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film title: The Exodus decoded copyright : date posted on youTube: 17Nov2024 youTube title : Is There Scientific Proof Of The Bible's Plagues | The Exodus Decoded youTube URL : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XObk07uabLI youTube host : Timeline - World History Documentaries, 5.37M subscribers views by 10Oct2024 : 14,816,505 |
Produced by |
Felix Golubev, Simcha Jacobovici |
Executive producer | James Cameron |
Expert commentary |
Uzi Avner, Arava Environmental Inst, Israel Manfred Bietak, Austrian Archaeological Inst: [discover, excavate] Avaris John Bimson, Trinity College Philip Davies, Uof Sheffield William Dever, Uof Arizona David Faiman, Ben-GurionU Catherine Hickson, Geological Survey of Canada Christos Doumas, Uof Athens James Hoffmeier, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Simcha Jacobovici, film [researcher, co-producer, main commentator] George Kling, Uof Michigan Amos Nur, StanfordU Constantinos Paschalidis, Natl Archaeological Museum Athens Charles Pellegrino, author Donald Redford, PennStateU Rabbi Chaim Sacknovitz Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, 1876 made a world-shaking discovery at Mycenae Jean-Daniel Stanley, Smithsonian Inst survivor, Lake Nyos, Cameroon Keith Whitelam, Uof Sheffield |
Locations (incomplete list) |
Aegean fault line Avaris, capital of Hyksos, Manfred Bietak [discover, excavate] Beni Hassan, ?turquoise mine? East Mediterranean fault lines Lake Monoun 1984 Lake Nyos, Cameron 1986 Santorini, huge volcanic eruption ended Minoans Serabit El Khadim, ?turquoise mine?, Simcha Jacobovici [investigate, early Hebrew alphabet] |
Key historical figures (incomplete list) |
Ahmose, Pharoah @time of Exodus Seqenenre Tao II, Ahmose father |
time | video comment |
0:52 |
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1:36 | Well right here in this building there's a 3500 year old gold image carved perhaps by an eyewitness to the biblical Exodus of the Lost Ark of the Covenant. And the people in there don't realize it. [Music] |
2:56 |
![]() [Prof Philip Davies, Uof Sheffield] When you come to the Exodus we have no evidence that it happened and a good deal of evidence that it didn't. They made it up. |
3:22 |
![]() [Prof James Hoffmeier, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School] Something must have happened. I can't explain what happened, but it's shaped ancient Israel's identity. And therefore I can't dismiss it as a fairytale. |
3:47 | In the famed Valley of the Kings where 60 Egyptian pharaohs were buried. It's a splendor the world has never equalled. archaeologists ... |
3:53 |
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4:10 | The Exodus story is at the very heart of Christianity Judaism and Islam for thousands of years. Believers have treated it as historical fact but in the past few decades scholars have called the story a fairy tale . |
4:23 |
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5:07 | How did we do it? By tracking down experts from a variety of disciplines who rarely if ever talk to each other. None of them fully subscribes to our take on the story but many possess critical pieces of the puzzle and what emerges challenge even the most skeptical. |
5:31 | But before we show you the evidence, let's start the story at the beginning. The biblical tale begins when the Hebrew patriarch Jacob escapes drought in the land of Canaan, modern Israel, and moves to the land of plenty, the land of the pyramids, ancient Egypt. There Jacobs clan, the future Israelites, flourish in their new environment. In fact Jacobs son Joseph became as powerful as the rulers of Egypt, the Pharaohs. |
6:20 | And yet, after Joseph dies his people are enslaved by the ruling Egyptians. More than a century later the Egyptians became afraid of revolution and instituted a policy of drowning all the Israelite male infants.It was at this point Jacobs great-great grandson was born. To avoid death the infant was hidden in the bulrushes where he was found by Pharaoh's daughter. The princess adopted him and named him Moses. |
7:07 | When Moses grew up he sided with his oppressed brethren and fled into the desert. 60 years later he returned to utter the unforgettable cry: let my people go. 10 times Pharaoh said no to Moses, and 10 times God struck Egypt with catastrophic plagues, ultimately killing all Egyptian firstborn males. Finally Pharaoh let the Israelites go, but then changed his mind and pursued Moses and his followers to the edge of the sea. |
7:47 | It looked like the Israelites were trapped, but then the impossible happened. The sea parted and the Israelites crossed to safety. Moses now led his followers to Mount Sinai where they received the Ten Commandments, the sacred laws they would take with them to the promised land. |
8:14 | Most scholars believe this story is a myth, so even when the evidence is staring them in the face they ignore it. The most dramatic example of this took place in 1947 when archaeologist ?Henri Chevrier? found pieces of a broken stone monument, or stele, dating to a pharaoh named Ahmose, around 1500 Before the Common Era or BCE. Incredibly the Ahmose stele is covered in hieroglyphic inscriptions that mirror the biblical tale. Today it lies abandoned in the basement of the Cairo Museum and all our attempts to get access to it were unsuccessful. So using Chevrier's published description, we reconstructed the stele and got one of the world's leading Egyptologists to comment on it. |
