The Exodus - scientifically speaking

      You’ve probably guessed that I take a great deal of satisfaction in finding information that corroborates the Biblical text and refutes the standard secularist propaganda.

So I want to look at the story of Exodus and how it relates to the historical evidence of what is called Atlantis, the Minoans, the Egyptians and the Philistines.

(By the way, don’t you love how subtle the secularists are? They always call themselves “the mainstream.” So, without saying anything that would be interpreted as an attack, they have immediately labeled anybody that disagrees with them as “abnormal,” “atypical,” “fringe,” “a radical,” “unconventional,” “eccentric,” or “a minority.”)

I’ve come to understand lately that there is a type of thinking that is a great threat to the Enemy. One writer called it being an “encyclopedic synthesist.” You probably know some people like this. They are able to take information from all sorts of different places and pull it together. They see patterns where others see chaos. They see unity where others see discrete portions and divisions. Most of us see the trees. They see the forest.

The enemy likes to keep us focused on the details, the minutiae. He can control our thinking better that way, like he did with Eve, getting her to focus on the one thing that she couldn’t have in the garden, instead of the myriads of things that she could have.

He likes to do that with science and scientists, too. He can hide a lot of information by keeping people focused on a very narrow field of interest and the fields are getting narrower all the time. They call it “specializing.” Some of the greatest discoveries and inventions have come just from someone noticing that one thing from one field fits with something from another field.

Let’s start out by briefly reviewing the story of the Exodus from both of the books of Genesis and Exodus. Of course, it begins when Jacob and his family move to Egypt to escape a famine. There are 70 members of the family.

Jacob’s son, Joseph, becomes the vizier. That means that Pharaoh was tired of being Pharaoh and so he told Joseph, “You do it.” Joseph was Pharaoh in everything but name.

Later, after Joseph died, the Hebrew people were enslaved and remained that way for around 200 years. By that time, they had grown large in numbers.

Moses, Jacob’s great-great-grandson, became a prince in Egypt by being adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. After being driven out of Egypt for murder, he returned 60 years later and said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”

Ten times Pharaoh refused. Ten times God struck Egypt with plagues:

1. Blood

2. Frogs

3. Lice

4. Flies

5. Cattle murrain (plague or pestilence)

6. Boils

7. Hail

8. Locusts

9. Darkness

10. Death

(By the way, I think that it is interesting that, in the tenth plague, God did to the Egyptians exactly what they were trying to do with Israelites in Moses time – kill all the first born males.)

Pharaoh released the Israelites, then changed his mind. He chased after them. God intervened to protect the Israelites – first with a pillar of fire, while He parted the Red Sea, allowing the Hebrews to walk across on dry land. Then He restored the Red Sea and killed the Egyptian army.

Modern scholars have been trained and conditioned by the secularists to believe that this story is a complete myth. Consequently, even when they see evidence supporting the story staring them right in the face, they ignore it.

One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in 1947, when archaeologist Henri Chevalier found pieces of a stone stela (an upright stone slab that has writing on it). When he re-assembled the pieces, it was found that the stela had been made in the time of a pharaoh named Ahmose.

Meet Ahmose. He lived sometime around 1500 B. C., depending on who’s talking. You don’t really want to see what he looks like now, but they do have his actual mummy. This is an obviously younger rendition of his face, but it was the best one that I could find.

The Ahmose stela was covered in hieroglyphic inscriptions that mirror the Exodus story in the Bible. The pieces now lie in the basement of the Cairo museum and no one is allowed to see them.

You see the Egyptians are afraid of anything that might possibly substantiate the story of the Exodus, for fear that it might strengthen the claims of the Jewish people in the Middle East. Consequently, they have a policy of actively suppressing access to certain artifacts and sites.

That’s another method that the enemy likes to use. We’ll talk more later about that.

Unfortunately for the Egyptians, the discoverer, Chevalier, published a complete description of the Ahmose stela when he found it. From this description, a copy of it can be reconstructed.

It records a tremendous catastrophe that struck Egypt. It mentions a great storm with rain, thunder and lightning. A storm like that rarely happens in north east Africa. It is very dry there.

