Dear friends:
I am very excited to find a new film “Exodus: Patterns of Evidence” that documents many Archaeology discoveries. We surely should ask the following question.( Keeping in mind "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" in Archaeology discoveries; there are still lots more to be dug out, and there are certainly lots of evidences long gone too.)
Does it matter whether or not the Exodus of Moses actually took place?
,,,In a 2011 interview with Columbia Journalism Review, celebrated filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War) says that the documentarian’s task is to help audiences “rediscover reality.” He observed:
Someone comes up to you and they say, “Well, I’m a postmodernist. I really don’t care about truth, truth is subjective, or there are all kinds of different versions of truth: your truth, my truth, someone else’s truth.” And then so you say to them, “Well, then it doesn’t matter to you who pulled the trigger? It doesn’t matter to you whether someone committed murder or not or someone in jail is innocent or not? That’s just a matter of personal opinion?”
Truth matters. People want to know the answers: the who, the what, the when, the how, and the why. And without providing those little truths, they may never learn of the ultimate Truth behind them.
(Click the following link for more about this new film.)
What is the validity of history found in the Bible? Is it fact or fiction? What does the hard evidence really have to say about the fundational story of the Old Testament: the Exodus out of Egypt? An in-depth investigation by documentary filmmaker Tim Mahoney searches for answers to these questions amid startling new finds that may change traditional views of history and the Bible.
For more than 50 years, the vast majority of the world’s most prominent archaeologists and historians have proclaimed that there is no hard evidence to support the Exodus story found in the Bible. In fact, they say that the archaeological record is completely opposed to the Bible’s account. This view of extreme skepticism has spread from academia to the world. The case against the Exodus appears to be so strong that even some religious leaders are labeling this ancient account as historical fiction.
Filmmaker Tim Mahoney begins with the question, “Is the Bible just a myth, or did the archaeologists get it wrong?” He decides to tackle this issue with a deliberate scientific approach. After examining the details in the biblical text, he journeys across the globe to search for patterns of evidence firsthand. The result is the most in-depth archaeological investigation into the Exodus from Egypt ever captured on film.
JANUARY 29, 2015, 12:19 PM EDT
Jews & Christians praise new Exodus movie as antidote to Biblical illiteracy
Filmmaker Tim Mahoney’s new documentary “Exodus: Patterns of Evidence” was shown Jan 29th in Manhattan, Queens and New Jersey.
Archaeologists have for decades been looking for evidence of a Hebrew presence and escape from Egypt in the New Kingdom city of Ramses on the Nile delta. After all, Joseph’s family settled in the “land of Rameses” (
Genesis 47:11), the slaves built the cities Pithom and Rameses (
Exodus 1:11), and the children of Israel departed from Rameses” (
Numbers 33:3). But the film points out, quite correctly, that this region was referred to as the “land of Rameses” in biblical texts like
Genesis 47:11 that refer to events such as the arrival of Joseph’s family in Egypt long before the time of Ramses the Great no matter how the dates are calculated.
11
The film suggests the biblical text included these geographical references so that readers would know the land of Goshen where the Hebrews lived was at the city of Avaris, which is near the city of Ramses. Because
Ramses—meaning “the Egyptian god Ra gave birth to him”—was a very common name to honor pharaohs, it may have become associated with property in this region long before any of eleven pharaohs known as Ramses or
the Ramses the Great became specifically associated with the land. In any case, when archaeologists look
in the region of the New Kingdom city of Ramses in deeper layers associated with the older “Middle Kingdom,” they find a wealth of archaeological and textual support for the historicity of the Exodus just as the Bible records it.
This illustration from the book Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus is similar to those in the film. Here the upper wall of time shows the traditional view of Egyptian chronology and the “late Exodus” view, which places the Exodus at about 1250 BC, during the reign of Ramses the Great. (The reign of Ramses the Great, who built many monuments, is indicated in the 1200s BC by a graphic “monument city” on the wall.) The colored blocks indicate events such as the arrival of Joseph’s family in Egypt, their multiplication and enslavement, the events directly related to the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. Archaeological evidence for these events is not found when the search is made for it in material related to that timeframe of history, but if the timeframe is shifted backward (white arrow) about two centuries toward Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, and the Exodus is placed around 1450 BC, archaeology tells another story. This is shown in the lower illustration. Image courtesy of Timothy Mahoney, Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus.
Timely Note
Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus uses an appropriately monumental display to visualize the timeline of Egyptian and biblical history—a wall stretching back through antiquity with pillars dividing it into thousand-year segments. The various positions—biblical and otherwise—on the timing of the Exodus are superimposed on this wall of time to illustrate the debate over whether it occurred in Egypt’s “New Kingdom” or “Middle Kingdom.”
The narrator describes this timeline as “a wall of time stretching back to the earliest moments of civilization.” We should note here that the visual timeline does appear to stretch back to an antiquity too old to be compatible with the chronology calculated from the Bible. From the Bible, we know Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and the global Flood of Noah would be dated in the 2300s BC.
12 Therefore, the suggestion of dates prior to this time, such as the beginning of Egypt’s Old Kingdom in the mid-2600s BC, reflect secular assumptions and even some incorrect assumptions related to biblical history. You can read more about these assumptions and the jumbled mess of Egyptian chronology in “
Doesn’t Egyptian Chronology Prove That the Bible Is Unreliable?” and
Unwrapping the Pharaohs.
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