The Great Pyramid of Giza

The event

Around 2560 BC, the pharaoh Khufu commissioned the largest pyramid ever built in Egypt, a monument so precisely engineered that it remained the tallest man-made structure on earth until the medieval period. Alongside the slightly smaller pyramids of his successors Khafre and Menkaure, it formed the necropolis at Giza, on the edge of the desert just outside modern Cairo.

These towering tombs reflect a civilization utterly convinced that its pharaoh was a god who needed an eternal palace for the afterlife — a theology entirely foreign to, and quietly answered by, the biblical picture of the one true God who cannot be confined to any house made with human hands (Acts 7:48-49). When Abraham later traveled down into Egypt during a famine (Genesis 12:10), or when Joseph rose to serve as vizier centuries afterward, they entered a land already ancient, already legendary for the scale of what Egyptian kings could build and command.

The pyramids stand, too, as a monument to what large-scale forced and paid labor in Egypt could accomplish — worth remembering when reading Exodus 1's account of Israelite slaves set to building Pharaoh's store cities. Egypt's engineering culture did not vanish between Khufu's day and Moses' day; it was the same nation, with the same appetite for monumental construction, right up through the New Kingdom.

Dating

The pyramid is dated by Khufu's reign (c. 2589-2566 BC in the conventional chronology), with construction traditionally placed around 2560 BC. Like all Old Kingdom dates this can shift by a decade or two depending on the Egyptian chronology used, and radiocarbon samples from the pyramid's mortar have suggested dates several decades to about a century earlier than the conventional figure — a discrepancy Egyptologists attribute to the builders' use of old wood. The attribution to Khufu and the Fourth Dynasty is archaeologically secure.

Scripture references

• Genesis 12:10
• Acts 7:48-49
• Exodus 1:11