Deniers of Ancient Israelite History Exposed

I was privileged this week to preview, before its release to the public, what may well prove to be a masterpiece of the documentary film-making art—a new look at the Biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt in the light of contemporary archeology and politics in the Middle East.

Filmmaker Tim Mahoney´s "The Exodus Conspiracy",[1] due to be released within a few months, seeks to demonstrate the historical accuracy of the Biblical narrative of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt on the basis of recent archaeological discoveries and geographic explorations. A secondary thesis of the film is that the "Red Sea" crossed by the Israelites was the Gulf of Aquaba (called the Gulf of Eilat by modern-day Israelis), rather than "Sea of Reeds" in Egypt, as most Biblical scholars have always assumed, and that the true "Mount Sinai" or "Mount Horeb" of the Exodus narrative is in northern Saudi Arabia, and is not the Mt. Sinai shown to pilgrims and tourists over the centuries in Egypt´s Sinai Peninsula.

At the same time, the film also documents the efforts of Arab governments, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to suppress, or at least to seriously impede, the discovery and publication of archaeological data that would confirm the historicity of the Biblical narrative. Is this a conspiracy to suppress the truth about the ancient history of the Middle East? And if so, who could possibly want to deny the reality of a 3,500 year old event, and why? The film´s answer to these questions is that Arab governments and political circles wish to deny to the Jews the status of indigenous inhabitants of the Middle East; and above all, to deny the 3,000-plus years of continuous Jewish inhabitance of the Land of Israel (called "Palestine" by the Romans, the British, and now the Arabs). The entire Arab justification for 88 years of relentless war against the Jewish people in the Holy Land, and their efforts first to prevent the rebirth of the Jewish nation there, and then to destroy it, rests on the claim that the Jews are alien European "settlers" in the Holy Land, while the Arabs are the "indigenous" native population, who have lived there "since time immemorial." Archeology that confirms the accuracy of the Biblical narrative, and which documents the ancientness of the Jewish habitation of the land, is thus extremely inconvenient to Israel´s enemies, even though (or rather because) it concerns events in the remote past.

While the archaeological-historical conclusions of The Exodus Conspiracy are controversial, a great deal of support for them can be found in "On the Reliability of the Old Testament",[2] a thoroughly documented and brilliantly presented study by Professor Kenneth A. Kitchen,[3] a professor of archeology and Egyptology at Liverpool University in Britain. Also offering strong support for the historicity of the Israelite worship experience at the Biblical "mountain of God" is the work of Italian archaeologist Emmanuel Anati,[4] who has explored a mountain in the Wilderness of Paran [5] along the Israel-Egyptian border. At this site, Dr. Anati has discovered inscriptions, tools and other remains of worship ceremonies left by ancient Semitic nomads that bear a striking similarity both to those described in the Book of Exodus, and to those found by the explorers of a mountain in Arabia who present their findings in The Exodus Conspiracy. I do not pretend to know which mountain was the original of the Mt. Sinai or Mt. Horeb described in the Book of Exodus. Nevertheless, archeology certainly confirms that ancient Semitic nomadic peoples engaged in worship at the base of desert mountains that was very similar to that described in the Biblical narrative of the exodus.

However, Mr. Mahoney´s description of a major propaganda effort to deny the reality of the Jewish people´s three thousand-plus years´ residence in the Middle East is undeniably true. This effort is documented in numerous reports in the daily press, and in nearly every Arab book, pamphlet or website devoted to the Arab-Israel conflict. It is also documented by the writings of numerous "revisionist" historians and archaeologists,[6] many of them Jewish and some Israeli, who support the Arab side in the Arab-Israel conflict. The attempt to deny the reality of the Israelites´ exodus from Egypt has even been joined by a well-known Los Angeles rabbi, David Wolpe.[7] Indeed, Mr. Mahoney could have said much more than he has chosen to say about the non-Arab and non-governmental participants in this war against history.

