At the very end of the second segment of The Exodus Decoded, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici claims, “We know from the Bible that the Israelites arrived in Egypt some 200 years before their exodus.” If you read the second installment in my extended review of The Exodus Decoded, you know that, in order to arrive at his “new date for the exodus” of 1500 BCE, Jacobovici has to move John Bimson’s idiosyncratic date of 1470 BCE up by 30 years, and he has to move the events described in Ahmose’s Tempest Stela and the subsequent expulsion of the Hyksos from Lower Egypt down by anywhere from 35 to 50 years. Now, with this statement about the timing of the exodus relative to the migration of Jacob’s tribe into Canaan, Jacobovici once again appears to be bending standard chronologies to fit his speculative reconstructions.

The biblical text to which Jacobovici refers in the quotation above can only be Genesis 15:13-14, which quotes God as saying to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be a stranger in a land not their own, and [your descendants] will serve [the people of that land], and [the people of that land] will oppress [your descendants] 400 years, but then I will sentence the nation that they will serve, and after that they will go out with great wealth” (my translation). The plain sense of the text clearly states the length of the Israelite oppression—or perhaps the whole sojourn—in Egypt as 400 years. Where did Jacobovici get his 200 years? He does not say, which strikes me as an appalling lack of detail, and perhaps even constitutes a degree of dishonesty. An uninformed viewer who takes Jacobovici at his word will go away thinking, “The Bible says that the Israelites would be in Egypt for 200 years.” In fact, the time frame is double that.

To try to be fair to Jacobovici, it’s possible that he is following an alternative interpretation of the text that starts counting the 400 years from the moment God makes this announcement to Abraham. Biblical narrators are not always scrupulous about marking the passage of time, and the Abraham narrative is a mixed bag in this regard. According to Genesis 16:16, Abraham (Abram at the time) was 86 years old when Ishmael was born; Genesis 21:5 puts him at 100 years old when Isaac was born. The biblical narrator does not bother to specify, however, the amount of elapsed time between the events of Genesis 15 and the events of Genesis 16 (reading the book of Genesis as a continuous, integrated narrative, with all the difficulties that entails). Abraham left Haran for Canaan at age 75, says Genesis 11:26; allowing time for the journey to Egypt (Genesis 12), the issues with Lot (Genesis 13), and the war of the kings (Genesis 14) would seem to put the events of Genesis 15 at least some five years into Abraham’s story. Let’s round this off and say that Genesis 15 could be pushed as early as Abraham’s 80th year of life. Isaac was born 20 years later (Genesis 21:5), and Jacob was born when Isaac was 60 years old (Genesis 25:26). This gives us an elapsed time of 80 years between the covenant-making scene of Genesis 15 and the birth of Jacob (again, if we take the numbers at face value and read Genesis as a coherent narrative). In Genesis 47:9, when Jacob appears before Pharaoh, he gives his age as 130 years. Adding Jacob’s 130 years to the 80 years elapsed between the covenant scene and Jacob’s birth yields 210 years, leaving 190 out of the original 400 years for the Israelites to sojourn in Egypt. Jacobovici does not explain any of this—which I think is a tad unscrupulous—but I cannot see any way to get to Jacobovici’s figure of 200 years except by following this logic and rounding the 190 years up to 200.

