I’m pleased to be able to begin this segment of my extended review of The Exodus Decoded with virtually unqualified praise for one of Jacobovici’s claims. As the program moves toward its third half-hour, James Cameron acknowledges that “Believers … may feel that a scientific explanation of the biblical story takes God out of the equation.” Jacobovici then reappears and asserts, “But in the book of Exodus, God does not suspend nature. He manipulates it.” For the most part, this statement is correct. Most of the biblical plagues represent intensifications of phenomena the Egyptians may be presumed already to know quite well: swarms of frogs, insect infestations, diseases, hailstorms, and so on. However much I want to agree with Jacobovici’s statement, though, it must also be acknowledged that some of the biblical plagues, and the signs accompanying them—the water turning to blood, the death of the firstborn, and, earlier in the story, the “sticks to snakes” trick and Moses’s leprous hand—go well beyond a mere intensification of some natural phenomenon. And when Jacobovici then takes the next step to claim that “according to the Bible, we should be able to understand the science behind the miracles,” he’s really gone beyond what the biblical data will support. Okay, so maybe that praise wasn’t “virtually unqualified.” I wanted to say something nice, but I must acknowledge the limitations of Jacobovici’s approach and his claims, even when—as here—I tend to want to agree with them.

Another thing that Jacobovici gets right is his disconnection of the parting of the sea from the main body of the Red Sea as we normally think of it today. Jacobovici correctly notes that the biblical name for the sea that God parted for the Israelites is “Yam Suph,” more properly translated “Sea of Reeds” or possibly “Sea of the End.” (You’ll see it transliterated as “Yam Suf” in The Exodus Decoded; the transliteration “Yam Suph” is more common in modern scholarship, if only because it makes it a little easier for readers to perceive the final Hebrew letter ף in the transliteration.) The tradition of “translating” “Yam Suph” as “Red Sea” dates back to the Greek Septuagint, so it is a very old tradition. However, it’s virtually impossible to imagine the Israelites traveling from the Nile delta hundreds of kilometers south in order to cross over the main body of the Red Sea—in one night. Rather, if the Red Sea is involved, it would only be the northern tip of the western “rabbit ear” at the top of the Red Sea, known to us today as the Gulf of Suez. For many years, scholars have debated whether the Gulf of Suez or some other body of water was meant by the biblical writer who used the term “Yam Suph,” without any real resolution of the issue.

Now this is where Jacobovici’s typical methods start to resurface. “Using our dates for the exodus,” Jacobovici claims, “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.” Using Jacobovici’s dates for the exodus is, as you know from earlier installments of this extended review, a very bad idea. There’s no need to rehearse all that here; go back and read the earlier installments if you need to. Instead, let’s focus on this artifact and its alleged revelations. For reference, I’ll be using F. L. Griffith’s translation of the inscription, as provided in Sean Mewhinney’s article “El-Arish Revisited,” Kronos 11.2 (1986).

Jacobovici claims that this artifact, the el-Arish inscription,“tells the entire story of the exodus from Pharaoh’s point of view.” Actually, it does no such thing. The text of the el-Arish inscription is a story about the gods, and it dates from Ptolemaic times, over a thousand years after Ahmose and Jacobovici’s date for the exodus. Moreover, on almost every point of interpretation, Jacobovici gets it wrong.

“The Bible calls Moses a king,” Jacobovici claims. “On this stone, Moses is called ‘the Prince of the Desert.’” He’s wrong on both counts. The book of Exodus does not refer to Moses as a king; the word “king” (Hebrew melek, מלך) occurs only 14 times in the book of Exodus, and in each case it’s referring to Pharaoh, never to Moses. I can’t find any other verse in the Bible that refers to Moses as a king, either. As for Jacobovici’s second claim, it makes it sound like Moses is unequivocally referenced in the inscription, though this is not true at all. Moses’s name does not appear in the el-Arish inscription. I also cannot find the phrase “prince of the desert” in the el-Arish inscription. There are references to a “great chief of the plain” and a “prince of the hills,” but it’s obvious from the context that these titles refer to a god, either Shu or Seb (Geb). Two big mistakes or misrepresentations, and we’ve barely gotten started on the el-Arish inscription.

“The Bible calls the Israelites ‘God’s people.’ The granite calls them ‘the evil ones.’” Well, if you have a reference to “God’s people” in one text, and a reference to “evil ones” in another text, those are obviously references to the same group, right? Once again, Jacobovici makes it sound as if the identification of the Israelites on the el-Arish inscription were as solid as the granite shrine itself, but that’s just not the case. The Israelites are not mentioned by name on in the inscription, and therefore any identification of the “evil ones” as Israelites must be justified on some other grounds, or must remain pure speculation. The el-Arish inscription does refer to “evil ones” or, in Griffith’s translation, “evil-doers.” However, it is clear from lines 24–28 of the inscription that these “evil-doers” are perceived as invaders, not as fleeing slaves:

Then the children of the dragon Apep, the evil-doers [of Usheru?] and of the red country came upon the road of At Nebes, invading Egypt at nightfall…….. now these evil-doers came from the Eastern hills [upon] all the roads of At Nebes:

Also, lines 22–24 of the inscription make it clear that when the god Ra fought with (these? other?) evil-doers years later, he was victorious. This does not fit the story of the Israelites crossing the Sea at all. It’s not even close.

“And then,” Jacobovici intones, “the granite corroborates the miracle of the parting of the sea. The symbol can be read by anyone: three waves and two knives, ‘the parted sea.’” Exactly what the hieroglpyhic symbols here—Jacobovici shows them on-camera—are unclear to me, insofar as I am very much an amateur when it comes to reading hieroglyphics. Neither F. L. Griffith nor Georges Goyon—two early translators of the el-Arish inscription, Griffith working in English and Goyon in French—seem to have quite known what to do with it. The three wavy lines are the sign for “water,” and can be used of a body of water; the function of the knife-like signs is unclear. Griffin apparently called it “the Place of the Whirlpool,” Goyon “the Hill of Two Knives.” Neither translated it “the parted sea,” which ought to be an indicator that Jacobovici’s glibness (“The symbol can be read by anyone”) is misplaced. To my surprise, Jacobovici has James K. Hoffmeier on camera opining that there could be a connection between the el-Arish inscription and the story of the parting of the sea in Exodus 14. How Hoffmeier can say this about a Ptolemaic-era text that clearly tells a mythological story about the gods Shu, Geb, and Ra is a mystery to me, and The Exodus Decoded doesn’t provide any additional details of Hoffmeier’s reasoning. Hoffmeier is well-known to biblical scholars as one who still tries to champion the historical reliability of the exodus, but I just don’t see how anyone who has read the text of the el-Arish inscription could come to this conclusion.

“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-Harot, and today archaeologists know exactly where it was.” First, please recall that the text does not “mention the parting of the sea,” or at least not such that Griffith or Goyon recognized it. What Jacobovici and Hoffmeier see in the hieroglyphics is probably a result of wishful thinking. Second, note how Jacobovici makes it sound like the inscription associates the location that he calls “Pi-Harot” with the “parted sea,” whereas the actual inscription does nothing of the kind. According to the el-Arish inscription in Griffith’s translation, here’s what happened at “Pekharti” (Griffith’s transliteration of this place-name):

The majesty of Shu departed to heaven with his attendants: Tefnut was in the place of her enthronement in Memphis. Now she proceeded to the royal house of Shu in the time of mid-day: the great cycle of nine gods were upon the path of eternity, the road of his father Ra Harmakhis. Then the majesty of [Seb met her] he found her in this? place which is called Pekharti?: he seized her by force: [the palace was in great [affliction]. Shu had departed to heaven: there was no exit from the palace by the space of nine days. Now these [nine] days were in violence and tempest: none whether god or man could see the face of his fellow.

The location “Pekharti”—Jacobovici’s “Pi-Harot,” proposed to be equivalent to biblical Pi-hahiroth—has nothing to do in the el-Arish inscription with any “parted sea” or any pursuit of “evil-doers.” In the inscription, “Pekharti” is the place where the god Seb (Griffith’s transliteration; usually transcribed as “Geb”) met and “seized by force” his mother Tefnut. The paragraph is entirely about conflicts between gods and does not in the slightest resemble the use to which Jacobovici puts it. As a side note, the word that Jacobovici pronounces as “Pi-Harot” appears only once in the el-Arish inscription. Goyon transliterated it as “Pi-Kharoti,” Griffith as “Pekharti.” Jacobovici wants this to be the Eygptian equivalent of “Pi-hahiroth” (פי החירת) from Exodus 14:2, 9, the name of a place where the pursuing Egyptians overtook the fleeing Israelites in the biblical story. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find a good drawing or photo that clearly shows the hieroglyphic signs for this name, nor have I been able to find a transliterated transcription of the el-Arish inscription. Therefore, I can’t assess whether Griffith’s and Goyon’s kh represents the Egyptian equivalent of a Hebrew כ or a Hebrew ח, which would be important in assessing the proposed equivalence of this place name with the biblical Pi-hahiroth. But comparative phonetics is not the only deciding factor. “Pekharti” lies somewhere along a path from Memphis to “At Nebes” (Griffith; or “Yat-Nebes,” Goyon). Unfortunately, I don’t know, and haven’t been able to find solid information about, where this particular location lies.

In any event, place-names aside, the el-Arish inscription tells a story about the adventuers of the god Geb. It has nothing to do with a human pharaoh faced with a slave escape, much less with any specific reference to fleeing Israelites. Consciously or not, Jacobovici repeats the same mistakes as Immanuel Velikovsky, many years before. Velikovsky also proposed to connect the el-Arish inscription to the biblical exodus, using the same alleged parallels as Jacobovici, plus a few others. The similarities between Jacobovici’s and Velikovsky’s treamtents, and the disconnect between both and how the inscription actually reads, are such that Mewhinney’s comments about Velikovsky’s treatment apply equally well to Jacobovici’s:

[Velikovsky’s] interpretations of the el-Arish inscription are so obviously, blatantly wrong in so many particulars that it is hard to see why there should have been any controversy over the facts of the case, excepting only minor details. We find names altered and combined, words mistranslated, characters confused with one another or split into two, and events set in the wrong time and place. To permit Velikovsky to make the associations he does, one would have to take a sledgehammer to the shrine, smash it to bits, and reassemble the pieces in a different order.

It’s a pattern seen over and over again in The Exodus Decoded: Jacobovici grabs a few phrases from an ancient Egyptian text, pairs them up with snippets from the book of Exodus, and claims to have found “the same story” in both. In none of these cases, however, can Jacobovici’s claims stand up to an actual reading of the texts in question. Whether Jacobovici simply doesn’t know any better or is intentionally misrepresenting his “data,” The Exodus Decoded does a disservice to the viewing public.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

When I began this extended review of The Exodus Decoded, I had no idea it would go on this long or grow to these proportions. I suppose it’s appropriate, however, that the tenth installment of this extended review should deal with Jacobovici’s “plausible scientific explanation” (his words) for the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn.

Jacobovici explains the death of the firstborn as basically asphyxiation by carbon dioxide inhalation.

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. According to our scenario, at this point in the sequence of events that began some six months earlier, the gas leak 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 animals and sleeping people before it dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere.

Once again, Jacobovici invokes the analogy of Lake Nyos in Cameroon. As other reviewers have pointed out, the Lake Nyos analogy is very weak, as there is a significant difference betwen the still waters of a lake and the moving waters of a river. For the moment, let’s set aside that problem—not to ignore it, for indeed it invalidates the entire analogy, but merely to see whether the other parts of the scenario work any better.