Conspiracy supports its conclusions with interviews with a wide range of explorers, archaeologists, Biblical scholars, religious leaders, and even senior Israeli political leaders, such as President Shimon Peres and opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu. It contains brilliant cinematography of ancient archaeological sites and the stark desert landscape in which they are situated, taken from original videos shot by the explorers of these sites. The documentary also contains recreations by actors of parts of the Biblical narrative of the origins of the Israelite people, clips from Cecil B. DeMille´s magnificent original 1920´s silent epic "The Ten Commandments," and oral narrations of the Exodus story by distinguished "storytellers," actually scholars and/or religious leaders of different faiths and from all parts of the world, dressed in their traditional national costumes. There are beautifully photographed scenes of present-day Jerusalem , and a truly shocking film clip of an Arab mob destroying Joseph´s Tomb, an ancient holy site sacred to three faiths, during the so-called "Intifada." In short, there is something here for everyone; The Exodus Conspiracy has great educational value and is first-rate entertainment as well.

To bolster the case for the historicity of the exodus, Mahoney cites recent archaeological work in the region that was once called "the land of Goshen," described in the Bible as the home of the Israelite people during their four hundred year sojourn in Egypt. These archaeological explorations have uncovered the presence of a substantial Semitic population there—which suddenly disappeared in the 13Th Dynasty of Egypt. This just happens to be the same era in which, many historians have surmised from surviving Egyptian historical records as well as references in the Biblical account, the Exodus must have taken place.

The people who lived in this region on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta, until their sudden and mysterious disappearance, kept sheep, which the Israelites raised and the Egyptians did not raise. The architectural style of their houses was characteristic of the Fertile Crescent region and different from that of contemporary Egyptian houses.

Most interestingly, perhaps, there is an elaborate tomb in this area of a high official of a Pharaoh´s government, which could easily be the tomb of the patriarch Joseph. Remnants of paint on a statue of the man even suggest that he wore a coat of many colors!

At around the same time and the same place, there is evidence of a sharp increase in deaths and mass graves have been found, as if victims of a plague were hastily buried without the usual funeral rites. Evidence of the slaying of the Egyptian first-born by the angel of death, as the Book of Exodus records?

Yet no archaeologist working in this region of Egypt has been willing to say publicly that he or she believes that the Semitic people who inhabited the Land of Goshen , and then mysteriously disappeared from it, were the Israelites. Why not? According to several scholars and archaeologists whom Mahoney interviewed, the answer is fear: the Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi A. Hawass, decides personally which archaeologists will be allowed to work in Egypt, and he would never allow any archaeologist who expressed a belief in an ancient Israelite presence in the country to work there.

If there is subtle, quiet intimidation of archaeologists in Egypt, the intimidation of them in Saudi Arabia has been anything but subtle. Explorers convinced that the Biblical ´mountain of God," where He revealed the Law to the Israelites, is in northern Arabia, rather than in the Sinai Peninsula where post-Biblical tradition places it, have encountered fierce opposition from the Saudi authorities. One exploration party was subjected to 78 days of imprisonment. Several have encountered armed Saudi soldiers and police ordering them to evacuate the area immediately. Even the personal physician to a high-ranking Saudi prince, armed with a personal letter from the prince authorizing him to explore anywhere in Saudi Arabia, was denied entry to this area by armed guards. Why, Mahoney and his interviewees ask, is the Saudi government so intent on hiding ancient ruins and inscriptions?

One reason may be that the explorers have discovered a mountain on which are located the remains of religious altars, ancient Semitic inscriptions, and evidence of major encampments by nomads at the base of the mountain—all of which are elements, of course, of the Biblical narrative of the Revelation at Sinai. If the Exodus really took place in northern Saudi Arabia as Mr. Mahoney and his interviewees maintain, then the Arab claim to be the sole "indigenous" inhabitants even of the Arabian Peninsula itself, let alone "Palestine," could be thrown into doubt.