This, though, talks about a great storm and that Egypt was enveloped in darkness. Also, although the Egyptians were polytheists (that is, they worshiped many gods), this stela says that this disaster happens when God – in the singular – manifested His power.

Interestingly, the Bible never names the Pharaoh of the Exodus. This stela names him “Ahmose.”

Curiously, the name Ahmose is a play on words. In Egyptian, Ahmose means, “The moon is born.” In Hebrew, it means, “The brother of Moses.” This man might have grown up with the Biblical Moses.

If you look at the mummy of Ahmose, it is very easy to see that he was killed in battle by the peculiar war axes that the Semitic people used, but the Egyptians did not. In history, Ahmose is remembered, with other members of his family for what is called, “The Hyksos Expulsion.”

The Hyksos (the name means “foreign rulers”) were people with Canaanite names that took over Egypt, first by a peaceful migration, then armed conquest. They did this with superior military hardware, such as the composite recurve bow, improved arrowheads, various kinds of swords and daggers, a new type of shield, , the metal helmet and most importantly the horse-drawn war chariot.

Ahmose was a hero to the Egyptians. He scored a major victory against an entrenched and well-armed foe.

This man was no weenie. He would not have been intimidated by Moses’ stern looks or thundering declarations. He was a man of strong will, courage and had the respect of his people. Probably, the only reason that he would have granted Moses an audience, in the beginning, was because he knew Moses.

Back to the Hyksos. The Egyptians hated and despised them. The Egyptians were like most of us and considered themselves better than everyone else. The very idea that these barbarians had come into their country and taken over shocked and nauseated them.

Consequently, we have a hard time finding anything out about the Hyksos, because, once the Egyptians had driven them out, they systematically went through the entire land of Egypt and erased, eradicated any sign of the Hyksos’ presence. They destroyed their towns, their possessions and weapons. Any writing or any sculpture that had to do with them was destroyed.

However, in the 1960’s, the remains of the Hyksos capital of Avaris (5) was located in the Nile delta, north of Cairo. The remains that they have found so far, stretch 1 ¼ miles long and about ¾ of a mile wide. It was a walled city of palaces. It would have probably been bigger, but the city was situated at that time between two branches of the Nile River – a natural moat, like Babylon had.

It was a major residence of the Hyksos Pharaohs. The evidence shows clearly that they were Canaanites. The Egyptians would have seen them as the same people as the Hebrews.

Evidence from Avaris is very difficult to obtain. I feel very sorry for the archaeologist in charge, a man named Dr. Manfred Bietak, an Austrian. He seems a very earnest man, who has been working hard on Avaris for years.

However, the Egyptian officials will allow no one to film there. In the few filmed interviews that I could find with Dr. Bietak, there was always an Egyptian official standing at his elbow to make sure that he did not say anything that the Egyptian authorities didn’t want said. You’d think he was in Communist China.

Notice that the dig site seems to be surrounded by crop fields? The Egyptian officials even go so far as to require Dr. Bietak, after each digging season, to completely cover the dig area and plant crops over it. They say this is to prevent looting, but I’ve never heard of this being done anywhere else. They just want to hide the best source of evidence for the Exodus that currently exists.

Unfortunately for them, looking down on it from a satellite, like with Google Earth, the city is clearly visible. Don’t you love the way God thwarts liars?

Now, all this history is important because current secularist scholars date the Exodus at around 1270 B.C. The Bible, however, states that the Exodus was 480 years before the reign of Solomon.

^{1Ki 6:1} In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the temple of the Lord.

That makes the Exodus around 1470 B.C., within 100 years of the Hyksos Expulsion. Let’s just make it a round figure and say that the Exodus happened around 1500 B.C.

The Biblical record indicates that the Israelites originally arrived in Egypt and were enslaved around 200 years before the Exodus. In the original Hebrew, the Bible calls the Israelites “the children of Israel” or “Amo Israel.” If that is so, then there should be hard evidence for the arrival of these “Amo” around 1700 B.C.

In Beni Hasan, Egypt, about 240 miles south of Avaris, there is a painting from the tomb of Khnumhotep. It is dated around 1700 BC. It clearly shows large numbers of Semitic people, coming into Egypt and being supervised by Egyptian officials.