If one accepts the Lake Nyos analogy and the possibility of a carbon dioxide fog rolling across Egypt—implausibly filling all of Egypt, which is a lot bigger than Cameroon, although only a small part of Cameroon was affected by the Lake Nyos gas—the next big hurdle to overcome is the question of how this fog knew to selectively suffocate only the firstborn. Jacobovici has an answer ready for this objection, though:

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-traveling gas suffocated the privileged Egyptian males sleeping in their beds.

To begin with, I have been unable to definitively verify or falsify Jacobovici’s claim about firstborn sons enjoying the “privilege” of sleeping on beds, to the exclusion of their siblings and parents; note that this addition of “and parents” is required in order for the scenario to work, for even eighth-born sons can have firstborn sons of their own. The inherent improbability of a firstborn son getting a bed—if a bed is considered a luxury—and his father and mother sleeping in less comfortable accommodations is a blow, though not a decisive one, to Jacobovici’s claim. I have not been able to find much information on sleeping arrangements in ancient Egypt, but the Egyptology Online page on life in ancient Egypt suggests that bedding differences were a matter of wealth and class, not of birth order. According to Bob Brier, Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians (Greenwood, 1999), pp. 143–144, houses for “all but the very poor” included bedrooms on the ground floor, and these bedrooms “incorporated raised alcoves for sleeping” (emphasis added). Thus far, the preponderance of what I’ve found speaks against the claim. Some sources do put forward the idea that Egyptians might have slept on their roofops in warm months, in order to catch the breeze and keep cool, but if so, it’s hard to imagine the father saying to his firstborn son, “Sorry, everybody else gets to sleep on the rooftop because it’s cooler up here, but since you are the firstborn son, you must sleep on inside, near the ground, on your bed. Don’t you feel ‘privileged’?” Since Jacobovici doesn’t cite his sources for this claim about firstborn sons sleeping on beds while everybody else slept on rooftops, it’s hard to check it out, but at this point I have to regard that claim as unproven at best (and I have a strong suspicion that it’s just plain made up). Certainly, the firstborn sons of peasants would not enjoy the same privileges as the firstborn sons of wealthy families, or of royalty.

There are a couple of other problems with Jacobovici’s scenario. If the Israelites were really “sitting up at their first Passover meal,” it’s improbable that their heads would have been that much higher than those of Jacobovici’s imagined firstborns on their beds. Tables in ancient Egypt were low to the ground, no higher than the beds and benches, and diners would have sat on the ground—not on chairs as in modern restaurants. The food would have been at about the level of the body of someone lying on a bed.

But if Jacobovici wants to claim that his scenario can account for the tenth plague “exactly as the Bible describes”—a phrase he uses repeatedly for some of the other plagues—he’s got yet a third big problem. According to Exodus 12:29, the plague affected not only the firstborn humans of all social classes (see above for social class distinctions), but also firstborn livestock. There’s no way that firstborn cattle were sleeping “on rooftops, sheds, and in wagons,” and no conceivable way for the carbon dioxide fog to discriminate between firstborn cattle and their younger siblings. (By the way, contrary to some popular misconceptions, cows do sleep lying down, and even if they did sleep standing up, a firstborn from a mother with more than one calf would be taller than his younger siblings, and thus less susceptible to the CO₂ posited in Jacobovici’s scenario.)

Nor does Jacobovici’s other “evidence” for the 10th plague prove anything. That “evidence” is a mass grave, excavated by Manfred Bietak’s team, that contains only male skeletons. With very little comment or explanation, Jacobovici infers that these were victims of the tenth plague. Numerous problems attend this inference. In the first place, there is—obviously—no way to determine a person’s birth order from their skeleton, so the assumption that all of these individuals were firstborn sons is completely gratuitous. Second, as documented by Bryant Wood in his unfavorable review of The Exodus Decoded, the graves post-date the Hyksos expulsion, the corpses seem to come from individuals only 18–25 years old (although there were undoubtedly firstborns both older and younger than this in Egypt at the time), and there are archaeological indicators that connect the graves to a military camp. Citing Manfred Bietak’s own report of the excavation (in a journal that is, unfortunately, not carried by my university’s library), Wood shows that Bietak concluded that these were corpses of “soldiers who died in the camps from diseases over a period of time” (Bietak, “The Tuthmoside Stronghold of Perunefer,” Egyptian Archaeology 26 [2005] 13). And finally, why does Jacobovici keep connecting the tenth plague only with firstborn sons? The Hebrew word bĕkôr is grammatically masculine, true, but in biblical Hebrew, the masculine gender is used for mixed or indeterminate groups. There is no reason to assume that the narrator of Exodus 11–12 thought that the tenth plague was limited to males. If anything, the narrator hints at gender inclusiveness in Exodus 11:5, “and every first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle” (JPS Tanakh).

Jacobovici’s data just don’t add up to the picture he wants to paint.

Jacobovici’s final “evidence” related to the tenth plague is the mummy of Ahmose’s son, prince Sapair. Jacobovici posits that if Ahmose were the Pharaoh of the ten plagues and exodus, then his son should have died young. Prince Sapair died young, apparently at age 12. Voila! Of course, Sapair’s age proves nothing. Once again, Jacobovici’s reasoning is as circular as a hula hoop. Lots of Egyptians died young, including Pharaohs like Tutankhamen. There is no evidence to suggest that Sapair died of carbon dioxide asphyxiation, or in a miraculous plague. And, of course, all of this assumes that Jacobovici has correctly identifed Sapair as the son of Ahmose. This is, in fact, a common identification, but some Egyptologists have argued that Sapair was one of Ahmose’s younger brothers (in which case he wouldn’t have been a firstborn at all; see Chris Bennett, “Thutmosis I and Ahmes-Sapaïr,” Göttinger Miszellen 141 [1994], pp. 35–37, cited here), or a son of Amenhotep I (see H. Winlock, “The Tombs of the Kings of the Seventeenth Dynasty at Thebes,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 10 [1924], cited in Edward F. Wente, “Thutmose III’s Accession and the Beginning of the New Kingdom,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 34.4 [1975], p. 271, n. 44).

At this point in The Exodus Decoded, James Cameron reappears and opines, “It seems that the Bible, geology, and archaeology are all telling the same story.” Not by a long shot, James. Not by a long shot. We’ll see if Jacobovici can do any better with the crossing of the sea in our next installment.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

Simcha Jacobovici’s attempt in The Exodus Decoded to connect the first seven of the ten plagues to disruptions caused by the Bronze Age Santorini eruption and a putative earthquake storm accompanying it fail to really correspond to the biblical accounts or to the Admonitions of Ipuwer, which Jacobovici invokes in the film. In fact, as Keving Edgecomb’s comment on part 8 of this extended review reveals, Jacobovici’s case is even farther from realistic than I first thought. Now it’s time to examine Jacobovici’s “scientific” explanations of the last three plagues.

8th Plague: Locusts

Jacobovici posits that a drop in temperatures accompanying the biblical hailstorm would drive locust swarms to ground, and then the locusts would become active again as the temperatures rose. The first big problem with this hypothesis is that Jacobovici’s “scientific” reconstruction does not in fact produce a hailstorm, but a precipitation of accretionary lapilli. One of the experts interviewed in The Exodus Decoded describes accretionary lapilli as being “like a hailstone,” but this does not mean that they are made of ice! Jacobovici wants his “volcanic hail,” which consists of small balls of volcanic ash, to be real hail, which consists of small balls of ice. But in reality, off the soundstage, you just can’t have this both ways. You can’t just claim that the hail was really accretionary lapilli, and that it was really hail, at the same time. They’re different phenomena.

Another big problem with Jacobovici’s purely naturalistic explanation of the eighth plague is that it is, well, purely naturalistic. Here’s how Jacobovici puts it, in his exact words:

Locusts migrate in swarms that can be between forty and eighty million adult locusts in each square kilometer. Cold weather produces a drop in their body temperature that makes them land en masse. 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 cleared and the temperature rose, so did the locusts, exactly as the biblical account describes.

Now remember that Jacobovici’s only evidence for a locust plague at this time is the biblical account itself, so his closing “exactly as the biblical account describes” is a rhetorical flourish that wraps the whole thing into another circular argument. As you evaluate Jacobovici’s argument, constantly remember that if you listen to his reconstructions uncritically, they seem to have a “ring of plausibility,” but when you look for the actual evidence or data, it’s often not there at all. Jacobovici needs a locust plague in order to fit the biblical story. He has no nonbiblical evidence of a locust plague subsequent to the Santorini eruption (and never forget that the volcanologists—you know, scientists who actually study and understand volcanoes—date the Santorini eruption on radiocarbon grounds to c. 1627 BCE, well over a century before Jacobovici’s c. 1500 BCE date for the exodus), just a scenario by which one might understand it.

For myself, I don’t even think the scenario makes good sense. I am not an entomologist and I don’t know much about locust behavior (though I’ve chased plenty of grasshoppers on the plains of north-central and western Texas), but on the face of it, Jacobovici’s reconstruction looks suspicious to me. Here’s what I mean. Jacobovici posits that migrating locusts “suddenly land[ed] in Egypt” because of a temperature drop there. Now it looks to me like what we have to imagine is a big swarm of desert locusts, moving at the rate of about 16–19 km per day, migrates through Egypt, all the while planning not to stop and eat the Egyptians’ tasty crops, but just to grab a quick fill-up at the local Conoco and then go on to hit those juicy fields over in the Sinai Peninsula. (You with me so far?) But it’s colder than normal in Egypt (says Jacobovici), so the friendly (they’re Schistocerca gregaria, after all) locusts decide it’s too cold to fly and settle down for a little nap. When the temperatures rise (and who knows how long that would take?), the locusts decide they can fly again, but now they’re soooooo hungry that they decide to ravage the Egyptian countryside. I’m being a little sarcastic, but come on. Don’t you think these alleged locusts would have ravaged the Egyptian countryside anyway—not just because they had to wait out a cold hailstorm (made up of fire and rocks, ejecta from the Santorini volcano, don’t forget)?

In the biblical story, the locusts aren’t there one day, then they are there the next day. Do you think it’s plausible that huge swarms of locusts could have just happened to have been migrating through Egypt but nobody noticed until after the hailstorm? Certainly that’s not plausible, and in conjunction with the biblical picture it becomes virtually impossible to believe. Moreover, according to the book of Exodus, the locusts were carried into Egypt by an unnatural east wind and carried out of Egypt by a miraculous west wind—in each case, overnight. If you thought that Jacobovici’s scenario was at all plausible, you might be able to buy that the biblical story reflects a distorted, mangled memory of entirely ordinary locust behavior, but it’s audacious and inaccurate to claim that this narrative about cold and warming weather is “exactly as the biblical account describes.”

9th Plague: Darkness

Undoubtedly you’ve guessed how Jacobovici will explain the ninth plague:

When the final eruption [of Santorini] came, it created an ash cloud almost 40 kilometers from top to bottom and 200 km across. When the ash cloud reached the Nile delta, it engulfed the Egyptians in what the Bible calls “a palpable darkness.”

