Sojourn of Israel

1361 words long.

Published on 2024-08-27

This article presents evidence that the 430-year sojourn of Israel lasted from 1877 to 1447 BC. It is lifted with minor changes from the chapter "Job's Anti-Jubilee Clock, Defined" in Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. For the complete chapter, see the article Job's Anti-Jubilee Clock, Defined

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Another conundrum is establishing when Abraham was born. The Bible is like a Sudoku puzzle. The numbers (dates) in some of the cells have been erased. We can restore them if we gather all the constraints (Bible statements with implications related to elapsed time) and eliminate inconsistent sets of conclusions. The missing cells in this case are the lifespans of the descendants of the children of Jacob leading up to the birth of Moses. The constraints are these verses:

The sojourn begins?

Now there was a famine in the land.

So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there,

for the famine was severe in the land.

- Genesis 12:10, ESV

The length of the time of affliction:

Then the Lord said to Abram,

“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners

in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there,

and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.

- Genesis 15:13

The total length of time in Egypt, both under affliction and free:

The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt

was 430 years. At the end of 430 years, on that very day,

all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.

- Exodus 12:40-41

A reference to Exodus, affirming the time duration:

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.

It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many,

but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.

This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward,

does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God,

so as to make the promise void.

- Galatians 3:16-17

The first thing to note is that two time periods are given. One is the length of time in Egypt, given as 430 years. The second is the time of oppression, given as 400 years. Thus we must discover two events: entrance into Egypt and the later start of the suffering. Theologians hold many views about which pair of events the Bible indicates.

The latest event for the suffering to begin is when the pharaoh arose who forgot about the good done by Joseph. This occurred either shortly after Joseph’s death at 110 years or before, during the reign of a pharaoh subsequent to the one Joseph served.

Earlier events that might match the start of suffering are the arrival of Joseph’s brothers in Egypt or Joseph’s prior entry as a slave and prisoner. Earlier yet would be the sojourning of Jacob or Isaac. For example, jealous and fearful people frequently stopped up the wells that Isaac dug in order to drive him away, adding to his suffering. These solutions assume that the sojourning in suffering included years spent in Canaan. Thus the reference to Egypt means that the majority and the deepest intensity of suffering occurred in Egypt, but not all of it.

This leaves us with the very earliest possibility, that the centuries of sojourning began during the life of Abraham. God’s warning was that Abraham’s offspring would be the ones to suffer, but that includes Isaac. Thus one popular solution is that the 430 years of sojourning began when Abraham left Haran at age seventy-five. At age one hundred, Isaac was born. Then when Isaac was five, he was weaned and at that time his half-brother Ishmael mocked him. (Jewish cultural practice was that weaning could occur anytime from age two to five. We are not told Isaac’s age when he was weaned.) The celebration of the weaning by this reckoning would be when Abraham was 105 years old, exactly thirty years after his sojourning began. Since Ishmael’s mother Hagar was Egyptian, this marks the start of Egypt’s oppression of Abraham’s offspring, by proxy.

(Another view holds that Genesis 12 describes two events, first leaving his country of Ur in Genesis 12:1-3 at an implied age of seventy and secondly leaving Haran in 12:4 at a given age seventy-five to go to Canaan. In that case, the sojourning begins at age seventy and the oppression begins when Abraham is one hundred and Isaac is born, a different thirty year span. This has the assumption that Hagar and Ishmael immediately despised Isaac, which is plausible but not stated. This view has less textual support than the one which starts the clocks five years later. However, since it only differs by five years, it will have a negligible effect on the prophetic calendar.)

Symmetry. Those who love mathematical symmetries should note the following curiosity (also discovered by others). If the 430 year sojourn began with Abraham as in the earliest possibility, we can divide it into two parts:

• 215 years sojourning in Canaan
• 215 years sojourning in Egypt

There exists a symmetry suggesting this clock is in the right ballpark as far as dates. It reflects back on the genealogy in Matthew and the clock given in Peace. Matthew divides the forty-two generations into three groups of four, with emphasis on Abraham, David, Jehoiachin at the time of the exile, and Jesus.

My prior clock starts with the creation, not Abraham. Its fourteenth generation does match David. Its twenty-eighth does not match the exile. Finally, the forty-first matches Jesus, but at his second coming.

This clock shall begin with Abraham. Its fourteenth generation does not match David, but its twenty-eighth generation does match the start of the Babylonian exile. Finally, this new clock’s forty-first generation matches the first advent of Jesus Christ.

Thus if you take the two clocks together, all four of the key names of the genealogy fall in the proper generations, with both Christ’s first and second coming represented. So Matthew’s genealogy hides the basic parameters of two prophetic clocks in its verses and both clocks are fleshed out in the same book, Job, which concerns a suffering servant who loves God’s Word.

Exhausting the prophetic richness concealed in Matthew’s genealogy has taxed my poor brain for the better part of the last decade. I began my search years before I began my study of Job and had no clue that Job contained the answers to my earlier quest. How great is our God! Jesus spoke truly when he said, “The one who seeks finds.” (Matthew 7:8) Now for the bad news…

Error bars. To recap, we shall adopt the earliest solution to the sojourn here, where the oppression begins with Ishmael mocking Isaac. It differs by up to 200 years from some of the other solutions. If you take that along with other uncertainties in historical dates to be discussed in what follows, it is likely that some verses in Job which are prophetic may refer to events in another era, not the one defined for the clock. It would require a person better versed in the Bible chronologies and secular history to reduce these error bars. However, as the ticks on the clock grow closer to Moses’ time, the general error bars shrink to ± 25 years, as the 41st era must encompass the Resurrection and we have excellent dates going back from there to the Exodus. Individual events, however, can have larger errors, especially for the lives of some prophets whom we cannot place with precision.

The following table shows the time of the sojourn in the context of notable Biblical events:

Year (BC)	Event
1952	Abraham born.
1877	Abraham leaves Haran at age seventy-five. 430 year sojourn begins.
1852	Isaac born.
1847	Isaac weaned and mocked by Ishmael. 400 years of oppression begins.
1527	Moses born.
1447	Exodus. 400 years of oppression end. 430 year sojourn ends.
1407	Joshua crosses the Jordan into the Promised Land.
967	Temple foundation laid. 4th year of Solomon’s reign. Exactly 480 years after the Exodus.
605	Babylonian captivity begins.
586	Solomon's Temple destroyed.
444	Nehemiah rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem.
4	Jesus born.
33 AD	Jesus crucified and resurrected.
93 AD	Revelation written.