Slide 0 (no slides shown yet)

In Exodus chapter 12 we read that the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were to

remember throughout their generations the delivery from Egyptian bondage. The

remembrance was to be particularly commemorated at the annual celebration of the

Passover. For 3000 years the question was not asked at the Passover Seder, “But did the

Exodus really happen?” Given the current zeitgeist, however, it is appropriate that we give

some attention to this question.

1. So the first question is: Did the Exodus happen? Arguments typically used against it’s

happening are: a) We have no Egyptian record of it. b) Some scholars say there is no

evidence for it in the archaeological record. c) If it happened, it must have been a

miracle for a bunch of slaves and their families to escape from the dominant world

power at that time, and we are told by reputable scholars that miracles are

impossible.

2. Second question: If it happened, when did it happen?

3. Third question: If it happened, what was its magnitude?

At this point the first slide was presented.

Slides 1-5 (each point by progressive disclosure)

Amenhotep II was a pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty who ruled in the second

half of the 15th century BC.

After item 1: Why did the Egyptians abandon a city in which their chief god

was supposed to dwell?

After item 2: In the text shown here, words that have been effaced or partially

effaced in the Karnak Stela are shown in brackets, sometimes with a

reasonable restoration based on context. Egyptologists have no explanation

for this puzzling inscription. An exception is Egyptologist Douglas Petrovich,

who says it relates to the defeat of Egypt’s gods in the plagues preceding the

Exodus.

After item 5: Akhenaton has been called the world’s first monotheist. Freud

wrote a book called “Moses and Monotheism,” in which he said that Moses

derived his monotheistic faith from Akhenaton. We shall see that Moses lived

before Akhenaton, not after him. Why did Akhenaton abandon the worship of

Egypt’s chief god?

Slide 6

This addresses more specifically the problem of whether there are any

Egyptian references to the Exodus. It is thought that Manetho was an Egyptian

priest, because he had access to Egyptian historical records. Manetho’s

assigning the Egyptian pharaohs to dynasties is followed by all Egyptologists.

He also assigned the name “Hyksos” to the Asiatic invaders who ruled Egypt

before the first pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty drove them out. He said the

Hyksos capital was Avaris. Austrian excavations under Manfred Bietak at

Avaris, 1973–2009, continuing to the present under Irene Förstner-Mueller,

confirmed Manetho’s statement that the Hyksos founded the city, and that it

was later taken over by the first pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, who built two

large palaces there. Adjoining Avaris was a considerable settlement of Semitic-

speaking people. How large the settlement was is not known because it

extended to places that cannot be excavated since they are occupied by

modern buildings. Here are some other items from Manetho that are

highlighted in the slide:

1. If the fleeing slaves were only a few hundred or a few thousand, why did

pharaoh chase them with an army of 300,000? Egyptians and other

ancient people could exaggerate the size of the enemy to make their

victory seem more glorious, but there would be little incentive to

exaggerate the size of an army that failed in its objective.

2. Pharaoh turned back. Reading the last sentence here, “Yet did he not

join battle with them, but thinking that would be to fight against the

gods, he returned back and came to Memphis . . .” Memphis is about

130 kilometers south of Avaris. Did he go there to get support from the

garrisons in the south because his northern forces had been wiped out?

3. Manetho named the pharaoh that chased the slaves as Amenophis,

which is the Greek form of Amenhotep. The only pharaohs with this

name were in the 18th Dynasty.

4. The only viable candidates for Manetho’s Amenophis, his pharaoh of the

Exodus, are Amenhotep II and Amenhotep III. Amenhotep I was too

soon after the time of the Hyksos; Manetho gave a long time between

the Hyksos and Moses. Amenhotep IV, usually called Akhenaton, was

basically erased from Egyptian history because of his heretical views.

Slide 7

Thutmose III, father of Amenhotep II, was the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, with

17 campaigns into the Levant and going as far as the Euphrates. The number of

slaves he took in his 17 campaigns is far less that those taken by his son in

Amenhotep’s second campaign. Amenhotep had only two campaigns; there

were none after his seventh year, in which he took all the slaves, even though

he reigned for a total of 25 years or more. Those taken captive were

Canaanites, not Israelites. Further, the second campaign was in November,

which has greatly puzzled Egyptologists. Egyptian campaigns began in the

spring.

