When Was the Exodus?

Credibility
Jacobovici's assertions have been criticized inter alia by Dr Chris Heard of the Pepperdine University. Based on the already existing literature, the criticism addresses each of Jacobovici's claims, as well as his methods in general, including:
• Jacobovici uses circular logic for his assertions. In the absence of any other evidence, Jacobovici attempts to find a real-world explanation for a Biblical phenomenon. Then, from the fact that a phenomenon could be caused by a certain event, Jacobovici surmises that a Biblical phenomenon was caused by exactly that type of an event.[9]
• Biblical scholars further criticize Jacobovici's method of first assuming that the Biblical description was an embellished description of a real world event, followed up with claims that his explanation is "exactly as the Bible describes," whereas in reality his explanation diverges from the Biblical description.[10]
• Chris Heard, Associate Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University on his Web site called "Higgaion" claims that while a single supposition is not an invalid tactic, Jacobovici uses a chain of suppositions to support each subsequent claim, often using commercial breaks to move from "it could be possible that" to "now that we've established that," a misleading rhetorical trick.[11]
• Chris Heard also claims through carbon dating evidence that the Santorini eruption happened some time between 1650 BC and 1550 BC, narrowed to between 1627-1600 BC, with a 95% probability of accuracy.[12]
• Jacobovici puts the Exodus in 1500 BC. However, it is believed that the pharaoh Ahmose ruled decades earlier, in 1550–1525 BC. Jacobovici does not address the issue, and simply moves Ahmose's rule 50 years to the future in order to fit his theory, without presenting any evidence or support for his claims.
• As in Hebrew the word 'Ah' means brother, and 'Mose' means Moses, Jacobovici claims that the word Ahmose can be understood as 'brother of Moses'. This however is incorrect, as actual hieroglyphics in the pharaoh's name read Yahmes. 'Ahmose' is a mangled obsolete misreading of the name, still used traditionally. Yahmes has nothing to do with Hebrew Ah Mose, and means 'born of Iah' or 'Iah is born'.[13] Iah is a lunar deity and is also written as Yah, Jah, Joh or Jah(w).[14] The syllable 'Ah' in the name 'Ahmose' (Jˁḥ ms(j.w)) is a theophoric syllable and refers to the deity Iah (Jˁḥ). Theophoric syllables were very common in ancient Egypt. The name 'Ramesses' (R`-ms-sw) is a combination of the theophoric syllable 'Ra' (R`) and the combining form '-moses' (-ms-s(w)). Consequentially 'Ramesses' means 'Ra is born' or 'Ra fashioned him'.[15] Furthermore, Moses is an English version of the Greek variant of the traditionally Hebrew Mosheh. Egyptian would have differentiated between 's' and 'sh' in Mose / Mosheh.[11]
• Chris Heard further claims that the mechanism of the Lake Nyos eruption and subsequent events is cardinally different from what would have happened in a river such as the Nile. Build-up of gas, or high concentrations of iron in the deep waters, would only be possib\le in a deep lake with still water; not in a shallow river with flowing water.[16]
• There is no archeological evidence, or any supporting evidence presented by Jacobovici, to support the claim that Egyptian first-born slept in beds, while all others slept on roofs. Moreover, Jacobovici's explanation of the 10th plague as being caused by carbon dioxide does not account for the Biblical description of deaths of firstborn cattle.[10]
• Chris Heard on his "Higgaion" website claims that while Jacobovici talks of a palpable ash cloud in Egypt, 800 kilometers from the volcanic eruption, later on in the documentary a geologist backs up the claim that ash reached Egypt by showing that only a microscopic amount is found in the soil, which would not only not create a palpable cloud, it would be altogether invisible to the naked eye.[17]
