Archeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian text, written by a man named Ipuwer and referred to as the Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage. It is a poetic lamentation, describing a time in which the natural order in Egypt was severely disrupted by death, destruction, and plagues.
The only surviving copy of the papyrus dates to the 13th century BC—perhaps as early as 1300 BC. Although the original copy is long since perished, careful analysis of the content, the linguistics of the text, and the date of the copy strongly indicate that the source document was originally composed during the 18th Dynasty around the 16th–14th centuries BC. Another interesting temporal correlation is that the name Ipuwer appears in inscriptions of the 18th Dynasty, and in particular one from the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III just prior to the Exodus.
The logical conclusion is this: 1) since the Admonitions describes events similar to the plagues recorded in Exodus, and 2) since the Egyptian account was composed in the same general time period as the events of the Exodus, 3) then it is highly plausible that the two documents contain independent accounts of the identical episode in history, but written from different perspectives.
Even though scholars have recognized and acknowledged the thematic and linguistic links between the plagues of the Admonitions and the plagues of Exodus, they have dismissed these similarities on the unwarranted a priori assumption that neither the book of Exodus nor the Admonitions of Ipuwer describe historical events. They then hedge their bets by asserting that even if the accounts were historically based, there is too large a time gap between the two texts to take historicity seriously.
However, since the chronology of the original texts seem to overlap adequately, and because of the uncanny match in specificity of the catastrophic events, there is a strong possibility that the documents describe the same general events and period of hardship in Egypt.
To recap the similarities:
| Admonitions | Exodus |
| The river has turned to blood | Exodus 7:19-20. |
| There is blood everywhere | Exodus 7:21 |
| Plague and pestilence throughout the land | Exodus 8:5-8; 8:16-19; 8:21-24; 9:4-7; 9:8-11; 10: 12-15 |
| The grain has been destroyed | Exodus 9: 22-25; 9: 31; 10:4-6 |
| The authority of the pharaoh called into question | Exodus 10:7 |
| Prevalence of death | Exodus 12:30 |
| Mourning throughout the land | Exodus 12:29 |
| The death of children | Exodus 12:29-31 |
| The gods of Egypt are ineffective, and have lost a battle | Exodus 7:10-12 |
| Jewelry is in the possession of slaves | Exodus 12:35-36 |
The evidence is there, and it seems highly likely that Admonitions are indeed an Egyptian remembrance and near contemporary account of the time of the Exodus plagues.
“I will strike the water that is in the Nile with the staff that is in my hand, and it will be turned to blood.”… And the blood was through all the land of Egypt (Exodus 7:17,21).)