Mahoney also places the obstructionist tactics of the Egyptian and Saudi governments within the broader context of the archaeological "front" of the Arab-Israeli conflict—a "front" that includes denials by Palestinian Arab religious and political leaders that there ever was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, despite the overwhelming historical and archaeological evidence of the presence of two magnificent Jewish temples there over a 1,000-year period. As a part of their effort to cover up the ancient Jewish presence at the Temple Mount, the Muslim religious authorities who have been allowed to control the site by Israel have carted away and dumped tons of rich ancient soil containing archaeological remains of the two Temples. The shocking desecration and destruction of the tomb of the Biblical patriarch Joseph, who first led the Israelites to Egypt, by Palestinian Arab "militants" in Nablus (the Biblical Israelite city of Shechem) was yet another "action" in the archaeological-historical front of the war. It is as if the Palestinian Arab "militants" think that they can erase the ancient Jewish inhabitant of the land by destroying the surviving physical remains of that presence. The Arabs are waging a war against history itself in an effort to uphold their claims. The Israeli diplomat and scholar Dore Gold, author of The Fight for Jerusalem,[8] in a brief on-camera interview in the film, lucidly summarizes the Jerusalem-Palestine "front" in the Arab war against Israelite-Jewish history. However, additional documentaries are needed to explore more fully this front of the propaganda-misinformation war against Israel and history.

While The Exodus Conspiracy is not the last word on this subject, and many additional documentaries about it should be made in the future, it is a must see for everyone who wants to understand the inseparable connection between the present-day conflict in the Middle East and the ancient events narrated in the Bible.

2] http://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208288608&sr=1-1

6] http://www.aish.com/societyWork/sciencenature/Archaeology_and_the_Bible_-_Part_2.asp

You can’t both argue that the Israelites did their exodus from Egypt AND Saudi Arabia

Nobody is arguing that.

The Exodus took place from Egypt, into 'The Wilderness'.

The Israelites then spent considerable time encamped at the foot of 'The Mountain of God' before beginning 'The Wanderings'.

That is where Moses received the tablets; and where the Tabernacle, Altar, Ark, and all the rest of the items for the worship service were made. It is also where Aaron & his son's were consecrated as priests...and where two of Aaron's sons were struck down by God for offering 'strange fire' to Him.

It is arguing that the mountain is in northern Saudi Arabia, rather than the traditional, relatively nearby, site of Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.

The Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) is that long, skinny finger of water the juts off to the NE from the Red Sea, (a drowned portion of the Great Rift) and separates the Sinai Peninsula from Arabia.

The story is contradictory in other ways.

You can’t both argue that the Israelites did their exodus from Egypt AND Saudi Arabia and that both countries are trying to cover up evidence of it.

This is an understandable impression because of the author's sloppy and misleading writing style, wherein she wrote "One reason may be that the explorers have discovered a mountain on which are located the remains of religious altars, ancient Semitic inscriptions, and evidence of major encampments by nomads at the base of the mountain—all of which are elements, of course, of the Biblical narrative of the Revelation at Sinai. If the Exodus really took place in northern Saudi Arabia as Mr. Mahoney and his interviewees maintain, then the Arab claim to be the sole "indigenous" inhabitants even of the Arabian Peninsula itself, let alone "Palestine," could be thrown into doubt.

What she has done with her careless writing is to muddle the distinction between the point of origin of the Exodus and the subsequent route of the Exodus. What she should have said was "If the route of the Exodus took them through northern Saudi Arabia..."

I haven't seen the movie on which the article is based, but I'm certain it clearly differentiates the two. There is no scholarly dispute that I'm aware of that the Exodus originated FROM Egypt, but there are several competing theories as to the actual routes which might have been taken by the Hebrews on that long journey. One can do a lot of wandering in forty years.

I guess I’ll buy that her lousy writing style conveyed something other than she meant to convey.

A couple of points. There can really be no dispute that the Jews had their origin in the middle east. Nor that they occupied modern day Israel and beyond. Any suggestion that today’s Jews are merely european interlopers is flatly wrong.

The exodus story is more interesting. If it is historical and not legend, there should be solid evidence of it, especially if it’s asserted to have been from a period of 400 years of slavery in a fairly advanced civilization. Despite the claims of this article, such evidence in Egypt does not exist, and archaeologists have been pouring through the Egyptian historical records long before the state of Israel was created.

It’s simply impossible to erase the records of 400 years of Egyptian history, and the plagues which brought Egypt to its knees and allowed the Exodus to occur couldn’t have happened. This was the Golden Age of Egyptian history in order to fit the biblical timeline. In a country that documented every season’s harvest totals or crop failures, it’s impossible to believe it wouldn’t have documented the 10 plagues and the release of its slave population which it never documented that it had in the first place.

In an ironic twist, I believe there was an Exodus, not from Egypt but from the Iraq/Saudi Arabia area. The bible is full of references to the Tigris and Euphrates, and even Abraham’s home is said to be in Ur, which is in Iraq.

