While early scientific accounts have challenged the story of the Exodus, claiming there had been “no Israelites in Egypt” during Pharoah Ramses II’s time (basing on the lack of historical records), Egyptologist James Hoffmeir, in Discovery Channel’s documentary, Who was Moses? (1996), said there were, indeed, enslaved Israelites based on archaeological proof.
According to the Bible, Israelites built the city of Ramses during their enslavement in Egypt. Hoffmeir confirms this with modern archaeology, saying that Israelites built an earlier version of Ramses’ city 30 miles off Tanis, Egypt. The city was abandoned and another city of Ramses was built in Tanis—leaving archaeologists clueless about the Israelite captivity in Egypt.
Further, Christos Doumas of the University of Greece and Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., suggested that nine of the 10 plagues of Egypt could be natural phenomena.
In the documentary, Doumas and Stanley said a volcano erupted with a 1,000 megaton force in Santonini, Greece (North of Egypt) during Moses’s time, causing a 40-mile cloud of smoke to rise, disturbing the ecosystem—causing locust and frog infestations, volcanic debris polluting the Nile and hail, and three days of darkness. The same eruption may have caused the momentous parting of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to escape to the “Promised Land.”
Biblical testaments say that the “Red sea” actually refers to the “Reed sea”, a lake near the Nile River. Archaeologists claim that the parting of the “Reed sea” is more probable.
According to Hoffmeier, the volcanic eruption in Greece could have triggered a tsunami, causing the water to recede momentarily into the ocean before crashing inland. This may have explained the fate of the Egyptian chariots pursuing the Israelites during the final leg of the Exodus.
However, no scientific study has successfully explained the death of the Egyptian first-borns which prompted the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from captivity, an event even recorded in the Admonitions of Ipuwer, an Egyptian document written during 2200-1570 B.C.
To date, science is still trying to bridge the gap between faith and empirical knowledge. But undeniable archaeological and scientific data have affirmed that there is indeed a bridge between faith and science.
With reports from Discovery Channel, www.artsci.wustl.edu, www.archaeology.org, www.actionbioscience.org
