I’ve “lightly” watched about the first half of The Exodus Decoded, and on the positive side I must say that it is as heavy on slick production value as it is light on reliable content. Visually, the program is engaging and entertaining. Unfortunately, all that entertainment value is squandered on content that just won’t hold up. I’m not going to try to address all of the issues raised (and mishandled) in ED in a single post. Instead, I’ll treat them one by one, roughly in the order that they are raised in the program itself.

Jacobovici’s “schtick” is rather staggering when you think about it. He, and filmmaker James Cameron, who introduces the program, claim that biblical scholars have missed “clues” to the historicity of the exodus, clues that are “hiding in plain sight.” Later in the program, Jacobovici gets more brash; he accuses scholars of “ignoring” evidence that is “staring them in the face.”

In the first segment of the program, Jacobovici presents what he calls “Exhibit A” in his case: the Ahmose “Tempest” Stela. According to Jacobovici, the Tempest Stela—which is apparently not on public display anywhere, but according to Jacobovici is in storage in a Cairo museum—tells a story remarkably similar to the biblical story of the ten plagues. In Jacobovici’s view, this confirms Ahmose himself as the Pharaoh of the exodus.

The Tempest Stela (I will call it this in preference to “Ahmose Stela,” since another stela of Ahmose is known) is a relatively little-known artifact, and not all that much has been published about it. The American Theological Library Association database lists only one journal article about it: Malcolm H. Wiener and James P. Allen, “Separate Lives: The Ahmose Tempest Stela and the Theran Eruption,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 57 (1998) 1–28. This “article” is really a juxtaposition of two essays, one by Allen and one by Wiener. We’ll return to Wiener’s contribution later in this series, as appropriate to the structure of The Exodus Decoded, and focus our attention first on the essay by Allen. (By the way, the fact that the essays by Wiener, of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, and Allen, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was published in JNES puts paid to Jacobovici’s assertion that scholars from different disciplines have failed to recognize the clues relevant to verifying the exodus because they “don’t talk to each other.”) Incidentally, the Tempest Stela was badly broken over the years, but reconstruction is aided by the curious fact that the Tempest Stela contained the same inscription on both sides.

First, the props—both in the sense of “praise” and in the sense of objects used to enhance a video production. Jacobovici’s production team has done a really attractive job of reconstructing the Tempest Stele. Jacobovici’s version looks like it has some gaps in the wrong places, and is a little disproportionate (height to width), but is nevertheless a very nice-looking and near-accurate piece of work, even if the glowing amber “missing pieces” are a bit cheesy.

Reconstruction of the Tempest Stela from The Exodus Decoded Drawing of the Tempest Stela from Wiener and Allen, JNES (1998)
Jacobovici's CGI Ahmose Stela Drawing of the real Ahmose Stela

Unfortunately, Jacobovici’s skill in interpreting the Tempest Stela falls far short of his effects staff’s skill in visually reconstructing the stela. Recall that Jacobovici’s thesis is that the Tempest Stele describes the biblical ten plagues from an Egyptian point of view, and that therefore Ahmose is the Pharaoh of the exodus. There are numerous problems with this thesis—taking it no further than this simple equation. My analysis here is very much dependent on Allen’s description of the stela in JNES 57; anything I say about the stela here should be understood to come with an implied “According to Allen in JNES 57″ attached.

When evaluating all of this, it’s important to keep the time frame in mind throughout the entire discussion. After all, one of Jacobovici’s major claims that the scholars are dating the exodus at least a century and a half too late. The customary dating for Ahmose’s reign is c. 1550–1525 BCE. Allen dates the Tempest Stela to Ahmose’s first regnal year; the date itself was once in what is now a lacuna in the text, so Allen’s reconstruction might be inaccurate, but he makes a good case for it on the basis of content, orthography, and the physical dimensions of the lacuna. Thus, if the Tempest Stela can be connected to the ten plagues, the plagues would have happened sometime in the period 1550–1525 BCE, with a good case being made for 1550 itself. Keep this in mind throughout this entire series of posts.

A critical question for Jacobovici’s case is whether or not the description of the calamity in the Temple Stela really resembles the biblical description of the ten plagues. Here’s the description of the calamity from the Temple Stela, as translated by Allen (lines 6–10 on the face of the stela, 8–12 on the reverse):

[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.

Allen comments on the nature of the tempest:

The main features of the storm were apparently torrential rain; darkness; and loud noise, probably from the thunder or wind, or both. The text does not note the duration of the deluge, but its aftermath is described as lasting for a period of several days or even weeks. It evidently occasioned large-scale flooding, property damage, and loss of life; the mention of “the east and west (banks)” being denuded of “covering” [in later lines than those quoted above—RCH] suggests that it also washed away large sections of cropland.