Notice the beards, which Egyptians never wore, but which they considered a hall mark of people from the Middle Eastern countries. Notice also the multicolored stripes that they wore on their clothing. Remember Joseph’s coat of many colors?

Since the secularists have everybody looking in 1270 BC for the Exodus, no one is looking in the time period of 1700 BC (230 years earlier), so no one links evidence like this to the biblical record.

Most telling of all, the hieroglyphics associated with this painting call these people the “Amo.” This almost a snapshot from that time period.

So, now we have evidence of the Israelite’s arrival in Egypt.

Now, let’s look at Joseph.

^{Ge 41:42} Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck.

The ring told everyone that Joseph was functioning with the full authority of Pharaoh. It would have had Pharaoh’s name on it.

In the same way, anyone working for Joseph would have worn a ring with Joseph’s name on it. Joseph’s name in Hebrew was Yesef ben Yakob - Joseph, son of Jacob.

Dr. Bietak, in his excavations of Avaris, has found 9 rings with the Hebrew name, “Yakob”, clearly inscribed on it. That’s kind of miraculous, like finding a needle in a hay stack.

So, we have evidence of the Hebrew’s rise to power.

Next, we go to a place called Serabit el Khadim, where there are extensive ruins. The Egyptians mined turquoise there from ancient times. Within one of the mines, there have been found places where inscriptions have been made. Some of them were made by the miners, the slaves that were used to work there. One of the inscriptions is the phrase “El (which is the Hebrew word for God) save me.”

This phrase is written in alphabetic Hebrew script, which is radically different from the pictographic hieroglyphs that the Egyptians used. It is fairly certain that the Egyptian slave masters would not have spent the time to educate their mining slaves in reading and writing. They would most certainly not have taught them how to write anything in the writing of the hated Semitics.

This then, must have been written by a Hebrew in the first generation of their enslavement. It was an educated man who had been forced into the mines, to probably be worked to death.

Now, we have evidence of Hebrews in Egyptian slavery. All three evidences that we have seen here – the Israelite arrival in Egypt, the Hebrews’ rise to power in Egypt and their subsequent subjection to slavery - correspond well to a 1500 BC date for the Exodus.

Something that also happened around 1500 BC was very significant to our study. It was a cataclysm that affected people around the entire Mediterranean and may have been the greatest catastrophe in history, short of the Great Flood itself. It was the eruption of the volcano on the island that is currently called Santorini, but in ancient times was called Thera.

Santorini is one of the beautiful Cyclades Islands controlled by the modern nation of Greece, about 420 miles from the coast of Egypt. The whole island literally rests on the mouth of a volcano.

The people who lived on this island in 1500 BC were called the Minoans. You may have heard of the Minoans before. The stories of King Minos, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth come from them.

They were an incredibly advanced civilization based on the island of Crete, with their capital at the city of Knossos (x2). In some cases, we are only now achieving a sufficient level of scientific ability to be able to understand what they accomplished, after 3500 years of “progress.” (That’s humbling, isn’t it?)

This is what we do know (and there is more being uncovered every day). This is the palace at Knossos. It is a maze of rooms that is probably the basis for the legend of the Labyrinth. It has over 1,300 rooms and was the size of four football fields. To give you some perspective, the White House has 132 rooms and we think it’s big.

The Minoan towns (this is Akrotiri, the only Minoan town left on Santorini and it is buried beneath dozens of feet of pumice) had three and four story buildings, with running water to the top floors of the residences (yes, uphill) and a mechanically sophisticated sewer system. They had functioning bathrooms on the fourth floors of their buildings! The construction of the buildings was such that they were earthquake proof. They had a very advanced system for conducting and modifying light and airflow to interior rooms of their buildings.

Their palaces were covered with polished gypsum, that shown like silver in the sun.

They had two complete alphabets, only one of which we have deciphered. One of them looks very much like the First Tongue that we talked about before. Remember Genesis 11:1, where the Bible tells us that all people had one language.

Their sculptures and paintings are very complex, very skilled and very life-like.

At the time, both Crete and Santorini were VERY fertile and the fields and orchards produced a great deal of produce for both consumption and trade.

