In the last scenes of a very famous movie, The Lost Ark of the Covenant, the box that once held the Ten Commandments is crated and abandoned in the basement of a warehouse. [Music] What if Hollywood's depiction accurately reflects reality? This would mean that hiding somewhere, there's tangible proof of the story the Bible calls the exodus, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt led by the prophet Moses.
Exodus. For thousands of years the biblical epic has captured the human imagination. But did it really happen?[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.
Painstaking excavation under 150 feet of sand and rock they discovered the ancient ????.[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.
[Prof Keith W. Whitelam, Uof Sheffield] What can you dig up which is going to prove the Exodus? What would you have to find in order to prove the Exodus?
I'm James Cameron and I know a filmmaker who for nearly a decade has been on a mission to answer a three thousand-year-old question: Is the Exodus fact or fiction? His name is Simcha Jakobovitch and he's a two-time Emmy winner in investigative journalism. He claims that scholars have missed the archaeological evidence that's hiding in plain sight. More than that he seems to have come up with the goods by putting together the long forgotten pieces of the ultimate archaeological mystery
[Donald Redford, PennStateU] We have this very interesting stele which is dated to the reign of Ahmose?. It records a tremendous catastrophe that happened to Egypt. We're not quite clear what it was but it involved rain and thunder and lightning, and such a storm that rarely happens in Northeast Africa. I mean that's a dry area. It sounds peculiar to me that the biblical tradition preserves the memory of plagues, you know, which involved climatic cataclysms. And here we have from the very time, this curious stele.
This curious stele may in fact hold the key to the Exodus enigma. Let's take a closer look.
- The Bible says that at the time of the exodus there was a great storm
Ahmose Stele also talks of a great storm - the Bible says darkness descended on Egypt
Stele says that Egypt was enveloped in darkness
- on this stele it is written that the storm and the darkness happened when God, in the singular, manifested his power.
[Simcha Jacobovici, film co-producer] The Bible describes Pharaoh but never names. Because of this stele we now know his name: Ahmose. And now that we know who he is maybe it's time that we met him.
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. 
According to our calculations, this somewhat discarded glass coffin contains the mummy of a woman whose husband contended with Moses and hardened his heart to God himself.
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]
In history Pharoah Ahmose is most famous for expelling a foreign nation from Egypt around 1500 BCE. At the time, Egypt was ruled by a people that the ancients called Hyksos (1750-1500 BCE). Until recently little was known about the Hyksos. Then in the 1960s their ancient capital Avaris was discovered north of Cairo. [Music]
This is Avaris a walled city dominated by palaces. 3,500 years ago it was surrounded by branches of the Nile. Avaris was discovered by Professor Manfred Bietak of the University of Vienna. Although only a few acres are exposed today, in ancient times Avaris seems to have dominated the area.
[Manfred Bietak, Austrian Archaeological Inst] Avaris itself was much bigger. It was 250 hectares, so it extended from here to the east about 2 kilometers, and from here to the south steps even one kilometer. In the Hysksos period this was one of the major residence of Egyptian pharaohs.
Egyptian history clearly states that the Hyksos who ruled mighty <avarice = Avaris%gt; were Semites like the Israelites, and that they left on a mass exodus known as the Hyksos expulsion. [Charles Pellegrino, author] :
- We have in the Bible the story of the Semites leaving Egypt and going eastward from Egypt.
- At the same time, independent of the Bible, we have a story of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt.
These scholars also say that the chronology of ancient Egypt cannot be tampered with.[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.
But some scholars are now breaking with that consensus. [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.
Professor Benson's calculations move the exodus from its present date to 1470 BCE, less than 100 years from the traditional date for the Hyksos expulsion. These are too close to write off as a coincidence. So we have a new date for the Exodus, approximately 1500 BCE.
[Donald Redford, PennStateU] Hyksos, and the Hyksos expulsion, is what we're talking about when we are talking about the Exodus.
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]
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.
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.
Now that we found hard evidence for the arrival of the Israelites in Egypt and their rise to power. And when searching for archaeological proof of their downfall in the slavery that led to the Exodus. In search of the evidence, we had to travel to a place called Serabit El Khadim, 400 kilometers south of the Nile Delta into the Sinai desert. [Music]
[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.
