Egypt — the land of the Nile and the pyramids,
the oldest kingdom of which we have any record, holds a place of great
significance in Scripture.
The Egyptians belonged to the white race, and their
original home is still a matter of dispute. Many scholars believe that it
was in Southern Arabia, and recent excavations have shown that the valley of
the Nile was originally inhabited by a low-class population, perhaps
belonging to the Nigritian stock, before the Egyptians of history entered
it. The ancient Egyptian language, of which the latest form is Coptic, is
distantly connected with the Semitic family of speech.
Egypt consists geographically of two halves, the northern
being the Delta, and the southern Upper Egypt, between Cairo and the First
Cataract. In the Old Testament, Northern or Lower Egypt is called Mazor,
“the fortified land” (Isa. 19:6; 37:25, where the A.V. mistranslates
“defence” and “besieged places”); while Southern or Upper Egypt is Pathros,
the Egyptian Pa-to-Res, or “the land of the south” (Isa. 11:11). But the
whole country is generally mentioned under the dual name of Mizraim, “the
two Mazors.”
The civilization of Egypt goes back to a very remote
antiquity. The two kingdoms of the north and south were united by Menes, the
founder of the first historical dynasty of kings. The first six dynasties
constitute what is known as the Old Empire, which had its capital at
Memphis, south of Cairo, called in the Old Testament Moph (Hos. 9:6) and
Noph. The native name was Mennofer, “the good place.”
The Pyramids were tombs of the monarchs of the Old
Empire, those of Gizeh being erected in the time of the Fourth Dynasty.
After the fall of the Old Empire came a period of decline and obscurity.
This was followed by the Middle Empire, the most powerful dynasty of which
was the Twelfth. The Fayyum was rescued for agriculture by the kings of the
Twelfth Dynasty; and two obelisks were erected in front of the temple of the
sun-god at On or Heliopolis (near Cairo), one of which is still standing.
The capital of the Middle Empire was Thebes, in Upper Egypt.
The Middle Empire was overthrown by the invasion of the
Hyksos, or shepherd princes from Asia, who ruled over Egypt, more especially
in the north, for several centuries, and of whom there were three dynasties
of kings. They had their capital at Zoan or Tanis (now San), in the
north-eastern part of the Delta. It was in the time of the Hyksos that
Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph entered Egypt. The Hyksos were finally expelled
about B.C. 1600, by the
hereditary princes of Thebes, who founded the Eighteenth Dynasty, and
carried the war into Asia. Canaan and Syria were subdued, as well as Cyprus,
and the boundaries of the Egyptian Empire were fixed at the Euphrates. The
Soudan, which had been conquered by the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty, was
again annexed to Egypt, and the eldest son of the Pharaoh took the title of
“Prince of Cush.”
One of the later kings of the dynasty, Amenophis IV., or
Khu-n-Aten, endeavoured to supplant the ancient state religion of Egypt by a
new faith derived from Asia, which was a sort of pantheistic monotheism, the
one supreme god being adored under the image of the solar disk. The attempt
led to religious and civil war, and the Pharaoh retreated from Thebes to
Central Egypt, where he built a new capital, on the site of the present
Tell-el-Amarna. The cuneiform tablets that have been found there represent
his foreign correspondence (about 1400). He surrounded himself with
officials and courtiers of Asiatic, and more especially Canaanitish,
extraction; but the native party succeeded eventually in overthrowing the
government, the capital of Khu-n-Aten was destroyed, and the foreigners were
driven out of the country, those that remained being reduced to serfdom.
The national triumph was marked by the rise of the
Nineteenth Dynasty, in the founder of which, Rameses I., we must see the
“new king, who knew not Joseph.” His grandson, Rameses II., reigned
sixty-seven years ( 1348-1281), and was an indefatigable builder. As Pithom,
excavated by Dr. Naville in 1883, was one of the cities he built, he must
have been the Pharaoh of the Oppression. The Pharaoh of the Exodus may have
been one of his immediate successors, whose reigns were short. Under them
Egypt lost its empire in Asia, and was itself attacked by barbarians from
Libya and the north.
