The Volcano Explains Everything—Or Does It?

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Canadian documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, in cooperation with James Cameron, director of Titanic, has master-minded a two-hour TV special dealing with the oft-treated—and oft-mistreated—Exodus narrative. The Biblical account provides the principal pillar of the script. Every sentence of the Biblical text is taken literally in quite a fundamentalist fashion.

Until now, Biblical scholars have not found specific archaeological evidence for the Exodus. This perspective—the archaeological evidence—is purportedly now supplied by Jacobovici and backed up, we are led to believe, with opinions of scholars working in the field. Technically the film is brilliantly produced—flashy and full of unusual special effects. The digital age has clearly arrived in this film, and no effort has been spared to find scholarly support from a whole series of experts (including the author of this review) whose research involves them in one way or another in the Exodus story.

The chronology proposed in the film is based on the volcanic eruption at the Mediterranean island of Thera (modern Santorini), more than 500 miles from Egypt, and the phenomena that followed. In the film, the Biblical narrative is explained in terms of this eruption and its aftereffects. According to the conventional chronology, this volcanic eruption is dated around 1500 B.C.E. The aftereffects of the eruption seem, at first glance, to be described in an Egyptian inscription known as the “Tempest Stela,” which dates to the reign of Pharaoh Ahmose (c. 1540–1515 B.C.E.), the founder of the Egyptian New Kingdom who transformed his domain into a kingdom encompassing not only the whole of Egypt but also starting to acquire areas of the Near East. In order to do this, Ahmose had to defeat and probably expel a part of the population living under the Hyksos, Asiatics then ruling Egypt. He did this in about 1525 B.C.E., thus liberating northern Egypt from a foreign dynasty and their people. The scenario of Near Easterners (Asiatics) living for a long time in Egypt and finally being driven out provides the alleged historical background through which Jacobovici explains the Israelite presence in Egypt, followed by their exodus. The ten plagues are explained as the natural aftereffects of the volcanic eruption.

Nearly two millennia ago, the Jewish historian Josephus suggested a connection between the Hyksos expulsion from Egypt and the Proto-Israelites of the Biblical Exodus story. Few Egyptologists today would support that idea, however, although it is still alive among some Old Testament scholars such as John Bimson of the University of Liverpool, who was given the opportunity to comment on this scenario in Jacobovici’s film. Most Biblical scholars, however, would date the Exodus, if they do not consider it largely legendary, to the Ramesside Period (c. 1295–1070 B.C.E.), that is, if we exclude the end of 061this era, about 250 to 350 years after the Hyksos expulsion from Egypt.

The idea of associating the Thera eruption with the unusual tempest in the Tempest Stela of Ahmose has also been suggested a number of times,¹ although the idea has also been refuted.² And the association of the Exodus with the Thera eruption is also not new. Already in 1981, Hans Goedicke, then professor at The Johns Hopkins University, compared the features in the Exodus narrative with a volcanic eruption and its aftereffects.^a However, according to Goedicke, Thera erupted not in the reign of Ahmose but (according to his interpretation of the Speos Artemidos inscription) half a century later, during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut (c. 1477–1457 B.C.E.).

In Jacobovici’s film a number of leading scholars in the field are interviewed. One is left to wonder why only snippets of their interviews are included. From the snippet of the interview with Professor Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University, for example, we are given the impression that he is a super-fundamentalist. I know him to be in fact quite the opposite. [A reporter for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail interviewed Redford about the film and reports that Redford “dismisses most of the film’s points as fantasy.”—Ed.] I am confident that the most important parts of Redford’s interview were left on the cutting room floor because they collided with the theories advanced in the film.

The same thing happened to me. Short statements from my interview, cut out of context, come across as seeming to support the film’s argument. In fact, I objected to dating the Exodus story to the Hyksos period and the reign of Ahmose. And I objected, not because I wanted to steer clear of Biblical chronology and history (the film claims that I was afraid of the Egyptian authorities—nonsense), but because archaeology does not provide any trace of Israelites before the Iron Age (shortly before 1200 B.C.E.). Written evidence is provided for the first time on the so-called Israel Stela from the fifth year of Pharaoh Merneptah’s reign (c. 1209 B.C.E.). It is probably no coincidence that likely evidence of Proto-Israelites appears in the archaeological record in Egypt in the latter half of the 12th century B.C.E. in the remains of a typical structure known as a Four-Room House, 062considered the customary housetype of Israelites throughout the Iron Age until the Babylonian Exile.^b