- First, the followers of Moses did not use hieroglyphic writing like the Egyptians. Rather the biblical tradition states that they used an early form of alphabetic writing..
- Also, the Israelites did not worship Egyptian gods, but a single God that the Bible calls El.
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.
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.
[Catherine Hickson, Geological Survey of Canada] To put this in perspective, an eruption like Santorini would be hundreds to thousands of times stronger, more explosive, than the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The energy of that eruption was so immense you would have had these huge explosions that were happening, and you hear crack, crack, crack. For hundreds of kilometers people around were listening to it. We were getting earthquakes probably magnitude [three, four, maybe even five or higher] that were happening extremely rapidly and it would have been, I'm sure to the people living there, as if the world was coming to an end.
[Charles Pellegrino, author] People have been arguing about the dates of Santorini. Volcanologist and geologists would date the eruption in the 1600s BC. Archeologists tend to date it in the 1500s.
Digging Avaris professor Bietak has no doubt that he can pinpoint the Santorini eruption to the exact time period where we place the Exodus. Here pumice? from the Santorini eruption appears for the first time. So from archaeological point of view, it looks very much as if the eruption happens early in the 18th dynasty, let us say around 1500 BCE.
[James Cameron, executive producer] Jacobovici's? chronology machine has now synchronized
- a pharaoh named ACMA's a
- the Hyksos expulsion
- the Exodus
- the Santorini eruption
- The Bible says that the God of Israel passed judgment on the gods of Egypt.
and the stele confirms that the statues of the gods of Egypt were toppled to the ground
[Amos Nur, StanfordU] Earthquake storms are sequences of large earthquakes that sweep across a large areas and the best examples are the eastern Mediterranean where we have long historical and archaeological records.
As it turns out, the biblical story takes place in an earthquake zone :
- The Nile Delta, where the Bible says the exodus took place, is criss-crossed by fault lines.
- To the east, the Great Rift fault separating the Asian and African plates runs through the [Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea, Red Sea] all the way to Africa.
- In addition, there is a fault line that runs along the modern Suez Canal, and another fault line that runs along the Nile Delta under ??.
- Meanwhile some 700 kilometers to the west, the rift between the African plate and the European plate runs practically under Santorini.
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 Neos, both in Cameroon, the sweet Clear Lake waters suddenly turned blood-red.
The mystery was solved when Professor George Kling explained the phenomenon in terms of an underground gas leak. [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.
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.
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 Neos 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.
The seventh plague was the plague of hail, but the Bible describes hail in a very unique manner. The hail was together with ice with fire, the idea being that the fire and the ice commingled together. They coexisted together. The Bible then describes God is making a miracle within a miracle, taking opposites in nature and having them coexist together.
Incredibly, there is an Egyptian papyrus that tells the exact same story. It's called the Ipuwer papyrus? and it's dated by many scholars to the Hyksos period. The Ipuwer papyrus? specifically states that Egypt was struck by a strange gale made up of ice and fire mingled together.
[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.
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 .
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:
- seismic activity in the whole eastern Mediterranean was causing the African plate to grind under the European plate (Howell: reverse causation?)
- seawater was then turned to steam that bubbled up through the magma
- this in turn caused pressure to build and erupt through weak points in the surface, triggering several small eruptions leading to a major blowout
- And the final eruption came. It created an ash cloud almost 40 kilometers from top to bottom and 200 kilometers across.
[Catherine Hickson, Geological Survey of Canada] In a matter of a few minutes they're? plunged into a black world. Ash is falling around them, they can't see, they can't breathe very well. Sun has disappeared, you have black overhead, and they have no idea what's gonna happen next.
[Jean-Daniel Stanley, Smithsonian Inst] We had to look through 10 to 20,000 grains to find one ???? 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 northern in northeastern Nile? Delta are individual grains that came in from Santorini.
Howell: our lab did some similar work, fingerprinting some African mineral to try and help identify material from forbidden protected areas. Others had long done similar work.
