James Hoffmeier, The Exodus: Recent Archaeological and Geological Work in North Sinai 05/21/2011

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right well my introduction has uh been already made uh as it relates to uh this book the bible unearthed and i just wanted to use that as a starting point because mark referred to israel finkelstein and and there there's the quote directly the historical saga contained in the bible from abraham's encounter with god and his journey to canaan to moses's deliverance of the children of israel from bondage is a brilliant product of human imagination so there you have it uh probably the best-selling book on biblical archaeology out there today uh when i was in germany recently in the famous pergamot museum it's the only book in german on biblical archaeology happily the book that mark referred to the archaeology of the bible is now available in german so i don't know how much competition it's going to create for professor finkelstein but it does present an alternative perspective now just to continue there are others this has been part of an academic movement and unfortunately what happens in academic circles there's this trickle-down or percolating effect which in the course of time makes it into the popular media makes it into popular books and everybody hears about these things uh so here you have a a professor named robert coote who says the writers of ancient israel knew little or nothing about the origin of israel i also that was funny because the bible knows about the origin of the philistines knows about the origins of the arameans but the israelites don't know about their origin that all struck me as funny anyway uh and he says the period under discussion therefore does not include the period of the patriarchs exodus conquest or judges as devised by the writers of scriptures these periods never existed now i will be the first one to admit that we don't have any direct archaeological evidence concerning the exodus but what i'd like to do is to take us on a little trip through what the bible actually reports and see does it fit with what archaeology says it's a simple exercise i put it in layman's term does it pass the blazing saddles test i thought here in texas that might be understood but i see maybe not it's been a long time since that movie played but in the movie blazing saddles which is said sometime after the civil war you have all these hilarious things happen for those who it's a mel brooks movie and those you don't know mel brooks he's a funny producer but in any event you have these strange appearances in the scenes of things that just don't fit okay so at the end of the movie instead of the hero drive riding off on his horse you know into the sunset he drives off in a cadillac right away you say that doesn't fit we know there were no cadillacs in the old west okay so as a historian and archaeologist i like to do is read various narratives of the bible with what archaeological background information we do have and say are there any of those cadillacs popping up in the bible where they don't belong let's start with the opening verses of the oppression narratives in exodus chapter one where it talks about the oppression when when the egyptians set past masters over the hebrews to oppress them with forced labor and they built supply cities pitholm and ramesses a subject will come back to later on and they made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor now notice we have two areas where the israelites were forced into hard labor one in brick making for building purposes and the second one is in agricultural areas so we ask is there anything in the archaeological record to suggest that foreigners in egypt were functioning as captives working for the egyptian state and the answer of course is yes i take you to the tomb of the prime minister of egypt well this would be uh in the mid 15th century bc his name is rehmere and that's by that's not him there in case you're wondering this is not lazarus time but in his tomb we have these very famous scenes painted on the wall right there where the arrow is pointing uh at the bottom of this register we have a depiction of a group of men making bricks you can see the man on the far left pulling water out of a pool they're mixing making mud carrying the mud and buckets to the brick maker at the top center and he's pressing the bricks into a mold to make bricks we also as a scene continues we have workers carrying off finish bricks uh in with yokes over their shoulders and we actually have a uh a taskmaster here with a stick and there's another one sitting there now remember this is this is the story of the oppression of some people egyptian style that is the story is being reported by egyptians so notice the sticks are very small and i'm sure if you were on the other end of the story drawing the picture might look a little different but what is important here and i've just simply enlarged this portion of the center because there's a faint inscription across the top of this which tells us the lead word here is the word hawk this word means plunder and it tells us that these men and if you could get up close and look at them you would see that they are ethnically presented as different than the egyptians some are clearly canaanite or syrian in origin you can tell us by their hairstyle their facial features their beards and some clearly have african features like the men bending over here picking up a yoke so it's very clear from these that we have brick making going on by people who are prisoners of war in the general period where the israelites would have been in egypt and it's clear these are foreigners working forced labor for pharaoh and by the way the inscription tells us they're making bricks to build a temple a temple in southern egypt in in modern day luxor or karnak temple they're actually building the mud brick ramps to drag the stones up for the construction of large and high walls now that verse we just looked at exodus 1 11 tells us that the israelites were making and the hebrew term is normally translated as store cities and you know we think okay cities houston dallas chicago well cities in the bible are not cities like american metropolises the cities in the bible can be very small anybody who's traveled to the holy land been to jericho know that it's the size of about six football fields it's not huge but that's a city a city basically is a walled facility of some sort that's a defensive perimeter a wall of some sort to protect it now what is a store city well what we're looking at here is an aerial balloon shot of the temple of ramses ii his funerary temple and that's by the way that's joel brynner that we're talking about ramses ii this is his funerary temple and what we're looking at from the air here's another view and you can see the temple which is the the central theme that everybody thinks about made of stone however surrounding it you'll notice there are all kinds of other structures which if you jumped out of your balloon and went down the ground you would see are made of mud brick and by the way this picture is taken standing on the decayed mud brick wall that surrounded this temple complex on the far side are these very impressive 32 to 33 hundred year old mud brick vaulted storage facilities in some places the arches are still intact impressive after all these years but these were the storage facilities of this temple complex so it's very clear to me that this is what the bible is talking about temples palaces of ancient egypt had mud brick storage facilities surrounding them within the walled structures i think this is what the bricks that the israelites were making would been for structures similar to this mudbricks abound in egyptian architecture as you can see and every now and then the pharaoh will actually stamp his name on the brick not enough we we found uh thousands and thousands of bricks in our excavations which i'll show you shortly none with any name of a pharaoh stamped in unfortunately here's one in the royal ontario museum in toronto with the name of ramses ii stamped in now here's something else that