• Jacobovici's claim of a shelf collapse, leading to a decrease in water levels, immediately followed by a second natural disaster, a tsunami, leading to a restoration of water levels, has absolutely no geological evidence, whereas such a calamity would have led to widespread devastation across the entire region, not just localized to one lake, and it would have left a huge geological footprint. It would have likely also been recorded by eyewitnesses. However, an eruption of the magnitude of Santorini, were it to occur during this period, would have generated tsunamis capable of significantly affecting water levels.[18] While Jacobovici claims that his explanation is 'exactly as the Bible describes', the Bible actually describes a wall of water on each side of the Hebrews, which is the exact opposite of Jacobovici's explanation.[19]
• Jacobovici presents the Beni Hasan tomb painting as proof of Jewish migration into Egypt. However, Jacobovici ignores the fact that the tomb painting is actually signed by the author, identifying the caravan as merchants (not migrants); coming from the land of Shut, which is not in the area of modern Israel; and dated to the reign of pharaoh Senusret II, circa 1890 BC and not Jacobovici's claim of 1700 BC.[1]
• Prof. Heard claims that presenting a ring signed Jacob-har and linking it to the Biblical Joseph, Jacobovici ignores the fact that Yaqub-Har is a well-attested to Egyptian pharaoh of the Second Intermediate Period; and Yakov and variants are common Semitic (not just Hebrew) names from the period. Furthermore, Jacobovici provides absolutely no explanation as to why Joseph would have a signet ring with the name of his father Jacob, and not his own, which is a modern-day equivalent of signing legal contracts with a signature of one's father.[20]
• Chris Heard states that inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadem, which refer to El, are not necessarily proof that Hebrews worked in the mines. El is a common Semitic (not just a Hebrew) word that means god (for example, see Allah, El (deity)); and the word El in the Bible is often used to refer to gods other than the Hebrew God. Altogether, the word El appears in the entire Tanakh 226 times, often referring to other gods; whereas the word YHVH appears 6,800 times and it refers exclusively to the god of Israel. Furthermore, the actual inscription shown in the documentary does not contain the word El at all; two other El inscriptions from the mine are known, but they are not shown in the program.[21]
• Altogether the connection of the Serabit el-Khadem mines to the Exodus is suspect, since the Bible tells of Moses liberating Hebrew builders from the Nile delta, not miners from 400 kilometers to the South.
• The composition of the Admonitions of Ipuwer, a papyrus that according to Jacobovici describes a plague of hail and fire, is in fact dated to ca. 1850 BC - 1600 BC, at least 100 years before Jacobovici's Exodus date of 1500 BC. The papyrus also refers not to current events but, most likely, to the First Intermediate Period of ca. 2134 to 2040 BC, five to six centuries before Jacobovici's Exodus.[1]
• The El-Arish granite shrine dates to nearly a thousand years after 1500 BC, and the symbols Jacobovici refers to as the 'parting of the red sea', two knives and three waves, mean nothing of the sort. The claim is akin to saying that the name Ramesses, based on hieroglyphics used to write it, means sun-fox-skins-folded-cloth-sedge-quail-chick. Altogether, the text in the stele is mythological, and none of the things Jacobovici refers to from the stele are actually found in any known translations of the text.[1][19]
• Chris Heard claims that while speaking of the 3 Greek stelae, Jacobovici only shows stelae 2 and 3 from Grave Circle A, and does not show stele 1, which clearly shows a hunting scene with chariots, and not Moses and the pharaoh. Instead of stele 1, Jacobovici shows a different stele from a different find, with a hole in the middle. The actual stele is shown only briefly, and is then replaced by a CGI version, with the hole filled in. Figures on the actual stele, which have tails curved up and are instantly recognized as lions, are replaced with CGI versions with tails turned down, now identified as horses.[22][23]
• The swirls motif on the stele, which Jacobovici identifies as water, is very common in Mycenaean art of the period, and often appears in context that clearly excludes its identification with water.[23]
• The Higgaion site claims that Jacobovici greatly distorts the Biblical description of the Ark of the Covenant, and the Tabernacle, in order to present the Greek pendant as a representation of the Ark. The pendant does not resemble the biblical description.[24]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus_Decoded