The “pillar of fire by night, and pillar of cloud by day” that guided the exodus corresponds timewise nicely to the volcanic eruption of Thera in the Mediterranean Sea, which is one of the biggest in recorded history. And it would point to Canaan if you were coming from Mesopotamia.

But not Egypt.

So, I’m going to catch it from all sides. I believe there was an exodus. I just don’t believe it was from Egypt.

I’m going to catch it from all sides. I believe there was an exodus. I just don’t believe it was from Egypt.

Not from me (at least not on this subject... /grin), although I don't believe you are correct.

For example, you commented that "Despite the claims of this article, such evidence in Egypt does not exist, and archaeologists have been pouring through the Egyptian historical records long before the state of Israel was created. ... It’s simply impossible to erase the records of 400 years of Egyptian history, and the plagues which brought Egypt to its knees and allowed the Exodus to occur couldn’t have happened. This was the Golden Age of Egyptian history in order to fit the biblical timeline. In a country that documented every season’s harvest totals or crop failures, it’s impossible to believe it wouldn’t have documented the 10 plagues and the release of its slave population which it never documented that it had in the first place.

This is a plausible argument, and you may indeed be correct. However, it relies on some basic assumptions which may or may not be valid. One, you assume that the Egyptian's well-known obsession with documenting "everything" would guarantee that such events would be recorded.

However, Egyptian history offers several known instances of concerted official attempts to "erase from human memory" certain undesirable and embarrassing people or events, e.g. the treatment accorded Hatshepsut, the first female Pharoah, or Akenahten (Amenhotep IV), who tried to replace the old gods (and more importantly, their priests who controlled the power and the loot) with a monotheistic religion. Their monuments, names and references to them were systematically scrubbed from almost every surface where they could be found.

Likewise, we now know that the official Egyptian records of Ramses II's "great victory" at Kadesh were a creatively slanted ancient example of state propaganda. Ancient Egypt was a totalitarian culture with an almost completely illiterate populace, and the Egyptian ruling class knew just as well as our present-day political elites that whoever writes the history controls the past, and thus the future.

It's no great stretch to believe that if an Egyptian pharaoh had really been defeated and humiliated as described in the Bible, he'd have spared no effort to wipe the evidence of it from existence and rewrite or sanitize the historical record to his advantage.

The other assumption upon which your argument is predicated is that our knowledge and archaeological evidence is sufficiently complete. I don't believe that it is.

I believe that despite the seemingly vast amount of information we have about past civilizations, far more has been destroyed or lost to the mists of time. While there is undoubtedly much that is still hidden and awaiting discovery, what we have is still only a small remnant of what once existed. Had the great libraries of Alexandria and Babylon not been destroyed our understanding of history might be very different today.

You noted that "The bible is full of references to the Tigris and Euphrates, and even Abraham’s home is said to be in Ur, which is in Iraq." However, as recently as a century-and-a-half or so ago, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, and even Homer's Troy were considered to be legends. Subsequent discoveries confirmed their historical reality, and since then many more "legendary" sites mentioned in the Bible have been identified. Who knows what discoveries lie in the future?

I’m not convinced that I’m right. I’m also far from convinced that I’m wrong.

If it happened like it was recounted, the Exodus should have ended the Golden Age of Egypt and it didn’t.

Plus Pharoah was killed in the pursuit of the Israelites according to the biblical account, and while there is no record of that happening, either, the dead Pharoah could not have been part of a grand coverup if the account is true.

My inclination is to believe that the Books of Moses simply are the first written documentation of what had been oral history passed down over the generations. It wasn’t intentionally false, but it wasn’t something directly dictated by the mouth of God, either.

That’s just my opinion, and those that have a different premise will certainly argue forever that the Exodus came from Egypt and that’s that.

I don’t think it matters in the overall scheme of things. I’d like to know a definitive answer, but I’m willing to remain somewhat uncertain indefinitely.

I am quite sure of this. If there was evidence of the Israelites being slaves in Egypt for 400 years and bringing the regime down in order to leave, we’d have some compelling evidence of it already, and no Egyptian official would be able to hide that evidence. That’s just not possible.