You don’t raid Canaan and then flood the slave market with 101,000 slaves

unless you just lost a comparable or even greater number.

The Bible doesn’t explicitly say that the pharaoh of the Exodus died in the Yam

Suf, or ‘Sea of Reeds,’ commonly rendered as “the Red Sea.” Here is what it

says:

Exodus 14:28: “The waters covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the

army who went after them into the sea.” We might think of Xerxes at the

Battle of Salamis, where Xerxes was on a hill overlooking the bay as he

watched his fleet, including his brother, perish.

Ps. 106:11: “The water covered their adversaries; not one of them was left.” [Not necessary

to read; seems to be echoing Ex 14:28.]

In Ps. 136:15: God “shook off” pharaoh and his army at the Sea of Reeds. The

Hebrew verb is na‘ar which means “to shake off.” It doesn’t say pharaoh was

destroyed; just that he was shaken off so that he was no longer a problem.

Slide 8

We’ve been dealing with the question of whether there is any archaeological

or other evidence, outside of the Bible, for the Exodus. Now let’s turn our

attention to the question: If there was an Exodus, when was it?

To that end we will make use of two methods that keep track of the years over

a long period of time: reckoning in terms of an era, or reckoning in terms of a

repeated cycle in the calendar. We see some examples of eras in the first

section of this slide. The second section introduces the cycles of the Jubilee

and Sabbatical years. Both methods will be of use in determining the time of

the Exodus.

Slide 9

The underlined texts are where the year is given but the phrase “of the going-

out” is not given but is understood. As we see from the examples, this was a

well-defined way of measuring time. It endured all the way down to the

kingdom period and the reign of Solomon, after which time was measured

according to the years of the reigning king. Writers who say that the 480 years

in 1 Kings 6:1 are 12 symbolic generations of 40 symbolic years ignore the

technical usage of this exact numbering system in the texts illustrated.

Slide 10

It is important to translate 1 Kgs 6:1 properly. Most translations say it was 480

years “after” the Exodus that Solomon had the foundation of the Temple laid.

The Hebrew of 1 Kgs 6:1 does not say that; it says it was the 480th year of the

“going-out,” i.e. the 480th year of the Exodus era. 479 years, not 480, had

passed since the Exodus.

We can say that something happened in our first year of college; that

means we hadn’t been in college a full year yet. When we say that something

happened “after” our first year of college, it means a full year had passed.

Judean years started in Tishri in the fall. In order to indicate that here, I

have placed a ‘t’ after the year.

The calculation shown on this slide allows us to use 1 Kings 6:1 to place the

Exodus, in terms that we are familiar with, in the spring of 1446 BC.

Slides 11 and 12

(progressive disclosure)

As in all ancient (and modern) legal contracts, some means of accurately

measuring the time over an extended period of years is necessary so that, for

instance, it would be known when the contract started and when the money is

due, etc. The Talmud says that the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles were used for

this purpose in the time of Israel’s judges.

If you have ever read the Talmud, you will know that its typical format is to

present what some respected rabbi said on a subject, and then there will be

several alternative opinions offered by other rabbis. Usually no conclusion is

given about who was right. But in the case of the citation of what Rabbi Yose

ben Halaphta, a student of the famous Rabbi Akiba, wrote about the Jubilee

years in the Seder ‘Olam there is no such discussion. The Seder ‘Olam’s

statements about the two Jubilees are simply stated as a fact that apparently

was so well established historically that no discussion or debate were

necessary or allowed.

Slide 13

Ezekiel says that when he saw the vision that occupies the last nine chapters of

his book, it was on Rosh HaShanah and it was also the tenth of the month.

According to the book of Leviticus, only in a Jubilee year was Rosh HaShanah

on the same day as Yom Kippur. The Talmud and the Seder ‘Olam make no

appeal to Rosh Hashanah being on the tenth of Tishri as evidence that Ezekiel

saw his vision at the onset of a Jubilee year. They simply state as a matter of

fact that it was the beginning of a Jubilee. Again, there is no debate about this.