Then Dr. Hickson (introduced to Higgaion readers in part 8 of this extended review) reappears on a floating screen and tells viewers:

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. The sun has disappeared. You have black overhead. And they have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Dr. Hickson is undoubtedly giving an accurate description of what it is like to experience a volcanic eruption “up close,” close enough to experience a heavy “rain” of ash. Perhaps the people of Pompeii experienced something much like this when Vesuvius, 8 km to the north, erupted. According to the Michigan Tech volcanism primer that I’ve mentioned before, Dr. Hickson’s description might also be appropriate to the citizens of Yakima, 80 miles east—downwind—of Mount St. Helens, where the ash fallout reached 10 mm in depth, but not the experience of those in Vancouver, Washington, 50 miles south (off the prevailing winds) of Mount St. Helens, where there were no ash depostis. The way Jacobovici edits the footage and splices it together, however, makes it sound like Dr. Hickson is describing the experience of the Egyptians subsequent to the Santorini eruption—while she is speaking off-camera, an animated infographic shows the ash cloud from the initial Santorini eruption rolling over Egypt and the Sinai peninsula in a matter of seconds. But this is entirely implausible. The closest that Egypt and Santorini get to each other is about 715 km (in the film, Jacobovici rounds this down to 700). Avaris is about 870 km away from Santorini, close to a direct southeasterly line on a Mercator projection map. As discussed and documented in an earlier installment of this series, the heaviest ash deposits from Santorini were in the eastern Agean and in Anatolia, demonstrating that the prevailing winds were westerly (that is, coming out of the west and blowing toward the east) at the time of the eruption. It is just not plausible that enough ash from the Santorini eruption blew across Egypt—hundreds of kilometers to the south and off the path of the prevailing winds—to give the Egyptians the kind of experience that Dr. Hickson desribed. They’re too far away from the volcano, in the wrong direction.

Jacobovici seems at this point to anticipate such objections, as he returns to footage of Manfred Bietak’s right hand holding a piece of pumice that Jacobovici identifies as Santorini pumice. This pumice is rather large, perhaps twice as large as Bietak’s hand. Jacobovici offers the Santorini pumice from Avaris as proof that the Santorini ash cloud reached Egypt, but this is a specious argument. Pumice doesn’t hitch a ride on ash clouds, and as discussed in earlier installments of this series, the notion that Santorini pumice flew through the air some 870 km is utterly unbelievable. Jacobovici seems to anticipate this objection, too, for he acknowledges the objection that the pumice might have floated there on the water. However, Jacobovici suggests that the presence of Santorini ash in the Nile delta counters this objection. Nobody disputes that ash from the Santorini eruption reached Egypt, or that the ash was airborne when it got there. But the mode of travel of tiny grains of ash is not necessarily the same as the mode of travel of blocks of pumice 15 cm long! To think that just because the ash was airborne when it reached Egypt means the pumice was airborne when it reached Egypt is like finding a coconut in England and concluding that it was carried there by a swallow.

As to the ash itself, in an uncharacteristic moment of “full disclosure,” Jacobovic presents footage of Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution describing the Santorini ash finds in the Nile delta. What is uncharacteristic about this is that Stanley’s data rather undermines Jacobovici’s suggestion that ash from Santorini “plunged Egypt into the biblical [plague of] darkness.” In the footage shown in The Exodus Decoded, Stanley explains that he and his colleagues found 40 grains of Santorini ash in the Nile delta. 40 grains. Remember that ash grains are tiny, measured in millimeters or fractions of millimeters. Compare Stanley’s 40 grains of Santorini ash in the Nile delta to the Santorini tephra deposits on Rhodes, which were 90 cm to 3 m thick; deposits at Kos, 170 km east of Santorini, were up to 12 cm thick, and deposits at Gölcük Lake in Anatolia, 330 km northeast of Santorini were also up to 12 cm thick (see Wiener—bibliographic details in part 6 of this review—p. 23, n. 33 for citations). Nobody can argue that Santorini ash didn’t reach Egypt; clearly, it did. But the evidence does not support Jacobovici’s contention that enough Santorini ash reached Egypt to account for the biblical “plague of darkness.” And it is telling that when Jacobovici wants a “talking head” to tell viewers that there is a plausible link between the Santorini eruption, the biblical plague of darkness, and the darkness mentioned in Ahmose’s Tempest Stela, he turns not to volcanologists like Catherine Hickson or Jean-Daniel Stanley, but to Charles Pellegrino, who has also published books attributing the demise of Atlantas and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to the Santorini eruption.

By the way, since I am not a volcanologist or geophysicist myself, I have been trying to get some help from volcanologists to assess my critique of Jacobovici’s use of volcanology. I will report those results when I have responses—and permission—from the volcanologists I have queried. In the meantime, please consider this illustration from a paper on the web site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Geology and Geochemistry Group. The paper, dated 2000, is by Ken Wohletz, a geophysicist who has been working on volcanology and other studies at the Los Alamos lab since 1983. In this paper, Wohletz is speculating about an “ultra-Plinian” eruption of “proto-Krakatau” affecting climate and history in the past. What’s interesting about this for our purposes is that an “ultra-Plinian” eruption would be many times more powerful than the Santorini eruption. Yet notice the pumice fallout pattern on the graphic (produced by Wohletz using his Erupt3 eruption simulator; click on the graphic to be taken to his paper, which contains a larger version). Even in this simulated “ultra-Plinian” eruption, the pumice fallout is mostly in a radius of 40–50 km from the volcano. Out to a distance of 60–70 km, the illustration still shows pumice fallout, but of much smaller pieces. Given this graphic showing the pumice fallout from a simulated explosion more powerful than Santorini by a factor of 10 or more, it just doesn’t seem likely to me that Santorini pumice was thrown 870 km away from the volcano to arrive airborne in Avaris.

Speaking of the Tempest Stela, let’s take another look at it in light (pun intended) of Jacobovici’s take on the plague of darkness. Remember that Jacobovici claims that the Tempest Stela’s reference to “darkness” parallels the “darkness” in the biblical plague story. Here’s how the Tempest Stela describes the calamity:

[Then] the gods [made] the sky come in a storm of r[ain, with dark]ness in the western region and the sky beclouded without [stop, loud]er than [the sound of] the subjects, strong[er than …, howling(?)] on the hills more than the sound of the cavern in Elephantine. Then every house and every habitation they reached [perished and those in them died, their corpses] floating on the water like skiffs of papyrus, (even) in the doorway and the private apartments (of the palace), for a period of up to […] days, while no torch could give light over the Two Lands. (lines 6–10 front // lines 8–10 back, Allen’s translation—see part 1 of this review for bibliographic data)

Note carefully that the darkness was observed “in the western region.” Other lines in the Tempest Stela make it clear that Ahmose was in Thebes, or shuttling between Thebes and nearby Karnak, at the time. Now take another look at the map of the prevailing winds as indicated by the tephra dispersal patterns from the Santorini eruption, and please realize that you can’t see Santorini from Egypt; it’s beyond the horizon. I’ve reproduced the map here for your convenience so that you don’t have to scroll up to find it. According to the Tempest Stela, from the perspective of someone in Thebes, the western sky was darkened. Rounding down to the nearest multiple of 10, Thebes lies about 1370 km southeast of Santorini, and the prevailing distribution of ash from Santorini was to the east and east-northeast of Santorini. It simply isn’t plausible that Santorini ash could be responsible for darkening the western sky from the perspective of someone in Thebes, an implausibility that Wiener uses to argue against any link between the Santorini eruption and the phenomena described on the Ahmose Tempest Stela.

Clearly, I find Jacobovici’s treatment of the 8th and 9th plagues, especially the 9th, unconvincing (to put it mildly). Like so much else in The Exodus Decoded, these treatments are characterized by selective misuse (“quote-mining”) of experts’ statements, textual misinterpretations, failure to take objections seriously, and a lack of critical thinking about actual geophysical possibilities. However, I do want to give Jacobovici props for noticing one aspect of the biblical darkness that often escapes attention in popular treatments, especially cinematic and cartoon treatments like The Prince of Egypt. Jacobovici describes the darkness in the ninth plague as “palpable.” He’s reflecting the wording of Exodus 10:21, where the narrator quotes God as telling Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched” (JPS Tanakh). For you Hebraists reading this, the final phrase is וימש חשך, literally, “and let one touch the darkness” (for any Hebrew students struggling to parse ימש, it’s the third masculine singular hiphil jussive form of משש, “to touch, to feel”). Jacobovici’s attempt to connect this “palpable darkness” with ash from Santorini is misguided, but I think he’s on the right track to think in terms of particulate matter. Recall the wording of God’s instructions to Aaron at the third plague, “Say to Aaron: Hold out your rod and strike the dust of the earth, and it shall turn to lice throughout the land of Egypt,” and the sixth plague, “Each of you take handfuls of soot from the kiln, and let Moses throw it toward the sky in the sight of Pharaoh. It shall become a fine dust all over the land of Egypt, and cause an inflammation breaking out in boils on man and beast throughout the land of Egypt.” Since the first nine plagues are arranged in three sets of three, each set having a similar progression and its own particular emphasis, and since particulate matter is explicitly associated with the third and sixth plagues, it makes sense to me to expect the ninth plague to involve particulate matter as well. Most of the plagues—the first being the most notable exception—involve intensification and selective targeting of otherwise natural phenomena, my best guess is that the narrator was thinking in terms of the ninth plague being a supernatural sandstorm. Most movies and cartoons that I’ve seen just depict the darkness as God spilling a celestial bottle of India ink on the sky, and at least it can be said in Jacobovici’s favor that he doesn’t make that silly mistake (not that this excuses the other mistakes).

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

A friend pointed me to another “What religion are you?” quiz, this one focused specifically on Christian denominations. I took the quiz and here are the results that popped out. According to this quiz I am:

#1 Episcopal/Anglican Church
#2 Evangelical Lutheran Church
#3 Methodist/Wesleyan Church
#4 Church of Christ
#5 Free Will Baptist
#6 Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
#7 Assemblies of God
#8 International Church of Christ
#9 Mennonite Brethren
#10 United Pentecostal Church

Okay, I confess that I am totally baffled as to how these particular denominations got to be my “top 10″ according to this quiz.

/me shrugs.

Bryant Wood, one of the staunchest defenders of the historical accuracy of the biblical exodus story and of an early (15th-century) date for the exodus, has posted a review of The Exodus Decoded, organized according to Jacobovici’s “exhibits.” While I often disagree with Wood’s arguments regarding biblical historicity and the dating of the exodus (I would follow the 13th-century dating and a very tentative understanding of what happened historically), but he makes many of the same points that I would make in debunking The Exodus Decoded. Of course, I hope that you will continue to read my extended review, but if you want the basic facts in short compass, read Wood’s review. In fact, he brings in some data that I did not know, which demonstrate that Jacobovici is misusing Bietak’s data and quotations as well as Bimson’s, Redford’s, and others’.

On a whim, I clicked on a link to BeliefNet’s Belief-O-Matic, which claims to know “what religion you are” (that is, to what religion you adhere) even if you don’t. I took the 20-question quiz, didn’t like being forced into discrete categories on some of the items, and ended up with this list:

1. Bahá’í Faith (100%)
2. Sikhism (91%)
3. Reform Judaism (86%)
4. Orthodox Judaism (85%)
5. Liberal Quakers (76%)
6. Islam (75%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (72%)
8. Unitarian Universalism (67%)
9. Neo-Pagan (67%)
10. Jainism (65%)
11. Hinduism (62%)
12. Eastern Orthodox (57%)
13. Roman Catholic (57%)
14. Orthodox Quaker (56%)
15. Mahayana Buddhism (54%)
16. New Age (51%)
17. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (49%)
18. Seventh Day Adventist (49%)
19. New Thought (41%)
20. Theravada Buddhism (41%)
21. Secular Humanism (36%)
22. Scientology (36%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (33%)
24. Taoism (29%)
25. Nontheist (27%)
26. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (23%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (20%)

Who knew?

Your public school 3rd-grader might bring home an alphabet sheet where the letters are formed from stick figures engaged in sex acts. You can see the whole alphabet here, but I warn you, it is not for those who are squeamish about sex, and it is definitely not appropriate for 3rd-graders!

In The Exodus Decoded, Simcha Jacobovici proposes to explain “the science underlying the biblical story” (to use the phrase with which James Cameron introduces the second third of the program), specifically, the biblical story of the ten plagues. As I described in part 7 of this extended review, Jacobovici posits that an “earthquake storm,” set off by a quake that preceded the Bronze Age eruption of the Santorini volcano, eventuated in one (or more?) earthquakes in Egypt that caused the phenomena recorded in the story of the ten plagues. I discussed the whole “earthquake storm” hypothesis in part 7. Now let’s turn to Jacobovici’s specific reconstruction of “the science” behind each of the ten plagues.