The Nineteenth Dynasty soon afterwards came to an end;
Egypt was distracted by civil war; and for a short time a Canaanite, Arisu,
ruled over it.
Then came the Twentieth Dynasty, the second Pharaoh of
which, Rameses III., restored the power of his country. In one of his
campaigns he overran the southern part of Palestine, where the Israelites
had not yet settled. They must at the time have been still in the
wilderness. But it was during the reign of Rameses III. that Egypt finally
lost Gaza and the adjoining cities, which were seized by the Pulista, or
Philistines.
After Rameses III., Egypt fell into decay. Solomon
married the daughter of one of the last kings of the Twenty-first Dynasty,
which was overthrown by Shishak I., the general of the Libyan mercenaries,
who founded the Twenty-second Dynasty (1 Kings 11:40; 14:25, 26). A list of
the places he captured in Palestine is engraved on the outside of the south
wall of the temple of Karnak.
In the time of Hezekiah, Egypt was conquered by
Ethiopians from the Soudan, who constituted the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. The
third of them was Tirhakah (2 Kings 19:9). In 674 it was conquered by the
Assyrians, who divided it into twenty satrapies, and Tirhakah was driven
back to his ancestral dominions. Fourteen years later it successfully
revolted under Psammetichus I. of Sais, the founder of the Twenty-sixth
Dynasty. Among his successors were Necho (2 Kings 23:29) and Hophra, or
Apries (Jer. 37:5, 7, 11). The dynasty came to an end in 525, when the
country was subjugated by Cambyses. Soon afterwards it was organized into a
Persian satrapy.
The title of Pharaoh, given to the Egyptian kings, is the
Egyptian Per-aa, or “Great House,” which may be compared to that of “Sublime
Porte.” It is found in very early Egyptian texts.
The Egyptian religion was a strange mixture of pantheism
and animal worship, the gods being adored in the form of animals. While the
educated classes resolved their manifold deities into manifestations of one
omnipresent and omnipotent divine power, the lower classes regarded the
animals as incarnations of the gods.
Under the Old Empire, Ptah, the Creator, the god of
Memphis, was at the head of the Pantheon; afterwards Amon, the god of
Thebes, took his place. Amon, like most of the other gods, was identified
with Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis.
The Egyptians believed in a resurrection and future life,
as well as in a state of rewards and punishments dependent on our conduct in
this world. The judge of the dead was Osiris, who had been slain by Set, the
representative of evil, and afterwards restored to life. His death was
avenged by his son Horus, whom the Egyptians invoked as their “Redeemer.”
Osiris and Horus, along with Isis, formed a trinity, who were regarded as
representing the sun-god under different forms.
Even in the time of Abraham, Egypt was a flourishing and
settled monarchy. Its oldest capital, within the historic period, was
Memphis, the ruins of which may still be seen near the Pyramids and the
Sphinx. When the Old Empire of Menes came to an end, the seat of empire was
shifted to Thebes, some 300 miles farther up the Nile. A short time after
that, the Delta was conquered by the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, who fixed
their capital at Zoan, the Greek Tanis, now San, on the Tanic arm of the
Nile. All this occurred before the time of the new king “which knew not
Joseph” (Ex. 1:8). In later times Egypt was conquered by the Persians (
525), and by the Greeks under Alexander the Great ( 332), after whom the
Ptolemies ruled the country for three centuries. Subsequently it was for a
time a province of the Roman Empire; and at last, in 1517, it fell into the
hands of the Turks, of whose empire it still forms nominally a part. Abraham
and Sarah went to Egypt in the time of the shepherd kings. The exile of
Joseph and the migration of Jacob to “the land of Goshen” occurred about 200
years later. On the death of Solomon, Shishak, king of Egypt, invaded
Palestine (1 Kings 14:25). He left a list of the cities he conquered.