that you might find interesting the story of how moses goes to approach pharaoh and says look let my people go they want to go we need to go out for three days in the wilderness to have a a festival for the lord our god etc etc and you know how pharaoh declines the the request now one thing that has been discovered which is very interesting and i should say just one a number of these have been what you're looking at here is a work roster for workers who worked to carve the royal tombs in the valley of the kings and this was basically a roster and there has been by the way a larger papyrus found from the period of ramses ii it's in the louvre in paris the louvre museum and it contains the work roster of workers on various building projects and what we learned from this is very interesting you may know it's very interesting in exodus 16 when the israelites just leave egypt and the manna first appears god instructs them there's to go out for six days collect man on the seventh day they don't do that that's the day of rest now you're saying well why does he bother telling them this they just left egypt why is he introducing this concept to them right away well in egypt they didn't have a week they did not have a seven-day week in egypt they had a 10-day week can you imagine and no official weekend so why bother with calling it a week they basically had three 10-day work cycles in a month three of them a month and there was no predictable weekend or predictable time off what we learned from these work rosters is that people were given time off for their personal religious holidays so they would get off for you know i'm from such and such a part of egypt or set in such a town i get my god's special days or holidays or festival days off and so it's been suggested that moses is actually not knowing this is going to fair and say look our people won our religious holiday too like the other workers get off so very nicely how this this begins to fill in some of the background information by the way remember that verse back in exodus 1 14 not only mentions stone sorry working in brick and building but also it mentions agriculture in the agriculture scenes such as these painted tombs from uh again around 1400 bc i'll just take a little bit closer it's been noted again that the workers doing the work in the vineyards are many of them are non-egyptian i'm pointing arrows at some of them but again we can tell this by closely looking at their facial features their hair style their beards which egyptians didn't have naturally they were very clean uh light haired people at least facially speaking and so here too we find and you see especially blondes when you see blonde these are not egyptians egyptians had dark hair so here too we again find foreigners and they're engaged in agricultural work so the question is does this statement about the oppression of building making bricks working in agriculture does that fit do we have evidence that such things were going on in egypt during the period what we call egypt's new kingdom the answer is yes so this does pass the blazing saddles test it does fit there's no cadillac driving off into the sunset here yeah well just one more scene of these uh men working away interestingly some of them were actually stomping on the grapes making the juice for the wine oh well i'm allowed to say that here okay it was wine um uh in in some cases we we actually uh find that the the workers in one case are referred to as habiru that's a long story to get into but the word khabiro is linguistically related to the word hebrew it's not to suggest that they were necessarily hebrews but this seems to be a broad sociological term for for a landless marauding roving people who don't have a permanent home something like that but it may be that the hebrews were thought of in those terms but in any event clearly foreigners are at work here now when it comes to direct archaeological evidence for israel from egyptian sources the one and only clear reference we have to israel is on this famous slab of stone called the mernepta stila mernepta is you know ramses ii reigned so long that he outlived his first 12 sons who says 13 is unlucky number 13 got to be pharaoh so this is lucky 13 and on a military campaign in 1208 bc he mentions encountering a people amongst others in the land of canaan called israel and that's basically the text right here is an enlargement that on the right is an enlargement of what's in the body of the text so we know that there was a some sort of geopolitical entity located in the land of canaan by 1208 bc called israel how long they had been there we don't know but we know they were there by this date now the second part i want to do is to focus on the geography of the exodus the geography is something that has fascinated people since the dawn of egyptology in fact it's been a subject that's been studied since the 19th century are the places mentioned in the exodus narratives places we can actually put dots on a map and locate are these real places or are they just simply made up are they mythical well believe it or not there are those who have written in recent years such as bernard batto and the late justa alstrom um believe that the exodus narratives were simply myths of some sort that later writers tried to historicize that has turned it into something that looked like history and a part of this process of making it look like history is to provide some sort of geographical setting for it because of this view there are those who think that geography doesn't fit it's simply made up one commentator of the book of exodus as recently as 1995 said that the exodus the book of exodus should be viewed purely as a piece of theology and concludes it is again therefore futile to attempt to locate this theological affirmation in geographical detail it's just about theology forget history forget forget geography there's been a recent debate and ironically most of these are former professors of mine so i learned all the inside scoop but professor donald redford john vance cedars these were professors of mine who have been writing and most of them including uh finkelstein has followed simply the lead of professor redford uh that's donald not robert for those of you um donald redford uh a dear friend with whom i disagree but a friend nevertheless and i respected mentor he argues that the geography was simply reflects the time the narratives were written and he argues that that time is the sixth century bc now that's exactly what you'll find in finkelstein without the footnote he simply buys into that despite the fact i should point out that professor redford has been roundly critiqued by a number of scholars not just me and not just by kenneth kitchen but even one of the dean of now the late uh wolfgang helk uh the dean of of german egyptologists took him to the woodshed uh some years ago in any event let's just go back to this verse that we started with exodus 111 where we have reference to the construction of these two supply cities or storage cities and i'm just going to focus on ramses because ramses plays a very important role in the exodus nerves pitholm has just mentioned once i could take 20 minutes to talk about this place and it would fascinate you but we have a lot of other ground to travel so we'll let that go for now but just at one point that we know what the word pithom means it means the house per is is p means house or domain of the god atum now atom is one is the principal deity of egypt uh he's also the proper name of the sun god uh you may remember that joseph's wife was the daughter of the priest of heliopolis the city of the sun where the sun god atum had his primary worship center now it's interesting to look at the pentateuch the five books of moses that they're called because there we have all the references in the bible to ramesses notice we find it in genesis 47 11 in connection with the joseph story that pharaoh allows the hebrews to settle in the best of the land of ramses in exodus 1 11 it's the store city the israelites helped to build and in exodus 12 37 it's the place from which the exodus begins it's a launching