Independently of the historical evidence, notice that the phrase that

Ezekiel uses, be-etsom hayyom hazeh, is the same phrase used in Leviticus to

refer to Yom Kippur. In this way too, besides indicating that Rosh HaShanah

was on the tenth of the month, Ezekiel reinforces that in 574 BC Rosh

HaShanah and Yom Kippur were on the same day, which was the case only at

the start of a Jubilee year.

Slide 14

Ezekiel’s Jubilee was the 17th. This is stated in the Seder ‘Olam, chapter 11, and

the Babylonian Talmud (‘Arakin 12b, 13a).

The Seder ‘Olam is accepted as an authoritative source in the Talmud, and its

statement that this was the 17th Jubilee, and it was preceded by a Jubilee in

the 18th year of King Josiah of Judah is not challenged there. That a Jubilee

began in Tishri of 574 BC can be supported by other historical considerations

that I will not go into here but they are covered in my writings.

The importance of the fact that Ezekiel’s vision came at the onset of a Jubilee

year, and that the Seder ‘Olam and the Babylonian Talmud say it was the 17th

Jubilee, will be shown on the next slide.

Slide 15

Lev. 25:1–8 says they were to start counting for the Jubilee and Sabbatical

years when they entered the land of Canaan. Doing the calculation shown

here, and based on the 17th Jubilee year beginning on Yom Kippur of 574 BC

means that counting for the Sabbatical and Jubilee years began in the spring of

1446. There is nothing artificial in the calculation shown here.

Slide 16

The calculation of the date of the Exodus based on 1 Kings 6:1 gives the spring

of 1446 for the Exodus. The calculation based on the Jubilee and Sabbatical

cycles gives the same date. What does this mean?

1. First, the harmony of the two independent methods of calculating the

year of the Exodus provides evidence that there really was an Exodus,

independently of the evidence for its reality that was discussed earlier.

2. Second, it means that the Levitical Priests, which included Ezekiel, were

faithful in recording when Sabbatical and Jubilee years were due, even

though, in the First Temple period, the people were remiss at observing

their stipulations.

3. Third, the independence of the two methods of calculating the years of

the Exodus and the entry into the land testifies to their credibility and

accuracy.

4. Liberal and conservative scholars alike agree that the only reasonable

source for the legislation of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years is the book

of Leviticus, chapters 25 and 27.

5. Therefore the book of Leviticus must have been in existence in 1406 BC.

Slide 17

On March 24 of this year, the Associates for Biblical Research gave a press

conference announcing the preliminary reading of the text of a curse tablet

from Mt. Ebal. The tablet was small, measuring only two centimeters by two

centimeters in its folded state. The curse tablet has been much in the news

since then. Its existence, and its interpretation, have a lot to do with the

subject we are discussing today, that is, whether there actually was an Exodus,

and, if so, when did it take place?

Some Biblical background. In Deuteronomy chapter 27, Moses charged the

people that, when they crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, half of the

people should stand on Mount Gerizim to read and recite the blessings that

would come if the people would be faithful to keep the commandments of the

Torah. These were commandments that Moses had written in the book that

we call Deuteronomy. The other half of the people should stand on Mt. Ebal to

recite curses that would come upon them if they neglected or disobeyed the

words of the Torah. Mt. Ebal therefore became known as the mount of

cursing.

The tablet was found when wet sifting was applied to the garbage dump of

excavations that were done on Mt. Ebal in the 1980s and 1990s. Wet sifting is

a technique that finds many small items like scarabs and coins that can be

missed by the dry sifting technique because they were covered with dirt. Scott

Stripling, head of the archaeological excavations at Shiloh since 2017, obtained

permission to remove a good portion of one of the garbage dumps from the

excavations at Mt. Ebal to a safe place where a wet-sifting apparatus was set

up. When the tablet was found in December of 2019, Stripling immediately

recognized it as a curse tablet because of its form: a small piece of lead that,

after being written on, was folded over, thus supposedly sealing the curse.