The disadvantage of placing the Exodus at the end of the Hyksos period, as Jacobovici chooses to do, is that one has to cope with some odd anachronisms in the Biblical text, but he does not deal with these. The Bible says, for example, that Hebrew slaves built the store-city of Ramesses (Exodus 1:11), but the Ramesside period was hundreds of years after the Hyksos period. Similarly with the Biblical reference to the “Way of the Philistines,” which the fleeing Israelites avoided on their way out of Egypt (Exodus 13:17)—but there were no Philistines in the Hyksos period. By using the lower chronology for the Exodus—to the Ramesside period—as is generally accepted by scholars, at least such grave anachronisms could be avoided. Placing the Exodus even later, into the time of Ramesses III or Ramesses IV (12th century B.C.E.) would make the expression “Way of the Philistines” meaningful.

Pharaoh Seqenenre of the 17th Dynasty (16th century B.C.E.) was killed by the Israelites, according to this film. This is presented as a fact. This so-called fact is based on an actual fact; Seqenenre was killed with Near-Eastern battle-axes (as we learn from a forensic examination). This is typical of the film’s logic: Because Seqenenre was killed with Near-Eastern battle-axes, it must have been the Israelites who were responsible for this happening.

The film identifies Ahmose as the pharaoh of the Oppression and of the Exodus because the Tempest Stela is dated to Ahmose’s time. The stela’s description of a tempest, perhaps an extremely violent rainstorm, that caused darkness in Egypt seems to fit with the volcanic eruption of Thera. According to the film, the Exodus can be “securely” associated with the Thera eruption.

The film should have made clear to the audience that, in fact, this argument 063skates on thin ice. First of all, the date of the Thera eruption is not settled. Radiocarbon dates place it at about 1720 B.C.E.; however, on historical grounds, it can be argued that it occurred in 1500 B.C.E. or even slightly later. Jacobovici’s contention holds water, so to speak, only if 1500 B.C.E. proves correct.

What is, however, highly unlikely is that Egypt was shrouded in a cloud of volcanic ash. Vulcanologists and oceanographers have clearly shown (based on sediment accumulation) that the ash from the eruption was transported northeastward, across Asia Minor. The dark clouds never reached Syria, Palestine or Egypt.

The Theran pumice that does appear at Egyptian sites³ most likely arrived by sea or by trade. Jacobovici shows some of this pumice from my site of Tell el-Dab‘a as proof of his position. However, the Theran pumice that massively appears at Tell el-Dab‘a and at some other Egyptian and southern Palestinian sites is from the Tuthmoside period and later (several generations after Pharaoh Ahmose). The tephra-particles found in the Nile Delta by Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution were not found in a datable context and, according to our petrographic scientist, Max Bichler, were too large to be windborne.⁴ All this means that it is highly unlikely that volcanic signals from Thera affected Egypt, except that tsunamis may have inundated the northern parts of the delta.

Also, the numerous sequelae of the Thera eruption that the film uses to explain the plagues are not always reasonable. For example, the evaporation of gases from the ground, killing only the oldest son (the tenth plague), sleeping as a kind of privilege in a bed while the other children would be sleeping on the roof, is hardly convincing. What about the elderly parents and the social dignataries who slept in beds? Why did they survive the creeping gas? It is also difficult to explain volcanic gases creeping or seeping through sediments in the Nile Delta. These sediments are more than a kilometer thick and consist of layers of both sand and compact silts.

To prove that Israelite slaves worked for the pharaohs, the film takes us to the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai with its well-known Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (the first alphabetic script, written in a Semitic idiom). Here Jacobovici uses a highly conjectural decipherment (“God save us”) proposed long ago for the still-not-fully deciphered script. But, in any event, these inscriptions can now be dated to 064the 12th Dynasty (19th century B.C.E.),⁵ more than 300 years before Ahmose.

Biblical figures such as Joseph, Jacob and Moses are presented in the film as if they were fully substantiated historical figures, firmly set into Egyptian history. Proof of Jacob and Joseph in the Hyksos period consists of nine bullae (seal impressions) with the so-called throne name of the Hyksos Yaqub-her (Yaqub=Jacob) that were found at Tell el-Dab‘a/Avaris, exactly “in the layer, where one would expect them to be.” This, according to the film, came after a painstaking search for evidence of Joseph. Jacobovici interviewed me as director of the excavations at Tell el-Dab‘a/Avaris. I spoke of a puzzle in connection with these bullae, but Jacobovici made a cut at this point and declared that the puzzle is solved if we apply his Biblical chronology and identify the seals with Biblical Jacob. My puzzle, however, was an entirely different one. All of these bullae of Yaqub-her dating to the Hyksos era were not found in the level where one would have expected to find them, but in a layer of the late Tuthmoside period (second half of the 15th century B.C.E.). This obviously did not interest the film producer. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Biblical names have a wide distribution in the Near East, and the people with these names were not necessarily Israelites. Besides that, the identification with the Biblical Jacob is naïve. The Bible does not tell us of a royal status for Jacob, and the name Joseph does not appear on these bullae.