9:14 |
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10:08 |
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10:22 |
The stele then says something very peculiar, though. Egyptians worshiped many gods :
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10:40 |
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11:03 |
![]() ![]() This is the Cairo Museum, home to some of the most famous mummies ever unearthed. We came here in search of Pharaoh Ahmose, the man who we believe is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. At first, we couldn't locate him but we did locate his father Seqenenre Tao II. If we are right, this is one of the pharaohs who oppressed the Israelites. According to most scholars his skull had been crushed by enemy axes. Perhaps those enemies were Israelites smashing his mummy as they left on the Exodus. |
11:54 | We continued on our search for Ahmose. It was hard to locate him because he had been sort of misfiled but we did locate one of his two wives under some debris in one of the museum's workshops. |
12:26 |
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12:48 |
![]() ![]() At last we located barrow Ahmose. Here is the man who confronted Moses. Can it be that Ahmose's father remembered the Israelite Prince he grew up with? And when he gave his son his Egyptian name Ahmose, "the moon is born", he chose the name because of a play on words. In Hebrew Ahmose means the brother of Moses. [Music] |
13:27 |
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13:57 | No-one has ever been allowed to film at Avaris. To get there we needed the cooperation of the Egyptian authorities. They're concerned and in the volatile Middle East the discovery of biblical artifacts will somehow strengthen modern Israel's claims in the area. As a result the Exodus is a touchy subject in Egypt today, so we didn't mention Moses, and we stressed that we were interested in Pharaoh Ahmose and the Hyksos he drove out of Egypt. After months of negotiations we were finally given permits to shoot at Avaris [Music] |
14:59 |
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15:30 |
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15:53 |
![]() [Charles Pellegrino, author] :
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16:41 | If the Hyksos expulsion and the biblical Exodus are really one and the same event, then perhaps we can find the long sought-after proof for the biblical Exodus during the Hyksos period. But most scholars say that the Hyksos and the Israelites cannot be equated because the Hyksos left Egypt hundreds of years before Moses was born. |
17:06 |
![]() [William Dever, Uof Arizona] You can play with Egyptian dates you can move them up maybe ten years and down ten years. But you can't move up up and down 50 or a hundred years. That's not possible. And yet many people try to do that. They try to adjust chronology to fit their predetermined notion of biblical history. You can't do it. |
17:31 | But maybe we have to. What if scholars are placing the Exodus in the wrong time period? Imagine the confusion if in the future scholars date World War two to the 1990s. You'll never find any evidence that it actually happened. Currently, most scholars date the Exodus to 1270 BCE during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses the second. |
18:00 |
![]() [John Bimson, Trinity College] The Bible gives information that would put the Exodus about 480 years before the early years of Solomon. In the middle of the 15th century BC. |
18:16 |
![]() [Donald Redford, PennStateU] Hyksos, and the Hyksos expulsion, is what we're talking about when we are talking about the Exodus. |
18:50 | Alright, our new date for the Exodus is 1500 BC. We know from the Bible that the Israelites arrived in Egypt some 200 years before their Exodus. In the original Hebrew the Bible calls the Israelites God's people, or Amal Israel. If we are right about our dates, there should be hard archaeological evidence for the arrival of these Amal around 1700 BCE. |
19:31 |
![]() ![]() 400 kilometers south of Avaris is a tomb at Beni Hasan. It dates to 1700 BCE. Because no one has looked for evidence of the Exodus in this period, the tomb has never been linked to the biblical story. And yet there is a perfectly preserved wall painting here that records an ancient migration into Egypt from the area of modern Israel. [Music] |
20:12 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As in the Bible the scene involves bearded Semites riding donkeys and bringing their families and flocks into Egypt. Like the biblical Israelites they are wearing multicolored tunics. The hieroglyphic inscription on this wall calls these people the Amal. God's people. |
20:44 | Looking in the right place during the right time we are the first to recognize a veritable snapshot of the migration of the biblical Israelites to Egypt. The Bible records that at the time of their arrival one Israelite rose to the highest levels of Egyptian power. His name was Joseph, son of Yaakov, Jacob in English, and he became so powerful that he wore on his finger the seal of royal authority. Discovering Joseph's seal at Avaris would prove that the Israelites arrived here exactly when our timeline predicts. That would be like finding a needle in a 3700 year old the archaeological haystack. [Music] |
