’s not a nice guy, is he. In fact, if someone sent to kill your son, be it even by magic, I still think it’s not right. I can’t imagine who’d think it would be. That’s not the sort of thing a great hero would do.

And don’t get me started on sexism in the bible.

All in all, nobody through the 13th dynasty spoke of any plagues, just natural occurances. I’m sure that if they’d have seen the Nile split in half right before them, they’d have something to write about, be it a conquest or a loss, the Egyptians wrote it all down.

In the battle of truth, proof and science will always beat myth.