The Exodus Decoded is back in the news again, this time in the Times of London (hat tip: Jim West). Although much of what is mentioned in the Times article has been reported before, although I did not know before reading the Times article that there is a web site devoted to The Exodus Decoded. Let’s see what’s there.

First, it’s important to note that Jacobovici’s present depends radically on dating the exodus event. In a sense, this is true with all attempts to find any sort of historical or archaeological corroboration for the biblical exodus story. The Exodus Decoded web site claims (please note that I’m aware that the web site itself is not an agent that can claim things, but since the materials in the Exodus Decoded web site are not always clearly attributed to any specific writer, I must myself attribute them loosely):

The problem is not a lack of evidence for the historicity of the Biblical story, but that most archaeologists have been looking in the wrong time period. Imagine the confusion if, in the future, scholars date WWII to the 1990s. They’ll never find any evidence that it actually happened. So let’s reexamine the chronology of the Exodus.

It should be immediately clear that this argument begs the question by assuming that the exodus was a historical event that occurred at a particular time, and then the argument goes off looking for evidence to substantiate that claim. Again, to some extent, any attempt to work with the exodus historically is going to fall prey to this problem, so it may in fact be unavoidable … but that doesn’t mean it’s not problematic.

So when does Jacobovici date the exodus? The ED web site acknowledges that the majority of biblical scholars who still try to put the exodus on a timeline put it in the thirteenth century BCE (ED cites the year 1260). ED recognizes that this dating is based, at least in significant measure, on the mention in the book of Exodus of Pithom and Ramesses as store-cities built by the Hebrew slaves. It is pretty much correct to say, as ED does, that there is no archaeological evidence for a thirteenth-century Hebrew exodus from Egypt. It is not quite correct, however, to say, as ED does, that there is no textual evidence for that date—a particularly ironic claim, since the paragraph itself cites the statement about Pithom and Ramesses! Of course, those statements have to be linked to archaeological conclusions about the dates of the construction and use of Pithom and Ramesses, but as far as I know (and I’m not an Egyptologist) that evidence points to the thirteenth century BCE (I admit there may be data here of which I am unaware).

But Pithom and Ramesses are not the only indicators of a thirteenth-century date, and there are some indirect archaeological indicators that the thirteenth century is the appropriate time frame for the exodus, if it happened. According to the biblical story, the Hebrews left Egypt, went to Mount Sinai, hung out around Kadesh-barnea for a little under four decades, and then “invaded” Canaan. If so, we should expect to find evidence of these new settlers in Canaan. There is no such evidence of a new ethnic group entering Canaan and establishing a new lifestyle in the middle of the fifteenth century BCE (which, as you’ll later see, is the date Jacobovici champions). Around the turn of the twelfth century, however—the time frame that Syro-Palestinian archaeologists commonly use to demarcate the younger Iron Age I from the older Late Bronze Age—the archaeological remains do attest to a veritable explosion of new settlements in the central Palestinian highlands. (By the way, I don’t intend anything political by using the term “Palestine”; I use the term anachronistically in its geographical, Roman-era sense, so that I can avoid using either “Israel” or “Canaan” for an early Iron Age region.) There are, of course, many debates over whether these new settlements are “Israelite” (or, as Bill Dever would have it, “Proto-Israelite”) or “Canaanite,” and—whichever way that question is decided—whether these “[Proto-]Israelites” migrated into the area from outside (as the Bible describes), or whether they were “always” in the area as semi-nomadic pastoralists and settled down due to socio-economic factors (per Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman), or some combination of these and perhaps other origins (the direction Dever seems to be moving in recent works). The point for our purposes here is that if the Israelites migrated into Canaan as the whole exodus story would require, they left no trace of themselves in Canaan until beginning around 1200 BCE. If the new highland villages that emerge starting around 1200 BCE are indeed Israelite or Proto-Israelite, and if indeed these Israelites migrated into Canaan after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, that would point us to the middle of the thirteenth century BCE for that exodus event. If the exodus happened some 200 years earlier, as Jacobovici suggests in The Exodus Decoded, then these migrating Israelites left no archaeological trace of themselves in their new homeland for the first couple of hundred years of occupation. That seems almost unbelievable. It certainly is evidence, if indirect, and dependent on a number of suppositions (but, further, note that if the suppositions are incorrect, then the evidence does not swing toward an earlier Israelite exodus and migration into Canaan, but rather toward no Israelite presence in early Iron Age Canaan at all, so the weaknesses in this reconstruction do not help Jacobovici’s case).

