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No event in the Old Testament has been dated more often or more confidently than the Exodus, and the confident answers are two hundred years apart. This is not a fringe dispute. Both positions are held by people who have spent careers on it.
Two dates, two centuries apart
The early date puts the Exodus at roughly 1446 BC. The late date puts it at roughly 1270 to 1250 BC.
The gap matters more than it looks. It decides which pharaoh is in the story, which archaeological layer you should be looking at, how long the period of the Judges runs, and whether the conquest of Canaan sits in the Late Bronze Age or at its collapse.
Get it wrong and every date for four hundred years afterwards moves with it.
The early date: 1 Kings 6:1
The early date rests on one verse, and it is a precise one. First Kings 6:1 says Solomon began to build the temple in the fourth year of his reign, "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt".
Solomon's reign can be fixed reasonably well against Assyrian and Babylonian records. His fourth year falls around 966 BC. Add 480 and you get about 1446 BC.
That is as close to arithmetic as biblical chronology gets, and it is why the early date has held on. It is not a reconstruction. It is a number the text supplies for exactly this purpose.
It also fits the book of Judges, if the periods of oppression and rest given there are read one after another. Those figures add to something in the region of four centuries, which the early date has room for and the late date does not.
Is the 480 a real number?
Here is the difficulty. Four hundred and eighty is twelve times forty, and forty in scripture is very often a generation rather than a count of years.
Twelve generations from the Exodus to the temple is a statement with a shape to it. If the number is schematic, and a generation in practice ran nearer twenty-five years than forty, then twelve generations is closer to three hundred years, and the Exodus slides forward into the thirteenth century.
The Septuagint, for what it is worth, has 440 rather than 480 in this verse, which is a small hint that the figure was not treated as untouchable.
There is no way to settle this from the text alone. Either the 480 is a straight sum, in which case the early date follows, or it is a generational frame, in which case it is not evidence for a specific year at all.
The late date: the store cities
The case for the later date is mostly archaeological, and it starts with Exodus 1:11: the Israelites built for Pharaoh "treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses".
The city of Pi-Ramesse was built in the Nile delta by Rameses II, who reigned from about 1279 to 1213 BC. If Israel was building it, Israel was in Egypt in the thirteenth century, and the Exodus is later than 1446 by a long way.
The obvious objection is that a later scribe could have updated an old place name to one his readers would recognise, which scripture does elsewhere. The obvious reply is that this is an argument built to save a conclusion.
The late date also suits the wider picture of Canaan. The thirteenth and twelfth centuries are when the Late Bronze Age system falls apart, cities burn across the eastern Mediterranean, and new highland settlements appear in Canaan. A people arriving and settling in the hill country fits that moment more comfortably than it fits the fifteenth century.
The one fixed ceiling
There is a hard limit on the late end, and it comes from Egypt.
The Merneptah Stele, carved around 1208 BC, lists the peoples Pharaoh Merneptah claims to have defeated in Canaan. One of them is Israel. The name is written with the marker used for a people rather than a settled city-state, which is itself interesting.
Whatever else is disputed, by about 1208 BC there is a group called Israel in Canaan, known well enough to be worth naming on a victory monument. The Exodus has to be earlier than that, with enough time afterwards for the wilderness years and the entry into the land.
That rules out the very latest proposals and squeezes the late date into the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth.
Jericho, and why it settles nothing
Jericho ought to be the test case, and for a while people thought it was.
John Garstang excavated in the 1930s and dated a destroyed city wall to around 1400 BC, which suited the early date very well. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated in the 1950s with better stratigraphic method and re-dated the destruction to around 1550 BC, which suits neither date and leaves Jericho largely unoccupied by the time either Exodus would have reached it.
The argument has run ever since, over pottery sequences and the interpretation of particular trenches. It is not resolved, and it is unlikely to be resolved by more digging at Jericho.
The honest summary is that the site has been used to support both dates by different competent people, which usually means it supports neither cleanly.
Where the Church stands
It does not. There is no revealed date for the Exodus and no official position on the question.
Church study materials have generally used the early date, largely because 1 Kings 6:1 is in the text and the arithmetic is simple. That is a convention, not a doctrine, and it has never been presented as one.
Nothing in the Restoration depends on which century the Exodus falls in. The event is not in question. Its year is.
What the timeline shows
The Exodus appears as a range, not a year, and the entry says which reading produces which end of it. Events that depend on it — the wilderness, the conquest, the Judges — move with it, and are marked as approximate for the same reason.
That is the rule everywhere on this site. Where respected sources disagree, both are shown and the disagreement is stated. A tidy line built on a quiet decision would be a worse tool than an honest line with a gap in it.
The related question of how long Israel was in Egypt before all this is in how long were the Israelites in Egypt. The general problem of competing chronologies is in why Bible chronologies disagree.