The Exodus Decoded
In 2006, the History Channel aired The Exodus Decoded, a multi-million dollar documentary by award-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, with additional backing from more famous filmmaker James Cameron. In The Exodus Decoded, Jacobovici attempted to forge firm historical and scientific links to the biblical story of the exodus. In my judgment, Jacobovici failed dramatically. I explain why in a series of nineteen analyses of Jacobovici’s evidence and arguments. The Exodus Decoded unfolds with a series of “exhibits,” a word that evokes both a museum tour and a courtroom dispute. I’ve organized my response to The Exodus Decoded using the same outline. In brief, Jacobovici wishes to date the Israelite exodus from Egypt to c. 1500 BC, to identify Ahmose as the pharaoh of the exodus, and to provide scientific explanations for the ten plagues. Jacobovici presents sixteen “exhibits” to support his case.
Exhibit A: Ahmose’s “Tempest Stela.” Jacobovici claims that Ahmose’s Tempest Stela gives an Egyptian version of some of the ten plagues. However, Jacobovici must rewrite both the Tempest Stela’s text and the biblical book of Exodus in order to make the synchronisms work, and the Tempest Stela predates Jacobovici’s date for the exodus by several decades.
Exhibit B: Pharaoh Ahmose. Ahmose’s mummy itself, of course, proves nothing. Jacobovici attempts to connect Ahmose to Moses, but this attempt rests on phonemic coincidences in English and ignores the details of Ahmose’s family tree (Exhibit B1). Jacobovici also attempts to connect the Israelites with the Hyksos, but to accomplish this, Jacobovici must mangle several important dates (Exhibit B2).
Exhibit C: The Beni Hasan tomb paintings. Jacobovici shows viewers some tomb paintings from Beni Hasan in Egypt. These paintings date from c. 1890 BC, and according to the hieroglyphic captions, they depict a group of Canaanite merchants visiting Egypt to trade cosmetics and other goods. Jacobovici, however, assigns the paintings to c. 1700 BC and tries to connect them with Jacob’s migration to Egypt as described in the book of Genesis.
Exhibit D: The Jacob-har royal ring. The name inscribed on this signet ring, better transliterated Yaqub-hor, belonged to a well-attested Hyksos ruler. However, Jacobovici wants viewers to ignore the -har element and its well-known historical connection, and instead to connect only the Yaqub part to Joseph’s father Jacob, from the book of Genesis, as evidence of Joseph’s connection with the Hyksos.
Exhibit E: Inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim. Jacobovici claims that some early alphabetic graffiti from Egyptian mines at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai peninsula can be identified as Israelite because of a letter sequence that Jacobovici reads as the divine name “El” (as in “Isra-El”). However, Canaanites worshiped El for centuries before and after the emergence of Israel. Moreover, Jacobovici misunderstands or misrepresents the content of the inscriptions, omits inscriptions that speak against his thesis, and ignores the tension between his scenario and the biblical narrative.
Exhibit F: Santorini/Thera pumice in Egypt. The Bronze Age eruption of the volcanic island known to the ancient Greeks as Thera and to modern tourists as Santorini plays such a large role in The Exodus Decoded that it requires four separate installments in this series. Jacobovici tries to use pumice from Thera (in the Aegean), excavated from Avaris (in Egypt), to establish that Thera erupted around 1500 BC. However, volcanologists date Thera’s Bronze Age eruption to c. 1625 BC, and Manfred Bietak, the archaeologist whom Jacobovici interviews on this point in The Exodus Decoded, concludes that the pumice was secondarily brought to Avaris after floating across the Mediterranean to the Egyptian shore (Exhibit F1). Jacobovici claims that an “earthquake storm” accompanied Thera’s eruption, and that this earthquake storm toppled Egyptian idols, as narrated in the Bible and in Ahmose’s Tempest Stela. However, the idols that suffered indignities in Ahmose’s Tempest Stela suffered those indignities before the titular tempest, and the biblical story of the exodus says nothing about idols toppling; moreover, Jacobovici’s has no geophysical or archaeological evidence that any such earthquakes occurred in Egypt c. 1500 BC (Exhibit F2). Jacobovici’s model of an earthquake storm depends heavily on a theoretical model that hypothesizes an earthquake storm propogating in a west-to-east pattern across the Agean, Anatolia, and the Levant in the period 1225–1175 BC. Based on this model, Jacobovici posits a similar earthquake storm around 1500 BC. However, the scientist who proposed the model in the first place calculated that the Mediterranean earthquake storm prior to the 1225–1175 BC storm would have occurred around 1625–1575 BC, much earlier than Jacobovici claims (Exhibit F3). Jacobovici claims that this earthquake storm could release gasses that oxidized the Nile, causing the water essentially to rust; he cites Lake Nyos in the Cameroon as his analogy. For Jacobovici, this explains the first through sixth plagues as a series of natural events. However, Jacobovici’s analogy doesn’t hold up when one considers the differences between lakes and rivers, and the phenomena he describes don’t actually mirror the biblical descriptions of the ten plagues, despite his claims to the contrary (Exhibit F4).
Exhibit G: The Admonitions of Ipuwer. Jacobovici claims that this text describes the seventh plague, which Jacobovici glosses as a hail of both ice and fire. However, the Admonitions of Ipuwer don’t say what Jacobovici claims they say, nor does his scenario fit the biblical description of the seventh plague. Moreover, the Admonitions of Ipuwer probably dates at least 200 years and possibly as much as 680 years or so before Jacobovici’s date for the plagues. Jacobovici’s scenario also requires a dramatically unrealistic spread of ejecta from Thera, but in fact Avaris is much too far away for any of the ejecta from Thera to have fallen in Egypt in sufficient size or quantity to make Jacobovici’s scenario realistic.