Moreover, the famous Merneptah Stele provides indirect support for a thirteenth-century exodus over against an earlier one. (It actually does not provide any support for an exodus at all, but does affect the dating if one supposes for other reasons that there was an exodus.) The Merneptah Stele is the oldest physical object that bears the term “Israel” (that is, the equivalent phonetic values in early Iron Age Egyptian hieroglyphics), and there it is used as the name of a people group (or at least seems to be). There is considerable debate over just what the referent of Merneptah’s word “Israel” might be, but if you have concluded on other grounds that there was an Israelite exodus from Egypt, and if you accept the prevailing view that Merneptah’s “Israel” was a socio-ethnic group in the central to northern Palestinian highlands, then the Merneptah stele places Eygpt’s first significant notice of them in the thirteenth century BCE. No inscriptions provide us with any hint of an “Israel” in Palestine before this time, which weakens proposals in favor of an earlier date for the exodus.

The only direct statement in the Bible about the timing of the exodus comes from 1 Kings 6:1, as ED notes.

However, in 1 Kings 6:1, we are informed that Solomon began building the Temple in the fourth year of his reign, 480 years after the Exodus.  Since Solomon ruled from 971-931 B.C.E., it is possible to obtain a date of 1447 B.C.E. for the Exodus. The Talmudic date for the Exodus is 1333 B.C.E., but recent emendations suggested by Mitchell First in Jewish History in Conflict bring the date to 1482 B.C.E.

Note that First’s emendations are to the Talmud, and that Jewish History in Conflict (Jason Aronson, 1997) is chiefly a study of the Talmudic chronology of the Persian rule over the Jews). Note further that 1447 is 35 years later than 1482, but this doesn’t seem to bother ED too much.

In fact, Jacobovici pushes the Hebrew exodus back still further, to around 1500 BCE, and he equates it with the explusion of the Hyksos:

If we look at Egyptian history, there is only one instance of a mass expulsion of Western Semitic people.   This took place at the conclusion of the Hyksos’ wars towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age around 1500 B.C.E.  It should also be noted that all ancient authors agree that the Exodus and the Hyksos wars happened at the same time.  This date is so close to the Biblical and revised Talmudic dates for Exodus that it cannot be dismissed.  

We have in the Bible the story of the Semites leaving Egypt and going eastward from Egypt. At the same time, independent of the Bible, we have a story of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt. I think definitely the two stories are related. They’re describing the same event from different viewpoints.

Therefore, the “Hyksos Expulsion” and the Biblical Exodus are really one and the same. But most scholars say that the Hyksos and the Israelites cannot be equated because the Hyksos left Egypt hundreds of years before Moses was born.  These scholars also say that the chronology of ancient Egypt cannot be tampered with, so even when the archaeological evidence is staring them in the face, they ignore it.

Anyone even remotely familiar with this hypothesis—which is hardly shocking or new, but has been around for quite a long time—should know that arguments against the Hyksos/Hebrew equation are not based solely, or even primarily, on chronology. The biggest prima facie problem with the equation is that the two stories are totally different in all but the very most superficial and abstract terms. In both stories we have a West Semitic people entering Egypt, staying for a while, and then leaving, but that’s about where the similarities end. The Hyksos (an Anglicization of a Hellenization of an Egyptian phrase meaning “foreign rulers”) are depicted in the relevant sources as ruling Egypt until they are forcibly expelled, while the Hebrews are depicted in the Bible as slaves in Egypt until they are forcibly liberated. To equate the Hyksos with the Hebrews requires turning one story or the other completely upside-down.