off place and that launching off place is mentioned in the itinerary in numbers 33 where it occurs twice now it's interesting that after the book of numbers this place has never heard from again an egyptian or in biblical literature we'll come back to that and ask why but the question we want to start with is was there a city somewhere in the delta the northeastern delta where the exodus and genesis narrative suggest the hebrews settled and well the answer is yes and the principle study was done by none other than sir alan gardner the oxford uh egyptologist famous for his ancient egyptian grammar that many of us learned our hieroglyphs on he was a prolific writer over the years and a brilliant scholar but he did the premier study on this way back in 1916 and documented every known reference at that time to a place called ramesses and determined there was that there was indeed a place in egypt called ramesses it was located somewhere in the northeastern delta based on the text but nobody could find it archaeologically at least not up till that point now we know much more now than we did in 1916. we'll cover some of that but basically this city was built and named by and after ramses ii himself who else he was around 67 years but his reign begins around 1279 bc so if his building efforts begin say around 12 it could have been started right away but let's just say for the sake of rounding off around 1270 the city begins to either function or be built by 1070 the city is gone we find no more references to it in egyptian text now we have more evidence but we'll come back to that in a moment but the point is we have textual evidence and now we have archaeological evidence that there was a city a major city called pyramicis and it only flourished for 200 years in its place around 10.70 and that's around you can give it a year or two one way or the other a new east delta capital is built called zoan depending if you're reading the good news for 17th century man that's the king james bible or tannis which is what the niv and more modern translation but that's the place indiana jones went to those who need a reference point this was a new capital built in the northeastern delta and it flourished from 1070 when kings mendes made it his new capital and it continued into roman times it had a history of over a thousand years twelve hundred years or more we have this large city called tannis or so on now let's look at the occurrence of tannis or zoan in the bible we have it in isaiah 19. the princes of zoan are foolish says isaiah we find it in ezekiel where god is going to set a fire and so on probably a reference to nebuchadnezzar's pending invasion and then it occurs in the most awkward place in psalm 78 celebrating the exodus from egypt talking about all these things the miracles that god brought about in the fields of zoan why doesn't it mention ramses that's where it happened it's very clear when the psalmist was writing this the city of ramses didn't exist so what does he do he uses the name of the city that's nearby and now we know was actually made out of the ruins of the abandoned city of ramses now archaeologists have had a hard time finding it you can see the black dots on the map those are all different sites that egyptologists have thought at different times in history uh was the city of ramses uh it's all over the map including tannis um the french had excavated by the way that's one detail of the indiana jones raiders the lost ark that's correct the archaeologists working there since 1926 till this day are french and they've been working this site and starting in the 1920s they declared that they had found the city of ramses and the city of tanis if you look in in any bible atlas that's published prior to 19 mid 70s you'll see a dot and it'll say ramses and tannis okay i'm sure some of you have one of those com commentaries or bible atlases which will make that point well just south of it and a coptic christian egyptologist named labieb habashi was poking around and begin to make discoveries at a south a site you can see just south it's just about 18 miles 20 miles south of the city of tannis and if you go there today it's it has been excavated quite extensively in the last 20 years by a german team of archaeologists and they found all sorts of interesting things and basically what they now believe is that this ancient city of ramses was abandoned but not forsaken what happened was blocks were removed and used for the building of this new city tattus in other words the egyptians were the first to invent recycling one of the important discoveries made by edgar push and his team and i had a chance to visit this just about seven eight years ago and what you're looking at here and this is this is this is cowboy country so everybody recognize what these are tethering posts these are to tie up your horses these were posts driven into the ground the ropes would go through the uh the holes that you see there and these came from a stable found at pyramicis that could house 500 horses fantastic discovery uh if you go to the site today you're looking in the fields of what is the land of goshen and what you're looking at are a couple men who are working on taking what we call a magnetometer survey these are high duty magnetometers that read metallic content in the soil and there they are walking the fields this gentleman here in the white t-shirt actually worked on my site too so i know these guys but they've been mapping this whole area and you maybe see a little bit better here this zoom in you can actually see the outlines of walls and what this turned out to be was a palace before the excavators began x-ray they knew by based on the architectural plan that what they had was a palace now the combination of this magnetometer survey plus the ground surveys which are picking up pottery and pieces of anything that's left in the farmers fields they've determined that this ancient city of ramesses was six square miles now that might not sound large by but that was the largest city in the ancient world and you go there today and all you see is corn fields or wheat fields that's all that's left and by the way that is one of the illustrations of why archaeology can't produce everything these are fields that have been irrigated and farmed for for well in this case 3 000 plus years and most of the major blocks and statues were moved and reused now this explains what happened when the psalmist of psalm 78 is reflecting back on what happened how god delivered his people from egypt he used the term that was current in the day for the delta capital and that was tennis because ramesses was gone so it's interesting the only place we have ramses is in what the bible reports to be the earlier material in the petite now i want to take you on a little ride first of all what i call the road less traveled this is the route that the israelites did not take let's just read this exodus 13 17 that when god let the uh when pharaoh let the people go god did not lead them on the road through the land of the philistines although it was near for god said let the people turn back now i've highlighted that in yellow as you can see because turn back is one hebrew word it means shuv and when we talk about the prophets and sunday school class that word will come back because it also means repent is turn around and come back okay so put that little there's two things i want you to remember tonight shuv you know just shove it and when they see war and return to egypt there's a fear if they go on this road of the land of the philistines something's lurking out there that'll scare the bajibers out of them they're going to make a u-turn and come back now 15 years ago we did not have a clue what this meant but we let's go to a map here um we have two roads that lead out of egypt two routes one is called in the bible the way of the land of the philistines the egyptians call it the ways of horus the god horus and it it basically hugs the coastline by the mediterranean and goes up into what is today rafa gaza and into canaan that was what the bible called the way of the land of the philistines there is a