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