They had a huge trading fleet and their artifacts are found all over the Mediterranean. Since their main bases were on islands in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and they themselves possessed the most superior ships, in both technology and number, they were almost unassailable by any other culture at the time and dominated the entire Mediterranean coastal region with their navies. The Egyptians said that they ruled all the nations west of Egypt.

They were the only people that the Egyptians considered civilized and on a par with their own culture. There is a city that the Minoans built on the Egyptian coast where their trade and diplomatic delegations carried on regular business with Egypt.

There was a reason for this. We don’t know where Plato got the name “Atlantis” or “Atlanteans.” We don’t know what the Minoans called themselves. In the Bible, the island of Crete is called “Caphtor” and the people who lived on it were called “Caphtorites.” The Egyptians called them “the Kefchu,”or "Keftiu," obviously a related word, which was also their name for the island of Crete.

Notice this verse:

^{Ge 10:6} The sons of Ham: Cush, Mizraim (the Hebrew word for Egypt), Put and Canaan

^{Ge 10:13} Mizraim was the father of the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites,

^{Ge 10:14} Pathrusites, Casluhites (from whom the Philistines came) and Caphtorites.

These are the Atlanteans. The legend of Atlantis first came to us from the writings of Plato, in his works called “The Timaeus” and “The Critias.” He tells us that his grandfather, Solon, (c. 638 BC – 558 BC) the Greek philosopher and lawyer, was able to interview some learned Egyptian priests of On, who told him about a place Solon called Atlantis.

We won’t go into great detail here, but suffice it to say that the story tells of a great people who lived on an island in the Mediterranean. They were very advanced and possessed many wonderful machines and abilities. They lived on an island that was circular in nature and had a series of canals in 3 concentric circles, with canals connecting them to the sea and large causeways to move the cargos from the docks. They were ruled by a council of 5 kings.

They ended, though, when their island sunk into the sea, “in a day and a night,” with fire and smoke. The end of the story says that this happened about 9,000 years ago.

That 9,000 years ago thing confused a lot of people. Then they found on an Egyptian wall inscription the almost exact same story, nearly verbatim. The interesting thing is that the Egyptian number for the number of years ago that this happened was 900, not 9,000. Solon had apparently misinterpreted the numbers.

If you add the date that Solon heard this story (say, around 600 BC) and you add 900 years to it, you get…. what? 1500 BC.

I think it’s interesting that the geologists want to argue about it and say that it was 1600. Who are we supposed to believe? The people who actually lived during that time or some egg head in an office somewhere, living 3,500 years later?

So, one of the bases of the Minoan empire, the island of Santorini literally exploded with a force that made Mt. St. Helens look like a firecracker. To give you some perspective, it was thousands of times more destructive than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and we all know what that did.

600 cubic miles of material were expelled, producing a crater 1,000 feet deep. It produced an ash cloud 24 miles high and 120 miles across. It could be seen from Egypt. The sound of the explosion circled around the world 10 to 12 times.

It produced what the geologists call an “earthquake storm.” That is, there were a rapid series of earthquakes, one right after another, in magnitudes 3-5.

I understand that every volcano spits out pumice, which is a light, porous, glassy stone formed by violently expelling lava. Each kind of pumice is unique to that volcano, like a fingerprint. They have found the unique pumice from the Santorini volcano as far away as the Nile Delta and the Black Sea, a thousand miles away.

Interestingly, Dr. Bietak has found a layer of this pumice at Avaris. He does not hesitate to date it confidently at 1500 BC.

This event essentially ended the Minoan civilization. The people on Santorini seemed to have had warning. There were beds dragged out into the street and piled with possessions. There were houses and tools and other possessions, but no bodies like we found at Pompey and Herculaneum. Remember, it took and day and a night to destroy the island.

They had to hurry to get away. The towns of Santorini were buried in 30-80 feet of pumice (that’s as high as an 8 story building).

Even if they did manage to get on boats and get away, there was no way that they could have outrun the subsequent blasts and wave fronts.

The tsunamis would have raced across the Mediterranean and the first barrier that it would have encountered is the island of Crete, power base and home to the majority of the Minoan people. There were not just one, but a series of tsunamis. They’ve found evidence for as many as 10. They would have run unimpeded across this low island, killing the people, tearing up the towns, orchards and gardens and soaking and re-soaking the fertile ground with sea water.