So here’s what we have: the Tempest Stele of Ahmose describes a massive thunderstorm that results in darkness (from the cloud cover, I suppose) and a flood that does not abate for several days, or even weeks. How closely does this resemble the biblical description of the ten plagues? There are indeed some meteorological phenomena in the ten plagues: in particular, the fourth seventh plague consists of hail, lightning, thunder, and rain, and the ninth plague, darkness, may have been meteorological (I think the “tangible darkness” of Exodus 10:22 is meant to evoke thoughts of a terribly thick sandstorm; note that the third and sixth plagues also involve airborne particulate matter, dust and soot). None of the other biblical plagues are overtly meteorological, and the Tempest Stele says nothing about water turning to blood (the first biblical plague; a surprising omission, if it relates to the plagues, since an abundance of water is the pressing problem in the Tempest Stela). There is no mention on the Tempest Stela of swarms of frogs (second plague), gnats (or mosquitoes, third plague), flies (fourth plague), or locusts (eighth plague). Ahmose’s PR agent (a.k.a. the stela’s author) says nothing about any diseases on livestock (fifth plague) or humans (sixth plague). There are indeed corpses floating around on the Tempest Stela, but there is no hint that these are limited to the firstborn (tenth plague), nor was the cause of their death mysterious—they were killed in the storm, or drowned in the subsequent flood. Note well that the biblical plagues story does not say anything about a flood in connection with the ten plagues, not even the plague of hail, and the Tempest Stela does not mention hail.

By now it should be clear that Jacobovici’s claim that the Tempest Stela of Ahmose reports, from an Egyptian perspective, the same events as the biblical ten plagues story hangs by the slimmest of threads. The Tempest Stela’s catastrophe could, at most, be seen as vaguely parallel to the plagues of hail and darkness, but even here there are enough significant differences to cast serious doubt on the suggested parallel. To try to connect the Tempest Stela with the ten plagues story as a whole, one must suppose either that the Tempest Stela (whose inscription dates within Ahmose’s twenty-five-year reign, as does the catastrophe itself) presents an exaggerated version of only one of ten catastrophes, or perhaps a mangled conflation of two of them, or that the biblical version (whose linguistic properties are characteristic of an era hundreds of years later than any proposed time frame for the exodus) presents a vastly expanded list of plagues based on a single, albeit devastating, thunderstorm. Neither of these scenarios, though, is what Jacobovici proposes. What it boils down to is simply this: The story of a devastating thunderstorm is just not the same as the story of the ten plagues. There is no compelling link between the text of Ahmose’s Tempest Stela and the biblical story of the exodus.

I would be remiss if I did not address one other issue, even though the foregoing analysis should be enough to demonstrate that Jacobovici’s suggestion of a link between the Tempest Stela and the book of Exodus hasn’t a leg upon which to stand. Jacobovici is unduly impressed by the fact that a line in the Tempest Stele refers to “god” in the singular, rather than “gods” in the plural. The exact phrase that seems to have caught Jacobovici’s attention is in line 10, “Then His Incarnation said: ‘How much greater is this than the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!’” (Allen’s translation) Jacobovici seems to want to interpret this as Ahmose attributing the catastrophe to “the great god”—singular—over against the “gods”—plural—of Egypt. But this is a misreading of the text. It is patently clear from line 6 (see above) that Ahmose attributes the storm to “the gods”—plural. Moreover, carefully reread the line just quoted. It says, “How much greater is this than the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!” It does not say, “How much greater is this the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!”—as it is misquoted on the Exodus Decoded web site (follow the link then click on part 4). This is very important, because Ahmose is contrasting “this”—the catastrophic storm—with both “the impressive manifestation of the great god” (singular) and “the plans of the gods” (plural). As Allen explains,

The key to the meaning of this clause appears to lie in the parallel theme of “the great god,” on the one hand, and “the gods,” on the other, which is sounded throughout the stela. Ahmose’s explicit response to the storm—”How much greater is this than the impressive manifestation of the great god, than the plans of the gods!” (ll. 10 F, 14 B)—indicates that both “the great god” and “the gods” were considered agents of its occurrence. The description of his subsequent actions follows the same pattern: first he returns to Amun’s presence in Thebes, then—following measures taken for the relief of the country—he orders restoration of “the templest that had fallen to ruin in this entire land.” The pair of clauses in ll. 6 F and 14 B are probably to be understood in the same light: as parallel statements of the theological basis for the storm. In the mind of the Egyptians, the catastrophe was evidently seen as a manifestation of Amun’s desire that Ahmose return to Thebes and of the gods’ demand that he turn his attention to the state of their temples.

Ahmose wasn’t referring to Israel’s God when he marveled at the severity of the storm. “The great god” is Amun, who is explicitly mentioned in line 3 of the stela, if Allen’s reconstruction (following W. Helck, Historische-biographische Texte der 2. Zwischenzeit und neue Texte der 18. Dynastie, 1975) of “A[mun-Re, lord of thrones of the Two Lands] was in Thebes” is correct. And again, notice that Ahmose says that the severity of the storm was greater than the manifestation of the great god (Amun). Allen comments,

Unusual as it is, the notion of events exceeding the original intent of their divine author has a literary parallel of sorts in the story known as “The Destruction of Mankind,” which describes the sungod’s efforts to stop the slaughter of human beings begun by Hathor on his orders.

 In other words, Ahmose isn’t floored by some great god from out of nowhere who was more impressive than “the gods”; rather, he seems to think that the catastrophe overran the original divine plan. (By the way, this theme is known in the Bible too; see Isaiah 10:5–11.)

In sum, Jacobovici’s thesis of a parallel between the Tempest Stela and the biblical story of the ten plagues simply doesn’t hold water. Only a willful blurring of vision, or very careless interpretation of the surface sense of both texts, can lead anywhere near such a conclusion.

This post has dealt only with that portion of The Exodus Decoded that runs from the beginning of the program to the first commercial break (as broadcast on the History Channel on August 20, 2006). I’ll be back in a later post with comments on the second segment of the broadcast.