Exhibit H: Santorini Ash in the Nile Delta. Jacobovici claims that falling and rising temperatures caused by the plague of hail—temperature variations for which no physical or documentary evidence exists—prompted odd behavior by locust swarms, the eighth plague. He turns again to Thera/Santorini for an explanation of the ninth plague, attributing the plague of darkness to ash from Thera’s eruption. Ash did reach the Nile delta region from Thera’s eruption, but in extremely small quantities, not enough to constitue a plague of tangible darkness.
Exhibit I: Mass graves at Tell el-Daba. Returning to his Lake Nyos analogy, Jacobovici claims that carbon dioxide gas, hanging low to the ground, killed the Egyptian firstborn, who slept on beds; their younger siblings slept higher away from the ground, and therefore escaped. Jacobovici has no evidence for this, only conjecture, and at any rate this cannot explain the exclusion of Goshen and the effect on animals as narrated in the biblical story. For Exhibit I, Jacobovici notes that Manfried Bietak has excavated some mass graves with only male occupants at Tell el-Daba. Jacobovici interprets these bodies as victims of the tenth plague. Of course, a skeleton cannot reveal its birth order, and the biblical story does not limit the plague to firstborn males. Perhaps more importantly, Bietak concludes that the corpses belonged to diseased soldiers who died over a longer period of time than one night.
Exhibit J: Ahmose’s son, Prince Sapir. Sapir, often but inconclusively identified as Ahmose’s son, died young, at about twelve years of age. Jacobovici wants viewers to conclude that Sapir died in the tenth plague, but of course nothing about an early death inherently ties Sapir to a miraculous plague. Many Egyptians died young of natural causes. Moreover, nothing in the biblical story suggests that the tenth plague discriminated by age, making Sapir’s youth even more irrelevant.
Exhibit K: El-Arish granite shrine inscription. This inscription, which dates from over a millennium after Ahmose, bears a hieroglyph that Jacobovici misinterprets as referring to a “divided sea.” He therefore tries to connect the inscription to the parting of the Reed Sea (Hebrew “Yam Suf”) in the exodus story. However, Jacobovici mangles the text and ignores the fact that it comes from a completely different time period.
The Reed Sea or Yam Suf. Jacobovici identifies Lake Ballah as the biblical Yam Suf. In this he may well be correct. However, instead of citing the actual biblical, archaeological, and geographical evidence that points in this direction, Jacobovici offers another misguided linguistic argument.
Exhibit M: Santorini wall paintings. Jacobovici wrongly claims that a particular wall painting from Santorini depicts a Minoan voyage to Avaris. He then locates some of these Minoans among Moses’s followers in the exodus—which, of course, the painting cannot possibly demonstrate.
Exhibit N: Mycenaean grave stelae. According to Jacobovici, the Minoans who followed Moses out of Egypt parted from the Israelites and “returned” to the Greek mainland, specifically Mycenae, where they carved grave stelae illustrating the crossing of the sea. Jacobovici’s interpretations of the stelae depend to a significant degree on distorting the stelae, in particular, on turning lions into horses.
Exhibit O: Mount Sinai (Hashem el-Tarif). As with the Yam Suf, Jacobovici may correctly identify the site of Mt. Sinai as Hashem el-Tarif. This identification remains inconclusive, however, and other contenders remain in the fight. Moreover, Jacobovici’s method of drawing the identification depends on spurious estimates of the Israelites’ travel time in the Sinai peninsula, and finding the actual location that ancient Israelites meant by “Mt. Sinai” doesn’t prove anything about the exodus.
Final Exhibit: Mycenaen bird pendant. For his final exhibit, Jacobovici produces a small Mycenaen pendant with birds perched at either end of a rectangular object. Jacobovici claims this small pendant represents the biblical ark of the covenant. To make this connection, Jacobovici claims that the Israelite tribe of Dan had a special relationship with the ark of the covenant, and that the Danites (or at least a substantial portion of them) were actually Minoans who followed Moses out of Egypt and then sailed for the Greek mainland to become Homer’s Danaoi. Jacobovici must also triple the size of the tabernacle’s altar and reorient various pieces of tabernacle furniture in order to make his scenario work.
For the reasons surveyed briefly above, I consider The Exodus Decoded misguided at best (if Jacobovici doesn’t know better) and deceptive at worst (if Jacobovici does know better). The pages that follow offer much more detail on each point. Unfortunately, I’ve heard from a number of well-meaning Jewish and (more frequently) Christian believers who find themselves attracted to Jacobovici’s thesis because they think his scenario gives them a firm historical basis for the exodus. However, Jacobovici doesn’t succeed in this—not only because he misrepresents (intentionally or ignorantly) his ancient nonbiblical evidence, but also because the story he tells differs noticeably, and sometimes quite dramatically, from the story the Bible tells.
Proceed to Exhibit A »

theheards.us/chris/?page_id=141

Feb 28, 2019 11:07:12 GMT -5 rockjunquie said:

parfive - I bet you had a blast with Ancient Aliens. 

It was aliens, I tell you!

I tried watching that. Could not get through a single episode.