In old times, when you conquered an enemy and you really wanted to hurt them, you would “sow their fields with salt.” That is, you and your army would go to every fertile field and spread salt all over it. What would that do?

So, within 24 hours the Minoans went from being a numerous, self-sufficient, comfortable, well-protected, rich people who were one of the major forces in their world, to a few shell-shocked, scattered stragglers who had no food, no hope of growing any food, nowhere to live, few boats and nothing to trade.

A few of them managed to make it to refuge in Egypt, which is how the priests of On got their story to tell Solon. Most of them just disappeared into oblivion.

I used to wonder why God would do such a thing to these people. There were multiple things that happened as a result of this catastrophe.

There were a people in Greece called the Mycenaeans. Anybody ever see the movie “Troy?” Well, that was the Mycenaean Greeks that destroyed Troy.

They weren’t what we would think of as Greeks today. They were more like the Vikings, a nation of bandits.

The Minoans had kept the Mycenaeans suppressed and dominated while they were in existence. With their removal, the Greeks began expanding their power and eventually were an influence throughout the ancient world. Their culture influenced much of Western thought.

In addition, they grew to be militarily strong enough to stop the Persians when they tried to invade and dominate Europe. Without the Greeks doing these two things, our history would have been vastly different.

With the Minoans no longer militarily superior to them, they could now do what they had always wanted to do. They invaded Crete and wiped out the few pitiful survivors there and took over Crete.

Unfortunately for them, they got all full of themselves and decided they could continue south and invade Egypt. Egypt was more than able to handle them. The Pharaoh of that time didn’t even need to kill them. He rounded them up and marched them to the border, dumping them out in the coastal area that later came to be called Philistia.

^{Dt 2:23} And as for the Avvites (a branch of the Canaanite tribes) who lived in villages as far as Gaza (we remember Gaza as being one of the Philistine towns on the coast), the Caphtorites coming out from Caphtor destroyed them and settled in their place.)

That’s right. That’s where the Philistines came from. The archeological record shows that the earliest Philistine artifacts were Mycenaean, not Minoan.

It explains why they suddenly appear in the Biblical record, seemingly fully formed out of nowhere. It also goes a long way to explaining their consistently violent dealings with the Israelites.

But our story still takes place back in Egypt in 1500 BC. What does all this have to do with our subject?

Remember the Ahmose stela? One of the things that it mentions is that the statues of the gods of Egypt were toppled to the ground. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of those statues, but some of them are 20-30 feet high. Anything that moved them had to be significant.

It turns out that the Biblical record takes place in an earthquake zone. The entire Middle East region is crisscrossed by fault lines. To the east is the Great Rift fault, which separates the Asian and African plates. It runs through the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River Valley and the Dead Sea, down to Africa. There is another fault line along the modern Suez Canal. Another one runs across the Nile Delta under Avaris. Up north, the rift between the African and European plates runs almost directly under Santorini.

What do earthquakes and volcanoes hundreds of miles away have to do with the Biblical story of the Exodus? Earthquakes are known to accompany volcanic eruptions, like Santorini. It seems that the volcanic eruption that destroyed Santorini and the Minoan civilization had a great deal to do with the story of the Exodus.

Let’s look at the first plague – the Nile River turning into blood. This is in Exodus 7:20. We have the evidence to see what happened, very close to hand.

In 1980, at Lake Manoun and in 1980, at Lake Nyos, both in Cameroon, the residents woke up one morning to find that the clear beautiful lake water had turned blood red. Extensive study determined that the deep lake had large deposits of iron oxide on the bottom. An underground gas leak that had come through the bottom of the lake had brought large quantities of iron to the surface. When it met the oxygen in the air, it formed iron hydroxide –rust.

The Nile River region has indications that there are pockets filled with gas beneath the surface. An earthquake could crack open and release that gas, bring iron to the surface.

If the Nile had been impacted by an earthquake and gases released that turned the waters blood red with rust, then the chain of events that produced the Biblical plagues had been set into motion.

That brings us to the first of the ten plagues – the Nile River turning into blood. This is in Exodus 7:20. We have the evidence to see what happened, very close to hand.