The problem with this, of course, is that the plain sense of the text does say what Jacobovici wants it to say. Those of you who can read Hebrew should take a look at the way it’s worded to see if I’m on or off base here, but I cannot see any linguistic justification for the exegetical shenanigans described above. Proponents might argue, in favor of the “shortened” interpretation, that it creates a span of 480 years from Abraham to the exodus, and 1 Kings 6:1 postulates a 480-year gap between the exodus and the beginning of the construction of Solomon’s temple. That’s a nice symmetry, but one that as far as I can discover is not explicitly postulated anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Proponents might also argue that the genealogical information provided in the Torah about the number of elapsed generations better fits a 190-year sojourn than a 400-year sojourn. The ancestry of Moses, for example, is given in Exodus as Levi > Kohath > Amram > Moses, removing Moses a mere three generations from the migration of Jacob and his sons. However, the 190-year figure doesn’t necessarily resolve the difficulties. According to Genesis 46:11, Kohath was born in Canaan, before Jacob and his family migrated to Egypt. So were all five of Judah’s sons, at least three of whom must be considered to have already reached marriageable age, based on the story in Genesis 38. The narrator gives us no other information about Kohath, so readers have no idea whether to think of Kohath as being closer to, say, Shelah’s age or Perez’s age (to stick with our sons-of-Judah analogy). It seems to me more reasonable to think of Kohath as more or less on a par in age with Er, Onan, and Shelah than with Perez and Zerah, but it’s all guesswork here. If Kohath were of marriageable age already, then you really only have two generations in those 190 years, which divides out to 95-year generations! Even if you have three generations to manage, if Kohath is much younger at the time of his migration to Egypt, you still have three 63-year generations—over 1.5 times the standard biblical “constant” of 40 years per generation. Shortening the sojourn to 190-195 years from 400 does shave some time off these generations, but it does not really make the generational gap reasonable. The larger point to be made here is that all this mathematical juggling is prompted not by any syntactical feature of Genesis 15:13 itself, but by a desire to make Genesis 15:13 fit some other chronological scheme that in the exegete eisegete’s judgment (as distinct from some explicit statement of the text) needs to be reconciled with that verse. Jacobovici here follows an interpretive technique that cuts the text’s time frame in half.

But Jacobovici’s misinterpretations of biblical language do not stop there. Jacobovici goes on to say that “In the original Hebrew, the Bible calls the Israelites ‘God’s people,’ or ‘Amo Israel.’” He then goes looking for “hard evidence of Amo” around 1700 BCE. Viewers who know no Hebrew might easily be misled into thinking that “Amo Israel” is biblical Hebrew for “God’s people”—it’s not—and that “Amo” is a proper noun—it’s not. Jacobovici’s amo is really a compound word, formed by starting with the the Hebrew word ‘am, “a people (group),” and adding the third person masculine singular possessive suffix -o, hence am-o, “his people.” As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell, Jacobovici’s phrase, ‘amo Israel, appears a mere seven times in the Hebrew Bible (Judges 11:23; 2 Samuel 5:12; 1 Kings 8:56, 59; 1 Chronicles 14:2; 2 Chronicles 31:8; 35:3). Another seven times, you simply see ‘am Israel or ha‘am Israel (ha- being the biblical Hebrew definite article, like English “the”). It’s rather more common (27 occurrences) to see‘ami Israel, “my people Israel,” in biblical quotations of divine speech. The key point to be made here is that ‘amo is not a proper noun, as Jacobovici wishes to treat it. Rather, ‘am is a common noun, “people (group),” and when it appears alongside the name Israel, whether alone, or accompanied by a possessive suffix like -o (“his”) or -i (“my”), or by the definite article ha-, it is a descriptive word, not part of a name. All of this will become important after the commercial break.

Jacobovici begins segment 3 of The Exodus Decoded with video of wall paintings from a tomb at Beni Hasan in Egypt. The mural on the wall shows 15 “bearded Semites,” to use Jacobovici’s term—the Egyptians who painted the scene would have called them “Asiatics”—traveling to Egypt in a caravan. Jacobovici draws attention to the “families and flocks” depicted here, and claims that “like the biblical Israelites, they are wearing multicolored tunics.” I would certainly like to know where the Tanakh describes Jacob and his clan wearing “multicolored tunics.” Joseph’s famous “coat of many colors” derives from the Septuagint (Greek) translation of Genesis, not from the Hebrew form of Genesis, and even if “multicolored tunic” were a legitimate translation of the Hebrew phrase that describes Joseph’s garment, the whole point is that Joseph’s “coat” is not typical. If it were just like what everybody else was wearing, his brothers would have no cause for jealousy. Once again, Jacobovici’s ability to read a text and accurately report its contents comes up lacking. But then comes the real punch line. According to Jacobovici, “The hieroglyphic inscription on the wall calls these people the Amo—God’s people.” Jacobovici follows this up with the remarkably audacious claim: “Looking at the right place, during the right time, we are the first to recognize a veritable snapshot of the migration of the biblical Israelites to Egypt.” (No, really. That’s a precise transcription from the program.)