Perhaps the most serious blunder of the film involves a hieroglyphic inscription on a granite Egyptian temple-naos from El-Arish, now in the Ismailia Regional Museum, dating to the 30th Dynasty (fourth century B.C.E.). Jacobovici, who is no Egyptologist, proceeds to interpret a few hieroglyphs in this inscription completely out of context, based on the pictorial appearance of the signs: three waterlines and two knives. According to him, these signs should be read as signifying a parting of the water. In reality the inscription involves a mythic lake known as the “Lake of the Two Knives” or phonetically as Yam Desdes. The name Desdes is also the name of the Bahriya Oasis, and there is a question as to whether our lake was situated there. Sometimes, however, Yam Desdes is associated with Hermopolis in Middle Egypt and in any case has nothing to do with the parting of the sea nor with the Exodus story (which, according to Jacobovici, occurred more than a millennium earlier). In this inscription, the lake serves as a medium for the magical transformation of the Uraeus (serpent) of the king in order to protect him, legitimize his rule and fortify him against his enemies (the Persians as well as enemies within Egypt).⁶ To the non-Egyptologist, the argumentation in the film may look great, but the specialist is left to wonder and scratch his head at what educational value a film like this can provide for the public.

The most incredible part of the film—although very impressive from a visual point of view—is the claim that a group of Israelites separated from Moses, took to their ships (where did they get the ships?) and sailed to Greece! The supposed proof of this contention is a Minoan wall painting from Thera depicting ships traveling between two towns. According to the film, one town is Avaris, home of the Hyksos kings; the other is Thera. Another painting from the same building depicts palm trees and felines, suggesting, according to the film, a Nilotic landscape. The suggestion is not new. It has, however, been refuted by several specialists in the subject.⁷

Jacobovici also relies on the fact that paintings depicting bull-leaping and other Minoan motifs have been found at Avaris. In my interview with the film maker, I explained that these paintings cannot be associated with Ahmose (the pharaoh of the Exodus of the film) because the Avaris frescoes date to the time of Tuthmosis III (1479–1425 B.C.E.), not Ahmose (c. 1540–1515 B.C.E.). In the film, however, my words were cut short and, instead, allowed the message of the film to be delivered by Dr. Charles Pellegrino, a fiction writer with experience 065in the Titanic production. Dr. Pellegrino, of course, knows what he has to say, according to the film’s script.

Incredibly, the film also suggests that the shaft graves at Mycenae in Greece are the last resting place of the group of Israelites who broke from Moses and sailed to Greece. It is also stated that they were buried at the foot of a pyramid-shaped mountain. The gold found in the Mycenae tombs is supposed to be the gold the Bible says that the Israelites got from the Egyptians when they left Egypt (Exodus 12:35).

Finally, some tiny gold plaques from the Mycenaean tombs, exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, depict a typical Aegean Bronze Age feature: a tripartite shrine. In the virtual reality (or unreality) of this film, part of this gold shrine is a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, with the stepped altar popping up from behind. In the film it is admitted that no one knows exactly how the ark looked. How, then, is one able to identify it with part of a tripartite shrine from the Aegean?

From a technical point of view, the film is brilliant. If this film were presented as a work of fiction, it would be engaging and entertaining. But it is not presented as a work of fiction. It makes the public believe it is based on a serious investigation. It is a pity that the theory behind the film has been so superficially researched and does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Uncredited photos courtesy of Associated Producers.

BAR Editor Hershel Shanks and Producer Simcha Jacobovici discuss the evidence for the Exodus presented in the film and the theological implications of the film’s argument in an exchange of correspondence posted on BAS’s Web site at www.biblicalarchaeology.org.

Canadian documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, in cooperation with James Cameron, director of Titanic, has master-minded a two-hour TV special dealing with the oft-treated—and oft-mistreated—Exodus narrative. The Biblical account provides the principal pillar of the script. Every sentence of the Biblical text is taken literally in quite a fundamentalist fashion. Until now, Biblical scholars have not found specific archaeological evidence for the Exodus. This perspective—the archaeological evidence—is purportedly now supplied by Jacobovici and backed up, we are led to believe, with opinions of scholars working in the field. Technically the film is brilliantly produced—flashy and full of unusual special effects. The […]