On August 20, 2006, the History Channel aired the US broadcast premiere of Simcha Jacobovici’s “documentary” The Exodus Decoded. Last week, I posted an extended review of the first segment (i.e., everything up to the first commercial break). Now I’m ready to consider the second segment (everything between the first and second commercial breaks).

In the first segment, Jacobovici presented the Tempest Stela of Pharaoh Ahmose as “Exhibit A” in his case. The Tempest Stele describes a major thunderstorm and subsequent flooding. Jacobovici argues that this description parallels the biblical ten plagues. In my review of segment 1, I discussed various reasons why the proposed Tempest Stela/ten plagues parallel is devoid of merit. However, in segment 2 Jacobovici (naturally) presupposes that the parallel is valid, so he focuses his attention on Ahmose himself in the second segment.

Jacobovici’s “Exhibit B” is the embalmed corpse of Ahmose himself. Obviously, Ahmose’s corpse does not in itself provide any link whatsoever to biblical events, or to any historical events at all, for that matter. It’s just a dead body, remarkably well-preserved, of course. By putting the corpse on-screen, though, Jacobovici cleverly puts “flesh” on the bare bones of his “decoding” job. While the camera plays over Ahmose’s mummified face, Jacobovici’s voiceover declares:

Here is the man who confronted Moses. Can it be that Ahmose’s father remembered the Israelite prince he grew up with, and when he gave his son his Egyptian name “Ahmose,” “the moon is born,” he chose the name because of a play on words? In Hebrew, “Ahmose” means “the brother of Moses.”

Please remember that, up to this point, Jacobovici’s only evidence that Ahmose is the pharaoh of the exodus comes from the very weak attempt to draw a parallel between Ahmose’s Tempest Stela and the biblical story of the ten plagues. That’s it. During the commercial break, “possiblies” and “maybes” have turned into certainties—a slick rhetorical trick, but trickery nonetheless.

The suggestion that Ahmose’s name might be a play on words is, well, rather silly. In the first place, it seems that the “play” is achieved only by piping the Egyptian name through English and then into Hebrew. I am not skilled in reading hieroglyphics, and I am therefore dependent on others’ expertise in this matter, but according the Audio Pronunciation Guide for The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (a college world history textbook by Richard W. Bulliet et al., published by Houghton Mifflin) and several dictionaries that I consulted, this pharaoh’s name is pronounced ah-mohs, not akh-moh-se, as Jacobovici consistently pronounces it in The Exodus Decoded. Jacobovici seems to have taken the English spelling Ahmose, “transliterated” it into the Hebrew spelling אח משה, and then proposes an ancient Egyptian word play based on his own mispronunciation of the Pharaoh’s name.

Jacobovici asks, “Can it be that Ahmose’s father remembered the Israelite prince he grew up with …?” This question implies that Ahmose’s father, Seqenenre Taa II, grew up with “an Israelite prince,” undoubtedly Moses, and then named his son “brother of Moses,” an appelation that would have been more accurately applied to the father than the son in this scenario. According to the biblical storyline, Moses’s adoptive Egyptian mother was the daughter of the current pharaoh, making the current pharaoh his adoptive grandfather. The book of Exodus is remarkably vague on all this, but it could be reasonable to assume that by the time Moses grew to adulthood and killed the Egyptian taskmaster, prompting his flight to Midian, that his pharaonic grandfather had died and that his adoptive father or uncle had assumed the throne. However, in the absence of any sort of data about this individual, it seems equally reasonable to assume that he had not. In order to make the subsequent discussion easier to follow, I will use “case 1″ as shorthand for the idea that Moses’s adoptive grandfather was the pharaoh who sought to kill him according to Exodus 2:15, and “case 2″ for the idea that Moses’s adoptive grandfather had already died and been succeeded by Moses’s adoptive father or uncle, who then would be the pharaoh seeking to kill Moses according to Exodus 2;15. If the pharaoh of the exodus was the son of the pharaoh during whose reign Moses fled Egypt, as seems to be implied by Exodus 2:15 and 4:19, that would make the pharaoh of the exodus Moses’s adoptive father or uncle in case 1, or Moses’s adoptive brother or cousin in case 2. Both Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and DreamWorks’s The Prince of Egypt take out a generation, making Seti I the Pharaoh who sought to kill Moses and Ramses II the Pharaoh of the exodus and Moses’s adoptive brother. Jacobovici’s treatment though, adds a generation. If Ahmose were indeed the pharaoh of the exodus, and if Seqenenre Taa II had named Ahmose after Seqenenre’s adoptive brother, the “Israelite prince” Moses, that would make Ahmose, the pharaoh of the exodus, Moses’s Egyptian nephew—a relationship that just doesn’t fit the biblical storyline unless you stick in another generation in between Exodus 2:15 and 4:19.

