Having made these statements, he proceeds to examine the whole question. He asserts the correctness of the view, that Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, was the prince who knew not Joseph. The first king of this new dynasty, he calculates, came to the throne two years after Joseph's death. With regard to the reign of Rameses II., he refers to the festival of the Sothis period which was celebrated in the thirtieth year of his reign. Starting from this period,(76) which, according to Oppolzer, was renewed in the year 1318 B.C., he calculates that the first year of Rameses II. was 1347 B.C., and that the Exodus took place in his thirteenth year, _i.e._ 1335 B.C.
According to the _Pirke di Rabbi Elieser_, Dr. Mahler says, the departure of the Israelites is said to have taken place on a Thursday. "This view is also held in the Talmud (cf. Sabbath 87B), and the _Shulchan-Aroch_ also maintains that _the 15th Nisan, the day of the Exodus, was a Thursday_. This all agrees with the year B.C. 1335, for in that year the 15th Nisan fell on a Thursday, and indeed on _Thursday the 27th of March (Julian calendar)_."
If we accept the theory that Rameses II. was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and that the Exodus took place in 1335 B.C., then Moses, who was eighty years old at the time of the Exodus, must have been born in the year 1415 B.C., _i.e._ the fifteenth year of Amenophis III. Now the chief wife of this ruler was queen Teie (see p. 275), a woman who was certainly of foreign, probably Asiatic, race. In all probability, therefore, Teie, being an alien and of a different religion from the Egyptians, was not by any means in favour with the Egyptian priesthood, however much the Pharaoh may have delighted in her. The daughter of such a woman, as will easily be understood, would find little or no opposition to the adoption by her of a child of one of the Hebrews, an Asiatic like her mother. This, of course, would explain excellently how it was that Moses came to be adopted and educated by an Egyptian princess at her father's court, and that he had no real sympathy with the people among whom he lived, though it raises somewhat of a difficulty, for it is hard to understand how the Egyptian king, sympathizing, as we may expect him to have done, with Asiatics, should have ordered the destruction of their children. Nevertheless, circumstances may easily have arisen to cause such a decree to be issued. Another difficulty is, to explain who the people hostile to Moses were, who in the thirteenth year of Rameses II. died (Exod. iv. 19). This has generally been understood to be the king and one or more of his advisers, though this objection, like the other, really presents no difficulty worthy of the name, as there was no indication that the king was included.