second route um which the bible calls the way to shore sure is this area right here just outside of egypt and the sinai we we don't have time to talk about that but these are the two ways in and out of egypt so if you want to leave egypt you have two choices and we'll help you expl see why there were two routes out of egypt i'll take you back to karnak temple in southern egypt where those workers were making bricks to help build walls and on the outside of the great hyperstyle hall there is this magnificent scene of pharaoh seti the first father of ramses and we have him returning by the way bringing foreign prisoners of war these are bedouin people from north sinai and southern canaan who might be akin to the biblical amalekites but he's bringing them back to egypt as pows now i want to show you a line drawing because you'll see the details much better here so you see the pharaoh in his chariot and he's returning to egypt and what you see on the right is a magnificent illustration of the border town of egypt what you see here and we have the names of these uh forts that are here um the arrow is is pointing towards where the names were actually written on the on the scene uh they're written at the bottom of the page because they've been enlarged so you could see them if if they were written to scale you wouldn't be able to see them on this drawing but we have noticed two forts two building complexes separated by a body of water with with some sort of bridge that connected between these two uh well we'll call them forts because that's what the inscription calls them they're called the khetam and charu this was egypt's entry point okay some of you understand what i'm talking about it's called charu this is egypt's checkpoint charu if you wanted to get into egypt you had to go through this ghettem it's a fort entrance point in fact hetem is a semitic word just means seal some people think this is where you got your passport stamped your documents sealed uh one possible meaning of this but this was the official entry point so we learned a couple things from this wonderful scene number one there were two forts of some sort associated with this charu fortress complex and i want you to remember this word charu by the way that's why this checkpoint chart this is important remember charu charo is a border town you have this body of water with alligators in and then there's another body of water running at a different by these guys aren't walking on water in case you were wondering um they're walking beside the water but there's another body of water and then we have a series of forts that go right across this great scene we're a part we're only watching looking at about a third of this there's three more panels and we have the names of the forts and what's what's interesting is we have the fortress charu secondly we have a fortress called the dwelling of the lion and those are between the horse's legs again ignore the scale believe me the forces are the horse forts are bigger than the horse's hoofs then we come to a third floor by the way these forts continue and the last one that you enter into canaan is called the fortress of canaan or the city of canaan which is thought to be gaza the same name is still with us today which by the way illustrates another important point many ancient geographical names survive in the modern time many ancient names survive in the modern times now i'm only going to take you to the third fort because i believe i excavated the second fort which i'll take you to notice the name of the third fort it's called the mgdoll of seti the first the forts are incorporate the name of the pharaoh into the name of the fort we know this because under ramses ii the names of these forts are the dwelling of ramses and the mgdoll of ramses and we have one also the amygdala of ramses the third i want to want you to also remember this word mgdol because we will come back to it so we have only these three forts that we'll be talking about now one of the wonderful things that's happened in recent years is the accessibility to archaeologists of satellite imagery satellite imagery in concert with geographical geological work on the ground is producing marvelous results what we know from this image and on-ground work is what you're looking at here by the way this is a declassified cia 1960 vintage spy image this is something declassified only in the 1990s but wonderful because there's been so much development in this area since the camp david accords we can actually see what the ground looked like before all this development i can i can show you much more beautiful colored satellite images today and you cannot see these details so the old stuff from the 1960s is great we can see archaeological sites we're looking at what was the mediterranean coastline going back 3000 and four thousand and more years ago you asked where's the mediterranean today well if you want to walk it would take you how long does it take you to walk 30 miles that long from this point to where the mediterranean coast is today is about 30 miles that's how much has changed in the last 3 000 years so when you want to talk about where could the israelites have gone where could moses have led them you have to know what the ground looked like then not now it's a faulty premise to begin with a modern geographical map and start putting dots one scholar who got his phd has has certain dots in places that we now know was mediterranean so you know this doesn't work anyway we know that this was a large ancient lagoon come back and talk about this and you probably can't see because of the darkness but in that circle is a rectangular feature an archaeological site called hebwa and there's a sister site right across the way and i i wish you could see a clearer picture but again i've worked with geologists in fact one of the jobs who helped me look at this is a man named farooq al baz is that name ring a bell to anybody farooq al-baz helped with the apollo space mission he's one of the most famous egyptians if he went to egypt today they probably make him president but he is he is at boston university one of the foremost experts in remote sensing reading satellite imagery but anyway it's very clear in talking to him and i collaborated with and you'll see more of his work later dr stephen moser geologist from wheaton college sedimentologist that we have traces you can see a white line here you see that white line that white line is the traces of an ancient river so what we know is that there's some sort of waterway that pass between these two white dots okay let's go on the ground um here is excavations at the site we were working um and i'm sorry it's not a better picture but what you're looking at is the back of dr mosher uh we archaeologists know the limits of our abilities and when we got down to uh a depth that we said this is geology stuff and we jumped out the jaw just jumped in but uh let me show you the next picture look what happened we're digging in sand and after about three feet of sand we suddenly go into black soil now that should not be in the middle of the desert unless there is something out there before well as it turns out we discovered a branch of the nile that nobody had known about and it flowed right through the site we were excavating we can reconstruct the paleo environment what this area looked like 3 500 years ago this is the way of the of the land of the philistines that the israelites did not go on here you have the mediterranean the very left the dark area we have a fortress located on that yellow rectangle called hebel one you have a branch of the nile flowing out into that lagoon and there's this other branch we now know about that we discovered that goes by the site teleborg that i was responsible for excavating between 1999 and 2008. and here's a another perspective on this so you can see what this looked like somebody who would go out this way would have to encounter this fort which was only discovered in the late 1980s still being excavated and to give you some sense there's a there's a man standing there for perspective these walls are about 14 feet wide by the way