1st Plague: Water into Blood

Working from scientifically well-understood modern analogies from Cameroon, Jacobovici suggests that an earthquake beneath Egypt could have released gasses that turned the waters of the Nile “blood-red,” to use Jacobovici’s term. In The Exodus Decoded, geophysicist George Kling explains the Cameroon phenomenon as high concentrations of iron in the deep waters at the bottom of the Lake Nyos bubbling up to the surface and reacting with oxygen in the air to form iron hydroxide. To put it crudely, the waters of Lake Nyos “rusted.” Jacobovici posits that “If the Nile turned blood-red as the result of a gas leak, then the chain of events described in the Bible could have been set into motion.” It’s worth noting that Kling describes the color of Lake Nyos as “reddish-brownish,” while Jacobovici continually uses the term “blood-red.” I’m not really convinced that these are the same color, but that’s perhaps a useless aesthetic nitpick (“rust-red” and “blood-red” are both red because of iron).

The important question to ask here is whether or not the scenario Jacobovici describes accurately reflects the biblical story. In Exodus 7, where the story of the first plague is told, Aaron (or Moses, the antecedent of the verb is not really clear) strikes the Nile with his staff, and the transformation into blood is more or less immediate. Although the narrator only reports a transformation in the waters of the Nile itself, God tells Moses in Exodus 7:19 that the transformation would affect all the water in Egypt, even in canals, shallow ponds and pools, and—note well—”even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.” The gaseous reactions that Kling describes for Lake Nyos could not possibly affect water stored in wooden barrels or stone jars. Again, the narrator does not explicitly report the transformation of stored water in Exodus 7:20–21, but does say that “there was blood throughout the whole land of Egypt.” Since I find it hard to believe that the biblical narrator thinks God was wrong about the extent of the plague in 7:19, I think the narrator must want readers to think that “throughout the whole land of Egypt” includes “in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.” Moreover, after the plague begins, Pharaoh’s magicians replicate the plague, according to Exodus 7:22. Never mind that the biblical story says that the water turned to blood, not that it turned blood-red.

The point is that while Jacobovici’s explanation of the discoloration of the Nile River may be geophysically and chemically possible (as unequivocally demonstrated by the Lake Nyos analogy), his only evidence for either a “rusting” of the Nile or the earthquake that would trigger the release of the necessary gasses is the biblical story of the ten plagues. Yet the story and his scenario don’t match up. Logically, what Jacobovici must be arguing is that the biblical story is a mangled version of real events. Otherwise, the argument doesn’t work at all.

By the way, the same hypothesis was apparently offered in the BBC program Moses (see part 7) a similar but distinct hypothesis was offered in the 2004 Discovery Channel program Rameses: Wrath of God or Man? In that program (narrated by Morgan Freeman, eminently more credible than James Cameron in my book—at least before Rameses), the reddening of the Nile was attributed to reddish clay washed down from Ethiopia on the waters of the Nile. To my mind, that’s a bit more plausible than Jacobovici’s otherwise unattested earthquake, but it still has all the same problems described above (doesn’t affect stored water, doesn’t accommodate the magicians, and so on).

2nd Plague: Frogs

According to Jacobovici’s reconstruction, the fish in the Nile died (see Exodus 7:21) because they had nowhere to go, and no oxygen to breathe. I confess that I found this just a little strange; Lake Nyos, despite its discoloration, remained a lake. If there was still water—albeit nasty and polluted—there was still oxygen (remember what water is? H₂0?). [Note: Stupid comment struck out, but still visible because I don't hide it when I make stupid mistakes. Instead, I admit them.] I have tried without success to find information about fish fatalities in Lake Nyos. [Note: A commentor on another installment revealed that Lake Nyos didn't have any fish before the incident, so there were no fish there to die.] In any event, Jacobovici’s scenario posits that the frogs were able to escape by hopping out onto land, and the mass exodus of frogs from the “rusty” Nile constituted the second plague.

Again, Jacobovici’s explanation of the second plague is virtually identical to that given in Rameses. And, again, it has a ring of reasonability around it but doesn’t really square with the biblical text. Part of the second plague story in Exodus involves Pharoah’s magicians summoning frogs, and part of it involves Moses praying and causing them to die. When evaluating Jacobovici’s argument, or that in Rameses, or that in Moses, always keep in mind that the biblical story of the ten plagues doesn’t just involve a cascade of catastrophes. The ten plagues are presented in the Bible as a discrete sequence punctuated by warnings, announcements, and conversations. The models in The Exodus Decoded, Rameses, Moses, and so on, if really believed, require their proponents to believe that the exodus story narrates a distorted memory of actual natural catastrophes. While it is not unreasonable to think that biblical narratives preserve enhanced, confused, incomplete, or distorted memories of the past, it is circular reasoning to use the biblical text as evidence for an otherwise unattested catastrophe, and then posit that catastrophe as the reality behind a distorted biblical text.

3rd–6th Plagues: Kinnim, Flies, Murrain, and Boils

The third plague involves an infestation of kinnim, some sort of insect; it’s not actually clear just what sort of insect that was. Jacobovici follows the translation “lice”; most English translations use “gnats”; some suggest “mosquitoes.” Jacobovici speeds through these four plagues in one sentence: “The lack of clean water then leads to lice, flies, and bacterial epidemics among humans and domestic animals.” Once again, while this all seems to sound eminently reasonable—well, okay, maybe not exactly as stated. After all, a lack of clean water doesn’t directly lead to lice or flies—though inability to wash normally might attract the critters. On this score, Rameses: Wrath of God or Man? actually has a leg up on The Exodus Decoded, suggesting that the death of the mosquitoes’ and flies’ natural predators—the frogs from the second plague—allowed unprecedented multiplication of the lice/gnat/mosquito and fly populations. But neither The Exodus Decoded nor Rameses really mirrors the biblical story. According to the Bible, the lice/gnats/mosquitoes did not just appear; they came from supernaturally transformed dust particles stirred up by Aaron’s staff. The biblical story also attributes the boils to soot from the kiln that Aaron tossed into the air (that was horrible syntax; he tossed the soot, not the kiln). Jacobovici invents a scientific explanation to explain the story, but in so doing rewrites the story to fit his explanation. Cue up the theme song from The Thomas Crown Affair.

By the way, Jacobovici returns at this point to Lake Nyos, where gasses released from the undersea earthquake cased painful welts on people living in the area. But once again, what Jacobovici has done is find a rough analogy to a biblical phenomenon, set it up as “the science behind the story,” and then ignore the parts of the story that don’t fit the new “scientific” scenario.

One of those very important parts of the story that Jacobovici simply ignores is the fact that the narration of the 3rd–6th plagues introduces a new element: the exemption of Goshen. In the narration of the first three plagues, emphasis is placed on their coverage of “the whole land of Egypt” (see Exodus 7:19, 21; 8:2, 6, 16, 17). Yet in the second group of three plagues, Goshen—where the Israelites live, according to Exodus—is exempted. No swarms of flies (Exodus 8:22), no murrain (9:4, 7); the exemption is not mentioned for the boils, but returns with the plagues of hail (9:26) and darkness (10:23). Jacobovici has no scientific explanation—nor can I conceive of one—for how the flies and livestock disease could “naturally” exempt Goshen; in fact, he does not even mention the issue. He just ignores this inconvenient part of the biblical story.

(By the way, what happened to the hippopotami? The crocodiles? The ibises? Or what about any of the other wildlife that lives in and along the Nile? Both the biblical story and Jacobovici just ignore this fauna, concentrating only on fish, frogs, and insects. To that extent, neither the exodus story nor The Exodus Decoded gives us a realistic narrative.)

7th Plague: Hail

Standing among oversized graphics of Egyptian texts and inscriptions, Jacobovici describes the seventh plague as “a very unusual hail, involving ice and fire mixed together.” Jacobovici is then joined by a rabbi, Chaim Sacknovitz (director of guidance for a Jewish high school in Toronto for many years), who says:

The seventh plague was the plague of hail, but the Bible describes this hail in a very unique manner. The hail was together with ’esh, with fire, the idea being that the fire and ice comingled together, they coexisted together. The Bible then describes God as making a miracle within a miracle, taking opposites in nature and having them coexist together.

Jacobovici then invokes the Admonitions of Ipuwer (Jacobovici calls it the “Ipuwer Papyrus,” but in the scholarly literature you will normally find it referred to as the Admonitions of Ipuwer or Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, since students of ancient texts tend to refer to the texts themselves by name and to the copies of the texts by papyrus designations), an Egyptian text that, according to Jacobovici, “tells the exact same story.” According to Jacobovici, “the Ipuwer Papyrus … is dated by many scholars to the Hyksos period.” That’s just wrong. The few scholars that have actually published serious arguments for the dating of the text place it either during the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2025 according to the standard chronology shown on the timeline at the Petrie Museum website; the low chronology brings this down [toward us] by as much as 30 years) or toward the end of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2025–1700 BCE). The Middle Kingdom is considered to include the 11th and 12th dynasties, by Manetho’s reckoning. The Hyksos form Manetho’s 15th dynasty; just when they rose to power within the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1700–1550 BCE by the standard chronology) is uncertain, and they were driven out during the reign of Ahmose, considered the first king of the 18th dynasty (1550–1525 BCE on the standard chronology, though some versions of the low chronology move his reign down as much as 14 years or so). The Admonitions of Ipuwer predate the Hyksos signifcantly, according to the Egyptologists who have studied the material in detail. Moreover, Gardiner and others who studied and published the Admonitions early in the 20th century suggested that the upheavals Ipuwer describes predate Ipuwer himself by up to several hundred years (but see below on Miriam Lichtheim’s judgment). By the way, I am only an amateur in Egyptology, but the Middle Kingdom date seems to be on solid linguistic grounds. Another curious fact is that the Admonitions are known to us from only one surviving papyrus (Papyrus Leiden 344), which appears to date to the 19th dynasty (c. 1292–1185), long after the Hyksos period. As with so many of Jacobovici’s attempted synchronisms, the artifacts just don’t fit together.

The Admonitions of Ipuwer is a lament prayer from Ipuwer to the “Lord of All,” which could refer either to the king or to the creator god. Ipuwer describes many social upheavals. Before we get into the text itself, we should note that Miriam Lichtheim, renowned for her three-volume set of translations of ancient Egyptian texts (Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings [3 vols.; University of California Press, 1973–1980]), has argued on the basis of genre considerations and comparisons with other texts in the same genre that there is no historical basis for any of Ipuwer’s complaints.

We have seen that Neferti has a political-propagandistic aim which it expresses through the poetic elaboration of the topos “national distress.” In Khakheperre-somb we have encountered the same topos in a work that seems to be largely rhetorical. Both works were written in times of peace and prosperity. When the Admonitions is placed alongside these two words, it reveals itself as a composition of the same genre and character which differs only in being longer, more ambitious, more repetitious, and more extreme in its use of hyperbole. Its very verbosity and repetitiveness mark it as a latecomer in which the most comprehensive treatment of the theme “national distress” is attempted, in short, as a work of the late Middle Kingdom and of purely literary inspiration.

The unhistorical character of the whole genre was recognized by S. Luria in an article that did not receive the attention it deserved. Adducing strikingly similar compositions from other cultures he pointed out the fictional, mythological-messianic nature of these works and the fixed cliches [sic] through which the theme of “social chaos” was expressed. … Luria also made the telling point that the description of chaos in the Admonitions is inherently contradictory, hence historically impossible: On the one hand the land is said to suffer from total want; on the other hand the poor are described as having become rich, of wearing fine clothes, and generally of disposing of all that once belonged to their masters.

