Publisher's Synopsis
The synchronizations between the Book of Judges and the records of Egypt are far too many to be overlooked or ignored. As almost all denominations of Christians and Jews agree that King Saul established his kingdom in 1037 BC, and the Septuagint's version of Judges includes 460 years of the land being ruled by Judges, or foreign kings, followed by an era of chaos when there was no king, the latest possible date the Exodus could have taken place was the 1500s BC, which supports the idea that the 10 plagues of Egypt were descriptions of the fallout and effects of the Minoan eruption which Egyptologists date to 1550 BC. According to Joshua, 42 years later the Israelites invaded Samaria, (northern modern Israel and the Palestinian West Bank) under the leadership of Joshua, which would have been 1508 BC. The plan was already laid out in the Book of Joshua to occupy the entire land of Canaan, yet just three years later, when Joshua was 85 years old, the Israelites stopped their campaign, after having only occupied the cities in Samaria, this would have been in 1505 BC.
The reason they stopped their invasion is not given, however, Egyptian records do explain it, as in the same year, 1505 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose I marched his army through Canaan to reconquer it for the Egyptian Empire. It had previously been under the control of the Hyksos Dynasty whose empire collapsed in the aftermath of the Minoan eruption. In 1550 BC, the Hyksos capital fell to the rival southern dynasty of Pharaoh Ahmose I, and the Hyksos retreated to their fortress of Sharuhen, near modern Gaza in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. This suggests the Hyksos maintained control over Canaan until Sharuhen fell to Ahmose I in 1540 BC. Ahmose I led an invasion of southern Canaan a few years later in an attempt to root out any remaining Hyksos. Egyptologists are not sure when this campaign was, placing it sometime between 1537 and 1527 BC. This campaign is not believed to have reached farther north than Byblos, in modern Lebanon, and did not result in any long-term political control over Canaan. Ahmose I's main goal seems to have been to destroy any remaining Hyksos in the region to ensure they did not try to recapture Egypt.
For decades after the conquest of Avaris, the new 18th Dynasty struggled to control Egypt, with numerous insurrections reported in the Nile Delta and Nubia, and does not appear to have tried to re-exert control over Canaan until Thutmose I's armies occupied the region in 1505 BC. Thutmose I marched his army all the way north to the Euphrates River in Syria, and reported all the peoples of Canaan surrendered to him without conflict, he then returned to Egypt and marched his army south to Nubia to suppress an insurrection there later that year. This means his army was only briefly in Canaan and did not have time to conquer any of the cities there, so either they did surrender without conflict, or, he lied. While the Book of Judges does not mention the Egyptian army passing through, this seems to have been redacted at a later point, as Joshua did stop his campaign in 1505 BC, and did not declare himself king, instead taking the subservient role of judge. Joshua's becoming a judge, means he ruled over a group of people but was under the authority of a king. The people were obviously the Israelites, and the king could only have been Thutmose I. This is an anticlimactic end to the tail of escape from Egypt and was likely redacted during the era of the two kingdoms when Egypt was again a foreign enemy.