those are small compared to the next ford i'll show you you see the turrets sticking out and this wall is over 800 yards long and 400 yards wide and that was sitting right on the middle of this narrow barrier island that was the way of the land of the philistines or the way out of egypt so if you went out there you'd have the ocean on one side you'd have the nile and probably wetlands on the right side and a fort sitting in the middle you tell me you wouldn't want to do a u-turn shoot and go back i think this fits the picture very nicely now here are some of the drawings made by dr mohamed abdul maksood showing that this site has three different periods of occupation going all the way back to about the 17 18th century bc and uh in 1999 the very day we went out to uh do our start our survey work this statue was discovered as if it was a providential discovery because on it we had the name of charu it was a dedication to horus the god of charu and often statues and objects are dedicated to the deity of the place where they were found a few years later june 99 was in the first discovered in 2005 another group of statues was found in a temple at the site of hebwa and this statue also had a second reference to the city of charu the fortress chara now when you find two inscriptions on a site with the name of the site it clinches it so everyone thought aha we now have charu this is important because if we find the next fort we will find uh well the dwelling of the lion now as i pointed out we have a second site on the other side of that body of water remember the egyptian scene that you have a fort water with crocodiles another fort and then enough a fort further along the road okay i'm going to take you eventually to this site teleborg which is only three miles away from that second white circle uh with water going through there this is the new fort that discovery of which was made beginning in 2007. now again for scale there's a man standing there these walls are over 30 feet thick this fort is the sister fort that goes with the other fort i showed you and they have that body of water that passes in between them so the egyptian scene depicts specifically exactly what we uh have archaeologically now this is this is new this is still these are still being excavated here's a balloon shot of this you can get some sense of scale here's an earlier fort located inside of the new fort this large fort was probably built by seti the first and or ramses ii this area has not yet again i haven't been there for a couple years now and reports are slow to come out as you can imagine with recent developments in egypt but the arrow is pointing to where the gate of the fort is which would be a very informative area when they dig it if if that has indeed happened i was there most recently in 2008 to see the work here's a plan and this one is 200 about 250 meters on one side 500 meters long but walls that are 34 feet thick this was the front line if egypt should be invaded so we have two big forts sitting out there and then j so basically now we can follow the archaeological sites and they'll go right around this ancient lagoon and that's your way out of egypt that's the way of the land of the philistines and every stop along the way there's some sort of military installation so this is the area we're told that god did not lead them no surprise right okay so what we have then are seen with the two forts on either side clearly the sites of hubble one and hebw2 i think this is unanimously agreed upon by by scholars today now why is all this important well number one we know why these flights didn't go that way it would have been a nightmare it was a death trap now which road did they take leaving egypt remember they're two ways out of egypt right and if they're not going this way they're going to head in the southerly direction and we're told that the people journeyed from ramesses to sukkot this is agreed on in the itinerary numbers 33 and numbers 33 and verse 5. so they go from ramesses to sukkot so there's apparently the equivalent of a day's journey however long that took that's another talk it's very clear they're heading for that other way out of egypt now there is a site which you can see right here called tel el muscuta in arabic and you don't have to be a linguist genius to recognize that in that name muscuta you can see the name sukkot preserved this actually derives from an ancient egyptian term named chekku cheku was the name of this entire region here which was the one of the eastern provinces of egypt and the other way out of egypt which by the way linked up with the road called the way of sure of the bible and if you followed that way you would end up in beersheba hebron jerusalem going north by the way this is the road that hagar is on trying to go back to egypt when she flees her mistress she's on the way of shure so we know which direction back to egypt no surprise there oh sorry uh so this site is called tel almoscuta and in excavations going back to the 19th century and early 20th century a number of objects have been found and you guessed it it's ramses ii smiting a foreigner and there's his name usur matre set up enray and guess who the god is atum the god who may be behind the name piton and there he is he's called atum lord of chaku lord of sukkot again naming this region so this is the clearly the israelites are heading away from that northern way out and they're going in a more southerly direction heading for hopefully greener pastures now when they get to this point and they're about to go we're told they're on the edge of the wilderness and i'm glad there's some pastors here tonight because we need your help at this point god says they're about to leave they're about to depart egypt tell the israelites to shoot there's that word again turn back and go between piha he wrote between migdol and the sea and balsa phone my rabbi friend rabbi benjamin scolner who's worked with us for a decade on this project said it's as if the biblical writer is trying to tell us exactly where the miracle of the sea occurred he gives us three cardinal points if you will three points on a compass to to find the one that's important is the one mig doll but so out here somewhere they make a shoe they head right back up into the area they were originally trying to avoid and i said geographically this makes no sense strategically it makes no sense so i hand it to the pastors and say boy is this good sermon material because sometimes god sends you in directions that make absolutely no sense to teach you something and i believe that he was taking them from was maybe a bad situation and putting him in an impossible situation so it's very clear the language is unambiguous here turn back head the opposite direction you're going and it seems to be taken right up to now that's why the sequence of forts is very important because remember in exodus 14 2 one of the places by the sea is called migdol migdal is a rare name in egyptian texts at this period in the new well the late bronze age from 1200 back it just doesn't occur that much dr nedwin's colleague and my former student dr aaron burke has written an extensive study on this term migdal and there are places all over the middle east called migdol or majdol today or magdala and maybe you know a lady in the bible named mary magdalene magdala means tower fortress lookout so makes sense for a military structure be a fortress tower or lookout i don't know what that says about her no it's just where she's from um so it seems that they're being directed right up into this area and by the way dr ellen morris very brilliant young egyptologist who's a professor at columbia university wrote a 900 page book in which she studied all the forts we know from egypt their names their locations their functions and she concludes after all her study 900 pages i mean you know that's like a year of marx sunday school lessons that there's only one fort named migdal in new kingdom egypt and it's located in north sinai okay now i'm going to take you to the site of talborg where i excavated i'm just going of it's a a very complicated site because there's a canal