When was the book of Exodus written?

Nothing in the book indicates who the writer was, but the reference to Elihu, "the son of Barachel the Buzite," might place the date about the time of Moses, for Buz was the son of Nahor, the brother of Abraham. There is indeed the probability that Moses was the writer. Moses could well have written Genesis and Job during his forty years in Arabia. He was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," which was doubtless used of God in preparing His servant for his future service. Exodus, Numbers and Leviticus were written afterwards, to record the history of Israel, and God's relations with His people, from Egypt to the precincts of the land of Canaan.

b) Date of Exodus out of Egypt

Most of today's scholars date the exodus of Israel in the 13th century BC, that is in the time of the 19th Dynasty (Ramses I. to Merenphthah, under whose reign the name of Israel is first mentioned in Egypt). This late date leaves much too little time for the period of conquest of the land and for the time of the judges. The different indications of time in the Bible also would be untrustworthy (see Jud. 11:26; 1 Kings 6:1; Acts 13:20). But if we take the Biblical indications the time of the exodus can be dated to the year 1446 BC approximately.

We thus come back with renewed assurance to the common faith of the people of God from the beginning, that the entire Pentateuch is the product of Moses. It was he whom God chose to be the appointed vehicle for carrying out His purposes and promises made known to Abraham and the fathers, and he is fittingly the historian of that great redemptive work recorded in the book of Exodus, together with the anticipative histories which are absolutely necessary to the right understanding of the narrative of Exodus itself.

We pass now to one scripture which sets its seal upon the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch: "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" Most significant indeed is this. It is unbelief which has assailed the authorship of the Pentateuch, and unbelief not merely in Moses' writings, but in Him of whom Moses wrote. We have similar confirmation by our Lord in the expression: "All things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the Psalms concerning Me." Here the Whole Pentateuch is again ascribed to Moses. In the face of this, we cannot afford to entertain the slightest doubt as to the authorship of the entire Pentateuch. It is one harmonious work, the author of which is not only declared upon its face to be Moses, but our Lord confirms that statement.

From those who are experts in ancient languages we learn that the word translated "lice" is an unusual one, and in the Septuagint is translated by a word which means a kind of small mosquito. It is of small moment what exactly the word means, but it is of interest to learn that the difficulty is occasioned by the word not being a strictly Hebrew one. It is an importation from the language used in Egypt, and is one of the many internal proofs that the Pentateuch was not written about the time of Ezra, as the "higher critics" would have us imagine. It was written when these Egyptian terms were well known and quite intelligible to the Hebrew reader.

Darby's New Translation gives us "gnats" as the plague, which accords with what we have just written. We may well be thankful to God that He has caused to be woven into the very texture of the Scripture these little signs that Moses, who was so well acquainted with Egypt, its words and its ways, was indeed the writer under the inspiration of the Spirit of God. This fact is the more striking, as we shall see when we consider the fourth plague, since the word, used there for the "swarms" that came up, is again not a Hebrew one but rather one that was peculiar to Egypt.

The school of the destructive Bible criticism claims that Exodus is of a composite origin. The same confusing nonsense of a "Jehovist-Elohist-Priestly" narrative with a number of redactors, with which they dissect Genesis, has been applied to Exodus. Canon Driver, an ardent disciple of the fathers of higher criticism, makes the following statement: "The two main sources used in Exodus are those now generally known as 'Jehovist-Elohist,' the chief component parts of which date probably from the seventh or eighth century before Christ, and the 'Priestly' which is generally considered to have been written during or shortly after the Babylonian captivity." According to these statements Moses had nothing whatever to do with the composition of this book. We do not care to invite our readers to a closer inspection of this higher critical dissecting room, nor do we wish to burden our pages with the infidel assertions of these so-called "learned men." It is a hopeless labyrinth of theories and contradictions, which lead gradually but surely into the outer darkness. Yet these pernicious inventions are taught in many colleges and seminaries of the different evangelical denominations.

A Jewish rabbi of considerable learning, after a close examination of the arguments produced by the critics, has of late shown their absolute worthlessness from a literary point of view. He declares, "All these and similar analyses of the sources of Exodus and the conclusions based thereon are entirely wrong.... The theory that the book of Exodus was compiled from previous works is not sufficiently supported; and the attempt to analyze it into its component parts is a hopeless one, for all the elements of the book are closely welded together into one harmonious whole (Rabbi Dr. Benno Jacob of Goettingen , Germany).

But it does not take scholarship to discover the truth of the last sentence, that "all the elements of the book are closely welded together into one harmonious whole." Every intelligent reader of Exodus makes this discovery. The impression is at once created that only one person wrote this book, and that this person was intimately acquainted with the history of the period which Exodus treats. That the author was Moses is indisputable.

In Exodus 24:4 we read, "And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord." In Chapter 34:27 another command to write is given, "Write thou these words." The Hebrews speak of the Pentateuch as "the law," and "the law of Moses." The book of the law, the law of Moses, now divided into five parts, was in existence at the time of Joshua (Joshua 1:8).