21:51 |
![]() ![]() Incredibly, the tiny seal was found precisely at the archaeological layer we anticipated. In fact Professor Manfred Bietak found no less than nine seals worn by Joseph's court officials and scribed right on them is the Hebrew name Yaakov, Joseph's father. [Manfred Bietak, Austrian Archaeological Inst] It's very strange that we found nine seals with the name Yakov here. It's a biblical name, by the way. The original was probably mounted on a ring worn on the finger, and this gives us a new puzzle. |
22:30 | Is it really a puzzle? Not if one uses our chronology. This is the only time that a Hebrew name appears on an Egyptian royal seal. It directly connects Avaris with the Bible. |
22:43 | The professor Bietak steers clear of biblical chronology. He's under the constant watch of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, who have made Avaris off-limits to the public. Supposedly for conservation reasons, Professor Bietak has been forced to cover up his dig every single year. The areas then plowed, seeded, and cultivated by local farmers. No one would suspect that underneath these fields lies an archaeological treasure trove that proves the biblical Exodus. [Music] |
23:34 |
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24:12 |
For thousands of years Egyptians mined turquoise in this area. Often they used slave labor. The ancient turquoise mines are off the beaten tourist track. The only ones who know their way in this area are the Bedouins?, who still live at the foot of the mines. [Simcha Jacobovici, film co-producer] I heard once that Bedouin they can do like the Prophet Musa that they know which rocks have water in them. They break it. Is that true? We got here, paid our respects to the local Sheikh, and recruited one of his sons to show us the way. Okay let's go. |
25:01 |
We learned of this place from old papers published in obscure journals. We came here to find proof of the slaves that Moses led to freedom. But even if we found evidence for the presence of slaves, how could we be sure that they were Israelites? The Bible provides us with two clues:
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25:55 |
![]() ![]() To support our new biblical timeline we needed to find alphabetic inscriptions carved by slaves some 3,500 years ago. In our wildest dreams they would also mention the biblical God El. And sure enough, there are slave inscriptions here and one of them records a 3500 year old cry: "El, save me". This is the writing of a slave, a slave who worked in this mine. You still see the chisel marks which were part of the forced labor that author of the subscription was involved in. And he wrote his cry to God saying "help me. don't forget me". Here, where he worked, and he slept, and he probably died. And it represents an incredible moment in human history. Not only is it the first inscription that records the name of God El, but it also records the oldest or maybe the second oldest alphabetic inscription. It's the basis which [Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, English, Arabic] all is based on this writing. Pretty incredible and after all these years we would be here to record this man's cry. |
27:39 | Moses stele Beni Hassan tomb paintings, Joseph's royal seal, and the Israelite slavery inscriptions all point to approximately 1500 BCE as the date for Moses and the Exodus. If our date is correct then there's something else that we have to factor in. Around 1500 BCE people living along the Mediterranean experienced one of the most cataclysmic events in history: the eruption of the Santorini volcano in modern greece. This eruption may be another crucial clue for decoding the biblical Exodus. [Music] |
28:24 |
![]() ![]() This is the island of Santorini, 700 kilometers from the egyptian coast across the mediterranean. It is literally the mouth of a volcano. Some 3,500 years ago santorini was destroyed by one of the worst volcanic eruptions in human history. When it erupted the volcano essentially brought to an end the Minoan civilization that once flourished here. It sent an ash cloud that measured some 40 kilometers straight up and 200 kilometers across. The sound of the eruption circled the earth some 10 to 12 times. |
29:06 |
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29:55 | So perhaps the cataclysmic events described in the Bible such as plagues, darkness and the parting of a sea are somehow connected to the santorini eruption. But like all things related to the Exodus, dating the Santorini eruption to 1500 BCE can be controversial. |
30:29 |
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30:30 |
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31:08 |
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32:10 |
Let's begin with the plagues. The biblical catastrophes that struck Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn't let the Israelite slaves go. Until now, no one has come up with a comprehensive scientific explanation for all ten plagues. The answer began to take shape for us after we returned to the Ahmose stele and discovered an amazing synchronicity with the biblical text.