Later analysis of a piece of lead that broke off from the tablet showed that the

lead came from a Greek island that was known to export lead in the Late

Bronze Age, that is from about 1500 to 1200 BC. The fact that a curse tablet

was found on Mt. Ebal is important in itself, because it means that Mt. Ebal

really was a place of curses, just as the book of Deuteronomy said it was to

become when Israel entered the land.

Slide 18

Dr. Stripling should be given credit for several decisions that made possible

the finding and reading of the curse tablet. Although he was primarily

concerned with the excavations at Shiloh, he was also interested in the

archaeological finds at Mt. Ebal. In about 1982, Adam Zertal of the University

of Haifa observed that a large mound existed on the mountain, although it was

a barren place with no other signs of settlement. He received permission from

the Palestinian Authority that controlled the area to carry out archaeological

research. He went there in 1983 and found that the topmost stones of the

mound were piled over a large rectangular altar measuring 7 meters by 9

meters, and these stones were apparently placed over the altar to protect it

when the site was abandoned. By means of pottery found at the site, the altar

was dated to about 1225 to 1250 BC, and it was covered with stones and

abandoned around 1150, so it was in use only about 100 years. Zertal thought

he had found the altar that Moses, in Deuteronomy chapter 27, commanded

Joshua to build on Mt. Ebal after the recitation of the curses and blessings.

Advocates of the Late Date of the Exodus then claimed that this supported

their 13th Century date for the Exodus. That would be in contradiction to the

material that we have looked at today that shows that Biblical texts date it to

the 15th Century, not the 13th. It would also contradict the circumstantial

evidence from Egypt that we looked at that places the Exodus in the reign of

Amenhotep II, again in the 15th Century.

Zertal died in 2015. In the course of his excavations at Mt. Ebal, he and his

co-workers left behind three garbage dumps. Stripling was interested in the

dump that, according to Zertal’s notes, contained material dug up from the

altar. Stripling and other Associates for Biblical Research members received

permission to take a truck and move about 30 percent of that particular dump

to a safe place in Israel where they could employ the wet-sifting apparatus

that was designed and built by my friend and fellow ABR associate, Steven

Rudd. The sifting was done in December 2019 and January 2020, during which

time they found the amulet. It was known that amulets like this would be

written on and then folded over, so that the curse would be on the inside.

At first only one letter could be discerned on the outside, an aleph. It was

thought that the amulet would be too brittle to allow opening it to read the

curse. Dr. Stripling used his contacts with experts in related fields to ask

specialists at the University of Prague if they could use their scanning

techniques and equipment to read the inside of the tablet without opening it.

The techniques used would be similar to a medical CAT scan.

The results from the scans of the University of Prague were submitted to

two experts on ancient writing, Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa and

Pieter van der Veen of the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

The results far exceeded anyone’s expectations. The reading of the inside of

the tablet was the substance of the press conference given on March 24.

Slide 19

Here is the text, in a preliminary reading that could be modified when the

images are reproduced in a peer-reviewed article currently in process. It

exhibits chiastic parallelism—that is, an A-B-B-A structure—that is found in

several of the Psalms. Gershon Galil, in the press announcement on March 24

(28:31), said this is “absolutely the most exciting inscription ever found in

Israel.” He also said, “No one can claim that the Bible was written at a later

period.”. To me, it is encouraging that Galil was willing to change his mind

when new evidence is presented, because I know from what he has written

over the years that Galil’s previous stance was that the historical events of the

Bible were not written by eye-witnesses, but by redactors and inventors . . .

hundreds of years later. In his statements on March 24, Dr. Galil provided a

good example of someone who was willing to change his ideas when

presented with new evidence.

If anyone is interested in literary structure, you will notice that the

chiasm is perfect. That is, it is entirely reflective.

The writing apparently was inscribed on the lead with an iron stylus. In

Job 19:23,24, Job said: “Oh that my words were recorded! Oh that they were

written in a book, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead!”. This is

just before the well-known two verses which have Job’s great affirmation of

his faith : “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the latter day He will

stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I

shall see God.” Job’s words actually were preserved—not on lead, but in a

more sure place, the Tanak.