running through it there are roads running across it the israeli army camped here for f between 1967 and the yom kippur war they were the israelis were caught off guard and got chased out of this site the egyptian army occupied it until the 1980s by the way we found some interesting archaeological evidence to confirm that in our excavation we found a 19th november 1973 fragment of a newspaper arabic newspaper so we know the egyptian soldiers they're reading the paper about their victory over this little turf they took the rest of sinai they didn't but they did get our sight so we had military on this site the site has been butchered to death we thought there was going to be nothing there worth finding but we're very happy we found the remnant of two forts what you're looking at is the inside of a moat of a fort on the left and on the right you can see red brick here's a another look at the red brick foundations to the moat this the superstructure is completely lost thanks to erosion rain wind etc and all you can see are the foundation we calculated that this fort um here's another section of it uh you can see how steep the walls of this uh of this mode are they're about a 45 degree angle the inside the superstructure walls which might have been 24 to 30 feet high are gone they just gone uh erosion remember we were pretty close to the coast there's rain these are bedo and local workers and i said to them uh you know they were cleaning it for the picture and they said to me yamudir oh director these walls are so steep why'd they make them so steep we can't climb up i said that's the point anyway but they didn't quite understand that but it was it was a good lesson on how these things work now when we were clearing this moat and this is for all you want to be archaeologists we had a guy from texas and he sounded like i'm sorry from tennessee du wayne he sounded like he was from tennessee and you know when you had this big bulky football kind of guy you don't want him to ruin some important discovery so dwayne go over in the middle of it's just full of sand take your wheelbarrow start shoveling and don't cause any trouble so he was digging right in this area with his wheelbarrow he did a one shovel threw it in the basket and hit a clunk he found gold the biggest piece of gold we ever found was was right there but the good news is that we found 34 pieces of gold in this little cache thanks to dwayne including lovely earrings ladies my staff wanted to model them but we wouldn't let them these are now safely in the cairo museum okay we have two forts the red walled fort where the f the red brick moat was this is a 15th uh 15th century fort and then we have a second fort the brown walls represent the second fort i wish i could tell you more about it but you can see here this is the second fort all we have left is the final brick in the foundation walls the rest has been eroded we're down to the final brick in some places other places we this is about a 12 13 foot thick wall up at the top of the picture is where the gate would have been but from fragments that we have we have all kinds of broken stone fragments fragments of cartouches of different pharaohs um this by the way is the name of ramses ii another one with the name of ramses ii and based on these fragments i know it's somewhat um speculative but we have a number of architectural pieces and this is what we reconstruct the entrance of our fort to look like oh yes we found some horses the largest archaeological find of horses in egypt we found horses or maybe donkeys or mules we found the remains of four of them i tried to convince my benefactor that they showed signs of having been drowned okay yeah he thought of that too and we found the the muzzle gear for the horse's steering we found a beautiful inscription showing the semitic god reshef and his counterpart astate annie oakley style riding on a horse sitting on the chair and what's interesting is that the overs the the man in charge of the stables who's written down here at the bottom his name is he's a has a foreign name he's a non-egyptian working in the service of pharaoh i think my friend and dr kenneth kitchen who helped decipher this okay we're going to move on now why this is important is if we've established that these two dots represent those two forts on egypt's frontier town and if our fort is the fortress charu sorry the fortress after charu that is the fortress called the way the dwelling of ram cease and dwelling of seti it would seem that the fortress of migdal must be close by now you'll notice i'm positing it's it's at the very southern end of the lagoon here but look at all the interesting water possibilities we have here we have this lagoon here we have the northern end of the bitter lakes system and here's here's another look at this um i'm going to skip very quickly here because i'm i realize most of you are here for the wonderful desserts um the bible tells us in in the references here that the name of the sea through which the israelites pass is called yamsuf which was recognized as early as 1868 that that hebrew term corresponded with the egyptian word for reads but to make a long story short all these names that we've been talking about today um ramesses which we have in egyptian documents all of these places are attested in ramicide period texts that is 13th century bc texts the only one that occurs before that is sukkot chakru so my point is that all of these fit very nicely into the so-called ramicide era there's nothing to suggest these names were just made up in the 6th century they fit very nicely the ramicide period now yeah well this is just to show all the sites that we can identify from the satellite images you see the red circles the brown the brown or black dots are all archaeological all of these have been confirmed archaeological sites okay some in fact tell hair is still being excavated at the bottom of that lagoon there is one of those dark dots in the 1970s eliezer oren israeli archaeologist who had free reign in sinai during the israeli occupation did a very careful archaeological survey of north sinai and when he was surveying he found where that red circle is an archaeological site that dates to this period 14th 13th centuries bc um in fact if you take this picture and enlarge it you can see where this site was and by the way this dotted line you see he drew this on this map for me this image to show the limits of this site where they found pottery and debris so we would very much like to go back and see could this be the elusive missing fort mcdoll even a closer look at this you can actually see what appears to be walls right angles well i i we went there and it's now a plantation with fruit and banana trees and so on and that white line represents what the surface level was like before the farm work began they brought in about uh four feet of sand to cover this whole area to even it out it was a very low spot we will never be able to get at it at least uh well maybe not in my lifetime so it may well be that mgdoll is down there and this would be very important for exodus 14 2 and where the israelites cross the sea now here's where i want to end in exodus 9 10 and verse 19. when the locust of the plagues was covering egypt we're told that the lord yahweh changed the wind into a west wind very strong which carried the locusts away and swept them into the sea of reeds now this is the new jerusalem bible this is their translation that's because it says sea of reads i used theirs but interestingly locus as you all know and when we start talking about the prophets tomorrow amos and others talk about locusts as invading armies become a symbol of armies god's judgment and now we have this locus horde being swept into the sea which seems to be foreshadowing where the egyptian army will take a bath [Music] now here is that site of ramses that everyone now agrees is is the is the area that the bible is talking about and you'll see that this area here is the the this big lake off to the right this was suggested in 1975 by the austrian archaeologist manfred bitock who is excavating the sister site of ramses called