In sum, the Admonitions of Ipuwer has not only no bearing whatever on the long past First Intermediate Period, it also does not derive from any other historical situation. It is the last, fullest, most exaggerated and hence least successful, composition on the theme “order versus chaos.” (vol. 1, pp. 149–150)

Any attempt to draw historical conclusions based on alleged parallels between the conditions described in Ipuwer, then, needs to grapple with the possibility that everything described in the lament is conventional, stereotyped, and pure literary fiction. As you might have guessed, Jacobovici attempts none of this. He simply assumes that Ipuwer’s lament describes historical events. So, what happens if we follow Jacobovici’s lead and take a good, long look at the Admonitions of Ipuwer? Consider again Jacobovici’s assertion:

Incredibly, there is an Egyptian text that tells the exact same story. It’s called the Ipuwer Papyrus, and it’s dated by many scholars to the Hyksos period. [Inaccurate; see above.—RCH] The Ipuwer Papyrus specifically states that Egypt was struck by strange hail made up of ice and fire mingled together. Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.

This is false. Jacobovici has either been misled by some secondary source or he is making stuff up. But don’t take my word for it. Read the Admonitions of Ipuwer for yourself online, courtesy of André Dollinger (I think he provides Lichtheim’s translation, though it could be Gardiner’s). Follow the link and read through the whole text, or use your browser’s “find” feature to look for “fire,” “ice,” and “hail.” (Really. Go ahead. I’ll wait right here.) Were you able to find any mention of “ice” or “hail” in the Admonitions of Ipuwer, much less a specific statement that “Egypt was struck by strange hail made up of ice and fire mingled together”? I can’t find it anywhere in the online version targeted by the link above, nor can I find anything like that anywhere in Nili Shupak’s translation in The Context of Scripture, volume 1, text 1.42, pp. 93–98. The simple fact is that the Admonitions of Ipuwer do not say what Jacobovici claims it says. Jacobovici’s statement is just flat untrue.

The Admonitions of Ipuwer is a red herring. It does not say what Jacobovici claims it says, and in any event, it dates no later than the end of the Middle Kingdom—150 years or so before Ahomse began to reign, and about 200 years (by the standard chronology, which differs from the low chronology here by only about 15 years, if I understand the schemes correctly) before Jacobovici’s target date of 1500 BCE. The Admonitions could, at a stretch, be interpreted as a kind of foreshadowing of Hyksos rule, but there’s no way the text can be dated to the end of the Hyksos rule, where it needs to be in order for Jacobovici’s house of cards to stand.

(If you want a close-up look at a similar house of cards, read “The Ten Plagues—Live from Egypt” by Rabbi Mordechai Becher. Please remember that the Admonitions runs for approximately 16 columns of about 14 lines each, but Becher selectively quotes, out of context, only about 18 lines—less than 10% of the entire text. That’s because the rest doesn’t fit. I’m actually somewhat surprised that Jacobovici didn’t invoke Ipuwer 2.10 like Becher does. Either Jacobovici hasn’t actually read the text of the Admonitions, or that part got edited out for length, or he realized that the Admonitions‘ reference to a bloody river wouldn’t help his case. Becher quotes only four words, in English, of 2.10: “the river is blood.” He seems to think this is enough to connect it to the first plague. But note what the immediate context says further:

Indeed, the river is blood, yet one drinks from it.
Men shrink from people and thirst after water.
Indeed, gates, columns, and walls are burning,
While the hall of the palace l.p.h. stands firm and endures. …
Indeed, crocodiles are glutted on their catch,
People go to them of their own will …
(Admonitions of Ipuwer, 2.10–13, Shupak’s translation in The Context of Scripture)

“The river is blood, yet one drinks from it”—although the Bible says they couldn’t drink from it. And it seems pretty clear to me why “the river is blood,” according to Ipuwer: it’s because the crocs are taking big bites out of the people desperate for water who go down to get it from the Nile. This doesn’t really resemble the first plague.)

But it gets “better.” Jacobovici goes on to claim that both the biblical story of the ten plagues and the Admonitions of Ipuwer (which, please recall, says nothing about “strange hail made up of ice and fire mingled together”) are describing accretionary lapilli—little round balls of tephra that form when airborne particles of volcanic ash collecting in layers around some “nucleus” object. Think of accretionary lapilli as “volcanic hail,” if you want to use Jacobovici’s term. And, of course, Jacobovici thinks that this accretionary lapilli “could only have come from the earthquake-induced Santorini volcano.” Catherine Hickson of the Geological Survey of Canada explains, on one of Jacobovici’s floating blue screens:

When the ash cloud goes up to great distances in the stratosphere, essentially what happens is that 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 hailstone.

Jacobovici piggybacks on Hickson’s description of the formation of accretionary lapilli to claim that “the Egyptians experienced fire and ice raining from above, just as the Bible describes.” But that’s not what Hickson said, and that’s not how accretionary lapilli works. Accretionary lapilli is “very similar to a hailstone,” to use Hickson’s words, but it’s not a hailstone. A bit of accretionary lapilli is not ice; it’s volcanic ash nucleated around water particles.

But then again, the biblical story of the seventh plague doesn’t actually say “ice” (qāraḥ) either. It says “hail” (bārad). Perhaps an argument could be made that the biblical writer was—like Jacobovici—simply unable or unwilling to distinguish between icy hailstones and balls of volcanic ash. Is it plausible that burning lava and accretionary lapilli from the Santorini explosion could have fallen together on Egypt, over 700 kilometers to the southeast? According to the tephra primer at Michigan Tech, “most particles more than a millimeter in size fall out within 30 minutes of the time they are erupted.” Also, note that accretionary lapilli is a phenomenon associated with the blast cloud that comes straight up out of the volcano itself. Of course, these clouds plume outward higher in the atmosphere. Even so, to imagine burning ash and accretionary lapilli falling together on Egypt as a result of the Santorini volcano, we have to imagine the ejecta travelling some 800 km before the ash had time to cool. If we use the rough-and-ready figure above of a 30 minute terminus for the fallout of tephra particles more than 1 mm in diameter—and a 1 mm diameter ash is hardly going to qualify as a “hailstone”—we have to imagine the ash traveling 800 km within 30 minutes—that’s 1600 km or 993.6 miles per hour. That’s faster than the speed of sound, about mach 1.3 (the speed of sound varies slightly with altitude and temperature). I confess that I find it extremely difficult to imagine ash—some of it still burning, and some of it accreted into lapilli—traveling faster than the speed of sound!

As if that weren’t unbelievable enough, Jacobovici’s scenario requires that this mixture of still-molten and cooled ejecta travel 800 km at mach 1.3 away from the prevailing winds. Wiener (first cited in part 6 of this extended review) explains:

At the time of the Theran eruption the prevailing westerly winds were in full play, as evidenced by the heavy dispersal of tephra in an arc to the east ranging from Rhodes, 210 km to the southeast (with a depth of deposit ranging from 90 cm to 3 m); Kos, 170 km to the east (depth of 12 cm); Gölcük Lake above Sardis, 330 km to the northeast (depth of 12 cm); seabed cores south of Thera and in the Black Sea north of Samsun, 1,000 km to the northeast; sediments from Köyceğiz Lake, 300 km east of Thera; further sediments from Gölhisar Lake northwest of Antalya; but only trace amounts of ash in the Nile Delta, 750 km to the southeast. (The Foster and Ritner [cited in part 6—RCH] reference to an “eastward and southward” flow is superseded by the recent data on dispersal to the northeast.) (pp. 23–24)

Airborne volcanic ash can travel a long, long way, even up to thousands of kilometers. But it can’t travel faster than the speed of sound, and it is totally dependent on wind currents. Consider this data from the Michigan Tech primer:

Wind direction and wind speed are very important in determining where and how large an area will be covered by ash. Ash erupting from Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 covered the town of Yakima, which is approximately 80 miles to the east of the volcano, with 10 mm of ash (Foxworthy and Hill, 1982). This caused the sky to become as dark as night during the middle of the day. The town of Vancouver, approxiamately 50 miles south of the volcano, had no ash deposited from the eruption because the wind direction was blowing away from it toward the northeast.

Now the Mt. St. Helens eruption was only a VEI 5, much less powerful than the Santorini eruption—but not so much less powerful that the ash from Santorini could buck the wind and go wherever it wanted. Some Santorini ash can apparently be identified in the Nile delta region, but not in the quantities that come from the east and northeast.

Oh, and don’t forget the exemption of Goshen. According to the biblical story, the hail didn’t fall in Goshen—the eastern part of the delta region. How on earth did the ash and lapilli manage to skip Goshen and only hit the rest of Egypt? Where’s the “scientific” explanation for that? The Exodus Decoded does not offer any such explanation, and omits any mention of that inconvenient tradition of the exemption of Goshen.

That only takes us through the first seven plagues, but it’s getting late and I need some sleep. In fact, I’m so sleepy that I almost forgot to come back to Jacobovici’s and Sacknovitz’s basic error in interpreting the biblical narrative of the seventh plague. Jacobovici insists that “to this day the rabbis teach” that the hail/fire mixture was “no metaphor.” I won’t disagree with that. Jacobovici and Sacknovitz aren’t wrong for taking the description literally (at least within the frame of the story), but they are taking it literally in the wrong way. It’s yet another specimen of Jacobovici not really appreciating the actual use of a biblical term, though I really would have expected more from Rabbi Sacknovitz. Jacobovici and Sacknovitz seem stuck on interpreting the word ’ēsh (אש) in terms of flames. Now it is entirely appropriate to see ’ēsh, “fire,” in the Hebrew scriptures and think in terms of flames. But that is not the only way that the word can function. Psalm 29 images God’s presence in terms of a violent thunderstorm (note v. 3) sweeping in off the Mediterranean Sea and crashing against the Phoenician coast. Psalsm 29. Verse 7 reads, “The voice of the LORD cleaves/splits flames of fire,” but remember the context of a thunderstorm. Here, “flames of fire” (lahăbôth ’ēsh, להבות אש) refers to lightning. If you’re not convinced, consider Psalm 18:10–13 (18:11–14 in Hebrew):

He rode on a cherub, and flew;
he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering around him,
his canopy thick clouds dark with water.
Out of the brightness before him
there broke through his clouds
hailstones and coals of fire.
The LORD also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice.
And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them;
he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them.

Psalm 18 is very explicit, and the story of the seventh plague is describing something similar: a hailstorm with lightning. You don’t need any oddball theories to explain that.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

The first third of The Exodus Decoded is devoted to establishing—unsuccessfully, in my judgment, as the previous six installments of my extended review have shown—1500 BCE as the common date for the catastrophe commemmorated in Ahmose’s Tempest Stela, the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, the Israelite exodus from Egypt (remember that filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici claims that the Hyksos expulsion and the Israelite exodus are the same thing, even though this requires that part of this group be empowered in Avaris while part of this group in enslaved at Serabit el-Khadim), and the eruption of the Santorini (Thera) volcano. The mashing of all these items strains credulity (as does Jacobovici’s redating of the Beni Hasan wall paintings from 1890 BCE to c. 1700 BCE), as do some of Jacobovici’s specific interpretations of the data. Yet it will not do at this point simply to dismiss the last hour (excluding commercials) of The Exodus Decoded. For one thing, I hate to leave a job unfinished. For another, were I to end my series here and move on, I would undoubtedly be thought to be dodging evidence I didn’t want to deal with. But most importantly, there may be viewers who think that the material in the last hour has enough persuasive force to overcome the chronological difficulties that beset the first half-hour of the program. Therefore, I will forge ahead.