This preliminary reading of the tablet is significant for several reasons.

1. The first has to do with the approximate date that can be assigned to the

writing, based on the form of the letters. On April 4, Stripling said “This type

of writing is more characteristic of the very beginning of LB2, that

LB1B/LB2A horizon, around 1400.” This argues against the position that the

Exodus occurred around 1260 BC and, instead, is consistent with the 1406

BC date for the entry into the land that, as we have attempted to show in

today’s presentation, is the date derived from the Biblical texts.

2. The second conclusion is that, if Stripling and his advisors are correct on the

approximate date of the writing, then it means that the argument no longer

holds that Moses could not have written the Torah because alphabetic

writing, in particular Hebrew writing, was unknown at the time.

3. The third conclusion is that this writing is Hebrew in an early form of the

Hebrew alphabet. The amulet is Israelite, not pagan, not Canaanite. It was

found in an Israelite sacred site, not a Canaanite site. That it is Hebrew is

shown by the two occurrences of the divine name. The God of the person

who wrote this tablet was the Hebrew God, not one of the pagan gods of

the Canaanites. This then is the earliest example, by two centuries or more,

of any Hebrew script found in Israel and also of any writing in Israel that

had the divine name.

Some years ago the Phoenicians were given credit for inventing the

alphabet, although there are no known Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions

earlier than the 10th or 9th Century BC. That idea is now discarded and scholars

want to give credit to the Canaanites. Currently the earliest examples of

alphabetic writing, found at the Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai, are

called “proto-Canaanite,” even though, according to the books of Genesis and

Exodus, it was the Israelites who were in Egypt at this time. According to a

2020 book by Douglas Petrovich entitled “The World’s Oldest Alphabet,” the

alphabet was invented by the immediate descendants of Jacob during their

time in Egypt. They formed the alphabet by starting with the Egyptian writing

and then extracting the hieroglyphs that represented phonemes, using them

to represent sounds in any language, rather than employing the complicated

picture-based system of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Curiously, the main opposition

to giving Hebrews the credit for inventing the alphabet seems to come from

modern Israeli scholars, such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University.

Slide 20

In his excavations at Mt. Ebal, Zertal discovered that there are two altars at the

site. The seven meter by nine meter rectangular altar was built over, and

centered on, an earlier round altar of uncut stones, as if to honor and perhaps

preserve the earlier altar. Steven Rudd, who had accompanied Zertal to the

site in 2005, suggested to Zertal that the earlier altar, not the rectangular altar

that was built over it to protect it or honor it, was the real Joshua’s altar. By

this time, however, Zertal was widely publicized as the discoverer of what he

called Joshua’s altar, meaning the rectangular altar, and he was unwilling to

modify that opinion in order to agree with Rudd’s suggestion. The paradigm

had been set; the larger altar was Joshua’s altar, and its construction in the

13th century showed that the Biblical date of the Exodus, some 150 years

earlier, was wrong. What then was this earlier altar? . . . a very important

question.

Zertal apparently recognized the challenge to his paradigm. If the earlier

altar was built before Joshua entered the land then it would have to be a

Canaanite, i.e. pagan, altar. In his writings, therefore, he ignored Steven Rudd’s

suggestion, but neither could he bring himself to say the obvious: If the round

altar preceded the time of Joshua, then it had to be Canaanite. Would Joshua

honor a Canaanite altar in this way? He and all the Israelites were commanded

to do just the opposite: In Exodus chapter 34 the Israelites were commanded

to tear down Canaanite altars, break their pillars, and cut down their Asherim.

So how did Zertal handle this contradiction to the rectangular altar

being Joshua’s presented by the archaeological evidence that he himself

uncovered? He handled it in a very strange way. Instead of coming right out

and saying that the earlier altar was pagan and Canaanite, as would be

required by his 13th-Century-Exodus paradigm, he described it, in his writing,

as a “primogenal” altar, whatever that means. Zertal avoided using the

obvious terms of “pagan” or “Canaanite” to describe the smaller and older

altar because of the damage this would do to his identification of the larger

and later altar as Joshua’s altar. He could not admit the obvious. This is

paradigm paralysis at its finest. . . . I’m sure we’ll see more of such paradigm

fixation in the coming weeks and months from those who do not want to

accept the clear implications of both the curse tablet and the evidence that the

earlier, round altar, is the real Joshua’s altar, dating to a time well before the

13th Century construction of the rectangular altar. There will be many who are

unwilling to follow the implication that this has for the date of writing of the

Books of Moses.

