EssEff

Did anyone here catch this? I saw the last 20 minutes or so and I found it compelling, but I'm hardly a biblical scholar. The main argument I heard was that a geologic event caused the plagues and the death of the first-born sons (who slept on low beds and thus suffocated as poison gas leeched from a lake, while older sons were on rooftops) and they also theorized about the parting of the Reed sea, which would have been a lake, not the Red sea. Here's a link to the site:

http://www.history.com/shows.do?acti...&showId=180013

Is this old news amongst biblical scholars? Or is it questionable a la the Jesus family tomb?

perditac

I heard about the reed sea as a kid in the seventies.

EssEff

Good to know. I was a kid in the seventies & never heard any kind of stuff like this. Episcopalian liturgy doesn't have room for new findings.

Chris Weimer

It's old news, for one, and fantastically imaginative for another. In otherwords, don't pay attention to it.

Malachi151

Simcha Jacobovici is the same guy who did the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" special. He's a total quack, who tries to make alternative history out of the Bible. If you see his name on anything, turn the other way basically, or indulge it knowing this guy's predilections.

Trying to find "natural" explanations for Biblical events is a double-edged sword. The first issue to address, which this type of scholarship never does, is whether these things even happened at all in the first place, much less if they can be naturally explained.

I have no doubt that the 7 plagues of of Egypt reflect real types of natural disasters that people experienced in ancient times, but the story itself and the confluence of those 7 plagues is highly doubtful.

Likewise with most stuff in the Bible. It's silly when people try to explain the "burning bush" by natural causes, as though the account of the burning bush is rock solid in the first place. More likely, this is all just symbolism and made up from whole cloth.

No one tries to explain the story of Persephone via natural causes, we except that its simply a fictitious story. Why people can't do this with Biblical stories I have no idea.

"The Exodus" probably has absolutely zero basis in history, its just completely fabricated. There is nothing to "decode".

perditac

the religion of my parents was episcopalian.
I came across the reed sea angle from my own forays into the vast world of organized religion. (Back then they also thought they had found remnants of Noah's ark...)
I think thirty plus years is time enough for them to dredge both the red and reed seas for artifacts of that huge event...the drowning of an army. I don't believe it happened.

Chris Weimer

I'm absolutely stunned, Malachi. It's 10 plagues, not seven, and even I seriously doubt that any of it is based in history at all. Stunned.

NZSkep

Plus the fact that taking a load of Israelites through the ‘reed’ sea doesn’t really amount to much of a miracle. Big wow, your god allows you to walk through a patch of reeds. I can already do that.

I can’t imagine it would be much of a spectacle to watch Charlton Heston wave his stick in the air in the name of the lord and then nothing to happen so the Israelites simply walk through a swamp. Seems you just can’t get the staff these days.:devil1:

Larsguy47

It's fascinating to me that Manetho gives two references for identifying the Exodus with Amenhotep III. One where he dates the 17th year of Apophis as the year Joseph is appointed vizier, which allows us to date the Exodus 215 years after the 25th of Apophis (i.e. 2nd year of famine when Jacob came to dwell in Egypt); and that it was the sister of Thuthmosis III who adopted Moses. Both work out for the Exodus occurring at the end of the reign of Amenhotep III. So there's a chance for some chronology-linked discussion for the specific reigns during which the Exodus occurred and how that might have impacted on these two specific kings, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, but that is seldom a part of these documentaries who seem to pretend there's no historical clue whatsoever as to when the Exodus occurred. ???

So it's just some uninformed people trying to make some more money based on their own ignorance and the ignorance of others.

Akhenaten's sudden and dramatically radical conversion to monotheism is the biggest testament to the miracle of the ten plagues one could hope for! Yet even with the historical reference Akhenaten is a stranger to the Exodus scenarios for the most part.

What gives?

RED DAVE

From Larsguy47:
What gives is that the Exodus never happened. When you can come up with some archeological evidence for a two or three million people wandering around the Negev for 40 years, let us know.

RED DAVE