There's very little room for doubt that the exodus account and the descriptions that we have in Egypt of this: the volcanic dust coming into Egypt, and geological description where we can actually [see, feel, touch, date] the ??? volcanic dust in the Nile, that they are describing the same tremendous volcanic event.
The final plague took place at midnight after Moses ordered the Israelites to sit down to what became known as the first Passover meal. While the Israelites were involved in the Passover ritual, the Egyptians slept. And then it happened: every firstborn male Egyptian died. Every house was affected. No one has ever been able to offer a plausible scientific explanation for the death of the firstborn. Until now. Howell: As I remember it, Velikovsky or someone later attributed this to the collapse of [rich, stone, earthquake-sensistive structures]. In that analysis "firs-born" meant the children of the wealthy.
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 Neos Cameroon. On the fateful night of August 21st, the villagers at Neos 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, <emerge=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.
[survivor, Lake Neos, Cameroon] I was eating, just sitting among the dead people inside they have some of ?they were?. Outside animals everywhere lying, house dogs, everything. All the family. We were 56 but 53 died.
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.
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]
[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]
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]
[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.
We found a hieroglyphic inscription on the granite monument that tells the entire story of the exodus from the Pharaoh's point of view.
- the Bible calls Moses a king. On this stone, Moses is called the Prince of the desert.
- The Bible <caused=calls?> the Israelites "God's people". The granite calls them the "evil ones"
- and then the granite corroborates the miracle of the parting of the sea.
[James Hofmeier, Trinity Evangelical School] The three water signs, one on top of the other, is typically used to apply to different types of bodies of water. It can apply to the Nile, apply to a marsh, apply to the sea. But what is not so common is when you have that word in combination with these two knives. The fact that you have these two knives associated with it would suggest that this is water that is cut, water that is divided. This might be an allusion to the waters that the Red Sea or the reed sea were divided. In Exodus chapter 14.
To examine the text ..nothing..? 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 Haroke? 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]
[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]
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"!!
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Under the ever watchful eye of the Egyptian authorities who traveled to Lake El Balah, the exact spot where one of the greatest biblical miracles is supposed to have taken place. The salt beds and reeds testified to the fact that at one time the salty waters of the Mediterranean and the sweet waters of Lake el Balah intermingled here.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.
[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 taht, 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.
[Charles Pellegrino, author] We get some glimpse of these tidal waves in Turkey where they carved? their channeled scablands 30 miles inland. And in order to do that at the shore it would have had to be more than half as high, these waves, as the Empire State Building. And that's exactly the description that we do have in the Bible.Howell: Cleopatra's palace is 35 feet below the surface of the Medditerranean sea. Geeneral land rebound from glaciation continues, and levels rose with the melting of glaciers.
If the tsunami went a mere twelve? kilometers inland it would have reached lake? El Balah and engulfed the Egyptian army. By this point, according to the Bible, the Israelites had advanced beyond the reach of the waves. 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.
[Christos Doumas, Uof Athens] The whole scene may be considered as the earliest, the oldest, map in the world.
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.
[Charles Pellegrino, author] Most people do not realize that there was not only contact between the Minoan world and the Egyptians, it was very intense contact and trade contacting ideas. We had the Egyptians referring to the Minoans as the only other civilization that they consider civilized. It was not a military presence in Egypt, it was actually a trade presence.
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]
She asks callers: what is it? I said well :
- it looks like a hunt but there's no animal,
- or it looks like a battle but there's no two people fighting
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 :
- frame number one you see waves on top and waves on the bottom. You actually literally see the parting with sea
- and this guy is on a chariot chasing Moses who's holding a staff
- that's frame number one
- in the movie this the water is gathering into whirlpools
- what's happened over here everybody thinks the man or the staff is the loser but
- he's actually turned around he's turned around
- he's facing his enemy
- he's occupying higher ground
- and this guy is occupying Laura ground
- and look there's a walls of water coming
- this guy's being overturned
- the water is engulfing them
- the horses are up ended
[Constantinos Paschalidis, Natl Archaeological Museum Athens] In this very example the options can be mainly to either he is a warrior in a battle scene, and he's the enemy, he's chasing the enemy and the enemy has tried to escape holding his wood.And the second option may be the chariot race scene.
