101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Heroes 195
Despite these errors, he and the other scholars of his time were on the right track
in counting the 430-year sojourn in Egypt from Abraham’s arrival in Canaan. In that
same year, Abraham moved to Egypt, so an Egyptian sojourn actually began at that
time. Further, as you may recall from the discussion in Myth #49, the biblical authors
tried to place Abraham in Canaan right after he departed the pharaoh’s household,
but the preceding biblical text says that he headed into the southern part of Egypt.
This brings us back to the prophecy to Abraham. The text indicates that the four
hundred years of affliction would begin with his seed, i.e., his children:“thy seed shall
be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict
them four hundred years.”
If we take this to mean that the four hundred-year period of affliction begins with
Abraham’s seed, to wit, the birth of Isaac, and ends with the Exodus from Egypt, as the
biblical author surely intended, then we have an interesting chronological congruence
between the prophesy to Abraham and the 430-year sojourn. Isaac was born in Abraham’s
one hundredth year, and Abraham began his sojourn in Egypt in his seventyfifth
year. Counting from Abraham’s sojourn instead of Jacob’s gives us a total period
of 425 years from Abraham’s arrival in Egypt to the Israelite departure from Egypt.
This is reasonably close to the duration of the 430-year sojourn mentioned in Exodus.
But, you might ask, where are the four hundred years of affliction? This is where
the biblical redactors confused two stories. One was about Canaanite affliction over
Egypt, a description of the Hyksos era when Canaanites ruled Egypt. The other was
about a departure of Israel from Egypt. Let’s look at the Genesis prophecy to see how
these two stories were combined.
The first thing we notice is that the affliction takes place in a land where Abraham’s
seed“shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs.” Where is that land? The assumption
has always been that the strange land was Egypt, but throughout the Bible, it is
Canaan that is identified as the strange land, not Egypt. Consider these statements
appearing in Genesis:
And I will give unto thee [i.e., Abraham], and to thy seed after thee, the land
wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession;
and I will be their God. (Gen. 17:8)