As the second half-hour of The Exodus Decoded begins, James Cameron reappears on camera to tell viewers that they are about to learn “the science underlying the biblical story.” Exit Cameron; enter Jacobovici, who claims that “Until now, no one has come up with a comprehensive scientific explanation for all ten plagues.” Take that, producers of Rameses: Wrath of God or Man! Take that, Discovery Channel! But of course the really important question is whether or not Jacobovici’s explanation succeeds. By the way, I am not going to take time here to get into the metaphysical and theological question of whether looking for a scientific explanation for miraculous events is a good idea. This is the project that Jacobovici undertakes, and my question is not whether it should be undertaken but whether Jacobovici’s attempt succeeds.

You have undoubtedly already anticipated that Jacobovici’s scientific explanation of the ten plagues will somehow involve the Santorini volcano. There is, however, one intermediate link that Jacobovici needs to forge. Claiming an “amazing synchronicity” between the Ahmose Tempest Stela and the Bible, Jacobovici explains:

1. “The Bible says that the God of Israel passed judgment on the gods of Egypt.”
2. “And the stela confirms that the statues of the gods of Egypt were toppled to the ground.”
3. “Earthquakes are known to accompany volcanic eruptions like Santorini.”
4. “Therefore, both the stela and the biblical narrative describe the effects of an earthquake. “It seems that the stela and the Bible are describing the results of an earthquake, or more precisely, what scientists now call an ‘earthquake storm.’”

The numbered sentences come directly from Jacobovici in The Exodus Decoded. Jacobovici states them in precisely this sequence; I have not left anything out. This is the entirety of the “argument” that Jacobovici presents in favor of his thesis that earthquake activity links the Santorini eruption to the biblical plagues. I have broken Jacobovici’s paragraph into numbered sentences just for clarity and ease of reference in the rest of this post.

Claim 1 is based on Exodus 12:12, where God is quoted as telling Moses, “On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments; I am Yahweh.” Coordinating claim 1 with claim 2, though, is quite problematic. Jacobovici implies that “passing judgment” on the Egyptian gods involved knocking down their statues. While readers familiar with the story in 1 Samuel 5 might think this a reasonable interpretation, nothing in the actual biblical story of the exodus (Exodus 1–15) would lead us in this direction. In fact, the line I just quoted is the only place in the entire exodus story where the Egyptian gods are mentioned, and nothing is said there of their statues. The word “idol” (a statue of a god) doesn’t appear at all in the biblical exodust story, and only appears twice in the whole book of Exodus (in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments and the Ritual Decalogue or “Second” Ten Commandments). Since the exodus story does not even mention the statues of the gods—unless you assume that the very mention of “gods” must refer to their statues, which is an invalid and unsustainable assumption—it is hard to believe that the biblical narrator meant to say that God was planning to knock over the statues of the Egyptian gods. In fact, the biblical narrator states precisely how God was planning to execute judgments on the gods of Egypt. The full quotation from Exodus 12:12 reads, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am Yahweh.” The death of the firstborn is the judgment on the gods of Egypt. There’s nothing here about the toppling of statues. Similarly, with regard to claim 4, the exodus story says nothing about an earthquake being associated with the plagues.

Claim 2 sends us back to Ahmose’s Tempest Stela. According to Jacobovici, the Tempest Stela says that the statues of the gods “were toppled to the ground.” There is a big problem with connecting this claim to the end of the plagues. Let’s deal with these in reverse order. First, let’s state up front that the Tempest Stela does focus its attention on Ahmose’s restoration of temples that have been damaged in some way, and that damage includes fallen statues. That’s entirely clear, and to that extent Jacobovici seems to be on track. Where Jacobovici gets off track is in failing to realize that, according to the Tempest Stela, the catastrophe itself was at most an effect of the damage to the temples—because the gods “were asking for all their cult-services” (Tempest Stela, line 6 front // line 8 back)—not the cause of that damage. Also, consider James Allen’s arguments (bibliographical information given in part 1 of this series) for dating the Tempest Stela to the first year of Ahmose’s reign. If Allen is right (and his reasons are indeed sound), Ahmose inherited rulership over these damaged temples. Moreover, since the Hyksos expulsion occurred no earlier than the fourth year of Ahmose’s reign, and possibly as late as his sixteenth year according to some Egyptologists, the damage to the temples would be more than half a decade in the past at that time. Once again, the dates just don’t line up, not even in a relative sequence. If the plagues happened at the time of the Hyksos expulsion, as Jacobovici posits, then they happened some five to 15 years after Ahmose begain repairing the pre-existing damage to the temples mentioned.

Leaving aside for a moment the chronological problems, we should look at the confluence of claims 2 and 4 ask whether the Tempest Stela attributes the toppling of idols to an earthquake. Here is the relevant section of the Tempest Stela, lines 14–18 on the front and lines 16–21 on the back, as translated by Allen (note that “His Incarnation” is Ahmose):

What His Incarnation did was to rest in the palace, Iph. Then one was reminding His Incarnation of the entering of the sacred estates, the dismantling of tombs, the hacking up of mortuary enclosures, and the toppling of pyramids—how what had never been done (before) had been done. Then His Incarnation commanded to make firm the temples that had fallen to ruin in this entire land; to make functional the monuments of the gods, to erect their enclosure walls, to put the sacred things in the special room, to hide the secret places, to cause the processional images that were fallen to the ground to enter their shrines, to set up the braziers, to erect the altars and fix their offering-loaves, to double the income of office-holders—to put the land like its original situation. Then it was done like everything that His Incarnation commanded to do.

Readers should notice several important things about this text. First, Ahmose has to be “reminded” of the architectural damage, hardly the situation one would expect if the damage were caused by a major (super)natural catastrophe like an earthquake that Ahomse himself experienced. Second, and much more important, the inscription actually makes it clear that tomb robbing, vandalism, and neglect were the causes of the damage to the sacred estates, tombs, mortuary enclosures, pyramids, and monuments of the gods. With regard to the line about the “hacking up of mortuary enclosures,” Allen writes that the verb (ḫb3 for any Egyptologists out there) “is regularly used for the willful destruction of buildings or lands” (p. 15). Allen interprets the lines quoted above to the effect that tombs had been vandalized and temples had been neglected.

Note further how the quotation above from lines 14–18 (front; 16–21 back) of the Tempest Stela begins: “What His Incarnation did was to rest in the palace, Iph.” Why would Ahmose be resting in his palace before restoring the temples, if the damage to the temples, including the the toppling of their idols, was part of the results of the catastrophe? In fact, Ahmose’s immediate reaction to the catastrophe is given in the previous lines, lines 10–14 (front; 12–16 back), as follows:

Then His incarnation said: “How much greater is this than the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!” What His Incarnation did was to go down to his launch, with his council behind him and [his] army on the east and west (banks) providing cover, there being no covering on them after the occurrence of the god’s impressive manifestation. What His Incarnation did was to arrive at the interior of Thebes, and gold encountered the gold of this processional image, so that he received what he had desired. Then His Incarnation was stabilizing the Two Lands and guiding the flooded areas. He did not stop, feeding them with silver, with gold, with copper, with oils and clothing, with every need that could be desired.

What His Incarnation did was to rest in the palace …

When you actually read the text of the Tempest Stela, it becomes quite evident that Ahmose’s response to the tempest was to pay homage and tribute to “the great god,” that is, Amun-Re in Thebes (line 2 of the stela) and to “the gods” who were in Karnak, and possibly (depending on who “them” is in line 18) providing aid to the affected areas in Egypt. Once he did this, he thought he was finished and “rest[ed] in the palace” until he was reminded of the condition of tombs and temples. Allen summarizes (my apologies for the limitations of web fonts for transliteration purposes):

Vandersleyen has argued that the devastation of these monuments was caused by the rains, while Foster and Ritner have suggested the additional agency of an earthquake. In the case of the tombs and mortuary monuments, however, the verbs used in the text connote purposeful destruction: “entering (‘q) … dismantling (whn) … hacking up (ḫb3), … toppling (w‘) … doing what had not been done (jryt tmmt jr).” Since these are regularly used with human agents, the normal implication here is one of willful wreckage—in that case, presumably a reference to the ravages wrought by the conflict between Ahmose’s predecessors and the Hyksos. The verbs referring to the ruin of the temples, in contrast, imply agentless neglect rather than destruction: “fallen to ruin (w3 r w3s) … fallen to the ground (ptḫ r t3).” In both cases, therefore, the text seems to indicate that the state of these monuments was not due to to the storm but, rather, existed before it. This makes excellent sense both in view of the statement that “the gods were asking for their cult-services” and in light of the wording of the introductory statement “then one was reminding His Incarnation.” The text seems to draw a deliberate parallel between the situation caused by the storm and that which existed before it. In the first case, the need for restorative measures was immediate and obvious; in the second, the need was no less serious but was evidently inconspicuous enough, or of long enough standing, that the king needed to be reminded of its necessity—a reminder no doubt prompted by the parallel offered by the more recent devastation. (p. 20; boldface added; italics and ellipses in the original)

I have quoted Allen in such length here to make it perfectly clear that Jacobovici has missed the point. The Ahmose Tempest Stela does not say that the statues of the Egyptian gods were toppled in the catastrophe that occasioned the stela, as Jacobovici claims. Rather, the stela’s inscription reports that after dealing with the situation caused by the tempest, Ahmose was reminded by his courtiers to turn his attention to the pre-existing condition of looted tombs and neglected temples.

The sequence of events here is quite critical, for if the tombs had been robbed and the temples neglected before the tempest, then there is no plausible connection between the toppling of those statues and the tenth plague’s “judgment on all the gods of Egypt.” Since the Tempest Stela is the only “evidence” adduced for the idea that these “judgments” involved the toppling of idols, then if the toppling of the idols cannot be connected to the tempest, the whole house of cards falls apart.

We ought also, before concluding this installment of the extended review, consider claim 3. It is true that seismic activity and volcanic activity can often be connected. However, Jacobovici’s phrasing—“Earthquakes are known to accompany volcanic eruptions”—is somewhat misleading. According to the volcanic hazards primer by C. M. Riley posted online by the geology department at Michigan Tech, there are two types of earthquakes that can “accompany” volcanoes. The primer explains:

Earthquakes produced by stress changes in solid rock due to the injection or withdrawal of magma (molton [sic] rock) are called volcano-tectonic earthquakes (Chouet, 1993). These earthquakes can cause land to subside and can produce large ground cracks. These earthquakes can occur as rock is moving to fill in spaces where magma is no longer present. Volcano-tectonic earthquakes don’t indicate that the volcano will be erupting but can occur at anytime.

The second category of volcanic earthquakes are long period earthquakes which are produced by the injection of magma into surrounding rock. These earthquakes are a result of pressure changes during the unsteady transport of the magma. When magma injection is sustained a lot of earthquakes are produced (Chouet, 1993). This type of activity indicates that a volcano is about to erupt. Scientists use seismographs to record the signal from these earthquakes. This signal is known as volcanic tremor.