Slide 21

This is a drawing of the two altars taken from Steven Rudd’s Web site. Steve

drew the circular altar above its actual location in order to emphasize it and

show that the rectangular altar was centered on it. There are some additional

facts about the circular altar that will be publicized by the Associates for

Biblical Research in the coming months.

In Deuteronomy 27 verses 5 and 6, when Moses was giving instructions

to Joshua about the altar that Joshua was to construct on Mt. Ebal, Moses said

that the altar should be built with uncut field stones, and sacrifices were to be

made on it. The circular altar that Zertal uncovered, and is there to this day, is

made of uncut field stones. Animal bones and ashes were found with it. But

unlike most altars, Zertal found something else mixed in with the fieldstones,

ashes, and bones: plaster. What was the plaster for?

Let us read Moses’s charge to Joshua in the Deuteronomy 27 passage:

“Set up some large stones and coat them with plaster. Write on them all the

words of this law when you have crossed over this Jordan into the land the

Lord your God is giving you . . . you shall write very clearly all the words of this

law on these stones you have set up.” In Joshua chapter 8, Joshua did just that:

he wrote on the stones, i.e. on the plaster that covered them, the law that

Moses had written. This explains why Zertal found plaster mixed in with the

stones of the lower altar.

Now if you have followed the logic this far, it should be clear that this

plaster is of tremendous interest. Perhaps Zertal recognized that, because

early in his excavations he boxed up some of the plaster pieces and had them

sent to the University of Haifa. That box has been in the basement of the

university’s museum for about 30 years now, with apparently no rigorous

investigation of its contents. Those of us at ABR are, naturally, very curious to

see if modern technology could be used to identify and read any writing on the

plaster fragments. If so, and if the altar is really Joshua’s altar as we believe,

that writing would be from the words of Moses that Joshua, according to his

mandate from Moses, wrote down within 3 months after the death of Moses.

If only a few letters could be discerned, that would give valuable insight into

the development of the alphabet. If, however, some consecutive words or

phrases were found, and these could be correlated with what we have in the

Book of Deuteronomy, that would be the most important discovery ever made

in the field of Biblical studies and Israelite archaeology, more important, and

more decisive in establishing the authenticity of the earliest books of the Bible,

than the Dead Sea Scrolls or any other archaeological discovery.

Steven Rudd is a personal friend of mine, and we have had some

discussion on this matter. I knew that Steve had developed, at his own

expense, a scanning machine that scanned ostraca from the Shiloh dig in both

infrared and ultraviolet, and this made legible faded writings on clay that could

not be read by the unaided eye. But Steve says that his equipment is far

inferior to the scanning equipment that the University of Haifa possesses, and

which he thought was priced at from 70 thousand to 125 thousand dollars. In a

follow-up to the March 24 announcement, on April 4 Scott Stripling said that

there will be an examination of the plaster. He also said that just that morning

he had gotten the results of a Carbon-14 measurement of the date of some

organic material in the plaster, but he naturally did not give the result because

that would be premature at this stage.

I would also mention that there is some danger and difficulty associated

with getting access to the Mt. Ebal site. When Steve Rudd went there in 2005

with Adam Zertal, they were accompanied by armed Israeli soldiers, and Steve

said there were military planes flying overhead. In February 2019, the

Palestinian authority took some of the stones from the site to use as

foundational material for a road they were building. As the site will receive

more publicity in the weeks and months ahead, it is also possible that the

Palestinians will decide to vandalize it because it is evidence that the Jewish

nation has a historical right to the land, something that the Palestinians try to

ignore or deny, even though in their holy book, the Qur’an, it is stated in five

places that Allah gave the Holy Land to the Jewish nation. Qur’an 5:21, 7:137,

10:93, 17:104, 44:54.