Rameses

Overview

Rameses, spelled Raamses in Exodus 1:11, is the city and district in Egypt's eastern Nile Delta from which the Israelites set out at the Exodus. The Pentateuch uses the name five times: for "the land of Rameses," where Joseph settled his father and brothers (Genesis 47:11); for one of the two store cities the Israelites built for Pharaoh (Exodus 1:11); and for the place the people left at the Exodus (Exodus 12:37; Numbers 33:3, 5). From Rameses they went to Succoth, their first camp.

Biblical Significance

Pharaoh told Joseph to settle his family "in the best of the land," in "the land of Goshen" (Genesis 47:6), and Joseph gave them a possession "in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded" (Genesis 47:11). Later, under a new king "who did not know Joseph," the Israelites were put to forced labor, and "they built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses" (Exodus 1:8, 11). The Exodus began here: the people "set out from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month," the day after the Passover (Numbers 33:3), and "journeyed from Rameses to Succoth" (Exodus 12:37). On OTIC's chronology, Jacob's family went down to Egypt in 1876 BC and Israel left in 1446 BC.

The Name and the Location

Genesis 47:11 uses the name for the time of Jacob, centuries before any Egyptian king was called Ramesses. Scholars who date the Exodus to the thirteenth century identify Rameses with Pi-Ramesses, the Delta capital of Ramesses II at Qantir, and date the building of Exodus 1:11 to his reign. On the early date that OTIC follows, the building came before Moses' birth (c. 1526 BC), and the name Rameses is read as a later updating of an older name for the city, such as Avaris, in the way that Genesis 14:14 calls Laish by its later name Dan (Judges 18:29). An older early-date view held instead that Raamses was itself a name in use before the Ramesside kings.

James Hoffmeier and Gary Rendsburg conclude that Rameses is to be located at Qantir, the site of Pi-Ramesses. Avaris, at Tell el-Dab'a, lies next to Qantir in the eastern Delta, so the two main readings place the biblical Rameses in the same area and differ over its date and its name. Its companion store city, Pithom, is discussed under Tell el-Maskhuta.