taladaba and he was the first to propose that this ancient lake system out here on the right is the sea of reeds of the bible and the egyptian patufi the marshall reedland so if the wind is blowing from ramses you see right where it goes east towards the east right into this large lake area now a lot of people get very upset and say well we need a bigger body of water than this this is too dinky it can't be the miracle c it's not deep enough it's just a little marsh well what you're looking at is something that's over 10 miles long and that's good enough miracle for me um and by the way there are places where reeds still grow uh very impressively as dr mosher uh who by the way marries a woman from houston um and you can see there's still this area a little bit of water and reeds grow very happily so could this be uh and by the way our work here is ongoing one of the things that dr mosher did uh we found the actual coastline where this this ancient lake it's all dry today for the most part it's all dry and we surveyed and we found out that if you go out from the shoreline out 320 meters say 350 340 yards it's 6 meters deep or 18 18 feet deep i think you could drown a horse there anyway so we're still doing more work in this in fact in the fall he's going to go back and continue his work on studying the history of this area with the drilling and all kinds of work but anyway at least our working hypothesis is that we now know where ramesses and sukkot are we have found the first two forts in the carnac sequence of forts that is the two forts of charu and the fortress that teleborg represents probably the dwelling of the lion and migdal the next fort in the sequence we suggest is migdal of of exodus 14 2 and this means that this the read c should be somewhere in this vicinity we'll find out thank you very much thank you thank you very much if you all have got questions and you'll you'll pass your cards in having read all of this gentleman's work what he's done is basically taken one snippet of the blazing saddles test out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages that are carefully footnoted carefully documented material showing time after time chapter after chapter verse after verse phrase after phrase how the biblical story is not only consistent with archaeology of egypt at the time but many times including i think if i'm not mistaken the forts along the way of the philistines many times only consistent during the time of ramesses ii give or take a hundred years either side which means if finkelstein and these cynics are right those israelites who made this story up in 600 or 500 bc must have been madame cleo because they were able to divine these forts that would have caused the the return or they were able to divine these names that had long since passed in history and were buried under feet of sand am am i fair in that well all these forts were abandoned um they weren't around much after 1200. yeah so 1200 bce which is uh uh um anyway so with that uh we'll start the q a are you ready what is the significance of the early or late dating of the exodus and what is your dating see my book ancient israel and egypt uh all right you all right the early dates 1447 bc well uh mark enlightened me today that the the entire premise of the the beginning of the events that lead to the eschaton that were to occur today were premised on a 1447 exodus date because he was counting somehow from that point see if he had taken the 13th century date as mark rightly points out means we have 200 more years so i told mark in 200 years if he's alive and i'm alive i'll come back and give the next edition of this lecture but no the difference really has to do with how you interpret exodus 111 and first kings 6 1. first king 6 1 says it's 408 years from the fourth year of solomon when work on the temple began to the exodus if you add 1447 to 967 the working date for solomon's fourth year the excess should be 1447 plus or minus a few years if you take exodus 111 and take that literally which refers to ramesses as the city of the israelites built you would come you would say it has to happen when ramses is pharaoh or sometime after that so the question is which text you take literally you can't take them both literally you have to adjust one one way or the other and one of the things that i've tried to do here tonight and by the way when i wrote my book uh ancient oh sorry israel in egypt the yellow book as i call it i was basically an early date exodus person but in writing that book i was actually converted to the later date and when professor alan millard wrote the blurb for that book one of the blurbs on the book he said that i made this compelling case for the 13th century exodus i did and i started going back and looking and i realized is when you summarize all the geography it fits the ramicide period it doesn't fit our known uh toponymy or place names for earlier periods so that was one of the things that tipped me so i i it's unfortunate that that christians fight about it sort of like the millennium you know the millennium is the era of peace on earth that christians fight about uh the the the date of the exodus is not something we should be fighting about because the issue really in the academy is was there an exodus and when we get in the quibble about 150 years or 200 years i don't think we help but i think a case can be made for both positions i i prefer the other i'm not dogmatically tied to it if new evidence comes along i will gladly go where the evidence leads right now that's where the evidence leads so the difference is an exit is somewhere around 1270 to 1260 working back from that 1208 date where we have israelites in canaan you have to at least tack on the wilderness period and i think the latest possible date would be in exodus around 12 50. and i suspect for you late daters if you want to be a late dater and deal with the first king six passage i'm a late dater the first king six passage of the 400 plus years actually reflects a number of generations and so it's it's a figure that that they totaled up but it it it's it's a figure that's reflective of generations not so much years so if you wanted to take it out and do it in to turn the generations of 40 years into realistic generations of people having kids when they're 20 or 25 it actually fits well with the late date as well so you're not throwing away that part of the bible you're just understanding the way that it's written is our argument how difficult is it to gain access to these ancient egyptian sites so they can be excavated uh well they're the acts working a site in egypt requires several things number one permission uh you have to get permission you have to apply there's a process it's very tightly regulated there are very clear guidelines and rules so number one you have to have a permit to dig you have to actually present who your team is made up of what are their credentials the director has to be have a full-time academic position with a phd they don't want unqualified people [Music] so you have a permission b you have to have a qualified team and three you have to have financial support it costs money to run a dig those are the three things but the big thing really is getting the the permits okay should we walk out of here convinced of a good theory or a pretty certain fact and let me first delineate this in two regards the accuracy of the text of the bible in terms of passing the blazing saddle test is that a theory or are you certain that it passes the tests well there's two parts of that question in my mind first of all there are certainly details that pass the blazing style test which and again i only did touch on a few things there are many other things we could call it little tiny details which are uniquely egyptian and setting one of them will say i didn't talk about it but when some of you women will appreciate this but uh when we have the story of the birth in of the egyptian babies or the israelite babies and the the when the women are are giving birth uh the description that is given there is unique to this one occurrence in exodus and literally the translations