In my 2006 book Empire of Thebes: Ages in Chaos Revisited I argued that most of the synchronisms and character identifications proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky in his Ages in Chaos (1952) were actually correct, and that the errors committed by him – which the critics made so much of – were of a relatively minor nature.

Ages in Chaos, in short, needed fine-tuning, not complete rejection. Indeed, Velikovsky missed a great deal of evidence in his favor. This was the case, for example, with the equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba.

In Ages in Chaos Velikovsky argued that the Eighteenth Dynasty rose to power at the same time as the kingdom of Israel, and that the first pharaohs of that line, Ahmose and Amenhotep I, were contemporaries of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David. About thirty years after the war of liberation, Egypt came to be ruled by Hatshepsut, an extraordinary woman, one who, unique in the annals of Egypt’s history, claimed the honor and title of Pharaoh. In Velikovsky’s system, Hatshepsut must have been a contemporary of Solomon, the fabulously wealthy and powerful son of King David. For Velikovsky, it was but a short step from placing Hatshepsut at the same time as Solomon to making her identical to Solomon’s famous royal visitor, the Queen of Sheba.

In support of this claim, Velikovsky noted that one of the most important events of Hatshepsut’s life was an expedition to a mysterious land named Punt. The journey to Punt, which she immortalized on her funerary monument at Deir el Bahri, was obviously regarded as an event of immense importance by the Queen, for she placed it alongside the story of her divine birth on the temple walls. Punt, Velikovsky argued, must have been Israel; and the expedition recounted on the Egyptian temple a contemporary record of the Queen of Sheba’s expedition to Jerusalem.

The problem of trying to match the characters and events of early Hebrew history with those of Egyptian history is one that has exercised the minds of scholars for over 2,000 years. Egypt, the Egypt of the pharaohs, plays an extremely prominent role in the story of the Jewish people; for which reason the Land of the Nile has long fascinated Christian and Jewish writers. Which pharaoh, they have wondered, reigned in the time of Abraham; who it was that made Joseph his vizier; and which ruler of the Nile oppressed the Israelites in the time of Moses? Following the decipherment of the hieroglyphics by Champollion in 1821, European scholars fervently hoped that all these questions would soon be resolved. Alas! It was not to be. Search as they might, historians found not a mention of the Israelites or of the great events described in the Old Testament. In time, the search was abandoned, and it became part of accepted wisdom that none of these things were mentioned by the Egyptians because the Books of Genesis and Exodus were little more than a collection of myths.

But although the Egyptian records could produce no Hebrew vizier named Joseph nor a catastrophe like the Ten Plagues or the Exodus, they did indeed refer to characters and events which seemed to recall these biblical stories. So for example one Egyptian inscription beside the Nile mentioned a famine of seven years and a wise vizier who solved the crisis by interpreting the pharaoh’s dream. The vizier was named Imhotep and the pharaoh Djoser. However, Imhotep and Djoser were placed by Egyptologists a thousand years before the biblical Joseph of the many coloured coat. In the same way, Egyptian documents named the Pessimistic Texts did recall a series of terrible disasters that afflicted Egypt, including a universal darkness, a slaughter of the “first born,” and the Nile turning to blood. However, Egyptologists dated the events described in the Pessimistic Texts a thousand years before those described in the Book of Exodus.

In Ages in Chaos (1952), Immanuel Velikovsky argued that the Amarna Letters, a series of over 300 royal correspondences composed during the reigns of pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaton, were written during the lifetimes of Ahab of Israel and Jehoshaphat of Judah. These latter, according to Velikovsky, were identical to the Amarna-period potentates Rib-Addi of Sumur and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem. Velikovsky presented an enormous quantity of evidence, from many areas of knowledge, in support of this claim. He was able to show, for example, the astonishing parallels that exist between the language used in the Amarna documents (which often include Hebrew sentences and words) and the language found in the Books of Psalms and Kings. In the Books of Kings we find reproduced the same words, expressions, idioms, and popular sayings, that already occurred in the Amarna Letters, though these are supposed to have been written six hundred years earlier.

The evidence of language was augmented with that of art and archaeology, whilst the position of the Amarna Letters in the time of Solomon’s great-grandchildren was reinforced by Velikovsky’s earlier equation of Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba. If Hatshepsut was the Queen of Sheba, and a contemporary of Solomon, then the Amarna Letters, which were written three to five generations after her time, must also date to a period three to five generations after Solomon – the time of Ahab and Jehoshaphat.