In 1980, at Lake Manoun and in 1986, at Lake Nyos, both in Cameroon, the residents woke up one morning to find that the clear beautiful lake water had turned blood red. Extensive study determined that the deep lake had large deposits of iron oxide on the bottom. An underground gas leak that had come through the bottom of the lake had brought large quantities of iron to the surface. When it met the oxygen in the water and the air, it formed iron hydroxide –rust.

The Nile River region has indications that there are pockets filled with gas beneath the surface. An earthquake could crack open and release that gas, bring iron to the surface.

If the Nile River Valley had been impacted by a series of earthquakes (as it was) and gases released that turned the waters blood red with rust, then the chain of events that produced the Biblical plagues had been set into motion.

First, the iron that was saturating the water was binding up all the oxygen in the water. Every living water breathing thing in the Nile waters would have died. The fish and other creatures would have died, further polluting the water.

This would have been an even worse problem for the Egyptians than we would think, because the temperature over there gets to 140 degrees sometimes. The only way to survive that is to drink lots of water. Dehydration effects would set in almost immediately.

The only things that would not have died in the Nile are air-breathing creatures – hippos, crocodiles, certain insect larvae and frogs.

Frogs are very sensitive to the pollution in waters. Scientists use them as indicators of water pollution levels. They are amphibians, so they take in a certain amount of their oxygen through their moist skins, as well as their lungs. If the water became too toxic, however, they would have been able to climb out, to flee, moving across the land looking for another water source – into the Egyptian’s houses.

Plague 2 – Frog infestation.

After the plague of frogs, the poisoned frogs would die, as the fish had. It just took them longer. The piles of dead frogs on the land and the logjams of dead fish in the river produced a perfect breeding ground for the next three plagues.

Plague 3 – Gnats.

Plague 4 – Flies.

Plague 5 – Cattle plague.

The gnats in Egypt have a life cycle somewhat like mosquito. Their eggs and larvae grow and mature in water. Their numbers are restricted because the vast majority of them are eaten by fish and other small water creatures.

Those creatures are all dead from the Red Nile, meaning that ALL of the gnats will mature and come out of the river at the same time. Unending swarms would have plagued the Egyptians and all their livestock.

Likewise, the flies would have bred in all the dead flesh that was lying around exposed (there were not enough creatures to eat it all quickly and there was too much to bury). They would also have quickly bred in unbelievable numbers.

The huge numbers of bites from the flies and gnats would have given some form of bacterial infection to all the cattle and livestock. That would have produced the cattle epidemic.

Plague 6 – Boils.

^{Ex 9:10} So they took soot from a furnace and stood before Pharaoh. Moses tossed it into the air, and festering boils broke out on men and animals.

The insect plague could have produced some of these boils, but not all of them. These boils were on man and beast. Humans and cattle or goats or sheep don’t have diseases that can be shared. I’m pretty sure no one here has contracted hoof and mouth disease.

However, the poor people around Lake Nyos can give us a clue. After their lake water turned red, people who lived around the lake began to develop strange boils and burns. It seemed that the volcanic action under the lake had been releasing carbon dioxide into the air, so that the oxygen content was lowered. This put people into a kind of coma. The lack of oxygen produced a sort of skin breakdown, due to the reduced circulation.

Plague 7 – Hail

The Holy Bible, New International Version®.

^{Ex 9:23} When Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, the LORD sent thunder and hail, and lightning flashed down to the ground. So the LORD rained hail on the land of Egypt;

^{Ex 9:24} hail fell and lightning flashed back and forth. It was the worst storm in all the land of Egypt since it had become a nation.

NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE - Updated Edition.

^{EX 9:23} Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth. And the LORD rained hail on the land of Egypt.

^{EX 9:24} So there was hail, and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very severe, such as had not been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.

This was a very unusual hail. The editors of the NIV version have, as usual, overreached themselves and decided that what the text is talking about here is lightning.

In Hebrew, the word for “hail” is barad. The word for “ice” is qorach. The word for “lightning” is baraq. The word for “fire” is esh. The words used in this passage are barad and esh. I think Moses was educated enough to know the difference between fire and lightning and how to use the words appropriately.