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32:59 |
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33:35 |
![]() ![]() As it turns out, the biblical story takes place in an earthquake zone :
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34:29 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But what do earthquakes have to do with the biblical plagues? Well, let's begin with the first plague. Earthquakes can't possibly explain how Moses turned the Nile's waters into blood. Can they? In fact, they can when they trigger gas leaks and we don't have to go back 3,500 years to prove the point. In 1984 at Lake Manu and in 1986 at Lake Nyos, both in Cameroon, the sweet Clear Lake waters suddenly turned blood-red. |
34:29 |
![]() [George Kling, Uof Michigan] What was happening was that the bottom waters contain very high concentrations of iron, dissolved iron, and when that was mixed up to the surface when the gas was released it contacted oxygen and it formed an iron hydroxide, essentially rust. The same thing that happens on cars. And that rust was what caused the reddish brownish colour at the surface of the lake. When it comes to the biblical plagues, along the Nile Delta there, there are many elements that are present that that could suggest a buildup of gas. So we could have a situation where gas beneath the the earth is trapped in pockets and earthquakes along the fault line then release that gas. And depending on the kind of water that that gas goes through it could even turn that water red. |
36:20 |
![]() ![]() ![]() If the Nile turned blood-red as a result of a gas leak then the chain of events described in the Bible would have been set into motion. The first thing that happens in such circumstances is that the water becomes devoid of oxygen and all living things in it die. The fish then begin to float in the polluted waters, rotting in the Sun. The only things that do not die are frogs. Unlike fish they can hop out and as it turns out biblical plague number 2 is a frog infestation. The lack of clean water then leads to lice slides and bacterial epidemics among humans and domestic animals. Not surprisingly, biblical plague number three is lice, plague number four is flies plague number five is an epidemic. |
37:31 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Plague six is boils and blisters, man and beast. Can an earthquake induced gas leak explain this kind of outbreak? Let's go back to the 1986 disaster at Lake Nyos, Cameroon. At the time people living along the lake developed strange boils and burns. It turns out that carbon dioxide mixed with air put people into a kind of coma, reducing circulation to the skin and causing the kind of boils described in the Bible as plague number six. |
38:12 | Despite the first six plagues, the Bible records that Pharaoh still refused to let the Israelite slaves go. So Egypt was now struck by plague number seven: hail, and it was a very unusual hail involving ice and fire mixed together. To this day rabbis teach that the biblical description is no metaphor. |
38:40 |
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39:03 |
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39:47 |
![]() ![]() [Catherine Hickson, Geological Survey of Canada] When the ash cloud goes up to two great distances in the stratosphere essentially what happens is you have moisture in the atmosphere. You also have a lot of water vapor in the cloud itself so the small fragments of ash and crystals actually form a nucleus. Something very similar to a hailstorm. |
40:10 | In other words, Egypt experienced fire and ice raining from above just as the Bible describes it. It seems that earthquakes and the resulting volcanic and gas eruptions neatly explained the first seven biblical plagues. |
40:28 |
![]() ![]() They also explained plague number eight: locusts. Locust migrating swarms: there can be between 40 and 80 million adult locusts in each square kilometer. Cold weather produces a drop in their body temperature and makes them land enmass. The volcanic hail and the weather disruptions caused by the Santorini eruption would have forced great clouds of locusts, which are common in this part of the world, to suddenly land in Egypt. As the hailstorm clear and the temperature rose, so did the locusts, exactly as the biblical account describes . |
41:12 |
![]() ![]() Gripped by earthquake storms and their consequences, Egyptians, who are now going to experience the last phase of the Santorini eruption, or what the Bible calls plague number nine: darkness. This is the way it probably worked. During the months before the eruption:
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42:39 |
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42:56 | The discovery of Santorini pumice at Avaris seems to prove the arrival of the ash cloud in Egypt and explains the biblical description of a prolonged darkness. Some might argue that since pumice can float it could have been brought to Egypt by waves and washed ashore by tides. So we caught up with Professor Jean Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute. He's made the definitive discovery. He found Santorini ash in the Nile delta. It could only have arrived in the ash cloud that plunged Egypt into the biblical darkness. |
43:40 |
![]() ![]() [Jean-Daniel Stanley, Smithsonian Inst] We had to look through 10 to 20,000 grains to find one ash grain, so we found a total of 40 ash grains. Not all ash looks the same. Ash has a fingerprint aspect. The ash particles that we find in the northeastern Nile Delta are individual grains that came in from Santorini. |
44:07 |
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44:32 |