One crucial thing to note about these earthquakes that “accompany” volcanic eruptions is that both types precede the eruption of the volcano, and research indicates that this was so in the case of the Bronze Age Santorini eruption. Foster and Ritner (see bibliographical information in part 6 of this series)—who support a connection between the Santorini eruption and Ahmose’s Tempest Stela, state that

An earthquake, caused by plates shifting under the Aegean, probably set the Bronze Age eruption in motion. A few months to two years later, a small precursory ash fall heralded the dramatic, Plinian phase of the eruption … (p. 2)

Wiener (see bibliographical information in part 6 of this series)—who opposes a connection between the Santorini eruption and Ahmose’s Tempest Stela, provides slightly more detail, but agrees in the main:

The second earthquake at Akrotiri apparent in the archaeological record struck three months to two years before the eruption; damage from this quake was already under repair at the time fumes at the beginning of the eruption drove the populace away. (A few scholars have suggested a longer time interval, based on what they perceive as a possible humus layer between the earthquake and the eruption.) (pp. 22–23)

Already you should be seeing a serious problem with Jacobovici’s reconstruction. If the darkness of the Tempest Stela connects with the darkness of the ninth plague, as Jacobovici claims, and if the earthquake most proxmiate to the Santorini volcano caused idols to topple in Egypt in connection with the tenth plague, as Jacobovici claims, then this suggests that the tenth plague happened three months to two years before the ninth plague! Once again, Jacobovici’s reconstructions contort the chronologies of his sources beyond plausibility—almost beyond recognition. Even if we set aside the plagues, the connection between the earthquake and the Tempest Stela’s catastrophe is quite strained. As Wiener writes,

It is perhaps particularly difficult to understand why an earthquake and a great storm putatively caused by a volcanic eruption not less than three months later at the least should be perceived as one event (or even two closely related events) by the Stela’s author. (p. 23)

Moreover, there are some indications that the pre-Thera earthquake might not have been strong enough to cause the kind of damage in Egypt that Jacobovici—and Foster and Ritner—envision:

This quake, which Foster and Ritner suggest may have been responsible for the destruction of structures in both Lower and Upper Egypt, had only limited effects at Thera; the largest building exposed to date, three-story high Xeste IV, was left standing in good condition. (Wiener, p. 23)

It really is hard to believe than the pre-eruption earthquake at Thera barely damaged a three-story building near the volcano but toppled buildings hundreds of kilometers away.

By now it should be evident that there’s no plausible way the pre-Thera earthquake could be directly connected with the tenth plague, the parting of the Red Sea, and so on, and you’d be right. Jacobovici’s hypothesis requires an earthquake after the Santorini eruption. Jacobovici is apparently aware of this, for he invokes the concept of an “earthquake storm.” “Earthquake storm” is a term coined by geophysicist Amos Nur, who explains it on-camera in The Exodus Decoded. Basically, the idea is that an earthquake—and it doesn’t have to be a big one—can trigger another earthquake, and so on in series. These “storms” can extend over a short or long period of time. The time between quakes in an earthquake storm can be as short as a few hours or as long as several years (a triplet of quakes in Turkey in 1939, 1942, and 1967 have been connected in such a sequence by Nur and other geophysicists). Jacobovici doesn’t really explain this in detail when introducing the concept and showing the brief clip of Nur explaining what an earthquake storm is, but what Jacobovici’s scenario requires is that a pre-eruption earthquake diagnostic of the Santorini explosion set off—or was itself an intermediate step in—a whole series of earthquakes connected in one of these earthquake storms.

There is nothing inherently improbable in the idea that a series of earthquakes, linked in a storm, could wrack the eastern Mediterranean. Professor Nur, in fact, postulates that exactly such an earthquake storm, spanning the decades from about 1225–1175 BCE, violently disrupted life in the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Levant:

In conclusion, large earthquakes could have and probably did contribute to the physical and political collapse of the great population centres at the end of the Bronze Age. This probably happened by a storm of earthquakes that swept the eastern Mediterranean between 1225 B.C. to 1175 B.C. If true, these earthquakes physically damaged many of the urban centres involved. This damage rendered these centres militarily vulnerable or defenseless, thus inviting attacks not so much by powerful, distant, scheming Sea People, but by indigenous or neighbouring populations. These attacks led in turn to political and social collapse of the centres followed by a dark age of recovery and rebuilding lasting a few hundred years (and just in time for another earthquake storm). (Amos Nur, “The End of the Bronze Age by Large Earthquakes,” pp. 140–147 in Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical and Cultural Perspectives [ed. B. Peiser, T. Palmer, and M. Bailey; 1998], cited in Mark Rose, “Godzilla’s Attacking Babylon!” Archaeology online feature, September 22, 1999)

It won’t surprise you to learn that there are a couple of problems with Jacobovici’s use of Nur’s idea of earthquake storms. First is a problem with Nur’s thesis itself: it is based almost entirely on analogy. The reasoning (as published in Amos Nur and Eric H. Cline, “Poseidon’s Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean,” Journal of Archaeological Science 27 [2000] 43–63), goes like this (quoting the abstract in full):

In light of the accumulated evidence now published, the oft-denigrated suggestion that major earthquakes took place in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean areas during the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC must be reconsidered. A new study of earthquakes occurring in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean region during the 20th century, utilizing data recorded since the invention of seismic tracking devices, shows that this area is criss-crossed with major fault lines and that numerous temblors of magnitude 6·5 (enough to destroy modern buildings, let alone those of antiquity) occur frequently. It can be demonstrated that such major earthquakes often occur in groups, known as “sequences” or “storms”, in which one large quake is followed days, months, or even years later by others elsewhere on the now-weakened fault line. When a map of the areas in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean region affected (i.e. shaken) by 20th century BC earthquakes of magnitude 6·5 and greater and with an intensity of VII or greater is overlaid on Robert Drews’ map of sites destroyed in these same regions during the so-called “Catastrophe” near the end of the Late Bronze Age, it is readily apparent that virtually all of these LBA sites lie within the affected (“high-shaking”) areas. While the evidence is not conclusive, based on these new data we would suggest that an “earthquake storm” may have occurred in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the years 1225–1175 BC. This “storm” may have interacted with the other forces at work in these areas c. 1200 BC and merits consideration by archaeologists and prehistorians.

In other words, we know that a series of earthquakes rumbled across the region in the 20th century CE; sites more or less along the same broad path experienced destruction near the end of the Late Bronze Age; therefore the possibility that the LBA of these sites might be connected to an earthquake merits consideration. Nur and others have put forward criteria by which one might diagnose an earthquake as the cause of a destruction in the ancient world, and while these may be plausible, they ultimately remain speculative. As Rose writes:

For example, it isn’t enough to say that the North Anatolian Fault is dangerous and might have unzipped between 1225 and 1175—you need to prove that it did so at that time and, beyond, that, show how precisely it would have ended civilization as they knew it, from the immediate effects to ripples through political, economic, and social spheres on local and regional levels. Collapse is too vague a word (about 7.5 on the vagueness scale). Similarly, it isn’t enough to say x, y, and z problems existed in a civilization and then a catastrophe pushed everything over the edge (the blunderbuss approach). If you don’t have solid evidence for a catastrophe or for its effects you are telling a story. And that’s what we have to be careful of in reading any of the recent catastrophic books.

Actually, all Nur and Cline claim in the 2000 article is “a reasonable statistical probability that an ‘earthquake storm’ could have been in part responsible for at least some of the damage seen at a number of these sites” (p. 61). Although Nur clearly believes he’s onto something, he states his conclusions carefully. Still, that doesn’t improve the actual evidence for a late Bronze Age earthquake storm; Nur’s evidence is all circumstantial, even if some of it (e.g., his constrasts between sites that were almost surely destroyed by invaders and sites that he thinks were likely damaged or destroyed by earthquake) is persuasive and carefully developed. The lack of direct evidence, however, remains problematic.

The other problems arise from the way Jacobovici uses Nur’s concept. Although Nur has indeed posited an earthquake storm running in a west-to-east pattern across the Aegean, Anatolia, and Levant around 1225–1175 BCE, this earthquake storm is clearly not in the time frame where Jacobovici needs for it to be. Nur’s late Bronze Age earthquake storm is not Jacobovici’s earthquake storm. According to a report in New Scientist from December 20, 1997, Nur has posited that similar storms have recurred along the same path once about every 400 years. If so, that would put the earlier storm around 1625–1575. Of course, these dates are very rough and approximate, but they actually correspond pretty well with the geophysical (as opposed to archaeological) date for the Santorini explosion: around 1650–1625 BCE. I have not been able to find any published work by Nur that discusses this cyclical pattern, so I don’t know how he’d react to the suggestion that one of these Mediterranean earthquake storms happened c. 1500 BCE. I’d be surprised if he, a prominent geophysicist, accepted the c. 1500 BCE date for the Santorini eruption over the 17th-century date, and through a little Googling I know at least that some of his students who have put their research papers on the internet cite 1650–1625 as the date of the Santorini eruption (though this doesn’t necessarily reflect what Nur tells them in class). The real point to be made here is that Jacobovici is taking Nur’s suggestion of a 1225–1175 earthquake storm, for which there is circumstantial archaeological evidence in the form of collapsed structures that Nur believes fit the criteria for earthquake damage, and applying it to a hypothetical c. 1500 BCE earthquake storm that Nur does not posit and for which there is no evidence except Jacobovici’s unusual reading of the Ahmose Tempest Stela and the biblical exodus story. In the final analysis, Jacobovici’s “argument” amounts to this:

1. An “earthquake storm” is known to have happened in the Aegean and Turkey in the 20th century, and one may have happened in 1225–1175 BCE in the same region.
2. An earthquake might produce some phenomena similar to the biblical descriptions of some of the ten plagues.
3. The Ahmose Tempest Stela mentions damaged temples and toppled idols. An earthquake could cause such phenomena.
4. The biblical story speaks of a “judgment on all the gods of Egypt,” which could imply toppling their idols.
5. Therefore, the biblical story and the Tempest Stela reflect the occurrence of an otherwise unknown earthquake storm.

In brief, there’s no real evidence for such an earthquake storm around 1500 BCE. What one would need to support such a claim circumstantially would be widespread destruction that meets the criteria Nur and Cline describe in the 2000 article above, but Jacobovici does not give us that. The Nile delta region and parts southward along the river are in the “high shaking” zone charted by Nur and Cline. If there had been such a destructive earthquake storm c. 1500 BCE, we should see widespread archaeological evidence of destruction in that time period all along the path charted by Nur and Cline (from southern Greece across to Crete, Anatolia, Cyrpess, and down through Syria-Palestine toward the Gulf of Aqaba. But all Jacobovici gives us is, “An earthquake could help to explain texts A and B, therefore there must have been an earthquake storm, which explains texts A and B.” The reasoning is as circular as a volcano’s caldera.

Oh, and by the way, Jacobovici’s repeated claims that this is a “new” theory, never proposed in its particulars “until now,” is quite put in perspective by this item from The Daily Telegraph, November 12, 2002:

Fresh evidence that the Biblical plagues and the parting of the Red Sea were natural events rather than myths or miracles is to be presented in a new BBC documentary. Moses, which will be broadcast next month, will suggest that much of the Bible story can be explained by a single natural disaster, a huge volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in the 16th century BC. [..] Dr Daniel Stanley, an oceanographer has found volcanic shards in Egypt that he believes are linked to the explosion. [..] Computer simulations by Mike Rampino, a climate modeller from New York University, show that the resulting ash cloud could have plunged the area into darkness, as well as generating lightning and hail, two of the 10 plagues.

Read the whole story on the Telegraph web site. Truly, in the words of Qoheleth, “There is nothing new under the sun”—or in The Exodus Decoded.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

In the first three segments of The Exodus Decoded, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici marshaled the Tempest Stela of Ahmose, Beni Hasan wall paintings, seal or signet of the Hyksos ruler Yaqub-hor (incorrectly assigned to Joseph by Jacobovici), and the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (which for Jacobovici become “Israelite slavery inscriptions,” although nothing of the sort can be demonstrated) in an attempt to link all of these to the biblical story of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and their subsequent exodus, and to link that event to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt and to the rounded-off date of 1500 BCE. This entire house of cards has been thoroughly examined in parts 1–5 of this extended review.

After the third commercial break, Jacobovici turns to what seems to be one of his primary themes, and a lynchpin of his entire thesis: the connection of the ten plagues and the Tempest Stela catastrophe to a Bronze Age eruption of the Santorini volcano, more often referred to by its archaic Greek name, Thera. According to Jacobovici, “This eruption may be another crucial clue for decoding the biblical exodus.” Let’s see if it is.

