The Exodus in Fausset's Bible Dictionary

(the departure of Israel from Egypt), 1652 B.C. (See CHRONOLOGY.) A grand epoch in the history of man's redemption. The patriarchal dispensation ends and the law begins here. God by His providential preparations having wonderfully led the Hebrew to sojourn in Egypt, and there to unlearn their nomadic habits and to learn agriculture and the arts of a settled life, now by equally wonderful interpositions leads them out of Egypt into the wilderness. Joseph's high position had secured their settlement in the best of the land, apart from the Egyptians, yet in a position favorable to their learning much of that people's advanced civilization, favorable also to their multiplication and to their preserving their nationality. Many causes concurred to prevent their imbibing Egypt's notorious idolatry and corruption. As shepherds they were "an abomination to the Egyptians" from the first; they sacrificed the very animal the Egyptians worshipped (compare Exodus 8:26); blood in sacrifices too was an offense to the Egyptians. Jacob and Joseph on their deathbeds had charged that their bodies should be buried in Canaan (Genesis 1.), thereby impressing on their descendants that Egypt was only a place of sojourn, that they should look forward to Canaan as their inheritance and home. The new Pharaoh that knew not Moses was Aahmes I, 1706 B.C., about the same date as Levi's death, the last of Joseph's generation, mentioned in connection with the rise of the new king. The Exodus occurred early in the reign of Thothmes II (Cook, in Speaker's Commentary) (See EGYPT). The persecution that followed on their foretold multiplication, shortly before Moses' birth (no such difficulty attended Aaron's preservation just three years previously, Exodus 7:7), was divinely overruled toward weaning them from Egypt and binding them together as one people...