The rabbis, who have been studying the Hebrew language for thousands of years, translate the Hebrew word “esh” as “fire.” Rabbi Chaim Sacknovitz says that the text talks about this event uniquely. The text clearly tells us that the hail was mixed with the fire, they were mingled together. God, in effect, worked a miracle within a miracle. He caused opposites in nature to co-exist together.

Incredibly, there is an Egyptian papyrus that tells us exactly the same story. The Ipuwer papyrus is dated by many scholars to the Hyksos period. The writing on it says that Egypt was struck by strange hail, made up of ice and fire together.

Both the Bible and the Egyptian texts are describing the same thing – what scientists call accretionary lapilli. It is volcanic hail. It could only have come from the earthquake induced Santorini volcano.

The ash cloud rose 24 miles in the stratosphere. Water vapor is also in the cloud from the vaporized ocean water. As the water and ash were repeatedly thrown up by air currents near space, ice particles would begin to form around ash particles. This would continue to accumulate more and more until it became too heavy for the wind to keep it up or, in this case, the air currents become weaker. Then it would fall to the ground. It’s a process very similar to how normal hail is formed.

Accompanying these gradually growing balls of dirty ice would be globules of lava. The temperature of lava can range anywhere up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A short trip near space wouldn’t cool it down much. Liquid fire could describe it very well.

If these different materials lost their supporting air currents above the land of Egypt, it could very well have been described as a rain of hail and fire.

Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and gas leaks neatly explain the first seven Biblical plagues. It also explains the eighth plague.

Plague 8 – Locusts.

African locusts routinely travel in swarms of 65 to 130 million per square mile. Since they are cold blooded, they have to be in warm temperatures in order to sustain the energy levels that they need for flight. Cold weather produces a drop in their body temperature and their metabolism. Their energy level drops, they can’t sustain flight, so they drop to the ground en masse.

The cold hail and the weather disruptions that were caused by the Santorini volcano would have cause giant swarms, which are common in that part of the world to suddenly land in Egypt. As more swarms approached, they too would have dropped when they hit the wall of cold air.

This would have produced greater and greater numbers on the ground until there was a mega-swarm, ready to get up and fly at the same time. When the temperature rose again, so would the locusts, all flying together – exactly as the Biblical account describes.

Plague 9 – Darkness

Again, the Santorini eruption produced an ash cloud 24-36 miles high and 120 miles across. When the main body of that ash cloud reached the Nile, it enveloped Egypt in what the Bible calls, “a palpable darkness” – darkness that you can feel.

In a matter of minutes, you wouldn’t be able to see, you wouldn’t be able to breathe very well. The sun is gone. Torches or lamps don’t help.

It is a total blackness that has never been seen in all the long history of Egypt. The Egyptian wise men have no idea what it is.

This has been verified by geologists. The identifiable Santorini pumice ash is found in layers throughout the Nile delta.

Plague 10 – Death

This happened on the night of the first Passover. The Israelites had been warned to observe it under pain of death, but they were slaves. They would have had to work until the sun had set. Then there would have been a lot of preparations for the Passover meal. Then the Passover meal ceremony takes some time, even in it’s simplest form.

Moses instructed the Israelites to celebrate the Passover ceremony fully clothed, as though ready for travel. They were not at ease or comfortable under any circumstances.

The Egyptians, however, were sleeping.

^{Ex 12:29} At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well.

^{Ex 12:30} Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.

Every Egyptian household and family was affected. There were several factors that accounted for this.

First, the gas leaks that had been getting progressively worse under the Nile finally came to full eruption. Large quantities of carbon dioxide were released. Being heavier than air, the cloud flowed along the ground. Since the release happened under water, the event would have been soundless, invisible, odorless and deadly. It would have suffocated anyone or any animal that it enveloped.

It happened exactly the same way in Lake Nyos, in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986, while the people slept, the carbon dioxide that had turned their lake blood red previously erupted again.

The heavy water of the lake had kept the carbon dioxide gas down like the cap on a soda bottle. There was another slight earthquake, enough to dislodge some rocks. The falling rocks disrupted the water pressure and surface tension just enough to release all the gas that had been accumulating.

It moved down the slopes of the crater holding the lake like an invisible fog, suffocating everything in it’s way. As suddenly as it appeared, it dissipated, dissolving harmlessly into the atmosphere.

