Commenting: https://www.livescience.com/60817-bible-records-oldest-known-solar-eclipse.html

This is nonsense, and its appalling how its gets reported uncritically.

It's based on three suppositions that have no factual basis, and these three are then used to support each other:

- The idea that the Pharaoh in Bible's 'Exodus' story was intended to be Ramses II has no support. It has become popular in biblical crackpot circles because he's famous, and then become 'accepted' in these pseudo-scientific phantasies by the weight of being popular. The biblical story has no details that could be connected to what we know from the real historical Ramses except that he was a pharaoh also.

As the story in the bible is not historical writing and was never intended to be historical writing (our idea of historical writing would have been utterly alien to those who wrote it, annals being the extent of their understanding of historical writing), the Pharaoh is a representative figure whose character and role has been created based on the demands of the story, the myth, and not what the authors of the story might have known about past historical pharaohs (little beyond their immediate past):

If we want to find models for the 'Pharaoh of the Exodus', and have any scientific credibility, we would look at what historical phraohs authors of the story could have actually used as models and then sculpted for the demands of their story; someone very close to the time of the composition of the story as an oral version and and then another one at the time of it being written down.

- The idea that the biblical story represents a solar eclipse. That theory has been proposed before, but its a theory. As can be seen, the original text offers multiple ways of interpretation. The idea that there must be a real natural event to explain what is an event in a myth is something that we can't be sure of.

The biblical story is not constrained by scientific facts, but only by the imagination of the people who came up with it. There is no archaeological or historical evidence for any part of it, and there is no astronomical either.

The demands of the story decide how the event is portrayed, the story wasn't adapted to fit what we understands as scientific credibility.

- Even if the story would describe a solar eclipse, it doesn't have to describe some particular historical eclipse. If we could be sure that it's a solar eclipse in the story, even then we could only know that the people who came up the story knew a such phenomenon existed; we couldn't know that they recorded a real historical solar eclipse instead of using an overall description of solar eclipse in what they came up with.

The authors of the Exodus myth were not constrained by a real historical events; again, they were only constrained by their imagination. If they wanted to insert a solar eclipse in their story to create a dramatical event in the story, nobody would have said they couldn't do it.

If they wanted to make a solar eclipse to last a day, again no one would among their peers or audience would have said them that real solar eclipses don't last a day.

Myths and religious stories don't obey the rules of scientific writing.

- Trying to fit Biblical stories into scientific frame to 'prove them' should be a thing of the past; when crackpot theories based on circular reasoning are reported alongside valid science, these Biblical phantasies get credibility that they don't deserve.

I suggest people actually read the Exodus story and see it as the religious myth constrained only the imagination of their writers and the demands of the religion; the few most famous points that the biblical crackpot theories try to prove again and again have a multitude of other far-fetched points that go far beyond realism - I suggest, for starters, that you try to keep a record of the death toll for example.