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143 and, when war shall be called, they will join our enemies, and fight against us, and leave the land.” EXODUS 1:9-I0 Biblical scholars have assumed all along that the feared na- tion of the “Children of Israel’ were the Israelites sojourning in Egypt. But this is in accord with neither the numbers given nor with the literal wording in the Bible. Exodus begins with a list of the names of Jacob and his children who had come, with their children, to join Joseph in Egypt, and states that “all of those who descended from the loins of Jacob, exclud- ing Joseph who was already in Egypt, numbered seventy.” (That together with Jacob and Joseph the number totaled 72 is an intriguing detail to ponder.) The “sojourn” lasted four cen- turies, and according to the Bible the number of all the Israel- ites leaving Egypt was 600,000; no Pharaoh would consider such a group “greater and mightier than us.” (For the identity of that Pharaoh and of “the Pharaoh’s Daughter” who raised Moses as her son, see Divine Encounters.) The narrative’s wording records the Pharaoh’s fear that at time of war, the Israelites will “join our enemies, and fight against us, and leave the land.” It is a fear not of a “Fifth Column” inside Egypt, but of Egypt’s indigent “Children of Israel” leaving to reinforce an enemy nation to whom they are related—all of them being, in Egyptian eyes, “Children of Israel.” But what other nation of “Children of Israel” and what war was the Egyptian king talking about? Thanks to archaeological discoveries of royal records from both sides of those ancient conflicts and the synchro- nization of their contents, we now know that the New King- dom Pharaohs were engaged in prolonged warfare against Mitanni. Starting circa 1560 B.c.E. with the Pharaoh Ah- mosis, continued by the Pharaohs Amenophis I, Thothmosis I, and Thothmosis II, and intensifying under Thothmosis III through 1460 B.c.£., Egyptian armies thrust into Canaan and advanced northward against Mitanni. The Egyptian chronicles of those battles frequently mention Naharin as The Promised Land