Jacobovici claims that Ahmose, founder of the 18th Dynasty and champion of the Egyptians against the Hyksos, was the Pharaoh of the exodus. He seems—as far as information on the web site is concerned—to ignore the fact that Ahmose pursued the Hyksos as far as southern Palestine—well past the putative location of the Sea of Reeds!—and besieged one of their Palestinian outposts for several years. Jacobovici makes much of the Tempest Stele, a stele bearing an inscription in which Ahmose (or, more properly, his press agent) boasts of repairing temples that were damaged by a massive divinely-inflicted thunderstorm. Jacobovici claims that since the word “god” appears in the singular in the description of this storm’s cause, and since the biblical exodus story also speaks of a thunderstorm and a plague of darkness (which ought to be interpreted as a dust storm, but never mind that) caused by a singular God, the Tempest Stele and the story of the ten plagues are talking about the same events. Here is the relevant part of the stele, as quoted by Jacobovici:

[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…]…Then every house and every habitation they reached [perished and those in them died, their corpses] floating on the water…for a period of up to […] days, while no torch could give light over the Two Lands.  

Then His Incarnation said: ‘How much greater is this the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!’

Then His Incarnation commanded to make firm the temples that had fallen to ruin in this entire land …to cause the processional images that were fallen to the ground to enter their shrines…

Jacobovici camps out on the singular “god” in the second quoted paragraph, apparently ignoring or explaining away the plural “gods” in the first line. He also makes an unwarranted leap of illogic to connect “the manifestation of the great god” to the Hebrew God instead of to some Egyptian god such as Amun (the identification assumed at AncientNearEast.net), and the assumption that both the Tempest Stele and the biblical ten plagues story are talking about the same thunderstorm is entirely gratuitious.

I have not been able to find a good copy of the Tempest Stele to examine yet; there are lots of references to it online, but everybody seems to just be copying each other’s quotations, which are filled with ellipses. I shall have to leave off any further comments on the Tempest Stele until I can get more reliable information about it, but I think it’s clear that Jacobovici’s claims really stretch the so-called evidence. I am not sure whether Jacobovici is the author of the following paragraph from the ED website, but the appallingly poor logic speaks for itself:

We have this very interesting stele which is dated to the reign of Ahmose. It records a tremendous catastrophe that happened to Egypt. We’re not quite clear what it was but it involved rain and thunder and lightning and such a storm that rarely happens in northeast Africa, I mean that’s a dry area. It sounds peculiar to me that the Biblical tradition preserves the memory of plagues, you know, which involve climatic cataclysms and here we have from the very time this curious stele.

Most of the rest of what appears on the ED web site presupposes the correctness of the Hebrew/Hyksos identity and the identification of Ahmose as the Pharaoh of the exodus. If these fall, the rest of what Jacobovici has to say about the Hyksos and the family of Ahmose is irrelevant to the exodus. But there are other problems with ED.

ED exhibits a consistent tendency to lump all West Semitic peoples into a single category, and then to treat anything that can be said about West Semitic interactions with Egypt as if it could be said of Israelite interactions with Egypt. For example, the famous Beni Hasan wall paintings, which depict a group of Western Semites coming to Egypt for trade, is interpreted by ED so as to make it sound like these are drawings of Israelites migrating into Egypt to live, but of course this begs the question of the historicity of Jacob’s migration to Egypt (ED also dates the Beni Hasan wall paintings to c. 1700 BCE, although the customary dating is two centuries earlier, c. 1890 BCE).

More strikingly misguided is ED‘s treatment of the crude inscriptions from the Serabit el Khadim turquoise mines. Here are Jacobovici’s claims:

The question, of course, is whether or not there is any evidence for the enslavement of Western Semitic peoples (especially Hebrews) at the end of the Middle Bronze Age during the period of the Hyksos’ wars. At a turquoise mine in the Sinai called 6A Serabit el Khadim there is precisely this type of evidence.