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45:12 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() According to our scenario at this point, in the sequence of events that began some six months earlier the gas leaks that set the chain of plagues in motion would have finally erupted. Carbon dioxide would have seeped to the surface, and being heavier than air, would have killed the animals and sleeping people before it dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere. In case you think all this is conjecture, consider this: it happened in exactly the same way in 1986 at Lake Nyos Cameroon. On the fateful night of August 21st, the villagers at Nyos went to sleep. They couldn't have known that the carbon dioxide gas, which had turned the lake blood-red, was now reaching a critical point. As the people of Lake neo slept, the top of the lake was keeping the carbon down like a cap on a pop bottle. But then the earth rumbled and a landslide took place, sending rock into the water disturbing the surface pressure and releasing the gas. The gas then rose to the surface, and like some alien monster, emerged from the water. Droplets forming on it turning the invisible gas into a visible fog. The fog then rolled across the water and across the land suffocating everything in its path. And as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared dissolving harmlessly into the atmosphere. The next day those who had been sleeping on higher ground woke up to find some 1800 people dead, hundreds of cattle, and small animals also dead. All around there was deathly silence. |
47:27 |
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47:52 | After the death of the firstborn Phaaroah finally relented, letting Moses take his people out of Egypt. According to the Bible, what made Pharaoh give up was the selectivity of the death, the fact that it was only male firstborn who died. It was this selectivity that demonstrated to him that God himself was involved. How can we account for this? Well, Egyptian firstborn males had a privileged position. They were the heirs to the throne, to property title and more. They slept on Egyptian beds low to the ground, while their brothers and sisters slept on rooftops, sheds, and in wagons. The Israelites sitting up at their first Passover meal did not feel a thing while the low travelling gas suffocated the privileged Egyptian males sleeping in their beds. |
48:51 |
![]() ![]() This conclusion is backed by the archeology. At Avaris, Professor Manfred Bietak has found mass graves dating to before and during our date for the Exodus. The earlier graves are classic examples of ancient epidemics that killed men, women, and children. But at the time of the Exodus the mass grave he found has only males in it. [Manfred Bietak, Austrian Archaeological Inst] Here you see bones of burials from the early 18th dynasty. They are all male victims. By the size of the graves and the number of the individuals in the graves we think people died in rapid succession. And the individuals were just thrown into the pit, some of them lying on their stomachs, some lying on their side. Some of the pits were just 20 centimeters deep, and just some dust put on top of them. |
50:04 |
![]() ![]() The Bible says that Pharaoh's son also died during the plague of the firstborn. Since we claim that Ahmose is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, we should be able to prove that Ahmose's son died young. Searching in the Cairo Museum, he's right over there, on the shelf there. We found Ahmose's son. The prince had died young, he was only 12. For the first time ever we can put a face and a name to a victim of the biblical plagues. [Music] |
51:03 |
![]() ![]() ![]() [James Cameron, executive producer] It seems that [the Bible, geology, archeology] are all telling the same story. But skeptics who would like to regard the Exodus as myth might resist the idea that it actually happened, because this would imply that God does indeed exist. Believers, on the other hand, may feel that a scientific explanation of the biblical story takes God out of the equation. [Music] |
51:41 |
![]() ![]() But in the book of Exodus, God does not suspend nature, he manipulates it. [Music] In other words, according to the Bible, we should be able to understand the science behind the miracles. And the greatest miracle of them all was the parting of the sea after the death of the Egyptian firstborn males. Pharaoh let the Israelites go. He then changed his mind and pursued them. Finding them trapped on the shores of a sea, the Hebrew text calls the sea Yam Suf, and it was here where the miracle occurred. The sea parted, the Israelites crossed to safety, and then the waters came back, swallowing the entire Egyptian army, overturning chariots, drowning all the horses and soldiers. [Music] |
53:06 |
For years explorers have searched for evidence of the miracle of the parting of the sea. [Music] They've mounted underwater archaeological quests looking for ancient chariots, swords, and any evidence of drowned Egyptian armies. There is a theory that a huge subsurface shelf in the Red Sea could have been exposed for a short time during a powerful storm providing a land bridge for the Israelites to cross. If the search has always been unsuccessful. Who would have thought that instead of diving, they should have been driving. That's because Yam Suf, Hebrew for the place where Moses parted the waters, has for years been mistranslated as Red Sea, when in fact the correct translation is Reed seed. And reeds grow in Sweetwater, not salt water, in lakes not oceans. We should have been looking for a lake. But which lake is the Bible referring to when it describes the parting of the Reed Sea> [Simcha Jacobovici] It goes like this, ..nothing.. almost like a figure 8. Using our dates for the Exodus, we tracked down an ancient artifact that records the precise location of Yam Suf. It also provides us with the first archaeological evidence for the parting of the sea. |
55:06 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We found a hieroglyphic inscription on the granite monument that tells the entire story of the Exodus from Pharaoh's point of view.