On multiple counts, then, Jacobovici’s attempt to coordinate Egyptian history with the biblical exodus story by means of Pharaoh Ahmose falls apart.

But it gets worse.

After cutting away from Ahmose, Jacobovici takes his camera crew to the site of the Hyksos capital, Avaris, in the Nile delta region. After a catena of largely irrelevant video, Jacobovici plays a brief clip of Charles Pellegrino opining that the Hyksos expulsion and the biblical exodus are the same event, told from different points of view. It’s worth noting that Charles Pellegrino is neither a biblical scholar nor an ancient Near Eastern historian nor an Egyptologist. He is billed in The Exodus Decoded as an “author.” His web site describes his “eclectic literary works.” Pellegrino’s books include, according to an Amazon.com search:

• Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, in which Pellegrino (according to his web site—I haven’t read the book) argues that the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah reflects the real-life events of the eruption of Thera (Santorini)
• Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey to the Fabled Lost Civilization, in which Pellegrino tries to redate the destruction of Atlantas from 9000 years before Plato to 900 years before Plato, and connects it with—you guessed it—the eruption of Thera (Santorini)
• Ghosts of the Titanic
• Ghosts of Vesuvius
• The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History, forthcoming in March 2007 and co-authored with—you’ll never guess—Simcha Jacobovici

Pellegrino has also written a number of novels. Clearly, Pellegrino is a prolific writer, and based on the reviews it appears that he is a skilled and engaging writer. Even so, Pellegrino’s track record suggests an overly large preoccupation with the Thera (Santorini) volcano and a tendency to turn unsubstantiated speculations into books.

The real experts are those whose views Jacobovici downplays or dismisses. Immediately after the Pellegrino clip, Jacobovici tells his audience,

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.

Then Bill Dever—an actual Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, though not an Egyptologist—is shown on one of Jacobovici’s floating blue screens. Dever says:

You can play with Egyptian dates. You can move them up maybe ten years and down ten years, but you can’t move up and down fifty or a hundred years. That’s not possible. And yet many people try to do that. They try to adjust chronology to fit their predetermined notion of biblical history. You can’t do it.

Dever should have said “You can’t do it successfully,” because of course adjusting Egyptian dates by remarkable leaps is exactly what Jacobovici goes on to try to do. Jacobovici answers the virtual Dever as follows:

But maybe we have to. What if scholars are placing the exodus in the wrong time period? Imagine the confusion if in the future scholars date World War II to the 1990s. They’ll never find any evidence that it actually happened.

With this silly little remark, Jacobovici displays either ignorance of or complete disregard for the way historians and archaeologists actually work. The image conjured up by Jacobovici’s comment implies that scholars sit around and come up with a date for some past event, jump in a time machine to go check out that date, and if they find no evidence for it in the proposed date, conclude that it never happened. Baloney. If those future scholars somehow misunderstood their data and couldn’t find evidence of World War II in the 1990s, they would undoubtedly reassess their data and keep looking in other candidate periods. Archaeologists and historians attempting to reconstruction ancient Near Eastern history do the same thing. Moreover, it’s not normally the case that historians and archaeologists who study the ancient Near East sit in their studies, decide on an event to investigate, and then go looking for data. Particularly with contemporary archaeologists working in Syria-Palestine, the procedure is more often to pick a site and carefully excavate it to learn as much as possible about the site’s inhabitants at as many periods of occupation as can be discerned. It’s filmmakers and authors like Jacobovici and Pellegrino who pick specific events, form a speculative scenario, and then try to find data to bolster their case.