Before continuing with this segment of the review, I should add a few appropriate disclaimers. I am not a volcanologist, a geologist, or a meteorologist. Therefore, I am a little bit out of my depth when it comes to the Santorini volcano. I can certainly follow the argument laid out in The Exodus Decoded. My point is that for this segment of the review I will be heavily dependent on published work in these fields. I do not have independent expertise in the science side of this like I do on the biblical studies side. With that caveat in mind, let’s proceed with the analysis.

The first issue that requires consideration is the date of the Bronze Age Santorini eruption. According to Karen Polinger Foster and Robert K. Ritner—who support the claim that the eruption of Thera is the cataclysm memorialized on the Tempest Stele of Ahmose—in “Texts, Storms, and the Thera Eruption,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55 (1996) 1–14, the later date proposed for the eruption of Thera is in the range of 1535–1525 BCE, and is “based chiefly on ceramic sequences and Egyptian synchronisms” (p. 8). The earlier date proposed for the eruption of Thera is in the decade 1630–1620, and is based on radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, ice core measurements, and similar scientific investigations. For the radiocarbon dating, you might want to consult Walter L. Friedrich, Bernd Kromer, Michael Friedrich, Jan Heinemeir, Tom Pfeiffer, and Sahra Talamo, “Santorini Eruption Radiocarbon Dated to 1627–1600 B.C.,” Science 28 (2006) Jacobovici shares this basic information (though not bibliography) with viewers in a short clip featuring Charles Pellegrino, who will figure prominently in Jacobovici’s analysis of the volcano’s eruption and effects.

In attempting to untangle this controversy, Jacobovici turns first to Manfred Bietak, one of the lead excavators at Avaris, who says on-camera:

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 happened early in the 18th dynasty, let us say, around 1500 BCE.

Of course, Bietak’s “rounded off” number of 1500 BCE fits in very well with Jacobovici’s thesis. But note the disjunction between the date that Bietak gives and the date range given by Aegean archaeologists: Bietak’s “let us say” date is 25–35 years later than the decade normally proposed by Aegean archaeologists. 1500 BCE is also 14–25 years after Ahmose’s death and 23–46 years after the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt (the dates here must be given in ranges to acknowledge the debates over the “high,” “middle,” and “low” chronologies for the 18th dynasty). Sloppy use of dates is a hallmark of this presentation. This observation does not impugn the dating of the Thera eruption to the date of Ahmose, but the lowering of Ahmose’s and Thera’s dates to 1500 BCE (which Jacobovici needs to do so that he can “split the difference” between the tail end of Ahmose’s reign and the earliest 15th-century dates that anybody proposes for the exodus). The “rounding off” of dates by up to 50 years or more in The Exodus Decoded is a theme previous posts in this series have already explored in some detail.

A different but extremely important chronological issue is the relationship between the time of Thera’s explosion and the first signs of pumice in Avaris. In The Exodus Decoded and in his own publications, Manfred Bietak assumes that the appearance of Thera pumice in Avaris was roughly contemporaneous with the eruption itself. But that is not necessarily the case, and in fact, is not likely at all. In The Exodus Decoded, Jacobovici says that the island of Santorini lies about 700 km from the Egyptian coast; as I measure it in my Accordance atlas module, that looks about right from Santorini to the closest spot on the Egyptian coastline, about 22 km or so northeast of Alexandria. Avaris itself lay farther to the east, about 870 km from Santorini. It’s quite unlikely that pumice from Thera traveled 870 km through the air. Since I am not a volcanologist, I can’t ask you to just “take my word for it.” Let me explain my reasoning, and you can weight its validity.

First, a word about the way that volcanic force is measured. Volcanologists use a scale called the Volcanic Explosivity Index to rank the strength of various volcanos. According to the Global Volcanism Project at the Smithsonian, the Bronze Age Santorini eruption (which they date to 1640 BCE, ±12 years) was a 6 on the VEI scale, ejecting approximately 6.3 x 10¹⁰ m³ of material. By comparison, the Vesuvius eruption of 79 CE was a 5 on the VEI scale, ejecting approximately 3.3 x 10⁹ m³ of material. Based on these statistics, the Thera eruption was about 19 times as powerful as the Vesuvius eruption.

The comparison with Vesuvius will help us put a few things in perspective. Scroll back up and look at the screen capture from The Exodus Decoded that shows Bietak holding a piece of Santorini pumice excavated at Avaris (you can click on the still for a larger image). It’s hard to tell exactly, but I would guesstimate that the pumice between Bietak’s thumb and forefinger isn’t more than 5–6 cm in diameter. Let’s call in 5 cm, because the smaller the pumice, the farther it will travel while airborne during a volcanic eruption. Larger pumices will land closer to the volcano. In the Vesuvius eruption, pumices 15 cm in diameter made it about 6 km downwind, while pumices 5 cm in diameter traveled as much as 8 km downwind—about the distance from Vesuvius to Pompeii. But most of the pumice that landed on Pompeii was in the form of 1 cm rocks. Think about that for a moment: at a distance of about 8 km downwind from Vesuvius, most of the pumices that fell there were only 1 cm in diameter. If we multiply that by a factor of 19 for the Santorini eruption (using the ratio derived above based on the amount of ejected material from each eruption), we might expect to find 15 cm pumices as far away as 114 km downwind, but if Vesuvius is a good example, then most of the pumices we would find raining down on folks 152 km away would be closer to 1 cm. It stretches credulity to think that 5 cm pumices, or even 1 cm pumices, flew 870 km through the air and landed in Avaris. Ash is a different story, but the pumice would have landed much closer to the volcano itself. According to an article on the Thera Foundation website (S. Hood, “Traces of the Eruption Outside Thera,” Thera and the Aegean World I: Papers Presented at the Second International Scientific Congress, Santorini, Greece, August 1978 [ed. C. Doumas, Thera and the Aegean World, 1979]; S. Hood, by the way, followed the traditional dating of c. 1500 for the Santorini eruption, but this was in 1978, and based solely on archaeology, not on the later volcanological and geological investigations), there is no evidence that airborne pumice from the Thera eruption reached the Greek mainland (Athens is about 230 km from Santorini), though we should recognize that the prevailing winds may have played some role in this (more on that later).

There is no doubting that there was pumice from the Thera eruption in Avaris at the turn of the 15th century BCE, but it seems entirely unrealistic to imagine that the pumice was airborne when it got to Avaris. How then did it get there? I mentioned above Hood’s datum that no airborne pumice from Thera seems to have reached Greece, yet pumice from Santorini was indeed found in Greece. Again the question arises, how did it get there? Hood cites G. Rapp, S. R. B. Cooke, and E. Henrickson, “Pumice from Thera (Santorini) Identified from a Greek Mainland Archaeological Excavation,” Science 197 (1973) 471–473 to the effect that the Santorini pumice found at Nichoria was waterborne when it reached the Greek mainland, and had been removed from its original “landing point” by the inhabitants of Nichoria. Something similar seems likely for the Thera pumice at Avaris, especially since pumice from multiple volcanoes—not just Thera—has been found at Avaris (see C. Peltz, P. Schmid, and M. Bichler, “INAA of Aegean Pumices for the Classification of Archaeological Findings,” Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry 242 [1999] 361–377, cited by Stuart Manning on his web site [see the PDF update to Test of Time]). In an earlier installment in this series, I mentioned an article by James P. Allen and Malcolm H. Wiener, “Separate Lives: The Ahmose Tempest Stela and the Theran Eruption,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 57 (1998). This article is really two articles conjoined, one by Allen and one by Wiener. Allen’s portion deals with the textual aspects, Wiener’s with the scientific and archaeological. Wiener explains that the Avaris pumice reached Egypt by water, not by air, and continues:

Tests now show the pumice to be of Theran origin. Whether the pumice has any relevance as a chronological indicator is, however, open to doubt. The deposits are clearly secondary ones, of pumice gathered for some purpose, probably industrial, as distinguished from airborne primary deposits of tephra or ash. Given the direction of the Mediterranean currents, pumice from Thera would float naturally to the Nile Delta. Manning has suggested as an additional possibility the deliberate importation of pumice for some industrial use in the Eighteenth Dynasty. (pp. 25–26)

The idea that any pumice from Thera was airborne when it reached Avaris is unbelievable, and surely no pumice washed up directly on the shores of Avaris (except perhaps by means of one of the Nile’s various branches in the delta region), since it is some 70–75 km inland. The idea that Thera pumice washed ashore on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast and was later taken south to Avaris for “industrial” use is entirely probable and practical. This idea is supported by the fact that other pumice, non-Thera pumice, was also found in the same archaeological context in Avaris, and by the fact that Thera pumice has been found in a wide variety of chronological contexts. As Wiener explains:

In the Aegean such deposits are often found in later, and sometimes much later, contexts. For example, at the island of Pseira, two miles off the north coast of Crete, only about ten percent of the Theran pumice recovered comes from LM IA contexts close in time to the eruption, whereas about ninety percent is found in the LM IB destruction levels, a half-century after the eruption on the short chronology and a century later on the long chronology. At Zakros, on the east coast of Crete, significant amounts of pumice were found in an LM IB destruction context. J. Shaw notes that at Kommos, on the south coast of Crete, lumps of pumice are routinely found in most post-eruption strata. Deposits at other sites have been found in LM II-LH IIB, LM III, and even Hellenistic contexts. (p. 26)

The chief point to be made here is that the presence of Thera pumice in a particular archaeological layer is not diagnostic for the time of the eruption of the volcano itself. If it were, we would have to believe that Thera erupted almost continuously over a period of no less than about 1200 years! Yet archaeologists and volcanologists know for certain that this was not the case. Yes, pumice from Thera found its way to Avaris around 1500 BCE. But that does not mean that Thera erupted around 1500 BCE, because the pumice traveled to Egypt across the Mediterranean Sea and was subsequently collected and moved from its original point(s) of landfall. Pumice from multiple volcanoes was collected and taken to Avaris, apparently for some practical use (Wiener lists over fourteen different ways pumice was used in antiquity). It didn’t fall (there) from the sky. Bietak draws the wrong conclusion from the pumice’s presence at Avaris, and so does Jacobovici—and that’s the only evidence provided in The Exodus Decoded for the date of the Santorini eruption (at least in the first 30 minutes of the program—more on the rest of the show later).

All of the above sidesteps the amazing audacity of the attempt to deny the firm scientific data on the date of the eruption of the Santorini volcano. As good as ceramic chronology can be, it’s not as good as radiocarbon dating. Although attempts to date Thera’s Bronze Age eruption via ice core dating proved to be a red herring, radiocarbon dating of materials from the immediate vicinity of Thera provide a solid scientific basis upon which to date the Thera eruption. As inconvenient as it might be for Jacobovici, the solid scientific evidence points to an eruption in the last quarter of the 17th century BCE—about 125 years earlier than Jacobovici’s thesis demands.

Thus when James Cameron reappears and claims that “Jacobovici’s chronology machine has now synchronized a pharaoh named Ahmose, the Hyksos expulsion, the exodus, and the Santorini eruption,” he’s correct only if he’s referring to the special effects layered in behind him. Ahmose and the Hyksos explusion have long been “synchronized”; we didn’t need Jacobovici’s “chronology machine” for that. The first five parts of this extended review showed how the proposed “evidence” for dating the exodus around 1500 BCE fails, and this one has addressed the synchronism of the Santorini eruption, which belongs more than a century before Jacobovici’s proposed date.

“It appears that the exodus code has finally been cracked,” says Cameron. Not so. The case being argued in The Exodus Decoded just doesn’t hold together—and there’s still another hour or so to go. In subsequent installments, we’ll track Jacobovici’s attempts to link the ten plagues and the Tempest Stela of Ahmose to the Santorini eruption.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 (with addendum) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5