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55:06 |
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56:26 |
![]() ![]() To examine the text better, we got a pressing of the hieroglyphic. And as it turns out, the Egyptian text doesn't just mention the parting of the sea. It also mentions a specific location next to where the sea parted. The place is called Pi-Hairote and today archaeologists know exactly where it was, enabling us to locate Yam Suf, the place where the Bible states the sea parted. The Israelites crossed to safety, and human history was changed forever. [Music] |
57:15 |
![]() ![]() [James Hofmeier, Trinity Evangelical School] It's an ancient lake that survived until the 1850s when the Suez Canal was put in this ancient lake finally died. [Music] [Jacobovici] Professor Manfred Bietak, after conducting thorough study of this area, proposed that this lake was known to the Egyptians as ?Pa-Tufi?, the marshland, the marshy sea. [James Hofmeier, Trinity Evangelical School] And the word Tuf, Egyptian word for reed, is the same word as Suf in Hebrew. So that Yam Suf, he suggested, was a name derived from this body of water. Now it's called the El Balah lake. [Music] [captions] Lake El Balah in Hebrew means "The lake where God devoured"!! |
58:10 |
![]() Behind me is what's left of Lake El Balah. You can see the salt marshes. You can see the reeds. This whole entire area was one big lake or sea, but because of the Suez Canal, today you can literally walk or drive through the sea of reeds. |
59:08 |
![]() ![]() [James Hofmeier, Trinity Evangelical School] One of the problems most people have today is they pull out a map, and they try to find out where were these places that the Bible is talking about. But you can't use a modern-day map, you have to use a map that's three thousand years older. And we are working on that, by taking satellite images where we can actually see the depressions from ancient Lakes. And so we can actually begin to understand what the northeastern Delta of Egypt was like 3,500 years ago. |
59:29 | Identifying the precise location of Yam Suf means that we can finally explain the miracle of the parting of the sea. This satellite photo clearly demonstrates that lake el Balah is close to the edge of the Nile Delta, where salt accumulates and collapses from time to time. As Pharaoh chased the Israelites to the shores of Lake el Balah, the extreme seismic activity that caused the ten plagues and the Santorini eruption would have now caused the delta to start sliding into the eastern Mediterranean. And there's millions of tons of soil moved forward. The edge of the African plate, which had now been released from its burden, must have risen between 1 and 1 and a half meters. In other words, the sea parted. Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground and drained from pools and sinkholes creating dry land for the Israelites to cross. At this point further seismic activity, or another collapse of the Delta, would have sent a major tsunami crashing against the coast. |
59:58 |
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1:01:23 |
![]() As it turns out, some of the people that followed Moses across the parted sea, and later to Mount Sinai, did not follow him to the promised land. They boarded ships and sailed in an unknown Exodus to Greece. Why hasn't anyone noticed? Because no one thought to look in Greece for evidence of an event that happened in Egypt. In fact, until recently there was very little archaeological evidence of contact between the Minoan civilization of ancient Greece and Egypt at the time of Moses. All that changed with two great discoveries. The first was in 1972 when, digging under the ash at Santorini, archaeologists made a startling discovery linking this area of the world with the Exodus. They found unusual Minoan style wall paintings. Incredibly, among them there is a map depicting an ancient journey from Egypt to Greece. |
1:03:03 |
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1:03:03 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The map is breathtaking, the colors as vibrant today as 3500 years ago. It depicts an epic journey from Egypt to Santorini. The voyage is complete with a terrible storm at sea. Working even further back we see that the ancient sailors sailed past Egyptian fauna and palm trees in the Nile Delta. The map then follows the river inland and ends up in a magical city on a kind of river bound island. This mysterious city is surrounded by high walls with multi-storied houses, elegant ladies peering from the rooftops, and a rich harbour. At the time there was only one port in Egypt that fits the city in the map. The Avaris. Until late in the 20th century there was no archaeological proof of contact between Avaris and the Minoans of Santorini. Then in 1992 perfectly preserved Minoan paintings were discovered at Avaris proving that in biblical times this city was populated not only by Israelites, but also by people from ancient Greece. |
