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The Four-Hundred-Year Stele. During the early tenth century B.C.E., an Egyptian pharaoh of the XXIst Dynasty (c. 1075–948 B.C.E.), perhaps Solomon’s father in-law, transferred the capital from Ramses (formerly Avaris) to Tanis. Among the monuments moved in the process was this stele of Ramesses II, which records the inauguration of the cult of the Hyksos god Seth 400 years earlier. Baruch Halpern suggests that this stele, moved at a time when relations between Solomon’s court and the Egyptian court were good and when parts of the Bible were being composed in Jerusalem, is responsible for the biblical notion that 400 years separated Joseph (or the Hyksos) and the pharaoh who pressed the Israelites into building the capital city Ramses.