Putting The Pieces Together Part I: One Man’s Search for The Exodus

The Exodus. It’s one of the first Bible stories you’re taught in Sunday school, but among Scholars and Archaeologist’s alike it’s one of the most controversial subjects of our time. Most Scholars today put the Exodus story in your typical bag of fairy tales and myths, and claim it was just made up. In the above video one man seeks to find out the truth of the Exodus, and I must say his findings are quite compelling. Simcha Jacobovici is a film director and producer, and has been searching for proof of the Exodus for some time. He starts his documentary by saying: “In the last scenes of a very famous movie The Lost Ark of The Covenant, the box that once held the Ten Commandments is crated and abandoned in the basement of a warehouse. What if Hollywood’s depiction accurately reflects reality? This would mean that hiding somewhere there is tangible proof of the story the Bible calls the Exodus. The deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, led by the prophet Moses.” In Jacobovici’s documentary he seeks to find the truth and put together the pieces of the puzzle called the Exodus.

As with all things archaeological and historical the first thing we come to when dealing with an event in our history is the date. Dating an event like the Exodus takes a lot of research and study to be able to get the right outcome. To get the date he thinks is best suited for the Exodus Jacobovici uses some overlooked historical and archaeological facts and artifacts to piece together the Exodus puzzle. The first piece is an Egyptian Stele found in 1947 which is dated to 1500 B.C.E, and is connected to the Pharaoh Ahmose. Jacobovici describes the Stele as “Mirroring the Biblical tale” and that “Today it lies abandoned in the basement of the Cairo museum, and all our attempts to get access to it were unsuccessful.” Even with this difficulty though Jacobovici was able to reconstruct the Ahmose Stele, and asked a world-renown Egyptologist to comment. Professor Donald Redford states: “We have this very interesting Stele, which is dated to the reign of Ahmose. It records a tremendous catastrophe that happened to Egypt. We’re not quite clear what it was, but it involved rain, and thunder, and lightning, and such a storm that rarely happens in North East Africa. I mean that’s a dry area. It sounds peculiar to me that the Biblical tradition preserves the memory of plagues which involve climatic cataclysms, and here we have from the very time this curious Stele.” Jacobovici claims that the Ahmose Stele is “The key to the Exodus enigma,” and does a comparison between the Biblical account and the Stele, “The Bible says at the time of the Exodus there was a great storm. Ahmose’s Stele also talks of a great storm. The Bible says darkness descended on Egypt. The Stele says that Egypt was enveloped in darkness. The Stele then says something very peculiar. Though the Egyptians worshiped many gods, on this Stele it is written that the storm and the darkness happened when god, in the singular, manifested his power.”

With this we find that Ahmose’s Stele is the first piece of the puzzle for Jacobovici. He will then, from this first piece, start to place the rest of the pieces in order until the puzzle of the Exodus is completed. I am going to end this post here, but will continue to post on Simcha Jacobovici’s documentary The Exodus Decoded for as long as I need to. I am going to put a final quote from Jacobovici which deals with the nature of Ahmose’s name, but it is mere speculation and probability: “Can it be that Ahmose’s father remembered the Israelite prince he grew up with, and when he gave his son his Egyptian name Ahmose, The Moon is Born, he chose the name because of a play on words? In Hebrew the name Ahmose means The Brother of Moses.”