Endnote 7 – The Lowdown on the Riffraff

To be sure, there have been modern proposals for an early Exodus date. During his excavations at Jericho in the 1930s, John Garstang proposed a 15th-century B.C.E. date. More recently, John J. Bimson (Redating the Exodus and the Conquest [Sheffield, UK: Almond Press, 1978]), having reexamined archaeological evidence from key sites in Canaan, argued for an Exodus c. 1470 B.C.E. But these remain a minority view. We should note that rabbinic reckoning, based on an oral tradition, placed the Exodus in 1312 B.C.E., in the so-called Era of Contracts, exactly one millennium before the beginning of Seleucid rule in 312 B.C.E. (see Barry Weitzel, “The Era of the Exodus in the Talmud,” Mizraim 8 [1938], pp. 15–19).