1:04:59 |
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1:05:16 | So we now know that there was an intimate contact between Greece and Egypt at the time of the Exodus. As a result, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that some of the followers of Moses came from the area of ancient Greece, and it's quite possible that some of these people returned to Greece after the Exodus. The Bible says that Moses and his followers left Egypt with great quantities of swords and Egyptian gold. 3,500 years after the fact, is there any chance of finding Israelite swords and Egypt's golden treasures in Greece? |
1:06:19 |
![]() ![]() ![]() This is Mycenae, 50 kilometers from the coast on the Greek mainland. In 1876 the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, made a world-shaking discovery at Mycenae. Here he found 3500 year old tombs. The tombs are incredible with long shafts leading to vaulted ceilings. They were built in the shadow of a mountain that has the shape of a pyramid. Surprisingly, they contained a treasure trove of swords and Egyptian gold. Sleiman believed that the goal belonged to Homer's Agamemnon who led the war against Troy for the sake of the beautiful Helen. But scholars soon discovered that the people who were buried in the tombs lived about three hundred years before Agamemnon. They lived around 1500 BCE. Is it possible that here lie some of the followers of Moses? The answer is on the tombstones, that we now know were placed on top of the death chambers. The meaning of the images on the gravestones has never been deciphered until now. [Music] |
1:08:04 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She asks callers: what is it? I said well :
Three frames of the parting of the sea and they don't know they don't know it. But look at it, just look at it, it's so clear :
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1:09:42 |
![]() And the second option may be the chariot race scene. [Simcha Jacobovici] So this guy, this is kind of an ancient Olympics. This guy's an official, and this guy is racing around. [Constantinos Paschalidis, Natl Archaeological Museum Athens] Umm, he is bearing a sword as well, and he's holding a sword. [Simcha Jacobovici] This doesn't look like much of a sword, looks more like a staff to me. [Constantinos Paschalidis, Natl Archaeological Museum Athens] Yes. In this case it's an abstract depiction. It's not a observed realistic depiction, so we cannot say much. |
1:10:55 |
![]() ![]() ![]() To understand what's going on here, all you have to do is actually take this 3D image which has been flattened out, and just pull it out. Just pull it out and what you get is the biblical story. [Music] When the three stele are put together, what we see, exactly as depicted in the book of Exodus, is an Egyptian charioteer chasing Moses across the parted sea. Then Moses turns and faces his pursuer. Walls of water rise and come down on the Egyptians. Finally, [rider, chariot, horses] are drowned. Here we have literally carved in stone a visual account of the biblical tale dating back to the very time of Moses and the Exodus. |
1:11:50 |
![]() ![]() The earthquake activity that led to the crossing of the sea would have now led to oil and gas fires in this oil and gas rich area. What Moses and his followers would have seen, just like the Bible says, is a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night beckoning them into the desert. |
1:12:18 |
![]() ![]() So if we've interpreted the evidence correctly and we are right about the location of the part at scene, we can now make sense of distances provided in the Bible. Maybe we can even locate the legendary Mount Sinai, where according to scripture, God revealed himself to Moses. Many would argue that identifying Mount Sinai would be tantamount to corroborating the biblical tale. For thousands of years adventurers have attempted to find the elusive mountain, and they've always ended up in the wrong place. The most popular Mount Sinai is at the site of a third century Christian monastery. [Music] It is a high mountain in the south of the peninsula, and this is where the tourists flock. There is only one problem with this site: it doesn't fit a single biblical criteria.