It has been around this ground that the great battle has been waged between higher criticism in all its forms and the faith uniformly held by the people of God from the beginning, a faith we are assured which the word of God itself leads to. Until the attacks of infidelity, no one ever thought of questioning the universally accepted belief that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch. At first it might seem as though the only question were as to his authorship of the book of Genesis, which covers the periods of time from the creation to the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt. All of this, as having occurred before the birth of Moses, need not necessarily have been recorded by him; but it has been found that higher criticism, another name for infidelity, is never satisfied with assailing one portion of revelation; it reaches out until all has been brought under the blight of its malign influence. Thus when it had claimed that the book of Genesis was made up of various documents and fragments, it passed on to the other books about which there could be in the mind of the believer in the word of God no question that Moses was the author, and here all this was denied. It was said that the book of Exodus, with its varied ordinances and narratives, was composed long after the time in which Moses lived; indeed, it was declared boldly for a long time, until the very stones rose up and cried shame upon them, that writing was an art practically unknown in the days of Moses. It remained for Archaeology to set aside this glaring falsehood, by showing that, so far from this being the case, the age before Moses was a time of intense literary activity and, the remains of this are now open to the inspection of the world.

What has been said to the book of Genesis also applies to Exodus. In Genesis Moses depended on the revelations of God and possibly on the accounts of his ancestors while he was mostly able to write down the happenings of Exodus to Deuteronomy by his own view and experience under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (compare Ex. 17:14; Deut. 31:22,24).

In the New Testament Moses is mentioned several times as author of Exodus (for example Luke 20:37; Mark 7:10).

The principal events stand thus: B.C. 4004 Adam created. 2948 Noah born. 2348 The Flood. 1996 Abraham born. 1921 Call of Abraham. 1896 Isaac born. 1836 Jacob born. 1706 The Israelites enter Egypt. 1491 The Exodus. The law given. 1451 The Israelites cross the Jordan. 1444 The division of the land. (See JUDGES.) 1095 Saul anointed king: the kingdom begins. 1055 David, king. 1015 Solomon, king. 1005 Dedication of the Temple. 975 Division of the kingdom. (See KINGS.) (776 Era of the Olympiads begins.) (753 Rome built: era of A.U.C. begins.) 740 Captivity of the two and a half tribes east of the Jordan. 721 End of the kingdom of Israel. 658 Manasseh carried to Babylon. 606 Jerusalem taken: first captivity of Judah. 605 Nebuchadnezzar reigns alone. Time of the Gentiles begins in the first great empire — Babylon. 599 Jerusalem re-taken: the great captivity. 588 Jerusalem re-taken and destroyed. 538 Belshazzar slain: the second great empire commences. The Medes and Persians. 536 Cyrus reigns alone. The 70 years of Jer. 25:11-12 end. The Jews return. Ezra 1, 2: (See PERSIA.) 475 Artaxerxes succeeds Xerxes. 455 Artaxerxes commissions Nehemiah to build Jerusalem. The Seventy Weeks of Daniel begin. 336 Alexander the Great, head of the third great empire — The Greek. 323 Death of Alexander the Great: his four Generals divide the kingdom, but it mainly merged into two kingdoms: Egypt, 'kings of the South,' and Syria, 'kings of the north.' (See ANTIOCHUS.) 191 All Asia Minor on the west of Mount Taurus delivered to Rome. 166 to about 65 The times of the Maccabees. In 166 Jerusalem was recovered and the temple re-dedicated. 65 Rome, the fourth great empire, rapidly gains ascendancy. Syria becomes a Roman province. In 63 Judaea is subjected to Rome. In 30 Egypt becomes a Roman province. 40 Herod is appointed by Rome king of Judaea. 20 Herod begins to rebuild the temple 6 Birth of John the Baptist. 5 Birth of Christ. (See NEW TESTAMENT.)

On the fourteenth day of the month Abib, 1491 B.C., according to Usher's Chronology, the children of Israel kept their first passover, and commenced their march out of Egypt. They had cried by reason of their bondage, and God had heard (Exodus 2:23), and the Arm of Jehovah was now made bare on their behalf and whilst the Egyptians were engaged with the burial of their dead (Numbers 33:4), the persecuted, downtrodden nation of slaves was waking up to the reality of being Jehovah's first-born, redeemed by Him out of the house of bondage.

We pause here a moment to observe that Urquhart in his "New Biblical Guide," points out very forcibly that there are a number of words used that have their roots in the Egyptian language and not the Hebrew, as well as allusions to Egyptian customs and geographical details, which would only be known to people familiar with Egypt, and that these are introduced without one word of explanation. The unbelieving "Higher Critics" insisted that the Pentateuch was never written by Moses, but was the work of Ezra, or of someone else about his time — that it was a "pious fraud" perpetrated in the hope of making the people attach more weight to the law they were supposed to observe. But Ezra, or someone else, coming from Babylon, would never have had this intimate knowledge of Egyptian words and customs dating a thousand years before, and could he in some miraculous way have obtained the knowledge, he would have had to insert explanations to make them intelligible to the readers of his day. No, the hallmark of the Egypt of the time of Moses is plainly to be seen. It is as well for us ordinary Christians to know these facts, for we may occasionally be confronted by these infidel reasonings.