Jacobovici continues: “Currently, most scholars date the exodus to 1270 BCE, during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II. But some scholars are now breaking with that consensus.” Note Jacobovici’s use of the word “now.” He wants you to believe that arguments against an early- to mid-thirteenth century date for the exodus are a new thing that he is helpfully bringing to public attention. But they’re not. The dating of the exodus to the thirteenth century BCE did not emerge by, say, a vote over beer one night at a restaurant down the street from Chicago’s Oriental Institute. It is quite true that the large majority of those scholars who still maintain an interest in dating the exodus date it to the first half (or middle) of the thirteenth century. This “consensus” has emerged from a careful consideration of the available evidence. To give you just a few “bullet points”:

• The Amarna letters give us a picture of a robust, if fractious, “Canaanite” (our term, not theirs) culture in the fourteenth century BCE, with no signs of Israelites anywhere.
• The “explosion” of hill country settlements features “four-room” pillared houses—a style of architecture still in use in seventh-century Jerusalem, and often taken as a sign of Israelite or “proto-Israelite” ethnicity (e.g., by the aforementioned Bill Dever, and also by Israel Finkelstein, despite other disagreements between these two Syro-Palestinian archaeologists)—appear in the archaeological record right around 1200 BCE, and not earlier.
• The first mention of a people group called “Israel” in the region later occupied by the Iron Age kingdom of Israel (whether in the Palestinian highlands or in Transjordan is debated) is found on the Merneptah Stela, erected c. 1209–1207 BCE.

Scholars who want to find the exodus in history look to the thirteenth century not out of prejudice, and not out of a failure to consider alternatives, but because that is where the archaeological evidence leads.

Jacobovici’s example of a scholar who “break[s] with that consensus” is, by the way, John Bimson, who has been arguing unpersuasively for such a redating for more than twenty-five years (see his Redating the Exodus, Sheffield Academic Press, 1981). There is nothing new here. Bimson’s views have been tested and rejected by the scholarly majority on their merits. For Jacobovici to trot Bimson out as a brave renegade “now” departing from scholarly consensus is disingenuous, and plays with dates like the sparkly things at the end of a kaleidescope.

But that’s exactly what Jacobovici is good at: treating a difference of several decades as if it were nothing. Note the not-so-sleight-of-hand that Jacobovici next tries to pull next (yes, I am intentionally using language that evokes the image of a “con man,” and you will shortly see why):

Professor Bimson’s calculations move the exodus from its present date to 1470 BCE, less than 100 years from the traditional date for the Hyksos expulsion. These are too close to write off as a coincidence. So we have a new date for the exodus: approximately 1500 BCE.

Then, after a one-liner from Donald Redford on a floating blue screen, Jacobovici repeats: “All right. Our new date for the exodus is 1500 BCE.”

Amazing.

Less than five minutes earlier, when discussing hypothetical stupid scholars from the future, Jacobovici presented a variance of fifty years in the dating of Word War II to the 1990s instead of the 1940s as an intolerable source of hopeless historical confusion. Now, however, Jacobovici is ready to “round off” Bimson’s date of 1470 BCE to 1500 BCE—a thirty year variance! Let’s just lay this out plainly. Jacobovici wants to associate together the following events:

• The storm described in the Tempest Stela, which seems to pertain to Ahmose’s regnal year, c. 1550 BCE
• The expulsion of the Hyksos, dated by various Egyptologists as early as Ahmose’s fourth regnal year (c. 1546 BCE) or as late as his fifteenth year (c. 1535 BCE)
• The Israelite exodus from Egypt, dated by John Bimson to c. 1470 BCE, by 1 Kings 6:1 to c. 1440 BCE, and by Jacobovici’s “scholarly consensus” to c. 1270 BCE)

In short, Jacobovici’s reconstruction does not use plausible dates for any of the artifacts or events he wishes to bring together. The tempest described on the Tempest Stela predates the expulsion of the Hyksos by anywhere from three to fifteen years, which itself predates Bimson’s date for the exodus by sixty-five to seventy-six years, but Jacobovici splits the difference and rounds off all these dates to 1500 BCE—and wants to be taken seriously when he, a filmmaker, departs from scholarly “consensus.” He should have listened to Dever.