Western Semitic alphabetic inscriptions on the walls of these mines, which date to the start of the 18th dynasty, speak to the anguish of the authors.  “O El, save me from the mines.”  The fact that the cry is made to ‘El’ rather than ‘Yahweh’ indicates that whoever wrote this plea was not yet aware of the revelation at Mount Sinai (Horeb).

Note how Jacobovici slides from “West Semitic” to “Hebrew” and back again—an unwarranted slide. Also, while Jacobovici dates the inscriptions to the Middle Bronze Age, he may have them rather too early (see Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, “New discoveries at Serâbît el-Khâdîm,” Biblical Archaeologist 45 [Winter 1982] 13–18, who argues for a Late Bronze Age date—and Beit-Arieh, unlike Jacobovici, actually worked on-site as an archaeologist at Serabit el-Khadim); if so, these inscriptions would have been made after the exodus, according to Jacobovici’s dating of that event.

But even more important is to notice how Jacobovici again begs the question, and how Jacobovici displays woeful ignorance of Western Semitic religion, including Israelite religion. He suggests that the use of the divine name ’el in the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions (and I don’t have the resources handy just now to check out his translations of a couple of the inscriptions) shows that the miner who inscribed it “was not yet aware of the revelation at Mount Sinai.” To be blunt, this claim is all screwed up. The use of the word “yet” begs the question yet again: Jacobovici presupposes that the inscriber would someday become aware of the revelation at Sinai, thus presupposing his conclusion of cultural continuity between the miners and the Israelites. Jacobovici also gets his chronology wrong: in the biblical story, the name “Yahweh” is operative already in Egypt, well before the Israelites visit Sinai, and in fact some passages imply that it is a kind of “code word” by which Moses verifies his bona fides to the Israelite slaves. At any rate, if we are taking the biblical chronology seriously—as Jacobovici seems to be claiming to do—Abraham uses the name “Yahweh” long before Moses, so the absence of the name “Yahweh” from Serabit el-Khadim doesn’t mean a thing. In fact, one would only expect to find the name “Yahweh” there if one presupposed that the inscriptions were written in Iron Age or later biblical Hebrew—but the inscriptions aren’t in biblical Hebrew, they’re in some sort of West Semitic dialect that predates biblical Hebrew considerably. There’s absolutely no reason to suppose that the author was a Yahwist, in which case it’s not at all surprising to find the divine name ’el. Even if the inscriber was a Yahwist, which doesn’t seem at all likely, the name “Yahweh” did not displace the name “El” in Israelite usage. You can see that right there in the name: the “el” in “Israel” is this divine name “El.” Moreover, there are plenty of instances in biblical Hebrew where Israel’s God is unabashedly called “El.” Moreover, as I recall (again, I am not in a position at present to access good, reliable library resources), one of the first-deciphered Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions from Serabit el-Khadim read לבעלת—a Baalistic dedication—casting yet further doubt on the notion that the inscribers were Yahwists or proto-Yahwists and making the name “El” even less of a distinctive socio-ethnic marker. The divine names “El” and “Baal” are ubiquitous in the ancient Levant, so their presence at the turquoise mines tells us nothing at all about the timing of the inscriptions.

Jacobovici’s case turns to naturalistic explanations for the ten plagues as he tries to connect Ahmose’s Tempest Stele with the eruption of the Santorini volcano, which Jacobovici dates to around 1500 BCE. I’m not going to go through all this step by step. I will just say that it seems an awfully strange pursuit to me to try to “prove” the Bible—and, indeed, to go so far as to insist on the accuracy of the “480 years” figure in 1 Kings 6:1—by stripping it of the miraculous and showing that its “miracles” were really natural occurrences. I’ll also just say that everything the ED web site says along these lines is pretty much old news, ideas that have been proposed before, if perhaps in different forms or with some differing details.

There is more that could be said, but I’ve already spent far too much time on this one blog post. Let’s end by saying that nothing I have seen of Jacobovici’s special makes me think that there is any real value in it.