Posted on 06/12/2003 6:15:39 PM PDT by blam
Mount Sinai was volcano in Saudi Arabia, says scientist
By Roger Highfield Science Editor
(Filed: 13/06/2003)
Mount Sinai, where Scripture says Moses received God's Law, is located in Saudi Arabia, not Egypt's Sinai Peninsula - moving a key site for Judaism into the nation where Islam was founded, according to a Cambridge professor.
Science also backs traditional beliefs that the Israelites' exodus from Egypt was led by Moses, roughly the way that the Bible tells it, according to Prof Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University.
Prof Humphreys, a churchgoing Baptist and materials scientist, outlines his ideas in his forthcoming book: The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist's Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories.
While other scholars have proposed that Sinai was in Arabia, Prof Humphreys argues that the holy mount must have been an active volcano, since it shook and emitted fire and smoke (Exodus 19:18). And he has carefully examined records ancient and modern to fix the site.
His candidate: present-day Mount Bedr in north-western Saudi Arabia, since there were no ancient volcanoes in what was later named the Sinai Peninsula.
Prof Humphreys also thinks that near Mount Bedr, Moses experienced God's call at the "burning bush". He suggests that this was caused by flammable natural gas or volcanic gas escaping from the ground.
The Book of Exodus obviously underwent later editing, he said, but the evidence strongly suggests witness material that might well come from Moses himself. The book is "amazingly accurate and coherent", he said.
Prof Humphreys also offers other "naturalistic" explanations for wondrous events. For instance, he thinks that escalating natural disasters explain each of the 10 "plagues" that forced Pharaoh to let the Israelite slaves depart. The Nile "turned to blood" meant that toxic red algae killed fish, the dead fish forced frogs ashore, gnats and flies were drawn to the dead fish and frogs and the insects transmitted a virus that killed livestock.
This point is so predictable I think it must be a favorite in Bible school classes. Actually an account of it on a temple wall would not be surprizing. Rameses II lost the Battle of Kadesh by his mismanagement but he devoted a huge wall at Karnak to it telling how he crushed his enemies beneath his heal. Spinning war reports didn't start with Bush.
Even so, there are those 500,000 papyri, mostly from the New Kingdom, covering every aspect of Egyptian life at the time. And there are the archives of neighboring countries, containing thousands of tablets, all silent on the subject.
There are other problems. From internal evidence it is clear that the story was composed in the 5th or 6th century, some 700 to 800 years after the time in which the story is placed. The author(s) knew nothing of the Egypt of the 19th Dynasty. The story does have the Hebrews working in the "store-city of Rameses" and that is sometimes said to be a reference to Piramesse. But Piramesse was Ramesses' residence and Egyptians did not have store cities, which were a Canaanite usage. Many of the subplots (Moses in the basket, the various miracles of Moses, even the parting of the sea) were common folk tales of the region, much older than Exodus.
Whoever found what, the important thing is to find the facts and to get them out. Who knows what someone knew or didn't know anyway.
I think it even turns up in the Gilgamesh writings. In fact, I think the same story was told about Gilgamesh, or something close to it.
Unlike the history of the Israelites in the Old Testament which is brutally honest and very often self denigrating.
All perished when the Red Sea covered them. No Egyptian soldier was left to tell what happened, which suggests that the Pharaoh also perished. Exodous 14:28
There should be something along the lines of "The great Pharoah chased the Jews out of the country. The Gods were pleased with the cleansing of the country"
Something, anything. If there is a scroll, an inscription, anything in Egypt that suggests a couple million people took off, I would like to know about it.
There may be such a record in hieroglyphics, much of which is still untranslated, and some of which was destroyed by both man and nature.
Historically the Pharaoh at the time of the Exodous is thought to have been Amunhotep II, son of Thutmose III(18th Dynasty~1440BC) or Rameses II, son of Seti I(19th Dynasty~1290BC)...and now I see that Blam has found evidence of a 16th Dynasty possibility.
You'll have to admit that it's an interesting possibility.
A number of people believe there are errors in the Kings List. Most of the dating is dependent on this list.
* Moses was 80 years old at the beginning of Exodus
* Most of the Jews who left on the Exodus died enroute.
* Archaeologists have dated charred wheat found above the Santorina ash layer (1628BC) but underneath the collapsed walls of Jerico.
Well now you do. :-)
The entire desert region of the Great Basin in the US looks virtually identical to that place, right down to very fresh evidence of volcanic and geological activity. It is the exact same kind of rocks and mountain formations, and you can't swing a dead cat out there without finding a hot sulfur vent, boiling acid pit, lava tubes, steam vents, thousands of tiny volcanos and cinder cones, and all manner of related things. I'll run across several of examples of these in a day of off-roading through the mountains of the Nevada desert. You have to be careful, because you don't see some of these things until you are practically on top of them (like sinkholes full of boiling sulfuric acid). This part of CONUS is actually the most geologically active part of it, though not enough people live out there to notice.
Uh uh...
It's God's will that all come.
The decision not to believe is made by seti. He has free will.
My point is that we definitely do have free will--since we do always and only as we please--but that most people have overlooked the fact that the will always follows the nature. There are no exceptions to this. (This is by the very definition of the will as the nature's choosing faculty.)
Martin Luther has good discussion on this (see his most important book, The Bondage of the Will). Augustine also has good discussion on this.
God has a revealed will (the free offer of the gospel), but He has a more mysterious decretive will which actually regenerates certain individuals unto conversion.
(This is why we pray for people who don't believe. If God does not act in the powerful way of a supernatural renewal of the sinner's nature, that sinner will not believe the gospel. He has a nature which will not choose God. Period.)
I realize that all of this sounds strange in our day, but it is just historic Protestant theology--Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Brethren, Congregationalists, Anglicans, even early (Whitefieldian) Methodists. (It's too bad today's Protestants don't learn a whole lot of theology.)
The traditional site is a joke, an example of Satanic depravity in sheer contempt of Scripture.
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