Pi-Ramesses
The residence city built by Ramesses II in the eastern Nile Delta, located by excavation at Qantir. It is generally identified with the store city Raamses of Exodus and the Rameses from which Israel set out.
Pi-Ramesses, “House of Ramesses”, was the residence that Ramesses II (reigned about 1279–1213 BC) built in the eastern Nile Delta, beside the older city of Avaris. Excavation has fixed its site at the village of Qantir, near Faqus; James K. Hoffmeier calls the archaeological evidence “unequivocal” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, 2007, pp. 232–233). The city was abandoned in the later twelfth century BC, after the branch of the Nile on which it stood moved away or silted up, and Tanis, about twenty kilometres off, became the capital of the Delta (Hoffmeier, p. 233; Bryant G. Wood, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, 2005, p. 479).
Exodus says that the Israelites built the store cities Pithom and Raamses for Pharaoh (Exodus 1:11) and that they set out from Rameses (Exodus 12:37) (Numbers 33:3–5); Genesis calls the district where Jacob’s family settled “the land of Rameses” (Genesis 47:11). The identification of this place with Pi-Ramesses is generally accepted, and it is one of the main arguments for dating the Exodus from Egypt to the thirteenth century BC. Those who date the exodus to about 1446 BC accept the location but hold that the name in Exodus is a later updating of an older one (Bryant G. Wood, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, 2005, p. 479). The Psalms place the wonders of the exodus in “the field of Zoan”, the Hebrew name of Tanis (Psalm 78:12) (Psalm 78:43).
What happened here
- c. 1446 or c. 1260 BC, traditional dateThe Exodus from Egypt
Exodus tells how, after a series of plagues and the first Passover, Israel leaves Egypt under Moses and crosses the sea, in which Pharaoh’s pursuing army is drowned. The rest of the Bible looks back to this event constantly.