Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Religion

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Religion, MA

First Advisor

Randall W. Younker

Second Advisor

Paul J. Ray

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is twofold. First, I will research what a selected group of authors and scholars has stated regarding their search for the biblical city of Raamses. 3 This step will involve research of the motive of those researchers who attempted to match Raamses of Exod 1:11 with geographical locations in Egypt, to follow their search within the social and political context of these scholars. Second, based on these scholars’ research, I will attempt to discover what happened when Bible and archaeology interacted in the search for the city of Raamses.

The study begins with some pages of background. There, I have included a section covering the many geographical names we will encounter on this topic and their locations. Next, I provide a short introduction to archaeology and then follows the description of a selected group of scholars and their research. I have divided the study into fifty-year periods. The first three scholars covered, Gerardus Mercator, Edward Robinson, and Carl Richard Lepsius, published mainly before 1850. Then we will follow three other scholars, Frederick Charles Cook, Eduard Naville, and John William Dawson, who mainly published between 1850 and 1900, etc., until today. Since many of these scholars published also before and after the period in which they are considered in the present study, I have not followed these somewhat artificial divisions of fifty-year periods too rigidly but sometimes included what they have written later. I have chosen this approach in order to identify some of the major steps in the search for the city of Raamses as well as the development of the relationship between the Bible and archaeology. Each chapter includes a summary of the respective period regarding the views of archaeology for that time-period. Towards the end of the study, before the main conclusion, I include a final discussion about archaeology and the Bible. That chapter is based both on the scholars followed in this study but also on a wider context of what happened when archaeology interacted with the Bible.

Subject Area

Exodus, The; Pi-Ra'messe (Egypt)--Historiography; Bible. Exodus--Antiquities d 630 0 0 Bible|xAntiquities d 650 0 Archaeology and religion

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/theses/141/

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