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| Did Ridley Scott finger the right pharaoh in Rameses the Great? |
"Some academics have tried to muddy the waters of the Nile and disputed Christian tradition that Rameses II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, who defied Moses and refused to let the Hebrews go. This, no doubt, is their agnostic reflex at work. Rameses The Great in the role of the titanic villain is just too auspicious and biblically corroborative for them. They’d prefer a lesser pharaoh, which would have the effect of discrediting scripture and reducing the scale of the drama.
"But the identification of Rameses has
never been satisfactorily disproved. The fingers of Rameses are all over this
affair and his identification goes back to The Book of Exodus and receives
further confirmation by Eusebius of Caesarea, father of church history.
"I contend: if the pharaoh of Exodus
looked like Rameses the Great and behaved like Rameses (he press ganged the
work force into building a new city in the Delta called Raamses, as the Bible
tells us) and felt like Rameses (he was a megalomaniac who was not going to be
pushed around by anyone, including Jawveh) then he probably was Rameses..."
Excerpt from the novel The Ibis Apocalypse
NOTE: As the leading Rameses scholar Ken Kitchen points out, Moses made appeals to pharaoh on a daily basis - and that could only have been to Rameses II at his Delta city of Pi-Rameses (in the vicinity of the Israelite's region of Goshen).