Those who had slept on higher ground that night woke up to find 1,800 people dead. Hundreds of cattle and other livestock were also dead.

I saw an interview with one poor woman. She said that, when she went to sleep, there were 56 members in her family. When she woke up, 53 were dead.

Pharaoh was eager for the Israelites to be released, at this point. In fact, he drove them out. He was stunned by the selectivity of the deaths. Only the first born males in each family were slain.

How do we account for this?

In Egyptian society, the first born son occupied a place of privilege within the family that was higher than perhaps any other society. As in Hebrew society, the first born sons were heirs to throne, property and title. The eldest son was also charged with caring for the parents when they became older, as with the Hebrews.

In addition, the Egyptians believed that if no one spoke their names after they died, then their spirits would fade away and disappear. Consequently, the eldest sons were charged to carry out a ceremony in which they called out the names of their deceased ancestors, to keep them alive in the afterlife.

Consequently, the Egyptians treated their eldest sons very well. One of the ways that this was expressed was that the eldest son always slept on a bed. His other brothers and sisters, even his parents would sleep other places – a cool rooftop, a shed, a wagon.

The problem with that is that Egyptian beds were built very low to the ground. So, the people sleeping lowest to the ground were the eldest sons and no one else in the family.

The Hebrews, celebrating their first Passover meal, were all sitting up, instead of sprawled in exhaustion as they would usually have been. The low lying gas cloud would have suffocated only the privileged firstborn Egyptians lying on their low beds.

Archaeology supports the story. In Avaris, Dr. Bietak found mass graves dating before and during the time of the Exodus – 1500 BC. The earlier mass graves were classic examples of the result of massive epidemics. They contained men, women and children.

The graves dating 1500 BC, though, contained ONLY males in them. The size and number of the graves showed that many people had died in rapid succession. The bodies were just thrown in the graves haphazardly. They were buried rapidly. Some of the graves only had about 7-8 inches of soil on them. They were essentially just barely covered with dust.

There were too many. There was no time for ceremony.

The Bible says that Pharaoh’s son died in the plague of the firstborn.

^{Ex 12:29} At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well.

If Ahmose truly is the Pharaoh of the Exodus, there should be proof that Ahmose’s son died young.

Meet Prince Sapair, son of Ahmose. He died when he was only 12. He is the first and only face and name that we can put to a victim of the Biblical plagues.

It seems to me that the Bible, archaeology and geology are all telling the same story. The skeptics, of course, don’t like that because it implies that God not only exists, but has an active hand in the affairs of men.

Some believers don’t like science being introduced to the Biblical story. They seem to feel that it tries to take God out of the question.

If you look at the story, though, God did not suspend nature. He predicted, then used it. He directed and targeted it. Therefore, since God is a God of order and not of chaos, we should be able to understand the science behind the miracles.

WARNING!!

This blog has been written with the sole purpose of using the ample evidence available to verify and support the biblical record, while refuting the copious propaganda that is shoved down our throats daily by materialistic uniformitarians.

It is my contention that the Bible describes God's original creation of people with extraordinary capabilities who subsequently built an advanced civilization that exceeds our own. That civilization was destroyed in the Great Flood and we have spent the last 5,000 years trying to re-build that civilization. I contend that science supports all this in multiple disciplines, but this information is ignored or suppressed by various people who have an opposing agenda.

Nothing that you see on this blog is original. Any fact that you see here is obtainable on a dozen different websites and books. I use these facts and photos, without violating their copyrights, under the legal principle of fair use practice. That is, I use them one time, for educational purposes only.

The point is, nothing here is made up. The only thing that I do (or need to do) is assemble this information in a discernible pattern.

You might want to read through the first entry posted on this blog (Past Remembering: Thoughts toward a coherent view of our ancient past, our present and our future) in order to understand my theoretical and theological underpinnings more clearly.

The truth is there. You just have to see it.

 

 

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (NASB)

That which has been is that which will be,

And that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one might say,

“See this, it is new”?

Already it has existed for ages

Which were before us.

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (NASB)

That which has been is that which will be,

And that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one might say,

“See this, it is new”?

Already it has existed for ages

Which were before us.