say that when you see the hebrew women sitting on the birthing stool you and if you see a boy being born you'll kill them remember that the literal reading of that text is it's a dual word ebene which means sitting on the two bricks this was an exclusively egyptian birthing procedure so when i look at those sort of things and see something that's uniquely egyptian and by the way we don't read again outside of egypt and there are many of these sorts of things which i document in in my books but so yeah i think it does now so on the one one hand i say yes most of these details that i've talked about and others that i've written about really do pass now what i've talked about here in terms of the geography i would call that that's my working hypothesis that's subject to refinement and change if you read my yellow book which was written in the mid 1990s before our work began in earnest in north sinai uh i've actually changed my mind about the location of the sea because as work went on and i became more familiar with the area new data emerged i i said look i've got to adjust balancing a hopefully careful reading of the text with the archaeological data it's not a question that the archaeological data will win out over the bible it's trying to find that correct balance between the two because my position is that if you read the bible correctly and if you interpret the archaeological data correctly they don't disagree the problem is when you got one wrong or the other wrong or both wrong and how you read the data so i would say in terms of what i just ended on i would say that's my working hypothesis and i invite feedback and critique i'm not going to die on that hill but it's my working hypothesis all right we are out of time but there are four really good questions left so if y'all can hold on for just a few more minutes i want to push these last four questions and get a full answer but uh an abbreviated one with them sure a lot of people have circulated the email they've gotten the email they've seen the powerpoint ron wyatt found the chariots in the red sea has his work been verified would you invite me back for another lecture no the um it just so happens that my earliest publications were on chariot wheels and chariots and i actually studied uh my first one of my well my third published article in 1975 was on the evolving chariot wheel in in egypt in egyptian chariots um these claims in fact i've conferred with my geologist colleague and he says that the kind of of um coral formations in the red sea that leonard mohler and others are saying these are cherry wheels on which coral has built up he says funny off of belize i found the same sort of coral patterns he says so we have chariot wheels down there too the tides move the yeah it must be uh so no and and one of the problems with uh wyatt and all those who have followed him is that uh unfortunately most people who know about these series are are church people these things circulate churches and videos and so on and everybody i know in fact some of you may know uh the work of robert kornuk he and a couple of his colleagues approached me and my colleagues at wheaton back in 1987 they were desperately then and still are trying to find any archaeologist biblical scholars who will join their endeavor and basically back up their work and to my knowledge that is yet to happen so my answer is no i do not think they've been verified in any way but this is not a short answer but let me tell you this an invitation was made to robert cornick to come to the evangelical theological society that'd be a friendly crowd we have an archaeological group to go over his data and allow it to be critiqued by peers who are christians believers they refuse to do it so if you don't want to put your work out for professional colleagues who are believers to critique what are you afraid of next you showed blond hair workers in the mural hebrews and middle east folks are not blonde hair either who are the blondes did they dye their hair those who are blondes and those things are thought to be metonyians uh those are people dr younger would know about uh people up in northern syria northern mesopotamia uh ellen morris who has written about this the same one who wrote the 900 page book on the forts she she says these are mathonians from northern syria doctor younger who are could they be matanians from northern syria yes thank you okay last two questions this is a good one and and i in fairness you can't give this a short answer but recognize do my best well but this is an important question because if as a lawyer i see this as such an important question so many people want to find on the murals and the the engravings the names of the hebrews you know and i don't think they had it what would the egyptians well here's the question can any jewish names be deciphered from the work rosters but within the realm of that not just a jewish name these folks had lived in egypt for hundreds of years they were canaanite by origin what would they have even been called by the egyptians and do we have those names present there are names well first of all most of the names of the biblical characters are hebrew semitic okay they belong to the semitic group of of languages there are a couple names of the people who leave egypt or that generation whose names are clearly egyptian a guy named phineas in the bible is hebrews pinchas pinchas means the nubian okay the name miriam merreri a lot of the names associated with the priesthood the levitical family are names of egyptian etymology egyptian roots so on the one hand we have people leaving with egyptian names and we have others with semitic names and the answer is yes many names of of semitic in fact the guy we found who was the commandant of the the stables the master of the stablemaster uh at our site had a whorian name uh hurian or north syrian so some of these are prisoners of war but in their second and third generations and just like the israelites or the jews in babylon many of them like daniel and and his buddies because of their competence their their their skills they were promoted to positions of of responsibility and this happened in egypt too uh in in 1986 a very important discovery was made at um sakara the the famous necropolis of egypt just south of the pyramid south of cairo and this guy was the prime minister of egypt he was a prime minister of egypt under pharaoh akhenaten akhenaten being the great so-called monotheist king his prime minister we'd never heard of his name before he was the most powerful man in northern egypt there were one for upregion one for lower egypt and this guy's name is operel a semitic name and there he is the prime minister of northern egypt during a period that's very well documented and his tomb was found we never heard of the guy before but there he is within with a semitic name so there are many people in egypt running around with semitic names um and the and these go back hundreds of years before the time of moses too so okay the last question but i should say that the names don't mean that they're you can make a correlation between specific characters it's just like uh the name george you find a piece of paper an old piece of paper george is it george bush is it george the third is it george foreman you know there are a lot of georges uh so george fellaini one george foreman two george foreman there's a lot of those too i thought i was doing the polygamy jokes he had one three sons he named george um okay the last question is and and i'll preface this by saying uh uh dr hoffmeyer graciously agreed uh or told me he said hey if you want i've got another hour lecture on where is mount sinai the mountain of god i can do it sunday morning in your class i said no you can't we're in the prophets but uh uh we might bring you back here to do it so someone he clearly had send in the card where is the mountain of god to plug his next lecture go ahead plug your lecture sir yeah it's called where is mount sinai and why it doesn't matter thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 77min 42sec (4662 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020