As noted above, the biblical phrase ‘amo does not mean “God’s people,” but “his people.” To be fair to Jacobovici, I’ll start by nothing that, in the (mere) seven times where the phrase ‘amo Israel appears in the Hebrew Bible, the possessive suffix -o does, of course, refer to God. However, there are over 100 other occurrences of the phrase ‘amo in the Hebrew Bible, where the possessive -o suffix refers to some human being or other. I’ll content myself with just one example to substantiate this claim, though I could give 116 of them. Consider Exodus 1:9, “[Pharaoh] said to ‘amo, ‘Look, the Israelite ‘am is much too numerous for us.’” Here ‘amo, “his people,” clearly means Pharaoh’s people, the Egyptians. For Jacobovici’s linguistic equation of the “Amo” of the Beni Hasan caption with the biblical Israelites to work, the biblical phrase ‘amo would have to be a proper noun that referred exclusively to the Israelites. But this is not the case, so the equation falls apart on the biblical Hebrew side.

There are other problems with Jacobovici’s use of the Beni Hasan wall paintings. In the first place, the Asiatics depicted in the mural are merchants, not migrants. Jacobovici conveniently fails to tell his audience that the caption to the mural explicitly states that this group of Asiatics came to Egypt to sell stibium, black eye makup (see, among other possible sources, William Shea, “Artistic Balance among the Beni Hasan Asiatics,” Biblical Archaeologist 44 [1981] 219-228; the quotation about eye-paint is on p. 221 and mentioned elsewhere). They weren’t moving in, just bringing their wares for trade. Moreover, the caption specifies that this caravan consisted of 37 people led by one Ibshar (the name could be reverse-engineered into a West Semitic dialect as “Abishar”). When you take into account Jacob’s daughters-in-law, who aren’t counted in the biblical figure of 70 persons who migrated to Egypt with Jacob (and I presume any granddaughters-in-law are likewise omitted), Ibshar’s group is less than half the size of the biblical migrant clan. Finally—and this is a real kicker—Jacobovici’s math skills have clearly gone on holiday when he claims that the Beni Hasan wall painting comes from “the right time” for Jacob’s migration to Canaan. According to the figures given earlier in the program, Jacobovici wants to date the exodus to 1500 BCE (to make it synchronize with the Hyksos explusion, never mind that the Hyksos expulsion under Ahmose was somewhere in the range of 35 to 46 years before 1500), and the Israelite migration into Egypt 200 years before that. The Beni Hasan wall paintings, however, date—again, according to the caption—to the sixth year of Seostris II, or 1892 BCE (Shea, 221). That’s over 190 years earlier than Jacob’s migration as dated by Jacobovici.

I have not yet been able to verify or falsify Jacobovici’s claim that the Beni Hasan caption refers to the Asiatic merchants as amo. As discussed above, this term cannot be connected with a biblical Hebrew term ‘amo (עמו); no such connection will work. I would hazard a guess, however, that a link might be possible between the Beni Hasan amo and the biblical term ’amori (אמרי), “Amorites.” In fact, Shea uses this term “Amorite” frequently in his discussion of the Beni Hasan Asiatics. Even if you can’t read Hebrew, you can see that the first (rightmost) letter of these two words is different. Here again, as with his completely erroneous attempt to connect the name Ahmose with a Hebrew phrase אח משה, “brother of Moses,” Jacobovici may have gotten tripped up by taking an English transliteration of an Egyptian proper noun and incorrectly transliterating that English transliteration into biblical Hebrew.

This post has already gotten rather long, and I’m only about three minutes past the second commercial break of The Exodus Decoded. I’m sleepy, so I’m going to cut this post off here. I’ll continue my extended review—and, I guess you could say, rebuttal—at a later date.

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2