How many pharaohs (kings of Egypt) are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible?
064
Answer: At least 14
It is difficult to get a precise count of the Egyptian pharaohs in the Bible because they fall into three categories: (1) those specifically mentioned by name; (2) those mentioned indirectly in the name of a geographical feature; and (3) unnamed kings called simply “pharaoh.”1
The names used for the pharaohs in the first group have often been Hebraized, but scholars are able to identify them with names on Egyptian king lists, including Shishak/Sheshonq I (1 Kings 11:40, 14:25 et al.), So/Osorkon III or IV (2 Kings 17:4), Tiharka/Taharqa of Cush and Egypt (2 Kings 19:9; Isaiah 36:6), Necho/Nekau II (2 Kings 23:29, 33–35) and Hopra/Apries (Jeremiah 37:5, 44:30).
Sometimes the pharaoh bestowed his name on a city or other feature, as is the case with Ramesses (see Genesis 47:11; Exodus 1:11) and Merneptah (see the spring, or wells, of Nephtoah in Joshua 15:9, 18:15).
The last group is the largest, including the unnamed pharaohs at the time of Abram and Sarai (Genesis 12:15–20) and of Joseph (Genesis 40–50), of the Israelite oppression in Egypt (Exodus 1:8) and of the Exodus (Exodus 3–15), as well as the pharaoh who gave asylum to Hadad of Edom (1 Kings 11:18–20), the one who took Gezer and became the father-in-law of Solomon (1 Kings 9:16, 24), the one whose daughter Bithia was married to Mered (1 Chronicles 4:17), and the kings of Egypt in 2 Kings 7:6. There are additional unnamed references to kings of Egypt in the prophetic books, but these probably overlap with named pharaohs listed in the first group above.
How many pharaohs (kings of Egypt) are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible?
064 Answer: At least 14
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For the bulk of these, see Nahman Avigad, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, revised and completed by Benjamin Sass (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997); Nahman Avigad, Michael Heltzer and André Lemaire, West Semitic Seals: Eighth–Sixth Centuries B.C.E. (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2000); Robert Deutsch and André Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaeiff Collection (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2000).