A number of remarkable clay tablets, discovered at
Tell-el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, are the most important historical records
ever found in connection with the Bible. They most fully confirm the
historical statements of the Book of Joshua, and prove the antiquity of
civilization in Syria and Palestine. As the clay in different parts of
Palestine differs, it has been found possible by the clay alone to decide
where the tablets come from when the name of the writer is lost. The
inscriptions are cuneiform, and in the Aramaic language, resembling
Assyrian. The writers are Phoenicians, Amorites, and Philistines, but in no
instance Hittites, though Hittites are mentioned. The tablets consist of
official dispatches and letters, dating from 1480, addressed to the two
Pharaohs, Amenophis III. and IV., the last of this dynasty, from the kings
and governors of Phoenicia and Palestine. There occur the names of three
kings killed by Joshua, Adoni-zedec, king of Jerusalem, Japhia, king of
Lachish (Josh. 10:3), and Jabin, king of Hazor (11:1); also the Hebrews (Abiri)
are said to have come from the desert.
The principal prophecies of Scripture regarding Egypt are
these, Isa. 19; Jer. 43:8–13; 44:30; 46; Ezek. 29–32; and it might be easily
shown that they have all been remarkably fulfilled. For example, the
singular disappearance of Noph (i.e., Memphis) is a fulfillment of Jer.
46:19, Ezek. 30:13.
Easton, M.G.: Easton's Bible
Dictionary. Oak Harbor, WA : Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996,
c1897
EGYPT. The ancient kingdom and
modern republic in the NE corner of Africa and linked with
W Asia by the Sinai
isthmus.
I. Name
a. Egypt
The word ‘Egypt’ derives from the
Gk.
Aigyptos,
Lat.
Aegyptus. This
term itself is probably a transcript of the
Egyp.
H̬(wt)-k’-Pt(ḥ),
pronounced roughly Ha-ku-ptah, as is shown by the cuneiform
transcript
H̬ikuptah̬
in the Amarna letters,
c.
1360
bc. ‘Hakuptah’
is one of the names of Memphis, the old Egyptian capital on the
W bank of the Nile just above Cairo (which eventually replaced
it). If this explanation is correct, then the name of the city
must have been used pars pro toto
for Egypt generally besides Memphis by the Greeks, rather as
today Cairo and Egypt are both
Miṣr
in Arabic.
b. Mizraim
The regular
Heb. (and common
Sem.) word for Egypt
is
miṣrayim. The word first occurs in
external sources in the 14th century
bc: as
mṣrm
in the Ugaritic (N
Canaanite) texts and as
miṣri
in the Amarna letters. In the 1st millennium
bc, the
Assyr.-Bab.
texts refer to
Muṣur
or
Muṣri; unfortunately they use this
term ambiguously: for Egypt on the one hand, for a region in N
Syria/S Asia Minor
on the other, and (very doubtfully) for part of N Arabia (see
literature cited by Oppenheim in
ANET,
p. 279, n. 9). For the doubtful possibility of the N Syrian
Muṣri being intended in 1 Ki.
10:28, see *Mizraim.
The term
Muṣri
is thought to mean ‘march(es)’, borderlands, and so to be
applicable to any fringe-land (Egyptian, Syrian or Arabian;
cf.
Oppenheim,
loc. cit.).
However true from an Assyr. military point of view, this
explanation is hardly adequate to account for the Heb./Canaanite
form
miṣrayim/mṣrm
of the 2nd millennium, or for its use. That
miṣrayim
is a dual form reflecting the duality of Egypt (see
II, below) is
possible but quite uncertain. Spiegelberg, in
Recueil de Travaux
21, 1899, pp. 39–41, sought to derive
mṣr
from Egyp. (’i)mḏr,
‘(fortification-) walls’, referring to the guard-forts on
Egypt’s Asiatic frontier from c.
2000 bc onwards,
the first feature of the country to be encountered by visiting
Semites from that time. The fact that the term might be
assimilated to Semitic
māṣôr,
‘fortress’, adds weight to this. However, a final and complete
explanation of
miṣrayim
cannot be offered at present.
c
circa (Lat.), about,
approximately
ANET
J. B. Pritchard,
Ancient Near Eastern Texts,
1950; 21965;
31969
cf
confer (Lat.), compare
loc. cit
loco citato
(Lat.), in the place already quoted
Wood, D. R. W.: New
Bible Dictionary. InterVarsity Press, 1996, c1982,
c1962, S. 293