"The bible is full of references to the Tigris and Euphrates, and even Abraham’s home is said to be in Ur, which is in Iraq."

A major (possible) misconception is that Abram's (later, changed to Abraham) home was Ur in Iraq.

However, there is theory & evidence that "Ur of the Chaldees" was in the upper reaches of the Tigris & Euphrates.

The Chaldeans LATER moved toward southern Iraq, from what was their more northern homeland area at the presumed time of Abraham.

This would place them much closer to Harran, both physically & culturally, than if they had migrated from the Ur in southern Iraq.

Finding an event of a duration of probably weeks to months in a history of 4000 years is almost impossible.

It is further impeded by the basic assumptions of Egyptology. The accepted Egyptian time-line is based on three “pillars” which Egyptologists claim to know. One of them was/is that the Exodus and Moses’ interaction with Pharaoh occurred during Ramses II reign. This mistaken pillar was a mere assumption on the part of the father of Egyptology, Champollion, who reasoned that the most important personage of the Old Testament had to have interacted with the most famous of the builder Pharaohs, Ramses the Great. He was wrong.

Ramses the Great, on his wall of victories, recounted how he had conquered the city of Jerusalem... which would not have been possible had he been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

However, if you reset the accepted Egyptian time-line a few hundred years and place the Exodus about 300 years prior to Ramses II reign, suddenly you find everything reported in the Bible falling into place. You learn that people mentioned in the Amarna letters sent to Pharaoh Tutankhenamen and his father include people such as Jesse, the Young Lion (an appelation of David), and Saul and Jonathon. Events described in the Amarna letters recount the stories also told in the Bible.

Using the current, accepted Egyptian time-line to seek the Exodus is like looking for George Washington and the Revolutionary war in 21st Century America... and concluding they never happened because you can’t find them in 2000.

As for the plagues of the Exodus destroying Egypt’s golden age, Egypt survived many disasters and had a bureaucracy in place that was flexible enough to recover.

That’s interesting and I guess possibly true, but the Tigris River comes out of Turkey and Euphrates out of Syria, and they really don’t come close enough to each other to mention in the same sentence until they’re in Iraq.

Another thing worth considering is that both the Tigris and Euphrates are mentioned in the first couple chapters of Genesis, which was pre-Noah’s flood.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that a catastrophic worldwide flood would result in the same rivers being there post-flood.

In the efforts to achieve full transparency, I don’t believe that there was a global flood as recounted in Genesis. I think the legend was the result of a local flood in early history. It may have seemed global to them at the time, but it makes no sense, is not supported by the geological evidence, and certainly not the biological evidence.

The Tigris and Euphrates were approximately where they are before the flood that didn’t happen, and where they are today.

The whole origin of the Israelites, where the Garden of Eden was, etc., has its roots to Iraq. At least that’s what I’m currently thinking.

Where does the Gilgamesh Epic come from that many biblical scholars use to suggest that the Noah Flood is true?

Iraq.

I have read a ton on this "issue". This article makes some mistakes. The Exodus according to most scholars who believe in it, occurred in the 13th century BC (19th Dynasty), not the 13th dynasty. The sudden "disappearance" of the Semitic population in the northeast delta occurred in early in the 13th century. Interestingly enough, there is a sudden appearance of a new "Semitic" population in the hills of Canaan and in west-central Jordan (the areas settled by the tribes of Reuben and Manasseh) dated late in the 13th century that almost all archaeologist acknowledge as proto-Israel.

There is an active suppression of Israelite history by Arabs, and there are Israeli archaeologist who do not believe in the Biblical Exodus (Finkelstein, Silberman to name 2 prominent); but there are also very good archaeologist / historians who do believe in the Exodus or a form of it (Dever, Kitchen, Hoffmeier). There is a very rigorous debate on this issue right now (actually over the last 30 years). I have read most of the major scholarly books on this from all the sides (I plan on reading the rest over the next 2 years), I think the side that advocates the historical Exodus has the superior argument (based on the evidence of chronology, written documentation, physical evidence, linguistics, etc). Here is my disclosure though, I am a Bible believing Christian.

Here are some real good books on the pro-side:

Hoffmeier: Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition

Hoffmeier: Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition

Kitchen: On the Reliability of the Old Testament

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