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1:14:05 |
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1:14:05 |
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1:15:24 |
![]() ![]() The Bible provides us with three coordinates from Mount Sinai. First according to the biblical itinerary, Mount Sinai is a 14-day journey from a place called Elim. This is now easily identified with a place just south of Lake el Balah called to this day the springs of Moses. If a mass of people can walk no more than 15 kilometers a day, we can now draw an arc from Elim that takes us 210 kilometers into the desert. This gives us our first coordinate. |
1:16:03 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Exodus 3: 1 through 2, states that God first appeared to Moses in a burning bush on Mount Sinai. At the time Moses was tending his Medianite father-in-law's flocks. Mount Sinai therefore has to be within flock grazing distance of Medianite territory. The problem is that the Midianites lived in Saudi Arabia, not the Sinai Peninsula, except for one place: a place called Timna. Here archaeologists found the remnants of Medianite flocks and even Medianite wall drawings. If Moses was tending Medianite flocks in the Sinai, this is the only place it could have ?camped?. And based on local flock grazing practices, Mount Sinai should be no more than 45 kilometres from Timna. This gives us our second coordinate. |
1:17:12 |
![]() ![]() The final biblical coordinate in the search for Mount Sinai appears in Deuteronomy 1:2. It states that the mountain of God is an eleven-day journey from a place called Kadesh Barnea. Today, almost all archaeologists identified the biblical Kadesh Barnea with the oasis of Tel Kudarat in north central Sinai. Using 15 kilometres a day as our measure, we can now draw our last Ark into the desert a hundred and sixty-five kilometers from Kadesh Barnea, leaving us with a very tiny area that conforms to all the biblical coordinates. |
1:18:00 | Nonetheless, even in this small area there are many mountains. But there is a clue that may help us zero in on the precise peak. The book of Exodus calls Mount Sinai a holy mountain, and holy mountains in the desert are marked by ancient open-air rock sanctuaries. Yeah, looks like a little excavation. That's amazing, in this area there is only one mountain surrounded by sanctuaries. Today that mountain is called Jebel Hashem El Tarif. Very distinct that second peak. Although this entire area is in the middle of a military zone, we got to it. |
1:19:10 |
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1:19:37 |
![]() [Uzi Avner, Arava Environmental Inst, Israel] The mountain is not very high it's only about 200 meter above the plateau but it is very conspicuous. You can see it from distance. And the unique point is that it is surrounded by actually the largest concentration of open-air sanctuaries that we know today in the desert. |
1:20:00 |
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1:21:05 |
![]() ![]() But what would we need to find to prove that this Sinai? The Bible states that Mount Sinai has several unique characteristics. If this is the mountain it should have :
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1:22:16 |
![]() ![]() [Uzi Avner, Arava Environmental Inst, Israel] Each one is a circle of about fixed meter in diameter, and they are built in the shape of a platform. Each one you can see the burial cell int the burial cell nicely built and moved in. Rarest of all, look at this. It is the white stuff. It appears there was an ancient spring at the top of the mountain. This is a turpentine?, which means an accumulation of calcium under wet conditions. That integral indicates an ancient spring. Finding in tour the math on top is quite unusual. The remains of a real ancient spring. Yeah, this is quite unique. |
1:23:06 |
![]() I am God, your God who brought you out of Egypt from the place of slavery.
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1:24:09 |
![]() ![]() ![]() According to the Bible, Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on stone tablets and placed them in a golden box, the Ark of the Covenant. He then built a portable temple at the base of the mountain. A tabernacle is a place to worship the God of Israel and is a home for the holy art. The following model of the holy Tabernacle has been created to the exact specifications provided in the book of Exodus. At the time of the Exodus, as you neared the entrance, you would have come to a screen seven meters high according to ancient Jewish sources. The screen was decorated by winged lions or Griffin's figures, usually associated with ancient Greece. Only priests were allowed inside the courtyard. And here there was a four and a half meter high altar for sacrificial animals. In a daily ritual, priests carried animals up the ramp. Then the blood of the sacrifices anointed the horns of the altar. |
1:25:47 |
![]() ![]() In the back of the courtyard was the tabernacle, the house of God.
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1:27:46 |
![]() ![]() The Bible says that a tribe called Dan helped to craft the golden Ark. Is it a coincidence that Homer calls the people buried at Mycenae Danoi? Perhaps among the golden objects found by Schliemann at Mycenae, there is an image of the Ark made by the same Danites that crafted the box that once held the Ten Commandments? Incredibly, among all the golden objects there is a piece of priestly jewelry that goes unnoticed and unheralded. So far experts have assumed that this is a depiction of a single object but we believe that it's a 3500 year old image of three legendary objects viewed head-on. Here we can clearly see the holy altar, the ramp of the tabernacle, and the Ark of the Covenant. At last we know what the Ark of the Covenant looked like. [Music] More than that, we now know how the holy objects appeared when seen from the Holy of Holies looking out. Until now, the only person who would have seen these objects from this perspective is Moses. |
1:30:04 |
[James Cameron, executive producer] In the beginning of this journey we asked the question: is the biblical Exodus fact or fiction? I think a compelling case has been made that the Exodus is a historical fact. Here we were shown for the first time:
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1:30:51 | But I think we must end our journey as we started: with a question. Did all this happen as a result of massive geological events triggered by nothing more than nature? Or were the earthquakes, the volcanoes, and the tsunamis caused by divine intervention, when God decided to free a nation from slavery and forge a new covenant with humanity? |