[Simcha Jacobovici] So this guy, is this, is kind of an ancient Olympics disguise unofficial and this guy is racing around.
[Constantinos Paschalidis, Natl Archaeological Museum Athens] 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 absolute. The picture, it's not a abstract depiction so we cannot say much.
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.
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.
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.
- It's well off the main trans-Sinai routes
- it's nowhere near the Land of Israel where the Israelites were headed
- there is not a single plateau that could have accommodated hundreds of thousands of Israelites, and
- since the land is made up of granite there's hardly any shrubbery to sustain flocks, or water to sustain people
So where is the mountain of God? As they followed Moses into the desert there were only four main routes the Israelites could have taken. The northern, the southern, and two central routes. The Bible explicitly states that it wasn't the northern route. Geography rules out the southern, leaving only the central routes which combine to form a single road leading to the promised land.
[David Faiman, Ben-GurionU] It's the only road that is possible because to the south of the road there are treacherous mountains, and to the north there is arid desert sand dunes. This road is an ancient road. There are water systems all along it. That was the road on which Moses would have fled for his life from Egypt, and is the road that he would have taken back finally leading the Israelites out to revelation on Mount Sinai.
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.
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 <Midianite = Medianite< father-in-law's flocks. Mount Sinai therefore has to be within flock grazing distance of Mediantite 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 <Midianite = Medianite< flocks and even <Midianite = Medianite< wall drawings. If Moses was tending <Midianite = 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.
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.
This mountain perfectly fits all the criteria for Mount Sinai.
- it is surrounded by a huge plateau that could have accommodated hundreds of thousands of Israelites
- it is easily accessible
- it literally sits on the main transana highway which follows the topography of the ancient route
[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
If we are right, some 3,500 years ago Moses climbed this mountain and received the Ten Commandments on its summit. But this is as far as we're permitted to go. Our professional camera crew sticks out like a sore thumb in a military zone. The Egyptian army forbids us to proceed. We cannot climb the mountain to confirm our theory that this is Sinai. But we came back without a crew. And armed with the only a small camera we had to climb to the top in search of evidence that this was the mountain where Moses received the commandments from God.
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 :
- a large cleft in it
- a natural podium where? Moses stood and called out to his people
- like all holy mountains it would have grave sites of holy men on its summit
- there should be evidence of a freshwater spring on top of the mountain, an extremely rare characteristic that according to the Bible sets Sinai apart from other mountains in this desert.
- the cleft looking out to a natural amphitheater. From here Moses's voice would have carried for miles.
- And here are the gravesites.
[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.
All the evidence points to this mountain is Mount Sinai, where according to the Bible the words now inched in the human imagination were first heard. I am God, your God who brought you out of Egypt from the place of slavery.
- thou shalt not have any other God before me
- thou shalt not represent such gods by any carved statue or picture (Howell: this may be part of commandment #1?)
- do not take the name of God your Lord in vain
- remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
- honor your mother and father
- do not commit murder
- do not commit adultery
- do not steal
- do not testify, as? a false witness against your neighbor
- do not be envious of your neighbor's house
- do not covet your neighbor's wife
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.
In the back of the courtyard was the tabernacle, the house of God.
- Only Moses, his brother Aaron, and Aaron's sons entered it.
- Here beyond another tapestry embroidered with Griffin's were golden ritual objects.
- And in the back was the holy of holies. In it there was only one object, the ultimate object: the Ark of the Covenant. No one knows exactly what the Ark of the Covenant looked like. The Bible claims that it was designed by God himself to house the ten commandments. [Music] Based on descriptions in the book of Exodus, people have attempted to reconstruct it complete with gold carrying? posts, the golden cover crowned by birds. Whichever way it looked, what is clear is that it was an exquisite work of gold.
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.
- ancient hieroglyphics and stone carvings depicting the parting of the sea
- we saw the biblical plagues deciphered, and the archaeological and geological proof that they actually occurred
- we even trekked to the real Mount Sinai and then
- Jakobovitch revealed what is arguably the discovery of the millennium: a gold image of the Ark of the Covenant